Friday, June 12, 2009

Obama has Lost his Mojo

By Alan Caruba

The hours and the days speed by. It is almost five months since President Obama was sworn in. A million people gathered in Washington on a bitterly cold day to hear him and to leave behind a mountain of trash.

Granted that in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, first the White House and then the Congress panicked in the face of what looked like a total Wall Street meltdown. A frantic effort was made to secure a blank check for billions to purchase the “toxic” paper, the bundled mortgages that turned out to have no identifiable assets.

Major banks, investment houses, and a huge, international insurance company tottered on the brink of failure. Some did. Some were merged.

Americans, even the most unsophisticated, understood that such an implosion threatened the financial bedrock of the nation, but first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration said that such steps must be taken. Congress went along because they had no choice.

They did have a choice; indeed, a range of choices.

The bailed out automobile companies could and should have been allowed to proceed toward bankruptcy, a procedure which would allow them to reorganize. That would have saved taxpayers $70 billion of their money. The bailout was unconstitutional.

The banking bailouts were unconstitutional too. Public funds, treasury funds, are never to be used to favor one private entity or enterprise over another.

While it is called the Federal Reserve Bank, it is an institution in effect separate from the government that grants it the right to print money, determine interest rates, and exercise oversight over the financial health of the nation. It operates on its own set of imperatives.

Any Economics 101 student would tell you that flooding the nation and the world with dollars backed up by nothing more than “full faith and credit” is reckless and foolish. It always leads to inflation and it undermines the borrowing power of the Treasury. Top lenders like China have made it clear they will no longer underwrite the huge entitlement programs and a spending frenzy that knows no end.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are known as “government entities”, but together they own some fifty percent of all the mortgage loans issued by banking and lending institutions. Their top officers earned millions, but they are the primary cause of the collapse of the housing/mortgage bubble. Why? Because the government required banks and lending institutions to literally make bad loans. It was the law.

So Americans, whether they voted for Barack Obama or not, have arrived at a point where the man whose entire campaign was based on the promise of “hope and change” find themselves rapidly running out of jobs, money, and hope.

As credit froze up, unemployment began to increase and it is getting worse. Despite what the White House says, there is no such thing as “jobs saved” and the only jobs government can generate are government jobs.

A bogus $700 billion “stimulus” bill, promising funding of “shovel ready projects” is moving along at the pace of all government programs, very slowly. It’s not easy to spend that kind of money. The rest of the bill is pure pork. Typically, some of the projects are obscenely stupid. It should more accurately be called the Democrat Reelection Bill.

While the price of a gallon of gas begins to increase along with the prices of food and other necessities, the Obama administration is trying to push through legislation that would tax “greenhouse gas” emissions in the name of a global warming that is not happening. In parts of the United States, there will literally be no summer because the Earth has been cooling for the past ten years. In the first week of June there were record low temperatures in eighteen States.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill moving through Congress will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans to astronomical levels. It would drive down and drive out manufacturing of every description. When Microsoft Corporation tells the White House it is prepared to move its corporate headquarters and other operations overseas, it is not kidding.

Now the Obama administration is trying to push through “healthcare reform” that is little more than socialized medicine, systems that have failed in Canada and England, forcing people to wait weeks and months for treatment. It would require everyone to purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so. Your personal medical records? Any government bureaucrat could look at them.

Many Democrats are making it known they will not vote for “Cap-and-Trade” and may not vote for the takeover of the best health system in the world.

I predict that neither of these programs will become law and, if they do, Obama will have used up every ounce of trust and good will that has been extended to him. I also predict he will not care because his purpose is to bankrupt the nation and to destroy a Constitution he deems to be filled with too many restrictions on the federal government.

I predict that Barack Obama is just over a year away from seeing the Republican Party regain control of Congress in the same way it did in 1994. The October 2010 midterm elections will leave Obama a lame duck and likely a one-term President.

We cannot know what events will occur to further erode Obama’s vaunted popularity, the product of a mainstream media that has thrown away all journalistic standards, but you can be sure they will happen. Like 9/11 they will be largely unexpected by the general public or like Hurricane Katrina they will be an act of Nature.

On July 4, 2009, there will be 1,145 “Tea Parties” held across the whole of the nation according to the American Family Association. TEA being “Taxed Enough Already.”

Barack Obama makes people nervous.

Popularity is a curious thing. It can disappear overnight.

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3 comments:

Carolyn said...

Hi Mr. Caruba- My mother in law (I love her dearly) voted for the change. The only reason why I would hope that obama's agendas would work is for her sake, and millions of others like her. I don't want to see her so sad and sick over things that are effecting her family. My husband has been out of work since January. Since he was our only bread winner, well...
I'm not one of those who is waiting for someone to come to our rescue. My husband isn't either. We don't want hand outs from anyone in the shape of any Gov'ment nanny program. All he wants is to be able to work and earn enough to keep us afloat. There are millions like us, I know.
My mother in law however, keeps saying things like, well, Crist (we live in Florida) took that money, so it's just a matter of time before Michael gets work.
I hate the fact that Crist gave in and took it- and I know it will not help many of us out, nor will, as you pointed out- the shovel ready jobs. Seems to me that the only jobs created (if any at all) are either government jobs or going to unions.
I am not optomistic at all about the economy. I am grateful for the hope in the Lord I have, Thank you Mr. Caruba, for letting me rant a bit.

Alan Caruba said...

It is my suspicion that there are a lot more Americans out of work than the government statistics say. In fact, I would look at any figure they offer and double it.

Rich Kozlovich said...

In my state we already are at ten percent and it is probably closer to twelve. Fifteen has to be considered a depression. The state budget (The state constitution requires a balanced budget) is now facing a two billion plus dollar deficit because of downward projections that is going to spiral downward.

State agencies are being told to cut thirty to forty percent of their budgets, yet between the Barbers Board and the Cosmetology board, we are a state that spends four million dollars a year to make sure everyone gets a good haircut.

Our state wasted twenty five million dollars a year in "grant" money for the various politicos local pork and failed to install a computer system all of those years that could meet the states needs. Totally out of date electronic office equipment, but 25 million in pork! A 60 billion dollar a year corporation that operated that way would have been out of business years ago. Now it is all coming home to roost!

We just had a meeting at the capital dealing with industry affairs and concerns over this budget crisis and how services (services that are required by law) were to be provided. How will they get the annual licenses out to the individual applicators and businesses in order to be legal? Idiot regulations and unnecessary bills being promoted by activists (in and out of government) that will only cost more money and do little to alleviate the problems that they are supposed to fix! Worse yet, they will create expensive massive bureaucratic work to fix non-problems.

It is a mess, but they will have to hit bottom in order to find out what really needs to be funded, regulated and overseen. This is a state that has been losing businesses and population for years, eroding our tax base, and at the same time the state government has grown to meet the “needs” of less people.

There are some questions that I have been asking for years without a worthwhile answer. What regulation was ever passed that wasn’t already covered under civil and criminal law, or if you will…Common Law? Why is it possible for federal or state regulators and inspectors to enter your business or property and demand the right to inspect your property and records without a search warrant and without probable cause?

No policeman in the country can do that, yet regulatory agencies do it daily. The Wildlife service, the EPA, OSHA, etc….you get the picture. Both are clearly violations of the fourth and fifth amendments and yet it is done daily and SCOTUS upheld it. Why?

Just a thought or two! I was on a role and I didn’t want to waste it.