We Lost: Put Your Faith In Government Now

       I'm Clinging to My Faith And My Guns 

In every heart there is, of course, corruption. No one is immune from lust and greed.

Democracy accommodates this need, Embracing what might else lead to destruction.

People cannot people an ideal. Equality's a myth, always has been; No more than something to put favors in, Dependent on the lie that it is real. 

Each decision is a battlefield, Not of ideas but of interests, yours and mine, 
Calculated shrewdly to define. Exactly what advantage each might yield?

Do not be discouraged: Evil is As much a part of us as love or bliss.

Yet what is not a wound cannot be healed.

The United States has just had our elections, and nothing has changed. Barack Obama remains president. The Democrats remain in control of the Senate with a non-filibuster-proof majority. The Republicans remain in control of the House of Representatives.

The national political dynamic has resulted in an extended immobilization of the government. With the House -- a body where party discipline is the norm -- under Republican control, passing legislation will be difficult and require compromise. Since the Senate is in Democratic hands, the probability of it overriding any unilateral administrative actions is small. Nevertheless, Obama does not have enough congressional support for dramatic new initiatives, and getting appointments through the Senate that Republicans oppose will be difficult.

Thomas Jefferson

There is a quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "That government is best when it governs the least because its people discipline themselves." I am not sure that the current political climate is what was meant by the people disciplining themselves, but it is clear that the people want to imposed profound limits on this government. Its ability to continue what is already being done has not been curbed, but its ability to do much that is new has been blocked.

American politics, like politics everywhere, is a passionate business. The vilification from all sides that follows any mention I make of American politics is both inevitable and unpleasant. Nevertheless, it's my job to chronicle the unfoldings of our political system, and the fact that the United States is now moving away from an election cycle will affect American international behavior and therefore the international system.

Sheer size of our economic debt

The United States remains the center of gravity of the international system. The sheer size of our economy (regardless of our growth rate) and the power of our military (regardless of our current problems) is what makes us unique. Even more important, no single leader of the world is as significant, for good or bad, as the American president. That makes the American presidency, in its broadest sense, a matter that cannot be ignored in studying the international system.

There will be a great deal of unhappiness with the second Obama administration overseas. As much as the world condemns the United States when it does something, at least part of the world is usually demanding some action. Obama will disappoint, but it is not Obama. Just as the elections has paralyze him domestically, reality will limit his foreign policy. Immobilism is something the founders would have been comfortable with, both in domestic politics and in foreign policy. The voters have given the republic a government that will give them both.

Obama's campaign was about no particular policies. He ran on a platform that famously promised FORWARD!.  His tremendous political achievement was in getting voters to except the concepts in such a way that they would interpreted it to mean precisely what they wanted them to mean without committing Obama to specific policies. To the anti-war faction it meant that the wars would end. To those concerned about unilateralism it meant that unilateralism would be replaced by multilateralism. To those worried about growing inequality it meant that he would end inequality. To those concerned about industrial jobs going overseas it meant that those jobs would stay in the United States. 

In 2008, Obama told the Democratic convention: “We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage, whether you can put a little money away at the end of each month” but Obama got it dead wrong in suggesting that four more years of his “let government do it” presidency is the path that will restore the nation’s economic greatness.

One of the hardest things for a young adult to master is the principle that, for the most part, there is nothing that can be done. That is the phase in which the United States finds itself at the moment. It is coming to terms not so much with the limits of power as the nature of power. Great power derives from the understanding of the difference between those things that matter and those that don't, and a ruthless indifference to those that don't. It is a hard thing to learn, but history is patiently teaching it to the United States.

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.

Will The Dying Euro Be The Death Of The Dollar?

The American economy seems to be improving, albeit slowly.  The labor market has had four straight quarters of positive data.  Holiday sales were strong.  The S&P 500 might have registered a positive return for the year had it not been for the debt ceiling debacle and subsequent downgrade of U.S. Treasury securities and, of course, the debt crisis in Europe.  So far in 2012, it seems that not much has changed.  The darkest cloud hanging over the American economy is still what is happening in Europe.

As we move into 2012, it is likely that the European debt crisis will continue to dominate the market headlines.  The Europeans are in the process of approving plans to tie themselves more closely together fiscally.  This is a positive development but it is too late. Had rules been created to limit budget deficits when the currency union first came into existence, today’s crisis may have been avoided.  Now these rules will more likely exacerbate the crisis rather than mitigate it. 


Europe’s economy needs to grow to create more tax revenue for its governments’ coffers.  Raising taxes and cutting government spending does not create economic growth during times of economic weakness.  Chances are that the fiscal steps the Europeans are taking to try to dig themselves out of the crisis will send the Euro Zone into recession and have the opposite effect of their intended purpose.

A European recession certainly doesn’t help the American economy but its effects probably won’t be enough to cause a recession on this side of the Atlantic.  The problem responsible for the market volatility we experienced in 2011 has a lot to do with the European banking system.  Modern economies need a well functioning banking system to prosper.  When banking systems do not function, the credit that businesses and households need dries up, slowing economic growth.  We saw this with the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and subsequent global recession. We are already seeing the types of strains in the European banking system that we saw in September of 2008.  European banks are borrowing from and parking funds at the European Central Bank (ECB) instead of with each other, and at levels that signify significant stress in the banking system.

Banks are borrowing from the ECB because they don’t trust each others’ stability.  They are worried about each other’s exposure to the sovereign debt of the countries that may not be able to pay their obligations.  Banks are required by rules and their creditors to maintain certain capital ratios.  This means that they must have certain levels of assets to back up their liabilities.  Now assets that used to be safe – European sovereign bonds – are no longer and may not qualify as the right kind of capital to keep the banks’ capital ratios where they need to be.





This exposure goes far beyond simply holding bonds that may not be repaid.  This size of each of the sovereign debt markets is known; however what is not known is the exposure in the form of credit derivatives known as “credit default swaps.”  


Credit default swaps are a form of insurance against a loss on an investment or groups of investments, in this case, the investments we are worried about are the bonds issued by countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy as well as banks holding their debt.  If there is a default, the sellers of this type of insurance are on the hook for the loses. 

I'm So Confused!

 The problem is that this market is opaque; no one really knows who will be on the hook for how much.  There is no way for banks to know if their lending partners will be decimated by a credit event or not. This is one of the major reasons confidence among banks is waning.There are a few solutions that economists believe may solve the European debt crisis.  It is believed that the most effective solution would be for the ECB to purchase the debt of the distressed countries.  This would create demand for their bonds, increasing the price and lowering the interest costs. However, there are several problems with this solution. Unlike the Federal Reserve (Fed) in United States, the ECB has no mandate to promote full employment.


 The ECB is only charged with maintaining price stability.  The ECB is not a lender of last resort and is not charged with spurring economic growth like the Fed is.  For the ECB to buy bonds, it must issue bonds backed by the European Union itself.  The Europeans have created a mechanism to buy distressed sovereign debt called the European Financial Stability Facility. It is doing this on a very limited scale but a few billion in bond sales at a time is not going to do much to solve the crisis.

Right now, the ECB is buying limited quantities of the distressed nations’ debt; it is providing low interest loans to European banks; and allowing the banks to park the borrowed cash at low overnight rates.  The ECB’s 3-year loan program resulted in over half a trillion dollars of low cost loans to banks. It is encouraging that the ECB is taking these steps but the extent to which European banks are using these programs is very concerning.  Banks that use low interest loans from the ECB, then turn around and park the funds overnight at the ECB are not necessarily using the funds for all of their intended purposes. Funds parked at the ECB are not being used to lend to businesses and households to foster economic growth.  On the bright side, some of the funds borrowed from the ECB have been used to buy European sovereign debt, another purpose of the loans.

The Obama $1.00 Bill

The idea of expanding this plan to allow for the unlimited sovereign debt buying necessary puts Europe’s two largest economies on the spot, France and Germany. France would probably back a bond buying spree by the ECB but knows it will do no good to support that action if Germany is not on board.  Germany does not want the ECB to buy more bonds and it is questionable whether they will change this stance if the fate of the currency union hangs in the balance.

We can also question whether France and Germany can regain their AAA bond ratings if the ECB began issuing European Union Bonds.  If they are put on the hook for Euro area bonds they may not look as creditworthy as before. If Germany and France were downgraded, the problems described earlier about maintaining certain capital ratios would be magnified.  French and German bonds would not be considered as the gold standard in capital any longer. Luckily, when this happened in the United States, there were not the calamitous credit market reactions that some foretold.   In essence, if things don’t improve in Europe, it will be up to Germany and Angela Merkel’s willingness to save the Euro in its current form.

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The Great Depression Don't Have Anything On These Numbers

The unemployed have, on average, remained unemployed longer than in the 1930s; Employers wary of job gaps in resumes.

There is an unfortunate adage for the unemployed: The longer folks are out of a job, the longer it takes them to find a new one.

CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports that the chronically unemployed face the hardest road back to recovery, and that while the jobs picture may be improving statistically on a national level, it is not for them. 

Ben Tracy


Tinong Nwachan, for example, has far too much time on his hands. When CBS News met the former truck driver he had been out of work for two years.

"I don't really tell too many people this but I'm not ashamed or nothing, I'm homeless," Nwachan said.

Summer job bummer: Teen unemployment 24 percent

Nearly 14 million Americans are looking for work

"They're saying there are more jobs, but I'm just wondering where those jobs are," Lambrecht said.

About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months - a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Some of the 45.1% Unemployed


The bigger the gap on someone's resume, the more questions employers have.

"Employers think: 'Oh, well, there must be something really wrong with them because they haven't gotten a job in 6 months, a year, 2 years.' But that's not necessarily the case," said Marjorie Gardner-Cruse with the Hollywood Worksource Center.

The problem of course is the economy, but some industries, especially certain manufacturing jobs, are not ever expected to come back. Experts say unemployed workers need to be prepared to change careers, they have to realize that, discover what field they want to work in, become trained and find a job in that field," said Jerry Nickelsburg, Sr., an economist at UCLA.

Here's another problem: more than 1 million of the long-term unemployed have run out of unemployment benefits, leaving them without the money to get new training, buy new clothes, or even get to job interviews.

If you have been unemployed for 6 months or more, it takes a much deeper toll - not just on your personal finances and your career prospects - but on your emotional well-being.

Dr David Fryer, a psychologist from Stirling University in Scotland, has studied the psychological effects of unemployment for 14 years. He told an audience at Massey University last month that research into the effects of unemployment over the last 60yrs has produced `worryingly consistent findings'. His studies showed that up to 40% of unemployed people suffered psychological distress.

Fryer says that many official intervention programmes aimed at helping unemployed people only increased the mental health costs of unemployment. He says that Social Policy couldn't be designed much more effectively to exaggerate the risk of mental health problems.

Dr David Fryer



Fryer gave the 1994 C.S.Myers lecture at the Psychological Society's annual conference. We here give an essential summary of this lecture on Dr Fryer's research into unemployment as a mental health issue.

It is one of the major achievements of recent research to have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that unemployment causes, rather than merely results from, poor psychological health [...] studies spanning time, cultures, research groups and research methods converge in their conclusions that unemployment is associated with poor mental health. For many, the most impressive contemporary input has been made by researchers using quantitative psychological methods.

Anxiety, depression, dissatisfaction with one's present life, experienced strain, negative self-esteem, hopelessness regarding the future and other negative emotional states ... have each been demonstrated in cross-sectional studies to be higher in unemployed people than in matched groups of employed people.

There is also an emerging consensus that the physical, as well as mental health of unemployed people is also generally lower than that of employed people. 

Marie Jahoda



Marie Jahoda in 1980 said that employment is a social institution with objective consequences that occur for all effected by it, overriding individual differences in feelings, thoughts, motivation and purpose. Some of these, like earning a living, are intended or manifest. Others are unintended or latent.

According to Jahoda: " employment makes the following categories of experience inevitable : it imposes a time structure on the waking day; it compels contacts and shared experiences with others outside the nuclear family; it demonstrates that there are goals and purposes which are beyond the scope of an individual but require a collectivity; it imposes status and social identity through the division of labor in modern employment; it enforces activity..."

Crucially, unemployment is said by Jahoda to damage mental health because of the psychological deprivation of these unintended consequences of employment which normally function as psychological supports.

Back in 1936, German investigations showed that unemployment among German parents brings about a drop in the school marks of two thirds of their children. Where unemployment was very long term, they reported a further decline in school work. More recent Dutch work has also found poorer school performance in children with unemployed fathers.

McLoyd in 1989 concluded, after an extensive literature review, that children with unemployed fathers are at risk of `socio-emotional problems, deviant behavior, and reduced aspirations and expectations. The child may also model the somatic complaints of the father...'. McLoyd cites specific evidence regarding: mental health problems, withdrawal from peers, depression, loneliness, emotional sensitivity, distrustfulness, decreased sociability and low self-esteem.

Research by McKee and Bell in 1986 points to the difficulties spouses, generally female partners of unemployed men, face in trying to manage on reduced income, to cope with the spouses' intrusive presence in the household, to support distressed partners and deal with intra-family conflict.

Some of the effects of unemployment may persist into the period of re-employment. Kaufman in 1982 found that one fifth of his sample of re-employed professionals were under-employed i.e. had had to accept jobs which were inferior in terms of salary, type of work and use of skills. Only 47% reported their lives had returned to normal following re-employment. Further research has shown that re-employment is likely to be at a lower level and the re-employed people more vulnerable to future redundancy due to last in, first out practices.

The researcher Fineman in 1987 followed up a previously unemployed sample of people and found those re-employed in jobs which they felt were inadequate were experiencing more stress, and even poorer self-esteem, than they had during their period of unemployment. Half of Fineman's re-employed informants had what he described as `legacy' effects, whatever the quality of the new job. This legacy took of feeling there was a lasting blemish or stigma on their work record, of continuing doubts about their abilities, of personal failure. Organizationally they were prepared to give less of themselves to their new jobs.

There is a massive literature on occupational stress, increasingly referred to as strain. A traditional way of coping with such strain has been to change jobs. However, in recessional labor market conditions, people are increasingly likely to become trapped in psychologically distressing jobs.

A survey of 3,000 young people over eight years in South Australia asked about their job satisfaction. The study found that those employed youngsters who were dissatisfied with their jobs were indistinguishable in terms of mental health scores from the unemployed youngsters.

$3 Billion in support for Muslin Brotherhood in Egypt

Dr. Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh

One day after making a historic speech in calling for Israel to give up Jerusalem, President Obama is planning on providing $3 Billion in cash and debt forgiveness to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

On May 19th, President Obama laid out a plan to forgive Egypt of over $1 Billion in debt. This debt forgiveness is on top of the $2 Billion additional funds the Obama administration plans to provide in foreign aid to the Middle Eastern nation.

The gesture by Obama is what his administration and certain left-leaning media figures are describing as part of the “Arab Spring” – the hopeful spreading of democracy throughout the Middle East.

The White House unveiled a $2 billion multiyear economic aid package for Egypt, which officials say would largely shift existing funds. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel prepared to arrive in Washington with a package that he hoped would shift the burden of restarting the peace process to the Palestinians.

After the fall of Mubarak in Egypt over a month ago, several political groups in Egypt have been vying to fill the vacuum of power. The one significant group that has risen to potentially take control over the nation in the coming election is the Muslin Brotherhood. This radical Islamic group could possibly win 70% of the seats available in the legislature according to current polls, and even the office of the Presidency.

Though the Muslim Brotherhood will not appoint a candidate, Egypt's first freely elected president could be a prominent member of the once outlawed group: Dr. Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh. Although technically running as an independent and not formally allied with any party, including the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party, he is nonetheless perceived by many Egyptians as part of a Muslim Brotherhood juggernaut on its way to dominating Parliament and possibly capturing the presidency in Egypt's fall elections.

The Muslim Brotherhood has proven ties to terrorism, and has spawned many splinter groups that have performed terror activities around the world. In February, the head of the FBI spoke to a Congressional subcommittee on the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has in the war on terror.

With this evidence in hand, there is no equivocation that President Obama is intending to provide financial support to known terror groups, and to a government that is more than likely to be run by members tied to a terrorist organization after the coming October elections.

President Obama has done two things with his historic speech Thursday on the Middle East. His goal to force Israel to give up Jerusalem and move back to pre-1967 borders is a massive sea-change to US-Israeli relations, and his programs to provide $3 Billion in foreign aid through cash and debt forgiveness to Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood change the scope entirely on who we are now acknowledging as allies in the Middle East, and the ongoing war on terror.

U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan



U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan told Neil Cavuto of Fox news that the U.S. is “absolutely wrong” to give Pakistan another $3 billion in foreign aid after Osama bin Laden was found there.


Buchanan said the U.S. needs to re-examine its financial aid to both Pakistan and Egypt given how much debt the U.S. government is in.

“We can’t continue to buy our friends around the world,” Buchanan said in an interview on FOX Business Network.

Buchanan tells Cavuto all U.S. foreign aid should be re-assessed.



The amazing events in Egypt this year, despite rough sledding for other popular uprisings in nations whose populations are also seeking reform in the Middle East, remain viable for a long march to democracy, a member of the group of 100 that will begin crafting a new constitution for the country said in an exclusive interview.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat



Dr.Zaher, a prominent professor of urology at Ain Shams University in Cairo, has been in Washington, D.C. attending a medical convention. In a meeting arranged through friends he has known since childhood, Dr. Zaher, once an adviser to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, said that the main thing now threatening the progress toward democracy in Egypt, and throughout the region, is economic lack.

"Egypt will be bankrupt in six months," he said. The revolution has brought the domestic economy to a standstill as throughout the nation in every factory and business, workers are taking up the spirit of democracy and free speech to suddenly prefer speaking out to working.

As a result, Dr. Zaher said, the transitional Egyptian government has had to dip into its reserves to the tune of $3 billion per month, and at that rate, the reserves will be exhausted in six months. At that point, the population, already deep in poverty, will face starvation, as the government will be unable to continue its program of subsidizing basic food costs.

"Egypt is key to the entire region," he said. "All the rest of the Arab world will imitate what happens in Egypt." He said a successful transformation to democracy there will ensure that democracy eventually comes to the entire region.

He suggested that if the U.S. decided to launch an economic Marshall Plan for the region, that democracy throughout would thrive. Short of that, he said, he hopes the U.S. will come to the immediate aid of Egypt with economic resources, even large donations of basic wheat and bread.

He said that the revolution has been, as reported, a legitimate uprising of the people, led by the young who organized through the social media, including Facebook.

It was not instigated by the Egyptian Army, as some have claimed, in order to prevent Mubarek's son from succeeding him. But the Army took advantage of the opening created by the uprising to achieve that result. When Mubarek ordered the Army to put down the uprisings, the Army refused to obey.

Now, Dr. Zaher believes, the Army has a vested interest in helping to move the nation toward a stable democracy.

By that means, he said, the Army feels it can insure that a small minority of extremists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, do not seize control of power. Already, he noted, while the Muslim Brotherhood represents less than 10 percent of the population, it is seeking 75 percent participation in drafting the new constitution.

With so much of the population poor and uneducated, a group like the Muslim Brotherhood could wield inordinate power unless firm guarantees of a lawful process toward fair elections and the rule of law are put into place.

Chosen to participate in the group of 100 that begins meeting this weekend to draft a constitution, Dr. Zaher said that he has submitted three progressive proposals modeled on the German constitution, which he said, is very similar to the U.S.'s.