...we were all pro-communist

When I was a rich kid, we were all pro-communist

By David Lawrence


When I was a rich kid living in Great Neck, NY, I remember standing on the lawn of my girlfriend's house and listening to her parents talk about how my girlfriend's grandfather fought for the communists in Spain.  They were proud of him.  While the father puffed his pipe on the lawn of their estate, they pontificated on their sympathy for poor people and their desire to have a classless society.

They actually didn't know any poor people except the maid and the gardeners.  They feigned sympathy for the poor because it made them feel more generous.  Gramps thought that by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, he was bettering society.  He gave about ten percent of his income to charities and acted like he was donating ninety percent and had switched living establishments with the poor.  He didn't know that communists wreck the fabric of ambition and destroy Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, substituting it for survival of the weakest, which makes society feeble and non-productive. 

My dad was sympathetic to socialism, and due to his influence, I semi-agreed with my girlfriend's family.  I believed in communism and what would eventually become Obama's simplistic fair share.  I thought that Senator Joe McCarthy was a beast because he was tough on communists and made it difficult for some spoiled screenwriters to get jobs after betraying our country.  Hollywood cries; people in communist countries die.  I didn't realize that Senator Joe was defending the American way and supporting Emerson's self-reliance rather than the nanny state.

In my sixties I played tennis with Ben Gitlow, the son of the original president of the American Communist Party.  Even he had turned against the party.  The party was not kind.  It hurt those it pretended to help.  Only inexperienced fools who knew nothing about government remained loyal to the Communist Party. People like Ben and his dad, who had actually met with Stalin, knew that communism wrecked the economy and stole one's life force, one's soul. 

Communists back then pretended, like Obama today, to defend the middle class and spitefully attack the rich.  But communism actually decimated the middle class and created a new power-class out of the communist faithful.  It is a party built on jealousy.  The communists, like the Occupy Wall Street crowd, are so jealous of the rich that they are willing to destroy the business structure of Wall Street without leaving themselves a viable path to success.  Imagine those unemployed rich kids and rapists setting up a new business model on Wall Street.  Failure, thy name is inexperience and youth. 

Jews, of which I am one, are particularly prominent among American communists.  Maybe it's because they feel that communism is the antidote to fascism.  They don't care that communism killed five times as many people as fascism.  Nazis were small potatoes compared to communists.

Communist Jews follow communism's founder, anti-Semite Karl Marx.  They forget that Jews were never really popular in communist countries.  It was ironic to see communists rationing their food in the USSR while rich limousine liberals in New York insulted capitalism as they pretended to be men of the people.

How stupid that many communists are academics.  You'd think that they'd be smarter than that, but they can't get out of the way of their own envy and hatred of successful people.

What's ironic is that Nazism bears a terrible reputation, whereas communism gets a pass.  Communism hides behind the lie that it is trying to give everyone a fair shake and improve life on earth.  Liberals are derivative of communism and also think of themselves as great healers, when in reality they are wreckers of society and destroyers of the competitive urge of capitalism.

Both Nazism and communism hate the bourgeois and bury themselves beneath a blanket of totalitarianism.  Both are government-heavy and restrict individual freedoms.  Nazism, communism, socialism, and liberalism are imperialistic and create an ideological theocracy on Earth.  It's like deductive logic -- everything from the top, no inductive pragmatism.  It's time we woke up and realized that communism is as bad as Nazism, that Obama's liberal policies are the death knell of society.

In the seventies, my liberal parents visited Russia and discovered long lines for bread and bedbugs in their supposedly four-star hotel.  In fact, they could get water only every second day and had to brush their teeth with Coca-Cola or lemonade.  Yet all the liberals back in America looked up to the USSR.  They believed that communism was nice to the masses who were really starving in the streets.  Yet I don't remember any New Yorkers brushing their teeth with soda.

Communists have done more ill than fascists.  Yet the liberals still pat them on the back.  They make anti-Nazi movies like Inglorious Basterds.  They make pro-communist movies like Warren Beatty's Reds.  They make Nazis out to be monsters and communists into loving people who give out bread to the poor. 

Back in the real world, Che Guevara, America's rock star, was shooting people in the back of the head.  And Fidel Castro has taken a thriving economy and buried it in his arrogant demand for power. 

The Nazis starved many Jews to death.  Chairman Mao starved more of his own people.

Communism is fascism's sister.  It's time that they were recognized as twins and that the liberals stopped seeing communism through rose-colored glasses.  Democrats remind me of the Beatles' Strawberry Fields, where "Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout."

What they don't realize is that when you don't "get hungabout" the failures of communism, you end up hanging from a tree of your own neglect, dying in a noose of naïve optimism and the sophomoric fair-sharing of an unworkable society.

Million American Jobs Project

http://youtu.be/4FrGxO2Fn_M

How Republics Die

The ‘Living’ Law

 

Congress is handing its indispensable constitutional role to the executive branch.
 

By  Charles C. W. Cooke 

 

In his dazzling revolutionary polemic, Common Sense, Thomas Paine explained in no uncertain terms that

in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

John Adams put this a little more pithily a few years later, distilling into the new constitution of Massachusetts an ancient English value: This state, Adams wrote, would be “a government of laws and not of men.”
Adams’s axiom has become American scripture; an impulsively recalled maxim of liberty to which all men who feel threatened by government power return at will. Yet recent trends call into question whether the two things remain mutually exclusive. In Common Sense, Paine sets the king and the law as being diametrically opposed. But what if, instead of holding him back, the law is happy to give the king carte blanche? And what if a Congress that we instinctively believe to be jealous of its territory is in fact content to cede it to the executive branch, thereby producing not traditional laws but enabling acts?
It is a small jump from regarding the Constitution as “living” — as swathes of the will-to-power Left unashamedly do — to regarding legislation as “living,” too. This is a jump that many appear to have made. One of the more insidious developments of this presidential era has been the replacement of prescriptive, detailed, and fixed domestic law with bloated and open-ended legislation that is punctuated ad nauseam with instances of “the secretary shall.” As my colleague Andrew Stiles has noticed, the Senate’s desired immigration bill fits this new model of “living law” perfectly. He writes:

The 844-page bill contains 129 instances of what the DHS secretary “shall” do to implement its myriad provisions, 102 mentions of what she “may” do, and 35 cases in which implementation will be based on what the secretary “determines.” On five occasions, the bill affirms the DHS secretary’s “unreviewable discretion” to waive or alter certain provisions as she sees fit.

This should come as no great surprise to anyone. Obamacare, which makes the Senate’s immigration bill look like an exercise in legislative restraint, contains over 2,500 references to the secretary’s discretion, 700 cases in which the secretary “shall,” 200 instances in which the secretary “may,” and 139 cases in which the secretary “determines.” Its twin, Dodd-Frank, which effectively allows an unelected Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police the personal-finance sector, is little different, aggregating the power of the three branches into one, stripping Congress of its traditional capacity to set an agency’s budget and severely limiting the courts’ opportunity to review the CFPB’s legal interpretations. This is law, Jim — but not as we know it.
To ask for a concise explanation of what these new sorts of laws do would be futile, because the only meaningful answer is that they give the president the scope to run certain parts of the economy the way he wants. And what he wants is what Woodrow Wilson wanted in The Study of Administration: a means by which to “open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration” that is filled with the “hundreds who are wise” and that thwarts the “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” Government of the expert, by the powerful, and for the unworthy, in other words.
This, it should not need saying, stands in diametric opposition to the underlying principle — the “all-important English trait,” Orwell called it — that made the Anglosphere exceptional in the first place: that the law is regarded as “something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.” “The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root,” Orwell claimed of his native England. It has not quite taken root in America, either. But even here, the law, which should be firmly and beautifully dead, is in danger of taking on a life of its own. If it is allowed to do so, Americans will invite in caprice, the half-brother of whim, which, as Christopher Hitchens astutely observed, is the “essence of tyranny.”
Students of history will know that Americans have flirted with such expansive measures before, with consequences that were catastrophic for good and limited government. In the modern era, the worst such example is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964), which, by virtue of its wildly ambiguous language and a remarkable and fail-safe provision that allowed the president to “take all necessary measures” in Southeast Asia, effectively gave President Lyndon Johnson license to launch and escalate the Vietnam War without the need for Congress’s warrant. The eventual outcry, joined with general disillusionment with the imperial presidency, led not only to repeal of the resolution itself but also to the War Powers Act (1973), which, for some time at least, went some way toward restoring congressional constraints on the executive branch. Do we need a Domestic Powers Act to complement it?
According to all the president’s men, the answer is no. Instead, they insist, we should be happy about our fickle new arrangement. “If you look at the polling” on Obamacare, David Axelrod explained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, “the majority of the people say let’s move forward and fix it along the way — and that’s exactly what the president will do.” This, to say the least, is a rather novel theory of the American political system. Whether the “majority of the people say let’s move forward” on a particular project or not is rarely the salient question. The United States is a republic. It is not a monarchy, it is not a majoritarian democracy, and it is certainly not a direct democracy. Its highest value, in fact, is “nomocratic” — that is to say, that the rule of law and the overarching constitutional system trumps pretty much everything else.
In that they carry Congress’s blessing, our living laws are distinct from rule without Congress, a rule for which Obama is becoming increasingly famous. Nevertheless, both living legislation and executive rule rely for sustenance on the same appeals to urgency and necessity that our 44th president has perfected. Michael Oakeshott shrewdly observed in On History that the nomocrats will always be at a disadvantage because, while the rule of law “remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised,” it nevertheless “bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault.” Suffice to say: That the rule of law can distribute no loaves or fishes, in an age in which distributing loaves and fishes is regarded as the highest of all government functions, is a desperate problem for it.
Moved as we now are by our fetishization of democracy, claims of tyranny in America tend to be curtailed by the sight of elections. It is the German Enabling Act of 1933 that we mostly fear — a dramatic measure that would allow a man to rule in perpetuity as a king. But we overlook the real danger posed by other, duly passed, acts of Congress. America has never worked on the basis that the executive branch may do as it wishes during its four-year term with the understanding that, if the people don’t like it, they may remove the president when his time is up. Even presidents who win virtually every state in the union are required to follow the law, and they are required to remain in their designated sphere, too. Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place for our despotism?
In Federalist 47, Madison forthrightly characterized as “tyranny” the investment of great power in one branch of government. In Federalist 48, he built on this idea, warning that “powers properly belonging to one of the departments ought not to be directly and completely administered by either of the other departments.” America’s constitution operates on the presumption that the branches of government will inevitably compete with one another for influence. Thus do “parchment barriers” prevent the encroachment of one branch over another, and the deleterious “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands.”
But for the essential balance of power to be upset, one needs neither a tyrant nor a coup; one needs only a compliant or underconfident branch of government. This we have seen since Obama’s inauguration. In the past four years, Congress has happily handed over to the executive branch regulation of the environment, of the financial sector, and of the health-care market. It is currently considering doing the same thing with immigration.
George Washington’s parting warning about the “necessity of reciprocal checks of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories and constituting each the guardian . . . against invasions by the others” has never looked more prescient. The legislature, which has for so long now deferred to the president, must insist that, if Americans are to be governed by law, that law must be precise, and it must be dead. Down the “living law” road lies caprice — and caprice, remember, leads to tyranny.
— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.

Barack the Lawgiver

Obama sees the Constitution’s separation of powers as a quaint anachronism.

By  Charles Krauthammer 

 

As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws.
Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement, which is ratified by Congress and signed by the president.
That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence — e.g., about the amount of dope involved.
In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”
But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.
Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off.
Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare: the employer mandate.
Which followed hundreds of Obamacare waivers granted by Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions, and other well-lobbied, very special interests.
Nor is this kind of rule-by-decree restricted to health care. In 2012, the immigration service was ordered to cease proceedings against young illegal immigrants brought here as children. Congress had refused to pass such a law (the DREAM Act) just 18 months earlier. Obama himself had repeatedly said that the Constitution forbade him from enacting it without Congress. But with the fast approach of an election that could hinge on the Hispanic vote, Obama did exactly that. Unilaterally.
The point is not what you think about the merits of the DREAM Act. Or of mandatory drug sentences. Or of subsidizing health-care premiums for $175,000-a-year members of Congress. Or even whether you think governors should be allowed to weaken the work requirements for welfare recipients — an authority the administration granted last year in clear violation of section 407 of the landmark Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996.
The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend, and/or amend the law at will. Presidents are arguably permitted to refuse to enforce laws they consider unconstitutional (the basis for so many of George W. Bush’s so-called signing statements). But presidents are forbidden from doing so for reason of mere policy — the reason for every Obama violation listed above.
Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And, most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what’s left of the law?
What’s the point of the whole legislative process — of crafting various provisions through give-and-take negotiation — if you cannot rely on the fixity of the final product, on the assurance that the provisions bargained for by both sides will be carried out?
Consider immigration reform. The essence of any deal would be legalization in return for strict border enforcement. If some such legislative compromise is struck, what confidence can anyone have in it — if the president can unilaterally alter what he signs?
Yet this president is not only untroubled by what he’s doing, but open and rather proud. As he tells cheering crowds on his never-ending campaign-style tours: I am going to do X — and I’m not going to wait for Congress.
That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana-republic stuff. In this country, the president is required to win the consent of Congress first.
At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. His email address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com. © 2013 The Washington Post Writers Group.

THIS ONE DOES AND NOBODY DOES A GD THING ABOUT IT...
TUSC

To Hell with Them

The ‘To Hell with Them’ Doctrine

The attitude that there’s little the U.S. can do for the Muslim world is back.
 

By  Jonah Goldberg 

Maybe everyone is misreading America’s views on foreign policy?
Among Republicans, there’s a big argument between the so-called isolationist wing of the party and the ostensibly interventionist wing. On the left, there’s a similar debate (though liberals are never described as isolationists no matter how isolationist they might be). Among Democrats, the dividing lines are murkier if for no other reason than the Democratic party takes its lead from President Obama, and his own views are murky, to put it charitably.
The biggest boon to the anti-interventionists is the simple political reality that Americans just don’t want to intervene in Syria. They also want to get out of Afghanistan. They don’t seem to care much that Iraq is slowly sliding back into chaos. The footage out of Egypt may be horrific, but I would be surprised by any groundswell of sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some commentators paint all of this as part of a general isolationist or inward-looking attitude on the part of the American people. And Lord knows that after so much American blood and treasure has been spilt since 9/11, nearly everyone is war-weary.
But there’s a simpler reason for American reluctance to intervene in the Middle East that plays a much bigger role in people’s attitudes about foreign policy. It can be summed up with the words “to hell with them.”
I borrow the phrase from my National Review colleague Rich Lowry. In 2006, as even the rosiest scenarios in Iraq turned gray, Lowry wrote an essay on how the Bush administration was losing the support of the “to hell with them” hawks. These were, in Lowry’s words, “conservatives who are comfortable using force abroad, but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable, or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem.”
Recall that this was the time when the Palestinians held an election in Gaza and proceeded to elect a repugnant terror organization, Hamas, as their dictators. President Bush routinely responded to every fresh atrocity by insisting “Islam means peace” until it became a punch line.
Over the preceding two decades, the U.S. sent troops into harm’s way five times to liberate Muslim people — in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq — and yet America’s reputation generally worsened. And whenever Muslim fanatics launched horrific and brutal terrorist attacks — slaughtering, mostly, fellow Muslims — the supposedly vast reservoirs of moderate Muslims rarely voiced much outrage. Meanwhile, our supposed partners in Afghanistan and Iraq, never mind our allies in Egypt and elsewhere, didn’t express much interest in democracy that extended beyond saying the right words to keep the river of U.S. tax dollars flowing.
The understandable — if not necessarily laudable — response from many pro-defense conservatives was, “To hell with them.” They don’t want our help and, besides, we can’t help them when we try. If they attack us, we will attack back, but beyond that, they’re on their own.
That attitude is back with a vengeance, and not just among self-described hawks. There’s even a version of that attitude among doves. Though they probably wouldn’t say, “To hell with them,” they share a similar attitude that there’s little the U.S. can do for the Arab and Muslim world. Indeed, this exasperation is something of a boon for segments of the anti-American Left, who’ve always seen U.S. power as a force for ill in the world. President Obama offered the Muslim world a grandiose do-over, promising to be, in effect, an anti-Bush president. He’s now less popular among Arabs and Muslims than Bush was in 2008.
The “to hell with them” attitude is no doubt prevalent among Americans who dislike Muslims, but having animus in one’s heart is not a prerequisite for exhaustion and exasperation with large swaths of the Middle East. All you need to do is read the headlines coming out of the Middle East and feel like, “I’ve seen this movie before.” And thanks to fracking and other technological boons, the fact that we’re becoming less and less reliant on Middle Eastern oil only serves to undermine arguments that we need regional stability at any cost.
You can’t prove a negative, but my hunch is that support for Israel or South Korea, never mind our NATO allies, remains quite strong. If real friends were threatened, the American people would support coming to their aid. It’s just that there’s a growing — or, in many cases, deepening — sense that we don’t have real friends in the Muslim world.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

EXACTLY...
TUSC

Word Changes to Cover Incompetence

Obama’s Lexicological War

 

Behind euphemisms, the administration hides its incoherent policy on the war on terror.
 

By  Charles Krauthammer 

 

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of country.
Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need. In Janet Napolitano’s famous formulation, terror attacks are now “man-caused disasters.” And the “Global War on Terror” is no more. It’s now an “overseas contingency operation.”
Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. But the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of “workplace violence.”
The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others are killed in an al-Qaeda-affiliated terror attack — and for days it is waved off as nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration gone bad. After all, famously declared Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make?
Well, it makes a difference, first, because truth is a virtue.
Second, because if you keep lying to the American people, they may seriously question whether anything you say — for example, about the benign nature of NSA surveillance — is not another self-serving lie.
And third, because leading a country through yet another long twilight struggle requires not just honesty but clarity. This is a president who to this day cannot bring himself to identify the enemy as radical Islam. Just Tuesday night, explaining the U.S.-embassy closures across the Muslim world, he cited the threat from “violent extremism.”
The word “extremism” is meaningless. People don’t devote themselves to being extreme. Extremism has no content. The extreme of what? In this war, an extreme devotion to the supremacy of a radically fundamentalist vision of Islam and to its murderous quest for dominion over all others.
But for President Obama, the word “Islamist” may not be uttered. Language must be devised to disguise the unpleasantness.
Result? The world’s first lexicological war. Parry and thrust with linguistic tricks, deliberate misnomers, and ever more transparent euphemisms. Next: armor-piercing onomatopoeias and amphibious synecdoches.
This would all be comical and merely peculiar if it didn’t reflect a larger, more troubling reality: The confusion of language is a direct result of a confusion of policy — which is served by constant obfuscation.
Obama doesn’t like this terror war. He particularly dislikes its unfortunate religious coloration, which is why “Islamist” is banished from his lexicon. But soothing words, soothing speeches in various Muslim capitals, soothing policies — “open hand,” “mutual respect” — have yielded nothing. The war remains. Indeed, under his watch, it has spread. And as commander-in-chief he must defend the nation.
He must. But he desperately wants to end the whole struggle. This is no secret wish. In a major address to the National Defense University just three months ago he declared that “this war, like all wars, must end.” The plaintive cry of a man hoping that saying so makes it so.
The result is visible ambivalence that leads to vacillating policy reeking of incoherence. Obama defends the vast NSA data dragnet because of the terrible continuing threat of terrorism. Yet at the same time, he calls for not just amending but actually repealing the legal basis for the entire war on terror, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Well, which is it? If the tide of war is receding, why the giant NSA snooping programs? If al-Qaeda is on the run, as he incessantly assured the nation throughout 2012, why is America cowering in 22 closed-down embassies and consulates? Why was Boston put on an unprecedented full lockdown after the marathon bombings? And from Somalia to Afghanistan, why are we raining death by drone on “violent extremists” — every target, amazingly, a jihadist? What a coincidence.
This incoherence of policy and purpose is why an evacuation from Yemen must be passed off as “a reduction in staff.” Why the Benghazi terror attack must be blamed on some hapless Egyptian-American videographer. Why the Fort Hood shooting is nothing but some loony Army doctor gone postal.
In the end, this isn’t about language. It’s about leadership. The wordplay is merely cover for uncertain policy embedded in confusion and ambivalence about the whole enterprise.
This is not leading from behind. This is not leading at all.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 The Washington Post Writers Group

My Little Phony

GOP Agenda

The Fed's Money Trap

By Hugh de Payns

The Federal Reserve, and therefore the economy, is caught on the horns of a dilemma of our own making.

ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and the aggressive pumping of money (upwards of $85 billion a month) into the financial system have tripled our money supply.

If it weren't for nearly stagnant money velocity (MZ), we would be seeing inflation / CPI in the 20% range or more. 

This disruption of the money supply has sent confusing signals to both markets and Main Street, distorting prices and misallocating resources as the newly created dollars search for opportunities to earn a return.
Housing is perhaps the canary in the coal mine telling us that things are not going well and danger is close by.

Even with 3% 30 year mortgages and no money down, we have  to go back to 1997 to see such such low levels of home ownership in America.

New housing starts, while showing some improvement, are still quite weak perhaps even stalling out.  We now see a return to the Adjustable Rate Mortgage, a financial vehicle at least partially at fault for exacerbating the housing bubble.

Recently doctorhousingbubble had a terrific article on this strange phenomenon:

"At the same time, we find out that the home ownership rate continues to fall reaching a multi-decade low while rental vacancies slowly decline.  All of this of course makes sense given a supply constrained market and a massive amount of investor buying over the last few years adding rental properties to the market (taking off market potential single-family homes for actual purchase).  What is troubling about the data is the difficulty for first-time buyers to enter into this odd market.  Having a larger share of our market as renters might make sense given economic constraints of household incomes yet it should be abundantly clear who the big winners were from all the Quantitative Easing that has occurred.  Welcome to rental nation."

An increase in home prices but a recent and very pronounced slump in housing starts and softening demand for new mortgages!  What's up with that?  Essentially we are seeing banks sit on vacant properties and then very deliberately slow walk foreclosures through the system in order to both keep retail prices high by lowering inventories and to protect their balance sheets.  In essence, if banks should err by releasing too many homes into the marketplace, housing prices will decline and so will the value of their assets, potentially putting them at risk of insolvency.  At the same time, new housing is very soft, as too many young couples are both priced out of the market and are slogging through adverse economic currents that limit both opportunity and growth of income. 

But now a new element has injected itself into the mix.  Rising interest rates.

The most important number in the economy may be the yield on the ten year treasury.  Factoring out the imbecility of the Jimmy Carter years, historically a 10 year yield has been around 5%.  Now take a good look at the graph below.  Notice that yield basically hit bottom last year.  Frankly, it really could not go much lower than it was without going nearly zero, which is impractical. 

Folks, rates really have no place to go but up.  In the last few weeks the yield on a 10 year treasury has climbed significantly, and it seems on pace to break into 3% in the moderate future. But here is the fix we find ourselves in: it seems rates will have to come up, but if they do (and the side question is how much and how quickly),  it will increase the cost of borrowing money for the government, potentially blowing up our budget and starting a debt spiral (see Greece for specific details).  Rising rates also impact business investors, and private citizens.

What does this mean for housing?  Basically rising rates mean purchasers can afford less home, meaning either prices have to come down or risky loans have to be pushed into the system. 

If rates do not go up, a severe disconnect develops between the bond markets and the economy itself.  Eventually the bond vigilantes will saddle their horses and as history has shown, they will have their way, and in the process destabilize arrogant governments.  It has happened before, sometimes to the point of collapse.

Damned if we do.  Damned if we don't.

This is what happens when we elect leaders who brazenly ignore mathematics and the laws of economics.

Math wins.

We lose.

And you can take that, my friends, to the bank.

When Government Acts Illegally

Today's lead editorial at The Wall Street Journal ("Congress's ObamaCare Exemption") is a breakthrough in the battle against big, corrupt government.
Someone in the conservative media has finally summoned the strength to call government's illegal actions "illegal." As the editorial states:

"This latest White House night at the improv is also illegal. OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in congressional pay in return for less overall compensation. Those things require appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed by the President."

Conservatives seem to have a mental block, some psychological abhorrence to using the "I" word whengovernment breaks the law, which it does every day and in many ways affecting millions of Americans.

We hear about government "overreach" and "lawlessness." Conservatives will write that the Obama administration is undermining the rule of law, or the Constitution. In using those terms, however, we pull our punches and soften the blows.

When President Obama says he won't wait for Congress to act, and has turned his presidency towards an unconstitutional dictatorship, he is acting illegally. Republicans in Congress have yet to mutter the "I" word about Obama's actions. Instead, they pussyfoot around in ways that show weakness if not cowardice in the face of Obama's illegal "transformation" of our republican form of government.

If that is done out of respect for the American institution of the presidency, rather than some lesser motive, then it is actually disrespectful. Our constitutional institutions have been protected by the blood of patriots, and we dishonor them and the Constitution that they fought to defend by being anything less than candid and accurate.

Before the American Revolution, the British Parliament declared that certain acts of the King in contravention of the laws were "illegal." Some 19^th century judicial opinions in America used the "I" word in describing actions of government that violated the Constitution.

We conservatives like precedent. There is precedent for calling out government's illegalities.

It is up to conservatives on the outside to change the lexicon. We haven't yet. Conservatives cannot properly address and treat the problem until we admit what it is. When government breaks the law and violates the Constitution, that is 'illegal.'

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/when_government_acts_illegally.html at August 05, 2013 - 10:38:52 AM CDT 

The Front Man of Lawlessness

The Front Man

 

By  Kevin D. Williamson 

 

Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does. There is an alienness about him, which in the fever swamps is expressed in all that ridiculous Kenyan-Muslim hokum, but his citizen-of-the-world shtick is strictly sophomore year — the great globalist does not even speak a foreign language. Obama has been called many things — radical, socialist — labels that may have him dead to rights at the phylum level but not down at his genus or species. His social circle includes an alarming number of authentic radicals, but the president’s politics are utterly conventional managerial liberalism. His manner is aloof, but he is too plainly a child of the middle class to succumb to the regal pretensions that the Kennedys suffered from, even if his household entourage does resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm. Not a dictator under the red flag, not a would-be king, President Obama is nonetheless something new to the American experience, and troubling.
It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.
The result of this is his utterly predictable approach to domestic politics: appoint a panel of credentialed experts. His faith in the powers of pedigreed professionals is apparently absolute. Consider his hallmark achievement, the Affordable Care Act, the centerpiece of which is the appointment of a committee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the mission of which is to achieve targeted savings in Medicare without reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is to be achieved was contemplated in detail neither by the lawmakers who wrote the health-care bill nor by the president himself. But they did pay a great deal of attention to the processes touching IPAB: For example, if that committee of experts fails to achieve the demanded savings, then the ball is passed to . . . a new committee of experts, this one under the guidance of the secretary of health and human services. IPAB’s powers are nearly plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential veto, require a supermajority of Congress to be overridden.
IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.
Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.
#page#In an important sense, the American people have no political say in the health-care law, for example, because Congress did not pass a law reforming the health-care system; instead, Congress passed a law empowering the Obama administration, through its political appointees and unelected time-servers, to create a new national health-care regime. The general outline of the program is there in the law, but the nuts and bolts of the thing will be created on the fly by President Obama and his many panels of experts. There are several problems with that model of business, one of which is that President Obama, and more than a few of his beloved experts, have political interests. The partisans of pragmatism present themselves as disinterested servants of the public weal, simply collecting the best information and the best advice from the top experts and putting that into practice. Their only political interest, they would have us believe, is in helping the public understand what a great job is being done for them. Consider President Obama’s observation that his worst mistake in his first term was “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. . . . The nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” (It never seems to have entered into the president’s head that he might have got the policy wrong.) But of course there is a good deal more to politics than that. For example, the president would very much like the unemployment problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014 congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely to happen with employers struggling under an expensive health-care mandate that he has not told enough of a story about. And so he has decided — empowered to do so by precisely nothing — that the law will not be enforced until after the elections. Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too.
This is a remarkable thing. The health-care law gives the executive all sorts of powers to promulgate regulations and make judgments, but it does not give the executive the power to decide which aspects of the law will be enforced and which will not, or to establish a different timeline from the one found in the law itself. For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally.
The president and his admirers dismiss concern over this as so much chum for the talk-radio ravers, but it is no such thing. The job of the president is to execute the law — that is what the executive branch is there to do. If Barack Obama had wanted to keep pursuing his career as a lawmaker, then the people of Illinois probably would have been content to preserve him in the Senate for half a century or so. As president, he has no more power to decide not to enforce the provisions of a duly enacted federal law than does John Boehner, Anthony Weiner, or Whoopi Goldberg. And unlike them, he has a constitutional duty to enforce the law. Representative Tom Cotton says that the president’s health-care delay makes a deal on immigration less likely — if the president can simply decline to enforce the provisions of a law he fought for, why trust him to enforce provisions of a law he is accepting only as a compromise? Representative Cotton must also of course have in mind the fact that after Congress had unequivocally rejected another piece of immigration reform, the so-called DREAM Act, that the president had supported, he simply instituted it unilaterally, as though he had the authority to declare an amnesty himself. He then did away with criminal-background checks for those to be amnestied, also on his own authority. Strangely, the order to halt background checks came down on November 9, 2012, the same day that John Boehner said Republicans would seek a compromise on immigration reform.
In a similar vein, President Obama has refused to cut off foreign-aid funds to the Egyptian government, though he is required by law to do so in the event of a coup d’état, which is precisely what happened in July in Egypt. It might be embarrassing for the president to punish the Egyptian military and the grand mufti of al-Azhar for their overthrow of the unpopular Mohamed Morsi, but the law does not make exceptions for presidential embarrassment. The president is not legally empowered to assassinate American citizens, but he has done so, after going through the charade of drawing up a legal argument under which he judged himself entitled to do what the Constitution plainly prohibits. The law also prohibits the president and his allies from using the instruments of government to persecute their rivals, but that is precisely what the IRS has been up to for several years, as it turns out. And not just the IRS: Tea-party activist Catherine Engelbrecht was subject to an IRS audit, two FBI visits, an OSHA investigation, and an ATF inspection of her business (which does not deal in A, T, or F). And although the IRS has no statutory power to collect Affordable Care Act–related fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama’s managers there have announced that they will do so anyway.
#page#The president not only ignores the law but in some cases goes out of his way to subvert it. The U.S. military carried out the killing of Osama bin Laden, but the records of that event have been removed from military custody, where they are subject to inquiries under the Freedom of Information Act, and moved to the CIA, where they can be kept in secrecy. He has attempted to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess and has been stopped from doing so by the federal courts, which rightly identified the maneuver as patently unconstitutional.
There exists a federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restricts the federal government’s power to force Americans to violate their consciences. The Obama administration is forcing an abortifacient mandate upon practically all U.S. employers, in violation of that law. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who is responsible for drafting those regulations, received a number of letters from lawmakers arguing that the mandate she was contemplating violated the law; she proceeded anyway — without so much as getting an opinion from her departmental lawyer.
Congress’s supine ceding of its powers, and the Obama administration’s usurpation of both legal and extralegal powers, is worrisome. But what is particularly disturbing is the quiet, polite, workaday manner with which the administration goes about its business — and with which the American public accepts it. As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.” Barack Obama makes a virtue out of that caprice, having articulated for his judicial nominees not a legal standard but a political standard requiring sympathy for politically favored groups: African American, gay, disabled, old, in his words.
We have to some extent been here before. It is a testament to the success of free-market ideas that it is impossible to imagine President Obama making the announcement that President Richard Nixon did on August 15, 1971: “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.” President Nixon created not one but two IPABs, the Pay Board and the Price Commission, which were to be entrusted with managing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. economy. President Nixon, too, was empowered by a Congress that invested him with that remarkable authority, through the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, whose provisions were to be invoked during times of economic emergency. There was no economic emergency in 1971, but it is a nearly iron-clad rule of the presidency that powers vested will be powers used. That President Obama has adopted President Nixon’s approach but limited himself to health care might be considered progress if he had not adopted as a general principle one of Nixon’s unfortunate maxims: When the president does it, it isn’t illegal. President Nixon’s lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the decency to be ashamed of it. President Obama’s lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. President Nixon privately kept an enemies list; President Obama publicly promises that “we’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.”
Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.