This time next year, we should have a Republican in place to challenge President Obama for the title of 'World's Most Powerful Man." The campaign, of course, is the ultimate reality show, and it could get nasty.
As it stands now, Obama has to be considered the favorite despite the shaky economy. The Osama bin Laden takedown was huge for him, and the Medicare debate is going his way, as well. The president is a shrewd campaigner and may have as much as a billion dollars in donated money at his disposal. That kind of cash can buy a lot of things.
If the Grand Old Party nominates a populist candidate, it will lose the election. Independent voters will decide the race, and they are looking for someone to improve their lives, not drive ideology. The tea party movement is a force, but unless it is willing to compromise in some areas, there will be no celebration in Boston Harbor come November 2012.
The key to defeating Obama is understanding him. He is driven by one thing above all: social justice. He fervently believes that prosperous Americans have a moral obligation to help the deprived not only in the United States, but all over the world. This cause influences just about all of his decision-making.
The problem is that Obama does not really understand what drives poverty and hopelessness. Writing in the publication "Public Square," theologian R.R. Reno clearly defines the issue: "A Christian who hopes to follow the teachings of Jesus needs to reckon with a singular fact about American poverty: Its deepest and most debilitating deficits are moral, not financial; the most serious deprivations are cultural, not economic. Many people living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other goodies of consumer culture. But their lives are a mess."
For the president, social justice is all about money. And he is well on his way to bankrupting the nation in attempting to achieve it. The only cultural point the president has emphasized is that fathers need to be held accountable in supporting their children. Otherwise, the cultural aspect of poverty does not seem to exist for Obama.
The Republican Party seems lost to define the real issue: Can the country survive four more years of a president who simply does not want to cut entitlement spending? The risk is enormous because, once re-elected, Obama can veto any spending-cut bills that cross his desk.
Right now, Democrats are scaring senior citizens into believing their present benefits will be cut if Obama and the Democrats lose. In order to counter that fiction, the GOP must scare right back. If America's debt is not arrested, the country will decline rapidly and in drastic ways.
The cold truth is that Americans will have to become more self-reliant if the country is to maintain its superpower status. Americans must begin planning for their future medical and financial needs, with some government help but not total dependence.
Transitions are usually difficult, but crunch time is here. If the Republican challenger cannot persuade voters that real danger is on their doorstep, the president will win re-election. No spin.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Our President is Winning His War Against America's Private Sector
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have the unemployment news that we are now at 9.1% unemployment. We have next to no growth. We have massive unemployment. We're in the midst of a housing disaster, oppressive regulations. All of this and the regime is demanding massive tax increases. We face a threat of reduction in the nation's credit rating. We have systemic, historic deficits and still today you can read certain stories or go to certain networks and hear them talk about the recovery! There is no recovery. If this isn't a depression, then what is? And the sad thing is, what's even worse, Obama's entire motivation is to destroy what's left.
Now, for two and a half years we've been sitting here and we've been warning people who Obama is, what he is, what his policies are, what his objectives are, and it may be time to change tack, change the approach a little bit. I think we've gotten to the point we're preaching to the choir. Everybody knows that is a quagmire. Everybody knows it's either a depression or a recession. They don't need the proof every day; they live it. The question is, what do we do to get through the next 18 months and preserve what's left so that there can then be a genuine recovery? Fifty-four thousand jobs and they're still reporting that it was unexpected. They expected twice that many jobs. Based on what? Fifty-four thousand jobs created, unemployment up to 9.1%, hundreds of thousands of Americans have dropped out of the job market altogether. The housing market is drowning.
Folks, I have a story that as an American, as a human being with a large, beating heart -- ba-boom, ba-boom -- this story is heartbreaking. It's in the Wall Street Journal and all you need is the lead, the first sentence. You don't even need to read the whole story. It's about the housing market. We're talking about our country. "Home prices have sunk to 2002 levels, effectively wiping out almost a decade's worth of home equity across the U.S. and imperiling the fragile economic recovery as Americans confront the falling value of their biggest investment." Forget fragile recovery. There is no fragile recovery. How anybody can write that with a straight face or an honest cell in their body is beyond me. But here you have what Americans all over the country who were playing by rules, rules the country had promised them, assured them, a lot of people, the American dream and so forth.
Now, I know market fluctuations are what they are, don't misunderstand here, but this is just heartbreaking and so unnecessary. Home prices, 2002 levels effectively wiping out ten years' worth of home equity, wiping out the value of many Americans' biggest investment. It's just unbelievable. I can't really put this into words. I see a story like this, I see people, genuine human beings. This is not abstract to me. It's written statistically, but this is real, these are real lives, real circumstances that are being affected here. There is no private sector growth. Obama says this is a recovery. Let's take him at his word. That for him, this is what a recovery looks like. Let's just take him at his word, just for the fun of it. This is what a recovery looks like.
I saw Ichabod Crane on TV this morning, Austan Goolsbee. Most people have a 14-inch part in their hair. This guy's neck is 14 inches long and probably about four inches around. I don't know where he goes to buy shirts. Austan Goolsbee, yeah, said to be the funniest man in... well, there's this guy, this journalist that used to be at TIME Magazine, Matt somebody that used to be the funniest guy. At any rate, Obama looks out across the fruited plain and he sees a recovery. This is what a recovery looks like. He is at war with the private sector and he's winning, folks. The president of the United States is winning his war against the private sector. He is destroying it. That is his mission. His administration is succeeding. So for Obama this is a recovery. Let's go to the audio sound bites. February 10th, 2007. Springfield, Illinois. This runs by real quick, five, six seconds. This is Obama explaining to the country his view, his vision for revitalizing America.
OBAMA: Let's allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country's middle class again. We can do that.
RUSH: Unions, organizers, let them lift up the middle class. The private sector middle class is his target. The public sector middle class are his beneficiaries. Now, I submit, folks, everybody knows, and I mean everyone, the way you get out of a recession, the way you get out of the economic mess that we are in is to create incentives for private sector growth. You do that by lowering taxes, by reducing regulations. We had a call yesterday, Snerdley put a call up there from a guy, and I wanted to walk him through this. He asked, "Well, what would you do?" I've always found it can have much more impact to actually walk people through it, but he was sadly mentally incapable of walking through it on his own so it didn't work out. So I gotta explain it here myself.
You create incentives for private sector growth by lowering taxes, by reducing regulations, getting obstacles out of people's way, you strengthen the dollar, you reduce the size of government. But, you see, if you're a committed socialist and an authoritarian, you're simply not gonna do these things. You are not going to take the obvious and necessary steps to create prosperity because what I just described to you as the definition of an economic recovery is not how Obama sees recovery. What's happening is how he sees recovery, taking him at his word. In fact, if you're like Obama, if you are a socialist, authoritarian, you're gonna do the exact opposite of lower taxes, reduce regulations, strengthen the dollar, reduce government, you're gonna do the exact opposite. You're going to insist that the problems require more government. You are going to insist the problems require more regulations, higher taxes. You are going to continue to attack success and profits and businesses.
Alan Greenspan, the puppet of Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, came out today and joined the chorus for raising the debt limit. I see how this is gonna go now. Republicans are going to be blamed for this recession. Republicans are going to be blamed for a lack of recovery. Republicans are going to be blamed because they are going to stand in the way of more spending to fix this. It's exactly as I warned you a couple of weeks ago. This economy was in much worse shape than Obama even knew. Their policies are working. We are in a recovery. You hear them say so. But it's going to take much longer than we thought, and we do not dare change horses in the middle of the stream. We simply don't turn over the reins to the people who drove us into this ditch in the first place. We don't turn over the reins to people who will not agree to more spending and the solvency of our country, blah, blah, blah. That's exactly what's coming here, folks. Just get ready for it. More government, more regulation, higher taxes, continue to attack success and profits and businesses.
I'm taking him at his word. He says we're in a recovery. This, to him, is a recovery. He wants more of it, he says. So he's going to keep saying the same things. He's going to give never-ending life to the bogeymen he's already created, the rich, the millionaires, the billionaires, while leading a war against the middle class. The middle class, that's whose home values are plummeting. The middle class, that's who doesn't have any jobs. The middle class, that's whose savings are evaporating. That's the target. Obama attacks the millionaires and billionaires, they remain millionaires and billionaires. The middle class is losing it all in the private sector. The public sector middle class are making out like bandits. Just look at what Obama is doing and what he will continue to do and just listen to what he says and will continue to say. While this economy is causing great suffering and while Obama will pretend he actually cares about you, he will continue full speed ahead with his war on the private sector, his war on the middle class, and his promotion of socialism and authoritarianism. This is what Obama wants. This is his recovery. We take him at his word.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: According to Mark Hemingway at a blog, the Weekly Standard: "Half of Last Month's New Jobs Came from...McDonald's -- According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent." By the way, speaking of which I guess I ought to share with you the way the AP is reporting this. Here's their headline (excitedly) "Employers Add 54,000 Jobs, Rate Ticks up to 9.1 Pct." The AP's reporting this as though jobs are being created here. Wow! The casual reader will think that the number of employed has gone up, when it hasn't -- the number of employed has gone down -- and they did the same exact thing last month.
"Employers hired only 54,000 new workers in May, the fewest in eight months. The employment rate rose to 9.1%. The Labor Department report offered startling evidence the US economy is slowing." What is "startling" about any of this? I'm getting blue in the face asking this question: What recovery? So, anyway, 54,000 jobs. Here's a report from MarketWatch. As you remember, "McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 -- after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted -- in which 62,000 jobs" were created at Mickey D's. "That’s not a net number, of course," because they added some jobs and people quit.
There's always fluctuation, there's seasonal adjustment, and so the number is fluid. So Morgan Stanley is estimating that McDonald's hiring the 62,000 jobs nets out to an increase of actually 25 to 30,000 jobs, by the time you tabulate people quit and retired, what have you. The Labor Department will not detail an exact McDonald's figure. (They won't identify any company in the survey; it's not they're avoiding it, just they don't do it.) But here's the point: If Morgan Stanley's right, we got 54,000 jobs created, and McDonald's may account for 25 to 30,000 of them, that would be over half of them, and we remember.
We remember what the left said about McDonald's jobs. "They're worthless! No health care! They're hamburger-flipper jobs. No future, can't feed a family of four on one of those jobs!" They were always deriding those jobs, putting them down.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Eric in Wilmington, Delaware. Thank you for waiting, sir. Appreciate your patience. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. I'm a 1995 Mac user back in the bad days. (chucklds)
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: But I'm still... Mac's a great machine. But, anyway, another thing: A president pick is J. C. Watts, but I'll get to my point now. I was calling about a lady name Brooksley Born, she was the Commodity Futures Trading Commission person during the Clinton administration, and she warned against the derivatives.
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: And she was shut down by Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin so they couldn't regulate 'em which caused the financial -- helped cause the financial -- crisis that we have now. And these same people today are telling us things are getting better. It's nothing but crony capitalism.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, there are, as is the case in every economic cycle, good and bad. There are people who do well while others aren't and vice-versa, but you're right: A lot of corporate entities that are doing well are doing well because of crony capitalism. They're in bed with Obama. He's helping them out. They're getting health care waivers or what have you, any number of things to help shield them from other market forces and so forth. But the entire financial services industry you could say, at one time or another in the past three to four years, has been part of this crony capitalism. What is QE3? What is QE2? What is Quantitative Easing?
It's just the printing of money funneled in such a way that a lot of it was used to buy stock, ergo the stock market looks healthy, stays good; people that are invested in it back out like bandits. QE2, the printing of money, either has expired or is about to soon. You saw Wall Street on Tuesday: A 240-point drop and abject panic set in, and they started calling for a new round of Quantitative Easing. This is artificially being propped up, and if you're in the market that's good for you. You'll take it. That's how crony capitalism works. That's how you get people to throw away their ideological beliefs. It's how you get people to throw away their principles. You promise to take care of 'em financially, corporately take care of them financially and you own 'em.
That's how Obama got a lot of his health care bill passed. The insurance companies involved in it and some of the medical associations and so forth. Derivatives, same thing. It's the kind of stuff when people learn about it that they throw their hands up and say, "I can't stop any of this. You know, this is the kind of stuff, Rush, you can say, 'Liberalism, conservatism, principles,' none of that matters in this stuff. When you have a president who's gonna allow certain people literally reach into the federal Treasury and grab whatever they want from it, then, you know, don't tell me about big government, Tea Parties and all that. It doesn't matter, 'cause it's still money that everybody wants and everybody focused on, especially those that tell you that it isn't the money."
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here's James in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. Thank you for taking my call, Rush. I'm a lifelong listener, and I'd just like to say that before Obama's election I got a phone call about a possible job opportunity and then they said, "We have to see who wins the election," and then Obama won and they said the wrong person won. (cell garbled) They're not hiring now, and I'm one of those chronically unemployed persons who weren't counted in the current unemployment numbers, but I'm making progress. There are no stimulus jobs. I can tell you that factually.
RUSH: No, not unless you're in a union, not unless you're in a public sector union -- and there never were gonna be any private sector jobs with the stimulus. Let me ask you a question, James, because you're on a cell phone and I have a devil of a time comprehending what people say on a cell phone. Did you say that you get a phone call about a possible job opportunity and they said that the opportunity won't really exist until after they see who wins the election?
CALLER: Yes, that's correct.
RUSH: That's a year and a half away, James.
CALLER: No, that was 2008 election.
RUSH: Oh, 2008. Oh. Okay.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Well, that's still the case. It's still the case. People are not hiring.
END TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have the unemployment news that we are now at 9.1% unemployment. We have next to no growth. We have massive unemployment. We're in the midst of a housing disaster, oppressive regulations. All of this and the regime is demanding massive tax increases. We face a threat of reduction in the nation's credit rating. We have systemic, historic deficits and still today you can read certain stories or go to certain networks and hear them talk about the recovery! There is no recovery. If this isn't a depression, then what is? And the sad thing is, what's even worse, Obama's entire motivation is to destroy what's left.
Folks, I have a story that as an American, as a human being with a large, beating heart -- ba-boom, ba-boom -- this story is heartbreaking. It's in the Wall Street Journal and all you need is the lead, the first sentence. You don't even need to read the whole story. It's about the housing market. We're talking about our country. "Home prices have sunk to 2002 levels, effectively wiping out almost a decade's worth of home equity across the U.S. and imperiling the fragile economic recovery as Americans confront the falling value of their biggest investment." Forget fragile recovery. There is no fragile recovery. How anybody can write that with a straight face or an honest cell in their body is beyond me. But here you have what Americans all over the country who were playing by rules, rules the country had promised them, assured them, a lot of people, the American dream and so forth.
Now, I know market fluctuations are what they are, don't misunderstand here, but this is just heartbreaking and so unnecessary. Home prices, 2002 levels effectively wiping out ten years' worth of home equity, wiping out the value of many Americans' biggest investment. It's just unbelievable. I can't really put this into words. I see a story like this, I see people, genuine human beings. This is not abstract to me. It's written statistically, but this is real, these are real lives, real circumstances that are being affected here. There is no private sector growth. Obama says this is a recovery. Let's take him at his word. That for him, this is what a recovery looks like. Let's just take him at his word, just for the fun of it. This is what a recovery looks like.
I saw Ichabod Crane on TV this morning, Austan Goolsbee. Most people have a 14-inch part in their hair. This guy's neck is 14 inches long and probably about four inches around. I don't know where he goes to buy shirts. Austan Goolsbee, yeah, said to be the funniest man in... well, there's this guy, this journalist that used to be at TIME Magazine, Matt somebody that used to be the funniest guy. At any rate, Obama looks out across the fruited plain and he sees a recovery. This is what a recovery looks like. He is at war with the private sector and he's winning, folks. The president of the United States is winning his war against the private sector. He is destroying it. That is his mission. His administration is succeeding. So for Obama this is a recovery. Let's go to the audio sound bites. February 10th, 2007. Springfield, Illinois. This runs by real quick, five, six seconds. This is Obama explaining to the country his view, his vision for revitalizing America.
OBAMA: Let's allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country's middle class again. We can do that.
RUSH: Unions, organizers, let them lift up the middle class. The private sector middle class is his target. The public sector middle class are his beneficiaries. Now, I submit, folks, everybody knows, and I mean everyone, the way you get out of a recession, the way you get out of the economic mess that we are in is to create incentives for private sector growth. You do that by lowering taxes, by reducing regulations. We had a call yesterday, Snerdley put a call up there from a guy, and I wanted to walk him through this. He asked, "Well, what would you do?" I've always found it can have much more impact to actually walk people through it, but he was sadly mentally incapable of walking through it on his own so it didn't work out. So I gotta explain it here myself.
Alan Greenspan, the puppet of Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, came out today and joined the chorus for raising the debt limit. I see how this is gonna go now. Republicans are going to be blamed for this recession. Republicans are going to be blamed for a lack of recovery. Republicans are going to be blamed because they are going to stand in the way of more spending to fix this. It's exactly as I warned you a couple of weeks ago. This economy was in much worse shape than Obama even knew. Their policies are working. We are in a recovery. You hear them say so. But it's going to take much longer than we thought, and we do not dare change horses in the middle of the stream. We simply don't turn over the reins to the people who drove us into this ditch in the first place. We don't turn over the reins to people who will not agree to more spending and the solvency of our country, blah, blah, blah. That's exactly what's coming here, folks. Just get ready for it. More government, more regulation, higher taxes, continue to attack success and profits and businesses.
I'm taking him at his word. He says we're in a recovery. This, to him, is a recovery. He wants more of it, he says. So he's going to keep saying the same things. He's going to give never-ending life to the bogeymen he's already created, the rich, the millionaires, the billionaires, while leading a war against the middle class. The middle class, that's whose home values are plummeting. The middle class, that's who doesn't have any jobs. The middle class, that's whose savings are evaporating. That's the target. Obama attacks the millionaires and billionaires, they remain millionaires and billionaires. The middle class is losing it all in the private sector. The public sector middle class are making out like bandits. Just look at what Obama is doing and what he will continue to do and just listen to what he says and will continue to say. While this economy is causing great suffering and while Obama will pretend he actually cares about you, he will continue full speed ahead with his war on the private sector, his war on the middle class, and his promotion of socialism and authoritarianism. This is what Obama wants. This is his recovery. We take him at his word.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: According to Mark Hemingway at a blog, the Weekly Standard: "Half of Last Month's New Jobs Came from...McDonald's -- According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent." By the way, speaking of which I guess I ought to share with you the way the AP is reporting this. Here's their headline (excitedly) "Employers Add 54,000 Jobs, Rate Ticks up to 9.1 Pct." The AP's reporting this as though jobs are being created here. Wow! The casual reader will think that the number of employed has gone up, when it hasn't -- the number of employed has gone down -- and they did the same exact thing last month.
"Employers hired only 54,000 new workers in May, the fewest in eight months. The employment rate rose to 9.1%. The Labor Department report offered startling evidence the US economy is slowing." What is "startling" about any of this? I'm getting blue in the face asking this question: What recovery? So, anyway, 54,000 jobs. Here's a report from MarketWatch. As you remember, "McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 -- after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted -- in which 62,000 jobs" were created at Mickey D's. "That’s not a net number, of course," because they added some jobs and people quit.
There's always fluctuation, there's seasonal adjustment, and so the number is fluid. So Morgan Stanley is estimating that McDonald's hiring the 62,000 jobs nets out to an increase of actually 25 to 30,000 jobs, by the time you tabulate people quit and retired, what have you. The Labor Department will not detail an exact McDonald's figure. (They won't identify any company in the survey; it's not they're avoiding it, just they don't do it.) But here's the point: If Morgan Stanley's right, we got 54,000 jobs created, and McDonald's may account for 25 to 30,000 of them, that would be over half of them, and we remember.
We remember what the left said about McDonald's jobs. "They're worthless! No health care! They're hamburger-flipper jobs. No future, can't feed a family of four on one of those jobs!" They were always deriding those jobs, putting them down.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Eric in Wilmington, Delaware. Thank you for waiting, sir. Appreciate your patience. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. I'm a 1995 Mac user back in the bad days. (chucklds)
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: But I'm still... Mac's a great machine. But, anyway, another thing: A president pick is J. C. Watts, but I'll get to my point now. I was calling about a lady name Brooksley Born, she was the Commodity Futures Trading Commission person during the Clinton administration, and she warned against the derivatives.
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: And she was shut down by Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin so they couldn't regulate 'em which caused the financial -- helped cause the financial -- crisis that we have now. And these same people today are telling us things are getting better. It's nothing but crony capitalism.
It's just the printing of money funneled in such a way that a lot of it was used to buy stock, ergo the stock market looks healthy, stays good; people that are invested in it back out like bandits. QE2, the printing of money, either has expired or is about to soon. You saw Wall Street on Tuesday: A 240-point drop and abject panic set in, and they started calling for a new round of Quantitative Easing. This is artificially being propped up, and if you're in the market that's good for you. You'll take it. That's how crony capitalism works. That's how you get people to throw away their ideological beliefs. It's how you get people to throw away their principles. You promise to take care of 'em financially, corporately take care of them financially and you own 'em.
That's how Obama got a lot of his health care bill passed. The insurance companies involved in it and some of the medical associations and so forth. Derivatives, same thing. It's the kind of stuff when people learn about it that they throw their hands up and say, "I can't stop any of this. You know, this is the kind of stuff, Rush, you can say, 'Liberalism, conservatism, principles,' none of that matters in this stuff. When you have a president who's gonna allow certain people literally reach into the federal Treasury and grab whatever they want from it, then, you know, don't tell me about big government, Tea Parties and all that. It doesn't matter, 'cause it's still money that everybody wants and everybody focused on, especially those that tell you that it isn't the money."
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here's James in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. Thank you for taking my call, Rush. I'm a lifelong listener, and I'd just like to say that before Obama's election I got a phone call about a possible job opportunity and then they said, "We have to see who wins the election," and then Obama won and they said the wrong person won. (cell garbled) They're not hiring now, and I'm one of those chronically unemployed persons who weren't counted in the current unemployment numbers, but I'm making progress. There are no stimulus jobs. I can tell you that factually.
RUSH: No, not unless you're in a union, not unless you're in a public sector union -- and there never were gonna be any private sector jobs with the stimulus. Let me ask you a question, James, because you're on a cell phone and I have a devil of a time comprehending what people say on a cell phone. Did you say that you get a phone call about a possible job opportunity and they said that the opportunity won't really exist until after they see who wins the election?
CALLER: Yes, that's correct.
RUSH: That's a year and a half away, James.
CALLER: No, that was 2008 election.
RUSH: Oh, 2008. Oh. Okay.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Well, that's still the case. It's still the case. People are not hiring.
END TRANSCRIPT
Obama's Job Recession
Political advantage can be fleeting. A couple of months ago, during the winter quarter, job gains looked to be picking up, unemployment was easing lower, and President Obama’s reelection hopes looked more secure. But things sure have changed.
In recent weeks, a whole bunch of new economic stats have been pointing to a sputtering economy -- maybe even an inflation-prone, less-than-2-percent-growth recession. Stocks have dropped five straight weeks, as they look toward slower growth, jobs, and profits out to year end. And Friday’s jobs report didn’t buck these trends.
“Anemic” is the adjective being tossed around the media. According to the Labor Department, nonfarm payrolls increased a meager 54,000 in May, while private payrolls gained only 83,000. A week or two ago, Wall Street expected 200,000-plus new jobs. Didn’t happen.
Perhaps the most telling weakness in the jobs report comes from the household survey, which is made up of self-employed workers. Think of mom-and-pop owned stores and small businesses. Think of the Main Street entrepreneurial families who make up the backbone of the economy, and for the matter the country. And they vote, too.
Well, household jobs increased a paltry 105,000 in May, after falling 190,000 in April. The jobless rate is determined by the household survey, and you really need a couple hundred thousand new household jobs a month -- at least -- to lower unemployment. And you really need about 300,000 household jobs a month to put a little torque behind the Main Street economy. But with the lackluster May report, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.1 percent from last month’s 9 percent and March’s 8.8 percent.
Suddenly President Obama has gone from reelect to big trouble. The economic rug has been pulled out from underneath him.
So what changed in the last couple of months or so? Answer: A nasty oil-, gasoline-, and commodity-price shock. It’s eating away at economic growth and jobs. It’s stalling the economy. And it has cut into consumer real incomes and business profits.
Much of this problem can be traced to the failure of the Federal Reserve’s QE2 pump-priming campaign. QE2 has not produced growth, but it has produced inflation. In fact, the consumer price index over the past four or five months has been running close to 6 percent annually.
And most of that new Fed money has served merely to depreciate the dollar. And most of those cheaper dollars are on deposit at the Federal Reserve, where banks are earning 25 basis points for safety and risk aversion. In other words, the majority of that new money is not circulating throughout the economy. It’s a boneheaded Fed stimulus, and it has done more harm than good.
That said, in a larger sense, the failure to ignite small-business job creation has to be laid at the doorstep of the Obama administration, and the economic policies that threaten higher taxes and regulations virtually across the board. On Thursday this week, the president again promised House Democrats to raise taxes on successful top small-business owners. What a great new idea.
So mom and pop don’t feel like taking a risk in this environment. Higher tax-and-regulatory costs have put these entrepreneurs in survival mode. They’re playing their economic cards so close to the vest, business activity has buttoned up tight.
What you want is for people to take their suit jackets off, roll up their shirt sleeves, and go out there and build. But people are hunkering down, not building.
Bear with me for few more jobs stats.
Since the household-survey employment peak back in November 2007, 6.8 million jobs have been lost. Since the so-called end of the recession in June 2009, 199,000 jobs, on balance, have disappeared. And so far this year, household employment has increased by a total of 573,000, which is about 115,000 a month. That’s only one-third of what’s needed to bring down unemployment significantly.
The bottom line is that there hasn’t really been a jobs recovery. President Obama is going to have to own that. But the question is, both in Congress and on the campaign trail, does the GOP have a pro-growth jobs program that will get Main Street mom and pops to roll up their sleeves once again?
In recent weeks, a whole bunch of new economic stats have been pointing to a sputtering economy -- maybe even an inflation-prone, less-than-2-percent-growth recession. Stocks have dropped five straight weeks, as they look toward slower growth, jobs, and profits out to year end. And Friday’s jobs report didn’t buck these trends.
“Anemic” is the adjective being tossed around the media. According to the Labor Department, nonfarm payrolls increased a meager 54,000 in May, while private payrolls gained only 83,000. A week or two ago, Wall Street expected 200,000-plus new jobs. Didn’t happen.
Perhaps the most telling weakness in the jobs report comes from the household survey, which is made up of self-employed workers. Think of mom-and-pop owned stores and small businesses. Think of the Main Street entrepreneurial families who make up the backbone of the economy, and for the matter the country. And they vote, too.
Well, household jobs increased a paltry 105,000 in May, after falling 190,000 in April. The jobless rate is determined by the household survey, and you really need a couple hundred thousand new household jobs a month -- at least -- to lower unemployment. And you really need about 300,000 household jobs a month to put a little torque behind the Main Street economy. But with the lackluster May report, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.1 percent from last month’s 9 percent and March’s 8.8 percent.
Suddenly President Obama has gone from reelect to big trouble. The economic rug has been pulled out from underneath him.
So what changed in the last couple of months or so? Answer: A nasty oil-, gasoline-, and commodity-price shock. It’s eating away at economic growth and jobs. It’s stalling the economy. And it has cut into consumer real incomes and business profits.
Much of this problem can be traced to the failure of the Federal Reserve’s QE2 pump-priming campaign. QE2 has not produced growth, but it has produced inflation. In fact, the consumer price index over the past four or five months has been running close to 6 percent annually.
And most of that new Fed money has served merely to depreciate the dollar. And most of those cheaper dollars are on deposit at the Federal Reserve, where banks are earning 25 basis points for safety and risk aversion. In other words, the majority of that new money is not circulating throughout the economy. It’s a boneheaded Fed stimulus, and it has done more harm than good.
That said, in a larger sense, the failure to ignite small-business job creation has to be laid at the doorstep of the Obama administration, and the economic policies that threaten higher taxes and regulations virtually across the board. On Thursday this week, the president again promised House Democrats to raise taxes on successful top small-business owners. What a great new idea.
So mom and pop don’t feel like taking a risk in this environment. Higher tax-and-regulatory costs have put these entrepreneurs in survival mode. They’re playing their economic cards so close to the vest, business activity has buttoned up tight.
What you want is for people to take their suit jackets off, roll up their shirt sleeves, and go out there and build. But people are hunkering down, not building.
Bear with me for few more jobs stats.
Since the household-survey employment peak back in November 2007, 6.8 million jobs have been lost. Since the so-called end of the recession in June 2009, 199,000 jobs, on balance, have disappeared. And so far this year, household employment has increased by a total of 573,000, which is about 115,000 a month. That’s only one-third of what’s needed to bring down unemployment significantly.
The bottom line is that there hasn’t really been a jobs recovery. President Obama is going to have to own that. But the question is, both in Congress and on the campaign trail, does the GOP have a pro-growth jobs program that will get Main Street mom and pops to roll up their sleeves once again?
Socialism Comes Home to Roost in Markets
With today's employment report showing employment back up to 9.1%, there is growing discussion about the possibility of a double-dip recession.
The wrong-headed socialist policies of the Obama administration will come home to roost.
Socialism never works, yet politicians continue to practice it because it appeal to the masses wins votes. A double-dip recession with inflation should bode well for precious metals just as it did in the 1970s.
So far for 2011, price/volume seems unusually deceptive, and leading stocks that hold strong fundamentals often sell off hard when the major averages reverse even a couple percent. Most strategic investment solutions are flailing this year.
One might ask what can be done in this environment which seems unusually challenging.
Indeed, current market conditions are challenging.
The market has not had any sustained rallies since the start of the year, and when the major averages drop just a couple percent, some leading stocks tend to get clocked to the tune of 5% or more.
Furthermore, certain leading stocks had spin outs such as JAZZ on April 27 when the stock got throttled intraday. Thus this environment is fraught with higher than normal risk.
Fortunately, such periods eventually come to an end, and a new trend emerges when most investors least expect it since the market likes to surprise the masses.
It is during such periods that it is best to stay vigilant and watchful of market conditions since markets can turn on a dime. New trends, either up or down, can begin with only subtle warning that calls for strategic investment management.
But instead, many investors stop trading altogether when the market falls, and take their eye off the ball as bear markets are notorious for pushing away many investors.
While staying out of bear markets is a good strategy, one should still keep their eye on the markets by running screens and keeping a watch list of stocks that may be bucking the downtrend in the general market.
We maintain such a list then when the market direction model switches back to a buy signal, we send out reports in real-time so members can choose to act on any stocks that are issuing pocket pivot buy points which can then be bought. These are often the stocks that well outperform the major averages during the next uptrend.
Investors must absolutely understand that often, the next bull market's big leaders and hence best investment opportunities show their first positive characteristics during a market correction or outright bear market.
As the market goes through its paces, declining as much as 15-20% or more during a bear phase, future leading stocks are often building sound price/volume bases at the same time they are steadily showing improving fundamentals, such as improving and/or accelerating earnings and sales growth, improving profitability, and an increasing institutional following.
Pocket pivot buy points are often early clues of potential future strength in nascent leaders, and our Pocket Pivot Alerts service keeps you in tune with those stocks showing the most favorable price/volume characteristics in any market environment and often constitute our best stock picks.
Further, many investors fail to realize that good money can be made on the short side, especially now that many inverse ETFs exist that did not exist three years ago. And time value on the short side is enormous since general markets and stocks tend to drop much faster than they rise. Such is the emotional nature of fear vs greed/hope.
The tricky aspect of shorting stocks is timing. It is best to test the waters with a smaller than normal position, then add to the position as it proves itself on a price basis. We assist members through these treacherous waters via our Short Sale Set-ups reports.
In this current trendless market, the only positions taken in larger size were those that continued to move higher, so position sizing/money management techniques played an important role.
Buying a smaller than normal position on the first buy point, then subsequently small positions on subsequent buy points puts the average cost at a lower level than where the stock is currently trading, thus the investor can add to their position with psychological ease.
Strategic investment management is paramount.
The wrong-headed socialist policies of the Obama administration will come home to roost.
Socialism never works, yet politicians continue to practice it because it appeal to the masses wins votes. A double-dip recession with inflation should bode well for precious metals just as it did in the 1970s.
So far for 2011, price/volume seems unusually deceptive, and leading stocks that hold strong fundamentals often sell off hard when the major averages reverse even a couple percent. Most strategic investment solutions are flailing this year.
One might ask what can be done in this environment which seems unusually challenging.
Indeed, current market conditions are challenging.
The market has not had any sustained rallies since the start of the year, and when the major averages drop just a couple percent, some leading stocks tend to get clocked to the tune of 5% or more.
Furthermore, certain leading stocks had spin outs such as JAZZ on April 27 when the stock got throttled intraday. Thus this environment is fraught with higher than normal risk.
Fortunately, such periods eventually come to an end, and a new trend emerges when most investors least expect it since the market likes to surprise the masses.
It is during such periods that it is best to stay vigilant and watchful of market conditions since markets can turn on a dime. New trends, either up or down, can begin with only subtle warning that calls for strategic investment management.
But instead, many investors stop trading altogether when the market falls, and take their eye off the ball as bear markets are notorious for pushing away many investors.
While staying out of bear markets is a good strategy, one should still keep their eye on the markets by running screens and keeping a watch list of stocks that may be bucking the downtrend in the general market.
We maintain such a list then when the market direction model switches back to a buy signal, we send out reports in real-time so members can choose to act on any stocks that are issuing pocket pivot buy points which can then be bought. These are often the stocks that well outperform the major averages during the next uptrend.
Investors must absolutely understand that often, the next bull market's big leaders and hence best investment opportunities show their first positive characteristics during a market correction or outright bear market.
As the market goes through its paces, declining as much as 15-20% or more during a bear phase, future leading stocks are often building sound price/volume bases at the same time they are steadily showing improving fundamentals, such as improving and/or accelerating earnings and sales growth, improving profitability, and an increasing institutional following.
Pocket pivot buy points are often early clues of potential future strength in nascent leaders, and our Pocket Pivot Alerts service keeps you in tune with those stocks showing the most favorable price/volume characteristics in any market environment and often constitute our best stock picks.
Further, many investors fail to realize that good money can be made on the short side, especially now that many inverse ETFs exist that did not exist three years ago. And time value on the short side is enormous since general markets and stocks tend to drop much faster than they rise. Such is the emotional nature of fear vs greed/hope.
The tricky aspect of shorting stocks is timing. It is best to test the waters with a smaller than normal position, then add to the position as it proves itself on a price basis. We assist members through these treacherous waters via our Short Sale Set-ups reports.
In this current trendless market, the only positions taken in larger size were those that continued to move higher, so position sizing/money management techniques played an important role.
Buying a smaller than normal position on the first buy point, then subsequently small positions on subsequent buy points puts the average cost at a lower level than where the stock is currently trading, thus the investor can add to their position with psychological ease.
Strategic investment management is paramount.
Obama's 2nd Great Depression
Therefore, my brothers, you whom I LOVE and long for, my joy and crown, that is how you should stand firm in the Lored, dear friends! Exhortations… Phil 4:1
By any measure we have a copy of the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gummit expansion which extended the Great Depression. If you were to really find the true unemployment figures they are likely within a few points of the worst years of the Depression at 25%. We are seeing the home foreclosure rates are the worst since those years as well as the rising prices of food which is putting more and more in the soup lines. We have a 3 prong attack on the economy which just like FDR’s regime is destroying the private sector by design.
When FDR came into office he was a relative pauper who happened to be related to the Roosevelt fortunes in rail and oil although his father made his fortune in Chinese opium smuggling. FDR was the Red Headed stepchild who never made any money basically he was the first Kennedy brat. He tried his hand at oil and real estate and lost in both. He built a personal hatred towards banks as communism was sweeping the world and after he was Governor of NY moved to the White House on a hate the rich campaign. His was one of the first DNC campaigns in America to teach the voter to hate bankers and Wall Street which allowed him to nationalize the banking system while raising taxes on the wealthy to 90% stopping any growth or jobs in the private sector.
At one point he taxed them at 100% over $100K until the war broke out and private enterprise forced him to release control of the banks ending the Great Depression. The only difference between FDR’s gummit works programs and Premier Hussain’s is the federal workers today are unionized and receiving huge retirements. We are so overextended on public retirements there is no way to pay them although the unions haven’t explained it to their members. They believe they can just mine more dollars out of American pocket to maintain their lifestyles. They believe they are more deserving of a lavish retirement at 58 than you are at 75. Little do they know they are sitting in a rotting basket while they float down the flooding Mississippi heading for the waterfall.
If the gummit hadn’t done anything when the first collapse happened we would have been over this recession a year or two ago. His dumping the Porkulus bill into the problem only made a bad situation far worse and solved absolutely nothing economically. It may have propped up some union bosses and hid their ransacking the union pensions but it did not create a single job anywhere in the Country. We now have a huge burden dragging down the economy and all of the unionized businesses are paying excessive payments to prop up their overextended Ponzi schemes.
The second problem we have is the lack of an effective energy policy. We live in a Country which has abundant sources of energy but the gummit won’t allow us to develop it. The DNC and their megaphones in the media have effectively destroyed the opportunity to drill for Oil or Gas let alone drill for coal in areas it takes nothing more than digging and burning. They can all be done efficiently and cleanly but the media has so brainwashed the people through scare tactics and the Global Warming fraud it has allowed the regime to force us to starve for energy. It is like dying of thirst next to a lake because the gummit said the lake was poison when in fact the dead man could have drank his fill with no health problems.
Finally, the third part of the trifecta of doom is the destruction of the Banking industry. At a time we need to have the banks working as efficiently as possible the Ohbummer dictatorship has again forced the banks to stop underwriting loans for the poor and minorities. This is what got us here in the first place which means the banks have to give loans to people who will default within a few months or years so they can have a house. To avoid this, the banks have stopped giving loans to the deserving people so they won’t be brought before a committee or sued by the gummit for discrimination. The banks are in trouble to begin with but these laws have forced them to basically stop loaning money for houses or businesses and simply buy T-Bills which is making this meltdown last longer.
The answers to all of these problems are the same, it is to have the tyrants take their hands and regulations off the industries and let the free market solve the problems. The market would be bumpy for a few months while it sorted out the winners and losers then filled the vacuums and begin to recover slowly but surely. Once it begins to take hold there would be a slow growing and in a few years we would be back to gaining strength and the invisible hand of competition would do what it has done through the ages. Like an onion we will have to remove layers upon layers of gummit restrictions.
This is impossible for the commie libs since they have been brainwashed into believing they are the only ones who can run an economy fairly. They don’t believe there should be winners or losers except if they are the ones who choose them. They have no concept of taking their hands off of the economy or not using their taxing abilities as a great experiment to force people to live the way they determine is the right way. This looks exactly like the Soviet Union where all the Commie Party members who live their lives the right way receive all the bribes and limos while the unwashed live 2-3 families to an apartment to pay for those bribes and limos. They believe the beauty of their system is all the wrong thinkers live their lives equally miserable while the Marxists enjoy the rotting fruits of their broken economy.
Until we throw all of the Marxist bums out of power from both Parties we are doomed to living in this extended Depression. We will not see any jobs created in the private sector until Ohbummer and his Czars are unemployed. He can then enjoy the recovering market as he makes huge speaking fees from the obots who can’t get enough of his ability to read a speech. You know the comrades at ABDNC, SoddomWood along with the Silicon Valley who gave us this economic disaster. Until he is on his speaking tour explaining his economic solutions we will never see our industries begin to solve his solutions.
This trident of economic destruction was supposed to bring it down faster and harder which is a testament to the American will and determination to survive. We have the way out, we just need a leader with the courage, articulation and love of capitalism to put a steady hand on the rudder to steer this ship of state away from the rocks and back out to sea. For the time being we all need to be anchors and hold her off those rocks until we can bring in a Captain and crew who know how to start her engines to get her moving again. The key to setting sail will be throwing our bilge overboard.
Pray for America
Defending Israel, defying Obama
Defending Israel, defying Obama
A masked Palestinian youth fires a tear gas canister at Israeli soldiers following a demonstration against Israeli settlements and its separation wall in the West Bank village of Nilin on June 3.
As befits a modest country unaccustomed to leading the world other than by homogenized measurements of the quality of life, Canada seems not to have noticed that Stephen Harper has kicked off his new term as head of a majority government with the assumption of the moral leadership of the world (in the usual unobtrusive Canadian way); and even more astoundingly, has done so by successfully contradicting the President of the United States.
Canadian prime ministers have only rarely publicly taken issue with American presidents, and never successfully. John Diefenbaker did a U-turn and refused nuclear warheads in Canada, but bought the American missiles that were supposed to deliver them anyway; John F. Kennedy quietly disdained the whole affair, and Mr. Diefenbaker was voted out as prime minister in 1963. Lester Pearson gave Lyndon Johnson his under-informed and unoriginal views on Vietnam in a convocation speech in Philadelphia, and LBJ conspicuously ignored him. Pierre Trudeau opposed Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (which produced the Euro-missile Treaty and led to the end of the Cold War), and his inane pursuit of arms control was ignored by Reagan and every other leader in the world except those household words for enlightened statesmanship, the subsequently overthrown and executed Romanian president Nicolae CeauÐescu, and the terminally forgettable head of the unlamented state of East Germany, Erich Honecker. Jean Chrétien dissented from the American invasion of Iraq, and was ignored by George W. Bush, and the operation proceeded; there were many errors, but it was militarily successful, the Saddam Hussein regime was crushed, and Iraq is today one of the region's more stable and democratic countries.
But at the G8 meetings in Paris last month, Stephen Harper prevented the group's approval of Barack Obama's call for Arab-Israeli peace "on the basis of the 1967 borders." It was an outright veto by Canada, standing up to the Americans, and in non-confrontational dissent to all the others, who were prepared to let this stale bromide pass yet again. Mr. Harper had done the same thing at a Francophonie Conference in 2006, but that was only France, which has been playing footsie with the Arabs ever since Charles de Gaulle departed Algeria in 1963, leaving the oil behind and importing the Islamic problem into France. By killing it in the G-8 (U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K., France, Italy, and Russia), Stephen Harper became the moral leader of the world's statesmen, as the first head of an important country to debunk the 1967 fraud upon which the Arab-Israeli crisis, the longest-running and most definitive moral litmus test in the geo-political world (and least successful extended negotiation in history) is based.
Foreign Minister John Baird's reported recent statement that "We support, obviously, that [the] solution has to be based on the '67 border, with mutually agreed upon swaps, as President Obama said," is unexceptionable, as it takes up on Mr. Obama's "clarification" of three days later, after the furore developed from his original remarks, that he was just repeating the agreed view among those who supported a two-state solution, that there should be two states with "agreed and defensible borders," The problem with the Obama formula was not the concept of 1967 with land swaps, it was the call for peace to be achieved by "negotiation" between Israel and a party that in 44 years has never ceded a square inch of territory or renounced the right of self-proclaimed Palestinian fugitives from inundating with non-Jews what was established and recognized as a "Jewish state." Mr. Baird's comment takes nothing from the courage and effectiveness of Harper having prevented the G-8 from again urging Israel onto this ski jump to oblivion.
The Arabs started and lost the 1967 War; and in wars, the status of aggressors and defenders, and of winners and losers, is not interchangeable. The pre-1967 borders were entirely accidental, and left Israel nine miles wide at its narrowest, and the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in Arab hands. They had no legitimacy and even the United Nations resolutions called for agreed and defensible borders, and a two-state solution. Israel has accepted a two-state solution and Palestine, its government comprised of both Hamas and Fatah, has not, and has shown no disposition to agree on borders, especially any that Israel could defend. It has been clear for decades that the pattern of international intervention in the Middle East has been to promote tangible and practically irrevocable concessions of land by Israel in exchange for insubstantial, easily and instantly revocable professions of reduced hostility, supposedly culminating in peaceful co-existence, from the Arabs. This is the problem of Land For Peace: Israel cedes the land but gets no closer to peace.
President Obama's urging of the parties two weeks ago to "work it out" is a shabby euphemism for Israel to concede more land in exchange for more empty words in Arabic from the same entities that have yet to implement the Oslo obligation pledge of 1993 to acknowledge the right to exist of Israel as a Jewish state. That is what negotiations mean: preemptive, unilateral, ex gratia concessions by Israel, which is already the most legitimate country in the world, as Israel was created by unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council permanent members, not merely admitted as a founding member or applicant. It is also the only one of the world's 195 countries (including Taiwan, Palestine and the Vatican) under serious and constant threat of being eliminated as a country and exterminated as a population.
Also to be "worked out" under the Obama formula is the right of return, which is a euphemism for America abandoning its long commitment to Israel as a Jewish state while the Palestinians displaced from what is now Israel when that state was set up in 1947, may return in numbers to be negotiated, both to Israel, destabilizing it as a Jewish state, as well as to the Palestinian State to be established to accommodate them.
Those who oppose the existence of the state of Israel, for whatever motive, know that unless there is an unanswerable nuclear attack on Israel, which will not be possible even if Iran deploys deliverable nuclear weapons, given Israel's retaliatory capability, Israel can be eliminated only by extracting gradual concessions. Keep bickering about settlements, while Palestine receives international recognition as an independent state; keep arguing about borders as the Palestinian population bulks up from returning alleged fugitives on both sides of the disputed and indefensible border; and never agree until the two states are one big, happy bi-sectarian and multicultural commonwealth. Then, absorb, enslave, expel, or massacre the Jews, yet again, as so often in their history, while the world sits in professedly righteous silence.
It might be that the world would be a quieter place without Israel. Europe, desperate for non-Muslim immigration, especially of skilled people, would probably admit the Jews, as would the countries of the Americas and the Antipodes, unlike the policy of most of the countries in these areas in the 1930s and 1940s, when half the world's Jewish population was murdered, in what Mr. Churchill called "the long night of Nazi barbarism . made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science." But it would be a collective capital crime on the soul and conscience of Western Civilization.
If what Obama, heir to the presidents who saved the Old World, sponsored Israel, and contained and defeated totalitarian communism, is advocating comes to pass, our civilization, morally, will die before, and less honourably, than that of the Jews, from which it came. And only Stephen Harper and the incumbent pope, among the world's prominent current leaders, will have seriously dissented.
Whatever may come, Mr. Harper has brought great distinction on Canada, largely unrecognized, as proverbially happens among one's countrymen, and upon himself.
As befits a modest country unaccustomed to leading the world other than by homogenized measurements of the quality of life, Canada seems not to have noticed that Stephen Harper has kicked off his new term as head of a majority government with the assumption of the moral leadership of the world (in the usual unobtrusive Canadian way); and even more astoundingly, has done so by successfully contradicting the President of the United States.
Canadian prime ministers have only rarely publicly taken issue with American presidents, and never successfully. John Diefenbaker did a U-turn and refused nuclear warheads in Canada, but bought the American missiles that were supposed to deliver them anyway; John F. Kennedy quietly disdained the whole affair, and Mr. Diefenbaker was voted out as prime minister in 1963. Lester Pearson gave Lyndon Johnson his under-informed and unoriginal views on Vietnam in a convocation speech in Philadelphia, and LBJ conspicuously ignored him. Pierre Trudeau opposed Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (which produced the Euro-missile Treaty and led to the end of the Cold War), and his inane pursuit of arms control was ignored by Reagan and every other leader in the world except those household words for enlightened statesmanship, the subsequently overthrown and executed Romanian president Nicolae CeauÐescu, and the terminally forgettable head of the unlamented state of East Germany, Erich Honecker. Jean Chrétien dissented from the American invasion of Iraq, and was ignored by George W. Bush, and the operation proceeded; there were many errors, but it was militarily successful, the Saddam Hussein regime was crushed, and Iraq is today one of the region's more stable and democratic countries.
But at the G8 meetings in Paris last month, Stephen Harper prevented the group's approval of Barack Obama's call for Arab-Israeli peace "on the basis of the 1967 borders." It was an outright veto by Canada, standing up to the Americans, and in non-confrontational dissent to all the others, who were prepared to let this stale bromide pass yet again. Mr. Harper had done the same thing at a Francophonie Conference in 2006, but that was only France, which has been playing footsie with the Arabs ever since Charles de Gaulle departed Algeria in 1963, leaving the oil behind and importing the Islamic problem into France. By killing it in the G-8 (U.S., Germany, Japan, the U.K., France, Italy, and Russia), Stephen Harper became the moral leader of the world's statesmen, as the first head of an important country to debunk the 1967 fraud upon which the Arab-Israeli crisis, the longest-running and most definitive moral litmus test in the geo-political world (and least successful extended negotiation in history) is based.
Foreign Minister John Baird's reported recent statement that "We support, obviously, that [the] solution has to be based on the '67 border, with mutually agreed upon swaps, as President Obama said," is unexceptionable, as it takes up on Mr. Obama's "clarification" of three days later, after the furore developed from his original remarks, that he was just repeating the agreed view among those who supported a two-state solution, that there should be two states with "agreed and defensible borders," The problem with the Obama formula was not the concept of 1967 with land swaps, it was the call for peace to be achieved by "negotiation" between Israel and a party that in 44 years has never ceded a square inch of territory or renounced the right of self-proclaimed Palestinian fugitives from inundating with non-Jews what was established and recognized as a "Jewish state." Mr. Baird's comment takes nothing from the courage and effectiveness of Harper having prevented the G-8 from again urging Israel onto this ski jump to oblivion.
The Arabs started and lost the 1967 War; and in wars, the status of aggressors and defenders, and of winners and losers, is not interchangeable. The pre-1967 borders were entirely accidental, and left Israel nine miles wide at its narrowest, and the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in Arab hands. They had no legitimacy and even the United Nations resolutions called for agreed and defensible borders, and a two-state solution. Israel has accepted a two-state solution and Palestine, its government comprised of both Hamas and Fatah, has not, and has shown no disposition to agree on borders, especially any that Israel could defend. It has been clear for decades that the pattern of international intervention in the Middle East has been to promote tangible and practically irrevocable concessions of land by Israel in exchange for insubstantial, easily and instantly revocable professions of reduced hostility, supposedly culminating in peaceful co-existence, from the Arabs. This is the problem of Land For Peace: Israel cedes the land but gets no closer to peace.
President Obama's urging of the parties two weeks ago to "work it out" is a shabby euphemism for Israel to concede more land in exchange for more empty words in Arabic from the same entities that have yet to implement the Oslo obligation pledge of 1993 to acknowledge the right to exist of Israel as a Jewish state. That is what negotiations mean: preemptive, unilateral, ex gratia concessions by Israel, which is already the most legitimate country in the world, as Israel was created by unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council permanent members, not merely admitted as a founding member or applicant. It is also the only one of the world's 195 countries (including Taiwan, Palestine and the Vatican) under serious and constant threat of being eliminated as a country and exterminated as a population.
Also to be "worked out" under the Obama formula is the right of return, which is a euphemism for America abandoning its long commitment to Israel as a Jewish state while the Palestinians displaced from what is now Israel when that state was set up in 1947, may return in numbers to be negotiated, both to Israel, destabilizing it as a Jewish state, as well as to the Palestinian State to be established to accommodate them.
Those who oppose the existence of the state of Israel, for whatever motive, know that unless there is an unanswerable nuclear attack on Israel, which will not be possible even if Iran deploys deliverable nuclear weapons, given Israel's retaliatory capability, Israel can be eliminated only by extracting gradual concessions. Keep bickering about settlements, while Palestine receives international recognition as an independent state; keep arguing about borders as the Palestinian population bulks up from returning alleged fugitives on both sides of the disputed and indefensible border; and never agree until the two states are one big, happy bi-sectarian and multicultural commonwealth. Then, absorb, enslave, expel, or massacre the Jews, yet again, as so often in their history, while the world sits in professedly righteous silence.
It might be that the world would be a quieter place without Israel. Europe, desperate for non-Muslim immigration, especially of skilled people, would probably admit the Jews, as would the countries of the Americas and the Antipodes, unlike the policy of most of the countries in these areas in the 1930s and 1940s, when half the world's Jewish population was murdered, in what Mr. Churchill called "the long night of Nazi barbarism . made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science." But it would be a collective capital crime on the soul and conscience of Western Civilization.
If what Obama, heir to the presidents who saved the Old World, sponsored Israel, and contained and defeated totalitarian communism, is advocating comes to pass, our civilization, morally, will die before, and less honourably, than that of the Jews, from which it came. And only Stephen Harper and the incumbent pope, among the world's prominent current leaders, will have seriously dissented.
Whatever may come, Mr. Harper has brought great distinction on Canada, largely unrecognized, as proverbially happens among one's countrymen, and upon himself.
Two Killers Died Yesterday! (Kevorkian/Keynes)
Two separate-but-equal promoters of death, themselves, died Friday, June 3rd 2011. One, the infamous Jack Kevorkian, the famed “Doctor of Death” assisted suicide advocate, died peacefully at home at the age of 83, and the other, John Maynard Keynes, famed British economist, who posthumously promoted the death of the United States’ economy with his Keynesian Economic Theories, who physically died in the flesh in 1946, officially and finally died at age 128 on Friday with the release of the Labor Department’s dreadful unemployment report, (only 54,000 jobs added of 200,000 expected, and unemployment rate actually going UP to 9.1) proving the 800 billion dollar Keynesian stimulus program that the US Congress passed in the winter of 2009 was an absolute, total failure, thus officially ending Keynes’ time here on earth.
Kevorkian assisted in the deaths of 130 terminally ill people by attaching them to a euthanasia device that he had made. The individual then pushed a button releasing drugs or chemicals that would end their own life. Keynesian Economics assisted in the deaths of economies by allowing the country to borrow money it didn’t have, and release it into the economy, to “prime the pump” and theoretically get a weak economy moving.
See Video – Keynesian Economics Is Wrong: Bigger Gov\’t Is Not Stimulus
On Friday, however, it was devastatingly clear that, if an 800 BILLION DOLLAR Keynesian stimulus couldn’t turn an economy around, NO Keynesian stimulus could.
Both leave legacies of destruction, but the more sympathetic and caring of the two was obviously Kevorkian. The people who willingly went to him knew what his goal was, and what the likely result would be. But the people going to Keynesian Economics do not understand what the result will be, because the stated goal is not the same as the eventual result. Such deception is evil, and thankfully, gone from this planet forever.
Won’t it be interesting to see if rumors of either of these two actually “not being dead” will surface in the future! Maybe we’ll soon see in the National Enquirer “Is Kevorkian Alive” headlines. “”Doctor Death, living in private island, happily killing thankful natives”! We will have to wait and see.
But thankfully no rumors of Keynesian Theory still surviving will occur, that would be simply be unthinkable! When the economy, boosted by the largest Keynesian economic stimulus ever seen by mankind only a year and a half ago, thought by some to be in recovery, was shown to be the opposite by the unemployment rate actually going UP, an absolute sign of economic decline…surely no rumors of a “living” Keynes will occur!
John Maynard Keynes Keynesian economics
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.
(This article was taken down by The Nation due to an embargo, but it was excerpted at Columbia Journalism Review.)
It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:
This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).
Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.
Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.
God, civil disobedience and revolution
Posted: June 04, 2011
1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
The news this week was more than bleak. The economy remains in a tailspin and is getting worse; the Middle East remains highly unstable, creating the prospect of a meltdown if oil fields are taken over or destroyed by hostile interests; Germany, our strongest ally in Western Europe, has decided to end nuclear power as an overreaction to the Japan disaster, setting off an eventual energy shortage worldwide; and our nation is governed at the top by a president who not only has no clue how to rule, but who at heart sympathizes with radical Muslims who hate Jews and Christians – which, at least at present, remain the mainstay of our population and cultural base.
There is a sinking unsettling feeling in the air. Any moment I have the impression that the proverbial shoe could drop; one major catastrophic event could create a worldwide economic, social and political collapse. We are hanging by a thread, and the clock is ticking at the midnight hour.
Great American leaders who can rally the people in trying to avoid catastrophe have existed before, but they do not exist now. Mitt Romney, for the moment the leading Republican candidate to win his party's nomination for president in 2012, has no real moral or political compass, and others, with the exception of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin (who will face many unfair obstacles in the leftist-controlled media), lack the toughness and conviction to be president. Regrettably, even with all the bad news, absent a knockout legal punch, which I have been working on, our "mullah in chief" president, Barack Hussein Obama, is likely to be re-elected by "default" – notwithstanding the damage he will undoubtedly continue to do in the year and a half leading up to the next national election in 2012.
Now is the time to turn to God for guidance, as if this were not always the case. We the People are in his hands. And while I do believe that God helps those who help themselves, it's time that we show humility and pray. It's also time that we act in His name.
Get Larry Klayman's fascinating account of his battle with the powers that be: "Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment"
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela and other "civilian activists" – of all political persuasions – changed history by resorting not to violence against the ruling elite, but by using civil disobedience. That is what we now need to do collectively as the American people to regain control of our nation.
There is much talk these days about the budget crisis and what it means for ourselves and, most chillingly, our children and grandchildren. In the next few years alone, the overwhelming majority of our budget will go just to paying the interest on the country's huge debt, leaving very little for anything else. While establishment Republicans, who remain in control of their party by and large, claim that they are trying to rein in the debt, they have shown little desire to allow the current debt ceiling to remain intact. And, President Obama and his fellow Democrats largely refuse to make any real and meaningful spending cuts. In short, we are more than bankrupt; we are watching the nation fall into irreparable economic, social and political depression even if the Middle East and its oil fields do not literally blow up – sending world prices through the roof.
There are ways to get the ruling elite's "attention" to try to mend their ways. Work stopages, large-scale nationwide protests, collectively in mass refusing to obey government edits and mandates and the like could be used. We need to decide how best to accomplish our peaceful second American revolution and bring the ruling establishment elite to its knees.
In the regard, I would like to solicit your ideas and views and then in subsequent columns publish the results of this hard thought. If you feel as I do, and believe that we are facing disaster unless we act now, please write to me at leklayman@yahoo.com with your suggestions and ideas. There truly is no time to lose.
For if we think that a political "messiah" is on the way in time for the next elections, think again. There is only one messiah, and his name is not Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich – by any account "little" people by any stretch of the imagination. And, time is so short that we must draw up a list of demands of our government, present it to our current so-called political leaders and, if they do not heed the immediate call, act immediately on our own. That's what our Founding Fathers did, and when their grievances were again ignored and not heard, the rest became history – and a great nation was born. Now we must be "born again!"
These Founding Fathers did not sit around and wait for King George III to straighten himself out, and we cannot wait to put both leftist Democrats and establishment Republicans on the so-called "right track."
With the grace and guidance of the Almighty, and our own creative and committed spirit and strong peaceful actions, we can bring the nation out of its free fall; but we no longer have any time left if we are to be successful.
I look forward to hearing from you with your prayers and thoughts.
God bless the United States, and God bless its great people. Let us all roll up our sleeves and get to work before it is too late. Let us ignite the second American revolution with words and, more importantly, with strong deeds!
1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
The news this week was more than bleak. The economy remains in a tailspin and is getting worse; the Middle East remains highly unstable, creating the prospect of a meltdown if oil fields are taken over or destroyed by hostile interests; Germany, our strongest ally in Western Europe, has decided to end nuclear power as an overreaction to the Japan disaster, setting off an eventual energy shortage worldwide; and our nation is governed at the top by a president who not only has no clue how to rule, but who at heart sympathizes with radical Muslims who hate Jews and Christians – which, at least at present, remain the mainstay of our population and cultural base.
There is a sinking unsettling feeling in the air. Any moment I have the impression that the proverbial shoe could drop; one major catastrophic event could create a worldwide economic, social and political collapse. We are hanging by a thread, and the clock is ticking at the midnight hour.
Great American leaders who can rally the people in trying to avoid catastrophe have existed before, but they do not exist now. Mitt Romney, for the moment the leading Republican candidate to win his party's nomination for president in 2012, has no real moral or political compass, and others, with the exception of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin (who will face many unfair obstacles in the leftist-controlled media), lack the toughness and conviction to be president. Regrettably, even with all the bad news, absent a knockout legal punch, which I have been working on, our "mullah in chief" president, Barack Hussein Obama, is likely to be re-elected by "default" – notwithstanding the damage he will undoubtedly continue to do in the year and a half leading up to the next national election in 2012.
Now is the time to turn to God for guidance, as if this were not always the case. We the People are in his hands. And while I do believe that God helps those who help themselves, it's time that we show humility and pray. It's also time that we act in His name.
Get Larry Klayman's fascinating account of his battle with the powers that be: "Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment"
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela and other "civilian activists" – of all political persuasions – changed history by resorting not to violence against the ruling elite, but by using civil disobedience. That is what we now need to do collectively as the American people to regain control of our nation.
There is much talk these days about the budget crisis and what it means for ourselves and, most chillingly, our children and grandchildren. In the next few years alone, the overwhelming majority of our budget will go just to paying the interest on the country's huge debt, leaving very little for anything else. While establishment Republicans, who remain in control of their party by and large, claim that they are trying to rein in the debt, they have shown little desire to allow the current debt ceiling to remain intact. And, President Obama and his fellow Democrats largely refuse to make any real and meaningful spending cuts. In short, we are more than bankrupt; we are watching the nation fall into irreparable economic, social and political depression even if the Middle East and its oil fields do not literally blow up – sending world prices through the roof.
There are ways to get the ruling elite's "attention" to try to mend their ways. Work stopages, large-scale nationwide protests, collectively in mass refusing to obey government edits and mandates and the like could be used. We need to decide how best to accomplish our peaceful second American revolution and bring the ruling establishment elite to its knees.
In the regard, I would like to solicit your ideas and views and then in subsequent columns publish the results of this hard thought. If you feel as I do, and believe that we are facing disaster unless we act now, please write to me at leklayman@yahoo.com with your suggestions and ideas. There truly is no time to lose.
For if we think that a political "messiah" is on the way in time for the next elections, think again. There is only one messiah, and his name is not Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich – by any account "little" people by any stretch of the imagination. And, time is so short that we must draw up a list of demands of our government, present it to our current so-called political leaders and, if they do not heed the immediate call, act immediately on our own. That's what our Founding Fathers did, and when their grievances were again ignored and not heard, the rest became history – and a great nation was born. Now we must be "born again!"
These Founding Fathers did not sit around and wait for King George III to straighten himself out, and we cannot wait to put both leftist Democrats and establishment Republicans on the so-called "right track."
With the grace and guidance of the Almighty, and our own creative and committed spirit and strong peaceful actions, we can bring the nation out of its free fall; but we no longer have any time left if we are to be successful.
I look forward to hearing from you with your prayers and thoughts.
God bless the United States, and God bless its great people. Let us all roll up our sleeves and get to work before it is too late. Let us ignite the second American revolution with words and, more importantly, with strong deeds!
Celebrate Israel Parade - Sunday, June 5!
Celebrate Israel Parade - Sunday, June 5!
The Largest Event in the World Celebrating Israel's 63rd Year of independence
Watch the Parade LIVE
12 to 2 PM
On
My9 WWOR-TV
Or
Click Here to see the Live Webcast!
On-Demand Webcast beginning 7 PM
Over 30,000 participants will march up Fifth Ave. from 57th St. to 74th St. cheered by hundreds of thousands of spectators from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Parade - 11 AM to 4 PM - Rain or Shine.
The Largest Event in the World Celebrating Israel's 63rd Year of independence
Watch the Parade LIVE
12 to 2 PM
On
My9 WWOR-TV
Or
Click Here to see the Live Webcast!
On-Demand Webcast beginning 7 PM
Over 30,000 participants will march up Fifth Ave. from 57th St. to 74th St. cheered by hundreds of thousands of spectators from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Parade - 11 AM to 4 PM - Rain or Shine.
Great News: Juarez Murders Dip to 2-Year Low!
A total 150 people were killed in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez in May, the lowest monthly number since March 2009, when a massive army deployment caused the murder rate to temporarily plummet.
Before the recent improvement, the border town, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, had enjoyed the dubious designation of the world’s most dangerous city for some years. At its peak of violence, 350 people were killed in October 2010, in the city of 1.3 million or so residents. Since then, the violence has steadily declined, slipping to 183 murders in March and 168 in April.
Despite the dip in killings, Juarez remains an exceedingly violent city; the May total may have been the lowest since 2009, but it was enough to put the annualized murder rate well above 100 per 100,000 residents, which would make it the bloodiest of any major Mexican metropolis.
President Felipe Calderon previously hailed the work of the Federal Police in bringing about the decline in violence, though he offered no explanation as to how this had taken place.
One likely factor is attrition among the hundreds of gangs operating in Juarez. In what might be a sign of the shifting dynamics in the regional underworld, two larger groups that operate in Chihuahua -- the Zetas and La Linea -- recently announced an alliance in the city of Hidalgo del Parral, a few hours south of Juarez.
Before the recent improvement, the border town, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, had enjoyed the dubious designation of the world’s most dangerous city for some years. At its peak of violence, 350 people were killed in October 2010, in the city of 1.3 million or so residents. Since then, the violence has steadily declined, slipping to 183 murders in March and 168 in April.
Despite the dip in killings, Juarez remains an exceedingly violent city; the May total may have been the lowest since 2009, but it was enough to put the annualized murder rate well above 100 per 100,000 residents, which would make it the bloodiest of any major Mexican metropolis.
President Felipe Calderon previously hailed the work of the Federal Police in bringing about the decline in violence, though he offered no explanation as to how this had taken place.
One likely factor is attrition among the hundreds of gangs operating in Juarez. In what might be a sign of the shifting dynamics in the regional underworld, two larger groups that operate in Chihuahua -- the Zetas and La Linea -- recently announced an alliance in the city of Hidalgo del Parral, a few hours south of Juarez.
Something Fishy: Fed Reserve flies rainbow flag
The flag is being flown at the request of PRISM, a Richmond Fed group representing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees and allies. (And if the request would have been rejected?)
Obama’s assault on Michael Savage
KUHNER: Obama’s assault on conservative speech
Michael Savage is no threat to the peace
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
The Washington Times
The party president is at it again. In Ireland, he belted back some Guinness. In Britain, he savored $1,000 wine and toasted the queen. In Poland, he is sure to feast on pirogi and vodka. Yet President Obama’s European trip is more than a waste of taxpayer dollars on celebrity diplomacy. It is a cultural watershed - a key moment when the leader of the free world stood by and did nothing while the free-speech rights of an American citizen were violated by the very government he was praising. Mr. Obama’s slogan should be: “Give me fine French Burgundy, or give me death!”
An attorney for the British government reaffirmed that the ban on popular talk-radio host Michael Savage will remain in place. Britain’s previous Labor government put the fiery conservative on a national enemies list along with Hamas terrorists, neo-Nazis and Russian skinheads - vicious men who have committed murder or other serious criminal acts. Mr. Savage is banned from entering Britain. High-ranking correspondence shows that he was chosen for one reason: to provide “balance” against the high number of Muslim extremists. Mr. Savage has been falsely painted as an Islamophobic bigot who risks inciting violence and “intercommunal” tension. For Britain’s powerful Muslim lobby, he has become public enemy No. 1. London has put a giant target on his back. Being officially compared with terrorist butchers and Russian gangsters has exposed the talk-show host to the possibility of retaliation - especially by some crazed Islamist.
There is not a scintilla of evidence, however, that Mr. Savage has called for or sparked criminal behavior - let alone violence and bloodshed. Britain’s political class is deliberately trying to destroy his good name and reputation. The hope that the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron would repeal the outrageous ban vanished during Mr. Obama’s visit.
British government spokesman Michael Atkins wrote to Mr. Savage’s attorney, “Your client has not provided any evidence to show that he did not commit the unacceptable behaviour” that caused the “decision to exclude him, nor has your client provided any acceptable evidence to show his repudiation of those unacceptable behaviours.” The ban inverts the basic principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence: the presumption of innocence. Mr. Savage is presumed guilty until proved innocent.
Moreover, it represents a chilling assault on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It is a naked attempt to delegitimize and criminalize conservative ideas. Even leftists such as Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, have condemned the ban for imposing limits on free expression.
Mr. Savage is the victim of a political and judicial witch hunt. His real sin is not anything he has done; rather, it is what he stands for. Mr. Savage opposes statism, unlimited immigration and Muslim fundamentalism. He defends America’s national sovereignty and distinct cultural identity. In short, he is a nationalist who champions blood-and-soil conservatism. There is no place for him in multicultural Britain - and, increasingly, in post-Christian America. His show, “The Savage Nation,” is one of the last bastions of traditionalist nationalism. Unlike most other conservatives, Mr. Savage has no use for the “new world order” - economic globalization, free trade, rampant materialism, secularism and military interventionism.
The ban is more than simply the persecution of an innocent man. It signifies the triumph of a creeping soft totalitarianism. There is an unholy alliance between the hard left and Islamic fascism. Media Matters, a group funded by socialist billionaire George Soros, spearheaded the drive to get Mr. Savage on the blacklist. Mr. Soros is using his millions to stifle conservative voices. Like all Leninists, he believes in using state power to eradicate opposing points of view. Mr. Soros is a transnational progressive. He believes in one-world government marked by high taxes, lavish social programs, abortion on demand, euthanasia, the legalization of drugs and the appeasement of Islamic terrorism. He shares with Islamists one overriding impulse: the hatred of America. The political gods demand that Mr. Savage be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.
By persecuting Mr. Savage, the British government has turned him into a martyr. He has become a dissident of the European Union regime. Mr. Cameron is a phony conservative - a Red Tory. Whether it is the environment, gay marriage, abortion, Islam, taxes or now Mr. Savage, he is a liberal masquerading as a Thatcherite.
Instead of demanding that Britain rescind its ban, Mr. Obama stood silent. He is only too happy to support this assault on free speech. It is part of a larger pattern against his critics. The president has demonized Fox News as illegitimate, urged his minority supporters to “punish” their Republican “enemies,” excluded skeptical journalists from press gaggles and demanded the passage of the Fairness Doctrine - which would muzzle much of conservative talk radio. He also wants the government to monitor and have emergency powers over the Internet.
The Savage case gave Mr. Obama a golden opportunity to position himself as a centrist heading into the 2012 election. Had he come out against the ban, he would have shocked his political opponents and cast himself as a paladin of free expression. Rather, he did what most leftists do: kowtow to Mr. Soros, the sugar daddy of the Democratic Party. Like Mr. Soros, Mr. Obama cannot resist the Leninist temptation. Power trumps decency. Today, it is Mr. Savage. Tomorrow, it may be you.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute. He has served as a guest host for “The Savage Nation.”
Michael Savage is no threat to the peace
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
The Washington Times
The party president is at it again. In Ireland, he belted back some Guinness. In Britain, he savored $1,000 wine and toasted the queen. In Poland, he is sure to feast on pirogi and vodka. Yet President Obama’s European trip is more than a waste of taxpayer dollars on celebrity diplomacy. It is a cultural watershed - a key moment when the leader of the free world stood by and did nothing while the free-speech rights of an American citizen were violated by the very government he was praising. Mr. Obama’s slogan should be: “Give me fine French Burgundy, or give me death!”
An attorney for the British government reaffirmed that the ban on popular talk-radio host Michael Savage will remain in place. Britain’s previous Labor government put the fiery conservative on a national enemies list along with Hamas terrorists, neo-Nazis and Russian skinheads - vicious men who have committed murder or other serious criminal acts. Mr. Savage is banned from entering Britain. High-ranking correspondence shows that he was chosen for one reason: to provide “balance” against the high number of Muslim extremists. Mr. Savage has been falsely painted as an Islamophobic bigot who risks inciting violence and “intercommunal” tension. For Britain’s powerful Muslim lobby, he has become public enemy No. 1. London has put a giant target on his back. Being officially compared with terrorist butchers and Russian gangsters has exposed the talk-show host to the possibility of retaliation - especially by some crazed Islamist.
There is not a scintilla of evidence, however, that Mr. Savage has called for or sparked criminal behavior - let alone violence and bloodshed. Britain’s political class is deliberately trying to destroy his good name and reputation. The hope that the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron would repeal the outrageous ban vanished during Mr. Obama’s visit.
British government spokesman Michael Atkins wrote to Mr. Savage’s attorney, “Your client has not provided any evidence to show that he did not commit the unacceptable behaviour” that caused the “decision to exclude him, nor has your client provided any acceptable evidence to show his repudiation of those unacceptable behaviours.” The ban inverts the basic principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence: the presumption of innocence. Mr. Savage is presumed guilty until proved innocent.
Moreover, it represents a chilling assault on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It is a naked attempt to delegitimize and criminalize conservative ideas. Even leftists such as Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, have condemned the ban for imposing limits on free expression.
Mr. Savage is the victim of a political and judicial witch hunt. His real sin is not anything he has done; rather, it is what he stands for. Mr. Savage opposes statism, unlimited immigration and Muslim fundamentalism. He defends America’s national sovereignty and distinct cultural identity. In short, he is a nationalist who champions blood-and-soil conservatism. There is no place for him in multicultural Britain - and, increasingly, in post-Christian America. His show, “The Savage Nation,” is one of the last bastions of traditionalist nationalism. Unlike most other conservatives, Mr. Savage has no use for the “new world order” - economic globalization, free trade, rampant materialism, secularism and military interventionism.
The ban is more than simply the persecution of an innocent man. It signifies the triumph of a creeping soft totalitarianism. There is an unholy alliance between the hard left and Islamic fascism. Media Matters, a group funded by socialist billionaire George Soros, spearheaded the drive to get Mr. Savage on the blacklist. Mr. Soros is using his millions to stifle conservative voices. Like all Leninists, he believes in using state power to eradicate opposing points of view. Mr. Soros is a transnational progressive. He believes in one-world government marked by high taxes, lavish social programs, abortion on demand, euthanasia, the legalization of drugs and the appeasement of Islamic terrorism. He shares with Islamists one overriding impulse: the hatred of America. The political gods demand that Mr. Savage be sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.
By persecuting Mr. Savage, the British government has turned him into a martyr. He has become a dissident of the European Union regime. Mr. Cameron is a phony conservative - a Red Tory. Whether it is the environment, gay marriage, abortion, Islam, taxes or now Mr. Savage, he is a liberal masquerading as a Thatcherite.
Instead of demanding that Britain rescind its ban, Mr. Obama stood silent. He is only too happy to support this assault on free speech. It is part of a larger pattern against his critics. The president has demonized Fox News as illegitimate, urged his minority supporters to “punish” their Republican “enemies,” excluded skeptical journalists from press gaggles and demanded the passage of the Fairness Doctrine - which would muzzle much of conservative talk radio. He also wants the government to monitor and have emergency powers over the Internet.
The Savage case gave Mr. Obama a golden opportunity to position himself as a centrist heading into the 2012 election. Had he come out against the ban, he would have shocked his political opponents and cast himself as a paladin of free expression. Rather, he did what most leftists do: kowtow to Mr. Soros, the sugar daddy of the Democratic Party. Like Mr. Soros, Mr. Obama cannot resist the Leninist temptation. Power trumps decency. Today, it is Mr. Savage. Tomorrow, it may be you.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute. He has served as a guest host for “The Savage Nation.”
Feds bust devout Muslim moralist for drug ring
From NY post via MichaelSavage.com
Feds bust LI pharmacist for drug ring
By JOSH MARGOLIN and KIERAN CROWLEY
Federal drug agents this morning busted a moralizing Long Island pharmacy owner for illegally supplying the dope ingested by a whacked-out teen before she mowed down a retired doctor, who was gardening on her front lawn.
DEA agents hauled off Lutful Chowdhury, 61, of Westbury, and charged him with 14 felony forgery counts. He was arrested at the Aim Pharmacy in Baldwin that he owns and where he is the supervising pharmacist. He is accused of coaching his customers on how to steal or forge prescriptions so they can get their fixes.
Sources told The Post that Chowdhury’s pharmacy filled a stolen, forged Oxycodone prescription for Kayla Gerdes – who was high-as-a-kite on the stuff when she floored a van, mounted a lawn and killed Dr. Rebecca Twine-Wright, 69, last year.
As authorities investigated Gerdes, the DEA focused on the drug store where she had gotten the drugs – Chowdhury’s Aim Pharmacy – and found they "had been on the radar for years for excessive purchases of Hydrocodone and Oxycodone," a source said.
"Gerdes was part of a ring that was stealing and forging prescriptions and filling them at Aim Pharmacy," the source said. "Chowdhury was 'instructing' these individuals on how to avoid detection."
Agents are right now searching the pharmacy and seizing records, the source said. They "expect to uncover the outlet for his excessive" drug purchases, the source said.
The Gerdes case highlights the growing national problem of prescription-drug abuse – something that kills more Americans a year than did crack cocaine at the height of the crack wars two decades ago.
“It’s good medicine in bad hands and that becomes the problem,” John Gilbride, the chief DEA agent in New York, told The Post in a recent interview. “The perception is that it is OK because it is sold from a drug store.”
Chowdhury is to be arraigned later today at Nassau County First District Court in Hempstead.
Four years ago, Chowdhury made news when he publicly called on pharmacists to exercise a “conscientious objection" and refuse to fill orders for contraceptives or abortion-inducing medications.
On his storefront, Chowdhury, a practicing Muslim, says his shop is closed for an hour every Friday for prayers.
A nearby shopowner who declined to be identified said today "I'm shocked" by the arrest. "He's a family man. He's a nice, moral man -- he's a good person. He doesn't seem like a greedy man. I don't believe it."
Twine-Wright's son, Chauncey Twine, was enraged at the pharmacist's actions when informed of the arrest by The Post today.
“What a total fraud! It’s just horrible – this guy is putting people’s lives at risk...He is very culpable for my mother’s death. He shares responsibility. I’m sure he has ruined many other lives.”
"It's an absolute outrage," Twine said, "that a pharmacist that you’re supposed to trust is abusing his position to facilitate illegal drug use."
In addition to Chowdhury, five other pharmacy workers are being charged today in connection with the alleged drug scheme.
Danielle Knoeller, James Knoeller, Neftali Steinmitz, Ronen Mosaffi and Yosef Leibowitz are accused of acting in concert and knowingly filling forged or stolen prescriptions, for Fentanyl, another heroin-like narcotic, sources said.
On April 20, 2010, Gerdes was so stoned she seemed oblivious to the mangled body of her victim under the van and asked stunned witnesses to drive her to court, because she was late for a hearing on a previous arrest.
Later, Gerdes, then 18, chillingly told a cop that the death of the senior citizen wasn’t too bad because "she was old."
She also admitted that she saw her victim, who "looked up at me at the last second, but she was too old to get out of the way."
Even under arrest for manslaughter and driving under the influence of drugs, Gerdes, when left alone in police headquarters, pulled out some Oxycodone pills, crushed them in a dollar bill, lit them and inhaled the smoke to get high, according to police.
After she sobered up in jail, Gerdes declared the death was an accident and she had mistaken the gas pedal for the brake. "The monster I’ve been portrayed to be, I’m not. I’m so sorry for the family."
Feds bust LI pharmacist for drug ring
By JOSH MARGOLIN and KIERAN CROWLEY
Federal drug agents this morning busted a moralizing Long Island pharmacy owner for illegally supplying the dope ingested by a whacked-out teen before she mowed down a retired doctor, who was gardening on her front lawn.
DEA agents hauled off Lutful Chowdhury, 61, of Westbury, and charged him with 14 felony forgery counts. He was arrested at the Aim Pharmacy in Baldwin that he owns and where he is the supervising pharmacist. He is accused of coaching his customers on how to steal or forge prescriptions so they can get their fixes.
Sources told The Post that Chowdhury’s pharmacy filled a stolen, forged Oxycodone prescription for Kayla Gerdes – who was high-as-a-kite on the stuff when she floored a van, mounted a lawn and killed Dr. Rebecca Twine-Wright, 69, last year.
"Gerdes was part of a ring that was stealing and forging prescriptions and filling them at Aim Pharmacy," the source said. "Chowdhury was 'instructing' these individuals on how to avoid detection."
Agents are right now searching the pharmacy and seizing records, the source said. They "expect to uncover the outlet for his excessive" drug purchases, the source said.
The Gerdes case highlights the growing national problem of prescription-drug abuse – something that kills more Americans a year than did crack cocaine at the height of the crack wars two decades ago.
“It’s good medicine in bad hands and that becomes the problem,” John Gilbride, the chief DEA agent in New York, told The Post in a recent interview. “The perception is that it is OK because it is sold from a drug store.”
Chowdhury is to be arraigned later today at Nassau County First District Court in Hempstead.
Four years ago, Chowdhury made news when he publicly called on pharmacists to exercise a “conscientious objection" and refuse to fill orders for contraceptives or abortion-inducing medications.
On his storefront, Chowdhury, a practicing Muslim, says his shop is closed for an hour every Friday for prayers.
A nearby shopowner who declined to be identified said today "I'm shocked" by the arrest. "He's a family man. He's a nice, moral man -- he's a good person. He doesn't seem like a greedy man. I don't believe it."
Twine-Wright's son, Chauncey Twine, was enraged at the pharmacist's actions when informed of the arrest by The Post today.
“What a total fraud! It’s just horrible – this guy is putting people’s lives at risk...He is very culpable for my mother’s death. He shares responsibility. I’m sure he has ruined many other lives.”
"It's an absolute outrage," Twine said, "that a pharmacist that you’re supposed to trust is abusing his position to facilitate illegal drug use."
In addition to Chowdhury, five other pharmacy workers are being charged today in connection with the alleged drug scheme.
Danielle Knoeller, James Knoeller, Neftali Steinmitz, Ronen Mosaffi and Yosef Leibowitz are accused of acting in concert and knowingly filling forged or stolen prescriptions, for Fentanyl, another heroin-like narcotic, sources said.
On April 20, 2010, Gerdes was so stoned she seemed oblivious to the mangled body of her victim under the van and asked stunned witnesses to drive her to court, because she was late for a hearing on a previous arrest.
Later, Gerdes, then 18, chillingly told a cop that the death of the senior citizen wasn’t too bad because "she was old."
She also admitted that she saw her victim, who "looked up at me at the last second, but she was too old to get out of the way."
Even under arrest for manslaughter and driving under the influence of drugs, Gerdes, when left alone in police headquarters, pulled out some Oxycodone pills, crushed them in a dollar bill, lit them and inhaled the smoke to get high, according to police.
After she sobered up in jail, Gerdes declared the death was an accident and she had mistaken the gas pedal for the brake. "The monster I’ve been portrayed to be, I’m not. I’m so sorry for the family."
My Personal Award: Michael Savage New Site Gets 5 Stars!
World class excellence! Fantastic job, Dr. Savage
Did a pork-coated bullet kill Bin Laden?
Yes, says firm who claim its pig fat gun oil is bought by U.S. military personnel
Was Osama bin Laden shot with a bullet soaked in pork fat, denying him a place in paradise?
Yes, if one rather shady website, that peddles gun oil containing liquefied pig fat, is to be believed.
The makers of Silver Bullet Gun Oil claim it contains 13 per cent USDA liquefied pig fat thus making the product 'a highly effective counter-Islamic terrorist force multiplier.'
The apparent owner of the gun oil site, who goes by the name 'The Midnight Rider,' explains how the pig fat will transfer onto anything the bullet strikes.
This 'effectively denies entry to Allah's paradise to an Islamo-fascist terrorist,' Rider adds.
The oil, which costs $8.95 for 4oz, apparently puts the 'fear of death into them (terrorists)'.
In Islam consumption of pork is forbidden, but the Quran also states that if one is forced to consume the meat then they are guiltless and therefore not disqualified from paradise.
The website also notes its customers include members of the U.S. military.
'Thousands of bottles of Silver Bullet Gun Oil have been distributed since July of 2004 by its creator to members of ALL U.S. Military branches,' it claims.
Product: The website claims its Silver Bullet Oil is popular with members of the U.S. military
Claim: The oil distributors make their Bin Laden claim in a promotional video on YouTube
A promotional YouTube video for the oil shows a picture of Bin Laden and the claim: 'Killed with a weapon using Silver Bullet Gun Oil'.
'Midnite Rider' also known as 'Warrior of YAHWEH,' claims to be a former Marine scout sniper on the site.
Pictures of the 'production line' show a masked men wearing regulation Marine camouflage uniform, that is officially off-limits for civilians.
Special force: Bin Laden died after being shot in the head by a U.S. Navy Seal in a secret Pakistan compound last month (file picture)
A disclaimer on the website also reads: 'This product is for use on armed Muslim terrorists only.
'We do not promote discrimination against any race or religion, only terrorists.'
A spokesman for the U.S. Army's weapons-procurement command told the Southern Pverty Law Center's Hatewatch - a not-for-profit that monitors the evolving problem of online bigotry - that he was unfamiliar with Silver Bullet, 'though he conceded that a soldier or marine could theoretically purchase the oil on his or her own and use it on the battlefield.'
Was Osama bin Laden shot with a bullet soaked in pork fat, denying him a place in paradise?
Yes, if one rather shady website, that peddles gun oil containing liquefied pig fat, is to be believed.
The makers of Silver Bullet Gun Oil claim it contains 13 per cent USDA liquefied pig fat thus making the product 'a highly effective counter-Islamic terrorist force multiplier.'
The apparent owner of the gun oil site, who goes by the name 'The Midnight Rider,' explains how the pig fat will transfer onto anything the bullet strikes.
This 'effectively denies entry to Allah's paradise to an Islamo-fascist terrorist,' Rider adds.
The oil, which costs $8.95 for 4oz, apparently puts the 'fear of death into them (terrorists)'.
In Islam consumption of pork is forbidden, but the Quran also states that if one is forced to consume the meat then they are guiltless and therefore not disqualified from paradise.
The website also notes its customers include members of the U.S. military.
'Thousands of bottles of Silver Bullet Gun Oil have been distributed since July of 2004 by its creator to members of ALL U.S. Military branches,' it claims.
A promotional YouTube video for the oil shows a picture of Bin Laden and the claim: 'Killed with a weapon using Silver Bullet Gun Oil'.
'Midnite Rider' also known as 'Warrior of YAHWEH,' claims to be a former Marine scout sniper on the site.
Pictures of the 'production line' show a masked men wearing regulation Marine camouflage uniform, that is officially off-limits for civilians.
A disclaimer on the website also reads: 'This product is for use on armed Muslim terrorists only.
'We do not promote discrimination against any race or religion, only terrorists.'
A spokesman for the U.S. Army's weapons-procurement command told the Southern Pverty Law Center's Hatewatch - a not-for-profit that monitors the evolving problem of online bigotry - that he was unfamiliar with Silver Bullet, 'though he conceded that a soldier or marine could theoretically purchase the oil on his or her own and use it on the battlefield.'
Hey MSM Journalists... Cry Me a F***ing River!
You enjoy distorting truth and wrecking peoples lives, both personal and professional. Such a pleasant change to see you finally have to WORK FOR IT!!!
This is how you act when you discover your "Biggest Fear" isn't dead and buried? It sure sucks to be you!
Anti-American journalist at Politico "KASIE" HUNT (damn transvestite names) shows the level of desperation the American left will stoop to, in order to defame the image of Sarah Palin when nothing previously has worked. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a new low.... Looks like the fat kids can't play tag!
Click Title for MORE
This is how you act when you discover your "Biggest Fear" isn't dead and buried? It sure sucks to be you!
Anti-American journalist at Politico "KASIE" HUNT (damn transvestite names) shows the level of desperation the American left will stoop to, in order to defame the image of Sarah Palin when nothing previously has worked. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a new low.... Looks like the fat kids can't play tag!
Click Title for MORE
China Divests 97% of Holdings in US Treasury Bills
(CNSNews.com) - China has dropped 97 percent of its holdings in U.S. Treasury bills, decreasing its ownership of the short-term U.S. government securities from a peak of $210.4 billion in May 2009 to $5.69 billion in March 2011, the most recent month reported by the U.S. Treasury.
Treasury bills are securities that mature in one year or less that are sold by the U.S. Treasury Department to fund the nation’s debt.
Mainland Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury bills are reported in column 9 of the Treasury report linked here.
Until October, the Chinese were generally making up for their decreasing holdings in Treasury bills by increasing their holdings of longer-term U.S. Treasury securities. Thus, until October, China’s overall holdings of U.S. debt continued to increase.
Since October, however, China has also started to divest from longer-term U.S. Treasury securities. Thus, as reported by the Treasury Department, China’s ownership of the U.S. national debt has decreased in each of the last five months on record, including November, December, January, February and March.
Prior to the fall of 2008, acccording to Treasury Department data, Chinese ownership of short-term Treasury bills was modest, standing at only $19.8 billion in August of that year. But when President George W. Bush signed legislation to authorize a $700-billion bailout of the U.S. financial industry in October 2008 and President Barack Obama signed a $787-billion economic stimulus law in February 2009, Chinese ownership of short-term U.S. Treasury bills skyrocketed.
By December 2008, China owned $165.2 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, according to the Treasury Department. By March 2009, Chinese Treasury bill holdings were at $191.1 billion. By May 2009, Chinese holdings of Treasury bills were peaking at $210.4 billion.
However, China’s overall appetite for U.S. debt increased over a longer span than did its appetite for short-term U.S. Treasury bills.
In August 2008, before the bank bailout and the stimulus law, overall Chinese holdings of U.S. debt stood at $573.7 billion. That number continued to escalate past May 2009-- when China started to reduce its holdings in short-term Treasury bills--and ultimately peaked at $1.1753 trillion last October.
As of March 2011, overall Chinese holdings of U.S. debt had decreased to 1.1449 trillion.
Most of the U.S. national debt is made up of publicly marketable securities sold by the Treasury Department and I.O.U.s called “intragovernmental” bonds that the Treasury has given to so-called government trust funds—such as the Social Security trust funds—when it has spent the trust funds’ money on other government expenses.
The publicly marketable segment of the national debt includes Treasury bills, which (as defined by the Treasury) mature in terms of one-year or less; Treasury notes, which mature in terms of 2 to 10 years; Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), which mature in terms of 5, 10 and 30 years; and Treasury bonds, which mature in terms of 30 years.
At the end of August 2008, before the financial bailout and the stimulus, the publicly marketable segment of the U.S. national debt was 4.88 trillion. Of that, $2.56 trillion was in the intermediate-term Treasury notes, $1.22 trillion was in short-term Treasury bills, $582.8 billion was in long-term Treasury bonds, and $521.3 billion was in TIPS.
At the end of March 2011, by which time the Chinese had dropped their Treasury bill holdings 97 percent from their peak, the publicly marketable segment of the U.S. national debt had almost doubled from August 2008, hitting $9.11 trillion. Of that $9.11 trillion, $5.8 trillion was in intermediate-term Treasury notes, $1.7 trillion was in short-term Treasury bills; $931.5 billion was in long-term Treasury bonds, and $640.7 billion was in TIPS.
Before the end of March 2012, the Treasury must redeem all of the $1.7 trillion in Treasury bills that were extant as of March 2011 and find new or old buyers who will continue to invest in U.S. debt. But, for now, the Chinese at least do not appear to be bullish customers of short-term U.S. debt.
Treasury bills carry lower interest rates than longer-term Treasury notes and bonds, but the longer term notes and bonds are exposed to a greater risk of losing their value to inflation. To the degree that the $1.7 trillion in short-term U.S. Treasury bills extant as of March must be converted into longer-term U.S. Treasury securities, the U.S. government will be forced to pay a higher annual interest rate on the national debt.
As of the close of business on Thursday, the total U.S. debt was $14.34 trillion, according to the Daily Treasury Statement. Of that, approximately $9.74 trillion was debt held by the public and approximately $4.61 trillion was “intragovernmental” debt.
Treasury bills are securities that mature in one year or less that are sold by the U.S. Treasury Department to fund the nation’s debt.
Mainland Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury bills are reported in column 9 of the Treasury report linked here.
Until October, the Chinese were generally making up for their decreasing holdings in Treasury bills by increasing their holdings of longer-term U.S. Treasury securities. Thus, until October, China’s overall holdings of U.S. debt continued to increase.
Since October, however, China has also started to divest from longer-term U.S. Treasury securities. Thus, as reported by the Treasury Department, China’s ownership of the U.S. national debt has decreased in each of the last five months on record, including November, December, January, February and March.
Prior to the fall of 2008, acccording to Treasury Department data, Chinese ownership of short-term Treasury bills was modest, standing at only $19.8 billion in August of that year. But when President George W. Bush signed legislation to authorize a $700-billion bailout of the U.S. financial industry in October 2008 and President Barack Obama signed a $787-billion economic stimulus law in February 2009, Chinese ownership of short-term U.S. Treasury bills skyrocketed.
By December 2008, China owned $165.2 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, according to the Treasury Department. By March 2009, Chinese Treasury bill holdings were at $191.1 billion. By May 2009, Chinese holdings of Treasury bills were peaking at $210.4 billion.
However, China’s overall appetite for U.S. debt increased over a longer span than did its appetite for short-term U.S. Treasury bills.
In August 2008, before the bank bailout and the stimulus law, overall Chinese holdings of U.S. debt stood at $573.7 billion. That number continued to escalate past May 2009-- when China started to reduce its holdings in short-term Treasury bills--and ultimately peaked at $1.1753 trillion last October.
As of March 2011, overall Chinese holdings of U.S. debt had decreased to 1.1449 trillion.
Most of the U.S. national debt is made up of publicly marketable securities sold by the Treasury Department and I.O.U.s called “intragovernmental” bonds that the Treasury has given to so-called government trust funds—such as the Social Security trust funds—when it has spent the trust funds’ money on other government expenses.
The publicly marketable segment of the national debt includes Treasury bills, which (as defined by the Treasury) mature in terms of one-year or less; Treasury notes, which mature in terms of 2 to 10 years; Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), which mature in terms of 5, 10 and 30 years; and Treasury bonds, which mature in terms of 30 years.
At the end of August 2008, before the financial bailout and the stimulus, the publicly marketable segment of the U.S. national debt was 4.88 trillion. Of that, $2.56 trillion was in the intermediate-term Treasury notes, $1.22 trillion was in short-term Treasury bills, $582.8 billion was in long-term Treasury bonds, and $521.3 billion was in TIPS.
At the end of March 2011, by which time the Chinese had dropped their Treasury bill holdings 97 percent from their peak, the publicly marketable segment of the U.S. national debt had almost doubled from August 2008, hitting $9.11 trillion. Of that $9.11 trillion, $5.8 trillion was in intermediate-term Treasury notes, $1.7 trillion was in short-term Treasury bills; $931.5 billion was in long-term Treasury bonds, and $640.7 billion was in TIPS.
Before the end of March 2012, the Treasury must redeem all of the $1.7 trillion in Treasury bills that were extant as of March 2011 and find new or old buyers who will continue to invest in U.S. debt. But, for now, the Chinese at least do not appear to be bullish customers of short-term U.S. debt.
Treasury bills carry lower interest rates than longer-term Treasury notes and bonds, but the longer term notes and bonds are exposed to a greater risk of losing their value to inflation. To the degree that the $1.7 trillion in short-term U.S. Treasury bills extant as of March must be converted into longer-term U.S. Treasury securities, the U.S. government will be forced to pay a higher annual interest rate on the national debt.
As of the close of business on Thursday, the total U.S. debt was $14.34 trillion, according to the Daily Treasury Statement. Of that, approximately $9.74 trillion was debt held by the public and approximately $4.61 trillion was “intragovernmental” debt.
Bad Prez, Bad Jokes, Bad Timing (To View Video Click HERE)
Up! Up! And Away! 9.1%
Cooling employment casts shadow on recovery
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The economy may be in for a long period of soft growth after employers hired the fewest number of workers in eight months in May and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, just over a third of what economists had expected.
However, analysts saw little chance the economy would slide back into recession, given that temporary factors like high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from the earthquake in Japan were constraining growth.
"The recovery has not been aborted. The economy is not falling into a double-dip," said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University in the Channel Islands. "This weakness, however, is a warning shot across the bow of the economy."
The broadly weak report confirmed a loss of economic momentum already flagged by other data from consumer spending to manufacturing. The department said it found "no clear impact" on the jobs figures from the tornadoes and flooding in the Midwest and South.
The sharp slowdown in job creation accompanied signs of softening growth overseas and was troubling news for President Barack Obama, whose chances of re-election next year could hinge on the health of the economy.
In remarks to auto workers in Ohio, Obama did not directly address the jobs figures, although he acknowledged the economy's woes and said it would take a while to mend.
"There are still some headwinds that are coming at us. Lately it's been high gas prices, then you have the economic disruptions following the tragedy in Japan," Obama said.
"There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery. We are going to pass though some rough terrain."
PRONOUNCED "PAYCHECK CYCLE"
High gasoline costs hurt consumer spending in the first quarter, when economic growth was held to a 1.8 percent annual pace after expanding at a 3.1 percent rate at the end of 2010.
Wal-Mart Chief Executive Mike Duke on Friday said the "paycheck cycle," where people stock up around payday and then spend less as the month progresses and cash runs out, is more pronounced than it has ever been.
The employment data lent more fuel to talk about the need for the Federal Reserve to extend its asset purchasing program when it expires this month, but officials at the central bank have set a high bar for any further easing of monetary policy.
With the Obama administration and lawmakers discussing how best to trim U.S. spending as they try strike a deal on raising the debt limit, the economy could be left to its own devices.
Ratings agency Moody's on Thursday said it would consider cutting the nation's credit rating if progress is not made by mid-July in talks to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.
"One look at the jobs report should show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and healing our ailing economy," said U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner.
FED SEEN ON HOLD
U.S. stocks fell to mark a fifth straight week of losses, while the dollar sank to a record low against the Swiss franc.
Treasury debt prices and interest rate futures rose, signaling that traders believe mounting signs of economic weakness will lead the U.S. central bank to keep interest rates pressed to zero for a prolonged stretch.
A Reuters survey on Friday predicted the Fed would leave interest rates on hold this year and most economists did not see an increase before the second half of 2012.
"It pushes back expectations to when the Fed can start to renormalize policy, probably well into 2012 before we see an increase in the fed funds rate," said Robert Dye, senior economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh.
Views the economy was not falling off the cliff were supported by a separate report showing growth in the country's services sector picked up in May.
The Institute for Supply Management's services sector index rose to 54.6 last month from 52.8 in April, with gains in employment and new orders.
The private sector, which has shouldered the burden of job creation, added just 83,000 jobs in May, the fewest since last June, while government payrolls fell for a seventh straight month.
About 39,000 fewer jobs were created in March and April than previously estimated. Payrolls in May had been expected to rise 150,000, with private employment gaining 175,000.
The economy has regained only a fraction of the more than 8 million jobs lost during the recession. Economists say payrolls growth above 300,000 a month is needed to make significant progress in shrinking the pool of 13.9 million unemployed Americans.
The rise in the unemployment rate from 9.0 percent in April reflected discouraged workers re-entering the labor market after a pick-up in hiring in April.
"There was very little in the report that suggested the household sector has any reason to become more confident in the recovery and that in itself does not augur well for a future acceleration," said Patrick O'Keefe, head of economic research at J.H. Cohn in Roseland, New Jersey.
Employment in the private services sector rose by a modest 80,000, a sharp slowdown from April's 213,000 increase. Payrolls in May were held back by declines in leisure and hospitality, and retail.
Factory employment contracted for the first time since October, while construction rose for a fourth straight month.
The report showed the average workweek steady at 34.4 hours, and few signs of wage inflation with average hourly earnings rising 6 cents.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The economy may be in for a long period of soft growth after employers hired the fewest number of workers in eight months in May and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, just over a third of what economists had expected.
However, analysts saw little chance the economy would slide back into recession, given that temporary factors like high gasoline prices and supply chain disruptions from the earthquake in Japan were constraining growth.
"The recovery has not been aborted. The economy is not falling into a double-dip," said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University in the Channel Islands. "This weakness, however, is a warning shot across the bow of the economy."
The broadly weak report confirmed a loss of economic momentum already flagged by other data from consumer spending to manufacturing. The department said it found "no clear impact" on the jobs figures from the tornadoes and flooding in the Midwest and South.
The sharp slowdown in job creation accompanied signs of softening growth overseas and was troubling news for President Barack Obama, whose chances of re-election next year could hinge on the health of the economy.
In remarks to auto workers in Ohio, Obama did not directly address the jobs figures, although he acknowledged the economy's woes and said it would take a while to mend.
"There are still some headwinds that are coming at us. Lately it's been high gas prices, then you have the economic disruptions following the tragedy in Japan," Obama said.
"There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery. We are going to pass though some rough terrain."
PRONOUNCED "PAYCHECK CYCLE"
High gasoline costs hurt consumer spending in the first quarter, when economic growth was held to a 1.8 percent annual pace after expanding at a 3.1 percent rate at the end of 2010.
Wal-Mart Chief Executive Mike Duke on Friday said the "paycheck cycle," where people stock up around payday and then spend less as the month progresses and cash runs out, is more pronounced than it has ever been.
The employment data lent more fuel to talk about the need for the Federal Reserve to extend its asset purchasing program when it expires this month, but officials at the central bank have set a high bar for any further easing of monetary policy.
With the Obama administration and lawmakers discussing how best to trim U.S. spending as they try strike a deal on raising the debt limit, the economy could be left to its own devices.
Ratings agency Moody's on Thursday said it would consider cutting the nation's credit rating if progress is not made by mid-July in talks to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.
"One look at the jobs report should show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and healing our ailing economy," said U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner.
FED SEEN ON HOLD
U.S. stocks fell to mark a fifth straight week of losses, while the dollar sank to a record low against the Swiss franc.
Treasury debt prices and interest rate futures rose, signaling that traders believe mounting signs of economic weakness will lead the U.S. central bank to keep interest rates pressed to zero for a prolonged stretch.
A Reuters survey on Friday predicted the Fed would leave interest rates on hold this year and most economists did not see an increase before the second half of 2012.
"It pushes back expectations to when the Fed can start to renormalize policy, probably well into 2012 before we see an increase in the fed funds rate," said Robert Dye, senior economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh.
Views the economy was not falling off the cliff were supported by a separate report showing growth in the country's services sector picked up in May.
The Institute for Supply Management's services sector index rose to 54.6 last month from 52.8 in April, with gains in employment and new orders.
The private sector, which has shouldered the burden of job creation, added just 83,000 jobs in May, the fewest since last June, while government payrolls fell for a seventh straight month.
About 39,000 fewer jobs were created in March and April than previously estimated. Payrolls in May had been expected to rise 150,000, with private employment gaining 175,000.
The economy has regained only a fraction of the more than 8 million jobs lost during the recession. Economists say payrolls growth above 300,000 a month is needed to make significant progress in shrinking the pool of 13.9 million unemployed Americans.
The rise in the unemployment rate from 9.0 percent in April reflected discouraged workers re-entering the labor market after a pick-up in hiring in April.
"There was very little in the report that suggested the household sector has any reason to become more confident in the recovery and that in itself does not augur well for a future acceleration," said Patrick O'Keefe, head of economic research at J.H. Cohn in Roseland, New Jersey.
Employment in the private services sector rose by a modest 80,000, a sharp slowdown from April's 213,000 increase. Payrolls in May were held back by declines in leisure and hospitality, and retail.
Factory employment contracted for the first time since October, while construction rose for a fourth straight month.
The report showed the average workweek steady at 34.4 hours, and few signs of wage inflation with average hourly earnings rising 6 cents.
US has to create 250k jobs/mo. for 66 months to return to Dec. '07 unemployment by end of Obama's 2nd term
US Has To Create 250K Jobs A Month For 66 Months To Return To December 2007 Unemployment By End Of Obama's Second Term
Submitted by Tyler Durden
It was difficult rerunning this chart with a straight face, make that near impossible, but here are the results. Following the most recent NFP disappointment, the simple math indicates that for the US to return to its December 2007 unemployment, when factoring in the natural growth of the labor force of 90k people a month, the economy will need to add 250k jobs a month for the next 66 months or until the end of Obama's now very implausible second term. Then again, considering what the alternatives are, we can guarantee that the 2012-2016 period in terms of job creation will definitely not look like what is presented on the chart below.
Submitted by Tyler Durden
It was difficult rerunning this chart with a straight face, make that near impossible, but here are the results. Following the most recent NFP disappointment, the simple math indicates that for the US to return to its December 2007 unemployment, when factoring in the natural growth of the labor force of 90k people a month, the economy will need to add 250k jobs a month for the next 66 months or until the end of Obama's now very implausible second term. Then again, considering what the alternatives are, we can guarantee that the 2012-2016 period in terms of job creation will definitely not look like what is presented on the chart below.
Disgraced Ex-CEO of NPR Vivian Schiller Heads for NBC News
Remember Vivian Schiller, socialist Commissar of the coercively financed liberal propaganda outlet NPR, who was forced to resign after her appalling behavior in the Juan Williams scandal (though of course she was replaced by another leftist ideologue)? Progressives will be pleased to hear she has already found a new position, despite the difficulty those of us who are not members of the liberal elite have finding jobs in Obama's economy.
From an NBC news release:
"Bringing Vivian on board enhances this network's mission of growth and the evolution of its digital businesses and strategy. With Vivian's help, NBC News will be recognized as the premier broadcast news organization in America, as well as the most innovative, comprehensive and trusted news operation."
NBC News + Vivian Schiller = a trusted news operation? Someone must have learned mathematics in our government schools.
Once again we see that the free market provides people with whatever they want, even if they are foolish enough to want left-wing propaganda. Consequently, there is no justification whatsoever for forcing taxpayers to finance NPR or the comparably execrable PBS.
We also see that scraping off the hard left's answer to Howard Beale did not signify a move toward moderation on the part of NBC. Execs probably just couldn't stand the way Keith Olbermann makes the skin crawl.
From an NBC news release:
"Bringing Vivian on board enhances this network's mission of growth and the evolution of its digital businesses and strategy. With Vivian's help, NBC News will be recognized as the premier broadcast news organization in America, as well as the most innovative, comprehensive and trusted news operation."
NBC News + Vivian Schiller = a trusted news operation? Someone must have learned mathematics in our government schools.
Once again we see that the free market provides people with whatever they want, even if they are foolish enough to want left-wing propaganda. Consequently, there is no justification whatsoever for forcing taxpayers to finance NPR or the comparably execrable PBS.
We also see that scraping off the hard left's answer to Howard Beale did not signify a move toward moderation on the part of NBC. Execs probably just couldn't stand the way Keith Olbermann makes the skin crawl.
Thou Shall Not Steal, Thou Shall Not Covet
You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.
Exodus 20.17 – (HT:Oremus.org)
Gallup may have identified yet another fault line that divides the American People into two ideological camps. They recently polled as to whether the rich should be heavily taxed to provide more social benefits for the poor.
Republicans and Democrats have sharply different reactions to the government’s taking such an active role in equalizing economic outcomes. Seven in 10 Democrats believe the government should levy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, while an equal proportion of Republicans believe it should not. The slight majority of independents oppose this policy.
(HT: Gallup.com)
Although no one would ever call me rich unless they meant it as a sardonic pejorative, my chosen title of this post accurately describes where I come down on this issue. Count me in with the 70% of Republicans and the 49% for reasons both positive and normative.
My positive reasoning is this. The US economy has to stop looking like it does according to what is hyped as “The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever.” The money, resources, and other assets have to be put in the hands of people who are competent. We need people who know their jobs, if we want to create more jobs. Whether you buy into Keynesian Theory for correcting a recession or not, those competent people are not currently running the US Government.
Spreading the wealth, pace Candidate Obama, often puts this money into incapable hands and leads only to lower-order, non-productive consumption. This fails to stimulate the economy beyond a brief burst. People unprepared to handle money properly, often times merely lose it. They then have the same problems they had in the first place. Take the sad example of lottery winner Jack Whittaker.
Take the case of Jack Whittaker, the lone winner of $314 million. He picked the cash option and took home $114 million after taxes…. Today Whittaker is broke and his claim to fame is the run-ins with the law while having millions of dollars. How someone can go from having over $100 million to being broke is something most of us will never understand but it happens all too often.
-(HT: Alabama Lottery.net)
If giving people large sums of money insulated them from consequence, Jack Whittaker would probably tootle around town in a brand new Ferrari. Certainly, a few of the retailers, strip clubs and divorce attorneys patronized by Mr. Whittaker got a nice economic sugar high. However, no meaningful, lasting improvement resulted from placing $114 million dollars of hot cash in inexperienced hands. A very similar case can be made about many of the recipients of President Barack Obama’s stimulus funds.
The Government Accountability Office, in a report being released Tuesday, said at least 3,700 government contractors and nonprofit organizations that received more than $24 billion from the stimulus effort owed $757 million in back taxes as of Sept. 30, 2009, the end of the budget year.
(HT: Yahoo News)
The examples of the broke lottery winners and the stimulus crooks are excellent counter-examples to the old Keynesian Theoretical argument that you can resuscitate a moribund economy by paying people to bury a collection of objects and then paying more people to dig them back up again. Meaningless government handouts, designed merely to goose the velocity of money, do nothing more than urinate a large collection of funds down the drain.
Then we get to the more moral arguments. How do we justify having the government steal the property of another person on our behalf? And make no mistake about it. When we order the government to go “make the rich pay their fair share,” this is precisely the moral behavior we truly engage in. My position on this is simple. Thou shall not covet. Thou shall not steal.
Let me make this perfectly plain, perfectly simple and perfectly offensive. If you believe the government should tax the rich to make them “pay their fair share,” you are greedy and you are a thief. It is just that simple. Just saying “Barack Obama taxed the rich, not me!” does not absolve that evil. It is a dishonest answer if you voted for the man or morally approve of his “spread the wealth” positions on taxation or regulation.
Any person who voted for Barack Obama for the express purpose of having him utilize the US tax and regulatory apparatus to take money away from the rich and give it to them personally, is the moral equivalent of a bank robber. Neither I, nor any other person alive, is entitled to two red cents out of another person’s stash just because we don’t have as much.
Class envy and class warfare lead not only to bad economic investment, but also a society of blood-sucking amoral cannibals. The current desire to “tax the rich” is born of both petty hatred and cynical hucksterism. For America to fix many of our problems, we need to go back to our historical moral roots. Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not covet.
Exodus 20.17 – (HT:Oremus.org)
Gallup may have identified yet another fault line that divides the American People into two ideological camps. They recently polled as to whether the rich should be heavily taxed to provide more social benefits for the poor.
Republicans and Democrats have sharply different reactions to the government’s taking such an active role in equalizing economic outcomes. Seven in 10 Democrats believe the government should levy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, while an equal proportion of Republicans believe it should not. The slight majority of independents oppose this policy.
(HT: Gallup.com)
Although no one would ever call me rich unless they meant it as a sardonic pejorative, my chosen title of this post accurately describes where I come down on this issue. Count me in with the 70% of Republicans and the 49% for reasons both positive and normative.
My positive reasoning is this. The US economy has to stop looking like it does according to what is hyped as “The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever.” The money, resources, and other assets have to be put in the hands of people who are competent. We need people who know their jobs, if we want to create more jobs. Whether you buy into Keynesian Theory for correcting a recession or not, those competent people are not currently running the US Government.
Spreading the wealth, pace Candidate Obama, often puts this money into incapable hands and leads only to lower-order, non-productive consumption. This fails to stimulate the economy beyond a brief burst. People unprepared to handle money properly, often times merely lose it. They then have the same problems they had in the first place. Take the sad example of lottery winner Jack Whittaker.
Take the case of Jack Whittaker, the lone winner of $314 million. He picked the cash option and took home $114 million after taxes…. Today Whittaker is broke and his claim to fame is the run-ins with the law while having millions of dollars. How someone can go from having over $100 million to being broke is something most of us will never understand but it happens all too often.
-(HT: Alabama Lottery.net)
If giving people large sums of money insulated them from consequence, Jack Whittaker would probably tootle around town in a brand new Ferrari. Certainly, a few of the retailers, strip clubs and divorce attorneys patronized by Mr. Whittaker got a nice economic sugar high. However, no meaningful, lasting improvement resulted from placing $114 million dollars of hot cash in inexperienced hands. A very similar case can be made about many of the recipients of President Barack Obama’s stimulus funds.
The Government Accountability Office, in a report being released Tuesday, said at least 3,700 government contractors and nonprofit organizations that received more than $24 billion from the stimulus effort owed $757 million in back taxes as of Sept. 30, 2009, the end of the budget year.
(HT: Yahoo News)
The examples of the broke lottery winners and the stimulus crooks are excellent counter-examples to the old Keynesian Theoretical argument that you can resuscitate a moribund economy by paying people to bury a collection of objects and then paying more people to dig them back up again. Meaningless government handouts, designed merely to goose the velocity of money, do nothing more than urinate a large collection of funds down the drain.
Then we get to the more moral arguments. How do we justify having the government steal the property of another person on our behalf? And make no mistake about it. When we order the government to go “make the rich pay their fair share,” this is precisely the moral behavior we truly engage in. My position on this is simple. Thou shall not covet. Thou shall not steal.
Let me make this perfectly plain, perfectly simple and perfectly offensive. If you believe the government should tax the rich to make them “pay their fair share,” you are greedy and you are a thief. It is just that simple. Just saying “Barack Obama taxed the rich, not me!” does not absolve that evil. It is a dishonest answer if you voted for the man or morally approve of his “spread the wealth” positions on taxation or regulation.
Any person who voted for Barack Obama for the express purpose of having him utilize the US tax and regulatory apparatus to take money away from the rich and give it to them personally, is the moral equivalent of a bank robber. Neither I, nor any other person alive, is entitled to two red cents out of another person’s stash just because we don’t have as much.
Class envy and class warfare lead not only to bad economic investment, but also a society of blood-sucking amoral cannibals. The current desire to “tax the rich” is born of both petty hatred and cynical hucksterism. For America to fix many of our problems, we need to go back to our historical moral roots. Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not covet.
Will the last person to leave Mitt Romney's campaign headquarters please turn off the lights?
I supported Mitt Romney in 2008 because he was far, far preferable to the abysmal John McCain. But spewing this kind of pablum is simply unacceptable for any legitimate GOP candidate in 2012.
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy on Friday by saying he believes that humans are responsible, at least to some extent, for climate change.
"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.
"It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."
There is no -- and I mean no -- scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming.
Put simply, it's a scam foisted upon America by the United Nations. Don't believe me? Read the illustrated comic book version of the IPCC warming grift.
When both the far left World Rainforest Movement and the conservative American Enterprise Institute agree that "global warming" is a trillion-dollar bunko scam, I think we can safely assume that it is just that.
Mitt Romney's regurgitation of this Leftist tripe disqualifies him from office in my humble opinion. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum are the only legitimate candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 (and if Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, or Allen West decide to leap into the fray, they'll be welcomed with open arms).
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy on Friday by saying he believes that humans are responsible, at least to some extent, for climate change.
"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.
"It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."
There is no -- and I mean no -- scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming.
Put simply, it's a scam foisted upon America by the United Nations. Don't believe me? Read the illustrated comic book version of the IPCC warming grift.
When both the far left World Rainforest Movement and the conservative American Enterprise Institute agree that "global warming" is a trillion-dollar bunko scam, I think we can safely assume that it is just that.
Mitt Romney's regurgitation of this Leftist tripe disqualifies him from office in my humble opinion. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum are the only legitimate candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 (and if Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, or Allen West decide to leap into the fray, they'll be welcomed with open arms).
Cenk & Sirota: Obama Should Push Left-Wing Agenda 'Almost Regardless Of Consequences
So what if the markets tank? Pushing the "progressive" agenda is the paramount goal. That's the advice Cenk Uygur and his left-wing guest David Sirota have for President Obama. On a day when awful job growth numbers stirred fears of a double-dip recession, Uygur and Sirota still scolded Obama for suggesting that he had to be cautious in his public statements because of the possible impact on markets and the world at large.
Egged on by Uygur, Sirota said Obama should push his agenda "almost regardless" of the consequences. Damn the consequences, full left-wing torpedoes ahead!
CENK UYGUR: Can Democrats trust the White House during budget negotiations? At yesterday's meeting, the Democrats--led by Representative Henry Waxman--called for stronger action from the President in fighting back against the Republicans. Someone at the meeting said that Presdident Obama responded by saying: "there's a difference between me and a Member of Congrees. When I say something, markets and countries and people react in a way where it could cause us more problems than we have now."
David, I found that quote really telling. It said to me that the President said: "oh my God, I've got to worry about the markets! I can't be doing progressive things because of the markets!" Am I overreading that?
DAVID SIROTA: No: I think you're exactly right. I think the President, the comment seems to exude that he's thinking not about necessarily the agenda, he's thinking about other factors. I'm not saying he should only think about what he wants. There's many, many parts moving here. But I think you're exactly right: that the question should be, what has he promised, what does he want to do, and will he do it? And that requires marshalling the entire platform of the White House, almost regardless of those other external factors.
Egged on by Uygur, Sirota said Obama should push his agenda "almost regardless" of the consequences. Damn the consequences, full left-wing torpedoes ahead!
CENK UYGUR: Can Democrats trust the White House during budget negotiations? At yesterday's meeting, the Democrats--led by Representative Henry Waxman--called for stronger action from the President in fighting back against the Republicans. Someone at the meeting said that Presdident Obama responded by saying: "there's a difference between me and a Member of Congrees. When I say something, markets and countries and people react in a way where it could cause us more problems than we have now."
David, I found that quote really telling. It said to me that the President said: "oh my God, I've got to worry about the markets! I can't be doing progressive things because of the markets!" Am I overreading that?
DAVID SIROTA: No: I think you're exactly right. I think the President, the comment seems to exude that he's thinking not about necessarily the agenda, he's thinking about other factors. I'm not saying he should only think about what he wants. There's many, many parts moving here. But I think you're exactly right: that the question should be, what has he promised, what does he want to do, and will he do it? And that requires marshalling the entire platform of the White House, almost regardless of those other external factors.
Did the Recession Ever Really Go Away?
Housing prices hitting 2002 levels, unemployment still at 9 percent, private-sector job growth flat, and retail sales still struggling: these are headlines that few expected three years ago. The prevailing theory in Washington was that the recession was somehow precipitated (and therefore vaguely caused) by the crash in housing prices, and many big and small tricks were used to goose the market. But the price system has once again proven to be the greatest and most persistent practitioner of civil disobedience on the planet. That water just won't flow uphill.
All the stimulus programs (trillions of dollars!), the money creation, the buyouts of bad debt, the bailouts, the nationalizations, the ghastly spending, the new regulations: nothing has worked to bring back the shining city on a hill.
The massive confusion over cause and effect reminds me of a scene from the 1938 classic Bette Davis and Henry Fonda film, Jezebel. The "yellow fever" has swept the low-lying areas of Louisiana, and the local experts are thoroughly confused about the cause. They set up roadblocks, curfews, travel restrictions, and they cart off anyone who is sick to an island to die.
It never dawned on these folks that the yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes living in cesspools of undrained swamps made ever worse by poor sanitation. They figured that the fever was somehow being carried around in the air, so the solution was to shift the wind. How to do that? By the continual firing of cannons. Thus was every night filled with the sound of cannon blasts hurling lead balls into the air, the shots landing randomly.
It didn't work. It couldn't work. But it made the elders of the city — who were hiding out in their mansions on high ground — feel like they were at least doing something. They were unwilling to consider that it was their own failure to clean up the public sanitation system that was the real culprit.
Firing cannons was a way to show people that they were doing something and to distract people from discovering the real cause, even as they protected themselves as best they could.
It was the same with George Bush's gigantic stimulus efforts in October of 2008, followed by Obama's stimulus efforts of 2009, and the same with the Fed's endless rounds of debt buyouts and money creation, and the same with the Treasury's cobbling together of nationalizations and bailouts of its favored firms. It was all about protecting themselves, pursuing phony solutions that did not address the underlying problem, and distracting the public with fiscal and monetary cannon blasts to change the direction of the wind.
The screaming pleas from the political class in 2008 weren't really about finding a cure. They were about saving the top players (banks, unions, insurers) in a system that was built on illusion. According to official dating, the recession lasted only 18 months, and then recovery began. The belief that we are recovered then became the new illusion, mostly fostered by the injection of phony money and massive spending built on debt. As college grads faced a hostile labor market, as retailers dramatically shrunk inventories, as businesses have closed and closed, as income has shrunk, and as prices have pushed higher and higher, the feeling on the part of most people has been: something is not right.
Austrian economists were the ones who predicted the 2008 meltdown. And those seeking truthful answers to the mess turned to the Austrians in 2009 and following. The Mises Institute's adjunct scholars have been all over television, print media, conferences, and YouTube; there have been best-selling books and hugely prominent public appearances. This is true: in its entire history, the Austrian School has never been more prominent.
Well, here is something else the Austrians kept saying: the stimulus will not work to dig us out of recession. By extracting wealth from the private sector, bailing out loser companies, distorting interest-rate signals, and gumming up enterprise with ever more regulations, the attempts to stabilize and stimulate will have the reverse effect.
It is the summer of 2011, and we are awakening from the tale the government spun. The fundamentals are worse today in some respects than they were in 2008. The banks are recapitalized but with phony money that is potentially red hot if it should ever leave the vaults. Zombie banks are still walking. Labor markets are frozen. The debt is piled higher than anyone can imagine, and, meanwhile, all the old problems are still with us. Government is not getting out of the way to let the economy find its level, so that a real recovery can begin, but rather quite the opposite: we're getting antitrust, IP enforcement, labor regulation, and regulation in general, not to mention insane spending on wars.
What resources do we need to look at going forward?
Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles by Jesús Huerta de Soto is the mighty treatise on the relationship between the microeconomics and macroeconomics of business cycles. Mises's Theory of Money and Credit explains that all our problems are rooted in central banking and the vulnerable banking system it sustains with fiat money. Walk Away by Doug French explains the housing market and debunks a core postulate of the American civic religion. Rothard's America's Great Depression provides the model for how the business cycle works.
A few we can add to the list in light of new problems include Out of Work by Richard Vedder, Prosperity through Competition by Ludwig Erhard, and Rollback by Tom Woods. These books show how and why the entire statist apparatus must be dismantled. Money, Sound and Unsound by Joseph Salerno is a contemporary Austrian's explanation of money and society, while The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur by Peter Klein shows what is necessary for economic recovery. Ron Paul's Liberty Defined homes in on what's important; the Bastiat Collection shows the case for total freedom; and Conceived in Liberty reconstructs the history of America to show that liberty is the core principle of this land.
To teach the Austrian School to the young, you need Robert Murphy's Lessons for the Young Economist.
And for the most fantastic history of the Austrian School ever written, you need The Austrian School of Economics: A History of Its Ideas, Ambassadors, and Institutions by Eugen-Maria Schulak and Herbert Unterköfler.
There is so much more in the Mises Store.
We can fire cannons in the air and hope that the lead balls don't kill more people than the yellow fever. Or we can drain the swamps, fix the sanitation system, and get back to the business of building civilization.
All the stimulus programs (trillions of dollars!), the money creation, the buyouts of bad debt, the bailouts, the nationalizations, the ghastly spending, the new regulations: nothing has worked to bring back the shining city on a hill.
The massive confusion over cause and effect reminds me of a scene from the 1938 classic Bette Davis and Henry Fonda film, Jezebel. The "yellow fever" has swept the low-lying areas of Louisiana, and the local experts are thoroughly confused about the cause. They set up roadblocks, curfews, travel restrictions, and they cart off anyone who is sick to an island to die.
It never dawned on these folks that the yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes living in cesspools of undrained swamps made ever worse by poor sanitation. They figured that the fever was somehow being carried around in the air, so the solution was to shift the wind. How to do that? By the continual firing of cannons. Thus was every night filled with the sound of cannon blasts hurling lead balls into the air, the shots landing randomly.
It didn't work. It couldn't work. But it made the elders of the city — who were hiding out in their mansions on high ground — feel like they were at least doing something. They were unwilling to consider that it was their own failure to clean up the public sanitation system that was the real culprit.
Firing cannons was a way to show people that they were doing something and to distract people from discovering the real cause, even as they protected themselves as best they could.
It was the same with George Bush's gigantic stimulus efforts in October of 2008, followed by Obama's stimulus efforts of 2009, and the same with the Fed's endless rounds of debt buyouts and money creation, and the same with the Treasury's cobbling together of nationalizations and bailouts of its favored firms. It was all about protecting themselves, pursuing phony solutions that did not address the underlying problem, and distracting the public with fiscal and monetary cannon blasts to change the direction of the wind.
The screaming pleas from the political class in 2008 weren't really about finding a cure. They were about saving the top players (banks, unions, insurers) in a system that was built on illusion. According to official dating, the recession lasted only 18 months, and then recovery began. The belief that we are recovered then became the new illusion, mostly fostered by the injection of phony money and massive spending built on debt. As college grads faced a hostile labor market, as retailers dramatically shrunk inventories, as businesses have closed and closed, as income has shrunk, and as prices have pushed higher and higher, the feeling on the part of most people has been: something is not right.
Austrian economists were the ones who predicted the 2008 meltdown. And those seeking truthful answers to the mess turned to the Austrians in 2009 and following. The Mises Institute's adjunct scholars have been all over television, print media, conferences, and YouTube; there have been best-selling books and hugely prominent public appearances. This is true: in its entire history, the Austrian School has never been more prominent.
Well, here is something else the Austrians kept saying: the stimulus will not work to dig us out of recession. By extracting wealth from the private sector, bailing out loser companies, distorting interest-rate signals, and gumming up enterprise with ever more regulations, the attempts to stabilize and stimulate will have the reverse effect.
It is the summer of 2011, and we are awakening from the tale the government spun. The fundamentals are worse today in some respects than they were in 2008. The banks are recapitalized but with phony money that is potentially red hot if it should ever leave the vaults. Zombie banks are still walking. Labor markets are frozen. The debt is piled higher than anyone can imagine, and, meanwhile, all the old problems are still with us. Government is not getting out of the way to let the economy find its level, so that a real recovery can begin, but rather quite the opposite: we're getting antitrust, IP enforcement, labor regulation, and regulation in general, not to mention insane spending on wars.
What resources do we need to look at going forward?
Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles by Jesús Huerta de Soto is the mighty treatise on the relationship between the microeconomics and macroeconomics of business cycles. Mises's Theory of Money and Credit explains that all our problems are rooted in central banking and the vulnerable banking system it sustains with fiat money. Walk Away by Doug French explains the housing market and debunks a core postulate of the American civic religion. Rothard's America's Great Depression provides the model for how the business cycle works.
A few we can add to the list in light of new problems include Out of Work by Richard Vedder, Prosperity through Competition by Ludwig Erhard, and Rollback by Tom Woods. These books show how and why the entire statist apparatus must be dismantled. Money, Sound and Unsound by Joseph Salerno is a contemporary Austrian's explanation of money and society, while The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur by Peter Klein shows what is necessary for economic recovery. Ron Paul's Liberty Defined homes in on what's important; the Bastiat Collection shows the case for total freedom; and Conceived in Liberty reconstructs the history of America to show that liberty is the core principle of this land.
To teach the Austrian School to the young, you need Robert Murphy's Lessons for the Young Economist.
And for the most fantastic history of the Austrian School ever written, you need The Austrian School of Economics: A History of Its Ideas, Ambassadors, and Institutions by Eugen-Maria Schulak and Herbert Unterköfler.
There is so much more in the Mises Store.
We can fire cannons in the air and hope that the lead balls don't kill more people than the yellow fever. Or we can drain the swamps, fix the sanitation system, and get back to the business of building civilization.
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