The Fed's solution

Peter Schiff talks about what the Fed is doing now.

VIRTUAL ROME

THIS TRULY AMAZING DIGITALLY CONSTRUCTED VIRTUAL TOUR BY VIDEO OF ROME IN 320 A.D. WHEN AT THE PEAK OF ITS POPULATION (1 MILLION).  This site here which offered the video below features many free online courses.  Quite amazing.

Republicans and the hispanic vote

Put to rest any thought that the hispanic vote can ever be a factor in the conservative coalition.  It's not going to happen despite what Charles Krautheimer or any other wishful dreaming pundit thinks.  The truth is the hispanics are a natural constituency for big government, pro union, statist economies, which is mostly what one sees south of the border, down Mexico way and in other Latin American countries.  The only way to deal with the growing flood of hispanic voters is to severely restrict immigration and play hardball on amnesty.  Since that's not likely to happen Republicans should concentrate on increasing their percentage of the white vote and don't waste any more time chasing the rainbow coalition.  Read it and weep.

Why Hispanics Don’t Vote for Republicans By Heather Mac Donald November 7, 2012 12:20 P.M. Comments 278 Print Text    The call for Republicans to discard their opposition to immigration amnesty will grow deafening in the wake of President Obama’s victory. Hispanics supported Obama by a margin of nearly 75 percent to 25 percent, and may have provided important margins in some swing states. If only Republicans relented on their Neanderthal views regarding the immigration rule of law, the message will run, they would release the inner Republican waiting to emerge in the Hispanic population.   If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority. It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation. Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. And California is the wave of the future. A March 2011 poll by Moore Information found that Republican economic policies were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican party on class-warfare grounds — “it favors only the rich”; “Republicans are selfish and out for themselves”; “Republicans don’t represent the average person”– compared with 7 percent who objected to Republican immigration stances. I spoke last year with John Echeveste, founder of the oldest Latino marketing firm in southern California, about Hispanic politics. “What Republicans mean by ‘family values’ and what Hispanics mean are two completely different things,” he said. “We are a very compassionate people, we care about other people and understand that government has a role to play in helping people.” And a strong reason for that support for big government is that so many Hispanics use government programs. U.S.-born Hispanic households in California use welfare programs at twice the rate of native-born non-Hispanic households. And that is because nearly one-quarter of all Hispanics are poor in California, compared to a little over one-tenth of non-Hispanics. Nearly seven in ten poor children in the state are Hispanic, and one in three Hispanic children is poor, compared to less than one in six non-Hispanic children. One can see that disparity in classrooms across the state, which are chock full of social workers and teachers’ aides trying to boost Hispanic educational performance. The idea of the “social issues” Hispanic voter is also a mirage. A majority of Hispanics now support gay marriage, a Pew Research Center poll from last month found. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate is 53 percent, about twice that of whites. The demographic changes set into motion by official and de facto immigration policy favoring low-skilled over high-skilled immigrants mean that a Republican party that purports to stand for small government and free markets faces an uncertain future.    by Taboola

Melanie Phillips speaks out

Melanie Phillips, a much admired spokesman for true conservatism in England, and who has a following herein the US, speaks out on the meaning of the election.

The greatest satisfaction today over the re-election of Obama is not being felt in the Democratic Party. It is not being felt among the media, who are no longer objective observers but have turned instead into corrupt partisans who ruthlessly censored the truth about Obama and helped peddle his demonising propaganda about his opponent. It is not being felt among the gloating, drooling decadents of the western left who now scent a great blood-letting of all who dare defy their secular inquisition. No, the greatest satisfaction is surely being felt in Iran.

With four more years of Obama in the White House, Iran can now be sure that it will be able to complete its infernal construction of a genocide bomb to use against the Jews and the west. World War Three has now come a lot closer.

It is said that, with likely gridlock in Congress over domestic issues, Obama will concentrate on foreign policy. We should all shudder. So far, Obama has empowered Iran to destabilise the region; supported Islamist takeovers in Egypt and Libya; is backing al Qaeda affiliates in Syria; refused to come to the aid of Americans being attacked by al Qaeda in Benghazi as a result of which four American officials were murdered; and hung Israel out to dry against its genocidal Palestinian attackers.

A report last month that Obama was secretly negotiating with the Iranian regime took on an even more incendiary aspect a few days ago with a claim that these negotiations were being led by his close friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett.

If Jarrett was indeed involved, that should strike a deep chill into anyone who has not joined the lemming-like leap over the edge of the western cliff. For Iranian-born Jarrett – who Obama has admitted he consults before he takes any decision and who has been said to act as his ‘spine’ -- is a far-leftist with roots deep in the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine. Indeed, Jarrett has been credited with originally smoothing Obama’s entry into Chicago’s political elite, and is now said to be – despite her controversial background -- the most influential person in his circle.  

 There have also been claims that she advised Obama against killing Osama bin Laden, which although unsubstantiated are all too credible. If this wholly ill-equipped and sinister individual really has been leading secret negotiations with Iran – raising the fear that far from preventing Iranian nuclear terrorism Obama intends to allow the regime a face saving compromise under cover of which it will finish building its nuclear weapon – then Obama’s perfidy against the west really is as bad as some of us feared from the start.

Four years ago, America put into the White House a sulky narcissist with an unbroken history of involvement in thuggish, corrupt, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics. In his autobiography, Obama himself described his mentor, the communist agitator Frank Marshall Davis, as being a promoter of  black power; in 1995 Obama went on the Million Man March organised by the black power activist and radical antisemite Louis Farrakhan; for twenty years, Obama belonged to a church whose pastor, Jremiah Wright, peddled antisemitic conspiracy theories, denounced black assimilation into white society and in June 2009 claimed that Jews were controlling Obama and were preventing Wright from talking to him.

Obama’s agenda has been crystal clear from the get-go: to increase the power of the state over the citizen at home, and to neutralise American power abroad. Four more years of this and he’ll almost certainly have succeeded.  The impact upon western security could be cataclysmic.

Britain and the Europeans love Obama because they think he will end American exceptionalism and turn the US into a pale shadow of themselves. What they don’t realise is that, all but lobotomised by consumerist rights, state dependency, victim culture, sentimentality, post-religion, post-nationalism and post-Holocaust and Empire guilt, Britain and Europe are themselves fast going down the civilisational tubes.

Romney lost because he refused to provide an alternative to any of this for fear of being labelled a warmonger, flint-heart or social reactionary. He refused to engage with any of the issues that made this Presidential election so truly momentous. Up against the bullying of the totalitarian left, he ran for cover. He played safe, and as a result only advertised his own weakness and dishonesty. Well, voters can smell inconsistency from a mile away; they call it untrustworthiness, and they are right.   

Romney lost because, like Britain’s Conservative Party, the Republicans just don’t understand that America and the west are being consumed by a culture war. In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Islamic enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.

With the re-election of Obama, America now threatens to lead the west into a terrifying darkness.

Elite funders of the Democrat Party

Joel Kotkin weighs in here with a timely analysis of the new and powerful "elites" now funding the Democrat Party and Obama.  This wealthy claque of knowledge entrepreneurs is now beginning to assert itself by politically financing its ideas of how to solve the world's problems at least  as they see them.  Their agenda is clean energy, environmentalism, redressing racial and income inequalities, generally speaking that of the Obama Democrat Party.  In conjunction with Hollywood, academia and the administrative state regulators and enforcers, these newly wealthy represent post industrial progressives and sound very much like the old progressive descendants of the Woodrow Wilson movement.  Think micromanaging Mayor Mike Bloomberg, himself a technology billionaire,  and you have a pretty good fix on who these people are and how they think.  Since they are fabulously wealthy, made so by the clean business of packaging, manipulating and moving information, they are not in touch with nor sympathize with the industrial age types like energy industry titans or any others who live in the"dirty" world of heavy industry and the like.  Like all elites, they fervently believe they know best and therefore  are destined to help the lower orders lead better, more productive and happier lives.  This kind of thinking is a slightly more benevolent version of that which prevailed for 80 years planning and destroying the economy of the USSR, and for much briefer period of time in fascist Germany and Italy.

A phyric victory at best

So Obama won reelection.  The recriminations, finger pointing and scapegoating by Republicans begins.  It's not that difficult to understand.  Here's what WSJ has to say about the election:

Mr. Obama’s campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.
He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.
This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign’s turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls. . . . There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn’t one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.

Obama's win will prove to be a phyric victory at best.  Our sour economy will not improve. Al qaeda will not go away. The debt and deficit realities will not improve. He won a popularity contest because  his opponent lacked charisma and charm.  He won because he is a celebrity president in an age when the masses are into being entertained and amused before all else.  He won because colleges are churning out illiterate politically correct products especially about economics and history.  He won because blacks vote based on pigmentation, not character.  He won because single women want government hand outs.  He won because of identity politics. He won because the media is deeply in the tank for any democrat candidate.  He won because government is an industry to democrats and a bare necessity to republicans.  He won because of dubious fund raising from foreign sources.  He won because there are a lot of sheep among the electorate who want a messiah to take care of them.

Here is the view of a successful trial lawyer who manages to cut to the chase with a few well-chosen observations:

As I mentioned in our intermittent club pub conversations on the subject of Moderate Mitt, I never thought he would have any real chance of beating the worst president imaginable. I never thought otherwise at any stage of the campaign.

While I respected your always incredibly informed political acumen, the simple truth for me is that wets never win. Never. Or as I mentioned to Herman Cain in LA a few months back, you never beat a demagogic vision with no vision.

Put another way, if I tried high profile cases using consultants like Stuart Stevens, I would spend boatloads of my clients’ money, and end up lamenting that it seemed impossible to lose because we had such great arguments, and ultimately blame the stupid fact finders and the demographics of the jury and their “baggage.” We’ve both seen our share of big firm litigators in that mode, haven’t we, thankfully usually on the other side.

I only know one way to win these arguments: by putting overwhelming intellectual, moral and affective pressure on the other side until my metaphors imprison and prevail. Get the theory and attack and define relentlessly, albeit of course with charm. 

My almost visceral reaction to a relatively smart and decent guy was his manifest propensity to lose the unlosable.

Demographics? They haven’t changed much since the 2010 shellacking of the Democrats, ditto the so-called tipping point or 47 per cent.

What happened is in my view less complicated.

1) Romney let himself get defined early in the same brutal way we would define a litigation adversary early and often. The definition largely stuck and there was no early response, and no aggressive defining of an opponent who was a walking, talking incredibly rich target.

2) Romney organized a colorless and utterly insipid convention the point of which was to establish that he wasn’t as bad as the other side made him out to be and he really loved and some of his best friends were women.

3) Romney’s campaign then stumbled forward on a benign, six basic metrics referendum on the economy tack, leaving a treasure trove laden rich armory of munitions undeployed. Obamacare, the explosive issue of 2010 ignored. Social issues tied to huge avenues of attack on Obama viewed as too controversial, foreign policy neutered, Dukakis competence thought able to carry the day, all from the conventional Tory playbook, without sharp edges or ideological vision.

4) When he finally showed a pulse in the first debate and acted like he could almost be a decent trial lawyer, he got an immediate bump in the polls, and, immediately, lapsed back into a play it safe, sit on a lead, be nice and bipartisan mode. He couldn’t even do the Benghazi battle.

5) His everybody loves this country, reach across the aisle close was the final insipid wetness.

I hated to be Nate Silver but Mittens never had a chance against a terrible President with the silliest of demagogic campaigns.

Unfortunately the country is the big loser because the Republican candidate, for the second straight time, was not up to taking a failed and horrible president to task.  

Finally, it comes down to this quote from a blog thread :  "you can't let the other side define the debate. You have to set the terms: "I paid for this microphone." But, looking ahead to 2016, even a new Ronald Reagan will have a difficult time punching through the vast sea of simple-minded left-wing indoctrination dispensed in our schools and popular culture—that and the depths of simple ignorance of the voters the Democrats rely upon. How many of Obambi's voters knew about, or cared about, Benghazi, the 'fiscal cliff', Medicare and Social Security bankruptcy, even unemployment numbers?

The conservative wing of the Republican Party had better start thinking in earnest about how to cut through this fog of welfare mentality and abject ignorance. Given the lock the teachers' unions, and the university academics, and the Hollywood celebrities have on the young, is it even feasible to think about teaching the young and foolish about the principles of American Constitutional government, about free enterprise? If not, the game is up. We'll end up a giant Greece. "

Election day

Today is election day.  We will soon enough know whether we have corrected the horrifying mistake of electing a President who was not raised in our American culture, who has openly disdained many of our traditional beliefs and customs, who has governed in the tradition of third world dictators, and who on top of everything else is not a pleasant person.  And he also wears the crown of the single biggest liar ever to occupy the WH, although he had very big shoes to fill in those of FDR and Bill Clinton.  For many of us these last four years have been one long nightmare.  What will it be like if Obama is returned to office?  Since he will win, if he wins, by the smallest of margins, and he will most likely not have control of the House of Representatives, Obama will be forced to deal with all of the failed policies and programs before hostile committees headed by relentless bulldogs like Darrell Issa.  Of particular interest will be the failure represented by Benghazigate and the death of four Americans who were abandoned by their government.  He will also be forced to deal with the runaway budget which cannot be swept under the rug for another four years.  And he will have to deal with a wildly unpopular socialized healthcare disaster appropriately named after himself.  All in all he's probably better off losing and not having to deal with the messes he helped create and then made much worse in four years of the most partisan destructive leadership this country has ever experienced.  For a devastatingly accurate and damning picture of Obama's four years of power go here.

Crony Capitalism at work

Mitt Romney has been excoriated by the Obama reelection team for refusing to back a government "bailout" for GM.  In reality Romney proposed a "Managed" bankruptcy in which the government would guarantee the warrantees on new cars while the company was restructured to alleviate the crushing burden of union work rules and excessive wage-benefits packages.  What we got was a classic crony capitalism solution where Obama backers and bundlers from Wall Street were big time beneficiaries along with the UAW, another core constituency of the democrat party.  Nice work if you can get it.  Meanwhile retirees of ACDelco, a GM owned supplier subsidiary, were robbed of their retirement benefits and GM bondholders were also stiffed because neither is a core democrat party interest or voting group.  Yet another example of government meddling in the free market to benefit favored constituencies.  A brief synopsis of these events from Powerline:

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2012 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AUTO BAILOUTS, CRONY CAPITALISM

THE AUTO INDUSTRY BAILOUT — A CLASSIC CASE OF CRONY CAPITALISM

Peter Schweizer, in the Washington Times, helps expose the auto industry bailout for what it was — “a classic tale of cronyism, in which the well-connected sped away with big bucks.” In this instance, the “well-connected” can be found mainly in the world of Big Finance:

In his recent book “Bailout,” the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, points out that when it came to the bailout of GM, no one with auto-industry background was involved in the decision-making process. “Led by Steven Rattner, the head of a Wall Street private equity firm, and Ron Bloom, a former investment banker and head of collective bargaining for the United Steelworkers Union, the auto team had plenty of Wall Street firepower but did not include in its ranks anyone with experience in the automobile industry.” Likewise, when it debated the question of closing auto dealerships, the task force consulted “a bevy of Wall Street analysts.” Little surprise then that the winners are largely relegated to the world of Big Finance.

The GM bailout was handled by Evercore Partners, an investment firm in New York headed up by former Assistant Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. Before the bankruptcy, GM paid Evercore $46 million in advising fees to help GM find a buyer. Then, when the government came in and bailed out GM, Evercore turned around and asked for an additional $17.9 million “success fee.” Never mind that Evercore never found a purchaser or a funder — the company still called it a “Government Funded Sale Fee” in court documents.

Indeed, Evercore also took over the lucrative position of handling the General Motors Special Hourly-Rate Employees Pension Trust and the General Motors Special Salaried Employees Pension Trust. Those new pension funds were financed courtesy of more than 60 million shares of common stock, diluting the taxpayer stake in the company. The trustee for both of those new pension funds is Evercore Trust Co., a subsidiary of Evercore Partners.

Mr. Altman is also an Obama bundler, bringing in up to $500,000 so far. Evercore Partners CEO Ralph Schlosstein hosted a $38,500 per plate fundraiser at his home, raising a total of $2.1 million for President Obama and the Democratic National Committee.

The other big winners were the lawyers and government bureaucrats who handled the bailout. Mr. Bloom has returned to the investment house of Lazard Freres as vice chairman of U.S. investment banking, where he worked from 1985 to 1990. “I do think that my time in government can help to open that door a little bit,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s now advising mail carriers as the U.S. Postal Service undergoes restructuring.

When it came to making financial decisions affecting the automotive bailout, insiders and favorites made out well and outsiders were left outside. Nonunion workers saw their pensions go bust. The financiers on the Auto Task Force in Washington shafted 22,000 salaried retirees out of their pensions. Why? Those salaried retirees of the former Delphi Corp. (a longtime GM parts supplier) had a fairly solid pension fund, which was 85 percent funded. What they didn’t have was the political clout of the United Auto Workers. The Treasury Department urged the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. to seize the Delphi pension plan. This was not a financial decision — it was a political decision.

But can’t the bailout be defended nonetheless as having saved GM? Not according to Schweizer. He argues that it merely “kicked the GM can down the road and left taxpayers to pick up the tens of billions in bills.”

GM continues to hemorrhage market share and controls just 17.7 percent of the auto market, a 90-year low. When GM made a public offering in November 2010, the share price was $33 a share. It’s now trading at around $25 a share. The federal government owns 500 million shares of GM, or about 32 percent of the company. The stock price would need to get to $53 a share to break even. At its current market price, the government is sitting on a $14.5 billion loss.

Despite claims that GM is selling a lot of cars, a lawsuit filed by investors who bought into GM’s initial public offering in June alleges that the books are being cooked. The investors feel hoodwinked because GM was “predicting revenue based on production rather than actual sales.” (What business does that?) The lawsuit references a Bloomberg article that states, “GM may have been unloading excessive inventory on dealers, a practice known as ‘channel stuffing,’ in order to create the false impression that GM was recovering and sales and revenues were rising.” The problem is that although GM is stocking more and more cars in its dealers’ lots, few cars roll out of the showroom. So while GM is being touted as a successful turnaround story, the all-American car company is incentivizing its dealerships to take more product and counting that as sales.

General Motors is selling more vehicles in China, not creating jobs in this country. GM is planning hundreds of new dealerships in China and also expanding production there.

Not very good, even for government work.