Real Unemployment Rate Under Obama Over Nineteen Percent (As In FDR-Great Depression Unemployment)

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, after six years of failed FDR policies, unemployment was 20.7%

Obama is campaigning all over boasting that he’s cut the unemployment rate.  They say there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.  And Obama’s 8.3% unemployment rate is of the most demonic category of lie.

Here’s the reality:

Gallup Daily: U.S. Employment
Each result is based on a 30-day rolling average; not seasonally adjusted

• Download complete trend

	% Employed full time for an employer	% Underemployed	% Unemployed
01/26/2012	64.60	18.40	8.60
01/27/2012	64.40	18.50	8.70
01/28/2012	64.20	18.60	8.60
01/29/2012	64.10	18.70	8.60
01/30/2012	64.20	18.60	8.60
01/31/2012	63.90	18.70	8.60
02/1/2012	63.90	18.80	8.70
02/2/2012	64.00	18.70	8.70
02/3/2012	64.00	18.70	8.70
02/6/2012	64.10	18.70	8.70
02/7/2012	64.10	18.80	8.80
02/8/2012	64.00	18.80	8.90
02/9/2012	64.00	18.90	8.90
02/10/2012	64.00	19.00	8.90
02/11/2012	63.70	19.30	9.10
02/12/2012	63.90	19.20	9.00
02/13/2012	63.90	19.10	8.90
02/14/2012	64.00	19.10	9.00
02/15/2012	64.00	19.00	9.00
02/16/2012	63.80	19.10	9.10

Gallup tracks daily the percentage of U.S. adults in the workforce, ages 18 and older, who are underemployed, unemployed, and employed full-time for an employer, without seasonal adjustment. “Underemployed” respondents are employed part time, but want to work full time, or they are unemployed. “Unemployed” respondents are those within the underemployed group who are not employed, even for one hour a week, but are available and looking for work. Respondents “Employed Full Time for an Employer” are those who are employed by an employer for at least 30 hours per week. Daily results reflect 30-day rolling averages based on telephone interviews with approximately 30,000 adults. Because results are not seasonally adjusted, they are not directly comparable to numbers reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are based on workers 16 and older. Margin of error is ± 1 percentage point.

Notice that Obama has done NOTHING to bring down the “% underemployed” figure – which counted in the official unemployment statistic when FDR was miserably failing – while he was claiming to bring down unemployment.  Which is another way of saying that there are today more Americans suffering under the Barack Obama experiment in failure than EVER.

Here’s another quote for you:

“I told you so, you God-damn-America dumbasses.” — Michael Eden, almost every day of the last four years.

Obama was hailed as the second coming of FDR by the left:

And we’ve got what we voted for: another massive FDR New Deal failure of disastrous Keynesian economics, most likely followed by a world war.

Only this world war that our new FDR will bring us won’t be nearly as fun due to all the global thermonuclear weapons that will be flying around.

Here are a few more facts that your mainstream media propaganda hasn’t been telling you about:

Congressional budget chief offers dim outlook on economic growth, jobs
By Jim Angle
Published February 01, 2012 | FoxNews.com

Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf on Wednesday projected that economic growth will slow by next year and unemployment will rise before that — a forecast that Rep. Paul Ryan called ominous, grim and alarming.
 
Elmendorf laid out the latest projections on the economy and deficits before the House Budget Committee on Capitol Hill.
 
Ryan, R-Wis., who is chairman, raised alarm given projections that 2012 “will mark the fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits.” 
 
“Trillions more dollars will be added to debt in the years ahead, putting a chilling effect on jobs creation today and committing the next generation to a diminished future,” he said.

Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen took a different approach, saying deficits and growth would have been worse without President Obama’s stimulus plan. “The Recovery Act did serve its purpose. It’s kind of like when you’re walking up an escalator that’s going down very quickly. If you take no action you will go down very fast,” he said. 
 
Yet future deficits depend in large part on how fast the economy grows, along with spending and revenues. And on that front, the CBO isn’t offering a lot of encouragement. 
 
“The pace of the recovery has been slow since the recession ended two and a half years ago,” Elmendorf said. “And we project that it will continue to be slow for the next two years.”
 
The CBO believes that economic growth will be only 2 percent this year — and an anemic 1.1 percent next year. 
 
The office says that will leave the unemployment rate at 8.9 percent at the end of this year, well above current the current rate of 8.5 percent, meaning the jobless rate would be increasing at election time. 
 
That prompted this exchange between Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., and the CBO director.  “Let me ask you, are there more people working today or fewer people working today than at the — on inauguration day of 2009?” McClintock asked. 
 
“I believe the answer to that,” said Elmendorf, “is there are fewer people, congressman.”
 
And in 2013, CBO estimates unemployment will be even higher — at 9.2 percent.

So why would CBO Director Elmendorf have a prediction that flies in the face of the Obama-media propaganda???

Because – and here you will have to pardon my language – he has the raw “unadjusted” (meaning “unfudged”) statistics to see through the statistical bullcrap that is being put out.

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge is another guy who sees through the lens-distorting effect of all the bovine feces.  In commenting about the real plunge in retail sales, Durden said:

The topic of BLS propaganda seasonal adjustments has been discussed extensively here especially in light of January’s NFP beat. We’ll leave it at that. However, we were rather surprised to note that the Census Bureau may have also ramped up its seasonal adjustment “fudge factoring” because when looking at the January headline retail sales data, which naturally was a smoothly continuous line on a Seasonally Adjusted basis, rising from $399.9 billion in December to $401.4 billion in January, something rather odd happened in the Unadjusted data set: the plunge from $459.8 billion in December to $361.4 billion in January, or -$98.5 billion in one month, was the biggest one month drop in retail sales in history. Now we won’t say much on this topic, suffice to say that it would be far more useful if the BLS and Census Bureaus were to open up their models and explain in nuanced detail just what “old normal” adjustments they still incorporate into data sets. Because as many have already noted, seasonal adjustments used for data from 1980 to 2008 when “up” was the only allowed direction for everything, are completely irrelevant and misleading in the New Deleveraging Normal. Which reminds us: Zero Hedge will offer $10,000 to the first BLS employee to share with us the full and complete excel model set, including assumptions, data tables, and comprehensive output parameters that the agency uses to go from input A to output X. We hope that by spending that money we will finally do society a service and open up to everyone just how it is that the BLS adjusts its Non-Farm Payrolls data.

If he actually gets the chance to buy that data, I will give my contribution to Tyler Durden instead of the Republican candidate.  Because the truth will do more to get Obama out of office that any GOP ad ever could.

We’ve heard the phrase “Great Depression” bandied about.  Here are a few facts that people ought to know:

The Great Depression was triggered by a sudden, total collapse in the stock market. The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April, though still almost 30 percent below the peak of September 1929. Together, government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the corresponding period of the previous year. But consumers, many of whom had suffered severe losses in the stock market the previous year, cut back their expenditures by ten percent, and a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the USA beginning in the summer of 1930.

In early 1930, credit was ample and available at low rates, but people were reluctant to add new debt by borrowing. By May 1930, auto sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, but wages held steady in 1930, then began to drop in 1931. [Read about what to before, during and after a deflationary crash] Conditions were worse in farming areas, where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas, where unemployment was high and there were few other jobs. The decline in the US economy was the factor that pulled down most other countries at first, then internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. Frantic attempts to shore up the economies of individual nations through protectionist policies, such as the 1930 U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries, exacerbated the collapse in global trade. By late in 1930, a steady decline set in which reached bottom by March 1933.

A Wikipedia article provides a few other details that ought to make someone looking at our present day rather uncomfortable:

Even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, optimism persisted for some time; John D. Rockefeller said that “These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again.”^[11] The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April. This was still almost 30% below the peak of September 1929.^[12]

Together, government and business spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the corresponding period of the previous year. On the other hand, consumers, many of whom had suffered severe losses in the stock market the previous year, cut back their expenditures by ten percent. Likewise, beginning in mid-1930, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the USA.

By mid-1930, interest rates had dropped to low levels, but expected deflation and the continuing reluctance of people to borrow meant that consumer spending and investment were depressed.^[13] By May 1930, automobile sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, although wages held steady in 1930; but then a deflationary spiral started in 1931. Conditions were worse in farming areas, where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas, where unemployment was high and there were few other jobs.

I’ve pointed out a few things before: first of all, “things are starting to look a little better” is by no rational means whatsoever any kind of indicator that we’re not going to plunge; BECAUSE THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION. 

We’re being kept in the dark and fed on manure just like all the other government-cultivated mushrooms.

And we’re going to pay for it right here in good ol’ God damn America.

The beast is coming.

FDR’s Economic Policies FAILED. But Don’t Take My Word For It, Listen To Obama’s TOP Economic Adviser

Everyone ought to be familiar with the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

And for the record, in April 1939, the unemployment rate was 20.7%.  Anybody who thinks that FDR’s policies did anything but dig us deeper into depression are morons.

But few Americans have ever heard those words from that FDR economic official.  It’s an example of the kind of thing the mainstream media – or what should more accurately be called the progressive propaganda conspiracy – is designed to prevent you from knowing.  They regard themselves as “gatekeepers” of the news, and they want to be able to decide what you get to know and what you should not know.

If you knew that FDR’s very own Treasury Secretary had openly admitted that FDR’s economic policy had failed, you would probably not want to try that path again.  And the mainstream media – which is firmly under the control of the liberal/progressive/socialist/Democrat agenda – simply doesn’t want you to come to such an accurate and informed opinion.

So it really shouldn’t surprise me very much that I was unaware of the words of “President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser,” Lawrence H. Summers, on the economic policies of FDR:

Larry Summers blasphemy: Hitler saved FDR’s ass
by Lee on July 23, 2011 21:16 pm

Larry Summers is often quotable and Charlie Rose is occasionally watchable. Put ‘em together and you get the very definition of a blind sow finding an acorn.

The whole clip is interesting, but the money quote begins a hair after the 21:30 mark when Summers says something about left wing icon FDR that will undoubtedly result in fewer dinner invitations in the Hamptons this summer:

“Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.”

Why next thing you know Summers will be saying that Keynesian economics don’t work.

Clip here to watch the video: CharlieRose.com

Pardon me?

Nope.  I read it right.

After eight years of miserable failure, FDR would have and should have left office as a disgrace with a disastrous unemployment rate.  But Adolf Hitler bailed him out.  And the country rallied around their president – no matter how much or how badly he had failed them.

And the mainstream media decided it was unimportant that we know that – in spite of the fact that Obama had cast himself as the economic reincarnation of FDR:

It ought to interest the American people that FDR prolonged the Great Depression by seven completely unnecessary years of miserable anguish and suffering:

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate
ByMeg Sullivan
8/10/2004 12:23:12 PM

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.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt’s policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt’s policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called for under NIRA.

Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.

“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”

NIRA’s role in prolonging the Depression has not been more closely scrutinized because the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional within two years of its passage.

“Historians have assumed that the policies didn’t have an impact because they were too short-lived, but the proof is in the pudding,” Ohanian said. “We show that they really did artificially inflate wages and prices.”

Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s anti-competition policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found. Ohanian and Cole painstakingly documented the extent to which the Roosevelt administration looked the other way as industries once protected by NIRA continued to engage in price-fixing practices for four more years.

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of 6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257 different occasions between mid-1935 and mid-1936. The bids were not only identical but also 50 percent higher than foreign steel prices. Without competition, wholesale prices remained inflated, averaging 14 percent higher than they would have been without the troublesome practices, the UCLA economists calculate.

NIRA’s labor provisions, meanwhile, were strengthened in the National Relations Act, signed into law in 1935. As union membership doubled, so did labor’s bargaining power, rising from 14 million strike days in 1936 to about 28 million in 1937. By 1939 wages in protected industries remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been, based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high. By comparison, in May 2003, the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was the highest in nine years.

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

“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.”

Don’t you think this would have been highly relevant for the American people to know in 2008 when Obama was running as FDR’s long-lost ideological twin???  I don’t know, maybe Time Magazine (the magazine that eulogized FDR as the bestest and most wonderfulest president ever ever, I noticed from the article above) could have ran this article instead of photoshopping Obama into their socialist hero.

I get so pissed off so often about how utterly dishonest the media is.

I mean, Scott McClellan wrote a book attacking President George W. Bush that I heard about for weeks and weeks in the press in 2008.  It didn’t matter how many lies and half-truths that amounted to whole lies might have been in it; it was anti-Bush; it was NEWS.

But when President Obama’s TOP ECONOMIC ADVISER basically says that Obama’s entire premise for the economy of the United States had already been a documented historical failure – which the prudent person should therefore expect to fail AGAIN – shouldn’t like SOMEBODY have reported that fact???

And now here we are, grinding our national gears and SUFFERING.  We’ve had a massive and massively failed $3.27 TRILLION “stimulus.”  We’ve had an absolutely godawful takeover of the health care system that is frankly so damaging to the economy that half of the 1,372 waivers (as of May 16) were requested by and given to the very liberal unions who had PUSHED FOR OBAMACARE IN THE FIRST PLACE.  We’ve had the absolutely disastrous Dodd-Frank financial regulations that have so stifled investment that EVEN ÜBERLIBERAL FINANCEER GEORGE SOROS said he couldn’t continue operating under such requirements.  We’ve got Obama’s packed National Labor Relations Board basically playing the role of union thug laying a beatdown on Boeing for daring to build a plant in a right-to-work state.

And these FDR-Obama Democrats say, “We’re doing all of this to help the poor.”  And it’s just a LIE.  They HURT the poor.  Over and over again, THEY HURT THE POOR.

Black people have been devastated.  Women have been devastated.  Under Obama, we’re seeing the highest poverty rate increase in fifty years. 

And the news we’re hearing right now is simply awful.

Manufacturing has tanked.  Consumer spending is the lowest since when we were seeing the panic-side of the “great recession” in October 2008.  The housing crisis is WORSE than – you guessed it – FDR’s Great Depression.  The credit rating agencies are giving the U.S. a negative outlook for the year.  China’s credit rating agency (remember who we borrow from!) just cut our rating for the second time in history – with both times occurring in Obama’s failed presidency.  Food stamp enrollment is at an all-time high, with one in six on the program.

And because we live in an age of constant media deception and propaganda, the news of Obama’s mishandling of the economy is always “unexpected.”

Here we are, déjà vu and voilà, in the worst shape since the LAST time FDR’s policies were poisoning America.  And we don’t learn because the media won’t LET us learn.  But you find out that FDR’s “progressive tax rates” that attacked the rich actually ended up hurting the poor as the rich sheltered their wealth to protect themselves and their families and the poor bore the brunt of economy and employment-killing taxation policies.

Obama is back to the same utterly failed Marxist class warfare tactics that have always failed before. In the 1990s, Democrats imposed a “luxury tax” on items such as yachts, believing that the wealthy “could afford it.” Maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t, but the FACT was that the rich STOPPED buying yachts. As in stopped completely.  As in NOBODY bought a yacht with that damn tax on it. The Democrats finally rescinded that stupid tax two years later after destroying the yacht building and yacht maintenance industries and killing over 100,000 jobs. Rich people weren’t hurt at all; ordinary people were devastated.

And now Obama wants to do the same thing with corporate jets that previous Democrats did to yachts. And they only people who will get hurt if Obama gets his way are the companies that hire people to build and maintain those jets and the workers themselves who will lose their jobs and their livelihoods. And the only thing that is stopping this rape of businesses, workers and the economy that depends on workers and businesses are Republicans – who are trying to do the right thing and make the tough decisions necessary to lead in the face of constant demagoguery.

And people wonder why this economy is struggling, and why it will CONTINUE to struggle until this FDR-clone (or clown?) is finally gone.

US Is in Even Worse Shape Financially Than Greece. And Why Is That In The Age Of Obama???

Thanks for “fundamentally transforming” our economy, Barry Hussein!

We’re constantly being told that Obama has done a great deal to make our economy stronger.  Because who wouldn’t rather have 9.1% unemployment than that 7.6% that Obama started out with.

The thing that most killed the US economy in 2008 was the sheer weight of godawful subprime mortgages that Democrats imposed on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and all the other mortgage lenders in order to create more “fairness” and allow everyone (especially racial minorities) to have “the right” to own a home whether they could actually afford to do so or not.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “Government Sponsored Enterprises,” all the investors knew.  So even as Fannie and Freddie began bundling together thousands of riskier and ever riskier mortgages into giant mortgage backed securities to advance Democrat-enacted policies, large investment houses continued to gobble them up.  After all, this was an arm of the United States Government – and the United States Government ALWAYS pays its debts.

Like all scams, it worked for a while.  But as soon as there was a correction in the dramatically overvalued housing market, the whole boondoggle began to implode.  And since Fannie and Freddie had bundled all kinds of bad mortgages in with the good ones, there was absolutely no way for anyone to know how much risk was contained in any of these giant investment vehicles all these giant private banking houses found themselves holding.

And suddenly the perception that Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “safe investments” turned into a “misperception.”  And the fecal matter began to hit the rotary oscillator bigtime.

Fannie and Freddie were the first to collapse.  The big private players who had played ball with them shortly followed.

President George Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to reform Fannie and Freddie when there was actually a chance to do something.  Go back to what the New York Times stated in 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.

Republicans were demonized for “deregulation” by the dishonest Democrat Party machine.  But they TRIED to regulate what needed to be regulated.  Democrats stopped them.

Many Republicans like John McCain literally begged Democrats to do something before it was too late.  But Democrats threatened to filibuster any bill that in any way prevented Fannie and Freddie from continuing the reckless economy-killing policies.  Conservative economists such as Peter Wallison had been predicting the Fannie and Freddie boondoggles would cause an economic collapse since at least 1999.  Wallison had warned back then:

 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.”

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.

That same New York Times article that said President Bush was trying to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ended with this demonstration of Democrats standing against necessary reform:

”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.

Why was Barney Frank deceitfully claiming that Fannie and Freddie weren’t facing “any kind of financial crisis”?  BECAUSE REPUBLICANS WERE RIGHTLY WARNING THAT THEY WERE.

Only about a month before the whole Fannie and Freddie boondoggles Democrats had fiercely protected collapsed – taking the entire US economy with it – Democrat Barney Frank was on the record saying 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.”

So we blew up nearly COMPLETELY BECAUSE OF DEMOCRAT POLICIES.  But Democrats along with an ideological mainstream media that is the worse since Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi Minister of Propaganda were ready.  They ran on a platform that it happened while Bush was president, and that therefore Bush was entirely responsible for the thing he tried over and over again to fix while Democrats used their power to block those efforts.

Let me just say “Franklin Raines.”  Raines as Fannie CEO presided over Enron-style accounting policies and got $90 million in his account because of those corrupt policies.  But Raines was the first BLACK CEO of Fannie Mae.  And even though he was a Democrat and a Clinton guy, President Bush lacked the courage to push the “first black Fannie Mae CEO” out.  Which of course is the same reason that the “first black Fannie Mae CEO” didn’t do hard time in prison where he belonged.  “Political correctness” is a demonic device by which liberals protect themselves – usually from going to prison where they ought to go.  He got a sweetheart deal basically so Republicans wouldn’t be accused of being racists by
Democrats who of course call them racists no matter what they do.  My main point is simply that it was Democrats, Democrats, DEMOCRATS who did this to us.

Fannie Mae was well politically-connected Democrats went to make millions as they bounced back and forth between “public” employment where they developed contacts and “private” crony capitalism to get rich.

Here’s the conclusion of New York Times financial markets writer Gretchen Morgenson about DEMOCRAT Jim Johnson:

Morgenson focuses on the managers of Fannie Mae, the government-supported mortgage giant. She writes that CEO James Johnson built Fannie Mae “into the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.”

But in the process, Morgenson says, the company fudged accounting rules, generated big salaries and bonuses for its executives, used lobby and campaign contributions to bully regulators, and encouraged the risky financial practices that led to the crisis.

And of course DEMOCRAT Jim Johnson who got rich plundering Americans was an OBAMA Democrat.

Morgenson – again a New York Times writer and not someone from Fox News – said of Fannie Mae on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC program on Monday, June 13: “Whatever Fannie Mae did, everybody else followed.”  And of course they all followed right into an economic Armageddon created by Democrats for Democrats.

But who got blamed?  Republicans, of course.  George Bush and Republicans were to Obama and the Democrats what Emmanual Goldstein was to Big Brother in 1984.  George Bush and Republicans were what the Jews were to Adolf Hitler.  Fascists always need a bogeyman.  And so the people who were truly to blame turned the people who tried futilely to stop them into the scapegoats.  All with the mainstream media’s complicity.

The analogy would be holding the police officer who tried but failed to catch the rapist for the rape of the woman rather than holding the actual rapist who raped her responsible.  But it was easier to say “This is the result of President Bush’s failed Republican policies” than it was to actually explain the facts to an enraged Attention Deficit Disorder-ridden ignorant pop culture – particularly when virtually no one in the biased mainstream media had any intention whatsoever of telling the truth.

Barack Obama – the ACORN community organizer who pushed these very America-killing policies – ran a demagoguing campaign promising to fix everything.

But has he?

How about a great big giant “NOT”???

What has Zero Obama done to fix that housing market that he helped collapse?  How about NOTHING???  After nearly three years of Obama, housing isn’t the worst since 2008; it’s gotten WAY WORSE than 2008 and is the worse since the Great Depression!!!  Obama started out with a terrible plan.  And we have terrible results to show for his terrible plan.  And yet this disgraceful fool actually keeps claiming he’s made things better!!!

Before you read this article, check out the “current account balance” compiled by the CIA.  Ours is a negative figure that dwarfs everyone else’s by so much it’s a joke.  Which is to say that Gross’s assessment is 1000% correct.

US Is in Even Worse Shape Financially Than Greece: Gross
Published: Monday, 13 Jun 2011 | 10:33 AM ET
By: Jeff Cox
CNBC.com Staff Writer

When adding in all of the money owed to cover future liabilities in entitlement programs the US is actually in worse financial shape than Greece and other debt-laden European countries, Pimco’s Bill Gross told CNBC Monday.

Much of the public focus is on the nation’s public debt, which is $14.3 trillion. But that doesn’t include money guaranteed for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which comes to close to $50 trillion, according to government figures.

The government also is on the hook for other debts such as the programs related to the bailout of the financial system following the crisis of 2008 and 2009, government figures show.

Taken together, Gross puts the total at “nearly $100 trillion,” that while perhaps a bit on the high side, places the country in a highly unenviable fiscal position that he said won’t find a solution overnight.

“To think that we can reduce that within the space of a year or two is not a realistic assumption,” Gross said in a live interview. “That’s much more than Greece, that’s much more than almost any other developed country. We’ve got a problem and we have to get after it quickly.”

Gross spoke following a report that US banks were likely to scale back on their use of Treasurys as collateral against derivatives and other transactions. Bank heads say that move is likely to happen in August as Congress dithers over whether to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The move reflects increasing concern from the financial community over whether the US is capable of a political solution to its burgeoning debt and deficit problems.

“We’ve always wondered who will buy Treasurys” after the Federal Reserve purchases the last of its $600 billion to end the second leg of its quantitative easing program later this month, Gross said. “It’s certainly not Pimco and it’s probably not the bond funds of the world.”

Pimco, based in Newport Beach, Calif., manages more than $1.2 trillion in assets and runs the largest bond fund in the world.

Gross confirmed a report Friday that Pimco has marginally increased its Treasurys allotment—from 4 percent to 5 percent—but still has little interest in US debt and its low yields that are in place despite an ugly national balance sheet.

“Why wouldn’t an investor buy Canada with a better balance sheet or Australia with a better balance sheet with interest rates at 1 or 2 or 3 percent higher?” he said. “It simply doesn’t make any sense.”

Should the debt problem in Greece explode into a full-blown crisis—an International Monetary Fund bailout has prevented a full-scale meltdown so far—Gross predicted that German debt, not that of the US, would be the safe-haven of choice for global investors.

America is going down because her stupid citizens wickedly voted for corrupt dishonest Democrat fools – the very fools who imploded our economy – to have complete power.  Nancy Pelosi took over dictatorial control in the House of Representatives, and Harry Reid took over the US Senate, in 2006.

Thanks to Obama, America is now worse off than Greece.  But that didn’t stop Obama from offering to bail out Greece.  Maybe it’s because George Soros is Greek; maybe because the American left has always adored the European-style socialism in spite of Thomas Jefferson’s warning that “the comparison of our governments with those of Europe is like a comparison of heaven and hell.”  Maybe because Obama simply WANTS hell for America.  But there you have it.

Republicans acknowledged they failed to live up to their values and spent too much.  But the last Republican budget (Fiscal Year 2007) passed in 2006 had only a $161 billion deficit.  The very next Democrat budget for FY 2008 had a deficit of $459 billion – nearly three times larger than the one they’d demonized Republicans for.  Then their FY-2009 budget dwarfed that deficit with a black hold of red ink deficit of $1.4 TRILLION.  That was more money than any government in the history of the world had ever contemplated.  But Democrats dwarfed that the very next year with a FY-2010 budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit.  And as for FY-2011, the Democrat Congress simply refused to perform its most basic duty of governance and didn’t even bother to pass a budget.  Republicans are now forced to do the last disgraced Democrat-controlled Congress’ job for them – and Democrats are demonizing them for it.

That’s how this game is played.  Democrats are fascist demagogues who shrilly launch into Republicans as they try to save the American people from unparalleled future suffering.  They are people who ROUTINELY demonize, demonize, demonize until THEY are the ones forced to call for the very things they demonized and tried to prevent from happening.  But by the time they react this time, just as before, it will be too late.

Try this on for size: our actual debt isn’t the $14 trillion we constantly hear about; it’s more like $200 trillion.  And even THAT gargantuan number doesn’t take into account the massive debts that all the liberal labor unions have amassed in state pensions (e.g., California’s public pension system has unfunded liabilities of $500 billion).  We cannot possibly hope to pay this – and yet Democrats demand more and more and more, and demagogue Republicans for even trying to cut millions when we need to cut TENS OF TRILLIONS or collapse.

Democrats run ads showing a look-a-like of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan pushing an old lady off a cliff; but they want every single senior citizen to die terribly as the Medicare system completely collapses while they refuse to do anything to fix it – as even Bill Clinton openly acknowledged.

We are going to end like the PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain- because we elected Democrat swine to ensure we perished like pigs.

Greece just got downgraded to the point where they are the lowest-rated currency in the history of the planet.  And it happened yesterday.

When that happens to us it will be the worst nightmare in history.  300 million Americans are going to go into an insanity of panic – and of course the violence will begin with the left.  If you don’t have an arsenal, someone will kick down your door and murder your whole family just to eat the food in your house.  And that hell on earth will be entirely because you trusted Democrats like Anthony Weiner to run your health care, your pension, your economy, your life.

I hope you vote in 2012 like your very LIFE was at stake in these elections.  Because this time it truly is.

Bumps On The Road: If At First They Don’t Succeed, Obama, Democrats (And Their ‘Experts’) Lie, Lie Again

There’s a memory that still makes me laugh.  I had a friend who worked the graveyard shift when I was in college.  When he got off work (i.e., when I was just getting up) he took his car to the shop for a repair and had asked me to meet him there and give him a ride home.

So I was standing there when the mechanic began to explain what was wrong with my friend’s car.  And my friend, wanting to see, put his hand on the radiator of the still hot engine.  He leaped back holding his hand.  The mechanic looked at him for a second, shook his head, and continued explaining.

Soon enough, my friend AGAIN put his hand on the radiator.  With the same result.  This time the mechanic looked at me and shook his head before going on.

You won’t believe this, but my friend actually did it a third time.

And the mechanic looked at him and said, “You just don’t learn, do you?”

I am here to tell you that Democrats are every bit as dumb as my friend.  And the only thing more hopelessly stupid than a liberal is a liberal “expert.”

Our economy is in a state of ruin.  Many of the most important numbers – such as unemployment and housing and manufacturing and consumer confidence – aren’t just as bad as they were when Obama took over, but far, far worse.  And with no sign of getting better.

If you survey the history of economics, there has never been a recession that lasted forever.  Sooner or later, things hit their bottoms and begin to get better.  Most severe recessions last about two years.  Even during the Great Depression – which in fact was a Great Depression for virtually every country on the planet – most of those nations emerged after no more than a few years.  The ONLY exception was the United States of America, which was being led by a socialist named FDR with near dictatorial power.  That recession/depression just went on and on and on.  FOR SEVEN YEARS LONGER THAN IT SHOULD HAVE.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a disaster that we actually amended the Constitution to make sure that we’d never end up with another FDR ever again.  Roosevelt knew absolutely nothing about business or economics and actually thought that by punishing business he’d somehow get more employment.  Like my friend, he repeated the same mistakes again and again and again, constantly expecting different results than the ones he kept getting.

And that is precisely where we are today: helplessly writhing in the grasp of a dictatorial socialist fool.

Allow me to show you how Obama, how the Democrats and how their “economists” – to put it in the words of the mechanic – “just don’t learn.”

Let’s begin with the beginning of the Obama regime, with his “stimulus” (also known as the Generational Theft Act): pork barrel spending that will ultimately cost the American people $3.27 TRILLION.

What did Obama promise you, as even the New York Times was forced to admit?

In the weeks just before President Obamatook office, his economic advisers made a mistake. They got a little carried away with hope.

To make the case for a big stimulus package, they released their economic forecast for the next few years. Without the stimulus, they saw the unemployment rate  —  then 7.2 percent  —  rising above 8 percent in 2009 and peaking at 9 percent next year. With the stimulus, the advisers said, unemployment would probably peak at 8 percent late this year.

We now know that this forecast was terribly optimistic.

According to Obama’s forecase, unemployment would NEVER rise above 8% if that massive government spending aka the stimulus was passed.  And unemployment would be UNDER 7% this year.  Let’s chalk that up as a great big giant “NOT!!!”

OUCH!!!  That’s one hand on the hot radiator.

Obama and the Democrat Party and their “economists” continued to stuipdly talk about all the jobs he “saved.”  The only problem was that “saved jobs” had NEVER IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS BEEN CONSIDERED PRIOR TO THE AGE OF OBAMA:

Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw said, “there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?”

And they went on and on with pure unadulterated totally bogus bullcrap to pat themselves on the back for what in reality was a total fiasco.  They just don’t learn, do they?

“OUCH!!!”

Let’s call that a second hand on the hot radiator – even though they did it over and over and over again – and are STILL doing it as we speak.

But that wasn’t it with this pile of pure fools.  If at first your policy fails, keep trying to fail more and bigger:

Obama Defends Stimulus Amid Calls For Round Two
by Mara Liasson   July 8, 2009

President Obama is being forced to wade into a domestic economic debate that just won’t go away: As the unemployment rate rises, there have been calls for a second round of stimulus spending.

Obama is in a difficult position. He has to defend his $787 billion economic stimulus package at a time when there are few visible signs that it has had an effect. Unemployment is at 9.5 percent, even though the White House predicted in January that with the stimulus bill, it would rise to only about 8 percent

That’s right, boys and girls.  Obama and his ilk couldn’t learn from the hot radiator.  They assumed that something else must have been hot, and they weren’t really touching what they’d just been touching.  Massive government spending was just an unmitigated failure that the answer was clearly …. (drumroll, please) …. EVEN MORE MASSIVE GOVERNMENT SPENDING!!!

“OUCH!!!”  That’s a third hand on that hot radiator.

Then there were the “green shoots” Obama saw in 2009:

Obama sees the green shoots of recovery
25/03/09 05:36 CET

US President Barack Obama believes his strategy to battle the economic downturn is beginning to show some positive results.

It comes as skepticism is growing as to the wisdom of his massive budget plan. The president took to the podium to defend his actions and answer questions from the world’s media. He said: “We’ve put in place a comprehensive strategy designed to attack this crisis on all fronts. It’s a strategy to create jobs, to help responsible homeowners, to restart lending and to grow our economy over the long-term. And we are beginning to see signs of progress.” Next week Obama makes his debut on the world stage when he attends the G20 summit in London. He outlined what he was looking for from the talks. “The goal of the G20 summit, I think, is to say to all countries ‘let’s avoid steps that could result in protectionism that would further contract global trade.’ Let’s focus on how are we going to move our regulatory process forward,” he said. Obama claims his economic plan, along with his new budget which is being prepared, is based on job creation, a more fluid housing market and a banking industry that is prepared to get credit flowing again.

Were there ever any green shoots?  Nope.  And certainly if there WERE, it’s a bunch of dead grass now.  Obama’s bullcrap stinks to high heaven, but it lacks the power to fertilize much of anything.

“OUCH!!!”

You put your hand there AGAIN, Barry Hussein?  Man, you just don’t learn, do you?

You might have thought my friend was pretty dumb.  But history would prove that he’s smarter than the man who is now President of the United States.  My friend only did it three times.  Obama’s up to four and counting.

Because what did we have in 2010 but “recovery summer”???

Obama, Biden declare ‘Recovery Summer’
By MIKE ALLEN | 6/17/10 5:06 AM EDT

Vice President Joe Biden today will kick off the Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week-long push designed to highlight the jobs accompanying a surge in stimulus-funded projects to improve highways, parks, drinking water and other public works.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said: “This summer will be the most active Recovery Act season yet, with thousands of highly-visible road, bridge, water and other infrastructure projects breaking ground across the country, giving the American people a first-hand look at the Recovery Act in their own backyards and making it crystal clear what the cost would have been of doing nothing.”

Biden, President Barack Obama and other administration officials will travel to more than two dozen Recovery Act project sites in coming weeks. On Friday, the president will travel to Columbus, Ohio, to mark the groundbreaking of the 10,000th Recovery Act road project to get under way. The administration says the road improvement project in downtown Columbus is expected to create over 300 construction jobs, and will contribute to a broader economic development effort in the area around Nationwide Children’s Hospital. […]

“OUCH!!!”

Oh, come ON, Barry Hussein.  Are we going to have to put a cork on your fork so you don’t stab out your other eye???

Okay, so last year we were at “wreckovery summer.”  What now?  I mean, what else can this fool possibly say?

Well, now all the terrible news about unemployment, about housing, about manufacturing, about consumer confidence is all just a “bump in the road.”

“There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery,” Obama said.

“OUCH!!!”

Obama is a far more stupid and more foolish man than my friend will ever be.

The question is, just how stupid are YOU???  I hope not so much as to actually re-elect this complete moral idiot.

In August 2009, while Obama was still talking about his “green shoots,” we had this prediction:

Peter Schiff, Pres Euro Pacific Capital: “The recession might be coming to an end; the problem is the depression is just getting started.”

“Newsweek trumpets the recession is over.  But it’s just a temporary ‘good time’ like the high you get if you do too much crack cocaine; with the stimulus being an artificial stimulant that gets us deeper and deeper into debt.  Remember the problem was we took on too much debt; well, now we have even more debt than when the recession began.”

OUCH!!!

Only this one is YOUR hand on the boiling hot radiator of an economy in meltdown …

Obama Cooking Up A Nasty Batch Of Poison Stew For Democrats With Shocking Inflation

If you listen to the mainstream media, Obama is unbeatable.  Which is really quite bizarre, given the state of the “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Inflation: Poison for Obama in 2012
By Nina Easton, senior editor-at-large @CNNMoney May 9, 2011: 7:22 AM ET

FORTUNE — One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school — car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government’s price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing. That also was the year President Gerald Ford cooked up an equally goofy plan: Whip Inflation Now, or WIN.

As Ford unveiled WIN to a joint session of Congress on Oct. 8, his bulbous forehead gleaming with sweat, he truly believed he was giving voice to a momentous occasion — on a par with F.D.R.’s call to action at the depth of the Great Depression. How could he know that, four decades later, people would still ridicule his pleas to farmers to grow more food, to citizens to “drive less, heat less,” and — the worst — to supporters to wear those ridiculous WIN buttons that the smart set turned upside down to declare “Need Immediate Money”?

That government leaders would embrace such silliness — it was Nixon who instituted the Stalinesque wage and price controls that set the stage for Ford’s call to citizen action — stands as a powerful testament to how much inflation unnerves the body politic. We haven’t experienced real inflation in more than a generation, so this economic blight is mostly an uncertain stranger to pollsters and political strategists — as well as to voters under 50. But if inflation warnings are right, this stranger could become the dark horse of the 2012 election and beyond.

We know that inflation distorts economic behavior. In the 1970s a combination of high tax rates and inflation prompted investors to flee production in favor of protection. “Give me shelter,” recalls Michael Barone, principal co-author of the annual Almanac of American Politics, referring to not only tax behavior but also investments in assets like real estate to beat inflation rates. But inflation also affects voting behavior — and could exacerbate already widespread anxiety and uncertainty about a struggling economy and President Obama’s reaction to it. With rising prices on everything from big-ticket items like college tuition to food and gas, consumers “feel they don’t have any safe ground to stand on,” Barone notes.

As both President Carter and the late President Ford could attest, that’s not a good place for an incumbent to be. John Huizinga, an economist at the University of Chicago, rightly notes that while unemployment affects some people — and rattles many more — “inflation affects everyone.” Huizinga co-authored a 1982 study that opened with the conventional wisdom of that era: “It is well known … that the public regards inflation as a more serious problem than unemployment.” Looking back, that seems astonishing. While the double-digit inflation of the 1970s had inched down to 8%, unemployment at that time was still a whopping 9.7%.

By historical standards, the latest consumer price index showing a 1.2% annual rise remains super low. But consumers are being hit with hikes to two key components that aren’t included in that number — gas and food. Consumer Growth Partners recently called the rise in grocery prices (6.5% in the first quarter) “the sharpest in a generation.” And gas prices are pushing toward $4 a gallon. Including gas and food, the annual inflation rate is more than double the rise in the CPI.

Even if systemwide inflation doesn’t return in this election cycle, rising gas and food prices will be on the minds of voters. President Obama already faces an unemployment rate that has only recently slipped below 9%, worsened by long-term jobless rates unprecedented since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office now predicts an unemployment rate of 8.2% on Election Day 2012; no President since F.D.R. has been reelected with unemployment over 8%. (President Reagan, facing a similarly painful recession, was elected with a 7.2% jobless rate.)

Add inflation to that mix and it could become a poisonous stew for Democrats. And we’ll know the President is in real trouble if his staff starts handing out buttons.

There’s a video (apparently unrelated to the above article) at the site with the title, “Fed has more to worry about.”  At just before the 2:30 mark, the expert guest says (and this is not a completely accurate transcript, but it’s pretty close):

“A lot of people think that what they’re going to do is raise interest rates and it’s going to turn into a replay of the Hooverism of the 1930s in this country where they raised rates just as the economy was beginning to creep forward.  And then you just end up with another big recession.”

And, of course, in this case, “another big recession” was otherwise known as THE GREAT FREAKING DEPRESSION!!!

Thanks to Obama and his Fed’s incredibly risky and immoral policies, shockingly high interest rates are a fait accompli.  You don’t spend (“throw away” on political patronate pork is more accurate) the trillions of dollars that these fools have spent; and you don’t simply create money out of thin air the way these clowns have done with their QE1 and their QE2 and very shortly QE3 and just get away with it.

The Fed is going to be forced to raise interest rates.  That is simply a fact.  The Obama Federal Reserve is about the only entity on planet earth that refuses to recognize that inflation is becoming a huge problem.  And the moment they ARE forced to ultimately raise rates, you’re going to start to see really ugly get really really really ugly.  Because there’s almost no possible way now that we’re going to be out of our economic woes before the Fed is forced to deal with inflation.

And yes, oh yes, inflation is most definitely here.

This was the Jimmy Carter problem.  And as people like me have been pointing out all along:

It took Ronald Reagan to get America out of a death spiral last time.  Sadly, this time there may not BE another Ronald Reagan.  And this time it may well just be too late.

The beast is coming.

America’s Credit Rating Downgraded: ‘Chickens Coming Home To Roost’

“America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”  Just not the way that Barack Obama and his spiritual mentor for more than 20 years said it was.

Taking the war to enemies who despise us and plot our destruction is not what brings on “No, no, no.  Not God bless America, God DAMN America!”  It is the vile policies of a profoundly socialist president such as Barack Obama that bring that judgment about.

“Our chickens” are going to be roasted – and God will damn America – with a financial implosion that will make the Great Depression look like the most pleasant walk on the beach.

Margaret Thatcher said that “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  But Obama will continue to demand that we keep spending “other people’s money” – the rich he demonizes even as he parasitically leeches off of, China and anyone else fool enough to give him money – until there is nothing left to spend but empty promises of “hope and change.”

And then pop will go the American weasel that had been an eagle until Obama “fundamentally transformed” it.

Standard & Poor’s on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there’s a risk U.S. policymakers may not reach agreement on how to address the country’s long-term
fiscal pressures. […]

The Dow Jones industrial average tumbled more than 200 points on word of the revision, while gold prices hit a new record above $1,496 an ounce …

What is basically going on is that S & P is worried that politicians will act as morally depraved as Barack Obama did in 2006 when he voted against the debt ceiling and demonized George Bush for his “failure of leadership” and his “reckless fiscal policies” in seeking an increase in the debt ceiling:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

If our political leaders act as depraved and foolish and vile as the man who is now our president did, we are in big, big trouble.  Think about that: if anyone in this mess acts as craven and as personally despicable as Barack Hussein Obama, America is in big, big trouble.

Now Obama is essentially saying, “Anyone who talks and acts and votes like I did is basically a traitor to America.”

And S & P fears that the America imploding “fundamental transformation” into “hope and change” will win out.

Obama immediately moved to demagogue the S & P the way he’s spent the last two and a half years of his failed presidency demagoguing George Bush:

The Obama administration moved swiftly Monday to downplay ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgrade of its U.S. credit outlook, calling the decision
a political judgment that should not be taken too seriously.

The timing of S&P’s announcement was unwelcome for the White House, coming just as President Obama tried to regain the initiative on the deficit debate in Washington.

Sorry if fiscal reality got in the way of your viscerally divisive political attack that represents your campaign when everyone who isn’t a total fool knows that we need agreement and consensus.

Obama had (when it was in his hypocritical self-serving interests to appear non-partisan) said:

“We’re not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that’s — the other party’s being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”

Then the man who said we need to stop demagoguing and come together proceeds to turn into an incredibly divisive political demagogue in an obvious game of chicken he wants to play with the American people’s future:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.  And who are those 50 million Americans?  Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid.  Many are poor children.  Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome.  Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care.  These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

Rep. Paul Ryan framed Obama’s cynical and vile tactics beautifully:

MR. BARNES: What are the prospects for a grand bargain?

REP. RYAN: Well, this definitely damages them. I think when you go after your political adversaries with the kind of demagogic terms and comparisons that the President did, that makes it harder.

I forgot whose quote this was. Maybe it was Churchill. But he was basically a pyromaniac in a field of straw men. I mean, to set up all these straw men arguments and then to tear them down, it’s almost as if he wanted to paint his political adversaries, supposedly us, in a cartoonish kind of a way, in a caricature as if we want to hurt people’s grandparents, were against families who have children with autism and disabilities and we don’t want kids to go to college. I mean, that’s basically what I got out of the President’s speech yesterday is that what we believe.

How do you have a serious debate about this? This coming from a President who came to our Republican retreat about a year and a half ago and said what we were hoping to hear: We’ve got to do entitlement reform. We, House Republicans, have put out some credible, serious ideas, and we can’t demagogue each other. We can’t go after each other.

And, look, I’m saying both parties do this, but when the President came and said, “We can’t treat the other party as if they’re hurting seniors and hurting people and using this demagoguery,” that’s what he told us when he came to talk to us in 2010 in Baltimore. What we got yesterday was the opposite of what he said is necessary to fix this problem.

Obama said that demagoguery was only going to undermine any chance at agreement.  Now he’s in full-fledged demonization mode, literally trying to push the Republicans into doing what he himself did in 2006 and vote against raising the debt ceiling.  Because this vile president wants the American people to suffer so that he can demagogue that suffering and pervert it into his political advantage as he runs for president on a record of total dismal failure.

And don’t think for one nanosecond that the Standard & Poor’s downgrade was a direct result of Obama’s vicious, demagogic speech in which he amply demonstrated he will do absolutely nothing about our spending problem except demonize anyone who tries to fix it.

Here is a video of an incredibly chilling fictional scenario that is looking more and more and more like the national news just a short time from now:

It was when a foolish nation voted for Obama that “America’s Chickens came home to roost.”  It was when Obama began to “fundamentally transform” America that we truly became “God damn America.”

Actual U.S. Debt Exceeds GDP Of Entire Planet

Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on.  Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:

True U.S. debt exceeds world GDP by $14 trillion
Obama 2010 budget deficit now 5 times larger than nation’s output
Posted: March 21, 2011
By Jerome R. Corsi

As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget  deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.

That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. GDP for 2010 was $14.861 trillion. World GDP in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund, was $61.936 trillion.

“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.

Statistics generated in Williams’ most recent newsletter demonstrate the real 2010 federal budget deficit was $5.3 trillion, not the $1.3 trillion previously reported by the Congressional Budget Office, according to the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government as released by the U.S. Department of Treasury Feb. 26, 2010.

The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget  deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in  the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official  budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including  Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they  occur.

The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis  (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes  in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs  such as Social Security and Medicare.

Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social  Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.

“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and  Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range  in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion,  remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.

“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising  taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits  to do so,” he warned.

In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams  listed both an official accounting and an alternative.

“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he  noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting  was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare  liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently  enacted health care legislation.”

U.S. Government GAAP Accounting  Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States,  2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)

Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and  Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S.  government in bankruptcy, even before we take  into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may  be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health  care.

“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into  balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100  percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a  federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”

Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a  hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt  obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely  slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.

“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a  solution to not having enough money to cover  obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have  committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a  bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross  mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”

He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy  of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by  mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”

“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange  rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain  timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper  assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset  of hyperinflation in the near-term.”

Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by  an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to  unfold in response to QE2.

“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to  assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving  wealth and assets,” he advises.

Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced  near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the  purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the  Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.

$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot.  And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness.  But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:

I Can Give You 200 Trillion Reasons Why We Need To Cut Government Spending NOW
By Michael Eden     March 7, 2011

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way.  Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Enron-style accounting?  From our government?  Say it aint so!!!

It’s isn’t a matter of IF America will financially collapse; it is only a matter of WHEN.  And “WHEN” is SOON.

And it will necessarily happen because Democrats are genuinely depraved.

Recklessly spending money on fools’ projects that your grandchildren will become debt slaves just trying to pay the interest on is immoral.

I can only keep begging Republicans to turn the Democrats’ demonization game back at them.  Democrats are running around on their talking points denouncing Republicans as “extremists” who want to kill poor people.

Bullcrap.

It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.

It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold.  It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.

Don’t you dare forget that it has been LIBERALS who have been dreaming of undermining and imploding America financially since Cloward and Piven back in the 1960s.  And now we’ve got a JUST-ex SEIU official on tape plotting to send America into a financial crisis that will dwarf anything ever seen.

If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek.  That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”

Americans Decide They Don’t Want Another Great Depression, Turn To GOP In Greatest Numbers Since 1930

Hmmm, do we want to go back to FDR and keep the Great Depression running like a Merry Go Round, or do we want to get off that particular ride?

Apparently, Americans are deciding that they don’t want the next liberal demagogue who will keep the country in a perpetual state of suffering.

GOP Turnout Exceeding Democrats’ For First Time Since 1930
By Ed Carson
Wed., Sept. 08, 2010 3:59 PM ET
Tags: Elections – Republicans – Democrats

Republican primary turnout for statewide offices is outpacing the Democratic vote for the first time since 1930, according to election expert Curtis Gans of the American University.

* The share of Americans voting in GOP primaries hit 10.5%, up from 8.2% in the 2006 primaries and the highest since 1970.

* The share of Americans voting in Democratic primaries was a record low of 8.3%.

* Republican turnout in their statewide primaries exceeded Democratic turnout by over 4 million votes.

A wide variety of polls and individual primaries have pointed to a big Republican enthusiasm gap vs. gloomy Democrats, but this survey offers a comprehensive look at actual voting patterns. “If there is an analagous election, it could be that of 1994, where the Democrats lost massively,” the report says.

The full report is here (pdf).

And you can express it negatively, too:

Study: Democratic turnout for primaries lowest in 80 years

During the 1930s America had King Überüberliberal FDR (at least before Obama came along to strip him of the title), to go along with more Democrats than you could shake a stick at, running and ruining the country.

And no matter how badly FDR and the Democrats in Congress failed, or for how long they kept failing, Americans just kept re-electing them.

Here’s another article about those days:

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate
By Meg Sullivan
8/10/2004 12:23:12 PM

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.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt’s policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt’s policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called for under NIRA.

Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.

“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”

NIRA’s role in prolonging the Depression has not been more closely scrutinized because the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional within two years of its passage.

“Historians have assumed that the policies didn’t have an impact because they were too short-lived, but the proof is in the pudding,” Ohanian said. “We show that they really did artificially inflate wages and prices.”

Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s anti-competition policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found. Ohanian and Cole painstakingly documented the extent to which the Roosevelt administration looked the other way as industries once protected by NIRA continued to engage in price-fixing practices for four more years.

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of 6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257 different occasions between mid-1935 and mid-1936. The bids were not only identical but also 50 percent higher than foreign steel prices. Without competition, wholesale prices remained inflated, averaging 14 percent higher than they would have been without the troublesome practices, the UCLA economists calculate.

NIRA’s labor provisions, meanwhile, were strengthened in the National Relations Act, signed into law in 1935. As union membership doubled, so did labor’s bargaining power, rising from 14 million strike days in 1936 to about 28 million in 1937. By 1939 wages in protected industries remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been, based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high. By comparison, in May 2003, the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was the highest in nine years.

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

“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.”

-UCLA-

LSMS368

One of the greatest indictments of FDR’s legacy comes from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary and closest personal friend:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enought to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, after those two terms in office, unemployment was at 20.7%.  Morganthau was an honest enough man to admit that his and FDR’s policies had utterly failed.  But generations of dishonest liberal propagandist journalists and historians merely ignored Morganthau’s honest and accurate admission and heralded the man who did more to drive America into socialism than anyone until one Barack Hussein Obama stepped onto the scene.

FDR’s failure to do anything but further destroy the American economy becomes critical because Obama has been widely viewed as the 2nd incarnation of FDR.

I mean, the SAME Time Magazine that thought FDR walked on water gave us this cover:

And we don’t want that guy.  He’s the LAST thing we should want.  Because we don’t want to linger in the great misery of the Great Depression for year after year.

And thank God more Americans are realizing the Obama-as-FDR fraud than at any time since FDR came along to lead America into unparalleled misery.

Catastrophic Failure Of Leadership: US Birthrate Falls To Lowest Level In 100 Years

Have you heard?  America’s birth rate is lower than at any time in the last last 100 years.

There seems to be something profoundly wrong with Obama’s central message of hope and change.  There is something profoundly wrong with Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America.

22/08/2010
Recession effect? US birth rate lowest in 100 yrs

Milkwujee [sic]: The US birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century. Births fell 2.7 per cent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report. The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families. “It doesn’t matter how you look at it — fertility has declined,” Ventura said.

The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging stocks, jobs and births down. “When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. “It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added, noting that the birth rate stayed low throughout the 1930s.

As the report shows, it’s actually the lowest in a lot more than a hundred years.  But we’ll go with the lamestream media’s headline.  The REAL news here is that – while the low birthrate is being blamed on the recession – the birthrate is actually lower than it was during the Great Depression years (it was 21.3 births per 100 Americans in 1930, the year AFTER the Depression began).

The birth rate is shockingly down for not one but two years in a row.  Which is contrasted with 2007 (“Miss me yet?”),  when more babies were born to Americans than at any time in our history.  The Democrats under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would soon screw that up, however.

And now, Obama has not only crushed “hope” in America, but love as well.

Gotta ask: how’s that “Marxist as Moscow” “hopey changey” thing working out for ya here in “God damn America”?

The media is depicting this frightening news that American can’t replenish it’s population and is now going the way of the Dodo bird to the impact of the recession.  It’s the economy, stupid.  There’s only one problem with that: it wasn’t this bad in the GREAT DEPRESSION.

Now, I remember when Obama was campaigning for office and when he was trying to ram his stimulus – that he said would keep employment under 8% – through a Democrat-owned Congress.  Those were the days when Obama

… turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

Obama got his presidency.  He got his massive stimulus boondoggle.  But he poisoned the well of American confidence in doing so.

For all his many failings – such as keeping the Great Depression going for seven years longer with his terrible economic policies – FDR was a man of incredible confidence who gave his people optimism in the future.  “Things are bad for us now,” he essentially said, “But we’ll lick this depression.  You just wait!”  And most Americans, perhaps gullibly given his awful policies, believed him.

Ultimately, FDR’s own Treasury Secretary and close personal friend Henry Morganthau, acknowledged the utter failure of FDR’s economic policies:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

But at least the people had confidence -however misplaced – in FDR’s leadership.

Unlike Obama, whom they have no confidence in at all.

I have said this many times, and said it quite forcefully hear only a couple of months after Obama assumed office:

At this point, Obama is demonstrating that he cannot lead. And in a way it’s not his fault; there was never anything in his life experience that indicated he could lead. Community organizer? Obscure Illinois State Representative [who used thug tactics to come from nowhere to claim the seat]? One-term Senator (who promised he’d serve his first six-year term but then ran for President after 158 days???)??? [….]

He is a total failure. We don’t have a leader, we just have a guy who campaigns for four years. The country will begin to increasingly drift until we get a real president.

And boy oh boy was I ever right.

Here’s a short list of news reports I came up with that revealed how America was in the grip of disaster while Obama was on vacation gripping a golf club:

• Jobless claims rise to highest level in 9 months.
• Pre-owned home sales drop 27.2% to lowest level in 15 years.
• New home sales fall 12.4% to weakest level since 1963.
• 1 in 10 homeowners with a mortgage are at risk of foreclosure.
• US foreclosures up 4%; top 300,000 for 17th straight month (Obama’s been president for 19 months).
• 14.42% of all mortgages either delinquent or in foreclosure.
• Foreclosures jump 25%.
• New durable goods orders excluding transportation post largest decline in 1-1/2 years.
• Frightening trend: Commercial Property Owners Choose to Default.
• 401(k) hardship withdrawals, loans SOAR.
• Dow Jones dips below psychologically-important 10,000 level.
• Nightmare ‘Hindenburg Omen’ triggered, but economic fundamentals just as scary.
• US unemployment figures increase fears of double-dip recession.
• Taliban in Afghanistan strengthening, spreading; violence surging.
• Top Marine General says Obama Afghan deadline gives sustenance to enemy.
• Spending baseline has increased $4.4 trillion under Democrat control.
• 2010 Federal Deficit Second Largest in 65 Years (2nd only to 2009).
• Trade gap widens, largest increase in imports in 26 years.
• Weak GDP raises fears, with Fed running out of options.

Did you notice how many of those new bad news releases reveal terrible numbers that go back decades?  And that things were NEVER this bad when Bush was president?

And here’s the headline that Obama finally comes back from the lap of luxury after his sixth vacation of the year to see:

Record number in government anti-poverty programs

And the story there:

WASHINGTON — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.

One major problem facing the country is that millions of Americans are glad that Obama is giving them welfare, versus the Americans who would rather have a president who leads the nation as a whole out of poverty and back to prosperity.

It’s not just Obama’s bad economy that is causing Americans to stop having babies and start fading away as a nation; it’s not even his terrible policies that are sustaining that bad economy; it’s his total failure of leadership that is creating this unparalleled lack of confidence in America’s future.

Articulate Incompetent Obama Leads Nation To Great Depression Unemployment Levels

Robert Blagojevich – the brother of Democrat Governor Blagojevich – labeled Jesse Jackson Jr. as an “articulate incompetent” (actually a “f-ing articulate incompetent”).  That label couldn’t suit Barry Hussein better.

Barack Obama is a complete failure.  He’s an utter disgrace.  But he’s an articulate failure and utter disgrace.  Which means he’s always smooth-talking, always using disingenuous and dishonest rhetoric to conceal or camouflage his failure.

As an example, Obama is out on the stump saying:

“And I do want to point out, when you get in your car, when you go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you want to go back, what do you do? (Laughter.) You put it in ‘R.’  We won’t  want to go into reverse back in the ditch. We want to go forwards. We got to put it in ‘D.’ (Applause.) Can’t have the keys back.” (Laughter.)

That’s quite rhetorically clever.  It’s so articulate.  It’s also substantially utterly meaningless.

Putting facts to the rhetoric doesn’t look so good for Obama.  George Bush “handed Obama the keys” with unemployment two full points lower and with the deficit trillions of dollars lower.  Would I rather have Obama’s 9.5% unemployment – which as bad as it is is artificially low because of all the people who’ve dropped out of the job market, and which is now forecasted to up to 10% and remain there next year – or would I rather put the car in ‘R’ and go back to Bush’s worst unemployment rate of 7.6%?

We’re going to have a double dip recession – and which president is responsible for that second giant scoop of pain which will occur ENTIRELY on Obama’s watch?  Goldman analyst Jan Hatzius and his team just lowered their GDP forecast for 2011 from 2.5% to a dismally pathetic 1.9%, increased their unemployment forecast from 9.8% to 10.0%, boosted their inflation expectation from 0.4% to 1.0%, and said that the rather frightening Fed scenario known as “QE lite” is now on the table.

Specifically, the Goldman analysis says:

“As a result of this downgrade, we now expect the jobless rate to rise to 10% by early 2011 and remain there for the rest of the year.”

Does that make you want to put the car in ‘D,’ dumbass (which is another thing that ‘D’ stands for, for what it’s worth)?  We can see the cliff, but it’s full speed ahead with the turbochargers blazing.

In this case, “forward” leads to screaming-in-pain hell.

Obama says that Republicans don’t have “a single, solitary new idea” to help the American people recover from the economic recession.  Which takes a lot of chutzpah, given that Obama’s “new ideas” date back to 1848 and Karl Friggin Marx.  And the very newest “new ideas” of all date back to the colossal failure otherwise known as Jimmy Carter.  It’s not enough to say that Obama is throwing stones in a glass house; he’s using a machine gun to blast out every pane in the building.

Obama is quite “articulate” at fearmongering, race-baiting, slandering, demagoguing and demonizing his opponents.

But that kind of crap is all Obama’s got.  He’s incompetent at everything else.  As a matter of simple routine, we receive massively conflicting and contradictory messages from this White House.  On Wall Street.  On Afghanistan.  On health care.  On Iran.  On Everything.  Other than that, the first president of “God damn America!” is an utter disgrace.

So let’s look past the Obama rhetoric and look at the hard facts.

Losing is the New Winning

By: Larry Walker, Jr.

According to today’s Employment Status Report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals that as of July 31, 2010 there were 857,000 fewer persons employed than there were in July of 2009. Yet from Barack’s glass bubble, it sounded like all is well. Sure, his chief economist, Christina Romer just resigned, but that’s no cause for concern. The latest from Obama is that ‘private employment has increased every month’ during 2010. Really? Does that mean there are more jobs today than there were yesterday?

Following is my latest presidential scorecard, based purely on official BLS data:

Obama was quick to take credit for the false increase in overall employment, earlier this year, when the U.S. Census Bureau hired 500,000 temporary workers, but now that they’re all gone he’s been slow to acknowledge the true situation. According to the BLS there were 139.8 million Americans employed in July of 2009, and 138.9 million employed in July of 2010. That’s a decline of 857,000 jobs over the past 12 month’s. There has actually been a steady, and progressive, decline in civilian employment for the past year, but you know, Obama doesn’t have time to look at facts and figures.

When G.W. Bush entered office in January of 2001, there were 136.8 million jobs. When he left office in December of 2008, there were 145.3 million jobs. When Obama entered office in January of 2009, there were 145.3 million jobs. As of July 31st of this year, there were 138.9 million jobs. So when we do the math, there are now 6.4 million fewer jobs than there were when Obama entered office in January of 2009. That’s reality. That’s what it feels like on the ground. Obama is losing, and losing big. And in his losing, he’s dragging America and the Democrat party along for the ride.

Is this what success looks like in the minds of progressive Democrats? Is losing the new winning? If so, Obama is certainly leading the pack. It’s time to throw the bum(s) out!

Just so you know that I’m not making this stuff up, here’s a snapshot of the latest BLS report:

Sources:

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employment Situation 8/6/2010

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Historical Data

Related:

Obama on Jobs: Fool Me Thrice

Obama on Jobs: Worst Track Record in History

Recovery (dot) Fail Not Jobs

The labor force has never decreased since World War II – and it has now decreased for two years in a row under the worst failure in American history.

We have one chance, and only one chance, to avoid a Great Depression.  And that is to elect a Republican House of Representatives and a Republican Senate.

Bill Clinton gets all the credit for being the economic genius who gave us incredible economic growth by the mainstream media.  But if that’s so, why was he smacked down with the biggest political landslide in American history, when Republicans came from out of nowhere to retake both the House and the Senate in 1994?  And why was it that it was only AFTER the Republicans took control of Congress that we began to see the positive economic developments?

Read my article on the subject for why the credit for the “Clinton Economy” belongs with the Republicans in Congress.  It is Congress which enacts budgets, and it is Congress alone which has the authority to spend.

It is also Congress alone which can check a foolish, incompetent, and out-of-control president.