Change It Back

Freedom's Death Panel

Words Mean Whatever They Say They Mean: It Wasn't A Tax, Now It Is

STEPHANOPOULOS:  That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.

OBAMA:  No.  That’s not true, George.  The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. ... 

STEPHANOPOULOS:  I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA:  George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.

-- 9/20/09, here

Our Enemy, The State

Supremes Uphold ObamaCare 5-4. George Bush's Liberalism Carries The Day.

George W. Bush's appointee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts, voted with the liberals 5-4, redefining the mandate as a tax, which the Democrats denied it was to get it passed, but argued it was to get it upheld. He agreed.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

This just proves once again how unreliable are the appointees to the courts by Republican presidents. Conservatives they rarely are. But, of course, as we've said before, Ronald Reagan wasn't a conservative. He was a Democrat in recovery. George W. Bush was just in recovery.

So the Supremes have put the stink of raising your taxes on the Democrats, where it belongs. But just as the Democrats rammed the bill down our throats, the Supremes have just shoved it up your ass.

Was it good for you, baby?

Will someone now challenge this on tax grounds? If everyone must have health insurance, isn't it a poll tax which must be equally shared by every man, woman and child? To be constitutional, it must be apportioned according to population, which it will not be.

By the way, anyone remember Roberts defending Kagan's integrity, leaving it to her to decide whether she should recuse herself from this case?

Boy, was that ever a clue.

Q1 2012 GDP, Third and Final Estimate: 1.9 Percent

A decline from Q4 2011 of 36 percent.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis report is here.

Hey President Obama! Keep on sucking until you do succeed!

Gold To Fall To $700?

Yoni Jacobs thinks so, here, based on the gold price having broken the 300-day moving average:

“Just like you see oil falling from $115 to $80 – we will see the same thing with gold and it’s already underway.”

With a normal ratio of 15 barrels of oil to one ounce of gold, a $700 dollar price for gold also implies further deterioration in the price of oil ... to about $46/barrel.

"The euro crisis is first and foremost a banking crisis."

"The euro crisis is first and foremost a banking crisis."

-- Barry Eichengreen, 3/2/2011, here

"The eyes of our citizens are not yet sufficiently open to the true cause of our distresses. They ascribe them to every thing but their true cause, the banking system; a system, which, if it could do good in any form, is yet so certain of leading to abuse, as to be utterly incompatible with the public safety and prosperity. At present all is confusion, uncertainty and panic."

-- Thomas Jefferson, 6/22/1819, here

Shouldn't We Be Just A Little Worried That Spain's Jaime Caruana Heads The Bank For International Settlements?

Excerpted from the story here:

From their lofty perches, first at Spain’s central bank and then as the IMF’s top executives assessing global banking risk, José Viñals and Jaime Caruana were well positioned to sound alarms about the looming bank debacle. ...

Pressed at an IMF news conference in July 2008 about falling house prices in Spain, [Mr. Caruana] acknowledged there might be loan losses. But he said, “The financial system in Spain is able to cope with that and is properly capitalized.” ...

In Spain, the increase in house prices between 2000 and 2007 was particularly extreme — so much so that as early as 2006, a team of inspectors within the Bank of Spain sent a cautionary report to the government.

The study criticized the “passive attitude” of Mr. Caruana, who led the central bank from 2000 to 2006, and the extraordinary acceleration of loans to homebuyers and real estate developers.

The inspectors also warned of Spanish banks engaging in unusually heavy short-term borrowing at levels far beyond their deposits. ...

[A] real estate specialist based in Barcelona, says that ... the Spanish central bank in 2004, led then by Mr. Caruana, succumbed to bank lobbying and pressure from Europe by halving the amount that banks had to set aside to 15 percent of overall loans, from 30 percent. ...

Mr. Caruana’s career has since thrived. After just three years at the IMF, he left in 2009 for one of the plum global finance jobs: chief executive of the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based regulatory body that serves as a forum for the world’s central banks.

Don't miss the rest of the story about the other characters in this debacle, at the link above.

Ratings Agency Downgrades Germany On "Massive" Uncollectible Receivables

From Greece.

Story here.

Average Age Of Vehicles On Road Climbs Year Over Year To All Time High

'97 Olds LSS

As reported here:

Feel like you're driving an old car? You're not alone. In fact, the average age of vehicles in the U.S. has hit a new all-time high. Experian Automotive says the average age of the 245 million vehicles registered in the U.S. in the first quarter of this year was 11 years.

That's an increase of just over 2 months compared the first quarter of last year.

European Project Has Been Hijacked To Prop Up Insolvent Banks

So says an angry Irishman, Declan Ganley, who is none too happy that despite being in an economic depression, Ireland continues to bailout failed banking institutions elsewhere, here:

“[On Tuesday] Ireland paid, once more, another half a billion euros to unsecured, un-guaranteed failed private bank holders — we don’t know who they are,  some of them are French banks, some of them German — it’s not even disclosed [to whom] Irish tax payers money is going.  So Irish taxpayers are bailing out failed banks."

“The whole of the European project, it would appear, has been hijacked to subsidize and protect an industry that needs to go through its insolvency purge [and] needs to go through bankruptcy."

Well . . . yeah!

His faith in American-style banking bankruptcy arrangements for Europe, expressed elsewhere at the link, is touching, but we don't really practice them here either, sorry to say, in the cases that really matter. American taxpayers remain on the hook for failed behemoths like Citigroup and Bank of America, and Fannie and Freddie, GM, AIG, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Some French readers will be amused by these additional remarks:

“You cannot take the path that Hollande is taking in France of dropping retirement ages and putting in exploitative, extractive taxation and creating a hostile environment for business [because then] there will be no growth in Europe and the whole European project will fall apart.”

Disappearing Real Estate Wealth Visualized

From the latest z.1 release from the Federal Reserve, real estate has declined from $25 trillion in 2006 to $18.6 trillion in early 2012.

The June 7, 2012, release is here.

The $6.4 trillion amount is almost the same $6 trillion amount noted by Mish via Zero Hedge here as evidence of ongoing deflation, defined as credit marked to market. It is the amount of decline in credit-money circulation.

When housing declines in value as it has, the credit used to secure it disappears with it.

The housing nadir was actually in Q4 2011 at $18.2 trillion, a $6.8 trillion dollar decline overall, or 27 percent from peak. Things have improved a little since then, by $400 billion, which is part of the reason for all the happy talk about real estate.

I remain unconvinced about a housing rebound since valuations remain at the upper limit of historical experience before the bubble. Stabilization of housing values near current levels and then going forward a number of years isn't unreasonable, but there are no guarantees given the absence of a driver for jobs.

Once and present homeowners rubes continue to bear the brunt of the deflation caused by the government/industry skimming operation designed to fleece Americans of their dreams. 

Not just fascism. Rapacious fascism.

TSA Goon Spills Cremated Remains At Checkpoint, Laughs At Relative

Story here:

"She didn't apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments. I couldn't pick up all, everything that was lost. I mean, there was a long line behind me."

Of such things are retribution made.

Libertarian Leads Profanity-Laced Demonstration In Middleborough, MA

Once again proving that libertarianism has nothing to do with conservatism.

The story is here:

The protest rally was organized by Adam Kokesh, a libertarian who publishes podcasts online from a Virginia studio. He says police can "steal from you if they don't like what's coming out of your mouth."

Royal Bank Of Scotland IT 'Glitch' Turns Into 7-Day Catastrophe

The unacceptable failure from the IT perspective, here:

Not since Dick Jones' demonstration of ED-209 in Robocop has the word "glitch" been so inappropriately used.

In more real terms, what RBS have experienced is a catastrophic systems failure, which has then caused a cascading systems failure. This is where a single unrecoverable error occurs, causing an initial critical system to fail, and then has an equally show-stopping effect on other systems dependent on it. ...

The initial problem should have required so many failures in so many redundant backups and secondary systems that the probability of it happening becomes astronomical. The subsequent reversal of the change that caused the problem should have taken hours, or a day at maximum.

However... they managed it. They have created the biggest failure of a "modern" financial system in UK history, spanning 7 full days and affecting customers across the country without any clear plan or set expectation of when service would be restored. In the meantime... house purchases have fallen through, flights have been cancelled, business deals have evaporated, bills have gone unpaid. All that's missing is a plague of locusts or a Monty Python foot from the clouds.

For many people, life has been completely and in some cases irreparably disrupted.

Illegal Immigration Magnets

How To Explain 2008: "Liability Without Control Leads To Disaster"

So John Hussman, here:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel explained the entire situation in five words: "Liability and control belong together." This is a profound phrase, because it also summarizes how the U.S. got into the housing crisis - the government deregulated the banking system and abdicated proper control, while still assuming the liability through deposit insurance and other government backstops. Liability without control leads to disaster.

The control was abandoned in November 1999 with the adoption of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Nine years later, kaboom.

He Endorsed Obama And Now Warns About Our Enemy The (Fascist) State

It seems that fascism is becoming something of a meme over at Forbes.

Lawrence Hunter weighs in here against Walter Williams' categorization of Social Security under "handouts" and the recipients of it under "thieves":

... the modern fascist welfare state in America ... is every bit as real and destructive as he describes. ...

Food Stamps, The Women, Infants and Children (WIN) program, Medicaid, agricultural subsidies and price supports, most refundable tax credits, federal deposit insurance, all are examples of federal government “handouts;” Social Security is not; it is a government-mandated Ponzi Scheme—a “giveback”—and there is a huge difference. ...

"[W]orkfare” [is] a dodgy transaction between politicians and public employees/contractors and government subsidized-employers where government gives swag to bureaucrats, contractors and subsidized workers in exchange for their political backing and protection. ...

“Workfare” is the ultimate replacement of the private sector by the government where jobs are created and wages, salaries, benefits and pensions are paid or subsidized to strengthen the fascist welfare state. ...

Allowing one’s rage at the state (especially with respect to Social Security) to muddle one’s understanding of precisely how the state operates and what it is that makes the modern welfare state so vigorous and robust is a mistake that actually strengthens it. The vast majority of people support the modern fascist welfare state precisely because these distinctions [between handouts, givebacks and workfare] are real and matter to people. ...

[T]he modern fascist welfare state is a universal prisoners’ dilemma. The rational strategy when stuck in such a vicious game is to betray everyone else caught in the clutches of the government operating the game in the hope that you can minimize the damage government does to you. ...

[L]ibertarians like my friend Walter Williams have it upside down and backwards when they call Social Security a handout and seniors thieves for insisting on their monthly check. The problem isn’t that everyone is a thief in a fascist welfare state; it is that most everyone is a victim of the criminal enterprise called government and must defend themselves against the state—res publica culpa.


Lawrence Hunter became infamous in 2008 for endorsing Obama, here, primarily over opposition to Bush's foreign adventurism.

The whole thing is not a little ironic. Mr. Hunter allowed his rage at Bush to muddle his thinking about Obama v. McCain and pick the wrong guy. Can anyone seriously argue that the fascist welfare state would have strengthened in the exponential way it has under Obama under a president John McCain, who understood the prisoner's dilemma in fact, not just in theory?

The state? Res publica culpa.

Lawrence Hunter? Mea maxima culpa.

We Are All National Socialists Now

One Nathan Lewis, a Forbes columnist, describes the peculiar character of American fascism here:

[P]articularly in the last few years, the character of U.S. policy has become distinctly corporatist, favoring large-scale theft (“bailouts”) particularly by the financial sector, although also by the defense, education, and healthcare sectors in my opinion. Many corporations have also used their political influence to allow themselves to engage in behavior that is destructive to the middle class, such as predatory or just plain excessive lending, for homes, autos and education, which might otherwise have been curtailed. The U.S. healthcare system has also become effectively predatory upon the middle class, claiming 17% of GDP to provide what costs 5-8% of GDP in other developed countries.

In short, certain businesses are using their influence of the political system to take the government’s money. And, since it is mostly the “99%” who provide this money, via their tax payments, this constitutes theft from the middle class by the oligarchical class. So far, this theft has been financed essentially by debt, so the effect on the middle class has not been felt directly. But, debt will need to be paid, and it is the taxpaying “99%” that will do the paying. ...

[F]our elements – devaluation of wages by currency mismanagement; mediocre tax policy including a gradual increase in tax rates on lower incomes; the deteriorating capital:labor ratio; and crony capitalist theft and predatory activities – constitute the basis for the deterioration of the U.S. middle class today.