California,The “Failed State”

By Austin Hill
“Failed state.”

That sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Do a web search with the words “failed state” and names like Somalia, Haiti, and Sudan will appear on your computer screen.

Unfortunately, the 31st state in our union – California – is looking more and more like a “failed state” as well. And this should matter to every American, because like it or not, California is both a global economic epicenter and a spectacular place in the world.

My native homeland of California is home to the highest mountain in the contiguous forty-eight states (Mount Whitney), the lowest valley (Death Valley), Facebook, “Surf City, U.S.A.”(Huntington Beach), Apple Computers, The World Champion San Francisco Giants, the most fertile farm land in the world (San Joaquin Valley), eBay, Legoland, Cisco Systems, “the entertainment capitol of the world” (Hollywood), three U.S. Presidents (Richard Nixon by birth, and Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan by “adoption”), and Mitsubishi Motors of North America. It remains a global leader in the agricultural, information technology, and aerospace sectors. If it were its own country, it would comprise the eight largest national economy in the world.

This is to say that California can be and should be a place of robust economic opportunity across multiple sectors. But politicians and government employee labor unions have a stranglehold on the state (sound familiar?). Businesses and capital are now leaving while actual economic output is slumping.

Most academicians and government bureaucrats who keep track of the world’s “failed states” still won’t admit that Greece belongs on their lists, so the idea that California has in any sense “failed” isn’t even considered. But if we take seriously the criteria for determining a “failed state,” then the sad truth about California becomes painfully clear.

One of the most often quoted authorities on failed states is The Fund for Peace, a Washington, DC-based non-profit think tank organization, and among the many indicators of a failed state that “FFP” notes is “uneven economic development among group lines.” This notion of “uneven economic development” often has “life or death” implications in places like Zimbabwe or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, yet the idea is every bit as real in California as it regards the disparity between the government, and the private sector economy.

For the record, the government of California presently entails a budget deficit of somewhere between $10 and $15 billion – a deficit that is expected to swell to about $25 billion by the middle of 2012. With this as his backdrop, Governor Jerry Brown took office in January noting at the time that California had a history of “kickin’ the can down the road” with its budget woes, and that his plan to solve California’s dreadful fiscal problems would involve both cuts in government spending, and – if California voters approved – tax increases.

Yet Governor Brown is a life-long government employee, and will have nothing to do with cutting state spending where it is most problematic – in the arena of government employee salaries, benefits, and retirement pensions. In fact, while he has been completely unable to implement his plan of “temporarily extending” certain “temporarily inflated tax rates” (which de facto amounts to a tax increase plan), he has continued lining the pockets of unionized government employees with more lavish expenditures on their salaries, benefits, and retirement pensions.

In April, for example, Brown approved a new contract for the California Prison Guard’s union, which allows guards to accrue unlimited numbers of un-used paid vacation days each year. When a guard retires, the un-used vacation time can now be “cashed-in” at the guard’s highest salary rate- a sweet pay-off from Governor Brown to a labor union that spent nearly $2 million on his campaign last year.

And here’s where yet another set of criteria comes in to play for determining a “failed state.” According to the Fund for Peace, failed states often exhibit “a disappearance of basic state functions that serve the people, including a failure to protect citizens from terrorism and violence…” The high-minded folks at the FFP may not know this, but – shocking news! – California has so horribly mismanaged its prison system that it can’t afford to facilitate all of its prisoners.

After being taken to court over the conditions in which they were detaining convicts – which included as many as 54 prisoners sharing one toilet – the California government was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in May of this year to release huge numbers of prisoners. This is to say that California’s leaders had plenty of money to spend on their unionized prison guards, yet it doesn’t have enough money to properly facilitate prisoners so as to comply with federal requirements.

Is this “failure enough” to get anybody’s attention? By the FFP’s own criteria, California has failed to fulfill a “basic state function” and to protect “citizens” from “violence.”

The Fund for Peace needs to sound the alarm bells over the California government’s failures, but they probably won’t. It’s up to the state’s citizenry to demand better leadership in Sacramento – before it’s too late.

Email: Austin Hill


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Salary Caps Don't Apply To Obama's "Friends

Almost daily, Obama or one of his thugs complains about what some corporate executive earns. It is a part of the propaganda mill designed to paint U.S. businesses as EVIL.


However, if you work for one of the corporations that Obama illegally seized or you work for a quasi-corporation like Fanny Mae or Freddie Mac, the sky is the limit, after all, the bill is paid by American taxpayers.

Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae need a couple of hundred billion dollars every month or two to cover losses. But the executives in both corporations “earned” massive bonuses.

GM (Government Motors) was illegally exempted from paying taxes so that they could look profitable when the GM stock was placed on the market. They actually lost big bucks and used monies that would have been used to pay those taxes, to pay-off part of the bailout loan. Yet the executives are receiving big bonuses.

According to Obama, it perfectly all right to pay executive bonuses with tax dollars; it is EVIL for the non-government sector to pay bonuses using corporate monies.

Read on----



Outrage: Freddie and Fannie Execs Pocketed $35 Million In Taxpayer Money


Friday, 01 Apr 2011
By Jim Meyers

Top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were paid more than $35 million in the past two years while the two bailed-out mortgage finance giants were receiving $153 billion in support from taxpayers.

The huge payouts came to light in a new report published on Thursday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Office of Inspector General.

“Although the Enterprises [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] have lost billions of dollars and continue to depend upon federal support to remain in business,” the report states, “their senior executives continue to receive multi-million dollar salaries.”

At Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association), its chief executive officer received $9.3 million in total compensation in 2009 and 2010, the report reveals. The CEO is Michael J. Williams, who joined the company in 1991.

At Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association), CEO Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments, made $7.8 million in the two years since the company was taken over by the federal government.   < Read more of the story >



 Administration Approves Bailout Pay Packages


Friday, 01 Apr 2011
Newsmax

WASHINGTON (AP) — The four companies still receiving government bailout aid won't be able to raise the amount of cash they pay out to their top executives this year, the administration's pay czar has ruled.

The decisions, released late Friday, cover 2011 compensation for the top 25 executives at General Motors Co., Chrysler, American International Group Inc. and Ally Financial Inc., the former financing arm of GM. The rulings clear the way for millions of dollars in salary and bonuses to be paid out by companies that are still repay the billions in aid they received during the financial crisis from the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

While the companies can't give cash raises, they are being allowed to boost the value of deferred stock awards to their executives. The Treasury Department defended that decision, saying it is in line with pay guidelines that it used to make compensation decisions in 2009 and 2010.

The government's findings do not identify the executives by name but only by salary rankings.

The highest-paid executive at insurance giant AIG will total compensation of $10.5 million in 2011, including a $3 million salary, the largest of any of the pay packages approved Friday by the pay czar. AIG confirmed in a filing with regulators Friday that President and CEO Robert Benmosche's pay will stand at $10.5 million this year, the same package he received in 2010.   < Read more of the story >


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We All Must “Sacrifice” (Except The President’s Friends)

By Austin Hill
We live at a time when all Americans must sacrifice.

All, that is, except those of us who can be politically helpful to our President as he seeks re-election.

Last month, President Barack Obama addressed a gathering of the National Governor’s Association, wherein he suggested that “shared sacrifice” should become a new catch-phrase, of sorts, for America. “If all the pain is shared by one group,” the President noted, “that’s not good for anyone.”

In that same engagement, the President went on to address his healthcare “reform” legislation from last year. “I "I am not open to refighting the battles of the last two years or undoing the progress we've made," he noted, but then explained that he wanted a bipartisan group of Governors to work with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to make Obamacare “even better.” "I will go to bat for whatever works,” he claimed, “no matter who it comes from."

Before we move on to the broader issue – this insincere notion of “shared sacrifice” – let’s look carefully at some of the “straw man” arguments and erroneous insinuations that the President articulated to the Governors, just based on the portion of his speech recorded above. Why, for example, would the President suggest that the “pain” of the economic downturn is only being felt among “one group” of Americans?

The Great Recession has been felt in nearly every sector of the economy, among people from nearly every socioeconomic category. Even the wealthiest among us (a group President Obama so often disparages as being “greedy”) have had fewer opportunities in which to invest and with which to expand their wealth – and de facto that has meant fewer employment opportunities for others.

In reality, the “one group” of people that has been most successfully sheltered from the “pain” that the President wants us all to “share” is government employees, themselves. And on that matter, President Obama told the Governors that "I don't think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified.”

Here are the facts of the matter. In the state of Wisconsin, state taxpayers pay nearly 100% of the costs of government employee retirement pension contributions, and well over 90% of government employee’s healthcare insurance costs. The uproar in that state has not been about Wisconsin indiscriminately firing government workers or cutting the workers’ benefits, but about the necessity of government employees taking more financial responsibility for their own retirement and healthcare. This, of course, led to Wisconsin school teachers storming the state capitol and chanting “tax the rich – don’t cut our benefits…”

But never mind the disparity between the economic realities of the private sector, where most of us pay for a good bit of our healthcare and contribute our own earnings to private retirement accounts, and the comforts of the government sector where tax payers foot the bill for these things. According to our President, holding government employees responsible for modest portions of their own retirement and healthcare costs is “villifying” and “denigrating,” Sacrifice ought not be shared among “them.”

And now, back to Obamacare. From 2007 (when his presidential campaign began) to March of 2010 (when the bill was signed into law), Mr. Obama insisted that his plan for national healthcare “reform” would expand healthcare access. And it would save the federal government from going bankrupt. And it would produce a higher quality of healthcare. And it would save state governments money. And it would “bend the healthcare cost curve downward.”

Today there is no evidence that any of these things are even remotely on their way to happening. Over half the states in our union (26) have filed law suits to prevent the implementation of Obamacare. And over 1000 private organizations have been granted waivers from having to comply with the mandates of Obamacare,

And note the disingenuous essence of the “waivers.” While the President created this healthcare monstrosity that is supped to be good for all Americans, his Administration has been busy “waiving” groups that can be politically helpful to the President himself.

The list of waiver recipients includes hundreds of local labor unions; McDonald’s restaurants (a company that employs over 30,000 hourly workers nationwide who earn less than $11,000 a year), Carlson Restaurants (owners of “TGI Fridays” – again lots of low wage workers); and the General Electric Corporation, whose C.E.O. Jeff Immelt was a large cash contributor to the President’s first presidential campaign. Interestingly, Mr. Immelt also received another nice political favor from our President when G.E. was granted a waiver from complying with federal environmental regulations surrounding a G.E. power plant project in California.

So the call for “shared sacrifice” only applies to those of us who are not politically helpful to the President. Government employees enjoy the benefit of President Obama seeking to shelter them from economic reality, while private groups that can help with the 2012 campaign are now blessed with Obamacare exemptions.

America must make a better choice in 2012, and put an end to this corruption.

 
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Obama Has A "Boot On The Throat" Of The Global Economy

By Austin Hill

The devastation of our coastline is the worst part of it.

But, oh, the painful lessons of the Gulf oil spill.

Let’s start with the “lessons” to which President Obama is currently being subjected. Hopefully Mr. Obama now understands that it is an “art” (and clearly not a “science”) for a President to know how, and when, and in what circumstances to intervene, and what stance to take with the challenges at hand.

Herbert Hoover and Franklin D Roosevelt responded inadequately to the “Great Depression.” John F. Kennedy mishandled the “Bay of Pigs” incident. Jimmy Carter bungled the Iranian Hostage crisis. And, even by President Obama’s own observations, his predecessor George W. Bush displayed “unconscionable ineptitude” in his response to Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, in order to know these things President Obama would need to have been at least somewhat of a student of American history, and I’m uncertain as to what his interest level is with that subject. But we can hope that over the past fifty-five days or so, somebody has told Mr. Obama about some of the struggles of his predecessors.

We can also hope that our President better understands his inability to simply “speak things into existence.” Powerful as he is, things aren’t always as President Obama clams them to be.

It was about a year ago that Mr. Obama delivered his famous address in Cairo, wherein he stipulated that American values and Muslim values are not in conflict with one another, but rather, are complimentary. Since then, the U.S. has sustained three terrorist incidents on domestic soil (the mass murders at Fort Hood Army base last November, the Christmas Day in-flight “underwear bomber” case over the skies of Detroit, and the plot to blow up Times Square a few weeks ago), all of which entailed adherents of one form or another of “radical Islam.”

Just because President Obama makes a moral equivalency of American culture and the culture of the Islamic world, doesn’t mean that such an equivalency exists. And just because the President and members of his Administration insist that “the system worked” or that they were “ready on day one” in the face of a national crisis, doesn’t mean that a crisis is being managed.

Yet, another lesson – for President Obama, and all the rest of us – is that our President’s disposition towards economic matters is, to put it simply, very destructive. President Obama seems to naively assume that wealth creation is essentially a guaranteed thing, and the big question surrounding the economy is how wealth will be distributed, and to whom. President Obama also seems to presume that, just as is the case with Islamic terrorism and oil spill clean-ups, he need only stipulate that something is true, and it will be so.

Consider, for example, President Obama’s proclamation on May 27th that he would seek a “ban” on all off-shore oil drilling. It is understandable why he felt the political need to say such a thing, given that the initial explosion that touched-off the “spill” had happened several weeks prior on April 20th. The President had a political need to do something decisive, so as to look like he was “taking charge” and “handling things.”

Yet the President fulfilling his political need could cost tens of thousands of jobs in the oil, and related industries, and could cost the U.S. economy – especially in the Gulf Coast states – hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues. Barack Obama’s attempt to “speak into existence” a solution to the oil spill crisis could end up exacerbating yet another looming crisis – unemployment and a sluggish economy – while doing nothing to contain the spill itself.

Similarly, President Obama seems either to be uncaring about the economic and diplomatic tensions he has created because of his, and his Administration’s disposition towards the British Petroleum Corporation. On May 3rd of this year, President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced in his now-famous Press Conference that Washington had a “boot on the throat” of B.P. This, apparently, was yet another attempt by the Obama Administration to appear as though they were “in control,” and “handling things.”

But as of last Thursday, June 10th, the left-wing MSNBC network had estimated that shares of B .P. had lost some $71 billion in value, in no small part because of the U.S. federal government’s threats on the corporation. This, in turn, has engendered a backlash against Obama in the U.K., especially from those whose retirement pensions are invested in B.P. stock.

This illustrates one of the greatest tragedies of the Obama presidency: our President’s harshest, most angry, most aggressive words are usually aimed at free enterprise. It’s difficult to imagine our President ever claiming to have a “boot on the throat” of Islamic terrorists, or Iran, or North Korea. Yet even dating back to his earliest days on the presidential campaign trail, he has often spoken words of vitriol towards American businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, car manufacturers, and – yes – oil companies.

The world is learning a very painful lesson – a lesson about Barack Obama.

Email: Austin Hill

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