Back to Basics

Taxpayer-supported mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac — yes, the same government-sponsored entity that is sucking $64 billion of your money to stay afloat — is proud to announce that it is squandering more of your bucks on a “diversity officer:”

Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage buyer, on Monday named Subha V. Barry to head its newly formed office of diversity and inclusion.

As chief diversity officer, Barry will work with the company’s business units to ensure they’re maximizing opportunities in diverse markets. She will also ensure the company is utilizing diverse talent among its employee and suppliers, and developing strategies focused on the needs of a diverse work force.

Barry will also design the new executive diversity council.

You can thank diversity-mongering Maxine Waters for stuffing the race preference mandates into the financial “reform” law.

Expect more cronyism of color on the public dime.

So much for MLK’s dream, eh?

Grim reaper photoshop credit: Manly Rash

I said yesterday in my Beltway Chainsaw Massacre column that the GOP needs to track the Obama jobs death toll and tell the victims’ stories far and wide.

But there’s no need to wait for the GOP. I’ll keep doing it right here.

The first story of the day comes from the Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas, where a health insurer called Health Markets has laid off 70 workers and expects up to 180 more as it braces for the costs of Obamacare and other government mandates:

HealthMarkets, the North Richland Hills-based seller of health insurance, laid off 70 employees this month and expects to trim 180 more positions by the end of the first quarter of 2011, according to a recent federal filing.

In the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, HealthMarkets blamed the layoffs on “dropping enrollment levels experienced by the company’s insurance subsidiaries,” along with national healthcare reform and “related legislative developments.”

HealthMarkets provides insurance plans to the self-employed, individuals and small businesses.

The second story of the day comes from the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts, where a local hospital will slash about 50 full-time jobs:

About 50 full-time jobs will be eliminated at the HealthAlliance Hospital — Leominster Campus, and one of two planned expansion projects may be cut back.

Mary Lourdes Burke, chief communications officer for the hospital, said yesterday the job cuts do not mean 50 layoffs, because some were vacant positions that will not be filled, and some were positions that had hours reduced. Also, she said, some union contracts required moving employees into other posts.

Loathsome cowboys

How’s that Summer of Recovery working out for you? Continuing my series on the White House War on the West, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s attack on the economy, and the White House land lock-up (Part 1, Part 2) and ocean grab, here is the latest on Barack Obama’s deliberate job destruction policies.

According to the WSJ, the administration forged ahead with its junk science deepwater drilling ban despite knowing it would cost 23,000 jobs.

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Marcia McNutt, an Obama administration science adviser, commented on the corporate culture of BP in a memo sent to Michael Bromwich, the administration’s new top offshore oil exploration regulator, on June 28.

Critics of the moratorium, including Gulf Coast political figures and oil-industry leaders, have said it is crippling the region’s economy, and some have called on the administration to make public its economic analysis. A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects…

Sound familiar?

Just last month, you’ll recall, the TARP inspector general reported on how the capricious Dealeragate mandates of Obama’s non-expert auto experts deliberately destroyed jobs in the name of “shared sacrifice” to appease Big Labor.

Then there are more and more Obamacare job-killing stories piling up like this one:

Assurant Health is eliminating 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn., by Oct. 1 as the health insurer prepares for changes under federal health care reform.

Yea that economic recovery is going great. Nobody but pinheads in D.C. and Wall Street are surprised. We have been saying for the better part of 2 years that the economy sucks. Obama spent a trillion dollars in wasted “stimulus” on local government improvement projects. Nothing was done for those small businesses that create real productive jobs.

Now it seems big corporations are sitting on TONS of cash from massive cost cutting. They aren’t hiring. Why? Because the idiots in D.C. hate capitalism. Their policies are killing this economy. Health care “reform”. Finance “reform”. Bailouts. Impending higher taxes.

If these news laws were so great then why are Democrats not running their campaign extolling their virtues. Not a single one that I have seen or read about brags about how great these policies are and how they should be the platform from which they are re-elected or elected. No, they can only talk about race and blame Bush. That is their platform.

On the other hand we have folks in the GOP like Rep. Paul Ryan coming up with great plans to get the country back on track. Yes it’s true despite what the left-media wants leads you to believe. The GOP has rightfully been the party of NO. I love that they have said no for the last 18 months. They have plans but they don’t fit the agenda, the narrative, of the liberal left so they are dismissed and ignored.

So now we have proof that Obama-nomics are a failure. We gave him a TRILLION dollars of our money to fix the Bush problem. We gave him bailout money. We let him give money to your neighbor to buy a car. We let him pay off the unions. His statist Keynesian spending spree has not worked. The economy that he inherited from Bush still exists. He has done nothing to fix it. Obama is a failure.

Well, hallelujah, after FIVE turncoat Senate Republican RINOs voted to approve the inexperienced, highly un-American ethics liberal Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, they also approved $600 million for Border Security.

The controlling liberal Democrats, who are destined to destroy our country, hit two grand slams yesterday with the two actions cited above.  Of course they couldn’t do it without some help from some very sorry species of Republicans called RINOs.  (You all know that RINO means; Republican In Name Only.)

And even before I name these traitors who will not do as their voters back home elected them to do, I would bet that most of you could name them.  But seeing that there are more than five RINOs in the Senate (possibly as many as a dozen) I will give you the names of this current batch who sided with the socialist-communist liberal Democrats.

The most consistently RINO culprits such as the pair from Maine, Collins and Snowe were of course there for the Dems as were ‘Whimsy’ Graham of SC; ‘TrickyDicky’ Lugar of IN; and ‘Judas’ Gregg of NH, the last of which is the traitor who rock-ribbed conservatives of my state of New Hampshire elected to the Senate in the long tradition of sending wise and frugal people to the upper body of Congress.

How these RINOs can turn their backs on the people who sent them there mystifies me; it must run in the blood as it happened before when NH sent ‘Scooter’ Soutar to the Supreme Court thinking he was a conservative but who scooted over to and sidled up with the slippery liberals once he was seated.

It is probably better that Gregg is not running for reelection as he will be saved from the embarrassment of NH rejecting him this time.

But that was only half of the damage that the liberal Dems thrust on our once mighty nation.  They pretended to be concerned about our Border Security when they approved $600 million for Border Security.  I say ‘pretended to be concerned’ because if they were really concerned they would approve a much larger amount.

Some call the Barack Obama administration progressive. Some call it socialist. Other terms used are Marxist and communist.

I have called it fascist and corporatist in the past. Now I’ll just call it Evil.

That’s because the rule of law is dead in America. Now we have the rule of man—or government agency. The rule of man—or government agency—is a rule of Evil because it knows only the moral bounds of those making the rules. And it’s evident this administration, its appointments and its goals are amoral, if not immoral.

In America there is a Federal law that makes being in the United States illegally illegal. There is a requirement in the law that those who are not United States citizens but are here legally must carry papers designating their legal status.

That law is not enforced. Why? Someone decided not to. Granted it hasn’t been enforced for some time, maybe since its enactment in the 1940s, but it is a law and it should be enforced or changed. Were we under the rule of law it would be.

In Arizona the legislature followed the rule of law—and the will of its citizens—and passed an immigration law, subsequently signed by Governor Jan Brewer, that mirrored the U.S. law. However the Obama administration made it plain it would not only not help Arizona enforce its law it would work actively against its enforcement. It sued to stop the law from being enacted. It ordered its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Division not to pick up any illegals Arizona arrested under the law.

SB 1070, Arizona’s citizen-friendly, illegal-alien hostile, bill has ruffled quite a few feathers, including those who occupy high places in government in Washington, D.C. After putting up with the nonsense from Washington for years, I have concluded that the U.S.should scrap SB 1070 as well as all of Obama’s foolish fantasies about immigration reform. We can do that and solve our illegal alien mess in one fell swoop by taking one simple step: Implement Mexico’s immigration laws in America!

Mexico, according to journalist and terrorist expert Dr. J. Michael Waller, has some of the strictest immigration laws of any country, and they enforce them to the letter.

A link to his commentary.

Waller informs us that “Mexico has a radical idea for a rational immigration policy that most Americans would love. However, Mexican officials haven’t been sharing that idea with us as they press for the U.S. Congress to adopt the Marxist immigration reform bill.”

Waller adds: “That’s too bad, because Mexico, which annually deports more illegal aliens than the United States does, has much to teach us about how it handles the immigration issue.

Under Mexican law, it is a felony to be an illegal alien in Mexico.”

Waller sharpens his point by commenting on the unnerving tendency of some legal scholars in the U.S. to use foreign laws as a reference point for deciding issues in America.

Whew… A long week for me last week. Traveling, working, and spending time with my son. It left me little time to pursue my passion of writing here at SUFA. But now I am back to work on the site for a couple weeks until I have to travel again for two weeks. Tonight I want to talk about something that I have been wanting to talk about all week. I want to tread into the realm of financial reform and financial responsibility as put forth by our federal government. This article is going to address some things, mostly done by the Obama administration, but really simply pertains to our federal government in general. To be honest, the words fiscal and responsibility should not even be allowed to be used in the same sentence with federal government, unless it is done to point out a lack of it. The sheer magnitude of fiscal ineptitude displayed by the federal government is staggering, and it has now pushed us both to the edge of financial disaster and to the brink of full government control over the private industry in the United States. This is both infuriating and scary as hell. And I have to say that I have taken one step closer to believing a rebellion is the only answer.

First there is the financial reform bill that has been passed and signed into law during this last week. According to the Obama administration, the bill creates a body within the Federal Reserve aimed at protecting consumers, oversight of the derivatives market, and a way for the government to take over and dismantle failing financial firms. Read that last one carefully folks, TAKE OVER AND DISMANTLE failing financial firms. In other words, we are being asked to trust the federal government to determine who to dismantle and who to let live. Is there anyone in America who is not a far left kool-aid drinker who believes that this is going to be done in an impartial manner? Because I don’t believe that for a second. And let me tell you why:

I watched as the Troubled Asset Relief Fund was administered, “saving” those few big banks who were deemed “too big to fail”, allowing all the small banks to perish along the way. The “too big to fail” got BIGGER and the end result was something that I knew instinctively was bad for our future: Centralization. Anyone who understands control and how the government intends to enforce also understands that a primary need is to centralize the power over the economy in a way that will make them easier to control. They can’t control a hundred million independent banks, but they can easily control things if they consolidate power into ten superbanks. And that is what they have done.

Further, the financial reform bill does very little in the way of reforming anything. It merely gave the government power to do whatever it likes. The real work is yet to be done. The body created by the legislation will now quietly go about creating whatever rules and regulations that it likes without regard to public opinion or scrutiny. After all, now that Congress is done doing the public “work”, the committee can do what it likes, and no one will be paying attention. They won’t answer to anyone. There will be little to no oversight of what they do. Further intrusions into the private marketplace can now occur without anyone knowing a thing about it until they are implemented, which means too late to stop them.

What else is going to happen as a result of the financial reform bill that has passed? To be honest, there is a lot that we don’t know, because as usual, they took 2,300+ pages to basically set up a committee that will figure out the rest of the steps. Of course that is because of the pork involved and the other areas that they wanted to address. For example, the bill will require thousands of U.S. companies to show what steps they are taking to ensure that the products they make, including laptops, cellphones and medical devices, don’t contain “conflict minerals” from the Congo. That will have a fairly dramatic impact on manufacturing in America, as one fifth of the Tantalum used in those devices worldwide comes from the Congo. The law contains no provisions for punishment yet, but they are already talking in Washington about sanctions and penalties. Why would any company want to manufacture in this country, where they spend more in reporting and taxes than they do in labor and materials?

What this bill will really do is further allow for the manipulation of the market by both the federal government and the large corporations who are involved. Wall Street gains extra time and ability to manipulate regulations quietly in back room deals. Or to put it more bluntly, the corporations that only have the ability to manipulate the market because of government, have now been given additional resources to manipulate the market. DC insiders will have the ability to influence the failure or flourishing of organizations based on loyalty and campaign contributions. Is there really anyone other than the kool-aid drinkers who really believe that the federal government would pass a bill that did anything other than give themselves more power, influence, and ability to profit from industry in America?

And just to add a little fire to the one world government conspiracy folks, there is the reality that the government sees the bill as a robust way to work towards that. There are many provisions in the legislation that are based on world economic decisions by groups such as the G20 or the United Nations. In fact, Treasury Thief Timothy Geithner came right out and said so, albeit in a round about way when bragging on the influence that the bill gives us. He said, “I am very confident with the strong hand that this (the legislation just passed) gives us, that we will be able to bring the world with us.”

The powers in Washington, D.C. seem to be living in a parallel universe from the one the rest of the nation occupies. Even worse is the way the Obama White House and Democrat controlled Congress appears to be hell-bent on destroying the economy before they can be voted out of office.

No Congress since the days of the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration has been driven to pass legislation that is more injurious to the present and future of the nation. It began with the so-called Stimulus Act that is widely seen as a failure, followed by Obamacare, the government takeover of one sixth of the economy replete with the rationing of care that will literally kill some people.

On Wednesday the President signed “financial reform” legislation that will play havoc with the financial industry while expanding government regulation still further.

Let us examine the reality. Washington tells us that the unemployment rate is 9.5%. Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence has been closely following unemployment data. His survey in May revealed that 28% of a thousand households reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job.

Mayur’s firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors’ Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. The June poll revealed 27.8% of households experiencing unemployment and, in the second week of July, it showed 28.6%. That translates to an unemployment rate of more than 22%!

The so-called financial reform act is likely to be as great a power grab as Obamacare, but it totally ignores the root cause of the 2008 financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored “entities” whose collapse revealed that many of mortgages granted by banks and lending companies, and then purchased by Fannie and Freddie for bundling and resale were inherently unsound.

Why? Because the government had long been pressuring banks and mortgage lenders to issue mortgages to people who could not afford to borrow the price of a hamburger. They were called “Ninja” loans; no job, no assets.