AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Unemployment Rises To 9.8% – When Will Obama Failure Quit Being ‘Unexpected’?

“Unexpected” is the very favorite adjective of the mainstream media these days.  And it will continue to be their favorite adjective until Obama is finally driven out of office in the same spirit of disgrace and abject failure that Jimmy Carter left under.

When a Democrat – and most especially when a liberal Democrat – is president, every single new negative economic report is an utter surprise that no one could possibly have every expected.

When a Republican is running the country, by contrast, no matter how good things might be, it’s actually a bad thing.

The media’s bias is simply mindboggling.  As I have frequently documented:

Media’s Bias, Dishonesty Re: Reagan Vs. Obama Unemployment Bodes Ill For America

And as researches have proven with media studies:

Partisan Bias in Newspapers?  A Study of Headlines Says Yes

An article titled, “Stocks Fall… Unemployment Rate Rises… Factory Orders Down” sums up the Obama economy:

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks have begun the trading day down, with a disappointing jobs report souring investors’ mood. The Dow, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 are all seeing modest declines in early trading.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Economists had expected better, but the Labor Department reports the nation’s employers added only 39,000 jobs last month. That was a sharp drop from the 172,000 created in October. It also pushes the nation’s unemployment rate to 9.8 percent. It’s now been above 9 percent for 19 straight months, the longest stretch on record.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Commerce Department reports orders to U.S. factories fell 0.9 percent in October. That’s the biggest drop since May. Plunging demand for commercial and military aircraft was the biggest factor. Excluding transportation, orders were off 0.2 percent.

But here we are.  With our most current “Unexpected Update To Unexpected Unemployment News.”

A Labor Department report released today reveals job creation in November was down by 133,000 jobs from October, bringing the total unemployment rate up to 9.8 percent.

This was a declared the most recent Unexpected Development in our long unemployment saga by the media.  Private-sector job creators are facing massive tax hikes, which the President and his Party say they will defend to the bitter end.  The cost of labor has skyrocketed due to a poorly designed, constantly mutating health care bill, which keeps spitting out unforeseen, but universally expensive, consequences.  Somehow there are “analysts” who think they will respond to these factors by expanding their operations and hiring more people.  Such analysts now live in a constant state of surprise.

Only 39,000 jobs were added in November, which makes it the sixteenth consecutive month in which unemployment has remained above 9.5%, the worst record since the Great Depression.  You may recall that the Democrats predicted 7% unemployment by now, after a peak below 8%, if their trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill was passed.  The Republican House Ways & Means Committee certainly does, and put out a press release to that effect this morning.

The ABC News report of the new unemployment figures contains an interesting quote from Daneil Pedrotty, director of the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment, who thinks employers are squeezing more work out of few people by exploiting a “climate of fear”: “There are five applicants for every opening.  You have to work harder, or your job either will be done away with or outsourced.  Companies would just as soon open a factory in India as Peoria.”

No, they wouldn’t, or they already would have done so.  No CEO looks at pins in Peoria and Calcutta on a world map, shrugs, and says “Whichever.  I don’t know, flip a coin.”  They choose Calcutta because they have to.  They outsource when hiring American workers, or building facilities on American soil, no longer makes economic sense.  Both sentiment and practical considerations cause them to prefer American locations.  No sane executive would prefer to manage facilities on the other side of the world, commuting thousands of miles for meetings or inspections.  If companies truly would “just as soon open a factory in India as Peoria,” there has been very little stopping them for decades.  Are we supposed to believe America just keeps winning those coin tosses?

Furthermore, the idea of reducing personnel needs by enslaving current employees through a “climate of fear” is ignorant rubbish.  Anecdotal cases surely exist, but the bulk of job creation, on a national scale, is a response to demand. The ABC report makes much of the contrast between falling job creation and rising corporate profits, missing the point that long-term hiring decisions are made in anticipation of future opportunity.  Uncertainty breeds hesitation and thwarts expansion.

Look at it this way: suppose the government simply hired everyone, and guaranteed them a splendid income.  What would they all do? The government could give them make-work jobs, but this would not be a response to demand, so it wouldn’t last very long.  Every aspect of the economy, from consumer prices to interest rates, would be thrown wildly off kilter by a horde of people getting paid $30,000 per year to do whatever a government bureaucrat can think up… or more likely do nothing at all while waiting for the Federal Bureau of Imaginary Jobs to come up with something.  The government would quickly go bankrupt, while citizens waiting in line to buy ten-dollar loaves of stale Wonder Bread.  You don’t have to imagine what this looks like – just crack open a history book and look up “Soviet Union.”

Only demand and opportunity sustain job growth.  People need each other.  The only way government can help them hook up, and generate wealth through commerce, is to get out of the way.  Wise observers will expect robust, sustained job growth when they see signs of that happening.

This marks the nineteenth consecutive month of unemployment being over 9%.  The media continues to vilify George Bush, but do you know how many months the unemployment rate was over 9% during the Bush administration?  Try ZERO.

The worst month for unemployment for George W. Bush was 7.8% – which, interestingly, was the same worst month as Bill Clinton (who, as we all know, paved the streets with gold) had.

Nineteen straight months of 9+ percent unemployment.  Versus zero months.  So we blame the guy with the zero months for the record of the guy with the nineteen straight months.  And this from the very people who constantly harp about “fairness.”

Let’s blame the guy who had an unprecedented 52-consecutive months of job growth, rather than consider the policies of the guy who has clearly imploded our economy.

Let’s blame the guy who had one of the best records for appointing people with private sector business experience, rather than the guy with the worst record in history:

Whatever we do, let’s NOT blame the guy who doubled and then tripled the debt in the most massive spending binge in American history:

This ‘Blame Bush’ Crap Has Just GOT To End

George Bush inherited the policies that led to the 9/11 disaster only months into his presidency.  George Bush inherited the Dotcom disaster that wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq index along with $7.1 trillion in American wealth that was just vaporized as a result of Bill Clinton’s economy.  And rather than spend the next two years blaming his predecessor, Bush cut taxes and turned the economy around.  At least until Democrat policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act and Democrat refusal to reform and regulate Democrat-created Fannie and Freddie brought America crashing down.

Why don’t we blame the president who actually sued banks to force them to make bad loans to people who couldn’t afford the home loans that the banks were forced to provide???

By the standard the Democrats used to demonize George Bush in 2004, Barack Obama is the worst president in American history.

But the media prefers “the unexpected” to “the truth.”

For the record, I am rather fed up with “unexpected” lousy economic news that anyone with a scintilla of common sense saw coming before Obama even took office.

It Was DEMOCRATS Who Blew Up Our Economy In 2008

I’ve been saying this for months: It was DEMOCRATS who destroyed our economy in 2008.

First of all, given all the times that you’ve heard the line, “The Republicans created this mess,” ask yourself a question: when was the last time you heard an explanation as to just precisely what the Republicans did to cause the disaster?

Don’t be a lemming and a tool; read up on how Democrats loaded up GSEs Fannie and Freddie with liberals, massively increased the government ownership of the mortgage industry, engaged in incredibly risky policies even as our housing market was beginning a cyclical downturn, and then refused to allow any regulations or reform whatsoever:

With Eyes Finally Wide-Open, Reconsider Why The Economy Collapsed In The First Place

Who REALLY Exploded Your Economy, Liberals Or Conservatives?

Biden: We Misread The Economy – And It’s All The Republicans’ Fault

Want To Know Why Your Economy Blew Up?

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

This Blame Bush Crap Has Just GOT To End

And here’s the latest fact and the latest explanation as to just how Democrats blew up our economy:

The quotes that explain the entire financial meltdown
posted at 12:10 pm on October 12, 2008 by Ed Morrissey

For those who want a smoking gun to show the genesis of the financial collapse, this short sequence from a longer video I posted this week will do it. Clinton HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement of a lending discrimination complaint with Accubanc, a Texas lender whose prerequisites for mortgages came under attack from “community organizers” at the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission and the city of Dallas. I clipped out this sequence to underscore its importance:

Watch the video.

CUOMO: To take a greater risk on these mortgages, yes. To give families mortgages that they would not have given otherwise, yes.

Q: [unintellible] … that they would not have given the loans at all?

CUOMO: They would not have qualified but for this affirmative action on the part of the bank, yes.

Q: Are minorities represented in that low and moderate income group?

CUOMO: It is by income, and is it also by minorities? Yes.

CUOMO: With the 2.1 billion, lending that amount in mortgages — which will be a higher risk, and I’m sure there will be a higher default rate on those mortgages than on the rest of the portfolio …

Here, in fact, is the genesis of the problem, the ideology that created the monster.  Cuomo, the Clinton administration, and Congress believed they had the right and the power to determine acceptable risk for the lenders, rather than lenders determining it for themselves in a free market.  Even while imposing risk standards on lenders, Cuomo admits that he expects a higher default rate on the new loans — which is why the lenders didn’t want to write them in the first place.

In other words, the CRA didn’t get used to fight discrimination, but to force lenders to give money to high-risk borrowers for political purposes.  And Cuomo knew it.

That was the political arrogance at the heart of the collapse.  However, the CRA was more a sideshow than the actual problem.  When Congress decided that enforcement alone wouldn’t generate enough mortgages to boost their political fortunes, they had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eliminate the risk entirely for lenders through the purchase of the subprime loans.  Without that risk and with almost-guaranteed short-term profits of subprime loans, lenders went wild while Fannie and Freddie repackaged them as quasi-government bonds for investors.

While Democrats like Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi keep blaming “greed” for the collapse, it was Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd building that “greed” into the system in order to drive the subprime lending market.  And it was Democrats like Frank, Dodd, Maxine Waters, and Lacy Clay who suggested that regulators like Armando Falcon were racists for blowing the whistle on the Ponzi scheme they created.

The Democrats decided, as Michelle says, that mortgages were a civil right, and wouldn’t cost the American taxpayers a dime.  How well is that working out, America?  And now, the question you have to ask yourselves is this: Do you want the nation’s economic policies run by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank for the next two years?

John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The problem is that we aren’t a moral or religious people anymore.

We’ve become a bad people.  And bad people allow a climate in which lies dominate, and then they believe the lies they are told.

And that is why we allowed a mainstream media to fabricate an entire culture of lies, and then we believed their narrative that Republicans (who hadn’t been in power for two years in the Congress) were the party to blame.  We blamed Bush – who tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to reform and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prior to the economic meltdown just in 2008 alone.  And Bush had called for reform and regulation of the GSEs 34 times since 2001.  And we put the very Democrats who blew up our economy by refusing to allow those reforms or regulations until after it was too late in charge of the economy that they ruined.

It was Democrats and the Government Sponsored Enterprise system Democrats created (i.e., GSEs Fannie and Freddie) that created the financial disaster; just as it is Democrats who are in total control of our government who are CONTINUING to undermine our economy now.

We gave Democrats total power.  And in just two years they have so destroyed our economy and our health care system that we may never be able to recover.

Fed Changes Mind After Changing Mind, Monetizing Debt Again As America Flushes Way To Ruination

First, the New York Times headline:

Fed to Buy U.S. Debt, Saying Recovery Has Slowed
August 10, 2010, 2:19 pm

The Federal Reserve acknowledged Tuesday that its confidence in the economic recovery had dimmed, and it announced that it would use the proceeds from its huge mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities, The New York Times’s Sewell Chan reports from Washington.

Bu bu but I thought Barry Messiah said this would be the summer of economic recovery.  I thought Barry Hussein had kissed the economy with his beatific wonderfulness and made it all better.

The fourth paragraph in the Slimes article underscores the fact that the Keystone cops of the Obama administration have absolutely no idea what they’re doing:

The Fed’s new stance marked the completion of a turnabout from a few months ago, when officials were discussing when and how to eventually raise interest rates and gradually shrink the $2.3 trillion balance sheet the Fed amassed through its response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Ben Bernanke came out back in February and had this finance fit:

Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress that the Federal Reserve does not plan to “print money” to help Congress finance the exploding U.S. national debt.  In fact, Bernanke told Congress that the U.S. could soon face a debt crisis as bad as the one in Greece if the U.S. government does not get things in order financially.  This represents a fundamental change in policy for the Federal Reserve, because they have been enabling the massive borrowing by the U.S. government over the past couple of years by “buying” the majority of new U.S. government debt that has been issued.  But now the fat cats over at the Federal Reserve have apparently changed their minds.  Using uncharacteristic bluntness, Bernanke told Congress that the Federal Reserve is “not going to monetize the debt”.So why is the Federal Reserve changing course?

Well, have no fear: the Federal Reserve is Re-changing course.  Like a boomerang that comes back around to smack an ignorant fool right in the head.  Perhaps they have come to realize that the U.S. economy is about to flush down the drain and plunge into a deep, dark hole, and they figure the fall might be softer if we land on giant piles of worthless currency.

Yes we’ll monetize the debt.  Oh no we won’t.  Oh yes we will.  Stop arguing with me!  But I am you!

I thought the following was a good article due to its provision of a historic context for today’s Fed decision:

Fed begins monetizing the deficit

The Federal Reserve, in announcing the results of this week’s meeting of the Open Market Committee, surprised the market by revealing it will begin purchasing US Treasury notes and bonds with the principal income it receives from its vast holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage securities. This practice – wherein the Fed buys up US government securities and injects cash into the public market as payment for these securities – is a form of monetizing the debt. The last time the Fed did this on a big scale was back in the 1960s when it attempted to mop up the excess Treasury securities that were flooding the market as a result of Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to finance the Vietnam War. That Fed program was viewed at the time as a failure, since the cash the Fed put back into the economy in exchange for the securities was a big reason – perhaps the major reason – why price inflation accelerated from the late 1960s until a decade later, when Paul Volcker managed to squelch inflation once and for all with forbiddingly high interest rates.

The market was expecting some sort of monetary stimulus, but not this. The expectation was that the Fed would renew its “quantitative easing” program involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities – a program designed to push down long term mortgage rates. That program was successful inasmuch as mortgage rates are at record lows, but it left the Fed with well over a trillion dollars of these securities on its balance sheet. Fed officials have lately been pondering publicly how to get rid of these securities, and apparently have concluded they can’t under present market conditions without forcing mortgage rates back up again, which would only hurt the housing market. Instead, these officials have concluded that the Fed has no choice but to hold on to these securities until they mature, which is well over 10 years from now for the portfolio.

The Fed receives billions of dollars of principal and interest payments every year on this portfolio, and what to do with this cash has always been open for discussion until now. But using principal proceeds from these securities to monetize the government debt is fraught with risk. For one, should the housing market start to weaken again and foreclosures rise from current levels, the Fed will be sitting on billions of dollars of credit losses on its portfolio. This could eat up most if not all of the profit it would otherwise earn on this portfolio. Second, older investors have memories of the nasty inflationary consequences the last time the Fed monetized the debt, and the market has become very skittish about the risk of inflation, and maybe even hyperinflation ala Weimar Germany, that could result from the enormous fiscal and monetary stimulus put into the economy since 2007.

In terms of these risks, the best thing the Fed has going for it at the moment is that the pricing problem facing the current economy is not inflation, but deflation. A growing number of economists, and even some Fed governors, are worrying outright about deflation, but at least in a deflationary environment the Fed is given a lot more leeway to monetize the debt and build up its balance sheet as a consequence. The Fed press release today did not mention deflation per se, but the FOMC no longer described the economy as “progressing”, as it did in June. Instead, the Fed sees an economy with substantial slack, a stagnant housing market, repressed earnings power for workers, and very low inflation.

The bond market was happy to buy Treasuries on this news, concentrating in the 2 to 10 year maturities, in anticipation of higher prices (and thus lower yields) once the Fed begins actively purchasing. So far, in other words, the bond market sees no risk of inflation, much less hyperinflation, and is content to see yields continue to head to record low levels. Such excessively low yields on government bonds have only been seen in deflationary economies like Japan has experienced for nearly two decades. This is in essence what the bond market is forecasting for the US economy.

The stock market, which has been on a tear since early July, took this news in stride, but time and past experience is weighing heavily on this stock rally. When bond yields fall to record lows, this has never boded well for equities. In a deflationary economy, stock prices are one of the main victims, and the US stock markets have so far shown no significant adjustment downwards to reflect deflation. Stocks may have some serious “catching up” to do.

At the least, we can say we are no longer in that environment in the spring when Fed governors were talking seriously about how they were going to remove all their monetary stimulus now that the economy has recovered. Instead, we are witnessing yet another round of monetary stimulus, a recognition by the Fed that their previous efforts have failed to ignite a sustainable recovery.

All this from the Federal Reserve, an entity that is neither “federal” nor a “reserve.”  It is a private bank that issues currency based on fiat of delegated institutional power.  And what it is doing now is akin to photocopying a dollar bill to pay a credit card bill.  Another analogy would be if you were facing bankruptcy, and decided to start buying your own furniture from yourself.

Mind you, this is only partly the Federal Reserve’s fault.  They are in an impossible position as the Failure-in-Chief continues a path of spending America into collapse, and they have to figure out how to finance Obama’s addiction.

The Obama administration alternately fearmongered and promised that if the stimulus was passed that unemployment would not rise above 8%.  They lied.  The rate has been dropping from an earlier high exceeding 10% only because discouraged workers who give up are paradoxically dropped off the roles and aren’t counted.  Then they spent months creating pure fictions such as “created or saved” as “evidence” that Obama’s failed policy had succeeded.

To quote:

“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called `jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason…” – Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy

“There is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” – Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw

Then Obama spent months telling us that the economy was recovering when it really wasn’t, culminating in his bogus “summer of economic recovery.”

This is an administration that falsely takes credit for a false recovery even as they falsely blame Bush and refuse to accept responsibility for their own policies.  It’s “win, we win, lose, Bush loses.”

These people should have zero-point-zero-zero credibility.

Barney Frank And Democrat Party Most Responsible For 2008 Economic Collapse

I don’t want to ridicule Barney Frank on account of his weight.  Suffice it to say he is easily able to pull off the two faces he routinely wears, and the two sides he routinely takes.

Here’s the recent side of Barney Frank:

Frank: “well one of my biggest differences with the Bush administration, even with the Clinton administration, was that they overdid that. I have always been critical of this effort to equate a decent home with home ownership. I think we should have been doing more to provide rental housing, my efforts have been to try and get affordable rental housing I was very much in disagreement with this push into home ownership and I think the federal government should not be artificially doing that. The goal is for people to have decent housing and I think beginning in the Clinton administration, exacerbated by Bush, we pushed people too much into home ownership…”
– Barney Frank, May 20, ‘2010 on CNBC.

And here’s Frank from 2005 documenting the fact that Barney Frank in 2010 is a rank liar:

“This is a very important resolution, particularly at this time, because we have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about home ownership and its role in the economy.
Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership, homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we have seen elsewhere.

This is not the dot-com situation. We had problems with people having invested in business plans for which there was no reality and people building fiber-optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you will not see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble.

So those of us on our committee in particular will continue to push for home ownership.
– Barney Frank, 2005

link
Video Link

[I found these quotes at US Politics Online].

You’re right, Barney.  It wasn’t the Dot-com situation.  It was a hundred times WORSE than the Dot-com situation, even given as bad as the Dot-com bubble was.  And yeah, you sure were right when you said there wouldn’t be a collapse, weren’t you?

So first of all, we have Barney Frank – liberal Democrat par excellence – acknowledging that the bad policy that led to the mortgage market meltdown was actually a CLINTON policy that Bush merely continued (most likely because he knew he’d be called a “racist” the moment he ended a program that gave billions of dollars to minorities to buy homes they couldn’t afford).

From the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

It’s beyond asinine that Democrats blame Bush for ruining the economy, and praise Clinton as having the mostest wonderfulest economy ever, when it was a Clinton program that ruined the Bush economy.  But that’s the mainstream media narrative for you.

It’s ironic that Frank in hindsight so laughably compared the housing mortgage bubble that brought down the economy in 2008 to the Dot-com bubble that brought down the economy just as Clinton was leaving office.  Because that’s TWO giant economy-killers that “Mister Wonderful Clinton” inflicted on George Bush.  The Clinton-era Dot-com crash ultimately destroyed 78% of the Nasdaq composite.  Clinton benefited with a huge market surge, and Bush paid with a huge market collapse that began taking place while the handprint on the Bible from Bush’s oath of office was still warm.

So Barney Frank reminds us that the destruction of the Bush economy was bookended by massive Clinton failures – the Dot-com bubble collapse in 2001 and the housing market bubble collapse in 2008.  And Clinton was never blamed for either of them by the propagandist mainstream media.

The second thing you can notice is that Democrats like Barney Frank – who were so quick to pounce all over the mortgage meltdown and blame Bush for it – were not only the ones who created the problem, but were the ones who defended the problem.

What’s the Democrat-mainstream media-created narrative for why we had the 2008 collapse?  Republicans refusing to regulate?  Read what the New York Times said back in September 11, 2003:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

So Bush WANTED to regulate, in contradiction to all the lies that you heard.

And who blocked those regulations?  Omigosh, it was Barney Frank and his Democrats.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

You would find if you bothered to look at the facts that Bush demanded reform and regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac SEVENTEEN TIMES during his presidency.  And that Democrats refused to regulate the GSEs and even threatened filibusters against regulation.  Not that the mainstream media is honest enough to report the truth.

You would find if you bothered to look at the facts that financial experts literally predicted that the Clinton-birthed Fannie and Freddie expansion would ultimately explode.

Again from the New York Times, September 30, 1999:

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

What do we have, even in the pages of the New York Slimes?  A prediction that as soon as the economy cooled off, the mortgage market wold explode like a depth charge and the government would have to step in to prevent a catastrophe?  From a Clinton program?

The same man – Peter Wallison – who had predicted the disaster from 1999 wrote a September 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”

The New York Times acknowledged that Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios.”

And the Los Angeles Times on May 31, 1999 describes how this process turned into a bubble, as more begat more, and then more and more begat more and more and more:

Lenders also have opened the door wider to minorities because of new initiatives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the giant federally chartered corporations that play critical, if obscure, roles in the home finance system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from lenders and bundle them into securities; that provides lenders the funds to lend more. . . .

In a nutshell, Fannie and Freddie, acting as Government sponsored enterprises, bought tens of millions of mortgages, and then repackaged them into huge mortgage-backed securities that giant private entities such as Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers purchased.  What made these securities particularly attractive to the private banking entities was that these securities were essentially being sold – and had the backing – of the United States government.

Here’s the process:

The Role of the GSEs is to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. Step 1 Banks lend money to Households to purchase and refinance home mortgages Step 2 The GSEs purchase these mortgage from the banks Step 3 GSEs bundle the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities Step 4 GSEs sell mortgage-backed and debt securities to domestic and international capital investors Step 5 Investors pay GSEs for purchase of debt and securities Step 6 GSEs return funds to banks to lend out again for the issuance of new mortgage loans.

Now, an intelligent observer would note a conflict: the GSE’s role was to “provide stability,” and yet they were taking on “significantly more risk” in the final year of the Clinton presidency.  What’s wrong with this picture?

The GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were designed to bundle up the mortgages into mortgage backed securities and then sell them to the private market.

Fannie Mae is exempt from SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulation. Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.  This allowed Fannie Mae to bundle up mortgages, which were then rated AAA with no requirement to make clear what is in the bundle.  Which screams why Bush wanted to regulate them.

This is what has allowed toxic instruments that have been sold across the world.  It also created a situation where money institutions did not know and could not find out whether potential inter-bank business partners were holding these “boiled babies on their books, complete with a golden stamp on the wrapping,” rather than safe instruments.  This then inclined banks to a natural caution, to be wary of lending good money to other banks against these ‘assets’.  And thus banks refused to lend to one another.

John McCain wrote a letter in 2006 urging reform and regulation of the GSEs.  He said:

Congress chartered Fannie and Freddie to provide access to home financing by maintaining liquidity in the secondary mortgage market. Today, almost half of all mortgages in the U.S. are owned or guaranteed by these GSEs. They are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding between them. With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

An of course, they could not pay their debts.  Fannie and Freddie basically went bankrupt and were taken over.  And they took a whopping share of the biggest financial institutions down with them.  Fannie is in the process of devouring nearly 400 billion dollars of bailout money from the American taxpayer.  And now – GREAT GOOGLEY MOOGLEY – Obama is planning to funnel yet another $800 BILLION through the same Fannie and Freddie who already destroyed us once.

And thus you had a financial disaster created by one William Jefferson Clinton and one Democrat Party.  And now a second act of economic destruction is being planned by Barack Obama.

The 2008 economic collapse that Democrats were elected to fix was itself created by Democrats who will now continue the very policies that created the disaster in the first place.

Democrats then demonized Bush for merely being there when the disaster happened.  When they had created the mess, and when they had refused to allow Bush to do anything to prevent a Democrat-created disaster that he and other Republicans saw coming, but ultimately lacked the courage to stop.

Why ObamaCare Passage Marks A Day That Shall Live In Infamy

The pundits have rightly compared the gigantic ObamaCare bill with the Roosevelt administration – if nothing else than because we haven’t seen any government program so gigantic since then.

In a way that is very fitting.  Because we can bookend December 7, 1941 and March 21, 2010 with the same prediction: a day that shall live in infamy.

December 7th was a disaster because FDR utterly failed to see a clear and present danger building on opposite sides of both oceans.  We failed to take precautions.  We failed to arm ourselves.  We even failed to protect ourselves.  What made it so criminal was that we had years of ample warning, but simply chose to ignore it.

March 21 was hardly a surprise, either.  Just as with December 7, a lot of Americans saw it coming, but lacked the power to do anything but point and shout about the coming disaster.  The major difference is that on December 7, 1941, our government failed to protect our way of life, whereas on March 21, 2010, our government actively attacked our way of life.

And now it is here.  And now that it is here, it will grow like a cancer.  Slowly at first – it doesn’t fully kick in until 2014 – and then it will erupt like a big poisonous mushroom.

Charles Krauthammer described what the passage of ObamaCare means with his usual brilliance:

“Nonetheless, it will be the law of the land as of tonight and we’re going to be a different country.  We are on our way, there is absolutely no chance we are not going to end up with national health care.   This is nationalizing health care, the insurance companies are now utilities, they are contractors. the government makes all of these decisions, only a matter of time and will probably happen after the Obama administration.  But he will be remembered as the father of national health care as they have in Canada or Britain and it starts tonight.”

Krauthammer is in no way exaggerating or politicizing the regulatory takeover of private insurance companies by the government under ObamaCare.  That can be demonstrated merely by examine what Dennis Kucinich said about ObamaCare and about the role of private insurance companies before he went ahead and voted for it anyway:

• “I don’t know what there is for my constituents”
• It’s “a license to just steal money from people”
• ObamaCare is a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
• This bill is “not going to protect consumers from these rapid premium increases
• It provides “no guarantees of any control over premiums”
• It is “forcing people to buy private insurance”
• It’s going to result in “five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases”
• “I just don`t see that this bill is the solution”
• “The insurance companies are the problem and we`re giving them a version of a bailout”
• “This bill doesn`t change the fact that the insurance companies are going to keep socking it to the consumer”
• It results in a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
• “You`re building on sand. There`s no structure here”
• If we pass this bill, “all we`re going to have is more poverty in this country”
• If we pass this bill, “people aren`t going to get the care that they need”

This remaking of private insurance companies as utilities, as contractors for the government, is fascism, pure and simple.  The government didn’t nationalize them, as it would do under communism, but it created a massive new set of regulations, and bureaucracies, and mandates, and taxes that quintessentially takes them over as agents of the state.  And that is what fascism is all about:

The entry under “Fascism” in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics reads in part:

Where socialism [i.e., communism] sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”–that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities.

And that is exactly what is happening.  Liberals may not like my term, but it couldn’t be more applicable here.  Obama demonized the insurance companies, and he will now regulate and control and dominate them “in the national interest.”

ObamaCare amounts to a regulatory takeover of the private health insurance companies.  They will be told what to do, how to do it, and how much to charge (although you might see them massively raise rates in preparation to protect themselves for the onslaught that is coming their way).  The government under Obama already owns General Motors and Chrysler.  His administration already essentially owns many banking institutions.  The government under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac controls more than 90 percent of the nation’s secondary mortgage market.  And Paul Volcker acknowledged that “the federal government was responsible for up to 95 percent of all new home mortgages in the fourth quarter of 2009.”

Even the student loan industry was effectively nationalized under ObamaCare.

It’s naked fascism.  And that fascism which was slowly trickling onto us during the Bush years has now become an massive avalanche under Obama.

Fascism is bad, of course.  But the economic consequences of this fascist takeover of our health care system may be even worse than the political ones.

As for that, consider what Weekly Standard journalist Steve Hayes said (link includes video of the following):

“I think that if you take a step back from this the real story here is is the deficit and that story.  Everybody’s familiar with the debt clock; we’ve all seen how fast it moves.  This is going to put it on double time or triple time because when you go back and you look at the history of entitlements in the country, that’s the pattern.  There are promises that this is going to cut deficits or debt, and it never does.  You look back at at what FDR said when he signed Social Security into law in July 1935. He said it would act as a protection for future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. He also said this is a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States and economic structure of vastly greater soundness. Social Security today?  $43 Trillion dollar unfunded liability – that’s 400 thousand dollars per household in the United States today. And you go back to 1965.  LBJ did the same thing. You saw Nancy Pelosi carrying the gavel – it’s the same argument.  He said it would be $1.50 a month for the average worker.  $1.50 a month.  Three dollars per month after you’re 65.  Today, Medicare has a $57 trillion dollar unfunded liability.  $500,000 dollars per American household.  This will bankrupt the country.”

FDR said in 1935 when he signed Social Security into law:

It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

$43 TRILLION dollars of unfunded liability.  That is $400,000 for every household in the country.  That is $184,000 for every single man, woman, and child in the country.  Please pay up now.

Does that sound like something that lessened the force of possible future ANYTHING? A protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply in debt???  Something that provides the United States with an economic structure of vastly greater soundness???  We’re doomed.

Maybe you don’t care that this giant boondoggle is going to crash and burn your country, and that your children or grandchildren will literally die as a result of your greed and selfishness.  But I do.

They promised us a bogus Utopia, and that Utopia is about to collapse into the fiery pit of hell.

What was it that Lyndon Johnson promised us when he sold his load of Medicare malarkey?

Now here is how the plan will affect you.

During your working years, the people of America–you–will contribute through the social security program a small amount each payday for hospital insurance protection. For example, the average worker in 1966 will contribute about $1.50 per month. The employer will contribute a similar amount. And this will provide the funds to pay up to 90 days of hospital care for each illness, plus diagnostic care, and up to 100 home health visits after you are 65. And beginning in 1967, you will also be covered for up to 100 days of care in a skilled nursing home after a period of hospital care.

And under a separate plan, when you are 65–that the Congress originated itself, in its own good judgment–you may be covered for medical and surgical fees whether you are in or out of the hospital. You will pay $3 per month after you are 65 and your Government will contribute an equal amount.

Let me tell you how Medicare affects me: It affects me with a $57 trillion unfunded liability.  It affects me with a bill of $500,000 for every single household in America.  It affects me with an individual bill (that every single man, woman, and child in this country owes) of $230,000.

The forerunner of the CBO underestimated the actual cost of Medicare by a whopping factor of 10.  If they repeat their little boo-boo, ObamaCare will cost $10 trillion dollars over ten years, and the United States will completely collapse as an independent nation-state.

And that’s $230,ooo on top of the $184,000 I owe for Medicare.  I owe $414,000.  And my household owns $900,000.  And great googly moogly, we don’t got it.  We’re on a speeding train that is going to keep hurtling along until it flies off a cliff and crashes.

Hey, I got an idea: let’s double that.  Hell, let’s triple it.

If you believe that the government is going to create a trillion dollar entitlement that ensures 47 million more people – (John Larson, chairman of the Democratic caucus, used the “47 million” figure on ABCs “This Week” just yesterday; he used it again on CNNs “State of the Union”) and spends less money than is spent now, you are an abject fool.

And that “47 million” clearly includes 17 million illegal immigrants.  The Democrats’ incredibly cynical plan is to take health resources from you and from your children and grandchildren and give those resources to illegal immigrants so they can capture the Hispanic vote.

The metaphor is a dozen people rushing into your house to eat your food and consume your resources while your own kids go hungry.  No one would do this.  But your government is doing it under Democrat Party tyranny.

The real cost of this bill is over $6 TRILLION.  The Democrats filled their legislation with gimmicks, such as assuming they would cut doctors’ Medicare reimbursements by 21% when they know they won’t, then putting that “Doctor fix” in another bill.  That will add $208 billion to the real cost of their plan.  Then they falsely start the bill’s ten-year score in 2010, when the benefits don’t start getting paid out until 2014.  That accounting deceit masks the fact that the REAL cost of the bill is $2.3 trillion.

The $6 trillion (PLUS!!!) figure comes from the biggest and most despicable shenanigan of all: all the money from American citizens who will be unconstitutionally forced to purchase health insurance isn’t counted in the CBO score.  At all.  Not one penny.

In other words, your ObamaCare – which really isn’t even deficit neutral at all – was sold as “deficit neutral” because it doesn’t count the trillions and trillions of dollars that American citizens will be compelled by their government to pay for health insurance.

ObamaCare amounted to the slitting of the national wrists.  And we’re going to start bleeding out until we either abandon it or die.

The Republicans have a few more tactics to fight this bill, but they amount to starting backfires to try to temporarily contain a massive hungry forest fire.  It won’t be enough, and it probably won’t ultimately succeed.

Thirty-eight states and counting are now working to preempt the ObamaCare disaster by protecting their citizens from this disgraceful and unconstitutional boondoggle.

Having this monster 2,700-page government takeover of health care may be the only chance this nation has of avoiding a very-near term financial implosion.

If this bill isn’t stopped, one day Americans will look back at the late great former United States of America and realize that that was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

Bush Katrina Economy Obama Haiti Economy

Yesterday on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos substitute host Jake Tapper interviewed Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  Bush could not have been more gracious in praising Obama’s relief efforts.

In other words, he didn’t try to do to Obama what Obama and the Democrats so viciously did to him.

And I couldn’t help but wonder: if Democrats believed their own crap about Bush and Katrina, why on earth would they be asking George Bush to lead an effort for Haitian relief now?

It has now been six days since the earthquake that destroyed Haiti.  Obama promised an unprecedented massive effort to provide emergency relief.

Has it been organized well?

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. relief effort after the Haiti earthquake started too slowly and cautiously, says a retired general who led the military relief effort on the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“The next morning after the earthquake, as a military man of 37 years service, I assumed … there would be airplanes delivering aid, not troops, but aid,” said retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who coordinated military operations after disaster struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005. “What we saw instead was discussion about, ‘Well we’ve got to send an assessment team in to see what the needs are.’ And anytime I hear that, my head turns red.”

The problem, Honore told USA TODAY, is that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, instead of the military, take the lead in international disaster response.

“I was a little frustrated to hear that USAID was the lead agency,” he said. “I respect them, but they’re not a rapid deployment unit.”

USAID immediately dispatched an assessment team and search-and-rescue teams, but there has still not been widespread distribution of food or water, three days after the Haiti earthquake.

Let’s file that as a ‘no’.

Very little in the way of actual lifesaving supplies had gone out as of the time of that article.  Has that situation improved?

Yesterday, ABC’s Tapper pointed out:

“But it’s five days later, and still a lot of the relief effort, a lot of the aid has not gotten to the people who need it most.”

An exchange between Tapper and Raddatz:

So how about it, Martha? Is the relief effort getting to those who need it most?

RADDATZ: Well, we actually went with a convoy, one truckload of supplies yesterday. We arrived really early in the morning, expecting to track this truck, come back, and go out with another truck. It took us five-and-a-half hours to get these supplies where they were needed.

General Keen, the military commander, said that 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 food rations had been handed out Saturday – four days after the disaster!  70,000 bottles of water for 3.5 MILLION people in need.  They needed 10 million bottles of water a day.

Let’s file that as another big ‘no.’

How many days did Bush get before Democrats hatefully and viciously attacked him?

Well, are they at least providing security for the relief supplies yet to come?

Another exchange during the ABC program between Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz:

TAPPER: Speaking of chaos, Martha, we keep hearing about reports of sporadic violence. Where is the U.S. military in all this? Are they making attempts to secure the island?

RADDATZ: Absolutely not, Jake. They really aren’t. I keep hearing these numbers. There are about 4,200 American military supporting this mission, but mostly they’re out on the ships. They’re on the cutters. You’ve got the 82nd Airborne, not all of the 82nd Airborne, a brigade, about 3,500 soldiers are here. They’re expected to be here sometime next week. The Marines are not yet here, 2,200 Marines.

Jake Tapper pointed out to the US military commander for the region, General Keen, that:

General Keen, I’d like to go to you first. Martha Raddatz just reported that U.S. troops are not out there securing Haiti, even though there are sporadic outbursts of violence, some of them horrific. We heard a report of — in Petionville, a suburb of Port- au-Prince, a policeman handed over a suspected looter to an angry crowd. They stripped him, beat him, and set him on fire. We’ve also heard that some medical personnel are clearing the area because they don’t feel secure.

Sounds like another rather big ‘no’ vote.

I think I’ve amply proven the case that a week after the Haiti disaster a great deal separates what has been done from what could have been done.  I can’t help but remember how bitterly the left attacked Bush for the same failures following an unprecedented natural disaster.

This is what liberals would be saying about Barack Obama if they weren’t hypocrites: Barack Obama hates black people!!!  Barack Obama is creating a genocide of black people!!!

And Republican elected officials, if they were like Democrats, would be claiming accusing the Obama administration of “ethnic cleansing” in Haiti.

Because that’s how loathsome Democrats rolled just a few years back.  And yes, that’s right: the same Democrats who regard any criticism of Barack Obama as a form of blasphemy.

I was pointing that out last year during the Democrat National Convention when Democrats were STILL demonizing and demagoguing Bush for Hurricane Katrina.

The left ignored the fact that Hurricane Katrina was a supermassive disaster that simply overwhelmed the resources of the federal government regardless of who was in charge of it.  They ignored the fact that Bill Clinton hadn’t prepared New Orleans for such a disaster any better than George Bush did.  They ignored the fact that the heavily Democratic city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana had utterly failed to prepare, when such preparation should have been at the very core of their agenda.  They ignored details such as this:

The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn’t do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn’t, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a “mandatory” evacuation a day late, but kept the city’s 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water.

They ignored everything but their ideological agenda and the political axe-to-grind they had in their hands to swing at George Bush with.

And the propagandistic mainstream media helped them do it.

The same media that basically demanded that George Bush push a button and FIX New Orleans have gone out of their way to make excuses for the numerous failures in Haiti under Obama.

What is funny is that it was largely the attacks against Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina that led to the Democrat takeover of the House and the Senate in 2006.

Unemployment was 4.7% when the Democrats took over Congress.  It was 4.7% when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid assumed their respective majority leadership positions.  They have been in control of Congress ever since: and what is unemployment at now?

The Democrat Party/lamestream media narrative is that Bush was responsible for the economic meltdown because it happened during his watch.  There was never once a mention that it happened during Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s watch.  Because that particular narrative doesn’t fit their agenda.

George Bush called for reform of the housing finance market 17 times in 2008 alone — and Democrats ignored him.  They had been blocking his every effort to prevent disaster ever since Bush first tried to do so beginning in 2003.  At that time, Democrat Barney Frank led the effort to block reform, saying:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

George Bush and John McCain repeatedly warned that if we didn’t address the situation, we would suffer a financial collapse.

John McCain wrote an urgent letter in 2006 that read:

These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform. For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs—and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns.

In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay. I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

John McCain signed another letter that ended with these words:

With the fiscal challenges facing us today (deficits, entitlements, pensions and flood insurance), Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?

Substantial testimony calling for improved regulation of the GSEs has been provided to the Senate by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, HUD, GAO, CBO, and others. Congress has the opportunity to recommit itself to the housing mission of the GSEs while at the same time making sure the GSEs operate in a manner that does not expose our financial system, or taxpayers, to unnecessary risk. It is vitally important that Congress take the necessary steps to ensure that these institutions benefit from strong and independent regulatory supervision, operate in a safe and sound manner, and are primarily focused on their statutory mission. More importantly, Congress must ensure that the American taxpayer is protected in the event either GSE should fail. We strongly support an effort to schedule floor time this year to debate GSE regulatory reform.

And they DID fail.  They massively, massively failed.

Only about a month before the whole system crashed, Barney Frank went on the record and said this:

REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.”

They sure were, you fat, miserable, loathsome, obscene, disgusting, slobbering, lying toad.

The top three headlines under the Google search “Fannie Mae collapse”:

Freddie, Fannie Scam Hidden in Broad Daylight

Financial Markets Reeling from Fannie & Freddie Collapse and Evitable Government Bailout

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Too big not to fail

But as our economy exploded along with the boondoggle housing finance market artificially sustained by Fannie and Freddie, the Democrats demagogued the Republicans.  And the lamestream media duly reported it as though it were all the liberal’s-god-socialist-big-government’s truth.

And thus you see how the liberal demagoguery surrounding Hurricane Katrina led to the liberal demagoguery surrounding the economic collapse.

And it just never stops.

The Obama White House has been rather shamelessly politicizing the Haitian earthquake disaster to bolster up its low support.

And even when Obama abandons Haiti to go to Massachusetts to prop up Democrat Martha Coakley’s failing candidacy, Democrats manage to demagogue over Haiti.

Bill Clinton, the Obama-appointed special envoy for Haiti, didn’t bother to go there, but focused on what was far more important: Martha Coakely’s election bid in Massachusetts.

Someone asked Bill Clinton about that, and he said that relief for Haiti and the election of Martha Coalkey in Massachusetts were “just two sides of the same coin.” The blatant and breathtaking politicization is mindboggling!!!

What would the mainstream media be saying about Republican George Bush literally turning his back on a disaster to fly north to Massachusetts to campaign for a Republican – bringing us special envoy to Haiti to do so with him – rather than turn south to deal with the Haiti disaster?  What would these demagogues who deceitfully call themselves “journalists” have said?

Even if you’re a liberal, you’re not stupid enough to realize that the media would have unleashed hell on earth to attack George Bush for such a partisan political act of abandonment.

And that’s what I’m really getting at.  The double standard between treatment of Democrats and Republicans is so massive it is positively unreal.  Obama can screw up every which way and the media will let it pass; Bush could hit a homerun and the media would declare it a foul ball and then attack him for his incredibly poor swing.

Meanwhile, of course, millions of Haitians are suffering, and not getting helped.

Just as millions of Americans are suffering, and not getting helped.

Meanwhile, the news media largely continues to spin the economy positively, even as more jobs were lost under Obama in 2009 than for any president in any year since 194o.

Update January 29:

HUMAN TRAFFICKING, FOOD RIOTS AND LACK OF MEDICINE PLAGUE HAITI
John G. Winder , The Cypress Times
Published 01/29/2010 – 10:28 a.m. CST

Mass graves. Tent cities.More than 90% of the nation’s structures damaged or destroyed. No food.Amputees and orphans left to fend for themselves.  Nearly all of the businesses gone.  No employment.  Yet it still gets worse for the people of Haiti.

Haiti’s Prime Ministery, Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN that he is receiving reports of children being stolen and trafficked as slaves, sex slaves and for the purpose of having their organs harvested to be sold.

“There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs,” Bellerive said.

UNICEF is also reporting that children are being taken from hospitals by traffickers.

Had this happened under George Bush, with these results, the lamestream media would be attacking Bush as the most evil man since Hitler and the most incompetent buffoon since God created incompetent buffoons.

Just pointing out the obvious truth.