Conservatism Unplugged: There Goes The Neighborhood

This will be my final installment under the “Conservatism Unplugged” banner. I will be frank and up-front with you on this matter of race and politics as they're current today here in America. I have nothing personal against Obama, BUT, Doesn’t it seem like the Obama administration has divided this country by both race and income?


 The expectations of most pundits, the election of President Obama has aggravated the racial divide in America between blacks and all other racial groups because Obama has hardened black political and social segregation. Far from bringing black and white together, as he promised to do in his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech and that was implicit throughout his 2008 campaign, his policies since assuming the Presidency have led to racial polarization, Here, see for yourself.

Jeremiah Wright

Obama's political palaver about bringing people together when he was on the national stage was belied by his own statements and actions when the lights were not shining on him.  After all, this is the man who was an active member of a church led by the race-baiting Jeremiah Wright, and who held out Wright's statement that "white people's greed runs a world in need" as transformative to himself.


But it has been Obama's statist policies, his mania for social and economic engineering that has stoked the racial divisions. His policies, be it the affirmative action policies that are laced throughout the laws passed under him (including ObamaCare), the policies of departments such as the Department of Justice, rules and regulations that have proliferated under his Presidency, his massive shifting of savings among groups have hardened the divides.  There has been a great deal of favoritism exhibited by this administration, some visible but a lot invisible,  or that certainly fly under the radar screen and remain unvisited by mainstream media. Nothing surprising about this dynamic. People vote on pocketbook issues all the time. But I will undoubtedly be decried as being a racist for simply stating that fact and putting it in its proper context.

It was hailed as the dawn of a “post-racial America,” ushered in by the election of the first black president in a country still scarred by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and the battle for civil rights.

Just a few short months after President Obama’s historic 2008 election, when many Americans believed the country had finally taken the upper hand over race, some are asking where did the dream of a post-racial America go?  The historical significance of Obama’s White House win, creating the illusion of a colorblind society where racial issues were no longer a major concern.

“The whole country says, ‘Wow, this is a euphoric moment. We’ve transcended our baggage,’ and post-racialism was born with Obama’s election.

Why is race still such an explosive issue in the U.S.? The race question as an onion with many layers to it, is still the biggest hurdle that America has yet to properly deal with the consequences of its history of racism, slavery, segregation and open oppression.

Obama is not being judged through the prism of race by whites, he’s being judged on his lack of economic knowledge. Despite slipping poll numbers, surveys find that a relatively low percentages of voters believe Obama is favoring a black agenda. According to the recent Pew Research Center poll, 13 percent of whites and Hispanics and 1 percent of blacks said they believe he's not paying enough attention to the concerns of the black community.

We were all there in 2008 when the black community voted in record numbers for this President, and now after talking with many in my community, it’s happening again, because our community is still stoned on that koolaid that was served up in 2008. Will the effects ever wear off? 

Does anyone remember the recent unveiling of the Bush portrait? Bush got a  joke off about the possible future of America. I believe what he was saying was "I was the last President of a free America".

Studies have revealed that black men are no longer excited about Obama, and it is mainly due to the fact that they feel he has not done enough for the African-American community. In addition, some feel President Obama is not black enough, and leans towards pleasing white America.

Solving our racial problems in this country will require concrete steps, significant investment and above all, commitment. We're going to have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It can't be purchased on the cheap. I am fundamentally optimistic about our capacity to do that. And I do assert that there's a core decency in the American people and in white Americans that makes me hopeful about our ability to deal with these issues. But these issues aren't just solved by electing a black president or a white president, all of our mind set must change.

Race and racism are still critical factors in determining what happens and who gets ahead in America. The election of Barack Obama ushered in this silly term and now that he’s begun running for re-election, I’m here to brusquely escort it out of the party called American English because it’s a con man of a term, selling you a concept that doesn’t exist.

“Post-racial” is a mythical idea that should be as painful to the mind’s ear as fingernails on the chalkboard are to the outer ear. It’s an intellectual Loch Ness monster. It is indeed a monster because it’s dangerous. What people seem to mean by “post-racial” is: nowadays race no longer matters and anyone can accomplish anything because racism is behind us. All of that is false. But widespread use of the term lends credence to the idea that all of that is true—I mean, why would we have a term for an idea that’s not real? In that way the lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus feeds the notion that it’s O.K. to be somnambulant about race or even aggressively dismissive of it.

Only through being aware of racial disparities and talking about race can we have any chance of forward movement. Because nowadays there are many white people who are not racist, who are perhaps anti-racist, but who still benefit from white privilege without even meaning to. So you may not be racist but still receiving the spoils of racism. That still doesn’t make you racist. But it makes you part of the system and reveals why it’s also your responsibility to interrogate and examine how our society works and be aware of the biases that keep white supremacy functioning. 

I suspect “post-racial” was born benignly from the hope that Obama’s electoral success meant that the racial problems that have long plagued America were over. Kumbaya. Surely Obama’s victory revealed something had changed in America, but it was not a signal that we’d reached the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s mountaintop world where race no longer matters and equality has been achieved.

During the Obama administration “post-racial” and “race card” and “reverse racism” have run amok like gremlins in the language, obfuscating race and making discussions about it harder. America still has so much work to do regarding race and racism and “post-racial” is only making that work harder to do. That’s why “post-racial” and its cohorts must be stopped posthaste.

Illogical Politics

Obama, like most Liberals/Marxists claims to be for "the little man, the family, the working class, the poor and the minorities"...especially the minorities.

Let’s examine Obama's real record, you know, the one he actually has, not the one he falsely lays claim to, we'll see that Obama's world-view, agenda and policies deeply and badly hurt the very one's he and all Liberals pretend to help. 

Obama has slammed Romney and Bain Capital for their part in the closure of "American Pad and Paper". 250 people lost their jobs. What Obama does not even hint at is that Romney helped save "Staples", and many other struggling companies. But a recent report reveals a very disturbing, greedy, corrupt and dark look at Obama's private sector experience.

Obama’s own private sector history reads much like the one he accuses Romney of.  While working as an attorney for a Chicago law firm in early 1990s, Obama volunteered to work on a case involving several black residents who believed that they were being discriminated against by Citibank Federal Savings.

The president’s 1995 housing-discrimination class action lawsuit: It provided him with legal fees, greased his political donations and boosted his role in Chicago politics.

Obama learned about politics in Chicago, a city controlled by the Democratic Party machine of the Daley family. In recent weeks, sweetheart deals between Mayor Daley’s office and several union bosses have come to light. Those deals have made the unions bosses enormously wealthy.

Obama wants to raise taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Ironically, the Daley machine and Obama are determined to make union leaders part of that 1% as quickly as possible, at the expense of taxpayers and ordinary, rank-and-file union members.

Through loopholes created by Democratic Party lawmakers, union leaders have received six-figure “double dip” pensions from the city while receiving equally huge salaries from their union positions. 

Meanwhile, governments and pension plans at all levels stumble toward insolvency and default, and ordinary taxpayers and union members struggle with financial hardship. Obama learned about union deals from the Daley machine, and his “jobs bill” is just another way to reward unions for their support.

Richard M. Daley

Richard J. Daley

Between father Richard J. and son Richard M., the Daleys served in the mayor’s office for more than half a century and attracted no less than seven separate federal corruption investigations. The Daleys have always been suspected of “fixing” the 1960 election for John F. Kennedy, delivering the Illinois Electoral College votes by the narrowest of margins.

William Daley

The younger Daley’s brother, William, was Al Gore’s campaign chairman during the 2000 presidential race, personally traveling to Florida for the recount, and now serves as Obama’s chief of staff. And the newly anointed heir to the Chicago throne is none other than Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s previous chief of staff. Obama’s links to the Daleys and their power are well documented.

What makes the Daleys powerful is their partnership with labor unions. Union bosses provide the campaign contributions, the volunteers, and the votes that are the lifeblood of most Democrats’ political campaigns. In return, like so many other Democratic Party supporters such as Solyndra’s investors, union bosses are given access to huge amounts of money from taxpayers.

At the lower levels of the Chicago machine, faithful operatives of the Democratic machine are rewarded with jobs on the city payroll. The departments of streets and sanitation, code enforcement, and other city services are packed with loyal Daley supporters.

All city workers were of course organized by the unions, paying a portion of their city salaries as union dues. Much of the dues money, in turn, was passed on to Democratic politicians in the form of campaign contributions. The workers walked the precincts to get out the vote for the Democrats and, on Election Day, they often took a day off to maximize the GOTV effort.

As their years of loyal service turned into decades, and tens of thousands of Chicago Republicans sold their homes and moved to the suburbs, Democratic control of the city and county became cast in reinforced concrete. Any disputes became purely intramural in nature: one faction of the Democratic Party against another. And the most loyal Daley supporters moved up through the ranks, in city government and the unions.

No, Wait, Don't Look at My Style Of Politics

Lets take an in-depth look at how President Obama has perfected Chicago-style politics in the White House. I’m not suggesting that Obama is the government version of Tony Soprano, who sends “Sicilian messages” or sells drugs or moonshine or untaxed cigarettes out of the White House basement. Illogical politics is about something else: about governing without recognizing the legitimate limits of one’s power. It’s about officials who use public office to make winners into losers and losers into winners; who bend, break and make the law to help their friends and punish their enemies….Obama didn’t come to Washington from Mount Olympus. He came from the corrupt and dirty politics of Chicago.

For the past two years, shooting directly from the presidential pulpit, Obama has used bullying and intimidation to attack those who disagree with his policies, rewarding his friends at the direct expense of the American people.

For all the high-minded reform rhetoric of his 2008 campaign, all the talk of a “new politics,” all the passages in his books about respecting others’ points of view, Obama’s response to people who objected to his administration’s massive expansion of federal power was to deride and insult them. He didn’t merely criticize his political opponents or conservative talk radio hosts, he disparaged and belittled the voters who disagreed with him as irrational or “teabaggers.”

Illogical politics documents how Obama and his administration have pushed unpopular policies such as the wasteful stimulus, government bailouts and health care reform, while at the same time attacking large segments of the voting population and ignoring an election mandate from the public.

In an interviews conducted with Obama when he was a candidate for U.S. Senate, the then-Illinois state representative exhibited some of the liberal tendencies Americans have come to recognize in his presidency, along with statements that seem at odds with his later policy decisions, and criticisms of the George W. Bush administration for budget deficits and foreign oil prices far milder than those over which Obama now presides.

The interviews in 2003 and 2004. The videos were first made publicly available on YouTube on Friday and Saturday. At the time of the 2003 appearance, Obama was a recent entrant into the Democratic primary race to replace the retiring Sen. Peter Fitzgerald. By the 2004 interview, Obama had already won a landslide primary victory and was just entering the general election season.

On the first tape, Obama addressed “economic security,” a theme that later followed him to the White House. Illinoisans, he said, were “trying to figure out, ‘What am I going to do about the potential layoff? How am I going to pay for my retirement?’”

But then, as now, Obama resisted the idea that cutting taxes on businesses in order to create American jobs will help the economy.

It’s 2012, and people are suffering. And as much as people may like President Obama, we have to be honest enough to admit that our communities are suffering because of his policies. How much more pain are we willing to inflict upon our communities just because we want to root for this president? We have to judge this president not by the color of his skin, but by the results of his policies.

The Unemployed

President Obama’s policies have been devastating to minority communities and to the most vulnerable in our society. America is suffering through the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression: Unemployment has been stuck over 8 percent for almost three-and-a-half years under Obama, after averaging only 5.3 percent under President George W. Bush. Minority communities have been hit much harder: African-American unemployment is 14.4 percent, and black youth unemployment is an obscene 44.2 percent. Latino unemployment is 11 percent. I recited these figures recently to a gathering of Pacific Islanders in Nevada, which is being crushed by the highest unemployment rate and worst housing crisis in the country. They didn’t need to hear these numbers to know that their community is hurting. If you had tried to tell these folks, three-and-a-half years into the Obama presidency, that their ongoing misery was President Bush’s fault, they would rightly have considered that to be an insult to their intelligence.

Unable to defend his own record, the president has launched an avalanche of attack ads that even the liberal Washington Post has decried as dishonest. With even many of President Obama’s strongest supporters praising the high ethics and excellent track record of Bain Capital, the bottom line is this: If you have a problem with Bain, you have a problem with private equity; if you have a problem with private equity, you have a problem with capitalism; if you have a problem with capitalism, you have no clue what it takes to create jobs and help poor people escape poverty.

The Obama Record

At a time when we need to do everything possible to make it easier to create jobs in America, President Obama has done everything possible to make it harder — and those who are struggling the most in this economy, the people who really need jobs, are the ones who are hurt the most by his policies.

Despite his best intentions, President Obama has consistently thwarted job creation. He has created a hostile regulatory environment that has made businesses afraid to expand and banks afraid to lend. Investors are afraid to make job-creating investments: the threat of higher taxes makes it harder to justify risking money in an abysmal economy. Employers are afraid to hire because they have no idea how much Obamacare will increase the cost of each additional worker.

Job Killer

Minority activists typically pride themselves on putting the interests of “the people” ahead of the interests of businesses, investors and banks. It is foolhardy, though, to treat businesses, investors and banks as the enemy. When they’re scared (and like it or not, President Obama is scaring the heck out of them), minority communities are devastated most of all by the resulting failure to create jobs.

The president’s job-killing policies cause great hardship today, but his negligence on the debt crisis could destroy our future. President Obama ran up more debt in three years than President Bush ran up in eight. Our record debt will cripple the ability of our children and grandchildren to use government as a means to help people. The most vulnerable in our society — the people who must depend on government the most — will suffer the most when government no longer has the means to protect them. We now must spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year just to pay interest on our debt. That money cannot be used to make life better in America — instead, it is being used to make life better in China and other foreign nations that hold our debt.

Polls show that a majority of Americans agree with President Obama’s proposals to tax the “rich.” I strongly disagree, but it’s not because I feel sorry for rich people. Rich people will be just fine; if you raise their taxes, they’ll still be rich. But they’ll invest less, and hence fewer jobs will be created, and hence the rest of us will be poorer. That’s why President Obama, before he was running for re-election, said that “the last thing you want to do is raise taxes” on anyone — including the wealthy — in a down economy. That’s why President Clinton slashed the tax on investment, the capital gains tax. That created jobs and strengthened the economy. Tax revenues actually went up because Clinton’s tax cuts helped the economy boom. Everybody won.

President Obama wants to do the opposite of what President Clinton did. He wants to double the capital gains tax rate. Ernst & Young, the respected, nonpartisan accounting firm, has determined that President Obama’s proposals to tax the “rich” would cause our economy to lose 710,000 jobs — this at a time when all of us, especially minority communities, desperately need the economy to create more jobs. Ernst & Young further found that the president’s proposals would reduce wages, reduce investment and reduce economic output. President Obama’s proposals would thus make all of us, collectively, less rich. The rich can afford to be less rich; the rest of us cannot. And the poor can afford it least of all.

So why would President Obama propose policies that would inflict further harm on those who are struggling? Certainly not to reduce the debt. The revenue that Obama’s tax hikes would raise would only be enough to fund the federal government for eight-and-a-half days. No, the reason that the president is proposing these tax hikes is to promote “fairness.”

So let’s get this straight: In the name of fairness, President Obama would make it much harder for folks who are struggling the most in this economy to find jobs. In the name of fairness, President Obama would lower our wages. If that’s “fairness,” then maybe we should give unfairness a try.

If you desperately need a job to support your family, which would you rather have: (a) a job, or (b) the satisfaction of knowing that some rich guy you’ve never met will have to pay more taxes? If you chose (b), I feel sorry for your family — and you should vote for Obama.

For those of us who are having trouble grasping President Obama’s concept of fairness, we should consider Gov. Romney’s: “We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.”

With apologies to my Democrat friends who think they own the word, Gov. Romney’s idea of “fairness” is much fairer than President Obama’s.

Conservatism Unplugged: Where did all the money go?

Politics brings out the worst in us. One is more vile the more there is at stake.

Leveraging a little animus, It turns mere opposition into hate.

The lava bubbling underneath each heart, Inhibited by guilt or love or fear, Comes bursting forth, by scribes with subtle art Stoked vigorously as new elections near.

If ever there has been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama. Voters acknowledge that President Obama has mishandled the economic recovery, failed to confront our fiscal problems, embraced unpopular legislation, contravened the law through executive orders, broken numerous pledges on taxes, taking public monies, hiring lobbyists and publishing bills before they are signed, managed to blame his problems on anyone handy and cynically chosen to severely divide the country. And yet, in spite of these monumental shortcomings, Mr. Obama is deemed “likeable” and is running even with Romney.   

With the billions in stimulus dollars that was given to foreign companies, mostly to subsidize their own green energy projects. AFP President Tim Phillips said “The Obama Administration continues to waste our tax dollars trying to pick winners and losers. This leads to overspending, no new job creation, and inevitably creates government cronyism. The President wasted some $530 million on Solyndra, but now we’re finding billions more given to ‘green energy’ companies overseas. The American people deserve to know the disturbing details of how their tax dollars are being wasted in pursuit of an ideological agenda.”

The purpose of this posts is to review what I call "random wasteful spending" that exists throughout most, if not all, of the Federal bureaucracy. This is different from what I call "systemic wasteful spending" that is anything but random. Systemic wasteful spending occurs everyday, every month, every year, in the same manner, almost like clockwork. 

After following various reports of jailed convicts and illegal immigrants receiving unemployment checks from U.S. taxpayers, the Obama Administration has admitted that in fiscal year 2011 the government “overpaid” around $14 billion in benefits.

Wishing For A Bonner

Obama's $840 billion stimulus contained more than a million dollars to study erectile dysfunction, and yes, I know, any complaint will be identified as a war on men.

That would be in addition to a Republican war on women as alleged by zanies not liking perfectly sound criticisms of Obama's health insurance mindlessness.

That’s a chunk of change for a nation suffering through a painful debt crisis that’s topped $15 trillion. Like most bloated government programs, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) unemployment benefits— paid by state treasuries and the federal government—is rife with fraud and corruption. 



Estimates of stimulus benefits cannot possibly calculate the pluses of leaving more money in the private economy, and the Congressional Budget Office is among those worrying about long-term harm offsetting current advantages.
Thanks not just to the stimulus, but to fervor for more spending generally when revenues are down, the debt has grown by $5 trillion under Obama. That renders us vulnerable to immediate danger on top of saddling our grandchildren with impoverishing repayments.

The president has ignored corrective recommendations of his own debt commission, and this year offered a $3.8 trillion budget defeated 99-0 in a Senate vote that left Democrats making flimsy excuses for what was really a rejection of ruin.

Ours is a president of spectacular negligence. A prime example has been his refusal to propose changes in Social Security, Medicare (beyond cuts that were not overall budget deductions) and Medicaid, even though those three entitlements and debt interest will consume all federal tax revenues as soon as 2025 if not restructured.

Obama himself has even acknowledged that something has to be done, but instead of doing it, created a new health care entitlement worsening the jam we are in by more than a trillion dollars over the next decade. If you want an idea of how absurd Obama's $3.8 trillion budget request for 2013 is, consider the fact that he actually wants to increase funding for the U.S. Department of Energy.

CBS News reported this year that it found 12 "green" companies that got billions from Washington "then declared bankruptcy or are suffering other serious financial issues."

Beacon Power, one such company, was deemed by Standard & Poor's credit rating agency to have a 70 percent chance of failing. Yet that didn't stop the administration from giving Beacon tens of millions of dollars -- after which the company went under.

Harry Reid

It was also via the Energy Department that the Obama administration halted the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Taxpayers had pumped billions of dollars into Yucca Mountain so that it could accommodate spent nuclear fuel from around the country. But to please Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and environmentalists, the administration ended the project, and another huge investment by the Energy Department was lost.

Does that seem like an agency on which the president should want to spend more money for "clean-energy development"?

Not surprisingly, the $4 trillion in deficit reduction supposedly sought in the budget proposal would come "over 10 years." So even if Congress approves the president's plan, a future Congress could readily restore the money, and more.

At any rate, the "reductions" are dubious. The president claims huge savings from winding down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those "savings" largely represent money that was not going to be spent anyway. It's an accounting gimmick.

And private economists are challenging the president's reliance in his budget figures on rosy projections of 3 percent economic growth this year and next, when actual growth is struggling to maintain 1 percent. They say that is far higher than growth is actually likely to be.

Meanwhile, a series of destructive tax increases would be imposed on "the rich," on banks, and on the oil, gas and coal companies that meet most of our nation's energy needs. Do you want to pay more to heat your home and fill your gas tank?

And the president's plan gives scant attention to reforming Medicare and other programs that are the key drivers of rising debt.

Finally, the president wants well over $100 billion in new "stimulus" spending, a big part of it to hire more government workers despite the 2009 stimulus' failure to produce the projected jobs.

The president's chief of staff, Jacob Lew, openly rejected talk of real spending cuts.

"The time for austerity is not today," he said on a Sunday talk show.

Bob Corker

We disagree, and so does U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

"An honest analysis of the president's budget virtually eliminates the White House's claims of deficit reduction when you remove the spending cuts previously enacted in law, alleged savings from money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that was never going to be spent, and nearly $2 trillion in new taxes," Corker stated in a news release.

Noting that our national debt -- $15.3 trillion -- is now as big as our entire economy, he added: "This budget makes a mockery of the American people. If a Republican or Democratic governor of Tennessee proposed a budget like this one, they would be run out of the state."

The president should start anew and offer a budget that relies on slashing wasteful and unconstitutional spending, not on growth-destroying tax increases and "stimulus."

Conservatism Unplugged

America's Future Under Obama

When the world is laid waste, and its celebrants are cinders, And its clothes ashes; When it is once again a dead rock; like the rock that encircles it; Its dust open to the poisonous wind; When we have wrought what we've wrought, and done what we've done, and there is no one left to look back in sorrow or anger: Ah, then, what a song will never be sung! 

In this election, we’re not having an argument that pits capitalism against socialism. We are trying to decide what kind of capitalism we want. It is a debate as American as Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay — which is to say that we have always done this. In light of the rise of inequality and the financial mess we're going through, it’s a discussion we very much need to have NOW. 

Mitt Romney

The back-and-forth about Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old company, is part of something larger. So is the inquest into the implications of multi-billion-dollar trading losses at JPMorgan Chase. Capitalism can produce wonders. It is also capable of self-destruction, and it can leave a lot of wounded people behind. The trick is to get the most out of what capitalism does well, while containing or preventing the problems it can cause. 

To describe this grand debate is not to deny that President Obama’s campaign has some, shall we say, narrower motives in going after Bain. Obama’s lieutenants need to undermine Romney’s claim that his experience in the private equity business makes him just the guy to get our economy back on track.

The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is wealthy.

Romney will focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He will tell about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.

That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like myself call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.

The Destruction Caused By Capitalism

This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

Does this approach cause unnecessary suffering among the employees of the companies in question and the communities that often lose plants and jobs as a result? Sucking pension and health funds dry to aggrandize investors seems less like a creative act than a betrayal of workers who made bargains with their employers in good faith.

More generally, while some of the innovations in the financial sphere have been beneficial to growth, it’s far from clear that this is true of all or even most of them. Some of them helped cause the downturn we are still trying to escape and created incentives for the dangerous risk-taking that led to JPMorgan’s troubles. And there’s little doubt that our new financial system has transferred wealth from other sectors of the economy to the people at the top of the financial business.

Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change. I almost hated to say that, but Please, bare with me here.

“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”

Romney, by contrast, is wary of dismantling any of these nifty new Wall Street inventions, which is one reason why any conservative would wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.

We need to have this great national argument. To borrow a term pioneered by Germany’s Christian Democrats, we can try to build a social market. Or we can have an anti-social market. An election is the right venue for deciding which one it will be.

Everything we thought was true was not true. Everything we thought was right was wrong. The leaders whom we idolized were madmen, Mass murderers, whose crimes were helped along. 
                     

We were the volunteers for this economic genocide, the dupes who gave out leaflets for the devil, for whom obscene dictatorships were good and our own democracies were evil. Obama is the organizers of the poor, for who's numbers are swelling, the builder of immoral unions, the champion of unconstitutionality, sacrificing society only to serve his mortal yearning for significance. We were blind in service to our passions. We were deaf in service to our need. Now I will drive the truth straight through our hearts that we might die at peace with what we did, and for our crime against liberty, Forgiveness denied.

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I'm Going To Steal This Election



And, There's Nothing You Or Anyone Can Do About It



The United States of America has a brand new private VOTE COUNTING company that the Obama administration has personally handpicked.

The company is called Scytl and it is based in Michelle Obama’s most favorite vacation spot, Barcelona, Spain. 

Forget the fact that Barack is once again outsourcing  jobs for people in another country; there are much bigger fish to fry in this story.

According to the “About Us” section of the Scytl website:

Scytl is a worldwide leader in the development of secure solutions for electoral modernization.

Scytl was formed as a spin-off from a leading research group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This group, funded by the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Science and Technology, has pioneered the research on e-voting security in Europe since 1994 and has produced significant scientific results, including 25 scientific papers published in international journals and the first two European Ph.D. theses on electronic voting security, by Prof. Joan Borrell and Scytl’s founder Dr. Andreu Riera (in 1996 and 1999, respectively). This research group also participated in the first Internet binding election in Europe (i.e., the 1997 election to the Presidency of the IEEE IT Spanish chapter).

Scytl has customers both in the private and public sectors. Some of these customers represent leading references in the electoral modernization market (e.g., governments in Spain, the USA, France, Austria, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, Finland and Australia) and are pioneering new electronic voting applications. Scytl’s solutions have been successfully used in multiple projects worldwide, some of which represent breakthrough projects for the electoral modernization industry.

So what does this mean for all us non-European voters here in America?

It means a foreign company may now, ostensibly and unconstitutionally, determine who wins US “elections.” 

It also means that the Obama administration has sold the processing right of our votes in the general election to Scytl, which will make it impossible to track and verify our votes.

Michael Savage

According to Michael Savage, “This critical component to a free election, the transparent tabulation of votes, will no longer  be handled by individual precincts but by this company over which we have absolutely no control…The problem is that once the votes are merged, it will be impossible to go back and check their integrity at the local level. It is very likely that this is the final step in Obama’s corruption of the voting process. It has the promise of enabling him and his cohorts to control the outcomes of federal elections with no accountability. On top of that it’s one more step toward a global government.”

            

Pere Valles

There are no Americans on the Board of Directors of Scytl—but CEO Pere Valles once lived and worked in Barack’s old stomping grounds, Chicago. From the Scytl website:

Mr. Valles joined Scytl in March 2004 after spending most of his professional career in the United States. Prior to joining Scytl, Mr. Valles was Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer of GlobalNet, a NASDAQ publicly-traded telecommunications company headquartered in Chicago. Mr. Valles assisted GlobalNet in becoming one of the leading providers of Voice-over-IP in the world and was instrumental in the successful sale of the company to The Titan Corporation, a NYSE defense company. At GlobalNet, Mr. Valles was responsible for designing and executing the strategic plan that led to an increase in revenues from US$ 25 million to over US$ 100 million and brought the company to profitability. Previously, Mr. Valles had worked as Senior Manager for KPMG‘s Mergers & Acquisitions group in Los Angeles and Miami providing financial and strategic consulting services to private equity groups and corporations involved in acquisitions in the United States, Latin America and Europe. During his career at KPMG, Mr. Valles actively participated in more than 20 transactions in the telecommunications and technology areas. Mr. Valles has a bachelor degree in Economics and a bachelor degree in Law from the University of Barcelona and a MBA (summa cum laude) from Indiana University.


Although the mainstream media has yet to report on the fact that a Spanish based company will be tabulating the Nov. 2012 vote, or at least a significant part of it, those who are aware of the plans are raising serious concerns about the integrity and privacy of the U.S. general election this year.

First, does the U.S. Constitution allow for a foreign entity to take over voter tabulations in this country? If there is no definitive statement in the document itself, the next place to look for the answer is to the Framers themselves, and to historic precedent. Elections in this country have always been under the control and jurisdiction of the local Elections Boards through precincts. To take the process out of the hands of Americans at the local level and place it in the hands of foreigners seems to be a gross violation of every principle of national sovereignty by which the country has operated for over 200 years.

Second, SCYTL has a known history of problems with the integrity of its vote tabulations. The state of Florida refused to allow the company to tabulate its vote in 2008 after discovering significant risks. Those risks are summarized here:

 (1) voters being unable to cast votes,    (2) an election result that does not accurately reflect the will of the voters, or    (3) disclosure of confidential information, such as the votes cast by a voter. The extent to which these vulnerabilities could actually be exploited in the ODBP is beyond the scope of this op-ed given my lack of system context. Secure handling and audit of the Voter Choice Records may defend against some or all of these vulnerabilities, but these procedures were not available for review. 

I've identify three findings of particular significance: 

The use of supervised polling stations provides significantly better protection against voter coercion or vote- selling than is present in some other absentee voting systems, such as voting by mail. 

Two copies of each vote are stored: one electronically, and another on paper as a Voter Choice Record. This provides redundancy that is not present in existing vote-by-mail systems. If the electronic votes are well-protected, then they can enable audit of the paper records in ways that are not currently possible.


  After casting their ballot, each voter is given a receipt that is intended to give voters confidence that their votes were “Counted as Cast”. These receipts do not achieve their stated goal of allowing voters to “independently verify that their ballots have been correctly accounted for.” These receipts might indicate that a vote was received and decrypted by the county (a property not typically provided by current postal voting systems), but they do not provide assurance that the voter’s vote was correctly recorded. 

Third, in 2010 the new electronic voting system installed in Washington, D.C. by SCYTL was hacked.

Fourth, SCYTL was originally funded in part by the Spanish government and maintains a close association with that government. The company is also known for its support of socialistic principles in Europe. Such a scenario raises significant red flags concerning the ability of foreign governments to gain access to valuable private voter information in the U.S.

Fifth, SCYTL is owned by the former CEO of Global Net, who made the maximum legal donation to the Obama campaignin 2008. It has been speculated that he has a relationship with Media Matters, but it is unknown if that relationship extends to MM founder George Soros.

Geoff Ross

Sixth, Senior Chief Geoff Ross, U.S. Navy, retired, wonders if the choice of SCYTL is the reason Obama sounded so confident of his reelection when he was overheard on a live microphone telling the Russian President that much more could be done about nuclear arms after the November elections. Ross further wonders who made the decision to go with SCYTL and how. Was it an Obama Executive Order? Did the Federal Elections Commission make the choice? Was it approved by Congress?

Seventh, given that vote counting is the responsibility of state and local elections commissions, how many of these entities have contracted with SCYTL to do their counting for them? Are these local elections commissions being pressured by the feds at the FEC to contract out their electronic vote tabulations to SCYTL? Is this another attempt of the Obama Administration to usurp local authority?
              

So far there are many questions here but few answers.