And Jerry Pournelle neatly encapsulates why this is so:
It is probably irrelevant given the election results, but my remedy is simple: any company that is too large to be allowed to fail is too large, and ought to be subject to anti-trust regulation.
In the argument about whether we should or should not bail out, I think this is Q.E.D. for those who have argued against.
14 comments November 23rd, 2008
The right way to do it:
Credit this idea to Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration official. We’ve had lots of disagreements with Reich in the past, and no doubt will in the future. But on this he’s right: If a bailout is to be given, the Big Three and their unions must thoroughly revamp their businesses, almost as if it were a bankruptcy. Call it a Chapter 11 Bailout.
Above all, the companies’ poisonous contracts with the United Auto Workers union have to be torn up. The problem is that the UAW, under President Ron Gettelfinger, remains adamant: No givebacks. This is financial lunacy.
Thanks in part to managerial incompetence, but mostly due to pricey union contracts, it costs American carmakers too much to build cars here; they can’t compete. When you fold in health care, pensions, hourly pay, vacations and the rest, average total compensation for a Big Three autoworker is $73.21 an hour, according to data cited by University of Michigan economist Mark Perry.
Toyota, Honda and Nissan pay a still-generous $44.20 an hour in total compensation — a cost edge of nearly 40%. Is it any wonder that Ford, GM and Chrysler can’t compete? Or that, after paying their workers, they never have enough cash left to retool?
Today the total market capitalization of the Big Three has fallen to about $7 billion. Is it better for the owners of those companies to suffer a total loss or for taxpayers to lose $25 billion? The answer is obvious. As such, the only case for a bailout is if it would force major changes on the industry. That won’t happen with current management in place or with giveaway union contracts that make the companies unviable.
And, remember, if Big Auto did go out of business, it would only be in the sense that the corporate bosses and union chiefs who currently run the show would be out of business - the plants, themselves, would either never close at all or only close for a short time as new management comes in and simply keeps things going, now without the corporate pinheads and self-destructive union contracts. The talk of millions of jobs lost is the typical Big Corporation/Big Government scare tactic when reality is about to overtake them - they don’t want to change, so they claim that if the taxpayers don’t pony up, we’ll have fire, famine, war and a plague of locusts o’er the land…don’t believe them. Its utter BS they are selling.
We were stampeded on the $700 billion bail out (and kudos to those few - left and right - who warned from the start that it was an idiot idea), but we must not allow ourselves to be snookered in to becoming Uncle Sugar for every corporate behemoth and corrupt union in the nation. Unions are, at best, useless - and more often downright destructive. Big corporations like GM are essentially devices designed to hide incompetence until the CEOs get their golden parachutes. The swifter these dinosaurs die off, the better our economy will be for it.
Democrats will fight tooth and nail for these bail outs - because unions shovel massive amounts of cash at the Democrats and, additionally, the corporate bosses are also more than happy to shell out to the Democrats in order to keep the corrupt government process going whereby well-connected corporations help Democrats write the tax laws to advantage big corporations and disadvantage any prospective competitors. Another bit of bull flop not to believe is the leftwing story that liberals fight against corporations - they fight off the corporations with all the determination of hookers fighting off Johns in Vegas on a Friday night…
Let them go belly up - if they are failing, then taxpayer money will only go to reinforce failure. Better to have done with them and allow a rational auto industry to replace the current failed system.
21 comments November 19th, 2008
Democrats - and a few RINOs - start lining up for funds to cover their own stupid governing mistakes:
Three big city mayors asked the federal government Friday to use a portion of the $700 billion financial bailout to assist struggling cities.
The mayors sought help with their pension costs, infrastructure investment and cash-flow problems stemming from the global financial crisis.
The mayors—Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, Shirley Franklin of Atlanta and Phil Gordon of Phoenix—made their request in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
Nutter said cities are facing an economic crisis not seen since the Depression and need help just like financial institutions.
“I want to make sure that cities and metro areas are at the table, that their voices are being heard, that our challenges and problems are well understood, so that we can get relief,” Nutter said.
The big cities - even when they have a supposed Republican Mayor - are generally governed under the core liberal principle that you can spend forever, raise taxes like there’s no tomorrow and issue bonds like they’re going out of style and none of these chickens will come home to roost. After all, to the liberals, the money supply is endless and there’s no level of taxation, spending and regulation which will ever discourage business and/or convince those who can leave that the ‘burbs are a better option. After having spent themselves into oblivion (Philly, for instance, has three departments for housing issues - among a list of city agencies large enough to run the British Empire at its height), these useless and all too often corrupt big city leaders now want you, dear taxpayer, to bail them out. And Obama has encouraged this by saying he wants an element of bail out for profligate liberals in his government.
Get ready for the most recession-inducing and -deepening government free for all in human history, boys and girls: the Democrats are back in power and anyone who actually thought they’d show fiscal restraint and, indeed, common sense just hasn’t been paying attention for the past 40 years.
5 comments November 14th, 2008
Always a bad sign for a Congresscritter when he has to deny he’s under investigation:
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said he’s not a target in a Justice Department [investigation] of Countrywide Financial.
NBC News recently reported that the FBI is investigating Countrywide’s VIP program – which gave special mortgage deals to government officials.
Conrad was among those officials who received a mortgage.
The senator told WDAY Radio News that neither he nor his office have been contracted by federal investigators.
The Senate Ethics Committee is investigating Conrad’s relationship with Countrywide, and Conrad has denied he ever received preferential treatment.
The other Democrat on the chopping block here is Senator Chris Dodd (D-Bailout Package) - but there are others, and one of the first tests of the Obama Justice Department will be on whether or not they are prepared to see a fairly large number of Democrats brought down by this scandal. My bet is that its a test Obama will fail miserably, given the Democrats’ penchant for simply not caring about corruption unless they can tag a Republican with it at election time.
9 comments November 14th, 2008
From NRO’s The Corner:
Here’s a stat from my friend, blogger Mark Perry: Total compensation per hour for the big-three carmakers is $73.20. That’s a 52 percent differential from Toyota’s (Detroit South) $48 compensation (wages + health and retirement benefits). In fact, the oversized UAW-driven pay package for Detroit is 132 percent higher than that of the entire manufacturing sector of the U.S., which comes in at $31.59.
I don’t care how much money Congress throws at GM. With that kind of oversized comp-package they are not gonna be competitive. It’s throwin’ bad money after a bad cause. What a way to start the new Obama era.
I’m finding less and less arguments in favor of keeping the Federal Reserve and not going back on the gold standard…
One thing this whole financial mess has demonstrated conclusively is that politicians and corporate executives are entirely too pin headed to run an economy. The twits are asking us to trust them, again, because this time they’ll use our money wisely…promise! Here’s a concept - why do we need a “big three” set of automakers? Why can’t there be a dozen regional automakers competing fiercely for our dollars? What is the purpose of the United Auto Workers other than for employment of corrupt union bosses and donations for corrupt Democrat politicians? Anyone seriously think that if the UAW is dissolved that people will have to go back to working 12 hours a day for a dollar?
I’ve become the sworn enemy of Big Government and Big Corporation - no more of this archaic “what’s good for GM is good for America” nonsense…and neither is there any sense involved in thinking that some government hack in DC can figure out what we need in our States and communities. Any of you pinkos out there want to join me in this, I’ll welcome you with open arms - we’ll part company on a lot of issues, but if you wish to war on government and corporations, then I’m your ally.
It is high time we stopped allowing this sort of idiocy - a free man (or woman) owning his own property and able to look after himself and his family, that is what we are supposed to shoot for. We have to encourage useful things - growing stuff, making products, digging materials out of the ground. One man starting up a small manufacturing business in a depressed neighborhood is worth a dozen Ivy League economists trying to convince Obama that government can actually do something worthwhile in the economy. Think about it - did Henry Ford start out as a major multinational corporate boss? Heck no - he started out very small and worked his way up. Now it might be time for his company to bite the dust, and allow some modern day Henry Ford to work it out anew and figure out an even better way to get cheap transportation into the hands of the average American.
America has been buried under and avalanche of corporate and socialist garbage for nearly a century now - time to bring it to an end.
18 comments November 13th, 2008
There is much Democratic angst over General Motors and the prospects of Big Auto bankruptcy. My view: allow the bankruptcy to happen. The economic model enshrined in Big Auto is a dinosaur from the 1950’s and it is unrealistic to think that such a large corporation with a huge bureaucracy and an entrenched, corrupt union can ever compete in the global market. We can subsidize, bail out and protect till the cows come home - but it is certain that the American auto makers will have to undergo massive change.
Worse than the economic illiteracy involved in a Detroit bail out is the fact that our taxpayer dollars - already strained by the clearly-failing Wall Street bail out - will merely be used to prop up Democratic donors. Democrats could give a hoot about GM, but they do care very much to keep the UAW afloat because the UAW donated nearly $1.8 million directly to Democratic candidates in 2008 while also shelling out more than $9 million on other political activities which directly or indirectly aided Democratic political efforts. That is a lot of scratch, and the Democratic party doesn’t want this cash cow slaughtered.
We GOPers in our political wilderness at least have this advantage - we can’t get government swag for anyone, and thus we are now allowed to re-establish ourselves as the anti-corruption and fiscal responsibility party. We are, once again, the taxpayer’s watchdog.
Sorry, GM, but it was your own fool decisions which got you into this mess. Everyone has to start thinking, and no better place to start than in that monument to liberal and corporate failure, Detroit
34 comments November 12th, 2008
From the consequences of their insane labor contracts with Big Auto:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent to send a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urging him to assist the Big Three auto makers by considering broadening the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to help the troubled industry.
The two top Democratic leaders in Congress are likely to make the request in a letter to the White House, which could be forwarded as soon as Saturday afternoon, said individuals familiar with the matter. President-elect Barack Obama is generally supportive of the appeal, but at the moment is moving on his own track to assist the industry, these individuals said.
Mr. Obama is scheduled to meet with President George W. Bush at the White House Monday.
The White House has been reluctant to broaden use of the $700 billion program, which was created by Congress just ahead of the election to deal improve credit flows and calm turmoil in financial markets incited by the downturn in the housing economy.
“It was not set up for anything else,” said Bush spokesman Tony Fratto, noting the only assistance authorized by Congress for the auto industry is a $25 billion loan package meant to help the industry retool to meet higher fuel economy standards.
Democrats are worried that if the auto industry is forced to deal with economic reality it will result in fewer union members and thus less union swag for Democratic political campaigns - so, they want to bail out Big Auto and thus prevent any change to the way auto manufacturers do business. Now, don’t get me wrong here - Big Auto, at least its American component, appears to be the usual mush of corporate pinheads who, even with 12 million unit sales expected this year, have managed to run their cash machine up on the rocks. It isn’t hard to sell a car in America, ya know? Its not like they don’t have people knocking on their doors asking for their product, even if its a relatively crappy product which is over-priced and not fuel-efficient (I do like my Malibu Max, and thus I understand that GM is discontinuing the model…). Don’t anyone get the idea that I have any sympathy for the faceless blob corporations of the United States - devices to hide incompetence, that’s all they are…smaller is better, and if we can figure out a way to break up these big corporations without adversely effecting the free market, then I’m all for it.
Anyways - this is what we can expect from our Democrats; using taxpayer dollars to protect their electoral base. It doesn’t matter that the UAW and the corporations have made it almost impossible for our auto companies to swiftly react to changing market conditions, the only thing that matters to Democrats is the next election, and they want a lot of donations and no major union job losses, regardless of cost to the taxpayer and larger economy. This is what “hopenchange” really means, liberals - more corporate greed, union corruption and Democratic backscratching…
10 comments November 8th, 2008
And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, I’m finally inspired by the guy - inspired by how badly we can beat him once the headwinds of 2008 are out of our GOP way.
This is the guy who’s gonna save the world?
Q Mr. President-elect, do you still intend to seek income tax increases for upper-income Americans? And if so, should these Americans expect to pay higher taxes in 2009?
PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: The — my tax plan represented a net tax cut. It provided for substantial middle-class tax cuts. Ninety-five percent of working Americans would receive them. It also provided for cuts in capital gains for small businesses, additional tax credits. All of it is designed for job growth.
My priority is going to be, how do we grow the economy? How do we create more jobs?
I think that the plan that we’ve put forward is the right one. But obviously over the next several weeks and months, we are going to be continuing to take a look at the data and see what’s taking place in the economy as a whole. But understand the goal of my plan is to provide tax relief to families that are struggling, but also to boost the capacity of the economy to grow from the bottom up.
All right? Thank you very much, guys.
He didn’t answer the question! He must have thought he was having a fourth debate with McCain. The possible answers were, “yes, because its integral to my plan”, “no, at this time that would be unwise” or “we are reviewing that as part of our overall economic plan given the rapidly changing circumstances”. Couldn’t get it out - couldn’t get past a mindless repetition of the talking points.
Of course, the printed text doesn’t give the full flavor of the incoherence and meaninglessness of what the President-elect said. For 8 years now we’ve been told that President Bush is a dunce - and this is the smarter guy who’s going to fix everything?
Right now Obama still has the gleam of victory and the MSM bubble to protect him - but we’re going to flatten him as his liberal policies start to fail and the American people wake up to the fact that we’ve elected what appears to be a indecisive, liberal automaton…
UPDATE: Obama apologizes for his tasteless joke about Nancy Reagan. Forgiven and forgotten, as far as I’m concerned.
50 comments November 7th, 2008
As the global recession grows, the risk of a Chinese economic meltdown increases:
In conclusion, the risk of a hard landing in China is sharply rising. A deceleration in the Chinese growth rate to 7% in 2009–just a notch above a 6% hard landing–is highly likely, and an even worse outcome cannot be ruled out at this point.
The global economy is already headed toward a recession. A hard landing in China will have severe effects on growth in emerging market economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as Chinese demand for raw materials and intermediate inputs has been a major source of economic growth for emerging markets and commodity exporters. The sharp recent fall in commodity prices and the near collapse of the Baltic Freight index are clear signals that Chinese and global demand for commodities and industrial inputs is sharply falling. Thus, global growth–at market prices–will be close to zero in Q3 of 2008, likely negative in Q4 of 2009 and well into negative territory in 2009. So brace yourself for an ugly and protracted global economic contraction in 2009.
Read the whole thing. The short story is that China’s economy requires a massive and ever increasing amount of exports in order to sustain itself - exports are already falling and will collapse in 2009, while China’s government already seems to have used up the resources necessary for any substantial fiscal stimulus. Bad news for China and the world - and confirmation of my idea of “Freedom Trade” to replace free trade…had we not done this much business with China and instead put our money in free nations, we wouldn’t have this massive collapse in an explosive country about to happen…of such stuff are world wars made.
Obama sure has a full plate - and only a rejection of liberal dogma gives him a chance of weathering the storm. The engine of global economic growth - the United States - has to be revved up, and only tax cuts and regulatory restraint will do the trick. We’ll find out soon if Obama is as smart as his minions say he is.
32 comments November 7th, 2008
Stocks took one look at President-elect Obama:
The stock market posted its biggest plunge following a presidential election as reports on jobs and service industries stoked concern the economy will worsen even as President-elect Barack Obama tries to stimulate growth.
Now, macro-economic factors are involved here, but the pre-election surge was followed by a post-election sell off. The Tax Man cometh, and investors are starting to hide - for our economy to rebound, Obama will have to convince them to get back into the game.
22 comments November 6th, 2008
You ain’t seen nothing, yet - as Roger Kimball notes and quotes:
For the last few decades, the West has been pumping money into economic backwaters, taking care first to assure everyone that they were “emerging” markets. But what if it turns out that they only seemed to be emerging when propped up by easy capital, in the absence of which some or all of them reverted to being what they always had been, i.e., submerging markets? What then?
“Europe,” Evans-Pritchard observes, has already had its first foretaste of what this may mean. Iceland’s demise has left them nursing likely losses of $74bn (£47bn). The Germans have lost $22bn.” Demise? Iceland? Well, economically, it pretty much amounts to that: as a professor at the university of Iceland put it earlier this month, “Iceland is bankrupt. . . . . The IMF has to come and rescue us.”
But what happened in Iceland was only the beginning. The crash of so-called “emerging markets” is sending shock waves throughout Europe and parts of Asia. Evans-Pritchard sketches the dismal picture:
Austria’s bank exposure to emerging markets is equal to 85pc of GDP – with a heavy concentration in Hungary, Ukraine, and Serbia – all now queuing up (with Belarus) for rescue packages from the International Monetary Fund.
Exposure is 50pc of GDP for Switzerland, 25pc for Sweden, 24pc for the UK, and 23pc for Spain. The US figure is just 4pc. America is the staid old lady in this drama.
Amazingly, Spanish banks alone have lent $316bn to Latin America, almost twice the lending by all US banks combined ($172bn) to what was once the US backyard. Hence the growing doubts about the health of Spain’s financial system – already under stress from its own property crash – as Argentina spirals towards another default, and Brazil’s currency, bonds and stocks all go into freefall.
Broadly speaking, the US and Japan sat out the emerging market credit boom. The lending spree has been a European play – often using dollar balance sheets, adding another ugly twist as global “deleveraging” causes the dollar to rocket. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in the ex-Soviet bloc.
The region has borrowed $1.6 trillion in dollars, euros, and Swiss francs. A few dare-devil homeowners in Hungary and Latvia took out mortgages in Japanese yen. They have just suffered a 40pc rise in their debt since July. Nobody warned them what happens when the Japanese carry trade goes into brutal reverse, as it does when the cycle turns. . . .
Russia too is in the eye of the storm, despite its energy wealth – or because of it. The cost of insuring Russian sovereign debt through credit default swaps (CDS) surged to 1,200 basis points last week, higher than Iceland’s debt before Götterdammerung struck Reykjavik.
The markets no longer believe that the spending structure of the Russian state is viable as oil threatens to plunge below $60 a barrel. The foreign debt of the oligarchs ($530bn) has surpassed the country’s foreign reserves. Some $47bn has to be repaid over the next two months.
And this leaves out China - which must export massive amounts of cheap consumer goods in order to keep its financial system afloat; cut those exports just a bit - as will certainly happen in the current downturn - and we mat see a Chinese economic meltdown as they are unable to pay their debts, bribe their oligarchs and pay for their military buildup all at once. Something will have to give. Why worry? Because China’s government made a deal with China’s people after Tienamen Square - “leave us in charge, and we’ll shepherd you to economic prosperity”. China falls into economic depression and all bets are off.
Now more than ever we need to elect John McCain - with this economic tsunami raging around the world, we need a President who understands that taxes have to be kept low, that business have to be free to innovate, that the American worker has to be free to compete, that regulations have to protect the public while not straightjacketing business. McCain will be that sort of President - Obama, on the other hand, is already wedded to the Euro-trash socialist model which has placed Europe’s economic head on the chopping block.
14 comments October 26th, 2008
That would be Thomas Sowell, for you liberals out there:
Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.
It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don’t want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.
An e-mail from a reader mentioned trying to tell his sister why he was voting against Obama but, when he tried to argue some facts, she cut him short: “You don’t like him and I do!” she said. End of discussion…
…many today seem to assume that if things are bad, “change” will make them better. Specifics don’t interest them nearly as much as inspiring rhetoric and a confident style. But many 20th-century leaders with inspiring rhetoric and great self-confidence led their followers or their countries into utter disasters.
These ranged from Jim Jones who led hundreds to their deaths in Jonestown to Hitler and Mao who led millions to their deaths.
What specifics do we know about Barack Obama’s track record that might give us some clue as to what kinds of “changes” to expect if he is elected?
We know that he opposed the practice of putting violent young felons on trial as adults. We know that he was against a law forbidding physicians to kill a baby that was born alive despite an attempt to abort it.
We know that Obama opposed attempts to put stricter regulations on Fannie Mae — and that he was the second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. We know that, this very year, his campaign sought the advice of disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines…
…The public has been told very little about what this man with the wonderful rhetoric has actually done. What we know is enough to make us wonder about what we don’t know. Or it ought to. For the true believers — which includes many in the media — it is just a question of whether you like him or not.
All very true - I’ll only add this point: at bottom, to support Obama is to take the coward’s way in politics. Other than once or twice asking parents to turn off the kids’ video games, Obama asks nothing of us other than that little detail of turning all power over to him. He’s not going to do anything to us (95% of the people won’t get a tax increase, right?), but he will punish “they” who have caused our problems. You see, it isn’t us who screwed the pooch, it is “they” who did it, and Obama’s gonna get ‘em and fix their little, red wagon! Oil companies, insurance companies, drug companies…we’ll get them for what “they” did to us! And all will be well - the malefactors punished, we can expect pure, unadulterated bliss without us having to do anything, ’cause we never were at fault, it was “they”, not us.
Of course, there is no “they” - there is only us, and it is we who have made a hash out of it, and only if we roll up our sleeves and get to work behind a President who has the courage to take the hard road will be get out of our current crisis. You can believe all you want that “hope ‘n change” will do the trick, but what is really going to do it is investigating carefully what has happened and letting the chips fall where they may, and then resolving - as a people - to not do that sort of thing again. Greedy bankers and corrupt politicians got over on us because we let them do it - because when voices were raised for reform we turned a deaf ear. John McCain and Sarah Palin are raising the voices for reform - Obama is saying “trust me, I’ll make it all better”. Which will you choose, fellow Americans?
33 comments October 22nd, 2008
While Obama plays the class warfare game, John McCain lays out a plan to help actual Americans deal with the real problems of the day:
We must restore trust to our financial system. On my orders, the Department of the Treasury will guarantee one hundred percent of all savings accounts for a period of six months. This will calm the understandable fears of widespread bank failure, while also restoring rational judgment to the choices of the market.
As president, I will also act to protect investors — especially those relying on their investments for retirement. Current rules mandate that investors must begin to sell off their IRAs and 401Ks when they reach age 70 and one half years old. Those rules should be suspended to spare senior citizens from being forced to sell their stock just as the market is hurting the most…
…It is essential that we avoid an exodus of capital from the market. Senator Obama yesterday offered up a proposal that would have the effect of encouraging early withdrawal of funds from 401(k) accounts, by suspending penalties through 2009. This is an invitation to capital flight, and therefore to continued instability in the market, at a moment when exactly the opposite is needed… I will cut in half the capital gains tax on stocks purchased and held for more than a year…
…It will not be enough for the federal government to correct the excesses of Wall Street without reforming its own reckless practices.
Spending in Washington is out of control and I am going to rein it in. As president, I will veto the pork barrel special interest projects that are wasting your tax dollars, driving up our debt, and weakening our dollar. I have proposed a one year spending freeze with certain exceptions for such things as defense and veteran care. We are going to use that year to turn Washington inside out and get rid of wasteful, inefficient programs that do no one any good.
While we put government back on your side, we must reform our tax system to deliver needed tax relief to working Americans, and to create jobs. I will double the child deduction, from 3,500 dollars to 7,000 dollars. Every person in America who chooses it will receive a 5,000 dollars towards the purchase of health insurance — health plans that will be theirs to keep, even if they change jobs or move to another state. And we will reduce the federal business tax rate from 35 percent — the second-highest in the world — to 25 percent. I am also proposing today that for those who are between jobs, we eliminate all taxes on unemployment benefits. It is unclear to me why the government taxes money it has just sent you, and we should relieve this burden from Americans who’ve been hit the hardest.
Reducing business tax rates has the potential to stop and reverse the rise of unemployment, and could create millions of new jobs. Despite the frequent changes to my opponent’s tax plans in recent months — he seems to revise them with each new poll — his plan to raise taxes on 50% of small business income has survived. And even as he rails against companies that shut down their plants and move overseas, he refuses to cut the tax rate that drives many of these companies away…
…This weekend, a plumber concerned that Senator Obama was going to raise his taxes asked him directly about his plan. The response was telling. Senator Obama explained to him that he was going to raise his taxes to quote “spread the wealth around.” This explains how Senator Obama can promise an income tax cut for millions who aren’t even paying income taxes right now. My friends, my plan isn’t intended to force small businesses to cut jobs to pay higher taxes so we can “spread the wealth around.” My plan is intended to create jobs and increase the wealth of all Americans.
My plan for economic recovery does not require guesswork or blind faith from the American people. You know my record. You don’t have to hope I will do what I promise. When I say I will cut spending, you need only look at my record to know it’s true. When I say I will defend taxpayers, you know it’s true because it’s what I’ve always done. When I say I will work across the aisle, you can see it in the results I’ve delivered.
And when I say I will change Washington, you know I’ll do it, because for me change isn’t a political slogan, it’s what I’ve been doing my whole career.
This is a bold, Reaganesque plan to re-start and economy currently burdened by years of bad financial practices encouraged by corrupt Congressional Democrats - what this financial crisis really boils down to is years of Democrat back scratching between Congress and Fannie/Freddie finally coming home to roost and the Democrats sticking the American people with the bill and then blaming the free market for the problems Democrats created.
We GOPers share the fault here - we didn’t go hard enough after Democrats and their leftwing allies. People like Frank, Dodd, Rangel and the people who run groups like ACORN should have seen the inside of a jail cell years ago rather than being allowed at the pinnacle of American power and wealth. We have found out that extreme nastiness must never deter us in the future from protecting the American people - it would be worth it to lose an election after sending Frank to jail, you see? Let them belabor us on the campaign trail as homophobes or what have you - but lets enforce the laws and go after corruption everywhere and all the time. It wouldn’t disturb any of us, I think, if Abramoff and the directors of ACORN were sharing a cell, now would it?
In John McCain and Sarah Palin we have the two people who, if they win, will owe absolutely nothing to the powers that be in DC and Wall Street. The entirety of the American elite, including a selection of the conservative elite (which persons are soon to be drummed out of the club, if we rank-and-filers have our way about it) has risen as one man to defeat McCain and elevate Obama, because in Obama they see a man who will allow things to go on as they are now…with the people who are on top today being on top tomorrow and no risk of a nasty criminal investigation in to just what has been going on with the financial system over the past 10 years or so.
For the sake of our families and the economy we depend upon but, also, for the sake of our free institutions, we must elected McCain/Palin. Allow Obama’s corrupt minions four years of unfettered power in DC and the United States government will become a sick joke, and America a much weaker nation in the world, despised as a banana Republic which can be bought on the open market by the highest bidder. We have it in our power to prevent this - to rise, ourselves, as one man and tell the elites that while they have been able to fool a good number of our fellow Americans, they didn’t fool a majority of us.
2 comments October 15th, 2008
Nevada Pundit cuts through a lot of the nonsense being said - especially on the left - about what caused our financial meltdown. The free market works - the government-managed market fails. Always and all the time.
14 comments October 15th, 2008
I’ve been pondering writing a history of the 20th century and calling it, “The 20th Century: A Christian Failure” or, perhaps, “A Failure of Christians”. We really flopped in the 20th century, we who claim to call Jesus Our Lord - we allowed things to slide from bad to worse and each time a moral decision was required we retreated behind a fog of disingenuous rhetoric about “rights” and “separation of Church and State”. This is not to say that our Jewish and Moslem brothers and sisters didn’t contribute to the whole problem, but as the West in general - and the United States in particular - have been the project of those who, in their large majority, claim (or, at least, claimed at one time) to be Christian, the lion’s share of the blame must be laid at our door.
Discussing the financial meltdown, Deacon Keith Fournier points out that the financial failure is, at bottom, just a symptom of our moral failure - our unwillingness to speak the truth and adhere to truth:
When a society fails to recognize that persons are more important than things, when it loses sight of the primacy of the inviolable dignity of every single human person at every age, every stage and of every size, it soon devolves into a form of practical materialism, worshipping a new golden calf. It uses the language of human rights but has lost its true moral content. When there is no recognition of a preeminent right to life, there will soon be an erosion of the entire structure of human rights. Human rights do not exist in a vacuum; they are goods of the human person. This is why I absolutely insist that to be “Pro-Life” is NOT to be a political Partisan or a “single issue” voter. Rather, it is to be truly human and to recognize that there is a hierarchy of rights. Without acknowledging the preeminent right to life, all derivative rights and the entire infrastructure of human rights is placed in jeopardy. The further legitimate questions and positions of political parties become moot. Without the freedom to be born, all of the talk about compassion for the poor and the promotion of freedom throughout the entirety of life, and how we attain it, is hollow and empty. Failing to recognize our first neighbors in the womb as having a right to be born and then to live a full life in our community is a foundational failure of our obligation in solidarity to one another and the entire ethic of being “our brothers (and sisters) keeper”. There can be no enduring lasting solidarity in a culture that kills its own children and then calls it a “right”. This is a moral crisis.
Mother Teresa, whom the Catholic Church now rightly calls “Blessed Teresa”, put it so clearly: “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.” (emphasis in original)
Some people contest my assertion that abortion - the battle over Life - is the central issue of our times, but the more time goes on and the deeper I think on this issue, the more clear it is that I’m correct in my assertion. While there are many elements and cross-currents at work in our world today, the fact that we removed the most defenseless from the protection of our laws has been corroding our culture until, now, we hardly even bat an eye at moral depravity which, once upon a time, would have outraged the whole of society. The fabric of lies which has been used to support legal abortion has found itself apt in supporting every other form of moral collapse - it really does go, “if its ok to abort a child, then its ok to - insert immoral act here“.
At the heart of our financial crisis stands one Barney Frank - no, he’s not the primary culprit, as there is no such person in existence; it was a group effort. But, still, Frank is at the center of the meltdown - and he’s a man who offered his shield to the malefactors of great wealth who plundered Fannie and Freddie; while, at times, his lover was involved with the firms…and, once upon a time, Frank wrote letters on behalf of another lover who needed character witnesses in regards to his conviction for having sex with a minor. In other words, Frank is the sort of person who, once upon a time, would not have survived in politics…but now we shrink away, fearful that any critique of Frank - or the underlying immorality of Frank which so easily led him down the path to cover for financial skullduggers - will get us called “homophobic” and other hateful names…and so, Frank goes on, and likely will continue to go on until he voluntarily retires from the scene. Frank is impervious to us - because he has slipped out of basic morality, and we have become afraid to point out the truth of the matter.
Unless and until we recover our morality, all our efforts to cure our society will ultimate fail. Only men and women who boldly state what is right and what is wrong and who take the fight to the corrupt special interests. We can’t have, as it were, an open and honest banking system run by people who think that killing children is ok, or that pornography is harmless, or that massive sex and violence in popular culture won’t lead people astray. As we view it right here, three weeks before the election, the reason Obama is ahead is because we are - or, at least, have been - thus far unwilling to really call him on his lies and his horrific personal and political associates….he might slip into the White House on a series of lies which the American majority - long fallen from a rigid adherence to morality - fall for because they sound good. Lies usually do - its why we tell so many of them. Truth is like rough sandpaper to the soft, velvety texture of Lies.
We have a choice in November - to find comfort in plausible lies, or to march open eyed into the difficult country of Truth. What will that choice be, I wonder?