Obama's 2012 New England Fear Factor Tour

Obama’s 2008 Hope and Change Tour, has degenerated into the 2012 Fear Factor. The Anointed One is making the New England fund raising circuit – at taxpayer expense – denigrating Republicans and bastardizing history.

Raising campaign cash in Maine on Friday, March 30, Obama said Republicans want to return to economic policies that would let Wall Street play by its own set of rules and allow insurance companies to roll back health coverage.

"We won't win the race for new jobs and new businesses and middle-class security if we cling to this same old, worn-out, tired 'You're on your own' economics that the other side is peddling," Obama said.

"It was tried in the decades before the Great Depression. It didn't work then. It was tried in the last decade. It didn't work," he said. "You know, the idea you would keep on doing the same thing over and over again, even though it's been proven not to work. That's a sign of madness."

Madness is taking this man’s word as gospel, and we all know what he thinks about Christians. Anyone with a modicum of curiosity would cast aside the progressive’s rewriting of history, and question why the Great Depression lasted as long as did. And if you’re going to be honest with yourself, one must question the policies of FDR and the New Deal.

It’s the New Deal era program, Fannie Mae that brought about the housing bubble and economic crash that we are currently suffering under. Was it not President Clinton who instigated the subprime market? And wasn’t it the Democrats in Congress that belligerently bullied regulators who tried to warn the American people about the abuses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Madness is ignoring history and trusting a self-serving politician whose policies are un-American.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Reckless-Endangerment-Outsized-Corruption-Armageddon/dp/0805091203#_

http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_20294841/obama-accuses-republicans-madness?source=rss

The Export/Import Bank of the United States is the Godfather of New Deal Crony Capitalism

The Department of Energy has become the poster child of crony capitalism. But there is another agency operating under the radar, that’s been around since the New Deal era with a track record just as bad. And like its cousin Fannie Mae is quasi-governmental.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt started the Export/Import Bank via executive order in 1933; in 1945 Congress made it an independent agency. And like Fannie Mae, is a government sponsored entity that provides loan guarantees, direct loans, and insurance to those who couldn’t obtain one in the private sector. The purported goal is to assist foreign buyers and countries in the purchase and export of American goods.

The charter for the Export/Import Bank of the United States is subject to periodic renewal by Congress and is purportedly self-sustaining, but the House Appropriations Committee says differently:

Export and Investment Programs – The bill provides $266 million for export assistance programs, a reduction of $84 million from the request. The bill also includes $1.5 million over fiscal year 2011 for the Export-Import Bank Inspector General to provide robust oversight over the agency. The Trade and Development Agency – which promotes U.S. trade interests abroad – is level funded at $50 million, the same as last year

For a better perspective on the banks operations, I refer to Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner:

Ex-Im is a posterboy for corporate welfare. Its mission is to transfer money from U.S. taxpayers, through foreign buyers, and ultimately into the pockets of American companies. While the agency touts its support for small business, a vast majority of its money goes to subsidize sales by the largest corporations in America.

The money from Ex-Im loans and loan guarantees — the agency’s biggest transactions, and the only kinds that are itemized in Ex-Im’s annual report — goes overwhelmingly to a handful of large corporations, including Halliburton, Bechtel, General Electric, Caterpillar and Westinghouse. But there’s a reason Ex-Im is known as "Boeing’s Bank."
In fiscal years 1998 through 2005, Ex-Im has issued $63.5 billion in loans and long-term guarantees. In those years, $33 billion of Ex-Im subsidies went to Boeing. That means that a majority — 52 percent — of Ex-Im’s money went to help just one company.

But that was under previous administrations. The Obama administration is now using the bank to invest in the development of natural resources in foreign countries like Brazil:

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

It looks like the Obama administration has changed the mission statement of the Export/Import Bank of the United States. And with their track record on loan guarantees, the American people will end up eating this Brazilian “investment” too.


Source: http://washingtonexaminer.com/node/378361#ixzz1a3TwXJin

http://appropriations.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=253692

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41829.pdf

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html

Obama Exhorts Businesses to Boost Economy

Barack Obama’s rhetoric and approach to America’s economy is reminiscent of FDR. The New Deal was a disaster, and prolonged the depression. Here is an excerpt from Jim Powell’s book, “FDR’s Folly”:


Some economists claimed the economy declined because the federal government had cut government spending in 1937, after having splurged the previous year to help assure that FDR would win the election. This line of thinking implicitly suggested that the economy had become dependent on government spending and that FDR hadn’t prepared a transition toward private investment and private employment.


The bottom line was a chronic low level of business investment. The National Industrial Conference Board reported that the amount of investment capital per employee was much lower in the 1930s than it had been during the 1920s. Less capital meant fewer people could be employed. Economist Roose added that low working capital was an issue during the 1937-1938 recession, as evidenced by a dramatic increase in corporate accounts payable (unpaid bills).


A substantial portion of business investment was short term, as had been the case throughout the New Deal period. Economist H. Gregg Lewis observed, “The situation was dominated by the short-run outlook, and was for that reason vulnerable. All the elements of a short run boom were there, but the requirement for a sustained recovery – recovery in outlays made on the basis of a long term outlook – was lacking. Reasonable certainty as to the future was absent.


Employers were wary of long-term risks, one of which was a president and Congress threatening those with “idle”capital to invest. Many economists then and now recognized how bashing employers can destroy jobs. Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his 1939 book Business Cycles that employers felt threatened: “They realize that they are on trial before judges who have the verdict in their pocket beforehand, that an increasing part of public opinion is impervious to their point of view, and that any particular indictment will, if successfully met, at once be replaced by another. Again, we may differ in our estimates of the importance of both of this factor and the functions it tends to paralyze, but it should not be overlooked.



Here we have Obama telling businesses it is their “obligation” to provide jobs.



(Reuters) - President Barack Obama called on U.S. businesses on Saturday to do more to boost the economy by hiring more workers and making investments.


The government has an obligation to make the United States the best place to do business, by providing the best schools, incentives to innovate and the best infrastructure, he said, but added that businesses also have to do their part.


"If we make America the best place to do business, businesses should make their mark in America," Obama said in his weekly radio address. "They should set up shop here, and hire our workers, and pay decent wages and invest in the future of this nation. That's their obligation



Barack Obama is about as clueless as FDR. History can guide us away from the pitfalls of the past. Unfortunately, today’s intellectual elites skipped that class.

Will the Federal Government Confiscate Our Gold Again?

When Obamacare was passed a little known provision was deeply embedded in that monstrous piece of legislation that would have a profound effect upon every American: every transaction that exceeded $600 would have to be reported on a 1099.


The business community gasped in horror at the clerical nightmare that would bury their accounting departments in a tsunami of paperwork. But something even more insidious could explain why the feds want to know every transaction that would meet this dollar requirement. They want to know who owns precious metals, especially gold.

During the Great Depression FDR required that the citizens surrender their gold or be fined and thrown in jail. In 1935 a divided Supreme Court upheld Congress’s 1933 resolutions in 3 companion cases which became known as the Gold Clause Cases. The Court, Congress and the Executive branch had no regard for personal property rights or contracts; it was a complete repudiation of the Constitution of the United States.

The irresponsible fiscal policies Washington D.C. has willed upon the American people, could plunge the dollar in a Weimar Republic nightmare; requiring the confiscation of wealth from the citizenry. The Market Oracle outlines some notable events and the possibility that history could repeat itself:

Historically, when the economic or political shit hits the fan, governments have always moved to seize precious metals from the citizenry. The Nazis did it in World War II. The US did it in the 1930’s. The Bolsheviks did it in 1917. Rome did it by removing 90% of the silver from their coinage.


It is conceivable that, because of global economic problems, governments like the US, China and EU may once again make a move to “repatriate” the gold belonging to their citizens. Even if this is avoided, the tracking capabilities that have been provided for in the Obama health care legislation now give the government the ability to know exactly who buys how much gold, as well as an easy tracking mechanism for taxing the transaction. Rather than confiscating your gold, they may simply tax your profits at 95% at the point of sale, virtually wiping out the very reasons for why an investor buys precious metals to begin with.

Whoever put that provision in the healthcare bill may have a more evil design than just trying to collect a little revenue from simple business transactions.

Source: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article21284.html

Senator Michael Bennet Failed to Learn from History

Senator Michael Bennet (D) Colorado held a town hall meeting Saturday, August 21 where he lamented the ineffectiveness of federal government spending:


Regarding spending during his time in office he said, “We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet” and, “in my view we have nothing to show for it.” Speaking of the debt, he said our debt almost equals the economy. Regarding the current job situation, Bennet said the situation has been dire for over a decade saying, “We have created no net new jobs in the United States since 1998” which were the last two years of the Clinton administration. Pointing to a slide showing budget expenditures, he said that currently 65 percent of the budget was for social security, Medicaid and Medicare expenditures and that we could not grow our way out of debt

Before becoming a Senator, Mr. Bennet was a superintendent of Denver public schools. The history curriculum in that city must be crap, because if the Senator had any knowledge of the recent past, he would have recognized the almost exact same admission by FDR’s treasury secretary. Here is Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s 1939 confession to the Ways and Means Committee:

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong…somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises…I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…And an enormous debt to boot!

It looks like the old adage is true: ‘Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it’

I guess knowledge of history is too much to ask from a former superintendent of schools. Maybe Mr. Bennet should take Secretary Morgenthau’s advice and get another job.




Source:  http://www.greeleygazette.com/press/?p=5029