"Openness", Obama-style

Don't ever expect Leftist talk to be matched by their actions

Officials at the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Stability contracted with a small consulting firm that has given nearly $25,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005 (and no money to Republicans) to hire “Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Analysts to support the Disclosure Services, Privacy and Treasury Records.” The firm is currently advertising a job opening for a FOIA analyst with experience in the “Use of FOIA/PA exemptions to withhold information from release to the public” (emphasis mine, and if that link goes down, The Examiner has kept a copy for its records).

UPDATE: Phacil has changed their job description on their website (without making a note), however here is a link to another job description for the same job that still uses the above as a qualification. They also have not yet returned calls to The Examiner. The side by side comparison of the old and modified versions are at the bottom of this post.

This means that the entire OFS, which is tasked with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is trying to hire people who will withhold information from release to the public.

In fact, according to the website of the staffing company, Phacil (pronounced Fa-SEAL), co-founders Rafael Collado and Sascha Mornell were “thanked by President Obama,” and “commended at the White House during National Small Business Week for being selected the SBA New Jersey State Small Business Persons of the Year.” The contract is listed under service contracts of the Office of Financial Stability in a recent report from the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Collado and Mornell are among the top donors at the firm. Mornell has given $12,600 over the years, while Collado has given $6,700. Another donor, Robert Cottingham, listed Phacil as his employer, stating his position as vice president of government affairs.

That Treasury outsourced its mechanism for transparency to a firm with such partisan ties casts new light on a report from Bloomberg News in which Treasury officials have repeatedly obstructed reporters’ requests for information.

More HERE

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Liberal "ideas" boil down to coercion and more coercion

Here’s a letter to the New York Times Book Review from economist Don Boudreaux

A theme that runs with approval throughout Jonathan Alter’s review of recent books on modern “liberalism” is that “liberals,” in contrast to their mindless Cro-Magnon opposites, overflow with ideas (“The State of Liberalism,” Oct. 24).

Indeed they do. But these ideas are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else’s contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments.

Put differently, modern “liberalism’s” ideas are about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas – each one individually chosen, practiced, assessed, and modified in light of what F.A. Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place” – with a relatively paltry set of ‘Big Ideas’ that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced not by the natural give, take, and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people but, rather, by guns wielded by those whose overriding ‘idea’ is among the most simple-minded and antediluvian notions in history, namely, that those with the power of the sword are anointed to lord it over the rest of us.

SOURCE

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Resistentialism

Herbert London

You have undoubtedly heard of existentialism, a philosophical position based on personal choice without the benefit of normative judgment. Well I reject it since driving through a red light is hazardous to your health.

However, I am a resistentialist, an eponymous condition in which adherents categorically reject the fatuities of modern life. Let me cite several examples.

Automobile manufacturers produce a car with 300 horse power that can easily achieve speeds of 120 miles per hour so that the car can remain stalled on the Long Island Expressway during rush hour.

Art is often described as post-modern, a school that has flash but no pan. However, if modern is new, how can you be post new? In fact, at what point does new go post?

Texting is the communications channel of the young. But from what I can discern it is an addiction to banality since the text hasn’t any substance and the language is puerile shorthand, e.g. RUOK?

The IPod is one of those devices that permits cultural toxins such as rap music to enter the brain without filter. It inflicts a form of Parkinson’s disease on its adherents who find it very difficult to stand still.

These examples are the symptoms of modernity that resistentialism oppose. Fortunately personal liberty suggests you don’t have to drive a car with a turbo engine or admire Michael Graves’ architecture or use a handheld device to communicate or put any electronic wiring in your ears. But it is hard to avoid the conditions of modernity since they are osmotic, in the cultural air surrounding us.

There aren’t many triumphal moments for the resistentialist, but the few he does experience are memorable. I recall with satisfaction my resistance to the plasma screen TV. After all, I noted, is it really so different from the conventional color TV? “Well,” said the salesman “yes it is different and it will change the nature of viewing.” I wasn’t about to change my viewing patterns and would certainly not do so for $2500. So I resisted. A year later this same television set sold for $2000 and despite entreaties from my family, I remained firmly opposed. By the third year the price was $1200 and I conceded, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing my resistance saved $1300.

More HERE

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The Meltdown: A brief history lesson

1977: Jimmy Carter (D) signs the Community Reinvestment Act, guaranteeing homes loans to low-income families.

1999: Bill Clinton (D) puts the CRA on steroids by pushing Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac (F&F) to increase the number of sub-prime loans (owning a home is now a 'right'.)

1999 (September): New York Times publishes an article, 'Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending', which warned of the coming crisis due to lax lending policies of the Clinton (D) administration.

2003: White House calls Fannie and Freddie a "systemic risk". The Bush (R) administration pushes Congress to enact new regulations.

2003: Barney Frank (D-CN) says F&F are "not in a crisis" and bashes Republicans for crying wolf and calls F&F "Financially Sound" Democrats block Republican sponsored regulation legislation.

2005: Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan voices warning over F&F accounting "We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk"

2005: Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY) says "I think F & F over the years have done an incredibly good job and are an intrinsic part of making America the best-housed people in the world."

2006: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) again calls for reform of the regulatory structure that governs F&F.

2006: Democrats again block reform legislation.

2008: Housing market collapses: Democrats blame the Republicans.

Obviously the Republicans aren't free of guilt concerning the cause of this crisis because they didn't try hard enough to prevent it and in some cases allowed it to happen. But as can plainly be seen the Democrats hold the lion's share of blame for the economic meltdown we're currently enjoying.

I received the above by email but it seems pretty right -- JR

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Some news summaries from Richard Viguerie



Why NPR must go: Pat Buchanan writes that the issue of terminating federal funding for PBS, NPR and the CPB will be an early test to determine whether the GOP is serious about having learned its lesson from the days of Big Government “conservatism,” arguing that these taxpayer supported entities are ripe for elimination. Buchanan says the firing of Juan Williams helped highlight the need to cut funding, but the main reason for eliminating the money is the simple fact that the government shouldn’t be in the news and entertainment business in the first place.

The voter fraud perpetrators are at it again! Michelle Malkin highlights a pervasive problem throughout the United States, namely rampant voter fraud perpetrated by various leftwing groups that are determined to fix the elections using any means possible – including through largely unaccountable absentee and early voter schemes. Malkin provides the evidence from different parts of the country and underscores the need for Americans to elect state secretaries of state who will enforce the law in determining legal voter registrations.

Good news for the GOP and great news for conservatives from the Battleground poll: Bruce Walker examines the results of the most recent Battleground poll and argues that it bodes very well for Republican candidates in the upcoming elections, and for conservatives in general. Walker says the Battleground poll has been the most consistent over the course of the years, and there’s no reason to doubt that America is truly a conservative-leaning country and that people will vote that way next Tuesday when they go to the polls.

Fed-up Americans: Don’t stop with kicking out incumbents, fire the judges too! Connservatives all across the country are working hard to toss out liberal incumbent congressman, state legislators and governors that don’t listen to the People, and in Iowa, they’re getting the opportunity to “fire” Justices on the state Supreme Court who have proven to be equally contemptuous of tradition and the will of the majority. The Iowa Supreme Court recently overturned the state’s Defense of Marriage Act in order to allow homosexuals to “marry,” and three of those jurists are now on the ballot. Fire the judges too!

President Obama pushes the myth that fat cats favor the GOP: Timothy Carney examines myth (as espoused by President Obama) versus reality (actual figures from the Center for Responsive Politics) in who donates money to candidates, arguing the real numbers would surprise people who only rely on the mainstream media to feed them the “news.” Carney debunks the notion that Republicans are the main beneficiaries of Wall Street contributions (as well as lobbyists and other various special interests), a fantasy that is perpetuated by lazy and biased “journalists” who should be reporting the facts.

Latinos are rejecting Obama’s socialist policies and are going conservative: Hispanic conservative Chris Salcedo states it plainly: President Obama’s greatest accomplishment may be the awakening of the conservative movement in the Latino community. Salcedo cites polls that show Latino support for President Obama’s policies has dropped significantly in this year alone as the traditionally conservative Hispanic culture realizes that liberal socialistic policies are not in line with what they believe. As a result, Salcedo argues, a major shift could be taking place in the country’s fastest growing demographic group.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

WikiLeaks leaks all over the anti-war cause: "Is WikiLeaks just a curnning front for the American military-industrial complex? First its latest document dump showed that Lancet exaggerated by 600 per cent when it published its notorious paper claiming the liberation of iraq cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis. Now it’s confirmed that Saddam Hussein did indeed have weapons of mass destruction - and the experts to resume production once the US backed down: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction".

Protect deployed parents’ rights: "Divorced or separated military parents often lose custody of their children — and sometimes permanently forfeit any meaningful role in their lives — simply because they have served their country. Many married parents deploy overseas, never suspecting that their parenthood essentially ended the day they left home. The divorce rate in the Armed Forces has skyrocketed during the long deployments necessitated by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Obama’s imaginary tax cuts: "How many times have you heard the president and the congressional Democrats say Americans who make less than $200,000 a year have not had, and will not have, any of their taxes increased? Unfortunately, it is not true, and it is likely to become a whole lot worse. The 111th Congress has already enacted $352 billion in net tax increases and may, in the upcoming lame-duck session, enact the largest tax increases in history, which will hit every man, woman and child — as well as every business in America.”

To fix the economy, let bad banks die: "Two years ago, many of the nation’s largest banks should have failed — because their business model failed. That business model was willful incompetence. Back then, banks, including Countrywide Financial, now part of Bank of America, showcased this incompetence in helping homeowners borrow money they could never repay. Today, thanks to Washington’s bailouts, the bad banks are still alive. So is their disastrous business model.”

Ethiopia shows the damage that aid can do: "HRW have shown in chilling detail how aid money given to the Ethiopian government has been used to coerce people into supporting the regime. Aid-funded education programmes are turned into government ideology reeducation camps; projects aimed at feeding the country’s poor are used to deprive the regime’s opponents of food; and other aid money is channelled to fund ‘retraining’ of judges and teachers. In short, Western aid money is being used by the Ethiopian government to create a totalitarian regime.”

Animal rights fanatics in New Zealand ban kosher meat: "New Zealand recently became the first country in the world to outlaw kosher slaughter since the Nazis enacted similar legislation in Europe over 70 years ago. New Zealand Jews may soon be the only Jews in the world who can no longer eat chicken. Your children or grandchildren may never experience a Passover with chicken soup and matzah balls, or ask the meaning of the lamb shank on your family’s Seder plate. "Some kosher meat (but not chicken) may be able to be imported, for a limited period. It is likely however that if we lose the right to practise shechita, then the ability to import kosher meat will soon follow."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). 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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Always get it in writing -- on paper

The foreclosure crisis has highlighted again a major flaw of our modern economy: the fragility of ownership and property rights in the Internet age. Quite apart from the possibility of an EMP field blanking out everybody’s servers, the sheer complexity of computer-managed structures such as securitization can make them very difficult if not impossible to unravel. At some point, we will all pay a major price for this flaw.

Securitization was always going to involve these kinds of problems. The idea that you can take a simple instrument like a home mortgage and dice up payments from it in hundreds of different directions, with mortgages being securitized and re-securitized, worked all right in the investment banks’ computers, but would never have worked on paper! Naturally, with sloppiness all round and a fair admixture of fraud, together with a lot of expensive lawyers available, the result has been an unholy mess. Even without fraud in the computer systems themselves, the passage of time, as not only the original deals but the original deal management systems become forgotten, will ensure that ownership rights become untraceable. For a substantial percentage – perhaps 5%, perhaps 10% -- of the mortgages written between 2002 and 2007, this process will result in the property rights, in both the mortgage and the underlying house, becoming unenforceable because the evidence for them does not exist in unambiguous form.

While securitization has given rise to the most immediate problems, there are other areas in which property rights have been rendered more uncertain by computerization. Dematerialized bonds and stocks, the great back-office fad of the 1980s and 1990s, mean that investors are now completely dependent on the record-keeping capabilities of New Jersey computer servers. Banks, investment companies and credit card companies increasingly badger their customers to go “paperless” thus leaving themselves with no tangible record of their assets and liabilities.

The dangers of this are obvious. The science fiction threat of an “EMP” nuclear attack is far greater now than it was in the early days of the Internet around 1995-96, although electronic equipment was already as vulnerable then as it is now. Back then, banks still sent paper statements and transactions in general generated a blizzard of paper, even though the Internet was rapidly becoming a popular means of communication. Hence an EMP destruction of the 1995-6 Internet would have left us with written records of almost all significant transactions. That is far from being the case today. Far from having improved our defenses against EMP we have made ourselves infinitely more vulnerable. Like holders of California subprime mortgages with inadequate documentation, our property rights have been sharply diminished.

Ownership rights were not particularly solid in the ancient world; there was always the risk that someone with more clout or simply a bigger band of thugs would dispossess you. Outside Song Dynasty China, the first attempt at a society with solid ownership rights occurred in the reign of England’s Henry VII. He established the rule of law, even applying it to the baronage and setting up a system of Justices of the Peace to enforce prohibitions against random thuggery. His Tudor and early Stuart successors violated property rights frequently, but after the Restoration the protection of property rights increased rapidly – an increase that coincided with Britain’s economic take-off and to some extent caused it.

The high point of property rights in Britain came under the great Tory governments of 1783-1830. By that time, the legal system worked well, under the benign guidance for most of the period of Lord Chancellor Eldon. With a sound monetary system, property rights could thereby be preserved over astonishingly long periods. In Anthony Trollope’s first Barchester novel “The Warden,” published in 1855 the plot revolves around a bequest for Hiram’s Hospital that had been made in 1434. By the time of the novel, roughly the late 1840s, the bequest has increased in value, providing an excellent income for the hospital’s warden, Septimus Harding.

The gradual erosion of property rights after 1830 is however illustrated by the novel’s central struggle to update the terms of the bequest more in line with the money values and moral principles of the Whig 19th Century, depriving Harding of most of his income. Harding and his supporters the Bishop of Barchester and Archdeacon Grantly base their case on the values of their pre-1830 youth; in the Whig world of two decades later they are eventually defeated. However the protection and expansion of the Hiram’s Hospital property rights for 400 years is a notable example of the stability of both money values and society as a whole that emerged in the centuries following John Hiram’s death.

Thus in Trollope’s world, 400-year old documents kept in strong boxes by family solicitors (or, in that case, those of the Diocese of Barchester) were still rock-solid evidence for the disposition of substantial sums of money. Those property rights had already begun breaking down in 1855 and were sadly further eroded by the 20th century tendencies of governments toward expropriation, ruinous taxation and currency debasement. The virtualization of records has now taken that unhappy process a massive stage further.

One has only to think of the chances of making a successful claim in the year 2410 based on today’s computerized records to realize how far property rights have sunk. Computer databases are updated every 2-3 years and after a few “generations” of such updates become unusable. Even ten years ago, the massive panic over the Y2K problem, based on inadequate programs that were at that stage only 20-30 years old, shows how quickly data stored in virtual form can be rendered inaccessible. In addition, there’s the destructibility of the computers themselves, which has become a far worse problem with the new migration of data to cell-phones and tablets. (Desktops were equally likely to be smashed when you dropped them, but they were much less likely to be dropped, since they were not considered “portable.”)

If John Hiram’s will were made today therefore, and kept in virtual form, it would become a major data recovery problem by 2030 and entirely unavailable by 2050 or so. (Bizarrely destructive monetary policies might well also make his legacy valueless in that time!) Within a tenth of the period for which the original Hiram’s will was preserved by the Diocese of Barchester’s solicitors, and the value of his property preserved by good management aided by mostly sound monetary policies, the property of a new John Hiram would have been decimated, and the evidence for its existence destroyed.

This problem will get worse not better. Its ramifications will become exponentially more obvious as the virtualization revolution ages, and only concerted action, nowhere currently in view, can remove it.

More HERE

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A Mass Nervous Breakdown of the Left

The left can be mean, vicious, and deceitful. I've recently concluded, however, that the left is having, before our eyes, a mass nervous breakdown at the prospects of its collapse, exacerbated by the lost prospect of being on the verge of something really big. They thought they had won. Now, they're seeing it all crumble in a mountain of unsustainable debt, a loss of freedom, and an awakening of voter awareness of who's and what's at fault.

I first came to the conclusion that the left had crossed a sanity threshold to the point that its arguments were hurting its cause when President Obama and the patsy chorus on the left began attacking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other very American entities, without proof, of using foreign money on political ads.

The president himself had taken contributions of questionable origin. The left raises money from multinational sources the same way as those they accuse, but the left probably has a problem twice as incriminating. That angle of attack was a tactical error that sane, strategically thinking people would not make. It's irrational.

There have been many other instances -- too many to mention in this piece -- but I don't recall ever seeing the like of the disproportionate, unhinged attacks on Christine O'Donnell for her statements addressing the Establishment Clause in her Widener Law School debate with Chris Coons.

The left couldn't possibly want that one Delaware Senate seat enough to match their vitriol.

It's important to understand the context in which the Establishment Clause issue was addressed at the debate. Chris Coons said that only evolution must be taught in schools, and that intelligent design is prohibited from being discussed, even as a dissenting footnote to the conclusion that man was not created by God (who, then, consistent with Marxist doctrine, cannot be the source of our rights).

As I and others have pointed out, Ms. O'Donnell was right about the Establishment Clause. The mere debate, though, unravels many on the left.

Our president, for example, has stubbornly and repeatedly removed reference to "the Creator" from his quotations of the Declaration of Independence. That omission does little to motivate his base, enough of whom still believe God is the source of our rights, but it is a frontal attack on our most fundamental American principle -- that we are endowed with rights by God -- and is therefore an affront to most Americans' sense of being and security.

The omission is an irrational act, like the false, vitriolic representations of Christine O'Donnell's Establishment Clause comments. Those attacks on our fundamental, existential notions of who we are have already begun to unleash a torrent of thoughtful articles, blogs, and discussions about the bastardization of the Establishment Clause and, concomitantly, why control by the federal Department of Education should be replaced by state and local controls.

If nothing else, eliminating the Department of Education, which has been with us only since 1980 and is neither essential nor necessarily constitutional, would result in many billions of dollars saved for the states and localities. There is no constitutional question about fifty state departments of education, and once people understand how much money is spent and wasted by the U.S. Department of Education, and by states complying with its mandates, wiser heads will prevail.

Also, the national debate that will evolve will expose how the separation of church and state doctrine has become an excuse by which the left actually under-educates our children and is used to impede real First Amendment freedoms.

Religion, education, and even science, properly and thoughtfully addressed, are not only compatible, but often are inextricably linked. That's rational. Those who say religion may not be addressed in schools have an agenda, but that agenda is collapsing. And there are enough people on the left who understand correctly that the separation of church and state doctrine was not intended to remove discussion of religion, for religion's good or for its misuse, from the public square or within schools.

Would, for example, it be permissible for the federal government to ban the teaching of how religion has played a role in America's history, that religion played a role in the art of Michaelangelo, or that religion played a central role in the motivations and science of Galileo ("I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use")?

Would such teachings violate the separation of church and state? Or would the absence of such teachings deprive students of real knowledge?

The media, by showing a consuming, irrational rage over one relatively inconsequential race, has opened Pandora's box. They have made a larger debate front and center. The Tea Parties and new, fresh candidates will challenge notions and assumptions that have not been challenged enough in decades by go-along Republicans.

The left will laugh and mock those attempts. That's good. That's what got them into trouble in the first place. They're too crazed to understand that.

In fact, many people never experienced personally the savage, disingenuous, doctrinaire political media attacks until they became active in the Tea Parties. A sane person on the left would understand that what the left is doing is actually fulfilling Christine O'Donnell's "I'm you" ad. Sane-thinking people don't do things intentionally that hurt their own cause.

SOURCE

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Comparing Jews to Nazis Meets NPR's 'Editorial Standards and Practices'

"[Juan Williams'] remarks were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR." - Statement issued by NPR

Remember what National Public Radio did to its foreign editor Loren Jenkins last year after he said, "Israel has used Gaza as a bombing target practice"?

They did nothing to him, for he was simply espousing the reckless anti-Israel hyperbole that is business-as-usual for NPR. Addressing an audience at an Aspen public radio event, Jenkins also said that Israel "created the biggest ghetto we've ever known" and is therefore responsible for the likelihood that Gazans "are all going to be turned into Palestinian terrorists because they have nothing else to do."

Andrea Levin of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), who reported on Jenkins' inflammatory falsehoods, also recounted his history of equating Jews with Nazis and softening the image of Palestinian terrorists:

That Jenkins, who clearly harbors prejudicial views about Israel, remains ensconced at NPR with influence over what is broadcast about the Middle East should be a worry to those who care about decent and factual coverage of the region.

An earlier CAMERA study of NPR bias found its editors and reporters working on behalf of organizations that vilify the Jewish state:

... Significantly, Jenkins has regularly appeared at events sponsored by the stridently anti-Israel American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee (ADC), and [reporter] Kate Seelye was for a number of years beginning in the late 1980's the ADC's Manager of Media Relations.

Not surprisingly, the report found, "[e]ntirely one-sided programs were commonplace, whether devoted to assailing Ariel Sharon as a 'war criminal,' to characterizing Israel as a 'Jim Crow' nation which should be done away with in its 'apartheid' form, or to blaming Israel for excessive violence, anti-American riots in Arab capitals and erosion of a supposed Arab commitment to peace."

Perhaps nothing reveals NPR's true colors more dramatically than their hiring of Hamas enthusiast Ali Abunimah (perhaps best-known as an early ally of President Obama on Mideast issues) as a commentator -- and their promise in 1998 to blacklist terrorism expert Steven Emerson when Abunimah demanded it.

Jeff Jacoby noted that Steven Emerson had achieved the status of "the nation's foremost expert on Islamic terrorism" when Abunimah set out to have him silenced.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

The fallacy of TARP profits: "In the end, we were right. The entire Wall Street bailout has cost taxpayers billions while not improving the economy in the slightest. It surely has not improved the housing market or the job market — the unemployment rate stands at a high 9.6 percent. In fact, a Congressional Oversight Panel report says that ‘there is very little evidence to suggest that (TARP) led small banks to increase lending.’”

Insurance lessons from Alabama: "While Alabama certainly has some ambiguous laws and archaic regulations, the federal government ought to take a lesson from Alabama when it comes to property insurance. In an effort to keep the state’s insurer of last resort solvent (meaning it will have enough money to pay the claims people are likely to file), Bob Groves, manager of the state-run insurer, announced that they will no longer issue policies for homes built over or standing in water.”

One more reason why Britain really does not need the European Union: "Idly browsing, as I do, I came across this fascinating little post about the cost of transport. As a decent approximation, getting 30 tonnes of anything from anywhere to anywere now costs around $5,000. If, and only if, you’re on the container routes (either sea or rail). Which means that, again to a reasonable level of approximation, distance is no longer really a concern in trade matters. … It simply isn’t true any more that geography determines the costs of trade: thus geography shouldn’t be an influence upon trade policies.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). 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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Barack Obama echoes anti-Americanism of Europe in calling voters stupid

Obama and his fellow Democrats are mocking Republicans and the Tea Party as stupid. But they could be the ones who look foolish on election day

So what is the closing argument of Barack Obama's Democrats before next Tuesday's midterm elections? The President is no longer the self-proclaimed "hope-monger" of 2008, who vaingloriously declared that his vanquishing Hillary Clinton marked "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal".

He has stopped patting voters on the back for choosing, by voting for him, to listen not to their doubts or fears but to their "greatest hopes and highest aspirations". Instead, he is berating Americans (most of whom now do not believe he deserves a second term) for not being able to "think clearly" because they're "scared".

Having failed to change Washington or, as he promised that night in St Paul, Minnesota in June 2008, to provide "good jobs to the jobless" (unemployment was 7.7 per cent when he took office and is 9.6 per cent now), Obama is changing tack. Boiled down, the new Obama message to Americans is: you're too stupid to overcome your fears.

To be fair, it's not entirely new. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was caught on tape at a San Francisco fund-raiser saying it was not surprising that voters facing economic hardship "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them".

At a fund-raiser in Massachusetts this month, Obama spoke of Democrats having "facts and science and argument" on their side. As opposed, presumably, to the lies, superstition and prejudice that Republicans rely on.

This year, Democrats have embraced with gusto the notion that Republicans, and by extension anyone thinking of voting for them, are dimwits. Their mirth over the likes of Tea Party figures like Christine O'Donnell, the former anti-masturbation activist who once she had "dabbled" in witchcraft and is now a no-hoper Senate candidate in Delaware, seems to know no bounds.

The most chortling of all about the populist Tea Party and its anti-tax, anti-government uprising against the Republican establishment can be found on the shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the edgy liberal satirists on Comedy Central. Mocking Republican candidates last week, Stewart declared the midterm elections as "the best chance ever for a bowl of fresh fruit" to be elected.

Three days before the elections, Stewart will hold a "Rally to Restore Sanity" in Washington on the same day as Colbert, who adopts the character of a Right-wing talk show host, leads a "March to Keep Fear Alive". The thinly-disguised message: Republicans are crazies who trade on fear.

In choosing California and Massachusetts, two of the most liberal states in the union, to demean ordinary Americans during election campaigns, Obama did not display a whole lot of his much-vaunted intelligence. But Obama's decision to plug Stewart's rally approvingly and appear on his show three days beforehand is even more foolish.

In the 1990s, Democrats managed to get away from their image as "eggheads" in the 1950s or "pointy-headed liberals" in the 1970s. Bill Clinton spoke like a Good Ol' Boy from the Deep South, ate junk food and enjoyed trashy women. He was clever, but he did not look down on people.

Obama, by contrast, has become a parody of the Ivy League liberal smugly content with his own intellectual superiority and pitying the poor idiots who disagree with him. It is an approach that shares much with the default anti-Americanism of British and European elites, who love to mock the United States as a country full of gun-toting, bible-clutching morons.

David Cameron [Centrist British PM] has made nods to this sniffy condescension, speaking of the Sarah Palin phenomenon as being "hard for us to understand" (how about giving it a go, Dave?) and describing American conservatism, inaccurately, as moving in a "very culture war direction". This might be part of the reason why he seems to have hit it off with Obama.

The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that belittling the Tea Party movement, which is taking hold of much of Middle America, merely fuels the popular sense that the party in power is out of touch. It also highlights the reluctance of Obama and the Democrats to discuss the Wall Street bail-out, economic stimulus and health care bills because they know they are not vote winners.

Joining the Europeans in mocking ordinary Americans for their supposed idiocy may play well at big-dollar fund-raisers. In adopting this as a political strategy, however, the Democrats could be the ones who end up looking stupid.

SOURCE

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A problem with socialism

by Roderick T. Beaman

Like many others, I flirted for a while with socialism when I was in high school. I think many have. It seemed sensible on paper but then I saw how the world really worked.

William Buckley once responded to a high school student who had written that he thought Buckley was horribly wrong and that John Kenneth Galbraith was correct about economics. Buckley responded that the high school student was at the perfect age to appreciate John Kenneth Galbraith; another perfect putdown by the Enfant Terrible.

During the 1960s, there were many variants of this saying; if you’re not part of the solution, at least don’t be part of the problem. As I grew up, I saw more and more that government was the problem.

The 1964 election had promised to be one of the most interesting in history until the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Barry Goldwater was considered the favorite of rank and file Republicans to be nominated to face Kennedy in his reelection bid.

Kennedy’s assassination elevated the loathsome Lyndon B. Johnson to the presidency and he immediately embarked upon the imposition of his Great Society that was so broad and so deep that we are still absorbing its effects, 41 years after he left office. The election instead became a referendum on the sentiments for a dead man’s agenda. Johnson swamped Goldwater, taking 44 states with Goldwater winning six.

Enter the Monday morning quarterbacking. The New York Times, which had been endorsing Democrats for years, began telling Republicans what they did wrong. It anointed Cong. John V. Lindsay for Mayor the following year. He was the Moses who would lead the GOP out of the Goldwater wilderness.

Lindsay was Yale educated, handsome and from New York City’s fabled Silk Stocking District of Manhattan’s East Side. He was also as reliably liberal as any liberal Democrat, voting for just about every New Frontier and Great Society program. Lindsay had never seen a taxpayer’s dollar that he didn’t want to spend.

Lindsay was elected beating Buckley, the Conservative Party nominee, the only time he ever ran for office, and Democrat Abraham Beame. The spending began.

Lindsay was greeted in 1966 with a 12-day subway strike under the Transit Worker’s Union leader Mike Quill, who’d had a deep and long association with the Communist Party of the USA. (In an interesting sidelight, Quill’s communist roots were never mentioned by the various media during the strike. I never knew about it until years after. Why am I not surprised by that?) He’d broken with them in 1948 but there could be no doubt that his orientation was socialist. He extracted a generous contract from the Lindsay Administration and died three days later. The contract, and concessions to others, left the city teetering.

Lindsay responded with (drum roll, please), you guessed it, a tax increase in the form of the City’s first income tax. It went into effect in September 1966.

At that time, I was working as an electrician’s helper in Local Union #3 in the city. We were contracted to a 6-hour workday but almost everyone was working seven hours a day. For paid holidays, we received the contract pay for just six hours, not the usual seven we worked.

One day we were asked to work overtime one hour and most of us jumped at the opportunity for some extra pay. That pay week though, encompassed the Labor Day weekend and the one hour of overtime just balanced the 6-hour holiday pay and brought us up to our usual 35 hours pay week. That week, the city’s income tax also went into effect so we netted less than what we had been.

One fellow worker said that if he had known that, he wouldn’t have grabbed the extra hour of overtime and just accepted the smaller paycheck. The take home lesson is that this is an example of how people react within a system. It is all so very predictable and our governmentalist politicians, (fascist, progressive, liberal and socialist) rarely take into account how people will react within a system.

Rhode Island has, as many states have had, a long tradition of vanity license plates. The car owner pays some extra fees and has some special combination of letters to spell something or his initials, etc. It raises some extra revenue for the state treasury and is a harmless venture for the driver.

When Bruce Sundlun, a Democrat, became governor in 1991, the state was facing a revenue shortfall. Together with the solidly Democratic legislature (in Rhode Island, that’s redundant), they decided to double the fees for vanity plates. They assumed that the revenue would increase markedly, possibly double. Instead, people who had held particular plates for years, even decades, simply decided they weren’t worth it and turned them in for regular plates. My wife and I did it for each of our plates and four or five other people and couples we knew did the same. While I don’t know the exact figures, I am sure that the actual revenue realized was far less than what had been predicted just from the experience and I am sure the many people at the State House never even considered the possibility that a lot of people would simply turn in their plates.

I am also befuddled by politicians, of all stripes, who rail against ‘price gouging’ during emergencies. Of course, any serious student of economics knows that there is no such thing as price gouging. Either the marketplace sustains a price or it doesn’t. As many far wiser minds than mine have noted, the price mechanism represents an opportunity for signals of needs or excesses to be passed through the market to others for problems to be corrected.

During the recent spate of hurricanes to hit Florida, Attorney General Bill McCollum has been out there in front of the cameras (for any politician that’s almost redundant) was out there, thundering, about various businesses price gouging. It certainly appeals to voters (is anything a politician does, not geared to voters?) but it doesn’t stand up to examination.

In storms, floods and other natural disasters, one of the first things to be needed is water. Oh yes, it may impress as unseemly for a merchant to jack up his price for water after a storm but it does provide an important signal for the need for more. If someone has a truck with few other resources to otherwise drive to, say Tennessee, to bring back a truckload, would not the possibility of earning some money to do it, afford him the wherewithal? I think this is an intelligent question but few politicians can answer intelligent questions.

The merchant or businessman has several choices in such a matter. He can simply close his shop or refuse to sell the item in question or he can sell them at the regular price and soon be exhausted of them. In any case, he is left with no resources to correct it and in the first two cases, no need whatsoever is met.

The ultimate example of governmental stupidity (I apologize here for any redundancy) is the rent control situation in New York City. It was first enacted nationally in 1943 by (are you really surprised by this?) Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was considered an emergency at the time (what government action isn’t?) and has been in effect ever since.

The force of logic shows that price controls on anything leads to shortages or distortions in the market. Rent control has been shown to lead to a two-tiered system of rents. The simplest thing would be to terminate the program but political pressures from people who have stayed in their sub-market priced residences for decades will lead a march on City Hall to protest any such attempts. The controls are part of many systemic reasons why there is a huge dearth of medium priced apartments The Big Apple. There is a great need but socialism or governmentalism gets in the way of a solution.

So there we see government getting in the way or its ventures not living up to expectations. It’s the limit of politics and government as Buckley said in his campaign. People will react in ways that are simply not anticipated but nevertheless are very predictable. They will always move in the direction of their own perceived self-interest. The problem is they may not move in what the state’s perceived self-interest. They may decide not to work or to turn in their license plates rather than pay the extra price, they may simply withdraw from participation.

And what is the state’s ultimate weapon against the people when they act in their own self-interest rather than the state’s? Why penalties. Imprisonment. And ultimately, execution.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The mystery of FDR unraveled: "For seventy-plus years, the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has vexed people of a libertarian bent. His policies, extending war socialism based on Mussolini’s economic structure, expanded the American State to an unthinkable extent, and prolonged the Great Depression through the horrific World War II. Normalcy did not return until after his wartime controls were repealed and the budget was cut. Lasting economic recovery began in 1948. And the guy that made all that happen is a hero? His picture is on the (depreciated) dime.”

The real reason for FDR’s popularity: "All presidents worry about their popularity. They try to bolster it through impassioned rhetoric, free stuff for influential voting blocs, new programs that cost billions, dramatic photo ops, and of course wars to unite the country behind their valiant leadership. In most all cases, they choose means of gaining popularity that come at the expense of liberty.”

ME: City considers letting non-citizens vote: "Like his neighbors, Claude Rwaganje pays taxes on his income and taxes on his cars. His children have gone to Portland’s public schools. He’s interested in the workings of Maine’s largest city, which he has called home for 13 years. There’s one vital difference, though: Rwaganje isn’t a U.S. citizen and isn’t allowed to vote on those taxes or on school issues. That may soon change. Portland, Maine, residents will vote Nov. 2 on a proposal to give legal residents who are not U.S. citizens the right to vote in local elections, joining places like San Francisco and Chicago that have already loosened the rules or are considering it. Non-citizens hold down jobs, pay taxes, own businesses, volunteer in the community and serve in the military, and it’s only fair they be allowed to vote, Rwaganje said.”

Mountain roads, take me home: "A natural camaraderie exists among people who work for a living and don’t have much. I didn’t exactly work, but I had grown up around people who did, and knew how to fit in. It wasn’t surprising that they offered to share their vodka with a stranger. Talk to anyone who has hitchhiked extensively. He will tell you that the likelihood that a car will stop is inversely proportional to the price of the car. People who have needed help are inclined to provide help.”

A better way than the VA?: "If you listen to Democratic campaign ads in Colorado, Nevada, or Delaware, among other places, you will discover yet another perfidious plot by evil Republicans — they want to ‘privatize the VA.’ Which makes one respond, ‘This is a horrible thing because … why?’”

How much air superiority does a man need?: "The chatter is skittering on the sheen of the Obama and Israel-approved Saudi purchase of 84 old and technically degraded F-15s. As this sale promotes the MIC and is agreeable to AIPAC, Congressional approval of this proposed sale is moot. In terms of military capability shifts, as Jeff Huber at Antiwar.com explains, is it much ado about not much. The sale simply enhances Saudi Arabia’s capability to do what we ourselves do with our F-15s, primarily argue amongst ourselves about which old man is going to take a joy ride. Expensive fun counts for plenty, if you are a servant of the state.”

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. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). 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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Mao's Great Famine‏

An email from a Western correspondent living in China who was once himself a Maoist

Well I've been reading again -- this time going over old familiar territory using new, unbelievable sources: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe as reported in national, provincial and city archives in China.

Can it be possible? - Author Frank Dikotter, China historian in HK, claims a new law allows such access and basically confirms the details of what we knew generally back in the 70's. Whereas we used transcripts of mainland radio broadcasts and reports of mainland newspapers and magazines, refugee accounts and documents smuggled out, he got access to official documents which, while they have shortcomings, add a degree of authenticity and first person, including the words of major players as reported in provincial reports of meetings in Beijing. No-one comes out well, even those who were persecuted for their honesty, as they were usually enthusiastic supporters before they saw for themselves the degree of horror in the countryside.

Their disillusionment was they thought officials at the lower levels, people were better than they! -- e.g unrealistic grain seizure quotas were increased at every level before they got to central level. They were often met by starving villagers to death -- i.e. The Chairman's delusional and venal behaviour was reflected at all levels of the party with any villager questioning the quotas being branded a bourgois conservative, anti-party element and often beaten to death.

I guess this marks the beginning of a whole new genre of revisionist scholarship bound to embarrass Professor Barme and the New Sinologists who appear to insist we should draw a line under 1978 and ignore anything before it!

As for me it only underscores the inadequacy of my mea culpa. And what of those who still cry Shihuizhuyi hao! (Socialism is great!)? Are present-day officials any better? Only a matter of degree perhaps.

One typical line from the good Chairman. "It is necessary for half of the people to die so the other half can eat their fill!" The legendary Zhou making endless calls to local cadres in 1959 demanding they fulfil their quotas despite knowledge of the famine.

The official policy of exporting grain to one and all, often free, to demonstrate the superiority of Chinese Communism. Liu Shaoqi giving the GLF his enthusiastic support. The enormous loss of state stored grain due to neglect, insects, rot, theft and corrpuption extending up to 80% in some places. Deng Xiaoping insisting quotas be collected ruthlessly "As in war". Its all very depressing reading.

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Obamacare Reality Bites: And HHS waivers

The Obama-inspired overhaul of medical insurance has just started to kick in, and already reality, in the form of economic law, is biting back. Companies are canceling or threatening to cancel coverage because the new terms of doing business make business as usual uneconomical. For example, some insurance companies announced they would no long write child-only policies. The new rules say that beginning now, no insurer can refuse coverage to an already-ill child and that the premiums can’t be higher than those charged for well children. (In a few years the “antidiscrimination” rule will apply to adults.)

Anyone with a smidgen of economic knowledge – heck, how about just some common sense? – would know that this cannot work. How can you run an insurance company when parents can wait until their children are seriously ill to buy coverage — and then the insurer can’t set the premium according to the expected medical services. That’s not insurance. It’s welfare filtered through business.

Well, now, when the companies announced they would stop writing those policies, the Department of Health and Human Services relented and waived the rule (at least for a while).

A pattern emerges. Companies claim they can’t live with a particular Obamacare mandate, and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius issues a waiver. When McDonald’s and other companies said that their limited mini-med policies would become prohibitively expensive if the government enforced its no-benefit-cap rule, Sebelius granted a waiver. She is now considering a request for a waiver of the rule mandating no less than an 80-85 percent medical loss ratio on mini-med polices. That’s the percentage of revenues paid in benefits rather than administrative costs. Companies with a high workforce turnover say insurance administrative costs are naturally higher than with a stable workforce and thus the mandated medical loss ratio is impractical. (It’s been pointed out that the medical loss ratio was not intended as a measure of efficiency.)

At issue here is not the details of the more than two thousand pages of law. It’s the discretionary power the government has acquired because of it. A one-size-fits-all law was written by Congress. During the debate over the legislation many of us warned that such an approach would defy the laws of economics and would therefore have undesirable unintended consequences. We said, for example, that price caps which ignore real market conditions would cause producers to exit the market, leaving people without services they want.

So Secretary Sebelius is busy granting waivers. On one level this is good: The direct consequences of Obamacare will be less severe than they would have been. But at another level this is not good at all. Obamacare has increased the amount of discretionary power bureaucrats have over our lives. Whatever standard HHS uses in judging waiver requests will be arbitrary. How big does a hardship have to be before a request gets a favorable ruling? Will a company’s CEO have to be careful about criticizing the Obama administration – even on nonmedical issues – for fear that a future waiver request might be turned down? Bureaucrats are human too. (Sebelius has warned insurers not to publicly blame premium increases on Obamacare mandates.)...

Finally, we readily describe the negative effects of this law as “unintended consequences.” I’d like to suggest that they may not be so unintended. It is hard to believe that some of the higher-ups did not realize that price controls and similar restrictions would push insurers out of the market. I would not be surprised to learn that this was widely anticipated and that the ruling elite intended to exploit problem to amass even more power over medical insurance. One need not be a conspiracy aficionado to think this. One need only understand purposive human action.

More HERE

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The Lies of ObamaCare

Yet more evidence is emerging that Obamacare is a lie, a complete fraud perpetrated on the American people. Prior to congressional enactment of the legislation, Barack Obama promised in his State of the Union Address that it would “reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses.”

Now we know that’s a lie. Not only are insurance companies already warning of higher premiums because of Obamacare, now the Department of Justice (DOJ) is preparing to sue Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan because, get this, premiums are too low.

Specifically, because the insurer negotiates with hospitals and other health care providers for the lowest possible rates for its customers, Obama’s DOJ is arguing that that is increasing the costs for everyone else. Never mind that Blue Cross covers 2.4 million people in Michigan, or about 27.7 percent of those with insurance in the state.

Those 2.4 million people just are not paying enough, according to Obama.

So, they will wind up paying more for their health care if the Administration’s lawsuit succeeds. Why? Because if Blue Cross’ contracts with hospitals and other health care providers are deemed invalid, it will not result in others getting the same rates as Blue Cross had. It will mean that Blue Cross customers will pay as much as everyone else.

Further, it will set a precedent that no company can negotiate for a lower rate. This puts the lie to Obamacare. The intention never was to lower rates for the insured. It was to drive up the costs to force individuals off of private health insurance — and into government’s waiting arms.

Obamacare always was a road to government control. That’s why it includes an individual mandate to purchase insurance starting in 2014, and that’s why its own regulators admit the bill will force up to 69 percent of enrollees off of their employer-provided plans. How else to get folks to incrementally be forced into a single-payer system?

The whole purpose Obamacare, therefore, is to drive up costs, creating a health care affordability crisis in the nation. In the mean time, the Administration accuses companies of “price-gouging”.

It’s already started. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has warned insurers not to inform enrollees that premium hikes are a direct result of Obamacare: “[S]everal health insurer carriers are sending letters to their enrollees falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act… [T]here will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases,” Sebelius wrote in a letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans.

Sebelius has the answer. She writes, “Later this fall, we will issue a regulation that will require state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases filed by health insurers, with the justification for increases posted publicly for consumers and employers.” Never mind that insurance carriers are already required to notify enrollees of hikes in premiums, how dare insurers tell their customers the real reason for the hikes?

Sebelius promises to “keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.” The implication? If you are an insurer, and you speak out against Obamacare, they will shut you down...

The Obama Administration is taking great pains to force health care costs up to compel the American people onto government-run health care. Meanwhile, they are regulating blame for those premium hikes to private insurers.

All of this is proof that Obamacare was a lie from the very beginning. The Administration does not care about lower costs, because they don’t even care about the costs. What they want is control.

More HERE

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Close to a trillion down the drain

What if I told you that the Chairman and CEO of IBM, Samuel J. Palmisano, approached President Obama and members of his administration before the healthcare bill debates with a plan that would reduce healthcare expenditures by $900 billion? Given the Obama Administration’s adamancy that the United States of America simply had to make healthcare (read: health insurance) affordable for even the most dedicated welfare recipient, one would think he would have leaned forward in his chair, cupped his ear and said, “Tell me more!”

And what if I told you that the cost to the federal government for this program was nothing, zip, nada, zilch?

And, what if I told you that, in the end and after two meetings, President Obama and his team, instead of embracing a program that was proven to save money and one that was projected to save almost one trillion dollars – a private sector program costing the taxpayers nothing, zip, nada, zilch – said, “Thanks but no thanks” and then embarked on passing one of the most despised pieces of legislation in US history?

Well, it’s all true. Samuel J. Palmisano, the Chairman of the Board and CEO for IBM, said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview that he offered to provide the Obama Administration with a program that would curb healthcare claims fraud and abuse by almost one trillion dollars but the Obama White House turned the offer down.

Mr. Palmisano is quoted as saying during a taping of The Wall Street Journal's Viewpoints program on September 14, 2010: "We could have improved the quality and reduced the cost of the healthcare system by $900 billion...I said we would do it for free to prove that it works. They turned us down."

A second meeting between Mr. Palmisano and the Obama Administration took place two weeks later, with no change in the Obama Administration's stance. A call placed to IBM on October 8, 2010, by FOX News confirmed, via a spokesperson, that Mr. Palmisano stands by his statement.

Speaking with FOX News' Stuart Varney, Mort Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, said: "It's a little bit puzzling because I think there is a huge amount of both fraud and inefficiency that American business is a lot more comfortable with and more effective in trying to reduce. And this is certainly true because the IBM people have studied this very carefully. And when Palmisano went to the White House and made that proposal, it was based upon a lot of work and it was not accepted. And it's really puzzling...These are very, very responsible people. They don't have a political ax to grind. They are very familiar with the subject; they understand exactly what the issues are."

Given the fact that Mr. Obama’s own Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services actuary debunked the claim that health insurance costs would diminish over the next decade and given that the budget deficits for 2010 and 2011 are in the $1.2 trillion–$1.4 trillion ballpark, the question begs to be asked: Why would Mr. Obama balk at a sure-thing savings of almost $1 trillion?

CMS actuaries also say that Medicare cuts mandated by the law are unrealistic and unsustainable. An April 22, 2010, CMS report about the financial and coverage effects of selected provisions of the new law estimates that about 15 percent of hospitals and other healthcare providers could lose money treating Medicare beneficiaries as a result of the proposed cuts.

And the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year, which ended Sept. 30, will total $1.29 trillion. The Obama administration has projected that the deficit for the 2011 budget year, which began on Oct. 1, will climb to $1.4 trillion and that over the next decade, it will total $8.47 trillion.

So, again, I ask you, with the main issue being the economy, including the audacious spending habits of elected officials in Washington DC, why would Mr. Obama and his team balk at facilitating not only the saving of almost $1 trillion in healthcare expenditures, but the opportunity to affect an issue victory in the 2010 midterm election cycle?

Mr. Zuckerman concluded: "When you are in a situation where this country is facing a huge deficit and where anybody who knows anything at all about the healthcare system knows how much waste, fraud and abuse is involved in that system...not to take this offer up, frankly, does not make sense."

Mr. Zuckerman is correct, but only to a point. It doesn’t make sense if Mr. Obama is trying to reduce waste and fraud, and make health insurance affordable for all Americans. It does make sense if those were never the goals in the first place.

As I wrote in an article titled, Cloward, Piven & Obamacare: “...the goal of the Progressives is to crash the system; to overwhelm the system to such an extent that it fails. It is at this moment of failure that Progressives believe they can enter the situation as the “knight in shining armor.” It is at this particular moment of vulnerability that Progressives believe the American public will acquiesce to the false choice of “something is better than nothing”; to a government-run universal healthcare plan to rescue the devastated American healthcare system, a system Progressives themselves threw into chaos, courtesy of their ridiculous health insurance reform law."

It is one thing to be – as a good many elected officials in Washington DC are – arrogant, self-absorbed spendthrifts, so detached from the actualities of what Americans require and want from their government. It is quite another to willfully abuse the system – and the American people – in an attempt to bring about an ideological “change” – a “fundamental transformation” – of the very system of government that has made the United States the most prosperous nation in the history of the Western Civilization and the last best hope for freedom and liberty for all in the world.

More HERE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). 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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Why Obama Doesn’t Seem to Relate emotionally

Unlike most people, he exhibits little or no moral sense

Tibor R. Machan

Most of the time when I hear about how President Obama lacks the emotional disposition that most Americans would like to see him demonstrate, I am disinclined to make much of the point. What I want from someone in the role of the presidency is good thinking and not sensitivity.

Nonetheless I have been paying a bit more attention to this criticism of the President because as I have been following his efforts to bolster the chances of Democrats to remain in power in Washington, DC, I have noticed that there is something amiss with how he comes over emotionally.

As a start, Mr. Obama is always glib, as if nothing on earth could phase him, as if it is all old hat to him, he is way ahead of everyone. This comes through, for instance, in his repeated dismissal of anything that members of the Tea Party complain about.

And that’s just the beginning. One related steady emotional theme in the president’s talks is the effort to be accommodating toward critics and enemies of America. Indeed, the very idea that Mr. Obama would identify anyone as an enemy of the United States of America seems off base. This is because it looks like he is mostly interested in building bridges between us and them, however barbaric they may be.

Mr. Obama is one of those American intellectuals who appears to be stopped from criticizing anyone abroad because, well, this country has had slavery and segregation and poverty so how could it justify being critical of anyone? It shows a spirit of perpetual self-criticism and mea culpa, attitudes that appear to dominate the president’s conscience (and we are here talking about appearances).

There is no black and white for the man –no one, not even a vicious terrorist and a leader of a country in which women are systematically and barbarically oppressed, justifies for him any sort of firm moral condemnation. Like those ever-permissive parents who always have an excuse for what their offspring are doing, no matter how mischievous or outright evil it manages to be, for Mr. Obama those who attack America, actually attack innocents everywhere, just could not be all bad, unworthy of understanding.

This mentality of turning the other cheek, no matter what, appears to underlie the widespread distrust people have of Mr. Obama’s emotional makeup. Emotions, although they are ultimately unreliable guidelines to action, are pretty good clues to what system of values someone has internalized. If one has to force oneself disapprove of or condemn vicious conduct and people and it doesn’t arise naturally, people who do have a sense of just how bad some others can be will become suspicious.

President Obama and his cheerleaders must realize that eloquence is no substitute for emotional balance, for being in tune emotionally with what those deserve who comport themselves villainously. Being well spoken is not enough. One must also have a sense of what needs to be said, have substance to communicate, a sense of justice, if you will.

Or perhaps Mr. Obama just despises being disliked by people, even by vicious rulers abroad. But that, too, reveals his emotional priorities. Mr. Obama needs to open himself up to the possibility that some people should really be hated, that they are evil and not merely misguided, sick, or deranged.

Human life is distinctive in the world precisely because human beings have a moral nature and they can act irresponsibly, morally deplorably, contemptibly, as well as admirably, demonstrating moral excellence.

And while that idea has always had its detractors, the moral skeptics, they simply cannot sustain their denial that people are moral agents and capable of doing vile things for which they ought to be condemned. They do not deserve sympathy but contempt.

And this is evident from the fact that the one exception to the skeptics’ ambivalence about morality is their own utter contempt for those who do take morality seriously. They tend to be dismissed, even derided, as fundamentalists or moralizers, which is clearly and paradoxically something (morally?) contemptible to the skeptics!

Moral skeptics usually are hoisted on their own petard. Their amoral stance isn’t philosophically sustainable because human beings are indeed moral beings, unlike the rest the members of the living world. And one result of having a moral nature and admitting to it is that one will openly cope with moral evil as well as moral excellence. If one denies this, as it seems President Obama does when it comes to America’s enemies, it will eventually stand in the way of reaching out to ordinary people.

SOURCE

NOTE: In extreme forms, lack of a moral sense is psychopathy. Obama's glacial calm is also normal in psychopaths. See here and here -- JR

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Assault on Palin, DeMint and Other Conservatives Often Rooted In Lies or Distortions

The long knives have been out for Sarah Palin since her emergence on the national stage just over two years ago. Katie Couric infamously mocked Sarah Palin and her family on tape even while the Republican Convention was still going on… long before her “objective” interview with her. But that was just the beginning.

Recently there was this silly effort by leftists to make fun of Palin for admonishing activists not to “party like it’s 1773″ yet. Not just random bloggers, mind you, but that paragon of fairness and balance from PBS, Gwen Ifill, lept at the opportunity to make fun of Palin for getting a date wrong. The problem, of course, was that Palin was correctly referring to the year of the Boston Tea Party. Ooops.

But then today, we see that Jonathan Martin with Politico has put out a piece trying to make the case that Palin is a “Diva.” In the article, he writes “[a]ccording to a source familiar with the situation, she backed out of planned interviews with conservative talk-show hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin the morning she was scheduled to talk to them.” Again, there’s at least one problem… that is, Mark Levin says that this is an outright lie. On Facebook, Mark says, “Sarah Palin never backed out of any interview with me. Period. And John Martin, the reporter, never contacted me to ask me directly. I insist on a retraction. ” Sarah Palin has her faults, but it sure makes one wonder how accurate this piece is when at least part of it is a flat out lie.

But that’s not the only example today. Jim DeMint was on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News last night. During the interview, the Senator made some comments about the state of the Republican Party - pointing out, essentially, that he “doesn’t want to watch the Republican Party betray the trust of the American people again.” Amen. But, what does RealClearPolitics put up as the headline?

They wrote, “DeMint threatens to leave GOP if agenda is not limited government.” Jim DeMint did not “threaten” to leave the GOP. He said he doesn’t want to be a part of a Republican Party that is like that - and that this is not what Republicans are about across America.

This is only the beginning, of course. Senator DeMint will find himself as the ever-increasing focal point of criticism, by the press and, perhaps more, by Washington establishment insiders who feel threatened by anyone willing to stand up to their big-spending, back-scratching, Senate “club” ways. Senator DeMint dares to suggest that the old guard needs to change or go home. He dares to criticize pork-barrel spending and the corrupt appropriators who continue to do it. And most of all, he dares to fight against an establishment built around perpetuating itself rather than liberty, by backing candidates who are willing to challenge that establishment.

SOURCE

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While the media continues to attack Christine O’Donnell, liberal buffoons are given a pass

Let's look at a quality Democrat candidate: Alvin Greene

Jim DeMint started the recession. Perhaps I should repeat. Jim DeMint started the recession. Didn't hear me? Jim DeMint started the recession. Are you ready for me to say something else... ANYTHING else? I'm sure that's how MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell felt as he was interviewing Democrat Senate candidate Al Green. While the media continue to attack Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Green is coasting under the radar. Let's take a look at the man who is running against South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. Oh, and remember... Jim DeMint started the recession...

The media are having a field day with Christine O'Donnell. They somehow feel it's relevant to focus on comments O'Donnell made when she was in high school. But take a look at Al Green. This man won 59& of the vote in South Carolina without running any campaign ads. One has to wonder what South Carolina Democrats were thinking...



Ok... let's think about this. This man is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Does that give anyone pause? Wait there's more. In Connecticut, Democrat Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal has been hammered, because he couldn't answer the question, "How do you create a job?" Guess what? Al Green knows how to create jobs... the Al Green action figure:



Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here, but I just don't even know where to begin. The media are pulling no punches regarding O'Donnell, but they ignore Green. Typical, but their outright support for Democrat candidates is getting more blatant by the day. Another point... the electorate gets what it deserves. More people voted for Green, and he won. Ok, one final note... Jim DeMint started the recession.

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ObamaCare looks like being a bonanza for employers but a huge slug on the taxpayer

By way of example, the Tennessee State government could reduce costs by over $146 million using the legislated mechanics of health reform to transfer coverage to the federal government -- So says Phil Bredesen, Democrat governor of Tennessee, below

One of the principles of game theory is that you should view the game through your opponent's eyes, not just your own.

This past spring, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (President Obama's health reform) created a system of extensive federal subsidies for the purchase of health insurance through new organizations called "exchanges." The details of these subsidies were painstakingly worked out by members of my own political party to reflect their values: They decided who was to benefit from the subsidies and what was to be purchased with them. They paid a lot of attention to their own strategies, but what I believe they failed to consider properly were the possible strategies of others.

Our federal deficit is already at unsustainable levels, and most Americans understand that we can ill afford another entitlement program that adds substantially to it. But our recent health reform has created a situation where there are strong economic incentives for employers to drop health coverage altogether. The consequence will be to drive many more people than projected—and with them, much greater cost—into the reform's federally subsidized system. This will happen because the subsidies that become available to people purchasing insurance through exchanges are extraordinarily attractive.

In 2014, when these exchanges come into operation, a typical family of four with an annual income of $90,000 and a 45-year-old policy holder qualifies for a federal subsidy of 40% of their health-insurance cost. For that same family with an income of $50,000 (close to the median family income in America), the subsidy is 76% of the cost.

One implication of the magnitude of these subsidies seems clear: For a person starting a business in 2014, it will be logical and responsible simply to plan from the outset never to offer health benefits. Employees, thanks to the exchanges, can easily purchase excellent, fairly priced insurance, without pre-existing condition limitations, through the exchanges. As it grows, the business can avoid a great deal of cost because the federal government will now pay much of what the business would have incurred for its share of health insurance. The small business tax credits included in health reform are limited and short-term, and the eventual penalty for not providing coverage, of $2,000 per employee, is still far less than the cost of insurance it replaces.

For an entrepreneur wanting a lean, employee-oriented company, it's a natural position to take: "We don't provide company housing, we don't provide company cars, we don't provide company insurance. Our approach is to put your compensation in your paycheck and let you decide how to spend it."

But while health reform may alter the landscape for small business in unexpected ways, it also opens the door to what is a potentially far larger effect on the Treasury.

The authors of health reform primarily targeted the uninsured and those now buying expensive individual policies. But there's a very large third group that can also enter and that may have been grossly underestimated: the 170 million Americans who currently have employer-sponsored group insurance. Because of the magnitude of the new subsidies created by Congress, the economics become compelling for many employers to simply drop coverage and help their employees obtain replacement coverage through an exchange.

Let's do a thought experiment. We'll use my own state of Tennessee and our state employees for our data. The year is 2014 and the Affordable Care Act is now in full operation. We're a large employer, with about 40,000 direct employees who participate in our health plan. In our thought experiment, let's exit the health-benefits business this year and help our employees use an exchange to purchase their own.

First of all, we need to keep our employees financially whole. With our current plan, they contribute 20% of the total cost of their health insurance, and that contribution in 2014 will total about $86 million. If all these employees now buy their insurance through an exchange, that personal share will increase by another $38 million. We'll adjust our employees' compensation in some rough fashion so that no employee is paying more for insurance as a result of our action. Taking into account the new taxes that would be incurred, the change in employee eligibility for subsidies, and allowing for inefficiency in how we distribute this new compensation, we'll triple our budget for this to $114 million.

Now that we've protected our employees, we'll also have to pay a federal penalty of $2,000 for each employee because we no longer offer health insurance; that's another $86 million. The total state cost is now about $200 million.

But if we keep our existing insurance plan, our cost will be $346 million. We can reduce our annual costs by over $146 million using the legislated mechanics of health reform to transfer them to the federal government.

That's just for our core employees. We also have 30,000 retirees under the age of 65, 128,000 employees in our local school systems, and 110,000 employees in local government, all of which presents strategies even more economically attractive than the thought experiment we just performed. Local governments will find eliminating all coverage particularly attractive, as many of them are small and will thus incur minor or no penalties; many have health plans that will not meet the minimum benefit threshold, and so they'll see a substantial and unavoidable increase in cost if they continue providing benefits under the new federal rules.

Our thought experiment shows how the economics of dropping existing coverage is about to become very attractive to many employers, both public and private. By 2014, there will be a mini-industry of consultants knocking on employers' doors to explain the new opportunity. And in the years after 2014, the economics just keep getting better.

The consequence of these generous subsidies will be that America's health reform may well drive many more people than projected out of employer-sponsored insurance and into the heavily subsidized federal system. Perhaps this is a miscalculation by the Congress, perhaps not. One principle of game theory is to think like your opponent; another is that there's always a larger game.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). 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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Fools Rush in Where Europe Rushes Out

Jonah Goldberg

As of this writing, France is paralyzed. By the time you read this, it might be in flames. In Britain, where politics is more polite but the problems are perhaps just as dire, the government is proposing budget cuts on a scale not seen for nearly a century. In Greece, well, the less said about Greece the better.

All of these countries -- and many more -- are going through painful retrenchments because they spent too much money, made too many promises and expected too little from their own citizens. The era of European austerity is upon us, because the Europeans -- or at least those in charge -- understand the mess they've made of their economies.

This should present a real problem for Barack Obama and the vast (though shrinking) chorus of experts, editorialists and activists who support his agenda. In broad terms, all of the policies Obama and the Democrats have pushed are the sorts of policies the British, the French and other Europeans had for years, even decades.

As far as I am aware, no one has asked President Obama a simple question: If your philosophy is so great, how come the countries that have embraced it for generations are so much poorer than us?

Nor have they asked: If guaranteed health care for everyone will make us so much more "competitive," how come we've been doing so much better than our "competitors" who already have socialized medicine, high tax rates and lavish pensions?

Nor has the president been queried about the incongruity of saying his policies have laid a "new foundation" for economic growth and job creation when the countries he's trying to emulate are trying to dismantle the very same foundations in order to survive.

If you want evidence for all this, you don't need to look to Europe. You need only look to America. We've had the weakest recovery from a recession in memory. In Gerald Ford's first year as president, the country rebounded at a rate of 6.2 percent. Under Reagan it was 7.7 percent. Even Clinton's recovery rate was over 4 percent from 1993 to 1994 (and grew from there). Obama's recovery has not only been anemic and sputtering at around 3 percent, it hasn't made a dent in the unemployment rate because employers have no confidence that we'll have reliable growth or that Obama isn't waiting to bring the hammer down with more Euro-style policies and taxes.

Obama supporters will respond that he has, in fact, "created" jobs, but just not enough to climb out of the massive hole created by the financial crisis and former President Bush's evil policies. The White House insists that it's not remotely responsible for the 3.2 millions jobs (2.9 million in the private sector) that have disappeared on Obama's watch, but is completely responsible for every single new job that has been created or "saved" since then.

But consider this about the relatively few new net jobs the economy has created under Obama. As my National Review colleague Rich Lowry recently noted, half of all the new net jobs created in the United States (from August 2009 to August 2010) were created in Texas. According to White House logic, Obama must simply love Texas, since he's the one creating all of those jobs. You have to wonder what he has against New York or California -- you know, the states that actually share Obama's economic vision and are descending into an economic abyss as we speak. Why reward low-tax, pro-growth Texas with all of these jobs?

SOURCE

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Democrats call Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell and others stupid

As usual, it shows that abuse and arrogance is all that they've got

The 2010 election has devolved in its closing days into a battle – familiar in American history and high school alike – over who’s stupid, and who’s a snob.

Palin “has made ignorance fashionable,” the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote Wednesday, comparing the Alaska Governor’s intellect – unfavorably – to Marilyn Monroe’s.

Rachel Maddow occupied her MSNBC show Tuesday night mocking a series of Republican figures, laughing through a clip of O’Donnell’s attempt to explain that the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, a point that drew nothing but ridicule on the left and in the British press. “The crowd is laughing at you,” she said as O’Donnell appeared on-screen.

Republicans say this strategy will work about as well this year as it did when used against Ronald Reagan.

But the Democrats are just getting started. Their laughter will be noisiest in a rally on the Mall on the eve of the midterm election, led by two comedians who have reveled in mocking the resurgent conservative grassroots. Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have tapped into the Democratic Party’s ironic, scornful mood.

In doing so, they’ve also brought to light some of the party’s most self-destructive tendencies, the elitism and condescension that Bill Clinton sought to purge in the 1990s, when he matched a progressive agenda with the persona of a likeable “Bubba” to win two terms. Not many Democrats could pull it off. Charges of elitism dogged John Kerry in 2004 and resurfaced against Barack Obama at his lowest points in Pennsylvania in the spring of 2008, when he was recorded saying that small town people “cling” to their faith and their guns.

And President Obama himself has given his blessing to the election-eve irony-fest on the Mall, planning to appear on Stewart’s show in advance of the rally and plugging it in a recent appearance in Ohio, suggesting that Stewart’s point was to rally a silent, “sane” majority.

“There is a tendency now in the Democratic Party not only to disagree with, but to belittle political opponents,” said former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen, who accused Obama of “blaming the voters.” He called the posture “counterproductive,” and indeed, the Democrats have provoked the almost automatic backlash.

“These are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote of a recent Obama comment about how voters were responding to Republicans out of fear. Gerson interpreted it as saying that Republicans had lapsed into reliance on their “lizard brains” while Democrats used their higher faculties.

More HERE

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The New Republican Right

By Dick Morris

A fundamental change is gripping the Republican grass roots as they animate the GOP surge to a major victory in the 2010 elections. No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops. Now economic and fiscal issues prevail. The Tea Party has made the Republican Party safe for libertarians.

There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation and curbing spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.

It is one of the fundamental planks in the Tea Party platform that the movement does not concern itself with social issues. At the Tea Parties, evangelical pro-lifers rub shoulders happily with gay libertarians. They are united by their anger at Obama's economic policies, fear of his deficits and horror at his looming tax increases. Obama's agenda has effectively removed the blocks that stopped tens of millions of social moderates from joining the GOP.

As a byproduct of this sea change in the Republican Party, GOP grassroots activists are no longer just concentrated in the South. They are spread all throughout the nation, as prominent in Ohio as in Alabama, in New York as in Georgia, in California as in Nevada.

The Tea Party's focus on fiscal and economic issues finds deep resonance among voters of all stripes, united as they are in economic hardship and disappointed as they all are by Obama's economic program. This antipathy to federal policies is paving the way for vast Republican inroads in normally solid Democratic turf like New York state, Massachusetts, California and Washington state.

This preference for economic and fiscal questions over social issues is not a top-down decision of the Tea Party leadership. There really is no Tea Party leadership. Those who conduct its affairs are mere coordinators of local groups where the real power lies. The entire affair is a grass roots-dominated movement.

The determination to focus on fiscal and economic issues, to the exclusion of social questions, wells up from below as individual members vent their concerns over ObamaCare, stimulus spending and cap-and-trade legislation. It is around opposition to Obama's agenda, not Roe v. Wade, that the movement is organized. It is a new day on the Republican right.

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Congress has destroyed free check accounts

“Free checking as we know it is ending,” says the lead paragraph of a widely-read and tweeted story this week from the Associated Press. Noting Bank of America’s announced monthly charge of $8.50 for most checking accounts, the article reports that “almost all of the largest U.S. banks are either already making free checking much more difficult to get or expected to do so soon, with fees on even basic banking services.”

And other reports have noted the possible demise of free checking at many regional banks as well. Daniel Indiviglio blogs for The Atlantic that “free checking will soon be something only economic historians talk about.”

But the tide of economic history doesn’t necessarily have to turn this way. As noted in both The Atlantic and AP, the primary reason for free checking going by the wayside is not market forces, but new regulations from Washington.

The main culprits in free checking’s demise are the Federal Reserve’s rules that severely restrict banks from charging overdraft fees when customers make debit card purchases that exceed the balance of their checking accounts and the amendment from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) putting price controls on the interchange fees merchants pay to banks and credit unions to process debit cards. On Tuesday, as noted in the AP story, Bank of America took a $10.4 billion charge against earnings from projected loss of revenue due to the Durbin amendment.

The rules were sold as “protecting” the majority of consumers, but in reality they shifted costs to responsible middle-class consumers from irresponsible consumers who didn’t keep track of their checking accounts. Some of the nation’s biggest retailers also used bank-bashing rhetoric to get their share of corporate welfare at consumers’ expense. As The Atlantic’s Indiviglio writes, “At this point, banks are forbidden from squeezing as many fees out of bad customers and have less freedom to charge merchants. So their only alternative is to demand more money from their good customers.”

I propose that, as one of its first orders of business when it convenes next January, Congress enact “The Free Checking Restoration Act of 2011″ that would remove these cumbersome rules and will almost certainly result in competitive banks and credit unions offering traditional free checking to once again attract customers. The bill would get rid of the Fed’s overdraft rule and the Durbin amendment that puts price controls on merchant interchange fees....

At CEI, our mission is to make good policy good politics, and under current circumstances, promising voters the return of free checking accounts suddenly fits this bill. Since the promise some 80 years ago of ”a chicken in every pot,” political “freebies” have been a mainstay of modern campaigns.

Fiscal conservatives and libertarians usually look askance at these promises since most of the time they involve either spending a sum of money to bring the ”free” good to certain member of the population or mandating that businesses spend to provide this good, and the cost will have to be made up somewhere. But in this instance, Congress would not have to spend or mandate to provide this free good.

Rather, all it would have to do is remove misguided rules that were pushed through thoughtlessly in the Obama administration’s rush to regulate.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

The US economy needs to rob people of their savings? (That's what inflation is): "John Maynard Keynes claimed that people will develop an irrational ‘liquidity preference,’ hoarding money while waiting for interest rates to rise. The modern apostle of the liquidity trap is Paul Krugman, who says the only way out is for the government to spend and inflate, which then will dislodge the hoarded cash, as people spend in anticipation of rising prices. One would hope that the supposed ‘great minds’ at the Fed and in academic economics would better understand inflation and its destructiveness, but that is not to be.”

Fannie, Freddie could hook US taxpayers with $363 billion tab: "U.S. taxpayers could be stuck with a tab more than double its current size for subsidized mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a government regulator said Thursday. If housing prices drop through 2013, the bailed-out lenders will need another $215 billion to stay afloat, for a total bill of $363 billion. Some $148 billion has been spent so far to keep them in the black during the worst recession since the Great Depression.”

France: Riot police sent in to break oil blockade: "Teams of riot police carried out dawn raids to free France’s oil depots Wednesday as industry said the strikes against pension reforms were costing businesses up to $160 million per day. Under orders from President Nicolas Sarkozy, riot police in black body armour broke blockades around three depots in western France overnight, as fuel shortages left a third of France’s filling stations without gasoline. … All 12 of France’s oil refineries are still blocked but police have cleared access to 21 oil depots since Friday, and the government has insisted that fuel shortages will end within five days.”

Two US air marshals flee Brazil after being charged with assault: "Two U.S. air marshals who arrested the wife of a Brazilian judge on a flight to Rio de Janeiro — and were themselves arrested and had their passports confiscated by Brazilian authorities — fled the country using alternate travel documents rather than face what they believed to be trumped-up charges, sources said. The incident has impacted air marshal operations on flights to Brazil, officials said, and air marshals contacted by CNN said the case raises questions about Brazil’s willingness to support future law enforcement actions by U.S. officials on international flights.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). 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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