This is from Israel's Barak, not our Barak.
Our Barak is too busy campaigning to worry about something as innocuous as Iran going nuclear.If our Barak was doing something meaningful about Iran, other than inept sanctions that have meant nothing, he would have to make a very tough decision and that is not his forte.
Is Obama the mother of all 'duckers.' (See 1 below.)
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Soros is probably correct in his assessment but he also has to be licking his chops because he profits from chaos, has often positioned himself by betting on it happening (which is his right) and appears to enjoy assisting his dark outlook by funding radicals,radical organizations,radical causes etc.. (See 2 below.)
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Democrats like Arabs won the propaganda war years ago by convincing Black Americans they are their friend. This video is by a Black American and exposes the truth. I urge you go to the site and watch it. It was sent to me by a friend and fellow memo reader.
Facts are facts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UObEdF_uhaw
Democrats See "Blacks" as "Useful Idiots"...Vir...By Frantz Kebreau Kebreau| 1 video
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In yesterday's memo I expressed myself about Andy Stern's article in the WSJ. This is another comment by Jeffrey Folks. (See 3 below.)
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Like the "Fall of The House of Usher" old Barney will soon be out on his ass and a big one it is.
Ah but, Democrats, based on Seniority rules, must replace old Barney with Maxine Waters - a bigger idiot never lived but there is a hitch. Maxine's favoritism of her husband and his financial connections is being investigated. The investigation has been suspended for the time being.
God help this nation if the likes of Waters, who is a certified ding bat, is able to serve as minority chair on the Ways and Means. (See 4 below.)
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Mitt versus Newt - Krauthammer's take.
As for my own assessment I too want to see Obama go down in flames but I would rather lose with Romney - a decent, intelligent and competent, if not inspiring candidate, than win with a bomb thrower who is bright and articulate but has an ego bigger than his head and that can and has proven to be a very dangerous matter.
I still would love to see Huntsman rise and become better vetted.(See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) Barak vs US: We can't wait until Iran declares it has a nuclear bomb
Major US-Israel differences surfaced suddenly Thursday, Dec. 1, over the timing and circumstances of an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, when Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff, said: "I don't know whether Israel would alert the United States ahead of time if it decided to take military action against Iran." Three hours later, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak maintained US policy would enable Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon without the possibility of attacking it.
In an interview, General Dempsey went on to admit a range of differences between the US and Israel on two key issues: The first related to their expectations from the sanctions and the diplomatic moves being taken by the Obama administration, “with the stated intent not to take any options off the table” – language that leaves open the possibility of future military action.
“I am not sure that the Israelis share our outlook” on this matter, said the American general.
“I am not sure that the Israelis share our outlook” on this matter, said the American general.
The second issue on which the Americans and Israelis are divided is their perspective on the future course of events relating to the Iranian nuclear program and the Middle East: “And … because to them this (a nuclear-armed Iran) is an existential threat I think probably that it’s fair to say that our expectations are different right now,” said Gen. Dempsey.
In an early morning radio interview, Ehud Barak laid Israel's cards on the table with unusual frankness: He said he would be happy if diplomatic moves and sanctions were to stop Iran’s nuclear program and make it possible to give up the military option, but he does not believe that is the case.
“They (the Americans) tell us - What’s the hurry with an attack on Iran? Wait until (Ayatollah) Khamenei announces that Iran is abandoning the NPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty). The Iranians will break the locks (IAEA inspection seals at Iranian uranium enrichment plants) and then it will be clear to all that they have a nuclear weapon.”
Barak added: “The difference between us and the Americans is this: We say that because the Iranians are busy moving their nuclear program to underground facilities, they can announce this (that they have a nuclear weapon) after it is no longer possible to attack it." He went on to warn that If Israel is pushed into a corner, “it will have to act.”
In other words, Israel is not willing to wait, as the Obama administration proposes, until diplomatic moves and sanctions against Iran have achieved their aim, mostly because Israel is not ready to let Iran complete the transfer of its nuclear facilities to underground facilities and so make them safe from attack.
According to military and intelligence sources, Israel gives Iran no more than six to eight months to complete this transfer, i.e., by June to August, 2012.
Another point made by the Israeli defense minister was that some of Iran's nuclear facilities have already been hidden underground and are therefore impossible to monitor, even by military satellites. He was referring especially, our sources say, to the Fordo bunker site near Qom where, according to intelligence data, Iran is about to start enriching 20-percent grade uranium to 60 percent. This would bring the program to a few weeks away from weapons grade uranium for a bomb or a warhead.
On Tuesday, Nov. 29, former IDF military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin estimated that Iran had already accumulated sufficient enriched uranium to build 4 to 5 nuclear bombs.
In his interview Thursday, Defense Minister Barak also answered former Mossad chief Meir Dagan's persistent arguments against an Israeli military strike against Iran on the grounds that it would immediately trigger a regional war: Syria, Hizballah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad would launch attacks on Israel, seriously battering the country and inflicting heavy casualties, in Dagan's view.
Israel, Barak replied, is nowhere near being paralyzed by messages of doom. The degree of damage and number of civilian casualties would not, in his view, be alarmingly high. He repeated his estimate of early November that the casualty figure from a combined Arab missile assault resulting from an attack on Iran would be “a lot less than 500” – especially if people took cover.
The defense minister concluded this comment by saying: I have no idea what may happen tomorrow morning in Syria, or in Egypt.” Military sources interpret this as meaning that the danger of a new Middle East regional war is already present - unrelated to a possible Israeli attack on Iran, but rather as a result of the volatility set up by the uprising in Syria and the predicted rise to power in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi Islamists
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2)Soros: World Financial System on Brink of Collapse
By Forrest Jones
The world financial system is on the brink of collapse, with developed markets running full speed ahead toward disintegration, says billionaire financier George Soros.
Although developing countries are battling a slew of problems themselves, such as corruption and tattered infrastructure, they will likely end up faring better than markets in the big, industrialized nations, Soros says.
Developing countries are unscathed by the "deflationary debt trap that the developed world is falling into," Soros told a New York gathering at the International Senior Lawyers Project, a group that provides pro bono legal services, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While the global financial system finds itself sliding down a slope of a "self-reinforcing process of disintegration," investors must brace for the worst because "the consequences could be quite disastrous. You have to do what you can to stop it developing in that direction," Soros adds.
Emerging markets in Africa and in the Arab world, however, serve as bright spots in an otherwise dim global economy.
"A lot of positive things are happening," Soros says.
"I see Africa together with the Arab Spring as areas of progress. The Arab Spring was a revolutionary development."
Other experts agree that money will resume flowing into emerging markets, bonds especially, once investors who bolted for the sidelines amid the European debt crisis grow some appetite for risk.
The value of emerging-market debt in the second quarter of this year totaled $163 billion, says Renaissance Capital's global chief economist Charles Robertson, according to CNBC.
While smaller than the $212 billion peak in the third quarter of 2008, the number is high enough to merit attention.
"Nearly $100 billion a quarter going to emerging markets, over the last 12 months. I think that can only continue," Renaissance Capital's global chief economist Charles Robertson tells CNBC.
"By 2013, it would be no surprise to us if lending to EMs hit record highs."
Asia and Africa will figure big, Robertson adds.
"If you want yield or growth, it has to be Africa first, but Asia's going to be up there as well. If you're looking for liquidity, Asia again is going to be interesting. So, I would argue that the portfolio money is going to still be flowing into emerging markets, and flowing into these high-yielding stories."
© Moneynews. All rights reserved.
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3)A Stern Vision of America
By Jeffrey Folks
Yesterday, in a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Stern laid out his vision of America's future in remarkably unambiguous, and chilling, terms. That vision hinges on state planning and government control of a kind practically indistinguishable from that practiced in communist China. The fact that Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), holds such opinions is not really surprising. But the fact that he has been and remains a close confidant of President Obama should sound warning bells.
Stern makes it abundantly clear that in his view, the capitalist economic model that fostered American prosperity over the last two centuries is now obsolete. The "free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model," as he calls it, "is being thrown onto the trash heap of history." What has replaced it is the centrally planned economy, with its 5-year plans and state allocation of resources, as practiced in China and other communist states. In particular, Stern lauds the achievements of Chinese communist hard-liner Bo Xilai, mayor of Chongqing and popular spokesman for a resurgent Chinese nationalism. According to Stern, who recently toured China (sponsored by the left-leaning Center for American Progress), Chongqing is a city on the move with "1.5 million square feet" going up daily and "700,000 new units of public housing annually."
Stern seems to have swallowed the Chinese communist hype hook, line, and sinker. Not since Edgar Snow's The Long Revolution has there appeared such an unabashedly fawning report on the Red Star rising in the East. Not content to laud the achievements of the state-run economy, Stern seems to go out of his way to diminish the recent accomplishments of American capitalism. He sneeringly refers to "Team USA's results" of high unemployment, stagnant wage growth, trade deficits, and income inequality. All of this, he believes, is the consequence of America's inability to emulate China and other state-planned economies.
It is clear that Stern's thinking has had a profound influence on President Obama. No outside adviser has visited the White House more often than Stern during Obama's presidency, and no one has had freer access to the Oval Office. Every major policy decision coming out of the Obama administration has had to be cleared with Big Labor, and Stern has been Big Labor's point man in this regard. It is no accident that Obama's massive stimulus spending contained such largesse for states and municipalities to reward their public-sector employees. Nor is it accidental that ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and other administration initiatives are designed to extend state control over major sectors of the economy. Obama and Stern must sit around at night thinking up ways to subject more and more of the private sector to state control.
The problem with all of this is that Stern's vision of the future modeled on that of mainland China is not only fanciful, but dangerously misguided. It contains so many errors of interpretation that one hardly knows where to start.
Is it true, for example, that the impressive gains racked up by the Chinese economy over the past decade have resulted from state planning? Is it state-sponsored industries that have driven employment growth in China? Are state-run Chinese banks to be credited with astute long-term planning and keen investment acumen?
In point of fact, China's record of centralized planning, stretching back to Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, has been anything but impressive. Even the Chinese state's more recent attempts to manage its economy in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008-2009 have shown decidedly mixed results. State planning has led to inefficient steel mills that have collapsed under the weight of their unsustainable cost structures, oversupply of housing (including those 700,000 units going up in Chongqing annually), high-speed rail networks that have had to be shut down, and state-sponsored banks with opaque balance sheets masking undisclosed losses. It is not state control and planning that have resulted in economic growth. That growth has taken place in spite of the state's efforts to plan and control the economy.
Nor is China the edenic land of income equality that Stern wishes to foster in the U.S. Under revised guidelines, China has just quadrupled its estimate of the number of its citizens living in poverty. Political corruption is rampant throughout the party apparatus that governs the economy -- so much so that thousands of spontaneous protests, many involving violent crackdowns on the part of the state, take place every year. This may be the future that Obama and his closest advisers have in mind for America, but it is not my idea of utopia.
In fact, I doubt if very many Americans would wish to reside in any of those thousands of public housing "units" going up all over China. Not that those units are enough. For millions of Chinese, life remains an endless round of hunger, poverty, and disease amid the shelter of the mud hut. One hundred million Chinese still live in rural poverty, and millions of others who have emigrated to the cities lead a precarious existence of day labor and black-market transactions. It is clear that the Chinese state does not have a very good record in regard to its most impoverished citizens.
To the extent that the Chinese economy has evinced growth over the past two decades, it is the result not of state planning, but of the same free-market forces that Stern so wishes to suppress in the U.S. It is not the state-run industries, banks, and service companies that have lifted a quarter-billion Chinese into the middle class; it is the free market. Home-grown entrepreneurs, foreign corporations, and foreign investors have unleashed an engine for growth and wealth-creation that has transformed China from the backwater dominated by state-run industries that it was just 20 years ago into the second-largest economy in the world.
Clearly, the Chinese people on average are enjoying a better quality of life because the partial privatization of the Chinese economy. But the Chinese continue to live under the iron hand of an authoritarian government that restricts nearly all forms of liberty. The basic freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution do not exist in China.
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2)Soros: World Financial System on Brink of Collapse
By Forrest Jones
The world financial system is on the brink of collapse, with developed markets running full speed ahead toward disintegration, says billionaire financier George Soros.
Although developing countries are battling a slew of problems themselves, such as corruption and tattered infrastructure, they will likely end up faring better than markets in the big, industrialized nations, Soros says.
Developing countries are unscathed by the "deflationary debt trap that the developed world is falling into," Soros told a New York gathering at the International Senior Lawyers Project, a group that provides pro bono legal services, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While the global financial system finds itself sliding down a slope of a "self-reinforcing process of disintegration," investors must brace for the worst because "the consequences could be quite disastrous. You have to do what you can to stop it developing in that direction," Soros adds.
Emerging markets in Africa and in the Arab world, however, serve as bright spots in an otherwise dim global economy.
"A lot of positive things are happening," Soros says.
"I see Africa together with the Arab Spring as areas of progress. The Arab Spring was a revolutionary development."
Other experts agree that money will resume flowing into emerging markets, bonds especially, once investors who bolted for the sidelines amid the European debt crisis grow some appetite for risk.
The value of emerging-market debt in the second quarter of this year totaled $163 billion, says Renaissance Capital's global chief economist Charles Robertson, according to CNBC.
While smaller than the $212 billion peak in the third quarter of 2008, the number is high enough to merit attention.
"Nearly $100 billion a quarter going to emerging markets, over the last 12 months. I think that can only continue," Renaissance Capital's global chief economist Charles Robertson tells CNBC.
"By 2013, it would be no surprise to us if lending to EMs hit record highs."
Asia and Africa will figure big, Robertson adds.
"If you want yield or growth, it has to be Africa first, but Asia's going to be up there as well. If you're looking for liquidity, Asia again is going to be interesting. So, I would argue that the portfolio money is going to still be flowing into emerging markets, and flowing into these high-yielding stories."
© Moneynews. All rights reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)A Stern Vision of America
By Jeffrey Folks
Yesterday, in a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Stern laid out his vision of America's future in remarkably unambiguous, and chilling, terms. That vision hinges on state planning and government control of a kind practically indistinguishable from that practiced in communist China. The fact that Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), holds such opinions is not really surprising. But the fact that he has been and remains a close confidant of President Obama should sound warning bells.
Stern makes it abundantly clear that in his view, the capitalist economic model that fostered American prosperity over the last two centuries is now obsolete. The "free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model," as he calls it, "is being thrown onto the trash heap of history." What has replaced it is the centrally planned economy, with its 5-year plans and state allocation of resources, as practiced in China and other communist states. In particular, Stern lauds the achievements of Chinese communist hard-liner Bo Xilai, mayor of Chongqing and popular spokesman for a resurgent Chinese nationalism. According to Stern, who recently toured China (sponsored by the left-leaning Center for American Progress), Chongqing is a city on the move with "1.5 million square feet" going up daily and "700,000 new units of public housing annually."
Stern seems to have swallowed the Chinese communist hype hook, line, and sinker. Not since Edgar Snow's The Long Revolution has there appeared such an unabashedly fawning report on the Red Star rising in the East. Not content to laud the achievements of the state-run economy, Stern seems to go out of his way to diminish the recent accomplishments of American capitalism. He sneeringly refers to "Team USA's results" of high unemployment, stagnant wage growth, trade deficits, and income inequality. All of this, he believes, is the consequence of America's inability to emulate China and other state-planned economies.
It is clear that Stern's thinking has had a profound influence on President Obama. No outside adviser has visited the White House more often than Stern during Obama's presidency, and no one has had freer access to the Oval Office. Every major policy decision coming out of the Obama administration has had to be cleared with Big Labor, and Stern has been Big Labor's point man in this regard. It is no accident that Obama's massive stimulus spending contained such largesse for states and municipalities to reward their public-sector employees. Nor is it accidental that ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and other administration initiatives are designed to extend state control over major sectors of the economy. Obama and Stern must sit around at night thinking up ways to subject more and more of the private sector to state control.
The problem with all of this is that Stern's vision of the future modeled on that of mainland China is not only fanciful, but dangerously misguided. It contains so many errors of interpretation that one hardly knows where to start.
Is it true, for example, that the impressive gains racked up by the Chinese economy over the past decade have resulted from state planning? Is it state-sponsored industries that have driven employment growth in China? Are state-run Chinese banks to be credited with astute long-term planning and keen investment acumen?
In point of fact, China's record of centralized planning, stretching back to Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, has been anything but impressive. Even the Chinese state's more recent attempts to manage its economy in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008-2009 have shown decidedly mixed results. State planning has led to inefficient steel mills that have collapsed under the weight of their unsustainable cost structures, oversupply of housing (including those 700,000 units going up in Chongqing annually), high-speed rail networks that have had to be shut down, and state-sponsored banks with opaque balance sheets masking undisclosed losses. It is not state control and planning that have resulted in economic growth. That growth has taken place in spite of the state's efforts to plan and control the economy.
Nor is China the edenic land of income equality that Stern wishes to foster in the U.S. Under revised guidelines, China has just quadrupled its estimate of the number of its citizens living in poverty. Political corruption is rampant throughout the party apparatus that governs the economy -- so much so that thousands of spontaneous protests, many involving violent crackdowns on the part of the state, take place every year. This may be the future that Obama and his closest advisers have in mind for America, but it is not my idea of utopia.
In fact, I doubt if very many Americans would wish to reside in any of those thousands of public housing "units" going up all over China. Not that those units are enough. For millions of Chinese, life remains an endless round of hunger, poverty, and disease amid the shelter of the mud hut. One hundred million Chinese still live in rural poverty, and millions of others who have emigrated to the cities lead a precarious existence of day labor and black-market transactions. It is clear that the Chinese state does not have a very good record in regard to its most impoverished citizens.
To the extent that the Chinese economy has evinced growth over the past two decades, it is the result not of state planning, but of the same free-market forces that Stern so wishes to suppress in the U.S. It is not the state-run industries, banks, and service companies that have lifted a quarter-billion Chinese into the middle class; it is the free market. Home-grown entrepreneurs, foreign corporations, and foreign investors have unleashed an engine for growth and wealth-creation that has transformed China from the backwater dominated by state-run industries that it was just 20 years ago into the second-largest economy in the world.
Clearly, the Chinese people on average are enjoying a better quality of life because the partial privatization of the Chinese economy. But the Chinese continue to live under the iron hand of an authoritarian government that restricts nearly all forms of liberty. The basic freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution do not exist in China.
I find it striking that Andy Stern's paean to Chinese economic planning contains no mention of the fact that Chinese citizens do not enjoy even the most basic of human rights. Nor does there seem to be any realization on Stern's part that the freedoms enjoyed in America, including the protection of free speech and the rights of property, evolved within a free-market economy and are to a great extent intertwined with and dependent upon the continuation of capitalism.
As Michael Novak writes in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, "[w]hat censorship is to free speech, the command economy is to the free market" (p. 112). The freedom to engage in business, to earn and retain profits, and to decide how and where to invest capital are inextricably bound up with basic human liberties of freedom of speech and assembly, religious freedom, the free conduct of marriage and family life, and other essential liberties. The fact that neither Andy Stern nor President Obama recognizes this fact is incredibly alarming.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the
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4)The Fall of the House of Frank
By Ben Voth
The imminent retirement of Barney Frank from the House of Representatives is an important rhetorical marker for one of the most significant financial disasters in U.S. history. The housing bubble and ultimate collapse was substantially informed, justified, and rationalized by the public arguments of Congressman Barney Frank. The conventional punditry of our nation, allied with a reactionary "occupation" movement in the streets, has constituted itself as a Greek chorus of support. They echo the idea that private banks have robbed Americans into destitution and that government must, in the classic Keynesian tale, come to our perpetual rescue in the form of regulation, taxation, and government guarantees. Frank's departure offers an inflection point to re-examine this cherished myth of the reactionary left.
Frank's congressional website highlights frequently asked questions from constituents regarding his supervision of the federal government's financial arm for supporting mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2003, Frank publicly argued that those institutions were not in danger of causing an economic crisis. Frank would ultimately go as far as blaming anyone who dared question the wisdom of federal housing policy as the true culprits in any impending financial harm.
In the mythmaking of the reactionary left, private banks created risky financial instruments predicated on the U.S. mortgage industry that were so intrinsically corrupt that it led to an inevitable collapse in the housing market in 2008. Private banks that were bailed out in TARP were collectively engaged in negligence and fraud that led to our present economic demise. The staggering loss of $6 trillion in housing values damaged the entire global economy.
Noticeably absent from this commentary and storytelling is a sense of the federal government's key role in creating the crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the largest financiers of mortgages in the United States. Preceding the crisis, congressional regulator Franklin Raines made public statements that there "was no risk" to investing in American mortgages. The deregulated view of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac combined with the regulator's statements that there was no risk in this area of financial investment was the equivalent of telling chronic gamblers that the casino will cover all bets. Not only did congressional regulators such as Barney Frank fail to constrain the federal agencies inflating the housing bubble, but they actively criticized in public those trying to prevent a crisis through increased regulation, and they worked to inculcate the view that there were no undue risks in the American housing market.
Congressman Frank provides his own convoluted review of this crisis on his congressional homepage. In his account, the Bush administration took the inexplicable view of opposing regulation from 2001 to 2007 and then endorsed regulation in 2007, when Frank took leadership of the important housing issues relating to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to Frank, the regulations passed in 2007 by himself and President Bush were "too late." Outside the reactionary left's mythmaking offered by Congressman Frank, the Bush administration repeatedly called for heightened congressional oversight and regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac throughout both terms of the Bush presidencies. In reality, the Bush proposals to treat GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the same as private banks in the regulatory world, were termed "inane" in 2005 by Congressman Frank. The reforms passed by Frank came in 2008 -- after the industry had collapsed -- despite Frank's 2005 assurance that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "fundamentally sound." The GSEs purchased considerable political sway in fall of 2006 to prevent the regulatory leveling sought by the Bush administration. Democratic senators such as Chris Dodd and Barack Obama received considerable financial support from the GSEs in a landslide sweep for Democrats in Congress that functionally guaranteed that the GSEs would fend off future regulatory reforms pushed by the president.
Confronting this argumentative mythology is important. One reason for this is the confusing paradox posed by the 2008 financial crisis. In the telling of the reactionary left, this is a story of deregulation and its natural fruits. That telling justifies the inherently regulatory stature of the left. As is often the case, the story is half-true. GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were permitted to engage in lending practices at higher risk levels than their private counterparts because they essentially had the power of the federal Treasury printing presses behind them. This advantage was so acute, systemic, and well-understood by 2006 and 2007 that the global banking industry was highly invested in an American housing market that was "guaranteed to be without risk." This absurd contention was doomed to collapse at some point. Private banks were engaged in a rational enterprise of investing in a market "guaranteed" to grow and produce positive returns.
A second reason for confronting this argumentative myth is the potential to perpetuate further crises using the paradoxical regulatory model of the reactionary left. The government exempts itself from the regulations it places on its private citizens. This is why the Congress will always have a superior health care system while it wrecks the one for its citizens. That is why the Congress can engage in fruitful insider trading like that practiced by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi while it rails its regulatory wrath against Wall Street. That is why we are headed for another boom/bust cycle in the student loan market that is financed in a manner highly similar to the former American housing market.
The proper writing of Barney Frank's political epitaph is not important only as a matter of history. It is important as a moral enterprise in trying to allow history to teach us how not to repeat the errors of the past. The American public have an intuition that they have been abused by their political handlers. The surrounding punditry class continues to form the Greek chorus of support for half-truth stories of how we went from 4.7% unemployment in January of 2007 and falling deficits to 9-percent unemployment and ever-soaring trillions of debt in January of 2012. The retirement and a proper sense of the fiscal legacy of Barney Frank is an opportunity to restore some measure of sanity to America's economic house and possibly avoid a repeat of these mistakes.
Ben Voth is the chair of Communication Studies and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
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5)Mitt vs. Newt
By Charles Krauthammer
It’s Iowa minus 32 days, and barring yet another resurrection (or event of similar improbability), it’s Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here’s the scorecard:
Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.
Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. No exertion required on Romney’s part.
Enter Gingrich, the current vessel for anti-Romney forces — and likely the final one. Gingrich’s obvious weakness is a history of flip-flops, zigzags and mind changes even more extensive than Romney’s — on climate change, the health-care mandate, cap-and-trade, Libya, the Ryan Medicare plan, etc.
The list is long. But what distinguishes Gingrich from Romney — and mitigates these heresies in the eyes of conservatives — is that he authored a historic conservative triumph: the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.
Which means that Gingrich’s apostasies are seen as deviations from his conservative core — while Romney’s flip-flops are seen as deviations from . . . nothing. Romney has no signature achievement, legislation or manifesto that identifies him as a core conservative.
So what is he? A center-right, classic Northeastern Republican who, over time, has adopted a specific, quite bold, thoroughly conservative platform. His entitlement reform, for example, is more courageous than that of any candidate, including Barack Obama. Nevertheless, the party base, ostentatiously pursuing serial suitors-of-the-month, considers him ideologically unreliable. Hence the current ardor for Gingrich.
Gingrich has his own vulnerabilities. The first is often overlooked because it is characterological rather than ideological: his own unreliability. Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.
Take that ad Gingrich did with Nancy Pelosi on global warming, advocating urgent government action. He laughs it off today with “that is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”
This will not do. He was obviously thinking something. What was it? Thinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend (preferably one with a tinge of futurism and science, like global warming), demonstrating his own incomparable depth and farsightedness. Made even more profound and fundamental — his favorite adjectives — if done in collaboration with a Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Kennedy or even Al Sharpton, offering yet more evidence of transcendent, trans-partisan uniqueness.
Two ideologically problematic finalists: One is a man of center-right temperament who has of late adopted a conservative agenda. The other is a man more conservative by nature but possessed of an unbounded need for grand display that has already led him to unconservative places even he is at a loss to explain, and that as president would leave him in constant search of the out-of-box experience — the confoundedly brilliant Nixon-to-China flipperoo regarding his fancy of the day, be it health care, taxes, energy, foreign policy, whatever.
The second, more obvious, Gingrich vulnerability is electability. Given his considerable service to the movement, many conservatives seem quite prepared to overlook his baggage, ideological and otherwise. This is understandable. But the independents and disaffected Democrats upon whom the general election will hinge will not be so forgiving.
They will find it harder to overlook the fact that the man who denounces Freddie Mac to the point of suggesting that those in Congress who aided and abetted it be imprisoned, took $30,000 a month from that very same parasitic federal creation. Nor will independents be so willing to believe that more than $1.5 million was paid for Gingrich’s advice as “a historian” rather than for services as an influence peddler.
Obama’s approval rating among independents is a catastrophically low 30 percent. This is a constituency disappointed in Obama but also deeply offended by the corrupt culture of the Washington insider — a distaste in no way attenuated by fond memories of the 1994 Contract with America
My own view is that Republicans would have been better served by the candidacies of Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan or Chris Christie. Unfortunately, none is running. You play the hand you’re dealt. This is a weak Republican field with two significantly flawed front-runners contesting an immensely important election. If Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return (which is precisely his own objective for a second term).
Every conservative has thus to ask himself two questions: Who is more likely to prevent that second term? And who, if elected, is less likely to unpleasantly surprise?
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As Michael Novak writes in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, "[w]hat censorship is to free speech, the command economy is to the free market" (p. 112). The freedom to engage in business, to earn and retain profits, and to decide how and where to invest capital are inextricably bound up with basic human liberties of freedom of speech and assembly, religious freedom, the free conduct of marriage and family life, and other essential liberties. The fact that neither Andy Stern nor President Obama recognizes this fact is incredibly alarming.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the
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4)The Fall of the House of Frank
By Ben Voth
The imminent retirement of Barney Frank from the House of Representatives is an important rhetorical marker for one of the most significant financial disasters in U.S. history. The housing bubble and ultimate collapse was substantially informed, justified, and rationalized by the public arguments of Congressman Barney Frank. The conventional punditry of our nation, allied with a reactionary "occupation" movement in the streets, has constituted itself as a Greek chorus of support. They echo the idea that private banks have robbed Americans into destitution and that government must, in the classic Keynesian tale, come to our perpetual rescue in the form of regulation, taxation, and government guarantees. Frank's departure offers an inflection point to re-examine this cherished myth of the reactionary left.
Frank's congressional website highlights frequently asked questions from constituents regarding his supervision of the federal government's financial arm for supporting mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2003, Frank publicly argued that those institutions were not in danger of causing an economic crisis. Frank would ultimately go as far as blaming anyone who dared question the wisdom of federal housing policy as the true culprits in any impending financial harm.
In the mythmaking of the reactionary left, private banks created risky financial instruments predicated on the U.S. mortgage industry that were so intrinsically corrupt that it led to an inevitable collapse in the housing market in 2008. Private banks that were bailed out in TARP were collectively engaged in negligence and fraud that led to our present economic demise. The staggering loss of $6 trillion in housing values damaged the entire global economy.
Noticeably absent from this commentary and storytelling is a sense of the federal government's key role in creating the crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the largest financiers of mortgages in the United States. Preceding the crisis, congressional regulator Franklin Raines made public statements that there "was no risk" to investing in American mortgages. The deregulated view of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac combined with the regulator's statements that there was no risk in this area of financial investment was the equivalent of telling chronic gamblers that the casino will cover all bets. Not only did congressional regulators such as Barney Frank fail to constrain the federal agencies inflating the housing bubble, but they actively criticized in public those trying to prevent a crisis through increased regulation, and they worked to inculcate the view that there were no undue risks in the American housing market.
Congressman Frank provides his own convoluted review of this crisis on his congressional homepage. In his account, the Bush administration took the inexplicable view of opposing regulation from 2001 to 2007 and then endorsed regulation in 2007, when Frank took leadership of the important housing issues relating to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to Frank, the regulations passed in 2007 by himself and President Bush were "too late." Outside the reactionary left's mythmaking offered by Congressman Frank, the Bush administration repeatedly called for heightened congressional oversight and regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac throughout both terms of the Bush presidencies. In reality, the Bush proposals to treat GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the same as private banks in the regulatory world, were termed "inane" in 2005 by Congressman Frank. The reforms passed by Frank came in 2008 -- after the industry had collapsed -- despite Frank's 2005 assurance that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "fundamentally sound." The GSEs purchased considerable political sway in fall of 2006 to prevent the regulatory leveling sought by the Bush administration. Democratic senators such as Chris Dodd and Barack Obama received considerable financial support from the GSEs in a landslide sweep for Democrats in Congress that functionally guaranteed that the GSEs would fend off future regulatory reforms pushed by the president.
Confronting this argumentative mythology is important. One reason for this is the confusing paradox posed by the 2008 financial crisis. In the telling of the reactionary left, this is a story of deregulation and its natural fruits. That telling justifies the inherently regulatory stature of the left. As is often the case, the story is half-true. GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were permitted to engage in lending practices at higher risk levels than their private counterparts because they essentially had the power of the federal Treasury printing presses behind them. This advantage was so acute, systemic, and well-understood by 2006 and 2007 that the global banking industry was highly invested in an American housing market that was "guaranteed to be without risk." This absurd contention was doomed to collapse at some point. Private banks were engaged in a rational enterprise of investing in a market "guaranteed" to grow and produce positive returns.
A second reason for confronting this argumentative myth is the potential to perpetuate further crises using the paradoxical regulatory model of the reactionary left. The government exempts itself from the regulations it places on its private citizens. This is why the Congress will always have a superior health care system while it wrecks the one for its citizens. That is why the Congress can engage in fruitful insider trading like that practiced by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi while it rails its regulatory wrath against Wall Street. That is why we are headed for another boom/bust cycle in the student loan market that is financed in a manner highly similar to the former American housing market.
The proper writing of Barney Frank's political epitaph is not important only as a matter of history. It is important as a moral enterprise in trying to allow history to teach us how not to repeat the errors of the past. The American public have an intuition that they have been abused by their political handlers. The surrounding punditry class continues to form the Greek chorus of support for half-truth stories of how we went from 4.7% unemployment in January of 2007 and falling deficits to 9-percent unemployment and ever-soaring trillions of debt in January of 2012. The retirement and a proper sense of the fiscal legacy of Barney Frank is an opportunity to restore some measure of sanity to America's economic house and possibly avoid a repeat of these mistakes.
Ben Voth is the chair of Communication Studies and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
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5)Mitt vs. Newt
By Charles Krauthammer
It’s Iowa minus 32 days, and barring yet another resurrection (or event of similar improbability), it’s Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here’s the scorecard:
Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.
Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. No exertion required on Romney’s part.
Enter Gingrich, the current vessel for anti-Romney forces — and likely the final one. Gingrich’s obvious weakness is a history of flip-flops, zigzags and mind changes even more extensive than Romney’s — on climate change, the health-care mandate, cap-and-trade, Libya, the Ryan Medicare plan, etc.
The list is long. But what distinguishes Gingrich from Romney — and mitigates these heresies in the eyes of conservatives — is that he authored a historic conservative triumph: the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.
Which means that Gingrich’s apostasies are seen as deviations from his conservative core — while Romney’s flip-flops are seen as deviations from . . . nothing. Romney has no signature achievement, legislation or manifesto that identifies him as a core conservative.
So what is he? A center-right, classic Northeastern Republican who, over time, has adopted a specific, quite bold, thoroughly conservative platform. His entitlement reform, for example, is more courageous than that of any candidate, including Barack Obama. Nevertheless, the party base, ostentatiously pursuing serial suitors-of-the-month, considers him ideologically unreliable. Hence the current ardor for Gingrich.
Gingrich has his own vulnerabilities. The first is often overlooked because it is characterological rather than ideological: his own unreliability. Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.
Take that ad Gingrich did with Nancy Pelosi on global warming, advocating urgent government action. He laughs it off today with “that is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”
This will not do. He was obviously thinking something. What was it? Thinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend (preferably one with a tinge of futurism and science, like global warming), demonstrating his own incomparable depth and farsightedness. Made even more profound and fundamental — his favorite adjectives — if done in collaboration with a Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Kennedy or even Al Sharpton, offering yet more evidence of transcendent, trans-partisan uniqueness.
Two ideologically problematic finalists: One is a man of center-right temperament who has of late adopted a conservative agenda. The other is a man more conservative by nature but possessed of an unbounded need for grand display that has already led him to unconservative places even he is at a loss to explain, and that as president would leave him in constant search of the out-of-box experience — the confoundedly brilliant Nixon-to-China flipperoo regarding his fancy of the day, be it health care, taxes, energy, foreign policy, whatever.
The second, more obvious, Gingrich vulnerability is electability. Given his considerable service to the movement, many conservatives seem quite prepared to overlook his baggage, ideological and otherwise. This is understandable. But the independents and disaffected Democrats upon whom the general election will hinge will not be so forgiving.
They will find it harder to overlook the fact that the man who denounces Freddie Mac to the point of suggesting that those in Congress who aided and abetted it be imprisoned, took $30,000 a month from that very same parasitic federal creation. Nor will independents be so willing to believe that more than $1.5 million was paid for Gingrich’s advice as “a historian” rather than for services as an influence peddler.
Obama’s approval rating among independents is a catastrophically low 30 percent. This is a constituency disappointed in Obama but also deeply offended by the corrupt culture of the Washington insider — a distaste in no way attenuated by fond memories of the 1994 Contract with America
My own view is that Republicans would have been better served by the candidacies of Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan or Chris Christie. Unfortunately, none is running. You play the hand you’re dealt. This is a weak Republican field with two significantly flawed front-runners contesting an immensely important election. If Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return (which is precisely his own objective for a second term).
Every conservative has thus to ask himself two questions: Who is more likely to prevent that second term? And who, if elected, is less likely to unpleasantly surprise?
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