Obama's plan for the economy--written June 10, 2008

"We'll be hearing a lot about the economy from Obama. Being a Democrat, he'll of course propose new taxes while rescinding the Bush tax cuts. Being a Marxist, he'll aim high (or is that low?). Marxists as you'll recall if you were schooled before 1990 (when they disappeared from every country outside the Americas and from our school books), believe there are only exploiters (capitalists) and the exploited (workers). You can view a tape of Obama's pastor if you're fuzzy on the details--Black Liberation Theology is Marxism in black face. So in a country where most people aspire to be either rich capitalists after their college daze, or taken care of after their drug haze, and there is virtually no poverty, just a gap between the bottom quintile and the top quintile, the Marxists may be entering the golden age. An age when the government will finally succeed in destroying private property, marriage, unborn babies, religion, and national borders. (We've actually got a good head start on this, so it shouldn't take much.) It didn't work in poor, uneducated countries across the pond, so maybe it will in one of the most successful and richest. It could even be Obama's secret weapon to fight illegal immigration! Who would want to come here if it's more of what they left?

It's really going to help a lot to tax the oil companies' profits and take away their tax incentives instead of deregulating, which would allow for drilling or refineries. Money in alternatives? I'm sure of it, and so are they! They're smarter than our Congress so I'm guessing they're just waiting until Congress sweetens the deal after show and tell. I'm looking forward to that wind driven car going 5 mph between battery plug-ins. And all those products we use made of petroleum--I guess we'll cut down all the trees, or make them out of cotton, or wool or dirt. Those of you sweltering on the east coast right now, get used to it. AC will definitely be out. . . except for government officials, former veeps from TN and NC senators in giant houses."

I nailed it, didn't I?

Freedom and liberty and myths

Most of my years were lived out in the 20th century. I grew up in a household with a liberal mother (liberal in the classical sense of the word, not the pejorative it has become), and a conservative father who owned a small business (first he worked for Standard Oil to learn the business, then became a partner with an older man in coal which was losing out to fuel oil to have the financial backing he needed, then bought out his partner and became a sole owner). Both of my parents attended Mt. Morris College (merged with Manchester in 1932), as did my mother's parents, my father using a Polo, IL charity and his athletic skills, my mother using her parents' dwindling resources. The town Mt. Morris in which my parents lived, went to college, and supported my father's little business had a thriving printing industry at one time begun by two young brothers in the early 20th century, the Kables. It then was unionized (don't know the dates), then was bought by a larger corporation, then was struck down by a union strike in the late 1970s, from which it has never recovered. The smaller publishing and fulfillment companies which grew up around the printing industry, eventually left too, as the town voters turned down bond issues and highly qualified and educated people left for greener, freer pastures, all of which will live out that same cycle. 1) Entrepreneurial start up based on a good idea at the right time, 2) thriving growth, 3) unionism, 4) increased government regulations, 5) stagnation and strikes, 6) outsourcing to less regulated area to avoid the unions, either in the U.S. or abroad, and finally, get-out-of-town-shut-it-down.

I never heard my parents argue about politics--he voted Republican, she voted Democrat, so for 65 years they crossed out each others votes. The fact that I didn't hear it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. After all, I left home when I was 17 (went to California after graduation to work in a church program, and then in the fall went away to college). From then on I was a visitor and we talked about other things--town issues, grandchildren, grandparents, health, etc. I followed Mother's path and voted pretty much a straight Democratic ticket until the 2000 presidential election, although for local and state elections I voted for what ever name recognition the candidate had.

During my parents' lifetime and my own, however, there were vast changes in our political, economic and religious life. They lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, Korea, Vietnam and various smaller conflicts. We had just celebrated our 40th anniversary in my father's home on Sunday when 9/11 happened on Tuesday. And during their lifetime and mine, the definitions of freedom and liberty were gradually changing. It used to mean, and this was before my time, freedom from the coercion of the state, but has evolved to mean freedom from need, from want, from lack, and especially from competition to be better or the best.

My chosen career, library science, is pretty much a profession owned and controlled by the state. Yes, there are a few private companies that employ librarians, but for the most part it is top to bottom state run and regulated. Librarians like to talk about "freedom to read" and that public libraries are "the university of the people" but that's another freedom myth, one that has been subject to the redefinition of that word. Librarians, whether public or academic, vote overwhelmingly Democratic--223 to 1--in the 2004 election. That fact alone makes the profession more liberal than Hollywood, more liberal than the ACLU. This is the result of a mindset of "we know what's best for you" and it's in all levels of government from your local zoning board, to the school board, to the state department of transportation all the way up to the Oval Office. This is why I say book banning begins in the back room of the library where "acquisition" takes place, not at the point where an irate parents comes in and complains about a sex scene in a child's book. It also explains why librarians did not invent the world wide web, Google, or any of the "tools" that are now putting them in unemployment lines. Even with all that information at their finger tips, all library innovation is dependent on government grants and regulations, not competition for ideas or investors or entrepreneurship.

The redefinition of freedom is taught throughout the public school curricula and the Sunday Schools and pulpits of mainline Protestantism. As poor as Haiti is, the private school where my husband volunteers has a classical, liberal (in the true sense) curriculum that would put ours to shame. It exists even in the "required" volunteerism component now included in most schools' college-bound tracks. In many churches, the message from the pulpit is not about freedom in Christ, but that redefined freedom that the government offers us, freedom from the need to work or be sexually chaste, freedom from saving enough for a 20% down payment on a mortgage, freedom from hunger or poor housing, freedom from having to wait for a new car until you can afford it, freedom from renting, freedom from having borders or fences that keep other people out, etc.

Planned economies promise such freedoms, usually by taking from someone who has and giving it to someone who has not. That's what President Obama offers us (following a long line of 20th century presidents), offered us this past week in his martial "words of war" against not just British Petroleum, but our whole way of life based on fossil fuels. Make no mistake, planned economies, including the newer "green" cap and trade plans, the top down, dictator/czar/president knows best, always end badly. The leftists among us advising the President are urging Obama to become a dictator, a communist--even using those words (they don't even hide it with squishy "progressive" language).

With all their faults and up and down business cycles, capitalism and corporate monopolies have never put in place plans that resulted in the deaths and imprisonment of millions and millions of their "customers" in the way that the planned economies of Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and North Korea have murdered upwards to 100,000,000 of their own citizens.

It's a really high price to pay for "freedom," don't you think?

Remembering how we got here

Was it just two years ago we woke up to the damage the sub-prime loans and putting people into mortgage products they couldn't possibly pay was going to do to all of us? Usually, I don't search out Wikipedia for answers, but this little paragraph really sums it up nicely. The numbers refer to its footnotes.

The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.[1][2][3]

Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining.[4][5] The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation. (See full text of Act and current regulations.[1] To enforce the statute, federal regulatory agencies examine banking institutions for CRA compliance, and take this information into consideration when approving applications for new bank branches or for mergers or acquisitions.[6]

Reading through it, you see all the intentions were good--by community activists, the FHA, Fannie and Fred, oh, and lookee here

Community groups only slowly organized to take advantage of their right under the Act to complain about law enforcement of the regulations."

So soon banks and lending institutions were being threatened and pushed into unwise credit risks by these "community groups," [who were taking their cut from the applicants.] Hmmm. Now those same groups are threatening Americans who are exposing them--like the film maker in the Baltimore ACORN and Glenn Beck and Fox News. [I don't know if they've intimidated NYT and CNN and broadcast news, but they are certainly quiet.] Time to wake up, folks, You've been scammed big time--the intentions of the Democrats 30 years ago were good (I was one so I know). And the Republicans and business CEOs fell in line and were afraid of being called racists if they resisted. Who could not support a welfare mother or a Latina housekeeper with suspect documentation getting her own home?

Interesting that I got to this article through another article on "Centrally Planned Economies" which used the CRA to show how it's done in America.