jobs - ACTION - Command Center

Unemployment 7.8% October Surprise

Posted by Michael J. Fell on October 5, 2012 at 1:32pm

After having his hat handed to him and being shown the door by his opponent in a debate performance so poor for Barack Obama that his only recourse was to bully Mitt Romney on the campaign stump the next day, what is a candidate hoping for re-election supposed to do to change the momentum?

Have the Labor Department revise previous unemployment numbers to show that the economy created 86,000 more jobs during the summer than first reported, then conclude that as a result, the unemployment rate has actually fallen below 8.1 per cent in for the first time in almost four years.

What a coincidence. Just like magic.

The Labor Department reported the economy had added 114,000 jobs in September. That is not fast enough to keep pace with population growth, much less reduce the rate of unemployment.

If growth in the human population is creating new workers faster than economic growth is creating new jobs, how is it possible that the unemployment number went down?

And why did it unexpectedly happen in a report issued immediately after an Obama debate performance that left him on the ropes and displayed his weakness to a television audience of 67.2 million?

How about that? A sudden, unexpected, unexplainable change in the jobs numbers making them more favorable to Obama’s re-election aspirations. And it just so happens to occur at a crucial moment in the presidential race.

Mysterious.

The fact is so many people have had such little success finding work they have fallen out the unemployment data pool. How does that mean jobs outlooks are improving? They have been out of work for so long they have reached their 99 week unemployment insurance benefits limit and thus are no longer counted by the Labor Department.

This artificially lowers the unemployment statistics and creates a false impression that “progress” is being made in the single most important number to struggling unemployed Americans.

Can you say false “Hope”?

Of course, this does not deter the “re-elect Barack Obama at any and all costs” members of the “progressive” Party Pravda.

What was their reaction?

Yahoo News headline: “US jobless rate falls to 7.8 pct., 44-month low.” The sub-headline: “US unemployment rate falls to 7.8 pct., lowest since 2009, giving Obama a potential boost.”

First paragraph: “The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month, dropping below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years and giving President Barack Obama a potential boost with the election a month away.”

If this is not intended solely to make Obama look good at precisely the moment his campaign hits rock bottom, then Hugh Hefner is a virgin.

http://mjfellright.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/unemployment-7-8-october-surprise/

Spain’s Present is Obama America’s Future

Posted by Michael J. Fell on September 4, 2012 at 10:46pm

Although Spain is not as bad off as Greece, a look at Spain’s current economic reality reveals the future of America under four more years of Barrack Obama.

Despite European commitments to inject up to 100 billion euros into Spain’s faltering banking system, bank withdrawals have accelerated. During July, doubts about Spain’s financial system caused Spaniards to withdraw a record $94 billion from their banks. That amounts to 7 percent of Spain’s total domestic economic output.

Capital flight is beginning to include educated entrepreneurs who are fed up with scant job opportunities in a country with a 25 percent unemployment rate. Statistics show that in a twelve month span 30,000 Spaniards have registered to work in Britain, an increase of 25 percent over 2011 levels.

Since taking office in 2009, Obama has aggressively promoted a “green energy” agenda modeled after the one pursued by Spain. The assumption that pursuing the same agenda will bring about different results is based on no known empirical data.

If American voters are willing to accept 25 percent unemployment as the new normal and can live with a combination of major investment capital flight and disappearing employment opportunities, then Obama’s re-election is a foregone conclusion.

However, if Americans prefer to see a resurgence of American economic might through development of its domestic energy resources, and the millions of jobs that activity will create, then Obama’s days in the White House are numbered.

http://mjfellright.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/spains-present-is-obama-americas-future/

America Needs a New Sheriff

Posted by Michael J. Fell on August 23, 2012 at 2:03pm

The American labor market showed few signs of new life in the latest jobs report. First time filings for unemployment benefits rose again last week to a one-month high. Claims rose for a second week, by 4,000 for the period ended Aug. 18. After economists had predicted 365,000 new claims, the number climbed to 372,000.

The administration continues to cite the European debt crisis and economic slowdowns in Asia as deterrents to investment.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-23/jobless-claims-in-u-s-climb-for-second-week-to-one-month-high.html

It is far easier to blame the global economy than to admit that this administration’s energy policies are killing jobs in America. That this administration poked their thumbs into the eyes of millions of unemployed Americans when they laughed about “shovel-ready” projects not being as “shovel-ready” as advertised. It is not the least bit funny to Americans when they discover that this administration does not know what they are doing, especially after they spent trillions of taxpayer dollars on plans that did not work and redistributed hundreds of billions of the taxpayer’s wealth to rich “progressive” bundlers for the administration’s campaign machine.

Across the country, Americans have had enough of this administration’s policies, starting with those that kill jobs; like the healthcare reform law that levies huge tax hikes on all Americans and imposes additional burdens on businesses. Americans are done with the policies that are killing America’s energy industry, like stifling EPA regulations that make it impossible to build new petroleum refineries or use coal powered energy. Americans can no longer tolerate a lack of policy; a lack that precludes any hope for recovery in the housing market. Many small businesses will find it difficult if not impossible to exist, much less expand and hire while banking regulations imposed during this administration make it virtually impossible for banks to loan them money.

Why does America continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on foreign energy rather than developing the abundant energy in its own country? Why not keep those hundreds of billions of dollars at home in its own sluggish, cash strapped economy?

At a time when tens of millions of Americans are struggling to find work and its economy is starving for liquid capital, why does this administration refuse to take advantage of America’s wealth of natural resources? Why does this administration continue to prevent drilling for oil and natural gas or mining for coal? Why not put Americans back to work building refineries and power plants? Why not have Americans delivering gas, coal and natural gas to American consumers?

How many peripheral jobs will be created by that process?

For every new oil well, power plant, refinery or mine there will be new roads built, followed by restaurants, stores, housing, schools and places of worship. All generated by the only force capable of powering America’s economic recovery: the private sector.

The key to economic recovery in America is a shift in policy. The only way for that shift to happen is to alter the governing philosophy. For that alteration to take place, America must elect a new sheriff and new deputies.

http://mjfellright.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/america-needs-a-new-sheriff/

NextEra Energy: Third Largest Power Company in the World is the Third Largest Recipient of DOE Risky Loans; CEO Sits on President Obama's Jobs Council

Posted by Christine Lakatos on August 18, 2012 at 9:00am


Lewis Hay, III and President Obama NexEra Energy Viewpoints

Through this special series on green-energy crony-corruption, we’ve been highlighting specific examples of green-energy loan guarantees and grants. What connects each of these cases is that they received fast-tracked approval from the Department of Interior (DOI) for their projects. Of course, they also have many other dots that connect, such as key players with White House visits, raising funds for Democratic campaigns, and serving within government agencies such as the Department of Energy (DOE) or as an appointed member to President Obama’s Jobs Council.

Now we come to the last of our “special seven” series. Like those before it, it contains many inside players and funding from various “stimulus” government programs. While Lewis Hay (the CEO of NextEra Energy) with his White House involvement and friendship with former Florida Governor Charlie Crist make for some juicy details in the NextEra story, we’ll begin with a brief background that will help put this next piece of the green-energy crony-corruption scandal in perspective.

NextEra Energy, Inc. is one of the oldest, third largest, and arguably one of the most solid power companies in the world, with “2011 revenues [that] totaled more than $15.3 billion.” It is estimated by Forbes, that CEO “Hay earns nearly $10 million in total compensation from NextEra.”

NextEra Energy Inc. has two primary subsidiaries:

Florida Power & Light is the third largest electricity producer in the US (about which a September 2009 report states: “it's a political dynamo, making millions in political contributions and lobbying assiduously to achieve its goals”).
NextEra Energy Resources is the largest generator of energy from sun and wind resources in North America. The company also has the third largest fleet (8) of nuclear powered electricity generating plants in the United States.

Money

With its wealth and widespread influence, the DOE gave this huge energy conglomerate nearly $2 billion of taxpayer money, which includes the two risky projects listed below, plus hundreds of millions more in various stimulus grants.

Desert Sunlight: $1.2 billion

In September 2011, the DOE approved a $1.2 billion loan guarantee for the junk-rated Desert Sunlight project in California. A day after the loan was approved, First Solar, the project developer/owner sold Desert Sunlight to NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, the competitive energy subsidiary of NextEra Energy, Inc. and GE Energy Financial Services. Both CEO's are on President Obama's Job Council: Lewis Hay of NextEra Energy and Jeffrey Immelt of GE. NOTE (and correction from the Townhal.com column): GE is another top Obama donor, donating $529,855 to his 2008 campaign, while they have raked in more than $3 billion of stimulus money, and counting.

Genesis Solar Project: $681.6 million

But as we reported in the beginning of this series, the Desert Sunlight Project is not the only large DOE “risky” loan that NextEra secured. NextEra Energy Resources also received $681.6 million from the DOE for its Genesis Solar project in Blythe, California. This was one of the few DOE 1705 loans that were not considered junk rated, as S&P placed it at a “lower medium grade.”

Environment

Remember that the common denominator of these “special seven” projects was a “fast-tracked DOI approval?” The policy has come back to bite the projects.

According to the Los Angeles Times (LAT), “The $1-billion Genesis Solar Energy Project has been expedited by state and federal regulatory agencies that are eager to demonstrate that the nation can build solar plants quickly to ease dependence on fossil fuels and curb global warming. Instead, the project is providing a cautionary example of how the rush to harness solar power in the desert can go wrong—possibly costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and dealing an embarrassing blow to the Obama administration's solar initiative.”

The problem is the “expedited” process may endanger the whole project. The House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform’s March 20, 2012 report says, “To expedite site approval, NextEra opted for a less thorough process.” As a result, the site “encroached on the habitat of the endangered kit foxes.” NextEra had to move the foxes prior to grading the site. “Ultimately, seven foxes died from NextEra’s removal process.”

Additionally, there have been concerns of desert tortoises and a “prehistoric human settlement.”

But warring factions within the environmental movement also plague the NextEra Genesis Solar project.

A small environmental group, the Wildlands Conservancy, raised $45 million to preserve 600,000 acres of the Mojave Desert—with the intent that it would be protected forever. The LAT reports, the Wildlands Conservancy bought the land and deeded it to the federal government only to have 50,000 acres of that bequest opened up for solar development. April Sall, the organization’s conservation director says, the group is “watching this big conservation legacy practically go under a bulldozer.” Sall’s group and others are feeling “burned by the rush to build solar projects.”

The small environmental groups are trying to fight utility-scale solar projects while the big national groups, such as the Sierra Club, have “scolded” some of the local chapters for opposing the projects. A national office directive instructed local chapters to “fall in line.”

Michael O'Sullivan, senior vice president of development for NextEra Energy Resources, says that “the problems threaten the entire project” and “the project could become uneconomical.”

If that were to happen, the LAT explains, “80% of the project's outstanding loans would be covered by the federal government, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management would begin shopping for another renewable energy company that was interested in leasing the property. If there were no takers, the scarred land would be restored with reclamation bond funds.”

Smart-Grid and Wind Energy Grants

In October 2009, Florida Power & Light (FLP) was awarded the maximum grant amount of $200 milllion for Energy Smart Florida. Interestingly, this is connected to Silver Spring Networks, one of Kleiner Perkins shining green companies, where John Doerr (another jobs council member that was influential in what went into the energy-sector of the 2009-stimulus) and Al Gore are partners, of which their 2008 $75 million investment had scored over $700 million.

The DOE started dishing out billions from the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program (part of the stimulus plan) in August 2009 and awarded select utility companies for particular smart-grid projects––close to sixty percent of Silver Spring “customers” were winners.

In fact, Florida Power and Light, Silver Spring, General Electric, and a few others have joined forces on a Smart Grid Miami project, which was announced in 2009.

(Note: if you are not familiar with the Smart Grid, Brian Sussman’s book Eco-Tyranny offers an overview which includes this: “President Obama cleverly sold it like this: ‘We want to invest in the next-generation of high-speed wireless coverage for 98 percent of Americans. This isn’t just about a faster Internet or being able to friend someone on Facebook. It’s about connecting every corner of America to the digital age.’ The digital age Obama spoke of is the age of Big Brother monitoring your carbon footprint. The Smart Grid’s interactive broadband capability will enable your home’s PCT, HAN, and smart meter to be connected and communicating with your utility provider. Once complete, the utility company will be your government-sponsored Big Brother, constantly monitoring and regulating your carbon footprint. With a bureaucratic keystroke any electrical device in your home could be selectively turned off—or on—without your approval.”)

Also, you'll be “blown away” by the billions ($4.4) of “wind energy grants” that blew out of the stimulus package back in February 2010. General Electric is connected to at least 26% of these wind energy grants as the “Turbine Manufacturer.” NextEra is the “project owner” and the recipient of a $99.9 million grant for a wind project in Colorado.

Politics

So, NextEra Energy, a multi-billion dollar company with a CEO who’s paid multi-millions, gets government grants and loan guarantees worth billions for risky projects that you and I wouldn’t have voluntarily invested in that even the environmentalists can’t agree on.

Despite the fact that NextEra CEO Hay was actually a “major political contributor to Sen. John McCain,” Hay quickly learned which side his bread was buttered on. (FPL employees and PACs have been known to give generously to both sides including $18,800 to Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign.) On October 8, 2009, Hay dined at the White House in an intimate lunch “with President Barack Obama and a handful of other Fortune 500 executives.” Hay reportedly “boasted to the president about FPL Group’s environmental achievements and Florida Power & Light’s plans to open the nation’s largest solar power plant.” He also “discussed his belief that forward-looking, clean-energy policies are vital to America’s economic recovery and FPL Group’s strong support for legislation to combat global warming and strengthen America’s energy security.”

The opportunity to grandstand obviously worked. Later, in the same month, Hay’s FPL’s DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Aracadia, Florida, provided Obama with the perfect backdrop for his announcement about the “nation’s biggest investment in clean energy.” The press release from the White House said: “President Barack Obama today announced the largest single energy grid modernization investment in U.S. history, funding a broad range of technologies that will spur the nation’s transition to a smarter, stronger, more efficient and reliable electric system. … The $3.4 billion in Smart Grid Investment Grant awards are part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.”

While the announcement regarding the smart-grid grant disbursement was like “Christmas morning” for the 100 recipients, FPL received the maximum $200 million grant, as previously addressed, “to buy 2.6 million new smart utility meters to be placed in homes over the next two years and invest in other technology aimed at cutting energy costs.” And those risky loan guarantees issued to NextEra for the Desert Sunlight and Genesis Solar projects were approved after Obama’s “stimulus PR swing” appearance at FPL’s DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center.

Hay and FPL have a long history of political contributions and have a “cozy relationship” with career politician former Governor Charlie Crist—Republican turned Independent to run against Marco Rubio in 2010, only to lose. In June 2009, FPL and its executives donated more than $36,000 to Crist’s Senate campaign, and Hay was an invited guest at Crist’s December 2008 wedding. While, we don’t know if Hay actually attended the Crist wedding, we do know that he donated to Marco Rubio’s 2010 campaign––what a difference two years make.

Thomas Saporito, an energy consultant and former FPL employee is quoted as saying: “It certainly appears to me that Gov. Crist and certain PSC Commissioners have a very cozy relationship with FPL at a time when FPL is seeking an unprecedented $1.3-billion dollar rate increase.” Crist announced his opposition to FPL's rate hike but objections were limited to a press release and a few comments to reporters.

President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness

Keeping with the “cozy relationship” model of doing business, Hay joined wealthy Democratic donors on Obama’s Jobs Council in 2011—of which at least five members have direct ties (two indirect) to firms that were awarded billions of clean-energy stimulus money and four are confirmed Obama donors.

A Jobs Council by the way –– those advising President Obama on how to create jobs and grow the economy –– "is full of deep-pocket Democratic donors and high-profile financiers of Obama’s re-election campaign," as reported by ABC News in October 2011.

Since the creation of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the members have pushed for renewable energy subsidies. In October 2011, these Obama advisors who’ve financially benefited from green energy projects—such as Hay—issued a report calling for among other things, “a new federal financing program to attract private investment for clean energy projects via loan guarantees and other tools.”

Hay is just one of the many Council members with green energy connections. Citigroup’s Richard Parsons with ties to SolarReserve, as well as Penny Pritker, who wears many liberal hats, including those close to the president. Pritker brings along her relationship to the $465 million DOE ATVM loan that went to Telsa Motors, which also has quite a few other interesting ties, like Steve Westly, Obama bundler and DOE Advisor. We also find GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and its $3 billion of green-government subsidies, as well as John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, who has Al Gore as a partner –– where as of 2010 we find that more than fifty percent of its Greentech Portfolio had received money from the energy-sector of the stimulus package and through other government programs approved by the Obama administration.

These Jobs Council members, also known for their “job outsourcing” –– and others like DOE Insiders and the Stimulus Authors –– who’ve benefited from the deal making, deserve a more thorough (forthcoming) exposé. We’ll call it “Spreading the Wealth to Obama’s Wealthy Jobs Council Members.”

Author’s note: Thanks to Christine Lakatos, the Green Corruption blogger, for research assistance. Unless project-specific funding is raised, this will be the last in the green-energy crony-corruption series.

============

Published at Townhall.com August 17, 2012 as Third Largest Power Company in the World is the Third Largest Recipient of Risky Loans -- the final installment of our Special Seven Series, whereas:

“Seven solar (two of which are geothermal) companies received fast-tracked approval by the Department of the Interior to lease federal lands in a no-bid process: Abengoa Solar, BrightSource Energy, First Solar, Nevada Geothermal Power, NextEra Energy Resources, Ormat Nevada, and SolarReserve,” as reported by the Washington Free Beacon in April 2012.
Each of these seven companies received billions of DOE funds under the 1705 loan program as well as renewable energy grants from the Treasury Department—despite “junk bond” status.
Christine's research of the DOE's 1705 Loan Guarantee Program, which she reported on in April 2012 –– Department of Energy “Junk Loans” and Cronyism, noted that 90 percent have "meaningful" ties to President Obama and other high-ranking Democrats –– or both.
We found these Special Seven on that DOE "junk" bond portfolio, of which all have connections to President Obama and other high-ranking Democrats like Senator Harry Reid that has ties to at least four.
Moreover, these 90 percent have plenty of Obama and Democrat "cronies" in the mix: bundlers, donors, investors, operatives, lobbyists, aides, buddies, relatives, and so on. Throw in some White House appointees, staffers as wells as DOE Insiders (former and present), and you've got yourself a tangled web of "green" cronyism and corruption.

That said, there is much more to expose...

“Romney Hood”? Obama Campaign Showing Signs of Idiocy

Posted by Bob Russell on August 14, 2012 at 8:44pm

I find the recent Obama re-election campaign tactic of referring to Mitt Romney as “Romney Hood” rather interesting. Obama and his cronies are actually complimenting Romney, seemingly without being smart enough to realize it. If idiocy isn’t the case they are counting on We the People being too stupid to know our fables. I am a long way from being a supporter of Mitt Romney but this isn’t about Romney, it is about the Muslim-in-Chief sitting in the White House and his associates.

Obama Attacks our College Youth

Posted by Marcia Wood on April 24, 2012 at 8:26pm

Obama Pretends to understand their struggles with college loans because he’s walked in their shoes

Columbia Party Boy

No Student Loans

Free Free Free

Illegal Aliens get free ride

Remember

It’s the Jobs “STUPID”

Millions of graduates and no jobs

Our kids could pay their loans if they had a decent job

Rajjpuut's Folly: Must You Change the Nation's Direction?

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on December 17, 2011 at 8:30am

Statistical Picture Much Grimmer

Than Average American Appreciates

Every body knows the economy is bad, but a look at today's statistics paints a far more sobering picture than you probably realize . . . .

The Definitely BAD NEWS:

1. U.S. national debt increase averaged $4+ Billion daily during President Obama’s first three years. IF the government stopped spending and began repaying immediately @ $1-per-second; it would need 479,000+ years** eliminating current debt . . . 2011’s budget deficit of $1.29 TRillion was the third consecutive year spending deficits exceeded $1 TRillion.

2. 19% of all American men 25-34 years old now live with their parents. 14% of Americans receive food stamps including 25% of American children. 37% of all U.S. households led by someone 35 or under have a net worth of $0.00, or less; 46% of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement; 29% of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved.

3. For every dollar China spends on American goods, we spend $4 on Chinese products; China just slapped a new 22% tax on all U.S. products (in a phrase: China “owns our Treasury Department”).

4. Without recent changes defining “Americans wanting jobs” today’s unemployment would be 11%. All Americans out of work, or under-employed (Bureau of Labor’s “SGS Alternate employment” while U-6 unemployment is 15.3%) is now 22+%. 74% of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire new workers in 2012, citing bad economic times; increased government regulations and health care uncertainties.

MIXED News:

1. New home construction is at an all-time low in 2011, but older home prices now aren't dropping nearly so fast.

2. Because of foreclosure sales: the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6,000. Great for buyers.

3. More Americans will now be able to afford homes, but the home price slide will NOT stop. The government’s foreclosure regulations retard average home sale rates by 21 months or more. No real estate bottom in sight for three years.

Ya'all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

** Note: math required is . . . 3,600 seconds per hour@ 24 hours per day = 86,400 seconds per day @ 365.25 days per year = 31,557,600 seconds per year over 479,000+ years = $15.125 TRillion national debt (as of today, 12/17/2011) paid off @$1 per second.

Healhy Workers + Healthy Managers = Healthy Profits for All

Posted by Terry Alan Jones on October 17, 2011 at 7:09am

I am submitting a blog that I wrote on an occurrence I suffered while working for a large regional bank.After 3 years of anger, hurt, blame...and seeing how our county is not so sharply divided after the call out from our President "tax the rich", I knew riots would erupt. This president and His administration and his cronies have set back and laughed as they have been apart of division. Remember the birth certificate...it divided the nation, they laughed....remember the debt ceiling crisis...his Friday speech? Everyone did call into their presentative..but, they knew there was already a divided state. Remember the Joplin tornado? Where were Obama and His wife??? Driving beer with his new found relatives. on our money. And now, oh so typical...the Jobs Bill....But see, my belief is that we are still...for a while...ONE NATION UNDER GOD....and He will get the last laugh. For me and my household. I will no longer participate in the hate...but, only unity of one America that is free. As a great leader Martin Luther King said...'FREE AT LAST...FREE AT LAST....GOD ALMIGHTY FREE AT LAST". I just pray and plead with Martin today, please have those words meant for me too Mr. King...I'm white but about to lose my freedom to this socialist dictator. And then the words of our great President Kennedy..."Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". Mr. President, I tried to do that with www.spark-local.com and with the Spark-Local Stimulus where we as a community should take care of each other.For all those companies who want to be registered on a national directory as "MADE IN AMERICA" I'm here for you and I am not going to waste your money...I will promote the transparency heart out of you...I will make you shine and show that capitalism works at the lowest level of our economy...I promote you and will not allow your ad to sit and gather dust. You are MADE IN AMERCIA and I am proud of you...I believe as a business owner that you have to hire people and treat people with respect and dignity. I came up with my own internal motto: HEALTHY WORKERS + HEALTHY MANAGERS = HEALTHY PROFITS. I hope to never treat people the way I was treated...never...My Blog for the archives…it is time to move on and help a great cause…The Tea PartyTJs Integrity Unlimited ListMONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2010We Operate With IntegrityWe Operate With IntegrityThese words, ‘We Operate With Integrity’ has stayed with me since the first incident on February 13, 2009 when in the office of my manager and in one of our so called “one on ones”, I was delivered a set of performance sentences from another department that were clearly not mine. And the one simple fact was, I was not that engaged with the department that my manager said they were from.So, the reader may say, “So what?” why make a big deal about it? Managers lie all the time, there is nothing you can do. But, I kept telling myself, “yea, but, the companies motto is “We Operate with Integrity”. I could not let it go. But, now, at the close of 2010, with a restraining ordered over my head from the company, without insurance, without a job and the future looking bleak after an interview with a temporary service yesterday requiring that I obtain 3 references from this institution, I ask myself “Why Terry, why would you ever have thought this bank would operate with Integrity? Why did you just keep telling yourself that in the end, truth would come out….why is such an idiot?”It has been hell for me since that day and also for my family and friends. By not letting go of just trying to get the simple question answered, “Where did these sentences come from?”, I obsessed night and day with only the end result of losing about everything that that I held near and dear. Family has stayed with me, certain others in my fellowship, and also those close friends who have only showed me unconditional love has stood with me through this whole ordeal. I have met some incredible people of whom I refer to as the heroes of work place bullying. Because it is an epidemic that is sweeping the workplace. As my EEOC investigator told me when I found out the truth about where the sentences came from, he said, “So what – they can do what they want?” Wow…did that ever hit like a ton of bricks.I filled an internal grievance and here is what happened’ me, alone had to sit with; manager, manager, HR Rep; higher level manager, HR Rep; me alone with the department manager of where the accusations came from – she is the only one who told the truth; proceeded to the highest level management and HR rep; after I signed off on the grievance, my management, both females, found another female to engage and the next thing I knew – I had a written warning with one of the statements was that I “threatened them”. This was enough for the EEOC to file a charge against the bank for reverse discrimination. Then, again, alone, because I did not have the funds for a lawyer, my meetings proceeded with me, alone, with; HR rep, internal lawyer, EEOC moderator, then, surprisingly enough on the day of reentry – SURPRISE, the bank had brought in outside counsel. So, being and knowing that I did not have council, it was me + HR Rep + internal lawyer + outside council and the ever so caring EEOC moderator. By that time, you would have thought I would have got the clue that this bank has no idea what it means to Operate with Integrity. It was apparent that they wanted to sweep everything under the rug. But, although they were just sentences, it was a matter of “fraud”. All I could think about was, what else are they sweeping under the rug?Well, the lawyers said that my management was afraid I was going to “harm them”, so, I would not be allowed back in. They were not going to try to find me another position; they wanted me and my crusade for justice out of their sight. So, after having no council I signed a bogus agreement and left, but, before leaving, I said the following words directed to the HR rep…..”You know, this type of harassment by these female managers was demonstrated by two other male employees before me, and you knew about it. One of the males was so beaten down that you did not know what he would do with himself, the other was so angry from the treatment, you did not know what he would do…I continued and said; “There will be one, it is not me because I am out of there, but one that will be pushed in the corner and he/she will have no where to turn and he will either harm themselves, their families, their management or go as far as harming their team.” She just looked at me…no care for what I said. Just – “Get Out!”This should have been the final chapter and all would have been well. But, after the time lapse for the severance ran out, I still had no job and the bank denied my unemployment causing hardship for 9 weeks until it was restated. I went into foreclosure, on the brink of bankruptcy, had two deaths, one being a close friend and then a sister that I will never forget…and after some desperate attempts, a mistake by me for some type of justice from this bank. Two days after my sister’s death, I received two restarting orders from the bank. The two were to appear in a Kansas court and then a Missouri court. Oh how we operate with integrity.I have struggled in closing out this chapter. I tried to start a blog on the concept that Jesus says to turn the other cheek and titled it “HEALTHY WORKERS + HEALTHY MANGERS = HEALTHY PROFITS” and then, I wanted to start a blog that demonstrated his anger when he overthrew the money changers tables in the temple and it was called’ “BUSTING THE BULLIES BALLS”, where, I wanted to flat out name the company so that customers who might trade with them would take a second thought as to if they wanted to do business with them or not.In both cases, I had to ask myself….”Terry, are you operating with integrity?” And sadly, no….I was not. I wanted revenge and still have that little seed in me. But, I am a man of faith who struggles with waiting on God. For God says; “vengeance is mine….I will repay.”2011 shows some hope and light in my life. I am trying to obtain a masters certification in entrepreneurship and open up my own business. I am hoping to help out with the healthy workplace bill by passing it in all states for the protection of employees in AT WILL STATES. And other ventures to keep me occupied, happy and productive. I doubt if I regain the confidence of friends that feel to the wayside but I tell you what, I will stay loyal to those who stayed loyal to me, because, I think I found the core of those who truly “Operate with Integrity”, and sometimes, we miss it. This blog is dedicated to the ones who stay loyal through the hell that others who are being bullied to the state of exhaustion. This blog is to say thank you for staying in their with all the obsessions, tears and fears. Thank you for you truly is the ones I call friends….you truly show what Operating with Integrity is all about. It is sad that companies around this nation cannot learn by your example. But regardless…..thank you for by your example, I will go forward with my business and with all prayers behind me….always strive - to Operate with IntegrityPosted by Terry Alan Jones at 8:48 AMEmail This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz4 comments:Terry Alan Jones said...As I start 2011, I must forgive and release all the past and those who have caused me pain and anguish and to ask forgiveness of doing the same. The one thing I will always miss from the whole event, is the laughter I shared with my management at one time in one place where joy filled the air.I do not want to perpetrate division, strife or contention, but, as we all know the pressures in the work place are forever increasing and most have forgotten the old days of going to work, be respected and to respect others and to always strive to be honest and true.With this said, it is time for the American Worker to speak up concerning the conditions of the workplace and to stand up for safety. I am hoping that we will never hear the words from an EEOC Investigator stating that employers in At Will States "can do whatever they want". And for companies who proclaim safety and integrity stay true to their word.This blog has one purpose and that purpose is to gather a list from workers and managers to come up with what I call TJs Integrity Unlimited List. It is a simple list of the voice of the American Workers asking for safety, honor and respect in the work place.Let's take our voice to the streets - for it is time to stand up and declare both employees and managers - We Operate with Integrity - We care for one another and support one another in all our affairs at work.Bring back honor in the work place. Bring back respect for the individual. Believe it - we can all care for one another in the days and years ahead.December 31, 2010 7:03 AMAnonymous said...1. A supervisor or manager has the right or freedom to falsify an employees performance report in writing or verbally. This is considered fraud in the court of law and other parties knowing of its existence are considered to be “scinters and it is illegal.2. A supervisor or manager has the right or freedom to harass an employee due to a personal dislike or trust. The employee was hired for the job and should be treated respectfully as such.3. Supervisors/Managers should themselves be evaluated for incompetence’s and overload stress levels that are being expressed through to employees. HR should take some responsibility of seeing both sides.January 4, 2011 4:53 AMAnonymous said...HR is strictly for the company, making sure employees know company 'policy.' They can be friendly so long as employee comes to work, does work, and goes home. Which, ideally, is how work is supposed to go.HR does not like complaints. Bullies know this, they push and push 'the buttons' if they wish to. The only option is to 'take it.' LAUGH IT ALL OFF...AND NEVER DO MORE than is specifically asked. (that's how to get along in today's work culture) GOOD is NOT RESPECTED.As long as you don't fall for it by stating any political, social viewpoints. Never give an opinion to any other statements of others and NEVER sit in the lunchroom where 'the gossipers' sit and hope to twist your words; conversing with them, you will 'make it' in work.WORK STINKS. GOVERNMENT CONTROLS made it this way. GOD is being PUSHED OUT in favor of subjective morality. (PROTECT certain types only)Nothing to do but wait it outJanuary 4, 2011 11:25 AMTerry Alan Jones said...I had a thought - what if the AT-WILL (common law) was abolished and replaced with theHEALTHYWORKPLACEBILL.ORGIn its generic form it gives equal rights to both employer and employee providing hopefully at some point:Healthy Workers + Healthy Managers = Healthy ProfitsJanuary 20, 2011 4:55 AM

Rajjpuut's Folly: New Obama Green Jobs Scandal Even Dwarfs Solyndra’s Ugliness

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on October 12, 2011 at 5:00am

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46761

“The path to a clean energy economy starts here, in places like SunPower’s research and development facility . . . .” Ken Salazar Interior Secretary

“How exactly did SunPower qualify to receive a $1.28 Billion loan when it was operating $820 million in the red; announcing three weeks before the loan that it was moving a huge amount of its jobs south of the border to Mexicali, Mexico; its stock has lost 94% of its value in the last four years; and it was being attacked by numerous shareholder lawsuits? How did such an obvious lemon receive more than twice the government handouts that Solyndra received?”

SunPower Stock Plummets 94%

Green Co. Gets $1.2 Billion Loan

Each SunPower Permanent Job

Costs$80 Million

As you might remember, the Obama administration’s green-tech jobs initiative was supposed to create five million brand new jobs. As you also might know, for almost three years Rajjpuut has been comparing Obama’s idea for America to the green jobs program in Spain that took that country’s economy from #1 in Europe at 4% unemployment to Europe’s second worst in 2010 with a whopping 22% unemployment after a dozen years. In that Spanish study each subsidized green job cost 2.2 real jobs lost from the real economy (five million Obama green jobs would translate to losing eleven million real jobs) and only one Spanish green job in ten proved permanent (translating to only half a million permanent green jobs created in America).

You’ve also recently heard about Solyndra Corp. getting $535 million in loan guarantees before going bankrupt last month putting 1,100 workers out on the streets; as well as hearing about a grand total of 3,500 green jobs created in almost three years at an average cost of almost $11 million per job. Well, the embarrassment for Obama’s green tech initiative is growing worse by the day: the new Obamanation and corruption, like Solyndra, also originates in California with another solar panel company SunPower Corp. (SPWR-NASDAQ).

How exactly did SunPower qualify to receive a $1.28 Billion loan when it was operating $820 million in the red; announcing three weeks before the loan that it was moving a huge amount of its jobs south of the border to Mexicali, Mexico; its stock has lost 94% of its value in the last four years; and it was being attacked by numerous shareholder lawsuits? How did such an obvious lemon receive more than twice the government handouts that Solyndra received?

SunPower’s planned photovoltaic “electricity ranch” project was so deep in the hole that it had announced it was already building its new panel manufacturing plant in Mexicali when the loan came through. Creating jobs in Mexico? When did that become worth nearly $1.3 Billion in government help? Three key voices put SunPower into the “winner” category for Obama’s energy department and got them the loan: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; California Democratic Representative George R. Miller III; and SunPower lobbyist George Miller IV, the Representative’s son.

SunPower, operating in a refitted Ford plant in Richmond, CA, was the scene of an October 14, 2010 tour of the plant choreographed by Rep. Miller (the elder) in which its CEO, Thomas H. Werner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar saluted SunPower’s future. “The path to a clean energy economy starts here, in places like SunPower’s research and development facility,” said Salazar during the tour. Miller (the younger) is accused of drumming up campaign contributions for his father from SunPower. Salazar continued, “The work that comes from these facilities transforms renewable energy ideas into a reality. When renewable energy companies continue to invest in places like California, the realization of a new energy future is within our reach.”

Rep. Miller the Elder added his own smoke . . . “We’ve worked hard to make renewable energy a priority because it represents America’s future economic growth. Today, businesses like SunPower are moving forward, hiring 200 people for good clean energy jobs in the East Bay.” According to the SunPower PAC filings in the 2010 midterm election campaign cycle, SunPower donated $15,650 donated to House and Senate candidates, $14,650 went to Democrats, with the top recipient: $4,000 to Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrats Senate Majority Leader. Sunpower also gave Miller, the Elder, $500 and gave his son a job.

The loan guarantee was earmarked to create 350 temporary and 15 permanent jobs at the California Valley Solar Ranch (CVSR) in San Luis Obispo County. One wonders if the 15 permanent jobs are for panel-dusting janitors. The math works out to $80 million for each SunPower job, about seven times higher than the $10.88 million average cost per Obama green job. How bad an investment is SunPower? The tiny company was listed as the “ninth-most-shorted solar stock in either the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ markets. Short sellers are betting that a stock price will go down, as opposed to those who buy long, who expect a stock price to up.

In early December, 2007, SunPower sold for $133 per share. Earlier this month the company was selling for $6.60 per share; it is now selling in a range between $8-$9 per share. The company has been accused of numerous accounting irregularities purportedly to deceive its stockholders; and at present several lawsuits have been filed in California courts relating to allege gross mismanagement, breach of fiduciary responsibility, unjust enrichment and abuse of control. The first of these lawsuits was in November, 2009, and so far no suit has yet been resolved.

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

BO says the Millionaires & Billionaires should pay their FAIR SHARE

Posted by Thomas Moore on September 20, 2011 at 11:10am

Why does BO not tell "we the people" the facts and post the actual dollar amount of Taxes paid by the Millionaires & Billionaires. There is not enough room on this post for all the zeros; so you will have to do the math. Very easy to find the amounts with a search. "Who Pays the most US Taxes". Buffet says "he pays less taxes than his secretary." OK Mr. Buffet why don't you give your empoyees a much needed RAISE? #game over!

According to the Office of Tax Analysis, the U.S. individual income tax is "highly progressive," with a small group of higher-income taxpayers paying most of the individual income taxes each year.

In 2002 the latest year of available data, the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid more than one-half (53.8 percent) of all individual income taxes, but reported roughly one-third (30.6 percent) of income.

Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Presidency Slips into Catalepsy, Dictatorial Powers Exercised

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on September 12, 2011 at 1:24pm

“Obama’s American Jobs Act is All Old, Borrowed, and Blue, NOTHING New.”

“HOW can he so aggressively DEMAND fifteen to twenty times in 25 minutes that Congress immediately pass a bill that no one has yet seen and most probably will NEVER see? Shades of Nancy Pelosi and Obamacare on which she said “We’ll have to pass it so you can see what’s in it.” At least with Obamacare we had 2,700 nauseating pages to examine . . . we’ve had nothing in writing from the ethereal presidency of Barack H. Obama since February of this year . . . just more and more speeches full of evanescent words.”

Obama DEMANDS Congress Pass “AJA”

Last Such Effort Resulted in 0-97 Failure

Mr. Obama gave another speech last Thursday. Ol’ Rajjpuut recommends the president heed the old adage that “action speaks louder than words” and take it to heart 100% from now on. Perhaps he should begin actually governing America instead of just hurting our ears with words that carry NO actual consequence because the proposals that they symbolize aren’t even written down and presumably will NEVER become a bill for Congress to act upon. Ahead of that speech his press corps told us that we’d be getting all the actual DETAILS in a few weeks. It’s that BIG an IDEA folks! Way too big for just one speech, it’ll take several weeks to roll it all out!! That’s your hype and change president for you. Wait for it, great things a ‘coming.

Consider that: nothing in writing, you know, no actual (bill) words , none (ZERO), on actual paper to be reviewed and critiqued, none of that damnable tangible stuff just a lot more blue sky and smoke and mirrors after the country was promised this great new program from Mr. Obama and then it was all put off for his Midwest campaign “listening tour” and then his Martha’s Vineyard vacation and then his trying to upstage the Republican debate by scheduling the speech for the same exact date and time . . . the President is now once again putting off the American people and procrastinating on having the Congress actually having his proposals in writing to consider.

After the speech, much of America indulged in 9/11 remembrances and ceremonies and TV lowlights from ten years ago during the weekend. Much of America welcomed back the National Football League starting with a barn-burner of a game in Wisconsin in which the New Orleans Saints died on the 1-yard line with time expired. Almost all of America did one if these things or the other or both. Few Americans paid much attention to the much ballyhooed Barack Obama-DEMANDED-address to both chambers (A joint session? We’d have felt better if we had a few joints or other pain killers instead of listening to that crap) of Congress to discuss his “new” jobs program known as the American Jobs Act (AJA) in a tired but threatening speech that contained almost nothing new; a lot borrowed from earlier failed programs and recycled; and a lot of “blue” extensions of utterly failed old programs that have not worked because they’re so inane they couldn’t possibly work. It was ill-conceived; politically fatal and downright cynical speech by a progressive politician who is rapidly becoming more and more socialistic with every falling leaf.

HOW can he so aggressively DEMAND fifteen to twenty times that Congress immediately pass a bill that no one has yet seen and probably will NEVER see? Shades of Nancy Pelosi and Obamacare on which she said “We’ll have to pass it so you can see what’s in it.” At least with Obamacare we had 2,700 nauseating pages to examine . . . we’ve had nothing in writing from the ethereal presidency of Barack H. Obama since February of this year . . . just more and more speeches full of evanescent words . . . .

Mr. Obama has spent the last seven months doing just that sort of nonsense. Every time he and the Republican leadership have “come to terms” on something about the budget or the deficit and National debt . . . Mr. Obama has told us how HE has jumped in to the fray and HIS input helped solve the problems. But, OOPS, Mr. Obama has then changed his mind (we know, we know, yes, it’s a “young girl’s prerogative” but hardly becoming behavior from the leader of the free world and our Commander-in-Chief) and all deals supposedly “on the table” have then been removed and become moot, not worth the paper they’re NOT written on. It’s good to examine WHY this has happened, why this nauseating pattern of empty promises has come to dominate Barack Obama’s actions.

Mr. Obama, after a long harangue against the first of three offered Republican House versions of a 2012 budget, the one from Paul Ryan, (Obama’s Democratic Senate has passed only one budget in almost three years and none in the last 900 days while the Republican House has passed four in less than nine months) decided in February of this year he’d personally save the country as the Oval Office submitted a budget he labeled “bi-partisan” although in point of fact he’d asked for NO input from the loyal opposition and not shown it to anyone of consequence either in the media, not one single word, and apparently he hadn’t run it past his own Senate Democrats either. The Obama administration has no clue how to write a bill these days.

Mr. Obama introduced that bill in the U.S. Senate in February and Democratic Senator (Majority Leader) Harry Reid refused to bring it to a vote until finally the President DEMANDED his man Reid put it to a vote . . . which he did in May. The result in a Senate dominated by his Democrats was . . . a 0-97 utter failure. That’s called being “totally out of touch with reality.” Think on that . . . . No president in our nation’s history has ever suffered such a gross defeat. Is it even conceivably possibly that anyone can create any idea, any idea at all, so absolutely inane and stupid that at least one Democrat or progressive Republican will NOT vote for it?

If anything now, the President’s AJA speech last Thursday was even less real and less common-sense and less relevant than his budget ideas were back then. Mr. Obama may SEEM to be very visible making important public appearance on every corner and at every opportunity and haranguing we the people every day . . . but that’s just his body, folks. His spirit is curled up in the fetal position sucking his thumb underneath his desk in the Oval Office . . . after that 0-97 thrashing he has totally given up on reality. Oh, my!

What exactly has the President offer us in the AJA? No actual jobs will be created; a lot of actual jobs will be killed. A lot more expense to the taxpayers. A lot, lot more government. A lot, lot more taxes^^ especially upon those who left to their own devices with no government interference actually tend to create jobs. A brand new stimulus program, this one funded by draining $450 Billion from Social Security (as if that program didn’t have enough problems). A program that’s supposedly already paid for . . . “well, actually, I’ll just add that payment stuff as another requirement for the bi-partisan “Super-Committee” already stymied by the prospect of coming up with $1.5 TRillion in budget cuts before Thanksgiving, what the hell.”

We have shown that Obama’s American Jobs Act is all Old, Borrowed, and Blue, with NOTHING New. It’s got to the point where a lot more mind-boggling B.S. from the President can NOT be considered mind-boggling any more. He called his AJA full of “Republican ideas.” When was the last time when fiscally-responsible and Constitutionally-faithful G.O.P. called for a half-a-trillion dollar STIMULUS, Mr. Prez? The middle-word in the program’s title is “JOBS,” but it seems only aimed at preserving one American’s job: your own. It cannot pass either chamber of Congress. If it did it would send us deeper and deeper into a double-dip recession . . . ah, but if it fails to pass . . . yes, yes, if the AJA fails to pass: then you can claim you put forth “all the winning ideas and those damn pesky Republicans wouldn’t get on board with the programs and their TEA Party wing has ‘held the country hostage,’ those terroristic b_stards!”

Mr. Obama, your 0-97 failed budget proposal was arrogant and self-centered (let’s keep my job) and foolish and unnecessary and completely political rather than focused (“like a laser”) on creating jobs for Americans . . . but this AJA is even less “shovel-ready” than your failed $787 Billion stimulus of February, 2009. You had the temerity to claim this bill was bi-partisan without getting any Republican input . . . well, if this speech was not the most hyper-partisan utterance ever made, then Ol’ Rajjpuut is a left-handed hunch-backed, cross-eyed aviator. This ANGRY-ANGRY speech was aimed at doing just one thing: giving you talking points for the 2012 re-election campaign. You wanted to set the G.O.P. up as the scape-goats as your economy continues to tank. “The economy would be all healed now, if those *&(#@$8^!*$%#@)+= Republicans had just done what I told them to do!” Well, Mr. President, there was a lot less pain in re-living all the 9/11 tragedies than in listening to your nonsense,** a lot, lot less.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

^^ Along with Obamacare requiring a 60% jump in capital gains taxes starting in 2013 to pay for it (What! You didn’t find that out from reading Ms. Pelosi’s bill?), and AJA’s call for an immediate repeal of the Bush era tax cuts on those who actually create jobs in this country . . . there are a whole lot of sneaky elimination of tax deductions thrown in among all the President’s AJA speech proposals . . . which means that the middle class will be helping fund all this (if you reduce tax deductions, and are raising money to pay for AJA taxpayers must and will pay more and since 49% of the country receives money from the government and effectively pays zero taxes and only 51% of us DO pay . . . that means the middle class gets screwed again. Aren’t you glad that the government has been set up life in this country so that almost a voting majority of people are receiving money from the feds and just the chumps like you and I are paying taxes? Soon they can vote themselves into the majority and then vote for us to pay 80% of income in taxes . . . marvelous, marvelous).

** Don’t get Rajjpuut wrong, now. When he’s procrastinating Mr. Obama is at his most lovable. When he’s doing nothing, he is at his most competent. But, unfortunately, he’s also been very, very busy creating mischief. Mr. Obama’s misguided efforts over the last nine months, although mostly futile have NOT been without danger. He’s seeking to rule dictatorially now that his words no longer have power. What do we mean? We mean to rule by “regulatory fiat,” by merely creating rules within federal agencies and thus given federal government agencies power to control our lives. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Interior department are, as you read this, closing down coal mines; obstructing oil drilling sites and instituting new and expensive and officiously complicated oil drilling requirements, establishing green job initiatives and establishing carbon dioxide restrictions – moves that Congress has repeatedly failed to pass. The EPA is particularly dangerous. Back in 2009 they set into motion actions that sent the UNemployment levels around Fresno, California (the vegetable-basket of the nation) as high as 40%. This was accomplished by forbidding ALL irrigation as a means to protect a three-inch fish called the “delta smelt” which sometimes swims into irrigation piping thus killing jobs; destroying farmers’ livelihoods, and making vegetable prices rise dramatically. He’s bypassed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to give amnesty to any and all ILLEGAL aliens in the country if they’re suspected NOT to have committed a serious crime. He seems intent on having those folks become citizens and voting for him in 2012 . . . .

The green jobs initiatives are potentially the most dangerous, believe it or not. Why? In 1997 Spain was the strongest economy in Europe with 3.8% UNemployment. Late that year the Spanish passed a green jobs program. Spain now has 22% Unemployment and is, behind Greece, one of the flimsiest economies in the entire world. What happened exactly? Spain’s government began using tax money and subsidizing green jobs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a2PHwqAs7BS0

Here’s the statistical result according to a well-known Spanish study:

Each green job created cost $677,000 dollars.

2.2 real jobs in the real economy were lost for each subsidized Spanish green job created.

The average Spanish green job paid $11-$13 dollars with much fewer paying as much as $14 per hour.

The average Spanish green job lasted from three weeks to eighteen months.

Only one in every ten Spanish green jobs was permanent.

This means that for every five PERMANENT green jobs created: 110 real jobs were lost.

PS: Mr. Obama in his 2008 campaign PROMISED to create five million brand new green jobs in America. So far, thank God, he has not moved on that. Should his EPA find a way via regulatory fiat to begin fulfilling that promise . . . we’ll all be in deep, deep crap. Based upon the Spanish example: five million new American green tech jobs would cost 11 million real jobs. Based upon the Spanish example: only 500,000 permanent green jobs would be created for the 11 million real jobs lost. Re-elect Barack!

I Would Rather Be Waterboarded Than Sit Through Another Obama Speech

Posted by Marjorie Haun on September 10, 2011 at 10:27am

One of the most challenging duties I have as an American citizen is to sit through a Barak Obama speech. But do my duty, I will, and I did so last Thursday evening. Sort of. First of all, the conventional wisdom that Obama is eloquent is false. He is not eloquent, he is not a master of communication, he is not as intelligent as we are told to believe. But he is clever, and he has a snake-pit of clever advisors behind him. Obama’s September 8 speech is simply a political set up for him to run against a “do-nothing” Congress in 2012. Clever, yes. More clever than the American people? No.

The content of Thursday’s speech was a rehash of former “stimulus” speeches. His “American Jobs Bill” is just another infusion of tax-payer dollars into the ether of his command economy. If he has his way another $400 billion will waft into the netherworld of socialist failure, just like the previous $3.27 trillion from previous stimulus packages. There is nothing in his AJB that would create a single lasting job. It is an attempt to pander to large swaths of his supporters, like teachers unions, government sector unions, the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO, who would all benefit directly or indirectly from his plan.

Obama pandered to small businesses as well with talk about a “payroll tax cut.” But it is corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, and personal income taxes on the small business owners who make over $200 K per year and declare their business income on their personal returns, that are killing jobs. Obama did not address those, but instead promised again to raise taxes on “those Americans who can afford to pay more.” In his mind that includes all of those small businesses and their owners who we know are not “millionaires and billionaires” but are ordinary Americans, struggling, cutting corners, pinching pennies, and fighting the federal government at every turn just to save the jobs they have created for their employees. As usual, Obama’s plan will kill more private sector jobs in exchange for a small rebate to households that will go to pay down debt and will have no lasting impact on the economy. He will fortify the unions, they will grow in power, and in the end, the government will be bigger, and the individual much smaller. Corporations will continue to outsource to other countries because the costs of production are impossibly large. And small businesses will continue to shutter their doors as the specter of Obamacare looms ever closer.

One of the most ironic aspects of Obama’s duplicity is his avoidance of the most obvious and immediate answers to our failing economy. As a resident of Western Colorado I know that in my region of this vast country, there lies underground enough natural gas and oil resources to fuel our nation and our economy for decades, if not centuries. Obama’s pet agencies like the EPA and DOE have essentially corked the potential for energy exploration and development in the West. If he were to ease the regulations, tell Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to take a long vacation to Fiji, and simply open the door for Americans to take advantage of the vast energy resources underneath our feet, the economy would receive the defibrillation it needs to get pumping again. Thousands of private sector jobs would be created, and dependence on foreign energy would be dramatically decreased.

The American people will not fall for the “run against a do-nothing congress” ploy. The president can’t stay disengaged and ineffective for another 15 months. The economy cannot bear the strain of further taxation, regulation, and statist manipulations of the free market. If Obama was sincere he would do the following.

Open energy-rich regions of the United States to exploration and development
Slash corporate and capital gains taxes and close loop holes for his crony corporate buddies like GE
Cut taxes on the upper 8% of income earners, most of whom are small business owners
Ask congress to immediately repeal Obamacare
Offer American corporations who are outsourcing or have moved overseas tax incentives to stay in country
Decrease the collective bargaining power of public sector unions at the federal level
Revisit the budget deal and adopt the Paul Ryan plan to address entitlement reform

But we know Obama is not serious about saving our economy or our standing of economic and military superiority. He will continue to point the finger of blame, play the race card, and toy with the free markets of the greatest country the world has ever known, until he begins the longest vacation of his life in 2013.

One more reason to un-elect Obama

Posted by Thomas Moore on August 16, 2011 at 11:11am

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed suit against Boeing to stop Boeing from moving to So. Carolina. If successful this will kill new jobs. The suit is a classic example of BULLYING. No wonder large companies have moved and are now moving overseas. What would The Gov. do if the big companies like Boeing, MSN,Apple and Facebook would say "we are sick and tired of the Government bullying us. Let's move to India." New jobs are NOT the problem. It's excessive Government intervention, no leaders, Gov. waste and stupid spending

Rajjpuut's Folly: Texas Prospers while Rest of Country Flounders, Stagnates

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on June 13, 2011 at 12:42am

“That’s right, in Texas they have part-time citizen lawmakers rather than a lot of professional politicians clogging up the scene all year round every single year.”

“. . . Texas dodged almost the full-brunt of the sub-prime lending crisis.”

Texas Grows 38% of Nation’s New BLS Jobs;

45% in REAL STATISTICAL Terms

Like the silly unemployment numbers used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measuring new job growth across the nation by BLS nonsense is a lesson in frustration. Nevertheless, according to BLS statistics since the financial meltdown ended (officially we’ve been recovering since June 2009) one state (Texas) has dominated the new job generation picture. 38% of all new jobs in the nation were created in Texas. So it took entire rest of the country 49 states and Washington, D.C. taken altogether to create the 62% of our new jobs that Texas didn’t create.

If instead of BLS statistics we use the far more accurate and straightforward non-farm payroll employment, Texas accounts for 45% of all new job creation. Texas, North Dakota, Alaska and Washinton, D.C. are the only areas to show a net job growth since the beginning of the meltdown. The District of Columbia, of course, benefitted from the huge growth in government size created by the Obama administration’s stimulus and regulation and new agencies (one law alone, Obamacare, created 384 brand new federal government agencies) programs.

Texas created roughly 72,000 more jobs, 266,000 in total) than the next two successful states (New York and Pennsylvania) put together and roughly 1,000 fewer jobs than the sum total of the other forty-seven states combined. This should come as no surprise since Texas is easily the most business friendly free market state in the union. These kind of figures are one reason that Texas Governor Rick Perry (though so far he’s UNannounced, is considered an important and necessary candidate in the Republican presidential polling).

Overall, eighteen states have lost jobs since the Obama-recovery began in June, 2009; California alone has lost 11,400 jobs. Thanks to Obama’s growth of government D.C. payrolls have increased 18,000 jobs since the meltdown began in mid 2007 compared to Texas’ 30,800 new jobs over the same period all the while the Lone Star State was eliminating government jobs and trial lawyer jobs (it’s harder for them to find work in Texas now due to new tort regulations that protect business and doctors from nuisance suits).

Besides the new tort laws, Texas has no state income tax. Its regulatory conditions are contained and flexible. It is fiscally responsible and government is small. Its right-to-work law doesn't impose unions on businesses or employees. It is always wide-open to global trade and competition. The words “government interference” are seldom heard in Texas where the state legislatute meets for roughly one-half year and then takes off the next eighteen months . . . that’s right, in Texas they have part-time citizen lawmakers rather than a lot of professional politicians clogging up the scene all year round, every single year.

Perhaps the single healthiest pro-jobs condition in Texas is the state rule in place since 1998, that limits mortgage borrowing to 80% of the appraised value of the home. Like a large minimum down payment, this reduces problems associated with over-leveraging and means Texas wasn't hurt nearly as badly by the housing crash as other states. So Texas dodged almost the full-brunt of the sub-prime lending crisis. Think about these five facts (the next five paragraphs) . . .

In 1975 before the Carter administration created the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA ’77) the questionable loan rate in the country was 0.24% of all home mortgages offered at 3% down payment or less (Texas, now, you’ll remember is requiring 20% minimum). The nation was largely operating as a free market in the home mortgage industry.

By 1985 with ACORN operating mainly only in one medium-sized state, Arkansas, (ACORN in those days stood for Arkansas Community Organizations For Reform Now) forcing mortgage lenders there to make knowingly bad loans in accord with CRA ’77 . . . the suspect loan rate more than doubled to 0.51%. ACORN was, of course, the driving force also for putting Bill Clinton into the governor’s mansion in Little Rock for 12 of the next 14 years and into the Oval Office after that. Except for Arkansas, the nation was still operating as a free market with regard to home mortgages.

After three legislative expansions in Washington (one by G.H.W. Bush; two by Clinton), a huge regulatory expansion of CRA ’77 by Clinton in 1993, and ACORN being expanded across the whole nation: the suspect loan rate jumped to 14.1% in 1995. ACORN was very busy, including a Chicago-area ACORN attorney named Barack Obama who was shaking down banks to make ever more bad loans and even to get ACORN donations from them. ACORN now had it’s present meaning of Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now and operated in all fifty states. The free market in home mortgages is wiped out.

About the same time as Bill Clinton was paying off his friends at ACORN for their support in 1998, by passing the steroid version of CRA ’77 expansion . . . Texas, with George W. Bush as governor, is wisely passing a 1998 law requiring a minimum of 20% down payment on all home mortgage loans. With ACORN’s push, Clinton’s law allows 0% down payments from people without jobs whose only “income” is food stamps. Even illegal aliens are now being put into $440,000 homes by ACORN with less effort than they needed a decade earlier to put better-qualified (but still UNqualified) loan seekers into $110,000 homes. By 2005, the suspect home rate is 34% across the nation. A large percentage of these new loan recipients are getting NO-Down payment loans.

The G.W. Bush administration first tries in January, 2005 to pass a law repealing CRA ’77 but Democrats block it. Finally thirty months later after nineteen speeches on the subject and other direct appeals to Congress, Bush and a bi-partisan group pass a weakened version of Bush’s 2005 bill into law in July, 2007. It helps immensely to save the housing market from utter collapse, but is way too little, way too late to stem the tide of nasty side effects and the financial meltdown begins within three months. The fifteen year long government-created housing bubble is ended.

Let’s sum this up: why has Texas prospered during this great downturn and mediocre “recovery?” Texas has, in a phrase, stuck to real core American values when the rest of the nation was throwing the U.S. Constitution out with the “wash water” and engaging in the wildest unjustified financial hokus-pokus imaginable. Let us learn our lesson from Texas’ wisdom. As the former “Lone Star State,” Texas is the only state with the legal-power to secede from the Union at will . . . we need about forty-nine other states to follow her lead and to uphold the 10^th Amendment of the Bill of Rights . . . if the UNITED States is to prove worth saving.

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

Rajjpuut's Folly: NLRB, Obama Obstructions Send Jobs Overseas

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on May 6, 2011 at 12:30am

“ . . . it signaled Obama’s opinion that all jobs are not created equal . . .” Rajjpuut

“ . . . we're going to build a constituency of people who believe in limited government, fiscal common sense and individual liberty." Matt Kibbe

Obama’s Heinous Favor

to Union Supporters;

NLRB Complaint

Outrage South Carolinians

When Barack Obama made his recess appointment of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board in late March, 2010, many economists were shocked. Becker’s appointment, in effect overriding a Senate Republican filibuster, was among the most appallingly partisan political IOUs ever paid and it openly signaled Obama’s opinion that all jobs are not created equal and only union jobs deserved legal protection. Becker, at the time a union lawyer with a particularly nasty resume, had repeatedly and unequivocally stated “No worker should have any right to opt out of union representation.”

While work continues at Boeing’s new aircraft assembly site in North Charleston (in South Carolina, a “right-to-work-state”) President Obama set his dogs from the NLRB upon Boeing. The NLRB complaint is that Boeing is planning to build airplanes at a non-union plant in S.C. rather than at its home site in Seattle, Washington. In 2009, Boeing announced it would build some additional assembly lines at a new factory in North Charleston, South Carolina to aid in producing Boeing 787 airliners.

The move was widely regarded as an economic measure for Boeing since Washington state laws support union-requirements that new workers must join a union to be eligible to work at a union site while South Carolina as a right-to-work-state . . . where each worker can decide individually if he wants to join a union or not . . . is less susceptible to high union pay demands. Of course, they were also naturally thinking of the crippling 2008 strike and the resulting brouhaha at Boeing’s Seattle factory by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers.

Boeing execs have long asserted that being “knocked offline” by union demands was adversely affecting the business. Clearly, the new factory scheduled to open this summer, makes sense in light of Boeing’s concerns but the union has filed a complaint against Boeing and the NLRB has taken up the complaint claiming that Boeing used “unfair labor practices.”

South Carolinians are up in arms, "This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama's re-election campaign," said S.C. Republican Senator Jim DeMint. "Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of hundreds of jobs in South Carolina and thousands of jobs nationwide." DeMint argues if the complaint goes forward, right-to-work states will struggle to attract jobs and the pace of jobs leaving the country and heading overseas will become a torrent.

“It will have a chilling effect on job growth in my state and in the country,” said DeMint. Boeing and DeMint point out that the company has added 2,000 jobs in Seattle since the South Carolina construction began. That, however, is no sop to the union demands: "Boeing's decision to build a 787 assembly line in South Carolina sent a message that Boeing workers would suffer financial harm for exercising their collective bargaining rights," IAM Vice President Rich Michalski said in a statement on the union's website.

S.C. Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican added, "If successful, the NLRB complaint would allow unions to hold a virtual ‘veto' over all business decisions. Left to their own devices, the NLRB would routinely punish right-to-work states that value and promote their pro-business climates." Since the jobless rate is 8.9% and this week saw the largest jump in new claims for unemployment in several years . . . the president’s contradictory claims notwithstanding, we are not seeing a true “rebound,” or “economic recovery” at all -- and his NLRB is doing everything they can to make sure that our economy never does recover.

In any case, this week has given us a “treasure trove” of other Obama contradictions and outrageous proclamations . . . .

ITEM: in other “outrageous news,” the United Nations is now talking about taking the United States to the World Court for “war crimes” associated with taking down Usama Bin Laden, the world’s most notorious terrorist.

ITEM: After dithering for three days before deciding NOT to reveal the photos and videos proving that Usama actually was killed because, “. . . we don’t need to spike the ball, that’s not who we are,” Barack Obama . . . GASP! went ahead and spiked the ball by making a visit to “Ground Zero” in NYC -- his first visit there since the 2008 campaign. Invitations to former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to join in the victory lap photo op were declined.

ITEM: Along with the atrocious recent NLRB actions against South Carolina and Boeing, Obama's administration is this week trying to force businesses bidding on federal government jobs to reveal political contributions . . . obviously this could have a chilling restraint on contributions to opposition parties and a positive effect for in-parties . . . an awfully bad idea.

ITEM: The contradictions just continue to mount up for Barack Obama. He allowed flag-draped coffins of fallen Americans this week to be published and of course, they wound all over the internet in the Muslim World. Meanwhile he won’t publish the death photos of Bin Laden.

ITEM: IF the Guantanamo site had been closed, the threads that led to discovering Usama’s location would not have existed. Obama has fought to close down that site for over seven years. He has also ordered his Justice Department to prosecute CIA (and other) interrogators who helped elicit the clues that finally tied together the whereabouts of Usama Bin Laden.

ITEM: Without the benefits and the threads provided by water-boarding and other EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques) evoking the eventual cooperation from the big three internees in Guantanamo, Usama’s location would still not be known. Mr. Obama has banned the CIA from using not only water-boarding but any EITs at all . . . thus handcuffing the nation’s intelligence-gatherers in the War on Terror. Mr. Obama has actually used the word “terror” recently and eschewed the phrase “man-caused disaster” that he originally preferred. In fact, to his supporters’ chagrin, Mr. Obama has almost totally come to adopt and even expand the “Terror War” exigency measures such as the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, and military courts which were first employed by George W. Bush.

ITEM: The Bin Laden death photos “would inflame the Muslim world” according to Mr. Obama who has banned release of that information. Mr. Obama has also told us that no real Muslim can be a terrorist (remember the great to-do that occurred when Bill O’Reilly visited the TV show “The View” and said “Muslims attacked us on 9/11”) then Obama's recently turned around 180 degrees and proved that the great Bin Laden actually was a Muslim who deserved full burial respect within 24 hours, including the proper ablutions, appropriate burial clothing and sacred words spoken above him. Some might complain that since Mr. Obama in 2009 released over 2,000 photos of Abu Ghraib prison abuses, it might be logical to permit one picture of Bin Laden’s corpse.

ITEM: Mr. Obama reaffirmed his loan of $2 Billion for deep sea oil drilling to Brazil saying, “We look forward to being your best customer,” meanwhile, this week his Department of the Interior has thrown new obstacles in front of land drilling; shallow-sea drilling; and, of course, deep-sea drilling anywhere in and around the United States proper . . . and this country has not built one single new oil refinery in the last 37 years because of congressional restraints . . . while the average price of a gallon of gas has reached $3.99 and the price of food has risen by 36%, Mr. Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve chief Bernanke have denied any responsibility for rising prices and indeed denied that inflation was occurring at all . . . certainly there could be no connection between the Fed’s policies, oil-drilling bans and what we consumers face at the pump and the grocery store checkout counter according to them.

ITEM: Ward Churchill, of Colorado University infamy (he’s the fool who called the innocent victims of the 9/11 attacks “Little Eichmanns”) who was in Tucson, Arizona, with numerous Obama supporters of “social justice” got upset and threw a fit along with the other leftists present because a class advocating that Southwestern lands of the United States must be returned to Mexico was no longer a required class, but just an elective.

The riot that ensued for the next three hours prevented a school board meeting from occurring. The syllabus of the class in question includes some real gems: “Thanksgiving was the first celebration of the beginning of genocide on the Native Tribes.” Virtually everything taught in the class is seen only through the lens of supposed White racism and undoubted Marxism. “Capitalism is the oppressive economic belief that the rights of the wealthy are more important than the rights of the poorer working class,” etc., etc. ad nauseum. You can read the full curriculum at GlenBeck.com as well as seeing Ward Churchill’s mug in the videos.

The group is calling for Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Justice Department to get involved and protect the students’ rights to hear this anti-American propaganda just as Justice got involved to protect a Muslim teacher’s right to be paid (and to pay for a substitute) during the weeks while she makes a “holy pilgrimage” trip to Mecca. The teachers’ union, of course, backed her up 100%. One might expect that she could make her pilgrimage after retirement or during summer vacation (if she wasn’t so particular about being there for the Hadj (a.k.a. Hajj) pilgrimage dates) . . . but common sense is probably not appropriate here.

ITEM on the Periphery: Government Motors (a.k.a. GM) has produced a monumental advertising blunder equal to the worst in their history. The same people who decided a generation ago that the perfect GM car for Spanish, and South and Central American markets was their Chevy Nova (any wonder a car called the “Doesn’t Go” <No va>) in Spanish doesn’t sell really well in lands where Spanish is spoken) have initiated a big ad campaign for the Chevy Camaro featuring an amorphous yellow manlike form. In 90% of the shots, however, the “head” of the yellow form is all that’s seen, and it looks remarkably akin to a certain sour yellow citrus fruit. Rajjpuut can’t speak for you, but he won’t be buying any LEMONS from GM anytime soon. A prediction: if GM and Chrysler ever actually do pay off their debt to the taxpayers who bailed them out, they will face bankruptcy again within ten years (which would be the third bailout for Chrysler: 1979, 2009 were the prior two).

ITEM of Curiosity: Since 1957 when Atlas Shrugged was first published, the three topmost enduring best-selling books year after year in the United States and Great Britain have been:

#1 The Holy Bible

#2 Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957)

#3 Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943)

It seems that even with those sterling results, improvement was still possible. Since 2008’s election of Barack Obama to president, Atlas Shrugged has sold over a million copies which is the greatest sales that book has ever known in any similar time period. In 2009, 520,000 copies were sold worldwide. And, of course, Atlas Shrugged Part I has been surprising theater goers for the last three weeks and is now about to jump from limited circulation to 2,000 theaters this week. According to Freedom Works President Matt Kibbe, "In a lot of ways, that project reflects the ethos of the TEA (“Taxed Enough Already”) Party. You had Republicans and Democrats and Independents who feel rejected by the establishment joining the TEA Party, and the same process is going to happen with Atlas Shrugged: We're going to build a constituency of people who believe in limited government, fiscal common sense and individual liberty."

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

Rajjpuut's Folly: Bernanke, Jobs, Housing, Debt and the Whole Sordid Mess

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on February 4, 2011 at 5:00pm

We now have FEWER people working in AMERICA than we've at any time had SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration. We also have more people working for the government than at any time in history outside of war.

Bernanke Sobers Up, Comes Clean, Sort of

Ben Bernanke had a National Press Club audience laughing while doling out some super-serious information yesterday. For example, he reminded them that the country’s projected deficit and debt level are actually not only unsustainable but impossible . . . because the nation’s creditors at some point in the future would wise up and refuse to continue financing our country’s spending.

ALERT: Before going further with the blog itself . . . the nation’s latest jobless numbers came out earlier today: 9.0% unemployment sounds like an improvement over the recent 9.4% . . . unfortunately, the fact is that virtually all of the “drop” in unemployment can be traced to unemployed persons who have stopped reporting in to the nation’s Workforce Centers and therefore “fell off” the statistical data base. True unemployment now stands at just a tad below 20% if all the unemployed; and forcible part-time workers are included . . . not to mention all the grossly under-employed who lost better jobs and are working at stop-gap situations. Only 36,000 jobs were created last month, almost 110,000 short of the projected 145,000. 1.4 million people gave up looking for jobs through official channels last month: 1.4 million! We now have FEWER JOBS in AMERICA than we've seen at any time SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration. The situation is getting so hopeless that more than half of the unemployed are no longer using the official Workforce procedures . . . these fictitious unemployment numbers just prove that when it comes to statistics, garbage in = garbage out. Now let’s get back to Ben Bernanke . . . .

“By definition, the unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debt (outlined by the Congressional Budget Office, CBO) cannot actually happen because creditors would never be willing to lend to a government whose debt . . . is rising without limit.” Currently the National Debt is stated at about 60% of the economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) officially; but in reality the figure is much closer to 95% than 60%. More on this soon . . . Bernanke said that the 90% threshold is projected by 2020 and debt would be 150% of GDP by 2030. But Bernanke’s citing of $9.5 trillion in national debt was sinfully inaccurate because it omitted the $4.6 trillion owed by the government to trust funds for things such as Social Security and Medicare, which have paid out cash to the Treasury in exchange for promissory notes. The full national debt – when both forms of debt are included is roughly $14.6 trillion.

Mr. Bernanke also failed to acknowledge the 180-ton blue whale splashing about in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the fact that not including all our welfare programs and barring deliberately infecting all our nation’s elders simultaneous with ebola . . . the federal government is already obligated for roughly $113 TRillion in services via Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid. He also was less than forthcoming about the fact that Obamacare is now shifting a huge burden in Medicaid from the Feds onto the unwilling states which will presumably bankrupt every single state by 2026 (2023 in some less optimistic projections). To emphasize the point he was semi-obscuring, Bernanke quoted economist Herbert Stein, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop” to exceedingly nervous Press Club laughter.

The Fed chairman strongly admonished Congress to act soon to cut spending or increase revenues (taxes), or some mix of the two, because otherwise the U.S. economy will suffer a severe correction. “One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget must occur at some point,” he said. Bernanke avoided predicting when the U.S. might experience a debt crisis similar to what Greece and other European countries have experienced. Bernanke suggested lawmakers should forget politics and not use the debt and debt ceiling as “bargaining chips” or resort to playing political “chicken.” He also seemingly assured Republicans that their understanding was correct, “Under current law, if the debt limit is not extended, for a time, the Treasury has various resources that it can use to make payments on our national debt,” he said, “but beyond a certain point, (our federal government) would not have those resources and the United States could conceivably — I think this is very remote, but it’s not something you want to play around with — the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt,” he said. “And the implications of that for our financial system, for our fiscal policy, for our economy would be catastrophic.”

The twin drivers of this unsustainable national path toward debt (and he did not mention, but also toward UNfunded liabilities), according to Bernanke is the double barrel impact of rising health care costs and exploding baby boomer retirements on entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. “Our ability to control health care costs, while still providing high-quality care to those who need it, will be critical for bringing the federal budget onto a more sustainable path.” He tempered pessimism with a slightly optimistic look at the overall economy citing “increased evidence that a self-sustaining recovery in consumer and business spending may be taking hold,” but immediately slipped back into pessimism saying the economy “does look to be growing more quickly, but is still in a deep hole, is still very far from where we’d like it to be.”

Coupled with Bernanke’s speech the Senate Budget Committee heard from numerous “experts” about the most serious threats facing the hoped for economic recovery: the housing crisis; state, local and federal budget shortfalls; unrest in Egypt and its possible effects on shipping via the Suez Canal and on the price of oil; and the continuing European debt crisis. Home prices are expected to fall another 5% this year and 14-17 million Americans are currently “underwater” on their homes (owing more than their homes are worth now, not to mention after a further 5% drop in prices). Overall this amounts to an expected total average home price drop of 35% between 2007 and the end of this year possibly igniting another round of the vicious cycle of default, foreclosure and greater downward pressure on home prices.

The pressure is not all at the federal level either. Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governor’s Association said that the Obamacare mandated explosion in Medicaid enrollment (coupled with other demands on the states shifted from the federal government) was the “700 pound gorilla” in the room as it increased costs to the states by 190 million by 2019. If the recession (which has been officially “ended” for over nineteen months now . . . you and I know better, any time home prices are down over 1/3 of their value in four years: that’s a recession!) continues, Rajjpuut concludes that the Obamacare-created meltdown of the states will happen sooner (2023) rather than later (2026). As far as bailouts, several of the witnesses at the senate hearing implied that there was no appetite for state bailouts. Going back to Bernanke, he failed to mention that the Federal Reserve Banks under his command had been busy printing paper money and creating electronic money for the better part of twenty-seven months and there was, believe it or not, some obscure chance that the nation’s major creditors (such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, Japan and others) might not only notice but also object to his willful policy of inflation. Since technically the math says that the current dollar is worth 3.4 pennies worth of the late 2008 dollar . . . this could also be a problem, eh?

In short, Mr. Bernanke seems to be sobering up, but he’s still not admitting his drunken money-creation, so overall the prognosis for the patient is very, very, bad.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

PS remember this: We now have FEWER people working in AMERICA than we've known at any time SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration. We also have more people working for the government than at any time in history outside of war. At a projected cost of 2 - 3.5 real jobs lost in the real economy for every government job created, is it any wonder?

Here's a chart of the eleven recessions the country's suffered through since World War II. Notice the "V" shape typical of recession recovery is not present now thanks to government interference . . . .

Rajjpuut's Folly: Midterm Reality Minus the Obama Spin

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on February 2, 2011 at 12:30am

Unclothing the Latest Obama Lies

Item: President Obama wants you to think he stopped the economy from entering Depressionville.

Background: Democrats ascribe the “lukewarm success” of the President’s $787 Billion stimulus to the fact that it was “way too puny,” but, they say, it saved us from a depression, Hallelujah! And now they’re seeking a much richer round of stimulus for the economy. Notice the weasel word “stimulus” from their mouths is much like the weasel word “investment” Obama unveiled during the State of the Union speech eight days ago . . . let’s substitute the more accurate words “government spending,” OK?

Facts: As we make our midterm assessment of his presidency, we must realize that Mr. Obama’s stimulus like all government spending comes at the cost of jobs in the real (non-government) economy. Government spending and government borrowing and government regulations and other government interference all kill real jobs in the real economy. This is why small government is so vital; government is grossly inefficient at doing any but its legitimate functions.

Item: The president likes to peddle two truly great fictions among the dozens of daily lies they put out. The first is that “Our programs have broken the back of the recession.”

Background: His bureaucracy released a GDP growth rate of 3.4% for the fourth quarter of 2010 using a price deflator that was quite self-serving. The price deflator was 0.3 while the Consumer Price Index rose at 2.6 . . . .

Facts: in layman’s language, what he is calling growth is just higher prices we all face at the pump, at the grocery store and across the board. If Jimmy Carter had used such lies he would have been bragging about the highest growth the nation has ever known (in 1980 inflation and interest rates both stood at 18%).

Item: The other great fiction is the “Car in the Ditch” fable that he’s used for two years to deflect responsibility for the economy onto conservatives and the free market and President Bush.

Background: The Sub-prime lending crisis began in 1977 with Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA ’77). In 1975 only one home loan in 404 was “suspect.” That is roughly 403 of any 404 home mortgages were granted to good risk clients and required virtually always 20% down payment. CRA ’77 forced lenders to knowingly make bad home loans to poor risk clients. After four expansions of CRA ’77 by Bill Clinton (one by regulatory means in 1993; two smaller ones in 1995; and his steroid version in 1998) by 2005 34% of all U.S. home loans were “suspect,” that is, granted at 3% or less (many without any down payment to people without jobs; some without I.D.; without income other than food stamps; many without previous rental history; with terrible credit ratings; and even to illegal aliens). Thanks to the steroid version of CRA ’77 passed by Clinton in 1998, ACORN and other provocateurs (who all used Saul Alinsky tactics for) pushing these unwise loans upon unwilling lenders found it as easy to put bad risk clients into $440,000 homes in 2000 as it had been a decade earlier to put them into $110,000 homes. By the way, working two years as an ACORN attorney, Barack Obama was famous for not only pushing lenders into these bad loans but wheedling “generous” ACORN donations from them as well.

Facts: George W. Bush saw the progressives including Democrats, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and especially ACORN deliberately pushing the car (the economy) toward a 500-foot ditch and jumped into the front seat grabbing the wheel and slamming on the brakes to guide the car into the nearest friendly-looking ditch.

We’ll back this incredible statement up by reminding the voters that Bush saw the increasing scope of the sub-prime lending problem in January, 2005, and sought to have the worst aspects of CRA ’77 repealed. His efforts were defeated, nay crushed, by the Democrats. Bush spoke to the nation and congress 18 more times on this subject and sought CRA ’77 repeal each time. Finally, 30 months later enough Dems were alarmed that a diluted version of Bush’s original bill was made into law in July, 2007. This proved too little too late, but it did help some, so much so that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner credited Bush’s action with limiting the impact of the recession and preventing a truly horrific plunge in housing prices. Only one more word needs to be discussed: the word “deliberately” in the italicized paragraph above. This CRA ’77 damage wasn’t all done because of misconstrued “good intentions” by the altruistic progressives in question but was a deliberate attempt by them to manufacture a crisis they could exploit . . . .

http:// teapartyorg. ning.com/profiles/blogs/rajjpuuts-folly-big-lies-doom

This link to another Rajjpuut’s Folly blog immediately above tells the whole shocking story starting with 1) Cloward and Piven creating their “Cloward-Piven Strategy” in 1968 and later bragging about how they doubled the number of welfare recipients in the country in eight years and bankrupted New York City (just missed bankrupting New York State) requiring a federal bailout in 1975. These are the same married couple Cloward and Piven who often quoted Stalin in their Columbia University (NYC) classrooms “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” 2) How Cloward and Piven told their followers to shift to voter registration and housing activism 3) How Wade Rathke in Arkansas created ACORN as soon as CRA ’77 became law. 4) How the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now became the nationwide Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now after putting Bill Clinton into the governorship (voter registration fraud helped in the first of his six elections) and doubling the bad home loans in the country from one in 404 to one in 196 just by their work in Arkansas 5) How once ACORN put Clinton into the White House he repaid them with the Motor Voter Act and four expansions of CRA ’77; etc., etc., etc. By the way, here’s a picture of the Motor Voter Act signing ceremony with Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven standing directly behind Bill Clinton as he signed into law “a twelve-lane highway for voter fraud.”

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-they-know-that-we-dont-elections.html

So where does all this leave President Barack Obama? Let us count his most obvious big failures: 1) His stimulus package was a counter-productive disaster*** that made the economy much worse (it jumped from 7.8 to 9.9% unemployment within six months after it went into effect). 2) His financial regulation bill (Dodd-Frank) is choking the life out of the economy that has so harassed small banks that they have stopped loans to small businesses entirely. 3) He appears to be losing Egypt to radical Muslims linked to the infamous Muslim Brotherhood (to learn about their link to 9/11 read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Towers: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11). 4) He and his Fed Chief Ben Bernanke appear to be inflating our money so terribly that there’s a good chance the dollar will cease to be the World’s Reserve Currency and hyper-inflation will result. 5) His god-awful “Affordable Health Care Program” better known as Obamacare (which would have a) bankrupted the individual states because the federal government was shifting virtually all federal side Medicaid funding upon them and b) was destined to become a $2.5 TRillion boondoggle) has now been called entirely UNconstitutional by a federal judge. And 6) he has put us all ninety giant steps closer to Marxist-Socialism in the process. God, what a great president!

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

*** actually, we’ve become what Dick Morris called “a nation of inventories.” Businesses are sitting on close to $1 TRillion dollars worth of cash they’re afraid to invest because the business climate is so horrendous. Banks have loads of capital handed out by Ben Bernanke’s fed as they try to “force-feed the economy by printing money” but the economic climate is so prohibitively bad they’re afraid to loan out 98% of it. Consumers now have paid off household debt to the tune of $200 BIllion rather than make any big investments such as homes; real estate; new cars. But real spending is not happening . . . even if the government is spending enough for sixty congresses . . . nobody is really buying anything, as we all wait for the next shoe to drop . . . .

Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Keeps Corp. Taxes High, Corporations Now Hiring Overseas

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on January 1, 2011 at 9:00am

What do call the economy of a country with a 35% corporate tax rate? How about “dismal?” “Pathetic?” Perhaps “out of touch?” How about “American?”

The United States enters the second decade of the third millennium with the second highest corporate taxes in the industrialized world; but it won’t stay there for long . . . Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he will lower that nation’s corporate tax rate from 40% to 35%. That's almost funny . . . Kan expects to revive his nation's moribund economy by dropping them into a tie for first place corporate taxer with America? Germany with one of the healthier world economies charges 29%; South Korea does better and has only a 24% corporate tax.

Republicans planning to spur job creation have announced their goal of a 20% corporate tax retroactive to today, New Year’s Day January 1, 2011 to stimulate the economy and jobs growth the old-fashioned way by rewarding job-creators directly. Right now American corporations are seeing a huge growth in jobs . . . but . . . overseas in far friendlier tax environments. But the issue is not just important to Republicans and TEA Party members, but actually bi-partisan.

According to G.O.P. Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat a twosome who are co-sponsoring a bill to make an 11% tax cut down to 24%, by eliminating a few tax breaks and instituting the corporate tax cut, the United States will instantaneously become far more competitive “with the world’s present up-and-coming economies.” However, there do appear to some Grinches in the picture: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the Grinchiest of them all: Barack Obama. Despite the balanced approach favored by Wyden and Gregg, Obama-Pelosi-Reid and their progressive followers insist that the corporate tax hike can only occur if energy taxes are allowed to rise. Let’s see, energy prices go up; then transportation prices go up; then the price of everything in the economy really goes up and . . . you guessed it, we’ll see fewer jobs in America not more.

It’s high time Barack Obama admitted that his two most evil . . . promises which he made in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 before the election . . .

#1 “My energy policy will bankrupt the coal industry”

and

#2 “In accord with my cap and trade energy program, the price of electricity will necessarily sky-rocket . . .”

and his even eviler promise

#3 To “create five million green-tech jobs” which (if the study of the decimation of Spain’s economy after a similar program was initiated taking the country from less than 4% unemployment to 20.8% today) can be expected to cost 11 million jobs in the wider American economy (not to mention that in all similar instances, only 10% <500,000> of the green jobs will prove permanent) . . . altogether these three promises will literally destroy the American economy if Obama is allowed to keep them.

Grow up, Mr. President, learn the lessons most of us learned in our college Econ-101 Class:

A. What government taxes you get less of. Tax energy profits more there’ll be less energy profits.
B. “Profit” is not an evil word. Profit keeps the doors of a business open. Profit keeps the company from becoming a bailout candidate. Profit creates jobs. Tax energy profits and we’ll not only see fewer energy jobs from the real economy; we’ll see far fewer jobs across the entire economy.
C. Government interference in the free market is the chief cause of the booms and bust cycles in those markets.

Speaking of “government interference” a.k.a. government boondoggles, do you remember what happened shortly after progressive President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated roughly 34 years ago? They created a new program forcing the banks and mortgage companies to knowingly make bad home loans with something called the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Funny thing, in Arkansas the very same year of CRA ’77, they created the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) which helped Bill Clinton become governor of that state via a bit of voter fraud; meanwhile they were browbeating Arkansas lenders into complying with that stupid law. Later as President, Bill Clinton would expand that law four times (Regulatory expansion as soon as he was elected in 1993; two new legal expansions in 1995; and the steroid version of CRA ’77 in 1998. In 1975, for every 404 home loans only one was completed at 3% down payment or less.

In 2005, 34% of home loans were written at 3% down or less (many of them at 0% to people without jobs; without good credit ratings; whose only “income” was food stamps; and even to illegal aliens all thanks to the nationwide, grown-up version of ACORN (now the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). That despite the progressives claims that it was the free market that gave us the current debacle . . . that was what caused the sub-prime lending crisis that precipitated the current meltdown. By the way George W. Bush spoke to Congress 19 times before a 2007 law somewhat reining in CRA ’77 was passed in July, 2007 . . . a law 30 months later and far, far less effective than the law he asked for originally in January, 2005.

As far as the corporate tax rate, the ball will soon be in Mr. Obama’s court. Nancy Pelosi has no more power to stop it. Harry Reid will probably NOT be able to stop it. Let’s see if Mr. Obama grows up and learns his lessons; let’s see how he plays tennis . . . .

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

On Thinking You're "Above a Job" In This Economy...

Posted by Roman Clark on December 19, 2010 at 7:44pm

Please consider this article, found on Mlive.com, a site dedicated to Michigan news:

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/12/benefits_jobless_relieved_life.html

As most know, Michigan has been hit as hard as any other state during this recession (perhaps Republican Governor elect Rick Snyder will outperform Dem. Granholm in this aspect). It breaks my heart to see how some of my fellow Michiganders are reacting to the rise in unemployment.

The article reviews how individuals are affected by legislation signed by President Obama extending unemployment benefits and cutting taxes. While the majority of this article should get your blood steaming, the kicker for me came in paragraphs twelve and thirteen, in which the former jewelery and fashion saleswoman, now on unemployment, classifies herself as above '"[settling] for a low-skill, low-wage job, saying she's not going to "throw [herself] into poverty."' This coming from a woman who professes having done everything it takes to find a job, and wanting nothing more. '"That's just making people settle for whatever can be had," she said. "Speaking for myself, I didn't spend 25 years in a career that was supposed to be my livelihood for the rest of my life to go work at a Starbucks."'

My thought is this; logic deems that if you cannot pay your bills, you are not above any job.

Government subsidized living is not the answer! Too many Americans are too proud, and need to realize that the work ethic and reform we are calling for in D.C. needs to start with us. My thanks to everyone who shows up everyday to ANY type of job to do the best they can for their family. True Americans work, no matter what job they're doing.

Rajjpuut's Folly: Where are the jobs? Miscounted into Thin Air!

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on October 18, 2010 at 5:00pm

“There are liars, damned liars and statisticians . . .” (old saying)

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/

specifically quoted:

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2009/08/09/green-pain_in_spain_sends_pesetas_down_the_drain.thtml

Obama Administration’s SEVERE

MISCOUNT of Stimulus jobs

Aims to Hide Sickening Truth

It’s considered unpatriotic by Mr. Obama to criticize him or his administration or their ineptness. If that’s so, you’re about to hear some truly unpatriotic blasphemy. Are you one of those Doubting Thomases very skeptical about the honesty of reported federal government statistics? The word on the street is that “figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.” Here’s a case in point, among all the “jobs created or saved by the Obama administration’s $787 Billion stimulus were 384 jobs created at Hormel’s Jennie-O Turkey Store in Willmar, Minnesota at a cost of $7,144,000 ( a mere $18,600 per job, fantastic by normal government standards). The summary of the grant reads this way: “production and delivery of small cooked deli breasts.” Sounds good. The turkey breasts in question are part of a $100 million package of grants received mainly for canned fruit, canned pork, and sliced ham for stocking food pantries across the nation.

OOOOps, one small problem: the 384 people hired eventually worked for less than 40 hours each. How many actual permanent jobs were created by this grant? ZERO! Cost per day for each of these jobs? $3,720. Are you still impressed? How much REAL money went into the pockets of Obama supporters for FAKE jobs on this one? Unfortunately, those statistics are not available . . . .

This is why virtually all federally released figures must be taken with a huge grain of salt by any intelligent voter. Weasel phrases akin to calling the neighborhood “pool parlor” a “Pocket Billiards Emporium” are the very stock in trade of federal liars like Barak Obama and all the people who surround him and support his efforts all the way right down to the sour-faced neighborhood bureaucrat. Do you remember back when Senator Obama was talking about creating five million new green-tech jobs as soon as he became president? If that was realistic and helpful, surely that’s where the bulk of the stimulus money should have gone, no? Well, Rajjpuut, and a whole hell of a lot of other bloggers around the country put the national media straight and that starry-eyed notion melted away like butter on a hot skillet bottom. Since the “green-tech” lie is a classic example of what we’re up against, it bears repeating . . . .

Admit it, it sounds terrific! Imagine five million new jobs in the green-tech industry helping get our nation off the oil bandwagon and all the pollution it produces. That was NICE. Now let’s face the facts . . . .

Up until about thirteen years ago, Spain was the top job creator among all nations in the European Union. Then they got the starry-eyed notion to pour money into "alternative energy," clean up the environment and create even more jobs via green tech. Sound familiar? One caveat for Mr. Obama, Spain's present unemployment rate at more than 20% is more than double the European Union average. Barak, of course doubles-down on green-tech, steadfastly refusing to let Americans drill off America's shoreline, in the country itself, or even to let Americans use new technologies to drill out old oil wells: all policies even the green-smitten Spaniards would call "absolutamente loco!"

So what do the stats tell us? The Spanish economy lost 2.2 jobs from the wider marketplace for every single green job created. That would mean Obama's program could cost America eleven million other jobs or a net loss of six million jobs, but wait . . . . Remember from our one-day turkey breast example, whenever liberal politicians "create" jobs they tend to count in "funny" sorts of ways, acting as if a one-week job and a permanent job were all the same thing. What happened in Spain was that ultimately only 10% of the green jobs they created were permanent jobs . . . ooooooops that means that instead of creating five million REAL JOBS, Obama will likely be creating five million bogus-counted funny-jobs in green tech that amount to only 500,000 real jobs-- so now we're looking at an overall loss of 10.5 million real jobs . . . that's 22 real jobs lost** by the subsidies needed to fund creation each single green-tech job, OUCH! Here’s a report from another heretic that Rajjpuut loves:

http://bond.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=e87126d9-93a1-2001-2698-ff77496e5690

This info, from the U. S. Senate Subcommittee on Green Jobs and the New Economy, concludes that many green jobs pay low wages, require expensive taxpayer subsidies, and require killing existing jobs to subsidize these new green jobs. Of course, Missouri Senator Kit Bond author of that report Yellow Light on Green Jobs and subcommittee ranking member is a conservative Republican and he's surely regarded as "unpatriotic" by Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Obama too??? Senator Bond, by the way, is retiring by choice and will be sorely missed. And also, “sorely missed”? All those jobs created or saved by the Obama stimulus . . . . jobs that upon closer examination all POOF! Disappear into thin air.

Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

** "How can this be?" you ask . . . . Government canNOT create jobs they can only redistribute wealth. Even creating apparent jobs in the military or the border patrol to carry out obvious and necessary government functions of protecting the nation comes at a cost of real jobs in the free market economy, it just so happens that almost all Americans agree those are worthy functions and don't begrudge the government the cost, but make no bones about it, there is a cost. World War II saw the "creation" of 16 million jobs and brought the Great Depression to an end because of that. What was the cost? Virtually all economic activity was diverted into the military sphere in one way or another and the entire country was under rationing beginning in the spring of 1942. Ordinary citizens found that certain foods were almost impossible to get and they cost much more than previously. Items like metals; gasoline and other fuels; tires and other rubber goods; a lot of food especially coffee, meats, butter, fats, cheese and oils; and even clothing such as nylons and shoes were rationed. In other words the citizens sacrificed greatly by government decree so the war effort could continue. Additionally, huge amounts of time and energy normally devoted to other activities by individuals and businesses was turned toward the war and the needs of the troops: scrap drives, huge drives for war bond sales, virtually all the normal activities of a nation at peace were foregone or dramatically reduced so the military could succeed. Besides the loss in people and in maimed individuals, the material wealth of the nation was greatly reduced, but it could have been far, far worse . . . imagine being a Japanese, Italian or German citizen and not only sacrificing so much, not only losing so many of your relatives, friends and neighbors, but also having your very homeland destroyed and so many of you killed in the process. War is not pretty and all the costs of it should always be understood before it's every embarked upon.

More reading desired?

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/BlogPostView.aspx?id=62a6c0e2-58a6-47ee-a4a6-3dbb5d436ef5

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2009/06/04/the_green-tech_fallacy_or_how_barak_flunked_economics.thtml

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2009/08/09/green-pain_in_spain_sends_pesetas_down_the_drain.thtml

jobs (48)

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Spain’s Present is Obama America’s Future

America Needs a New Sheriff

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Obama Attacks our College Youth

Rajjpuut's Folly: Must You Change the Nation's Direction?

Healhy Workers + Healthy Managers = Healthy Profits for All

Rajjpuut's Folly: New Obama Green Jobs Scandal Even Dwarfs Solyndra’s Ugliness

BO says the Millionaires & Billionaires should pay their FAIR SHARE

Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Presidency Slips into Catalepsy, Dictatorial Powers Exercised

I Would Rather Be Waterboarded Than Sit Through Another Obama Speech

One more reason to un-elect Obama

Rajjpuut's Folly: Texas Prospers while Rest of Country Flounders, Stagnates

Rajjpuut's Folly: NLRB, Obama Obstructions Send Jobs Overseas

Rajjpuut's Folly: Bernanke, Jobs, Housing, Debt and the Whole Sordid Mess

Rajjpuut's Folly: Midterm Reality Minus the Obama Spin

Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Keeps Corp. Taxes High, Corporations Now Hiring Overseas

On Thinking You're "Above a Job" In This Economy...

Rajjpuut's Folly: Where are the jobs? Miscounted into Thin Air!

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