ThoughtRogue:  Folks, take a look at the unbelievably sobering graphs below (courtesy of The Wall Street Journal).  Note the following: (1) Obama’s deficit is larger than Bush’s largest by a factor of FOUR – and the Usurper still attempts to shift the blame to others, especially Bush. (2) For the first time EVER, the federal deficit exceeds $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that’s 1 $Trillion in overspending) – and the fiscal year is far from complete. (3) The federal “revenues” have significantly SHRUNK in comparison to last year’s – that’s because business profits are disappearing along with tens of millions of tax-paying jobs. (4) The insatiable federal spending, bars on the right, are displayed on the same scale – and include all the bailout schemes to date.

WARNING:  These audacious, skyrocketing federal deficits do not yet include: (1) The “Cap and Trade” massive tax scheme (largest in American history if it passes the Senate). (2) The Socialized Medicine extravaganza – destroying our superior private health care system, in favor of the rationed ObamaCare “Universal” health care scheme. (3) “Immigration Reform” – aka The Mother of all Amnesty schemes.  And now, Congress is even contemplating another colossal “stimulus” pork-laden spending scheme.

Also, likely to compound this Obama Nirvana, (1) another stock market crash in the next few months. (2) a crisis in commercial real estate. (3) a continually collapsing value of our Dollar, and (4) a debilitating rate of inflation when our economy finally does become able to recover.

Ah, the wonders of Hopenchange!!  Perhaps we should have elected someone who is actually Constitutionally eligible (not to mention competent) for POTUS instead?

Economic Nirvana

White House Puts UAW Ahead of Property Rights

By Michael Barone

Big Barry ("Mack Daddy!")

 Last Friday, the day after Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, I drove past the company’s headquarters on I-75 in Auburn Hills, Mich. As I glanced at the pentagram logo, I felt myself tearing up a little bit. Anyone who grew up in the Detroit area, as I did, can’t help but be sad to see a once great company fail.

But my sadness turned to anger later when I heard what bankruptcy lawyer Tom Lauria said on a WJR talk show that morning. “One of my clients,” Lauria told host Frank Beckmann, “was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.

Lauria represented one of the bondholder firms, Perella Weinberg, which initially rejected the Obama deal that would give the bondholders about 33 cents on the dollar for their secured debts while giving the United Auto Workers retirees about 50 cents on the dollar for their unsecured debts.

This, of course, is a violation of one of the basic principles of bankruptcy law, which is that secured creditors — those who loaned money only on the contractual promise that if the debt was unpaid they’d get specific property back — get paid off in full before unsecured creditors get anything. Perella Weinberg withdrew its objection to the settlement, but other bondholders did not, which triggered the bankruptcy filing.

After that came a denunciation of the objecting bondholders as “speculators” by Barack Obama in his press conference last Thursday. And then death threats to bondholders from parties unknown.

The White House denied that it strong-armed Perella Weinberg. The firm issued a statement saying it decided to accept the settlement, but it pointedly did not deny that it had been threatened by the White House. Which is to say, the threat worked.

The same goes for big banks that have received billions in government TARP money. Many of them want to give back the money, but the government won’t let them. They also voted to accept the Chrysler settlement. Nice little bank ya got there, wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.

Left-wing bloggers have been saying that the White House’s denial of making threats should be taken at face value and that Lauria’s statement is not evidence to the contrary. But that’s ridiculous. Lauria is a reputable lawyer and a contributor to Democratic candidates. He has no motive to lie. The White House does.

Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party. The only possible limit on the White House’s power is the bankruptcy judge, who might not go along.

Michigan politicians of both parties joined Obama in denouncing the holdout bondholders. They point to the sad plight of UAW retirees not getting full payment of the health-care benefits the union negotiated with Chrysler. But the plight of the beneficiaries of the pension funds represented by the bondholders is sad, too. Ordinarily you would expect these claims to be weighed and determined by the rule of law. But not apparently in this administration.

Obama’s attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants “someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,” he said, but someone who has “empathy.” In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.

The Chrysler negotiations will not be the last occasion for this administration to engage in bailout favoritism and crony capitalism. There’s a May 31 deadline to come up with a settlement for General Motors. And there will be others. In the meantime, who is going to buy bonds from unionized companies if the government is going to take their money away and give it to the union? We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government. It is likely to be part of a continuing series.

Final Stimulus Package

Click the link to view this video

More from race baiting whiners!  Will these racists ever shut the hell up?! We’re sick of it!  

NC:  Earth to Liberals:  the secret to pulling out of the looming Depression is simple – (1) Stop the bloat of Big Daddy by reducing federal spending, (2) Stop borrowing ever more from the Chinese, (3) Stop printing our currency like you’re manufacturing candy, (4) stop taxing (stealing) the U.S. Citizenry blind, (5) Eliminate all corporate income taxes, (6) reduce all welfare payments, especially for corporations, (7) Nuke the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act which strangles business, (8} eliminate all capital gains taxes, (9) reduce regulations and litigations, and (10) implement the FairTax system now.

by Robert Tracinski

Hail to the Czar!

It looks as if we are going to have to relive all of the mistakes of the 20th century one more time–let’s hope it is one last time–before we relearn the big lesson of that century: the moral and material superiority of capitalism and the disastrous consequences of socialism in all its forms.

I thought we had learned that lesson well enough already, but it turns out I was wrong. Given a few decades to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union–and given an opportunity to take advantage of the ideological confusion and muddled pragmatism of the pro-free-market right–the left is making a serious attempt to reconstitute itself.

And it is not just any variant of the left. It is the Old Left, the mid-20th-century left of public-works giantism, ham-fisted labor union protests, and command-and-control central planning.

By the end of the 20th century, the failure of all of these policies had caused the Old Left to splinter into two groups. The New Left hippies rejected industrial socialism in favor of anti-industrial socialism, adopting environmentalism and holding up a neo-primitive lifestyle as the ideal, while the New Democrat centrists sought a “Third Way” compromise between capitalism and socialism.

But now the discredited Old Left seems to be making a roaring comeback. We can see the signs all around us.

Consider Barack Obama’s plan for up to $700 billion in New-Deal-style “public works” boondoggles. It is a good old-fashioned Keynesian “stimulus” based on the premise that you can revive the economy by spreading paper money around at random.

Yet it is now widely acknowledged that the original New Deal did not actually revive the Depression-era economy. Even under Keynes’s failed theory, the amount of FDR’s spending was not enough to stimulate the economy–and neither is the amount proposed by Obama. But that hasn’t fazed the revived Old Left. Alan Brinkley, a professor of history at Columbia University, says of the New Deal that “they didn’t spend nearly enough” and laments that “They were constrained by all kinds of traditional ideas about balanced budgets.” With Obama set to run a trillion-dollar deficit in his first year in office, it looks like those old-fashioned hang-ups have been overcome.

There is, however, one concession to the New Left in Obama’s New New Deal. Obama tries to sell the New Left environmentalist crusade as if it were an Old Left, heavy-industry, make-work program.

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