The miracle of iCapitalism
By Michelle Malkin
Here is your high-resolution teachable moment of the week: anti-capitalist, anti-corporate extremists of "Occupy Wall Street" mourning Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs without a trace of irony. While the Kamp Alinsky Kids ditch school to moan about their massive student debt, parade around in zombie costumes and whine about evil corporations over poached Wi-Fi connections, it's the doers and producers and wealth creators like Jobs who change the world.
They are the gifted 1 percent whom the "99 percenters" mob seeks to demonize, marginalize and tax out of existence.
Inherent in the American success story of the iMac/iPhone/iPad is a powerful lesson about the fundamentals of capitalism. The "Occupiers" chant "people over profit." They call for "caring" over "corporations." But the pursuit of profits empowers people beyond the bounds of imagination.
I blog on an iMac. When I travel, I bring my MacBook Pro. I Tweet news links from my iPhone. My kids are learning Photoshop and GarageBand on our Macs; they use metronome, dictation, video and camera apps daily. I use the technology for business, pleasure, social networking, raising awareness of the missing, finding recipes and even tuning a ukulele.
None of the countless people involved in conceiving these products and bringing them to market "care" about me. They pursued their own self-interests. Through the spontaneous order of capitalism, they enriched themselves -- and the world.
One of my favorite economics essays from which I've drawn bottomless inspiration is Leonard Read's "I, Pencil." He turned a mundane writing instrument into an elementary study of free-market capitalism. What goes for the pencil goes for any of the products Jobs introduced.
"I have a profound lesson to teach," Read wrote in the voice of a metaphorical lead pencil. "I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because -- well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me."
Read traces the family tree of the pencil from the Oregon loggers who harvest its cedar wood, to the California millworkers who cut the wood into thin slats, to Mississippi refinery workers, to the Dutch East Indies farmers who produce an oil used to make erasers. All of these people, and many more at the periphery of the process, have special knowledge about their life's work in their separate corners of the earth. But none by himself has the singular knowledge or ability to give birth to a pencil. Few will ever come in contact with the others who make the production of that pencil possible.
It's not because they "care about each other" that they cooperate to deliver any one good. It's the result of self-interest, multiplied millions of times over.
Read illuminates: "There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work." This spontaneous "configuration of human energies" is repeated endlessly in our daily lives. Think of the countless and diverse people involved in producing a Slinky, jump rope or baseball, a diaper, refrigerator or Boeing 747. And, of course, an iMac, iPhone or iPad.
Appreciating this voluntary configuration of human energies, Read argued, is key to possessing "an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith." Indeed. Without that faith, we are susceptible to the force of class-warfare mobs and the arrogance of command-and-control bureaucrats in Washington who believe the role of private American entrepreneurs, producers and wealth generators is to "grow the economy" and who "think at some point you have made enough money."
The progressives who want to bring down "Wall Street" will snipe that Jobs was one of "theirs," not "ours."
He belonged to no one. He was transcendently committed to excellence and beauty and innovation. And yes, he made gobs of money pursuing it all while benefiting hundreds of millions of people around the world whom he never met, but who shed a deep river of tears upon learning of his death this week.
From "I, Pencil" to iPhone, such is the profound, everlasting miracle of iCapitalism -- a triumph of individualism over collectivism, freedom over force and markets over master planning. To borrow an old Apple slogan: It just works.
SOURCE
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Reverse Racism
Thomas Sowell
Among those who have been disappointed by President Barack Obama, none is likely to end up so painfully disappointed as those who saw his election as being, in itself and in its consequences, a movement toward a "post-racial society."
Like so many other expectations that so many people projected onto this little-known man who suddenly burst onto the political scene, the expectation of movement toward a post-racial society had no speck of hard evidence behind it -- and all too many ignored indications of the very opposite, including his two decades of association with the egregious Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Those people of good will who want to replace the racism of the past with a post-racial society have too often overlooked the fact that there are others who instead want to put racism under new management, to have reverse discrimination as racial payback for past injustices.
Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government's role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.
The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder's views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.
Although the Department of Justice's prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.
That lawyer -- J. Christian Adams -- has now written a book, titled "Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department." It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice's civil rights division.
Bad as the Justice Department's decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Despite the efforts of some in the media and in politics to depict the voter intimidation in Philadelphia as just an isolated incident involving a few thugs at one voting place, former U.S. Attorney Adams shows that these thugs were in fact part of a nationwide organization doing similar things elsewhere.
Moreover, the civil rights division of the Justice Department has turned the same blind eye to similar voter intimidation and corruption of the voting process by other people and other organizations in other cities and states -- so long as those being victimized were white and the victimizers were black.
This is all spelled out in detail, naming names and naming places, not only among those in the country at large, but also among those officials of the Justice Department who turned its role of protecting the civil rights of all Americans into a policy of racial partisanship and racial payback.
The widespread, organized and systematic corruption of the voting process revealed by the author of "Injustice" is on a scale that can swing not only local but national elections, including the 2012 elections. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has not only turned a blind eye to blatant evidence of voter fraud, it has actively suppressed those U.S. Attorneys in its own ranks who have tried to stop that fraud.
Even in counties where the number of votes cast exceeds the number of people legally entitled to vote, Eric Holder's Justice Department sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil -- if the end result is the election of black Democrats. It has become the mirror image of the old Jim Crow South.
This is an enormously eye-opening book which makes painfully clear that, where racial issues are concerned, the Department of Justice has become the Department of Payback. A post-racial society is the last thing that Holder and Obama are pursuing.
SOURCE
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Obama Is Occupying America
David Limbaugh
Rational people realize that President Obama's policies have been an abysmal failure, which is why his only hope for re-election is to try to sow confusion among the voters, such as those populating "Occupy Wall Street."
People often say the success of democracy depends on an informed electorate. Given his record, that's the last strategy Obama can afford to embrace. Short of a fortuitous economic miracle falling into his lap, his only hope for re-election is that enough voters are misinformed.
From day one, Obama has been savaging George W. Bush for bequeathing him "the worst economy since the Great Depression." But he hasn't scapegoated Bush alone. He also impugned "fat cat bankers" on Wall Street and other evil corporations for "creating the mess" and for being its primary beneficiaries while everyone else was hurting. Conveniently, he didn't point his accusing finger at the real culprit, the liberal affordable housing policy that he supported.
He leveraged his vague slander against Wall Street to bolster his case against free markets and "crony capitalism" and to lubricate the public for his statist remedies across the board.
His goal was to fundamentally change America -- almost overnight -- with an accelerated push toward socialism, all while insisting he was a "fierce advocate of the free market" and committed to the American ideal. He just loved capitalism, but it couldn't possibly work when all the powerful and moneyed interests were loading the dice.
The scope of Obama's undertaking has been breathtaking, as has been his level of deceit in promoting and implementing it. Borrowing from both the Saul Alinsky and Cloward-Piven models, he excused the real culprits and demonized false ones to saddle the nation with historically reckless spending programs.
He didn't just give us his stimulus bill on the heels of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which he decried despite having his fingerprints all over it. He loaded his omnibus spending bill with earmarks after promising he'd radically reduce them, took over auto companies, crammed through socialized medicine and pushed through a staggeringly problematic financial reform bill that further empowered the government to engage in the same types of tyranny that led to all this. Though he failed to pass his cap-and-trade measure, his Environmental Protection Agency has engaged in a systematic pattern of circumventing Congress to impose further smothering regulations on American businesses.
Despite his profound incompetence on many levels, Obama has been an adept propagandist who has blamed capitalism for problems caused and magnified by socialist remedies to justify further socialist solutions. He's now doing the same thing all over again as his new socialist solutions are failing.
Obama not only eschews responsibility for his primary role in the nation's economic and debt catastrophes but also is using class warfare to foment unrest in his malcontent leftist base and marshaling union thug muscle to attach a veneer of authenticity to Occupy Wall Street, a largely AstroTurf-like phenomenon. Indeed, Obama practically expressed common cause with the protesters at his recent presser and certainly did nothing to calm their ostensible fears.
To appreciate the surreal nature of Occupy Wall Street, you have to watch a few video interviews of some of the protesters and review a laundry list of their complaints. These misguided people are like probation violators castigating their probation officers for catering to their pleas for leniency.
They are taking up all the popular causes of liberalism as they protest against problems spawned by those very causes. They shake their fists at Wall Street, banks, corporations and the wealthy "1 percent," which had little to do with our national nightmare. But they give a complete pass to government and even demand that it be given more power to further destroy what still does work in America.
Nothing illustrates their collective cluelessness more than their fulminating against the national debt while demanding a redoubling of the policies and programs that caused it and will make it immeasurably worse.
Obama is laughing all the way to the evil bank, hoping he can continue to capitalize on this very type of chaos and class envy to eke out re-election in 2012. Obama's protesters are occupying Wall Street while he is occupying America.
SOURCE
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Occupy Wall Street is a Misinformed Fraud
Am I pissed off about executives of banks walking away with golden parachutes and huge bonuses after running banks into the ground? You bet. But I am smart enough to realize that the Federal Government gave them the ammo to kill their companies via Fannie and Freddie, and then saved them with TALF and TARP. You might also remember that government forced companies like Bank of America ($BAC) to merge with Merrill Lynch ($ML), and that going back to 1998, it was President Clinton and Treasury Secretary Rubin that pushed hard for ending Glass-Steagall.
So yeah, I wouldn’t have bailed out the banks. I doubt many Tea Partiers would have. We aren’t happy about the outcome either. We don’t like Dodd-Frank and think it should be repealed. But it doesn’t mean we should nationalize and socialize the entire banking system. That would cause a worse train wreck than we already have.
The OWS crowd is really ticked off about education and student debt. So am I. Why the heck do we have so many subsidies for education? It simply drives up the cost. Education is one gigantic bloated bureaucracy. However, the OWS answer is “free education and forgiveness of student loans.” Well, screw that.
Why not offer competition in education? By the way, no one put a gun to your head an told you to borrow massive sums of money for school. You could have worked your way through, went to a community college the first two years and then a four year school. Did it occur to any of you to check out how much money a typical sociology graduate degreed person made before you ponied up more than 100K to get that sociology masters? Economics work. Used correctly, they help you make good decisions. Used poorly, you do stupid things.
Which politicians are using bigotry and hate? It’s not the right that is consistently playing the race card. Right now it’s the man in the oval office. He plays it as much as he can. I don’t hear cries of racism coming from the right. Were the OWS people in Atlanta racists for not letting a former civil rights activist turned Congressman speak? Just asking.
You guys embrace Obamacare. Yet, you don’t look at how other countries have fared with socialized medicine. Canada is starting to scrap it. England is considering it too. Entitlements eat up our budget. Why not more transparency and a free market targeted to individuals in health care?
OWS wants organic produce. They want green farming. No one takes better care of their land than the guy who owns it. We also can’t feed the world using organic means. OWS would rather see children starving than people eating. There is plenty of organic produce out there. All you have to do is buy it. Why take away freedom from people that don’t want to pay for it?
On energy policy you want green energy. Don’t we all. Problem is, the stuff doesn’t work and its too expensive. The greenest, most powerful energy source out there is nuclear and I don’t see you guys campaigning for more nuclear plants. Have you seen the damage to wildlife that wind energy has created? Energy is about economics. Increase the supply of energy and all prices will come down. But, from your statements I don’t think anyone from OWS spent a lot of time in a free market economics lecture. Google this, TINFL. Understand it. Live it.
You OWS people seem to be upset at corporations that pay no tax. Me too! But, you want to tax them more. I got news for you. Corporations never pay taxes. They are simply tax aggregators. They pass the cost to their consumers. We would be better off charging companies 0% in corporate taxes and incenting them to create jobs here in the US. Then you guys could go to work, pay off your student loans and stay out of the parks so everyone could go and enjoy them.
Most of the problems in the US stem from bad public policy and big government. Governments are awfully hard to put out of business. But it’s easy to put companies out of business. Don’t buy their product. Don’t use their services. Elect Tea Party people, they’ll shrink the size of government and give you more freedom.
We can disband all the companies if you want. We can blow up Wall Street and the capital markets. We can round up all the capitalists and send them to a camp. But, sooner rather than later the totalitarian paradise you envision will be ripped apart by economics. Black markets will tear at the fabric of your structured society. Markets eliminate transaction costs, increase transparency and make things cheaper!
Why? Because earning a profit and building economies of scale and scope are part of the human condition. Mankind has done it since the beginning of time. Our lives are easier, better and our standard of living is raised. All we really need is to get big government out of the way. The sooner you embrace that the better off you will be.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
The left, the race card, and Herman Cain
by Jeff Jacoby
THE DAY AFTER Herman Cain's dazzling victory in the Florida straw poll, I commented to a Republican neighbor -- and where I live, there aren't many of those -- that with Cain as a GOP rock star, liberals who have been so ready to smear President Obama's critics as racist would have to come up with a new shtick.
What was I thinking? Racial McCarthyism has been a staple of left-wing political rhetoric for years, but it went into overdrive with the rise of Barack Obama. Former president Jimmy Carter, for example, claimed that much of the backlash to the president's policies was explained by "the fact that he is a black man." Janeane Garofalo, the movie actress and liberal activist, called Tea Party protesters "racist rednecks" with one motivation: "This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up." Obama himself has sometimes played the race card; as a candidate in 2008 he predicted that Republicans would "try to make you afraid of me" by focusing on his color: "He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"
Of course such accusations are grotesque canards. But cynics and partisan ideologues have never been terribly squeamish about trafficking in ugly innuendoes to win votes, especially when a complacent media lets them get away with it. Still, you might have thought that surging Republican support for a proud black entrepreneur -- an up-from-segregation business star who summarizes his identity as "ABC: American first, black second, and conservative third" -- would make it tough even for cynics and ideologues to keep singing from the same racial hymnal.
Not a chance. "Herman Cain is probably well-liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican Party, conservative movement, and tea party movement," Garofalo theorized in a recent a TV appearance. "Cain provides this great opportunity so [Republicans] can say, 'Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look, we have a black man.'"
In other words, if Republicans or conservatives oppose a public figure who happens to be black, it's because they're racists. And if they support a public figure who happens to be black? That's also because they're racists.
Needless to say, there is no point arguing with such "logic." If Garofalo discovered that Tea Partiers are inordinately fond of applesauce, she would presumably attribute that to racism as well. It would almost be funny, except that there is nothing funny about racial calumny.
Four years ago, the emergence of the Democratic Party's first charismatic, credible black presidential candidate was regarded across the political spectrum as something to celebrate. Even Republicans who strongly opposed Obama because of his positions and outlook -- even John McCain! -- rejoiced in what Obama's success said about America's capacity for self-redemption.
Shouldn't the emergence of Herman Cain -- potentially the GOP's first charismatic, credible black presidential candidate -- evoke similar feelings? Especially if you think the Republican Party has a poor racial record, shouldn't you be encouraged that so many Republicans are excited about Cain? (As a matter of brute historical fact, it was the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that used to be the racist stronghold of American politics. But that's a separate column.)
Whatever his political prospects, Cain's story is exhilarating. Born into poverty in the Jim Crow South, where his mother was a maid and his father a janitor and chauffeur, Cain rose to become a mathematician in the US Navy, a successful business executive, the chairman of a federal reserve bank, and now a Republican star. Liberals should rejoice in his success, even if they disagree with his politics.
Yet on AlterNet, a prominent left-wing website, Cain is jeered as a "black garbage pail kid," a "monkey in the window," and a minstrel performer playing to "white conservative masters." Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who polled for the Obama campaign, blasts Cain as "racist and bigoted" for saying that many black voters have been "brainwashed" into rejecting conservatism. In a new memoir, Cain writes of being slurred as an "Oreo" and an "Uncle Tom" because he is an unabashed Republican conservative.
Love Cain or loathe him, it should be possible to talk about his candidacy without resorting to racial pejoratives. Like Lester Maddox's axe handle, the political race card ought to be by now nothing but an ugly memory -- something no decent voter, activist, or candidate would dream of brandishing.
SOURCE
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More From the Culture of Narcissism
I wouldn’t think it would be worthwhile to draw attention to the Occupy Wall Street “movement,” or its list of demands that wouldn’t pass muster in an average kindergarten class. But if America’s president and vice president choose to talk about it, and give it credibility, then it’s news.
According to VP Joe Biden, demands such as free college, pay independent of work, a $20 minimum wage (why not $100 or $1000?), and a nation with open borders have legitimacy and “a lot in common with the tea party movement.”
President Obama sees these demonstrations against corporate America as reasonable protest toward “the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this situation to begin with.”
This should provide perspective to what our most fundamental problem is today. We have an endangered species in America whose loss threatens our future. That species is called the American adult.
Can someone please explain to our vice president the difference between a screaming infant not getting what he wants, when he wants it and an adult who understands personal responsibility, humility, work and service to others?
A functioning free society requires citizens who are adults capable of overseeing and administering a government which enforce laws that protect life and property.
Once government simply becomes a playpen for those who believe they run the universe and make its basic laws, and that the rest of us must submit to their hallucinations about what is just, we wind up where we are today.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that, according to the latest census data, 48.5 percent of American families now are on the receiving end of some sort of government program, the highest percentage in our history. To provide some perspective, this figure was 10 percent in the 1920’s and a little over 30 percent in 1980.
During the 1960’s, a watershed decade when the infantile culture of narcissism began to subsume free adult culture in America, more government programs were born than in any other period. By 1980, four of these programs of the 1960’s – food stamps, Pell grants, Medicare, and Medicaid – accounted for 164 billion dollars in annual spending. Today these four programs swallow almost an additional trillion dollars.
In all our history, there is only one instance of major reform of a government spending program and that was the welfare reform that was passed in 1996.
These government programs are pure monopolies driven by political power, not efficiency or whether they are serving the real needs of citizens. They don’t change, they only grow.
This contrasts with America’s corporations, who Wall Street protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge, and America’s president and vice president, would like us to believe control everything.
But if big corporations did control everything, they would, like government programs, never change or lose power. But large firms regularly come and go, because, in contrast to government programs, they only remain powerful as long as they are serving consumers.
Of today’s list of 30 major corporations that constitute the Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, only 8 of them were on the list in 1980. The 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average firms have changed 45 times since the average was started 115 years ago.
No, Mr. Biden. Occupy Wall Street has nothing in common with the Tea Party Movement. The Tea Party Movement is protest against abuse of political power and the increasing marginalization and disrespect for truths, such a protection of life, liberty, and property, that define American freedom.
Occupy Wall Street is about lust for political power, about defining what others should have, and redistributing and spending what belongs to some else.
SOURCE
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The Real Problem with Solyndra
Sifting through the Administration-Solyndra emails it is clear that President Obama’s taxpayer investment in Solyndra was not random. Bureaucrats and political appointees spent significant time evaluating the company and debating the merits of the soon-to-be-wasted taxpayer guarantee. And that is exactly the problem!
Thanks to the diligence of various House committees, we now have an inside look at the decision-making process and ongoing conversations related to the Solyndra loan guarantee. Much of the reporting has focused on the political motivations behind the boondoggle, but the real focus should be on the email threads that are more suited for a private corporation than the Executive Branch of the United States.
Vice President Joe Biden’s then-chief of staff Ronald Klain emailed, “Putting my oId private equity hat on, I would say that these guys [Solyndra] are no different than a lot of stage two companies: they are burning capital, perhaps a bit fast, and are dependent on a break or two to be viable outside of the 18 - 24 month window.”
Mr. Klain’s analysis may be fine in the private equity world – you take calculated risks with private money expressly for that purpose. But in government, that is not the case. Americans do not work so their government can take risks, calculated or otherwise, with their tax dollars and discuss burn rates and business development stages.
Another email took a deep dive into Solyndra’s economics: “While debt coverage is robust under stress conditions, the project cash balance goes to $62,000.00 in September 2011.” The email went on to discuss “working capital,” a “funding shortfall” and a “negative cash balance.”
Taken in isolation, you would be tempted to think the email was from an investment advisor. Of course, any investment advisor worth his salt would warn you to stay far away from a company is such a downward spiral.
Matt Rogers, a senior advisor to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, seemed to understand the dire warnings. About the future of the Solyndra, he emailed, it “needs more capital to keep going long-term, which is why they are planning to tap the public markets.”
In email after email, we can find the same thing, bureaucrats and political appointees “putting on hats” and analyzing a private company’s economic viability to determine if they should invest taxpayer money into that company.
This is not the government our founders intended, nor the one we learned in civics class. Rather, this governing style is more suited for a bad Hollywood movie depicting incompetent crony capitalism in a country on the decline.
Ironically, the absurdity of the entire “green jobs” investment scheme was pointed out in an email to Larry Summers, who was the director of the National Economic Council. The snippet is a bit long, but instructive:
The allocation of spending to clean energy is haphazard; the government is just not well equipped to decide which companies should get the money and how much. That is, after all, what my industry does, and there are lots of mechanisms in place to see that it is done right. One of our solar companies with revenues of less than $100 million (and not yet profitable) received a government loan of $580 million; while that is good for us, I can't imagine it's a good way for the governement (SIC) to use taxpayer money (I'd prefer my opinion about that specific company be between us). Every administration seems to feel like it knows better than the private markets how to allocate capital, and I've just never seen that be true.
That email was from Brad Jones, the founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, and the company he referenced was Solyndra. Amusingly, in subsequent emails, Mr. Summers appeared to agree with him, emailing, “I relate well to your view that gov is a crappy vc [venture capitalist] and if u were closer to it you'd feel more strongly."
Another blacked out email warned that the Energy Department’s “‘system’ for monitoring loans is quite problematic…and does not seem to be a program priority.” So, not only were bureaucrats and political appointees acting like investors with our money, they knew they were doing a “crappy” job of it all.
Americans understand that Solyndra is just the most tangible symptom of a much deeper problem. The Washington Establishment’s faith in the power and expertise of government knows no limits. When given nearly unchecked power and money, bureaucrats and political appointees will use taxpayer money however they please, even if they recognize they do it poorly.
Right now, it is Solyndra. But until we get our government out of the daily ins-and-outs of the private sector, we can expect similar boondoggles.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Insurance is the cause — not the cure: "Insurance providing full coverage for every ailment and every medical procedure is the main reason why the cost of healthcare is spiraling out of control. Obamacare will only add to the rising costs by mandating that everyone have full coverage benefits. When everyone has full coverage without exclusions the costs can only go up."
Obama, the soaring sofa: "Cliches are an inexhaustible subject. I’ll always have more to say about them. It’s interesting to watch them come and go -- preferably go. Take 'soaring rhetoric.' (Please!) I don’t know who started that, but once somebody did, it became the phrase almost universally employed in speaking of Candidate Obama’s speeches. I could never understand this phenomenon. His speeches sounded to me like nothing but a tissue of ... well, cliches. And not very good cliches."
The thief of Caracas: "No nation dominated by the politics of socialism has long endured. After an initial frenzy of pillage and theft the inhabitants slide into an inevitable condition of apathy, poverty, and despair. There is no incentive to produce, no private property, no competition, no reason to get ahead of the next fellow. All fruits of effort beyond the minimal are quickly confiscated for consumption by others. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is once again proving the point."
Important new evidence on regime uncertainty: "The idea of regime uncertainty had sound economic theory and substantial empirical evidence to support it from the beginning, and a great deal of additional evidence has accumulated over the past three years. Yet critics have continued to dismiss it either as Republican bunk bought and paid for by Obama-hating billionaires or as a sort of 'just so' story concocted by flaky think-tank nobodies, such as yours truly. Now, however, the research reported by Baker, Bloom, and Davis knocks the ball firmly back into the critics’ court."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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by Jeff Jacoby
THE DAY AFTER Herman Cain's dazzling victory in the Florida straw poll, I commented to a Republican neighbor -- and where I live, there aren't many of those -- that with Cain as a GOP rock star, liberals who have been so ready to smear President Obama's critics as racist would have to come up with a new shtick.
What was I thinking? Racial McCarthyism has been a staple of left-wing political rhetoric for years, but it went into overdrive with the rise of Barack Obama. Former president Jimmy Carter, for example, claimed that much of the backlash to the president's policies was explained by "the fact that he is a black man." Janeane Garofalo, the movie actress and liberal activist, called Tea Party protesters "racist rednecks" with one motivation: "This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up." Obama himself has sometimes played the race card; as a candidate in 2008 he predicted that Republicans would "try to make you afraid of me" by focusing on his color: "He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"
Of course such accusations are grotesque canards. But cynics and partisan ideologues have never been terribly squeamish about trafficking in ugly innuendoes to win votes, especially when a complacent media lets them get away with it. Still, you might have thought that surging Republican support for a proud black entrepreneur -- an up-from-segregation business star who summarizes his identity as "ABC: American first, black second, and conservative third" -- would make it tough even for cynics and ideologues to keep singing from the same racial hymnal.
Not a chance. "Herman Cain is probably well-liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican Party, conservative movement, and tea party movement," Garofalo theorized in a recent a TV appearance. "Cain provides this great opportunity so [Republicans] can say, 'Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look, we have a black man.'"
In other words, if Republicans or conservatives oppose a public figure who happens to be black, it's because they're racists. And if they support a public figure who happens to be black? That's also because they're racists.
Needless to say, there is no point arguing with such "logic." If Garofalo discovered that Tea Partiers are inordinately fond of applesauce, she would presumably attribute that to racism as well. It would almost be funny, except that there is nothing funny about racial calumny.
Four years ago, the emergence of the Democratic Party's first charismatic, credible black presidential candidate was regarded across the political spectrum as something to celebrate. Even Republicans who strongly opposed Obama because of his positions and outlook -- even John McCain! -- rejoiced in what Obama's success said about America's capacity for self-redemption.
Shouldn't the emergence of Herman Cain -- potentially the GOP's first charismatic, credible black presidential candidate -- evoke similar feelings? Especially if you think the Republican Party has a poor racial record, shouldn't you be encouraged that so many Republicans are excited about Cain? (As a matter of brute historical fact, it was the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that used to be the racist stronghold of American politics. But that's a separate column.)
Whatever his political prospects, Cain's story is exhilarating. Born into poverty in the Jim Crow South, where his mother was a maid and his father a janitor and chauffeur, Cain rose to become a mathematician in the US Navy, a successful business executive, the chairman of a federal reserve bank, and now a Republican star. Liberals should rejoice in his success, even if they disagree with his politics.
Yet on AlterNet, a prominent left-wing website, Cain is jeered as a "black garbage pail kid," a "monkey in the window," and a minstrel performer playing to "white conservative masters." Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who polled for the Obama campaign, blasts Cain as "racist and bigoted" for saying that many black voters have been "brainwashed" into rejecting conservatism. In a new memoir, Cain writes of being slurred as an "Oreo" and an "Uncle Tom" because he is an unabashed Republican conservative.
Love Cain or loathe him, it should be possible to talk about his candidacy without resorting to racial pejoratives. Like Lester Maddox's axe handle, the political race card ought to be by now nothing but an ugly memory -- something no decent voter, activist, or candidate would dream of brandishing.
SOURCE
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More From the Culture of Narcissism
I wouldn’t think it would be worthwhile to draw attention to the Occupy Wall Street “movement,” or its list of demands that wouldn’t pass muster in an average kindergarten class. But if America’s president and vice president choose to talk about it, and give it credibility, then it’s news.
According to VP Joe Biden, demands such as free college, pay independent of work, a $20 minimum wage (why not $100 or $1000?), and a nation with open borders have legitimacy and “a lot in common with the tea party movement.”
President Obama sees these demonstrations against corporate America as reasonable protest toward “the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this situation to begin with.”
This should provide perspective to what our most fundamental problem is today. We have an endangered species in America whose loss threatens our future. That species is called the American adult.
Can someone please explain to our vice president the difference between a screaming infant not getting what he wants, when he wants it and an adult who understands personal responsibility, humility, work and service to others?
A functioning free society requires citizens who are adults capable of overseeing and administering a government which enforce laws that protect life and property.
Once government simply becomes a playpen for those who believe they run the universe and make its basic laws, and that the rest of us must submit to their hallucinations about what is just, we wind up where we are today.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that, according to the latest census data, 48.5 percent of American families now are on the receiving end of some sort of government program, the highest percentage in our history. To provide some perspective, this figure was 10 percent in the 1920’s and a little over 30 percent in 1980.
During the 1960’s, a watershed decade when the infantile culture of narcissism began to subsume free adult culture in America, more government programs were born than in any other period. By 1980, four of these programs of the 1960’s – food stamps, Pell grants, Medicare, and Medicaid – accounted for 164 billion dollars in annual spending. Today these four programs swallow almost an additional trillion dollars.
In all our history, there is only one instance of major reform of a government spending program and that was the welfare reform that was passed in 1996.
These government programs are pure monopolies driven by political power, not efficiency or whether they are serving the real needs of citizens. They don’t change, they only grow.
This contrasts with America’s corporations, who Wall Street protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge, and America’s president and vice president, would like us to believe control everything.
But if big corporations did control everything, they would, like government programs, never change or lose power. But large firms regularly come and go, because, in contrast to government programs, they only remain powerful as long as they are serving consumers.
Of today’s list of 30 major corporations that constitute the Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, only 8 of them were on the list in 1980. The 30 Dow Jones Industrial Average firms have changed 45 times since the average was started 115 years ago.
No, Mr. Biden. Occupy Wall Street has nothing in common with the Tea Party Movement. The Tea Party Movement is protest against abuse of political power and the increasing marginalization and disrespect for truths, such a protection of life, liberty, and property, that define American freedom.
Occupy Wall Street is about lust for political power, about defining what others should have, and redistributing and spending what belongs to some else.
SOURCE
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The Real Problem with Solyndra
Sifting through the Administration-Solyndra emails it is clear that President Obama’s taxpayer investment in Solyndra was not random. Bureaucrats and political appointees spent significant time evaluating the company and debating the merits of the soon-to-be-wasted taxpayer guarantee. And that is exactly the problem!
Thanks to the diligence of various House committees, we now have an inside look at the decision-making process and ongoing conversations related to the Solyndra loan guarantee. Much of the reporting has focused on the political motivations behind the boondoggle, but the real focus should be on the email threads that are more suited for a private corporation than the Executive Branch of the United States.
Vice President Joe Biden’s then-chief of staff Ronald Klain emailed, “Putting my oId private equity hat on, I would say that these guys [Solyndra] are no different than a lot of stage two companies: they are burning capital, perhaps a bit fast, and are dependent on a break or two to be viable outside of the 18 - 24 month window.”
Mr. Klain’s analysis may be fine in the private equity world – you take calculated risks with private money expressly for that purpose. But in government, that is not the case. Americans do not work so their government can take risks, calculated or otherwise, with their tax dollars and discuss burn rates and business development stages.
Another email took a deep dive into Solyndra’s economics: “While debt coverage is robust under stress conditions, the project cash balance goes to $62,000.00 in September 2011.” The email went on to discuss “working capital,” a “funding shortfall” and a “negative cash balance.”
Taken in isolation, you would be tempted to think the email was from an investment advisor. Of course, any investment advisor worth his salt would warn you to stay far away from a company is such a downward spiral.
Matt Rogers, a senior advisor to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, seemed to understand the dire warnings. About the future of the Solyndra, he emailed, it “needs more capital to keep going long-term, which is why they are planning to tap the public markets.”
In email after email, we can find the same thing, bureaucrats and political appointees “putting on hats” and analyzing a private company’s economic viability to determine if they should invest taxpayer money into that company.
This is not the government our founders intended, nor the one we learned in civics class. Rather, this governing style is more suited for a bad Hollywood movie depicting incompetent crony capitalism in a country on the decline.
Ironically, the absurdity of the entire “green jobs” investment scheme was pointed out in an email to Larry Summers, who was the director of the National Economic Council. The snippet is a bit long, but instructive:
The allocation of spending to clean energy is haphazard; the government is just not well equipped to decide which companies should get the money and how much. That is, after all, what my industry does, and there are lots of mechanisms in place to see that it is done right. One of our solar companies with revenues of less than $100 million (and not yet profitable) received a government loan of $580 million; while that is good for us, I can't imagine it's a good way for the governement (SIC) to use taxpayer money (I'd prefer my opinion about that specific company be between us). Every administration seems to feel like it knows better than the private markets how to allocate capital, and I've just never seen that be true.
That email was from Brad Jones, the founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, and the company he referenced was Solyndra. Amusingly, in subsequent emails, Mr. Summers appeared to agree with him, emailing, “I relate well to your view that gov is a crappy vc [venture capitalist] and if u were closer to it you'd feel more strongly."
Another blacked out email warned that the Energy Department’s “‘system’ for monitoring loans is quite problematic…and does not seem to be a program priority.” So, not only were bureaucrats and political appointees acting like investors with our money, they knew they were doing a “crappy” job of it all.
Americans understand that Solyndra is just the most tangible symptom of a much deeper problem. The Washington Establishment’s faith in the power and expertise of government knows no limits. When given nearly unchecked power and money, bureaucrats and political appointees will use taxpayer money however they please, even if they recognize they do it poorly.
Right now, it is Solyndra. But until we get our government out of the daily ins-and-outs of the private sector, we can expect similar boondoggles.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Insurance is the cause — not the cure: "Insurance providing full coverage for every ailment and every medical procedure is the main reason why the cost of healthcare is spiraling out of control. Obamacare will only add to the rising costs by mandating that everyone have full coverage benefits. When everyone has full coverage without exclusions the costs can only go up."
Obama, the soaring sofa: "Cliches are an inexhaustible subject. I’ll always have more to say about them. It’s interesting to watch them come and go -- preferably go. Take 'soaring rhetoric.' (Please!) I don’t know who started that, but once somebody did, it became the phrase almost universally employed in speaking of Candidate Obama’s speeches. I could never understand this phenomenon. His speeches sounded to me like nothing but a tissue of ... well, cliches. And not very good cliches."
The thief of Caracas: "No nation dominated by the politics of socialism has long endured. After an initial frenzy of pillage and theft the inhabitants slide into an inevitable condition of apathy, poverty, and despair. There is no incentive to produce, no private property, no competition, no reason to get ahead of the next fellow. All fruits of effort beyond the minimal are quickly confiscated for consumption by others. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is once again proving the point."
Important new evidence on regime uncertainty: "The idea of regime uncertainty had sound economic theory and substantial empirical evidence to support it from the beginning, and a great deal of additional evidence has accumulated over the past three years. Yet critics have continued to dismiss it either as Republican bunk bought and paid for by Obama-hating billionaires or as a sort of 'just so' story concocted by flaky think-tank nobodies, such as yours truly. Now, however, the research reported by Baker, Bloom, and Davis knocks the ball firmly back into the critics’ court."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Sunday, October 09, 2011
Elizabeth Warren and liberalism, twisting the ‘social contract’
Batty Elizabeth Warren thinks the government builds America's roads. Roads are in fact built by American workers who are paid by the American taxpayer. The government is merely a ham-fisted intermediary. And almost all income taxes are paid by "The Rich" -- defined as the top 50% of income earners. So it is in fact "The Rich" who have built the roads! -- JR
By George F. Will
Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.
The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says. Warren says:
Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.
Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.
The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.
Warren’s statement is a footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government — of the ability to govern one’s self. This liberalism postulates that, in the modern social context, only a special few people can literally make up their own minds.
In “The Affluent Society” (1958), modern liberalism’s symptomatic text, Galbraith, a Harvard economist, baldly asserted that corporations’ marketing powers — basically, advertising — are so potent they can manufacture demands for whatever goods and services they want to supply. Corporations can nullify consumer sovereignty and vitiate the law of supply and demand. Galbraith asserted this while Ford’s marketers were failing to create a demand for Edsels.
Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds, agree that other Americans comprise a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd whose “false consciousness” is imposed by corporate America. Therefore the herd needs kindly, paternal supervision by a cohort of protective herders. This means subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government staffed by people drawn from the clever minority not manipulated into false consciousness.
Because such tutelary government must presume the public’s incompetence, it owes minimal deference to people’s preferences. These preferences are not really “theirs,” because the preferences derive from false, meaning imposed, consciousness. This convenient theory licenses the enlightened vanguard, the political class, to exercise maximum discretion in wielding the powers of the regulatory state.
Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.
Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation. Government facilitates this cooperation with roads, schools, police, etc. — and by getting out of its way. This is a sensible, dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.”
SOURCE
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The ‘Injustice’ Department: J. Christian Adams’ New Book Exposes DOJ Defending Racism, Islamic Extremism
There is something terribly wrong with our Justice Department. Under Barack Obama, it is no longer interested in justice at all but instead has become a base used by far-left ideologues and race baiters to destroy the American idea of the equality of rights of all people before the law.
J. Christian Adams is the heroic former election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights section at the U.S. Department of Justice. He blew the lid off the Black Panther case of voter intimidation that Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute. Now he is exposing the Obama administration’s secret (or not-so-secret) race war and complete abandonment of individual rights.
In his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery), Adams, who worked inside the DOJ for five years, tells the whole shocking story about how Obama has allowed – or commanded – the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to be politicized. For his efforts to expose the corruption of the Obama Justice Department, Adams was my co-recipient of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Annie Taylor Award for Courage in 2010. And that honor was richly deserved. As Adams shows in this book, if you’re not a member of one of the groups that the Obama administration considers to be its constituency, there’s no justice for you. But if you are a black militant or a member of one of Obama’s other favored groups, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done: you won’t pay any penalty, no matter how serious your crimes.
Adams resigned from the DOJ after Obama’s cronies in the Justice (!) Department dropped the charges against the New Black Panther Party for its violation of voters’ rights on Election Day 2008, when menacing and threatening Black Panthers patrolled polling places in Philadelphia. During the actual voting, New Black Panther Party members threatened voters at the polls with deadly weapons and blocked poll and campaign workers from polling places with threats. Despite that, Obama, our Chicago political boss-in-chief, refused to prosecute the Panthers with their nightsticks and billy clubs.
In Injustice, Adams tells the whole story of that sorry episode for the first time and provides details of Obama’s public appearance with the Panthers in 2007. The New Black Panther Party offered Obama vocal support. New Black Panther Party support for Obama’s candidacy was posted loudly and proudly on Obama’s website back in March 2008, as I showed at the time at my website. Blogs like Atlas Shrugs that shined the light on the ugly underbelly of Obama’s campaign of race baiting and anti-semitism got the Obama campaign to take down a Panther-created support page. Nevertheless, as Adams shows in Injustice, their support for Obama has paid off big-time.
If the politicization and corruption of the Justice Department were limited to this one incident, that would be bad enough. But Injustice shows that the rot has spread much farther. Adams reveals how Obama and Holder have actually changed the hiring standards at the DOJ so they could pack the department with more radical leftists.
Adams also sheds new light on the case of Safoorah Khan, the Muslim teacher in a Chicago middle school who demanded three weeks off to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and whose case was taken up by Obama’s DOJ. Who starts a teaching job and demands close to a month off for hajj? What teacher would leave her students in the lurch for a month? And who pushed a Justice Department to “examine” the case of this hajj pilgrim in a move completely at odds with its goals and objectives? Islamic supremacists seeking to impose religion on the public square, that’s who.
And what Justice Department would sue on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood-tied Islamic supremacists? That of Iran? Malaysia? Egypt? No, the one in Obama’s America. Obama has made this the mission of his presidency. This was hardly the first case of the DOJ suing to impose Islam on the secular arena.
Obama’s attempts to mine America’s racial divide and pander to Islamic supremacists, and his use of the Department of Justice to do it, are despicable. This ugly racism and shilling for Islamic extremism ought to be obliterated and shunned by society. Instead, this man revels in it. Obama’s ties to radicals and seditious, America-hating groups is disturbing and dangerous. And as J. Christian Adams shows in this essential new book, those ties have now thoroughly corrupted the Justice Department.
SOURCE
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"Mandates" to be trimmed back under Obnamacare?
At last a still, small voice of reason: Health-care law benefits must be limited to ensure affordability, panel says
An advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health-care law.
Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM).
“The question is what is the fairest, most transparent way to get a reasonable set of benefits and still keep it affordable for both the user and for the taxpayers,” said committee member Marjorie Ginsburg. “We don’t want to say that one is more important than the other..... But the limiting issue obviously is affordability.”
The findings highlight the difficult balancing act the administration faces in carrying out one of the the health-care law’s most sweeping, yet ambiguous, mandates. The statute sets out 10 general categories — ranging from hospitalization to prescription drugs — that all new insurance plans for individuals and small businesses must offer starting in 2014. It also states that the scope of the essential benefits package should be equal to that of a “typical employer plan.”
But Congress did not specify whether this referred to the more generous plans sponsored by large employers or the more minimalist versions bought by many small businesses. And it gave Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius ultimate authority to decide both how much more detailed to make the package and what to include in it.
If she adds little to the legal requirement, the market could end up split between cheap, bare-bones plans of use only to the healthy, and exorbitantly priced full coverage plans financially out of reach of many sick people who need them most.
If she adds too many requirements, premiums for all plans could soar — with consequences for not just individuals but the success of the law as a whole. That’s because many healthy people could decide to pay a penalty instead of buying pricey insurance, skewing the risk pool toward the sick and causing premiums to spiral higher.
That would also cause a spike in the subsidies for health insurance premiums, which the law requires the federal government to offer low-income people, hammering the national budget.
Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, said the recommendations were “very helpful to the discussion.”
SOURCE
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The Power of Civil Society
Conservatives and liberals clash frequently on a wide array of issues, from taxes to trade, from deficits to defense. But their greatest conflict may lie in their contrasting attitudes toward civil society.
Conservatives regard the institutions of civil society -- families, churches and communities -- as sources of hope and renewal. Self-styled "progressives" see these institutions as seedbeds of prejudice and ignorance.
Conservatives believe that poverty stems largely from a lack of spiritual resources, resources that are typically transmitted through private, voluntary groups. Progressives view poverty as a simple lack of resources.
Conservatives believe that social justice is best pursued through the restoration of community, familial love, self-respect and responsibility -- all products of a robust civil society. Progressives believe that social justice requires that we redistribute material wealth.
Consider, too, how both groups react to the Tea Party movement.
For conservatives, this movement is a classic example of civil society in action: Ordinary Americans, appalled by the sudden, massive expansion of Big Government, and by the equally sudden, explosive growth of the national debt, have spontaneously organized into associations demanding change.
The great French author Alexis de Tocqueville would surely applaud the Tea Party movement. He would see in it an example of how a vigorous civil society, by serving as a check on the centralizing ambitions of the state, is vital to the health and well-being of democracy.
But progressives support the centralizing ambitions of the state. Thus, they've attacked the Tea Party movement with a fury that might have reminded Tocqueville of the French Revolution's hatred of religion. Prominent progressives have denounced Tea Party members as "terrorists," "racists" and "Nazis" who deserve to be "taken out."
The depth of progressive hatred of the Tea Party movement is startling. But I suppose this is how the "ruling class" invariably reacts whenever the "lower orders" start acting uppity.
Make no mistake: although today's "ruling class" calls itself progressive, it is in fact profoundly reactionary.
By undermining civil society, strengthening the state, and even trying to pin a smiley face on Big Government by renaming it "the federal family," it is laying the groundwork for the democratic despotism that Tocqueville foresaw, and warned against in his landmark book, Democracy in America.
Progressive hostility to the Tea Party movement has reinforced my conviction that strengthening civil society is more urgent today than ever before. We Americans need to regain something of Tocqueville's sense of awe and wonder at the power, ingenuity and creativity of those vital institutions.
Several years ago, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told a Heritage Foundation audience how a vibrant civil society contributed to a more just society in the rural Georgia of his youth:
"When someone down the road fell upon hard times," Justice Thomas recalled, "or when sickness beset a family, or when a hurricane or fire destroyed or damaged someone's house, people instinctively helped in whatever way they could. Not helping was unthinkable."
We need to remember that we are not helpless, ignorant masses desperately clinging to our guns or religion, as President Obama once said on the campaign trail. Nor are we anxiously awaiting the arrival of a messiah-president to deliver us from what Tocqueville called "the trouble of thinking and the cares of living."
Rather, we are the American people. We remain strong and resourceful. And we must open our minds to the untapped potential of freedom, to the hidden strengths of civil society, and to the indomitable power of the American spirit.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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Batty Elizabeth Warren thinks the government builds America's roads. Roads are in fact built by American workers who are paid by the American taxpayer. The government is merely a ham-fisted intermediary. And almost all income taxes are paid by "The Rich" -- defined as the top 50% of income earners. So it is in fact "The Rich" who have built the roads! -- JR
By George F. Will
Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.
The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says. Warren says:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.... You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.
Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.
The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.
Warren’s statement is a footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government — of the ability to govern one’s self. This liberalism postulates that, in the modern social context, only a special few people can literally make up their own minds.
In “The Affluent Society” (1958), modern liberalism’s symptomatic text, Galbraith, a Harvard economist, baldly asserted that corporations’ marketing powers — basically, advertising — are so potent they can manufacture demands for whatever goods and services they want to supply. Corporations can nullify consumer sovereignty and vitiate the law of supply and demand. Galbraith asserted this while Ford’s marketers were failing to create a demand for Edsels.
Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds, agree that other Americans comprise a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd whose “false consciousness” is imposed by corporate America. Therefore the herd needs kindly, paternal supervision by a cohort of protective herders. This means subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government staffed by people drawn from the clever minority not manipulated into false consciousness.
Because such tutelary government must presume the public’s incompetence, it owes minimal deference to people’s preferences. These preferences are not really “theirs,” because the preferences derive from false, meaning imposed, consciousness. This convenient theory licenses the enlightened vanguard, the political class, to exercise maximum discretion in wielding the powers of the regulatory state.
Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.
Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation. Government facilitates this cooperation with roads, schools, police, etc. — and by getting out of its way. This is a sensible, dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.”
SOURCE
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The ‘Injustice’ Department: J. Christian Adams’ New Book Exposes DOJ Defending Racism, Islamic Extremism
There is something terribly wrong with our Justice Department. Under Barack Obama, it is no longer interested in justice at all but instead has become a base used by far-left ideologues and race baiters to destroy the American idea of the equality of rights of all people before the law.
J. Christian Adams is the heroic former election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights section at the U.S. Department of Justice. He blew the lid off the Black Panther case of voter intimidation that Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute. Now he is exposing the Obama administration’s secret (or not-so-secret) race war and complete abandonment of individual rights.
In his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery), Adams, who worked inside the DOJ for five years, tells the whole shocking story about how Obama has allowed – or commanded – the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to be politicized. For his efforts to expose the corruption of the Obama Justice Department, Adams was my co-recipient of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Annie Taylor Award for Courage in 2010. And that honor was richly deserved. As Adams shows in this book, if you’re not a member of one of the groups that the Obama administration considers to be its constituency, there’s no justice for you. But if you are a black militant or a member of one of Obama’s other favored groups, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done: you won’t pay any penalty, no matter how serious your crimes.
Adams resigned from the DOJ after Obama’s cronies in the Justice (!) Department dropped the charges against the New Black Panther Party for its violation of voters’ rights on Election Day 2008, when menacing and threatening Black Panthers patrolled polling places in Philadelphia. During the actual voting, New Black Panther Party members threatened voters at the polls with deadly weapons and blocked poll and campaign workers from polling places with threats. Despite that, Obama, our Chicago political boss-in-chief, refused to prosecute the Panthers with their nightsticks and billy clubs.
In Injustice, Adams tells the whole story of that sorry episode for the first time and provides details of Obama’s public appearance with the Panthers in 2007. The New Black Panther Party offered Obama vocal support. New Black Panther Party support for Obama’s candidacy was posted loudly and proudly on Obama’s website back in March 2008, as I showed at the time at my website. Blogs like Atlas Shrugs that shined the light on the ugly underbelly of Obama’s campaign of race baiting and anti-semitism got the Obama campaign to take down a Panther-created support page. Nevertheless, as Adams shows in Injustice, their support for Obama has paid off big-time.
If the politicization and corruption of the Justice Department were limited to this one incident, that would be bad enough. But Injustice shows that the rot has spread much farther. Adams reveals how Obama and Holder have actually changed the hiring standards at the DOJ so they could pack the department with more radical leftists.
Adams also sheds new light on the case of Safoorah Khan, the Muslim teacher in a Chicago middle school who demanded three weeks off to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and whose case was taken up by Obama’s DOJ. Who starts a teaching job and demands close to a month off for hajj? What teacher would leave her students in the lurch for a month? And who pushed a Justice Department to “examine” the case of this hajj pilgrim in a move completely at odds with its goals and objectives? Islamic supremacists seeking to impose religion on the public square, that’s who.
And what Justice Department would sue on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood-tied Islamic supremacists? That of Iran? Malaysia? Egypt? No, the one in Obama’s America. Obama has made this the mission of his presidency. This was hardly the first case of the DOJ suing to impose Islam on the secular arena.
Obama’s attempts to mine America’s racial divide and pander to Islamic supremacists, and his use of the Department of Justice to do it, are despicable. This ugly racism and shilling for Islamic extremism ought to be obliterated and shunned by society. Instead, this man revels in it. Obama’s ties to radicals and seditious, America-hating groups is disturbing and dangerous. And as J. Christian Adams shows in this essential new book, those ties have now thoroughly corrupted the Justice Department.
SOURCE
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"Mandates" to be trimmed back under Obnamacare?
At last a still, small voice of reason: Health-care law benefits must be limited to ensure affordability, panel says
An advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health-care law.
Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM).
“The question is what is the fairest, most transparent way to get a reasonable set of benefits and still keep it affordable for both the user and for the taxpayers,” said committee member Marjorie Ginsburg. “We don’t want to say that one is more important than the other..... But the limiting issue obviously is affordability.”
The findings highlight the difficult balancing act the administration faces in carrying out one of the the health-care law’s most sweeping, yet ambiguous, mandates. The statute sets out 10 general categories — ranging from hospitalization to prescription drugs — that all new insurance plans for individuals and small businesses must offer starting in 2014. It also states that the scope of the essential benefits package should be equal to that of a “typical employer plan.”
But Congress did not specify whether this referred to the more generous plans sponsored by large employers or the more minimalist versions bought by many small businesses. And it gave Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius ultimate authority to decide both how much more detailed to make the package and what to include in it.
If she adds little to the legal requirement, the market could end up split between cheap, bare-bones plans of use only to the healthy, and exorbitantly priced full coverage plans financially out of reach of many sick people who need them most.
If she adds too many requirements, premiums for all plans could soar — with consequences for not just individuals but the success of the law as a whole. That’s because many healthy people could decide to pay a penalty instead of buying pricey insurance, skewing the risk pool toward the sick and causing premiums to spiral higher.
That would also cause a spike in the subsidies for health insurance premiums, which the law requires the federal government to offer low-income people, hammering the national budget.
Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, said the recommendations were “very helpful to the discussion.”
SOURCE
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The Power of Civil Society
Conservatives and liberals clash frequently on a wide array of issues, from taxes to trade, from deficits to defense. But their greatest conflict may lie in their contrasting attitudes toward civil society.
Conservatives regard the institutions of civil society -- families, churches and communities -- as sources of hope and renewal. Self-styled "progressives" see these institutions as seedbeds of prejudice and ignorance.
Conservatives believe that poverty stems largely from a lack of spiritual resources, resources that are typically transmitted through private, voluntary groups. Progressives view poverty as a simple lack of resources.
Conservatives believe that social justice is best pursued through the restoration of community, familial love, self-respect and responsibility -- all products of a robust civil society. Progressives believe that social justice requires that we redistribute material wealth.
Consider, too, how both groups react to the Tea Party movement.
For conservatives, this movement is a classic example of civil society in action: Ordinary Americans, appalled by the sudden, massive expansion of Big Government, and by the equally sudden, explosive growth of the national debt, have spontaneously organized into associations demanding change.
The great French author Alexis de Tocqueville would surely applaud the Tea Party movement. He would see in it an example of how a vigorous civil society, by serving as a check on the centralizing ambitions of the state, is vital to the health and well-being of democracy.
But progressives support the centralizing ambitions of the state. Thus, they've attacked the Tea Party movement with a fury that might have reminded Tocqueville of the French Revolution's hatred of religion. Prominent progressives have denounced Tea Party members as "terrorists," "racists" and "Nazis" who deserve to be "taken out."
The depth of progressive hatred of the Tea Party movement is startling. But I suppose this is how the "ruling class" invariably reacts whenever the "lower orders" start acting uppity.
Make no mistake: although today's "ruling class" calls itself progressive, it is in fact profoundly reactionary.
By undermining civil society, strengthening the state, and even trying to pin a smiley face on Big Government by renaming it "the federal family," it is laying the groundwork for the democratic despotism that Tocqueville foresaw, and warned against in his landmark book, Democracy in America.
Progressive hostility to the Tea Party movement has reinforced my conviction that strengthening civil society is more urgent today than ever before. We Americans need to regain something of Tocqueville's sense of awe and wonder at the power, ingenuity and creativity of those vital institutions.
Several years ago, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told a Heritage Foundation audience how a vibrant civil society contributed to a more just society in the rural Georgia of his youth:
"When someone down the road fell upon hard times," Justice Thomas recalled, "or when sickness beset a family, or when a hurricane or fire destroyed or damaged someone's house, people instinctively helped in whatever way they could. Not helping was unthinkable."
We need to remember that we are not helpless, ignorant masses desperately clinging to our guns or religion, as President Obama once said on the campaign trail. Nor are we anxiously awaiting the arrival of a messiah-president to deliver us from what Tocqueville called "the trouble of thinking and the cares of living."
Rather, we are the American people. We remain strong and resourceful. And we must open our minds to the untapped potential of freedom, to the hidden strengths of civil society, and to the indomitable power of the American spirit.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Saturday, October 08, 2011
The union of concerned Frauds
Anthony Watts, a prominent climate skeptic, has been having some fun:
Reader DJ writes in Tips & Notes: "Since becoming a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists when I found out all you needed was a valid credit card, my curiosity about who and what they really are has spiked."
I decided to put that theory to the test. I am very proud to announce that a member of my family has been accepted into this prestigious organization. With pride, I present new UCS member, Kenji Watts:
Yes, Kenji is our dog. Apparently, the claim is true, all that is required to be a member of the illustrious group of “concerned scientists” is a valid credit card. No discerning questions were asked of me when I prepared Kenji’s application and no follow up check after the application was done. I simply put in his name, address, and provided a valid credit card that matched the address.
So the real question is: How many real “concerned scientists” are there in UCS? Membership is apparently not any more discerning than the ability to send money.
I’m disappointed the Guardian hasn’t called for a quote on this story citing “leading U.S. Scientists”:
SOURCE
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The 54 trillion dollar question: Is Obama on his way out?
As America approaches the third anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic election victory, the country is mired in economic gloom.
Expectations were absurdly high in the autumn of 2008, stoked up not least by the victor’s own campaign team. Yet Americans now seem bemused by how, exactly, it could all have gone so wrong.
In the run-up to his election victory, Mr Obama won praise for keeping quiet about the economy. It was the time of the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, and the financial situation was shifting quickly: since it was hard for anyone to predict what would come next, silence seemed wise. However, some suspected that this reticence betrayed something worse than caution: cluelessness.
Installed in the White House, the new President chose Washington insiders such as Timothy Geithner (a former central banker) to be Treasury Secretary, and Larry Summers (who had held that post under Bill Clinton) to be his chief economics adviser.
Both men had, in different ways, been complicit in the policy mistakes that had devastated the U.S. economy. Their appointment suggested the Obama administration would have no new, radical ideas to improve the economy. That has turned out to be so. The old problems have persisted, and in some cases have become worse.
After three years, the U.S. national debt is a breathtaking $14.8 trillion. The total debt, including what households owe, is over $54 trillion.
Growth is negligible. Unemployment is 9.1 per cent, and the leading bank Goldman Sachs predicts it will rise to 9.5 per cent by the middle of next year — just as Mr Obama begs American voters to re-elect him.
There were 115,730 job cuts in September, double the number in August, and the highest monthly figure since April 2009. Around 70 per cent of those losses were from the U.S. Army, which cut 50,000 people, and the Bank of America, which shed 30,000.
The administration consoles itself that, on the other hand, 76,551 people obtained new jobs last month, but that was down almost 50,000 from the same month last year.
Few aspects of the economic disaster over which Mr Obama is presiding are more telling, or more tragic, than home repossessions. Foreclosures in August were 33 per cent up month-on-month, at 78,000. In 2010 there were 2.9 million, and another 1.2 million in first half of 2011.
Travelling this week around north-east America, between New York and Washington, I saw the unmistakable signs of poverty, industrial dereliction, social problems and decay all over the place.
Whole streets of houses are boarded up; factories closed; pawnbrokers flourish.
Ben Bernanke, head of America’s central bank, said this week that ‘the recovery is closer to faltering’. If this is how bad life is before it falters, God help America.
How have things come to this, after the ‘audacity of hope’ that accompanied the election of Mr Obama?
Quite simply, he and Mr Geithner (joined, until his resignation last year, by Mr Summers) have followed the wrong economic policy ever since they set foot in office.
Like socialists the world over, they believed America could spend its way out of recession. However, nothing has been done to improve productivity, or to assist the creation of wealth. In fact, much has been achieved in the opposite direction by making America a more regulated society, suffocating enterprise and discouraging work.
Their first plan was a stimulus package of $787 billion. It has not created a single job, but has simply added to America’s indebtedness. Its failure partly explains the political fight now raging over Mr Obama’s $447 billion jobs Bill — a desperate attempt to get unemployment down before next year’s presidential election.
While Republicans doubt it will work, there are widespread fears that it will increase the tax burden on those Americans most likely to create the wealth the country needs. For the President is proposing higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 in order to fund his job creation package, as well as extra taxes on the oil and gas industry.
These crippling tax rises are just part of a $1.5 trillion plan advocated by Mr Obama over the next ten years, which Republican critics say will fall on wealth creators and, therefore, on job creators.
The Right-of-centre Heritage Foundation says that the top 10 per cent (those earning more than $114,000 a year) already pay 70 per cent of all income tax while earning only 45 per cent of total income. Even Democrats in wealthier states are worrying about the negative effects.
The truth is that, like the Labour Party in Britain, Mr Obama can’t break his addiction to spending other people’s money. As a result, his policies are starting to hurt — without having any positive effect on the economy.
As for Mr Obama himself, he seems to be concentrating on fund-raising for his re-election campaign rather than endeavouring to rescue the country’s economy.
According to a new poll for the Washington Post, only 58 per cent of Democrats think he will be re-elected and 61 per cent of all voters disapprove of the way he is running the economy.
His only glimmer of hope is the weakness of his Republican opponents, with 76 per cent of Americans disapproving of the way they are conducting themselves. This is evidenced, for example, by the refusal of Republican Majority Leader in Congress, Eric Cantor, to hold a vote on the jobs Bill.
Worryingly for Mr Obama, many Democrats think he’ll be a one-term president. Some even wish he might stand aside and endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor — on the grounds that the economic crisis facing America is insuperable.
SOURCE
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The wannabe tyrants of Wall Street
Disdainful and conspiracy-minded, the protesters claiming to speak for all Americans are acting like teenage despots
The Occupy Wall Street campaigners sure have a lot of attitude. Like self-victimising teenage tyrants, the protesters camped out in New York’s financial district for the past three weeks have spent much of that time complaining that nobody is paying attention to them, that they’re being bullied and that, when it comes to America’s future, it’s their way or the highway.
From the outset, the protesters complained about a ‘media blackout’ and ‘police brutality’. So keen are they to put themselves on a par with the revolts in the Arab world that they have convinced themselves that the US media is being kept away from the scene by powerful forces and that the cops are on standby for violent clampdowns on a regime-threatening protest movement.
True, the relatively small-scale protests have not warranted the NYPD’s ridiculously large deployments, and the cops’ nervous reactions have added fuel to the protesters’ victim-image. But it’s hardly been brutal. And contrary to the complaints of a lack of attention, no follower of the American ‘mainstream media’ could have avoided news of the protests in the past few weeks. A Google search on the very first day of the Wall Street Occupation (Saturday 17 September) brought up coverage from the New York Times, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and more.
Certainly, the media attention has not matched the protesters’ overblown sense of self-importance – that would be an impossible feat. Sure, the protest is gaining some momentum. There have been a number of copycat protests in other American cities and a march on Brooklyn Bridge last weekend led to hundreds of arrests. This was after a video of a policeman dousing two protesters in pepper spray went viral and garnered sympathy for the protesters. On Wednesday, several prominent unions announced their solidarity and marched together with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The demonstration attracted thousands. It was the biggest turnout so far.
Yet despite this dramatic scenery (widely covered by the mainstream press, one might add), what of the protesters’ slogan that ‘we are the 99 per cent’? Like any mantra, the more they repeat it, the more convinced they are that it is the truth. But in fact, this is simply the oldest despotic trick in the book: to take it upon yourself to define the interests of all citizens and then declare yourself their righteous protector.
The so-called General Assembly set up by campaign organisers issues decrees agreed on by whatever group of right-on radicals happens to be around at the time of the meetings in the Financial District. This is a ‘leaderless protest movement’, but those involved apparently see themselves as patrons of simpletons. ‘The working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News, and the right-wing propaganda machine’, says one writer on the protest movement’s website. ‘We need to de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced.’
In other words, the ‘99 per cent’ don’t know what’s good for them. Enter the MacBook-armed, middle-class warriors who want their student debt cancelled. Whether you know – or like – it or not, they know what you need. And anyone who doesn’t get their multifarious point has, we are told, clearly been brainwashed into robotic compliance with a society based on mass consumption.
To be fair, it really is difficult to grasp the protesters’ point. Since they have a commitment to drawing up endless lists of grievances (for instance the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City lists over 20 complaints and has a footnote that says ‘These grievances are not all-inclusive’), the protesters’ aims are indeed confounding. From the death penalty to the environment, from the arms trade to healthcare – the Wall Street Occupation has become a Movement Against Everything.
Rather than seeing their lack of coherence as a limitation, the protesters embrace it as a new form of enlightened ‘direct democracy’. Also, it allows the protesters to refuse to be held accountable for each others’ views. Instead, when one person uses the protest movement’s platform to insult the entire American working class, another can just turn around and say it’s ‘not representative of the whole’.
One recurring view, however, is that Everything is the Corporations’ fault – it’s that one per cent steering every element of society to their own advantage. Not only are corporations ‘holding students hostage’ with thousands of dollars in debt, they have also ‘perpetuated inequality in the workplace’, ‘poisoned the food supply’ and profited from animal torture. In the conspiratorial saga conjured up by the anti-capitalist Wall Street protesters, The Corporation is a faceless, evil force that puppeteers the government, citizens, the media, the legal system and just about any other social force.
The protesters’ wild imagination about the octopus-like Corporation spreading its tentacles into every sphere of life indicates that they have little belief in human agency. Instead we’re all in the grip of powerful forces and there’s little we can do about it. As one placard in Zuccotti Park read: ‘We are the stupid and ignorant nation.’ Thankfully, the Financial District campers have seen through the corporate BS and can now enlighten the rest of us.
For all their talk of anti-capitalism and promoting ‘workers’ solidarity’, the Wall Street protesters are only interested in commandeering the future of America according to their own narrow interests. And when the masses fail to join this attention-seeking movement, the new tyrants of Wall Street are not likely to be surprised: they’ll just figure it’s because Americans are in thrall of the Corporations.
SOURCE
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The American economy is increasingly going underground
And that's most usually a Third world phenomenon
As some of you know, I own a 66 Dodge Polara that I've spent several years and several thousand dollars restoring.
Owning an old car like that requires a trustworthy, inexpensive mechanic to work on it. When I bought my old clunker I was referred to one in Hialeah. Over the years my mechanic did a lot of work on my cacharro, including rebuilding the engine. I became quite friendly with him and during my visits to his shop I passively observed the difficulty of running a shop like his. Permits, insurance, inspectors, certifications, etc. etc. All of that plus the usual overhead like rent and payroll.
Well, long story short, my old car was parked in the garage without moving for an extended period of time. I finally got around to calling the mechanic to let him know I was coming in and he told me he had closed up shop, he'd come to me instead.
Now, this is typical of what's going on with small business. It's being driven underground. The current business environment is prohibitive to set up and keep up a shop. This is not the first time I've seen this. The guy that sold me the audio system for the same car became a friend and he always complained about the same permitting and inspection issues. Last time I saw him he said, "it's not worth it, I'd rather just go mobile and drive around to referrals in an unmarked van."
As these businesses go underground the remaining above-ground bricks and mortar shops will bear an increasing burden and eventually more of them will go underground too. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're regulating commerce to death.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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Anthony Watts, a prominent climate skeptic, has been having some fun:
Reader DJ writes in Tips & Notes: "Since becoming a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists when I found out all you needed was a valid credit card, my curiosity about who and what they really are has spiked."
I decided to put that theory to the test. I am very proud to announce that a member of my family has been accepted into this prestigious organization. With pride, I present new UCS member, Kenji Watts:
Yes, Kenji is our dog. Apparently, the claim is true, all that is required to be a member of the illustrious group of “concerned scientists” is a valid credit card. No discerning questions were asked of me when I prepared Kenji’s application and no follow up check after the application was done. I simply put in his name, address, and provided a valid credit card that matched the address.
So the real question is: How many real “concerned scientists” are there in UCS? Membership is apparently not any more discerning than the ability to send money.
I’m disappointed the Guardian hasn’t called for a quote on this story citing “leading U.S. Scientists”:
SOURCE
***********************
The 54 trillion dollar question: Is Obama on his way out?
As America approaches the third anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic election victory, the country is mired in economic gloom.
Expectations were absurdly high in the autumn of 2008, stoked up not least by the victor’s own campaign team. Yet Americans now seem bemused by how, exactly, it could all have gone so wrong.
In the run-up to his election victory, Mr Obama won praise for keeping quiet about the economy. It was the time of the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, and the financial situation was shifting quickly: since it was hard for anyone to predict what would come next, silence seemed wise. However, some suspected that this reticence betrayed something worse than caution: cluelessness.
Installed in the White House, the new President chose Washington insiders such as Timothy Geithner (a former central banker) to be Treasury Secretary, and Larry Summers (who had held that post under Bill Clinton) to be his chief economics adviser.
Both men had, in different ways, been complicit in the policy mistakes that had devastated the U.S. economy. Their appointment suggested the Obama administration would have no new, radical ideas to improve the economy. That has turned out to be so. The old problems have persisted, and in some cases have become worse.
After three years, the U.S. national debt is a breathtaking $14.8 trillion. The total debt, including what households owe, is over $54 trillion.
Growth is negligible. Unemployment is 9.1 per cent, and the leading bank Goldman Sachs predicts it will rise to 9.5 per cent by the middle of next year — just as Mr Obama begs American voters to re-elect him.
There were 115,730 job cuts in September, double the number in August, and the highest monthly figure since April 2009. Around 70 per cent of those losses were from the U.S. Army, which cut 50,000 people, and the Bank of America, which shed 30,000.
The administration consoles itself that, on the other hand, 76,551 people obtained new jobs last month, but that was down almost 50,000 from the same month last year.
Few aspects of the economic disaster over which Mr Obama is presiding are more telling, or more tragic, than home repossessions. Foreclosures in August were 33 per cent up month-on-month, at 78,000. In 2010 there were 2.9 million, and another 1.2 million in first half of 2011.
Travelling this week around north-east America, between New York and Washington, I saw the unmistakable signs of poverty, industrial dereliction, social problems and decay all over the place.
Whole streets of houses are boarded up; factories closed; pawnbrokers flourish.
Ben Bernanke, head of America’s central bank, said this week that ‘the recovery is closer to faltering’. If this is how bad life is before it falters, God help America.
How have things come to this, after the ‘audacity of hope’ that accompanied the election of Mr Obama?
Quite simply, he and Mr Geithner (joined, until his resignation last year, by Mr Summers) have followed the wrong economic policy ever since they set foot in office.
Like socialists the world over, they believed America could spend its way out of recession. However, nothing has been done to improve productivity, or to assist the creation of wealth. In fact, much has been achieved in the opposite direction by making America a more regulated society, suffocating enterprise and discouraging work.
Their first plan was a stimulus package of $787 billion. It has not created a single job, but has simply added to America’s indebtedness. Its failure partly explains the political fight now raging over Mr Obama’s $447 billion jobs Bill — a desperate attempt to get unemployment down before next year’s presidential election.
While Republicans doubt it will work, there are widespread fears that it will increase the tax burden on those Americans most likely to create the wealth the country needs. For the President is proposing higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 in order to fund his job creation package, as well as extra taxes on the oil and gas industry.
These crippling tax rises are just part of a $1.5 trillion plan advocated by Mr Obama over the next ten years, which Republican critics say will fall on wealth creators and, therefore, on job creators.
The Right-of-centre Heritage Foundation says that the top 10 per cent (those earning more than $114,000 a year) already pay 70 per cent of all income tax while earning only 45 per cent of total income. Even Democrats in wealthier states are worrying about the negative effects.
The truth is that, like the Labour Party in Britain, Mr Obama can’t break his addiction to spending other people’s money. As a result, his policies are starting to hurt — without having any positive effect on the economy.
As for Mr Obama himself, he seems to be concentrating on fund-raising for his re-election campaign rather than endeavouring to rescue the country’s economy.
According to a new poll for the Washington Post, only 58 per cent of Democrats think he will be re-elected and 61 per cent of all voters disapprove of the way he is running the economy.
His only glimmer of hope is the weakness of his Republican opponents, with 76 per cent of Americans disapproving of the way they are conducting themselves. This is evidenced, for example, by the refusal of Republican Majority Leader in Congress, Eric Cantor, to hold a vote on the jobs Bill.
Worryingly for Mr Obama, many Democrats think he’ll be a one-term president. Some even wish he might stand aside and endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor — on the grounds that the economic crisis facing America is insuperable.
SOURCE
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The wannabe tyrants of Wall Street
Disdainful and conspiracy-minded, the protesters claiming to speak for all Americans are acting like teenage despots
The Occupy Wall Street campaigners sure have a lot of attitude. Like self-victimising teenage tyrants, the protesters camped out in New York’s financial district for the past three weeks have spent much of that time complaining that nobody is paying attention to them, that they’re being bullied and that, when it comes to America’s future, it’s their way or the highway.
From the outset, the protesters complained about a ‘media blackout’ and ‘police brutality’. So keen are they to put themselves on a par with the revolts in the Arab world that they have convinced themselves that the US media is being kept away from the scene by powerful forces and that the cops are on standby for violent clampdowns on a regime-threatening protest movement.
True, the relatively small-scale protests have not warranted the NYPD’s ridiculously large deployments, and the cops’ nervous reactions have added fuel to the protesters’ victim-image. But it’s hardly been brutal. And contrary to the complaints of a lack of attention, no follower of the American ‘mainstream media’ could have avoided news of the protests in the past few weeks. A Google search on the very first day of the Wall Street Occupation (Saturday 17 September) brought up coverage from the New York Times, ABC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and more.
Certainly, the media attention has not matched the protesters’ overblown sense of self-importance – that would be an impossible feat. Sure, the protest is gaining some momentum. There have been a number of copycat protests in other American cities and a march on Brooklyn Bridge last weekend led to hundreds of arrests. This was after a video of a policeman dousing two protesters in pepper spray went viral and garnered sympathy for the protesters. On Wednesday, several prominent unions announced their solidarity and marched together with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The demonstration attracted thousands. It was the biggest turnout so far.
Yet despite this dramatic scenery (widely covered by the mainstream press, one might add), what of the protesters’ slogan that ‘we are the 99 per cent’? Like any mantra, the more they repeat it, the more convinced they are that it is the truth. But in fact, this is simply the oldest despotic trick in the book: to take it upon yourself to define the interests of all citizens and then declare yourself their righteous protector.
The so-called General Assembly set up by campaign organisers issues decrees agreed on by whatever group of right-on radicals happens to be around at the time of the meetings in the Financial District. This is a ‘leaderless protest movement’, but those involved apparently see themselves as patrons of simpletons. ‘The working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News, and the right-wing propaganda machine’, says one writer on the protest movement’s website. ‘We need to de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced.’
In other words, the ‘99 per cent’ don’t know what’s good for them. Enter the MacBook-armed, middle-class warriors who want their student debt cancelled. Whether you know – or like – it or not, they know what you need. And anyone who doesn’t get their multifarious point has, we are told, clearly been brainwashed into robotic compliance with a society based on mass consumption.
To be fair, it really is difficult to grasp the protesters’ point. Since they have a commitment to drawing up endless lists of grievances (for instance the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City lists over 20 complaints and has a footnote that says ‘These grievances are not all-inclusive’), the protesters’ aims are indeed confounding. From the death penalty to the environment, from the arms trade to healthcare – the Wall Street Occupation has become a Movement Against Everything.
Rather than seeing their lack of coherence as a limitation, the protesters embrace it as a new form of enlightened ‘direct democracy’. Also, it allows the protesters to refuse to be held accountable for each others’ views. Instead, when one person uses the protest movement’s platform to insult the entire American working class, another can just turn around and say it’s ‘not representative of the whole’.
One recurring view, however, is that Everything is the Corporations’ fault – it’s that one per cent steering every element of society to their own advantage. Not only are corporations ‘holding students hostage’ with thousands of dollars in debt, they have also ‘perpetuated inequality in the workplace’, ‘poisoned the food supply’ and profited from animal torture. In the conspiratorial saga conjured up by the anti-capitalist Wall Street protesters, The Corporation is a faceless, evil force that puppeteers the government, citizens, the media, the legal system and just about any other social force.
The protesters’ wild imagination about the octopus-like Corporation spreading its tentacles into every sphere of life indicates that they have little belief in human agency. Instead we’re all in the grip of powerful forces and there’s little we can do about it. As one placard in Zuccotti Park read: ‘We are the stupid and ignorant nation.’ Thankfully, the Financial District campers have seen through the corporate BS and can now enlighten the rest of us.
For all their talk of anti-capitalism and promoting ‘workers’ solidarity’, the Wall Street protesters are only interested in commandeering the future of America according to their own narrow interests. And when the masses fail to join this attention-seeking movement, the new tyrants of Wall Street are not likely to be surprised: they’ll just figure it’s because Americans are in thrall of the Corporations.
SOURCE
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The American economy is increasingly going underground
And that's most usually a Third world phenomenon
As some of you know, I own a 66 Dodge Polara that I've spent several years and several thousand dollars restoring.
Owning an old car like that requires a trustworthy, inexpensive mechanic to work on it. When I bought my old clunker I was referred to one in Hialeah. Over the years my mechanic did a lot of work on my cacharro, including rebuilding the engine. I became quite friendly with him and during my visits to his shop I passively observed the difficulty of running a shop like his. Permits, insurance, inspectors, certifications, etc. etc. All of that plus the usual overhead like rent and payroll.
Well, long story short, my old car was parked in the garage without moving for an extended period of time. I finally got around to calling the mechanic to let him know I was coming in and he told me he had closed up shop, he'd come to me instead.
Now, this is typical of what's going on with small business. It's being driven underground. The current business environment is prohibitive to set up and keep up a shop. This is not the first time I've seen this. The guy that sold me the audio system for the same car became a friend and he always complained about the same permitting and inspection issues. Last time I saw him he said, "it's not worth it, I'd rather just go mobile and drive around to referrals in an unmarked van."
As these businesses go underground the remaining above-ground bricks and mortar shops will bear an increasing burden and eventually more of them will go underground too. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're regulating commerce to death.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Distrust of intellectuals is not stupid
Hostility toward the philosophes is not unique to Americans, of course. It was the ancient Greeks, after all, who executed Socrates because his philosophy conflicted with their piety. Likewise, there is an element of fear among religious conservatives that the intellectual project as such—not any particular brand of intellectualism—is inherently subversive of their settled wisdom.
But the bigger reason for this anti-intellectual animus is that every time really smart people run the country, things go spectacularly wrong.
The team of the “best and brightest” that Lyndon Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy embroiled America in an ignominy like Vietnam—not to mention Medicare, a fiscal quagmire that, unlike Vietnam, the country can neither exit nor fix without courting bankruptcy or seriously screwing over millions of seniors.
Moreover, George W. Bush’s failures resulted not from his alleged stupidity, as his most vitriolic critics believe, but the brainiacs in his Cabinet. Bush himself might have reveled in his Forest Grump image. But he assembled a team of intellectual stars including Dick Cheney, who was so smart that Beltway Republicans and Democrats wished that he had run for president; Paul Wolfowitz, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies; Condi Rice, provost of Stanford University; and Donald Rumsfeld, who made his mark in academia, politics, and military service. But this Mensa-worthy team, backed by Ivy League neocon intellectuals, left a legacy of Afghanistan, Iraq, and deficits as far as the eye can see.
The prize for discrediting intelligence, however, goes to President Obama. Unlike Bush, he wore his intellect on his sleeve, raising hopes that he could fix the country with sheer brainpower. But he has presided over a deterioration on every front: Deficits are worse, unemployment is higher, a double dip is imminent, and we have added another foreign misadventure.
So why do intelligent people consistently make such a hash of things? Because they are smart enough to talk themselves into anything. Ordinary mortals don’t engage in fancy mental gymnastics to reach conclusions that defy common sense. But intellectuals are particularly prone to this. Hence Bush’s brilliant foreign policy team used the apparatus of the state to search for evidence connecting Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attackers, which its superior ratiocination told them had to exist.
The great hope from Obama was that he would be different. That his thoughtful, professorial demeanor would prompt him to look for policies that worked—not push a preconceived agenda. In fact, when he took office, I hoped that he would be an “empirical president” who dispassionately considered the evidence from all sides before making decisions. One’s preferred position might not win every time under such a president, but it would at least have a shot, something that people outside Bush’s ideological kin never felt they had.
But Obama has been infinitely worse. He has glibly cited Congressional Budget Office scores and stats to argue that extending government-subsidized health coverage to 30 million Americans won’t exacerbate the federal deficit; that a debt-ridden country can borrow its way out of the recession; that pumping tax dollars into pie-in-the-sky green technologies would stimulate growth and produce energy security, and so on.
Ordinary folks might be unable to marshal facts and figures to counter such ludicrous claims, but they know bullshit when they see it. This has two effects on them: One, they feel profoundly disempowered watching their leaders deploy their smarts not on their behalf but against them. And two, since they can’t become experts and academics, they resist by retreating into their own simple certitudes drawn from folk wisdom, faith and founding principles. Indeed, Sarah Palin is as much Barack Obama’s gift to America as she is John McCain’s.
The great political divide right now is not between eggheads and blockheads, as Maureen Dowd puts it, or intellectualism and stupidity, as other self-serving liberal pundits sneer. It is between two types of activism: an irresponsible, pseudo-intellectual one and a retrograde, folksy one. This divide will disappear when some genuinely smart and wise leader earnestly addresses the nation’s problems, instead of pushing his or her loopy program.
SOURCE
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Some history: Stimulus Has Been a Presidential Job Killer
The political graveyards are full of politicians who thought that temporary, targeted economic policies would get them re-elected.
Temporary, targeted tax reductions and increases in government spending are not good economics. They have repeatedly failed to increase economic growth on a sustainable basis. What may come as a surprise is that such policies are not good politics either. Their inability to deliver promised economic benefits has invariably led disappointed voters to turn against those politicians, Democratic and Republican, who have supported them.
Consider the evidence. When President Gerald Ford entered office, the economy was in the midst of the serious 1974-75 recession. Responding to the popular clamor to "do something," he proposed a short-term stimulus plan in early 1975. The centerpiece was a temporary income-tax rebate. Congress added a one-time, $50 increase in Social Security benefits and, to bolster the sagging housing market, a one-time tax credit for new home buyers.
The rebate caused only a temporary blip in consumer spending. Economic growth rose to 9% in the first quarter of 1976 but then dropped to only 2% in the third quarter, and unemployment started rising.
Congress enacted a second stimulus plan in July 1976 over Ford's veto. It authorized grants to state and local governments designed to prevent layoffs of public employees or tax increases. This plan also failed to produce the promised stimulus. The economic pause of 1976 was enough to swing the election to Jimmy Carter and cause more incumbent senators to lose their seats than in any election in nearly 20 years.
President Carter took office and by the end of his first month proposed another stimulus plan, which he said would "restore consumer confidence and consumer purchasing power." His plan called for another round of one-time tax rebates and Social Security bonus payments, federal public infrastructure grants and countercyclical aid to state and local governments.
He also added a tax credit for small and medium-size employers hiring new workers. The fine-tuned plan, according to the chairman of Mr. Carter's Council of Economic Advisers, Charles Shultze, was "designed to tread prudently between the twin risks of over and under-stimulation."
In May 1977, Congress enacted the president's proposals in modified form. Although the pace of economic activity quickened for a while, subsequent studies by senior Carter administration Treasury official Emil Sunley and noted economist Ned Gramlich showed that the government-provided stimulus had little effect. The recovery was not sustained and the economy fell into recession in January 1980. The failing economy combined with rapidly rising inflation doomed Mr. Carter's re-election chances, along with the Democratic Party's control of the Senate and 33 Democratic seats in the House.
President Reagan rejected temporary stimulus measures and instead proposed permanent income-tax rate reductions. His tax program, in conjunction with steady monetary policy begun by Paul Volcker, produced the promised results.
By late 1982 the recession was over and in early 1983 employment and investment began to rise rapidly. In 1984, it was "Morning in America" and Reagan was overwhelmingly re-elected. Nearly two decades of strong, steady, noninflationary economic growth ensued.
The success of Reagan's permanent tax-rate reductions, juxtaposed against the clear failure of his predecessors' temporary Keynesian stimulus measures, put the Keynesian approach on the back burner. The extent to which temporary stimulus measures fell into disfavor is evident from President Bill Clinton's first year in office. That year he proposed a minuscule $16 billion stimulus plan. Congress rejected it and turned its attention instead to reducing the federal budget deficit by cutting the growth in spending and raising taxes.
When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, his first priority was to put a broad-based, permanent reduction in tax rates into effect. But when the signs that the economy was weakening became apparent early that year, temporary stimulus measures were added to the president's plan. The final tax-reduction law included a temporary tax rebate and phased in the tax-rate reductions at a slower pace than he originally proposed. As with previous stimulus efforts, the rebates had little or no effect.
A combination of the economic impact of 9/11 and the failure of the 2001 Keynesian stimulus measure to have any lasting economic effect led Congress in 2003 to enact additional tax relief. In May of that year, at the urging of Mr. Bush, Congress sharply reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends and put the 2001 income-tax rate reductions in place immediately.
Within four months, employment began to rise and the unemployment rate began to fall. By 2004, the economic recovery was in full swing. President Bush was re-elected, along with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.
In response to the recession that began in late 2007, both Presidents Bush and Obama chose to rely on Keynesian stimulus policies. President Bush's temporary tax rebate in 2008 had no discernible effect on the economy. The declining economy partially contributed to John McCain's defeat and played a crucial role in the Republicans' loss of seats in both the House and Senate.
Mr. Obama's $800 billion temporary, targeted stimulus plan took the same approach as Mr. Carter's more than three decades earlier. The February 2009 bill included temporary tax rebates, additional spending on federal programs, and one-time grants to state and local governments.
It had the same negligible economic impact as Mr. Carter's and, thus far, eerily similar political consequences. The plan's failure preceded a historic Republican electoral sweep in the 2010 House elections and significant Republican gains in the Senate. The continuing economic discontent has placed Mr. Obama's re-election in serious jeopardy.
That temporary tax reductions and increases in government spending can jump-start the economy and sustainably boost employment and personal income may seem like a politician's dream policy. But the repeated failure of these short-term interventionist policies to deliver the promised economic benefits should make politicians think twice. Reliance on them has already cost dozens of members of Congress their jobs and two postwar presidents a second term.
SOURCE
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Dangerous lies about Herbert Hoover live on
Attacking the idea of a Balanced Budget Amendment, “Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution,” issued a press release on October 4 promoting the falsehood that Herbert Hoover cut spending during the Great Depression, when in reality, Hoover more than doubled government spending as a percentage of GDP:
Nadler is wrong about the facts here, as he so often is. As I recently noted in the Edmonton Journal:
Data from the White House’s own website shows that Hoover increased, rather than cut, spending in the Great Depression, and ran up deficits that were huge by historical standards.
That is illustrated in Table 1.1 on page 21 of a document on the White House’s website, a document entitled, “Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2009.” It shows that Hoover increased the federal budget from $3.1 billion in 1929, the year he took office (and the Great Depression began), to $4.7 billion in 1932, his last full year in office, and $4.6 billion in 1933, the year he left office. The budget deficit went from a surplus in 1928 to a deficit of $2.7 billion in 1932. Table 1.2 on page 24 of that document shows that government spending and deficits rose considerably as a percentage of the economy under Hoover. (See Table 1.2, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (–) As Percentages of GDP: 1930-2013)” and Table 1.1, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (–): 1789–2013)”).
Newspapers like the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Washington Times also have noted that Hoover actually increased spending during the Depression. Financial writer Megan McArdle of The Atlantic noted that Hoover increased spending from 3.4 percent of GDP to 8 percent, increasing spending even as the economy shrank and deflation occurred. (Thus, government spending rose more rapidly as a percentage of the economy than in absolute terms.)
Recent massive spending by the Obama administration has similarly failed to stem rising unemployment, and some economists have argued that the $800 billion stimulus package actually wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Washington's Free Trade Adult: "President Obama is indulging Congress's protectionist elements as the price of moving three delayed free-trade agreements. Speaker John Boehner showed better judgment when he denounced such tactical domestic politics as "dangerous" on Monday night. Mr. Boehner's comments came after the Senate cleared with a 79-19 procedural vote a bill that would impose tariffs on China for supposed currency manipulation. Mr. Boehner was left to fill the Presidential vacuum, saying that "It's pretty dangerous to be moving legislation through the United States Congress forcing someone to deal with the value of their currency." He added that "This is well beyond what Congress ought to be doing," and he hinted that he wouldn't bring the bill to the House floor."
What we don’t know about health insurance: "Despite the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on public health insurance programs, there’s very little strong evidence to suggest that subsidized health insurance actually improves health. Indeed, the push for universal coverage may be preventing other, more effective health measures. So here’s the question: Is the drive for universal health insurance actually making people worse off?"
Stifling medical device innovation: "The United States has long been the home to cutting-edge innovations in the medical device industry, a remarkable private enterprise success that has improved or extended the lives of millions of people. However, increasingly burdensome regulatory policy is driving pioneering research and development to Europe and to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and self-styled public health advocates are engaged in an assault on the primary regulatory pathway through which new products reach the market."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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Hostility toward the philosophes is not unique to Americans, of course. It was the ancient Greeks, after all, who executed Socrates because his philosophy conflicted with their piety. Likewise, there is an element of fear among religious conservatives that the intellectual project as such—not any particular brand of intellectualism—is inherently subversive of their settled wisdom.
But the bigger reason for this anti-intellectual animus is that every time really smart people run the country, things go spectacularly wrong.
The team of the “best and brightest” that Lyndon Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy embroiled America in an ignominy like Vietnam—not to mention Medicare, a fiscal quagmire that, unlike Vietnam, the country can neither exit nor fix without courting bankruptcy or seriously screwing over millions of seniors.
Moreover, George W. Bush’s failures resulted not from his alleged stupidity, as his most vitriolic critics believe, but the brainiacs in his Cabinet. Bush himself might have reveled in his Forest Grump image. But he assembled a team of intellectual stars including Dick Cheney, who was so smart that Beltway Republicans and Democrats wished that he had run for president; Paul Wolfowitz, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies; Condi Rice, provost of Stanford University; and Donald Rumsfeld, who made his mark in academia, politics, and military service. But this Mensa-worthy team, backed by Ivy League neocon intellectuals, left a legacy of Afghanistan, Iraq, and deficits as far as the eye can see.
The prize for discrediting intelligence, however, goes to President Obama. Unlike Bush, he wore his intellect on his sleeve, raising hopes that he could fix the country with sheer brainpower. But he has presided over a deterioration on every front: Deficits are worse, unemployment is higher, a double dip is imminent, and we have added another foreign misadventure.
So why do intelligent people consistently make such a hash of things? Because they are smart enough to talk themselves into anything. Ordinary mortals don’t engage in fancy mental gymnastics to reach conclusions that defy common sense. But intellectuals are particularly prone to this. Hence Bush’s brilliant foreign policy team used the apparatus of the state to search for evidence connecting Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attackers, which its superior ratiocination told them had to exist.
The great hope from Obama was that he would be different. That his thoughtful, professorial demeanor would prompt him to look for policies that worked—not push a preconceived agenda. In fact, when he took office, I hoped that he would be an “empirical president” who dispassionately considered the evidence from all sides before making decisions. One’s preferred position might not win every time under such a president, but it would at least have a shot, something that people outside Bush’s ideological kin never felt they had.
But Obama has been infinitely worse. He has glibly cited Congressional Budget Office scores and stats to argue that extending government-subsidized health coverage to 30 million Americans won’t exacerbate the federal deficit; that a debt-ridden country can borrow its way out of the recession; that pumping tax dollars into pie-in-the-sky green technologies would stimulate growth and produce energy security, and so on.
Ordinary folks might be unable to marshal facts and figures to counter such ludicrous claims, but they know bullshit when they see it. This has two effects on them: One, they feel profoundly disempowered watching their leaders deploy their smarts not on their behalf but against them. And two, since they can’t become experts and academics, they resist by retreating into their own simple certitudes drawn from folk wisdom, faith and founding principles. Indeed, Sarah Palin is as much Barack Obama’s gift to America as she is John McCain’s.
The great political divide right now is not between eggheads and blockheads, as Maureen Dowd puts it, or intellectualism and stupidity, as other self-serving liberal pundits sneer. It is between two types of activism: an irresponsible, pseudo-intellectual one and a retrograde, folksy one. This divide will disappear when some genuinely smart and wise leader earnestly addresses the nation’s problems, instead of pushing his or her loopy program.
SOURCE
****************************
Some history: Stimulus Has Been a Presidential Job Killer
The political graveyards are full of politicians who thought that temporary, targeted economic policies would get them re-elected.
Temporary, targeted tax reductions and increases in government spending are not good economics. They have repeatedly failed to increase economic growth on a sustainable basis. What may come as a surprise is that such policies are not good politics either. Their inability to deliver promised economic benefits has invariably led disappointed voters to turn against those politicians, Democratic and Republican, who have supported them.
Consider the evidence. When President Gerald Ford entered office, the economy was in the midst of the serious 1974-75 recession. Responding to the popular clamor to "do something," he proposed a short-term stimulus plan in early 1975. The centerpiece was a temporary income-tax rebate. Congress added a one-time, $50 increase in Social Security benefits and, to bolster the sagging housing market, a one-time tax credit for new home buyers.
The rebate caused only a temporary blip in consumer spending. Economic growth rose to 9% in the first quarter of 1976 but then dropped to only 2% in the third quarter, and unemployment started rising.
Congress enacted a second stimulus plan in July 1976 over Ford's veto. It authorized grants to state and local governments designed to prevent layoffs of public employees or tax increases. This plan also failed to produce the promised stimulus. The economic pause of 1976 was enough to swing the election to Jimmy Carter and cause more incumbent senators to lose their seats than in any election in nearly 20 years.
President Carter took office and by the end of his first month proposed another stimulus plan, which he said would "restore consumer confidence and consumer purchasing power." His plan called for another round of one-time tax rebates and Social Security bonus payments, federal public infrastructure grants and countercyclical aid to state and local governments.
He also added a tax credit for small and medium-size employers hiring new workers. The fine-tuned plan, according to the chairman of Mr. Carter's Council of Economic Advisers, Charles Shultze, was "designed to tread prudently between the twin risks of over and under-stimulation."
In May 1977, Congress enacted the president's proposals in modified form. Although the pace of economic activity quickened for a while, subsequent studies by senior Carter administration Treasury official Emil Sunley and noted economist Ned Gramlich showed that the government-provided stimulus had little effect. The recovery was not sustained and the economy fell into recession in January 1980. The failing economy combined with rapidly rising inflation doomed Mr. Carter's re-election chances, along with the Democratic Party's control of the Senate and 33 Democratic seats in the House.
President Reagan rejected temporary stimulus measures and instead proposed permanent income-tax rate reductions. His tax program, in conjunction with steady monetary policy begun by Paul Volcker, produced the promised results.
By late 1982 the recession was over and in early 1983 employment and investment began to rise rapidly. In 1984, it was "Morning in America" and Reagan was overwhelmingly re-elected. Nearly two decades of strong, steady, noninflationary economic growth ensued.
The success of Reagan's permanent tax-rate reductions, juxtaposed against the clear failure of his predecessors' temporary Keynesian stimulus measures, put the Keynesian approach on the back burner. The extent to which temporary stimulus measures fell into disfavor is evident from President Bill Clinton's first year in office. That year he proposed a minuscule $16 billion stimulus plan. Congress rejected it and turned its attention instead to reducing the federal budget deficit by cutting the growth in spending and raising taxes.
When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, his first priority was to put a broad-based, permanent reduction in tax rates into effect. But when the signs that the economy was weakening became apparent early that year, temporary stimulus measures were added to the president's plan. The final tax-reduction law included a temporary tax rebate and phased in the tax-rate reductions at a slower pace than he originally proposed. As with previous stimulus efforts, the rebates had little or no effect.
A combination of the economic impact of 9/11 and the failure of the 2001 Keynesian stimulus measure to have any lasting economic effect led Congress in 2003 to enact additional tax relief. In May of that year, at the urging of Mr. Bush, Congress sharply reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends and put the 2001 income-tax rate reductions in place immediately.
Within four months, employment began to rise and the unemployment rate began to fall. By 2004, the economic recovery was in full swing. President Bush was re-elected, along with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.
In response to the recession that began in late 2007, both Presidents Bush and Obama chose to rely on Keynesian stimulus policies. President Bush's temporary tax rebate in 2008 had no discernible effect on the economy. The declining economy partially contributed to John McCain's defeat and played a crucial role in the Republicans' loss of seats in both the House and Senate.
Mr. Obama's $800 billion temporary, targeted stimulus plan took the same approach as Mr. Carter's more than three decades earlier. The February 2009 bill included temporary tax rebates, additional spending on federal programs, and one-time grants to state and local governments.
It had the same negligible economic impact as Mr. Carter's and, thus far, eerily similar political consequences. The plan's failure preceded a historic Republican electoral sweep in the 2010 House elections and significant Republican gains in the Senate. The continuing economic discontent has placed Mr. Obama's re-election in serious jeopardy.
That temporary tax reductions and increases in government spending can jump-start the economy and sustainably boost employment and personal income may seem like a politician's dream policy. But the repeated failure of these short-term interventionist policies to deliver the promised economic benefits should make politicians think twice. Reliance on them has already cost dozens of members of Congress their jobs and two postwar presidents a second term.
SOURCE
**************************
Dangerous lies about Herbert Hoover live on
Attacking the idea of a Balanced Budget Amendment, “Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution,” issued a press release on October 4 promoting the falsehood that Herbert Hoover cut spending during the Great Depression, when in reality, Hoover more than doubled government spending as a percentage of GDP:
“Did Herbert Hoover win the last election?” asked Nadler. “If, in the middle of a recession, when tax revenues are down, and unemployment is up, we begin to slash the budget in ways my Republican colleagues are now suggesting, much less the far more draconian measures that this amendment would require, we will go from the Great Recession, right into another Great Depression. It’s been tried before, and if we want the Constitution to enshrine Hooverism for all time, we will get what we deserve.”
Nadler is wrong about the facts here, as he so often is. As I recently noted in the Edmonton Journal:
Former U.S. president Herbert Hoover did not practice austerity, so it is incorrect for politicians to claim that he “helped plunge his country into the Great Depression through austerity measures.”
Hoover’s administration increased federal government spending from three per cent of the U.S. economy in 1929, the year he took office, to eight per cent in 1933, the year he left office.
The U.S. budget deficit became so large as a result that by 1932, the country’s government was spending more than $2 for every dollar it took in.
It was not austerity that caused the Great Depression, but misguided government meddling in the economy, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.
That increased tariff backed by Hoover ignited devastating trade wars between the U.S. and other countries that wiped out countless jobs.
Data from the White House’s own website shows that Hoover increased, rather than cut, spending in the Great Depression, and ran up deficits that were huge by historical standards.
That is illustrated in Table 1.1 on page 21 of a document on the White House’s website, a document entitled, “Historical Tables: Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2009.” It shows that Hoover increased the federal budget from $3.1 billion in 1929, the year he took office (and the Great Depression began), to $4.7 billion in 1932, his last full year in office, and $4.6 billion in 1933, the year he left office. The budget deficit went from a surplus in 1928 to a deficit of $2.7 billion in 1932. Table 1.2 on page 24 of that document shows that government spending and deficits rose considerably as a percentage of the economy under Hoover. (See Table 1.2, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (–) As Percentages of GDP: 1930-2013)” and Table 1.1, “Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits (–): 1789–2013)”).
Newspapers like the Richmond Times-Dispatch and Washington Times also have noted that Hoover actually increased spending during the Depression. Financial writer Megan McArdle of The Atlantic noted that Hoover increased spending from 3.4 percent of GDP to 8 percent, increasing spending even as the economy shrank and deflation occurred. (Thus, government spending rose more rapidly as a percentage of the economy than in absolute terms.)
Recent massive spending by the Obama administration has similarly failed to stem rising unemployment, and some economists have argued that the $800 billion stimulus package actually wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
Washington's Free Trade Adult: "President Obama is indulging Congress's protectionist elements as the price of moving three delayed free-trade agreements. Speaker John Boehner showed better judgment when he denounced such tactical domestic politics as "dangerous" on Monday night. Mr. Boehner's comments came after the Senate cleared with a 79-19 procedural vote a bill that would impose tariffs on China for supposed currency manipulation. Mr. Boehner was left to fill the Presidential vacuum, saying that "It's pretty dangerous to be moving legislation through the United States Congress forcing someone to deal with the value of their currency." He added that "This is well beyond what Congress ought to be doing," and he hinted that he wouldn't bring the bill to the House floor."
What we don’t know about health insurance: "Despite the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on public health insurance programs, there’s very little strong evidence to suggest that subsidized health insurance actually improves health. Indeed, the push for universal coverage may be preventing other, more effective health measures. So here’s the question: Is the drive for universal health insurance actually making people worse off?"
Stifling medical device innovation: "The United States has long been the home to cutting-edge innovations in the medical device industry, a remarkable private enterprise success that has improved or extended the lives of millions of people. However, increasingly burdensome regulatory policy is driving pioneering research and development to Europe and to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and self-styled public health advocates are engaged in an assault on the primary regulatory pathway through which new products reach the market."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Obama's USDA running amok
USDA threatens $60,000 fine, federal raid against woman in legal possession of indoor lemon tree. Do Americans have ANY legal rights left?
The US government's assault against innocent American citizens continues to get more aggressive and just plain strange, with new reports of harassment against honest owners of ordinary lemon trees. Health Freedom Alliance (HFA) reports that officials from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) are now spying on people whom they suspect are in possession of ordinary lemon trees, and threatening them with excessive fines and even federal raids if they refuse to surrender the plants on demand.
Several years ago, Bridget Donovan, who has now been dubbed "The Lemon Tree Lady," purchased a Meyer lemon tree from meyerlemontree.com. A resident of Wisconsin, Donovan purchased the tree legally and in full accordance with all federal and state laws regulating citrus transport, and had lovingly cultivated and cared for her indoor citrus plant for nearly three years.
Then, out of nowhere, Donovan received an unexpected letter from the USDA informing her that government officials were going to come and seize her tree and destroy it -- and that she was not going to be compensated for her loss. The letter also threatened that if Donovan was found to be in possession of "regulated citrus" again, she could be fined up to $60,000.
Donovan was shocked, to say the least, as her tree was not a "regulated citrus." The store from which she purchased it is fully legitimate, and she had done absolutely nothing wrong. But it turns out Donovan and many others who had also purchased similar citrus plants had faced, or were currently facing, the very same threats made against them by the USDA.
Most of those targeted simply surrendered their trees without trying to fight back, Donovan discovered. And while she, herself put up a hefty fight in trying to get honest answers in order to keep her tree, Donovan was eventually forced to surrender it as well. And worst of all, many of those who were told that a replacement tree would be in "compliance" later had those trees confiscated, too.
Why has the USDA been targeting lemon tree owners? The answer is unclear, other than that they are a supposed threat to the citrus industry. And a USDA official admitted to Donovan that the agency has been spying on those suspected of owning lemon trees, and targeting all found to be in possession with threats of fines and raids if they failed to give them up -- and the agency has been doing this without a valid warrant.
"I felt utterly violated, angry, and upset," Donovan is quoted as saying by HFA. "I pay my taxes, I obey the law, and this is how I was treated? I did nothing wrong. I would expect these action (sic) toward someone running a drug house, not someone who owned a lemon tree."
More HERE
**************************
The 'hunger' hoax
By Thomas Sowell
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over "hunger in America." Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, "one in eight American children is going hungry tonight." Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.
When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.
That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same "hunger in America" theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.
Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.
The political left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the "hunger in America" hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.
Burgers, pizzas and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of Sept. 25 by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is "to get people to see cooking as a joy." For this, he says, "we need action both cultural and political." In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!
Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don't find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don't always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.
An arrogant elite's condescension toward the people -- treating them as children who have to be jollied along -- is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening a society.
Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.
We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck.
Why are such people called "poor"? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.
Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in "poverty" to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.
Politicians, welfare state bureaucrats and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment in their lives by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.
SOURCE
*************************
Why Your Bank Is Charging More Fees
Obama favors retail millionaires and billionaires in the debit-card fight.
There are many observations that can be made about President Obama’s remark Monday to ABC News that businesses “don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated.” In and of itself, this comment reveals much about his beliefs and knowledge (or lack thereof) on economics, consumer choice, and the private sector in general.
But in the context in which it was made — Bank of America, Citi, and other banks’ recently announced debit-card and checking-account fees for consumers, which they are charging to recoup losses from the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law’s price controls on debit-card fees charged to retailers — what must first be said is that he was lecturing the wrong set of Fortune 500 corporations. The price controls were added to the law by an amendment from Senate majority whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.).
If he really wanted to point the finger at the big companies that have mistreated consumers and are reaping illicit profits, he should have addressed not Bank of America, but Walmart, Walgreens, and Home Depot. These big retailers are making a killing from the price cap — regulatory corporate welfare that they lobbied vigorously on behalf of — yet so far have not passed on any of their estimated $19 billion in savings to consumers. And even many Democrats can see what’s going on.
For example, consider this quote: “Consumers suffer when the government regulates interchange fees. . . . Merchants are able to offload their fees onto consumers[, and] retailers have no intention of passing along any savings to consumers. . . . We should not allow the federal government to dictate the terms of a private transaction — particularly in a case such as this, where government intervention would drastically harm [consumers].”
What firebreathing free-market zealot made these proclamations? None other than Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), the president’s own handpicked chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in a letter co-written with Rep. Kenny Marchant (R., Texas). Similar sentiments were reflected in a letter signed by 71 Democrats and 60 Republicans in June 2010 urging House-Senate conferees to strip the price controls from the final Dodd-Frank bill. Likewise, Dodd-Frank co-author Barney Frank (D., Mass.) has said repeatedly that this is the only part of Dodd-Frank he doesn’t like, and he’s offered to work with both parties to repeal it.
To be sure, there were defectors in the other direction, too: 17 Republican senators voted for the Durbin Amendment, though all but three of them would vote against Dodd-Frank at the end. And the GOP’s “Durbin Dozen” in June of this year voted against a measure by Jon Tester (D., Mont.) to delay the price controls, depriving it of the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.
From the very beginning, Durbin tipped his hand that his efforts were on behalf of the retail fat cats. When he introduced his amendment to Dodd-Frank in May 2010, Durbin said on the Senate floor that his measure came about after Walgreens’s CEO called him to complain that the transaction fees the company pays to process debit and credit cards were “the fourth largest item of cost for their business.”
Yet in this era of the “Buffett Rule” and bashing “millionaires and billionaires,” Durbin and other liberal proponents of these price controls never quite explained why Congress should be concerned with the routine costs of doing business for a retail chain such as Walgreens, which makes $2 billion in annual profits. Or for that matter, other retail behemoths such as Walmart or Home Depot — or Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, with retail units from Dairy Queen to Nebraska Furniture Mart — that will benefit from this regulation-driven corporate welfare.
Going back to the president’s remarks discussing whether there is an “inherent right to get a certain amount of profit,” it’s important to note that the Durbin Amendment does not give banks and credit unions the right to reap any amount of profit from the retail side of a debit card transaction, or even to cover their costs. Unlike price controls under utility-rate regulation that mandate a “reasonable rate of return,” Durbin’s provision in Dodd-Frank demands that interchange fees be “proportional to cost,” and that the Federal Reserve only consider “incremental costs” in setting the price caps.
Thus the Fed, concerned with stability of the banking sector, almost invited banks and credit unions to engage in cost shifting to consumers, “helpfully” pointing out that “the interchange fee standard would not limit the ability of an issuer to earn revenue from other sources, such as charging fees to cardholders.”
More HERE
***************************
ELSEWHERE
WV: Democrat wins special election for governor: "Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin overcame weeks of Republican attack ads to win the West Virginia governor's race Tuesday, successfully distancing himself from the Obama administration and the president's health care plan. Tomblin, who has been acting governor for the past year, will finish the final year of a term left vacant by Joe Manchin, a well-liked governor who stepped down after he won a U.S. Senate seat."
Land of the poor, home of the sick: "Thanks to a series of destructive government policies and incentives, a health care crisis has been steadily building in America for a generation or two. But the release yesterday of the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual survey reveals that the problem of unaffordable healthcare is becoming epidemic."
Government makes us poor: "Here's my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were 'in charge,' you'd have more freedom and prosperity. Freedom frightens some people. ... If libertarians were 'in charge,' there would be laws to protect us from foreign enemies and those who would steal from us or injure us. Today, by contrast, under the rule of Democans and Republicrats, we're drowning in rules -- 160,000 pages' worth. Micromanagement kills opportunity and freedom"
Did hubris or ideological blindness inspire Obama on his Solyndra visit?: "In the face of these warnings, why did Obama and his handlers proceed unflinchingly to visit the company last year? I can think of two likely explanations. One is hubris: The president thought that these admonitions were insignificant compared to his capacity as a politician and central planner .... The other explanation is simply sheer ideological blindness ..."
The fascist threat: "Everyone knows that the term fascist is a pejorative, often used to describe any political position a speaker doesn’t like. There isn’t anyone around who is willing to stand up and say: 'I’m a fascist; I think fascism is a great social and economic system.' But I submit that if they were honest, the vast majority of politicians, intellectuals, and political activists would have to say just that."
Class warriors for big government: "Acting as unofficial scorekeeper, Sojourners Founder and CEO Jim Wallis recently declared, 'There really is a class war going on, and the upper class is winning.' However, many of the class warfare protesters who are taking to the streets to 'occupy' Wall Street and American cities are the disgruntled children of well-to-do parents. ... Such protestors are driven less by genuine economic hardship than by misguided animus toward the market system that has enabled the wealth from which they have benefited."
Occupy Wall Street — the real culprits: "True Capitalism is not the problem. The reason successful firms are successful is because they offer things we want. We can choose whether to give them our money -- Ronald McDonald has never coerced you into buying a Big Mac. If the government were a firm on the open market, it would go broke within milliseconds. But we haven't got true capitalism"
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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)
****************************
USDA threatens $60,000 fine, federal raid against woman in legal possession of indoor lemon tree. Do Americans have ANY legal rights left?
The US government's assault against innocent American citizens continues to get more aggressive and just plain strange, with new reports of harassment against honest owners of ordinary lemon trees. Health Freedom Alliance (HFA) reports that officials from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) are now spying on people whom they suspect are in possession of ordinary lemon trees, and threatening them with excessive fines and even federal raids if they refuse to surrender the plants on demand.
Several years ago, Bridget Donovan, who has now been dubbed "The Lemon Tree Lady," purchased a Meyer lemon tree from meyerlemontree.com. A resident of Wisconsin, Donovan purchased the tree legally and in full accordance with all federal and state laws regulating citrus transport, and had lovingly cultivated and cared for her indoor citrus plant for nearly three years.
Then, out of nowhere, Donovan received an unexpected letter from the USDA informing her that government officials were going to come and seize her tree and destroy it -- and that she was not going to be compensated for her loss. The letter also threatened that if Donovan was found to be in possession of "regulated citrus" again, she could be fined up to $60,000.
Donovan was shocked, to say the least, as her tree was not a "regulated citrus." The store from which she purchased it is fully legitimate, and she had done absolutely nothing wrong. But it turns out Donovan and many others who had also purchased similar citrus plants had faced, or were currently facing, the very same threats made against them by the USDA.
Most of those targeted simply surrendered their trees without trying to fight back, Donovan discovered. And while she, herself put up a hefty fight in trying to get honest answers in order to keep her tree, Donovan was eventually forced to surrender it as well. And worst of all, many of those who were told that a replacement tree would be in "compliance" later had those trees confiscated, too.
Why has the USDA been targeting lemon tree owners? The answer is unclear, other than that they are a supposed threat to the citrus industry. And a USDA official admitted to Donovan that the agency has been spying on those suspected of owning lemon trees, and targeting all found to be in possession with threats of fines and raids if they failed to give them up -- and the agency has been doing this without a valid warrant.
"I felt utterly violated, angry, and upset," Donovan is quoted as saying by HFA. "I pay my taxes, I obey the law, and this is how I was treated? I did nothing wrong. I would expect these action (sic) toward someone running a drug house, not someone who owned a lemon tree."
More HERE
**************************
The 'hunger' hoax
By Thomas Sowell
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over "hunger in America." Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, "one in eight American children is going hungry tonight." Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.
When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.
That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same "hunger in America" theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.
Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.
The political left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the "hunger in America" hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.
Burgers, pizzas and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of Sept. 25 by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is "to get people to see cooking as a joy." For this, he says, "we need action both cultural and political." In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!
Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don't find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don't always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.
An arrogant elite's condescension toward the people -- treating them as children who have to be jollied along -- is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening a society.
Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.
We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck.
Why are such people called "poor"? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.
Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in "poverty" to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.
Politicians, welfare state bureaucrats and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment in their lives by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.
SOURCE
*************************
Why Your Bank Is Charging More Fees
Obama favors retail millionaires and billionaires in the debit-card fight.
There are many observations that can be made about President Obama’s remark Monday to ABC News that businesses “don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated.” In and of itself, this comment reveals much about his beliefs and knowledge (or lack thereof) on economics, consumer choice, and the private sector in general.
But in the context in which it was made — Bank of America, Citi, and other banks’ recently announced debit-card and checking-account fees for consumers, which they are charging to recoup losses from the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law’s price controls on debit-card fees charged to retailers — what must first be said is that he was lecturing the wrong set of Fortune 500 corporations. The price controls were added to the law by an amendment from Senate majority whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.).
If he really wanted to point the finger at the big companies that have mistreated consumers and are reaping illicit profits, he should have addressed not Bank of America, but Walmart, Walgreens, and Home Depot. These big retailers are making a killing from the price cap — regulatory corporate welfare that they lobbied vigorously on behalf of — yet so far have not passed on any of their estimated $19 billion in savings to consumers. And even many Democrats can see what’s going on.
For example, consider this quote: “Consumers suffer when the government regulates interchange fees. . . . Merchants are able to offload their fees onto consumers[, and] retailers have no intention of passing along any savings to consumers. . . . We should not allow the federal government to dictate the terms of a private transaction — particularly in a case such as this, where government intervention would drastically harm [consumers].”
What firebreathing free-market zealot made these proclamations? None other than Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), the president’s own handpicked chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in a letter co-written with Rep. Kenny Marchant (R., Texas). Similar sentiments were reflected in a letter signed by 71 Democrats and 60 Republicans in June 2010 urging House-Senate conferees to strip the price controls from the final Dodd-Frank bill. Likewise, Dodd-Frank co-author Barney Frank (D., Mass.) has said repeatedly that this is the only part of Dodd-Frank he doesn’t like, and he’s offered to work with both parties to repeal it.
To be sure, there were defectors in the other direction, too: 17 Republican senators voted for the Durbin Amendment, though all but three of them would vote against Dodd-Frank at the end. And the GOP’s “Durbin Dozen” in June of this year voted against a measure by Jon Tester (D., Mont.) to delay the price controls, depriving it of the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.
From the very beginning, Durbin tipped his hand that his efforts were on behalf of the retail fat cats. When he introduced his amendment to Dodd-Frank in May 2010, Durbin said on the Senate floor that his measure came about after Walgreens’s CEO called him to complain that the transaction fees the company pays to process debit and credit cards were “the fourth largest item of cost for their business.”
Yet in this era of the “Buffett Rule” and bashing “millionaires and billionaires,” Durbin and other liberal proponents of these price controls never quite explained why Congress should be concerned with the routine costs of doing business for a retail chain such as Walgreens, which makes $2 billion in annual profits. Or for that matter, other retail behemoths such as Walmart or Home Depot — or Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, with retail units from Dairy Queen to Nebraska Furniture Mart — that will benefit from this regulation-driven corporate welfare.
Going back to the president’s remarks discussing whether there is an “inherent right to get a certain amount of profit,” it’s important to note that the Durbin Amendment does not give banks and credit unions the right to reap any amount of profit from the retail side of a debit card transaction, or even to cover their costs. Unlike price controls under utility-rate regulation that mandate a “reasonable rate of return,” Durbin’s provision in Dodd-Frank demands that interchange fees be “proportional to cost,” and that the Federal Reserve only consider “incremental costs” in setting the price caps.
Thus the Fed, concerned with stability of the banking sector, almost invited banks and credit unions to engage in cost shifting to consumers, “helpfully” pointing out that “the interchange fee standard would not limit the ability of an issuer to earn revenue from other sources, such as charging fees to cardholders.”
More HERE
***************************
ELSEWHERE
WV: Democrat wins special election for governor: "Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin overcame weeks of Republican attack ads to win the West Virginia governor's race Tuesday, successfully distancing himself from the Obama administration and the president's health care plan. Tomblin, who has been acting governor for the past year, will finish the final year of a term left vacant by Joe Manchin, a well-liked governor who stepped down after he won a U.S. Senate seat."
Land of the poor, home of the sick: "Thanks to a series of destructive government policies and incentives, a health care crisis has been steadily building in America for a generation or two. But the release yesterday of the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual survey reveals that the problem of unaffordable healthcare is becoming epidemic."
Government makes us poor: "Here's my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were 'in charge,' you'd have more freedom and prosperity. Freedom frightens some people. ... If libertarians were 'in charge,' there would be laws to protect us from foreign enemies and those who would steal from us or injure us. Today, by contrast, under the rule of Democans and Republicrats, we're drowning in rules -- 160,000 pages' worth. Micromanagement kills opportunity and freedom"
Did hubris or ideological blindness inspire Obama on his Solyndra visit?: "In the face of these warnings, why did Obama and his handlers proceed unflinchingly to visit the company last year? I can think of two likely explanations. One is hubris: The president thought that these admonitions were insignificant compared to his capacity as a politician and central planner .... The other explanation is simply sheer ideological blindness ..."
The fascist threat: "Everyone knows that the term fascist is a pejorative, often used to describe any political position a speaker doesn’t like. There isn’t anyone around who is willing to stand up and say: 'I’m a fascist; I think fascism is a great social and economic system.' But I submit that if they were honest, the vast majority of politicians, intellectuals, and political activists would have to say just that."
Class warriors for big government: "Acting as unofficial scorekeeper, Sojourners Founder and CEO Jim Wallis recently declared, 'There really is a class war going on, and the upper class is winning.' However, many of the class warfare protesters who are taking to the streets to 'occupy' Wall Street and American cities are the disgruntled children of well-to-do parents. ... Such protestors are driven less by genuine economic hardship than by misguided animus toward the market system that has enabled the wealth from which they have benefited."
Occupy Wall Street — the real culprits: "True Capitalism is not the problem. The reason successful firms are successful is because they offer things we want. We can choose whether to give them our money -- Ronald McDonald has never coerced you into buying a Big Mac. If the government were a firm on the open market, it would go broke within milliseconds. But we haven't got true capitalism"
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
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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