Liberals Hate Job Creation

It is becoming more apparent that Liberals actually hate job creation. As if crafting fiscal policies that stifle economic growth and discourage job growth weren’t enough, they feel it is necessary to actively protest one of the few sectors of the economy that is actually growing: low paid, unskilled, retail and service jobs.

OUR Wal-Mart, an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), held a series of protests last week against Wal-Mart’s “unlivable” wages. Of course, hardly anyone showed up. (Although, compared to recent Organizing For America events it looked like a million man march.) According to David Tovar, Wal-Mart’s Vice President of Corporate Communications, less than one-tenth of the company’s 1.3 million employees took part in the “protests.” I guess that means there are potentially 50 new job openings at the retail giant.

The Wal-Mart walkouts (or . . . um . . . attempted walkouts) followed a recent series of protests aimed at shaming fast food restaurants into raising their hourly wages. Such demands, after all, make sense in the minds of Liberals: Of course a person flipping 99 cent hamburgers deserves $15 per hour!

But back to our point about Liberals hating job creation: According to the August Jobs report we have finally achieved something in the Obama-economy that has been elusive and evasive since the conception of Obamacare. . . Full Time positions were actually created! And in what sectors were these elusive full time positions created? In the “lowest paid” sectors. In other words: At Wal-Mart, McDonalds, etc.

Exactly the places the UFCW and other Lefties are picketing.

The trend highlights a disturbing trend in both American’s understanding of work, and the overall economic conditions of the good ole’ USA. It seems highly improbable that the majority of full time “low paid” positions are being given to up-and-coming entrants to the work force. In fact, it is seeming more likely as Obama’s great recovery drags on, with penetrative devastation to our economy, that skilled labor is having to settle for less than optimal employment opportunities.

And there is a reason that these low-skilled and low-paid jobs are offering full time employment: The low wage allows employers to appropriate excess capital to the required benefits that laws such as Obamacare will soon mandate. What the UFCW and leftists world-wide seem incapable of grasping, is the concept that such a low-paid job is not designed to be a career. A position at a Wal-Mart, or a McDonalds, should be a stepping stone to something greater. Such a position is not designed to produce a “livable” wage, because it is not designed as a lifelong pursuit, or a 40 year investment of time and labor. Such a position is, by its very nature, a position that should offer new entrants to the workforce an opportunity for experience and resume building. It should not be the ambition of any American to work as a hamburger flipper for fifteen years – regardless of their ability to earn a livable wage.

Unfortunately, in Obama’s America, the opportunities for career minded individuals seems to be diminishing. As firms engage in “temporary” hiring, “contract” hiring, and part time hiring, careers are slowly being turned into lucrative “jobs” that offer employees a resume enhancer while prepping them for very little. The once praised action of engaging in a lifelong career, is being slowly eradicated by Labor laws, Obamacare regulations, and the anemic “recovery” that looks an awful lot like a recession continued.

And now, as America struggles to produce some sort of real job market recovery, Leftists are choosing to picket the few employers that are unafraid to offer full time work – albeit at entry level wages.

It seems to merely be more proof that the Left hates Job creation. . . Or they have a fundamental ignorance of free market economics. Either option should disqualify their altruistic impulse to engineer our economy into their economic vision.

 SOURCE

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Create a job and be harassed by your government

“So, what did you do during your summer break?” If you happen to be a certain 12 year old boy from Pocatello, Idaho, you spent the summer being productive and successfully carrying on an entrepreneurial venture, and then experiencing your state government cracking-down on you for not being licensed and demanding a portion of your revenues.

The 12 year old son of Jason Weeks is who we’re talking about. Weeks’ son announced at the beginning of the summer that he wanted to acquire a motorcycle. Weeks had the good sense to tell his son to earn money and purchase one for himself. So the son took the father’s advice, and – presumably with some help from some adults – he launched a fruit stand, right near a Red Wings Shoe store in small town Pocatello.

But soon after Weeks’ son launched, the Idaho State Tax Commission lunged. “They confronted him first and he called me” Weeks told the Idaho State Journal newspaper. “It was the second day that my son was in business.”

According to Weeks and the local newspaper, the state is demanding payment for a 6% state sales tax that they claim should have been collected by the boy from cash paying customers that bought his raspberries. Weeks would not return my calls prior to the writing of this piece, but, without commenting specifically about the incident, the state tax commission acknowledges that it happened and notes that they have to enforce the law with everybody.

Americans everywhere should make note of this situation and learn from it. Lesson number one is that nobody should attempt to launch any sort of business in the United States without making certain that they are in full compliance with city, county, state and federal regulations. That’s a tall order, but that’s how costly it has become to do business in America.

Governments nationwide and at all levels are almost universally on the hunt for money, and many of them are broke. There is no limit to governments’ willingness to turn people upside down and shake cash out of their pockets, and they’ll even do it with children. (The Idaho state tax commission had a similar run-in with a 6 year old back in 2010!). If a business is being operated without the proper licensure and permitting requirements being met, and without proper taxation procedures in place, an operator no matter their age will likely be fined for being out of compliance, and fined retroactively for however long the non-compliance has been happening. Business owners, beware.

The other great lesson in this situation is to realize that we live in an era of abusive government. Agents of city, county, state and federal government often don’t know any limits to how they can and will exercise their powers over the lives of private individuals, and the cause of the problem is we, the people. With often less than 50% of the American population participating in U.S. presidential elections, voter turn-out for state and local elections is usually even smaller. Such ambivalence is emboldening to bureaucrats and politicians who have power and enjoy using it.

Abusive government won’t stop until Americans wake up and choose otherwise. Hopefully the young Mr. Weeks from Pocatello – and others in his generation – will someday choose more wisely than today’s adult population.

 SOURCE

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Medisave Accounts in Singapore

By John C. Goodman

In 1984, Richard Rahn and I wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in which we proposed a savings account for health care. We called it a Medical IRA. That same year, Singapore instituted a related idea: a system of compulsory Medisave accounts. Through the years, my colleagues and I at the National Center for Policy Analysis have kept track of the Singapore experience, including publishing a general study of Singapore’s social welfare system in 1995 and a study of its health care system in 1996.

It’s taken about almost three decades, but all of a sudden Singapore has come to the attention of a lot of other policy wonks, including a book by Brookings, a whole slew of posts by Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll, a good overview by Tyler Cowen, and lots of links in all of this to other studies and comments.

Before commenting on the commenters, let me jump to the bottom line, which was completely missed by Austin and Aaron, as well as some others: No, Singapore does not have a free market for health care. What it does have is an alternative to the European/American welfare state, in which private saving and private insurance do what employers and governments do in other countries. The Singapore philosophy is:

    Each generation should pay its own way.
    Each family should pay its own way.
    Each individual should pay his own way.

    Only after passing through these three filters, should anyone turn to the government for help.

If the United States adopted a similar approach to public policy, there would be no deficit problem in this country.

How the system works.

In Singapore, people are required to save for health care, retirement income, and other needs. They can use their forced saving to purchase a home, pay education expenses, and purchase life insurance and disability insurance. For individuals up to age 50, the required saving rate is 36% of income (nominally divided: 20% from the employee and 16% from the employer). Of this amount, 7 percentage points is for health care and is deposited in a separate Medisave account. Individuals are also automatically enrolled in catastrophic health insurance with a deductible of about US $1,172, although they can opt out. When a Medisave account balance reaches about US $34,100 (an amount equal to a little less than half of the median family income) any excess funds are rolled over into another account and may be used for non-health care purposes.

Some hits and misses by the commenters:

    A number of commentaries (including comments by Singapore officials) seem overly focused on the issue of whether health care should be delivered in free markets or in regulated markets. However, that has always been a secondary issue, if an issue at all. Medisave accounts are self-insurance, as distinguished from third-party insurance. They affect incentives on the demand side of the market, regardless of how capitalistic or socialistic the supply side is. The issue both in the United States and in Singapore is: can individuals be counted on to manage some of their own health care dollars in a responsible way, or does health care work better if all the dollars are controlled by third-party payers? This topic has generated extensive, heated debate in the United States ― ever since we formally proposed Health Savings Accounts in the early 1990s.

For example,Paul Krugman (who has almost a perfect record for getting everything wrong in health care) called HSAs a sop to the healthy and the wealthy. After three decades of experience, Singapore has shown the world (to the great consternation of the critics) that individual self-insurance works and it works well.
 
 There has been a lot of back and forth about whether Medisave accounts have reduced overall health care spending, including some commentary by William Hsiao, who seems to have forgotten the Econ 101 distinction between the income effect and the substitution effect. Anytime you force people to save for a consumption item and the savings rate for a lot of them is higher than what they were previously spending, total spending is going to go up. Duh. That’s the income effect.

But, money in the accounts belongs to the account holder and anything not spent in the current period rolls over and is available for future spending. Choosing between current and future spending is the substitution effect. So, compared to taxing people and giving the revenue to insurance companies to pay for first dollar coverage, of course spending is going to be lower than it would have been. How could it be otherwise?

    The most important thing Singapore has accomplished in health care (in contrast to all the other developed countries) is an enormous shift of money and power from the public to the private sector. Since 1984, the Singaporean government’s share of the nation’s total health care expenditure dropped from about 50% to 20%. When you stop to think about it, that’s incredible.

    Finally, the most important feature of Singapore’s overall approach to social welfare is that the country has found a rational way to provide services that are provided by ill-conceived social insurance programs in the rest of the developed world. As is well known, programs for the elderly have devolved into little more than legalized Ponzi schemes in the United States and throughout Europe. Governments everywhere have made promises of benefits they were unwilling to fund. So now they must either default on those promises or impose draconian taxes on the productive sector. Singapore has avoided that problem.

 SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Obama Ignoring Real Racism?

Evidence mounts day by day, week by week that the White House not only doesn't care about the racial divisions in our society, but may actually seek to deepen them and incite new ones.

And why shouldn't they?  Racial tension is one of the Democrats' most potent political tools for driving Americans to re-elect them.

Black racism or hatred of non-blacks is real, is poisonous and might be more commonplace than we are led to believe by the main stream media.  There is plenty of evidence of this and our president is not living up to his promise of “one America”.  Don’t look to the Liberal media because it isn’t reporting on this, in fact, they ARE IGNORING it, and in some cases, they conceal the truth!

The recent cases of Tuffy Gessling and Ayo Kimathi do nothing but draw that fact into sharper and sharper focus.

Tuffy Gessling, you may recall, is the Missouri Rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask in the ring while taunting a bull to come get him, as is a rodeo clown’s job.  This however, drew down a mountain of liberal wrath. The Missouri State Fair banned him for life, the Missouri political establishment almost universally denounced him, and even the former president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association, Mark Fircken, resigned from the MRCA in protest when his organization failed to ban Mr. Gessling for life as the State Fair did.

Well, it only got worse from there! Recently, Mr. Gessling has reported numerous instances of threats and abuse directed against him. “I’ve had one lady spit in my face - called me a dirty name, spit in my face and walked off…I’ve had somebody threaten to run me over. One of them wanted to burn my house down!”

Even worse, the Missouri chapter of the NAACP called for a federal investigation of the rodeo incident!

This is plainly a witch hunt against anyone who dares criticize or mock our king of a president. Don't believe me? Consider the case of Ayo Kimathi, the employee of the Department of Homeland Security, who runs his own hate website, www.waronthehorizon.com.

Tell Congress and President Obama to stop playing political games and actually HEAL the racial divide in this country!

On August 21, the Left-wing group The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on Mr. Kimathi, who when posting under the pseudonym "The Irritated Genie," writes hate-filled posts declaring the coming of an imminent race war.

"[In order for Black people to survive the 21st century]”, he writes, “we are going to have to kill a lot of whites - more than our Christian hearts can possibly count."  Does this sound very Christian to you?

On Friday, August 23, Mr. Kimathi was put on leave—not fired, not reprimanded, simply put on PAID ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE—by DHS. Presumably, he is still receiving a paycheck from the same federal government into which we pay our hard-earned tax money year after year!  Your tax dollars hard at work ladies and gentlemen, to help start a race war!

Worse still, it turns out that Mr. Kimathi has been known to be a terrifying hate-monger for some time now. His former supervisor, who goes unnamed in the SPLC article, learned of the website in mid-June. “When I saw the website, I was stunned,” she said. “To see the hate, to know that he is a federal employee, it bothered me."  Did we not learn one lesson from the terrible tragedy in Foot Hood?  Political correctness will destroy our culture.

And yet no one in DHS did anything to change the situation until August 21, when the SPLC ran their column on this hate-filled federal employee.

Check out some other highlights from Mr. Kimathi's website:

“Plan every act of vengeance, retaliation, protest, aggression, etc. … for the month of August knowing that the ancestors, and especially Prophet Nat [Turner], Boukman Dutty, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, will be with you as you do your hunting.”

A list of "enemies" that includes Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell (misspelled as "Colon"), Oprah Winfrey, Al Sharpton, and even President Obama, who are described as “treasonous mulatto scum dwellers… who will fight against reparations for Black people in amerikkka, but in favor of fag rights for freaking in amerikkka and Africa.”

Despite these examples of racism far more clear and obvious than any performance by a rodeo clown, there has been relative silence from the federal government. Also, not one representative of the NAACP has stepped forward to denounce Mr. Kimathi for his comments about President Obama.

So a white-hating, homophobic advocate of mass murder against white people is kept on the federal payroll, only being placed on paid administrative leave as punishment - while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask is fired from his job, banned for life from the Missouri State Fair, threatened with violence and made to fear for his home and his safety??

In what version of America is this remotely okay?

To put Tuffy Gessling's actions in perspective, bear in mind too that this is hardly the first time a rodeo clown—or anyone else—has made fun of a sitting president. “I didn’t think anything more of it than what we’ve done 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, when we’ve done it with Bush, Clinton and Ronald Reagan," he said in an interview, and wearing masks and making fun of presidents is an old, old game among rodeo clowns.  IT WASN’T ABOUT Left or Right, after all, he’s a rodeo clown.

You don’t hear about racism unless it fits the Left’s agenda. For example, a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1994 describes the following scene from the Cowtown rodeo: "A dummy with a George Bush mask stood beside the clown, propped up by a broomstick… the bull saw the George Bush dummy. He tore into it, sending the rubber mask flying halfway across the sand as he turned toward the fence."

And yet, in response to the more recent incident, one fairgoer described the scene as "awful… sickening… racist," and likened it to "a Klan rally."

Where was the outrage over the years from 2000 to 2009?  Hateful, vile things were said and murderous anger was directed against President George W. Bush for years!

Some of the more offensive jokes implied threats and hatred was spewed at President Bush the entire time he was in office.  There were numerous pictures depicting guns being pointed at Bush's head, with captions reading "Kill Bush."  We had Bush piñatas, Bush decapitation signs and that “mockumentary” film showing a fictional assassination of President Bush!

The difference couldn't be the political party he belongs to, could it?

The difference between these two stories echoes a pattern that has repeated itself with depressing frequency over the past few years.  Just this year, we saw a huge furor and uproar over the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case … but where was the outrage over the case of Roderick Scott, a black man who shot Christopher Cervini, a 17 year-old white kid, back in 2009?

There have been literally hundreds of cases of shootings of black teenagers in this country in the months since February of 2012, when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, but not one of those has received the scrutiny the Zimmerman case received.  Why not? In most of those cases, the one doing the shooting was also black, and the story of black-on-black violence is nowhere near as politically potent and exciting to the progressive Left’s agenda!

The rhetoric of racism has played a prominent role in the political speech coming from Democrats since 2006, when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took control of the United States Congress and Senate.

At every level of government, Democrat leaders frequently invoke the specters of slavery and Jim Crow to emotionally bludgeon their way through difficult political issues like Obamacare, budget cuts, and even the decision on whether to go to war with Syria.

SOURCE

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Blunt words about Muslim backwardness

Mark Steyn

In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.”

Full disclosure: Five years ago, when I was battling Canada’s “human rights” commissions to restore free speech to my native land, Richard Dawkins was one of the few prominent figures in Her Majesty’s dominions to lend unequivocal support. He put it this way: “I have over the years developed a dislike for Mark Steyn, although I’ve always admired his forceful writing. On this issue, however, he is clearly 1000% in the right and should receive all the support anybody can give him.”

Let me return the compliment: I have over the years developed a dislike for Richard Dawkins’s forceful writing (the God of the Torah is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” etc.), but I am coming round rather to admire him personally. It’s creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West’s chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group. I doubt The Satanic Verses would be accepted for publication today, but, if it were, I’m certain no major author would come out swinging on Salman Rushdie’s behalf the way his fellow novelist Fay Weldon did: The Koran, she declared, “is food for no-thought … It gives weapons and strength to the thought-police.”

That was a remarkably prescient observation in the London of 1989. Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.

What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future. According to a new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, “Mohammed,” in its various spellings, is now the second most popular baby boy’s name in England and Wales, and Number One in the capital. It seems likely that an ever more Islamic London will, for a while, still have a West End theater scene for tourists, but it will have ever less need not just for Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward and eventually Shakespeare but for drama of any kind. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Dawkins is wrong, maybe the U.N. Human Development chaps are wrong. But the ferocious objections even to raising the subject suggest we’re not.

A quarter-century on, Fay Weldon’s “thought police” are everywhere. Notice the general line on Dawkins: Please be quiet. Turn him off. You can’t say that. What was once the London Left’s principal objection to the ayatollah’s Rushdie fatwa is now its reflexive response to even the mildest poke at Islam. Their reasoning seems to be that, if you can just insulate this one corner of the multicultural scene from criticism, elsewhere rude, raucous life — with free speech and all the other ancient liberties — will go on. Miss Weldon’s craven successors seem intent on making her point: In London, Islam is food for no thought.

SOURCE

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Revising the past again

The Los Angeles Times: "Since Democrats led the passage of civil rights legislation that marchers pushed for in 1963, Republicans have struggled to recover with black voters, leaving a stark racial divide in American politics."

History Lesson: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 received greater support from Republicans than Democrats, both in the House and in the Senate. Senate Democrats, in fact, staged an 83-day filibuster in opposition to the measure.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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 Australian election

Conservatives have just had a huge win in Australia's Federal election.  Romney would have had a similar win but for the rusted-on vote of America's two big minorities.  There are no such big minorities in Australia.

The picture below shows voting in Australia.  Australians just use pencil and paper in temporary carboard cubicles.  No voting machines so no hanging chads, no accusations of the machines being "fixed" and easy recounts.  And results were known within a couple of hours of the polls closing.



Elections in Australia are also less hectic.  They are on Saturdays when most people are not working.  And if you turn up to vote mid-morning there are usually no lines of people waiting to vote.  I had no wait at all.

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Why America Is Saying 'No'

Peggy Noonan is pretty right below but at the same time I don't think it would go amiss to drop a large bomb on Bashir Assad's Presidential Palace

It is hard, if you've got a head and a heart, to come down against a strong U.S. response to Syria's use of chemical weapons against its civilian population. This is especially so if you believe that humanity stands at a door that leads only to darkness. Those who say, “But Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons—the taboo was broken long ago,” are missing the point. When Saddam used gas against the Kurds it was not immediately known to all the world. It was not common knowledge. The world rued it in retrospect. Syria is different: It is the first obvious, undeniable, real-time, YouTubed use of chemical weapons. The whole world knew of it the morning after it happened, through horrified, first-person accounts, from videos of hospital workers and victims' families.

The world this time cannot “not know,” or claim not to know. And though Bashar Assad has made his pro forma denials, it does not seem believable that this was not a government operation. Assad's foes may or may not be wicked enough to use such weapons, but it is hard to believe they are capable.

When something like this happens and the world knows and does not respond, you won't get less of it in the future, you'll get more. And the weapons will not only be chemical.

So the question: What to do?

After 10 days of debate in Europe and America, the wisest words on a path forward have come from the Pope. Francis wrote this week to Vladimir Putin, as the host of the G-20. He damned “the senseless massacre” unfolding in Syria and pleaded with the leaders gathered in St. Petersburg not to “remain indifferent”—remain—to the “dramatic situation.” He asked the governments of the world “to do everything possible to assure humanitarian assistance” within and without Syria's borders.

But, he said, a “military solution” is a “futile pursuit.”

And he is right. The only strong response is not a military response.

The world must think—and speak—with stature and seriousness, of the moment we're in and the darkness on the other side of the door. It must rebuke those who used the weapons, condemn their use, and shun the users. It must do more, in concert—surely we can agree on this—to help Syria's refugees. It must stand up for civilization.

But a military strike is not the way, and not the way for America.

Francis was speaking, as popes do, on the moral aspects of the situation. In America, practical and political aspects have emerged, and they are pretty clear.

The American people do not support military action. A Reuters-Ipsos poll had support for military action at 20%, Pew at 29%. Members of Congress have been struck, in some cases shocked, by the depth of opposition from their constituents. A great nation cannot go to war—and that's what a strike on Syria, a sovereign nation, is, an act of war—without some rough unity as to the rightness of the decision. Widespread public opposition is in itself reason not to go forward.

Can the president change minds? Yes, and he'll try. But it hasn't worked so far. This thing has jelled earlier than anyone thought. More on that further down.

What are the American people thinking? Probably some variation of: Wrong time, wrong place, wrong plan, wrong man.

Twelve years of war. A sense that we're snakebit in the Mideast. Iraq and Afghanistan didn't go well, Libya is lawless. In Egypt we threw over a friend of 30 years to embrace the future. The future held the Muslim Brotherhood, unrest and a military coup. Americans have grown more hard-eyed—more bottom-line and realistic, less romantic about foreign endeavors, and more concerned about an America whose culture and infrastructure seem to be crumbling around them.

The administration has no discernible strategy. A small, limited strike will look merely symbolic, a face-saving measure. A strong, broad strike opens the possibility of civil war, and a victory for those as bad as or worse than Assad. And time has already passed. Assad has had a chance to plan his response, and do us the kind of damage to which we would have to respond.

There is the issue of U.S. credibility. We speak of this constantly and in public, which has the effect of reducing its power. If we bomb Syria, will the world say, “Oh, how credible America is!” or will they say, “They just bombed people because they think they have to prove they're credible”?

We are, and everyone knows we are, the most militarily powerful and technologically able nation on earth. And at the end of the day America is America. We don't have to bow to the claim that if we don't attack Syria we are over as a great power.

Are North Korea and Iran watching? Sure. They'll always be watching. And no, they won't say, “Huh, that settles it, if America didn't move against Syria they'll never move against us. All our worries are over.” In fact their worries, and ours, will continue.

Sometimes it shows strength to hold your fire. All my life people have been saying we've got to demonstrate our credibility—that if we, and the world, don't know we are powerful by now we, and they, will never know.

But a Syria strike may become full-scale war. Is Barack Obama a war president? On Syria he has done nothing to inspire confidence. Up to the moment of decision, and even past it, he has seemed ambivalent, confused, unaware of the implications of his words and stands. From the “red line” comment to the “shot across the bow,” from the White House leaks about the nature and limits of a planned strike to the president's recent, desperate inclusion of Congress, he has seemed consistently over his head.

A point on how quickly public opinion has jelled. There is something going on here, a new distance between Washington and America that the Syria debate has forced into focus. The Syria debate isn't, really, a struggle between libertarians and neoconservatives, or left and right, or Democrats and Republicans. That's not its shape. It looks more like a fight between the country and Washington, between the broad American public and Washington's central governing assumptions.

I've been thinking of the “wise men,” the foreign policy mandarins of the 1950s and '60s, who so often and frustratingly counseled moderation, while a more passionate public, on right and left, was looking for action. “Ban the Bomb!” “Get Castro Out of Cuba.”

In the Syria argument, the moderating influence is the public, which doesn't seem to have even basic confidence in Washington's higher wisdom.

That would be a comment on more than Iraq. That would be a comment on the past five years, too.

SOURCE

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Rachel Maddow Lies Again

Lies are stock in trade for Leftists



I don't watch Rachel Maddow much, but when I do, I am always amazed at how few minutes it takes before I hear her make a baldfaced lie.

Today I heard her say this on her August 16, 2013 broadcast (text from MSNBC transcript, with spelling corrected):

This is Viviette Applewhite. She was 92 years old when she started fighting the state of Pennsylvania for her right to vote. Republicans in that state passed a new law last year that would block you from voting unless you showed documentation that you've never had to show before and that hundreds of thousands of legal voters in the state do not have, including Viviette Applewhite.
Tell it to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rachel, which accompanied Mrs. Applewhite exactly one year to the day before your broadcast, and watched Mrs. Applewhite apply for and easily and immediately receive the required Pennsylvania ID.

The Inquirer further reported that there was no indication the Pennsylvania state employees had any idea Mrs. Applewhite was a plaintiff in an ACLU lawsuit claiming she cannot get an ID, saying, "an Inquirer reporter who accompanied Applewhite to the PennDot center on Cheltenham Avenue in [Philadelphia]'s West Oak Lane section saw no sign that the clerk recognized her or realized she was a major figure in the battle over the law."

In the August 16, 2013 broadcast, Maddow crowed about Applewhite's "victory" in the lawsuit, about which which the Inquirer described in 2012: "[it] claims the law would bar [Applewhite] from exercising the voting rights she's enjoyed for more than half a century…"

But, as the Inquirer pointed out in 2012, the ease with which Mrs. Applewhite got an ID made the need for a lawsuit, even then, questionable.

By the time of Maddow's August 2013 broadcast, it was even more questionable, as Mrs. Applewhite had had her photo ID for a full year by then.  Despite what Rachel Maddow told her audience.

SOURCE

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Jobs Recovery Bummer

At first blush, today’s jobs report once again seems to contain good news: 169,000 jobs added and unemployment dropping a tenth of a point to 7.3%, the lowest since December 2008. But beware what we call the “headline” numbers. The Leftmedia employes them to bolster the sorry record of their man in the White House.

Digging deeper, we find trouble quickly. July numbers were revised down from 162,000 to just 104,000, and June was revised down for the second time. The unemployment rate fell once again only because so many people are giving up looking for work—312,000, or nearly twice the number who found work—and they aren’t counted in the report. The labor participation rate fell to 63.2%, the lowest since Jimmy Carter’s malaise days of August 1978. If labor participation remained at the same level it was in January 2009, the headline unemployment rate would be 10.8%. It would be 7.7% if participation was the same as just one year ago.

As for the U-6 fuller measure, Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey observes that it “dropped from 14.0% to 13.7%, its lowest level in five years.” But, he warns, “[T]hat has to do with the shrinking workforce, too. In order to be counted in U-6, workers have to be at least marginally attached to the labor force. That’s defined as ‘those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.’”

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his crack shot economic team promised that if we just passed the “stimulus” unemployment would be 5% by now.

SOURCE

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Al Qaeda-Linked Rebels Attack Christian Village Where Aramaic--Language of Christ--Still Spoken

The sound of artillery reverberated Thursday through a predominantly Christian village north of Damascus as government troops and al-Qaida-linked rebels battled for control of the mountainside sanctuary.

The hit-and-run attacks on the ancient village of Maaloula, one of the few places in the world where residents still speak Aramaic, highlighted fears among Syria's religious minorities about the growing role of extremists among those fighting in the civil war to topple President Bashar Assad's regime.

The fighting came as President Barack Obama's administration pressed the U.S. Congress for its authorization of a military strike against the Assad regime, while the president arrived at a G-20 summit in Russia expected to be overshadowed by Syria.

The fighting in Maaloula, a scenic village of about 3,300 perched high in the mountains, began early Wednesday when militants from Jabhat al-Nusra stormed in after a suicide bomber struck an army checkpoint guarding the entrance.

The group - listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department - is one of the most effective fighting forces among Syrian rebels. The suicide attack triggered battles that terrorized residents in the village, famous for two of the oldest surviving monasteries in Syria - Mar Sarkis and Mar Takla.

SOURCE  

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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 Syrian Political Charade

A funny thing happened on the way to the U.S. attacking Syria: Barack Obama decided to seek congressional approval. Such is not his usual wont. Since occupying the Oval Office, Obama has made a practice of issuing executive orders and other decrees about all manner of policy preferences without bothering to go to Congress. He attacked Libya without Congress, but now with Syria he's seeking an accomplice -- though he still insists he doesn't need one.

Columnist George Will notes that, ironically, the British Parliament's rejection of military action prompted Obama to go to Congress. "If Parliament had authorized an attack," Will wrote, "Obama probably would already have attacked, without any thought about Congress' prerogatives."

The outcome of a looming congressional vote on military action is uncertain -- the sides don't break along party lines. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) support Obama's call, as does Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). But significant numbers of the rank-and-file aren't convinced, despite assurances from Secretary of State John Kerry that we won't be "going to war in a classic sense."

The issue for many in Congress -- as well as grassroots Americans -- is whether a limited strike will achieve any clear policy objective that serves vital U.S. interests. Kerry warns that "we cannot allow Assad to be able to gas people with impunity." But will a strike eradicate Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons stores now that he's had time to move and protect them? If we weaken or remove Assad, will al-Qaida rebels come out on top? Will a limited strike sufficiently chastise Assad for crossing the "red line" Obama now ridiculously asserts he "didn't set"? And if a strike is strong enough, what reaction can we expect from Syria, Iran or Russia?

In short, Obama has turned this into a political charade. Any principle governing our response was lost as soon as he opened his mouth.

SOURCE

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12 Unspoken Rules For Being A Liberal

There may be no official rule book for being a liberal, but that doesn't mean there aren't rules. There are actually quite a few rules liberals go by and the more politically active liberals become, the more rigidly they tend to stick to their own code of behavior. These rules, most of which are unspoken, are passed along culturally on the Left and viciously enforced. Ironically, many liberals could not explain these rules to you and don't even consciously know they're following them. So, by reading this article, not only will you gain a better understanding of liberals, you'll know them better than they know themselves in some ways.

1) You justify your beliefs about yourself by your status as a liberal, not your deeds. The most sexist liberal can think of himself as a feminist while the greediest liberal can think of himself as generous. This is because liberals define themselves as being compassionate, open minded, kind, pro-science and intelligent not based on their actions or achievements, but based on their ideology. This is one of the most psychologically appealing aspects of liberalism because it allows you to be an awful person while still thinking of yourself as better than everyone else.

2) You exempt yourself from your attacks on America: Ever notice that liberals don't include themselves in their attacks on America? When they say, "This is a racist country," or ",This is a mean country," they certainly aren't referring to themselves or people who hold their views. Even though liberals supported the KKK, slaughtering the Indians, and putting the Japanese in internment camps, when they criticize those things, it's meant as an attack on everyone else EXCEPT LIBERALS. The only thing a liberal believes he can truly do wrong is to be insufficiently liberal.

3) What liberals like should be mandatory and what they don't like should be banned: There's an almost instinctual form of fascism that runs through most liberals. It's not enough for liberals to love gay marriage; everyone must be forced to love gay marriage. It's not enough for liberals to be afraid of guns; guns have to be banned. It's not enough for liberals to want to use energy-saving light bulbs; incandescent light bulbs must be banned. It's not enough for liberals to make sure most speakers on campuses are left-wing; conservative speakers must be shouted down or blocked from speaking.

4) The past is always inferior to the present: Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering. It’s like an architect ripping out the foundation of a house without questioning the consequences and if the living room falls in on itself as a result, he concludes that means he needs to make even more changes.

5) Liberalism is a jealous god and no other God may come before it: A liberal "Christian" or "Jew" is almost an oxymoron because liberalism trumps faith for liberals. Taking your religious beliefs seriously means drawing hard lines about right and wrong and that's simply not allowed. Liberals demand that even God bow down on the altar of liberalism.

6) Liberals believe in indiscriminateness for thought: This one was so good that I stole it from my buddy, Evan Sayet: " Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust. There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization."

7) Intentions are much more important than results: Liberals decide what programs to support based on whether they make them feel good or bad about themselves, not because they work or don't work. A DDT ban that has killed millions is judged a success by liberals because it makes them feel as if they care about the environment. A government program that wastes billions and doesn't work is a stunning triumph to the Left if it has a compassionate sounding name. It would be easier to convince a liberal to support a program by calling it the “Saving Women And Puppies Bill" than showing that it would save 100,000 lives.

8) The only real sins are helping conservatism or harming liberalism: Conservatives often marvel at the fact that liberals will happily elect every sort of pervert, deviant, and criminal you can imagine without a second thought. That's because right and wrong don't come into the picture for liberals. They have one standard: Does this politician help or hurt liberalism? If a politician helps liberalism, he has a free pass to do almost anything and many of them do just that.

9) All solutions must be government-oriented: Liberals may not be as down on government as conservatives are, but on some level, even they recognize that it doesn't work very well. So, why are liberals so hell bent on centralizing as much power as possible in government? Simple, because they believe that they are better and smarter than everyone else by virtue of being liberals and centralized power gives them the opportunity to control more people's lives. There's nothing scarier to liberals than free people living their lives as they please without wanting or needing the government to nanny them.

10) You must be absolutely close minded: One of the key reasons liberals spend so much time vilifying people they don't like and questioning their motivations is to protect themselves from having to consider their arguments. This helps create a completely closed system for liberals. Conservative arguments are considered wrong by default since they're conservative and not worth hearing. On the other hand, liberals aren't going to make conservative arguments. So, a liberal goes to a liberal school, watches liberal news, listens to liberal politicians, has liberal friends, and then convinces himself that conservatives are all hateful, evil, racist Nazis so that any stray conservatism he hears should be ignored. It makes liberal minds into perfectly closed loops that are impervious to anything other than liberal doctrine.

11) Feelings are more important than logic: Liberals base their positions on emotions, not facts and logic and then they work backwards to shore up their position. This is why it's a waste of time to try to convince a liberal of anything based on logic. You don't "logic" someone out of a position that he didn't use "logic" to come up with in the first place.

12) Tribal affiliation is more important than individual action: There's one set of rules for members of the tribe and one set of rules for everyone else. Lying, breaking the rules, or fomenting hatred against a liberal in good standing may be out of bounds, but there are no rules when dealing with outsiders, who are viewed either as potential recruits, dupes to be tricked, or foes to be defeated. This is the same backwards mentality you see in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, except it's based on ideology, not religion.

SOURCE

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Family Farmers Fight Michigan Township For Their Animals

Kelly Vander Kley Hunter and her family have spent the last three years pouring their time and money into building a small hobby farm in Mattawan, MI. Today, they are fighting their local township government in order to keep their farm animals.

“We feel like we’re under a microscope. We feel like everything we do, on our own property, we have to get permission from the township,” says Vander Kley Hunter.

Roughly a three hour drive from Detroit, Mattawan is a rural community that is home to many small farms with many farm animals.

Yet Vander Kley Hunter had still checked before purchasing the property to make sure that having animals would be all right, and the township confirmed that farm animals were indeed allowed. But earlier this summer, the Hunters received a letter stating that their farm was no longer in compliance with the township zoning ordinance and that they had 90 days to get rid of more than half of their animals.

“It knocked the wind out of my sails,” says Vander Kley Hunter, "I was pretty depressed for awhile over it."

Vander Kley Hunter says that her neighbor complained to the township about the animals, thus prompting the township to reinterpret the ordinance and state that the Hunter farm was out of compliance.

“The local government can change the zoning of any parcel of land on a whim,” says Reason Foundation’s Adrian Moore, “it's being played out basically on crony politics rather than any kind of real, objective standard."

Moore says that property rights have eroded vastly over the last 100 years in America, and that these kinds of issues should be resolved in the courts, not in the political arena that is far more susceptible to abuse.

“The fact that the neighbors are using the political process rather than the court system already says they’ve got a somewhat suspicious complaint.”

Moore says the only way to fight a political battle is with politics, and that the community has to rise up against the township. Luckily for the Hunters, the community has come to their aid and is speaking out against the township at regular town hall meetings.

“The support that we’ve received from all of this has been completely overwhelming, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” says Vander Kley Hunter.

Vander Kley Hunter is hopeful that the community's support combined with her family's persistence will be enough to save her animals.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

S&P: Lawsuit is “retaliation” for stripping AAA rating:  "Standard & Poor's on Tuesday blasted a $5 billion fraud lawsuit by the U.S. government as retaliation for its 2011 decision to strip the country of its 'AAA' credit rating. The McGraw Hill Financial Inc unit was the only major credit rating agency to take away the United States' top rating, and the only one sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly misleading banks and credit unions about the credibility of its ratings prior to the 2008 financial crisis."

TX: Guard refuses to process same-sex benefits:  "The Texas National Guard refused to process requests from same-sex couples for benefits on Tuesday, citing the state constitution's ban on gay marriage, despite a Pentagon directive to do so. ... Maj. Gen. John Nichols, the commanding general of Texas Military Forces, wrote in a letter obtained by The Associated Press that because the Texas Constitution defines marriage as between a man and a woman, his state agency couldn't process applications from gay and lesbian couples. But he said the Texas National Guard, Texas Air Guard and Texas State Guard would not deny anyone benefits. ... He then listed 22 bases operated by the Department of Defense in Texas where service members could enroll their families."

DoD training manual: Founding fathers followed “extremist ideology”:  "A Department of Defense training manual obtained by a conservative watchdog group pointed to the original American colonists as examples of an extremist movement, comments that have sparked fear of a broader crackdown on dissent in America. ... The first paragraph of the section entitled ‘Extremist Ideologies’ opens with a statement that has drawn heated criticism: 'In US history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.'"

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Fascist America

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics explains what fascism in Italy was all about:

"As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.

Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions."

Now that you've read what fascism entails, consider the following excerpt from an article yesterday at The Huffington Post, noting how nearly 40% of U.S. CEOs have come to have a very large portion of their income paid for by U.S. taxpayers:

"WASHINGTON -- More than one-third of the nation's highest-paid CEOs from the past two decades led companies that were subsidized by American taxpayers, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank.

"Financial bailouts offer just one example of how a significant number of America's CEO pay leaders owe much of their good fortune to America's taxpayers," reads the report. "Government contracts offer another."

IPS has been publishing annual reports on executive compensation since 1993, tracking the 25 highest-paid CEOs each year and analyzing trends in payouts. Of the 500 total company listings, 103 were banks that received government bailouts under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, while another 62 were among the nation's most prolific government contractors."

Meanwhile, that all would be occurring as American entrepreneurs would appear to be harder and harder to find:

"The US entrepreneurial spirit may be faltering. Check out these data points from The Wall Street Journal: a) In 1982, new companies made up roughly half of all US businesses, according to census data. By 2011, they accounted for just over a third; b) from 1982 through 2011, the share of the labor force working at new companies fell to 11% from more than 20%; c) Total venture capital invested in the US fell nearly 10% last year and is still below its prerecession peak, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers."

The United States would appear to be well on its way to adopting fascist Italy's political-economic system, favoring the politically-connected while starving entrepreneurs out of the economy. Although today in America, we call it "crony capitalism". And the people who practice it "progressives".

Do you think we should start calling it what it really is?

SOURCE

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More glue in the works

By Martin Hutchinson

As the pace of extortion accelerates, the economic system inevitably nears the point where it ceases to work altogether.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been pouring regulatory glue into the U.S. economy since 1973. The trial bar has also been pouring litigation glue into the U.S. economy for a similar period, and their colleagues in the New York financial bar have equally been adding to the sticky stuff with documentation glue (as a former corporate financier I would quickly find another line of work if faced with today's U.S.-law documentation for the simplest transaction). Now a series of federal agencies have banded together to launch wave after wave of lawsuits against the big banks, mostly relating to the same set of transgressions they committed in 2005-08. At some point, an economic system with so many dysfunctional activities ceases to work altogether, turning into a rent-seeking mess. From the latest economic statistics, we may be nearing that point.

Last week's depredations against the big banks included a government order to J.P. Morgan to pay $6 billion to the Federal Housing Finance Agency in relation to subprime mortgages underwritten during the bubble—about 20% of the $33 billion principal amount of subprime mortgages underwritten by Morgan entities during that period. JPMorgan has spent $5 billion in legal costs in each of the last two years, and raised its estimate of legal losses to $6.8 billion at the end of the second quarter—presumably after this piece of bad news it will have to raise them again.

The same week, a judge rejected Bank of America's bid to dismiss a similar-sized case relating to toxic mortgages, and the case will go to trial this month (to be fair, the toxic mortgages concerned were issued by Countrywide, which Bank of America acquired in January 2008—surely one of the worst M&A deals ever done). The same day, a judge threw out Bank of America's lawsuit to recover $1.7 billion in losses related to the 2009 $2.9 billion Taylor Bean collapse (no, I'd never heard of Taylor Bean either—in the collapse of the housing market $2.9 billion was a mere rounding error).

The previous week a judge allowed the use of a specialized fraud law against Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Bank of New York Mortgage Corp.—and with it a 10-year statute of limitations instead of the normal 5 years, thus prolonging the banks' legal jeopardy until 2018 instead of ending the creation of new cases in a month or so.  Last week also a New York court revived a $2.5-billion case against Barclays that had previously been dismissed relating to an April 2008 offering of shares.

That's within just two weeks. You have to remember that five banks last year paid a settlement totaling $25 billion, which was supposed to cover all their liabilities in relation to the mortgage market's bubble-era shenanigans. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the six largest banks' legal bills since the financial crisis totaled $103 billion, around 40% of which has arisen since January 2012, as the pace of extortion accelerates.

And yet none of the big banks' top managements have gone to jail. (Fabrice Toure, who faces a jail sentence, was strictly small fry, while Raj Gupta, a Director of Goldman Sachs, was sentenced in relation to unrelated insider trading.) So presumably criminal activity was not significantly involved—after all Enron's Jeff Skilling was sentenced to an excessive 25 years simply for selling his Enron shares after he left the company but before its bankruptcy occurred.

The only penalties in relation to the mortgage disaster are being borne by the banks' unfortunate shareholders—and they are being subjected to triple, quadruple and quintuple jeopardy in relation to the same offenses through suits brought by innumerable state and federal authorities seeking a piece of the action. Banking is generally a decently profitable business, but having seen the pattern of jeopardy applied to the United States' largest banks I have to say I wouldn't invest in them, and I suspect many of the largest investment institutions are coming to the same conclusion. Even with smaller banks subject to less extreme jeopardy, this has to reduce the growth in the U.S. economy, as well as making its biggest banks' foreign and corporate businesses subject to potential takeover by foreign banks not subject to the same pillage.

Since financial services represents around 10% of GDP these days, the tsunami of uneconomic activity forced on the sector by the regulators and legal community is a serious drag on U.S. economic performance. Yes, of course it allows innumerable lawyers to live high on the hog, but their activity is a classic example of rent-seeking; it merely extracts money from the productive economy and devotes it to the welfare of the rent seekers. That's only partly true of financial services itself, though I quite grant you that a substantial percentage of the businesses invented in the last thirty years serve little genuine economic purpose.

When you add up all the spurious drags on the U.S. economy from regulators and lawyers, it's a wonder the thing functions at all. As I have discussed before, big infrastructure projects cost in real terms about 10 times what they did in 1925. New businesses, if they have any kind of environmental angle, get interminably delayed, while costs are added—the Keystone pipeline, with the State Department decision on it now delayed into 2014, is a recent example of this.

Entire industries, such as coal-fired power stations, are in danger of being closed down by regulators, with billions written off. Other industries, such as corn-based ethanol, spring up from nowhere, with no economic or environmental rationale other than a collection of regulations and subsidies dreamed up by lobbyists and fed to Congressmen. Other industries, such as solar power, have their birth pangs gigantically subsidized, then to the surprise of cynics become successful, after which they disappear to China on cost grounds, with the subsidies to U.S. solar panel manufacturers having achieved absolutely zippo.

Then there is the unfortunate Binghamton, NY, a depressed medium-sized town whose main economic activity currently appears to be processing income tax returns, which sees in the distance the mirage of the Marcellus Shale oil and gas deposits, and unimagined riches (by Binghamton standards) for its inhabitants as a major center of the fracking business. Alas, this vision recedes ever further into the distance, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo refuses year after year to authorize fracking in the state. However the unemployed frackers of Binghamton need not worry—Cuomo has authorized a casino to open there, so they can gamble away their welfare checks. Of course I can't help thinking that giving the town two economic activities, income tax return processing and a casino, is asking for an unpleasant mutual interaction between the two.

As I have said before, I'm an optimist. One day, the United States will again have a vibrant economy. New discoveries, such as self-driving cars, genetic engineering and sophisticated online education will hugely increase U.S. wealth and productivity. However to regain the growth levels of the twentieth century, a major pruning will need to take place:

* Financial regulation must be cut back, with a simple division between deposit-taking institutions (assuming deposits are guaranteed) and deal-doers, and tight monetary policy used to burst bubbles before they really get going. Each financial institution must have one regulator, and thus be subject to only one pocketbook raid when things go wrong.

* Environmental regulation must be incorporated into the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Energy abolished, so that any necessary environmental regulations will be drafted with the care and attention to business's needs currently enjoyed by product standards and trade regulations.

* Contingency fee lawsuits and outsize settlements must be outlawed. However, as a London-based banker for many years, I have no idea how one suppresses today's grotesque document bloat, other than by re-creating the London merchant banks, who dealt with each other and with customers on the basis mostly of trust. That's a much more efficient way to run a financial system than the current one, but it unfortunately takes 200 years to create.

Without such pruning, U.S. economic growth will become ever more sluggish, or possibly disappear altogether. Ships encrusted with too many barnacles eventually sink.

SOURCE

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Trains to Nowhere

John Stossel

When Democrats and Republicans agree, I get nervous. It often means that they agree to grab my wallet.  Both parties now agree that we don't have extra budget money lying around, but both say government does need to spend more on "infrastructure."  Even conservatives want more spent on roads and mass transit.

The reason, advocates claim, is that infrastructure, unlike most government spending, has a "multiplier effect" -- it creates new wealth by doing things like speeding up travel.

Well, it might.

Advocates also point out something that seems obvious to them: Infrastructure is a job that must be done by government. Who else would launch big projects like the New York City subway system? Subways are what Big Government supporters call a "public good."

They are important to many people, but there's no way that business would build subways or run them, they argue. Subways lose billions of dollars. Entrepreneurs would never invest in subway cars or dig subway tunnels -- there's no profit in that.

But often what we "obviously know" ... is not so.

Most of New York's subways were actually built by private companies. Few New Yorkers even know that. Private companies dug the first tunnels and ran the trains for about 40 years. But when they wanted to raise the fare to a dime, the politicians said they had to "protect" the public. Government took over the system, saying only "public ownership" could guarantee affordable fares.

But government doesn't do anything well. Under government management, profit disappeared and the fare rose well beyond the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what the private companies had wanted to charge.

Now, politicians want you to buy them new trains. Who wouldn't like a shiny new train? The Obama administration gave your money to California politicians who want to build a 200-m.p.h. train to take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Somehow, in the tradition of political boondoggles everywhere, the train that politicians actually approved doesn't yet come close to either city. It starts, and ends, "in the boondocks," says Reason magazine's Adrian Moore.

"I live in a little mountain town called Tehachapi," he says. "It's in the middle of nowhere, 50 miles to the nearest Walmart ... the high-speed rail line in California comes right through my town. This thing is like the boondoggle of boondoggles."

When I confronted train advocate Dennis Lytton about that, he said, "They're starting high-speed rail in the middle of the state because that's where you can build it fast."

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for 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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Rosh Hashanah

Shana Tova umetuka.  May Am Yisrael be blessed with clarity, moral strength and courage and may Hashem reward his people with a New Year of shalom, goodness and sweetness.

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Democrats and Lawlessness

In the third of the six films of the Star Wars saga, the Sith Lord who has infiltrated to become the ruling Chancellor of the democratic republic confederation of peaceful worlds announces to the elected Assembly of representatives of those worlds that to deal with an exaggerated, fabricated crisis, “The Old Republic will be reorganized into the first Intergalactic Empire.” The distracted Assembly responds with polite applause. One of the few characters who understands what is happening remarks wryly, “So this is how the Republic ends. With applause.”

Proving that truth is stranger than fiction, this is happening right now in the United States of America. President Obama has already seized the power to rule by decree, and is doing so virtually every day now.

For those who do not immediately get what is meant by “rule by decree,” let me explain. The Constitution grants the power to legislate, to make laws, to the Congress, which is why it is called “the Legislative Branch.” It grants the power to carry out, or execute, the laws to the President, which is why the President and his Administration are called “the Executive Branch.” The Constitution accordingly specifies that the President’s duty is “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” It grants the power to interpret and adjudicate the law to the Judiciary, which is why that is called “the Judicial Branch.”

But President Obama does not accept the limitations of his role within this constitutional framework. He is now regularly exercising the power to legislate directly himself, either by announcing on his own supposed authority changes in existing laws that Congress has already passed, or by announcing that he will carry out entirely new laws that Congress never passed, or even refused to pass. These actions are brazen, lawless violations of the Constitution.

The President through his Executive Branch has the power to issue regulations interpreting the law as passed, for purposes of implementation. But all regulations must be authorized by an underlying law passed by Congress. Neither the President nor any agency underneath him in the entire Executive Branch can issue a regulation that contradicts or changes the law that is cited as authorizing it. In other words, if the law says 2014, the President has no authority to say screw it, I say 2015, by regulation or otherwise.

The same is true of Executive Orders. All Executive Orders must be based on authority granted to the President by some law passed by Congress, or by the Constitution itself.

The President does have the authority to refuse to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But he cannot refuse to enforce laws because he disagrees with them, or to gain political advantage, such as delaying implementation of a law until after the next election, attempting to deceive the American people as to what has been enacted until the next election passes. The Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Justice Department exists to advise the President as to his legal powers. And this is what legal opinions issued by that office have said.

Similarly, in Clinton v. City of New York, the Supreme Court ruled, “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes…. The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation.”

The Lawless President President Obama has engaged in such lawless usurpation of authority most of all in regard to his pride and joy, Obamacare, which he finagled through Congress in 2010 on a strict party line vote, openly buying off recalcitrant Democrats who foresaw the coming train wreck with various political sweeteners at taxpayer expense. But now that it has passed, he refuses to implement it as passed, even though former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said we would have to pass it to find out what is in it. But not when the public finding out what is in it might lead to political disadvantage for the Democrats, apparently.

The lawlessness started even before President Obama’s re-election. The law provided for $716 billion in cuts to Medicare in the first 10 years alone. But to evade political retribution for these cuts, the President delayed them until after the election, and dishonestly misrepresented them during the campaign. He and his campaign told voters the cuts involved only reductions in “overpayments” to doctors and hospitals providing health care to seniors, and in “subsidies” to insurance companies, which millions of seniors had chosen to provide their Medicare benefits under Medicare Part C, saying actual Medicare “benefits were not affected at all”— “not by one dime.”

The President did not want seniors to be able to see in their own lives that these gross mischaracterizations were not true. The Medicare Chief Actuary explained that within a few years, the cuts would reduce Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals to only about half what is paid under Medicaid for health care for the poor, which studies have documented results in poor health care for the poor. So the cuts disappeared until after the election, by illegal Presidential decree.

Similarly, the Obamacare law provided that insurance companies could not decline coverage for children with pre-existing conditions, but in an alleged mistake, the law as passed said that did not become effective until January, 2014. But to gain political advantage before the 2012 elections, HHS issued a rule declaring that this popular provision would become effective on September 23, 2010. Intimidated from challenging the illegal rule in court, health insurers began withdrawing the sale of child only policies, resulting in no one selling such policies in almost half the country.

The Obamacare law as passed also provides that the extensive Obamacare subsidies for purchasing health insurance on the exchanges apply in such Exchanges set up by the states, as the law contemplated. But 27 states exercised their right under the law to refuse to set up exchanges, leaving the federal government to do it in those states, primarily because the states were left with no discretion or authority regarding how to organize them. Only 17 states have actually established exchanges on their own. The law as written and passed only provides for the Obamacare exchange health insurance subsidies to apply in these 17 states. So on May 23, 2012, the IRS issued an illegal rule providing that the Obamacare exchange subsidies shall apply in all 50 states any way.

After the President’s re-election, he famously announced a delay for one year of one of the basic pillars of the law, the employer mandate requiring employers of 50 or more full time workers to buy health insurance for their workers, as the government specifies exactly what they must buy. The Obamacare law explicitly says the Obamacare law would become effective in 2014. The President has no legal authority to change that to 2015, as the Supreme Court has ruled. But the President brazenly flouted the law, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court by decreeing the mandate shall be delayed until 2015.

This rewriting of the law as we go is contributing to further Obamacare chaos. The exchange subsidies were only supposed to be available under the Obamacare law to those who do not receive the required employer-provided insurance. But since no such insurance will now be required next year, very few will actually have the elaborate and expensive employer insurance as required. Moreover, the CBO estimates on the cost of Obamacare are based on only a fraction of workers qualifying for the exchange subsidies.

The Obamacare law requires the exchanges to verify whether applicants for the exchange subsidies qualify because they do not have required employer coverage, and to verify applicant incomes with employers to determine how much applicants qualify for in subsidies. But with no employer mandate for next year, the Obama Administration recently issued another illegal rule authorizing exchanges to just take the applicant’s word on whether they have employer-provided health insurance, and how much they are paid.

The Obamacare law as passed provides that Obamacare shall apply to members of Congress and their staffs when it becomes effective next year. But that was causing extensive panic on Capitol Hill as our public servants began realizing what that would mean for them. So the Office of Personnel Management recently issued another illegal rule exempting Congressional members and their staffs from the Obamacare limitations on what the federal government could pay for their health insurance, which will still apply to others in the private sector.

The Obamacare law also provides for caps on out-of-pocket costs consumers themselves must pay under Obamacare policies, limiting such costs to $6,350 for individual policies and $12,700 for family policies. But because the Obama Administration is apparently unprepared to implement these caps, the Labor Department issued an illegal rule in February 2013, rewriting the Obamacare law once again to waive these caps until 2015.

The Obama Administration has similarly flouted the Obamacare law in regard to implementing the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), which was supposed to grant small businesses broader health insurance options, the Federal Basic Health Plan Option, which was supposed to offer a more affordable managed care insurance choice, and required electronic notification to consumers of eligibility for Medicaid and Exchange subsidies.

An Illegal Habit But President Obama’s illegal flouting of the law has not been limited to his own hapless Obamacare law. Last year, the President implemented the so-called DREAM Act by decree, after Congress had considered it, but refused to enact it, providing for new benefits for illegal immigrants brought to America as children. Before that, the President had ruled by decree that governors could apply for waivers from the welfare reform work requirements adopted in 1996 under President Clinton.

President Clinton was sent out during the Democratic National Convention to falsely claim that the ruling only allowed the governors to require more work. But under the 1996 welfare reforms, the governors did not need any more authority to require more work. The law already granted them complete authority to do so.

Earlier this month, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered all U.S. attorneys to stop prosecutions of all nonviolent, non-gang-related, drug crime defendants subject to mandatory minimum sentences. The law requires such mandatory minimum sentences. The Obama Administration is just refusing to follow and enforce the law.

Last week, the President asked the Federal Communications Commission to impose a $5 tax per cell phone to finance the extension of a program to expand Internet access. The American colonists protested in the Boston Tea Party against a 3 cent tax on tea, which they complained was not imposed in accordance with law. The colonists were smart enough to see that if the King could impose a 3 cent tax without legal authorization, there was no legal constraint at all on his abuses. That protest led to the Revolutionary War over the principle.

One of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon was that he used the IRS for special audits and investigations of his political opponents. Under Obama, we all know now that the IRS has done the same thing. President Obama has also refused to obey court orders, such as when the federal courts ruled that his so-called recess appointments of federal officials when the Senate was not in recess were unconstitutional, or the federal rulings that the President’s extended moratorium on Gulf oil drilling after the British Petroleum oil leak were illegal under the law,

Charles Krauthammer wrote earlier this month regarding President Obama’s lawlessness that “such gross usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers….If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what is left of the law? What’s the point of the whole legislative process — of crafting various provisions through give and take negotiation — if you cannot rely on the fixity of the final product, on the assurance that the provisions bargained for by both sides will be carried out.”

Krauthammer further explained the resulting breakdown of our government, saying, “Consider immigration reform. The essence of any deal would be legalization in return for strict border enforcement. If some such legislative compromise is struck, what confidence can anyone have in it — if the President can unilaterally alter what he signs?”

Krauthammer adds, “Yet, this President is not only untroubled by what he is doing, but open and rather proud. As he tells cheering crowds on his never-ending campaign style tours: I am going to do X — and I’m not going to wait for Congress. That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana republic stuff. In this country, the President is required to win the consent of Congress first. At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law.”

Democrats Against Democracy If the President can rewrite and make up the law, then the bonds of democracy are broken completely. We are no longer governed by laws adopted through the democratic process, but ruled instead by authoritarian, Third World-style decree.

These brazenly lawless abuses of office by the President more than justify his impeachment. But with the most partisan Democrat control of the Senate in our history, that impeachment would go nowhere in the Senate. Moreover, even to raise the word guarantees a 250% Democrat voter turnout next year, especially given how the public reacted when the Republicans attempted to impeach President Clinton for his much more mild violations of law.

But there is another check and balance on President Obama’s abuse of office. Hold the Democrat party politically accountable for the third world-style authoritarianism and suspension of democracy of the Obama Administration. They are the ones covering for the authoritarian caudillo, in Krauthammer’s words. They are the ones who selected Obama as their party standard bearer despite his radical left-wing extremist roots and background.

Those today who contribute to, support, and vote for the Democrat party are supporting this lawless suspension of our democracy. Is democracy even socially respectable in America today?

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ELSEWHERE

Union dumps AFL-CIO for its sucking up to Obama:  "The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has cut ties with the AFL-CIO, citing in part the private-sector union’s support for ObamaCare and immigration reform. In an August 29 letter to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, leaders of the 40,000-member union said they have become 'increasingly frustrated' with the federation’s policy positions on such matters as immigration and healthcare reform. 'We feel the federation has done a great disservice to the labor movement and all working people,' wrote Robert McEllrath, president of the San Francisco-based ILWU"

Documents: AT&T assists US drug thugs with bigger database than NSA’s:  "For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls -- parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs. The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant. The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987."

University tries to nip professors’ union in the bud:  "What does a research university in Boston have in common with the corporations Pfizer, Cablevision and IBM? They hire the same union-buster. According to Adjunct Action, a project of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Northeastern University has retained Jackson Lewis, a law firm used by major corporations to thwart employee organizing efforts. The AFL-CIO calls the New York-based firm 'the number one union-buster in America.' The move could signal intensified efforts by university administrations to defeat organizing drives among contingent faculty, which have been gaining momentum in several cities"

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

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