I haven't always agreed with George Will, but at present he's one of the few voices crying out in the wilderness while Obama leads our nation into socialist slavery, right over the cliff of freedom.
I got up this morning, fixed my breakfast and turned on the TV to Fox News to see what is happening. First guest on The Pundit Pit is a black woman, who responds to this question about nationalizing our health care system, which is being planned by Obama and the nutroots left.From our vantage point in early 2009, we can see that critics of Alan Greenspan were right when they said that he lowered interest rates too much between 2001 and 2004. But what about the products that the Wall Street wizards were selling? They were called -- in hushed tones of awe -- "complex derivatives." Actually, they were sausages stuffed with junk loans, mediocre loans, good loans and sufficient spice to sucker the credulous. These sausages were sold all over the world, and every time a transaction was made, those in on the transaction made money, even the vegetarians, even the economic ignoramuses. It was a kind of gigantic chain letter. Government regulators did not take heed. The politicians did not take heed. Those investment bankers who did and who spoke out were ignored.Complex derivatives. Sorta like sausage with an undetermined amount of hog crap mixed in. Works for a while until somebody smells the crap and guess what? Nobody buys any sausage.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
Breathtaking. Rahm Emanuel brazenly admits the Obama administration plan to ignore dealing with the banking crisis and take advantage of it to socialize America for a political power grab.
God help us all. He's our only hope. Don't look to Washington for economic salvation. It ain't there.But the markets were aware of the huge problems plaguing the banking system before Obama became president. Surely what they are reacting to now is his failure to address them. Obama has spent far more time publicly defending his stimulus package, and touting his health care, energy, and education proposals, than explaining how he's going to deal with the banking crisis. Yet virtually all serious observers--whatever their politics, whatever their economics--agree that the financial crisis is the central crisis we face, that the core of the problem is the banking system. But the administration has treated this as merely one "leg" of a three-legged stool (the other two are stimulus and housing), and the least urgent one to fix at that. And now Obama wants to focus on "long term" issues like health care and energy and education--while not showing any sense of urgency about the banking crisis.
Instead, the Obama administration throws more money at Citi and AIG. This at best simply puts off the day of reckoning (but at some considerable cost); at worst, Obama's Treasury is fiddling while Rome burns. And it's not as if there's that much disagreement across the political or economic spectrum as to what has to be done; everyone agrees the toxic assets have to be separated from the rest. And the disagreements about how to do this seem to some degree semantic ("nationalization" followed by selling off good assets vs. setting up a "bad bank" vs. public-private partnerships to buy and manage toxic assets, etc.). What spooks the markets, I believe, is that the Obama administration has shied away from embracing any solution. Under his administration, has a single toxic asset actually been seized, separated, sold, or de-toxified? I don't think so.
No, the stock market isn't like a tracking poll. Tracking polls were just about the electoral prospects of Barack Obama. The stock market is about real money, about the real livelihoods of real Americans. Obama's political advisors may have told him that dealing with the banking system will be politically difficult. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may want to build up his political capital after a rough confirmation before he steps up to the plate. Larry Summers may not want to endanger his chance to be Fed chairman by being identified with an unpopular bank "bailout". I'm told almost every theme in Obama's speech last Tuesday night was focus-group tested--and the speech played pretty well politically. But the markets weren't impressed. Isn't it time for Obama and his team to get up the nerve to stop playing politics and to govern?
If any member of the Gender Mutiny Collective is offended by this column I invite you to come and monitor my classroom. I also invite you to kiss my ass.Say goodnight Gracie.
Famed stock-market analyst Barack Hussein Obama offered us bitter, backwoods clingers to God and guns some sage financial advice yesterday: "Buy low, sell high."I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died. Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: "Bush lied, people died." There are, of course, two differences between the slogans.Michael Gerson calls this The Week of Revelation as Obama reveals his true colors, not Democrat blue but red, not as in Republican red, but as in Socialist red with a capital S.Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction. In the age of Obama, there is little more important than maintaining the integrity of our language against the onslaught of Orwellian language abuse that is already a babbling brook and soon will be a cataract of verbal deception.
The other difference is that Bush didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He merely was mistaken. Whereas Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week: "As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't."
Even Maureen Dowd, the red-head at the Noo Yawk Times, joins in the chorus of nay-sayers on Obama. She's either off her meds again or she forgot to drink her Kool-Aid yesterday.Obama chose a time of recession to propose a massive increase in progressivity -- a 10-year, trillion-dollar haul from the rich, already being punished by the stock market collapse and the housing market decline. This does not just involve undoing the Bush tax reductions but capping tax deductions to collect about $30 billion a year. Despite all the rhetoric of "responsibility" and shared sacrifice, the message of the Obama budget is clear: The wealthy are responsible for the economic mess and they will bear the entire sacrifice so that government can "invest" in the people.
But governments do not "invest," they spend. Such spending can be justified or unjustified. It is wealthy individuals, however, who actually invest their capital in job creation. Most have much less capital than they used to. Under the Obama budget, they would have less still. This does not seem to matter in the economic worldview of the Obama budget. Equality is the goal instead of opportunity or economic mobility. And government, in this approach, is more capable of investing national wealth than America's discredited plutocrats -- meaning successful two-income families, entrepreneurs and professionals.
In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.
He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.
“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget.
He reckons he’ll need Congress for more ambitious projects, like health care, and when he goes back to wheedle more bailout billions, given that A.I.G. and G.M. and our other corporate protectorates are burning through our money faster than we can print it and borrow it from the ever-more-alarmed Chinese.
Team Obama sounds hollow, chanting that “the status quo is not acceptable,” even while conceding that the president is accepting the status quo by signing a budget festooned with pork.
Obama spinners insist it was “a leftover budget.” But Iraq was leftover, too, and the president’s trying to end that. This is the first pork-filled budget from a new president who promised to go through the budget “line by line” and cut pork.
On “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, dismissed the bill as “last year’s business,” because most of it was written last year.
But given how angry Americans are, watching their future go up in smoke, the bloated bill counts as this year’s business.
It includes $38.4 million of earmarks sponsored or co-sponsored by President Obama’s labor secretary, Hilda Solis; $109 million Hillary Clinton signed on to; and $31.2 million in earmarks sought by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood with colleagues.
(Even Barack Obama was listed as one of the co-sponsors of a $7.7 million pet project for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions until he got his name taken off last week.)
And then there are the 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million that Emanuel put into the bill when he was a congressman, including money for streets in Chicago suburbs and a Chicago planetarium.
Blame it on the stars, Rahm, or on old business. But as Shakespeare wrote in “Lear”: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our own disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars.”
As Scooby Do sez, "Ruh Roh!"
You gotta love somebody who agrees with you and Michael Medved read my mind this morning by comparing the early days of President Obama's administration to the disastrous presidency of James Earl Carter Jr, who Medved calls "the century's worst president."In the sweep of recent history, James Earl Carter, Jr., stands utterly alone in leading his party to capture the White House with overwhelming Congressional majorities (61 Senators, 292 members of the House – far bigger margins than Obama!) and then, after a brief four year demonstration of almost unimaginable ineptitude, handing the reins of government back to the opposition.
In looking ahead to the Obama administration, no one wants an economic or foreign policy repetition of the nightmarish Carter years – the Republic can hardly afford that sort of long-term damage.
But GOP loyalists should legitimately hope that the new president does manage to follow Little Jimmy’s political example – repeating the Carteresque feat of losing the presidency for his party after a single term of office.
In this regard, President Obama’s first week has already provided a promising start—displaying some of the nastiness, small-mindedness, insecurity, and self-righteousness that notably characterized the Georgia Peanut. The Inaugural Address included graceless digs at President Bush that undermined the promised theme of “unity,” while touchy, grumpy comments to the White House press corps stunned reporters who had previously displayed their infatuation with the new president. The odd remarks scolding Republicans with a reminder that “I won” and warning them not to listen to Rush Limbaugh, hardly characterize a self-confident, optimistic, coalition-building leader in the style of FDR, JFK or Ronald Reagan.
Maybe, like Carter, Obama will bury himself in his own hubris and we'll get rid of him in just four years. That's about as optimistic as I can get. But good Lord, he can do a lot of damage in four years. Will we still have a republic standing after four years of Obama-Carter socialism?
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