WHAT BARACK OBAMA IS THINKING

So, Obama thinks he's the second coming of FDR, but he has a rude awakening. He's not, and it's not the 1930's. America has come a long way in 70+ years, and once again the left wing radicals have underestimated the American people. It would also take someone far more experienced than this guy, who is the "least qualified, and least experienced guy in the room". But, that will not stop him from trying to 'fundamentally transform' us.

In the process, Obama is spending more money than all the presidents before him in total, grabbing as much power as he possibly can before the clock runs out, enabling our enemies and insulting our allies. All this while not doing the job of a sitting president. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico speaks volumns on his performance and priorities.

Peter Ferrara writes an excellent piece in American Spectator about another historic parallel, re-iterating once again about repearing the errors of the past:

What Barack Obama Is Thinking
by Peter Ferrara, May 26, 2010

Students of history will recognize the method to President Obama's madness. The parallels in both policy and politics to the Roosevelt Administration are too striking not to be deliberate. President Obama is consciously modeling his Administration on the Roosevelt Administration. But just as the liberals of the 1930s graduated to the New Left of the 1960s, President Obama's policies and politics transcend the liberalism of the 1930s. He is building what Newt Gingrich rightly calls a 'secular socialist machine' in his new book To Save America.

Unreconstructed Keynesian Economics
Roosevelt's Keynesian economics was left for dead in the 1980s with President Reagan's supply-side revolution miraculously ending the stagflation of the 1970s with a 25-year economic boom. But President Obama came into office talking as if that never happened, casting it down the memory hole. While Reagan's early 1981 budget cuts slashed the federal budget by about 5%, Obama rammed through an almost $1 trillion stimulus package of nearly all Keynesian economics from the 1930s, laughing at his astounded critics with the question, "What do you think a stimulus is?"

Economically, it didn't work, just as it didn't in the 1930s or the 1970s. Now 29 months after the recession officially started in December, 2007, unemployment is 10% and rising, and the stock market is again stumbling, with the Dow still 4000 points off its last highs. The recovery was overdue a year ago, and even now economic growth is not half what it should be.

But note how the stimulus spending was structured so that more is spent this year than last. Was the goal to reduce unemployment as quickly as possible, or to use the guise of Keynesian stimulus spending for a political slush fund to buy as many votes as possible in this political year? Note also that about half of the direct "stimulus" spending went to state and local governments to prop up the employment of public employees, the most reliable supporters of liberal Democrat candidates. The only thing President Obama's stimulus is stimulating is a left-wing Democrat political machine.

Attack on Wall Street
Another early central theme of the Roosevelt Administration was a searing attack on Wall Street. The famed Pecora hearings, led by the Chief Counsel to the Senate Banking Committee Ferdinand Pecora, crucified top Wall Street bankers and brokers as the cause of the Depression. Despite the hallowed political propaganda long taught to American schoolchildren, Wall Street misdeeds played only a minor bit role in the Great Depression. The real causes were Fed mismanagement enabling a drastic collapse of the money supply, causing ruinous deflation, followed by brutal tax rate increases, and the soaring protectionist tariffs of the Smoot-Hawley Act. Roosevelt's massive overregulation and Keynesian economics draining private sector investment were additional factors extending the Depression for a decade, putting the "Great" into the "Great Depression" as Amity Shlaes put it in her eye-opening book, The Forgotten Man.

But the Pecora hearings and Roosevelt's class warfare rhetoric excoriating "the malefactors of great wealth" successfully shifted the blame politically from the government to the private sector. The result was passage of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, imposing extensive new regulation on Wall Street, as if that would resolve the causes of the Depression. The measures did not produce economic recovery, but rather mostly just decades of voluminous securities filings filled with meaningless boilerplate that nobody ever read.

Today we see President Obama trying to pull off the exact same thing. The Democrats managed to inspire union-generated civil unrest with their incendiary rhetoric regarding contractually specified Wall Street "bonuses." The statesman Obama then poured oil on the fire, explaining,

The people on Wall Street still don't get it. They're still puzzled why is it that people are mad at the banks? Well, let's see. You know, you guys are drawing down 10-, 20-million-dollar bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it's gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we got 10% unemployment.

But actually, no, Washington, it was "you guys" who caused the problem. The Fed again started it, this time with excessively loose monetary policy during the Bush Administration keeping real interest rates below zero for years, as explained by Stanford monetary policy guru John Taylor in his book Getting Off Track. That policy essentially subsidized excessive leverage and runaway risk.

Those cheap dollar, easy money policies joined with the "affordable housing" policies of the Clinton Administration and Congressional Democrats to create the housing bubble, pumped up by subprime mortgages going to people who couldn't afford them, or who were just speculating and willing to abandon their homes if they got into trouble. The Congressionally sponsored, financial terrorist organizations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac then spread trillions in toxic securities backed by these subprime mortgages throughout the global financial system, ultimately threatening to bring it all down.

Following Roosevelt, President Obama again used the crisis to enact further government regulation of Wall Street in the financial regulatory reform bill. But Obama's regulatory monster makes Roosevelt's Wall Street regulation look like a sellout. Obama's bill effectively takes over Wall Street, institutionalizing bailouts with comprehensive new federal authority to seize any institution the government deems troubled. That power does not even have to be used, for the financial industry to become a house pet of the Democrat political machine, with President Obama's new billy club always ready and waiting in the closet. Don't expect to see any Republican fundraisers on Wall Street any time soon. Those are all Democrat affairs now, collecting protection money.

Further following the Roosevelt model, the Obama Administration inaugurated the Congressional debate on the financial regulation bill with a trumped-up, show-trial securities fraud suit against Goldman Sachs. Any free market advocate has to detest Goldman, which already has long been a central cog in the Democrat political machine. But the civil fraud suit against Goldman is an abuse of power, alleging essentially that Goldman defrauded itself into $75 million in losses in sponsoring an investment vehicle demanded by the market, which enabled investors to bet either for or against the subprime housing bubble. The suit is so contrary to legal precedent and the basic facts that the government prosecutors richly deserve sanctions, and if it ends with the deserved judicial excoriation, remember you read it here first.

In the end, two of the actual malefactors of the great wealth of government power themselves at the root of the housing bubble crisis, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, stood taking credit for the financial reg reform bill, which will only add to the secular socialist machine rather than address the root causes of the financial crisis.

Crony Capitalism
Another major portion of the stimulus went to subsidies for so-called "green" energy, solar, wind, biofuels, etc. This was supposed to create "green" jobs, with President Obama proclaiming, "The nation that leads the green energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy." (The global warming scientific grounds for such subsidies are sheer fantasy as discussed at length in this column many times before). Last year, a study of the experience with such subsidies in Spain found that they destroyed 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy for every green energy job created. High cost energy that has to be heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars is not a good strategy for creating jobs.

More recently, a leaked Spanish government study estimates even greater net job losses. As Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute reported last week at Pajamas Media, the Socialist Party Spanish government has publicly acknowledged that its green energy subsidy program has to be drastically curtailed if not abandoned altogether, "lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece." Investors Business Daily further reported last Friday a new study of green energy subsidies in Italy considering the full impact of the higher energy costs on the economy, and concluding, "Each green job cost 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector and 4.8 jobs across the entire economy." Indeed, high energy costs kill manufacturing.

But while green energy corporate welfare fails miserably as economics, it succeeds politically in building the Obama/Democrat political machine. All the "businesses" that exist, whether wind, solar, ethanol, or others, solely because of their Democrat party benefactors now also have trade associations that will join in contributing and openly campaigning for continued Democrat party majorities, especially as Tea Party conservatives exhibit greater clout in the Republican Party, defeating RINOs.

The same strategy is now being pursued in the new Kerry-Lieberman cap and trade bill, structured to deliver billions and billions to corporate interests to buy off their potential opposition. If that bill becomes law, all these businesses will be added to the Obama/Democrat political machine as well.

Government Dependency
President Obama has also followed Roosevelt's creation of massive new entitlements with the Obamacare takeover of health care. If not repealed, that government takeover will mean the end of high quality American health care, with government bureaucrats ultimately deciding what health care you can receive in service of the cause of "social justice" rather than your personal health.

But in the process, the legislation massively increases government dependency with an estimated trillion dollars in increased welfare providing health insurance subsidies for families making as much as $88,000 per year. Those cost estimates will prove woefully inadequate, as the legislation will likely cost at least 3 times as much, if not following Medicare in costing 10 times original estimates. But the ultimate cost does not matter to President Obama. What matters is that he considers the votes of everyone receiving the new entitlement benefits to be bought and paid for as part of the New Left political machine. The same politics are reflected in the one-third increase in federal welfare spending President Obama has already adopted in his first two years alone, with total national welfare spending now to cost an astounding $10.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

Like Roosevelt, Obama has thoroughly aligned himself with the labor unions, even though the great majority of workers today have rejected unionism as not in their best interests. Just as Roosevelt's 1935 Wagner Act heavily favoring the institutional interests of unions over the interests of workers until corrected by the 1947 Taft Hartley Act, Obama today seeks to pass card check legislation that would take away the vote of working people over unionization. It would effectively turn small and medium businesses over to union organizers as well through mandatory, 90 day arbitration dictating the terms and conditions of union contracts. Besides the massive auto bailout, actually a bailout for the UAW, Obama seeks to overturn the careful balance of traditional labor law through every means possible, including the appointment of radical leftists like Craig Becker to controlling labor-related government positions. Expanding unions, of course, just further expands the Obama/Democrat political machine.

President Obama's misrepresentation and defamation of the Arizona immigration control law is a further, naked attempt to build his secular socialist machine. That law was carefully crafted only to enforce current legal requirements of federal law. It also expressly prohibits racial profiling, allowing officers to investigate immigration status only during otherwise lawful contacts arising out of other matters, and only when there is probable cause to question such status. Yet Obama sponsors Mexican President Felipe Calderon before a joint session of Congress misrepresenting the Arizona law and effectively denouncing America, to the great applause and glee of Congressional Democrats, while Mexico maintains punitive immigration laws. Obama here is simply trying to rile up his Hispanic voter base for this year's elections.

In short, President Obama and the Democrats are trying to nationalize the urban political machines dating back to New York City's Tammany Hall that have long been the backbone of the Democrat party.

It Won't Work
But it won't work. Only an intellectually cloistered prep school Marxist could think the politics of the 1930s would be an effective model for today's modern America 75 years later. While America's old media and brain freeze academia are part of the Obama/Democrat New Left political machine as well, they are effectively countered today by the modern media of the Internet, cable and satellite TV, talk radio, nationally distributed conservative newspapers and magazines, and the conservative and libertarian think tanks and grassroots organizations.

In this environment, the Obama/Democrat political machine cannot survive the substantive policy failures that will blast it to smithereens over the next 24 months. We are enjoying now the high point of the Obama economy, a natural cyclical recovery that Obama has already managed to stunt to my own surprise. Yet the ultraliberalism of Washington's ruling Democrats is already cratering their political fortunes. When the concrete economic disasters of the 1970s begin to reappear next year with a new economic downturn, President Obama and his propagandists are not going to be able to talk their way out of political chaos. The American people are far too sophisticated now and have experienced too many years of bountiful prosperity to settle for the stagnation of European and Latin American socialism that Obama and Pelosi are brewing.

Compounding this is a trajectory of grievous foreign policy reversals, with President Obama inviting War through Weakness in the Middle East and elsewhere, and mushrooming nuclear proliferation in response to the now emerging nuclear Iran. The likely result of all this is a geometrically worsening downward spiral of political collapse for the Obama Democrats.

The better political survival strategy for the Democrats is the Blue Dog Democrat ploy that continued to work in the Pennsylvania 12 special election last week. But even that shows the weakness of the Obamunistas. In a two to one Democrat district, represented by Democrats for decades, with the national union infrastructure able to focus all of their resources on that one race, the Democrat won campaigning against the Obama agenda on a Rush Limbaugh platform. Will Obama really be able to maintain his leftist agenda with a Congress increasingly populated by those winning in this way?

Republicans must and will learn to counter this more effectively by aggressively attacking and exposing Blue Dog double dealing. Even more important, they must get much better at projecting a vision and theme of renewed American prosperity and growth.


Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

BAUCUS'S CORNERSTONE

The mendacity of people in congress these days is quite alarming. Government run health care has become a personal battle, and it's 'no holes barred'.

Washington DC politicians have nothing less than their own monuments in their sights, and it's all about them, with our fearless leader as their example. "We the People?" -- Who the heck is that?

Government is the problem, not the solution.

Baucus is a prime example, as described in American Spectator:


Baucus's Cornerstone
By Philip Klein, September 29, 2009

"Rome wasn't built in a day," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said Tuesday afternoon. He made the statement over the course of arguing that he could not support the creation of a government-run plan, because it could not get 60 votes in the Senate.

"My top priority is getting this across the finish line," Baucus said.

He encouraged liberals to recognize that the important thing was to get something passed now, to lay a "cornerstone" that could be built on. As a historical example, he noted that when Social Security was first passed Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 he argued that the legislation was just a start.

Now, if liberals refuse to back any proposal that does not include a government plan, Baucus said, they would fail to lay a cornerstone.

Thus Baucus unintentionally made the argument that conservatives have been trying to make repeatedly -- that is, what we have to consider is not only what is in legislation as it is currently written, but also the infastructure that it would put in place, allowing future lawmakers to expand the role of government further.

Even with the so-called "moderate" proposal of Sen. Baucus, we'll end up with a bill that significantly expands Medicaid, forces individuals to purchase insurance or pay a tax, makes people purchase government-designed insurance policies on a government-run exchange, and creates a new tax-exempt class of insurers that would have access to government money to finance start up costs. That's quite a cornerstone to build on.


Philip Klein is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent.

Are Democrats Ignorant of Facts or Just Too Arrogant to Care?

It's like FDR all over again. In a time of economic disaster, double digit unemployment, and inflation in the background, Obama is about to increase taxes across the board. It will effect everyone, from taxes on the so called rich, to 'sin' taxes, to carbon tax, to health care -- everyone. Sound familiar?

Is it intentional, or do the elitists not know any better. PajamasMedia writes:


Are Democrats Ignorant of Facts or Just Too Arrogant to Care?
From tax increases to gun control to environmentalism, Dems keep pushing policies that adversely affect Americans.
by AWR Hawkins, September 21, 2009

Through various policies and legislative acts from the Progressive Era to our own day, Democrats have been inextricably linked to burdensome taxation, government expansion, limitations on individual liberties like gun ownership, and most recently environmentalism. In all these things, the Democratic Party goes against the history of free people and travels instead down the path to serfdom and despotism.

Do the Democrats do this incidentally, ignorant of the facts? Or are they so arrogant that they pursue their beloved agenda knowing the costs, yet simultaneously turn a blind eye to them?

Consider President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. Although his fiscal policies were detrimental to prosperity, Democrats praise them.

From the moment FDR was sworn into the presidency in 1933, his solution for the Great Depression was characterized by high taxation. And while many of these taxes were on personal income, in a clear attempt to “soak the rich,” all were not. In fact, his tax hikes were so broad and varied that he actually “tripled taxes during the Great Depression, from $1.6 billion in 1933 to $5.3 billion in 1940.”

Tax increases at such astronomic levels were largely the result of various excise taxes, which FDR “levied on alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, matches, candy, chewing gum, margarine, fruit juice, soft drinks, cars, tires (including tires on wheelchairs), telephone calls, movie tickets, playing cards, electricity, and radios, [among other things].” We don’t have to be economists (or senators and congressmen) to understand that while taxes like these may have indeed soaked the rich, they did so at the expense of drenching the middle and lower classes as well.

Such tax policies dried up the coffers of many employers and forced them to forgo adding personnel to payrolls, as demonstrated by the fact that unemployment “averaged 17%” throughout the 1930s. This detrimental effect aside, President Obama and the Democrat leadership cannot wait to implement similar tax policies during the current economic downturn. Just months ago, in July 2009, Obama talked about his openness to “sin taxes,” which would include taxes on soft drinks and many of the other things FDR placed excise taxes upon.

Historically speaking, higher taxes lead to larger governments, which in turn tend toward larger deficits. So with Obama’s tax proposals in mind, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that 2008’s national deficit of just over 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) will grow to 11.4% of GDP by the end of 2009. This means part of Obama’s solution to our current economic downturn includes driving us deeper and deeper into debt nationally. It’s like FDR all over again.

In addition to repeating and renewing financial woes, Democrats have been relentless in their efforts to restrict personal liberties like gun ownership during the last four decades. In 1968 they passed the Gun Control Act. During the 1970s they were able to achieve complete handgun bans in certain cities or districts. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was passed in 1993 and was quickly followed by the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Then, in 1996, Democrat Senator Frank Lautenberg’s amendment to broaden the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed, and the push for further restrictions has only increased in the 21st century.

Yet if history teaches us anything, it’s that gun control only controls law-abiding citizens: criminals will not relent from carrying and using guns because they are by nature hostile to the very laws that make carrying and using guns illegal. This much has been demonstrated in Europe and Australia, where gun bans emboldened criminals who appreciate the fact that their victims can’t fire back.

After Britain banned handguns in 1996, the four years that followed witnessed a 40% rise in gun crimes. And in Australia, where they not only banned guns in 1996 but also made it “a crime to use a gun defensively,” “armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24%, … kidnappings by 43%, [and] manslaughter rose by 16%.”

Yet in 2003, Obama, while an Illinois state senator, not only opposed the right to private gun ownership but also supported an Australian-like ban on the use of guns for self-defense.

And this brings us to the Democrats’ ongoing push for environmental agreements like the Kyoto Protocols. Availing themselves of scare tactics like Bill Clinton’s 2002 prediction that “New York City is going to be underwater from global warming … in 50 years [if we don’t do something],” Democrats energetically seek to stifle technological advancement in order to save the planet — as if our wealth is the planet’s curse. Yet Vaclav Klaus, current president of the Czech Republic who lived through the Soviet Union’s domination of Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, knows firsthand “that the higher the wealth of society is, the higher [too] is the quality of the environment.” And he warns that the current environmental hysteria is but communism repackaged: “This ideology preaches Earth and nature, and under the slogans of their protection — similarly to the old Marxists — wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of … global … planning of the whole world.”

But in the face of Klaus’ warnings, Obama continues pressing for a cap-and-trade system that will charge such an exorbitant “sum for greenhouse gas” emissions that it will make coal-burning power plants too expensive to build, which will in turn make electricity more scarce and more expensive, thus forcing us to adopt green habits in order to survive.

We can only conclude that Democrats who support high taxation, larger government, gun control, and rabid environmentalism are either ignorant or arrogant. If ignorant, their liberalism is lamentable but it can be overlooked. If arrogant, their liberalism is unforgivable, for it is practiced to the peril of their own countrymen.