Check out this Fox Business interview with Eric Singer, the founder of Congressional Effect Management, an investment firm that only gets into the stock market when Congress is out of session. The key to Singer’s strategy is avoiding ‘political risk’ – the damage to wealth creation that Congress causes through taxes and regulation (real or threatened).
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino comments on the desperation tactics and outright lies of President Obama and his liberal allies against their political and ideological opponents.
Interview with Megan Brown, a Litigation and Appellate attorney at Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C., on the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court’s October 2010 Term.
Further proof that the Beltway Keynesians have taken us down the economic rabbit hole: it’s now falling to Europeans to warn us that inflation and stimulus are tanking the dollar. Consider the following from the Financial Times:
Increasing expectations the Federal Reserve will pump more money into the US economy next month under a policy known as quantitative easing sent the dollar to new lows against the Chinese renminbi, Swiss franc and Australian dollar. It dropped to a 15-year low against the yen and an eight-month low against the euro …
A senior European policy-maker, who asked not to be named, said a further aggressive round of monetary easing by the US Federal Reserve would be “irresponsible” as it made US exports more competitive at the expense of its rivals…
Russia’s finance minister Alexei Kudrin, in a meeting with European Union officials, blamed the US – and others – for global currency instability.
He said one reason for exchange rate turmoil “is the stimulating monetary policy of some developed countries, above all the United States, which are trying to solve their structural problems in this way”.
The entire justification for the creation of the Federal Reserve was to ensure that monetary policy would be insulated from political pressure. If Ben Bernanke chooses to act as a handmaiden for the profligacy of the Obama Administration, then he deserves to be cleaning out his desk just as much as the president.
One year ago, the Obama Administration rammed through an auto bailout benefiting Big Labor that utterly obliterated the contractual rights of secured creditors. Obama has also famously charged like a bull through a china gallery on ObamaCare, Arizona’s immigration enforcement law and myriad other issues.
Despite those abuses of authority, Obama shamelessly pivots to plead that his hands are tied whenever it suits his momentary needs. Appearing on MTV today, Obama was confronted with an inconvenient question about his failure to make good on his sanctimonious promise to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. His answer? “It has to be done in a way that is orderly… I do have an obligation to make sure that I’m following some of the rules. I can’t simply ignore the laws that are out there, I’ve got to work to make sure that they are changed.”
Obama may soon be hoping to achieve a Clintonian recovery following a disastrous mid-term Congressional election, but his clumsiness to date doesn’t suggest that he’s in the same league as Slick Willie.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has an eye-popping expose on the insane delusion about the ‘root causes’ of homelessness among what passes for San Francisco’s intelligencia. Though the entire article is worth reading, one passage deserves special mention for the way it shows how disconnected are the captains of ‘Homelessness, Inc.’ from the actual motivations of the people they claim to serve:
An unintentionally hilarious letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2010 revealed just why the homelessness-industrial complex is so desperate to claim the Haight infestation for itself: government contracts. “The majority of the youth on the streets and in the park are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,” wrote the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. “Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community.” Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
Larkin Street’s analysis of why people hang out in the Haight is as wildly inaccurate as the Coalition’s fingering of unaffordable rent. Few, if any, of these vagrants are “in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,” unless “support” means money for booze and drugs. To the contrary, the “youth” are there to party, en route to their next way station. As a platinum blonde boozily announces in The Haight Street Kids: “I love this city, love your fucking life.” A tall youth draped around her adds: “It’s awesome for traveling kids to stop in when they need a break.”
Predictably, the offer of services and housing—which San Francisco’s round-the-clock outreach workers constantly put before the Haight Street vagrants—is usually turned down. As for becoming “contributing members of the community,” that’s definitely not on the agenda, either. Asked what he saw for himself in the future, a “traveler” in the Stanford documentary rolls his eyes, smiles nervously, and shakes his head for nearly a minute before replying: “A hot dog, there’s definitely a hot dog in my future.”
A federal judge in Florida today ruled that 20 U.S. states can proceed with a lawsuit against the recently passed federal health care legislation on the grounds that its individual mandate is unconstitutional. In response, CFIF President Jeffrey Mazzella released the following statement:
The Center for Individual Freedom commends the court for recognizing and validating arguments presented by the plaintiffs, who have provided substantive legal arguments regarding the unconstitutional nature of the legislation’s mandate on individuals and the troubling power grab by the federal government represented in it.
“We will continue to join the plaintiffs and others in advocating the merits of this case, making it clear to the American public that the legislation is an unconstitutional infringement on the freedom of individual Americans.”
In a refreshing victory today for individual freedom, the concept of federalism and Constitutional principles, a federal judge in Florida rejected the Obama Justice Department’s request to dismiss the challenge by 20 states against ObamaCare’s unconstitutional provisions.
Among other things, Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the states can proceed in their argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate, which forces citizens to engage in involuntary commercial transactions by purchasing insurance, violates the Constitution. The Obama Administration, which couldn’t seem to decide whether ObamaCare passed Constitutional muster as a “tax” or under some other convenient authority, contended that the challenge should be thrown out in its entirety. With this preliminary legal victory, the case can now proceed toward trial.
The number of Americans who pay taxes continues to shrink—and the United States is close to the point at which half of the population will not pay taxes for government benefits they receive. In 2009, 64.3 million Americans depended on the government (read: their fellow citizens) for their daily housing, food, and health care. Starting in 2015, the Social Security program will not receive enough taxes to pay all the promised benefits—which will be hard for all job-holders, but devastating for roughly half the American workforce that has no other retirement program. Add in last year’s preposterously named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, spiraling academic grants, flat-out farm socialism, the swelling ranks of Americans who believe themselves entitled to “free” government benefits—and now the government takeover of the nation’s health care system—and the very nature of this country’s republican form of government is called into question. Like they have been doing since 2002, Heritage Foundation policy experts lay out the increasingly gloomy facts. Can Americans pull back from the brink of complete dependence on government?
A great companion piece to Heritage’s ‘Dependence Index’ is the Legatum Institute’s ‘Prosperity Index,’ an equally in-depth look at policies that grow individual wealth instead of destroy it.
Recently, the committee conferring the Nobel Peace Prize decided to give the award to someone who actually deserves it: jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Excerpts of his writings can be found in Q & A form here. In the snippet below, Xiaobo explains the importance of continuing to pressure the Chinese regime to free its people from dictatorship:
Does your struggle for democracy in China have any significance for the rest of the world?
To eliminate the negative effects of the sudden rise of dictatorial communist China on world civilization, we must help the world’s largest dictatorship transform into a free and democratic country as soon as possible. In the great cause of global democratization, China is a key link: if China is in the game, then the game is on for everyone.
Therefore, whether to let the CPC dictatorship, which has taken more than one billion people hostage, continue to degrade human civilization, or to rescue the world’s largest hostage population from enslavement, is not only a matter of vital importance for the Chinese people themselves, but also a matter of vital importance for all free nations.
Were China to become a free country, its value to human civilization would be incalculable. It would inevitably follow in the wake of the global collapse of the Soviet Eastern European totalitarian empire to bring about another global avalanche among the remaining dictatorial systems. It would be difficult for dictatorial regimes such as North Korea, Myanmar, Cuba, and Vietnam to continue, and those Middle Eastern countries with firmly entrenched dictatorial systems would also suffer a great blow. ~ The Negative Effects of the Rise of Dictatorship on World Democratization, 2006
As we profiled in last week’s Freedom Minute video, they’re currently doing a bit of housekeeping in the Obama White House, with key departures coming throughout the ranks of the senior staff. Thus far, the biggest change has been on the economic team, with the departures of Peter Orszag, Chrisina Romer, and Larry Summers. Last week’s announcement that General Jim Jones would step down as National Security Adviser, however, shows that the bloodletting is now spreading to the president’s foreign policy team.
Unfortunately, the upshot of this transitional period seems to be replacing plaques rather than policies. The new economic advisers promise more of the same. And on national security, we may actually be trading down.
While General Jones was known for keeping banker’s hours and not being a particularly influential member of Obama’s inner circle, his military credentials insulated him from being viewed as too dovish on foreign policy. Not so his replacement, Thomas Donilon, whose past successes include being in-house counsel at Fannie Mae (you can’t make this stuff up).
Writing in today’s New York Post, AEI’s Arthur Herman lays out the case for pessimism at Obama’s choice for the nation’s most powerful national security position:
Donilon is the anti-Kissinger, the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. By every account, he measures success by the number of position papers he has read and sees process as important as substance in foreign policy.
He learned this working as chief of staff for the most colorless and ineffectual 20th century secretary of state, Warren Christopher. Formerly No. 2 at State in the Jimmy Carter years, Christopher embodied the Carter mindset of seeing America as an arrogant problem child that needs to be spanked and grounded if the world is to have any peace.
That mindset now rules the Obama White House.
It’s why Obama is comfortable with America’s steady decline both economically and strategically, why he’s pushing for more defense cuts and why he clearly resents having been talked into backing the surge strategy in Afghanistan — a problem he wishes would simply go away.
For those wondering if Obama is going to pull off a Clintonesque renaissance in the wake of a mid-term drubbing, the appointment of advisers even more ideologically extreme than their predecessors provides an answer.
We’ve always known that Obama views himself in quasi-religious terms. Now it’s beginning to look like he’s setting himself on a path of political martyrdom.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino calls the recent departure of several senior White House staff “a good start,” then recommends further cuts in the president’s cabinet.
For all the ink spilled trying to divine the cause of the present financial crisis the most stirring theory is that culture – not capitalism – failed America. It’s a theory that lies at the heart of the Citizens United documentary “Generation Zero” and is discussed in eye-popping detail by William Cohan in today’s New York Times.
Asserting the commonsensical notion that people do what they are rewarded to do, Cohan (a former denizen of Wall Street) claims that when firms morphed from partnerships to corporations they simultaneously shifted the risk of loss from executives to stockholders. That simple change in legal form privatized profits while socializing losses.
Here’s Cohan’s solution:
To my mind, its central feature should be that each of the top 100 executives at Wall Street’s remaining “systemically important” firms be personally liable for the risks they take. Not just their unexercised stock options or restricted stock, but every asset they have in their possession: from their cars to their fancy homes to their bulging bank accounts.
…
Pretty harsh, right? Maybe, but Wall Street deserves no sympathy. Had this security, or something like it, been in place at every Wall Street firm five years ago, there would have been no mortgage bubble, no financial crisis, no deep and unsettling economic recession with nearly 10 percent unemployment, no need for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and no need for Dodd-Frank or Basel III.
Why? Because human beings do what they are rewarded to do — especially on Wall Street — and if they are rewarded for taking prudent and sensible risks, that’s exactly what they will do.
Along with Reps. John Dingell (D-MI) and Barney Frank (D-MA), another incumbent Democrat congressman is looking at the very real possibility of losing his seat on November 2nd. And because of his stunts, it couldn’t happen to a better poster child for partisan politics than Florida’s Alan Grayson. Byron York provides a nice summary of Grayson’s offenses:
Grayson has been involved in so many dust-ups, scrapes and other indignities that it’s surprising to realize he has only been in office 20 months. From describing the Republican health plan as hoping the sick will “die quickly” to calling a top official at the Federal Reserve a “K Street whore” to saying of former Vice President Dick Cheney that “blood … drips from his teeth while he’s talking” to “Taliban Dan” — well, a lot of people in Florida and Washington won’t be sad to see him go.
A poll taken by Sunshine State News at the time of the ad controversy showed Webster with a 7-point lead, 43 percent to 36 percent. Barring any unforeseen events, that’s likely to hold. The 8th District was Republican for almost 30 years, until the Obama-Grayson victories of 2008. Now it appears to be moving back to the GOP.
Nobody should cheer bad economic news, but neither should anyone deny reality or ignore the clear consequences of toxic public policy.
Some 19 months after Barack Obama signed a nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill into law, the Labor Department this morning announced that unemployment remains elevated at 9.6%, and the nation lost 95,000 jobs in September. This following Obama’s and Joe Biden’s promises of a “recovery summer.” Obama and his apologists may trot out the teleprompters and once again claim that the private sector gain of 64,000 jobs (offset by losses in other sectors to arrive at the negative 95,000 total) shows that “we’re moving in the right direction.”
No, we’re not. Even that paltry 64,000 is down almost 30,000 from the August private sector gain of 93,000, all at a time when his “stimulus” would supposedly have the economy accelerating, not decelerating. Further, the Labor Department announcement stated that 15,000 more jobs were lost in July and August than previously estimated, along with a 366,000 downward revision in jobs during the 12 months through March. The bottom line: since Obama signed the “stimulus,” unemployment has steadily risen from 8.2% to 9.6%.
By way of comparison, in the 19 months following the arrival of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.3%. The facts speak for themselves.
In a recent interview with CFIF, Contest founder and bestselling book author Bob Dorigo Jones shares the results of the 13th Annual Wacky Warning Labels Contest and discusses America’s lawsuit-happy culture and the lengths to which companies must go to avoid being sued.
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