Two dissatisfied customers comment about a restaurant. One says, “The food here is terrible.” The other replies, “I know, and such small portions!” In many ways, they could be describing our current employment picture. Not only are the portions shrinking, but the jobs themselves are steadily losing quality.
Today’s release of the October jobs report showed the loss of another 190,000 jobs had pushed the official unemployment rate to 10.2%, only the second time since the Great Depression that unemployment was quoted in double digits (factoring in workers who had given up job hunting altogether or have settled for part-time work would push that rate to 17.5%). That didn’t stop Wall Street pundits from trying to fashion a silk purse of this sow’s ear. The ‘green shoots’ crowd focused on the slowing pace of job losses, the nascent economic ‘recovery’ (even if it is jobless), and the projected improvement in 2010. No mention was even made of the quality of what few jobs were being created.
The analysts completely ignored the continued trend of replacing goods-producing jobs with those jobs that require production from other sources. For example, we lost 61,000 manufacturing jobs last month, but added 45,000 jobs in education and health services. In particular, the addition of health workers is nothing to celebrate. Just as a family’s economic position is not improved by higher medical bills, the country as a whole does not benefit from increased health-care spending. Until this trend reverses, our unbalanced economy will not regain its stability, a real recovery will never take hold, and the overall job outlook will get much bleaker.
“How did I go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.” — paraphrased from “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
“May you live in interesting times.” — a proverbial Chinese curse
President Bush and the Republican Congress expanded government more than any administration in history. They also laid the basic foundations for a future police state. Now, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have . . .
Retained, and in some cases expanded, all the Bush-era policies — the wars, the PATRIOT Act, warrantless spying, REAL ID, imprisonment without due process, extraordinary rendition, etc.
Begun to extend the already existing foundations for a future socialist state with things like direct government ownership of businesses, the health care bill, cap and trade, and a host of other measures big and small
Put the Bush and Obama policies together, sprinkle in a couple more terrorist attacks, and one or two more state-caused financial calamities, and you have a recipe for . . .
The destruction of American liberty
The blossoming of a Leviathan State
Read the signs . . .
We are living through a Statist revolution.
Statism is a mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation. Statists love the State because they are blind to its fundamental nature . . .
The State is a monopoly that you cannot easily fire, replace, or even control
Dr. Elinor Ostrum, 76, based her work around the idea that there are human interactions beyond the statistics of market prices surrounding the “commons” such as fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins are managed as common property. Although this idea itself is not new – Ludvig von Mises covered this in gory detail inHuman Action from 1949, Jared Diamond provided both historical and modern examples in his 2005 book Collapse, and Walter Block and Hans Hermann-Hoppe of the Mises Institute have reviewed many aspects of the commons already – it IS probably new to the Nobel committee. However, the details of her work itself are very novel.
As nominations were submitted before February 1, 2009, much of the world was shocked to find out that freshman President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. To his credit, Obama proclaimed he was “surprised and deeply humbled” and did not feel he deserved “to be in the company” of past Peace Prize winners. I must say that, politically-speaking, the former junior senator from Illinois is to be admired in many respects. To prevent and distract the press from analyzing his worthiness for the Peace Prices, the very next day he announcedthat he would (eventually) end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the military – a crafty move that appeals to his base and Americans who champion and respect civil liberties and individual rights, which includes myself.
Per NobelPeacePrize.org, in 1895 Alfred Nobel signed his will to use most of his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes. The Peace Prize was dedicated to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Has the President done the “most or best work for fraternity between nations”? I would say not. Four days after becoming President, he ordered the bombing of a village in Pakistan, which is yet another nation the United States has not declared war on.
Has the President worked for “the abolition or reduction of standing armies”? Certainly not that of the United States. In fact, per his website, he was elected on the promise that he would expand America’s standing army by about 100,000 troops.
A year ago when the Presidential election was in full swing the main buzzword we heard out of the Obama camp was “change”. In fact, “change you can believe in”. At the time we were pretty sure it was all hogwash and his first year in office has proven that assessment to be true.
A piece by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com a few weeks ago points out many examples how so much of Obama’s talk of change was just that: talk.
“When it comes to uprooting (’changing’) the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism and civil liberties — the issue which generated as much opposition to the last presidency as anything else — the Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do.
“They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers.
“With great fanfare, they announced the closing of CIA black sites — at a time when none was operating.
“They trumpeted the President’s order that no interrogation tactics outside of the Army Field Manual could be used — at a time when approval for such tactics had been withdrawn.
“They repudiated the most extreme elements of the Bush/Addington/Yoo ‘inherent power’ theories — while maintaining alternative justifications to enable the same exact policies to proceed exactly as is.
“They flamboyantly touted the closing of Guantanamo — while aggressively defending the right to abduct people from around the world and then imprison them with no due process at Bagram.
“Their ‘changes’ exist solely in theory — which isn’t to say that they are all irrelevant, but it is to say that they change nothing in practice: i.e., in reality.”
“Isn’t it so interesting how the phrase ‘Patriot Act’ was the symbol of everything Democrats claimed to find so heinous during the Bush years, but now that there’s a Democratic President, Senate and Congress, it’s absolutely certain that the Patriot Act will continue, and civil libertarians are reduced to hoping that there may be some tiny modifications to it, and even that’s highly unlikely?”
Ron Paul published a video answering the question, “What do you think about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Price?”
Ron covers many of the same points critics have made already, but he interestingly points out that the anti-war Left is AWOL now that Obama is in office. Projecting a bit into the future I’m curious what will become of these “Tea Partiers” if another big-government neo-conservative Republican wins the White House in 2012. Will they go AWOL too? I fear they will. Can we please, for the love of liberty, break this vicious cycle?
Partisanship is an evil drug and too many Republicans and Democrats are addicted. The Constitution was not created for convenience or whim. It was once the “supreme law of the land”, but now it really has become “just a god-damned piece of paper” for far too many people.
I expect there are many people out in the world today, some of them even Obama’s most staunch supporters, wondering why Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Saying that I’m incredulous is an understatement. He just bombed the moon. He has continually bombed and killed civilian innocents in Pakistan. We are not out of Iraq. We are not out of Afghanistan.
Louis Armstrong’s famous song “What A Wonderful World” is now officially satire.
Maybe the Nobel Prize Committee was afraid of being called racist?
The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.
Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.
Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.
Perhaps Obama winning this award is not surprising after all. The only other two sitting U.S. Presidents to win the award were Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. Hmmm, do I detect a pattern here? Perhaps it should be renamed, “The Nobel Progressive Prize”. It certainly has nothing to do with peace.
What if this obvious political move has the unintended consequence of spreading more resentment for America overseas than less? In effect this would be using the prize as a strategic chess piece for wishes that will never come true.
“I don’t think Obama deserves this. I don’t know who’s making all these decisions. The prize should go to someone who has done something for peace and humanity,” said Ahmad Shabir, 18-year-old student in Kabul. “Since he is the president, I don’t see any change in U.S. strategy in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
As part of the platform that got him elected almost a year ago, Barack Obama promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 annually. But now he’s seriously pushing the idea that all citizens be forced to carry health insurance or else the IRS will impose a penalty. And he claims this isn’t a tax.
In an interview on Sunday, George Stephanopoulos grilled President Obama by asking the rather obvious question, “Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money [to buy insurance], fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?”
Jeff Jacoby’s op-ed on Boston.com discusses the president’s response:
Obama replied that the individual mandate “is absolutely not a tax increase,’’ since, in his view, there is good reason to impose it. He stuck to that position even when confronted with Merriam-Webster’s definition of “tax’’ – “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.’’
But the only one “stretching’’ was the president, whose position was at odds with the legislation itself. “The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax,’’ notes the committee staff report on the Baucus bill. “The excise tax would be assessed through the tax code and applied as an additional amount of Federal tax owed.’’
“George,’’ chided Obama, “the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary . . . indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now.’’
Jacoby’s excellent piece goes on to explain how mandatory insurance is indeed nothing more than a tax. Read it here.
So often we hear those associated with the GOP (mostly neocons) complaining about Obama’s big-government policies. It’s the nature of politics, I suppose, that they can’t see past the blinders of their own party to realize that they’re just as much to blame as the Democrats. Indeed, the size and scope of the Federal Government has grown every single year since the days of Herbert Hoover (and probably since even as far back as the days of Lincoln when the country created by our forefathers ceased to exist).
Sheldon Richman at the Future of Freedom Foundation explains how the Republicans are disingenuous with regards to their commitment to smaller government and in fact are to blame for our troubles:
If the expansion of intrusive government (a redundancy) gives you the willies — it should; the cost is freedom and prosperity — you may be tempted to direct your anger at Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership. That would be myopic, however.
Blame the Republicans, beginning with the former president, George W. Bush. (We could go back further, but time and space are limited.)
The reason can be illustrated by an extraordinary moment that occurred just after Obama unveiled his multiyear budget plan. Contemplating the spending blueprint, Republican House leader John Boehner went before the media microphones and declared, “The era of big government is back.”
For Boehner to make such a statement suggests two possibilities, although both could be true: he thinks Americans are morons or he’s been in a coma since January 20, 2001, when Bush took office.
Note that he didn’t say, “Uh oh, government is going to get even bigger than it is now.” No, he said, “The era of big government is back.” Back — as in: returned after having gone away.
When did it go away? And does Boehner really believe that the American people don’t realize how much government grew under Bush?
Quote of the Day: “Economists used to worry about government using up the nation’s savings. But now Americans have no more savings to use. Still, the nation that can’t save a dime sets out to save the entire planet.” — Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt, pg 35.
DC Downsizers have joined with many thousands of Americans to ask members of Congress to co-sponsor Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill. Your pressure worked! The legislation now has 27 co-sponsors in the Senate and 290 in the House (that’s 2/3rds of the House!).
That should have been enough to spark committee hearings, and perhaps even an expedited vote, but Congressional leaders didn’t want either thing to happen, so . . .
In early August we asked DC Downsizers to call the House Finance Committee Chair, Barney Frank (D-MA), and its Ranking Member, Spencer Bachus (R-AL) to ask for hearings on the Audit the Fed bill. Many of you did that, and guess what?
It’s bad enough when Congress allows the Executive Branch bureaucracy to write regulations that have the force of law, but at least we can hold both the President and the Congress accountable for what the bureaucracy does. However . . .
The Fed is an independent institution accountable to no one. In fact, without an audit, we’re not even allowed to know what the Fed is doing with many of the powers and resources it already has.
* Let’s use our “Tell Congress to Cut Red Tape” campaign to fight expanded regulatory powers for the Fed.
* Send a letter to Congress using DownsizeDC.org’s Educate the Powerful System.
* Use your personal comments to say you oppose President Obama’s plan to give the Federal Reserve expanded regulatory powers.
* You can send your letter here.
Congratulations. Your pressure keeps working, so keep doing it!
Liberty Maven
by Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit from the Economic Collapse
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