The Urban Grind

When B. Hussein was campaigning, he insisted that only those EEEVIL rich people making over $250,000 would be taxed, and that the tax burdens of 90% of Americans would decrease. But now it looks like they’re trying to soften up Americans in order to get them to accept “inevitable” tax increases.

Here’s how that tax cheat Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to rationalize it to George Stephanopoulos:

“We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,” Geithner told me. “And that’s going to require some very hard choices.”

“We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will be not strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,” he said.

While Geithner told me, “There are signs the recession is easing,” he warned that, “We have a ways to go.”

“I want to emphasize the basic reality that unemployment is very high in this country,” the secretary said. But, he underlined that the administration is “going to do what is necessary to bring growth back on track.”

Turning to the bank bailout, he told me it is “quite unlikely” that the U.S. Treasury will go back to Congress to ask for more funding for the financial rescue package.

“We do not plan to ask for more money and I think it’s quite unlikely that we do,” Geithner said in his most blunt language to date on TARP funding. The secretary said that today the TARP has roughly $130 billion, in part due to more than $70 billion that has already come back into the government.

Now let’s see here. That RINO former President George Bush Senior lost his bid for re-election because he re-negged on his promise not to raise taxes. Could the same thing hopefully happen to our teflon black supremacist Marxist Muslim Imam-in-Chief? One can only hope. Unfortunately, I think that since it’s only seven month’s into the Obamessiah’s presidency, his people will get away with blaming it on President Bush. Naturally, the media will cover for him.

Also, do you notice that when liberals mention deficits, it’s always their way of saying “We’re raising your taxes?” I remember once listening to a constipated sounding NPR announcer (all of them sound that way, which is how I know I’m listening to NPR) pontificate that most Americans are in favor of increased taxes if it means reducing our deficit. As far as I can remember, the woman never bothered to back up her assertion. Anway…the MSM conveniently ignores the fact that it’s the politicians who are responsible for out of control government spending. They never bother to ask why taxpayers should be penalized when these politicians spend our money like drunken sailors. That would be like saying “Hey, the Emperor has no clothes on!”

Despite the 24/7 Obama worship all over the news, I think it’s safe to say the market is the most accurate predictor of where we stand economically. The market (unlike Obama supporters) doesn’t respond to platitudes. So the fact that the Dow plunged 8,000 points should tell you more than all of Obama b.s. speeches.

At the close of a stormy Inauguration Day session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 332.13, or 4.01 percent, to 7949.09 in its worst day since Dec. 1. The tech-heavy Nasdaq plummeted 88.47, or 5.78 percent, to 1440.86. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 sank 44.90, or 5.28 percent, to 805.22.

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The catalyst for the free fall among bank stocks Tuesday was a report by State Street Corp., the world’s biggest money manager for institutions, that its earnings for the last quarter of 2008 nosedived by 71 percent. The company lost nearly half the value of its shares.

What will it take to convince people that affirmative action banking and socialism do not work?

Here’s a look at what The One has in mind to fix our economy.

Obama said the massive government spending program he proposes to lift the country out of economic recession will include a renewed effort to make public buildings energy-efficient, rebuild the nation’s highways, renovate aging schools and install computers in classrooms, extend high-speed Internet to underserved areas and modernize hospitals by giving them access to electronic medical records.

“We need to act with the urgency this moment demands to save or create at least 2 1/2 million jobs so that the nearly 2 million Americans who’ve lost them know that they have a future,” Obama said in his weekly address, broadcast on the radio and the Internet.

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In his address, Obama offered the first outline of how he wants to direct the public works spending.

The largest share would go to roads and bridges and could be used to accelerate long-delayed repairs and expansions. Responding to concerns that new transportation money might be caught up in red tape at the state level, Obama said states must quickly invest in road and bridge construction and repair or lose the federal dollars.

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Much of the public works program would be aimed at improving technology. The government would pay for new computers in schools, new medical technology in hospitals and doctors’ offices, and a nationwide push to bring broadband to parts of the country that cannot yet access the Internet at high speeds.

Now what I want to know how putting more people on the government payroll is going to help the economy. Don’t we already have people building bridges, roads and working in our public schools? How is creating more goverment bureaucracy going to help?

Of course the MSM is ecstatic about how the Messiah is going to fixed the “mess” created by big bad President Bush. Here are the details.

“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges; modernizing schools that are failing our children; and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technology that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years head,” he said.

He noted that he will need support from both Democrats and Republicans to pass such a plan and said he welcomes suggestions from both sides of the aisle.

Uh, aren’t there already people working on our roads and bridges, and our public schools? This sounds to me like more government jobs, which means higher taxes for the rest of us.

Also, according to one editorial, that 2.5 million goal is actually quite modest.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush promised 15 million new jobs. In 1992, Bill Clinton said his economic plan would create 8 million. In 2000, Al Gore promised 10 million new high-tech positions. That same campaign, George W. Bush said his tax cuts would add 5 million to payrolls. In 2004, John Kerry pledged 10 million.

Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton offered up a plan during the primaries that she said would create 3 million jobs just “through increased investments in the nation’s infrastructure.”

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Since Eisenhower’s first term, the economy has created an average of 1.5 million new jobs each year. Since Reagan’s first term, the average has been about 2.5 million a year. And Reagan, who inherited an economy as bad if not worse than the current one, saw 6.3 million new jobs created four years after he entered the White House.

If Obama just manages to hit the post-World War II average, there would be 3 million more jobs by 2011.

What’s more, Obama’s promise doesn’t keep pace with projected growth in the labor force. The BLS projects that roughly 2.6 million new workers will enter the labor pool over the next two years.

If that’s the case, Obama’s plan would leave the unemployment rate slightly higher in 2011 than it is now. Moreover, Obama’s stimulus plan could eventually total $700 billion, the Washington Post reports. So, as former Council of Economic Advisers chief Gregory Mankiw notes, each job Obama “creates” will cost $280,000.

Originally, it was economist John Maynard Keynes who argued that the economy could be boosted by government borrowing, and spending money. This has become the gospel for Democrats and RINO’s. But here’s a look at why it doesn’t work.

That’s what we could face if President Bush or Obama decides to take advantage of Saudi petrodollars for any bailouts.

All they want, those in the know insist, is for Washington to encourage Wall Street – more and more of which is owned by the U.S. government – to embrace Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). A Treasury Department seminar convened last week depicted SCF as nothing more than a kind of socially responsible investing vehicle that respects Muslim religious beliefs by eschewing interest-bearing transactions and those involving pork and “sin” stocks. So, what’s the big deal? The Catholics, Methodists and Jews have their funds, why not the Muslims?

What makes the Shariah-Compliant Finance gambit both a big and troublesome “deal” is that, unlike these other religious traditions, Shariah’s adherents are pursuing a global theocracy. They believe they must impose their agenda on everybody else, religious and secular alike, using violence if necessary. And SCF is explicitly described by leading practitioners as a complement to violent holy war: “financial jihad” and “jihad with money.”

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What will the answer be when the Islamists insist that free speech must not allow the slander, libel or defamation of Shariah, or other aspects of their faith? If the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Council have already accommodated themselves to this demand, why should we object? So what if, by so doing, we would effectively thereby be precluded from talking about – or even understanding – the Islamist threat we face, to say nothing of eviscerating the First Amendment? As the Treasury Department can attest, we need the money.

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At such a moment, a federal judge in Oregon has held the law criminalizing material support for terror is unconstitutionally “vague.” Taken together with the other manifestations of our capitulation, is it any wonder the champions of Shariah are convinced that “yes, they can” have their way with us? Who will disabuse them of this terrifying notion? We can, but will President-elect Obama lead the way?

You can read about him here.

Interestingly enough, Emanuel is a former ballet dancer. If anyone digs up pictures of young Rahm in white tights, I’d love to see it.

Now on a more serious note, Mr. Emanuel was also on the board of Fannie Mae. (Hat tip: Masterwolf)

During the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandal involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities. Freddie Mac and its sister organization Fannie Mae were taken over by the federal government in September 2008 after years of mismanagement and scandal. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put the two beleaguered GSEs into a conservatorship, stripping common stock shareholders of their rights to govern the companies.

In 2006, Freddie Mac was forced to pay a $3.8 million fine to the Federal Election Commission to settle allegations it illegally contributed to congressional candidates between 2000 and 2003 – while Emanuel was on the board and running for and serving in Congress.

“Freddie Mac was accused of illegally using corporate resources between 2000 and 2003 for 85 fundraisers that collected about $1.7 million for federal candidates,” an Associated Press story from April 18, 2006 said. “Much of the fundraising benefited members of the House Financial Services Committee, a panel whose decisions can affect Freddie Mac.”

And, since his successful run for the House of Representatives in 2002, Emanuel has been the beneficiary of campaign cash from Freddie Mac and its sister organization Fannie Mae – $51,750 according to the Center for Responsive Politics Web site OpenSecrets.org.

Emanuel received $25,000 in contributions from Freddie Mac during his first run in 2002, right at the end of his tenure at the government-sponsored enterprise. Freddie Mac was his third largest overall contributor that year.

However, there was an even larger conflict of interest that Sweet pointed out in an editorial column published in the Chicago Sun-Times on Aug. 14, 2003.

“Emanuel’s trust is supposed to be blind, not stupid,” Sweet wrote. “Freshman Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former Freddie Mac board member, sits on the very House subcommittee that has oversight of the federal government-sponsored enterprise at the same time that he has outstanding options for 2,500 shares of the company.” Read Full Article

Some change, eh?

When it was discovered that the Enron executives were cooking that company’s books, many Democrats were gloating with anger about how these crooks stole money. They basically branded it as a GOP scandal.

But now that we’re learning more about Fannie Mae’s shady practices, and its role in the subprime mortgage mess, do any of you think for a minute anything will happen to this organization or its top executives?

I say no. After all, for Democrats, anything is justified if it’s for their beloved poor minority constituents. So the “rich” will always be blamed, regardless of the facts.

Here’s how James B. Lockhart III, head of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, described the two companies back in 2006, before the meltdown occurred:

“The result of (Fannie’s and Freddie’s) rapid growth unconstrained by market forces and a weak regulator was years of mismanagement, flagrant earnings manipulation, and systems-and-controls problems. Managements of both companies were forced out, earnings were misstated by an estimated $16 billion, fines exceeding one-half billion dollars were imposed, and remedial costs will exceed $2 billion.”

Yet Congress did nothing. Fannie and Freddie continued to enjoy a virtual monopoly of the housing finance market, holding nearly half the nation’s $12 trillion in mortgage assets in 2007.

And what happened to Fannie’s and Freddie’s top executives, almost all with deep ties to the Democratic Party? Did they get perp-walked to prison like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, Tyco’s Dennis Koslowski, Adelphia’s John Rigas, ImClone’s Sam Waksal, or any of the others who did time for corporate misdeeds in the early 2000s?

No. Jim Johnson, former Walter Mondale aide, became head of Barack Obama’s vice presidential search committee. Franklin Raines, who headed Fannie from 1998 to 2004, the years of its worst excesses, pocketed nearly $100 million in pay and bonuses from Fannie. He, too, became an adviser to Obama.

Other Fannie-Freddie alumni did equally well. Rep. Rahm Emanuel has been front and center in crafting a new rescue bill. Ex-Clinton Justice official Jamie Gorelick careens from career catastrophe to catastrophe, and still gets top jobs. It pays to have ties.

Meanwhile, as previously documented, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd repeatedly thwarted reforms. Yet today they stand front-and-center as Democrats try to “fix” a problem they created.

As such, any investigation into Fannie and Freddie must include Congress, both current and past.

There’s lots of evidence that the two mortgage giants had become little more than taxpayer-guaranteed front companies for Democrats, who used them to reward supporters with cheap loans and to provide jobs for out-of-work politicians.

In other related news, Fannie Mae is facing a federal grand jury investigation for their accounting practices.

The mortgage-finance companies said Monday that a federal grand jury in New York was investigating accounting, disclosure and corporate governance issues at Washington-based Fannie and McLean, Va.-based Freddie.

Fannie and Freddie said they received subpoenas Friday from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan as well as requests from the Securities and Exchange Commission that they preserve documents. Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government this month as their mounting defaults and foreclosures threatened the entire mortgage market.

I predict these Fannie Mae people will play the race card, and get off scott free.

James Johnson was the CEO of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. He also served as the head of Barack Obama’s VP search effort until June 2008. Johnson resigned from that position when it was revealed that he received a low cost home load from Countrywide Financial’s CEO.

Anyway, when Johnson was CEO of Fannie Mae, he set up a goal of buying one trillion dollars in low income mortgage loans.

Of course Johnson adamantly opposed any government attempt to monitor Fannie Mae.

Fannie Mae opposed any attempt to regulate or monitor that business. In 1992, Congress considered a proposal requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to disclose their debt to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Public disclosure of Fannie’s and Freddie’s debt would have allowed the SEC to monitor their business and ensure that these “government-sponsored enterprises,” which were exempt from federal taxes, and had a line of credit with the U.S. Treasury, did not overextend themselves.

He also opposed the use of credit scoring, which is used to determine likelihood of a person repaying a loan.

Johnson told a 1995 conference of mortgage lenders in Chicago that credit-scoring was “a vehicle to do more, not an excuse to do less.”

“We abhor the use of credit scoring as a way to deny housing finance to those people who need help the most,” Johnson said. “We won’t put mechanical systems and arbitrary numbers above our faith in your [local lenders’] judgment and we won’t go back and second guess loans you’ve already made…if they don’t match up to a new way of assessing risks or doing business.”

What a piece of work!

Johnson called the higher interest rates paid by sub-prime borrowers a “tremendous burden” for families and said “it seems we can make A’s out of B’s and C’s in many circumstances” by giving less weight to factors such as divorce or job loss, which would normally lower credit scores.

This Johnson is a clone of James Taggart. He never seemed to care about whether or not these loans could be repaid. All he cared about the *need* of the borrowers.

Check out this video

I think it’s also important to remember how Obama’s beloved ACORN contributed to this crisis.

WHAT exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama’s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

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In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act – a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA – and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.

There we have it! Obama is just a slicker version of the ebonics ranting Jesse Jackson. Do we really want another Jesse Jackson in the White House?

ONE key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott – an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” – organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

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IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early ’90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers – and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

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Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

So much for the “failed policies of George Bush” leading to this mess.