Stubborn Facts

     My theory is that the reason Ben Bernanke is making chatter about ending the quantitative easing program earlier than he expected, is not because the economy is improving enough to take the Fed's training wheels off the market. It is exactly the opposite reason, he and the administration know that the economy is headed for a cliff from the disaster that their fiscal policy has created. In fact, it has been a combination of Bernanke's "don't stop the printing presses from spitting out 100 dollar bills until I say so" along with the Obamanomics of burdensome regulation and higher taxes, that has killed the goose that laid the golden egg called capitalism.
     Facts are facts, and as the man once said they are stubborn things. The fact is that the country finds itself in a much worse financial condition than it was after the 2008 financial meltdown. A meltdown caused by Liberal Democrat social policy that forced loans to be made to people who could never pay them back, artificially ballooned housing prices by making 100-plus percent loan-to-value loans commonplace, loosened mortgage brokers' licensing standards so low as to pollute that industry with charlatans, taught mortgage brokers how to bundle bad loans with good ones and sell them on Wall Street as investment vehicles and lowered borrowing standards to the point that income and down payment requirements were eliminated. And as a community agitator, Barack Obama was front and center, using intimidation tactics to force lenders to make loans to the poverty-stricken.
     Another stubborn fact is that as much as the Obama administration has tried to fudge the numbers with unemployment, the real unemployment, the U-6 number the government reports every month, is around fourteen percent. There is no arguing with the stubborn fact that the labor force participation rate has dropped to its lowest level in over 30 years and foretells another stubborn fact, i.e., that there are over eight million fewer people working today than there were at the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency in January 2009. And with the tsunami of over 15,000 new regulations imposed by the Obama regime on business, don't expect companies to be adding many new jobs in the foreseeable future. ObamaCare alone is now estimated by the Congressional Budget Office and others to cost the economy millions of jobs over the next few years as it is fully implemented.
     The debt caused by President Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke is so astronomical and crushing, that this stubborn fact is too gruesome for many to even admit. President Obama has created more debt through his federal government expansion than all the debt created by all presidents through Bill Clinton. And by the end of his second term, he will have doubled the debt from the level it was at when he took office. He will have succeeded in burying this country in an inescapable grave that will restrict future generations from freedom and liberty, thus killing the aspirations of the Founding Fathers to have a government subservient to its people. And that is a stubborn fact we will all have to live with in the Obama future we have allowed to infect the greatest and freest nation the world has ever seen. 

    

Jason And The Labor Of Love

     I hope that regular readers of this site will allow me the diversion from the political on this one post so that I may indulge my first love, music. I recently ordered and received a CD of 9 instrumental songs that is representative of musical styling from the worlds of jazz, soul, blues and even some Latin. The music is brilliantly performed by Jason Green and his band, called, "The Labor Of Love." If you don't know who Jason Green is, don't feel bad, he is one of the most gifted guitarists of whom you have probably never heard. I have included a link to his website at the end of this post, and I recommend anyone who has an interest in good music to buy this CD. If after listening you are dissatisfied, I promise to buy the CD from you. That is how confident I am that you will feel the price, thirteen dollars and some change, is well worth the price of admission to this musical roller coaster thrill ride.
     I met Jason in the late 1990s through a mutual friend, and quickly developed not only an immense appreciation of his talent, but a deep and abiding admiration for his gentle confidence that never even got close to arrogance. For a time I actually took lessons from Jason, and was again amazed at his ability to instruct in a manner which lent itself to learning the instrument, something uncommon in some people who are gifted musicians. You see, Jason plays not only so that he is heard, but so that people will support live music of every stripe. That's why this CD is so special, it is recorded live in the studio, with all the musicians playing together as if they were sitting in your living room. That love of the music and of playing together drips off of every note of this CD.
     The CD has as its bookends two traditional Jazz pieces, "Ed's Place" in the opening and "Invitation" as the closing number. In between these two bookends is a smorgasborg of musical flavor unrivalled by anything I have heard in a long time, if ever. The Labor Of Love's rhythm section is comprised of bassist Yanko Valdes and drummer Tom Papadatos. Additional texture is provided by saxophonist, Rob Chaseman. The three extraordinarily gifted musicians weave their larger than life talents with that of Jason Green's unstoppable guitar to take the listener on a magical journey through songs with Latin themes like  "Fiesta del Cuatro" and "El Amor es Verde", soulful selections like "Union Square Soul" and down and dirty blues like "17 Slide."
     "Fiesta del Cuatro", "El Amor es Verde", "17 Slide" and "Union Square Soul" are all original compositions by Jason Green, the other 5 songs are standards that he has arranged to round out this musical extravaganza. Listening to Jason's original compositions makes one realize that his talent and understanding of music goes beyond playing guitar. But the guitar, is of course, front and center in these musical numbers, even when he is masterfully backing his fellow musicians with rhythm chords. His quick hand, seamless transitions and smooth as butter use of chord scales, are reminiscent of the great Django Reinhardt, considered one of the greatest jazz guitarist ever. And Jason's slide work on 17 Slide is 84 bars of some of the best slide guitar I have ever heard (with all due respect to Dwayne Allman).
     The CDs final song is "Invitation", which one might think would be more appropriate in the opening slot. But it is fitting as a closer because Jason is inviting the listener to make live music a part of their lives. Whether it is live CDs like this juggernaut of jazz, or going to a club, Jason wants the listener to know that musicians combining their talents and creating a live musical experience to be appreciated by more than just the ears, is truly for him and his band, a Labor Of Love.
Click Here For Jason Green's Website

The Juvenification Of America

     In order for Leftist policy to gain favor with a majority of the population, an entire generation of adults has had to be turned into children. Over the last 40 years the Left, having control of the schools and media in this country, have trained the populace to respond emotionally to every issue, just as children do. One of the fundamental responsibilities of successful parents is to develop in their child a sense of self-restraint and to place critical and rational thought above the emotional. But the current and previous generations have been raised to posses self-esteem, not self-control.
     If you have ever tried to have a rational discussion on an issue with someone firmly on the Left, you know what I am talking about. Even when presented with facts, statistics and reasoned arguments, the Leftist will always respond emotionally and resort to name calling or irrational arguments. A classic case in point is how the Left, in the media and elsewhere, responds to Sarah Palin. They attack her personally, calling her stupid (and in the case of Bill Mauer using the "C" word to describe her), but they never deal with the substance of her positions. This tactic has been just one of many tools used by the Leftist Democrat party over the last 40 plus years. But beginning in the 1990s, with the institution by the Clintonistas of the politics of personal destruction, and building into an Alinsky crescendo with Barack Obama, the Democrat party has made character assassination their only tool.
     The reason that this demonization and marginalization of their political opponents works today and would not have in prior eras, is that the population has been juvenilized over the last 40 years. I am amazed as I read more and more history and realize how much more mature people were, and at a younger age, 80, 100 or even 200 years ago. The bearing, fortitude and responsibility that young men at 20 years old routinely possessed is hard to find in "men" twice that age today. The Left has purposely inculcated in people the desire to be taken care of and not to do for themselves so that they are more dependent on government. It is frightening the number of times in a single day I hear people  making reference to some other entity, be it government at some level or a private business, taking responsibility for a personal need of theirs. Exemplary of this condition is many Americans expecting taxpayers to pay for their cell phones or a business to pay for some minor inconvenience they have suffered.
     The juvenile nature of many Americans today leads them to being easily offended by something someone has said and expecting financial re numeration for suffering such indignity. The juvenile nature of many Americans today informs them that they have no stake in such things as their own health care, children's education or even providing their own food. The juvenile nature of many Americans today causes a feeling of entitlement, as if they are somehow guaranteed happiness instead of its pursuit. The juvenile nature of many Americans today would have them give up liberty, which requires intestinal fortitude, and replace it with dependence and entitlement, which requires a lack of character and sense of responsibility. The more childish this nation has become, the less free we have become, and that is the real tragedy of the juvenification of America.  

Stupid Fed Trick

     The David Letterman Show use to have a segment called, "Stupid Pet Tricks." This was back in the day when Letterman actually had some relevance and talent. People would bring their pet on the show and have them perform some lame trick. I have recently been reminded of "Stupid Pet Tricks" watching Ben Bernanke's handling of monetary policy.
     It doesn't take a genius to figure out that with our monetary policy reflecting that of Europe, it won't be long before we are in the same dire straits as they are. In fact, our debt to GDP ratio is getting dangerously high, now solidly over seventy percent. Which means the government now owes almost an entire year's worth of the entire economic output of the country, and that does not not count the unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare. When these government promises are added to the balance sheet, our country's real debt is several times one year's economic output of the entire country.
      Ben Bernanke, the man who never worked a job in the real economy but now controls it through bad monetary policy, has been draining the life out of the economy at a rate of eighty five billion dollars a month. This is the amount he has been printing in his little meth lab for money and then using it to buy government bonds in order to keep their rates low so investors see equities as a better investment. This is what has been driving the market to new highs, it is not the traditional rising fundamentals of an expanding economy. And don't think that business leaders do not recognize this, and are holding onto their cash and not hiring as they would if the economy was actually expanding at a rate approaching that of an economy not on life support.
     It bears repeating that the average post-World War II gross domestic product growth rate has been 3.2 percent, in times of recovery after recessions, the growth rate is usually well over 4 percent. During the Reagan recovery of the 1980s, some financial quarters saw GDP grow at a rate of 7 percent. The average GDP growth rate during the Obama regime has pathetically been under 2 percent, enough to give any president GDP envy. Of course, when the economy is not growing there are no new jobs being created. But if you have drank the Obama administration's cool aid, you might be saying, "But wait, the last jobs report showed an addition of 240 thousand jobs." First of all, that number is padded with the 100 thousand people who became so despondent that they gave up looking for work and took themselves out of the job market. Barack Obama and his gang now count those people as employed. Secondly, even if 240 thousand legitimate jobs were added, that number is barely acceptable in a normal economy, let alone one that is suppose to be in recovery. During some months of the Reagan recovery, a million new jobs were added to the labor force.
     The government's own metric for real unemployment, the U-6 number, which is not the number that is front an center every month when the nation's unemployment rate is reported, is a whopping 15%. And with GDP growing at well under 2 percent, the record eighty million people that are not working in this country have no hope of finding work anytime soon. More people are now living in poverty than ever, 1 in 6, and there are more people receiving food stamps than at any other time, a staggering 50 million at last count. The unemployed are expected to suffer without work while our Vice President spends millions on lavish European vacations and the President and his family have already taken three taxpayer funded vacations, trying to exceed the 1.2 billion dollars it took to support their extravagant life style last year. But none of this matters, because Ben Bernanke can just print as much money as the President needs while at the same time ruining the greatest engine for economic growth the world has ever seen. Now that's a stupid Fed trick that rivals anything I ever saw on Letterman.

Throw The Dog A Bone, And Hope He Returns With a Steak

     Immigration policy is one of those issues that the Left has spent the last 35 years or longer priming the public pump to actuate the free flow of their bad ideas, in this case granting illegal immigrants legal status. During the Reagan administration, Democrats promised stricter border security in exchange for giving amnesty to the three million people living in this country illegally. Ronald Reagan trusted the Democrats, a mistake for any conservative to make, and after amnesty was awarded, the Democrats ignored their promise of border security. In the ensuing years, Democrats have worked hard to give illegals more taxpayer money and more rights of citizenship, which in turn has given incentive for more lawbreakers to breach our borders. Today some estimates have the number of illegal immigrants as high as twenty million.
     In 2007, during the George W. Bush administration, there was a push by Democrats and Democrat-lites such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to once again pursue amnesty for those in this country illegally, although they now called it, "comprehensive immigration reform." The nation's Capital was inundated with so many calls and emails from U.S. citizens, that the re-election conscious politicians on both sides of the aisle dropped their bid to create new Democrat voters through amnesty. But commensurate with Leftist ideology, Democrats are once again trying to ram through the Congress of the United States legislation that is against the will of the governed. This is the tactic used by the Left when their desire for control is counter to the will of the people. They slowly drain the fight out of public dissent by constantly ramming their bad ideas into the wall of common sense. By the way, this is how every authoritarian regime throughout history has imposed tyranny.
     The Lefts struggle is made easier by Republicants who think if they throw a bone, i.e. "path to citizenship" to Democrats, that they will return with the T-bone steak of border security. Democrat senator, Chuck Schumer, said recently that they have the "metrics" for border security, but they basically are keeping them a secret until there is an  agreement on making illegals legal. I honestly can not understand why Republicants like Marco Rubio are members of the so-called "gang of 8", a group made up of four Republicants and four Democrats whose purpose is to give Democrats everything they want and make it look as though it is bi-partisan. I can understand the feckless John McCain allowing himself to be used by the Left as a tool to push through their agenda, but I thought Senator Rubio was more conservative and more savvy than the aforementioned Republicant dinosaur.
     The Republicant establishment thinks if they back amnesty for illegals, that this will somehow help them garner more votes from the Hispanic population. But the Republicant establishment fails to remember history, and history showed that after President Reagan signed the 1986 amnesty bill, the Republicant nominee George H. W. Bush, received fewer Hispanic votes in the next presidential election than Ronald Regan received in 1984. And now, once again, some Republicants want to throw away the baby that is the rule of law with the bath water that is illegal immigration.

The Social Justice Of Barack Obama

     When rights and laws no longer have as their source God and nature, then true liberty and justice is replaced with politically manufactured liberty and justice. When the nature of the human condition is subjugated to the constructs of the human will practiced by the ruling class, the natural right of people to be free is forever infringed. The founders of this great nation instinctively knew this in their hearts and minds, and they built a nation from the best examples from all of human history up until that point. They knew that when people were free to use their God-given abilities and talents to their full potential, unfettered by burdensome government, the resulting society would be a beacon of freedom in the world, as well as the world's repository of good that would lead to the greatest advancement of the human condition.
     The social justice of Barack Obama is a fraudulent justice because it reassigns the liberty from one group to another based on the variance of prosperity between the two groups. There is no justice when it is built upon the remnants of liberty stolen from the more prosperous and given to the less prosperous. There is no liberty when the fruits of a man's labor can be confiscated by his government at any time for the purpose of imposing economic equality on a free people. And there is no justice when a central government authority has become so entwined in the lives of the governed that in its arrogance thinks it can make personal decisions better than the individuals who are subject to that authority. Decisions on what to drive, what to eat, what kind of health insurance to purchase, if any and a myriad other decisions that range from the type of light bulbs one can use to how much energy an individual can consume.
     True justice  is defined by each man reaping the reward or punishment of his own behavior based solely on the merit or demerit of that behavior. The social justice of Barack Obama seeks to transfer wealth from the industrious to the non-industrious in an effort to impose egalitarianism on a nation founded on liberty. The social justice of Barack Obama imposes equality using the force of government to make every citizen equally enslaved to that government. True justice does not seek equality but the moral certitude that is produced by freedom of choice. True justice promotes each man making his own choices and then living with the consequences of those choices. The social justice of Barack Obama seeks to transfer outcomes from bad choices made by individuals to other individuals who have engaged themselves in making good choices, and visa versa.
      The justice of Barack Obama is packaged with the modifier "social." But true justice stands on its own and needs no modification. It has existed since God breathed life into the earth and created human beings from earthen materials and gave them souls composed from His love and His justice. To repackage the holy gift of justice from God into the profanity that is the Barack Obama brand of justice is a sin, not only against man, but more importantly against God.

The Straw Man Strategy Of The Left

    The Left is a failure at promoting policies which lead to more freedom and prosperity. But they are successful at creating and using straw men. A straw man is a mis-characterization of your political opponent's position on an issue for the purpose of deflecting public attention away from the substantive argument your opposition makes. Straw men also give the user the ability to set themselves up as the only defense against that which is not real in order to create policies that actually limit freedom and increase the size of government. Which is the essence and mission of the Leftist soul.
      The gay rights issue is one of those for which the Left knows they do not have majority support. So they mis-characterize their position, their opposition's position or both. Many times, especially in recent years, the Left is helped by obtuse Republicants who accept the Lefts premise on a particular issue without even knowing it. Gay marriage is exemplary of this behavior, to wit: how many Republicants have you heard take up the Lefts mis-characterization of the ballot initiatives to protect traditional marriage, as a "ban" on gay marriage? There is not one state that has banned gay marriage, and it is not illegal in any of the fifty states. The states that have passed defense of traditional marriage legislation have only said that this type of union is the only kind that they will officially recognize as marriage. No government, at any level, should officially recognize gay marriage because it is not the most optimum relationship in which to raise children, the fundamental reason for marriage for thousands of years. Government at all levels should be promoting the most optimum policies in society.
     Another recent straw man argument was made by the President's re-election effort during the 2012 presidential campaign. Gullible voters were convinced by President Obama and others on the Left of the false premise that, Mitt Romney specifically and Republicants in general, wanted to restrict access to contraception. For the record, there wasn't one Republicant that suggested any policy that would restrict people's access to birth control. Even family values advocate, Rick Santorum, stated that he would not in any way restrict access to birth control. The Republicant position was and is that government should not be using taxpayer money to buy contraception for millions of people, especially since it is ubiquitous and cheap. But with a main stream media that is essentially the propaganda arm of the Democrat party, the actual Republicant position was smothered by the straw man argument advanced by the Left.
     If Republicants have any hope of ever regaining political power, they need to find a way to put match to straw men and make them disappear. One way, I believe, they can successfully do this is to stop accepting false premises that are advanced by the Left. On issues ranging from gun control to global warming, some in the Republicant camp have ceded basic fundamental arguments to the Left. For the record, background checks are unsuccessful at reducing gun violence and there is no settled science that supports man's role in any kind of climate change. The best way to prevent someone from building a straw man is to remove their access to the straw, i.e., Republicants need to articulate Conservatism often and forcefully. This is the only way in which a clear distinction can be made between Left and Right, thereby mitigating the Lefts ability to build effective straw men.