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Rajjpuut's Folly: TRUE Parables Pack More Punch than Lame, False Ones

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on February 5, 2012 at 2:00pm

 

 

          One of the most common and frustrating complaints of fiscal-conservatives and Constitutional-conservatives is watching what a terribly inadequate job so-called conservative leaders do in articulating the nature of the mess in Washington and in putting the standard of truth forth against the never-ending progressive lies and distortions.  Recently, a nearby (Westminster, CO) weekly ran a letter to the editor dissing Mitt Romney and supporting Barack Obama in the form of a godawful parable about country life and muddy roads.  Here's the letter I wrote in response and expect to appear in the Westminster Window this Feb. 15th.

 

    Letter-to-editor writer Rich Stewart’s quaint (1/26) story imitated the approach of a Nazarene parablist (circa 33 A.D.) while attempting to discredit Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  I am NOT a Romney supporter but totally DISrespect near-totalitarian big-government-deluded social-engineer Barack Obama. 

    A parable’s power lies in telling a simple story with universal application easy for ordinary folks to hear.  Mr. Stewart’s story missed the standard of simple-profundity badly because his parable lacked an underlying true analogy. 

 

              “Once a preacher named Obama drove a Deeeconomy SUV. Obama blamed the previous preacher because Deeeconomy was in the ditch all the time.  One day, however, we saw him deliberately drive into the ditch.  Then his principle supporter, Progreh Sivdemocrat got several thousand bags full of $100 bills and using them as kitty litter hoped to change things by providing traction for the preacher’s SUV.  Progreh Sivdemocrat’s big tractor got stuck and it took five hours, several other tractors, and a passel of farmers with hip boots, shovels and planks to free everyone.  Meanwhile the money flowed downriver and was eventually used by a blind friend of Preacher Obama as kindling for his fireplace."

 

    Translation:  in 1977, President Carter and his progressive congress passed CRA’77 aiming to give a private home to everyone, whether they could afford it or not.  Progressive president Clinton and ACORN helped expand CRA’77 four times (three times legislatively) so that 1977’s 0.24% suspect home loan rate expanded to 2007’s devastating 34.2% suspect loans many at 0% down payment to people without jobs or credit whose only “income” was food stamps  -- even to illegal aliens.  By the way, in fairness: one of the “stuck tractors” belonged to George H. W. Bush who won 45 of his 46 vetoes but did not veto the first expansion of CRA’77 in 1992.

 

    One more thing:  in 1930 it took a total of 57 seconds worth of work for the average American to pay off all his local, state and federal income taxes.  Today that average American works 99 days before he's free of income taxation; which doesn't include a host of other taxes including 7+% for state sales tax and huge gasoline taxes as well.

 

Ya'all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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Rajjpuut's Folly: 30-50% Lose Healthcare Coverage Once Obamacare Kicks-in

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on June 17, 2011 at 12:40pm


 

 
                        When in Doubt, Dems Attack Messenger,
Whistle-blowing McKinsey Consulting Firm
 
 
                “WHEN is this nonsense going to stop?”   AT&T calculated that dropping coverage and paying the fine rather than face the escalating future premiums associated with Obamacare and rising health care costs will save the huge firm $1.8 Billion annually. 
 
 
 
            We’re all familiar with journalists who protect their sources being sent to jail for “contempt of court.” High-profile global business consulting company McKinsey & Co. may soon be facing a similar situation. McKinsey’s great transgression? Not revealing the sources of a stunning new poll finding that “30% of employers intend to, or probably will stop offering employer-sponsored insurance after 2014 to avoid the expensive burden of Obamacare. The 78 million employees involved rank as just one more “unintended consequence” of the 2,773 page Obamacare law which creates 384 brand new federal agencies. 2014 is the year the full-impact of Obamacare is scheduled to kick-in.
            It gets worse than that, however . . . . Among businesses citing “a high awareness” of what Obamacare is all about,” over half of them are planning to drop health care insurance benefits for their workers. In a phrase, the death knell for private health insurance has been sounded. Among those uncomfortable with the tolling bell: the Democratic Party, specifically Dems in the Senate, and the Obama administration who are attacking McKinsey and the results of the study. Already the threats of senate hearings have been issued. Already “requests” for McKinsey data related to the study have been mentioned. Already talk of “subpoena” power (to get McKinsey to reveal the sources of its poll results) is rampant.
Besides the now infamous 1,920 “waivers” granting freedom from Obamacare to numerous unions and progressive employers favored by the Obama administration (In April 20% of all such waivers in the country were granted to one San Francisco district whose representative is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi) other cracks are showing already in Obamacareland: unrelated studies have also shown that many small businesses employing slightly more than the “cut-off” number intend to lay off workers rather than face the prospect of mandatory expensive new Obamacare regulations “gutting their businesses.” (Obamacare requires employers of more than fifty workers to provide insurance for them or pay a fine).   In yet another unrelated study roughly 76% of such businesses this year intend to pay the $2,000 fine per employee rather than offer insurance and dealing with Obamacare. AT&T, for example, calculated that dropping coverage and paying the fine rather than face the escalating future premiums associated with Obamacare and rising health care costs will save the huge firm $1.8 Billion annually. 
Of course the kickback among Senate Dems was instantaneous. Hoping, it seems, to be able to pressure businesses with the temerity to respond honestly to the poll they want to know WHO? is responsible for such answers about their beloved takeover of the nation’s health care industry. A better question might be WHEN is this nonsense going to stop? You’ll recall that among the numerous phony projections used to sell Obamacare to the Dems themselves (no Republicans in the House or Senate voted for it) was the notion that only 2.5% of employers would find a way to opt out of the program. Chances are the Republican projections that huge portions of the business world would seek to escape Obamacare’s burdensome provisions sent the Obama administration to giggling among themselves . . . now it seems that 30% or perhaps 50%**(once they learn more of what Obamacare is all about) of all businesses might “vote with their feet” and endeavor to escape Obamacare. We repeat, “WHEN is this nonsense going to stop?”
It can now be expected that millions of the workers cut loose will be forced to shop within the government blessed "exchanges" – and will be eligible based on income levels for generous taxpayer funded premium subsidies thus predictably driving the cost to the taxpayers sky-high. Thus the Dems will once again be “buying votes with taxpayer's money” – or worse, with debt borrowed from China.  ObamaCare makes subsidies available up to 400% of poverty level income.” This is wealth-redistribution that holds the potential to destroy capitalism in three years.   Thus it’s now official, the Republicans were right, rather than being a program that “pays for itself” as promised, the impact on the taxpayer and the treasury and the national debt will be in the tens of TRillions of dollars.   Bankruptcy of the nation looms.
 
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
**Once again the progressives in Washington, D.C. show their ignorance of reality and of the broken-window fallacy so that the taxpayer and the business owner and the owner’s employees are negatively impacted by a fanciful creation^^ of their deluded minds: Obamacare.
 
^^Of course that fanciful creation of the deluded mind of Jimmy Carter CRA ’77 (the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 which forced banks and mortgage lenders to knowingly make horrifically bad home loans to highly UNDERqualified loan seekers) sent the percentage of “suspect” loans in this country from 0.24% in 1975 to 34.1% in 2005 (after four legislative expansion – three by Bill Clinton – and a Clinton regulatory expansion) and created our sub-prime lending crisis and financial meltdown. Thanks to the Clinton steroid-version legislative expansion of CRA ’77 in 1998; ACORN in 2000 found it easier to put bad loan candidates into $440,000 homes than they’d been able to put better (but still Unqualified candidates) into $110,000 homes in 1990. Instead of 3% down payment loans of 1990, many illegal aliens; and welfare recipients whose only “income” was food stamps after 2000 were put into very expensive homes with ARMS (adjustable rate mortgages); a situation just waiting to meltdown into the abyss.
 
 
 
 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Progressives Cripple Capitalism, Blame Free Markets

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on May 10, 2011 at 5:51pm

 

 

       "If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth, even when what you are saying is total crap.”

Richard Belzer

 

       “Ho, ho here’s the free market in trouble again and here we in Congress are going to have to bail them out of trouble  . . .  again.”

A comment from (Massachusetts) Representative Barney “The Big Liar” Frank who a) in 2003 and again in 2004, 2005 and 2006 before the financial meltdown affirmed the soundness of  federal government-sponsored mortgage enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; b) several times denied that progressive politicians like him were undermining the free market mortgage system; and who now is calling for the end of both Fannie and Freddie . . . and then “starting over from scratch” with whole new government mortgage entities controlling the free markets.

 

Real Capitalism

       (Today’s introductory blog is the first in a series aiming to put the record straight and pinpoint progressives’ lies and other tactics and strategies that have betrayed our country, its economy and our freedom.)

 

Introduction:

“What, You Don’t Remember Our Lies?

Good, we’ll just recycle them!”

 

       Before we get to capitalism and the lies told about it by progressives – we’ll use this introduction to start out discussing progressives and something called “The Big Lie.” Political adherents of progressivism (a notion that “we must ‘progress’ beyond the ill-conceived and outdated U.S. Constitution so we may make progress toward earthly Utopia”) who have controlled congress for roughly 95 of the last 110 years in this country (since Teddy Roosevelt succeeded assassinated William McKinley), base their attacks on the United States and its patriotic citizens primarily by using a whole series of what propagandists call “big lies” and upon the constant and consistent inattention of a large part of the voting and non-voting public. Where did the idea of “The Big Lie” come from?

       Adolf Hitler and his chancellor and propaganda minister Josef Goebbels credited their superior and effective use of propaganda from some studying of the British in World War I, but mostly (according to Goebbels’ diaries) from the powerful techniques they gleaned from the administration of progressive American President Woodrow Wilson and his chief Public Information facilitator, Edward Bernays (called by Time magazine one of the Top-100 Influential Americans of the 20th Century).  Hitler was the first to coin the term “The Big Lie” while in Landsberg am Lech prison in 1924 as he dictated Mein Kampf. 

       Hitler devoted two chapters in Mein Kampf to discussing propaganda. Within those two chapters, “The Big Lie” got most of Der Fuehrer’s attention. The Big Lie according to Hitler was a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” 

       Herr Schicklgruber** of the Charlie Chaplin moustache then gave an excellent example of the big lie by first stating the technique was used by Jews to unfairly blame Germany's loss in World War I on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff.   Of course, it was that sweetheart Hitler and his Nazis who created the highly effective Big Lie that the Army had been near victorious in the field in late 1918 and just on the verge of achieving victory when suddenly out of nowhere they had been stabbed in the back by the “November Criminals” (Berlin politicians and civilians back home including Marxists, and especially the Republicans who he said signed the infamous Treaty of Versailles, kicked the monarchy out, and set up the Weimar Republic;  and, of course among the November Criminals, were his favorite scapegoats: the Jews.  That “Stabbed in the Back by the November Criminals” Big Lie was part of at least 1,800 of his speeches over the first decade and a half of the Nazi rise to power (late 1919 to early 1934). Here is Hitler using the Big Lie to accuse others (the Jews) of using a Big Lie . . . .

                                       “. . . it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.


                                      “All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

 

       Goebbels expanded upon Hitler’s definition some seventeen years later in a magazine article “Churchill’s Lie Factory” again using the Big Lie to accuse others of using the Big Lie. 

 

                                                         “The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

 

       Certainly the Big Lie in conjunction with name-calling is the prime progressive tactic used so overtly and commonly against conservatives as to rank almost as a strategic end. Can’t win an argument, no problem that a bit of name-calling and or ridicule can’t solve.   “What? You don’t agree with us, you are a RACIST!” “Don’t buy our philosophy? You must be really stupid!”   It all begins with changing history by asserting some BIG LIE as truth. Among the progressive-left’s favorite big lie is to attribute Nazism and Fascism to conservatives. Associated with this big lie is the labeling of conservatives as “the Right,” that is with those traditionally aligned with monarchies. The “Right” is also then expanded to include Nazis and Fascists and then they kick the monarchists out so only conservatives, Nazis and Fascists constitute the so-called “Right.” This particular Big Lie Complex has proven so successful that 90% of people now unquestioningly buy some of it or the entire intertwined lie . . . that is, even a majority of conservatives believe they constitute “the Right.” Check out your truth vs. B.S. detector by labeling the following twelve statements

 

TRUE or False. Correct answers follow. What’s the truth?

1.       The first of those right-wing monsters called “Rednecks” were gun-toting mine-workers’ union members attacking mines that had shutdown in defiance of the unions. They wore red-bandanas to avoid shooting each other accidentally.

2.     What we call Fascism began in Italy. The labor unions became so pervasive and strong that pretty soon, they had kicked the business owners out, taken over the companies, and created their own government.

3.     The word “Nazi” is a German acronym that means “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”

4.     When Communism was banned in Germany the membership in the Nazi Party almost doubled with perhaps 2/3 of the new recruits coming from among the ex-communists.

5.     The bankruptcy of New York City and near bankruptcy of New York State (NYC was bailed out by the federal government in 1975) was part of a strategy plotted by progressive Neo-Marxists Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and George Wiley that doubled (by adding eight million new recipients) the welfare rolls.

6.     Something called C-P Strategy was used by ACORN’s creator Wade Rathke in Arkansas in 1978 to help make Bill Clinton state governor at age 32 and president at age 46.

7.     The financial meltdown of 2007-2008 had its roots in a 1966 magazine article written by the creators of “C-P Strategy;” in a 1977 law (CRA ’77) forcing mortgage companies to knowingly make bad loans to unqualified recipients; and in Rathke’s 1977 creation of ACORN.

8.    The percentage of suspect home loans (granted at 3% down payment or less) in 1975 was 0.24% but thanks to CRA ’77 and five expansions to CRA ’77, it had risen to 34.1% by 2005.

9.     Bill Clinton was the first ACORN president and he paid ACORN back by expanding CRA ’77 four times during his presidency and by passing the Motor Voter Act.

10.Barack Obama was an ACORN lawyer in Chicago shaking down banks and other mortgage lenders to force them to comply with CRA ’77 and make terribly unwise loans.

11.   Bill Clinton’s steroid-version expansion of CRA law in 1998 made it easier to use CRA ’77 laws to get into a $400,000 home in 1999 than it had been to put a more qualified buyer into a $100,000 home a decade earlier.

12.  ACORN in the early 21st Century was able to routinely get home loans for buyers without jobs; without decent credit ratings; without even rental histories; with only food stamps to show as “income”; and even for illegal aliens . . . courtesy of CRA ’77.

 

As you’ve probably figured out, all twelve statements are TRUE. Here’s some useful explication: 

 

1.       “The Battle of Blair’s Mountain” in 1921 when the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) union sought to expand their hold on West Virginia Mines was the largest armed insurrection in the nation since the Civil War. Over one million rounds were fired and it required U.S. Army intervention to stop it.  Union workers . . . that’s progressive action by the rednecks, no conservativism involved.

2.       The syndicalist/union movement in Italy began in 1907 as a socialist/Marxist philosophy seeking to help the laborer. It was a splintered socialist movement until 1914 brought World War I. One group was anti-Marxist; the other was very nationalistic and even imperialistic. The groups merged in agreement against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914. After the war the old differences emerged until Benito Mussolini recombined the labor emphasis in 1919 and imposed a state-sponsored socialism upon the nation. Listen to his words as he provides his own interpretation:

 

                                                            "The official Italian Socialist Party has been reactionary and absolutely conservative. If its views had prevailed, our survival in the world of today would be impossible."

 

       Yep, you’re right Mussolini is claiming Socialism is conservative and even reactionary. Similarly, Hitler and the Nazis would proclaim they offered a “third path” saying, “We’re not communists and not capitalists, we offer a better (third) way.” In practice their words mean nothing, deeds mean everything. Controlled economies by the Nazis and the Italian Fascists definitely bear NO resemblance to capitalism or to free-markets anywhere.

3.     Since “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” is explicitly socialistic and for workers and those words clue us to socialism and unions rather than to individualism and capitalism, only a monstrous lie by the progressives repeated a million times a year would confuse people the way they are now.

4.     According to William Sheridan Allen’s masterpiece The Nazi Seizure of Power (1965), when Communist Party (KPD) scandals  (and several abortive and unsuccessful “uprisings”) were exploited in Germany by political opponents (including the Social Democrats, the more popular branch of Marxism in Germany at the time) the membership in the Nazi Party rose dramatically. Later Hitler would ban the KPD and the Social Democrats. Leaders of the SD and all members of the KPD were subject to arrest and being sent to concentration camps from then on.

5.     In 1966 Cloward and Piven Strategy (C-P Strategy) was created when the two Columbia University Marxists wrote an article in The Nation magazine entitled The Weight of the Poor: a Strategy to End Poverty which advocated exploitation of social-welfare laws to create chaos and push a radical leftist agenda (in this case, Cloward and Piven wanted a GNI (guaranteed national income). After creating the NWRO in 1967 they doubled the welfare rolls.

6.     Cloward, Piven and Wiley never did get their GNI but they bragged about their “success” publicly and also in print. The progressives now had an “overload strategy” to exploit the ever-expanding government that Democratic congresses were giving them. When they shifted to voter registration and housing the whole nation was endangered while Bill Clinton was empowered.

7.     Rathke was a lieutenant of George Wiley (Wiley along with Piven and Cloward created the National Welfare Rights Organization) who had been sent to Arkansas in 1970. After boasting of their success following the ’75 bankruptcy of NYC, the threesome told their advocates to move onto voter registration and public housing. When Jimmy Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, Rathke created the “Arkansas” Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) which expanded to the whole country within a decade and became the “Associations of” Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). 

8.    Just by working in Arkansas, Rathke doubled the nation’s suspect loan rate from 0.24% to 0.51%. He and ACORN also pulled a bunch of shenanigans to get Bill Clinton elected Arkansas governor. Cloward and Piven regarded Rathke’s work as so successful they expanded ACORN to the entire nation.

9.     Although he lost two years later in 1980 during the first Ronald Reagan wave, Bill Clinton was elected to the governor’s mansion every year from 1982 to 1990 and served till 1992. He paid ACORN back by expanding CRA ’77 four times (once by regulatory edict/thrice by legislation) during his presidency and by passing the Motor Voter Act with Cloward and Piven (husband and wife) standing directly behind him during the signing ceremony.

10.Obama was so effective for ACORN that not only did he get individual loans; but he also got promises of future loan quotas; and even got ACORN donations from the banks.

11.   The Republicans canNOT plead “not guilty” in all this. In 1992, George Bush, Sr., who successfully vetoed 45 of 46 bills he opposed, failed to veto a law with one section of it that expanded CRA ’77 to government mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. They also controlled the house and senate in 1995 and still allowed other compromise bills that expanded CRA ’77 twice that year. Progressive Republicans and other Republicans not paying attention helped the more numerous progressive Democrats to do us in. However, Clinton saw the suspect loan totals go from half a percent in 1985 to 14% in 1995 and was still pushing for laws that put the suspect home loan ratio above 34% with many of the loans after 1998 at 0% down payment.

12.  Thanks to ACORN’s street action a la Saul Alinsky (author or Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules^^ for Radicals (1971), welfare recipients and illegal aliens got into lots of huge mortgage loans they had no chance of ever paying off. A housing boom ensued, a boom built on blue sky and doomed to fail##.

 

       These are some of the most obvious of the Big Lies progressives use to confuse the issues and to so severely betray the Constitution and America’s citizens today. Dodging issues by using ad hominem attacks; and by impugning racism, stupidity and callous unconcern against all who want to limit government’s size, power and spending is their illogical but popularly constant refrain.  In their illogical arguments for and against specific legislation they resort to Keynesian economic models that never have worked but which are always referred to as Gospel among those desiring centralized control of every facet of existence. They would have all of us regard the word “conservative” as a curse word. Is that so bad?   Remember this, our Founding Fathers were not “conservatives,” but rather very radical proponents of individual liberty, property rights, economic freedom and limited government . . . Libertarians akin to today’s TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party. Only one system fulfilled their desiderata: the laissez-faire capitalism that had naturally evolved within the thirteen colonies . . . a brand of capitalism which Ayn Rand has called “The Unknown Ideal.” 

 

NEXT TIME: “The Morality of Capitalism”

 

 

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

 

** About ten years before Adolf’s birth his father changed his name from Schicklgruber to Hitler. “Heil Schicklgruber!” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

^^ One of Alinsky’s favorite protégés was Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama taught “Rules for Radicals” while simultaneously teaching a Constitutional Law class in Chicago. “Street Theater” as taught by Alinsky was all about in-your-face-confrontation primarily to get newspaper coverage and gain public support.

##For those of you who truly like to understand rather than merely memorize . . . .

       Mr. Obama has at least a hundred times referred in his speeches to conservatives or free markets or George W. Bush “driving the economy into a ditch.” In truth Bush spoke over 30 times publicly and 18 times to Congress seeking to repeal CRA legislation, beginning in January, 2005. Not until 30 months later in July, 2007, was a very weakened version of Bush’s bill passed. Predictably, while it helped a lot, when it came to dodging the financial meltdown, the bi-partisan 2007 law proved way too little, way too late. So the truth is that:

 

       George W. Bush saw the progressives and Democrats deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot cliff; jumped in; grabbed the wheel; and slammed on the brakes to gently guide it into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.

 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Debt-Caused Downgrade Drives Dollar, Gold, Oil, Food, Inflation Higher

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on April 20, 2011 at 8:32am


 

 
 
           It’s been less than two weeks since the Republican House leadership caved into President Obama and received just $392 million in real cuts for the fiscal 2011 budget; and just two days since the Standard & Poors bond rating services listed a negative outlook for the United States’ fiscal future and already the effects are being felt as worldwide distrust of the once-mighty dollar is evident everywhere:
 
Item: George Soros, “The Man who Broke the Bank of England” a.k.a. the “International Man of Misery” who’s earned his tens of billions by wrecking currencies and whole economies especially in Europe and SE Asia  . . . is moving in for the kill. Soros -- the biggest individual funder of the Obama campaign for presidency via 54 separate U.S. and foreign foundations -- claims that the U.S. Dollar as evidenced by the S&P ratings adjustment is “no longer the world’s reserve currency.” Soros added that the dollar is plunging so quickly in value, central banks and investors have no choice but to shift away from the Greenback to avoid huge losses and that oil, gold and other commodities as well as currencies such as the Chinese Yuan, Euro and Yen are taking up the slack.
Item:  The price of gold has shot up to $1,503 the highest in history; silver moved up to $44.77 zeroing-in on its all-time high price of $51.28. Gold has risen 6.5% since the New Year; silver has climbed 55% in the same period.
Item: Numerous restaurants in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles have raised their prices and some have placed easily-read signs saying they take foreign currency such as the Mexican Peso, the French Franc, the British Pound and Canada’s dollar.
Item: The U.S. dollar index is currently near a 16-month low at roughly 74.30 against a basket of other currencies. The Federal Reserve banks’ easy-money policies are now coming under heavy criticism from Democrats as well as Republicans.
Item: Ethanol subsidizing continues although everyone who understands the problem realizes that Ethanol 1) is only viable because of government subsidies and cannot stand on its own and b)Ethanol causes far more pollution in sum than gasoline does because of the huge costs required to transport corn to the ethanol plants (not quite the same as an oil pipeline). Meanwhile the price of corn and corn products, which are found in about 300-different common foods, are sky-rocketing and surprise, so is the price of food.
Item: The price of oil, which seemed to be ebbing last week, has jumped back almost $5 to $110.60 a barrel. Gasoline prices above $4 per gallon are fast becoming commonplace.
Item: There may be a bit of a silver-lining to this last item. Whenever gasoline gets above $3.30 a gallon, Methanol becomes quite an attractive alternative as does Natural Gas. Both would require about a $150-200 retrofit to be used in cars, but they’re cheaper than gas now; much cleaner; much more abundant in the United States than anywhere else. Some environmentalists claim that while it’s better than gasoline, Natural Gas is still nasty pollution-wise.   At roughly$2.20 a gallon for gasoline we have a real cheap alternative – and of course sometime soon we could see gas prices double that in this country . . . keragen a.k.a. marlstone a.k.a. oil shale (it’s neither shale; nor oil and takes a mining rather than drilling operation to free from the ground. Right now the huge keragen deposits in Western Colorado, NE Utah; and Southwest Wyoming could provide 400 years worth of fuel for the entire world. The leader in that technology is TOSCO (“The Oil-Shale Co.”) and guess who our only real competitor for Keragen dominance might become? China. So you’d better believe it would be in our interests to develop keragen quickly before China does.
An Only Casually-Related Item: Even as 53% of Americans still blame our financial troubles on George W. Bush -- Goldman Sachs has just this week received a blistering new rain of criticism for making a fortune during the financial meltdown by short-selling many of those ridiculous lumped-together-mortgage packages based upon shoddy sub-prime home loans that banks and mortgage companies had been forced to make since President Carter first passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 (CRA ’77). CRA’ 77 law was expanded four times by President Clinton which Bush fought to repeal for 30 consecutive months between January, 2005 and July, 2007. Finally, a bi-partisan too-little, too-late bill passed which in August, 2010, Treasury Secretary Geithner paid respect to Bush for his efforts, by saying his law prevented a much worse meltdown and an utter collapse in home prices. Rajjpuut says, “Congratulations to Goldman Sachs! ”Isn’t it amazing how successful the left-wing is at blaming the free-markets and conservatives for every disaster caused by progressive left-wing interference in the free markets? 
After Clinton’s 1998 steroid-version expansion of CRA ’77 people without jobs; with horrific credit ratings; without rental histories; with only food stamps to declare as “income”; and even illegal aliens found it, easy thanks to ACORN, to get into $300,000 and $400,000 homes than people with good credit, etc. had faced in trying to get into $150,000 homes a decade earlier. If you’re uninformed and believe that conservatives pushed the economy into a ditch you deserve what Obama and the rest of the big spenders are giving us . . . the rest of us don’t. PS: who was the most famous ACORN attorney at getting home loan compliance forcing mortgage companies to make knowingly bad loans in Chicago?   Who was at the same time teaching night classes in self-described “Neo-Communist” Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”??? Barack Hussein Obama. In 1995 and 1996 Obama not only was successful in getting such outrageous loans repeatedly and getting promises of further compliance but also in securing large ACORN donations. Does all this make you proud to be an American?
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Expensive, INeffective Pet Obama Housing Program Repealed

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on April 3, 2011 at 4:05pm

 

“There are lies, damn lies, statistics . . . and then there are damnable statistical lies from politicians.” 
Rajjpuut
 
“When you combine ignorance and borrowed money, the results can get interesting.” 
Warren Buffet
 
 
 
Wide-spread Housing Collapse Underway
Main Obama Program Fails, ‘Cash for Keys’ Proposed
 
 
NOTE:  CBS Moneywatch today, ran an article entitled “Why the Housing Market is three times worse than you think.” Since Rajjpuut has several times mentioned that when it comes to housing, the situation is probably seven or eight times worse than the administration wants people to believe, it’s time to clear the air.   This blog concerns HAMP and other failed big government housing initiatives and how they’ve destroyed the U.S. housing market now and possibly well into the future. Many American readers know very little about the background of the situation which is provided in the next few paragraphs. If you’re well-informed, skip the introduction and head right down to the “red” paragraph below and start reading there . . . if you’ve foolishly been thinking over the years that politics and the economy don’t matter – don’t affect you, read and understand every word and continue to the footnotes and read and understand that as well. As the Kingston Trio once sang, “Citizens, hear me out, this could happen to you!”
            As every would-be bride knows, it’s “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" . . . and yes, a similar pattern is starting to develop. The “old” is the outdated Keynesian idea that government can create real and meaningful jobs in free markets and that government interference could actually save free markets in times of duress; can improve the free market system. 
The “new” under Obama was a series of handouts and bailouts bearing his signature ‘zero oversight, zero results’ label . . . first came the Obama $787 billion second-stimulus.  Then “Cash for Clunkers” in mid-2009 proved itself an expensive program that accomplished little or nothing and absolutely destroyed the used car market so badly that’s its effects are still in place today: the average used car today costs $1,778 more than an average used car cost in 2009, hurting poorer Americans more than all others. Then came HomeStar, unofficially known as “Cash for Caulkers,” launched later that same year to encourage economic growth by offering incentives to homeowner and retailers and small business owners for improving their homes’ etc.’s energy efficiency.  The program got all tied up in bureaucratic red tape when Republican oversight indicated that the beneficiaries would mostly tend to come from a narrow-range of construction firms that had contributed to the Obama presidential run in 2008. “Cash for Keys” (more below) is a similar program which has an importantly distinct “wrinkle.”
“Something borrowed” includes all the same lies that made Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) such a left-wing hero even though he took an ordinary recession and extended it out to 12.5 years until Pearl Harbor finally jump-started the economy and ended the country’s horrific malaise. In this age of real information available in real-time, however, the slick lies that allowed FDR to confiscate the nation’s gold coinage from citizens and then to re-peg the price of an ounce of gold from $20.76 up to $35 an ounce (a theft of the wealth of the citizens and an overnight inflation of roughly 69% which mugged 92% of all Americans <gold coin holders> on the one hand; and then impoverished 100% of the nation on the other) aren’t able to fester so long as there are now in the information age watchdogs like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News (and to a lesser extent USA Today) defying the liberal media’s cheerleading for the Obama administration and holding their feet to the fire every single day; 24 hours a day.  Even though most citizens don't bother to educate themselves as to political reality; the 24-7 news cycle makes it impossible eventually for the majority to stay ignorant forever.  When they "wise up" often their bitterness toward the liars in government can be dramatic:  as we saw on the last Election Day.
Under real media scrutiny, Joe Biden’s remarkable rhetorical statement (“Are we going to have to borrow trillions, to keep from going bankrupt? Yes!”) was quickly revealed for the preposterous notion it was and not repeated.  When a poll earlier this week showed that 60% of Americans do NOT approve of Obama’s economic programs and then virtually identical results came from the always trustworthy Rasmussen Reports, it shows that Americans sooner or later get the picture.   Only 36% of Americans think the Obama economic programs are sound.  57% are so convinced that they're in favor of a government shutdown so long as substantial budget cuts result.
Something “blue” is the result of all the government interference in the once great American housing market. We’ll only touch briefly here on the well-documented fact that it was government interference** which created the crisis in the first place (see the footnote if you’ve been too busy watching sitcoms and IRreality shows to notice how the government stuck it to us . . . and pay attention from now on). We will mention that the job-killing government interference that supposedly was designed to expand job opportunities in the free market has had the exact opposite effect. The money that normally would sit on the sidelines during the initial stages of a recession and then come into play has stayed there on the sidelines for two and a half years now. The bottom of the recession, as shown by the American stock markets which usually get it close to right, was in mid-March, 2009 six months after the height of the financial crisis. Typically in normal times within another nine or ten months (that would mean at the end of 2009 or January of 2010) an all-out recovery is well underway. 
However, thanks to all the new government regulation and interference and all the confusion and uncertainty that’s been created . . . even larger amounts of capital has stayed uninvested by small business, the engine of economic recovery. This is money that would have been working in the free markets for fourteen or fifteen months already which is too frightened by the economic assault Barack has lain upon them. Obamacare, is one of the administration’s worst moves ever. The new law all by itself created 384 new government agencies (in 12+ years FDR only created 39 new agencies) – no, that is NOT a typo, 384 new agencies and all their red tape anti-business bureaucracy Americans now have to deal with. Now let us move on to something’s “double-blue.”
On Tuesday, March 29th, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to end HAMP one of president Obama’s most ambitious housing programs. HAMP (the Home Affordable Modification Program) was designed to keep homeowners in their homes despite being on the road to foreclosure for not paying their mortgages. Republicans and virtually all so-called “Blue-dog” Democrats agree nearly 100% that HAMP was a fiasco, a monumental failure. There are lies, damn lies, statistics . . . and then there are damnable statistical lies from politicians . . . such as when Janet Napolitano tells us with contrived data that the borders are safer than ever; or President Obama assures us that his approach to the housing approach is actually working quite well; and justifying his request to modify and expand the program . . . .
“Real” (meaningful numerical information designed to highlight a problem and point at a solution) statistics tell a different story than the Obama folk would have you believe. As soon as the repeal HAMP bill was passed in the House, fifty Democratic reps sent a message to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner urging that he reform HAMP: “HAMP must change to meet its potential.” The real stats show a deeply flawed program. Besides the few Blue-dog Dems voting for the bill, most Democrats know that HAMP is the poster boy for failed government interference and government spending boondoggles, but they feel they must vote with their caucus and their president . . . so the HAMP repeal vote faces a highly uncertain future in the senate . . . not to mention that Barack Obama has said he will definitely veto the HAMP repeal bill should it reach the Oval Office.     What is it about HAMP that Democrats find to love? First, the facts . . . .
The outgoing special investigator general for TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), Neil Barofsky, called HAMP a "failure," in an interview with CNN on March 24th. He said HAMP was supposed to help 3 to 4 million underwater homeowners stay in their homes. But so far, it has only managed to help less than half a million do so despite immense expenditures of time and money.   "It's really one of the deep failures of TARP," Barofsky said. "TARP wasn't supposed to just help the banks return to profitability, it was also supposed to help people stay in their homes." Mr. Geithner at the Treasury has pointed out, on several occasions, that while the HAMP program could be better, it's the only federal program spurring mortgage servicers to help homeowners. 
What goes unmentioned among all the administration spin is that because of the huge amount of time and red-tape involved with HAMP and the refusal of many aggrieved foreclosed owners to leave their properties the possibility of a genuine recovery in the American housing market is years away. Until these depressed properties are handled, their shadow hangs over all potential dealings as the vast majority of Americans paying their mortgages every month find that their once “most valuable asset” (their home) has now become a monstrous drag on their personal finances. Should they want to sell, they face depressed prices and/or long periods of uncertainty before a buyer can be found. If they hold onto their homes they face 3%-10% drops in value that threaten in many cases to put them “underwater” on their mortgage despite their homes’ built-up equities. 
Barack Obama’s refusal to insist that reasonable foreclosures be allowed to proceed is a huge black cloud hanging over the nation’s real estate marketing. Of course, Barack as an ACORN lawyer in the mid-90’s was helping shake down lenders and setting up a lot of these very same loans to ignorant and unworthy clients by extorting banks to abide with the federal government’s CRA ’77 legislation forcing them to make horrifically bad home loans so perhaps his judgment in the matter is clouded. Besides clearing this nebulous situation up, the Republican HAMP repeal bill will knock $1.3 billion off the federal deficits. So why does Obama and why do the progressives Democrats love HAMP? Despite all their claims about Bush and “the car in the ditch,” most Democrats know who really caused the financial meltdown we saw beginning in late 2007. They’d prefer, however, to continue to lie to themselves and to the American voter.  
HAMP is their last ditch effort to prove to themselves that despite the obvious facts on display . . . government interference works; that they really did NOT undermine and cut the legs off the U.S. economy with all their constant mortgage industry interference beginning with CRA ’77 (see the earlier mentioned footnote** below). Of course the fact that the original CRA President was Jimmy Carter; and our first ACORN president Bill Clinton, expanded Community Reinvestment ACT ‘77 legislation once by regulatory fiat in 1993; twice by separate legislations in 1995; and by a steroid-version expansion of the law in 1998; and the fact that Barack Obama was an ACORN lawyer for parts of three years shaking down banks and mortgage companies to extort their involvement in CRA 77 and grant knowingly unsound loans to knowingly terribly fiscally-unworthy clients . . . these facts should not color your evaluation of progressive politicians and their competence now, should it?
So what is the big picture here? What’s going on in the housing markets? When can we expect a full recovery? Recent reports show that new home sales hit a record low in February, 2011. Last week we found out that 19 of the 20 largest metros areas according to Standard and Poors, experienced a pricing slump in January. This is horrible news three years into the financial meltdown and almost by itself guarantees a “double-dip” recession. Ah, but the situation degenerates even more . . . .
The good news is that besides some job growth and a tiny wage growth . . . American banks are finally looking at the economy with a rosier perspective and are now far more likely to grant home loans.   However, the fly-in-the-ointment is the nasty situation with depressed and foreclosed homes mentioned above. It’s what the mortgage industry calls “shadow inventory.” Besides the alarming backlog of older homes on the market and the relative DEPRESSION in new home turnover, there is this nagging shadow inventory that can’t be dealt with properly because of the government red tape; Obama’s intransigent belief that his programs are infallible; and Eric Holder’s “INJUSTICE DEPARTMENT” standing in the way, protecting the unworthy ACORN-inspired borrowers over the forced-to-loan-‘em-money-by-your-stupid-CRA ’77-law banks and handcuffing the entire U.S. economy as a result.
Here’s what the statistics tell us: A) 3.5 million existing homes are being tracked by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) which, at their current prices, are homes that would sell on average only after 8.5 – 9 full months’ exposure on the market. B) The “shadow inventory” that the government and the banking industry would like to pretend isn’t fouling their nets is, if you press them, another 1.8 million homes definitely likely to hit the market sometime soon in our futures. Why? Some people will eventually “just walk away” from their underwater mortgages; or from their job losses which have made them unable to continue paying on older homes in which they’ve some real equity; most of these people are now anywhere from three months to nine months behind in paying their mortgages and foreclosure is now a definite prospect. And what is the likely result of all this shadow inventory eventually? A large chunk of these homes will appear on the market and the NAR’s projected nine month turnaround will then jump to an average of two years . . . a literal disaster for home-sellers and C) in reality the biggest lie of our time concerning the mortgage industry is now coming to light: it appears that a hither-to unreported severely underwater shadow inventory has been glossed over until now. 
These are two million homeowners who now find themselves at least 50 percent underwater on their mortgages. A huge percentage of these folk were the “beneficiaries” of the CRA ’77 legislation and ACORN’s efforts to put the jobless and poor credit risks and even illegal aliens into expensive homes (that statement is zero exaggeration, but LITERALLY 100% true). A leftist rebellion has charged many of these folks with a zeal for ignoring the facts of life and staying in their homes (despite years of not paying their mortgages in many cases) despite the official proceedings. To say that this element is a severe drag on the housing market is to underestimate reality by 600% in Rajjpuut’s opinion. IF they are allowed to get away with this the banks are really in trouble. IF they get away with this, what’s also to stop normal, honest debtors who can afford their mortgages but who find themselves underwater from saying “Screw it? I like their idea!” What would prevent that? This sort of widespread collapse of private property would mean the end of America as we know it.
Rather than facing reality, the Obama administration is looking at creating another government-spending and government-interference boondoggle called “Cash for Keys.” Their idea is to give $21,000 to all the bad loan recipients from CRA ’77 so they’ll vacate their homes and the housing market can finally start to return to normalcy. So the progressives in the federal government almost bankrupted the banks and mortgage companies by forcing them to make horrifically bad loans to those people (many of whom could not honestly afford an $800 used car) and after bailing out the banks, they’re going to bailout these fools who couldn’t figure that there was no way in hell they could ever pay off their home loans . . . . Now do you still believe in making government bigger? What do you think of government-forced redistribution of wealth schemes now?
For the home-sellers in the worst-hit states: (New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, Florida, Delaware, Georgia, Connecticut, Alabama, California and Washington) those turnover numbers are beginning to drag out already. Only four states seem to have a semi-healthy housing industry outlook for 2011-2012: the aforementioned North Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Montana. Sugar-coating all this information is the Obama strategy to get him through the next nineteen months and re-elected . . . excess sugar is terrible for your health.
As a quick side note: if you’re in the market for a home, present mortgage rates are very much on your side, so take your time, look over the available housing carefully; don’t be afraid to offer 50%-60% of asking price. After initial refusal you might find a bargain home in five or six weeks. If you’re selling a home, make sure you live in North Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming or Montana; or look to hold onto it for 8-10 years when the markets might hopefully rebound and stabilize at a higher level. Of course, if we wind up with hyper-inflation in the next decade, your home and its present ridiculously high mortgage might just prove to be your saving grace if you can survive the ravages of 80% or higher inflation. Good luck, America!
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
** “When you combine ignorance and borrowed money, the results can get interesting.” Warren Buffet                  Buffet’s comment not only applies to the unworthy and ignorant borrowers (perhaps worthy of a 55% down payment loan for an inexpensive home if they won a lesser part of the lottery some day, but definitely NOT worthy of a 0.0% loan on a $400,000 home) blogged about here . . . but also to the ignorant and heavily mortgaged Federal Government. Are you far better off now, than you were $5 TRillion ago? I’m not and neither is the country. How did we get into this mess? It’s a long but very interesting story . . . .
 
ITEM:  In 1975, 64% of American private citizens owned their own homes, then the highest in the world. Only one loan in 404 was considered “suspect.” 90% of home loans were granted with 20% to 33% down payment. Even the “suspect” loans were special cases, typically military officers attending college on the GI bill who received mortgages in some cases with 3% down payment. In short our private home ownership mortgage system was NOT broken. But progressive politicians of both parties would soon fix that, and us.
 
 
A decade earlier, a progressive president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, not only got us deeply involved in war in South East Asia, but also launched an expensive “War on Poverty” which included Medicare and the Federal side of Medicaid that today face a combined $68 TRillion in unfunded liabilities; a broad expansion of Social Security benefits (now with $36 TRillion in unfunded liabilities); and a sweeping and, of course, overly generous and anti-work-incentivized welfare set of expansions. About the time this was happening, a husband and wife neo-Marxist team, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, published an article in The Nation magazine in 1966 entitled The Weight of the Poor: a Strategy to End Poverty which has come to be popularly known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy;” the two were Columbia University professors not opposed to crapping in their own nest (New York City) as you’ll soon see. In C-P Strategy the poor are unwittingly used as leftist storm troopers in their attempt to bankrupt the federal government of the United States. 
Their stated goal -- when they established the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in 1967 with Black militant activist George Wiley – was to bankrupt the welfare system by creating a huge welfare state and thus to cause such financial chaos they’d get the Democratic Party to institute a Guaranteed National Income (GNI). This approach they said would SNAP! eliminate poverty; totally destabilize American capitalism; and set the country on the fast lane to “the Revolution.” Frances Piven, by the way, is still alive and still calling for “The Revolution” and violence and blood in the streets today. Rajjpuut bets “Nana Frannie” makes a wonderful peachy-keen grandmother – wanna bet she knits some wonderful Afghans?
Their Alinsky street-battling worked wonders in the welfare offices (self-proclaimed “neo-Marxist Saul Alinsky is famous for Reveille for Radicals in 1946; and Rules for Radical in 1971 he also was a mentor to Hillary Clinton and his “Rules for Radicals” course was taught in Chicago by Professor Barack Obama) and C-P strategy worked “wonderfully,” welfare rolls were doubled within three and a half years and by 1975, New York City was bankrupt; New York State itself was on the verge of bankruptcy and numerous large metropolitan areas and big-city states around the country were also in dire fiscal straits. NYC was bailed out by the federal government in November that year. 
Wiley and Cloward and Piven took to publically boasting of the “great things they’d accomplished” even though their stated goal (GNI) was never an idea discussed seriously in Congress;” then they called upon their followers (using the “Saul Alinsky street tactics” Wiley had perfected for future endeavors) to now get involved in federal housing and in voter registration. Therein hangs the meat of our tale . . . .
ITEM: As new president Jimmy Carter took office in January, 1977, a Wiley-NWRO lieutenant sent to Arkansas about 1970, Wade Rathke, was assigned the task of coming up with a Cloward and Piven type organization along the lines of the NWRO to test out in Arkansas. Arkansas was chosen because it was far from the “media glare” and because they had an up-and-coming young politician whose thinking ran to progressive aims that C and P and Wiley strongly believed in: Bill Clinton, at 30 years old one of the youngest Lieutenant Governors in the country and one of the nation’s most promising Democrats. 
                The stimulus for the Rathke assignment was that Carter and the Democrats had promised CRA ’77- (Community Reinvestment Act of 1977) type legislation designed to spread the wealth by forcing mortgage companies to make home loans to bad risk clients (at that time just in the inner cities) who, as they saw it, might otherwise not be in the housing market for ten or twelve years. Perhaps 4% of Americans understand the whole big picture of Cloward and Piven and of Carter’s CRA ’77 legislation and how it led inexorably to the financial meltdown of 2007. It’s a fascinating story. But first consider this: it took Cloward and Piven’s NWRO parts of eight years to bankrupt NYC and nearly bankrupt New York State and with Bill Clinton’s unending support, it took ACORN roughly 30 years to bring down the USA and almost ruin it irreparably. 
ACORN (originally the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now) was created at virtually the same moment as Carter’s CRA ’77 law was signed. At first ACORN was largely ineffective in getting housing action but they went out almost immediately and began registering voters for the 1978 Arkansas election. They signed an enormous bunch of people up; many of them were even real people really eligible to vote in Arkansas. They also threw all the Republican registrants paperwork in the trash which threw the 1978 election dramatically to William Jefferson Clinton, the state’s new governor. At that time Arkansas governors were only elected to two-year terms, later that changed. Nevertheless with ACORN’s backing Bill Clinton remained Arkansas governor for 12 of the next 14 years and became president of the United States in 1992. Meanwhile ACORN had figured out how to get lots of bad home loans for risky clients. In a little while, ACORN was found in all 50 states and now stood for: Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.  By 1985, the action of ACORN limited only to Arkansas had made a big difference in overall mortgages in the entire United States. The number of suspect loans was roughly doubled: from 1 in every 404 in 1975, to 1 in 196 by 1985.
ITEM:  The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 was a welcome relief for progressives after the fiasco that was Jimmy Carter in 1980; and the non-electables Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. Even though Clinton made the CRA ’77 situation much worse, it would be unfair to give Democrats all the blame. About 80% of Democrats were progressives in the early 1990’s but progressive Republicans played a role every step of the way and, even a non-vigilant conservative president caused us a lot of problems. George H. W. Bush who succeeded in upholding 45 out of 46 presidential vetoes against a big-spending congress saw a bill pass his desk that he approved of except for two or three small details. Instead of standing his ground, Bush #1 signed the bill into law instead of vetoing it and sending it back to Congress for removal of the offending parts. Too bad, part of that bill was an expansion of CRA mortgage legislation into the big federal mortgage programs Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac -- a huge mistake. The good thing was that the original CRA ’77 was a poorly constructed law that mostly any conscientious mortgage company could largely ignore.
                Bill Clinton came into office in January, 1993 aiming to put across a very ambitious conservative agenda including government health care. He was beholden to ACORN and to all the Cloward-Piven people and more importantly he largely believed as they did. His first two major actions were aimed at re-paying them.   You’ll recall that ACORN was created in response to the C-P call for their supporters to get involved in voter registration and in federal housing after their success in bankrupting NYC . . . Clinton passed the “Motor Voter Act” called by opponents “a twelve-lane highway to voter fraud.” No doubt the ACORN people considered Motor Voter to be a great help to their registrations scams. If you’ll visit this picture of the Motor Voter signing ceremony you’ll see something very important in the picture:
Yes, if you visited the Wikipedia link given earlier you’re right, that is Frances Fox Piven in the green sweater standing almost directly behind President Clinton with her husband Richard Cloward the tall man with glasses to her immediate left watching the Motor Voter Act get signed into law.
                Clinton also used the regulatory fiat of his office to turn the rather cumbersome CRA ’77 legislation into a powerful and more easily enforceable law. Now it would not be so easy for mortgage lenders to laugh off the notion of making bad loans to unqualified would-be home buyers . . . now it would become part of their everyday life. Twice in the year 1995, Clinton was able to sneak bills further expanding CRA ’77 through Congress even though it was dominated by Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Newt Gingrich the Speaker of the House did a horrible job and allowed almost anything the Democrats could dream of into numerous “compromise bills.” During this time a Chicago attorney named Barack Obama was working for ACORN and shaking down home loan companies. Obama was reputed to be so good at his job that court appearances never happened. The Banks just caved in, agreed to a certain pattern of loans and usually even offered up a donation to ACORN thanks to Barack’s persuasiveness. By 1995, one in every seven home loans was suspect and also offered at less than 3% down payment.
Finally, in 1998 Clinton passed the steroid version of CRA ’77 in 1998. Obama was long gone but the ’98 Clinton expansion of CRA put ACORN in the driver seat. From now on they’d have less trouble getting unqualified loan recipients into $440,000 homes than they had getting them into $110,000 homes a decade earlier. ACORN had elevated its shake-down processes into a science. Where before loans for moderately bad risks had been common, the new law made it easy for ACORN to get home loans for people without jobs; people with bad credit ratings; people without even rental histories; people whose only “income” was food stamps; or other welfare roll recipients; and even illegal aliens. By 2005, 1 in every 3 home loans (34% to be precise) was granted to unqualified loan recipients at 3% down payment or less . . . many of them at 0% down. The housing bubble was accelerating and America was in trouble.
Perhaps the first person to write about the seriousness of the bubble was investech.com guru James Stack out of Whitefish, Montana. As early as late November, 2003, Stack was upon the problem like ugly on an ape. He soon began including a graph of the Housing Industry bubble which he said had been created by senseless sub-prime loans that could never be expected to be repaid. That graph slowly changing month after month was a regular part of the investech weekly reports for roughly the next 5 ½ years. The Republicans of the Bush #2 administration figured things out by late December, 2004 and presented Congress with a bill undoing the 1998 Clinton expansion and many of the most harmful features of all the CRA ’77 legislation. President Bush gave nineteen separate speeches about the unraveling of the American economy that CRA ’77 was bringing about. The bill was defeated every time and the liberal press virtually totally ignored the story. Rajjpuut, who had been warning people since December, 2003 was aghast. Here was the most serious financial debacle of our time and no one cared. 
Finally, 30 months after their first try, the Republicans passed a seriously watered-down version of the anti-CRA ’77 bill in July, 2007 just about the time the problem became Unignorable. It was, of course too little, too late. Nevertheless, according to a speech Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made in August, 2010, Bush’s efforts probably saved the nation from absolute financial Armageddon and he credits Bush in particular for preventing a total meltdown in housing prices. So as far as that little fable Mr. Obama delights in about the Republicans, conservatives and Wall Street driving the economy in the ditch . . . the truth is quite different. Here it is:
George W. Bush seeing the progressives, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and most Democrats deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500 foot-cliff,  jumped into the front seat grabbed the steering wheel and hit the brakes and guided it into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.  Amen.
 
It's that key word "deliberately" that is most disturbing on two levels:  first, that one of our major parties has been hijacked by people (progressives) who put their own agenda totally and utterly ahead of the nation's because they know best for all of us; and secondly, the fact that only two main news sources in the country have considered this story important enough to cover.  Just in case you don't know what progressivism is:  it's the conviction that we must "progress" beyond the 'outdated and ill-conceived U.S. Constitution' if we are to make necessary "progress" toward an earthly Utopia.
 
 
Read more…

Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama, to G.O.P., “You can Ride in Back”; No One Tells Truth

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on October 26, 2010 at 1:00am

Make no mistake, this is not 1948 (when polling was in its infancy). Polling today is pretty damn scientific and sophisticated. A “Wave” or “Near-Wave” election has been prognosticated . . . if somehow, the Democrats come out smelling like a rose, than there are only three possibilities:

A. ACORN inspired voter fraud based upon Bill Clinton’s “Motor Vote Act” (the signing of which was attended by Richard Cloward and Frances Piven in an infamous picture^^ all over the internet . . . the same Cloward and Piven who deliberately bankrupted New York City in 1975 by overloading the welfare system who then called two years before ACORN’s birth for their followers to move into voter registration and the mortgage industry).

B. That huge swaths of the public believed Barack Obama’s big lie . . .

“The Republicans put the car in the ditch and now that we’ve done all the work to almost get it out, here they are asking for the keys. Well, they can ride along in the back, but we’re not giving them back the keys.”

C. Or both A and B above.

The matter of voter fraud via ACORN is another matter altogether, but Barack Obama has used constant repetition (a key propaganda element) of the “Big Lie” (the most notorious of all the propaganda elements) at least a hundred times in the telling of that “car in the ditch story,” why won’t anyone tell the truth?

George Bush saw Obama, Clinton, ACORN, and other progressive groups deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot cliff (utter financial disaster) dived into the front seat, grabbed the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes creating a controlled skid that put the vehicle into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.

Could that be true? You ask . . . .

“President G.W. Bush warned congress at least 18 times about the problem after January, 2005, when his administration made their first attempt to undo the evils of CRA legislation, especially the last three expansions by Clinton (1995 twice and 1998’s steroid version), but were defeated by the progressives. Finally thirty months later in July of 2007 a much weaker, watered down bill was passed by bi-partisan vote. It would prove far too little, far too late and the meltdown began soon afterward. However, it was sufficient help to the economy that Treasury Secretary Geithner in August, 2010, credited Bush with preventing a truly deep recession and preventing home prices from plummeting dangerously.”

The Shocking Truth that Sets the Country Free

Those of you who've heard a little bit of mythology have almost surely run into Cassandra. She was the daughter of King Priam of Troy and sister of Hector and Paris. Supposedly she slept overnight in the Temple of Apollo and the snakes therein licked her ears so clean she could "hear the future." Because her clairvoyance might quite likely interfere with destiny, Apollo cursed her with being unbelieved. For example, she foresaw the defeat of Troy, her brother Hector's body being brought back within Troy's Walls and also warned of the dangers of the Trojan Horse . . . but, of course, no one would believe her ever, about anything. Ouch!!!

Rajjpuut is beginning to know exactly how that unlucky lady felt. In November of 2003, James Stack of investech.com started running a chart that he would continue to run for an unheard of length of time -- almost five full years. The gist of the chart (Housing Industry Bubble) was that not only were housing prices artificially high, but that mortgage industry stocks and virtually all stocks associated with housing in any way (construction, home improvement, insulation, insurance, etc.) were in a huge bubble (1400% of their 1995 values) which was sure to collapse AND that something called the "sub-prime lending crisis" as well as derivative investments based upon that crisis were threatening to undermine the very foundation of our nation's economy. The story involved in creating that crisis covers over 44 years and is NOT, like Cassandra's tales from the future . . . but rather from the past and all easily verifiable, yet like Cassandra . . . Rajjpuut finds no audience that listens . . . .

In seeking to understand that situation, Rajjpuut uncovered all these truths and he began writing about them to each and any and every ear he could find roughly seven years ago. It's all true, all verifiable and it amounts to tying together two of the greatest acts of treason in America's history with each other and the two most corrupt presidents in our history, our two ACORN presidents, with each other and with the "Founding Destroyers" of our country, Saul Alinsky and his two greatest disciples: Richard Cloward and Frances Piven . . . .

It’s well known and documentable that . . . the American housing loan industry was the finest in the world before progressive legislators got involved. Our sparkling 64% private ownership of homes was the envy of the planet. Sub-prime lending (that is lending to people who can’t afford their mortgage and will default on their loan unless they win the lottery) was unheard of. Banks that failed just failed in those days . . . and only when they actually failed or some shenanigans were discovered would the government step in in order to protect the depositors. Only 1 in every 404 home loans was made at less than 3% down payment in 1975, almost always to distinguished veteran officers from our military who were going to college and working part time. More than any other single person, Bill Clinton changed all that. Be prepared to be shocked . . . because Bill Clinton made a big deal about his "legacy" during his last term and the evidence shown below is that the Clinton Legacy actually is "The Great ACORN-Progressive Betrayal of America" . . . read on, and Rajjpuut will prove it to you . . . .

It’s NOT well-known that Bill Clinton was the first ACORN president, but he was. ACORN (originally “Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now”) was the brainchild of Wade Rathke created in Arkansas in 1977 to take advantage of Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA ’77). Much later when ACORN proved itself successful in Arkansas it was expanded across the whole nation, the “A” in ACORN stopped meaning “Arkansas” and came to mean “Association of.” Bill Clinton obviously was a real political comer (elected Arkansas lieutenant governor in 1976 at the age of 30), but his politicking was made much easier with the backing of ACORN over the next 18 years. ACORN helped Clinton win the governor’s mansion in Arkansas 12 of the next 14 years as well as two terms as president of the United States. It happened this way . . . .

Wade Rathke, was a George Wiley lieutenant sent to establish a National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) branch in the state of Arkansas seven years earlier. NWRO had been created by Wiley and Richard Cloward and Frances Piven in NYC to test out the Cloward-Piven Strategy (published in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine, The Weight of the Poor: a Strategy to End Poverty) and they planned to sufficiently overload the nation’s welfare system so that Congress would have to create a GNI (guaranteed national income) Law and abolish American poverty on the spot.

It didn’t work, but using Alinsky tactics (Saul Alinsky was a self-described “neo-Marxist” community organizer who had authored Reveille for Radicals and later Rules for Radicals) and by putting 8.2 million presumably unqualified new recipients on the welfare rolls, they did bankrupt New York City and almost bankrupt New York State. The federal government stepped in to bail out NYC in 1975. What happened exactly? In the late-sixties, founder George Wiley forged an army of tens of thousands of single minority mothers, whom he sent out to disrupt welfare offices through sit-ins and demonstrations demanding an end to the “oppressive” eligibility restrictions that kept down the welfare rolls. His aim: to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America’s unjust capitalist economy.

The flooding of the welfare rolls succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams. From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared so that by the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy. Despite their failure to get GNI and abolish poverty, Wiley, Piven and Cloward bragged publicly and in writing about their ‘great accomplishment.’ That great accomplishment? Instead of igniting a restructuring of American capitalism and a GNI, this explosion of the welfare rolls only helped to create a culture of family disintegration and dependency in inner-city neighborhoods, with rampant illegitimacy, crime, school failure, drug abuse, non-work, and poverty among a fast-growing underclass. Wiley, Cloward and Piven told their eager followers that voter registration and housing were the next areas they needed to probe. Not surprisingly, ACORN today is known most of all for voter registration fraud and exploiting and abusing the nation’s housing legislation . . . .

So Wade Rathke (who would later create the nation’s and the world’s largest union SEIU) created ACORN in Arkansas to carry out voter registration and housing “activities” of a highly questionable nature. ACORN during Clinton’s first run for governor in Arkansas registered roughly 24,000 persons to vote and then threw away all the paper work for would-be Republican registrants. Clinton won, of course. They were less successful in getting CRA ’77 housing loans. But thanks to their efforts (mostly in Arkansas), the percentage of home loans made at 3% down payment or less around the nation more than doubled from 0.24% in 1975 to 0.51% in 1985 . . . but it was a “drop in the bucket.” From 1977 to 1993 only about $100 Billion in CRA ’77 loans were even issued to questionable borrowers. This was nothing like bankrupting NYC . . . .

However, because of huge success in registering Democrats, ACORN was quickly expanding across the nation and was sufficiently strong to put William Jefferson Clinton into the Oval Office in November, 1992. After that, things changed overnight for ACORN and for CRA ’77. The process had not been very active or very successful during the ‘70s or ‘80s, because banks only had to demonstrate to CRA regulators a “reaching out to the inner city.” As a result, only about 100 billion dollars was loaned to questionable borrowers. In the two great ACORN concern areas, Clinton did ACORN proud. He created the motor voter act (“a 12-lane highway leading to voter fraud” according to critics) in 1993 and brought in Richard Cloward and Frances Piven to stand directly behind him during the White House signing ceremonies.

Clinton moved next on housing . . . first by Presidential edict in 1993. He put teeth into CRA regs** by using the regulatory process itself to more or less make law, skipping Congress altogether. From now on poor inner city dwellers were to become preferred home loan recipients, mortgage traditions and their poverty be damned. Clinton went outside the CRA regs and also ordered HUD to set quotas for "Affirmative Action Lending" through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A new pressure fell upon the banking industry to make loans that banks would otherwise have rejected as “financially absurd.”

Subprime lending was virtually unknown before the multiple changes made by Clinton. The system was no longer recognizable as “free market.” Then it snowballed with more regulatory change and then two expansions of CRA law in 1995, the Clinton administration forced banks to loan more than a trillion dollars in high risk loans accepting as “income” items like welfare checks, unemployment checks, seasonal income, occasional part time work and other questionable sources of “qualified income.” By the end of 1995, 14% of all home loans were conducted with less than 3% down payments, many of them with no down payment at all.

With ACORN in the streets embarrassing and badgering and shaking down lenders (Barack Obama, an ACORN lawyer in Chicago, was reportedly one of the best at not only securing loans and future loan promises but also at getting large ACORN donations from the lenders he was shaking down!) and with officious federal regulators promoting and pushing and applauding bad loans not only with “the stick” of CRA and HUD but also using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as “carrots” due to their nature as implicitly guaranteed by the federal government. Millions of loans were made, often at breakneck pace in the normally snail-action world of mortgages.

In 1998, Clinton’s steroid-expansion of CRA law was passed. It was a nightmare. Now “food stamps” were regarded as income. Now ACORN found that they didn’t need high-powered extorters like Barack Obama, anyone with an eighth grade education could secure a loan for an ACORN client . . . and they found that it was now just as easy to get a poor person into a $450,000 home as it had been to buy a $120,000 home ten years earlier.

President G.W. Bush warned congress at least 18 times about the problem after January, 2005, when his administration made their first attempt to undo the evils of CRA legislation, especially the last three expansions by Clinton (1995 twice and 1998’s steroid version), but were defeated by the progressives. Finally thirty months later in July of 2007 a much weaker, watered down bill was passed by bi-partisan vote. It would prove far too little, far too late and the meltdown began soon afterward. However, it was sufficient help to the economy that Treasury Secretary in August, 2010, credited Bush with preventing a truly deep recession and preventing home prices from plummeting dangerously. And ACORN, even as they got loans for illegal aliens and people without even a rental history, they were getting paid to market CRA loans and made millions as a result.

All of this corruption enforced by strong-armed government agencies put millions of people into homes they simply could not afford. This caused an artificial feeling of financial prosperity for everyone and trillions of dollars were going into bad investments including derivatives based upon these horrific loans. Now, 90% of these laws are still on the books while the tax payer must pay for millions of past risky loans and are forced to bail out the irresponsible banks, insurance companies, automobile companies and Wall Street. Until we totally remove the government’s power to coerce, bribe, reward and bail out irrational and unfree decisions in the UNFREE MARKET, more of the same is always possible. The free market was working fine. It was working so fine that it took thirty years of deliberate abuse for the unfree market to bring America to its knees. Too much government? Yep! Blame it mostly on William Jefferson Clinton.

You did remember that the system originally wasn’t broken, right? You did remember that the progressives set out to manufacture a crisis a la Cloward-Piven Strategy and Alinsky Tactics that would “overload the system?” You have heard Barack Obama talking about somebody else driving the car in the ditch and now wanting the keys back, haven’t you? Are you going to ignore the evidence and head back to your sitcom? How about thinking this over . . . ?

George Bush saw Obama, Clinton, ACORN, and other progressives deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot cliff (utter financial disaster) dived into the front seat, grabbed the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes creating a controlled skid that put the vehicle into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.

So Monica, Paula and Jennifer weren’t the only ones, were they? Slick Willy also had his nasty way with you and with all the American public . . . and remember that George W. Bush was only barely successful in his efforts to fight the evils of CRA laws . . . so that today 90% of the same laws (and 75% of the Clinton steroid-version expansion of 1998) that contributed to the fiasco and empowered ACORN are still on the books waiting to do us in once more. Every bit as dangerous as the new welfare laws threatening to overload the food stamp program; as dangerous as Obamacare; and as dangerous as progressivism itself are the CRA laws still@@ on the books . . . .

You've read it all, you have it in your power to fact-check every item of the story . . . this is a story all America needs to know, don't you agree?

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

^^http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/what_the_dems_know_universal_v.html

** Let's spread the blame around deservedly: George H.W. Bush succeeded with 44 out of 45 vetos and presumably would have succeeded in mid 1992 also with a large, complicated, many-faceted bill pushed through mostly by progressive Democrats. He should have vetoed it because one tiny part of it passed CRA '77 legislation into the realm of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae the two federally-backed mortgage-guaranteers. The bill was still unwieldy and had no teeth but it was potentially a monster-disaster in the waiting . . . this was the law with which Bill Clinton began the mammoth attack on the mortgage loan industry; the law that made ACORN infamous.

@@ As we approach the coming election, Barney Frank and Charles Schumer are planning to introduce “Universal Voter Registration” during the lame duck session. Basically any list of names anywhere in a state can be used to register all voters with NO actual identification or verification required . . . ACORN’s and Clinton’s Motor Voter Act would then be turbo-charged.

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Rajjpuut's Folly: EPA, Progressives Treat Bedbugs as "Endangered Species"

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on October 16, 2010 at 2:00pm

Our Federal Government’s Become EXPERT

in Fixing Everything that Ain’t Broken Yet

We’ve all heard the old rhyme, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” You may have also heard that the federal government has moved into crisis mode about the rising bedbug infestation in the country, but you probably didn’t know that under the Clinton administration, the progressive politicians in this country and their most progressive expression of the nanny-state . . . the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) . . . began treating the bedbug as an endangered species (not literally, lighten up a bit) and today we’re reaping the rewards of their “enlightened” policies. Furthermore the enlightened feds are not backing down from their enlightened stance so that . . . in a nutshell, just as in the federal government’s law suit against Arizona's new immigration law moves forward, the feds are also giving the state of Ohio an enormously heavy-handed hard time because GASP, Ohio is striving mightily to eradicate the little pests.

How bad has the problem gotten? The EPA has announced its second national bedbug summit for this winter in Washington, D.C. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City and the Wall Street Journal discovered bedbugs in their confines last week. And meanwhile since its last bedbug summit in April, 2009, the problem has gotten much worst and the EPA is still sitting on its hands unable or unwilling to make a decision since then on raising their ban on stronger more effective pesticides first put into effect under the Clinton administration. In the eighteen months since the last bedbug summit, the EPA has not been idle, however, they’ve changed their website info on bedbugs seven times.

The bedbug “problem” was practically non-existent between the end of World War II and the mid 1990’s when Clinton’s people decided to fix what wasn’t broken and ban all-manner of effective pesticides. Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bedbug eradicators. And even now as public health officials around the country are clamoring to bring those chemicals back to help solve the bed bug “emergency,” EPA bureaucrats have downplayed the idea and environmentalists are pushing hard against the effort, citing safety concerns. Yup! Yup, they fixed the problem real good! Yup!

And, yup, EPA chief Lisa Jackson, who dismissed Ohio Governor Ted Strickland’s appeals over the issue in a June letter, still pompously assumes that only the feds know what’s best for the rest of us. Ohio has just been “presumptuous” enough to assume that they can allow the use of an effective bedbug fighting pesticide called “Propoxur” which has NOT been banned by the EPA yet. The best that can be said for bureaucrat Lisa Jackson is that she hasn’t outright banned Propoxur YET! Propoxur, you see was allowed for use in residential homes until 2007 and has never been actually banned at all. The EPA, in its wisdom said (without studies one way or another) that they feared that Propoxur might prove dangerous for children. Rather than paying for an expensive re-do of their own original studies of the pesticide . . . knowing the vagaries of the EPA’s whims, the manufacturer of Propoxur decided not to strive to sell the product in the United States. Any Propoxur manufactured before 2007 is still available for use in residential areas, so pest controllers have a limited supply they could use . . . and that’s Ohio’s plan.

Are you getting the gist of all this? The federal government is now in crisis mode to fix a problem they created (a very familiar pattern as you’ll soon see). The federal government has become expert in “fixing what isn’t broken” with GIBs and GBSBs (government interference boondoggles and government big-spending boondoggles) and reducing our freedoms and our lifestyles as a result . . . .

ITEM: based on the non-science of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the United States and eventually the world moved to ban DDT, the safest and most effective pesticide ever created (you can literally drink DDT or use it on your salad as a dressing). Malaria deaths which dropped to 43,000 worldwide in 1970 now stand at 2,000,000 every year. Ms. Carlson’s book and the EPA over-reaction without doing any real studies have killed 75 million people since 1970.

ITEM: to save a three-inch fish, the delta smelt, from getting sucked into irrigation piping, in the middle of a seven-year drought, the EPA has banned much irrigation in central California around Fresno . . . turning the nation’s vegetable basket into a dry, lifeless center of unemployment.

ITEM: In 1975, the United States was the envy of the world averaging 64% private home ownership year after year. Only one in every 404 home loans was made at 3% down payment or less -- almost all home loans were granted at 10-25% down payment. In 1977, the Carter administration passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA ’77) to force mortgage lenders to make bad loans to people who could not reasonably be said to qualify for such loans. In 1993 the Clinton administration used regulatory processes to bypass congress and give the CRA laws real teeth; in 1995 Clinton and congress was able to expand CRA ’77 law twice; in 1998 in a steroid-version expansion of CRA Clinton and congress made another CRA expansion. The result of fixing a system that wasn’t broken?

By 2005, 34% of all home loans were made at 3% down payment or less (an increase of 13,800% in the ratio of presumably unwise home loans in America since 1975); worse, borrowers who would have had trouble getting a $120,000 loan in 1993, were being put into $400-$500,000 homes in 2005. Thanks to the ACORN** efforts (to overload the system a la the same Cloward-Piven Strategy that bankrupted NYC in 1975 after overloading welfare for eight years) on behalf of people without jobs; people with atrocious credit ratings; people without even a rental history; people with food stamps as their only “income”; other people on some form of welfare; and even illegal aliens . . . the country found itself in a “sub-prime lending crisis” that the government with the willing help of ACORN and progressives had created.

Are you still a fan of big government? Do you still think the government knows best? Do you think they can do a better job with your money, after raising your taxes, than you can do with it? Was the system broken before 1965 when Lyndon Johnsons’ “Great Society” programs expanded welfare dramatically; created Medicare and Medicaid (federal and state programs both) and led us to two monstrous entitlement programs that today have put the U.S. government $80 TRillion behind the 8-ball in UNFUNDED liabilities? Did you know that the obligations on the state side of Medicaid will bankrupt all but one or two states by 2024? What about Social Security, did you know that the SSA is $34 TRillion in the hole in UNFUNDED liabilities? That social security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid now are approaching $115 TRillion in UNFUNDED liabilities? Did you know that all three of these programs are “set-asides,” but that rather than setting the money aside as required by law, the government used that money and even borrowed more to create not only those three huge UNFUNDED liabilities but also our present national debt of roughly $13.8 TRillion? Do you understand why so many people are up in arms about respecting our Constitution? About taking care of our nation’s fiscal mess? About reducing taxes? About reducing spending? About taking the country back from politicians and putting it back in the hands of the people? About returning to sanity?

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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