US Banks Stay In Business Because Of The Fed's Discount Window

So says Jeff Bailey, here:

Bankers will talk about being entrepreneurial and needing the freedom to compete. This is B.S. The only reason they're able to stay in business is FDIC deposit insurance and access to the Fed's discount window for emergency borrowing. They exist by virtue of extraordinary government assistance, and while their shareholders get to [the] upside of this deal, taxpayers are hugely exposed to the downside.

Very few people seem to understand this, or even care anymore. And it's the not-caring that really amazes. The lid was blown off this story by Bloomberg here on Sunday night, November 27, 2011, the end of the Thanksgiving weekend when absolutely nobody was paying attention in the public:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

The story became the rage for a time among bloggers who blogged about it at length and news organizations who dutifully reported the astounding figures, but the nation shrugged. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, 5 million residences were forfeit by their owners, and the federal government basically did nothing about it, even protested there was not much it could do, but it made damn sure the bankers and corporations were made good at great expense and risk to the public. Meanwhile the big banks have grown bigger and more dangerous than ever, re-inflating asset prices in the process as they try to repair their off-balance-sheet balance sheets, along with their public ones, and rank and file Americans are basically set back decades because of their losses.

The poor you have always with you, the man from Galilee once told us. Customers of the banks, no doubt, every last mother's son of them.

Rep. Justin Amash Is Poison For The GOP

Once again Rep. Justin Amash illustrates that he's not really a Republican. It's really hard to say what he is, actually. Who knows, maybe he's a Martian. His loyalties obviously lie elsewhere than with the Republican Party. Whatever he is, it's not a team player.

Consider that if it were really true, as he claims below, that the Republicans weren't really serious about any alternatives to the sequester, why would that be anything but good except for the political lying part, seeing that the sequester will force some real cuts to spending? I gather he's against those cuts because they aren't really real cuts because baseline budgeting increases spending automatically and we're just reducing the increase not the net spending year over year, or . . . they just aren't big enough cuts, kind of like voting to defund Planned Parenthood wasn't good enough because the bill didn't defund everyone like Planned Parenthood, so just vote to continue funding the nation's largest abortion provider. Interesting Republicanism.

Here he was at mlive: 

"They've been throwing this at the Democrats, saying we [Republicans] put two proposals on the table to replace the sequester," Amash told the gathering of 75-plus constituents at Gaines Township Hall. "No, we haven't."

The effect of this was nothing more than a poke in the eye to all Republicans, whom he'll never persuade if he keeps acting like that in public. God knows he'll never persuade Democrats in Congress. At some point you just have to shrug your shoulders at Rep. Justin Amash. He won't play nice and he can't persuade anybody, so . . .  what? We elected him so he could go to Washington and just play in the big Congressional sandbox?

Surely there's a good ole country boy up there somewhere on Capitol Hill who can talk some sense into the child. But somehow I think it's going to take more than talk to adjust his attitude.

Republicans Need To Get A Grip: Obama Did Not Win By A Landslide In 2012

Republicans need to get a grip: Obama did not win in a landslide. Not in 2008, and especially in 2012.

Joe Curl for The Washington Times, in particular, needs to take a pill and calm down, who three times in a recent op-ed (here) credits Obama with a "landslide" victory, which drives him to all manner of hand-wringing and unnecessary speculation about the need for Republicans to alter their message. Instead, what Republicans need to do is alter their candidate.

At this far remove from the November election the results are plain for everyone to see, but no one, evidently, is looking. It really doesn't come as a surprise, however, because they didn't really look at the results after 2008, either, and promptly annointed another loser in the mold of McCain, albeit a better loser.

Sen. John McCain lost to Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 by 1.4 million votes out of 131.3 million cast, barely 1.1% of the total vote.

Gov. Romney lost to Pres. Obama in 2012 by 0.77 million votes out of 129.1 million cast, barely 0.6% of the total vote.

They both lost because both failed to carry Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. Had Romney carried them all, which he failed to do by just 767,000 votes in the aggregate, he'd be the president today. McCain failed to carry the exact same states, but by 1.34 million, a performance almost twice as bad as Romney's. In addition McCain lost both North Carolina and Indiana by just 42,000 votes between the two, either of which with the other seven states would have meant a McCain presidency, not an Obama presidency.

The problem with the Republican Party isn't that it can't win elections against a supposedly landslide commanding Democrat machine. Its problem is it can't win with bad candidates like McCain and Romney. They are bad candidates because they are essentially liberal Republicans whom the voters take for Democrat-lite, and shrug.

Why vote for that at all, or why vote for that when you can vote for the real thing?

Message to Republicans: Don't alter your message. Alter your candidate. Nominate a real conservative for a change. The chances are good you'll win.

Obama Shrugs, Sunsets His (Mostly Ignored) Jobs Council

Safely reelected, Obama's Jobs Council sunsets this week, even though millions still can't find work:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama will let his jobs council expire this week without renewing its charter, winding down one source of input from the business community even as unemployment remains stubbornly high. ...

Obama met with the council only a handful of times. During the last meeting, in February 2012 . . . 

Read the rest, here.

Markets Shrug At Terrible GDP Report, Hang On Words Of Federal Reserve

Faced with the worst GDP report since Q2 2009, the markets shrug. What really counts for markets is whether the Federal Reserve this afternoon will announce some new intervention to boost the economy. Markets ignore reality, and hang on the words of the bankers. This is not free market capitalism. These are not free markets. These are rigged markets. This is corporatism. This is fascism. It favors an elite few in exchange for their support, while the majority of Americans gets by on crumbs.

One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.

Total Votes Cast In Presidential Elections Since 1968

Figures rounded to the nearest million:

1968.....73 million

1972.....78

1976.....81

1980.....87

1984.....93

1988.....92

1992...104

1996.....96

2000...105

2004...122

2008...131

2012...123.

The biggest "shrug" was in 1996 when Republicans ran me-too liberals Bob Dole and Jack Kemp against the real liberals, Billy Clinton and the Div. School Dropout, AlGore.

The second biggest shrug just occurred, when Republicans again ran me-too liberals, tax collectors for the welfare state who promised to preserve Medicare and keep certain parts of ObamaCare, against the real deal in Obama, who just expanded the welfare state with ObamaCare.

Republicans. They don't call them the stupid party for nothing.

If they had at least run conservatives who lost we could say conservatism lost. But they didn't, and we can't.

Republicans Lose Again Because They Offered No Conservative Alternative

Andrew McCarthy for National Review here gets it, even if I would quibble about the precision of his election results:

In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. ...

Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. ...

[T]he Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? ...

Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it ... They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.” ...

Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. ... No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.

That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. ... Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.

McCarthy thinks about 2 million fewer voters showed up in 2012 than in 2004, which is "staggering", except that his election math already looks just a little off. Today I'm showing 122.5 million total votes in 2012, and 122.3 million in 2004, eight years and two elections ago. Still, that is a staggering comparison when you realize that the population has grown by a net 21 million over the period.

Clearly, as McCarthy says, the voters in 2012 "shrugged", but the shrug was actually bigger in 1996 when Republicans again characteristically picked two other moderate losers in Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Fully 8% fewer ended up voting in 1996 than in 1992 (1% fewer voted in 1988 than in 1984).

Starting with 1968 and ending with 2008, the average increase in total votes cast in the presidential from election to election has been 6%. 2012 compared to 2008 shows 6% fewer votes cast. The slightly smaller shrug over moderate Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may reflect the distance in time and understanding from the debates over conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s.

The single biggest gains in total votes cast, incidentally, occurred in 2004 in Bush 43 v. Kerry (16% more votes cast than in 2000) when war in Iraq put patriotism center stage (just barely 51% voted for that despite buying off seniors with Medicare Part D in 2003), followed by 1992 in Bush 41 v. Clinton (13% more votes cast than in 1988) when the issues were breaking the no new taxes pledge (43% voted against that) and "that giant sucking sound" (19% voted against that).

Republicans still haven't learned how to put conservatism all together and wrap it in a bow.

The New York Times Uncorks The Wildest Slur Yet Against The Tea Party

Suddenly the Tea Party is the most selfish, arrogant and yet servile lot on the planet, according to one Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor at Stanford, for The New York Times, here:

". . . the Tea Party, whose members believe they are the only ones who deserve government aid."

Wow. Haven't heard that one yet. Is that what it takes to get tenure at Stanford these days? The intimate connection she divines between the Randians and the Tea Party is, quite simply, the sort of fantasy one might expect of someone trying to find something new to say. Not that the Shruggers wouldn't like to co-opt the Tea Party. They would, and they are trying, as is the Republican Party's Dick Armey, which is enough to give anyone who has watched them from the beginning the staggers. The spontaneous revulsion of common, everyday folk in America to the designs of their elected leaders provoked the reaction which is the Tea Party, most of which is as non-ideological as a hamburger. 

I dunno, maybe she's confusing the Tea Party with Occupy Wall Street, some of whose members are infamous for demanding student loan forgiveness, and the right to poop on your stoop.

Just two years ago in Slate Mark Gimein could reasonably characterize the Tea Party as "the responsibles" who rose up against "the deadbeats", homeowners who had stopped paying on their mortgages and wanted bailouts from the Obama regime even as millions of underwater homeowners continued to pay on theirs.

I guess Jennifer is fairly new to the planet.

Neil Barofsky, TARP "Watchdog", Blasts Financial Fascism In New Book

And Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times provides a favorable review, here:

He is Neil Barofsky. Remember him — the man whose job it was to police the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program? And his new account, a book titled “Bailout” (Free Press), to be published on Tuesday, is a must-read. ...

He soon discovered that the [Treasury] department’s natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren’t at risk for fraud and abuse.

“The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.” ...

Meaningful changes to our broken system may finally come about, he writes, if enough people get angry. His conclusion is this: “Only with this appropriate and justified rage can we sow the seeds for the types of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks.”

At the center of that whole sordid affair of regulatory capture at the time was Tim Geithner at Treasury, former head of The New York Federal Reserve Bank, who obviously isn't simply morally challenged with respect to paying his taxes, but also with respect to reporting LIBOR irregularities.

Unfortunately for us, we not only had two candidates for president in 2008 who voted FOR TARP (Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama), in 2012 the Republican candidate still defends it, as recently as March here in USA Today Away:

"There was a fear that the whole economic system of America would collapse, that all our banks or virtually all (banks) would go out of business," Romney told a town-hall-style forum in Arbutus, Md. "In that circumstance, President Bush and Hank Paulson said, 'We've got to do something to show we are not going to let the whole system go out of business.' I think they were right. I know some people disagree with me, I thought they were right to do that.".

And not only that, Romney is as unlikely as anyone to get angry about bailouts in future. We can't even get Romney to be angry about ObamaCare.

It's not even clear Obama's recent $100 million in attacks against Romney's personal character have made him mad, especially when it's the subject of speculation on conservative talk radio. Here Rush Limbaugh notes Romney "finally" gets ticked off about Obama's (plagiarizing) use of (Elizabeth Warren's) "you didn't build that", but even Rush isn't 100 percent convinced:

RUSH: You know, folks, I think this actually made Romney mad! I actually think that what Obama said finally ticked Romney off. I think Romney now has realized Obama is not a nice guy who's just befuddled and wrong. That was Romney's prior description of Obama: "He's a nice guy, just doesn't know what he's doing." I think this really got to Romney. Let's squeeze one more in here...

RUSH: Yes, siree bob! Something lit a fire. I am convinced that what Obama said actually has made Romney mad. Not in an insulting way. It has made him mad over what we're up against now. And, of course, as I say: The Obamaites are saying that their guy was "taken out of context." Right. Okay. ...

RUSH: Have you seen anything on Romney's speech in Irwin, Pennsylvania? "A little bit." Well, before we go to the break, let's play sound bite nine again and then follow it up with the last one. This is Romney on fire yesterday in Irwin, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. He's really ticked off now, I think. This is about Obama saying (impression), "You started a business? You didn't do that! You didn't make that happen! You didn't build that. Uhhhh, you didn't -- you -- you -- you had help! You had a road, a bridge. You didn't do that."

And I think Romney is really ticked. I think there's now a fire burning under the posterior. So here are the two bites. Just bang 'em back-to-back, Mike.

If conservatives aren't sure if Romney's really angry, who is? The man is cool, I tell you, as in passionless, just like Obama. And that is the prerequisite for deception.

On the outstanding problems of our time, from massive bailouts of the banking system to government coercion in healthcare, Gov. Romney is on the same side as Obama and the Democrats.

Some choice!

Meanwhile, the American people just shrug.

A country that can't get angry about anything is a country that deserves what's coming to it (see France).

A Marine in Missouri Will Vote For the Republican Candidate, But Gives $ Only to Newt

From the LA Times, here:

Jim Crossland, a retired Marine handing out flyers about the national debt after a Santorum speech in northern St. Louis, shrugged when asked about the candidate, the apparent local favorite. “In Pennsylvania, his nickname was ‘Tricky Ricky’ -- talks one way, votes another,” Crossland said. “But if he’s elected for our side, I’ll get behind him.”

“I’m still sending money to Newt,” he confessed. So what if it’s Romney, like a lot of people predict?

Crossland paused. “I’ll vote for him,” he said, “but I won’t send him any money.”

The UK Depression is Huge, But the Response is a Shrug of the Shoulders

So says Martin Wolf for The Financial Times, quoted here:

For the present depression to be shorter than its longest predecessor, it must end not later than April 2012. But output is close to 4 percent below its starting point, with eight months to go. ...

The cumulative loss of GDP is likely to be worse this time even than in the 1930s. It was 17.7 percent of GDP back then, against 14.5 percent, this time, so far. But this depression is not over. If growth were to be 2 percent a year, the cumulative loss would be over 18 percent of GDP.

This then is a huge depression, by UK standards. Yet the response is a shrug of the shoulders.

In America we can't bring ourselves even to speak of 'economic depression,' so deep is our collective delusion caused by the widespread gnosticism of political correctness.

The United States has had back to back years of declining GDP in 2008 and 2009, followed by a mere balance sheet recovery in 2010 defined entirely by massive government spending. With the latter now nearly at an end, GDP is in the toilet.

The answer of the Democrats is to propose more fake GDP. And unfortunately for the Republicans, they're stuck with their free-trade religion which has misallocated hundreds of billions of dollars abroad, especially to China, and with it all our jobs.

Where are the Patriots?

Our Tyrant is Himself a Servile Bastard

As Jonah Goldberg reminds us here:

More to the point, once the president concluded that the law [Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act] was unconstitutional, he would be bound by his oath to ignore it, and challenge it in every way possible.

President Obama says DOMA is unconstitutional, and yet the “law professor” says he will continue to enforce it.

In a properly ordered constitutional republic, this would be a scandal. But in America today, it’s cause for eye-rolling, shrugs, and platitudes about the demands of politics.

Translation for those of you in Rio Linda: the president is violating his oath of office to defend the constitution when he enforces an unconstitutional law, and is bowing to the Judicial branch of government by deferring to it to decide the fate of the law  instead of asserting the co-equal power of the Executive branch, of which he is the head.

Such servility in the soul is a prerequisite for a tyrant. Obama often can't bring himself to assert the power of the Executive, which helps explain the dithering, idling, and lack of urgency which characterizes his decision making, especially in crises, the bowing to foreign leaders, the apologizing for America's sins abroad, etc.

It's all one important reason our opposition to Obama has a good chance of succeeding, and is. He is weak.