Running the USA into the Ground

By Alan Caruba

I needed a mattress cover so I went over to the local dollar store today and discovered they have them in every size but twin. I returned home. I went online to Bed, Bath and beyond. With a few keystrokes I not only had the exact item I wanted, I also received an email confirmation of the sale and a notice that once shipped, I will be able to track its delivery from the warehouse to my front door.

If only the federal government operated with such efficiency. Instead, we have a government that has been operating on “continuing resolutions” for over a thousand days due to a lack of a budget. An essential job of the executive branch is to produce a budget, but if you don’t have one, you can egregiously waste billions.

Everybody else has a budget, but not the federal government.

As we head into an election year, even more political madness and maneuvering will ensue. As a Wednesday editorial in The Wall Street Journal said:

“The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.”

Serendipitously, the Journal also ran an opinion by Peter J. Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuits against six top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced last week, are a seminal event. For the first time in a government report, the complaint has made it clear that the two government-sponsored enterprises played a major role in creating the demand for low-quality mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis.”

“More importantly, the SEC is saying that Fannie and Freddie—the largest buyers and securitizers of subprime and other low-quality mortgages—hid the size of their purchases from the market. Through these alleged acts of securities fraud, they did not just mislead investors; they deprived analysts, risk managers, rating agencies and even financial regulators of vital data about market risks that could have prevented the crisis.”

One member of Congress, among many who protected Fannie and Freddie, who will not be indicted, is Rep. Barney Frank who is retiring with full pension and benefits, no doubt more wealthy than he arrived.

A new book by Peter Schweizer, the William J. Casey Fellow at the Hoover Institute is titled, “Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich off Inside Stock tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism that would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.” At this point, the only bipartisan activity in Congress is the way, on both sides of the aisle our elected representatives increase their personal wealth. The book so rattled Congress it is now holding hearings on the extraordinary premise of requiring its members to obey the same laws as the rest of us!

A familiar theme of those of us that comment on government is its size, its waste of public funds, and its general inefficiency. It is a government that sends millions in checks to dead people. It is a government that has turned the process of flying anywhere into a nightmare because of its one-size-fits-all idiotic approach to getting on an airliner. The Israelis accomplish this with far less inconvenience to passengers and their system works.

My contention is that our metastasizing government has gotten progressively worse from the days of the Great Depression and now we learn—if we did not already know—that it was two “government sponsored enterprises” that brought about the mortgage crisis that plunged the nation into a pretty good imitation of the Great Depression.

Now we are forced to watch Congress play political gamesmanship while millions of Americans are out of work.

Now not a week goes by without another “green” enterprise going belly-up, taking our money with it or one of those wonderful electric cars has batteries that are likely to catch fire. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy just released a report that estimates that each of the Chevy Volt cars sold thus far has as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it—a total of $3 billion thus far. We never needed electric cars.

What kind of idiocy throws money away when the U.S. sits atop reserves of oil that are so vast they could end imports?

What kind of President refuses to permit Canada to ship its ample oil to Houston for refining?

Why are we holding our breath hoping that Congress will let us purchase Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era?

Little wonder that the polls demonstrate the record-setting low esteem in which Congress is held. It is running the nation into the ground. To the belated astonishment of everyone, the nation is led by the President whose greatest achievements have been to destroy jobs and plunge the nation into unimaginable debt.

November 6, 2012 cannot come soon enough.

A majority of the electorate wanted “change” in 2008. Let’s give it to Congress in 2012. Let’s support candidates who want to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, restructure the “entitlement” programs, and reduce the debt before it impoverishes the next generation and the one to follow.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Africa, the Awful Continent

By Alan Caruba

As long as I can remember, for seventy-plus years I have seen photos of sick and starving African children. Now that Africa is home to seventy percent of the world’s cases of AIDS that image applies as well to too many of its adult population. As far as I can tell, it is an awful continent.

That is a vast generalization, of course, but I suspect that a lot of Africans would agree. In 2005, Martin Meredith’s book, “The Fate of Africa”, was published. Its subtitle was “From the hopes of freedom to the heart of despair: A history of 50 years of independence.” It is as definitive as any book I have read about Africa and it is a horror story.

“Since independence,” Meredith wrote, “Africa has received more foreign aid than any other region of the world. More than $300 billion of Western aid has been sunk into Africa, but with little discernible result. Aid fatigue has become a permanent condition.”

I was reminded of this while reading a briefing paper by Greg Mills, the director of the Brenthurst Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled “Why is Africa Poor”, it was published by the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity.

While America and Europe struggle with economic problems of their own making, the general poverty of Africa defies the imagination. “Africa is not poor because its people do not work hard,” says Mills, “but because their productivity is too low. African states have resisted western innovations of large-scale farming, so too many Africans survive on subsistence agriculture.

“Nor is Africa poor because of it lacks natural resources,” says Mills. “Compared with Asia, it is a treasure-trove of natural resources from agricultural land and precious metals to wildlife and hydropower. Yet, with few exceptions (Botswana is one), those resources have been used only to enrich elites, spread corrupt practices, and divert development energy and focus.”

It is not a stretch to say that the best thing that happened to Africa was colonialization. It brought measure of development that Africans would never have achieved on their own. Following the end of World War II, the European colonial powers were confronted with indigenous demands for independence and fairly swiftly, if not happily, they abandoned their control of much of the continent from the Maghreb in the Northern tier to South Africa at the tip.

“In a half century of independence, Africa has not realized its potential,” says Mills, warning that Africa’s youth, “a huge source of talent” is widely regarded “as a destabilizing force because it is largely unemployed and uneducated. This is not only a threat to Africa’s security. By 2025, one in four young people worldwide will be from sub-Saharan Africa.”

Africa reeks of corruption by a few, oppression of the many, poverty, and the potential for enormous conflict because its so-called leaders are a horrid bunch of dictators and thieves. Few have shown any interest in improving the lives of those in their nations.

“African leaders have successfully managed, with the help of donors, to externalize their problems, making them the responsibility and fault of others,” says Mills. This condition is the result of “a relative lack of democracy (or to single-party dominance) in Africa.” In other words, socialism.

Not mentioned in his analysis is the role of Islam in much of Africa, a religion devoted to the complete submission of Muslims and resistance to anything that passes for modern governance or advancement. Another factor not discussed is tribalism. It was the cause of a terrible Rwandan genocide.

For this reason, more than a half century after independence arrived, “Getting to Africa is difficult. Moving around Africa is similarly onerous. It would take no donor money to keep borders open around the clock” notes Mills.

One thing is certain. All the money donated to African nations is largely stolen by its elites and the provision of aid for education and health exists only when donor nations and non-governmental organizations exercise close control over it.

The rot that exists in Africa in human terms, in the failure to modernize, in the vile corruption of a few, will persist and, fifty years hence, there will likely be more books and briefing papers that reflect those being written today.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

On the Blago Watch

By Alan Caruba

If the nation was not contending with a horrible economy, taking a deep breath of relief after the capping of the BP oil well, and not distracted by other stories in the news, I am sure it would have been riveted by the trial of former Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich.

If ever a trial called out to become a Hollywood movie, this one does. At the very least, a book or two should result from it.

Writing this the evening of Monday, August 9th, the jury has been deliberating since the closing arguments on July 27. When the verdict does come in, it will ignite a brief media frenzy, but a hung jury would as well.

The six-woman, six-man jury must grapple with 24 counts of racketeering, wire fraud, extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and false statements leveled against Blago. His brother, Robert, who administered the campaign fund in the last months of 2008, is charged with four counts of wire fraud and extortion.

In essence, however, Blago is charged with trying to “sell” the appointment to the vacated Senate seat of Barack Hussein Obama, elected president in 2008

In closing arguments on July 27, Blago’s defense attorney, Sam Adams Jr., described him as “insecure”, “silly” and “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” His defense strategy was that Blago was too stupid to be guilty of the charges against him.

The jury, however, was made aware that Blago had been an attorney before being elected governor, so one might assume he had some knowledge of the law. Whether he had knowledge of ethics, morals, or other virtues we hope to find in our elected representatives is anyone’s guess.

Listening to some of the wiretapped tapes the government played seem to confirm his attorney’s low opinion of his client’s IQ. He portrayed Blago as someone with “absolutely horrible judgment in people”, a variation of the “he’s too stupid to be guilty” defense.

This is probably an advantage when it comes to Chicago politics where some contend the whole system is corrupt from top to bottom. Better, perhaps, to just think well of one’s fellow politicians than contemplate their sins.

There’s something of a tradition in Illinois for this. Three former governors have gone to prison in the past 35 years. Two Democrats, Otto Kerner and Dan Walker, and one Republican, George Ryan, convicted in 2006 by a federal jury. Ryan had been governor from 1999 to 2003. A total of 79 state workers and lobbyists were charged along with Ryan and 75 were convicted.

The attorney for the federal government, Reid Schar, had a different impression of Blago. He told the jury that he was a “practiced communicator” and reminded them that he had twice been elected governor of the nation’s fifth-largest state.

Lawyer Adam contended that the phone calls in which various choices for the Senate vacancy appointment were discussed along with the strategies to fatten Blago’s campaign fund were just so much jabbering, a bit of gossip between the two brothers and others.

At one point Blago even tossed out Oprah Winfrey’s name for the job. The prizes he sought in return for the appointment were a wish list that included a position in Obama’s cabinet, a possible ambassadorial appointment, and other notions too idiotic to mention. Manifestly unfit for any—-just ask his lawyer—-Blago seemed dazzled by the opportunity.

In the end, a Chicago attorney, Roland Burris, was given the appointment and he too felt some heat thereafter for a lapse of memory.

I won’t venture to guess the outcome of the jury’s deliberations, but given Illinois’ track record of crooked governors, it does not look good for Blago The “too stupid to be crooked” defense does have some merit if for no other reason than its entertainment value.

I have ceased to be amazed at the low caliber of people elected to high office. We seem to be in an era of truly awful politicians at all levels and we take heart from the few who seem to stand for something other than their own self-interest and enrichment.

There's an interesting video that examines why the trial is lasting as long as it is.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/blagojevich-trial-jury-dead-locked/

© Alan Caruba, 2010