Socialism and the End of the American Dream

Whoa.  This is bad stuff.  The facts, the numbers, the players.  They all point to our Federal government, the Clinton Administration in 1993, Democrat obstruction of much needed reform, and a Democratic Congress in 2007 as the catalist that blew an $18 Trillion dollar hole in our economy.  Miserable socialist bastardos!! excerpt:  Fannie and Freddie's congressional sponsors-some of whom are now leading the administration's effort to "reform" the financial system-have a lot to answer for. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, sponsored legislation adopted in 2008 that established a new regulatory structure for the GSEs. But by then it was far too late. The GSEs had begun buying risky loans in 1993 to meet the "affordable housing" requirements established under congressional direction by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Most of the damage was done from 2005 through 2007, when Fannie and Freddie were binging on risky mortgages. Back then, Mr. Frank was the bartender, denying that there was any cause for concern, and claiming that he wanted to "roll the dice" on subsidized housing support. View Full Image Associated Press In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then controlled by Republicans, adopted tough regulatory legislation that would have established more auditing and oversight of the two agencies. But it was passed out of committee on a partisan vote, and with no Democratic support it never came to a vote. By the end of 2008, Fannie and Freddie held or guaranteed approximately 10 million subprime and Alt-A mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (MBS)-risky loans with a total principal balance of $1.6 trillion. These are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, accounting for both their 2008 insolvency and their growing losses today. Since 2008, under government control, the two agencies have continued to buy dicey mortgages in order to stabilize housing prices. There is more to th

Good Charts comparing the spending of USA Presidents starting with Eisenhower. Spending in Bush's first year (FY2001) was $1.863 trillion, thus he presided over an 83-percent increase in overall federal spending, which includes defense, domestic, entitlements, and interest. Even without TARP and Fannie/Freddie, spending was up a huge 70 percent under Bush over eight years. By contrast, total spending under eight years of President Clinton increased just 32 percent. These are the overall increases in nominal dollars. Now let's look at the real annual averages. Figure 1 shows the average increase in total spending under recent presidents. Bush II was the biggest spender since LBJ. His spending increases were far larger than the three prior presidents.

Looking at the Facts.... on Dec 28, 4:18 PM said: Economy Comparison: William J. Clinton (WJC); George W. Bush (GWB) Average annual GDP growth: W.J. Clinton: 3.6%; G.W. Bush: 2.6% Real median household income: WJC: grew by $5,825; GWB: fell by $1,273 Unemployment: WJC: 7.3% -> 4.2%; GWB: 4.2% -> 6.5% Non-farm employment: WJC: 22.7 million jobs; GWB: 3 million jobs (worst record of any US president in 70 years) Poverty rate: WJC: fell 3.5% (6.4 million fewer people) GWB: rose 1.3% (5.4 million more people) Federal Spending as % of GDP: WJC: 22.1% (fiscal 1992) to 18.4% in 2000; GWB: back up to 20.8% -2006 Total executive branch employment (does not include classified numbers for CIA, DIA, NSA, & other intelligence agencies; does not include outsourced jobs): WJC: down by almost 450,000 (2.225 million -> 1.778 million); GWB: up by almost 100,000 (to 1.872 million). Federal Debt: WJC: inherited deficit of $290 billion -> surplus of $236 billion (fiscal 2000); GWB: increased by almost $3 trillion (as of 2006) Public Debt as % of GDP: WJC: -16.4%; GWB: +4.4%

Good video news story from local station KTVU in San Francisco.  My neighbor sent me this link, and i think this local gun rights story is representative of what is happening across America.  People are arming up.  And while there is perhaps no more liberal area in this country than San Francisco, concern over second amendment rights and the constitution affects every aspect of American life.  Our constitution is designed to seriously limit the power and growth of government.  Yet, in the past year alone, our government debt (public debt) has risen from 43% of GDP to 58%!!!  Tha tis unsustainable, unconstitutional growth and empowerment.  No wonder the second amendment is a concern.  For government to be on such a growth binge, the entire constitution would have to be breached.  Which is what i fear we are facing. Oh, and then there is the NY Times story on how the Feds are now tracking eMail and social network sights like Facebook and twitter, looking for dissident comments.  What's going on here?

That's Dr. Tom Coburn.  The same Dr. Tom Coburn who managed to force the public reading of Socialist Bernie Sanders health care amendment proposal designed to force government run health care on all Americans. excerpt: Every American, not just seniors, should know that the rationing provisions in the Reid bill will not only reduce their quality of life, but their life spans as well. My 25 years as a practicing physician have shown me what happens when government attempts to practice medicine: Doctors respond to government coercion instead of patient cues, and patients die prematurely. Even if the public option is eliminated from the bill, these onerous rationing provisions will remain intact.

Once again Karl Rove lays the lumber to the liar Obama.  Rove provides a trove of stats and facts exposing Obama as a shameless liar and phony.  And then Rove points out that the American people are not fooled.  Polls show an increasing number of Americans are angry and aware that they have been had.  Obama is not who he claimed to be. excerpt:Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year: 49% approve and 46% disapprove of his job performance in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll. There are many factors that explain it, including weakness abroad, an unprecedented spending binge at home, and making a perfectly awful health-care plan his signature domestic initiative. But something else is happening. Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politics-free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spin-was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.

By Mark McHugh The pending reappointment of Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve is the non-story of the Century, and I find this terrifying.  Propaganda of his alleged "success" has been crammed in every orifice of the American people by the rich and shameless (yet relatively few believe it).   This is truly the time for action, unless you really enjoy Tea-partying 'til you puke.  I'm asking every American to demand that their Senators stand up and oppose the nomination.  Our future depends on it.   Contact your Senator Sign Bernie Sanders' Petition To Prevent Bernanke's Reappointment >>

Excellent editorial taking a clean shot at Google and the many other "aggregators" stealing "news" content.  Rupert also hits the news industry itself for not serving their customers with truth-filled journalism.  He points out that editors have lost the trust of their consumers. excerpt: We are at a time when many news enterprises are shutting down or scaling back. No doubt you will hear some tell you that journalism is in dire shape, and the triumph of digital is to blame. My message is just the opposite. The future of journalism is more promising than ever-limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to overregulate or subsidize us.

Goldman Sachs employees are buying up hand guns to protect themselves from the angry throngs of peasants (taxpayers) with pitchforks.  This is clipped from a Bloomberg article!  (Good videos) excerpt: Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and -- oh yes -- the other banks. People "were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system." Torn Curtain There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm's revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses. This slip-up let the other bailed-out banks happily hand off public blame to Goldman, which is unpopular among its peers because it always seems to win at everyone's expense.

quote from global warming hoax advocate Stephen H. Schneider: "as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but--which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts." So let me get this straight.  Scientist who support the global warming hoax are lying.  That puts them at odds with the most fundamental of scientific requirements - don't lie.  So therefore, global warming hoaxsters have disqualified themselves as legitimate scientists.  At best, they are dissembling practitioners of "political science". So, if we disqualify the scientific posers who are lying about global warming, and then take a look at the consensus of real scientist left (truth tellers), we have an interesting fact.  100% of legitimate scientists do not believe in the global warming hoax.   100% consensus!!! Bastardos.  Potemkin villages.  Show trials. 5 year plans.  Where have we seen this before?

Incredible story of how the Obama bailout of GM and Chrysler went down.  Very in-depth, exhaustively researched, and well written. excerpt: Detroit's Big Three automakers came closer than America realized to becoming the Big Two. General Motors Corp. ended merger talks with Chrysler LLC in November 2008 to focus on getting emergency federal aid, but Chrysler continued to believe a tie-up with GM was its best chance for survival. In April, as both automakers were surviving on government aid and fighting bankruptcy, Obama administration officials spent two weeks working on a plan for GM to acquire Chrysler's best assets and keep the doors open on a third of its factories. Advertisement Some members of President Barack Obama's auto task force saw it as a fallback position if Chrysler failed to reach a partnership deal with Italy's Fiat SpA. Other members opposed it. But top task force officials ultimately decided it was too late in the game for a merger, too complicated and would cost too many jobs compared to an alliance with Fiat. The GM-Chrysler tale is among new details that emerged in Detroit News interviews with more than a dozen insiders -- automakers as well as government officials -- over the past two months. They reveal the much greater government role in the historic bailout of both companies than has been disclosed previously. Faced with the prospect of losing 1.1 million direct and indirect American jobs, as well as a major leg of the nation's economy, the government believed it could not afford to let the industry fail. In the end, the GM and Chrysler bailout resulted from fortunate timing and the work of a group of unknown Wall Street veterans. Under the aegis of the White House, and without congressional approval, they forced a restructuring that the automakers themselves had been unwilling or unable to accomplish -- even as they saw disaster looming.

This explains everything.  Sadly.  Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact. excerpt: The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. In a September 2009 article, James Simpson wrote an article entitled "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis". Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.   The basis of this strategy is a plan called Cloward-Piven.  

WOW!  Everyday brings new revelations.  We've been robbed! excerpt:  Now we know: Geithner and Friedman interceded on behalf of Goldman and Wall Street (Merrill received $6.2 billion, Societe General - a whopping $16.5 billion) to deliver a stealth bailout, one that wouldn't need Congressional approval, and even better wouldn't require the counterparties to pay any of it back NOR would it require that they issue shares, warrants or any other instrument to AIG (taxpayers) in return for more than $32 billion in free money. In any other time, a sitting Treasury Secretary who interceded on behalf of Wall Street to screw taxpayers out of tens of billions, would not be sitting long.  But Democrats control both the House and Senate, so there are no investiagtions (Issa's letter aside).  Traditional media is content not to rock the boat for President Banks Obama lest they be shunned by their peers, and ultimately, 99% of TV and print journalists don't understand the issues well enough to complain with any conviciton, especially against the merry backdrop of the Dow rising and their deflated 401ks beginning to show life. They fall prey to fear and weakly submit to duplicitous hyperbole (Paulson threatening martial law and blood in the streets), when they should instead be consulting with the objective, critical voices who foresaw the crisis and were prepared with alternative solutions when it finally came (Stiglitz said instead of TARP, create new banks). A pox on Congress, President Banks Obama, Bush, Paulson, Friedman, Bernanke and Geithner (plus Greenspan and Rubin).  You may have gotten away with it for now, but I would wager there are a few million of us, roughly, who do understand everything that went down last Fall, and we're not amused.  We're not just going to let this one pass, and we will not stop filling the vast interweb with the truth (and our distaste and vitriol for your wretched souls) day after day, week after week, all over message boards and fin

Bob Moriarty from 321 Energy provides a brief explanation of the fundamentals -  excerpt: I've made it clear for a year that I believe we have entered what will be the most serious depression in history. It also will involve the greatest transfer of wealth in history. There are two basic classes of assets. There are paper assets and real assets. An ounce of gold is a real asset. A copper mine is a real asset. A house is a real asset. An oil field is a real asset. Over the counter derivatives now total over $596 trillion dollars, (click here [pdf]) ten times the size of the world economy. Those are paper assets, their value is derived from some other asset. That derivative size is what is going to destroy the world's financial system, it's all fraud. A mortgage is a paper asset. A T-Bill or T-Bond is a paper asset. A $100 bill is a paper asset. It's pretty easy to see that a $500,000 mortgage on a house now worth $250,000 isn't worth very much. Latest figures show 9.6 million homes in the US have negative equity. How many of those loans are going to be paid back? According to an ex-Fed Director, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bankrupt. They were leveraged 65-1. For those comforted by the thought of the FDIC bailing you out should the banking system fail entirely, you need to realize the FDIC is leveraged at 130-1. We are told that the collapse of Washington Mutual alone could bankrupt the FDIC. In a depression, no real assets appear or disappear. Paper assets, on the other hand, turn to vapor. But the ownership of real assets will change as the real assets move from weak hands into strong hands.

Those bastard banks have taken over $2 Trillion from the taxpayers, and are using this cash to invest in emerging markets instead of the USA.  The Feds are providing interest free money to central banks, which then are used to invest in emerging economies.  The bankers get the profits and USA taxpayers get stuck with the cost.   There is no possible upside for USA taxpayers unless of course you agree with Obama that the USA standard of living and extraordinary economic prosperity must be lowered before global economic equality can be achieved.  This isn't just about greedy bankers and self interested international corporations.  Wealth redistribution is now the official policy of our government.  And the Federal Reserve is carrying it out with unexpected zeal. The numbers are coming in.  The facts are on the table.  The USA is being gutted. excerpt:  Asian stock prices are shooting up, in part due to low interest rates in the U.S. Investors looking for higher yields are borrowing in U.S. dollars and then pouring that money "into countries that are growing more rapidly," said Stephen Cecchetti, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks' central bank, which warned early of the last asset bubble and is beginning to do so again. "That runs the risk of creating property and equity booms in those countries." About $53 billion has gone into emerging-market stock funds this year, according to data collector EPFR Global. Through Monday's trading, the broad MSCI Barra Emerging Markets Index this year was up 60.7%. Brazil was up 100%, and Indonesia had gains of 102.7%. Over the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 11.5%.

Whoa!  Incredible fact filled analysis of the pre election GDP numbers released by Obama. excerpt:  Disposable personal income decreased in nominal terms q/o/q by 5.9% while in real terms (inflation adjusted) it decreased q/o/q by 7.4%!  That is an enormous swing in purchasing power and not in the right direction! Personal outlays increased $148.2 billion (5.8 percent) in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $8.2 billion (0.3 percent) in the second. Personal saving -- disposable personal income less personal outlays -- was $364.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with $533.1 billion in the second. The personal saving rate -- saving as a percentage of disposable personal income -- was 3.3 percent in the third quarter, compared with 4.9 percent in the second. So into decreasing personal income and disposable personal income people tried to spend anyway.  Best guess: most of this was "cash for clunkers", which is the worst sort of "spending" - it is the taking on of more debt by replacing a paid-off car with one that now comes with a shiny (and nasty) payment book.  The Trade: Go long auto repo outfits (aside: as far as I know there are no publicly-traded repo companies.) Nothing in here I like; to the contrary, this report sucks and on a drill-down appears to be full of outright lies.

A compiled list briefly profiling Obama's most important associations.  Most of whom are radical Marxists, racists and social revolutionaries hating Christians, Jews, and the ordered liberty guaranteed by our Constitution.  The list includes William Ayers, Carol Browner, Frank Marshall Davis, Anita Dunn, Dr. Eziekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel, Chai Feldblum, Patrick Gaspard, Eric Holder, John Holdren, Valerie Jarret, Kevin Jennings, Van Jones, Mark Lloyd, Cecelia Munoz, Cass Sunstein, and uber racist Jeremiah Wright.  Good cheat sheet for future reference.

Incredible must read!  

In depth story about the Federal Reserve failure to act as an unregulated subprime mortgage industry raced out of control, and major banking and financial institutions bought into the wild wild west of high interest rate - predatory lending. excerpt:  during the years of the housing boom, pleas from consumer advocate groups failed to move the Fed, the sole federal regulator with authority over subprime mortgage businesses. Under a policy quietly formalized in 1998, the Fed refused to police lenders' compliance with federal laws protecting borrowers, despite repeated urging by consumer advocates across the country and even by other government agencies. The hands-off policy, which the Fed reversed earlier this month, created a double standard. Banks and their subprime affiliates made loans under the same laws, but only the banks faced regular federal scrutiny. Under the policy, the Fed did not even investigate consumer complaints against the affiliates.

Excellent read.  The financial crisis is examined in an informative but breezy way.  The conclusion however isn't good.  We're out of options, and there doesn't seem to be anyway of stopping the explosion of government debt that will, sooner or later, crush us.   Great read!