AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Has he tried the Communist Party USA yet? Why not, it would only keep him going in the direction he has been drifting, why not go all the way? After all, if you look at their website, you will find much of the Democratic Party platform. So he could try a different party and still keep some of his politics.

I was being funny. Actually I do not think Specter is a socialist, I think he is instead just a dummy without much of a solid foundational beliefs that found a career in politics and wants to keep his job.

There are a slew of articles on Obama's new target - the banks, but the pros and cons of his "new" interest isn't as clear-cut as he makes it out to be. He may end up killing the goose that gave the golden egg.

For starters, most banks trading in equities is very small as a percentage of their total business activity. That should be the first clue.

We have found the enemy, and it's all levels of government. They're a bunch of greedy idiots who have no idea what they've created.

http://www.atlassociety.org/cth-33-2279-Banking_envy.aspx
Banking on Envy
by Edward Hudgins

January 22, 2010 " The Obama administration is launching a rabble-rousing assault on big banks. Thus we see on display in Washington another example of how ideas have an impetus of their own that drives those who hold them to predictable deeds. These acts need not be destructive, but in this case they definitely are.

Failing health

The attempt by the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration to take over America’s health care system was derailed when the election of Republican Scott Brown as Massachusetts senator deprived the Democrats of a filibuster-proof majority. One reason for Brown’s victory was voters’ fears that the bloated, irresponsible, debt-ridden federal government would run doctors’ offices and hospitals like it does the Postal Service. Another reason was the sheer arrogant, sleazy, closed-door, bribe-ridden process of putting Obamacare together.

The day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she didn’t have the votes to foist Obamacare on unwilling Americans"many in her own caucus understand that the Massachusetts revolt could place them in the ranks of the unemployed in the fall 2010 elections"President Obama launched his war on the banks. In doing so, Obama turned to the chief weapon"and frequent motivation"of the paternalist: envy.

The blame game

In 2009, as part of their plan to “save” the economy from collapse, Obama officials strong-armed many banks into taking federal loans that many did not want. Most banks paid those forced loans back, with interest, as fast as they could.

Yet after the failure of his health care takeover, Obama needed a new cause. So at a January 21 press conference he argued that the current economic crisis “began as a financial crisis, when banks and financial institutions took huge, reckless risks in pursuit of profit and massive bonuses.” No mention here, of course, of the fact that it was bad housing loans, encouraged and facilitated by the federal government, along with too-loose Federal Reserve monetary policy, that sparked the crisis. But of course there is mention of bankers seeking profits and bonuses, part of Obama’s appeal to the envy of Americans.

He continued, saying: “To avoid calamity, the American people … were forced to rescue financial firms.” No, it was politicians like you, Mr. President, and your predecessor George W. Bush who decided on bailouts against the wishes of many Americans.

He declared: “Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is ‘too big to fail.’” Again, it’s politicians who bailed them out and, in any case, this statement means cutting down the size and activities of banks, which will make many too small to succeed.

Of course, this is part of a statist game. Politicians decide which banks are “too big to fail.” The government, which already regulates financial institutes, gives guarantees that also give it an even greater excuse to regulate; to decide what behavior is too risky; and perhaps, in the end, to simply take over bank that are failing. Why not, Mr. President, work to get the government out of both the regulation and guarantee business and let the owners take the risks?

With chutzpah pouring out of his every pore, Obama announced support for restrictions on what he defines as risky bank activities “that are central to the legislation that has passed the House under the leadership of Chairman Barney Frank, and that we’re working to pass in the Senate under the leadership of Chairman Chris Dodd.” Here he named the two members of Congress who most of all laid the groundwork for the current economic crisis. Both worked for years to force banks to make risky home loans to individuals who couldn’t afford them and both took campaign funds from the government-chartered Fannie Mae, which was making money packaging and marketing those bad loans. They sold the crack, and now they want to be deputized as drug-busting police.

True motives

Obama argued that banks enjoy special government privileges and thus should be under more government control. Of course, many of these “privileges” are freedoms that so far the government has not managed to stamp out. Others are protections"such as FDIC insurance"that the government requires.

In any case, Obama concluded that banks should not be allowed to use what he calls “cheap” money that results from “privileges” in order to “trade for profit.”

The motivations and tactics of Obama and all paternalists are frighteningly revealed in his banking policies.

His proposed restrictions on banks will further constrain capital investment in the American economy and reduce so-called “risky” lending. These constraints will certainly slow economic growth. They will especially make it tough for entrepreneurs to create whole new industries that are by their nature risky ventures, for which they bear the costs of the risk, and by which they hope to make huge, well-deserved profits. But it really isn’t economic growth and prosperity that paternalists seek.

Obama is shameless to suggest that his government, which is overseeing the most irresponsible and wasteful spending spree with taxpayer money in American history, should be imposing discipline on private bank responsibility. But it’s not responsible, efficient, and honest government that paternalists seek.

Paternalists want power. They are obsessed by the need to control every aspect of our lives. That’s why Leftists reacted as they did to the Supreme Court’s ruling"released on the same day as Obama’s anti-bank press conference"that corporations have free speech rights to make their thoughts about candidates known during elections. Obama is vowing to find ways to stamp out these First Amendment freedoms. The freedom of others to criticize is a grave danger to control-freak paternalists.

One of the principal tactics that paternalists use to induce individuals to surrender their freedom is to stoke their envy, resentment, and hate against some scapegoat and to promise that they, the paternalists, are the only ones who can punish the villains. “Look, that one is richer than you! Let’s get ‘em!”

Envy, of course, is an essentially nihilistic sentiment that revels in tearing down. It is a form of social relativism that teaches that one’s worth or status is always in comparison to others. And the easiest way to raise one’s own pseudo-sense of worth and status is to tear down others, to judge one’s self as better off only if others are worse off. Envy is a path to individual and social destruction.

It was inevitable that paternalist Obama would ramp up the envy offensive. In this case the envy is aimed at banks, but this is only because his attempt to seize power over our health care failed, so demonizing insurers is passé. This is what can be expected out of the paternalists, and it is the envy that they peddle as a narcotic to loll us into servitude that we must reject.

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Hudgins directs advocacy and is a senior scholar for The Atlas Society, the center for Objectivism.

I think this would be a good thread to post a thought or two about political philosophies, parties, and trends. I have been thinking about a cultural effect as it relates to politics, and so it is as follows.

Humans tend to do many things because they are trendy, whether it be clothing, music, architectural styles, car styles, hair styles, you name it really, it includes almost everything. To be accurate, there are a portions of the population or culture on opposite ends of the spectrum that do things or do not do things based upon their own in depth reasoning in terms of whether something is practical or suit their particular tastes or philosophies.

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication"joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees"in this case the emperor's flagrant nakedness.

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there"all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.
Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness"not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.
The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating""that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.
He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.
Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots""thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

...Conservatives of color may have an additional advantage of being able to see through the hypocrisy of political correctness...

An earlier version of an article by Delaware News Journal reporter Harry Themal quoted Biden as saying that his son Beau does not want to run for Senate.


But Beau Biden has still not made clear his senatorial ambitions.


Here is the originally published back-and-forth:


Biden: "If you run into Beau, talk him into running; he respects you."

Me: "I don't think he wants to run, though."

Biden: "I don't think he does either. I know he doesn't want to. ... I'm so proud of the job he's done [as attorney general]."

Me: "Would you campaign for him [against Republican Mike Castle]?"

Biden: "Hell, yes. I told him I'd give him my sixth-born grandchild."

Later in the afternoon, ABC News' Rick Klein reported:

The vice president’s office contacted ABC News to say that Vice President Joe Biden was talking about convincing his interim replacement, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) to run for a full term -- not, as the News Journal reported, his son, Beau.

The first Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 survey in the state finds that longtime Republican Congressman Mike Castle beats state Attorney General Beau Biden by five points " 47% to 42% - in a hypothetical match-up for the seat Biden’s father held for 36 years. Five percent (5%) like some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

$1.5 Trillion Ways to Cut the Deficit
January 25, 2010 09:38 AM EST by Elizabeth MacDonald


Fox Business is changing the debate.

We found $900 billion to $1.5 trillion worth of ways to trim the fat marbled throughout government. And these are items that government officials say should be cut. Government officials whose salaries are paid for with taxpayer dollars are spending their days telling taxpayers how the government can cut waste.

But instead of cutting $1.5 trillion, the government now wants to raise the nation's debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion to pay its bills. If it passes, the national debt would reach $14.3 trillion, equal to the size of the entire U.S. economy.

The nation’s overall debt just soared over the $12 trillion mark for the first time this past November.

Taxpayers are looking towards the President's State of the Union address, and whether he will address reckless spending at the hands of a Super-Size-me government that has led to staggering abuses of taxpayer money, with no end in sight.

We found plenty to cut, and we're not talking just about cutting pork, or the annual $60 billion to $200 billion in annual Medicare and Medicaid fraud and waste, which law enforcement is already hunting down, and we're not talking about expensive tax credits to support industry, like those for the solar companies, which have yet to photosynthesize into industry profits.

We found the fat with expert help from the Heritage Foundation"Brian Riedl, Erin Kanoy, Matthew Streit, Alison Fraser, JD Foster, and Steve Keen"along with research help from Fox Business producer Barnini Chakraborty and Fox News analyst James Farrell, along with data. We used analysis from the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and Citizens Against Government Waste.

Bureaucracies exist by feeding themselves. When companies fail, they get smaller (usually). When governments fail, they get bigger, as one analyst noted.

“Simply eliminate the wasteful spending, earmarks, and corporate welfare, and..consolidate the duplicative programs,” that will go a long way towards cutting the deficit, says Brian Riedl, senior federal budget analyst at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in DC.

Common Sense

I grew up in an Irish Catholic household where we were taught the common sense things in life.

Like don't brush your teeth with turpentine, don't put your head in the oven, and don’t run with hedge clippers. And don’t Krazy Glue your mother’s wallet shut. Our house still has the same black rotary phone.

“At home, being stupid was rewarded with a shoe boomeranging at you from around the corner,” says Fox Business’s Valerie Alexander.

Like you, we never felt the world owed us anything.

Supersize-Me Government

The US has hewed dangerously closer to the vision of the Founding Father of the Entitlement State, as economist Ed Yardeni calls him, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who set forth a new economic bill of rights in his 1944 State of the Union Address, that you have the right to a good job, good food, a nice house, and adequate health care.

And the right to let taxpayers pay for all of that for you.

That thinking has caused the Supersize-Me ballooning of the US government.

In 20 months, President Obama will add as much debt as President Bush ran up in eight years, according to an editorial by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal.

Annual interest on the U.S. debt, which equals the size of Belgium’s economy, would cover the budgets for 18 government agencies, including the legislative and judicial branches, and Homeland Security.

And that doesn’t include what the U.S. will owe for Social Security and Medicare, unfunded liabilities which approach the GDP of the entire planet. It also doesn’t include the debt owed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

For other ways to save a potential $140 billion, the Congressional Budget Office publishes its annual “Budget Options.”

Here’s What the U.S. Can Cut

Estimated $1.2 trillion unused federal property

The government owns and leases 3.87 billion square feet of property, and 55.7 million acres of land"meaning, one out of every forty acres. Real property asset value for all these holdings is estimated to be $1.2 trillion, says Citizens Against Government Waste, based on data from the Federal Real Property Profile created by the Bush administration, which helps federal agencies manage and dispose of their excess property.

One alarming example of the government’s wasteful holdings is Chicago’s Old Main Post Office, a 2.5 million-square-foot abandoned structure that has been vacant since 1997 and costs $2 million to maintain annually, (the government recently moved to unload it, after spending more than $26 million to maintain it, government sources note).

And don't forget the John Murtha airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the first project in the country to get stimulus money, an airport that cost $200 million in taxpayer money over the last decade but has more security officials than passengers on any given day.

Democrat Rep. John Murtha got the funds for the airport, and his portrait hangs in the entrance. He uses the airport often during campaign season; it has a new restaurant, and a new $8 million radar system that rivals international airports. The passenger count has dropped by more than half in the last decade. Just three commercial flights depart on any given day, all headed for Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC.

The $1.2 trillion unused property figure doesn’t include the $29 billion in assets picked up from the Federal Reserve's bailout of Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns.

For example, the central bank now owns the Crossroads Mall in Oklahoma City, a shopping complex abandoned after anchor stores Macy's, J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward and Dillard's all pulled stakes. It has an oil well pumping crude in the car park -- except the Fed does not own the mineral rights.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says there are more than 21,802 abandoned federal property assets littering the country that could be sold, worth a notional $17.7 billion. Tough to do in a downturn, as the property market is priced for the Ice Age.

Still, "it is obscene that the value of our government’s vacant or unused properties exceeds the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of half of the nations on earth…something is wrong when Congress asks taxpayers to sacrifice more but does nothing to eliminate an area of waste that is double the size of Afghanistan’s GDP," said Dr. Thomas Coburn (R-Okla).

$123.5 billion on government programs that have consistently failed

The OMB has something called the Program Assessment Rating Tool. It found 218 government programs that were either inadequate or ineffective virtually throughout the entire government--programs run by the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, HHS, Homeland Security, HUD, Interior, Justice, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, the VA, Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, the CFTC, EEOC, and the FCC.

$98 billion in annual agency overpayments

--Health and Human Services: $55.1 billion, or 9.4%. Includes overpayment rates of 7.8% and 15.4% in the Medicare fee for service and Advantage programs, respectively.

--Labor: $12.3 billion, or 9.9%. Almost all of the overpayments were in the unemployment insurance program.

--Treasury: $12.3 billion, or 25.5%. All of it was attributed to overpayments in the earned income tax credit.

--Social Security Administration: $8 billion, or 1.2%, in overpayments.

--Agriculture: $4.3 billion in overpayments, or 5.9% of total department spending. Much of it was in the food stamp, federal crop insurance and school meals programs.

--Transportation: $1.5 billion, or 3%. Much of it was in the Federal Highway Administration planning and construction program.

--Veterans Affairs: $1.2 billion, or 2.7%. That included overpayments in the pension and other compensation programs.

--Housing and Urban Development: $1 billion, or 3.5%. All attributed to public housing and rental assistance.

--Defense: $849 million, or 0.5%.

--Homeland Security: $644.5 million, or 3.7%. Much of it was in the Homeland Security grant program as well as Disaster Relief Fund Vendor Payments.

--Education: $599 million, or 2.1%.

"It goes without saying that these results would be completely unacceptable in the private sector, as they should be in government, especially at a time of record deficits," says Sen. Tom Carper, (D-Del.), who chairs a Senate panel on federal financial management.

$92 billion in corporate welfare

The US taxpayer has been very good to businesses, and this even before the TARP and the Federal Reserve’s massive intervention into the U.S. economy. Companies like Boeing IBM, General Electric, Xerox, Motorola, Honeywell, Xerox, and Dow Chemical have benefited.

The Cato Institute's $91 billion figure doesn’t include tax breaks or trade protections. The figure includes direct cash payments to farmers, and research funds to high-tech companies, as well as indirect subsidies, such as funding for overseas promotion of specific U.S. products and industries. The cash payments come from the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, HUD, and State.

$19.6 billion on 10,160 earmarks

Congress managed to jam 10,160 earmarks worth a whopping $19.6 billion into 12 appropriations bills last year, a 14% spike from 2008. Despite promises, the 2010 budget [also] contained over 10,000 earmarks,” Heritage’s Riedl notes. Of the 10,160 projects, Citizens Against Government Waste identified 221 earmarks worth $7.8 billion that were passed in violation of Congress's own transparency rules.

Alaska leads the country with $221 million in earmarks - which comes out to be $322 per capita. Hawaii ranks second at $302 million in earmarks, or $235 per capita.

Some of the more absurd calls for taxpayer funds:

$1.49 million for Mormon Crickets in Utah

$75,000 for Wayne Gomes Youth Baseball Diversity Foundation

$381,000 for Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, NY

$254,000 for Wool Research, Montana Sheep Institute

$2.2 million for Center for Grape Genetics, Geneva, NY

$1.8 million for swine odor and manure management research in Ames, Iowa

$4.4 million for the Army Center of Excellence in Acoustics

Defending the pork for swine odor on the Senate floor, Democrat Senator Tom Harkin said: “I’m sure that David Letterman will probably be talking about it and Jay Leno will be talking about it, we’ve got $1.8 million to study why pigs smell.”

Also worth noting, the Montana Sheep Institute, backed by Senate appropriators Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has received since 2002 seven earmarks worth $3 million, says Citizens Against Government Waste.

Massive program redundancies

Wasteful duplication in government is rampant, and it's an issue that's been out there for more than a decade"one hand of the government doesn’t know what the other is doing. The list includes 342 economic development programs; 130 programs serving the disabled; 130 programs serving at-risk youth; 90 early childhood development programs; 75 programs funding international education, cultural, and training exchange activities; and 72 safe water programs.

In 20 months, President Obama will add as much debt as President Bush ran up in eight years, according to an editorial by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal.

--Defense: $849 million, or 0.5%.