Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Photo by Dave Makes
Two news items yesterday, when put together, start to tell an interesting story. Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Bank of America in a private sweetheart deal that will guarantee him a 6% return (that’s $300 million per year) and he is hosting a fund raiser for Barack Obama in New York where the tickets start at $10,000. What’s going on?
This is a story you are not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. As previously reported on this site the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, came down hard on the sovereign country of Honduras for upholding their constitution and fighting against a Chavez style, “leader for life” power grab by their president Manuel Zelaya.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. – Barry Goldwater
“I always use the word extreme, that’s what the caucus instructed me to do the other week, extreme cuts and all these riders, and Boehner’s in a box but if he supports the Tea Party, there’s inevitably [be] a shutdown. – Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)
From a partisan point of view, I think it would be the best thing in the world to have a shutdown. If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it. I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before.” – Howard Dean, former DNC Chairman
The latest news on the economy is not encouraging: a mere 39,000 jobs added and the unemployment creeps ever closer to 10% at 9.8%. In spite of this, or apparently ignorant of it, the lame duck House voted yesterday for another whopping tax increase on the most productive among us. Yes, yes, they will beat the class warfare drums about tax “cuts” for the rich, when what they are voting on is not a cut at all, but either leaving things the way they are or raising taxes. With the recovery barely showing a pulse, it is not the time to take money out of the hands of free market capitalists and put it in the hands of the government. Who do you think can pull the economy out of the doldrums, entrepreneurs or government bureaucrats?
As is the case every ten years we take a census of the population of the United States, as required by the Constitution. After the census is taken the seats in the House of Representatives are shuffled to accommodate for shifts in population between the states.
So what does this all mean? In a previous post focusing on the Senate we showed that currently twenty-one Democrats and two independents who caucus (meet and generally vote with) the Democrats will be facing election in 2012 compared to only ten Republicans. In the House, everyone is up for re-election every two years. So after picking up 60 seats, or thereabouts as some races still haven’t been decided, where do the two parties start off as a result of reapportionment? Although final numbers won’t be in until December, it doesn’t look good for the Democrats.
President Obama, during his 2010 State of the Union address, did the unprecedented, which I suppose should surprise no one. He called out the Supreme Court, whose members were seated in front of him, and lambasted them on a recent decision called Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. The outcome of the case was that free speech was not limited only to individuals but could include corporations, groups of individuals, etc. As Justice Scalia pointed out in his concurring opinion, the First Amendment refers to speech not speakers.
With just over three weeks to the election, we know one thing about Tim Bishop. He has a problem with outsourcing. He doesn’t want to talk about his record, about TARP, the GM and Crysler bailout, the stimulus, Cap and Trade, or ObamaCare. His entire campaign is about a company his opponent Randy Altschuler founded in 1999 and sold in 2005 that provided business services. Mr. Bishop, like a magician, feels that if he can keep the voters distracted long enough on outsourcing, he can pull a reelection out of his, er, hat.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdDOiUzxIXU&hd=1
Transcript:
There is an increasingly nasty battle brewing in the Republican race for the nomination to run against Democrat incumbent Tim Bishop in the First Congressional District in New York. With jobs and the economy the number one issue across the nation, the petty personal attacks may result in potential Republican voters staying home in disgust.
In an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “New York’s GOP Never Learns,” Kim Strassel concludes her article by saying, “The effect has been to enrage and divide a New York party that should have bigger things on its mind. Say, winning this fall.”
Chris Cox is trying to play catch-up to the front runner Randy Altschuler who has been actively campaigning for more than a year. The difficulty for Mr. Cox is that his positions are not that different than those of Mr. Altschuler. So, while Mr. Altschuler has been taking on the Democratic incumbent Tim Bishop and Bishop’s lockstep voting with Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Cox has resorted to attacking Mr. Altschuler. Not to leave his flank unprotected, Mr. Altschuler has been forced to respond and now the race, with two weeks to go before the primary on September 14th, has degenerated into a mudslinging contest. There is a third candidate, George Demos, who is lobbing attacks from the rear with little effect.
Each candidate is calling themselves the “true conservative,” and Mr. Cox has garnered the support of the Suffolk County 9-12 Project the self-proclaimed “Largest Tea Party organization in Suffolk County.” Mr. Cox’s father, Ed Cox, is the head of the New York State GOP. Ms. Strassel reports that the senior Mr. Cox, backed Steve Levy over Rick Lazio for governor to curry favor with the Suffolk County GOP chairman to back his son. It is all the kind of backroom political dealing that have attracted a rush of newcomer candidates and put incumbents of both parties on the endangered species list.
The Tea Party Endorsement
What caught my eye was the endorsement of the Suffolk County 9-12 Project and the announcement by Bob Meyer, co-founder. He gave as one of his primary reasons that, Randy Altschuler was one of those people, “getting rich off the backs of hardworking Americans by outsourcing their jobs.” That sounds more like Jimmy Hoffa, Andy Stern, or Barack Obama’s class warfare than any Tea Partier I know. A commenter on the 9-12 Project’s site, Judyann Joyner added, “Randy is credited with the creation of ‘white collar sweatshops in India.’” Pretty strong stuff. I don’t know if Ms. Joyner or Mr. Meyer visited the company that Mr. Altschuler co-founded in India, but Business Week magazine did.
“The lights burn day and night in the gleaming glass-and-chrome building that towers over a leafy street in the southern Indian city of Madras. Here at OfficeTiger, 1,500 young men and women peer into computers 24 hours a day, analyzing and processing U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission reports and other documents drawn up by lawyers and bankers on Wall Street. Walking the floor, sometimes even at 3 a.m., is 34-year-old co-founder and co-Chief Executive Joseph Sigelman.”
Just because the office operates 24 hours per day, don’t be conned into thinking the same people are at their desks 24 hours a day. “Gleaming glass-and-chrome building that towers over a leafy street,” yup, sounds like a hellhole to me. Business Week added, “Indeed, OfficeTiger is the only successful startup in India’s $5 billion outsourcing industry that is owned and managed by a U.S. entrepreneur.” So we have an American company making money in India, in what seems to be a rather large and competitive field, and this is a bad thing? Since when did conservatives turn into protectionists? But what about the jobs they replaced? Okay, let’s examine that.
You have some Wall Street firms that are in a competitive business. A young entrepreneur comes up with an idea to reduce operating expenses by having an external company handle routine clerical tasks that are not one of the firm’s key competencies, that is, people don’t buy that firm’s services because of their typing skills. The company outsources and reduces costs. By reducing costs, they prosper and grow; by growing they create more high skill jobs like lawyers, accountants, financial analysts, IT people, etc. Perhaps even some of the former typists, because of their computer skills can move up the ladder to spreadsheets, and databases. Do some people lose their jobs, yes, just as buggy whip makers lost their jobs when the automobile came on the scene. Okay, let’s shift to India.
In India white collar jobs are created; their standard of living improves; they buy consumer goods like iPods and iPhones and their offices need sophisticated IT equipment from companies like Cisco Systems which grow companies like Apple and Cisco creating jobs in the U.S. We live in a global economy and if we want prosperity and peace, the best way to get there is through free markets. Even Mr. Cox in the policy section of his website blames government policies for companies outsourcing jobs overseas. If it is the government’s policies that make these jobs uncompetitive here and Mr. Cox knows it, why is Mr. Altschuler wrong for reacting to it and helping American companies that use these services remain competitive?
After selling Office Tiger to RR Donnelly, Mr. Altschuler started another company in the U.S., CloudBlue, that recycles old IT equipment. So we have an entrepreneur that has started a couple of companies that have created jobs around the world and that makes him a villain? Perhaps Mr. Meyer should go back and read some of the quotes on his own website:
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.” – Dr. Adrian Rogers
“I have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” – Thomas Jefferson
Mr. Meyer’s key criticism of Mr. Altschuler smacks of the government picking winners and losers. This business is okay, but not that one. If your business creates jobs overseas that is bad, but if it creates jobs here it is okay. Well, Mr. Altschuler has done both and he has firsthand experience doing so, which is what we sorely lack in Washington. If the strategy of Mr. Cox continues, including creating another party, the TaxPayer party, to run on and split the vote further, Mr. Cox might as well mail his strategy over to the Bishop campaign as I am sure they will find it very useful in the general election. Not my cup of tea.
The focus should be on defeating the out of control spenders in Congress who got us into this mess, not fighting each other to the death and let the incumbent waltz back into office. The time is now. Mr. Cox should focus on what he would do as a Congressman that is better than Tim Bishop and Mr. Altschuler. If he can’t articulate that, he should drop out. He is not going to win a lot of support by throwing mud at his fellow Republicans.
Note: In the spirit of full disclosure I have done some volunteer work for the Altschuler campaign
Republicans have to learn to stop fighting by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, while Democrats, bite, kick, pull hair, scratch and hit below the belt. Yes, Christ told us to turn the other cheek, but he also overturned tables, formed a whip out of cords and drove the money changers from the temple. In other words, sometimes you have the hit the bully hard between the eyes before he learns to stop being a bully.
So if the Republicans regain control of Congress in November, they should open the new Congress in January with detailed hearings on what happened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and don’t pull any punches. By that I mean if they need to put Andrew Cuomo in the witness chair, even if he is the governor of New York, which he probably will be, then they should do so. It’s time to stop playing patty-cake.
For all the hoopla of the Dodd-Frank Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were left out of the new regulations. Oh, we’ll get to those later. Okay, let’s get to them with the Republicans in charge. Let’s expose how it was our government that got us into the housing mess and let’s do this before the Democrats re-write history and paper over their culpability in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. It’s time to put the big lie to “it’s all Bush’s fault and Republican policies.”
The papering over has already started by none other than Franklin Raines the former head of Fannie Mae who received bonuses of over $90 million while at the helm of Fannie Mae and was also charged with cooking the books that helped him receive those bonuses. He reached a settlement with the SEC and gave back about $1.8 million from the profits in the sale of Fannie Mae stock and gave up $5.3 million in future benefits related to his pension. But he essentially kept the rest, what the Wall Street Journal called a “paltry settlement.”
Mr. Raines claims the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to which taxpayers have already coughed up $145 billion, was due to bad credit decisions made after he left the firm. To put it in his own words:
“The Journal had been warning for years that the on-balance sheet portfolios of Fannie and Freddie would lead to their demise. Mr. Carney suggests that excessive leverage was the culprit. Unfortunately, neither of these were involved. Nope. Just bad credit judgments. Decisions made, by the way, while operating under close regulatory scrutiny.”
According to the Wall Street Journal “What he doesn’t say is that Fan and Fred had a political and legal mandate to support low-income housing.” To meet this mandate which had increasing goals each year, Fannie and Freddie had to cast a wider net to find these borrowers and the wider they cast the net the lower their standards had to be. Thus more creative types of mortgages were created to lower the bar such as, interest only loans. This scheme would continue to work as long as housing prices kept rising but that could not go on forever. When the music stopped a lot of people were left standing without chairs and we all lost. People’s credit ratings were destroyed, mortgage securities were worth far less than face value, people walked away from houses, and taxpayers were forced to pick up another “too big to fail” enterprise. By the way, where in the Constitution does it authorize the federal government to get involved in helping people buy houses?
The secret veil put in place by the main stream media has been lifted. With the Internet and the bloggers and cable television and talk radio, the main stream media can no longer keep information that does not comport with their agenda hidden from the American people. The American people are energized and informed but that may not last long after the election, if we don’t continue to engage them. Uncovering the true “swamp” that is our federal government and draining it should begin by letting the sun shine in. So let’s do away with the good ol’ boy politics of not rocking the boat when you gain control so that they won’t rock the boat when they get it back. If we don’t have a new class of non-incumbents who are willing to go to Washington and clean it up, really clean it up, we need to get rid of them and put new people in their place. If that means replacing Republicans with better Republicans or Democrat incumbents with better Democrats, so be it. We have to end the process of only being able to choose between two pathetic life time politicians who have never lived in the real world.
