Falls of deaf ears. All they see is a positive day in the market.

" I did not have sexual relations with that woman.....you know the rest."

Karl - great minds think alike. Enjoy.



The Toxic Assets We Elected

By George Will


http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | With the braying of 328 yahoos — members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate the legal earnings of a small, unpopular group — still reverberating, the Obama administration yesterday invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government. This latest plan to unfreeze the financial system came almost half a year after Congress shoveled $700 billion into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, $325 billion of which has been spent without purchasing any toxic assets.


TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."


Another embarrassing auditor of American misgovernment is China, whose premier has rightly noted the unsustainable trajectory of America's high-consumption, low-savings economy. He has also decorously but clearly expressed sensible fears that his country's $1 trillion-plus of dollar-denominated assets might be devalued by America choosing, as banana republics have done, to use inflation for partial repudiation of improvidently incurred debts.


From Mexico, America is receiving needed instruction about fundamental rights and the rule of law. A leading Democrat trying to abolish the right of workers to secret ballots in unionization elections is California's Rep. George Miller who, with 15 other Democrats, in 2001 admonished Mexico: "The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose." Last year, Mexico's highest court unanimously affirmed for Mexicans the right that Democrats want to strip from Americans.

Congress, with the approval of a president who has waxed censorious about his predecessor's imperious unilateralism in dealing with other nations, has shredded the North American Free Trade Agreement. Congress used the omnibus spending bill to abolish a program that was created as part of a protracted U.S. stall regarding compliance with its obligation to allow Mexican long-haul trucks on U.S. roads. The program, testing the safety of Mexican trucking, became an embarrassment because it found Mexican trucking at least as safe as U.S. trucking. Mexico has resorted to protectionism — tariffs on many U.S. goods — in retaliation for Democrats' protection of the Teamsters union.


NAFTA, like all treaties, is the "supreme law of the land." So says the Constitution. It is, however, a cobweb constraint on a Congress that, ignoring the document's unambiguous stipulations that the House shall be composed of members chosen "by the people of the several states," is voting to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state. Hence it supposedly can have a Democratic member of the House and, down the descending road, two Democratic senators. Congress rationalizes this anti-constitutional willfulness by citing the Constitution's language that each house shall be the judge of the "qualifications" of its members and that Congress can "exercise exclusive legislation" over the District. What, then, prevents Congress from giving House and Senate seats to Yellowstone National Park, over which Congress exercises exclusive legislation? Only Congress's capacity for embarrassment. So, not much.


The Federal Reserve, by long practice rather than law, has been insulated from politics in performing its fundamental function of preserving the currency as a store of value — preventing inflation. Now, however, by undertaking hitherto uncontemplated functions, it has become an appendage of the executive branch. The coming costs, in political manipulation of the money supply, of this forfeiture of independence could be steep.


Jefferson warned that "great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." But Democrats, who trace their party's pedigree to Jefferson, are contemplating using "reconciliation" — a legislative maneuver abused by both parties to severely truncate debate and limit the minority's right to resist — to impose vast and controversial changes on the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. When the Congressional Budget Office announced that the president's budget underestimates by $2.3 trillion the likely deficits over the next decade, his budget director, Peter Orszag, said: All long-range budget forecasts are notoriously unreliable — so rely on ours.


This is but a partial list of recent lawlessness, situational constitutionalism and institutional derangement. Such political malfeasance is pertinent to the financial meltdown as the administration, desperately seeking confidence, tries to stabilize the economy by vastly enlarging government's role in it

Great ticker. You've pretty much done all the work for them. Now they have what they need to throw BB in the slammer.

Could this be outright treason?

Muscleknight wrote..

Could this be outright treason?

The constitutional explicitly defines treason much more narrowly than the popular usage of the word.

Quote:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Bernanke would argue that Benedict Arnold was misunderstood.

I've got no trouble labeling the GLOBALLY BENT financial elites residing in America as enemies of the USA when push comes to shove. Indict them as traitors, convict them and throw away the keys.

Wisc-xc wrote..

I've got no trouble labeling the GLOBALLY BENT financial elites residing in America as enemies of the USA when push comes to shove. Indict them as traitors, convict them and throw away the keys.

You have to be careful how far you stretch definitions for words like "treason". Once you open the door for "enemies" to be defined outside the context of a bona fide war, just imagine what these *******s will do with it: http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/ak....

I'm all for letting the courts sort out the particulars. At any rate we're dealing with a very narrow class of movers and shakers who wield uncommon POWER. Sorting them out isn't hard. TT, HP and BB are at the top of my list of transgressors.

Just remember that Article Three, Section 3 was written in blood.

I remember when $30 Billion was a lot of money. Now, the Fed and Treasury do $1 Trillion pump jobs.

Nice idea Gen but this would be an admission by the powers that be that they were asleep at the switch.

It's never going to happen.

We can't even get the government to prosecute the Wall Street crooks. Calling on them to prosecute the Fed Chairman is like pi***** into a 125mph headwind. You would see Frankenstein haul Dracula into the high court of Translyvania for being a danger to society before the government would go after Bernanke. This bad movie won't end with prosecutions. That's for damned sure.

Relax we got $80M back in bonuses from AIG.

The sheep can now go back to grazing.

I am completely down with the **** moving BACK to the Treasury.

That way, when the govt. blows up (as it WILL), the DOLLAR remains secure.

I hear the talk about unconstitutional fed actions, etc, but am curious why nobody is challenging this in the court system which is the only thing that will change any of this.

Have people filed suits against the actions?

Alchemist, look up a thing called "standing".

Its not as simple as it appears.

Guess you'd have to go off of taxpayer standing, which is harder than it sounds like you said:

Taxpayer standing

Taxpayer standing is the concept that any person who pays taxes should have standing to file a lawsuit against the taxing body if that body allocates funds in a way that the taxpayer feels is improper. The United States Supreme Court has held that taxpayer standing is not a sufficient basis for standing against the United States government, unless the government has allocated funds in a way that violates a specific prohibition found in the Constitution.[18] The Court has consistently found that the conduct of the federal government is too far removed from individual taxpayer returns for any injury to the taxpayer to be traced to the use of tax revenues.

Yeah, it's nice to be disenfranchised.

While I understand that you would get all kinds of frivolous lawsuits, maybe the real problem is this: the .gov is not adhering to the basics as specified under the Constitution. If they were, we'd never need to sue.

Well, I spent the afternoon educating a couple of Congressmen's financial advisors on what just happened here.

What would you say if I told you that they had NO IDEA this occurred last night - they had not heard about the Federal Reserve/Treasury's little stunt here?

Wouldn't shock me in the least.

What would you say if I got one person on each side of the aisle rather.....upset....no....outraged.....no.....I think they need medication now.

I'll believe it when I see a special prosecutor appointed, and not one second before.

Until I call bull**** on all claims of "outrage" in Congress.