Gangster Government

Michael Barone looks in to our mafia-like government:

Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration’s decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts.

This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything. The politically connected UAW folks got preference over politically unconnected bondholders. “We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government,” I wrote. “It is likely to be a continuing series.”..

…The Dodd bill … provisions promise to give us one episode of Gangster Government after another.

At the top of the list is the $50 billion fund that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. could use to pay off creditors of firms identified as systematically risky, i.e., “too big to fail.”

“The Dodd bill,” Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman writes, “has unlimited executive bailout authority. That’s something Wall Street desperately wants but doesn’t dare ask for.”

Politically connected creditors would have every reason to assume they’d get favorable treatment. The Dodd bill specifically authorizes the FDIC to treat “creditors similarly situated” differently.

This is a Chicago politicians dream – having legal authority in intervene at will combined with the authority to deliberately show favoritism. This thing become law and President Obama becomes Don Obamoni, Boss of Bosses.

“Say, that’s a nice, little bank you got there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it. You know, I’ve got these pals who need some loans – what say you help them out and then that take-over thing just goes away.”

This is what we get – what we deserve. We took a man who rose out of that sewer known as Chicago politics and installed him in the White House…even if he’s personally honest, he’s certain to be surrounded by corruption…and those people will do what they can to ensure their long term power and wealth.

As I’ve been saying, we’re in for a rough time while Obama is President.

Poll: It Really is The People vs The Powerful in 2010

Yep:

By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.

Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation’s top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation’s problems – including more government control over the economy – than there was when Barack Obama first took office…

…While anti-government sentiment has its own ideological and partisan basis, the public also expresses discontent with many of the country’s other major institutions. Just 25% say the federal government has a positive effect on the way things are going in the country and about as many (24%) say the same about Congress. Yet the ratings are just as low for the impact of large corporations (25% positive) and banks and other financial institutions (22%). And the marks are only slightly more positive for the national news media (31%) labor unions (32%) and the entertainment industry (33%).

Notably, those who say they are frustrated or angry with the federal government are highly critical of a number of other institutions as well. For example, fewer than one-in-five of those who say they are frustrated (18%) or angry (16%) with the federal government say that banks and other financial institutions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.

Do read the whole Pew survey as its quiet an eye-opener.

This does confirm my basic contention about the 2010 dynamic – people are furious with the way things are being done, not just angry about this or that issue which may fade away as time goes on. The reason the Democrats will be disappointed in their hopes for electoral amnesia by November – really, the only thing which could save their hides – is because the anger is over how things are being done as much as what is being done.

The whole establishment is being rejected by the electorate – outside of dyed-in-the-wool liberals, no one is remotely happy with current conditions, and even a lot of liberals feel let down by President Obama and, especially, the Democrat Congress. There is a perfect storm brewing which may sweep away the political landscape as we’ve known it since the 1930′s.

As I’ve been saying, whomever can tap in to this frustration and place themselves as a person who will change the way things are done will win in November. No one in the political class is safe – even Republicans have only this advantage: they’re not in power. Given the fact that Democrats rule, they’re going to bear the brunt of American anger – but it won’t surprise me if in some areas Democrat challengers tap in to the revolution and overturn a hidebound Republican or two.

This is a revolutionary time – the people have had enough.

Christie Got Guts, Union Goons are Nuts

Ah, our loving, tolerant liberals:

They’re the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.

But the target of this tirade is New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie — and the perpetrators are the state’s teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.

In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

“Never trust a fat f…,” read one profane post on the Facebook page, “New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze,” which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.

“How do you spell A– hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E,” read another.

Do keep in mind that Governor Christie (R-NJ) isn’t trying to cut teacher pay – he’s just saying that, you know?, given that New Jersey is bankrupt and what with the New Jersey taxpayers being all tapped out, and everything, can teachers please just stick with the pay they’ve got now? And maybe kick in a mite for their own retirement fund?

Naturally, this makes our soft hearted, love-filled liberals blow a gasket – and, also, show that the quality of teachers in New Jersey doesn’t necessarily justify the money being spent on them, as it is.

Keep going, Governor – we got your back.

If There's a Recovery…

…then why are income tax receipts dropping?

…it is getting worse, on both a week over week, a YTD cumulative basis, and, probably most relevantly to some readers, on a 4 week running bucket cumulative basis. In the week ended April 16, the US Treasury collected $29.3 billion, 10% less than the comparable week in the prior year when $32.5 billion was withheld. Cumulatively, the difference is now at an almost 2010 low, dropping to a $16.7 billion difference between the YTD period and the comparable period in 2009.

If you click on the link, you’ll see a series of graphs which really put it plain – plain enough for even a liberal to understand.

But here comes the liberal mantra: “employment is a lagging indicator”. Ok, so it is – according to the geniuses who tell us that the economy is in recovery, we started getting better six months ago. Granted that employment lags – shouldn’t we see some improvement by now?

Maybe in another six months, huh? Bet our liberals will be telling us in October of 2012 that employment is still a lagging indicator and just wait, if we re-elect Obama, its sure to get better…

Liberal and MSM Silence on Genuine Political Violence

The story

A brutal beating in New Orleans following the Southern Republican Leadership Conference — held in that city from April 8-11 — has challenged the myth regarding the preferred residence of political thuggery.

Circumstantial evidence is piling up that far-left anarchists viciously attacked a staffer to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, putting Allee Bautsch and her boyfriend Joe Brown in the hospital with broken bones. The story has been, unsurprisingly, ignored…

…Bautsch and Brown exited through the front door into what appeared to be a dwindling demonstration. The duo were immediately “catcalled” by the remaining protesters, and were followed by a group of approximately five white males bearing a “counterculture” appearance. The pursuers made repeated insulting comments based largely in class-warfare rhetoric: “little blond bitch,” “you think you’re f***ing special.”

Brown told Bautsch to hurry towards their car. When they reached the 600 block of St. Louis Street, a block and a half from Brennan’s, Brown turned to gauge their progress.

At that time, the attack began.

Brown was immediately set upon by four of the assailants, thrown into a wrought-iron fence. Another assailant attacked Bautsch, knocking her to the ground and stomping on her leg. She suffered four breaks in the leg, requiring a steel rod during extensive surgery on April 10, and faces three months of recuperation.

Brown suffered a broken nose and jaw, and a concussion.

Do read the whole article. This is genuine political violence – and this is the left on the rampage. And we can see the reaction by the MSM and the liberal leadership which is so quick to criticize the least manifestation of unruly behavior on the right – dead silence.

Why is this so? Because each and every statement in the MSM and by the liberal leadership deploring political invective is pure, unadulterated bull. They don’t care about violence – they only care about making conservatism odious…and so they’ll make stuff up about conservative violence and will either ignore or applaud leftist violence.

Based on a lie, the left can only sustain itself by keeping people ignorant and intimidating the other side. This sort of thing isn’t aberrant, but endemic to the left.

Out and About on a Tueday Morning

The worth of a primary challenge demonstrated: McCain changes his tune on immigration.

Britain’s Tories appear to be demonstrating how to lose to complete losers. Me: I think that all the Tory effort has just been weak. From what I can tell, they are running on a platform of responsible stewardship of the lousy political and economic system Labour has built up over the past ten years. Note to conservatives: when the people are furious with the way things are, promise to do different things, not the same, old things an allegedly better way.

In Afghanistan, Michael Yon questions General McChrystal’s conduct of the campaign and some milbloggers take Yon to task. Herschel Smith of Captain’s Journal puts it in perspective – Yon is doing the job he’s supposed to be doing: reporting on the war and asking questions of the high command. Me: I’ve an uneasy feeling about the Afghan campaign compensated by my awed respect of the men and women in our armed forces – if anyone can carry even a half-baked strategy to victory, they can. The troops, being lions, will probably pull this out for us, even though our leaders may well be asses.

Latest on the Goldman Sachs scandal – Mish has been keeping close tabs on this from the get-go.

How to anger liberals: Assert that Europe’s greatest heritage is its Christianity.

Credit where credit is due: the good things Obama has done.

Missing the Mark on Financial Regulation

John Médaille over at The Distributist Review nails the issue:

We live in an age of regulation. But surprisingly, there are very few principles of regulation… The result is that we are simultaneously over-regulated and under-regulated; we have thousands of pages of regulations that deal with situations that don’t require any, and no regulation in areas that need to be closely watched. The regs raise formidable barriers to competition, as the small businessman often finds that the cost and trouble of dealing with them is an insurmountable barrier to entering a given business. This leaves only the large players, for whom such regulation is a mere nuisance, a cost of doing business that brings a benefit of reduced competition. And since there are fewer competitors, they tend to be more politically powerful, and proceed to capture the very regulatory bodies that are intended to curb them. The government becomes, in effect, the protector of the oligarchs rather than their regulator.

What to do? Well, Médaille suggests we take a page of our Aristotle. Or, if that is too old-fashioned for all you hip, advanced people out there, something more up-to-date: St. Thomas Aquinas.

I can hear my liberals, now: what do such ancient men have to say to us? Well, they can provide you the truth. If you can handle it. The problem, as noted later in the linked article, is that we regulate the heck out of normal financial activities (borrowing for a home, financing a new business, etc) but don’t do anything about the bizarre flights of fiscal fancy – things which wind up being the CDOs Goldman Sachs is now in trouble for hawking.

Médaille then brings up something most people don’t know about – “natural” and “un-natural” transactions. Boiled down: a natural transaction is something a person does on a day to day basis to make a living. An un-natural transaction is something a person does merely to pile up money. There is a pile-up-money free-for-all going on while we are making it ever harder for people to transact normal business. You can invest money in some phony scheme much easier than you can invest money in, say, starting up a farm.

This, needless, to say, is backwards. Wrong. Stupid. And the Democrat’s proposed regulations really won’t do anything about it – mostly because they don’t understand economics and thus don’t see the need to have money readily available for people who want to work and produce wealth. It’d help, of course, if more Democrats would actually try to run a productive enterprise – academic work, government service and community organizing not being great training grounds for understanding reality.

As we set about the task of reforming our political system we must never lose sight of what the end is – the principle we are fighting for. We want a society geared towards the needs of the average man and woman. That, really, is all “We, the people” is about. A nation which neglects the mundane but vital tasks of every day life is a nation on the path to extinction.

As we enter this debate over financial reform and as we head towards November, our minds should run in this groove. Endlessly refer back to this first principle: does it help or hinder the common man? Keeping in mind that “help” doesn’t mean “coddle”. Dependency cripples the common man. Help means setting a stage where a man who wishes to work has a fair shot of achieving his desires.

Our world is not for a billionaire manipulating the financial sector. Our world is not for the socialist with a desire to decide for others. Our world is for that guy down the street, who just wants to be able to do the right thing and do for his own. If it is not such a world, then it isn’t a world worth living in.

Lieberman, Collins Want the Truth About the Ft Hood Massacre

A good thing, too:

Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) issued the first congressional subpoenas of the Obama administration Monday after accusing the White House of stonewalling their requests for information about the Fort Hood shootings.

In a letter with the subpoenas, the chairman and ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said the FBI and Defense Department had ignored their requests for five months. The Nov. 5 shootings at the Texas base, the largest Army post in the United States, left 13 people dead.

Lieberman and Collins said they sought witnesses and documents about what the government previously knew about the alleged gunman, Army psychiatrist Nidal M. Hasan, and whether it had adequately investigated his pre-shooting communications with Yemeni cleric and suspected terrorist Anwar al-Aulaqi.

The problem here stems from President Obama’s asinine determination to “reach out” to Islam. Its asinine not because its bad to reach out, but because Obama is reaching out to the wrong people.

While Obama reaches out to, say, the mullahs in Tehran, he should be reaching out to the people of Iran, who are on our side in the War on Terrorism. But the policy is to reach out, in effect, to the terrorists…so the blood of the Iranian people gets swept under the rug. As does the blood of the American people, murdered at Ft Hood by a man de-facto allied with the people the President is reaching out to.

But we need to know the truth. At bottom, we need to know how far the politically-correct rot has gone and how vulnerable we are to Islamists we’ve allowed to infiltrate our society. Obama’s Administration is refusing to set the record straight, and so it will have to be forced out.

Obama's $994,795 Goldman Sachs Problem

That is the amount of money people at Goldman Sachs lavished on President Obama for political campaigns. Will President Obama return the money?

After all, back when Abramoff scandal broke, Democrats were demanding that every dime even remotely connected to Abrahmoff activities be returned – isn’t turn about fair play?

True, that demand died down when it emerged that Democrats were major beneficiaries of Abramoff donations, but isn’t this just a great time for Democrats to live up to their own alleged standards?

Obama to Lavish Funds on Unions, Screw Everyone Else

This is nothing more than the most egregious and disgusting form of political payoff:

Barely 15 percent of all construction-industry workers in the United States are union members, while the remaining 85 percent are nonunion, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. So why has President Obama signed Executive Order 13502 directing federal agencies taking bids for government construction projects to accept only those from contractors who agree in advance to a project labor agreement that requires a union work force?…

…By eliminating the vast majority of potential bidders on federal construction projects, Obama guarantees two things. First, the projects will cost taxpayers more because union labor is always more expensive. And with mandated PLAs, the cost premium for union contractors will be even greater because fewer bidders always means less competition and higher prices. Second, by guaranteeing unions a bigger stream of federal contracts, Obama is making sure that Big Labor, already among the Democrats’ biggest sources of campaign cash, will have even more money to hand out for the 2010 and 2012 elections.

This is just nauseating – Obama is telling the vast majority of American construction workers that he doesn’t give a darn about them. He’s saying that the American economy and the taxpayer’s money are reserved only for groups which back the Democrat party. Essentially, Obama is impounding our government and economy in favor of his supporters, everyone else can go jump in a lake.

All Americans have a right to bid on all government contracts. The only things which should bear on whether a bid is accepted is the price offered and the ability to perform the task. All other considerations are simply un-American and should not come in to play.

This is just another example of what we fight against – this liberal notion that politics trumps everything. Obama is just locking down his union support for the 2010 and 2012 elections – what happens to the country just isn’t a factor in the decision.

HAT TIP: Mish’s