Obama-Endorsed Cockroach Jon Corzine Acted Like A Democrat With Investors’ Money

The Wall Street Journal sets the table for Barack Obama’s direct responsibility for Jon Corzine’s acts of pure theft:

President Barack Obama told us Jon Corzine was looking out for the little guy.

Never mind Mr. Corzine’s 1% pedigree as a former Goldman Sachs chairman. Never mind how Mr. Corzine essentially bought himself a U.S. Senate seat, spending his personal Goldman Sachs loot in one of the most expensive senatorial races ever. Never mind the dough Mr. Corzine stuffed in Mr. Obama’s pocket.

Here’s what Mr. Obama said in October 2009 while stumping for Mr. Corzine’s re-election bid as the Democratic governor of New Jersey:

• “You’ve had an honorable man, a decent man, an honest man, at the helm of this state. … He’s fought for what matters to ordinary folks.”

• “People…say, ‘You know, I was saving up all my life. …. Suddenly, because of this financial crisis, I may have to go back to work.’ “

• “Jon knows these are challenging times. This is why he got into public service. He didn’t do it for the paycheck.”

• “This crisis…came about because of the same theories, the same lax regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years.”

• “Jon’s got the mop and he’s cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.”

Now someone else has the mop, and they’re cleaning up Mr. Corzine’s mess.  [….]

“One of the things you’ve got in Jon Corzine is somebody who tells it to you straight,” Mr Obama said.

You see in microcosm the entire lie that is Obama and liberalism.  Republicans are crooks.  Only Democrats care about the little people.  Republicans created the mess.  Democrats are going to fix it.

The problem is that liberals are even more arrogant than they are foolish and naive.

Everything Obama says, everything Obama believes, is a lie.

Here’s what Joe Biden said about Jon Corzine – while he was pointing out how team Obama repeatedly asked Corzine for advice and trusted him implicitly:

“I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said Jon, what do you think we should do,” Biden said. “The reason we called Jon is that we knew that he knew about the economy, about world markets, how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew. It was because he had been in the pit — because he had been in the furnace. And we trusted his judgment.”

That’s right, Jon Corzine was a trusted adviser to Obama and Biden.  That’s why our economy is in such great shape now.  And the guy who helped Obama put together the massively failed stimulus also just put together the fourth largest bankruptcy in American history as he put his liberalism to work at MF (which stands for “Managed Futures”) Global and helped himself to other people’s money.

Here’s what Obama’s and Biden’s pal – the slick little weasel that Obama said was looking out for the little guy exactly as Obama himself was looking out for the little guy – has been up to:

11/05/2011 @ 12:48PM |6,308 views
The Mysterious Disappearance of MF Global’s $630 Million
Robert Lenzner, Forbes Staff

Where oh where did Corzine’s $630 million go to? The search and rescue teams are all about the mighty  financial institutions madly trying to find  $630 million of customers money that stupidly and  unethically and perhaps illegally was commingled with MF Global’s own capital in order for the firm to stay in business and avoid that deadly credit rating reduction that was one of a number of kisses of death.

Is it at JP M0rgan? At first, it was announced to be resting easily and safely at the House of Morgan. But, apparently not.

Then, some fantasist figured the  New York Federal Reserve Bank had grabbed it to secure its safety from mobs of enraged clients. No, that rumor has been put to bed.

I ask you; how is it possible that, days after MF Global filed for bankruptcy,   a sum as large as $630 million still be missing in action. Something is wrong in the state of Denmark. Didn’t some computer keep track monies coming in and going out at MF Global?

And there are other pointed inquiries that must be made into this ridiculously outrageous confusion.

1. How was it that former Democratic  Senate bigwig Corzine obtained approval from the regulators to combine other people’s money– and MF Global’s money in the first place?    This is an outrage– and if true, those regulators must be fired immediately–  and regulators hired who play by the rules of the game. This epic tale is kissing cousin to the unwillingness  of the law to charge criminal  fraud against some of the investment banks that  sold securities they knew to be nearly worthless.

2. How can it be that JP Morgan does not know for a certainty that the $630 million is money that ended up on their books from the chaotic ramifications of MF Global’s bankruptcy? It doesn’t fill me with confidence that JPM’s computers, its reporting system, its logistical reporting of its affairs up and down the ranks of the bank is working mellifluously. Sounds  like a job for the Senate Banking Committee, or the Fed in Washington to investigate and make sure we can know who owes what to whom in our financial system

3. Then, there’s the confusion about oversight of  MF Global. Here we are 3 years on from the meltdown, and still a firm like MF Global seems to have several masters that are obliged to understand its affairs. The CFTC, for starts, then what about the SEC,  and the commodity exchanges where MF does its trading. We had better resolve WHO has the role of BIG DADDY in making sure some other more crucial firm doesn’t come unstuck and lead to  the mysterious disappearance of several billion dollars. Or even several tens of billions of dollars.

We are still paying for an apathetic financial regulatory system. Get James Stone, former CFTC Chairman, to  form a special investigation committee, to map out the mandatory changes that must be made. And  let’s hope the powers that be find the missing $630 million by then. Let’s hope it’s the result of  sloppy record keeping, inadequate disclosure, the failure of systems– and not some perfidy.

We’re starting to learn what happened.  Remember Maxine Waters getting caught on tape threatening to “nationalize” the oil companies?  It has simply always been the tendency of liberals to “liberate” other people’s money and put that money to a “greater purpose.”  And in that spirit, Jon Corzine liberated investor money, taking it without the investors’ permission to invest it toward the greater needs of MF Global.  And now it’s simply gone, you know, like the $862 billion (actually $3.27 TRILLION) Obama did the same thing with in the name of “stimulus” or more specifically the $535 million Obama did it with in the name of “green energy.”

These damn liberals are all fascist crony capitalist thugs and thieves who would never dream of risking their own damn money when they can just take yours instead.

Update 4/23/12: Just to further document how incredibly corrupt Barack Obama is, Jon Corzine is STILL bundling campaign money for him.

As We Stare Into The Abyss Of A Great Depression, Let Me Ask You: WHO WAS RIGHT?

This is actually the concluding paragraphs of an article I wrote yesterday, but I thought the question merited its own title:

Let me ask you something. I’ve said repeatedly that Barack Obama – the president of God damn America and the symbol of God’s wrath on this nation until this disgrace leaves office IN disgrace – would lead us into a Great Depression with his reckless and depraved spending. Meanwhile, Obama, the Democrat Party and the left said that Obama would lead us unto a glorious recovery.

I’ve been pointing out since December 2008 right after Obama was elected that we would be staring into the abyss of a Great Depression due to this evil man’s failed policies. I pointed out in that article that the Great Depression began with a market tank, followed by a series of failed liberal-progressive policies that were like sugar for a diabetic; at first things seemed to get better, and then we had the real crash. You look at what I wrote in that article and tell me that we aren’t right on schedule.

We have the worst economy since the LAST time a failed socialist ran it into the ground in the 1930s. Surprise, surprise.

Let me point out that as early as October of 2008 I was pointing out the FACTS that CEOs “went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” Let me point out that I pointed out that same fact again in February 2009 after Obama’s foolish and wicked policies started taking shape.

Who was right? And who has been totally full of CRAP from the getgo?

Conservatives have been right again and again and again and Democrats have continued to demonize us even as their own failed policies have kept failing just like we said they would.

Why didn’t Obama’s stimulus plan work?  Because the government sucking money out of the productive marketplace and squandering it has NEVER worked.  And so surprise surprise, a little over a year after Obama’s destined-to-fail Keynesian spending binge was implemented, economists acknowledged that it had failed. JUST LIKE WE CONSERVATIVES SAID IT WOULD TO ANYONE WHO WOULD LISTEN TO REASON.  And about that same time investors were starting to scream that Obama was pathologically anti-business.  But liberals said “We don’t need no stinkin’ business.” 

History repeats itself when fools don’t pay attention to it.  And America in 2008 was a nation of fools.  We elected a man who represented the policies that created and sustained the Great Depression.

And as I’ve been warning over and over, we’re going to pay dearly for it.

Don’t get me wrong here. We’re going to have a sucker’s rally at some point. BECAUSE THERE ARE A LOT OF STUPID PEOPLE.

Democrats ran both the House and Senate since the November 2006 elections when unemployment was 4.6% as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the Democrats took over Congress.  Most Americans have no idea whatsoever that the LAST budget that Republicans passed (and I note that it has been 833 DAYS since Democrats have bothered to pass a budget) had a deficit of only $161 billion dollars.  Democrats have since utterly skyrocketed our reckless deficit spending into the trillions of dollars.  And all the while they have done nothing but blame and demonize Republicans.

I made a point in an article I wrote recently:

Now, let’s just say for the sake of argument that you were watching the Democratic National Convention in August of 2008 and came to the belief that the mainstream media coverage was so blatantly biased and dishonest that Barack Obama was going to win the election. And you had a vision of the sheer smackdown that would happen in this “God damn America.”

So you made an appointment with your portfolio manager and told her you wanted to cash out all of your stock holdings so you could put your investment nest egg into silver and gold.

What do you expect your portfolio manager would say? Do the words, “This is a big mistake. Trust me, the stock market is not going to collapse. The average gains of the stock market invariably outperform gold indices. Blah blah blah.” The bottom line is that if you pull your money out of the fund she manages, she’s not going to get any more of your money.

Well, the fool who did that would have bought all kinds of silver at about $13 an ounce and gold at about $825 an ounce. And that fool would have more than doubled his money while everybody else lost their shirt, then got part of their shirt back if they played the game right, then lost their shirt again.

I describe that individual who bought silver and gold because he truly believed Obama would be a total disaster who would create a second Great Depression and put America into food riot conditions (and see I was saying that after the Obama victory in November 2008).

And so “the fool” bailed out of the economy of the most evil man who has ever led this country and bought the only thing that made any sense to buy if he was right.

And who was right?

“The fool” who bet against Obama bought gold at $825 an ounce and that same gold is worth over $1,700 an ounce as of COB Monday.  That fool bought silver at about $13 an ounce and that same silver is worth nearly $40 an ounce Monday.  Then that fool went to bed and woke up this morning and saw that gold was saying good morning to him at $1,770 an ounce.  And silver was down slightly from the previous day so he’d only tripled his money from the day he bought the stuff by the pound.

Who was right?  The fool who bet Obama was a fool or the downgraded president who has now been factually proven wrong a ten thousand times times ten thousand times???

[Update, 8/9/11]: The above was written on August 8 and pulished early this morning; what follows is written in the hindsight of the market rebound today.

Well, I knew we’d get a sucker’s rally, and we sure got a sucker’s rally today.  After plunging to its sixth worse loss ever, the Dow rallied to its eleventh greatest gain ever.  I didn’t think we would see such a rally so quickly and I certainly didn’t think the Fed would throw this kind of a hail Mary pass by announcing that already rock-bottom interest rates would remain the same for two years.

Obama and his teleprompter showed up yesterday and neither one of them had any plan or any clue as to what to do. Fortunately, I suppose, Ben Bernanke DID have a plan. It’s not QE3, but it’s kind of like a QE3; basically, by enabling the banks to borrow money at near zero percent interest, banks (which were absolutely CLOBBERED in yesterday’s bloodbath) can make a ton of money by loaning that same money at a higher interest rate.

This was virtually the only trick the Fed had left.

The risk of this dramatic and basically UNHEARD of two-year freeze on rock-bottom interest rates is summed up in a very short paragraph expressing the concerns of the three Federal Reserve heads who voted against Bernanke’s aggressive move:

“Fisher and Plosser have warned repeatedly that the Fed risks stoking inflation or another asset bubble by keeping money too easy for too long.”

This seems to be the right point to state that we haven’t had dissent at the Fed since November 1992.

So why do the three Fed heads disagree with this policy?  Basically,  they understand that the artificially low interest rates created by the Federal Reserve are a rigged game.  The co-owned Federal Reserve, banks, and Wall Street firms benefit from the policy, while people who are trying to save money lose out because the artificial interest rates simply do not honestly reflect the weakening dollar and the rising prices we are clearly seeing all around us.  It amounts to a tax on savers and a subsidy for spenders.  Here’s an article on that gimmick by a writer pleading with Bernanke to allow interest rates to reach their market equilibrium well before his ploy today.

And artificially low interest rates also clearly increases the risk of an asset bubble (e.g., that’s what blew up our economy in 2008 with said “asset” being real estate) because it incentivizes people to increase their debt load far beyond what they can afford.

Ultimately, what Ben Bernanke did was kick the can down the road.  Because in two years (hint: AFTER Obama is up for re:election) we’re going to HAVE to see a spike in interest rates that will absolutely slaughter both the bond markets AND the stock markets.  We always selfishly think that whatever crisis we have now justifies setting up an even worse crisis later, just as we always foolishly believe that in a couple of years we will have developed the will to embrace tough choices that we clearly don’t have the will to face now.

A year ago now I pointed out that:

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs. And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation. Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate. Why? Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued. There’s simply no way it can’t be. If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire. The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems. If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency. And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins. Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

What I am essentially saying is that the government’s constant monkeying around has created a dilemma: as long as we remain in recession conditions, things will continue to suck as we slowly grind along.  But if we actually start to experience a real recovery, we’re going to very quickly get a crippling punch in the gut as the interest rates we’ve been holding down for FAR TOO LONG begin to rise in an out-of-control manner.  I’m not talking about “politics” or “economics” when I say this: it is simply the grim reality of physical math on a balance sheet.

The Bernanke move will ultimately hurt us badly.  Just not today.

Meanwhile, nothing else has changed.  The horrible fundamentals of our economy and the greater world economy are still just as horrible today as they were yesterday.  Europe’s sovereign debt crisis is still spiralling out of control. with France and England joining Italy and Spain as being both broke and “too big too bail”; and nothing whatsoever about our ravaged and dysfunctional economy has changed in any way, shape or form from the moment that the market began to take off after the Fed announcement.

In explaining its move today, the Fed wrote:

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that economic growth so far this year has been considerably slower than the Committee had expected. Indicators suggest a deterioration in overall labor market conditions in recent months, and the unemployment rate has moved up. Household spending has flattened out, investment in nonresidential structures is still weak, and the housing sector remains depressed. […]

Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. The Committee now expects a somewhat slower pace of recovery over coming quarters than it did at the time of the previous meeting and anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually toward levels that the Committee judges to be consistent with its dual mandate. Moreover, downside risks to the economic outlook have increased. […]

Which is to say that 1) Growth has been “considerably slower” than expected; 2) Labor market conditions have deteriorated substantially; and 3) Household spending has “flattened” (actually it has tanked); and 4) The housing sector remains depressed (and is literally more depressed than the Great Depression).

Anybody who believes that today’s Fed action or the stock market’s immediate reaction to it is simply a fool. The very reason the Fed even resorted to this dramatic and risky move was because things truly suck, and are expected to remain terrible until at least 2013.

The Fed, essentially in desperation, is now going to attempt to force bond yields to remain low while trying to keep stock prices high – which they define as “price stability.”  This entire process will in fact virtually REQUIRE the Fed to do a QE3 (which they did not feel they could do now because it was far too early after just-ended QE2), according to analysts from CNBC.  And the Fed is simply not worried about inflation at this point because they think they have bigger fish to fry.

When they get to the QE4 point – which QE3 itself will guarantee just as the ending of QE2 itself guaranteed QE3 – they will simply forgive their own debt and the system will run amok until it completely crashes due to hyperinflation.

I know I make all this sound so cut and dry that, if I’m right, any fool ought to be able to see what I’m describing and avoid the pitfall I predict.  And so it is easy to conclude that I simply can’t be right. 

I don’t doubt that the thinkers at the government and the Fed and Wall Street who are making these ruinous decisions are well familiar with the history of hyperinflation (e.g. the Weimar Republic or Africa); and they know the dangers of their policies.

But there’s another attribute these decision-makers have in addition to their pathological refusal to accept responsibility when they can kick the can down the road and make the future pay for their actions now instead; and that attribute is hubris.  Which is to say they reason, “Yes, that problem always happened before when a government did what we’re doing now, but we’re smarter.  And we have computers.  And so what happened to everyone else who did what we’re doing now won’t happen to us.”

And the thing about computers that has always been true is garbage in, garbage out.  The economic models these thinkers are plugging into their computers are filled with preconceptions that are in fact basically the same preconceptions that failed so wildly in the Weimar Republic.  And it doesn’t matter how many digits to the right of the decimal point your computer can calculate; when your assumptions are wrong, your model will turn out wrong.

By the way, “the fool” who bought so much gold was quite happy today.  That is because there is no point saving money, and the only two basic options are to risk your money in risky equities or to buy gold; so gold will continue to increase in value, baby.

They talk about “fool’s gold” (iron pyrite), which fools think is real gold.  But real genuine gold has the property of revealing fools in another way: consider that gold has spiked twice since 1970: during the misrule of the fool Jimmy Carter and now during the misrule of the fool Barack Obama:

What I said back in May seems to remain true: “Everyone But Obama And Obama’s Fed Knows That Prices Are Rising Drastically.”  And given our massive and wild market fluctuations the picture I provided in that article continues to describe Obama’s roller coaster economy:

As an American Thinker article correctly predicted shortly after the national disaster a.k.a. the Obama victory in 2008: “Hang on, this will be a rough period ahead.”

Who was RIGHT?

[Update, 8/10/2011]: Oh, oh.  It looks like that wild roller coaster ride is going DOWN the steep track again.  The DOW was down 520 points – more than erasing the gains from the previous day and putting the kibosh on the television talking head narrative that we were about to enter better days because the Fed had saved us.

I didn’t know we’d go up 430 points yesterday on the Fed’s hail Mary.  I didn’t know it would tank 520 today on the most radical market roller coaster in my lifetime.  But I know that Barack Obama will fail and bring America down with him unless the people stand up and STOP HIM.  This is God damn America now under Obama.  And God damn America is going to go down hard unless we stand up and repent of the evil that is the Obama agenda.

And that “fool” who bet that Obama would wildly fail is thrilled with his bet that Obama would ruin America, with gold soaring to over $1,800 an ounce today.

Shovel-Ready Projects: Obama Admits $862 Billion Was Pissed Away On Idiotic Libthink

We spent 862 BILLION dollars – actually $3.27 TRILLION when you factor in interest and the cost of extending all the programs Obama created – on what even Obama now admits was a completely bogus premise.

Now all we have to wait for is for Obama to realize that his other “success” – ObamaCare – was a dismal failure at best, too.

October 13, 2010 11:45 AM
Obama: “No Such Thing as Shovel-Ready Projects”
Posted by Stephanie Condon

With unemployment hovering near 10 percent nearly two years after President Obama signed his economic stimulus package, Mr. Obama is acknowledging that, despite his campaign promises, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

The president gave that remark in an hour-long interview with the New York Times.

Mr. Obama also told the Times that he should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” in the stimulus, rather than including them himself, so the package would have seemed more like a compromise. The stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office said this year will cost $862 billion, included $236 billion in tax cuts. Nevertheless, the president said in the interview that he comes across as “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat.”

When the president campaigned for the stimulus package at the start of his presidency, he and others in his administration repeatedly insisted the investments would go to “shovel-ready” projects — projects that would put people to work right away. As recently as August, however, local governments were still facing delays spending the money they were allocated from the stimulus, CBS News Correspondent Nancy Cordes reported.

Couldn’t help but laugh at the way Obama phrased a couple of things.  He says he “should have ‘let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts’ in the stimulus, rather than including them himself, so the package would have seemed more like a compromise.”  Because appearances are everything, aren’t they???  And if we’d just pitched it this way, and given Republicans just a tiny little bit of input, then maybe we could have blamed yet ANOTHER liberal-created mess on Republicans.

And “comes across as “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat.”  Do ya THINK???

Obama “comes across as “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat” the way most human beings come across as bipedal hominids.  It’s just pretty much what you are, dude.  I’m sorry you can’t bring yourself to see the real picture when you look in the mirror:

Gold reached the highest constant-dollar value ever recorded during the last year of the Carter administration.  Adjusted for inflation, that is a much better price than the new all-time-high we just saw today under Barry Hussein.  By the time Obama leaves office in utter disgrace, you can rest assured that gold will be in the stratosphere, as desperate investors look for anything that Obama can’t ruin.

One picture says a thousand words about the two times when gold shot through the roof:

And those thousand words can only describe the failure of Democrats, given the fact that not since the Carter years have Democrats had so much power in Congress.  And not since the Carter years have we seen such miserable failure.  And – while many people have bought the liberal media lie that Bill Clinton was a successful president – the truth is that Bill Clinton was such a dismal failure that he suffered the worse ever (until NOW) political defeat in American history in 1994.  That was the year of the “Republican Revolution” that swept Republicans into power in numbers never before seen.  It was those Republicans – and not Bill Clinton – who generated the economic success that led to the balanced budget that Republicans promised as the number one plank in the “Contract with America.”

Enter that old Carter “malaise,” that old Carter “crisis of confidence,” as the American people finally come to realize that their president knows less about how the economy works than most of them know about brain surgery.

Cloward-Piven Alive And Well: Progressives CONTINUE To Push For Destruction Of U.S. System

The next time you see a progressive liberal, realize that there is a good chance that they would love to see you in a soup line – helpless, hungry, desperate, and ready for “change.”

Back in August of last year, I wrote an article entitled, “Politico Article Reveals Obama’s Cloward-Piven Strategy Backfiring.”  I pointed out quite a few facts of history which I believed were important.  For example, I cited an article that defined the radical leftist Cloward-Piven strategy:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

Does that sound like something you’d like to see happen?  I hope not!  But you can bet that there are a lot of people on the political left right now who would love nothing more than having a crack at reshaping American society in their own image.

I cited the words of top Democrats like Obama’s chief of staff who said:

EMANUEL:  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.  This is an opportunity….  And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

And of course, you have Obama saying “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Change it exactly how, Barry Hussein?  And what about those of us who liked the United States of America our founding fathers gave us who don’t want it “fundamentally transformed”?

We haven’t known exactly what Obama meant by that. Because Obama turned himself into a “blank screen” while he was running for president:

“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

As I pointed out in a recent article:

A politician who has Obama’s ostensible verbal skills is, quite simply, not a “blank screen” unless he wants to be one.

Obama did not want us to know who he was, because we would have rejected him as our leader if we knew.

The more we finally learn about who Obama really is and what he really wants to do, the less we are going to like it.

We’re seeing more and more now.  The man has a record.  And sadly, it is a record of filling his administration with far leftist radicals – even with outright self-described communists (e.g., Van Jones, Mark Lloyd, Anita Dunn, Carol Browner, Ron Bloom, Andy Stern) – and of pursuing government takeovers of one sphere of our economy (e.g., auto manufacturing, banking industry, financial sector, health care system) after another.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why a man who professes himself to be a free market president would appoint a man who would say “We know that the free market is nonsense” as his manufacturing czar.  Ron Bloom is a man who said:

“We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.”

You’re a “free market guy” who appoints a man who thinks the free market is “nonsense” and agrees with Mao to restore our incredibly important manufacturing sector?

For the life of me, I can’t understand how a man who says he’s a “free market guy” would appoint Andy Stern to his fiscal commission given statements such as the following:

– “Because workers of the world unite, it’s not just a slogan anymore.”

– “We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

This same Andy Stern – whom Obama has invited to visit the White House more than ANY other person – described Obama’s “free market” program this way:

We now have a new metric. The president says he wants to judge the new economy whether it increases the number of people in the middle class. Whether we have shared prosperity, not just growth. Which is a fundamental different philosophy then what we’ve seen in this country to date. Now how do we distribute wealth in this country … clearly government has a major opportunity to distribute wealth – from the EITC, from tax policies, from minimum wages, from living wages – the government has a role in distributing wealth and social benefits. We are at historic crossroads … in terms of what our new president is trying to do and a different way we are going to try and evaluate the economy. And so all of sudden we are witnessing the first new American economic plan led by the government, not necessarily by the private sector.

(Video available here).

You’re a “free market guy” and you appoint a massive big government Marxist to figure out how to reduce government spending???  You’re a “free market guy” and you’re pushing a “fundamentally different philosophy” than anything this country has ever seen?  You’re a “free market guy” and you want to redistribute the wealth at the expense of growth?  You’re a “free market guy” and you have an economic plan led by the government, and not the private sector?

Really?

And, of course, for the life of me, I can’t understand how Barack Obama would have installed a man (i.e., Van Jones) who routinely said things like this –

• “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’”

• How’s that capitalism working for ya?

• And the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities.

• “This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don’t stop there! Don’t stop there! We’re gonna change the whole system! We’re gonna change the whole thing!

– to be his Green Jobs Czar!

“Free market guy”?  Really?  And I’m not supposed to be either rolling on the floor laughing or barfing in a giant bucket WHY?

Obama told us that he chose his friends carefully, and “carefully” chose to be friends with “Marxist professors” and Marxist terrorist-bombers.  The problem is that he’s STILL choosing to surround himself with Marxists.

Obama says his administration has a “fundamentally business- friendly” agenda and are “fierce advocates” for the free market.

But fully 77% of American investors understand Barry Hussein very, very differently:

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. investors overwhelmingly see President Barack Obama as anti-business and question his ability to manage a financial crisis, according to a Bloomberg survey.

The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency.

To summarize to this point, “Mr. Blank Screen,” who wants to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” by “never letting a serious crisis go to waste,” calls himself a “free market guy” while repeatedly appointing communists to important “free-market”-positions.  But more than 3/4ths of American investors who earn their bread and butter from the aforementioned free market think he’s full of crap.

With that foundation, let us get back to the strategy of Cloward and Piven.

The following comes from a member of the leftwing in very good standing.  He’s written and worked for LeftTurn, Political Affairs, and Monthly Review according to his Wikipedia entry.  He lives in Chicago (Barry Hussein’s hometown), where he founded Youth Against Apathy.

I instantly hearken to Michelle Obama’s saying of her husband: “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism.”

At a recent Brecht Forum, event, Jed Brandt said the following:

JED BRANDT, COMMUNIST: “We have to help bring this government down, we have to help destroy this system and that requires increasing the alienation that working class and oppressed people feel. The way change is going to happen in this country is through the destruction of what we call the United States of America.

I’m opposed to white supremacy not because it’s white people involved. I am opposed to the system we traditionally call imperialism and the idea that some people have rights and privileges that are not granted to all human beings. And the solution to that problem is called communism and socialism and we should put it in our mouths. We should say it when we say what is your politics? I am a socialist. I demand that we have health care for people and it’s not a demand that’s negotiable with health insurance companies.

We will take your insurance companies; we will take the farms in this country; we will shut down the military apparatus in this country and I am tired of being told to stuff my anger back in my pants.

[Youtube]:

Compare that to what Cloward and Piven were saying needed to happen way back in the 1960s:

Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands

Am I the only one who finds it interesting that the man who says “The way change is going to happen in this country is through the destruction of what we call the United States of America” is demanding that ObamaCare be passed in his very next breath?

I mean, if the Democrat talking points had any validity, wouldn’t this guy be who wants to see America destroyed be saying, “I want health care that features tort reform, competition across state lines, and all the other elements of the Republican plan???

This is where articles such as  Cloward-Piven Crisis Care should start making sense.  I myself offered my own article, “ObamaCare Is Cloward-Piven Strategy In Microcosm” to establish this connection well before hearing Jed Brandt make the connection.  I cited the world famous Mayo Clinic as pointing out that ObamaCare represents the idea of:

accelerating the financial ruin of hospitals and doctors across the country

I cited the Wall Street Journal which pointed out that:

Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable

I pointed out that the Dean of the Harvard Medical School said that:

while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants.

I pointed out the fears of the California Medical Association that ObamaCare:

would increase local healthcare costs and restrict access to care for elderly and low-income patients.

As we speak, we are talking about the destruction of America by means of a political technique that the Democrats themselves called “the arrogance of power,” “majoritarian absolute power,” “the precipice of a constitutional crisis,” “the abandonment of the concept of check on power,” and “a naked power grab.”

My favorite description and prediction comes from Max Baucus, who is now pushing for the very thing that he said would be “the way Democracy ends. Not with a bomb but with a gavel.”

I think that last is correct.  ObamaCare, forced down the throats of Americans by the unAmerican nuclear option, will indeed be the way Democracy ends.

ObamaCare – by whatever name it is called – will be the ultimate actualization of the Cloward-Piven strategy.  It will in short order overwhelm and collapse our social support network just as leftists have been dreaming about for decades.

As one Democrat said, “Never mind the camel’s nose; we’ve got his head and his neck in the tent.”

There’s your REAL “hope” and “change.”  Too bad it doesn’t represent your hope, and too bad it is change that you most certainly don’t want.

A Little Factoid: 77% Of Investors See Obama As ‘Anti-Business’

Stocks have tumbled 552 points as Obama announced his crackdown on American banks.  As a CNBC financial expert put it, “Obamanomics is a Chilling Experiment.”

From the AP on January 22:

NEW YORK – Stocks suffered their fourth sharp drop in five trading days as investors caved to growing anxiety about President Barack H. Obama’s plans to restrict big banks and earnings reports that just aren’t good enough.

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 217 points Friday, having lost 552 points, or 5.2 percent, over the past three days. Over the past five trading days, the Dow has fallen 537 points, having gained 115 points on Tuesday.

The drop gave the Dow its worst week since the index hit a 12-year low in March.

Investors are saying to Obama, “Please don’t do this,” but he is showing the same deaf-eared fanatic-ideologue determination that he demonstrated in driving his awful ObamaCare forward.

Is it any wonder that most investors – by an overwhelming margin – now believe that Barack Obama is simply hostile to business and to the market forces that allow for economic growth?

From Bloomberg, via Yahoo News:

Obama Seen as Anti-Business by 77% of U.S. Investors
Heidi Przybyla Heidi Przybyla   – Thu Jan 21, 6:25 pm ET

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. investors overwhelmingly see President Barack Obama as anti-business and question his ability to manage a financial crisis, according to a Bloomberg survey.

The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency.

The poll also finds a decline in Obama’s overall favorability rating one year after taking office. He is viewed favorably by 27 percent of U.S. investors. In an October poll, 32 percent in the U.S. held a positive impression.

“Investors no longer feel they can trust their instincts to take risks,” said poll respondent David Young, a managing director for a broker dealer in New York. Young cited Obama’s efforts to trim bonuses and earnings, make health care his top priority over jobs and plans to tax “the rich or advantaged.”

Carlos Vadillo, a fixed-income analyst at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in San Francisco, said Obama has been in a “constant war” with the banking system, using “fat-cat bankers and other misnomers to describe a business model which supports a large portion of America.” […]

Obama’s 71 percent unfavorable rating among U.S. investors is almost matched by two members of his economic team. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, president of the National Economic Council. U.S. respondents give Geithner a 63 percent unfavorable rating and Summers 67 percent. In October, 57 percent held a negative view of Geithner and 66 percent said the same of Summers.

Like Obama, both men do better with Asian and European investors.

One financial figure to find favor among U.S. respondents is Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who garners a 68 percent approval rating, which is in line with his marks from non-U.S. investors and the rating U.S. investors gave him in the October poll. […]

The U.S. investors’ overwhelming characterization of Obama as anti-business stands in sharp contrast to the results of a Bloomberg National Poll in December, when 52 percent of U.S. adults said the president had the right balance in his approach.

Obama gets considerably higher marks in Europe and somewhat higher marks in Asia.  Like I give a damn about what socialists think about our socialist president.

Take the Europeans (PLEASE!).  They claim to welcome Obama’s attack against banks, but at the same time announce they have absolutely no intention of killing their nations the way Obama is killing America.

One quote in particular that comes out of the above article:

“The Obama plan is really back to the future. These sort of plans were implemented after the Great Depression and then taken away in the 60s. He is sort of reinstating the same plans to deal with this crisis,” the source said.

Obama is taking us back to the Great Depression to “solve” our recession.  The problem is that economists now realize that FDR’s constant bureaucratic interference was what kept America in the Depression seven years longer than what was necessary.

Anyone with half a brain (which understandably rules out most Democrats) should readily understand that the cost of Obama’s taxes on and interference of banks will only end up being passed on to American consumers in the form of higher fees, charges, and penalties.  Obama is really only taxing us through the banks.  And he’s using populist demagoguery in hopes of making us want to punish the banks so much that we forget that we’ll be seeing higher fees as a direct result of that punishment.

Obama has lost more jobs in one year than any president has lost since 1940.  He has presided over the destruction of 4.1 million jobs.

This is NOT a “future” we should ever want to go “back to.”

Our investors – who far and away have been forced to live under Obama’s policies – pretty much realize he sucks across the board.

What does Obama have to offer?  No solutions, just more problems, and more attacks.  All to the tune of “It’s Bush’s fault.”

Pre/Post-Election Poll Craziness: Media Rewriting Its Propaganda

Okay.  Six weeks and one Presidential election apart.  Two articles reporting on two polls from the same source (CNNMoney): one titled “Poll: 60% say depression ‘likely’” and one titled “76% say Obama can fix economy – poll.”

Am I the only one who sees a contradiction?

Let’s backtrack a little bit.  Since election day, the Dow has lost 21% of its value, from 9625 on November 4 to today’s close of 7552.  It was 9525 on October 6, the day that 60% of Americans believed that a depression was “likely.”

The CNNMoney story from October 6 begins:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Nearly six out of ten Americans believe another economic depression is likely, according to a poll released Monday.

And it ends:

And [Economic Cycle Research Institute director of research Anirvan] Banerji said that the increasingly grim view of the economy will by itself lead to cutbacks in spending by both consumers and businesses. That in turn will result in greater job losses and more economic pain.

“The fact that the majority of people believe we are going into a depression ensures that the recession will get worse,” Banerji said.

The market has lost over one-fifth of its value since Barack Obama was elected President.  That is a rather stunning display of a complete lack of confidence in his leadership and in his policies.  Such an abandonment from the market following a presidential election is historically unprecedented.  And we are supposed to believe that now 76% of Americans believe Obama can “fix” the economy?

Because Obama has done what, exactly?

First of all, I have to ask: is it THESE people who believe Obama can fix the economy?  Is it the nearly 60% of Obama voters who – on crucial issues such as which party has been in charge of the Congress for the last two years – are dumber than monkeys, but get to vote anyway?

It sure isn’t THESE people, investors or chief executive officers, the people who actually invest and who actually run things.  You poll the CEOs, and you find out that “74 percent of the executives say they fear that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.”  You find out that CEO’s believe that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.”

Barack Obama is being portrayed by the media as the new FDR, superintending the “new new deal.”  That should frankly terrify you, if you had a clue.

Let me tell you what’s going on here: exactly what I and others have been saying would happen.  The same media that has been demonizing the economy as a narrative device to attack Republicans will begin to assure everyone that things will be okay now that Barack Obama is in charge.  Most Obama voters didn’t know that Democrats have actually been in charge of both the House and the Senate for the past two years because the media didn’t want them to know that.  Widespread awareness of such a fact would have undermined the media narrative that Republicans were responsible for the tanking economy.  Better to run one story after another trashing Sarah Palin.

John McCain was portrayed as some kind of older-than-retarded out-of-touch fool for claiming that the fundamentals of the economy were strong when they were at a time when they were ACTUALLY FAR STRONGER THAN THEY ARE NOW (you know, before Obama got elected and the market lost over a fifth of its value).  But you will begin to see “here comes the sun” articles building up the economy now that the election is over and Democrats came out on top.

The media has been so blatantly biased throughout its election coverage that it is completely accurate to say that we are now in a propaganda state.  There is no possible way that Republicans can win in this media climate: whether you look at the Media Research Center, or at the Project for Excellence in Journalism (or again at their brand new study), or at the University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin Advertising Project, there is widespread agreement with one longtime ABC journalist that the media is dangerously biased.  Pew Research discovered that Americans believe by a 70% to 9% margin that the media is biased in favor of Obama and against McCain.  The media now represents a fifth column of government – a propaganda wing – that attacks conservatives and celebrates and defends Democrats and their ideology.  Democracy is going extinct in the country that founded democracy, because no free society can survive such a climate of propaganda.

Are the two polls from CNN contradictory?  Of course they are.  But they are the product of two agendas: agenda #1 was to undermine confidence in the economy in order to get Obama and Democrats elected; agenda #2 is to reinforce confidence in the economy in order to help them be successful.

The problem is that the people who actually invest and who actually run businesses aren’t as stupid and naive as the brainwashed public that voted for Obama and a Democrat super-majority.  That’s why the smart money is bailing our of the economy like rats off a sinking ship so that they can actually keep what little profit they have before the Democrats can begin to start “spreading the wealth around.”

Obama’s “New New Deal” Will Redistribute Wealth Of Shrinking Economy

The last couple weeks may well be a harbinger of things to come, as the people Obama promised to tax heavily continue to pull out of the market.  On November 4, the Dow closed at 9,625; today, it was at 8,497.  That means that the market has lost nearly 12% of its value since Obama became President-elect.  Hardly a measure of confidence.

The market spoke rather clearly on November 5:

NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street hardly delivered a
rousing welcome to President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday,
dropping by the largest margin on record for a day following a U.S.
presidential contest.

 The slide more than wiped out the previous day's advance, the
largest Election Day rally ever for U.S. stocks.

Now, this wasn’t at all unexpected.  On October 24, I wrote an article titled, “Investors Ready For Dramatic Sell-Off If Democrats Win.”  A few days before that, I wrote an article pointing out that “Actual Job Creators Favor McCain 4-1 Over Obama,” which – among other things – points out that “74 percent of the executives say they fear that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.”

The people who invest, and create job opportunities, and build the economy, don’t want to have their wealth redistributed.  Would you want your wealth redistributed?

Democratic apologists point out that Obama promises on a meager jump in the top federal tax rates from 36% to 39%.  But that “insignificant” 3% comes right out of peoples’ profits.  It sounds a lot worse when the reality is understood: when businesses that had been making an 11% profit are now reduced to an 8% profit.  Or an 8% profit reduced to a 5% profit.  And Obama promises to increase capital gains taxes and several other taxes that will impact upon businesses and the investment climate that supports business.  How hard are job creators willing to work to experience a diminishing return on their time, labor, and risk?

Time Magazine – a publication that has gushed over Obama for months – has a new gushing cover:

It should frighten you.  FDR was no “moderate.”  He presided over a terrible time for the country, and – while he was a popular figure because of what he tried to do – his actual economic administration has been widely recognized by economists to have been a failure.  Studies have demonstrated that the average depression lasted only four years; but for some reason the Great Depression dragged on and on and on under FDR’s governance.  By 1938, after more than four years of FDR, the effects of the Depression were actually much worse than they had been when he first took office.

As an example of the new realizations regarding the 1930s, UCLA economists argue:

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.

Even the common man’s sense has largely been that World War II had more to do with getting us out of the Depression than FDR’s New Deal.  It certainly did get men who had been standing in bread lines put to “work.”  And as the nation coalesced together and began to pour resources into building weapons, factories that had been idled came back on line, and innovation increased to match the technological development of our enemies.  And certainly, the fact that, when hostilities ended, the United States alone was not reduced to rubble had a great deal to do with helping our economy surge forward.

But by that thinking, anyone who criticized President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is correct only insofar as we need an even BIGGER war.  For Obama to truly be like FDR, we need to have a devastating Depression that drags on for 12 years while incompetent liberals continue to tinker, and then we need slug it out in World War III against Russia and China.

So pardon me for looking at the “New New Deal” FDR-lookalike Barack Obama and shuddering down to the marrow of my bones.

We’re watching the market beginning to go down the slide.  It’s going to go down a lot more.  And fear over Barack Obama’s policies is going to have a lot to do with the lack of confidence that keeps investment from pouring back into the economy.

The picture is far more frightening than the story the media is telling: there are more than $700 trillion in derivatives in the global economy.  That’s far more than the total currencies of all the governments in the entire world.  As one writer puts it, “In other words, every dollar of insurance on bonds issued by some deadbeat governments and corporations is leveraged 200 times!”  We’ve got a time bomb waiting to explode.  And we put a lot of the people who created that time bomb in the first place in charge of fixing the mess they themselves created.  People like Obama’s National Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, who was at the epicenter of the subprime loan scandal and once paid $460 million to stay out of jail.  People like Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, and Jamie Gorelick, who pocketed over $300 million from Fannie and Freddie while juggling the books so they could get their bonuses.  People like Barney Frank, who claimed that nothing was wrong with Fannie and Freddie and the housing market they supervised, and repeatedly fought off President Bush’s efforts to regulate them at time when the crisis we are currently experiencing could have been averted.  People like Charles Schumer, who exemplified the sheer hypocrisy of the Democratic Party with his blaming others for what he himself did.  People like Joe Biden, whom two major studies said shared direct blame for the foreclosure disaster because of legislation he championed as the Senator from banking-capital Delaware.  And people like Barack Obama, who embraced more contributions from Fannie and Freddie – and from scandal-plagued finance institutions such as Lehman Brothers than anyone during his short time in the Senate.  Now all these people have been entrusted with fixing a mess of literally global proportions; a mess that they in large part created in the first place.

And Barack Obama wearing the “New New Deal” mantle of FDR’s Panama hat, glasses, and fancy cigarette is not going to make that time bomb go away.  In fact, it may be the very thing that brings the whole house of cards come crashing down.

Politico: Investors Ready For Dramatic Sell-Off If Democrats Win

Yesterday’s Politico story puts it this way:

Generally, financial analysts say the stock market likes Republicans more than Democrats. And while predicting market movements is as difficult as predicting the winner of the World Series in August, some experts say the market is already anticipating an Obama win on Nov. 4 and has at least partially accounted for it.

“Potentially, you could see a one or two-day rally on a McCain victory, and not much of a reaction if Obama wins, because that’s what’s expected at this point,” said Justin Fishkin, a partner at The Cypress Group, a financial services company in Washington, D.C. Fishkin, who earlier in his career was a hedge fund manager specializing in political, regulatory, and legislative event-driven investments, said the key issue on Wall Street minds is corporate taxation — which is why the market might prefer McCain and his promised rate cuts over Obama.

In other words, a significant part of the massive sell-offs we’ve already seen were inspired by the belief that Obama would win the White House and start screwing up the economy with socialism.

This adds to the fact that CEOs overwhelmingly (74%) fear that “an Obama presidency would be disasterous for the country,” that Obama would “have a negative impact on business and the economy,” and that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.”  Oh, well, what do Chief Executive Officers know about business or the economy, anyway?

Politico isn’t the only major news source reporting on the fear of an Obma presidency by the people who understand money and finance.  MSN has an article titled, “Why Wall Street Fears Obama“:

Investors this summer have been placing their bets on an Obama presidency, and for the most part that hasn’t been good for the market.

Without giving him a chance to explain himself in detail on the campaign trail or at the Democratic National Convention, they are voting with their shares by tossing financial, health insurance, manufacturing and high-dividend stocks into the ash can, and are growing skeptical about energy companies as well.

It’s not that major institutional investors don’t like the man — far from it. He has many backers among the financial elite, including multibillionaires George Soros and Ron Burkle. And it’s not that there aren’t many other reasons for investors to sell stocks now, as the global economy tangles with the terrible twin beasts of bank deleveraging and inflation.

It’s just that Obama’s rhetoric on taxes and health care is scaring common wealthy people with large capital gains from investments made over the past decade, and a lot of them don’t want to wait around to see whether it’s just populist fluff that might be set aside once he takes office.

The real question for investors after an Obama win is the extent to which Democrats assume control of the Congress, and the more there are the less they like it:

Joe Lieber, a political analyst at the consulting firm Washington Analysis who scrutinizes elections for his clients at hedge, mutual and pension funds, said an electoral lurch that gave the Democrats 60 seats could prompt a dramatic sell-off on Wall Street.

“We’re getting a lot more questions about the Senate than the presidential [race],” Lieber said, “because there’s almost nobody on Wall Street right now who believes McCain’s going to win.” A filibuster-proof Democratic majority (three-fifths of the chamber, or 60 senators) would not be well received by Wall Street traders, he added. “A lot of investment professionals don’t necessarily want to give one party the keys to the entire city. Free markets like gridlock.”

Ah yes, the thrill of one party domination, with the in-the-tank media determined to tell the Titanic that everything is fine no matter how fast the country plows toward the giant iceberg.

An interesting question is to what extent conservatives and Republicans believe we should try to forestall the disaster we think will occur under the Union of Soviet Socialist AmeriKKKa (because that’s how Barack’s Marxist/anarchist/terrorist pal and his preacher for 23 years spelled ‘America,’ after all) or just stand back and let the meltdown commence.