Oh, Happy Graduate!

By Alan Caruba

Life was much simpler for a young man graduating in the late 1950s. If he was classified 1-A in the Draft, he could look forward to two years in the military before even contemplating a career.

I had acquired a head full of Arts and Sciences mush over four wonderful years at the University of Miami (FL). It was still a comparatively young institution at the time and, if you had a pulse, you were guaranteed acceptance. There were lots of palm trees, dinner dances, a colorful collection of faculty, and even classes to attend if you were actually inclined to learn anything.

I noticed that almost nothing I had learned had any application to the real world beyond the edges of the campus. The U.S. Army did not care. They found in me a splendid specimen of young manhood they could fashion into a fearsome warrior. But first I had to learn how to make my bed, fold my t-shirts, march, and, best of all, to shoot an M-1, handheld, gas-operated, clip-fed, semi-automatic rifle.

It never crossed my mind that I might actually have to go to war somewhere and, lucky me, I never did. My departure from the U.S. Army was delayed by an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between President Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Krushchev over some missiles in Cuba. As soon as they were removed I was informed I could go home.

My first job was with a human relations organization that sent me back to my beloved Miami, but by the time Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I concluded that I had no interest in such matters. Returning home I was fortunate enough to be employed by a weekly newspaper, whereupon my real education began.

Suffice to say that jobs were plentiful in the 1960s. The nation was going to send a man to the Moon, the music was great, few had even heard of Vietnam until Lyndon B. Johnson decided to ratchet up a full-blown war there. He was also busy with a “War on Poverty” that did nothing to relieve poverty, but put a lot of lazy people on the dole, ensuring Democrat votes. That’s how it was done then. That’s how it’s done now.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be a twenty-year-old graduating from a college or university these days. They are emerging into the Great Recession and the job scene is grim.

According to a recent ABC News report, “The unemployment rate among young Americans, age 16 to 24, now stands at 18.9 percent. And while that number includes workers with only high school diplomas—-who have a hard time finding work even in good times-—there’s no getting around the mountainous challenge it represents.”

CNN Money.com reports that “This year has been extremely rough. New college graduates had forty percent fewer job prospects, a new report shows. And the outlook for 2010, while better, is still not promising.”

This is reporter-talk for ‘I have no idea what I am writing about and thank heavens for anonymous reports!’ He dutifully noted that, “Overall, hiring of grads with any degree will decline by two percent, compared to 2009.” Blah, blah, blah.

Truth be told, those with accounting, business administration, management or—-better yet—-computer-related and engineering degrees, are going to be in a stronger position to grab that first job. If you’ve graduated with a degree in statistics, you are golden!

The word on the street is that, if the newly minted graduate has had any kind of working experience, he or she is one up on those who have none. Employers are also seeking good communication and writing skills. The theory, it seems, is that you pretty much can be trained to do anything.

Also expect to be rejected. A lot! Be wary, too, of internships. Remember, everyone else in the office is getting PAID. If you get offered a JOB, take it. A better one is probably not waiting despite your extraordinary resume or unless you graduated summa cum laude.

No doubt recent graduates will get gobs of advice on how to dress, what to say, and how to make a good first impression. They’re not hiring your attire. Employers want to know you really, really, really want to work hard for them!

Lastly, start reading The Wall Street Journal and watching Fox Business News or some comparable business channel. Soon enough you will begin to connect the dots.

You may even figure out that the great leaders of our nation and the world haven’t a clue what they are doing, are in charge of hopelessly bloated engines of government, and are reluctant to get out of the way so that people who actually work for a living can get the economy going again.

That’s why so many nations are broke. That’s why there’s a Great Recession.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Nobody's Listening

By Alan Caruba

"'There is an overall sense of frustration that no one is listening,'" pollster Scott Rasmussen said about a problem that has plagued the political party in power for decades." – Washington Times, April 2, 2010, "Independent voters turn from hopeful to angry."

The article examines the way Obama has lost the support of the great body of “independents”, people who do not identify themselves as either Democrat or Republican.

The polls, of course, all reflect the president’s falling approval rating, but the problem now for Americans is that it is clear the White House and a compliant Congress are not listening. Obama disparaged polls recently. He is not influenced by them. To put it another way, the public be damned.

Despite months of public protests of the healthcare bill and only because of a straight party-line vote (no Republican voted for it) the bill was passed and signed into law. The avalanche of lies told before and since about Obamacare has resulted in a law that only Obama’s core of supporters—Ronald Reagan used to call them Welfare Queens—still believe will benefit the nation.

Within days, Obama’s EPA director announced new regulations regarding auto mileage and the agency’s intent to regulate carbon dioxide, a natural gas essential to all life on Earth. There is now the likelihood that Congress will ram through the disastorous Cap-and-Trade Act, a tax on all energy use.

Despite the exposure of the biggest fraud of the modern era, "global warming", the Obama administration is pressing ahead with legislation based on it!

A general amnesty is likely, too, as Mexicans begin to stream across the border, fleeing the drug wars in that nation, and seeking asylum.

Dick Morris, the political commentator, notes correctly that a Republican controlled Congress can nullify Obamacare by refusing to fund it, but November looks further and further away at this point.

The other element at work is the way the bulk of the nation’s news media have utterly abandoned its most essential function; keeping an eye on government and revealing the truth about elected officials and dubious legislative proposals.

We have arrived at a point in this nation where the only reliable news to be found in the daily newspaper is in the sports section. At least the scores are accurate.

Meanwhile, the headlines everywhere today speak of new jobs added while also noting a stubborn 9.7 rate of unemployment and that is not likely to diminish any time soon. The only bright spot is that Obama can no longer blame this on the Bush administration.

When a nation’s press betrays it, the only remaining hope for any truth is to be found in the many news/opinion Internet sites and yet I am plagued by the same feeling expressed in Rasmussen’s comment that those in power are not listening and that the only option that remains to save the nation from them are the midterm elections.

In the interim, economic stagnation will be the rule.

Not everyone reads the conservative comment on the Internet and liberal websites like the Huffington Post are thriving. While the network news shows continue to lose viewers and Fox News continues to grow, the deliberate destruction of the nation’s economy continues.

One is forced to ask, does it matter when the entire governmental structure of the nation is now controlled by the machine politics of Chicago? By the lies about global warming? By more and more restrictions on real access to the nation’s natural resources?

There is, finally, the harm that results from the combination of a limited general knowledge of American and world history and an attention span that grows shorter week by week.

We are reaching the apogee of a lot of very bad decisions and failed government programs that suggest the worst is yet to come.

Everybody knows this, but what does that avail Americans when neither protests, nor recent elections of Republican governors and a new Republican Senator from Massachusetts leave us vulnerable to the increasingly rapid predation of Marxists?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

It's Obama Time: Watching Jobs Disappear

Shoveling Borrowed Dollars

By Alan Caruba

You will not find much about “shovel ready” projects on the White House website, but there is an entire site, Recovery.gov, that extols the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was signed into law a year ago.

I generally do not spend much time on federal government websites and especially on those that are the creation of those around President Obama. For example, the White House in November 2009 put out an announcement that Vice President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had “jumpstarted more than 10,000 transportation projects across America thanks to the swift allocation of Recovery Act dollars.” At the time of the announcement, “state agencies reported a total of 10,041 approved.”

As we have learned, news out of the White House has in the past involved state districts that don’t even exist, so I tend not to get too excited by such announcements. The projects mentioned included several stretches of new highway in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. So far, good news.

The bad news in November was that, while more than $2 billion in federal highway funds had been allocated to California, only $837 million had been awarded for highway projects. “Even more surprising,” reported Eric A. Morris of The New York Times, “only $51 million, or about 2.5 percent of the total, had actually been disbursed.”

While Joe Biden and Ray LaHood were busy patting themselves on the back, Morris reported that “Overall, the U.S. Department of Transportation has managed to disburse only $5.5 billion to the states out of the $30.5 billion in available transportation funds.”

I don’t want to be too hard on the White House because, realistically speaking, major capital investments like highways require a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to jump before they ever begin. These are in place to ensure that the public doesn’t get ripped off and that those undertaking the projects meet fundamental industry standards.

Still, I recall President Obama telling Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press” back in January 2009 that he had met with several governors “and all of them have projects that are shovel ready.”

Shovel ready became the instant buzzword of 2009 and it evoked visions of crews of newly employed workers drawing paychecks as opposed to the ten million or more (much more) unemployed workers in the nation a year later.

It turns out that a lot of the “stimulus” money went to states that were in serious trouble meeting pension, Medicaid, and other obligations. By October of last year, reportedly the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had received $33 billion, the Labor Department $28 billion, Education $21 billion and the Social Security Administration $13 billion. That accounted for 86% of the spending to that point.

So, in fact, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act essentially authorized the borrowing of more billions of dollars to largely fund various government agencies. If any money falls off the edge of the table and some states get the scraps, well that’s a bonus.

A year later, however, most people have figured out that programs like the Recovery Act and “Cash for Clunkers” are just so much White House smoke and mirrors.

They have figured out that the U.S. simply cannot go on borrowing and spending. And they have begun to suspect that a few tax cuts that would put money back in the hands of consumers and investors would have done a far better job of getting the economy on its feet again.

Obama's Invisible Homeless and Hungry

By Alan Caruba

The most enduring images of the Great Depression from 1929 through to the beginning of World War II for America in 1941 were those of homeless people, hobo camps, and of soup kitchens to feed the hungry.

During the Reagan years, the media was filled with stories of the homeless as if to refute any improvement in the economy under a conservative president. These days, however, as America’s national debt and deficit continues to spiral out of control, the poor and the hungry remain largely unseen and, most significantly, largely unreported.

About the only thing one can find on the White House website with regard to homelessness are statements about the way “green jobs” will solve the problem. The first stimulus package, however, increased the amount of money that the nation’s food banks received in 2009 so someone involved understood America has a problem.

The New York Times reported “a $100 million windfall of extra food…” Also reported was that “requests for emergency food assistance were up by 30 percent in 2008 over the previous year”, but the financial crisis did not occur until late into the last year of the second Bush term.

As the recession took hold one food pantry organizer noted that “the next layer of people” were showing up; “a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse’s aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time.”

A recent study by Mathematica Policy Research revealed that in 2009 more than 37 million low-income people were receiving emergency food assistance through a network of pantries, kitchens, and shelters. Recipients represented “a broad cross-section of America, including 14 million children and three million elderly.”

“Approximately 40 percent white, 34 percent were Afro-American, and 20 percent were Hispanic.” Though 36 percent of recipient households had one working adult, ten percent were homeless.”

“Most of the organizations providing assistance in the network were faith-based” and I can recall the outcry when the Bush administration undertook to provide funding to these organizations.

While the media reporting seems limited to official government statistics, currently citing unemployment at 9.4 percent, most observers believe that it is far closer to 17 percent and that figure would actually exceed the Depression era.

There were no safety nets in the 1930s. Ironically, the programs put in place, Social Security, and later Medicare, are now all but bankrupt or soon will be. At the time they were instituted there were approximately sixteen workers paying into the system for every recipient, but now it is down to two workers per recipient and these programs represent both a high level of taxation and an increasing drain on the nation’s economy as demographic changes increase the numbers eligible for them.

Entitlement programs, along with defense, represent half of the nation’s annual budget. The proposed Obama budget is widely regarded as bizarre for the amount of spending it proposes.

In its first year, the Obama administration largely ignored joblessness in order to pursue a vastly expanded Medicare “reform” whose details, whenever they became known, generated a massive backlash from Americans who rightly saw the program as an effort to take over one sixth of the nation’s economy, putting it under federal control.

Political observers all say that the Obama administration will now “pivot” and concentrate on jobs as the major issue this year. The Democrat controlled Congress, however, is doing little to adopt the factors that contribute to job creation.

Virtually all economists recommend a reduction in the tax on U.S. corporations, currently among the highest in the world, rendering them less competitive and unable to expand their workforce.

Beyond that, the great economic engine of small businesses have seen minimum wage requirements increase and a host of other regulations that punish all businesses when they are forced to lay off or fire employees; both discourage hiring. Meanwhile, huge pension and other benefits for unionized government related jobs are bankrupting the states.

The “solutions” of the FDR years did nothing to relieve the Great Depression and are widely seen as having extended it. These same “solutions” are being pushed by the Obama administration, particularly in regard to increased taxation at the worst possible time.

For now the homeless and hungry will remain invisible to most Americans, but the media will be able to ignore it for only so long and then it will have to be addressed.

Are You "Stimulated" Yet?

I Prefer Local to Global

By Alan Caruba

Perhaps it is just the product of the times in which I grew up and my experience with the events of the world. Or perhaps it is the spin that has been added to the word “global”, endowing it with an almost spiritual quality.

Mostly, though, I think it is my utter disgust with “global warming”, having spent the better part of three decades striving to defeat this plot to enable all forms of governmental intrusion into people’s lives and choices.

A bit of personal history; as a child I recall riding the train to and from the Jersey shore when it was filled with young men in uniform, all destined to fight in far-off places whose names even then seemed exotic to me; Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Normandy, and Sicily. It was the harsh geography of war, but to a youngster it only meant someplace far away.

By the time I was a teenager, an older brother was already in Japan at the headquarters from which the Korean conflict was conducted. There were new names to deal with, Seoul, Incheon, and the Yalu River. By then the Cold War was well on its way.

The 1950s were full of talk of A-bombs and then H-bombs, and then intercontinental missiles. In college I took scant notice of events in Cuba, but a few years later I would be in full combat gear waiting for orders to invade. Then the problem went away without ever really going away. It has since spread to Venezuela.

Like many Americans, I learned about the world because we were sending troops somewhere to push back against some form of aggression or some new oppressive regime. At home the streets were filled with Civil Rights marchers or anti-war marchers, both of whom would be replaced by new groups demanding to be heard. It was the era of Woodstock and Watergate.

And no trains filled with soldiers because the military had ceased to be every young man’s duty to serve their nation. It became a voluntary military and, we’re told, one that is superior to the former model. It would suffer casualties in Beirut, wrest Grenada from a communist takeover, invade Panama to remove yet another corrupt leader and then, in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, go there to set things right. After 9/11, in 2001 it would drive the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and then in 2003 invade Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein.

Is it any wonder Americans are weary of war? Is it any wonder that the word “global” to my generation means some new place where young, dedicated Americans are battling some new despot, regime, or threat to peace anywhere and everywhere?

All of which brings me to the new meaning of “global” for the generations that followed mine. It is attached to “global warming”, the greatest hoax, not merely in the modern era, but in all of history! And it was initiated and implemented by an international institution that was supposed to end wars, the United Nations.

Some years ago, the UN published a book called “Our Global Neighborhood”, but we do not live in a global neighborhood. We live in our own, local neighborhood. The UN is all about global government with, of course, global taxes, a global army, and, as in the case of every dictatorship, a global restriction on gun ownership.

It is all about a vast matrix of global treaties that involve the surrender of some element of U.S. sovereignty to the UN to oversee “heritage” sites and our national parks. It is about an educational indoctrination program to turn American children into “citizens of the world.”

So you will have to forgive me if I look at the world and see places where Americans have continually had to sacrifice blood and treasure because someone or some nation had ambitions to impose their will on people who just wanted to be left alone.

If something terrible happens in America I do not expect to see one single other nation on Earth come to our aid.

In America today, the enemy is not always in some far-off place. It is in Washington, D.C. where an out-of-control Congress is spending and borrowing to the point where we are being warned that our dollar is at risk of being worthless. Led by a feckless new president, it has imposed huge debts on generations yet to be born.

The White House is trying to expand an “entitlement” program, Medicare, that is already broke for the purpose of controlling one sixth of the nation’s economy.

The White House is giving money to banks and then threatening to tax them after they have repaid it.

The White House has bought General Motors and Chrysler instead of letting them go through a bankruptcy process like any other business.

The White House is squandering billions on “clean energy” and “green jobs”, both of which are mere fantasies while billions of barrels of oil go untapped, billions of cubic feet of natural gas remains unavailable, and hundreds of year’s worth of coal is not mined.

Congress is engaged in phony, multi-billion dollar “stimulus” programs instead of cutting taxes to jump-start the economy.

“Think globally. Act locally” is the mantra of the environmental movement, but the movement itself is a global monster, determined to decide what you can eat, how you should deal with your garbage, what kind of car or truck you can drive, how much you should heat or cool your home.

It is despotism, no matter what other name you call it.

And then there are those insane followers of Islam who want to inflict more harm on America because they are not content with killing their fellow Muslims.

I wish I could ignore the world beyond my neighborhood, but it won’t let me.

Gives New Meaning to "Being in the Red"

The National Madhouse

By Alan Caruba

If you think that you are going mad, based on the statements out of the White House and Congress, let me assure you that you are sane, but those in charge of governing the nation appear to have lost their wits.

The Democrat’s third-ranking House leader, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), during an appearance on Fox News asserted that “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession.” It is his view that “We’re not going to save our way out of this recession.” So saving money is bad. Spending money we are borrowing at a rate of a billion dollars a day is good. If that sounds insane, you’re right.

In defending his new budget, President Obama declared that “Already, we have made historic strides…to cut wasteful spending.” The problem with that is that his budget proposal, for a second year in a row, would increase federal spending as a percentage of the Gross National Product at a higher rate than any time in the past 65 years. Fully a quarter of the GNP would be sucked up and spent by the government.

As we all know by now, because the President keeps telling us, that everything that happened last year was the fault of the previous President, George W. Bush, but it turns out that President Obama proposes once again to spend 30% more of the GDP than Bush.

President Obama has also given notice to the United Nations that the U.S. would agree to the Copenhagen Climate Change Accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is reported that this means a reduction of “carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.” This would be contingent on the passage of the Cap-and-Trade bill lingering in the Senate.

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is based on the now widely discredited global warming hoax that blamed carbon dioxide for the non-existent rise in the planet’s temperature.

Thus, the Cap-and-Trade bill is, itself, a hoax and, worse, would increase taxes on all energy use for all Americans. The reduction that President Obama calls for would require a return to the days of horse-drawn vehicles and an end to manufacturing and other activities dependent on oil, natural gas, and coal.

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced its intention to regulate carbon dioxide, the gas other than oxygen on which all life on Earth depends. Its justification for this is, of course, global warming. It requires a lot of gall to ignore the fact that the Earth entered a cooling cycle in 1998 that is likely to last another decade or two.

If the insanity emanating from the White House, Congress and the EPA is not enough, over at the United Nations last Monday the Human Rights Council met in Geneva. It was presided over by Halima Warzasi, a woman whom UN Watch notes “personally shielded the Saddam regime from international censure over the (Kurdish) gas attacks.” She was preceded in the chairmanship by Alfonso Martinez of Cuba. The Council’s principal members include China, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, none of which are famous for their attention to human rights.

Also last Monday, one brief moment of sanity; Ali Hassan al-Majeed, also known as “Chemical Ali” for having ordered the poison gas attacks on the Kurds, was hanged.

To Americans struggling with debt, with mortgages that cost more than the present value of their homes, and, for many, with unemployment, the notion that the nation would end the Bush tax cuts while raising taxes at the same time it is borrowing and spending money at an unsustainable rate is a good definition of madness.

In November, the Obama administration released a report stating that more than $98 billion in taxpayer dollars spent by government agencies was wasted. The main culprit according to the report was Medicare, a program that the same administration via its “healthcare reform” legislation wanted to expand by adding millions more to its rolls.

So you may be forgiven for thinking that something is terribly wrong with the White House and Congress because it is.

The Great Prevaricator

By Alan Caruba

Usually we have to wait around for the historians to pinpoint the exact day on which some politician crashed and burned his reputation beyond repair. My educated guess, however, is that President Obama’s first State of the Union speech will be the day when what little is left of his credibility and reputation goes straight into the toilet.

If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, then Barack Hussein Obama will be known as the Great Prevaricator.

Obama is so comfortable telling lies that he no longer knows the difference between the truth, a falsehood, a promise, or a casual slander. Take, for example, his recent claim that he would rather be a great one-term President than “a mediocre two-term” one. If George W. Bush wasn’t around to blame for his own incompetence, Obama would have to invent him.

Before the demands arrive that I list each and every lie that passed Obama’s lips, let me say that this is a brief commentary, not a ten-volume exegesis of his campaign and first year in office.

The State of the Union speech is always hugely boring, listing the many “accomplishments” of the year and then listing the intentions for this one. It is a political act, not a reportorial one.

Obama’s intensions cannot be taken at face value. It is said he wants to put a “freeze” on government spending, but the reason usually given to run for Congress is to be able to spend taxpayer’s money on projects “for the folks back home.” The more you spend, the more times you are reelected, until you secure a committee chairmanship and can spend almost at will.

The alleged freeze covers nothing of significance. The real spending engines of government, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Homeland Security and Defense will go untouched along with just about everything else other than a Department of Agriculture grant for the study of artichoke pollination.

When (if!) you listen to the President, keep in mind that at some point the money he’s talking about is no longer even “real.”

This is particularly true as regards the Federal Reserve, a private bank that isn’t federal in any sense except its name. Congress cannot even audit its books!

On the blog site of Theo Spark, there’s a brief, apt description of the way the Federal Reserve and the government “compliment” one another: “I understand that most folks think the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S., is a governmental entity.” The reason people think this is because whoever is President appoints the Chairman with the approval of Congress.

Congress is debating the reappointment of Ben Bernanke, an acolyte of Alan Greenspan, the previous Chairman. Both are equally to blame for not putting the brakes on the cheap credit that led, in part, to the lending and borrowing spree that got us to this point. They had a lot of help, though, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“Those pretty green slips of paper in your wallet commonly known as U.S. dollars are Federal Reserve Notes. Bank scrip. The Fed can print as much of it as it wants or needs to. With this in mind, consider that fully eighty percent (80%) of U.S. Treasuries (U.S. government debt) sold in 2009 were bought by the Fed because there were no other willing buyers.”

Here’s where you need to pay close attention. “Printing money to finance unsellable governmental debt is just like using a credit card to pay off a credit card. It is a scam, a Ponzi scheme. Like all such schemes it cannot go on indefinitely, but has to end. This will end badly.”

The annual Gross Domestic Product, the amount assigned to the value of all the goods and services sold, is about $14 trillion dollars. Congress has just voted to raise the “debt ceiling” to about $14 trillion dollars.

That is why a State of the Union speech promising to “freeze” spending or “cut back” on government waste, is laughable.

Spending is what the present-day government exists to do. It is why millions are spent on races for the White House and seats in Congress. It is why some enter the Capitol with modest means and leave as multi-millionaires.

The job of the President is to convince Americans and everyone else that the U.S. government is being wisely and prudently run.

When people at home and around the world no longer trust Obama’s Tele-Prompter words, the nation will be in big trouble.

If Obama was the CEO of a major corporation, the board of directors could get rid of him. We, the stockholders in America, are stuck with him for three more years.

MY State of the Union

By Alan Caruba

Each one of us has their own “state of the union” so far as the economy is concerned. Much of the workforce receives a paycheck, but many of those jobs have ceased to exist. Other jobs involve contract services. A reported 10% of the workforce is unemployed and the likelihood is that the actual percentage is much higher.

Small business, one of the largest components of the economy, is hurting because consumers are cutting back on spending. It is no surprise either that the banking community, under direct attack by the President, is reluctant to stick its neck out. The result is an understandable reluctance to extend credit and loans, and a loss of investor confidence.

On Wednesday, the President will give his first State of the Union (SOTU) speech, but if it looks and sounds familiar, it is because it will be the third time in the past year he has addressed a joint session of Congress. That has to be some kind of record, but he has set records for more than 400 speeches in the past year.

When the President reads yet another speech written for him by other people, keep in mind that he has surrounded himself with a cabinet and advisors composed primarily of lawyers like himself. Most have no experience in private enterprise. They have not managed a business, nor met a payroll. Less than ten percent of them have experience in the business sector. And these are the people charged with solving the current financial crisis!

I do not need to wait until Wednesday to hear President Obama’s State of the Union speech. I already know he cannot be trusted to respond honestly and candidly about any issue. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) gained fame by calling out “You Lie!” in an earlier speech and he was right. He did, however, apologize for the breach of etiquette, but I am pretty sure other Republicans in the chamber will feel the same impulse.

After fifty years of earning a good living as a public relations counselor and a provider of editorial skills, the market for my skills has contracted in response to the economy. That’s my SOTU. I am confident that, when the economy improves, there will be individuals, corporations, trade associations and others who will rev up their efforts to influence consumers and issues, but until then, while the President lives off the fat of the land, I am pretty much living off my “fat.”

A recent issue of U.S News & World Report devoted an entire issue to my generation and those closely gaining on it. It concluded that many either do not want to retire, nor can afford to. I have a cousin, also in his 70s, who’s in his Wall Street office every day. According to the magazine, both of us have a good chance of making it to age 100!

Many investments intended to provide a retirement nest egg have been reduced in value, interest on savings is miniscule, and the rising cost of living has left those in their seventies and older often unable to opt out of the work force if they are fortunate to be employed or considering re-employment if a job can be found. We make excellent workers because we come equipped with a good work ethic and attitudes.

Meanwhile, a legion of Baby Boomers is beginning to join our ranks, lining up for their Social Security and other benefits.

Tampering with Medicare this year, a huge distraction from the task of encouraging job growth, was possibly the dumbest thing the White House and Democrat Congress could have done. There will be a senior citizen payback at the ballot box in November.

I have a younger member of my family who, like thousands of Americans these days, owns a home whose value is less than his mortgage. Like all homes, it is a money pit. And worse for him, it is in New Jersey, a state with the highest property and other taxes in the nation. At the height of the housing bubble, I sold the home in which I had lived for more than sixty years and moved to a luxury apartment complex. I miss my former home, but it didn’t come with a pool, a fitness center, and a charming concierge staff.

Having been born during the Great Depression of the 1930s, I have now lived long enough to be in a new Depression. The irony is that both had their roots in government policies and, in both cases, were prolonged by government hostility to corporations, banks, and other generators of income and growth.

The present administration is maniacally opposed to Wall Street. They oppose the engines of energy in America, oil, coal, and natural gas. They waste billions on so-called “renewable” energy or “biofuels”, all of which are incapable of producing sufficient energy for even a moderate-sized city or town. Biofuels just drive up the cost of crops like corn for no sensible reason.

Those “shovel-ready” construction projects have not yet materialized while the nation’s infrastructure continues to be neglected. Not one single new nuclear plant or refinery has been built since the 1970s.

Over the years, the auto industry has been destroyed by increasing congressional interference in the form of mileage mandates, by requirements for ethanol use, and, internally, by the auto unions that demanded and received huge medical and retirement plans that ate profits. Two of the largest American auto manufacturers are essentially owned by the taxpayers due to massive, multi-billion bailouts, and controlled by the unions that destroyed them.

So my SOTU is to find a market for my editorial and other skills. I don’t give a rat’s patoot what the President will say Wednesday evening. He’s not the solution. He is the problem.

The Bill Comes Due for Socialism in America

By Alan Caruba

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister

It began as a beautiful cruise to a land of “hope and change”, but it has become a nightmare in which the ship of state is being deliberately steered toward a whirlpool of debt from which, if Obama is successful, the nation cannot escape.

One of the primary reasons the U.S. economy has grown over the years has been the confidence in its innovation and productivity. It has generated investment from around the world from those who wanted to profit from our success story. There was a time when U.S. securities were the safest in the world, but that is no longer the case.

On December 24, 2009, the U.S. Senate voted to raise the ceiling of the government debt to $12.4 trillion, described by an Associated Press reporter as “a massive increase over the current limit and a political problem that President Barack Obama has promised to address next year.”

On January 20, 2010, barely a month later, Senate Democrats “proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion.”

This is the reason, by virtue of the Massachusetts special election; the United States has dodged the bullet of a “reformed” healthcare system which would have slashed a half trillion dollars from Medicare coffers while adding millions more people to its rolls.

It would have turned the health insurance industry into a public utility. They would have ceased to be private enterprises of competing companies. It would have driven physicians out of practice. It would have bankrupted the nation and reduced a widely acknowledged excellent health system to that of a third world nation.

The proposed “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on all energy use—the lifeblood of any economy, must be defeated. This will come most likely from a lack of votes as Senate Democrats are finally scared enough of the electorate to act with some degree of rationality.

In a recent commentary, Jerome R. Corsi, the author of “America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving the Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty”, wrote “With the recession and the huge stimulus package added to the beginning of the baby boomers retiring, United States debt is already at 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the Obama administration plans as they currently stand.”

In other words, the U.S. government is committed through various “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other expenditures, to spend more than it takes in via taxes. The other major expense is for defense. These three factors represent half of the annual U.S. budget.

The situation is so grave that, on January 18, The Washington Times editorialized that “Obama is killing the economy.”

The bill has finally come due for decades of socialism that began in the 1930s.

“The 2009 budget deficit tripled over 2008. The deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) went from 3.1 percent in 2008 to 9.9 percent in 2009. The deficit for the first month of fiscal year 2010 was $176 billion, which was greater than the $161 billion deficit for the entire 2007 fiscal year.”

At present rates, the public debt of the United States will reach 85 percent of GDP by 2018, just eight years from now, and 100 percent by 2022. It would be 200 percent by 2038 unless some brakes on spending are not applied before the ship of state gets sucked down beneath an ocean of debt.

What does President Obama propose? He wants to apply an unconstitutional special tax on banks! And not all banks, but just those banks on “Wall Street” whom he blames for the current recession.

His most recent proposal to regulate the banking system drove down the Dow Jones Average signaling further fears of his intention to micro-manage the economy. It is a recipe for disaster and shares of the big Wall Street banks in particular fell. He is deliberately attacking the great engine of the nation’s economy.

Wall Street is not the problem. The government is the problem.

Obama made no mention of the real culprits for the housing market meltdown, the reckless spending of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act that underwrote a program that put $12 trillion of mortgage loans, half of all such loans, in the hands of the federal government!

As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, “President Obama’s proposal (would) bring back 1930s-like separation of commercial and investment banks, dubbed Glass-Steagall II or Glass-Steagall 2.0, (and) would do little to prevent the problem of financial institutions being too big to fail. What it would do is hurt economic recovery, reduce types of financing available to businesses big and small, and give European and Asian financial services firm a huge competitive advantage over their U.S. counterparts.”

The billions still unspent in the so-called “Stimulus” bill should be returned to the Treasury. Plans to expand Medicare and Medicaid need to be scrapped. Taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, must be avoided if for no other reason that CO2 has nothing to do with a non-existent global warming.

The capacity of the United States to recover calls for an end or at least a cap on the mindless spending of taxpayer millions on the pet projects and crony deals of Representatives and Senators.

It calls for an end to the restrictions on the exploration for and extraction of the nation’s vast coal, oil and natural gas reserves, including in ANWR and aggressively in the offshore continental shelf.

It calls for an end to huge multi-million dollar subsidies for “renewable energy” schemes such as solar and wind power.

It calls for an end to the ethanol mandates that dilute the mileage of every gallon of gasoline and actually increase CO2 emissions!

It calls for an end to congressional mandates on the auto industry that have, in part, driven two of its largest manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler, into bankruptcy. The U.S. must divest its ownership in both companies.

It calls for reining in the rogue government agency, the Environment Protection Agency that is attempting to unilaterally impose control of CO2 emissions and has long engaged in practices that impede economic growth for business, industry, and the nation’s agricultural sector.

There are many reasonable and rational steps that can and should be taken, but it seems clear that the President, with the support of a Democrat controlled Congress, has no intention of taking any of these steps and, indeed, is intent on bankrupting the U.S. government and its people.

The Buck Stops Everywhere Else

By Alan Caruba

It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

In the event that the White House has not made it perfectly clear: It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

If, however, you have grown tired of hearing this excuse, er, reason, then you have between now and November to find a candidate of your choice to REPLACE every incumbent Representative and Senator in Congress who has ever uttered this lame excuse for the failure of Obama’s policies.

Some Obama policies and actions you might want to consider are:

Unprecedented national debt
Multi-Billion dollar bailout of General Motors and Chrysler
Multi-Billion dollar bailout of AIG
Multi-Billion Dollar job “Stimulus” Bill producing no real jobs, only “green” ones
A multitude of “czars” who were not approved by Congress
Obama’s “war” on coal
Denying exploration for oil in USA continental shelf and elsewhere
Supporting a “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a tax on all energy use
Trip to Copenhagen for Olympics in Chicago
Trip to Copenhagen to support global warming fraud
Trip to Cairo to tell Muslims America was wrong in the past
Trip to Oslo to accept an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize
Telling Americans not to “jump to conclusions” after Fort Hood murders
Waiting three days to respond to Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing
Selecting Janet Napolitano as Director of Homeland Security
Seeking to prosecute CIA operatives who interrogated enemy combatants
Authorizing a civil trial in New York City for the 9/11 mastermind
Continuing to try to close Guantanamo
Proposing an unconstitutional tax on a select group of banks
Supporting amnesty for illegal aliens
An overhaul of Medicare that would strip a half-trillion dollars from it
Exempting Nebraska, Florida, and union insurance plans from Medicare “reform”

But, remember,

It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.
It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

Are You Better Off?

Obama's First Year Ends

By Alan Caruba

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy one of the books about his brief administration was “A Thousand Days” by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Even so, he had set America on a trip to the Moon, helped advance the Civil Rights movement, and, with Jackie Kennedy, brought a brief era of grace and sophistication to the White House.

January 20 will mark a year since Barack Obama took the oath of office. As this is written, the entire nation awaits the outcome of the special election in Massachusetts and many want to see an end to the Democrat control of the Senate. There are any number of ironies, not the least of which that it was Massachusetts that gave us JFK and his bloated little brother, Teddy.

It is hard to recall a more brutally partisan administration and Congress. Bribery and thuggish uncivil behavior has become the hallmark of the Democrat controlled political process; weakness and appeasement the nation’s foreign policy.

“Yes, we can” has transitioned into a public panic regarding the massive expenditures, the billions spent to take over the auto industry, banks, insurance companies, and an insulting “stimulus” bill devoted more to “green jobs” than real jobs. The final injury as the first year comes to a close would be the passage in the Senate of a widely hated Medicare “reform” that reeked of unconstitutional elements and which will surely be challenged in the courts.

It is astounding that a single Senate vote could end the reign of terror that characterizes Obama’s first year.

The answer Barack Obama gave over and over again was that it was all the fault of George W. Bush. By summer, that excuse had lost its power to influence all but Obama’s most stupid supporters.

Obama’s “first thousand days” will prove critical to the future of the nation. Profligate debt and possible default haunts most of the States and the nation as a whole. Moody’s Investor Services has warned that the nation is barely three years or less away from losing its prized triple-A rating for its securities. China has warned that America cannot assume it will continue to purchase its debt.

On Christmas Day, al Qaeda reminded Americans that all are considered targets in its terror war on the nation and the West. If they wanted to scare us, they succeeded. Perhaps they were encouraged by a President who took three months to make up his mind whether to continue to wage war on them in Afghanistan and three days before he made a public response to the Christmas attack.

After the Fort Hood assault, it was former President Bush who quietly visited the wounded, not President Obama, though he did stage an earlier photo opportunity of his greeting the returning war dead from Afghanistan.

There is no question that, in the first year- of Obama’s first—and likely his last-—term in office, Iran will achieve its goal of becoming a nuclear power with the ability to put warheads on top of missiles capable of hitting anywhere in the Middle East and as far away as Europe. Diplomacy has failed. Only one option remains.

At this writing, very nearly half of the voters express disapproval for Obama’s conduct of the nation’s affairs and they will focus on November’s midterm elections in an effort to politically neuter his administration with a transfer of congressional power to the Republican Party.

If the off-year election of Republican Governors in New Jersey and Virginia was an indicator, the steady stream of announcements by Democrat legislators that they intend to retire or change party affiliation suggests that the writing is clearly on the wall.

The leading indicator, however, remains the unemployment rate, officially at ten percent, but widely considered to be closer to fifteen percent and higher.

The President’s State of the Union speech on January 27 will be parsed and examined like a doctoral dissertation on economics, a subject Obama seems to understand only in terms of Marxist orthodoxy.

Worse for him will be the increasingly widespread view that he lies virtually all the time. He lacks credibility with everyone except the slavish drones of the mainstream media and brain-dead supporters.

Well before the end of his first thousand days, Obama has joined former President Carter among the pantheon of Presidents forever known for their failures.

Distracted by Stupidity

By Alan Caruba

I have a friend who lives with his blind Malamute dog, Boris, in a cabin deep in the Missouri woods. He is as self-sufficient as one can be, but he is not one of those survivalists who are waiting for the Homeland Security to show up. He has to go into town to get dog food and pipe tobacco, although he has been brewing his own hard cider of late. It’s his latest hobby.

He is hardly cut off from the world and that seems to be his main complaint because he is of the opinion that it is largely populated by stupid people and, frankly, it is hard to disagree. As a result, we are both richly rewarded with evidence on a daily basis.

For example, it is abundantly clear (except to stupid people) that a majority of voters in 2008 elected a fool to be President of the United States of America and the presumed “leader of the free world.” Do not ask the presidents of France or Russia, or the Prime Minister of England for their opinions of him. For that matter, don’t ask former President Bill Clinton, who’s still waiting for his cup of coffee.

One of Obama’s first official acts was to dispatch Air Force One to do a low fly-by of New York City for a photo. For some reason, that scared the hell out of New Yorkers.

It is hard enough to get through life when most people around you have concluded that you are a dunce, but when it is America being judged as stupid, led by stupid people, and populated by too many stupid people, it is hard to get other nations to cooperate.

My own email and comments on my blog suggest that there are still plenty of very smart people in America and I think the Tea Party movement is evidence of that because these folks are looking for a home that is neither Democrat, nor Republican, but just sensible and a place where someone has actually read the U.S. Constitution.

As we close in on the anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration (remember the nearly two million folks that showed up in the freezing cold, thrilled to be a part of the hopey-changey thing?), but even by the kindest standards of judgment, it is clear that he is utterly clueless in an over-educated way that reeks of condescension.

You get the feeling that he has Tele-Prompters at the breakfast and dinner table in order to provide him with small talk. Without them, listeners begin to wonder if, at some point, he suffered some form of brain damage.

Worse, the next in succession is a Vice President who recently held a closed-door meeting on “transparency” in government. Behind him wait the Wicked Witch of San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi, who burns through $60,000 of jet fuel each way to and from the capital every week. Next in line is the Nevada troll, Harry Reid.

You have to be spectacularly stupid to blow billions of taxpayer dollars “bailing out” General Motors and Chrysler when the ordinary bankruptcy process would have spared us the insanity of owning a failed auto company. Capitalism rewards success and scorns failure, but those in power these days think capitalism is a bad thing.

Given the pathetic performance of other government-owned entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and the fact that they have been exempted from the “financial responsibility” taxes Obama wants to impose on banks, it comes as no surprise that their executives collected multi-million dollar bonuses at the same time some government official was railing against similar bonuses for Wall Street bankers and investment executives.

In the midst of the worst financial crisis this nation has faced since the 1930s, how stupid do you have to be to try to “reform” Medicare in ways that slash billions from it while adding more people to its rolls? By what stretch of the imagination does Congress think it has the power to require people to buy insurance they do not want? And, it turns out, exclusively from the government.

What ever happened to the free marketplace where competition determined prices? There’s a reason insurance companies run all those TV commercials. Didn’t anyone in Congress or the White House ever take Economics 101?

The Founding Fathers said over and over again that the only way a republic such as ours can survive is if it is led by men (and now women) of “virtue”, by which they meant people that weren’t in public service to plunder the treasury. They knew those elected to public office would not all be angels, so they put together a legislative process that slows the passage of laws to a crawl. All manner of impediments exist and we should be very happy that they do.

I grew up in an era before television when newspapers, radio, and the Movietone News were the main sources. This may seem odd to today’s generation, but during World War Two the media did not compete with one another to be the first to tell the Nazis when and where D-Day would occur or which island in the Pacific would be invaded next.

This is a far cry from Walter Cronkite telling Americans that our troops lost the Tet Offensive in Vietnam when we had actually killed thousands of the enemy, rendering them a terrific blow. That was the first war of the modern era which the media wanted the U.S. to lose. It has since been followed by both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

Well before 9/11 America was locked into a war with al Qaeda even if no one in the White House wanted to give it much thought. By treating the 1993 bombing of the Twin Towers as a criminal act, the U.S. set in motion its final destruction. Now we have a government that wants to extend the protection of the U.S. Constitution to captured terrorists and try them in the heart of New York City. Do not tell me that is not stupid!

Just what do you do with an overweight, slovenly, Muslim U.S. Army Major who was also engaged in a lively exchange of emails with a jihadist mullah in Yemen? You give him his discharge papers. When you don’t, you end up with thirteen dead soldiers while he stands around yelling “Allahu Akbar!” Today’s military is so politically correct the rules of engagement on the battlefield include offering candy and soft drinks to the enemy before actually shooting at them.

Putting an idiot like Janet Napolitano in charge of Homeland Security aptly fits the description of stupid, but a close look at the monkey cage of loonies attached to the Oval Office reveals more social misfits than you could find in a Beverly Hills rehabilitation center.

We are stuck with Obama and his merry band of morons until 2012, but we can begin to clean house in Congress in November 2010 thanks to the midterm elections.

It’s up to the people with common sense and good judgment to take charge of this nation through participation in all manner of civic and political organizations, through a constant deluge of Congress to stop Obamacare, immigration “reform” (how I hate that word!), and the strangling of the free market economy that has enriched those willing to actually hold a job and lucky enough to have one.

Haiti and other Hell-holes

By Alan Caruba

This is by way of just blowing off a bit of frustration in the wake of the non-stop news coverage of the latest disaster to hit Haiti.

To begin with, we are witnessing in this first day or so of news coverage that I call the "Five Known Facts" school of reporting; repeated endlessly!

That is to say, 98% of everything being "reported" is pure spectulation from the news room anchors and assorted experts, and the rest of the reporting is the most obvious stuff from the on-the-scene reporters. They are scrambling to say something more than just that hundreds, if not thousands, have died, buildings are destroyed, et cetera. We know that already!

It is the story of every major earthquake or comparable disaster anywhere.

For my part, however, it is a reminder that I have never heard anything about Haiti that was not a testament to the most vile aspects of despotism and corruption found in too many nations around the world.

How many millions have been poured into that chunk of Hispanola at this point? None of it ever reaches the people. None of it ever builds a road, a bridge, a school, or a hospital.

The minute Haitians can escape Haiti and come to America they become productive, wonderful citizens, but Haiti is a prison nation of no value to them or the rest of the world.

Haiti's current grief will be the focus of news organizations for perhaps two weeks at most. Forgotten or ignored is the way Haiti reflects comparable conditions in several African nations and elsewhere around the world where dictators continue to pillage whatever is of value and to oppress freedom.

Our attention span for such things is short and, if I dare to say so, America is in the early stages of becoming a failed nation, defaulting its debts, and rendering its dollar valueless.

The nation is being deliberately destroyed by Barack Hussein Obama and his cronies. That's why he doesn't care if he takes down the Democrat Party as well.

So, instead of really doing something about the rising unemployment occurring here, tending to the long-needed repair of our bridges and other infrastructure, cutting taxes so we can use our own money for our own needs, Americans blithly pass their time watching "American Idol" and discovering that yet another athlete is a failed human being.

Our Congress is no longer responsive to the millions of Americans, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, who hate the vile Obamacare program, something which the White House and Congress have wasted far too much time upon, given the fact that it is a hugely bad idea and occurring at the worst of times; wasteful and hurtful in more ways than one can count.

Is there death and destruction in Haiti? Yes. Will America do what it can to help? Yes. BUT! We have terribly serious problems here at home and, instead of solutions, we have been forced to deal with the failed ideology of socialism while abandoning the successful application of capitalist answers. The government will not let either Wall Street or Main Street function properly!

We need to stop beating up the bankers who were forced to make the bad loans and then to take TARP money. We need to stop kicking around the Wall Street crowd that risks billions to underwrite new technologies and help businesses and industries of every description grow and prosper.

The government must stop thwarting the building of more nuclear plants, more coal-fired plants, and the generation of the energy we will desperately need in the very near future. We need to Drill Here and Drill Now!

America is a treasure trove of coal, oil, and natural gas, but the government will not allow private industry to find it and extract it.

Do I feel bad about the Haitians? Sure, but five, ten, or twenty years from now they will still be wearing rags and living in shacks.

Right now, I want to avoid that future for more than 300 million Americans.

I want to stop the flow of illegal aliens draining our economy and using our services while contributing nothing in return. They have no right to be here. I want us to stop pretending that Islamists are not plotting to kill all of us and a nuclear Iran will give them the means to do it.

So, look at the television footage of the misery of the Haitians and think to yourself, unless we rid ourselves of those in power, fix our present economic problems without "bailing out" failed industries and financial institutions, and begin to prepare for the future, there but for the grace of God, go us.

Stop the Bailouts!

By Alan Caruba

I can recall the bailout that Chrysler received in 1979. Jimmy Carter was President and the question of whether the government should save the nation’s third largest automaker was subjected to a lot of debate. In the end, Congress authorized a $1.5 billion loan package. In 1983, Chrysler repaid the loan guaranteed by the U.S. taxpayers.

By contrast, the so-called Stimulus Bill authorized the spending of $787 billion!

The Chrysler bailout was considered an anomaly even though the government has been in the business of making loans to just about anybody and everybody from small business owners to college students for a very long time.

From the G.I. Bill after World War Two to the latest effort to rescue defaulting homeowners from themselves, loans are part of the fabric of how government is seen.
Given the success of government-run entities such as Amtrak or the Postal Service, the notion that the now government-owned GM can recover, let alone pay back those billions, is doubtful.

Based on a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, the Federal Housing Administration was founded in 1934 to insure mortgage loans made by private firms to qualifying homeowners. The U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression and the FDR administration engaged in every kind of intervention into the economy in an effort to end it.

In hindsight, many historians and economists believe that, had the government done nothing, the Depression would have very likely ended on its own. The general consensus is that all those government programs prolonged the Depression for ten long years until World War Two intervened.

The government really got into the mortgage loan business big-time when it created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that everyone who wanted to own a home could go to a bank or mortgage company that would, in turn, sell the loan to either of these two quasi- government entities. By the time the government was forced to seize their control, they would own or guarantee about half of the United States’ $12 trillion mortgage market.

Recall that in September 2003, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) defended the financial soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Backed by the full credit of the nation, mortgage loan rates kept getting lower and lower at the same time banks and mortgage loan firms were being pressured to make loans to minorities and others who, using normal banking standards, would not have received them.

Just how well did that work out? According to a December 31 article on Bloomberg.com, “Taxpayer losses from supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will top $400 billion, according to Peter Wallis on, a former general counsel at the Treasury who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.”

Do you think there might have been a connection? “The debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks grew an average of $184 billion annually from 1998 to 2008, helping fuel a bubble that drove home prices up by 107 percent between 2000 and 2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index.”

So, it was the government, not “greedy” bankers and mortgage loan companies that created the scenario that led to the present financial crisis.

If you think that was a bad idea, wait until H.R. 4173 kicks in. The financial reform legislation that passed the House of Representatives in early December and is awaiting a vote in the Senate is the handiwork of Financial Services Committee Chairman, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the same person who told us how sound Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were.

At 1,279 pages, it is unlikely that anyone in the House read the bill, but we are in a new age of governance where Congressmen and women no longer feel required to read a bill before voting on it.

Republican members of Congress are the exception because, as you may have noticed, not one of them voted for healthcare “reform.” Through bribery and other means, the bill still passed the Senate. A dozen or more states are already seeking exceptions and some governors are threatening to sue to block it.

Columnist David Reilly of Bloomberg.com reports that Rep. Frank’s bill authorizes the Federal Reserve to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes.

“This is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around.” The bill does require that there has to be “a 99 percent likelihood” that all funds and interest will be paid back. It also allows the government to back financial firm’s debts in the next crisis. It is a blank check for the next crisis and a very bad idea.

The Frank bill also prohibits “any incentive-based payment arrangement.” And we all know how well any business functions when you take away any incentives.

In October, the Cato Institute issued a Policy Analysis titled, “Would a Stricter Fed Policy and Financial Regulation Have Averted the Financial Crisis” by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Peter Van Doran.

“Imposing onerous financial regulations will only impede the reconstitution of financial institutions, delay the recovery, and dampen the pace of long-term economic growth.”

You think?

The Cato analysis noted that many of the nation’s prominent economists significantly misread the state of the economy.

“In hindsight,” the Cato authors concluded, “they were all wrong.”

In the first issue of 2010, Business Week’s Bradley Keoun pointed out that, “As the last big banks scrambled to return their bailout funds in mid-December, the President summoned top Wall Street chiefs to the White House, urging them to increase lending to companies and individuals.”

What the President knows or understands about finance could fit neatly into a bug’s ear. In his view, Wall Street is composed of “fat cat bankers.” Not a good attitude if you want them to begin making loans again.

While granting that the TARP funds proved effective in getting credit flowing again, Keoun also noted that “Even when they had the federal funds, banks hunkered down in the face of losses.” They have not been making loans at the previous pace, fueled in part by the housing bubble (see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Indeed, “As capital rises, lending is falling,” noted Keoun.

Ominously, the Business Week reporter concluded that “The only provider of credit is the government.”

The government is not supposed to be in the banking business. What it is authorized to do is “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Towards this end, the government may “borrow money on the credit of the United States.”

That credit is based on the ability of Congress to manage the government in such a way to avoid plunging the nation into levels of debt that will devalue the U.S. dollar and threaten the loss of its rating as a reliable, trusted borrower. The U.S. government must borrow a billion dollars a day just to stay in business.

In May 2009, the President said “We have no money.”

After that he and the Congress returned to the effort of increasing the national debt with a “Stimulus” bill that was pure “pork”, and nutty programs like “Cash for Clunkers.” After that, we were told that jobs had been “saved” in Congressional districts that don’t even exist. The latest insanity is Obamacare that increases the insolvency of Medicare by adding thousands of recipients to its rolls.

The White House and Congress are treating the nation’s wealth as if it were Monopoly money. It’s not. It’s our money.

2010's Top Anxieties

The National Anxiety Center Lists Top Ten Fears

Founded in 1990, The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, has periodically issued a list of the top anxieties Americans will experience in the coming year.

“The list,” says founder Alan Caruba, “is subjective; based on an analysis of the past year’s headlines and anticipated events. It incorporates on-going, often long term concerns that Americans have expressed.”

1. Out of Control Government Spending. It is evident to everyone except the White House and Congress that America cannot spend its way out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, but both have embraced programs that will increase the level of taxation facing Americans, while engaging in “stimulus” programs that only stimulate more anxiety. The lack of job creation in the private sector will be the major anxiety Americans encounter in 2010.

2. Iran. It is evident to Americans and the world that Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons that can be used in a missile attack on Israel and which can reach Europe and other nations throughout the Middle East. The only option available is an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and there is considerable anxiety regarding its timing and outcome.

3. Afghanistan War. Eight years after the initial effort to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban, Americans are war weary and increasingly wondering about the benefit of further involvement, its costs, and the possibility that leaving would embolden Islamist enemies there, in Iraq, and worldwide. The Middle East remains a powder keg of instability.

4. The Economy. There is anxiety concerning how long it will take for the American economy to recover from the housing and credit bubble created by Congressional programs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No steps have been taken to eliminate these programs and, indeed, other federal programs have been introduced to assist imprudent mortgage holders already in default.

5. Inflation. The raising of the nation’s debt limit, the printing of vast amounts of paper currency by the Federal Reserve, and other comparable actions portend an inflation of prices and a possible default. Moody’s Investor Service has warned both the U.S. and British governments they are in peril of losing their triple-A ratings.

6. Medicare. Medicare, like Social Security, will be insolvent within a few years and Americans of all ages are worried, not only about solutions to this prospect, but about proposals to vastly expand Medicare at the most inopportune time.

7. Illegal Immigration and Amnesty. The drain on the nation’s economy and problems associated with illegal immigration, now estimated to number more than 12 million, as well as yet recently proposed amnesty program continue to worry Americans.

8. Education. The continued failure of the nation’s school systems to meet international standards of scholastic achievement has resulted in the decline in the ability of American’s children’s to acquire basic skills and the knowledge required to compete in a global economy.

9. Diet and Health. The growing number of overweight and obese Americans is a personal and national concern for the overall health of everyone struggling with weight problems and their potential for diabetes and other diseases.

10. American Culture. The increasing vulgarity found in films, on television, in music, fashion, and other elements of American culture remains a concern for many, particularly as it affects the younger generation.

“The good news is that more Americans are no longer concerned about global warming and carbon dioxide as they become aware that the claims justifying these fears are based on deliberately falsified computer models and the fact that the nation and the planet are now a decade into a natural cooling cycle,” says Caruba.

“2010, the end of the first decade of the 21st century, is likely to be seen in retrospect as a tipping point that will determine either a return to traditional standards of fiscal prudence,” says Caruba, “or will plunge the nation and the world into a Depression of cataclysmic proportions.”

The National Anxiety Center maintains a website at www.anxietycenter.com. Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.

Obama's Useless "Solutions"