Tag: books

More Catch-Up

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Well, the Christmas weekend was pretty relaxing. I didn’t do much of anything but recharge my batteries. But I am reminded once again of stuff I wanted to post about but didn’t get around to.

First up, Stephen Halbrook has an important book out that he (and the Independence Institute) want to drive to #1 on Amazon and beyond: The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms. The push started on the Bill of Rights day (Dec. 15), but Amazon ran out of stock when it hit #140 overall. Apparently it’s back in stock (though Amazon is still quoting 3-4 weeks). If you haven’t, buy a copy. Buy one for your nearest high-school library, if nothing else.

Next up, our buddy Saul Cornell. It appears that he’s still living in his jabberwocky world where history says what he twists it to say. David Hardy has written an article published in the Northwestern University Law Review on the source material Saul Cornell used in pieces that were cited in both majority and minority opinions in D.C. v Heller. David’s piece proves conclusively that Saul was, once again, exceedingly selective and misleading about what was in those source materials. As Clayton Cramer explained,

. . . as several reviewers of Cornell’s most recent book have pointed out, Cornell’s work is riddled with gross factual errors–and like Bellesiles, those errors are remarkably one-sided . . . .

He does seem to do that a lot.

And get away with it.

Here’s the pertinent excerpt from David Hardy’s paper:

One wonders how the Stevens dissent in Heller could have argued, from these lecture notes, that St. George Tucker, on whom the Court relies heavily, did not consistently adhere to the position that the Amendment was designed to protect the ‘Blackstonian’ self-defense right . . . or that the notes suggest the Second Amendment should be understood in the context of the compromise over military power represented by the original Constitution and the Second and Tenth Amendments.

The brief answer appears to be that the dissent relied uncritically on the portions of the lecture notes quoted by Saul Cornell in a 2006 article, which the dissent cites as authority. The article sets out the quotations cited by the dissent and argues that they reflect Tucker’s earliest formulation of the meaning of the Second Amendment, and casts the right to bear arms as a right of the states.

In fact, the article’s quotations are misleading; they come from Tucker’s discussion of the militia clauses of the original Constitution, which predictably deal with military power and the States. Tucker argues that the States have the power to arm their militias should Congress not do so since such power is not forbidden to States by the Constitution and hence is protected by the Tenth Amendment, just as any arms given would be protected by the Second Amendment. When, less than twenty pages later, Tucker does discuss the Bill of Rights, the language he uses closely parallels his 1803 Blackstone’s Commentaries, usually down to the word.

The 2006 paper was St. George Tucker and the Second Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Misunderstandings, 47 WM. & MARY L. REV. 1123, 1129–30 (2006). The words that Saul Cornell left out of his paper?

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed – this may be considered as the palladium of liberty. The right of self defense is the first law of nature. In most governments it has been the study of rulers to abridge this right with the narrowest limits. Where ever standing armies are kept up & the right of the people to bear arms is by any means or under any colour whatsoever prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated is in danger of being so. In England the people have been disarmed under the specious pretext of preserving the game. By the alluring idea, the landed aristocracy have been brought to side with the Court in a measure evidently calculated to check the effect of any ferment which the measures of government may produce in the minds of the people. The Game laws are a [consolation?] for the government, a rattle for the gentry, and a rack for the nation.

Can’t have that when you’re trying to prove that St. George Tucker didn’t believe the right to arms was an individual one, independent of militia service! Best not mention it! Your Joyce Foundation monies might be cut off!

Keep giving him hell. Maybe Cornell can be disgraced out of his position like Michael Bellisiles was.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

I’ve been busy, so I didn’t notice that Mike Vanderboegh had published another excerpt from Absolved on Monday until Wednesday night. Here’s today’s QotD excerpted from that piece, and if you haven’t read the novel up to this point, I suggest that you read this part and then start at the beginning and read the whole thing:

You’ve got us surrounded, you poor bastards.

Remember that we consider our rights merely codified by the Constitution. They are, we sincerely believe, God-given and inalienable. Remember too that we are willing to die for our liberties rather than surrender them up meekly. Remember as well that men and women who are willing to die for their principles are most often willing to kill for them too.

Hey, Nicholson Baker can write Checkpoint, Vanderboegh can write Absolved.

Think of it as the “fairness doctrine” in action.

Awwww Crap!

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Awwww Crap!

Michael Crichton has died. I didn’t even know he had cancer. One of the most eloquent voices against the abuse of and the politicization of science has been silenced. And it appears that his web page, where most of his speeches and essays are posted is getting hammered – I’m seeing a lot of “503 Error – Service Unavailable” messages.

I’ve read just about every book he’s written, and most if not all of his essays. The last book of his I read was Next, and it was one of the most disturbing novels I’ve ever read – especially since I know how thoroughly he researched his work. The man was a national treasure.

If you haven’t already seen it, I strongly recommend you go to this post from July and watch the 56 minute interview he gave to Charlie Rose after Next came out.

RIP, Michael. We need you, and we’re going to miss you. The Church of Global Warming will be ramping up their membership drive shortly.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for…but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires. – R.A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

And urge all your friends and neighbors to do likewise.

Remember: The choice is between disaster and catastrophe, and if you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Noonan’s Response

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Peggy Noonan has her own web page, unsurprisingly enough, and several days ago I made use of her contact page to ask her a question. It says right on the contact page:

(O)wing to the amount of spam I have received in the past, messages are not forwarded to me until they have been reviewed. That generally results in a delay of a day or two before I see the message.

I imagine she’s received a flood of mail since she endorsed Obama, so I’m not all that surprised that my little missive has apparently not reached her notice.

I didn’t save it, but I remember the gist of it. It was, after all, a variation of the one I sent to Rev. Donald Sensing. In Ms. Noonan’s case, the piece she wrote was Oct. 27th, 2005’s A Separate Peace, which inspired my essay, Tough History Coming. I quoted from her column:

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford’s lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It’s called “Symptoms of Withdrawal.” At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn’t gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. “Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta.” Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy “took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.’ “

Mr. Lawford continued, “The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of ‘maybe we shouldn’t go there.’ Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on.”

Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family–that it might “fall apart.” But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

And–forgive me–I thought: If even Teddy knows . . .

I asked her, as I asked Rev. Sensing, if the intervening years had altered her opinion, and if so in what way.

But here’s an equally pertinent excerpt, the concluding paragraphs:

If I am right that trolley thoughts are out there, and even prevalent, how are people dealing with it on a daily basis?

I think those who haven’t noticed we’re living in a troubling time continue to operate each day with classic and constitutional American optimism intact. I think some of those who have a sense we’re in trouble are going through the motions, dealing with their own daily challenges.

And some–well, I will mention and end with America’s elites. Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don’t think that’s our elites’ problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people–I know them and so do you–trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They’re trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

I believe I have my answer. I think Ms. Noonan’s opinion hasn’t changed. She’s just found a group of elites she fervently hopes might possibly save the ship, put the trolley back on the tracks, ignoring the fact that the elites never do the actual work. It’s always left to Joe Six Pack. (Or Joe the Plumber.)

There’s a scene from Frank Herbert’s classic SF novel, Dune of a dinner party on the desert planet Arrakis where some rather delicate but vicious political maneuvering is going on. During the dinner conversation, Paul Atreides, the young hero of the novel (not at that point, though – that comes later) takes a political jab at one of the dinner guests himself:

“Once, on Caladan, I saw the body of a drowned fisherman recovered. He –“

“Drowned?” It was the stillsuit manufacturer’s daughter.

Paul hesitated, then: “Yes. Immersed in water until dead. Drowned.”

“What an interesting way to die,” she murmered.

Paul’s smile became brittle. He returned his attention to the banker. “The interesting thing about this man was the wounds on his shoulders — made by another fisherman’s claw-boots. The fisherman was one of several in a boat — a craft for traveling on water — that foundered . . . sank beneath the water. Another fisherman helping recover the body said he’d seen marks like this man’s wounds several times. They meant another fisherman tried to stand on this poor fellow’s shoulders in the attempt to reach the surface — to reach air.”

“Why is this interesting?” the banker asked.

“Because of an observation made by my father at the time. He said the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable — except when you see it happen in the drawing room.” Paul hesitated just long enough for the banker to see the point coming, then: “And, I should add, except when you see it at the dinner table.”

And, I would add, except when you see it in political punditry.

John Ringo, the ANTI-PC Author

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John Ringo, the ANTI-PC Author

John Ringo, of “Oh John Ringo, No!” infamy has authored another book, The Last Centurion which is, as far as I am able to ascertain, intended to cause the Patchouli crowd to suffer massive brain aneurysims. In fact, as long as she has not seen the “Ghost” series of novels referred to in that first link, I’m relatively confident that this book would cause Rachel Lucas to spontaneously ovulate.

I’m only about a third of the way through it, and I won’t give you any spoilers if you intend to read it, but it’s about the simultaneous occurrence of a killer flu pandemic and global cooling worldwide in 2019-2020. It’s written “blog-style” by the author – essentially (so far) running posts of explanation of “how we got to where we are now” for the uninformed. The main character is writing in first-person of his experiences and observations of what happened, when and why. A précis is here.

And he is VERY anti-PC.

As one reviewer objected:

(T)he beginning of The Last Centurion is about as interesting (to me, at any rate) as reading one of the zillion blog posts by people who cannot stand the junior senator from New York and go on for paragraphs about how HRC is the second coming of Eleanor Roosevelt, only uglier and more thuggish. Still, since this was John Ringo, I skimmed through the polemic because I knew there was some quality combat SF in there somewhere.

Which there is; only problem is that there’s only about 3-4 short chapters worth, and then we’re back in CONUSstan where the Army does the best it can to save the country from mass starvation, economic collapse, and the kind of political coup both Reagan and W were accused of preparing. Needless to say, they do this in spite of the increasingly deranged President and apparently without much help from the Air Force, Navy or Marines. It reads like the bastard child of Atlas Shrugged and Gust Front, only without John Galt or the Posleen . . . .

I haven’t gotten to the “quality combat SF” yet. I am, however, enjoying the polemic.

Here’s an excerpt that I found particularly fascinating – John Ringo on American Exceptionalism:

The U.S. is a strange country. Growing up in it I never realized that, but spending those tours overseas really brought it home. We’re just fucking weird.

Alex de Touqueville(sic) spoke of this weirdness in his book Democracy in America way back in the 1800s. “Americans, contrary to every other society I have studied, form voluntary random social alliances.”

Look, let’s drill that down a bit and look at that most American of activities: The Barn Raising.

I know that virtually none of you have ever participated in a barn raising. But everyone knows what I mean. A family in an established community has gotten to the point they can build a barn or need a new one or maybe a new pioneer family that needs a barn puts out the word. There’s going to be a barn raising on x day, usually Saturday or Sunday.

People from miles around walk over to the family’s farm and work all day raising the barn. Mostly the guys do the heavy work while women work on food. That evening everybody gets together for a party. They sleep out or in the new barn, then walk home the next day to their usual routine.

ONLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA.

Only ever happened in America. It is a purely American invention and is from inconceivable to repugnant to other cultures.

A group of very near strangers in that they are not family or some extended tribe gather together in a “voluntary random social alliance” to aid another family for no direct benefit to themselves. The family that is getting the barn would normally supply some major food and if culturally acceptable and available some form of alcohol. But the people gathering to aid them have access to the same or better. There is a bit of a party afterwards but a social gathering does not pay for a hard day’s work. (And raising a barn is a hard day’s work.)

The benefit rests solely in the trust that when another family needs aid, the aided family will do their best to provide such aid.

Trust.

Americans form “voluntary random social social alliances.” Other societies do not. Low trust societies do not. (Example omitted)

In other countries an extended family might gather together to raise the barn or some other major endeavor. But this is not a voluntary random alliance. They turn up because the matriarch or patriarch has ordered it. And family is anything but random societally. (However random it may seem from the inside.)

You know, I’d never considered that.

The entire chapter is pretty fascinating, and I’m enjoying the book very much. In fact, I think as soon as I hit “Publish” I’m going to go to bed and read some more!

How You Know When There’s a Problem

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There’s a fairly famous story from the era of the Great Depression wherein Joseph P. Kennedy pulled his money from the stock market just prior to the Crash. He said that when his shoe-shine boy gave him stock tips, that was the signal that the market was wildly overinflated and it was time to get out.

Personally, I’ve known there was a problem in the mortgage industry ever since every fifth radio commercial was an advertisement for a 0% down, interest-only adjustable rate mortgage at a low, low, low APR! Anybody could qualify!

That was about four years ago, here in Tucson. Had I lived in California (perish the thought!) it would have been a lot sooner.

I ran across a transcript from radio host Mark Levin’s Sept. 19 show that is good enough to archive:

September 2008 will be remembered as the time when Socialism really, really took hold in this country.

Unfortunately these politicians are running for the hills because they do not want to take responsibility for what is going on, and I mean BIG TIME.

So I want to tell you a little story about your government; I want to tell you a little story about how it works and doesn’t work. I want to tell you a little story about how things go on in the shadows in this country and the massive bureaucracies of this country that you don’t know about, and yet they affect your lives every single day.

We have a massive Administrative State….and we have this massive bureaucracy, that’s utterly unelected, and unaffected by what you want or what you believe. It’s part of the Washington elite management system that controls so much of what goes on in this country.

…And I want to tell you a little bit about how the liberals in government whether they be elected or appointed, whether they be bureaucrats or politicians, how they work together and bring us to this point. And then tell YOU the problem is free markets, the problem is Capitalism, the problem is greed.

They lie.

The Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA – is a federal law that requires banks and thrifts to offer credit throughout their entire market area. And it prohibits them from NOT giving loans to poorer areas within the reach of their communities. They call this redlining. They call violations of this redlining.

The purpose of this Act is to provide credit, including home ownership opportunities to what they call “under-served populations” and commercial loans to small businesses.

The law was passed by Congress in 1977 under Carter as a result of national grassroots pressure from groups like ACORN (an ultra-Left wing criminal enterprise in my humble opinion) which brought pressure for affordable housing for the poor. It was opposed significantly and aggressively by the banking community. But they had no choice. It became law 31 years ago.

The law mandates that “each banking institution be evaluated to determine if it has met the credit needs of its entire community” – that is, if it has given loans to enough poor people, or people who can’t really afford them.

And then that record is taken into account by the federal government when it considers an institution’s application for mergers and acquisitions.

And so the law is enforced by the federal government and in 1995, as a result of interest from Bill Clinton’s Administration – particularly Janet Reno and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the implementing regulations for the law were strengthened by focusing the financial regulator’s attention on institution’s performance in helping to meet community credit needs.

So they really, really pushed them. They used the FORCE OF LAW to compel these private institutions to make bad loans.

These changes were very controversial.

…The Clinton Administration’s regulatory revisions with an effective starting date of January 31 1995, were credited with substantially increasing the number and aggregate amount of loans to small businesses and to low and moderate income borrowers for home loans. Clinton used to brag about this.

Part of the increase in home loans was due to increased efficiency in the genesis of lenders like Countrywide that DID NOT mitigate loan risk with savings deposits, which traditional banks do. They were using the new SUBPRIME AUTHORIZATION, of 1995. Are you listening to me? This is known as the secondary market for mortgage loans. The revisions in the law allowed the securitization of CRA loans containing subprime mortgages. In other words, they had to figure out how to give loans to people who do not qualify for the loans under traditional procedures. So they changed the procedures.

The loans were not capitalized. So you have No Down Payment loans, No Interest loans, Low Interest loans that turn into higher interest loans over time (ARMs), and on and on. They were trying to be creative in what they could do, and they HAD TO BE under the threat of losing business practices and activities as compelled by the Federal Government.

The Federal Government compelled this activity and compelled this behavior.

The first securitization of CRA loans, started in 1997 with Bear Stearns (remember them?)

Now in 2003, The Bush Administration recommended what the New York Slimes (Times) called “The most significant regulatory overhaul in the Housing Financial Industry since the Savings and Loan crisis a decade ago”. This change was to move governmental supervision of two of the primary agents guaranteeing subprime loans; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under a wholly new agency created within the Department of Justice, which would give it more oversight power and more auditing power. It would require these two so-called “companies” to better capitalize their debt.

Even so, what remained was the implied guarantee that the American taxpayer, should anything go wrong, would back-up these loans.

But that legislation to strengthen these programs, to move the oversight to an independent separate agency WAS BLOCKED in 2003 by Congress. And it was blocked by the Democrats, because the Democrats were in bed with ACORN and these other “community activists grassroots groups”, of whom Barrack The Hussein Obama is quite familiar.

These are the constituents of the Democrat party – that is these Left wing groups like ACORN.

(Barney) Frank (D-MA) was in bed with them; Chris Dodd (D-CT) was in bed with them; the Clinton Administration was in bed with them; and so they blocked the reforms the Bush Administration proposed in 2003.

Barney Frank said at the time “These two entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are NOT FACING ANY KIND OF FINANCIAL CRISIS. The more people exaggerate these problems…the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing”.

So basically, the Socialists FORCED the private sector to behave in ways the private sector didn’t want to behave but was forced to behave under threat of law. That is to give loans to people who were bad risks.

The two government run companies; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when the Bush Administration said in ’03 “Look we got a problem here. They don’t have enough capital, they’re running wild over there. We don’t have enough oversight and auditing activity. We want to break out that activity – make it independent so they can oversee it. Force them to capitalize against their loans better”. They were BLOCKED.

Now I don’t know about people who say we can’t talk about party (blame) – We HAVE TO TALK ABOUT PARTY HERE because the only way you have accountability, and the only way you fix this situation, is to know WHO and WHAT is responsible, and what policies got us here!

Now these policies encouraged the development of the sub-prime debacle, through this CRA legislation, which forced banks to lend to uncreditworthy customers. Which they are now being criticized for having done. Before this debacle, while they are now attacking these huge financial institutions – they would praise them for all the uncreditworthy risky loans they were giving to ‘certain’ citizens (and non-citizens) in this country!

In 2003, the NY Slimes said of the Bush Administration’s plan “The plan is an acknowledgment by the Administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together have issued more than 1.5 trillion in outstanding debt, is broken”.

2003.

Former Treasury Secretary John Snowe from the Bush Administration, 2003 – “There is a general recognition, that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprise neither has the tools nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises.”

Michael Oxley, Republican from Ohio, former House Finance Services Committee Chairman, he said: “The current regulator does not have the tools or the mandate to adequately regulate these enterprises. In recent months, we have seen the mismanagement and questionable accounting practices went largely unnoticed”.

The Senate Republican Policy Committee, the Conservatives warned in 2003, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac threatened the U.S. economy and taxpayer “Although both firms seem to be performing well at the moment, it is far better for Congress to take pre-emptive action, instead of facing an enormously expensive corrective action after a destabilizing crisis strikes. Given how large these government companies have grown, and how much interest rate risk they retain, the risks posed by their current operations, should move Congress to increase their disclosure requirements, improve safety and soundness regulations, and examine how best to extricate the Federal Government from their operations. And through such steps, Congress could give regulators and investors a better sense of the risks that Fannie and Freddie’s operations pose and reduce the likelihood of a bailout.”

That was the Conservative Republican Policy Committee, Conservative Republican Senators.

What did the Democrats say? What did they say in 2003?

When the Bush Administration in 2003 was in fact, ringing the alarm bells, and did in-fact draft proposed legislation to address this, Republicans supported it and Democrats blocked it.

“These two entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are NOT FACING ANY KIND OF FINANCIAL CRISIS. The more people exaggerate these problems…the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing”. – Barney Frank, 2003 (D-MA)

He told the AP a few weeks later: “I don’t think we face a crisis. I don’t think we have an impending disaster.”

In 2004 Frank said “I think Wall Street will get over it”, referring to the possible collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In 2005, the Republicans in Congress offered legislation to basically do what the Bush Administration had proposed two years earlier, and here’s what the Democrat Minority Leader in the Senate Harry Reid had to say: “The legislation from the Senate Banking Committee passed today on a party-line vote by the Republican majority, includes measures that could cripple the ability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to carry out their mission of expanding home ownership. While I favor approving oversight by our federal housing regulators, to ensure safety and soundness, we cannot pass legislation that could limit Americans from owning homes and potentially harm our economy in the process”. That was UPI quoting Harry Reid in July ’05.

This by the way is the same reason they won’t address the other looming disasters like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They just won’t do it. Until we’re on the brink.

Over, Mark. Over the brink.

As recently as August 16, 2007 – a little over a year ago – Schumer and Dodd, the Chairman of the Banking Committee, called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulators TO LIFT THE PORTFOLIO CAPS SO THEY COULD GIVE OUT MORE LOANS, to MORE people. They argued that allowing the two firms to buy more mortgages, and we’re talking about these sub-prime mortgages, “at least temporarily” they said, “would inject much liquidity into the market and calm the financial markets.”

That’s what we’re talking about.

In November 2006, Schumer in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “With the benefit of hindsight, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which imposed a new regulatory framework on all public companies doing business in the U.S., also needs to be re-examined. Since its passage, auditing expenses for companies doing business in the U.S. have grown far beyond anything Congress had anticipated. Of course, we must not in any way diminish our ability to detect corporate fraud and protect investors. But there appears to be a worrisome trend of corporate leaders focusing inordinate time on compliance minutiae rather than innovative strategies for growth, for fear of facing personal financial penalties from overzealous regulators.”

They were arguing for REDUCING the regulations that had been passed after Enron!!!!

…We will be paying for all of this now and down the road because of Socialism. That’s what I am trying to explain. That’s why I am taking the time to slog though this. Because it all sounds so foreign – because it has all been going on, behind the curtain. So we really haven’t been aware of it. It’s like Illegal Immigration, been going on for 45 years, they have been passing these laws, and we really haven’t been aware of it. We’re aware of it now, because we are on the hook for it.

What Chuck Schumer wrote in the WSJ Op-Ed in November 2006, is not what Chuck Schumer says today. Here’s what he said on the senate floor

“8 years of de-regulatory zeal by the Bush Administration, an attitude of “The market can do no wrong” have led us down the short path to economic recession. From the unregulated mortgage brokers, to the opaque credit default swaps market, to aggressive Short Sellers who were driving down the price of even healthy financial institutions based on innuendo, this Administration has failed to take the steps necessary to protect both Main Street and Wall Street”.

There may not be a silver bullet to fix what is currently dragging down the economy, but we can take steps to mitigate the costs and make sure that the impact of this crisis will be short-term. ” – Schumer, (D-NY)

See, our nation would be far better off without charlatans like Chuck Schumer. We have you dead to rights here Chuck. We have you in writing where you demanded LESS regulation and less oversight. So the fact you go to the senate floor and spew your talking points doesn’t work here.

We have you Barney – we have you dead to rights too. You’re a liar. You fought the reforms the Administration tried to put in place in 2005.

Yet Frank had this to say today:

“The fundamental issue is we have got to put an end to this situation in which there is no sensible regulation, and irresponsible individuals in the private market, or unwise individuals in the private market can incur the kind of risks that put us in a threatening situation,” said House Financial Services Committee Chairman, Barney Frank.

He’s a liar.

Now Barrack Obama, Obama is allied with radical groups like ACORN. These radical Left wing front groups like ACORN which pushed hard for the legislation that Carter put in place – the CRA forcing private financial institutions to make the riskiest of loans.

We have the Clinton Administration dead to rights – including Janet Reno, who insisted that these banks and financial institutions would not be able to survive and expand unless they took a certain amount of their assets and applied them to the riskiest of loans. That’s what they created in 1995 with this sub-prime market – of zero down loans. They were trying to come up with packages so they could meet their federal requirements. And they did.

Then step in the two government-run entities, Fannie and Freddie – and they are buying up these loans from the private sector as far as they can. Now that doesn’t promote home ownership, yet that is what they were in existence to do. So why were they buying up these risky loans?? Because they appeared as assets on their books, even though they weren’t. And the more assets they had, the bigger the bonuses for Franklin Raines, and Jamie Gorelick, and Jim Johnson – these three who are Obama’s ECONOMIC ADVISORS – that’s why they bought them up. It was in their OWN self-interest!!

I’ve seen no evidence that these three are, in fact, Obama’s “economic advisors,” but in July the Washington Post reported that, since his resignation from Fannie Mae, Raines had “taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.” Gorelick was mentioned some time back as a possible choice for Obama’s Attorney General. In June, the Minnesota Post reported that Jim Johnson was an Obama advisor, but did not specify what Johnson was advising him on. The story did state this, however:

No matter how they were introduced, the selection of Johnson to be a part of the inner circle seems to run contrary to Obama’s campaign theme of “change.”

Johnson represents Washington power as it’s always been. He’s the consummate insider. He’s very rich, very connected and very much behind the scenes.

Johnson’s wealth and politics appear to be related.

Interesting.

Continuing with Levin’s monologue:

This corrosive cronyism, has spread throughout the financial institutions in this country. That’s why they are hustling to fix it! Their fingerprints are all over this dammit! Don’t you see???!!! This wasn’t the private sector that did this, this wasn’t any individual company that did this, this is institutionalized corruption – we call it Socialism!!! Every effort to address it by the Bush Administration in ’03, by the Republicans in ’05, was rejected. Rejected by Chris Dodd, rejected by Chuck Schumer, rejected Barney Frank, rejected by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is why I rail against this! This is why I rail against the Left and the Socialists.

This isn’t a joke! This is real life!

And now, over the weekend, the Treasury Secretary – who is a Liberal Democrat, and a Friend of Schumer’s – has a plan that sticks us with a bill of over 1 TRILLION dollars!

We’re nationalizing businesses, we’re subsidizing businesses, now we’re going to create a one trillion dollar trust?

I tell you what; Socialism Sucks.

The Paulson plan could cost $1 trillion!

Look what your government has done! They have dragged us to the precipice!

You and I weren’t overseeing Freddie and Fannie – you and I had nothing to do with this CRA law – with all these Left Wing grassroots groups – or forcing banks and thrifts to cough up money for risky loans – we had nothing to do with this!

This is what goes on behind the scenes.

“Oh it’s Capitalism and Free Markets that are the cause” – no it’s not – THAT’S the problem!

What kind of a businessman gives a loan to someone who cannot pay it back unless they have a gun to their head???

…So all this crap that is out there – all these bad loans that are out there – they are going to pass them off into this fund, so every business out there that is loaded with these is going to dump them on you and me – the American taxpayer. To save those businesses. And by the way, those businesses – in many cases were forced to make these crap loans by the very people who are going to save us!!!

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” said lawmakers were told last night “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications, here at home and globally.” 


Why is Chris Dodd still chairman of the banking Committee?? Why isn’t he spooning out slop at some federal prison? Why isn’t he in charge of the soap at some Federal prison?

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments — certainly rare in my experience here — was that Democrats and Republicans decided we needed to work together, quickly,” Dodd said.

Funny how they want to work quickly to fix it now – but refused to do so in 2003 and 2005 BEFORE this collapse was triggered.

“Congressional leaders tell Politico that to expedite the rescue, Treasury plans to seek additional authority rather than creating a new entity. The plan involves buying up hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgages to take them off the books of financial institutions that otherwise might fail”.

…Yeah let’s hurry up (and fix this) let’s set this thing up before the American people figure out what’s going on. Let’s set it up – because as all the experts keep telling us, “this is just too big to fail!” That’s too big and this is too big – we have to nationalize everything! That’ll fix it! That’s because we know that whatever the government does is okay and whatever the private sector does is horrific.

I’m sick of these Socialists.

What happened here wasn’t due to a “lack of federal regulatory oversight,” it happened because of federal regulatory oversight – oversight that set up conditions that a free market would not have. The government required banks to make risky loans, then provided entities to remove much of the risk for the lending institutions. Making loans means lenders make money. There’s an incentive to make loans. If there wasn’t, no one would make them. But there’s also risk, which is why the old cliché goes “You can only get a loan if you can prove you don’t really need one.” If the risk is minimized, then the money flows freely.

And it did. Zero Down! Interest only! Jumbo ARMs! And low prime interest rates only fueled the fire. Greed certainly had a part in it – lenders undoubtedly convinced borrowers that they could afford a bigger loan than they had any business asking for. On the radio the other day I heard a sixty-plus year old woman complaining that a lender convinced her and her sixty-plus year old husband that they could afford a loan with a $5,000 a month payment, since interest rates were low. Zero down! No, no, no, you don’t need a no prepayment penalty clause! Certainly your son and daughter-in-law can be included since they’ll be living on the property with you!

Except the son and daughter-in-law divorced. And the property value has plummeted. And even if they could refinance, the prepayment penalty is prohibitive.

I’m not letting the lenders off the hook.

But I’ll be damned if I put all the blame on them, either.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, the free market works, if we let it. But when we fuck with it, we do so at our own peril. There’s this thing called the “Bell Curve.” Some people are stupid. Some people are greedy. And we forget this at our own risk.

In that piece on Locke v. Rousseau I linked to yesterday, “doqz” said:

Locke thought that men were born morally/intellectually neutral, the blank slate (that idea was developed by Locke in the course of his career TAing survey history courses to freshman in a major state University). And in the course of their life, people become themselves though accumulation of experience.

—

Jean-Jacques (Rousseau) thought that men are born good. I am not going to discuss what he thought about women – this is a family program. But men were born excellent. Unfortunately in course of their life they are corrupted by the state, which learns them all sorts of bad ideas and words. Like stuff. And the desire for more stuff.

P.J. O’Rourke said something similar in his book Republican Party Reptile:

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

For some reason they neglect to remember the last part of Rousseau’s Philosophy of Man – Man gets corrupted.

No, to the Left there must be some uncorrupted Enlightened Beings – “Lightworkers,” if you will – to whom we can entrust our care and feeding so that we don’t have to concern ourselves with it any more.

(UPDATE: LabRat has a P.J. O’Rourke quote of her own in the comments that is very apropos:

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

Indeed. End update.)

The Socialism Levin rails against isn’t the boot-on-a-face-forever Orwellian image, or even the dystopia of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. It’s the ham-handed destructiveness of those for whom beautiful ideas – in this case “fairness” in lending to people who probably shouldn’t get mortgage or small business loans – turn into disasters – in this case a financial debacle of almost unimaginable proportions – because too few are willing to deal with reality.

And that’s the biggest problem I have with the Left. To be sure, the Right isn’t immune to it, but the Left seems to wallow in it.

It didn’t work, but the philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again, only HARDER!

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Part VI of excerpts from the chapter entitled “The Road to Nowhere” from David Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith. Another long one:

By 1917, Russia was already the 4th industrial power in the world. Its rail networks had tripled since 1890, and its industrial output had increased by three-quarters since the century began. Over half of all Russian children between eight and eleven years of age were enrolled in schools, while 68% of all military conscripts had been tested literate. A cultural renaissance was underway in dance, painting, literature and music, the names Blok, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Diaghelev, Stravinsky were already figures of world renown. In 1905 a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament had been created, in which freedom of the press, assembly and association were guaranteed, if not always observed. By 1917, legislation to create a welfare state, including the right to strike and provisions for workers’ insurance was already in force and — before it was dissolved by Lenin’s Bolsheviks — Russia’s first truly democratic democratic parliament had been convened.

The Marxist Revolution destroyed all this, tearing the Russian people out of history’s womb and robbing whole generations of their minimal birthright, the opportunity to struggle for a decent life. Yet even as this political abortion was being completed and the nation was plunging into its deepest abyss, the very logic of revolution forced its leaders to expand their Lie: to insist that the very nightmare they had created was indeed the kingdom of freedom and justice the revolution had promised.

It is in this bottomless chasm between reality and promise that our own argument is finally joined. You seek to separate the terror-filled actualities of the Soviet experience from the magnificent harmonies of the socialist dream. But it is the dream itself that begets the reality, and requires the terror. This is the revolutionary paradox you want to ignore.

Isaac Deutscher had actually appreciated this revolutionary equation, but without ever comprehending its terrible finality. The second volume of his biography of Trotsky opens with a chapter he called “The Power and The Dream.” In it, he described how the Bolsheviks confronted the situation they had created: “When victory was theirs at last, they found that revolutionary Russia had overreached herself and was hurled down to the bottom of a horrible pit.” Seeing that the revolution had only increased their misery, the Russian people began asking: “Is this…the realm of freedom? Is this where the great leap has taken us?” The leaders of the Revolution could not answer. “[While] they at first sought merely to conceal the chasm between dream and reality [they] soon insisted that the realm of freedom had already been reached — and that it lay there at the bottom of the pit. ‘If people refused to believe, they had to be made to believe by force.’ “

So long as the revolutionaries continued to rule, they could not admit that they had made a mistake. Though they had cast an entire nation into a living hell, they had to maintain the liberating truth of the socialist idea. And because the idea was no longer believable, they had to make the people believe by force. It was the socialist idea that created the terror.

Because of the nature of its political mission, this terror was immeasurably greater than the repression it replaced. Whereas the Czarist police had several hundred agents at its height; the Bolshevik Cheka began its career with several hundred thousand. Whereas the Czarist secret police had operated within the framework of a rule of law, the Cheka (and its successors) did not. The Czarist police repressed extra-legal opponents of the political regime. To create the socialist future, the Cheka targeted whole social categories — regardless of individual behavior or attitude — for liquidation.

The results were predictable. “Up until 1905,” wrote Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, in his monumental record of the Soviet gulag, “the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia.” From 1876 to 1904, 486 people were executed or seventeen people a year for the whole country (a figure which included the executions of non-political criminals). During the years of the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “the number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and…many others; from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came to an abrupt end.”

But then came the Bolshevik seizure of power: “In a period of sixteen months (June 1918 to October 1919) more than sixteen thousand persons were shot, which is to say more than one thousand a month.” These executions, carried out by the Cheka without trial and by revolutionary tribunals without due process, were executions of people exclusively accused of political crimes. And this was only a drop in the sea of executions to come. The true figures will never be known, but in the two years 1937 and 1938, according to the executioners themselves, half a million ‘political prisoners’ were shot, or 20,000 a month.

To measure these deaths on an historical scale, Solzhenitsyn also compared them to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, which during the 80 year peak of its existence, condemned an average of 10 heretics a month. The difference was this: The Inquisition only forced unbelievers to believe in a world unseen; Socialism demanded that they believe in the very Lie that the revolution had condemned them to live.

I am reminded here again of Eric Hoffer’s observation to Eric Sevareid during an interview:

I have no grievance against intellectuals. All that I know about them is what I read in history books and what I’ve observed in our time. I’m convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.

In my new book I elaborate on this and I offer an explanation why. You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.

Continuing:

The author of our century’s tragedy is not Stalin, nor even Lenin. Its author is the political Left that we belonged to, that was launched at the time of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals, and that has continued its assault on bourgeois order ever since. The reign of socialist terror is the responsibility of all those who have promoted the Socialist idea, which required so much blood to implement, and then did not work in the end.

But if socialism was a mistake, it was never merely innocent in the sense that its consequences could not have been foreseen. From the very beginning, before the first drop of blood had ever been spilled, the critics of socialism had warned that it would end in tyranny and that economically it would not work. In 1844, Marx’s collaborator Arnold Ruge warned that Marx’s dream would result in “a police and slave state.” And in 1872, Marx’s arch rival in the First International, the anarchist Bakunin, described with penetrating acumen the political life of the future that Marx had in mind:

This government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land,…All that will demand…the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!

If a leading voice in Marx’s own International could see with such clarity the oppressive implications of his revolutionary idea, there was no excuse for the generations of Marxists who promoted the idea even after it had been put into practice and the blood began to flow. But the idea was so seductive that even Marxists who opposed Soviet Communism, continued to support it, saying this was not the actual socialism that Marx had in mind, even though Bakunin had seen that it was.

Time once again for this image:


And still, the lie is embraced by people who style themselves “Idealists without illusions.”

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Part V of excerpts from the chapter entitled “The Road to Nowhere” from David Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith. A long one this time:

Straitjacketed by its central plan, the socialist world was unable to enter the “second industrial revolution” that began to unfold in countries outside the Soviet bloc after 1945. By the beginning of the 1980s the Japanese already had 13 times the number of large computers per capita as the Soviets and nearly 60 times the number of industrial robots (the U.S. had three times the computer power of the Japanese themselves). “We were among the last to understand that in the age of information sciences the most valuable asset is knowledge, springing from human imagination and creativity,” complained Soviet President Gorbachev in 1989. “We will be paying for our mistake for many years to come.” While capitalist nations (including recent “third world” economies like South Korea) were soaring into the technological future, Russia and its satellites, caught in the contradictions of an archaic mode of production, were stagnating into a decade of zero growth, becoming economic anachronisms or what one analyst described as “a gigantic Soviet socialist rust belt.” In the 1980s the Soviet Union had become a military super-power, but this achievement bankrupted its already impoverished society in the process.

Nothing illustrated this bankruptcy with more poignancy than the opening of a McDonald’s fast-food outlet in Moscow about the time the East Germans were pulling down the Berlin Wall. In fact, the semiotics of the two were inseparable. During the last decades of the Cold War, the Wall had come to symbolize the borders of the socialist world, the Iron Curtain that held its populations captive against the irrepressible fact of the superiority of the capitalist societies in the West. When the Wall was breached, the terror was over, and with it the only authority ever really commanded by the socialist world.

The appearance of the Moscow McDonald’s revealed the prosaic truth that lay behind the creation of the Wall and the bloody epoch that it had come to symbolize. Its Soviet customers gathered in lines whose length exceeded those waiting outside Lenin’s tomb, the altar of the revolution itself. Here, the capitalist genius for catering to the ordinary desires of ordinary people was spectacularly displayed, along with socialism’s relentless unconcern for the needs of common humanity. McDonald’s executives even found it necessary to purchase and manage their own special farm in Russia, because Soviet potatoes — the very staple of the people’s diet — were too poor in quality and unreliable in supply. On the other hand, the wages of the Soviet customers were so depressed that a hamburger and fries was equivalent in rubles to half a day’s pay. And yet this most ordinary of pleasures — the bottom of the food chain in the capitalist West — was still such a luxury for Soviet consumers that to them it was worth a four hour wait and a four hour wage.

I could stop here, but no. The next paragraphs are just too good:

Of all the symbols of the epoch-making year, this was perhaps the most resonant for leftists of our generation. Impervious to the way the unobstructed market democratizes wealth, the New Left had focused its social scorn precisely on those plebeian achievements of consumer capitalism, that brought services and goods efficiently and cheaply to ordinary people. Perhaps the main theoretical contribution of our generation of New Left Marxists was an elaborate literature of cultural criticism made up of sneering commentaries on the “commodity fetishism” of bourgeois cultures and the “one-dimensional” humanity that commerce produced. The function of such critiques was to make its authors superior to the ordinary liberations of societies governed by the principles of consumer sovereignty and market economy. For New Leftists, the leviathans of post-industrial alienation and oppression were precisely these “consumption-oriented” industries, like McDonald’s, that offered inexpensive services and goods to the working masses — some, like the “Sizzler” restaurants, in the form of “all you can eat” menus that embraced a variety of meats, vegetables, fruits and pastries virtually unknown in the Soviet bloc.

These mundane symbols of consumer capitalism revealed the real secret of the era that was now ending, the reason why the Iron Curtain and its Berlin Walls were necessary, why the Cold War itself was an inevitable by-product of socialist rule: In 1989, for two hour’s labor at the minimum wage, an American worker could obtain, at a corner “Sizzler,” a feast more opulent, more nutritionally rich and gastronomically diverse than anything available to almost all the citizens of the socialist world (including the elite) at almost any price.

In the counter-revolutionary year 1989, on the anniversary of the Revolution, a group of protesters raised a banner in Red Square that summed up an epoch: Seventy Years On The Road To Nowhere. They had lived the socialist future and it didn’t work.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s QotD!

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Part IV of excerpts from the chapter entitled “The Road to Nowhere” from David Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith:

The lineage of these ideas could be traced back to our original complex noun, Trotsky: the legend of the revolution who had defied Stalin’s tyranny in the name of the revolution. While the Father of the Peoples slaughtered millions in the 1930s, Trotsky waited in his Mexican exile for Russia’s proletariat to rise up and restore the revolution to its rightful path. But as the waves of the Opposition disappeared into the gulag, and this prospect became impossibly remote, even Trotsky began to waver in his faith. By the eve of the Second World War, Trotsky’s despair had grown to such insupportable dimensions, that he made a final wager with himself. The conflict the world had just entered would be a test for the socialist faith. If the great war did not lead to a new revolution, socialists would be compelled, finally, to concede their defeat — to admit that “the present USSR was the precursor of a new and universal system of exploitation,” and that the socialist program had “petered out as a Utopia.” Trotsky did not survive to see the Cold War and the unraveling of his Marxist dreams. In 1940, his dilemma was resolved when one of Stalin’s agents gained entrance to the fortress of his exile in Mexico, and buried an ice pick in his head.

But the fantasy survived.