Having Sachs in the Oval Office

The buzz in Washington these days is still all about the arrival of Scott Brown and how the Republicans finally have enough votes to join the Healthcare debate.  Meanwhile, a scandal is continuing to brew unnoticed.  It turns out this President is engaged in the same unethical relationships as both his predecessors.  And as I predicted, Tim Geithner may be taking the fall for it.

The White House relationship with Goldman Sachs first became news when Rahm Emanuel, now Obama’s chief of staff, was working for Bill Clinton’s campaign.  Actually, technically Rahm worked for Goldman Sachs and volunteered for Clinton’s campaign.  Goldman Sachs gave as much as they were allowed, had their employees give as much as allowed, and then paid the salaries of Clinton’s campaign staffers so that Clinton wouldn’t have to.  At the time, they said they were hiring Clinton staffers for networking purposes.  This loophole got the Clinton campaign around the campaign finance laws that Obama indignantly called out the Supreme Court for repealing.

The payoff came when Clinton bailed out Mexico and other countries through the IMF after Goldman Sachs had invested heavily in government bonds from those countries and stood to lose it all.  This was just the first time the Government bailed out Goldman Sachs by bailing out what they had invested in.

The Bush administration destroyed it’s reputation as a free market, capitalist administration when Goldman Sachs alumnus Henry Paulson was handed sole control and responsibility of the TARP bailout process.  Half of the left portrayed Bush as an imbecile, the rest saw him as some sort of evil genius.  In this instance it actually was one or the other.  But before those on the left cheer, it was the Pelosi/Reid congress who wrote Paulson’s financial regency into the TARP bill.

Several banks took large amounts of TARP funds.  Goldman Sachs themselves took $10 billion, but many banks were told to take it to avoid creating a stigma on certain banks as worse off than others.  Although the plan didn’t work and AIG, Citigroup, and a handful of failed banks have been destroyed in public opinion, Goldman Sachs managed to stay out of sight through the process.  Although Goldman Sachs has set aside $11 billion for bonuses this year, AIG is the name that comes to mind when Americans think of evil banks who stole our money and spent it on outrageous bonuses.  In fact, it is ironic that one of the greatest mouthpieces for the liberal movement, Michael Moore, shows up in front of Goldman Sachs asking for the American people’s money back.  Moore’s own movie was funded by Goldman Sachs.

Speaking of AIG, they are now under investigation for what they did with some of the billions of dollars in taxpayer TARP funds they received.  What they did was use the money to pay off some of their best investing partners who were going to lose it all.  Guess who one of those major investing partners would be.  In fact, Goldman Sachs was invited to the table when the government decided what to do with AIG.

Up next on Obama’s agenda is far reaching regulations to discourage banks from every doing anything that might make them a profit in the future.  Obama is going to ride in on a white horse and make it so that banks will lend freely and with no risk.  I have no idea how, but then again he has the best in the business like Tim Geithner.  And Geithner is getting the best advice from his chief of staff, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but as unemployment remains above 10% and the economy prepares to begin stage two of it’s double-dip, Goldman Sachs is about to have it’s most profitable year in the company’s history.  If you are keeping score, you might think something was up.

A Fool And Your Money

Officially, US taxpayers have bailed out Citigroup multiple times with $45 billion in TARP loans.  Unofficially, the number is much higher.  Tim Geithner, who was supposed to be so perfect for the job that we could overlook his tax evasion, is to blame for most of the Citigroup mismanagement according to Henry Blodget writing for Tech Ticker.

When Citigroup was first bailed out, the TARP funds were considered a loan.  When it appeared that Citigroup might fail anyway, but was regarded as too big to fail, we converted a portion of the TARP bailout into preferred stock.  Despite being 100% unconstitutional, this did give the unwilling taxpaying public the opportunity to earn dividends and have a controlling stake in Citigroup.  Eventually Citigroup would pay us back by buying back the preferred stock, and the unwilling taxpaying public would hopefully make enough money to pay interest on our loans from China.

Instead, any chance for profit was ruled out when Geithner’s Treasury Department granted Citigroup a private IRS ruling that will reduce their taxes by $38 billion dollars.  This is money we will never see again.  Democrats spent a great deal of time talking about Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.  Will any of them comment about this huge tax cut for this corporation?

Geithner also decided to convert our preferred shares into common stock.  As Blodget points out, not only did we lose our ownership leverage, but Geithner converted our shares at $3.25 when the stock was only worth $1.60.  To put that in layman’s terms, Geithner took the government’s 34% ownership in Citigroup valued at $25 billion and converted it into a 34% ownership in Citigroup valued at $12 billion.   Happy birthday Citigroup.  For anyone keeping track, that’s $45 billion in TARP loans, $51 billion in free gifts from US tax payers gift-wrapped and hand delivered by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.  I hate to harp on the issue, but we have a Constitution specifically to prevent this type of theft from happening.

It gets better.  Citigroup then decided to pay back the portion of TARP that we hadn’t traded for now de-valued stock.  You can’t blame Citigroup for wanting to get out from under the watch of the Pay Czar and the illegal regulations the Obama administration added to TARP after the fact.  Nothing has changed at Citigroup, so despite all the money we have given to them they don’t have $20 billion to pay the government back.  They decided to raise it by printing and selling additional common stock.  Again, in layman’s terms, the government’s 34% ownership stake in Citigroup is now only a 26% ownership stake.

With the value of a share of Citigroup common stock selling for only slightly less than a Big Mac already, I wouldn’t be too excited about the government getting our money back.  After all, considering Citigroup is basically in the same shape it was before we gave them nearly $100 billion in taxpayer funded aid, would you be jumping to buy when the government sells their 26%?

Remember all that talk during the campaign about Wall Street and Main Street?  Check the score.

Secretaries Who Rule The Country

I don’t think anyone would have difficulty conceding that a President with only a couple years of national political experience and a record of voting “present” should surround himself with strong and active advisers who can help him run the country.  But at what point does advising turn into an outright takeover of unelected secretaries? This dangerous precedent set by the TARP legislation under the Bush administration is now becoming the norm.

When the economy neared a terrible collapse, or at least a short-term and painful correction, conservative capitalist President George W. Bush decided to give up both conservatism and capitalism and set aside a several hundred billion dollar slush fund of our tax dollars to bail out major bank CEOs so that they would continue to lend to companies who couldn’t afford to pay them back.  Subsequently, the Democrat party reversed years of their own party’s policy by attacking banks for being greedy and making loans to people who couldn’t pay them back.  What they used to call community reinvestment had become white man’s greed running a world in need. This of course led to the bi-partisan TARP legislation.

Who did congress and our President decide should handle ALL of the TARP funds and decision making?  The Secretary of the Treasury.  Of course, that was back when the Secretary of the Treasury wasn’t an incompetent tax cheat; he was merely incompetent.  After Obama was elected, Tim Geithner became the man in charge of unrestrained government waste.  Having perhaps financed a car at one point, Geithner mistook GM and Chrysler for banks and proceeded to funnel billions in bank bailout tax dollars to them.  Of course, when this didn’t work, he sold the companies at a discount to the overseas competitors of the last standing American auto giant and gave the proceeds to the union bosses who put his boss in power.

With the new health bill, we will see this story replayed with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  Obamacare will see the HHS Secretary become responsible for regulating the insurance industry (a task formerly and constitutionally delegated to the states), determining where government will fund and provide abortions, cutting or expanding medicare and medicaid without congressional authorization or oversight, determining how much private insurance companies can charge for premiums, and deciding how your care should be rationed.  Devon Herrick, a health care expert at the National Center for Policy Analysis, says that Obamacare “…lists 1,697 times where the Secretary of Health and Humans Services is given the authority to create, determine or define things in the bill,”

I don’t remember Kathleen Sebelius or Tim Geithner being on the ballot.  In fact, Sebelius was not even Obama’s first choice.  It just so happens that Tom Daschle had managed to reach the golden amount of tax fraud to disqualify himself from the position.  We will never know how close Geithner came to that magic number.

The idea of tax cheat Tim Geithner running the bailouts and pork stimulus has already become a frightening reality.  The idea of pro-abortion, liberal Kathleen Sebelius running your health insurance and doctor’s office is on the doorstep.

Next on the horizon?  Cap and Trade: the legislation that will turn our nation’s energy sector over to Energy Secretary and Global Warming devotee, Dr. Steven Chu.  He already is already a member of the Nobel Prize club for his work on recently debunked Global Warming “science”.  On the bright side, at least we haven’t seen Press Secretary Robert Gibbs making appearances on the Letterman show or catching footballs in United Way commercials.  Nice to know Obama is doing something to earn his paycheck.

Culture of Plausible Deniability

Last night between 8:00pm and 8:45pm the most honest person on your television set may have been Congressman Joe Wilson.  It certainly wasn’t President Obama. In town hall fashion, Wilson was the house member who forsook normal government civility and dared to call Obama a liar.  Ironically, this was only shortly after the President called half of the country liars for imagining that government healthcare might have to ration limited resources.  When Obama said that they were going to call out people who give misinformation about his healthcare plan, was he exempting himself from this threat?

Obama said that his healthcare plan wouldn’t increase the deficit.  In order to cut Medicare costs by $500 billion without shorting doctors, they already plan on increasing Medicare funding by $245 billion in deficit spending.  Since it’s going to happen anyway, Obama decided not to count that.  That was the obvious falsehood.  The not-so-obvious falsehood is that Obama is using the most optimistic numbers his DC accountants can provide and ignoring outside independent sources.

Obama said his plan will not use federal dollars to fund abortion.  If only it were true.  Let me explain the shell game.  Obama says no federal dollars will be used for abortion.  Obama says no federal dollars will be used to fund the public option, because it will be self-sufficient on the premiums it receives.  This allows Obama to cover abortion on demand with the public option while saying that no federal funds are used for abortion.  It’s not paid for with federal funds, it’s paid for with premiums paid by the customers. Obama then says that they will provide federal dollars to those who cannot afford health insurance and subsidize them so that they can pay the premiums.  In the end, the federal government gives dollars to Americans, who then use those dollars to buy into the public option that will cover abortion. But in Obama’s mind he can plausibly deny that he is using federal dollars to pay for abortion.

If you doubt me, look at what has happened every time an amendment has been offered that prohibits the public option from providing abortion.  Look at what will continue to happen every time this amendment is offered.  And then look at the Capps amendment that specifically guarantees that the public option will cover abortion on demand.

Obama said his health plan won’t cover illegal aliens.  Here is where the vilified Joe Wilson sounded more like a member of the British House of Commons than a member of the US House of Representatives.  When he spouted “You lie!” towards the President, I paused in a moment of shock because I couldn’t tell if those words were coming from the TV or directly from my own mouth.  I figured it out when Pelosi shot daggers from her eyes towards the right of my screen and not directly at me.

When Republican Dean Heller from Nevada offered an amendment to HR 3200 requiring verification of citizenship status before someone could obtain benefits from the Democrat health plan (just like they do for any other government assistance), it was defeated on party lines.  Now why is that?  Obama says his plan won’t cover illegal aliens, but they refuse to do what is necessary to ensure that it doesn’t.  Do you see what is going on here?

It is a pattern that is becoming more and more recognizable.

During the campaign, the biggest names surrounding Obama could all be found in one place: under the campaign bus.  Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, his own grandmother, and others suddenly were mere acquaintances.  When Obama was elected he hired a string of people who didn’t know they owed back taxes, including new head of the IRS Tim Geithner.  In fact, IRS chief Tim Geithner claimed he made an honest mistake on his tax return.

Just recently, Van Jones resigned after discovering that signing the petition to investigate George Bush for causing 9/11 meant that he thought we should investigate George Bush for causing 9/11.  But Obama remains unscathed by these blunders.  As easily as Van Jones claimed he never agreed with his younger self, Obama can claim that he has no idea about his friends’ and employees’ past.  In the same fashion, he has been able to successfully tie HR 3200 to Nancy Pelosi and act as though his plan is different.  I will believe it when I see it.

Of course, this has become the modus operandi of the Left.  At the same time Pelosi was getting the class of 2006 elected on claims of a Republican culture of corruption, William Jefferson of Louisiana was plausibly denying that he knew about the hundred grand of bribe money in his freezer, Harry Reid was plausibly denying culpability for government improvements near land he had just purchased, Charlie Rangel was plausibly denying that he knew anything about his illegal rental tax shelters, and the combination of Frank and Dodd were plausibly denying that the government had screwed up with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and something needed to be done about it.

Now we have lost 2.5 million jobs since the stimulus was enacted, but  Obama claims he has created or saved over a million jobs.  Obama again last night blamed is $1.58 trillion deficit on the last 8 years.  ACORN has turned in their own members from Florida for voter fraud, claiming that this proves they are an honest organization.  Obama got alot of mileage out of bringing up the Iraq and Afghanistan war last night.  Interestingly, some of the senators who applauded the loudest were Democrats who voted for the wars before they voted against them.

From his staff picks to his policy, Obama has made something completely clear.  The buck stops somewhere before it reaches his desk.  He has surrounded himself with socialists and self-declared communists who have radical ideas about healthcare, but he himself makes speeches to children as though he were a conservative capitalist.  He talks about limited government, personal responsibility, and vast right wing mythology, but eventually America will become weary of this culture of plausible deniability.

Leave the Czars to the Russians

I have put in my time.  I have researched Article II of the Constitution and the amendments.  I never found the word Czar, nor did I find constitutional justification for such a position.   But Obama has as many as 32 Czars.  He has a TARP Czar, an Auto Recovery Czar, an Afghanistan Czar, a Terrorism Czar (I guess we can use that word if it’s part of a job description), a Car Czar (completely different from the Auto Recovery Czar), a California Water Czar, and rumor has it that as Obama continues his extended vacation over Labor Day weekend that he is going to appoint a Presidential Fill-In Czar.

It’s not just Republicans who disapprove of the President delegating his duties, constitutional and unconstitutional, to these Czars.  Some Democrats, like Senator Byrd, are unhappy that they don’t have a say in approving these Czars.  Of course, I suspect that their issue is more one of the President giving power to the Czars that should belong to Congress, and not so much the constitutionality aspect.

Of course, what is disconcerting is the power given to these individuals in circumvention of the Constitution.  Even Liberal Republican Susan Collins can see the danger of what she called a lack of transparency and accountibility associated with Czars.  The American Thinker calls the Czars commissars, named after the political agents appointed by Communist regimes to implement the dictators policies apart from the normal governmental process.  Is that an invalid assessment?  Rep. Kingston from Georgia calls Obama’s Czar structure a “parallel government”.

What about the idea of removing authority and responsibility from our government and putting it in the hands of these people?  Look at what happened when Bush passed the first TARP bailout that put the authority and responsibility for fixing the economy directly and solely in the hands of the Treasury Secretary Paulson.  Now those powers and responsibilities are solely in the hands of Tim Geithner the tax cheat.  How’s that economy going, America?  And the Treasury Secretary has to be approved by Congress, unlike most of Obama’s Czars.

Is this truly something to fear?  Well, these titles give me pause: Faith Based Czar, Urban Affairs Czar, Information Czar, Pay Czar, Domestic Violence Czar, Technology Czar…wait, back up.  Faith Based Czar??  Nevermind that the government specifically has no jurisdiction over half the things Obama has Czars for according to the 9th and 10th amendments to the Constitution. Obama is strictly prohibited by the 1st amendment from having jurisdiction over faith.

Here are some other historical titles that should give you pause: Minister of Food, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Forestry, Minister of Science and Education, Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs (Faith Based Czar?), Minister of Aviation, Minister of Economics, Minister of War, oh yeah, and Minister of Propaganda.  I will let you draw your own conclusions.

Before you write me off as an alarmist, let’s examine exactly who Obama is putting in these positions of unaccountable authority.

Van Jones: Of all the environmentalists in the country, Obama chose a civil rights activist, 9/11 conspiracy theorist in Van Jones to be his “Green Jobs” Czar.  Van Jones says he never agreed with the 9/11 conspiracy petition that he signed in 2004, calling for an investigation into whether Bush was responsible for murdering more than 3,000 civilians through the 9/11 attacks.  Great, so our Green Jobs Czar is either a liar or doesn’t read stuff before he signs it.  Well, ok, so that’s par for the course in Washington.

What I find interesting is how little experience Jones actually has as an environmentalist.  When you hire a die-hard affirmative action proponent with almost no environmental experience as your Green Jobs Czar, what do you think the intended result is?  Jones has accused “white polluters” of polluting black neighborhoods.  So much for reconciliation and an end to racism in this country.  And of course, Jones has strong ties to Communism.  You would think after the Jeremiah Wright incident, Obama might know what type of people to avoid in political circles.  I guess that’s what you get for not paying attention in church.

Cass Sunstein: The Regulation Czar has advocated for a ban on hunting in the US and an opt out policy on organ donation.  Basically this means that unless you specifically say otherwise, the government can use your organs when you die.

John Holdren: Obama’s Science Czar is another character with a regretful past when it comes to ideology.  Holdren at one point advocated forced abortions and sterilization.   Of course, that isn’t a new concept either.  Holdren, like Jones, released a statement saying that he had never supported his ideology.  Fundamentally disagreeing with oneself seems to be a requirement for a position in Obama’s government.

Carol Browner: The Energy and Environment Czar Carol Browner is a well known socialist.  Of course, she is well known only because of a great deal of research done.  After Obama suggested her, records of her ties to socialist groups began disappearing off the web.  But for Browner, this is nothing new.  In 2003 a Federal Judge held the EPA in contempt for destroying records and shredding documents during the Clinton administration.  Browner’s were among those.

Vivek Kundra, Obama’s Information Czar, has had FBI troubles and Obama’s first shot at Performance Czar had to withdraw due to tax troubles.  Apparently Nancy Killefer had enough of  back taxes to keep her from getting hired as a Czar but not enough to become the next head of the IRS.

You can call me an alarmist if you want to.  I prefer to use the term vigilent.  If Congress can’t approve Czars, they can’t  impeach them either.

The Top 10 Ways To Destroy An Economy

Originally Posted January 27, 2009

Every time there is an economic downturn, we have some wonderful lessons to learn to help us avoid the same mistakes the next time. Well, from this and other downturns, I would like to highlight some of the greatest pitfalls when it comes to turning around an economy. So here it is, the top 10 ways to destroy an economy:

1. Take money away from employers. Employers work hard to produce goods and services that people want and need. In the process, they hire people and provide employment. They are the backbone of our economy. As such, they also employ and pay themselves and receive a premium for their ideas and organization that allows them to employ others. This makes them a prime target for class warfare. But when you take money away from a free and independent employer you can guarantee that they will lay off other workers before they lay off or give a pay cut to themselves.

2. Print money and borrow money so that you can spend 125% of what you take in. Not only does this increase the debt burden on our nation, that every subsequent generation has proven will never actually be paid back, but it increases the cost of goods through an oversupply of money.

3. Take all the money from items one and two and spend them on things that don’t produce economic growth. Prime examples would be $50 million for the arts, $87 billion for “family planning”, $4 billion for neighborhood organizers (wonder who thought of that one). Other prime examples would be $750 billion for businesses that cannot compete and do not offer goods and services that people actually want.

4. Speaking of family planning, reduce the size of your young population. Everybody knows how good an economy runs when the majority of the individuals are no longer capable of producing economic goods and services. It gets even better when their income stream is a ponzi scheme that only survives when there is a greater number of young workers contributing to the system.

Or How about this, take the money from numbers one and two and send it overseas to fund foreign abortions. That way we lose the money and potential future export trade. It’s ok, as long as the printing presses are operational we can spare the cash.

Nancy Pelosi, when advocating cutting the number of babies born in America (hello China), said this: “No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.”. Think of this as an economic spanking for our badly performing country.

5. Make exploration and procurement of domestic energy illegal anywhere where there are large sources of domestic energy. This way we have to buy our energy from other countries at whatever prices they choose to charge us. Consider it a sort of deregulation of the industry. There isn’t a single thing we can do to OPEC.

6. Speaking of trade, cancel and prohibit beneficial free trade agreements with countries who we already trade with but do not have a beneficial arrangement. Columbia comes to mind. Make sure you do it for political reasons to look good in an election. It’s all about how you present it.

7. Capitalize banks by taking printed inflationary money and lending it to them at two points higher than they can lend it to consumers. Call it a bailout.

8. Create stricter and more costly regulation on already failing industries. For example, if it costs Ford $2,000 more per car than their foreign competitors because they already have to pay union wages and retirement, make it $2,000 more so that they will get a couple extra miles per gallon too.

9. Hand out stimulus checks from the money you don’t have in items one and two. Make them one time payments to lower/middle class income workers. That way they can not invest them, spike the economy through consumer spending for a month, and then return to normal spending levels while leaving lingering inflation.

and finally 10. Hire a known tax cheat who willfully committed fraud four years in a row on his tax returns as the chief of revenue collection for the government.

It’s a no brainer. Literally.