Is $5 a Gallon Gas Right Around the Corner?

Five dollar a gallon gas will shatter the Federal Reserve’s tightly constrained lid on inflation and accelerate the other half our long anticipated “double dip” recession. Gas and diesel powers America’s 141 million cars, 100 million pickups and SUV’s, 8.8 million heavy trucks and 6.7 million motorcycles. Oil runs our harvesters, delivers our groceries, cooks our food, heats our houses, propels our jets, fuels our M-1A1 Abrams tanks, and lubricates our bicycles. American business can only absorb a few percentage points increase in oil prices before passing on their additional distribution costs to the consumer. Already the increases in food and clothing prices have been felt at the cash register. Disposable income will inevitably drop along with consumer demand for domestic cars and trucks, imported goods from China, and destination vacations to resorts in the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. Don’t even ask what this means to our already sluggish unemployment numbers.

In June of 2008, Congressman Roy Blunt released the following information about how the House members voted on energy issues. During this time Democrats were the majority party in both the House and Senate.

ANWR Exploration:

House Republicans: 91% Supported

House Democrats: 86% Opposed

Coal-to-Liquid:

House Republicans 97% Supported


House Democrats: 78% Opposed

Oil Shale Exploration:


House Republicans: 90% Supported


House Democrats: 86% Opposed

Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Exploration:

House Republicans: 81% Supported


House Democrats: 83% Opposed

Refinery-Increased Capacity:


House Republicans: 97% Supported


House Democrats: 96% Opposed

Summary:

91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of American-made oil and gas, while 86% of House Democrats have historically voted against increasing the production of American-made oil and gas.

In 2009, the United States still imported 51% of all its petroleum requirements, both crude and refined. This continues to be an unacceptably high number in our quest for energy independence. Gas prices remain hostage to the increasing hostile regimes that sell us oil. Our own Department of Energy has proudly halted off shore drilling. With the political unrest in so many oil producing nations, and the long-term obstruction of Democrats to domestic oil exploration and production, American families have begun to pay the steep price for our failed national energy policies. This current Administration has wasted tens of billions of stimulus dollars on solar panel factories and windmills rather than building new oil refineries and using new technologies to recover the oil buried in our own back yard.

Financial Overhaul Provision to Promote Diversity Hiring in Federal Agencies Stirs Backlash

In this Oct. 28, 2009 file photo, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. , is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP)

Fox News

In the financial overhaul bill that is on the cusp of becoming law, House Democrats have included a largely overlooked provision that would create diversity czars to promote racial and gender hiring in federal agencies — a move that has sparked concerns about racial quotas, government waste and charges that Democrats are attempting to politicize the Federal Reserve.

The bill would establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion at each federal financial services agency to “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the work force and senior management.

The diversity czars would also aim to “increase the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency and conduct “an assessment” of those goals.

Each diversity czar would be a presidential appointee who must be confirmed by the Senate and have power “comparable to that of other senior level staff,” the bill says.

In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal accused Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., author of the provision, of trying to politicize the Federal Reserve.

“The Waters provision will also give Congress and the White House a new and powerful lever to influence the operation of the 12 regional Fed banks,” the newspaper wrote. “Accusations of racial or gender indifference, much less outright bias, are politically deadly.”

“With the threat of such an accusation in their holster, the Waters czars will have enormous clout to influence Fed governance and regulatory decisions, perhaps including monetary policy,” the newspaper added.

Waters’ office did not respond to a request for comment but the lawmaker vigorously defended the provision in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, saying the newspaper’s critical editorial was “filled with misrepresentations, unsupported conclusions and outright distortions.”

“Nothing in the bill mandates lending to minorities or women,” she wrote, denying charges that the provision would politicize the Fed or allocate credit by race and gender. “The provision does not even mention lending. The offices will only be responsible for employment, management and business activities of the agencies.”

“What this legislation will do is help address an indisputable problem, the lack of diversity in financial services,” she said, arguing that studies show the “discrimination that women and minorities face compared to white men of similar educational background and age.”

Waters cited the Treasury Department where minorities make up 17.2 percent of employees at senior pay levels and a recent Government Accountability Office report that shows the lack of diversity within the financial services industry has barely improved at the management level from 1993 to 2008.

“The provision is designed to broaden and improve the work force of these agencies and expand opportunities for our nation’s small businesses – including minority-and women-owned businesses – to participate in programs and contracts instead of continuing to rely on the same ‘old boy’ network and handful of Wall Street firms responsible for the crisis in the financial markets.”

The provision remained in the legislation during a conference committee between House and Senate negotiators. The House approved the final version of the bill late last month but the Senate delayed its vote until after the July Fourth holiday.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said the bill should be sent back to conference stripped of this provision, citing concerns about racial quotas and costs.

“The chief concern is that you’re moving from a situation where discrimination is prohibited, which is well and good and that is established law, to a situation where there are quotas in the workplace,” she told FoxNews.com, contending that the law would extend the provisions to contractors and subcontractors – a situation that could lead to quotas in the private sector. “And those are two very, very different things.”

The law would create at least 20 new offices and up to 29 if every Treasury agency is required to create a minority office, she said.

“It would probably cost a million or over” to operate on an annual basis for each office, she said.

Furchtgott-Roth also noted that the Cabinet-level department all have similar offices in place and questioned why more is needed.

“This is a very serious concern,” she said. “We have a deficit of over a trillion dollars. Every American knows that we need to cut the deficit and not only is this a waste of money
but it implies that the existing offices we have are a waste of money.”

Obama’s Thuggocracy

By Andrea Tantaros- FOXNews.com

From the G.M. bondholders, to the Black Panthers at polling stations, to ACORN to the mobs showing up at the homes of private citizens, Obama is running a Hugo Chavez-style thuggocracy.

This past Sunday, in one of the most aggressive and offensive intimidation tactics to date, hundreds of members of the largest union – the SEIU – stormed the front yard of Bank of America deputy general counsel Greg Baer’s home. The angry mob had bullhorns, signs and even broke the law by trespassing to bully Baer’s teenage son, the only one home at the time, who locked himself in the bathroom out of fear.

This is what unions do. They pressure politicians into spending too much. They push government into bad policy decisions. They sacrifice the private sector for the public sector. And now, they trespass and break the law only to scare the children of private citizens to get their way.
If you think the unions are working along, think again.

These protests, the ones storming Wall Street bank lobbies and now the private homes of bankers, are likely being carefully coordinated with the White House to increase their profile against the financial fat cats and help pass disgraced Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s financial regulatory bill.

Remember, when the White House visitor records were finally made public, it was SEIU boss Andy Stern who was the most frequent guest.

There are also no coincidences in politics. The bill passed the Senate last night.

From the G.M. bondholders, to the Black Panthers at polling stations, to ACORN to these assaults on private citizens, Obama is running a Hugo Chavez-style thuggocracy. Like Chavez, he gets non-official “allies” to act as his henchemen and do the intimidation work. Obama provides the narrative and tells the story of “greed” while the SEIU provides the muscle. This is about power, not prosperity.

This time it’s gone too far.

Unions see the writing on the wall. The goose that laid the golden egg is bleeding on the operating table – and they’re the ones who killed it. They are bankrupting local and state governments, and putting a strain on the federal budget. Unions have also put us at a major trade imbalance. The stimulus has gone to create more public sector union jobs. These jobs cost on average, 30K more than their private sector equivalents.

Take New York State, for example, once upon a time there was manufacturing, a robust Wall Street engine of growth, Fortune 500 companies aplenty. That “Empire State” is no more. The unions lobbied to ensure that these companies were taxed to death and made it extremely challenging to do business — so much that it became easier to do business in communist China.

Let’s be clear, I’m not defending Bank of America. I’m defending the American tax payer from organized labor who has bled them dry and the politicians who have been too weak to stand up to their gangster ways.

Unsurprisingly, the SEIU has made no apology for their behavior toward Baer’s family. Their spokespeople argue that the protest was over home foreclosures under Bank of America’s watch, but that still doesn’t give them the right to break the law. It also doesn’t allow them a carve out like they demanded in the health care bill for their costly Cadillac insurance plans. It’s absurd that in a recession, the unions feel they deserve special treatment because they are connected to the party in power. If that’s what they’re arguing they need to stand up and say it.

In this economy, you can’t punch someone without feeling it yourself. Punch the bank, they stop making loans, thus hurting the private sector. Punch the private sector, you hurt the markets. Hurt the Street and you hurt the pensions funds, in fact, the very same ones unions are going gangster to protect.

We now know, there is nothing they won’t do, nobody the unions won’t intimidate. And the president, who promised to preside over an administration free from special interest influence, should be held accountable. As long as we continue to feed the unions, the country will continue to decline. It’s time to stand up to this behavior with the same muscle they’ve used to bully our country all these years and send a message loud and clear: we will not be intimidated.

Andrea Tantaros is a conservative columnist and FoxNews.com contributor.

Starve the Beast?

What would happen if U.S. businesses stopped paying federal payroll taxes? What wou;d happen if we went along with the idea thrown about by Neal Boortz and allow people to understand how much money the federal government takes from them each paycheck? Would they get the idea of how great of an idea the fairtax is if they got 100% of their paycheck for a month or two? Would the federal government get the idea of how angry the American people are if they were starved from their monthly allowance from all American businesses?

Right now, we are looking at becoming Greece, or worse, Bangkok. What is the solution, civil disobedience? What are your thoughts, your ideas?

There is a facebook page: what if Businesses stopped paying federal payroll taxes?

What say you?

Let It Burn

By Demosthenes

For the past hundred years, America has been slowly moving away from the principles of its founding. The ideals of liberty, individual achievement, limited government, and the equality of opportunity have been slowly supplanted by calls for security, class warfare, excessive regulation, and the equality of outcome. The passage of stimulus acts, bailouts, government takeovers of two U.S. automakers, and the health care overhaul prove that our movement away from 1776 has accelerated.

Passage of the health care bill has sparked a revival of small-government thinking, causing many to predict significant Republican gains in Congress this fall. But despite some short-term success, this small-government revival is doomed to fail. The depressing truth is that the only way to regain the full measure of those freedoms proclaimed in our Founding Documents is for our current federal government to completely collapse under the weight of its own excesses.

Often, one carefully articulated analogy can succinctly convey a very complex idea. In our case, that analogy is addiction. Over the past hundred years, we have slowly allowed a monstrous system of dependence to develop until nearly every citizen relies upon government money, and thus is an addict. This has come about because the hard logic of the Founders has been replaced by the seductive ease of emotional arguments. All too often, the debate is over not if government should do something, but what it should do. This almost imperceptible shift in our national philosophy is a manifestation of our addiction.

While the citizen-addict is hooked on government largesse, the politician-addict is hooked on something far more sinister: power. Their drug is available in Washington, D.C. Just as a dealer will go to any length to continue selling his wares, politicians will stop at nothing to retain their power. These two groups of addicts are locked in mutual co-dependence, where the politician-addict seeking re-election buys off the citizen-addict with more spending. Then the citizen-addict, seeking yet another free lunch from Washington, reelects the politician-addict. The result is endless, ever-expanding government programs and our current fiscal nightmare.

The persistence of these programs has nothing to do with their success. They continue because we are more concerned that our actions are deemed compassionate than whether our programs are actually successful. If we truly wanted to help people save for retirement, we would not establish a program with a meager 1.23% rate of return while simultaneously supporting a monetary policy of systematic inflation. Yet these and other ineffective or even counterproductive programs continue. Such willful blindness to economic reality cannot be sustained indefinitely. The Congressional Budget Office has recently stated that our national debt will constitute 90% of our gross domestic product — that is 20.3 trillion dollars — in just ten years. What is even more shocking is that these debt numbers do not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security, which currently rest at 107 trillion dollars. Sadly, this trend cannot be stopped.

If Republicans take control of the House and Senate, and if they repeal the health care bill, then they will not be able (or likely even try) to reform Medicare or Social Security. These programs alone will bankrupt our nation. Yet they are untouchable because a large number of Americans have come to depend upon these benefits. They have become unknowingly hooked. Senior citizens have organized their financial futures around the twin promises of Social Security and Medicare and will naturally resist any change to either. George W. Bush knew this when he attempted his overhaul of Social Security. That is why his plan to privatize retirement savings was voluntary and would have excluded those over 55. Nevertheless, it was easy for the politician-addicts to scare the citizen-addicts, and his plan was defeated.

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety.” This quote by Ben Franklin is often used by civil libertarians in opposition to government security programs such as the Patriot Act. But this sentiment is equally applicable to those who would give up economic liberty to obtain economic safety. The economic attitude of the nation has shifted. We are no longer a nation of self-sufficient, rugged individualists; we are now a nation of addicts, hooked on a politician’s promises of economic safety.

This is why America is lost. Too many Americans are hooked for us to return to a sound economic footing via the normal political processes. Our efforts to moderate the most radical agendas — welfare reform, for example — serve only to delay the inevitable. In fact, many of those reforms are quietly undermined as the slow march towards collapse continues. We cannot alter our current trajectory; expansive government, greater entitlements, and ever-increasing taxes are our fate. Attempts by responsible citizens at reform will be only partially successful, not changing the fundamentals of our dilemma.

The addict analogy carries through to recovery. For most addicts, recovery can begin only once they have descended so far in their addiction that they lose everything, a process often called “hitting bottom.” Sometimes there is no recovery, and hitting bottom means death. But for others, hitting bottom is a tremendous learning experience, and they emerge as better people. America is addicted. The decline has begun, and now our nation must hit bottom.

Detoxing America will cause social, political, and economic strife of a sort unimaginable, and yet it is a process we must endure. Hitting bottom is our only hope for a national rehabilitation. It is our only chance for a true reacquaintance with those principles that made this the greatest nation on earth: liberty, individual achievement, limited government, and the equality of opportunity.

Demosthenes is a lawyer whose current employment prohibits taking a public position on political issues.

Palin: ‘Mama grizzlies’ will take back US

WASHINGTON (AP) – Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday that “mama grizzlies” will help Republicans win this November, sweeping away the agenda of President Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Addressing an anti-abortion group, the potential 2012 presidential candidate also said she understood how some women might consider abortion, citing her own experiences as the mother of a child with Down syndrome and the parent of an unwed teen mother. Last year, Palin said that “for a fleeting moment” she considered having an abortion when she learned of her son Trig’s prognosis.

Palin said Friday that abortion is morally wrong and women should carry a fetus to term.

“It may not be the easiest path, but it’s always the right path,” she said.

Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, used a speech to the Susan B. Anthony List to remind activists why they rallied behind the Republican ticket and why they should work to stop Obama’s agenda.

She said Obama is “the most pro-abortion president ever to occupy the White House” and asserted that the health care law would fund abortions.

In fact, Obama’s health care law would not allow federal dollars to pay for elective abortions. Catholic hospitals and organizations of Catholic nuns backed the measure. U.S. Catholic bishops and major anti-abortion groups opposed it, arguing that federal dollars could end up paying for abortions.

Palin challenged Republican women—”mama grizzlies,” she called them—to help the GOP “take this country back” and elect anti-abortion lawmakers. She praised female leaders of the tea party movement and invoked her 2008 acceptance speech where she compared herself to a pit bull.

“You don’t want to mess with moms who are rising up,” Palin said. “If you thought pit bulls were tough, you don’t want to mess with mama grizzlies.”

Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List, said Palin talks a good game, but her version of what American women want doesn’t honor freedom and independence. She mentioned the Democratic lawmakers whom Palin had targeted for their votes for health care overhaul.

“First she puts targets on their back, then she wants the government in their bedrooms—what is Sarah Palin doing to Western women?” said Schriock. EMILY’S List helps candidates who back abortion rights.

Palin also criticized the media, singling out their coverage of her daughter Bristol, whose pregnancy was announced days after Palin was named the vice presidential nominee. Bristol Palin is a single mother who works on an abstinence-only campaign.

“Choosing life was the right road, the right choice. … It hasn’t been easy and society, culture sure hasn’t been easy on her,” Palin said. “Wow, our culture and our media has made it rough on her.”

She said some young women would see what happened to Bristol and perhaps be encouraged to seek an abortion instead of facing similar criticism.

She cast herself as a victim of a liberal media and elite academics.

“Some of them refused to admit I’m even a woman,” she said.

Big Brother Wants to Spy on You!

by Capitol Confidential

Thanks to provisions buried within the Obama/Dodd financial deform bill, your personal information — from ATM withdrawals to loans — will now be collected by the federal government with no protections to your personal privacy.

The legislation creates another federal bureaucracy — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that is nothing more than a systematic government invasion of your personal finances of every consumer creating a financial fingerprint for the government to watch over.

Dodd’s bill deputizes the CFPB to act as a new federal watchdog agency to collect consumers’ personal financial information and transactions including records from Automatic Teller Machines from any financial institution or firm.

Don’t believe us — read the bill.

Section 1022 – Under Dodd’s bill the CFPB is granted unprecedented power to write, administer and enforce federal consumer financial law with no Congressional oversight.

Section 1071 – Dodd’s bill compels financial institutions like banks, credit unions and stock brokerage firms to maintain records of all financial transactions including the number and dollar amount and to submit that information to the CFPB.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the bill is it leaves it up to the discretion of the CFPB bureaucrats to determine how to use the personal information collected on American consumers and to share that data with other Federal agencies as it sees fit.

The Dodd bill constitutes an unprecedented intrusion into the privacy of the American people. For this reason alone, it deserves to be defeated.

Big Banks, Big Government and Big Labor, Oh My….

by Liberty Chick

The financial reform bill is finally in its home stretch in the Senate, but Americans have yet to fully engage on the issue. In fact, in recent weeks as I’ve worked with various grassroots leaders across the country to discuss the bill, its impacts on our economy and on us as American citizens, I must admit, it’s probably the first time I’ve ever found myself frustrated at the progress of activism.

It’s a complex issue, and let’s face it, not exactly an exciting one either. But that’s precisely what the left is counting on. So, whenever I find myself feeling frustrated that others might not share my same level of fervor on the issue, I remind myself of its complexity and lackluster appeal. And then, I proceed directly to the source – the bill itself.

I hone in on a few key points in three categories that resonate with most activists I know: Big Labor, Big Government, and Big Brother. Put those together in the context of Big Banks, and they spell out big disaster.

As the left goes on demonizing Wall Street and big bankers on one hand, Democratic lawmakers on the other hand are busy making sweetheart backroom deals with them up on Capitol Hill, promoting their legislation to the public as “consumer protection.” But really, such measures are nothing more than payback to the likes of three-way mortgage entitlement partnership stronghold of the Bank of America, Center for Responsible Lending and Fannie Mae.

Meanwhile Democrats and Obama allies like Organizing for America are also using the issue as a shameless fund-raising opportunity.

The banks actually SUPPORT this bill – so don’t let that “Main Street Not Wall Street” message fool you, no matter which side of this issue you’re on.

Once many people learn about some of what’s in the bill, their reaction of immediate remorse followed by outrage is completely understandable. Remorse – for some – for not having engaged their grassroots groups earlier. Outrage over just how much this bill would push the country head first toward socialism. That’s right, I said the “s” word. Let’s stop pretending and just call it for what it is, shall we? Even old school Democrats I talk to feel the same outrage and see the “s” word coming as the result of this bill. Facing down the inevitable is the only way we’re going to be able to tackle what the radical left has snuck into this thing. All the while, they have been counting on the apathy of average citizens on BOTH sides, and on the burnout of Tea Party and other patriot group activists.

The reality is this: If we sit back and allow this bill to pass the Senate in its current form, then we deserve the destruction of our privacy, our liberties and of our free market system that will follow. WE will be the only ones to blame. Because as bad as we all thought the Health Care bill was for our freedoms, the Financial Reform bill makes Health Care pale in comparison. No level of remorse could suffice if we failed to engage every last patriot, every last Paul Revere and Sam Adams , during these final days of the legislation.

I’ve found that one way to help other activists digest this bill has been to put all of the actual financial details aside and focus solely on some of the parts of the bill that demonstrate the erosion of our personal liberties and the free market system as we know it.
Big Labor: Dismantling the Free Market System

Under the American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S 3217), several provisions tucked away in the bill will give labor bosses unprecedented powers that, especially if abused, could threaten the very structure of our free market system.

* Financial institutions and other covered businesses could be required by law to give labor unions “Proxy Access”, enabling union bosses to potentially abuse the system to force unrelated agenda items, like unionizing the firm’s employees, before the shareholders
* New regulations will control how board of director elections are conducted – at private corporations!
o The SEC would be granted the power to force the names of outside nominees onto the corporate ballot (as reported by Politico)
o Directors running in an uncontested election would now be required to win a majority of votes cast, rather than only by the current plurality(as reported by Politico)
* Similar rules will also determine whether an individual may serve as both the CEO and Chairman of the Board – at a private corporation!
* Government and labor unions will have “say on pay” for the annual salaries and bonus compensation of executives and other employees. Essentially, like Obama himself, they can determine at what point “someone has made enough money”

I don’t think anyone’s against shareholders having their proper say and representation in the corporate management process. But that’s not really what’s behind these pieces of the legislation. We’ve seen how today’s labor bosses are abusing their powers and using the shareholder resolution as a hostage weapon to bully corporations into unionization and special union concessions. Just read my prior post, “SEIU’s Secret Weapon: If Obama’s Plan Fails, Brandish the Shareholder Resolution” for a taste of that tactic.

It’s been known for some time that labor bosses are now organizing on a global scale, and as such, have taken to the Participative Management style common in European workplaces. In the U.S., private corporations might typically achieve a similar democratic process of employee participatory management when the company enters into a direct employee ownership plan. The difference here however is that we’re talking about companies that do not belong to the labor unions – these are companies in which the union might have a pension fund investment, or perhaps some of its workers unionized on premise. These are private companies that the unions attempt to overtake through such smaller connections to earn a place on the board, and then change it from the inside out until a Participative Management environment is achieved. If that achievement were to occur, US corporations would quickly fold and restructure under a more socialist model. Eventually, the free market system would erode away as labor unions take over the boards of once privately owned corporations.

For weeks now, Ive been searching for the resources to help me describe this threat in simple terms, and just as fate would have it, my friend Peter List over at LaborUnionReport and RedState pens the perfect post describing this with clarity and precision, in his post titled “Changing America Forever: Behind the AFL-CIO’s Push for Financial Reform.”
Big Government: Power, Control and Everlasting Entitlements

* A new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, or CFPA, would serve as massive bureaucracy that would control everything from defining the types of loans consumers may be permitted to purchase, to expanding redlining provisions and subsequent mortgage entitlement programs. (And let’s not forget that the head of this agency would be Eric Stein, who ran the Center for Responsible Lending, and before that worked at Fannie Mae)

* The CFPA’s authority goes far beyond banks or financial institutions. This new bureaucracy would have the power to regulate hundreds of thousands of businesses. Examples of small businesses that would be subject to CFPA oversight (as outlined by the US Chamber of Commerce):
o A nonprofit organization that provides financial literacy education
o A software company that creates products to help consumers manage their money
o An advertising company that provides services relating to financial products
o Utilities companies, retailers and even doctors that extend credit to their customers.

* The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, or CFPA, created in the bill would be housed within the Federal Reserve, an already secretive and unchecked force of power in our financial system that insists on going unaudited
* A government agency will have unlimited executive bailout authority, including the power to pick and choose which companies are saved and which are left to fail. This creates serious potential for abuse, as private corporations could literally live or die based upon political decisions
* This bill contains the same language used by groups like the Center for Responsible Lending in the redlining laws and changes to the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 for special research centers and programs “that promote awareness and understanding of the access of individuals and communities to financial services, and to identify business and community development needs and opportunities”

And we all know what happened as the result of those redlining laws and subsequent CRA changes in 1995.
Big Banks: Empowered by Big Government, Become Big Brother

Finally, in order to justify all these entitlement programs, all this forced unionization, all this takeover of private companies’ boards of directors, the government needs research. Not to worry, the bill creates vehicles for that, like the “Office of Financial Research” and a national database for the collection of your personal bank account and loan information, and various deposit account data.

Fannie Mae and Bank of America will be so thrilled when this passes the Senate (as will ACORN and SEIU). Thanks, of course, to years of lobbying by organizations like the Center for Responsible Lending. After all, they pioneered the use of banking research to mandate mortgage entitlements. Just imagine all the new entitlements that will be created once they can analyze all of that *new* banking information and data on what we’re purchasing. Someone will find some injustice somewhere in there. You can count on that.

If you haven’t been as interested in all the complex language about things like financial derivatives and credit default swaps in this bill, then all of this above should be plenty for you to be concerned about.

Welcome to the Era of Expensive Energy

By Ed Lasky

Gas prices are marching steadily upwards — past three dollars at my local suburban station and a couple of dimes more than that in Chicago. Why? Part of the rise is seasonal in nature: demand increases going into summer to fill up those cars going on family vacations. Also, as summer proceeds into fall, refineries start refining more heating oil from crude and less gasoline. Part of the rise can be attributed to the lack of refineries in America — government rules and regulations (and the NIMBY-Not In My Backyard dynamic) have halted the building of American refineries. Our country is more reliant than ever on refineries located in foreign nations. They can turn the faucet on and off at will.

States, such as my own Illinois, have very arcane rules regarding the blends of gasoline permissible to sell and that increases cost. Demand for energy is increasing around the world as some signs of economic recovery take hold, especially in booming China.

Years of governmental obstruction in tapping our offshore and onshore stores of black gold have played a role. A little-mentioned cause is the fact that our Federal Reserve and the Democrat-led government is printing so much cash that our dollar is becoming is becoming Weimar Wallpaper — an increasingly worthless slip of paper that retains value against the Euro only because the EU is farther along, for now, into socialism than we are.

Here is my question.

Why are Democrats silent about the gas rise? After all, aren’t oil companies their favorite bogeymen? They like to bully Big Oil every now and then — especially when gas prices rise. This certainly occurred a great deal when we had a Texan as President and a Vice-President with leadership links to Helliburton (misspelling intended). But they have always done so when Republicans have any degree of power — be they Texans or not. Bullying oil companies is a nice tool in the partisan tool belt.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal noticed a dynamic at work years ago. When Democrats are in control, homelessness is forgotten as an issue. However, when Republicans lead the government (particularly when Ronald Reagan was President) homelessness became the topic of the day. He dubbed this the “homelessness watch.”

How about calling this the “Gas Price Rise” watch? Democrats do not want to be on the watch when bad things happen because then the public may blame them. People may point out that Democrat policies — such as the ones that led to a weak dollar, or that shut off vast areas of America to oil development and refinery building — have created the conditions that give rise to oil prices. Democrats and their friends in the liberal media just don’t like people pointing out bad things happening when they have the keys to power.

Many liberals live in high rises in urban areas, so they don’t commute long distances to work and/or use public transportation to do so. They don’t empathize with suburban or rural Americans or care about their troubles. Certainly our President is outright disdainful towards them (suburbs bore me, rural people are bitter and cling to their guns and religion). After all, suburban and rural people are Tea Partying racists who deserve no respect.

But one more factor may be at work.

Democrats really like it when gas prices rise. They just use it as a bludgeon to whack Republicans when it is politically useful to do so.

After all, people such as New York Times columnist Tom Freidman have long advocated higher taxes on gas to reduce demand and make “renewable energy” less foolish. Haven’t we been told for years by the nattering nabobs of the nanny nation that gasoline price rises are good for us? Why are these powers-that-be also trying to shut down the development of shale gas, a clean burning domestic resource that our nation has in vast abundance?

In fact, Democrats do like high gas prices because it allows them to justify the irrational and costly subsidies and tax breaks they give to their friends in the “green movement” and their cronies who benefit from the drip, drip, drip of tax dollars going from the government IVs into their bank accounts. As I have written before, General Electric is a prime beneficiary of this government corporate welfare-hence, MSNBC and NBC’s devotion to Democrats.

Are liberals actually maneuvering to increase gas prices at the pump?

This Washington Times editorial may lead one to believe so:

Long-anticipated climate-change legislation is scheduled to be unveiled in the Senate today. The ostensible purpose is to clean the air by cutting carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. If the bill becomes law, though, consumers will get smoked as they are forced to pay more for a fill-up.

Backers of this measure are more beholden to ideology than reality. As scientific data shows the Earth is actually cooling, the only thing heating up is alarmist rhetoric. On Friday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president believes “now more than ever is the time to act,” indicating White House complicity in the push for higher gas prices. Attempting to impose new burdens on American families struggling in a buckling economy in hopes of mitigating an unproven climate theory says a lot about the O Force’s warped priorities.

The widely reviled cap-and-trade plan would institute a Wall Street-type market for carbon permit exchanges. Cap-and-dividend would prohibit the marketing of carbon permits and instead collect revenues in a government account that would – in theory – be rebated to consumers. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for that check.)

Whatever the taxing mechanism is called, the end result would be the same: the imposition of increased costs on all carbon-based energy products, which would be passed on to consumers. Americans would see steeper prices at the gas pump.

Is this the Democrats’ dream? To finally be able to take advantage of gas price rise (that they have engineered) in order to force radical changes upon the American way of life? We have seen over the last 17 months of Democratic rule, that they couldn’t care less about what Americans as a whole want (see ObamaCare). They are determined to waterboard us with a bundle of new laws and regulations that will be shoved down our collective throats — whether, to borrow a phrase from Barack Obama, “we like it or not”.

This is the essence of liberal fascism. Americans are just dumb..we don’t know what is good for us. We have deluded Don Quixotes tilting at windmills (and wind energy is disastrously inefficient and costly and have many problems associated with them-unreliability of wind, transmission lines, medically related complaints from neighbors) while the rest of us would rather see oil pumps (that occupy a very small footprint) on the horizon pumping out cheaper crude to fill our tanks.

The only pumps the Obama team and their allies in Congress like are the ones pumping our green tax dollars to their pals and donors in the “renewable energy” racket of the jolly Green Giant with the big carbon footprint: Al Gore.

A digression. When I was young the Burt Lancaster movie The Rainmaker made a powerful impression on me. Lancaster played a con man Bill Starbuck, who comes into a drought-stricken small town promising to bring forth water from the skies like so much manna. His appeal was almost religious in nature; he promised and preached salvation. But he was just a con man — a trickster who promised to change the weather for a price. We have a quite the crew of Bill Starbucks bellying up to the governmental trough. He was a fake — and so are they.

Americans suffer, as lefty Thomas Frank reminds us, from false consciousness; we just are too ignorant to know what is good for us, what is pure and high-minded. Hence the need for our masters to take control.

Actually, I think liberals feel that suffering is good for us. That it makes us better people. After all, didn’t Barack Obama hector us that we can’t drive big cars or keep our thermostats in the comfort zone (while he makes the White House all but a Hawaiian like sauna, according to David Axelrod; meanwhile, he takes that big plane on overseas jaunts to help his cronies land the Olympics for Chicago; and flies to Broadway shows for a night on the town with Michelle). They want to punish us for all types of past transgressions against the liberal creed: colonialism, imperialism, materialism, for living in suburbs, for racism.

We have to consider the rest of the planet — which couldn’t care less about Americans — and Mother Earth, the patron Goddess of all that is good and wonderful. Humanity — particularly the American variety — is bad.

We have utopian leaders with very little experience in the real world but plenty of experience in Ivy League classrooms, where high minded platitudes substitute for empiricism and pragmatism. But they have the keys to the kingdom. For now.

They may try to silence Americans as they stuff policies down our windpipes-but Americans will not remain silent. Never have; never will.

Liberation is coming-not in the form of the Trinity of Pelosi, Reid and Obama-but in the form of a ballot box.

November, here we come.

Depression 2010?

By Robert Samuelson

WASHINGTON — It is now conventional wisdom that the world has avoided a second Great Depression. Governments and the economists who advise them learned the lessons of the 1930s. When the gravity of the financial crisis became apparent in late 2008, the response was swift and aggressive. Central banks like the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank dropped interest rates and lent liberally to threatened financial institutions and rattled investors. The United States and many countries approved “stimulus” programs of tax cuts and additional spending. Panic was halted. A downward spiral of falling private spending and rising unemployment was reversed. The resulting economic slump was awful. But it was not another Great Depression. The worst has passed.

Or has it? Greece’s plight challenges this optimistic interpretation. It implies that celebration is premature and that the economic crisis has moved into a new phase: one dominated by the huge debt burdens of governments in advanced societies. Comparisons with the Great Depression remain relevant — and unsettling. Now, as then, we may be prisoners of deep and poorly understood changes to the world economic system.

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Historians increasingly attribute the Depression to broad geopolitical upheavals. World War I shattered the existing global economic order. Dominated by Great Britain, it fostered vibrant trade and rested on the gold standard. (Under the gold standard, paper currencies could be converted into gold coins or bullion.) The war also spawned huge international debts, reflecting German war reparations and large U.S. loans to Britain and France. It was impossible to reconstruct the prewar order. Britain was too weak, the gold standard was too constricting, and the debts were too heavy. But countries tried, because the prewar order had delivered prosperity. This futile effort brought on Depression. Only when economic hardship became unbearable were unrealistic goals (keeping the gold standard, repaying debts) abandoned.

There are eerie, if crude, parallels now. The welfare state is today’s equivalent of the gold standard. With aging societies, advanced countries have promised more benefits than their tax bases can support. Hence, high government debt. Greece is merely the canary in the coal mine. But politicians resist cutting popular benefits except under extreme pressure. It takes a crisis. Greece, again. Another unsettling parallel is the global economy. The United States’ leadership since World War II is eroding before China’s ascent. There’s a danger now, as then, of a power vacuum. Witness the long delay in coming to Greece’s aid. No one country acted decisively, even as markets grew nervous.

Of course, these parallels do not preordain a second Depression. But they at least clarify today’s confusing economic outlook. There’s a tug-of-war. The normal mechanics of the business cycle signal recovery, while deeper economic weaknesses threaten it. In late 2008 and early 2009, fear and hysteria were almost palpable, especially in the United States. Consumers and companies cut spending anywhere they could. From September 2008 to June 2009, the U.S. economy lost 6 million payroll jobs. In 2009, American car sales were almost 40 percent lower than in 2007. Governments’ frenetic interventions stabilized confidence. People and firms are opening their wallets again, here and abroad. The world economy will grow almost 4.3 percent in 2010 and 2011, with the United States expanding at an average of nearly 3 percent, reckons the International Monetary Fund.

But the deep-seated problems remain. Three stand out: first, the weight of the welfare state and aging populations; second, the burden of huge private debts (mortgages and consumer loans in America and elsewhere); and finally, huge imbalances in global trade, with some countries — notably China — running massive surpluses and others — notably the United States — having large deficits. Each threatens a vigorous recovery that could conceivably plunge the world back into a protracted slump.

To cope with big budget deficits, developed countries would cut spending or raise taxes. These steps would weaken recovery. The problem is that failing to do so might have the same effect by creating a financial crisis. Lenders, scared by mounting debt, would insist on higher interest rates. The value of older government bonds, issued at lower interest rates, would drop. Banks around the world, which are big holders of various countries’ bonds, would suffer huge losses. So would other investors and financial institutions. The financial system might again seize up.

The dilemma posed by Greece isn’t unique. It’s different only in degree. In 2009, Greece’s budget deficit was almost 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — its economy. Its accumulated debt was 115 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, Italy’s deficit was 5 percent of GDP and its debt 116 percent of GDP. Spain’s deficit was 11 percent of GDP and its debt 53 percent. Germany’s deficit was 3 percent and its debt 73 percent. The U.S. deficit — calculated slightly differently — was 9.9 percent of GDP; the debt, 53 percent of GDP. Most developed countries, representing about half the world economy, are caught in the same trap.

The same is true, though to a lesser extent, of heavily indebted households in the developed world. As they pare back, or lenders tighten lending standards, consumer spending will remain subdued, depriving the recovery of another powerful propellant. It wasn’t just Americans who enjoyed years of easy credit. In the United States, household debt reached 138 percent of disposable income in 2007, reports the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Elsewhere, comparable figures were also high: 138 percent in Canada; 128 percent in Japan, 186 percent in Britain; 102 percent in Germany. There is no precise threshold as to what constitutes too much debt; but these levels suggest restraint and retrenchment, not exuberant spending.

On paper, the escape from these problems seems plain. China, India, Brazil and other “emerging market” countries would become the world’s engine of growth. Their appetite for advanced goods from the developed world — airplanes, power plants, earth-moving equipment, medical instruments — would raise their living standards and sustain production and employment in advanced countries. This could be happening. The latest IMF forecasts have poorer countries (“emerging and developing economies”) growing at about 6.5 percent in 2010 and 2011 compared with 2.4 percent for all developed countries. The trouble is that this shift requires that China and other Asian countries permanently renounce export-led growth. It’s not clear that they can or will.

Everywhere countries face changes of policies, practices and habits that are deeply woven into their social, political and economic fabrics. Can developed countries gradually rein in their welfare states? Will Asia’s relentless export economies shift to domestic-led growth? Will Americans save more and spend less — and the Chinese do the opposite? As after World War I, reverting to what’s familiar, comfortable and understood may be hazardous. It was the inability to see and adapt to change in the 1920s — a process complicated by the war’s animosities — that fundamentally caused the Great Depression, economic historians Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Peter Temin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have argued.

The case that we have dodged a second Great Depression rests on a narrower notion: that the Depression was preventable; and that advances in economic knowledge allowed us to do so. If we knew then what we know now, governments could have averted the tragedy. Despite some disagreements, economic scholars subscribe to a broad consensus about what went wrong in the 1930s. Government central banks, like the Fed, were too passive. They didn’t halt bank panics. Intervention at decisive moments (perhaps the failure of the Bank of the United States in late 1930 or Austria’s Credit Anstalt in spring 1931) could have changed history. Instead, mounting unemployment and falling prices fed on each other. Debtors couldn’t repay loans, leading to more bank failures, a contraction of credit and deposit losses. But this time the mistakes were not repeated. Despite criticism, banks were “bailed out.” Money was pumped into credit markets to pre-empt a downward spiral.

By this reading, the world has bought itself time to deal with underlying problems. As the economic recovery strengthens and lengthens, the politics of confronting unstable export-led growth (for Asia) or unsustainable welfare spending (for developed countries) will grow easier. People will be more optimistic about the future; they will be more open to necessary, if not popular, adjustments. This could happen. The world may muddle through, making gradual and messy changes that ultimately defuse another large crisis.

But there is another more sobering reading of the Great Depression. It is that painful and once unthinkable changes are made only under the pressure of acute crisis. One reason that central banks were so passive is that they clung to the gold standard: Relaxing credit policies too dramatically to rescue banks might lead to a loss of gold; people would demand metal to replace paper money. Gold was abandoned in various countries only after it seemed untenable. Similarly, the post-World War I debt problem wasn’t “solved” until repayment was impossible. As for Britain’s place as global leader, the United States assumed that role only in World War II.

Against that backdrop, today’s unresolved problems — over the welfare state, leadership in the global economy — become more ominous. They suggest that major adjustments won’t be made until they’re compelled by some sort of crisis. This possibility defines the present economic drama. Will the recovery encourage conscious changes? Or is recovery providing a false sense of security? The stakes are, of course, enormous, because — as everyone knows — the economic suffering of the Great Depression transformed many countries’ politics for the worse and led to World War II.