Oh, For Mr. Benny!

Some excerpts from George Stephanopoulos' interview with Tim Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, on ABC News This Week, 29 March 2009. Try not to choke:





STEPHANOPOULOS: But even if we come out of that, a lot of economists worry that this recovery is going to feel like a recession, that we're going to have a jobless recovery. Very -- I see you nodding your head. You believe that?
GEITHNER: I think a lot -- people worry about this. You have a recession like this, which is born out of a period where people borrowed too much, and we let our financial system take on too much risk. The risk in that conduct is you have a longer, slower, more gradual process of adjustment and recovery.



SO...Mr. Geithner admits that our current economic crisis emerged from an excess of liquidity in the market, as I've discussed at length in this space. What he doesn't explain is how that excess of liquidity was started - by the left-wing social engineers on the Hill.




STEPHANOPOULOS: So do Americans have to get used to the idea that the boom times really aren't coming back?
GEITHNER: Well, we're going to emerge out of this stronger. And we're going to do that because the president and the Congress are going to make sure that we have the government doing a better job of things it needs to do.
So we have a more productive economy in the future, better education outcomes, better health care system, better energy policies, stronger infrastructure.

Mr. Geithner tells us that the Federal government is putting the economy in a headlock and that incomes, education, health care and energy will be rationed.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Stronger, but as affluent as we were in the past?


GEITHNER: Well, you know, we want to have sustainable growth. We don't have -- we don't want to have a recovery which is going to be artificial and short-lived, just produce the seeds of the next crisis.
We want to have a durable recovery based on a stronger foundation that has a stronger, more productive economy emerging through it where the gains are more broadly shared across the economy as a whole.

Remember how Mr. Obama answered Joe the Plumber's question on that campaign trip in Ohio last October, about how he wanted "to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too…" and "I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody"? Remember how everybody on the Left from Joe Biden on down excoriated Joe for daring to ask such an impudent question? Here's Tim Geithner saying that's exactly what Obama's doing.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So income inequality goes down?
GEITHNER: It should go down. Again, you know, if you look at the record of performance in the '90s, you know, we had very strong productivity growth during a period of fiscal discipline, fiscal responsibility, strong private investment, and the gains were shared much more broadly.
We can do that as a country, but it requires getting this government to do a better job of doing things only governments can do. That's why I assume important we get better outcomes. That's why fixing our health care system and get costs growing more slowly is so important. That's why we need a better energy policy. And that's why infrastructure needs to be improved.

Mr. Geithner assures us that income distribution in the Obama administration will flatten, not from a result of making low- and middle-income people more prosperous but by punishing the hell out of people in upper income levels. He also paints a rosy picture of the 1990's under Bill Clinton, who inherited an economy coming out of recession but raised taxes anyway, who didn't face 9/11, the economic shock it administered, the Global War On Terror and multiple natural disasters simultaneously.

Mr. Geithner also repeats his earlier assurance that the Federal government, invested with ultimate national power, will force us into a centralized, planned economy - the "better outcomes" he mentions.


STEPHANOPOULOS: And you are obviously trying to do that with your plans to shore up the banking system. You laid out what to do about these legacy toxic assets in the banking system this week. And a lot of people are wondering, will it actually work? The stock market definitely seemed to like it, so did a lot of experts. As you know, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was not a fan. And I want to show what he wrote this week in The New York Times.
He said when he read this plan, it gave him a sense of despair. And he went on to say: "Financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet and no amount of financial hocus-pocus, for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to, will change that fact."
Financial hocus-pocus.
GEITHNER: George, this is a piece of a series of initiatives we've put in place to help get the financial system doing what it needs to do, which is to provide the credit necessary for recovery. You know, economies depend on financial systems. They're what is -- provide the oxygen, the blood that economies need to grow.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But he says it's just not going to work, that these banks are insolvent, and that even if you put more capital in them, eventually you're going to have to take them over.
GEITHNER: But I just wanted to -- let's step back for a sec. So this is piece of a broad framework of initiatives we're undertaking to help restore the strength of the financial system. Part of our plan -- a core part of our plan involves making sure banks have enough capital to provide the lending we're going to need to get recovery back on track.

Mr. Krugman correctly observes that the home mortgage industry and by extension, the American financial system, trusted the Federal government would not allow a collapse of the housing boom they created and were disastrously wrong. Therefore, it's small wonder why American investors distrust anything Washington tells them now. Mr. Geithner answers Mr. Krugman's criticism by saying the Obama administration's answer to the financial crisis, which he already said was the result of too much credit, too much borrowing in years past...is to spur more borrowing. Is there any wonder why so many people - let alone conservatives like me - think Mr. Geithner is simply a fool? How does dumping more liquidity into the market solve the problem when the market is already drowning in liquidity?


GEITHNER: Absolutely. Our obligation now, again, is to defuse and help unwind this deeply complicated problem that AIG presents. But we want to work with the Congress to put in place stronger tools, stronger resolution authority, so the government can come in more quickly, earlier, before things have passed the point of no return, contain the damage, prevent the fire from spreading, restructure the firm, have it emerge stronger, at less risk to the taxpayer. That's what we need. We should have had this before this crisis, but we didn't. But we need to move quickly now.

Secretary Geithner now says that he wants authority not granted him, the Federal government or anyone under the Constitution, authority to regulate, interfere with and assume control of private institutions. Any private institution. If you weren't scared before, you'd better be scared now.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's talk about government debt. A lot of Americans more and more are concerned about that. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 10 years, the government debt will be 82 percent of GDP. And I'm going to read a question that came in from one of our viewers, Bruce Gower of Rock Hill, South Carolina. He asks, "how do you justify printing money out of thin air and the amount of debt you are subjecting future generations to with this budget? Who cares if roads are smoother if I or my children can't afford a car to drive because of the hyperinflation that had taken away all their spending power?"
Are you worried about hyperinflation down the road?
GEITHNER: That's not going to happen in this country, will never happen.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Why?
GEITHNER: Will never happen. Because we have a strong, independent Fed, with a clear authority from the Congress to keep inflation low at -- stable at low levels going forward.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The Fed has been putting so much money into the system.
GEITHNER: But that's not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future.
We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time.



I dare you to name a more asinine Treasury Secretary among Mr. Geithner's 74 predecessors.
He is presiding over the second half of the $700 billion TRAP package approved last Fall, the $787 billion stimulus package, the $1 trillion bank rescue package and Obama's $3.6 trillion FY2010 Federal budget, yet he says that all this spending - the cure for the excessive spending he already blamed for starting the financial mess, mind you - will never cause inflation. That by itself defies logic, but he explains himself by saying that inflation will be strangled by an aggressive, proactive Federal Reserve who "will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time." Tell us. Mr. Geithner, how does the Federal Reserve plan to do that? How has the Federal Reserve controlled inflation in the past? By increasing interest rates so high that they discourage borrowing. Now I'm just the product of western Indiana public schools but that's just absurd. He admits the financial crisis was caused by too much borrowing but he and His Serene Loftiness want to stimulate more borrowing and then slam the brakes on borrowing. Who besides an economically illterate buffoon proposes an idiotic scheme like this? Imagine Jimmie Johnson flying down the straightaway at Talladega and rather than slowing down into Turn 1 to maintain control, he jams the accellerator to the floor. As his car screams toward the wall and he realizes he's going too fast, Jimmie then decides to plant both feet on the brakes. What would be the likely result of this scenario? The #48 car and Jimmie Johnson smeared all over the track, the wall, the stands and everything else, that's what. God save us from Tim Geithner and his demagogic boss and give us Jack Benny, because he might have made us laugh but he sure took good care of his money.

P.S.
HSL fired the CEO of General Motors today but didn't fire the head of the UAW. What do they call it when the workers own the means of production?


Source: http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/story?id=7201898&page=1





Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Business/story?id=7206475&page=1

DaneGeld

A thousand years ago when pillaging was done the old-fashioned way, with swords, fire and slaughter rather than with legislation, it was common practice in northern Europe to pay huge bribes to the marauding tribes of Vikings then terrorizing the continent so they would do their marauding somewhere else - taking their show on the road, so to speak. The first of these bribes was paid by the Franks in 845 to prevent the sack of Paris, the Vikings being bought off with nearly six tons of silver and gold bullion which, if valued to its maximum, would be worth over $180 million by today's standards. That's big money even if your name is Alex Rodriguez and even bigger money if you're a Dark Age pirate intent on plunder, so an idea - and a phrase - was born: DaneGeld. Shakedown money for those lawless brigands of the North so they won't torch your crops and murder everyone in sight and it worked: For the Franks and the Danes.

You see, besides being bloodthirsty ogres, the Danes were smart enough to recognize easy money when they saw it. If they could make a fortune just by threatening violence, they'd settle for making threats. If the threats worked once, they'd probably work again. For example, in 991 after their victory at the Battle of Maddon, they demanded payment of 10,000 lbs. of silver from the English king Aethelred the Unready or they would burn his kingdom to the ground, and on advice from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Aethelred paid up. The Danes took the silver and left but returned three years later and demanded more as they laid siege to London, and they got it. The cycle was repeated in 1002, 1007, 1012 and 1018, by which time the Danes had extorted nearly 167,000 lbs. of silver from the English people, nearly denuding the island of its valuables. And the practice wasn't limited to the English. The historian Snorri Sturluson reported that Finland and her neighbors paid protection money to the Swedes and that people as far east as Moscow were forced to pay tribute to the rapacious Vikings. Currency blackmailed from their northern European victims was so widespread that more English coins from that period have been found in Sweden than in England itself.

The custom of paying DaneGeld may have spared the subject populations the immediate effects of the Vikings' fury but had widespread and disastrous effects in the longer term, namely:

• The psychological damage caused by being too weak to resist and being forced to pay their enemies not to attack them.
• Rather than improving their own lives, people had to work extremely hard to make their enemies rich.
• As long as DaneGeld had to be paid, a people were kept militarily weak so all their hard work made them no stronger.
• The nobility imposed crushing taxes on the peasants to both pay the DaneGeld and to maintain their lifestyles, sacrificing the common people to a lifetime of backbreaking labor and misery.
• Paying a huge DaneGeld only encouraged the Vikings to demand another.

Even the Vikings who demanded DaneGeld were undermined by the custom. Such fabulous treasure made the reputation of many a warrior but an economy based on extortion was doomed to fail: Having starved their victims of all their gold, the Vikings also starved themselves, condemning Scandinavia to nine centuries of subsistence living.

We are now led by a chieftain no less greedy than those horn-helmeted fiends of the frosty North. His Serene Loftiness Barack Obama, current lord of the skalli at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, demands that the diligent, prosperous workers of America hand over $5.4 trillion for redistribution among his loyal subjects the poor, minorities, illegals, unions and radical environmentalists, the sum consisting of the $787 billion stimulus package, the $1 trillion bank rescue package and his FY2010 Federal budget. This is over and above the $820 billion in rebates and bailouts already approved by the Bush administration which has had zero effect on the economy, but like his Viking predecessors, Mr. Obama gives no thought to the victims of his extortion because taking their money suits his purposes, not theirs. His vision is lofty (hence the title), the radical reshaping of our capitalist, free-enterprise economy into a true socialist model, oriented away from freedom and individual opportunity and toward regulation, entitlement and mediocrity. From somewhere in his past, he is motivated by a resentment of capitalism and its accent on personal drive and achievement, a bitterness flowing from the idea that if his subjects are poor it's because they were cheated, not because they made bad decisions, lacked education, missed opportunities or simply failed. To him, corporations are corrupt and executives are swindlers, and the only way to set things right is to take their profits - stolen from the poor and unfortunate - and give them back to the peasants. Like the Vikings, Obama thinks the fastest way to wealth is to steal from someone else, not help the poor earn more themselves.

Yet his resort to stratospheric levels of taxation and spending will undo him and his class-warfare friends as the DaneGeld undid the Danes, for the same reasons:

• Simply taking money from people who earn it and giving it to people who don't is not the same as prosperity.
• The people being exploited resent it and will find ways to rebel, hurting themselves and the exploiters.
• The people doing the exploiting will always demand more, not caring that they're crushing the source of their wealth until it's gone.

It would be well for Mr. Obama to hearken to the words of Rudyard Kipling, who said the following about demanding tribute and paying it:

"It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray;

So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost;For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Evil Genius

In the 1973 movie Live and Let Die, James Bond (played by Roger Moore in the first of seven appearances as the British secret agent) investigates the murders of three of his colleagues at the hands of a notorious Harlem drug dealer, Mr. Big. As the plot unfolds, 007 learns that Mr. Big is the alter ego of Dr. Kananga, dictator of a small Caribbean country who plans on distributing two metric tons of heroin across the United States for free. Since Kananga owns the poppy farms that produce the heroin, he could drive his competitors out of business and be left with a monopoly on the drug trade, drowning America with an unending flow of narcotics.

Bond expresses grudging admiration for his adversary's plan. By offering his product for no charge, Kananga undercuts his rivals knowing that by owning the means of production, he can afford the losses he will incur until they were eliminated. Moreover, he creates a nation of addicts with no other source for their drugs and willing to pay whatever price he demanded for their daily fix.

Repeatedly and at great length in this space, I have demonstrated how utterly preposterous President Obama's policies are if we take him at his word; that is, that he wants to help the economy recover. In a market desperately trying to shed costs - the latest Labor Department figures indicate 651,000 jobs lost in February 2009 and 4.4 million lost since the recession started in December 2007 - His Serene Loftiness is dumping $5.3 trillion into the system (the stimulus package, the bank rescue package and his FY 2010 budget) with the prospect of a second stimulus package later this year, at the same time that the Federal Reserve is holding the throttle wide open with a ridiculous 0.25% prime interest rate. By dumping gigantic levels of liquidity into a market already drowning in liquidity while drastically devaluing the currency with runaway inflation, Obama risks sending the free enterprise system into cardiac arrest. Given that the Bush administration's twin attempts to jump-start the economy failed - the $120 billion rebate in Spring 2008 and the $700 billion TRAP package last Fall - why on Earth would Obama try it again only much, much worse?

The answer lies in his objective. HSL's actions only make sense if he is ignoring the health of our economy and is actually trying to restructure American society, hooked on government and beyond rescue. If that is the case, then it doesn't matter if the economy regains its vigor or not. With the supposed mandate of the election behind him, tens of millions of Americans willing, like Esau, to sell the birthright of their freedom for a bowl of stew, Obama will grow the government to colossal levels, consuming everything, controlling everything, choking the life out of the old ways, crushing them out of existence. He spends untold trillions of dollars on pork barrel projects, on pro-union contracts, on health care for the poor and illegal immigrants, to bail out people who should never have been approved for a gasoline card much less a mortgage, knowing that it will be his political opponents who will be stuck with the bill. Free market capitalism will be gone, replaced by a collective mediocrity in which prosperity is punished, health care is rationed, foreclosures and repossessions are forbidden, union membership for every job is compulsory, private property is tightly regulated, the government owns every bank, every credit card company, every insurance agency and every realty, and every child in every school gets straight A's in every class because everyone must excel...meaning nobody will excel. This is Obama's America, a nation of hollow-eyed, nervous junkies queueing up at the clinic door every morning for our fix of government services, trading the liberty purchased with the blood of our ancestors for a welfare check.

If this is Obama's vision - a country of pathetic sameness where equal rights count for less than equal results - then his policies, like Dr. Kananga's free heroin, become brilliantly logical, and we have reason to fear. Instead of a laughably inexperienced minor leaguer, we would be led by a truly evil genius bent on the most monstrous plot ever devised: The undoing of America.

The Emperor Wills It

On 27 January 41 AD, the Roman emperor Caligula was assassinated by his Praetorian Guard as he walked in the passageway between his palace and the Area Palatina. Reigning less than four years, Caligula was a sadistic, insane degenerate, once ordering the Senate to declare him a living god and he even considered appointing his favorite horse, Incitatus, a consul of Rome: His word, however, perverse, was law.





In 1980, Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He collected American luxury cars and vacationed in a private resort on the Black Sea while the life expectancy of the average Russian was less than 63 years and 32% of all deaths were related to alcohol abuse. Paraphrasing George Orwell, Comrade Brezhnev was more equal than others, hypocrisy be damned.





Here in America, His Serene Loftiness Barack Obama, President of the United States and emperor of all he surveys, announced stringent new ethics rules for his administration forbidding the employment of lobbyists then granted himself an exception 24 hours later. After announcing that he had closely consulted with former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich as to his successor in the Senate, he then denied such consultations. While campaigning last year, he bitterly criticized President Bush's deficit spending, then demanded (and signed) a $787 billion stimulus package, approved $1 trillion in new spending for US banks, and submitted a $3.5 trillion Federal budget for FY 2010 which includes a $1.75 trillion deficit by itself. Beyond this, he convened a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" at the White House on 23 February during which he scolded state governors on the spendthrift culture of American politics. Do as I say, decrees the President, not as I do.

Common sense would label this behavior as bald-faced hypocrisy and in Mr. Obama's case, common sense is supported by empirical facts as the following figures from the Dow Jones Industrial Average attest:

20 January 2008: 11,971.19
04 November 2008 (Election Day): 9625.28
05 November 2008 (day after Election Day): 9139.27
20 January 2009 (Inauguration Day): 7949.09
02 March 2009: 6763.29



The stock market fell 2346 points between 20 January and 04 November 2008 as the economy sagged beneath the weight of massive home mortgage defaults and $820 billion worth of stimulus and bailouts under President Bush's leadership. Yet in response to Barack Obama's election, greeted by the Left and the legacy media with messianic fervor, the DJIA fell another 486 points, then fell another 1190 points by Inauguration Day 2009 and another 1186 points by 02 March, such that the market has declined 2862.09 points or 29.7% between Election Day and the present. That America's premier stock market would fall more than twice as fast in response to Mr. Obama's leadership than it did under Mr. Bush would seem a convincing indictment of his socialist policies, but if his apologists were to complain that his responsibility only began on 20 January, that would still account for a loss of 1186 points or 14.9% of its value since he assumed office, clearly an indication that the free market rejects his big government, tax-and-spend agenda. But is empirical evidence enough to dissuade Mr. Obama from his destructive approach?

History, as I illustrated above, would say no. Demagogues, dictators and egomaniacs cannot face reality when it conflicts with their personal vision. They want to impose their will anytime, on anyone, anywhere, regardless of circumstances or consequences. They seek to validate themselves as powerful, historic, legendary figures capable of epic achievements, bending humanity and nature itself to their will, and Mr. Obama is one of them. His lies, distortions and soaring hypocrisy are to be disregarded: As he spends more money than all the other nations on earth combined, he harangues defense contractors about wasting taxpayer dollars. He promised as a candidate that he would review the budget "line-by-line" to eliminate pork barrel projects but now promises to sign a $410 billion onmibus spending bill with 9000 earmarks, claiming that this is simply "last year's business." He blares his intention to revive the staggering economy while demanding Congressional approval of a cap-in-trade policy that would strangle job creation and growth, without batting an eye. He assays to save an economy drowning in liquidity by drowning it in liquidity, in short, he wants to force the laws of commerce to his will when they have defied every like effort in human history. (Remember Comrade Brezhnev? Mao Tse-Tung? Fidel Castro, anyone?) Arrogant is simply insufficient to describe him.

On 21 April 1945, Adolf Hitler ordered General Felix Steiner of the Waffen SS to attack Russian forces threatening Berlin. Since General Steiner's command existed only on paper, he decided that it would be foolish to try to execute Der Fuhrer's order and the Russian advance went unchecked, but the following day when Hitler learned that a nonexistent unit failed to attack a real Soviet force ten times its size, he flew into a maniacal rage. This is the essence of megalomania, that stark reality can be overcome simply by one's desire: Imperator mos is - the emperor wills it. But as Hitler learned to his cost, will alone often is not enough...take heed, Mr. Obama, take heed.







Source: http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI







Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/feb/22/obamas-spending-plan/







Source: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/2/14/obamas-trillion-dollar-spending-plan.html







Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/23/politics/100days/main4821499.shtml







Source: http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?Country=RU&IndicatorID=116







Obama, 23 February 2009 Fiscal Responsibility Summit: "We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences."