Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

How lack of private property rights of fisheries - or communal ownership - is destroying them. This is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons.

FASCISM:

The return of the left's American brown scare. Let's hope they don't wipe out anybody this time like they did the Branch Davidians.

This story of an innocent man in New Orleans who was arrested for looting his own home by cops who admitted looted themselves and held without trial or a phone call and tortured for weeks is horrendous.

Under the guise of increasing competition, FTC seizes property from Whole Foods and sells it to Trader Joes at sub-market price.

ECONOMY:

The stock market is due for a correction. Will charges against Goldman trigger it?

TAX AND SPEND:

Boortz tees off on Obama's claim that he kept his promise of not raising income taxes.

"What did Barack Obama think of your rallies and protests on Tax Day? He was "amused." In response to Tea Parties and tax protests around the country, Obama says that we should be thanking him for the greatest expansion of government in history. He says, "You would think they'd be saying thank you" because he claims he has cut taxes. Over the weekend, he expanded on this point claiming that he has kept his promise of not raising income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year. Notice something different about that statement? Now Obama is claiming that he has kept his promise because he has not raising income taxes on those earning less than $250,000 a year. While that may be true, he has not lived up to his promise from September of 2008: "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.""

The other day I was torn between stupid and evil on this one. It's evil.


Obama taxes.

Non-binding votes are, well, non-binding, but this is still a good sign:

"The Senate voted 85-13 Thursday to pass a nonbinding "sense of the Senate" resolution that calls the value-added tax "a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America's economic recovery.""

That won't stop Democrats from pushing a VAT, but it gives the people ammunition to fight it. Special Report reported that Obama isn't looking at a VAT. I get it now. Democrats are running away from the VAT this year in hopes of saving some seats come November. This non-binding vote against the VAT is just a political ploy. If they retain the House and Senate, they're going to push the VAT next year.

Telling us how bad the debt problem will be in 2080 is worthless. Most of us will be dead by then. The world could be destroyed a meteor by then. A new source of virtually free energy could make everybody millionaires by then. Predictions for 2080 are worthless. In order to make an issue matter, you have to penetrate the people's brains' resistance to politics that government has built up over the centuries. In other words, you have to make it personal.

REGULATION:

Obama warns that we'll experience another economic crisis if Congress doesn't pass economic reform. He put himself in a win-win position. If financial reform passes, he wins. If it doesn't, he looks smart when the next crash hits. Smart, evil politics. These Wall Street firms are being useful idiots by supporting the Democrats. Obama's going to seize them after the next crash.

Texas Congressman proposes legislation to repeal the Community Reinvestment Act which forced banks to make subprime loans. Liberals will respond by calling this guy a racist.

I'm not the only one who thinks the fraud charges against Goldman-Sachs are political propaganda.

"The American public needs to first grasp a broader view of this event. The Administration in Washington DC, heading for an election in November that will surely be fueled with voter outrage, has decided to strike a seeming blow to Wall Street to strengthen its hand in pushing for financial reform. Yet it is so odd that politicians were the ones who allowed all this to happen (more on this below). Does anyone have an explanation why the SEC has only now decided to file charges involving a 2007 billion-dollar investment? Or why the investor who most benefited financially and who assembled this mortgage-backed investment, John Paulson, has yet to be charged with any wrongdoing?"

I'm all for punishing fraud, but the government was in on the fraud all along. This may end up supporting my contention that the so-called collapse back in September 2008 was a coup.

"Another piece of the intrigue here is that the primary provider of evidence in the case is a star Goldman Sachs trader, a Frenchman by birth, who has suddenly left the U.S. for Europe as this story hits the news outlets. Fabrice Tourre, a GS vice president, wrote an email in 2007 that is the smoking gun in this case. Did he leave the U.S. in fear for his life?"

Or is he looking for protection in France so he has leverage against the US government because of its knowledge of the fraud? If he can make the case to the French government that this is part of US government corruption, he might be able to avoid extradition.

"Believe it or not, an entire book was written of this now infamous investment before the SEC took action.

Of interest is Greg Zuckerman, The Wall Street Journal’s senior reporter in this case, who wroteThe Greatest Trade Ever, about this trade and others like it, long before the SEC took action. The jacket on this book says: "The behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history." The book, published in November of 2009, hardly made ripples on Wall Street or in the financial news press. The SEC was sitting on all this information for over two years and did nothing. It was waiting for the right political moment to strike."

Politically motivated theater for sure. The SEC has hundreds of regulators monitoring this stuff. Then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was the ex-CEO of Goldman. Then Fed big-wig Tim Geithner was overseeing this stuff too. Government was up to its eyeballs in this scam. Diagram of how the deal worked.


Another theory on why the SEC hit Goldman now is to crowd out news that it busted another Ponzi scheme that had failed to bust for 13 years.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission suspected Texas financier R. Allen Stanford of running a Ponzi scheme as early as 1997 but took more than a decade to pursue him seriously, according to a report further tarring the agency that missed Bernard Madoff's huge fraud.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission suspected Texas financier R. Allen Stanford of running a Ponzi scheme as early as 1997 but took more than a decade to pursue him seriously, according to a report further tarring the agency that missed Bernard Madoff's huge fraud.

The report by the SEC's inspector general says SEC examiners concluded four times between 1997 and 2004 that Mr. Stanford's businesses were fraudulent, but each time decided not to go further. It singles out the former head of the SEC's enforcement office in Fort Worth, Texas, accusing him of repeatedly quashing Stanford probes and then trying to represent Mr. Stanford as a lawyer in private practice.

The former SEC official, Spencer Barasch, is now a partner at law firm Andrews Kurth LLP. He couldn't be reached for comment, but Andrews Kurth managing partner Bob Jewell said the firm believes Mr. Barasch acted properly. The inspector general referred Mr. Barasch for possible disbarment from practicing law."

That's government regulators for you. Corrupt to the core. It doesn't matter what party is in charge.

This story says the SEC and Goldman-Sachs have been in negotiations for months, but Goldman says it was blindsided by the suit. It looks like Goldman is prepared to defend this thing to the fullest. Funny how only three of five regulators voted to sue. If Goldman did something wrong, why wouldn't all five regulators agree? How can the SEC have standing? Don't the investors who were defrauded have to sue? This is like the pot suing the kettle even though the pot was not harmed. Going on the offensive against Obama might backfire big-time. He might just seize them.

"SEC officials say that they told Goldman last summer the agency would probably bring action, and that the bank did not show any contrition. At the same time, they say they wanted to use the Goldman case to make a broader statement about the agency's renewed intention of holding prominent financial firms accountable for misconduct."

At least they admitted their political motivation.

"Chairman Mary Schapiro, who was appointed by President Obama, and the two Democrats on the commission voted to proceed; the two Republicans opposed the move. The commission periodically splits on decisions, with Republicans often more reluctant than Democrats to take companies to court."

It's always all about politics, never the rule of law.

IRS forces businesses in Vegas to report customers who spend over $10,000 in cash in the club a year. You have to be kidding me. I've spent more than that in cash in clubs in a year, and I wasn't laundering money. I was just having fun. Funny how it's OK to use credit cards, just not cash.

Instead of asking if employers should be allowed to check a prospective employees credit, we should be asking if it's legitimate for government to stop employers from doing so at the point of a gun. Of course not.

FEDERAL RESERVE:


Greenspan taken to task by panel investigating the crash. Greenspan is shown to have intentionally engineered the economic conditions that led to people taking out second mortgages on their houses, going into debt and spending it, funding the great economic bubble that burst. But as I've long contended, Greenspan knew this bubble he created was going to bust, and that's why he retired before it did. Here's his quote from 2002:

"it's hard to escape the conclusion that at some point our extraordinary housing boom and its carryover into very large extractions of equity, financed by very large increases in mortgage debt, cannot continue indefinitely into the future."

Then this creep turned around and blamed the free market. This guy is scum.

"It might seem extraordinary, if we were not discussing Alan Greenspan, that the Federal Reserve chairman actively engaged in financial shenanigans with the specific intention of encumbering Americans with more debt at a time their incomes were falling."

The fatal flaw of central planners is that they're human. They're not God. They're out for themselves, not the benefit of others, and even if we had a angelic mortal as a central planner, he would fail because he's not God either so he can't possibly know as much as all everybody else in the economy combined.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Cows on treadmills create clean power for farms. The Marxists posing as ecologists will hate this. Look for the animal rights groups to call it cruel. This movement is all about impoverishing humans, not ecology.

Another reason to hate Richard Nixon - creating the EPA. I love the caption on the graphic: "Stop breathing. The EPA says you're poisoning me." I didn't know it was created with executive order, not legislation. Why does Congress fund it?

WAR:

Iraqi intelligence group with US support kills top two al Qaeda in Iraq leaders.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Great point by Mark Steyn.

"What Obama and his empty showboaters failed even to acknowledge in their "security" summit is the reality of the Post-Big Five nuclear age: We're on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel 'n' dime basket-cases go nuclear."

Our welfare states and political correctness have so poisoned our societies, turning them bland shades of gray, that most don't think self-defense or having children is worthwhile. Western civilization is committing cultural suicide by government.

"In the Congo, five and a half million have been slaughtered – and, again, in impressively primitive ways."

Wow. I hadn't followed any news on Congo, so I didn't know that. Assuming Steyn has his facts right, that's a new holocaust.

"By the way, that's another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It's not that Britain has nukes, and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It's that the machete crowd are willing to kill on an industrial scale, and the high-tech guys can't figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative."

I hate to laugh at that, but I did.


POLITICS:


Interesting poll shows that while tea partiers are largely united in their antipathy toward both Democrats and establishment Republicans, they're almost evenly divided between libertarian-leaning Paul supporters and Palin supporters who want to use the government's gun to force their values on others.


Facebook's influence on Paul's popularity.

"This means that Facebook pages are more revealing of a person’s interests and commitments than an email data base is. On Facebook, people "let it all hang out" as they used to say. Their pages reflect their major commitments.

This makes for far more personal communications. When something grabs a person’s interest that he wants to share with his peers, he posts it.

What we find is that people are now identifying themselves politically. They post items in terms of their major commitments. They say, in effect, "take or leave it." They are really saying "take me or leave me."

This trend is the opposite of diversity. It is the essence of special-interest politics. It is leading to the creation of new voting blocs. This is going to Balkanize American politics."

It it puts an end to the two party system, I'm all for it.


We spend way more on defense than just the military budget.


MISC:


Documentary of Branch Davidians, intended to indict them, ends up indicting the government instead. Good for the documentarians.


The Government Accounting Office yet again torpedoes the establishment agenda by pointing out that all those studies claiming they use government data to show that internet pirating costs artists and big media companies tons of money are phony.


The claim that ideas are more powerful than armies are complete bunk. How anybody can claim that after the century of war is beyond me. The guy with the sword kills the guy with the idea every time, and the time between wars is just time rearming for the next one.


Prospectus for the US government. Nobody in their right mind would invest.