Demagoguery

During the past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this:  “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”  And President Barack Obama wrote that without a so-called stimulus bill, the current recession will become so severe that “we may not be able to reverse” it.

 

All of which brings to mind the famous quote by H.L. Mencken many years ago:  “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

 

Pelosi’s claim is so asinine that it should incite laughter among anyone who has even a casual acquaintance with facts. Since the entire population of the United States is only 300 million – a number that includes children, retirees, stay-at-home parents, prisoners, disabled, etc. – there is no arithmetic in the universe that could make it possible for 500 million to lose their jobs at all, much less every month.

 

And Obama’s claim is absurd.  Historically, recessions last from 5 to 11 months during which the private economy adjusts to whatever caused the recession, and those adjustments then lead to periods of economic growth which last 4 to 6 years and cause the country to be more prosperous than before the recession.  And it's worth noting that America’s economy has been stronger than the world’s others even when it is going through a recession.

 

Only one time in our history has a recession lasted for years, and it just so happens that time was the only one in which our government responded the way Obama wants it to respond now.  When FDR took office the economy had been ailing for about a year, and he proceeded to usher in unprecedented government involvement in the economy.  The recession then grew into the Great Depression, which was still going on 8 years later.  The unemployment rate during that period was three times what it is today.

 

Conversely, history provides many examples of tax cuts enacted during recessions helping to spur recovery by leaving more money in people’s pockets, and thus available to be used naturally in the economy.  This happened under Kennedy, Reagan, and George W. Bush (Democrats like to ignore the fact that through most of Bush's tenure the economy was much stronger through when he was elected...only to be undone in the end by liberal policies like government mandates in the credit industry, plus Bush's liberal tendency to spend wildly on dubious social programs).

 

Yet, during the past week Obama had the audacity to write this about tax cuts:  “I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”  It is his right to reject the philosophy of tax cuts if he chooses, even if the facts show that choice to be foolish.  But when you consider that one of the main reasons he won the election was that he kept proclaiming he would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, what are you to make of his current statement that “the American people” reject tax cuts?  Of the many conclusions you might draw, none of them say anything good about the self-flattering egotist who occupies the Oval Office.

 

One week before being elected, Obama said that a vote for him was a vote “to choose hope over fear.”  On the day he was sworn in, he said that by electing him the nation had “chosen hope over fear.”  Yet his recent comments (and those of his ally Pelosi) are fear-mongering at its worst, and the mongering is being done to gin up angst amongst the people so the people will pressure Congress to rush through a disastrous bill without scrutinizing it first.  The bill is disastrous because it will greatly increase government’s control over private initiative.  It does much to hurt the economy in the long-term, and nothing to help it in either the short- or long-term.

 

Obama is a Marxist who cares about power and doesn’t give a damn about average citizens, other than figuring out how he can manipulate them into yielding power to him.  I have said it before and I will not stop saying it, because there is a wealth of evidence that supports that statement and none that contradicts it.

Carrying the Soviet Torch

In the second post of my “Decision 2008” series, I wrote that Barack Obama seeks to establish Marxism though he will never say the word. Well, he still hasn’t said the word, but a video has now surfaced that shows him talking in ways that remove any doubt about whether he is a Marxist.

Taken from a local public radio call-in show in 2001, the video shows The Exalted One saying that “the Supreme Court never enter(ing) into the issues of redistribution of wealth” ranks as one of the “failures of the Civil Rights Movement.”

A moment later, he says that one of the movement’s “tragedies” was that it lost track of the “activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”

And while discussing the Supreme Court of the movement's era, Obama expresses disappointment that “it didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

It is noteworthy that although he was responding to callers on this video, Obama spoke without the stammering, the awkward pauses, the “ums” and “uhs” that mark many of his responses when asked questions on the campaign trail. That is because he was speaking to a local and reliably leftist audience, at a time when he didn’t need to worry about appealing to the general population, and therefore he felt free and comfortable to speak his mind. Those words represent Barack Obama’s true thoughts, pure and clean and unfiltered…and they reveal a man who wants government’s power to be unfettered, who disregards personal liberty, and who disdains the notion that people should keep the fruits of their labor and use them as they see fit.

This is a man who rose to power by eliminating his opponents rather than facing them in an election. When he first ran for the Illinois Senate, he employed teams of lawyers to have all of his opponents removed from the ballot by combing through their nominating petitions and getting the magic number of signatures to be disqualified…based on things as absurd as having been written in manuscript rather than cursive.

Later, when Obama made his first run for the U.S. Senate, he trailed in the primaries until the person ahead of him was suddenly accused of domestic abuse. Then, his general election opponent watched a judge open what was supposedly a sealed divorce document containing unproven personal allegations by his wife, leading him to withdraw from the race as the ensuing media tempest ignored the campaign and focused solely on the divorce documents. FDR once said that “in politics, nothing is a coincidence” – an adage that should be impossible to ignore when one man keeps benefiting from such timely occurrences.

Nobody should forget that Obama chose to spend two decades (up until this election year!) regularly attending and financially supporting a church whose pastor often spoke in racially inflammatory language, and who said, immediately after 9/11 during a sermon with children present: “No, no, no, not God bless America! God damn America!”

Obama is a man who has chosen to spend years allied with a home grown terrorist who admits to being a Marxist and to bombing the Pentagon, and who says his only regret about his violent past is that it wasn’t violent enough. Their alliance is so close that Obama began his political career at a meeting in this man’s home.

In his autobiography, Obama wrote that “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout” he made sure to choose “Marxist professors” as his friends. (emphasis mine)

There is nothing new or different about Barack Obama. His ideas have been around for generations, they have been tried in many places around the globe, and they have failed every time they have been tried. His economic philosophy is straight from The Communist Manifesto and his governing impulses are the same ones that autocrats everywhere have always had. Unfortunately, the young people who love him are too poorly educated to understand any of this, and the aging radicals who love him are too scornful of this country to care.

Obama's ability to make people stop thinking and start swooning is the stuff of which every autocrat dreams. He is the politician for which every Bolshevik since 1917 has been waiting.

Beware the Posturing

Yesterday, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was bought out. Predictably, the Dow responded today by dropping more than 500 points. Even more predictably, a chorus of politicians began calling for government regulation while depicting these firms' downfall as some kind of flaw in capitalism. We should oppose that chorus with all our might, for it is a textbook case of politicians lying through their teeth in order to expand their power at our expense.

According to The Guaradian, the primary cause of Lehman Brothers' and Merrill Lynch's finanical woes is "the unfolding credit crisis." This is a fancy way of saying they are in peril because large numbers of mortgages are going into default. Six months ago the same thing nearly caused Bear Sterns to fail, and less than two weeks ago it led to a taxpayer bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All of which begs the question: Why are bad mortgages so ubiquitous?

Politicians from both parties, along with their retinue of useful idiots in the MSM, have spent a great deal of time blaming mortgage companies for creating the mess by engaging in "predatory lending." This is nonsense, since even kindergarteners can figure out that when Peter loans Paul money that Paul can't pay back, it is a much worse deal for Peter than it is for Paul.

The truth is that mortgage companies have never been eager to loan money to people without a great deal of confidence those people would hold up their end of the bargain. But politicans mandated that mortgage companies do just that, and even restricted how much interest the mortgage companies could charge.

Of course, the politicians never admitted that they were forcing private businesses into bad deals. Instead, they praised themselves for "helping working families" and for taking action to "correct" the gap in approval rates between black loan applicants and white loan applicants. In other words, they hustled for votes with the mindless fervor of hogs running to the slop trough.

The result was a rash of loans that would not have existed otherwise. Many of them were structured as adjustable-rate or interest-only mortgages, in order to lower the early payments and thereby accomplish the shortsighted goal of increased borrowing that politicans had mandated. And look where we are now!

The bottom line is that by forcing businesses to do things that businesses would never choose to do, government created the credit crisis that is convulsing Wall Street. But politicians never admit their errors, so now they are whitewashing the facts and using Wall Street's unease as an excuse to expand their power and restrict free enterprise. Ronald Reagan's famous quip is just as true today as it was years ago: "Government is not the resolution to our problem; government is the problem"