Profits Are for People

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding "people before profits" -- as if profit motivation were the source of mankind's troubles -- when it's often the absence of profit motivation that's the true villain.

First, let's get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by entrepreneurs. They're what are left after other production costs -- such as wages, rent and interest -- have been paid. Profits are the payment for risk taking, innovation and decision-making. As such, they are a cost of business just as are wages, rent and interest. If those payments are not made, labor, land and capital will not offer their services. Similarly, if profit is not paid, entrepreneurs won't offer theirs. Historically, corporate profits range between 5 and 8 cents of each dollar, and wages range between 50 and 60 cents of each dollar.

Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is the role played by profits, namely that of forcing producers to cater to the wants and desires of the common man. When's the last time we've heard widespread complaints about our clothing stores, supermarkets, computer stores or appliance stores? We are far likelier to hear people complaining about services they receive from the post office, motor vehicle and police departments, boards of education and other government agencies. The fundamental difference between the areas of general satisfaction and dissatisfaction is the pursuit of profits is present in one and not the other.

The pursuit of profits forces producers to be attentive to the will of their customers, simply because the customer of, say, a supermarket can fire it on the spot by taking his business elsewhere. If a state motor vehicle department or post office provides unsatisfactory services, it's not so easy for dissatisfied customers to take action against it. If a private business had as many dissatisfied customers as our government schools have, it would have long ago been out of business.

Free market capitalism is unforgiving. Producers please customers, in a cost-minimizing fashion, and make a profit, or they face losses or go bankrupt. It's this market discipline that some businesses seek to avoid. That's why they descend upon Washington calling for crony capitalism -- government bailouts, subsidies and special privileges. They wish to reduce the power of consumers and stockholders, who hold little sympathy for blunders and will give them the ax on a moment's notice.

Having Congress on their side means business can be less attentive to the will of consumers. Congress can keep them afloat with bailouts, as it did in the cases of General Motors and Chrysler, with the justification that such companies are "too big to fail." Nonsense! If General Motors and Chrysler had been allowed to go bankrupt, it wouldn't have meant that their productive assets, such as assembly lines and tools, would have gone poof and disappeared into thin air. Bankruptcy would have led to a change in ownership of those assets by someone who might have managed them better. The bailout enabled them to avoid the full consequences of their blunders.

By the way, we often hear people say, with a tone of saintliness, "We're a nonprofit organization," as if that alone translates into decency, objectivity and selflessness. They want us to think they're in it for the good of society and not for those "evil" profits. If we gave it just a little thought and asked what kind of organization throughout mankind's history has accounted for his greatest grief, the answer wouldn't be a free market, private, profit-making enterprise; it would be government, the largest nonprofit organization.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are following the path predicted by the great philosopher-economist Frederic Bastiat, who said in "The Law" that "instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general." In other words, the protesters don't want to end crony capitalism, with its handouts and government favoritism; they want to participate in it.

SOURCE

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American Imperialism... Please

Jonah Goldberg

And so it ends. The United States is leaving Iraq.

I'm solidly in the camp that sees this as a strategic blunder. Iraqi democracy is fragile and Iran's desire to undermine it is strong. Also, announcing our withdrawal is a weird way to respond to a foiled Iranian plot to commit an act of war in the U.S. capital. Obviously, I hope I'm wrong and President Obama's not frittering away our enormous sacrifices in Iraq out of domestic political concerns and diplomatic ineptitude.

Still, there's an upside. Obama's decision to leave Iraq should deal a staggering blow to America's critics at home and abroad.

After all, what kind of empire does this sort of thing?

Critics of U.S. foreign policy have long caterwauled about American "empire." The term is used as an epithet by both the isolationist left and right, as a more coldly descriptive term by such mainstream thinkers as Niall Ferguson and Lawrence Kaplan, and with celebratory enthusiasm by some foreign policy neoconservatives like Max Boot.

The charge in recent times has centered on the Middle East, specifically Iraq.

The problem is, contemporary America isn't an empire, at least not in any conventional or traditional sense.

Your typical empire invades countries to seize their resources, impose political control and levy taxes. That was true of every empire from the ancient Romans to the Brits and the Soviets.

That was never the case with Iraq. For all the blood-for-oil nonsense, if America wanted Iraq's oil it could have saved a lot of blood and simply bought it. Saddam Hussein would have been happy to cut a deal if we only lifted our sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. oil industry never lobbied for an invasion, but it did lobby for an end to sanctions. We never levied taxes in Iraq either. Indeed, we're left holding the tab for the liberation.

And we most certainly are not in political control of Iraq. If we were, we wouldn't have acquiesced to the Iraqi government's desire for us to leave. Did Caesar ever cave to the popular will of Gaul?

Some partisans will undoubtedly say that the key difference is that Barack H. Obama, and not George W. Bush, is president.

But this lame objection leaves out the fact that Obama acceded to a timeline drafted by the Bush administration. Moreover, Obama has moved closer to Bush than anybody could have predicted.

Consider Libya. Obama pursued exactly the same policy goal -- forcible regime change -- that critics of the Iraq war routinely denounced as the heart of American imperialism. There are significant differences between the two adventures, to be sure, but at the conceptual level there's little difference at all, and neither has much to do with imperialism.

More important, for the imperialism charge to mean anything it needs to describe something larger than mere partisan policy difference. If our imperialism can be turned off and on like a light switch with the mere change of parties, then how imperialistic could we have been in the first place?

The word "regime" has been defined down in recent years to mean nothing more than presidential administrations. "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States," Sen. John Kerry said in 2003.

Regime actually describes an entire system of government. And if the American regime is imperial only when Republicans are in power, then it's not a serious claim, it's just a convenient and partisan slander.

In many quarters of the Middle East, the war on terror is cast as a religiously inspired front for crusader-imperialism. This nonsense overlooks the fact that America has gone to war to save Muslim lives more often than any modern Muslim country has. Under Democrats and Republicans we've fought to help Muslims in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. We've sought the conversion of no one and -- with the exception of Kuwait -- we've never presented a bill. When asked to leave, we've done so.

To say we did these things simply for plunder and power is an insult to all Americans, particularly those who gave their lives in the process.

SOURCE

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The Shocking Trend In U.S. Individual Income Inequality 1994-2010

Perhaps the most common measure of income inequality in a nation is the Gini Coefficient (aka the "Gini Ratio"), which ranks the amount of inequality there is in a country on a scale from 0, which represents perfect equality, where everyone would have an equal share of the nation's income, to a value of 1, which represents perfect inequality, where one person would have all the income, but everyone else has none.

So now, thanks to so much media attention being focused on the Occupy Wall Street "movement" (aka "politically-oriented publicity stunt"), where many activists (aka "not-too-bright people") appear to be upset at "the Top 1%" (aka "really high income earners"), who they claim have "gotten too rich" (aka "earned a high income by doing things that satisfy other people's needs"), we thought we'd use the "Gini coefficient" (aka "a well-established mathematically-based method for measuring inequality") to find out how out of whack things have become in the United States over the years.

Or more specifically, the years from 1994 through 2010, for which the U.S. Census has published detailed data related to the incomes earned by Americans based on their annual surveys of the U.S. population. Our chart showing the trend in income inequality for all individuals as measured by the Gini ratio for these years is below:


Gini Coefficient for the U.S. Population, 1994-2010

We were shocked to see the overall trend from 1994 through 2010 take the path it has, because it's so completely contrary to what we keep hearing in the news.

We only ask that someone ask the media for their reaction to this disturbing data!

SOURCE

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DOJ Tips The Scales Of Justice For Muslims Again

The head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, is taking strong steps to protect the rights of Muslims in America “because they are being targeted for abuse.” A new alliance between the DOJ and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is apparently giving him firepower to do just that.

First-year Muslim math teacher Safoorah Khan of the Berkeley School District in Illinois, insisted on 19 days off during grading period to go on hajj, or pilgrimage – and she has won her case without ever having to go to court. The small-town school district “cried uncle” after a three-year fight with the combined forces of the DOJ and the EEOC. Khan, who had resigned her position when both her requests for unpaid leave were denied by the school district, received $75,000 in back pay, compensatory damages and court costs. The settlement, which is subject to federal court approval, poses many disturbing questions for a society based upon rules and processes of law - rather than government-selected minority causes.

First, this extraordinary result suggests a new standard for other government workplace religious observance requests, since the longest religious leave previously championed by the EEOC and the DOJ was a 10-day period for the Worldwide Church of God. The Supreme Court has generally been unsympathetic to these employee petitions, denying them as demanding too much of employer business considerations. As these cases have had full hearing in the courts - rather than being hammered out between behemoth government agencies and a village school district - respect for the employer’s right to deny requests that impose “undue hardship” on business operations are factored into the legal determination.

Another critical legal consideration that this settlement seems to have skipped over is the necessary test as to whether the employee request is a reasonable one. Judicial deliberations over how to apply the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act anti-discrimination provisions turn on what is deemed a reasonable balancing of the employer concerns and employee’s “sincerely felt religious obligations.”

This DOJ-driven settlement fails both legal and sociological reasonableness tests on grounds other than Khan’s lack of tenure and her request to leave during grading period. First, her demand of 19 days for hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam and obligatory just once in the lifetime of most Muslims, was excessive according to Islamic website guidance suggesting a minimum of eight days vacation period for the four to five day ceremonial rituals in Mecca, with an outside recommended time off of two weeks.

Second, the hajj is observed during the last month of Muslim lunar calendar, so hajj rituals would have occurred during summer vacation approximately a decade from now. There was no reason that Khan had to go during her first year of teaching.

However, what is most disturbing about this case and its portent for preferential treatment of Muslims under Attorney General Eric Holder’s DOJ is the degree to which the federal government’s heavy hand is seen tipping the scales. This unusual DOJ intervention on behalf of a Muslim complainant fits right into the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s official Muslim outreach program. As featured on the DOJ website, the program is described as placing “a priority on prosecuting bias crimes and incidents of discrimination against Muslims” and others “perceived to be members of these groups.”

Even the fact that this was the first partnership demonstrating “closer collaboration” between the EEOC and the DOJ “to vigorously enforce Title VII anti-discrimination laws against state and local governmental employers” is an ominous development. When two fully funded federal agencies staffed with armies of the nation’s most zealous attorneys land on local agencies waving this settlement as the prototype for Muslim religious accommodation, the results will likely be driven by placating the Justice Department, rather than a pursuit of legal processes designed to provide justice.

It is even more alarming to consider that this official outreach program specially recognizing Muslims is overseen by a spokesperson for Khan’s hajj case, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ Thomas Perez. Perez’s potential for activism is underscored by former voting rights section DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams’ account of the Assistant AG’s role in burying the Black Panther voter suppression scandal.

In fact, just days ago, Perez and other DOJ officials dialogued with Islamist activists who lobbied “for cutbacks in anti-terror funding, changes in agents’ training manuals, additional curbs on investigators and a legal declaration that U.S. citizens’ criticism of Islam constitutes racial discrimination.” Perez notably ignored the call for restraint on First Amendment free speech rights and was quoted as saying, “There will be times where we have honest differences of opinion, but if we don’t talk and don’t actively listen and if we don’t reflect and recalibrate where necessary, then we won’t be doing our job, and you have our continuing commitment to that end.” At the end of the session, Perez is said to have “climbed the stage to embrace Imam Magid, who was born in Sudan and trained at a Saudi fundamentalist seminary.”

Another exhibit in this demonstration of agenda-driven DOJ priorities, is the explosive revelation earlier this year detailing whistleblower reports that political appointees at the DOJ were responsible for nixing the prosecution of CAIR and other un-indicted co-conspirators implicated in the government’s successful case against Hamas financiers in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

When the top government law enforcement agency becomes a lobbying arm for grievance factions, the rule of law takes second place to the pursuit of political ends and social justice agendas. Holder’s DOJ seems to have been captured by ideologues who best serve aggrieved minority Americans. It is beyond time for President Obama to fulfill his duty to restore the DOJ’s stated mission of “ensuring fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.”

SOURCE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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You Can't Wait? Neither Can We

President Obama couldn't have chosen a more fitting slogan than "We can't wait" to promote his latest legislative elixir for our ailing economy. What could be cleverer than to employ double meaning in aid of doublespeak?

CBS News reports that Obama will use the phrase to sell his jobs bill and to justify his plan to take unilateral executive action on the economy.

Obama has enlisted the phrase to argue that America can't wait on the private sector to generate economic growth. He can't wait on the people to get up to speed with his superior wisdom or for Congress to rubber-stamp his latest destructive scheme. He will not be denied; he will not be delayed; he will not wait.

So he "is going to begin a series of executive branch actions that will not require action from Congress -- or the assent of Republicans," including a "major overhaul" of the government's refinance program for federally guaranteed mortgages to assist homeowners who haven't been able to secure refinancing.

How many times do we have to go through this song and dance, in which the executive branch arbitrarily alters already-existing contracts? How many times will this policy have to fail before Obama quits trying it?

This is a perfect scam for Obama. Just as we watch the Occupy Wall Street protesters condemning the banks for actions forced on them by liberals, Obama is again forcing them into similar actions so that the protesters will have something to protest next year.

Audacious is no longer an adequate word to describe this president. He forced through his first stimulus through crisis-leveraged fear-mongering and then never really used but a fraction of that money for so-called stimulus purposes. Why would anyone still believe a thing he says?

Who is he to tell us "we can't wait" on the proper constitutional safeguards against such precipitous executive action? He is not America's king. The Framers deliberately placed safeguards in our system to prevent such capricious executive action.

Where does Obama get the authority to force banks to make loans on terms he prefers, irrespective of the sound banking practices that guide such decisions? The answer is that he doesn't believe he needs authority, only "noble" intentions.

Just like the liberals who crammed through their affordable housing policy, he believes that people ought to get a break. It doesn't matter that most of them won't be able to pay back these loans. What matters is that Obama wants to take money from people who he believes have too much and give it to those who he believes don't have enough. To him, that is the highest purpose of government. Call it "economic justice," because that's what he and his fellow radicals call it.

The concept of "We can't wait" is nonsensical on its face -- not that the absence of reason and common sense is any deterrent to such emotion-driven policies. He is implying that because we can't wait for the private sector to create jobs and he can't wait on Congress to pass his jobs-destroying jobs bill, he must order banks to make their loans less creditworthy. It's a classic non sequitur.

He's using the phrase as a ploy to deceive us into believing that his regulatory action would also help the economy when the only thing it would do is shift money around. This is no more about creating jobs than was his stimulus bill, but like the stimulus bill, it would be a lawless, unconstitutional redistribution of wealth.

It's true; Obama can't wait for Congress to sign on to his insane plans, because it won't, and he can't wait on the will of the people to embrace his patent statism, because they won't.

What we really can't wait on -- what America can no longer wait on -- is for this president to quit spending more money than we take in. We can no longer wait another 900 days on the Senate to produce a budget. We can no longer wait on structural reform to our entitlement programs. We can no longer wait for the Supreme Court to nullify Obamacare or for Congress to repeal it. We can no longer wait for Obama to quit behaving like an absolute monarch with no accountability.

But sadly, we have to wait on these things -- until 2012, when we can throw out of office those who refuse to obey the law by waiting to act until they have the constitutional authority to act.

SOURCE

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The importance of destruction

By Martin Hutchinson

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 masterpiece “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” described the process of capitalist wealth creation as being one of “creative destruction.” It’s a lesson that policymakers have not taken sufficiently to heart, largely because they have to answer to sentimental democratic electorates. Creation sells well to an electorate whose instincts, as demonstrated by the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, are largely socialist. But destruction doesn’t poll well. It is therefore ignored, not only in the bloviating speeches of politicians seeking election, but also in their policies when they have taken office. Throughout the world, the lack of sufficient attention to destruction is a major part of today’s economic problem.

The late lamented Steve Jobs exemplified this principle perfectly. While his succession of Apple products exemplified creativity at its finest, he was never afraid to destroy previous generations of hard-won product territory. Each generation was engineered for its own sake, not for compatibility with previous generations. Thus while Microsoft’s Windows and Office software was engineered so that it could cope with programs derived from previous generations, no such attempt was generally made at Apple. The result was a Windows sequence that by the Vista generation was vast and buggy compared to Apple products that remained slim, both physically and intellectually.

Truly free market capitalism involves a considerable amount of destruction along with the creativity. When new businesses arise, old ones are killed. In the tech sector, the Palm Pilot was a decade ago the gadget everybody had to have, then it became RIM’s Blackberry, then Apple’s IPhone and now the iPad. Thus in this sector, the multiples of 30, 40 and even 100 times earnings that gullible investors award their favorite companies are absurdly high. Because of the pace of creative destruction, tech sector companies should sell on four or five times earnings, reflecting their likely lifespan plus possibly a modest residual value at the end from the patents.

New products very often involve the destruction of their slightly inferior predecessors, as Henry Ford discovered when his Model T became obsolete and RIM is now discovering to its cost. Sometimes the destruction can be encompassed within one company, as Ford was able to do by shutting down his production line for a year and re-tooling to make the Model A. Sometimes the destruction involves the entire enterprise, as happened to Polaroid and may now be happening to Kodak.

Two forces have in recent years hampered this necessary process of destruction, loose money and governments.

Loose money prevents destruction, because there is no force forcing bankruptcy. Companies can run for years increasing their borrowings, repaying them with the occasional stock issue if they can find a compliant accountant. The premier example of this is Japan in the 1990s, where banks continued increasing their loans to real estate companies that were hopelessly insolvent, given the 70% drop in real estate prices from their 1990 peak. For a few years under Junichiro Koizumi (2001-06), rates were tightened and the banks were made to write off the worst of their bad debts, as a result of which Japanese economic conditions began to improve. Since Koizumi’s departure however, incipient recessions have been met with public spending sprees and further monetary easing, with the result that the Japanese “zombie companies” have proliferated and economic recovery has gone into reverse.

Now following the Fukushima reactor disaster we learn that its owner Tepco is also to be kept in operation through a banking system bailout, with no attempt made to liquidate its vast collection of “non-core assets” and ensure it is efficiently run which, given that Japanese utility tariffs are set on a “cost-plus” basis, it most certainly is not.

Europe has always been bad at allowing destruction, but in this recession it has got even worse. The Belgian bank Dexia was a model of sleepy inefficiency when I used to visit the Belgian savings banks from which it was formed in the 1970s and early 1980s. Since they had excessive ability to leverage and no proper asset generating capability, we made very nice money arranging Belgian Franc private placements for foreign government borrowers, all of which were placed with the same half dozen institutions. As it has since proved; our fees were well earned since we exercised a modest quality control on the borrowers – if we had provided them with duff paper our nice Belgian Franc placement business would have been kaput!

Merging these banks, giving them an expensive new headquarters and allowing them to compete for the dozier forms of lending with much sharper-clawed banks in the rest of the EU, without friendly merchant banks exercising quality control, was a recipe for disaster, and disaster has duly occurred. EU government paper was readily available – Greece would take any money you could lend it, at the low rates prevailing – and naturally Dexia filled its boots. The bank serves no useful purpose and while very large is should certainly not be regarded as central to the European financial system. Belgium, a gigantic beneficiary of the EU’s Brussels headquarters with vastly excessive public debt and not much of a non-bureaucrat economy except for some nice restaurants, certainly does not need its own banking system and Belgian taxpayers should not be milked to subsidize one.

The central cause of the EU debt problem, as of the U.S. subprime loan problem, is of course government regulation. In this case the regulation concerned is the monstrous Basel Committee regulation that says that holdings of OECD government paper could be weighted at zero when calculating banks’ capital requirements. Naturally, overleveraged banks in Europe have taken advantage of this provision to fill their balance sheets to the gunwales with dodgy government paper. The OECD membership requirement imposes a little quality control, but as Greece has shown, not much – without it, we would have doubtless seen massive multi billion dollar financings replicating the notorious 1822 bond issue for Poyais, a country that did not exist.

This absurd subsidy to the public sector (because holding capital costs money, and is priced into the cost of loans that require it), has been increased with the recent central bank requirements to raise extra capital, against which government debt is STILL not counted. It is the principal cause of the PIIGS government debt glut. Without it, bank appetite for the paper of gluttonous governments would have been far less, and interest rates on that paper would have soared even before the 2008 crisis.

The solution is to reduce or ideally eliminate the preference for government paper in calculating bank capital requirements, while throwing Greece, entirely uncompetitive at its current wage rates, out of the euro altogether. Banks will be forced to take writedowns against their holdings of Greek paper, and, in order to satisfy the new capital requirements, to sell other countries’ paper to institutional buyers. (Their immoral threats to stop lending and crater the European economy if forced to hold more capital should be treated with the contempt they deserve.) The banks that thereby become insolvent should be liquidated forthwith.

Thus the necessary destruction will be accomplished. Witterers who moan about “contagion” to other PIIGS or other banks should be quelled; one of the saddest results of the current attempts to pour yet more money into the Greek rathole has been the collapse of the fine Slovakian government, and its likely replacement by the bunch of not-very-ex Communists and kleptocrats that form the opposition. As Ireland has shown, it is possible to climb out of a banking crisis hole in a remarkably short space of time – and Ireland would have still fewer problems if it hadn’t foolishly guaranteed bank obligations in the first place. An equivalent austerity, perfectly possible under the capable Silvio Berlusconi and the incoming Spanish government would save Italy and Spain, although alas possibly not Slovakia, where the damage is probably done. Portugal also seems likely to save itself, but if not, it must share the fate of Greece.

Finally, here in the United States, bank balance sheets are endangered by the failure of the foreclosure process on underwater homes to proceed as it should and, still worse by the government’s conspiring with the trial lawyer lobby to make the banks responsible for a problem that was largely the fault of the government and the witless borrowers themselves. Instead, the government has kept the utterly damaging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in business and has attempted to force still money to go into the over-invested U.S. housing sector.

The great Andrew Mellon in December 1929 is alleged to have said “Liquidate, liquidate, liquidate.” With the statist Herbert Hoover in the White House, they didn’t do it then, and suffered a decade of depression as a result. We should be wiser now, in Japan, the EU and the United States. Subsidizing failure should no longer be an option.

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ELSEWHERE

FL: Court halts drug testing for welfare recipients: "A federal judge in Orlando on Monday temporarily blocked Florida’s controversial law requiring welfare applicants be drug tested in order to receive benefits. Judge Mary Scriven issued a temporary injunction against the state, writing in a 37-page order that the law could violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on illegal search and seizure." [????]

Libya: Interim ruler unveils Sharia agenda: "Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de fact[o] president, had already declared that Libyan laws in future would have Sharia, the Islamic code, as its 'basic source.' ... Mr Abdul-Jalil went further, specifically lifting immediately, by decree, one law from Col. Gaddafi's era that he said was in conflict with Sharia -- that banning polygamy. ... he announced that in future bank regulations would ban the charging of interest, in line with Sharia."

TSA releases VIPR venom on Tennessee highways: "If you thought the 'Transportation Security Administration' would limit itself to conducting unconstitutional searches at airports, think again. The agency intends to assert jurisdiction over our nation’s highways, waterways, and railroads as well. TSA launched a new campaign of random checkpoints on Tennessee highways last week, complete with a sinister military-style acronym -- VIP(E)R -- as a name for the program."

Hitler can happen here, and so can Stalin: "When dictatorship comes to America it won't come from left or right, it will come from both, together, as a welfare/warfare corporatist state. We already have most of it in place."

Is a large proportion of American adults stuck in poverty-level jobs?: "As workers age and, hence, gain experience, they are more and more likely to earn wages higher than the minimum. For example, in 2010 24.9 percent of workers aged 16-19 earned no more than the minimum-wage. But in that same year only 11.3 percent of workers aged 20-24 earned so little. The figure for workers aged 25-29 earning these meager hourly rates was lower still, at 5.5. This falling trend continues as workers age, so that the percentage of workers aged 60-64 earning wages no higher than the federal minimum was a mere 1.7."

With the rise of militant secularism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy make common cause: "A few short years ago a visit between Pope and Patriarch seemed impossible because of lingering problems between the two Churches as they reasserted territorial claims and began the revival of the faith in post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. The relationship grew tense at times and while far from resolved, a spirit of deepening cooperation has nevertheless emerged. Both Benedict and Kyrill share the conviction that European culture must rediscover its Christian roots to turn back the secularism that threatens moral collapse."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Origin of the term "Nazi"

A recent book born of research in the British library gives the following nonsensical explanation:

Nazi - an insult in use long before the rise of Adolf Hitler's party. It was a derogatory term for a backwards peasant - being a shortened version of Ignatius, a common name in Bavaria, the area from which the Nazis emerged. Opponents seized on this and shortened the party's title Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, to the dismissive "Nazi"

I think that explanation shows that you can't always look things up. The author obviously knows little of German pronunciation.

"National" is the same word with the same meaning in both English and German. The difference is in the pronunciation. In German it is pronounced (approximately) as "Nartsiohnahl". But in German the letter "z" is pronounced as "ts". So substituting "z" for "ts" in "Nartsiohnahl" gets us "Nazionahl". And "Nazi" is simply an abbreviation of that. Any nationalist would therefore tend to be called a "Nazi". I suppose an equivalent process in English would be to call any nationalist a "Nasho". But nationalism was never popular in the Anglosphere so that didn't happen. In time, of course, the prominence of Hitler's party made the term specific to members of Hitler's party rather than being applicable to nationalists generally.

For what it's worth, Friedrich Engels (Karl Marx's co-author) was a fervent German nationalist so he could theoretically be termed a Nazi, but I don't know that he ever was described that way.

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Perry hedges on Obama's birth certificate

TEXAS Governor Rick Perry expressed some uncertainty about the authenticity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate in an interview with Parade magazine published Sunday.

When asked directly if he believes Obama was born in the US, the candidate responded, "I have no reason to think otherwise" before hedging that he does not have "a definitive answer."

When Parade interviewer Lynn Sherr noted that Perry has seen Obama's birth certificate, Mr Perry said, "I don't know. Have I?"

Mr Perry noted he recently had dinner with Donald Trump, whose repeated questions about Mr Obama's place of birth helped push the president to release his long-form birth certificate in April.

"He doesn't think it's real," Mr Perry said about Mr Trump's view of the president's birth certificate.

"I don't have any idea," Mr Perry added. "It doesn't matter. He's the president of the United States. He's elected. It's a distractive (sic) issue."

Later, Mr Perry said he would like to have Mr Trump's endorsement for his presidential candidacy. "He is a job-creating machine, and that's what I'm all about," Mr Perry said.

SOURCE

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Obama's show trials deflect blame from where it really belongs

The Department of Justice is not in the sales industry. Yet the DOJ appears hell-bent on prosecuting provocative cases that deflect responsibility for the financial crisis away from the government and onto the private sector.

A recent Gallup poll reveals that most Americans blame the government, not Wall Street, for the economic downturn. Americans are fed up with disgraces like Fast & Furious, Solyndra and high unemployment. Now, it appears that President Obama may be relying on the DOJ to help him regain public approval for his collectivist policies.

Preet Bharara is the man President Obama nominated as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, headquartered in lower Manhattan.

With impeccable timing, Bharara is delivering the Occupy Wall Street progressives (potential Obama 2012 campaigners) exactly what they are clamoring for by prosecuting sexy, high profile cases that send an anti-wealth, anti-capitalism and anti-Wall Street message. Here is a timeline:

* September 17: Occupy Wall Street protest begins.

* September 21: Bharara announces that former Galleon Group LLC trader Zvi Goffer will serve 10 years in prison, the longest prison term on record for insider trading.

* October 7: Bharara announces that Emanuel Goffer will serve three years for acting on "inside information" that he received from his brother Zvi.

* October 12: Bharara announces that former attorney Michael Kimelman will serve 30 months for his involvement with the Goffer brothers (despite a very close jury and no clear evidence that Kimelman knew the he was acting on illegal information).

* October 13: After utilizing admittedly "aggressive prosecutorial methods and unprecedented tactics," Bharara announces that billionaire and Galleon Group LLC hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam will serve 11 years in prison, setting a new record for insider trading prison terms.

FBI press releases state that these cases were "brought in coordination with President Barack Obama's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, on which U.S. Attorney Bharara serves as a co-chair of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group." Government records indicate that President Obama created this tax force to "hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis."

The obvious problem with this task force is that shady Clinton-era government housing policies initiated the financial crisis, not Wall Street. So, how can a government task force hold the government accountable?

The government's Wall Street "watchdogs" are particularly tainted. The DOJ has notoriously blown taxpayer funds on extravagant conferences featuring $16 muffins, and, last spring, 33 Congressional probes uncovered high-level SEC employees using taxpayer time and equipment to indulge their addiction to porn.

Furthermore, economists including the widely recognized founder of the economic analysis of law, Henry Manne, argue that deregulating insider trading would benefit both the economy and society. UCLA School of Law Professor Stephen M. Bainbridge writes: "Insider trading is one of the most controversial aspects of securities regulation, even among the law and economics community. . Deregulatory arguments are typically premised on the claims that insider trading promotes market efficiency or that assigning the property right to inside information to managers is an efficient compensation scheme."

The New York Times has reported that, "Insider trading does not appear to have any appreciable effect on the markets, at least as measured by the volume of trading that occurs." The Guardian also reports that many insider prosecutions do little to anything to stop the practice, and, more importantly, the trading itself may not be inherently destructive to the market.

Bharara genuinely seems to think he's whipping horrific crimes. But what is more scandalous? To threaten America's food supply by ignoring and even facilitating drug cartel border violence (think Fast & Furious)? Or, to leverage your connections and cut backdoor deals on Wall Street-when there is no evidence that such trades hurt the economy?

Government waste and corruption is a far greater threat to the economy and society than insider trading. But when was the last time you saw a government regulator get perp-walked? I think the President's task force could send a superior anti-corruption message by securing the border and attacking government waste.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Sullivan in Manhattan suggested that historically high prison terms like Goffer's and Rajaratnam's: ".will be used to send a message to Wall Street." And Wall Street represents capitalism. So, these men appear to be sexy scapegoats serving drawn-out prison terms to send an anti-capitalism message to the progressive mob.

SOURCE

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All sides should agree: down with the Big Banks

They mainly support Democrat candidates anyway. They know who can be bought. And Obama definitely was a bargain for them

Liberal protesters "occupying" Wall Street hate the big banks, which they see as the engine of capitalism. But conservatives ought to hate the big banks because they are the enemies of capitalism.

Three events last week cemented how the bailed-out subsidy sucklers of Wall Street continue to profit, not from the free exchange and risk-taking that embodies the market, but from cronyism and offloading their risk onto the taxpayer.

First, Bank of America, which would have collapsed if not for the 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout, moved a reported $55 trillion in derivatives from its investment banking arm, Merrill Lynch, to a subsidiary that is backstopped by taxpayers through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Bloomberg news reported that FDIC officials don't like the move, which puts depositors' money at risk and taxpayers ultimately on the hook if risky derivatives blow up. But Wall Street insiders like the move for precisely that reason: If Bank of America melts down, these hedge fund managers or other big-time investors want their money in a division of the bank propped up by government. In short, big-time investors in risky financial products want taxpayers to bear some of their risk, and Bank of America has come up with a clever way to do that.

Banks play the same public-risk-private-profit game in the mortgage industry, where lenders and Realtors have successfully pushed a measure to expand taxpayer insurance for mortgages to include big-dollar homes. Sens. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., last week passed through the Senate a measure to expand the size of a loan that the federal government can insure, up to $729,750.

The Menendez-Isakson measure would allow government-owned mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy loans of that size off of lenders, and the Federal Housing Administration could insure loans that big. If a loan owned by Fannnie or Freddie (or insured by the FHA) fails, taxpayers take it on the chin while banks still get paid.

Assuming a 20 percent down payment, this proposed new bailout limit would have taxpayers subsidizing homes worth more than $910,000. Even in pricey Potomac, Md. -- plush with the wealth of lobbyists, government consultants and dual GS-15 incomes -- that sum could buy you a five-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath home with a two-car garage on a cul-de-sac.

Finally, last week we learned how much self-dealing was involved in the 2008 bank bailouts. A Government Accountability Office report highlighted plenty of conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve. New York Fed official Stephen Friedman was on the board of Goldman Sachs and actively buying up shares of Goldman while the Fed moved to give Goldman special access to its lending windows.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon sat on the New York Fed's board while the Fed was pouring billions of bailout dollars into JP Morgan and granting JP Morgan special regulatory exceptions.

Meanwhile, the banks keep hiring the "public servants" who help steer bailouts their way, further corrupting both the market and the government. Fed bailout honcho Brian Madigan, who, according to the New York Times, "played a leading role in the emergency lending programs during the financial crisis," cashed out to Barclays this year.

Senate Banking Committee counsel Amy Friend, who helped pass the summer 2008 housing bailout (dubbed the "Bank of America Bill"), now works for a leading financial consulting and lobbying firm. And FHA Commissioner David Stevens, who helped craft a handful of mortgage bailouts, cashed out to the Mortgage Bankers Association. That's just naming a few.

And all of these big banks still profit from an implicit bailout. The credit ratings agency Moody's recently downgraded Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup because the agency saw the likelihood of a bailout decrease from certain to "very high." These banks' credit is rated higher than they would be in a free market, meaning they profit from the expectation of a bailout, if necessary.

So banks profit largely through activities that do not create value or efficiencies. They profit through financial games that rest on government favors. Many Occupy Wall Street protestors demonize all profit. Conservatives defend profit-seeking as the engine that creates prosperity for all of society.

But the big banks have rigged the game so that they profit without creating value. In fact, they profit from activities that weaken the economy by creating instability. Today, big banks give capitalism a bad name. Believers in the free market should stop giving banks cover.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Jindal reelected by nearly 2-1 in Louisiana>: "In an election scarcely noticed by national political reporters, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was reelected yesterday with 66% of the vote-far more than the absolute majority needed for victory in this multicandidate election. In second place with 18% of the vote was Democrat Tara Hollis; three other Democrats got 10% of the vote. Jindal carried every one of Louisiana's 64 parishes (the equivalent of counties in other states) and got less than 50% in only five of them, including Orleans who is coextensive with the city of New Orleans, and four small rural parishes with large black percentages. Jindal was elected in 2007 with 54% of the vote; he improved his percentage in all but one parish (East Baton Rouge, which includes the state capital of Baton Rouge) and made especially big gains in the Cajun country along the Gulf coast.

Wholesale deception: "Beer wholesalers contend that alcohol legislation they are pushing on Capitol Hill would safeguard state and local rights -- but in reality, it is designed to simply serve the wholesalers' special interests. Wholesalers crafted the text of the Community Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness Act (H.R. 1161, aka, the CARE Act) to appear very similar to language in a 2005 Supreme Court case, Graholm v. Heald, which addressed direct shipping of wine from wineries to consumers and retailers"

No doubt about what Occupy Wall Street believes: "Since I wrote my op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, arguing that the Occupy Wall Street protestors believe in redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, and largely reject the basic tenets of the capitalist system, many have come to question the research that my firm did. ... But right now, a validation of the survey has come from Occupy Wall Street itself. Their Demands Group has put forward their agenda, subsequent to the publication of my poll. And their demands closely mirror what my survey showed they want."

Let sleeping failures lie: The reconstruction finance corporation: "As the signs of the faltering economy become ever more manifest, some prominent businessmen and others are seeking solutions in the recent past. Believing that the present crisis is comparable to that of the Great Depression, they are showing interest in discarded economic strategies. The bygone getting the most attention is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). Created in January 1932, the RFC extended loans and guarantees to industries, banks, railroads, mortgage companies, farmers, and state and local governments in the name of economic recovery."

Yes, let's have real localism: "Let's have a national income tax rate of 3.76%. OK, if you really insist we'll have a top national income tax rate of 15% as well. That's plenty to pay for the things that the national government really does have to do, defence, the higher courts systems and so on. Everything else we'll raise the money for and pay for at the lowest political level possible."

Infrastructure projects to fix the economy? Don't bank on it: "Increased infrastructure spending has bipartisan support in Washington these days. President Obama wants a new federal infrastructure bank, and members of both parties want to pass big highway and air-traffic-control funding bills. The politicians think these bills will create desperately needed jobs, but the cost of that perceived benefit is too high: Federal infrastructure spending has a long and painful history of pork-barrel politics and bureaucratic bungling, with money often going to wasteful and environmentally damaging projects."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Progressive America

Derek Hunter

Unemployment stands at 9.1 percent, with real unemployment closer to 20. Nearly 50 million Americans are on food stamps. We’ve added $4 trillion in new debt in less than three years. And there’s no sign any of this will change soon.

The seriousness of the times require serious leaders...and all we have is Barack Obama, Congressional Democrats and a sea of unwashed “gimmie-crats” sleeping in parks demanding more. Welcome to Progressive America.

As more “Green” scandals involving “friendly” treatment of friends and fundraisers for the president emerge, no one with a “D” after his or her name seems to give a damn. Why would they? It’s not their money. Spending other people’s money is fun. Spending two as-yet-unborn generations’ money is even more fun because you won’t be around when they realize what you’ve done to them. It’s the progressive way.

Not all our problems are Obama’s fault, of course. But his progressive “solutions” to the problems he inherited amount to blowing a hole in the side of a sinking ship in hopes of letting the water out. It might seem like a good idea on paper but only if you don’t actually consider the problem in the solution.

In Progressive America, hatred and anger rule. Does someone have more than you do? Protest that outrage. Remember, after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., by the anti-Bush lunatic, when President Obama gave that speech calling for a “new tone” in politics? It was a hopeful moment for a nation reeling from tragedy and sick of name calling. It lasted five minutes.

The failure of progressives to control their tongues, to resist spewing such “tolerance” as “The Tea Party are terrorists,” “Republicans are hostage takers” and of talking-head goons from calling conservative women “whores,” is surprising only if you haven’t been paying attention. You can’t stop hateful rhetoric when it’s who you are.

You don’t even have to be conservative to be on the receiving end of an attack from the progressive mob. Wall Street gave more money to Barack Obama than any other candidate in history, yet the aromatically challenged mob isn’t camped outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.; it’s drum circling on Wall Street.

If the protesters truly are angry about bailouts, shouldn’t they protest those who gave them rather than those who took them? If they equate money in politics with bribery, shouldn’t they take issue with those accept the bribes as well as those who give them? After all, it’s only an attempted bribe until it’s accepted.

Progressives tell you the system is corrupt, yet never mention Solyndra, Fisker, et. al. The system isn’t corrupt. A system can’t be anything other than a system. It’s the people who are corrupt. This doesn’t fit the progressive agenda, so you’re not likely to hear much about it. But this is, in fact, the heart of the problem.

The progressive agenda is about control – over everyone and everything. The movement was born of arrogance from people who thought they knew better, thought they were better. They were racists who once looked to eugenics to rid the world of “undesirables.” They were superior in thought and deed – and thus uniquely qualified to determine who was worthy of what in society. That mentality, that profound arrogance, continues to form the basis of modern progressivism.

The United States was founded by and for people who believed in the individual. But to be a progressive is to have zero faith in your fellow human beings, to look down on them. This was exemplified by Vice President Joe Biden this week when he doubled down on his “if Republicans don’t pass the president’s ‘jobs’ bill, rapes and murders will increase exponentially” vitriol.

He, the White House, which publicly stood behind his comments, and progressive talking heads all seem to believe Americans refrain from raping and murdering each other solely because there are police around. They believe we’re all animals, and only a powerful government can protect us from ourselves and each other.

Given that Republicans swept the 2010 elections and President Obama’s approval ratings are fast approaching his waist size, you’d expect reality to set in soon and for him to move to the political center. You’d be wrong. He is so insulated from reality and entrenched in the progressive philosophy that when he told ABC’s Jake Tapper “I believe all the choices we've made have been the right ones...” on the economy, he truly believed it.

As the election approaches, and if his poll numbers continue to fade, expect President Obama to redouble his efforts to implement as much of the progressive agenda through executive orders as possible. Expect Democrats in Congress to cheerlead the usurpation of their power and their media allies to cheer his actions when they can and ignore them when they must.

Some say progressives disrespect the Constitution, but you can’t disrespect what you never respected in the first place. The concept of limited executive power is foreign to them...when they’re in power. Should a Republican win next November and try to do half the things President Obama has done through executive order, the outrage from progressives will be, well …fun to watch.

SOURCE

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Has Our "System" Failed, Or Has Our President

“The system has failed.” Have you heard this comment lately? Does it express how you feel about America? This one sentence, vague as it is, nonetheless captures a common sentiment about the current condition of the United States.

With the “occupy” protesters disrupting civic life around the country and President Obama publicly bonding with them, we’re seeing that magical phrase – “the system has failed” – being used in increasingly ambiguous ways. So it makes sense that the rest of us should ask a couple of important questions: What “system” are they talking about? And in what sense has that system “failed?”

At times it would appear that the occupiers are decrying our American system of constitutional, elective and representative government. “Our voices aren’t being heard,” many of them will say, implying that they are being trampled-upon by an abusive dictatorial regime.

But if you probe deeper and ask “what do you mean by that?,” it often becomes apparent that what the occupiers are really saying is “my policy ideas were rejected,” “the election didn’t turn out the way it should have,” or “I disagree with the outcome of the legislative vote (the congressional rejection of the Obama tax hikes is a perfect example of this).”

Thus, the claim that “the system has failed” implies a very self-centered, narcissistic view of the world – “the system is not producing the policies that I want, so therefore the entire system is wrong.”

Another component to the “not being heard” claim is the fact that many of the occupiers seem disinterested in participating in the processes of making public policy. Pollster Doug Schoen recently noted in the Wall Street Journal that while an overwhelming majority of the occupiers voted for President Obama in 2008, less than half will vote to re-elect him and at least 25% won’t vote at all in 2012.

Similarly, in a recent interview I did with occupier “Christine,” the intelligent and articulate 25 year old gushed on my daily talk show about how the movement signals a “new awakening” where people are “letting their voices be heard.” Yet when I asked, she couldn’t name any elected official who represents her in the U.S. Congress, her state legislature, her city council or school board, and she openly admitted that she did not vote in the 2008 presidential election.

At other times, the occupiers seem to be saying that our free-market economic system has failed. Some of this rhetoric implies a very simple, socialistic, “it’s unfair if one person achieves more than the other” type of mindset. Other occupiers present more complex concerns, as does the unnamed Los Angeles occupier who appears in the now-famous “WTF is going on?” Youtube video.

“I’ve been an electrician for ten years,” the man in the video shouts into a bullhorn. “My wife is a nurse….we both have good jobs…and we can’t afford a house…That aint right!...What is going on?” he cries.

These types of frustrations are real and common. But the angry outbursts suggest a lack of interest in understanding important economic concepts like the relative worth of “things” – the value of labor, and durable goods, for example – and the variable value of the currency.

Perhaps most noteworthy about our alleged “system failure,” is President Obama implying that he wants to replace it. Most of the reaction to the President’s recent interview with ABC News focused on the fact that he said, in no uncertain terms, that he is “on their side” – on the side of the occupier protesters, that is, and apparently not on the side of the rest of us Americans.

However the more intriguing comments from the President were mostly un-noticed. “We want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Mr. Obama stated, “and that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers, that those folks aren’t rewarded.”

The President and the protesters may be shocked to learn this, but our free-market, capitalist economic system is already designed to accomplish this, and it does so pretty well – when it is truly “free” and competitive. When government refrains from punishing success with threats of ever-increasing taxation and regulation, people get rewarded for their hard work and responsibility and they’re incentivized to continue achieving. And when government allows businesses to compete with each other, excellence rises to the top and inferiority is allowed to fail.

President Obama has pursued policies that move us in the exact opposite direction. High-achievers are maligned in the President’s rhetoric and policy proposals. Mis-managed companies – failed banks and car companies in particular – are given “government bailouts.” And businesses that meet Barack Obama’s individual, political needs – G.E., General Motors, Solyndra, and Fisker Automotive of Finland, to name a few - are granted special privileges and waivers so as to become pre-determined successes.

The American “system” has not failed – not our economic system, nor our political system. But many of our currently elected government officials need to be replaced, along with many of their policies.

SOURCE

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Government makes poverty much worse than it needs to be

If you live in a middle-class household, you generally expect your needs to be met through the marketplace. You buy or rent housing in the real estate market. When you aren't driving your own car, you catch a taxicab or maybe even hire a limo. You or your employer buy health insurance, and you choose your doctor in the medical marketplace.

For most poor families, the experience is very different. Regulations designed to protect entrenched special interests have succeeded in raising the costs of basic services so much that low-income families have been priced out of the market for many essential services. Middle-class and poor communities differ not just by income. For the middle class, basic needs are met by markets and they benefit from the customer-pleasing innovations that competition produces. All too often, the poor must turn to public programs with all of the customer-pleasing attributes of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Take housing, for example. The cheapest form of housing is small, prefabricated homes for zero-lot developments. However, zoning regulations in most cities outlaw them — an act that effectively doubles the price of the cheapest housing. There are also other expensive restrictions on new housing, such as forcing builders to build on bigger lots and mandating specific types of materials and construction methods. Regulations vary widely across the United States. In Houston, a less restrictive city, regulatory costs add about $13,200 to the price of an average home. In San Diego, a multitude of regulations add $240,000. These cost-increasing regulations have essentially priced many low-income residents out of the market for a private home, forcing them to turn to public housing instead.

Then there is transportation. Did you know that people in the bottom fifth of income distribution take more taxicab rides than middle-income families? The reason: a lot of poor people don’t own automobiles. Taxi fares are far higher than they need to be, however, because local governments tightly control entry into the taxi market. There is no reason in principle why someone with a van couldn’t pick up workers in a low-income neighborhood and transport them to a jobsite, charging each passenger a few bucks. The problem: Most cities make this activity against the law.

When low-income families are priced out of the market for private transportation, they must turn to public transportation. Since only a few cities have subways, that means turning to buses. Yet, even a simple trip to work or a supermarket can be a logistical nightmare if you have to follow city bus schedules.

And consider health care. Sad to say, but the paramedics who treat our soldiers on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are not allowed to provide the same services back home for people who can’t afford, and perhaps don’t need, the attention of a physician. Although the restrictions differ from state to state, laws everywhere “protect” patients from care delivered by anyone other than a physician. This is despite studies showing that non-physician clinicians can competently provide from 60 percent to 90 percent of all primary care.

In some parts of the country, walk-in clinics in shopping malls allow nurses to give flu shots, take temperatures, prescribe antibiotics and deliver other timely, inexpensive care. But even these innovative services are often saddled with burdensome regulations. For example, in Massachusetts, regulations for clinics have such cost-increasing requirements as a separate entrance for patients, minimum size requirements for exam rooms, and a separate reception desk. When low-income families find they cannot afford private care, what’s the alternative? Community health centers and the emergency rooms of safety net hospitals. Yet these care sites often involve crowding and waiting, which limits access to care.

Child care is another basic service needed by many low-income families. In fact, low-income families spend about a third of their income on child care, as much as a typical middle-income family might spend on a home. In recent years, state and local governments have been making child care ever more costly, however. All manner of regulations are emerging, including the licensing of day care workers. Did you know that in most places, it’s illegal for a neighbor down the street to oversee children from the neighborhood for pay? Again, what’s the alternative? Low-income mothers must seriously consider abandoning the labor market altogether and rely solely on the welfare state.

Even a basic activity like keeping the neighborhood safe runs into regulatory barriers. In response to inadequate public police protection, an increasingly popular alternative is private police. In the United States, private security guards actually outnumber public police officers by a ratio of three to one; and they can perform most, if not all, of the necessary law enforcement tasks. Yet, government regulation has created substantial barriers for would-be security firms, including criminal background checks, examinations, training requirements, and insurance and bonding minimums.

A task force report produced by the National Center for Policy analysis calls for an end to these senseless policies, and advocates allowing our lowest-income citizens access to the benefits of the free market.

SOURCE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Occupy what?

Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich, a conservative German economist, sees some just cause for the OWS movement

The Occupy Wall Street movement has polarised public opinion: Either you regard the protestors as the new political avant-garde or as just plain silly. Either you believe they have a serious message or you think they are a bunch of nutters.

But what if the truth is a bit more nuanced than that? Perhaps the nutters have a point?

The silly stuff first: The protesters seem rather confused about what they are protesting against. They camp at Wall Street, which is fair enough if you want to object to financial capitalism. But they also protested in front of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the European Central Bank – not the usual suspects for financial excess.

It is also difficult to overlook some nasty anti-Semitic undertones in the rallies. One placard in Martin Place read ‘Occupy Sydney, not Palestine.’ From there it’s just one small step to claim that the financial crisis is the result of a Jewish conspiracy. In any case, what’s the link between Israel, Greece and Lehman Brothers?

Behind all this silliness, and frankly the utter nonsense, is a serious message: Corporatist capitalism has become a threat to prosperity, democracy and the free market itself.

The protesters no doubt exaggerate when they claim to represent 99% of the people worldwide. However, there really is public unease about the way the financial system works.

This week, I heard a representative of an anti-globalisation network complain that banks speculating in euro periphery debt should not be bailed out by the taxpayer when their investments go pear-shaped. It must have been the first time I was in complete agreement with the radical left.

There is something very wrong in a world in which heavily indebted governments have to take on yet more debt to save banks from the fallout of other governments collapsing under their debt burdens.

This is not a free market anymore. In a free market, banks have a right to speculate – and a right to go bankrupt.

What we are seeing instead is casino capitalism with a taxpayer provided safety net.

Acceptance of liberal economic policies suffers if good liberal principles can be suspended by powerful vested interests. The Occupy movement, silly as it looks, is a timely reminder of that.

SOURCE

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The world according to Jack Wheeler

I think he's mostly right

Russia. Putin is an ersatz macho-man, all hat and no karovi. Russia's navy is made of rust. Russia's ill-trained army of drunkards couldn't conquer Romania. Russian male life expectancy is lower than that of Bangladesh. Russia is a mafiacracy with a doomed economy dependent on oil & gas exports that fracking in Europe & the US will make uncompetitive. Do svidanya.

China. No wives, no water, no banks - and a hyper-dangerous military. Much of China is uninhabited - deserts, mountains, and wastelands. Habitable China is about the size of the US east of the Mississippi, with over a billion people squeezed into it. Northern China is turning into a waterless dust bowl. Scores of millions of Chinese men will never get married due to the Chicom's idiotic one-child policy and resultant mass female infanticide.

100 million bachelors are explosively dangerous. Chinese state banks are insolvent after going on a post-2008 loan binge with debt and credit in China now (according to the IMF) above 200% of GDP. A sharp economic contraction (increasingly likely) plus all those angry unmarried men equals war, the history-honored scapegoat diversion of tyrants.

The obvious Chicom choice for war would be Taiwan. But the Formosa Strait is 100 miles wide and China has no amphibious capacity. Taiwan is on the northern rim of the South China Sea, rapidly becoming one of the most jeopardous flash points in the world. Bordered by Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and China, over 50% by value of the world's shipping traverses it - and China claims all of it, the entire South China Sea, as its own territorial waters.

This cannot stand. China must be publicly informed by the next president that the South China Sea is international waters, period, there will be no discussion or negotiation. What is to be negotiated is the cooperative exploitation of what resources, such as oil, it may contain. No amount of Chicom bullying and saber-rattling will do any good. Every other country on the sea will join the US in this - and so will India and Japan.

Further, the Chicoms need to grasp that any aggression of theirs in the South China Sea will be naval only, and thus does nothing to occupy all their angry young bachelors. They need to go some place, a place with lots of water and lots of room for them, a place where the women prefer them to the local men who are drunks and beat up their wives, ideally a place once belonging to China but stolen by a foreign aggressor - so to get it back would give them a mission. Maybe even a wife.

There is such a place. It's called Siberia - specifically what China called its Maritime Provinces and Russia, after it seized them in 1860, calls the Russian Far East.

It's only a matter of time, at most a decade or two, before Beijing converts most all of eastern Siberia into Chinese Siberia. There is simply no way a dying Russia can hold on to it. Might as well divert the Chicoms toward it and away from Taiwan and the South China Sea.

North Korea. The Norks have no nukes. The half-kiloton yield in their tests means they failed to make weapons-grade plutonium. So they are no threat to us. They are a threat to South Korea with 11,000 artillery tubes aimed at the 17 million people of Greater Seoul. There is no need for American soldiers to be hostages to this. South Korea is a rich country with a powerful military capable of taking care of itself. We do not need to be there any longer.

India. The world's largest democracy is prickly, but the only country in Asia capable of standing up to China. The Chicoms are building naval bases in India's Indian Ocean neighbors such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma, which they call their "String of Pearls" around India's neck. India is countering with a growing alliance with China's ancient neighbor enemy, Vietnam.

The next president should build on President Bush's initiative for military and economic ties between the US and India. That could include a joint India-US naval base in Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam on the South China Sea. The Vietnamese would welcome us. Among nations, there are no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

The Great Game of the 19th century was between the Russian and British Empires colliding in Asia. The 21st century players of this game are China and India. It's in our interests to be on India's side.

Pakistan/Afghanistan. Both are make-believe countries with no legitimate rationale for sovereignty. The key problem in both is Pakistan's "government within a government" spy agency, the ISI - Inter-Services Intelligence. It is radical hate-America jihadi Islamist. It created and is in the heroin business with the Taliban. The first necessary condition towards any solution in this region is its dismantlement.

The other key problem is our State Department's anaphylactic allergy to regime and border changes. The best solution for Afghanistan would be for it to cease to exist as presently constituted. Actually, the same for Pakistan.

The Baluchis of southern Afghanistan and southwest Pakistan want their own Baluchistan (they have a marvelous harbor and the biggest gold deposits in the world according to BHP Biliton). They'd be joined by the Baluchis of southeast Iran and most likely by the Sindhis of adjoining Sind in southern Pakistan with the big city of Karachi.

The Tajiks of northern Afghanistan do not want their lives run by Pushtuns. They'd much rather secede and join Tajikistan - which wants our help to stabilize and protect it from Russia. The Pushtuns straddle the Af-Pak border. They dream of being united in a separate Pushtunistan. Pakistan's ruling group, the Punjabis, would retain the Punjab.

But basically, as with the Koreas, this no longer should be our problem to solve. Af-Pak should be India's problem to solve - Pak nukes, after all, are aimed at India, not us. There is no real nation to build in Afghanistan, and our troops have no purpose dying for it. Terrorist threats are the business of the CIA and spec-ops teams, not the Marines or Army.

Again, we need to ally with India and assist them in what is their problem, not ours, to solve.

Iran. This week we learned that Iran's government planned an act of war against us in our own capital. It is hard to overestimate the number of problems in the world that would be solved with this government gone. And that's the solution: regime change. Apply a straightforward Reagan Doctrine strategy to overthrow Iran's mullah regime by sponsoring - with money and weapons - insurrections throughout the country.

Of Iran's 78 million, over 20 million are ethnic Azeri - almost three times the number of Azeris in Azerbaijan next door, whom they would love to join in a Greater Azerbaijan. There are at least eight million Kurds, who would fight tooth and nail against their Tehran oppressors if we gave them support. There are three million Ahwazi Arabs who populate Iran's oil patch, Kuhzestan, across the border from southern Iraq.

And of course there are the Persians themselves, some 33 million, whose mass street protests have been so brutally suppressed (and which the current president did not lift a finger or say a word to support).

A president determined to effect regime change in Iran would succeed quickly. The world's main state sponsor of Islamic terrorism would be no more. Iraq would be free to flourish, Syria would be quickly liberated, the threat to the Saudi and Gulf oil fields would be removed, and of course, Iran's nuclear program would be destroyed in the process (Israeli spec-ops would see to that).

It's a long list of positives and few if any negatives. All it needs is a president with the courage of Ronald Reagan.

Israel. The pre-1967 demarcations our current president demands Israel return to were not borders - they were cease-fire lines where Israel was able to stop the Arab invasions after declaring its independence in 1948. The Six-Day War recaptured Israel's legitimate territory, and that territory, including Golan and Judea-Samaria (the so-called "West Bank") should remain so.

The Palestinians need to be told to STFU, that they no longer will be coddled and treated like spoiled children. They will recognize the state of Israel as legitimate and Jewish, or they can move to the Sinai, where Egypt will give them a Palestinian State since the Egyptians love Palestinians so much (the dirty secret is that the rest of the Arab world despises Palestinians and calls them rafida, Arabic for the N-word). Arabs and Euroweenies who object can shove their Nazi Anti-Semitism up their noses.

That's the way a pro-American pro-Israel president would deal with Israel and the Arabs. Then there's Turkey.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (air-doh-wan) is an Islamist megalomaniac fantasizing about recreating the Ottoman Caliphate. He is constantly threatening Israel, pretending his high school navy is a match for Israel's NFL navy. Yet he has gutted the Turkish officer corps and filled it with incompetent stooges.

Erdogan needs a US president to explain to him that any duke-out between Turkey and Israel will result in his total humiliation, causing his overthrow and Turkey's expulsion from NATO.

Europe. It's Old Europe, now known as the Eurozone, serving as an object lesson of the scam of the welfare state versus New Europe, the liberated former colonies of the Soviet Union who learned the hard way the evils of socialism and the virtues of capitalism.

A new president would focus attention on the Baltics, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, and Slovenia. And he would politely educate the lands of Old Europe on welfare state socialism as a religion of envy. Ireland is already figuring this out and is recovering thereby.

Mexico. As Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty significantly helped bring freedom to Soviet Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the next president could institute a Radio Free Mexico (including satellite television and web sites) teaching free market and small business economics to Mexicans.

Mexico is the land of crony corrupt corporate fascist capitalism. As a result, most Mexicans live in medieval poverty while the richest man in the world is a Mexican - Carlos Slim - whose wealth was gained with state-protected monopolies. A true free market economy would enable Mexicans to become prosperous in their own country.

More HERE

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Ron Paul shows that spending cuts ARE possible

Paul's plan not only extends the tax cuts enacted under the Bush administration; it reduces the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent while abolishing taxes on inheritances, capital gains, and personal savings. It nevertheless manages to eliminate the budget deficit within three years, largely by reducing military spending, capping most programs at 2006 spending levels, converting Medicaid and other welfare programs into block grants, and eliminating five cabinet-level departments: Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior.

As USA Today noted, Paul is "a longtime critic of federal spending not authorized by the Constitution"—a description that applies to sadly few members of Congress, all of whom take an oath to respect the limits imposed on the federal government by the document that created it. Yet Paul's plan would not return the country to the 1990s, let alone the 19th century. It calls for total outlays of $2.9 trillion in 2015, which is about as much as the federal government spent as recently as 2003, adjusted for inflation.

You may not agree with Paul's priorities, but at least he has laid them out for everyone to see. Meanwhile, the vast majority of his fellow legislators continue to pretend there is no need to prioritize at all.

Consider military spending. Counting savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Paul calls for $832 billion in cuts over four years, which would leave the Pentagon's base budget in 2016 about 2 percent lower than it is now.

Indiscriminate cuts may be undesirable, but so is indiscriminate spending, which is what we have now, with the United States accounting for more than two-fifths of the world's military outlays. Budget choices should drive strategic choices, since we can no longer afford to squander defense dollars on projects that have little or nothing to do with defense, whether it's launching optional wars across the globe or protecting rich allies that are perfectly capable of protecting themselves.

Paul's proposed abolition of various departments, agencies, and programs likewise should stimulate debate about the federal government's priorities. Aside from carrying out the decennial "enumeration" mandated by Article I, Section 2, does the Commerce Department do anything that is constitutionally authorized, let alone essential? What about HUD? Why should education be a federal responsibility at all, let alone one that requires an entire department? Is transportation security properly handled by the federal government or, as Paul argues, by the property owners whose interests are at stake?

These are the sort of questions presidential candidates would try to answer if they were truly determined to get our fiscal house in order.

SOURCE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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A long, steep drop for Americans' standard of living

Not since at least 1960 has the US standard of living fallen so fast for so long. The average American has $1,315 less in annual disposable income now than at the onset of the Great Recession.

Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.

Bottom line: The average individual now has $1,315 less in disposable income than he or she did three years ago at the onset of the Great Recession – even though the recession ended, technically speaking, in mid-2009. That means less money to spend at the spa or the movies, less for vacations, new carpeting for the house, or dinner at a restaurant.

In short, it means a less vibrant economy, with more Americans spending primarily on necessities. The diminished standard of living, moreover, is squeezing the middle class, whose restlessness and discontent are evident in grass-roots movements such as the tea party and "Occupy Wall Street" and who may take out their frustrations on incumbent politicians in next year's election.

What has led to the most dramatic drop in the US standard of living since at least 1960? One factor is stagnant incomes: Real median income is down 9.8 percent since the start of the recession through this June, according to Sentier Research in Annapolis, Md., citing census bureau data. Another is falling net worth – think about the value of your home and, if you have one, your retirement portfolio. A third is rising consumer prices, with inflation eroding people's buying power by 3.25 percent since mid-2008.

"In a dynamic economy, one would expect Americans' disposable income to be growing, but it has flattened out at a low level," says economist Bob Brusca of Fact & Opinion Economics in New York.

To be sure, the recession has hit unevenly, with lower-skilled and less-educated Americans feeling the pinch the most, says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com based in West Chester, Pa. Many found their jobs gone for good as companies moved production offshore or bought equipment that replaced manpower.

"The pace of change has been incredibly rapid and incredibly tough on the less educated," says Mr. Zandi, who calls this period the most difficult for American households since the 1930s. "If you don't have the education and you don't have the right skills, then you are getting creamed."

Per capita disposal personal income – a key indicator of the standard of living – peaked in the spring of 2008, at $33,794 (measured as after-tax income). As of the second quarter of 2011, it was $32,479 – almost a 4 percent drop. If per capita disposable income had continued to grow at its normal pace, it would have been more than $34,000 a year by now.

The so-called misery index, another measure of economic well-being of American households, echoes the finding on the slipping standard of living. The index, a combination of the unemployment rate and inflation, is now at its highest point since 1983, when the US economy was recovering from a short recession and from the energy price spikes after the Iranian revolution.

SOURCE

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Obamacare Will Price Less Skilled Workers Out of Full-Time Jobs

President Obama’s health care law requires employers to offer health benefits to full-time employees. This employer mandate will price many unskilled workers out of full-time employment.

After paying the new health premiums, the minimum wage, payroll taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes, hiring a full-time worker will cost employers at least $10.03 per hour. Full-time workers with family health plans will cost $13.75 per hour. Employers who hire workers with productivity below these rates will lose money. Businesses employing less skilled workers will probably respond by dumping their employees onto the federally subsidized health care exchanges and replacing full-time positions with part-time jobs.

Employers cannot reduce cash pay below the minimum wage. However, employers will not pay workers more than their productivity. No businesses will pay $14 per hour to employ a worker whose labor raises earnings by just $9 per hour. Businesses that pay workers more than their productivity quickly go out of business.

Employers hiring unskilled workers will respond to these higher costs in two ways. Many employers will forgo providing health benefits and dump workers onto the government health care exchanges. Doing so will incur a $2,000 penalty per full-time worker—far less than the cost of health premiums but still a $1 per hour increase in full-time employment costs.

The employer mandate will also encourage employers to replace full-time jobs with part-time positions. Obamacare does not penalize employers for not providing health benefits to part-time employees, so part-time positions will cost much less to fill than full-time positions.

Federal law gives employers a further incentive to hire unskilled workers only part-time. The law requires employers to offer the same health benefits to all full-time employees. If employers dump their less productive full-time employees into the government exchanges, they must dump the rest of their employees as well. However, hiring less skilled workers for part-time jobs does not restrict employers’ ability to offer health benefits to other workers. Many unskilled and inexperienced workers—those who produce less than $10.03 per hour—will find that employers will only offer them part-time jobs.

Obamacare hurts less skilled workers. It raises the minimum productivity required for them to hold a full-time job, particularly workers with families. Workers who cannot produce at least $20,000 per year (single plan) or $27,500 per year (family plan) of value to employers will have serious difficulty finding full-time jobs. Many of these workers will have to either live off reduced income from part-time hours or juggle the schedules of multiple part-time jobs.

Workers with productivity near this minimum will also face challenges. The law forces them to consume a substantial portion of their income as health benefits whether they want to or not. Take a full-time worker in Delaware with a family health plan earning the federal minimum wage. The employee and employer share of health care premiums for that plan will cost an average of $6.41 per hour. After paying the employee share of premiums, that worker will earn $6.56 per hour in cash wages. The law requires unskilled employees who do not get dumped into the exchanges to receive almost half of their compensation as health benefits. Workers who would like higher wages and less expensive health coverage do not get a choice.

More HERE

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Murders, Rapes, Falling Bridges and Phantom Jobs

David Limbaugh

What are we to think about a president and vice president who blow nearly a trillion dollars in borrowed money, accept no responsibility for it and then traverse the nation trying to convince Americans that if we don't spend half that much again, people will die from dilapidated bridges and women will be raped because we can't afford cops?

What business do these two have lecturing anyone about anything, much less the conditions that might ensue if we were not to spend more printed money to pay for things they failed to finance the first time because they misappropriated the funds?

Last month, Obama, stumping for his misnamed "American Jobs Act," told his AstroTurf audience in Raleigh-Durham that "in North Carolina alone, there are 153 structurally deficient bridges that need to be repaired. Four of them are near here, on or around the Beltline. Why would we wait to act until another bridge falls?"

After attempting to scare those in the crowd into believing they were one pylon away from being crushed by a fallen bridge, Department of Transportation engineers and administrators had to mollify residents about the safety of the area's bridges.

Wally Bowman, DOT's division chief for Wake County and six neighboring counties, said, "The key thing is: We don't have any bridges that are about to fall. We don't have any bridge out there that is structurally inadequate, where it cannot handle the traffic. We make sure those bridges stay in a good state of repair."

Obama obviously hadn't bothered to do his due diligence; he just made a false assertion to gin up support for legislation that a number of high-profile congressmen in his own party even reject.

Where's the outrage? Where are the media? Why don't they ask Obama why he's proposing to spend $447 billion on projects that aren't even necessary and trying to scare the public into supporting them?

Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste," but Obama has taken the maxim to a new level. The enhanced version is: "When all else fails to convince the electorate, fabricate a phony crisis, and fuel it with fear based on lies. Then re-present your proposal as the only antidote."

Obama has used this tactic with almost every major agenda item -- the stimulus package, Obamacare, the financial regulation bill, cap and trade, the federal takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler, all the debt ceiling skirmishes and his demagogic opposition to entitlement reform. Obama deliberately created a panic atmosphere based on an illusion of urgency so intense that even lawmakers wouldn't have time to read the bill, much less debate it, let alone post the bill online sufficiently in advance of congressional floor debate to allow public comment as he promised in his campaign

. Though the underlying problems he portrayed as crises were rarely urgent, his legislative "solutions" converted serious national financial problems into ones that present an existential threat to the nation.

Obama is not alone. His chief deputy, Vice President Joe Biden, has ratcheted up the administration's jobs bill rhetoric another decibel. In Flint, Mich., Biden intimated that the city will have more rapes and murders unless the jobs bill is passed.

"In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city," Biden said. "In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65, and rapes -- just to pick two categories -- climbed to 229. In 2011, you now only have 125 shields. God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don't rectify it."

Do these people have no shame?

Didn't they assure us that Biden would be our national stimulus cop, someone who would make sure that not a dollar of stimulus money would be wasted? And now they have the audacity to invoke the specter of rape and murder unless more federal money is thrown down ratholes, sent to nonexistent locations with phantom ZIP codes, allocated to ostensibly shovel-ready jobs that do not exist, used as slush money for their political benefactors and union cronies, and spent on research to inquire into the mating habits and sexual preferences of the Borneo walking stick?

It's time these two answered some questions themselves about the colossal waste of federal money they've directed toward the stimulus package, Obamacare, Solyndra, other green projects and scores of other boondoggles.

Until they can give us an honest accounting for their recklessness, they have no standing to be demanding more.

SOURCE

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Is America Disintegrating?

Pat Buchanan

In Federalist 2, John Jay looks out at a nation of a common blood, faith, language, history, customs and culture.

"Providence," he writes, "has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion ... very similar in their manners and customs ..."

Are we still that "one united people" today? Or has America become what Klemens von Metternich called Italy: "a mere geographical expression"?

In "Suicide of a Superpower," out this week, I argue that the America we grew up in is disintegrating, breaking apart along the fault lines of politics, race, ethnicity, culture and faith; that the centrifugal forces in society have now become the dominant forces.

Our politics are as poisonous as they have been in our lifetimes.

Sarah Palin was maligned as morally complicit in the murder attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Terms like "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" are routinely used on Tea Party members who one congressman said want to see blacks "hanging on a tree."

Half a century after the civil rights revolution triumphed, the terms "racist" and "racism" are in daily use. We remain, said Eric Holder in calling us a "nation of cowards," as socially segregated as ever. "Outside the workplace, the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America ... does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago."

He is not altogether wrong in that. In California's prisons and among her proliferating ethnic gangs, a black-brown civil war has broken out.

Yet, by 2042, there will be 66 million black folks and 135 million Hispanics here, the latter concentrated in the states bordering Mexico. What holds us together, then?

We are not now and will not then be "descended from common ancestors." We will consist of all the races, cultures, tribes and creeds of Earth -- a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual stew of a nation that has never before existed, or survived. The parallels that come to mind are the Habsburg Empire that flew apart after World War I, and the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that disintegrated after the Cold War.

No more will we all speak the same language. We will be bilingual and bi-national. Spanish radio and TV stations are already the fastest growing. In Los Angeles, half the people speak a language other than English in their own homes.

As for "professing the same religion," where 85 percent of Americans were Christians in 1990, that is down to 75 percent and plummeting. The old Christian churches -- Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran and especially Episcopalian -- are splitting, shrinking and dying.

Where three in four Catholics attended Sunday Mass in 1960, it is now one in four. One in three cradle Catholics has lost the faith. The numbers of priests and nuns are plummeting; religious orders are dying; Catholics schools are closing.

The moral consensus and moral code Christianity gave to us has collapsed. Since the great cultural-social revolution of the 1960s, there has occurred what Nietzsche called the "transvaluation of all values." What was morally repellent -- promiscuity, homosexuality, abortion -- is now seen by perhaps half the nation as natural, normal, healthy and progressive.

Socially, too, America is breaking down. Where out-of-wedlock births in the 1950s were rare, today, 41 percent of all American children are born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent; among blacks, 71 percent. And the correlation between the illegitimacy rate, the drug rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate is absolute.

This helps to explain the four decades of plunging test scores of American children and the quadrupling of the prison population.

And while all this is happening, the state is failing. We cannot control our borders, win our wars or balance our budgets. In three consecutive national elections -- 2006, 2008 and 2010 -- the incumbents have been repudiated. Confidence in politics, politicians and the future of the country has never been so low in our lifetimes.

There was a time not so long ago when the nation was united on a common faith, morality, history, heroes, holidays, holy days, language and literature. Now we fight over them all.

Neocons says not to worry, the Constitution holds us together. Does it? Do we all agree on what the First Amendment says about the freedom to pray in school and celebrate Christmas and Easter? How can we be the "one nation, under God" of the Pledge of Allegiance, or the people "endowed by their Creator" with inalienable rights, if we cannot even identify or discuss or mention that God and that Creator in the schools of America?

Do we agree on what the Ninth Amendment says about right to life? What about what the 14th Amendment says about affirmative action? What the Second Amendment says about the right to carry a concealed gun?

The new secession that is coming, Rick Perry notwithstanding, is not like the secession of 1861. It is a secession of the heart from one another.

SOURCE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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