One week out: The case against President Barack Obama’s re-election

Commentary by James H. Shott

Four years ago the left was filled with optimism and poised to win the presidential election. The Democrats had nominated the first African-American candidate for President of the United States, and millions were spellbound, and buoyed by his message of hope and change.

During his acceptance speech at the Democrat Convention, Barack Obama said, “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” The crowd went wild.

And it was about time we did those things. We had never cared for the sick before or provided jobs to the jobless. Or ended wars or been the last, best hope on Earth before.

In a campaign amazingly light on detail and substance, a dreadfully inexperienced Barack Obama won the election.

When he assumed office the country was in the midst of a recession, one President Obama frequently refers to as “The Great Recession.” As time passed and things didn’t improve as promised, this title has become a tool to make the downturn seem worse than it was to excuse his dismal performance on the nation’s crushing economic problems. Data show that other recessions were worse in one or more aspects than this recession, and while significant, the 2008 recession does not rate the honorific the president bestowed on it.

What does deserve our attention is the non-existent Obama recovery, which still has not taken hold 56 months after the recession began.

President Obama claims 5 million new jobs have been created during his term, but for the 37 weeks of 2012 through Sept. 15 the weekly new unemployment insurance claims average roughly 374,000, a total that dwarfs 5 million new jobs in just 37 weeks.

The U-6 unemployment rate stands at 14.6 percent as of September 30, and includes the unemployed, under-employed and those who have given up looking for work, a total of 22.6 million people.

Mr. Obama increased the national debt from $10.6 trillion on Jan. 20, 2009 by 51 percent, or $5.4 trillion, through a failed stimulus and a government spending spree. Despite spending all that borrowed money, since Q3 2009 GDP has averaged only 2.17 percent, substantially lower than the 3.25 percent average GDP through expansions and contractions since 1947.

Median household income has declined by 7.3 percent, and last year the Census Bureau reported more Americans in poverty than ever before in the more than 50 years that it has tracked poverty. Ironically, the group that has suffered the most during the Obama presidency has been black Americans, whose real incomes have fallen by more than 11 percent.

Had Mr. Obama set out immediately to address joblessness, and championed policies to spur the economy we would be far better off than we are. Instead, he wasted two years getting a bill passed to revamp the nation’s healthcare system, against the will of 60 percent of the people he serves.

Yet, the president does not regret wasting two years on Obamacare instead of focusing on the economy. In an interview with the Des Moines Register Mr. Obama said he had no regrets that he didn’t focus on the nation’s most pressing issue. “Absolutely not,” he said.

The dismal economic performance affects us all; however, the most remarkable failure is the scandalous behavior of the Obama administration before and after the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where during a seven-hour attack four Americans were murdered. There was a reduced level of security before the attack, despite numerous requests to maintain the higher levels and even increase those levels because of recent attacks on U.S. facilities and mounting levels of violence.

Requests for help during the attack, including requests from personnel stationed nearby who wanted to help were denied. And worst of all, adequate answers to the many legitimate questions about what actually happened still have not been provided fully seven weeks after the attack. It is difficult to avoid assigning political motives to this behavior, which appears at this point as a clumsy cover-up to get through the election.

Add to this the Fast and Furious gun-running debacle, the ridiculous job-killing ban on drilling for our own oil on federal lands, and the war on coal killing thousands of coal jobs and thousands more in related industries like power plants, railroads and support businesses, and there simply is no reason to give this man more time to wreck the economy.

Barack Obama is not the god-like figure his fawning fans believe him to be, but a very average man who allowed the nation to continue to suffer while he pursued his ill-advised ideological goals.

On the campaign trail he now says, “I want your vote for what I’m going to do.” But we’ve heard that one before, and we can’t afford to fall for it again.

Cross-posted from Observations

Poor economic policies damage the business environment

Commentary By James H. Shott


So many people in this country do not understand the workings of business, including the vast majority of our elected leaders in Washington. Their anti-business policies proliferate and have formed giant roadblocks to a healthy economy, have delayed the recovery and kept millions of Americans on the unemployment line for far too long.

If you want to end a recession, leave as much money in the hands of the people as possible; the more money people have, the more they can spend. Create a stable environment so that businesses feel comfortable in hiring; make it easy for existing businesses to expand and for new businesses to start up. That environment will create jobs and new taxpayers, and more jobs and more taxpayers will fuel a recovery.

What government is doing now, however, is implementing policies that create uncertainty and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit; increasing taxes that rob needed capital from small businesses and punish the wealthiest consumers, who are the ones with the most to spend; crafting regulations that raise business costs and make it difficult to add workers and expand.

It was a failure of the federal government and the Federal Reserve following the 1929 stock market crash that led to a 15-year depression, and that is what is happening now.

Testimony from someone who has as good a set of credentials as one could expect, Las Vegas casino resort and real-estate developer Steve Wynn, sees exactly this view. He is credited with much of the dramatic resurgence and expansion of Vegas, and he is splitting up his headquarters in Las Vegas and putting half of it in Macau, China. Why? In a May interview with CNBC, Mr. Wynn said: “The opportunities I see are far superior abroad than in America.”

Asked by the CNBC interviewer, “What about the regulation, the [communist] government oversight and working there, as opposed to here?” he replied, “Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington. That’s where we get surprises every day; that’s where taxes are changed every five minutes; that’s where you don’t know what to expect tomorrow. To compare political stability and … predictability in China to Washington is like comparing Mt. Everest to an ant hill. Macao, in China, is stable. Washington is not.”

From Steve Winn’s point of view, the actions of our elected representatives have created a situation in this country that not only discourages the very activities needed to turn the economy around, they have created a business environment that is less stable, and therefore is less appealing, than a communist economy. That is remarkable, and more than a little unsettling.

The Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress think that the way to turn the economy around is for the government to spend money it doesn’t have and to raise taxes on virtually everyone, and especially on “the rich.” This method is deeply flawed, as evidenced by what happened in the 30s, because it not only takes money from those at the bottom of the economic scale who need as much of their money as possible to survive, but it takes even more money from those at the top of the scale who are the ones in the best position to positively affect the economy by buying additional goods and services, and investing money in new and existing businesses.

Government cannot exist without the money it takes from the private sector. Why, then, since government cannot exist without a vibrant private sector, would anyone think that government can fix a downturn in the economy without supporting activity in the private sector?

President Obama wants to raise taxes on “the rich” by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and that is a horrible idea.

George W. Bush took office in January 2001 and inherited a recession that was substantially complicated by the September 11 terrorist attacks. The 2001 Economic Growth and Recovery Tax Act and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 together ended the recession, and did so not with spending and tax increases, but with tax cuts for everyone. And, according to the (begin ital) Wall Street Journal,(end ital) contrary to the “tax cuts for the rich” demagoguery, the Bush tax cuts resulted in the richest five percent paying 60 percent of all income taxes in 2005.

This is the kind of stimulus that we need today, but is the opposite of the steps that President Obama and Congressional Democrats have taken.

And a CNN/Opinion Research poll taken last month shows that the country disapproves of the way the economy is being handled by 57 to 42 percent, and by 62 to 36 percent Americans say the federal budget deficit is a serious problem.

Deficits result when government spends more than it takes in. Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders want to keep spending at record levels and increase revenue by raising taxes, which will thwart private sector productivity by transferring money to the government that would be better spent by the people who earned it.

The way to cure a deficit caused by too much spending is to spend less.

Cross-posted from Observations

ENOUGH!

ENOUGH!
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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We have HAD IT … with the politicians running the US government today! To narrow it down, a bit, we are writing, most specifically, about the Socialist-Democrats in Congress and the Socialist-Marxist in the White House.

We, the American people, have been shut out of our own government. Legislation is now made behind closed doors, as our Congresspersons and Senators cut themselves off from the very folks they swore to represent.

Their arrogance and condescension is nauseating. Anyone questioning them is at risk of being made a fool of, in public, before his friends and neighbors. How DARE we question our “betters?”

They blatantly go against the will of the American people by passing laws that are flat-out against the American will.

They refuse to defend the country from those stealing across its borders to take up residence, illegally, and begin sucking up every dollar possible from the people’s treasury, which is administered by the same socialist-democrats who then swear they are doing everything they can do to secure the border. That, dear reader is a LIE!

Our current government consists of socialists, Marxists, communists, progressives, and a handful of pitiful, completely malleable, liberals, as well as the RINOS from the right side of the aisle. THESE are the people taking the United States down the tube to that vast sewer of failed socialist nations whose citizens bought the scam lock, stock, and barrel – just as the millions of naïve, hopelessly vacuous, elites from the political left are doing now, today, with the propaganda spewed forth by the legions of Obama supporters hell bent on crushing the American Constitutional Republic.

They MUST bring about the total collapse of America in order for them to remold America into a socialist/marxist/communist police state – a nightmare for freedom-loving people EVERYWHERE.

The freedom-loving people in the US had had it. They are shouting to Washington, and to the world, that they have had enough of American-style socialism and are taking a stand against it.

Unemployment in America continues to hover around ten percent. The stock market seems to have taken a plunge that may yet prove fatal to the national economy.

The national debt is soaring while Congress continues to spend wildly, having closed their ears to pleas from their constituents to stop the spending, and the borrowing, that will keep us in debt for generations of unborn Americans in the future.

Americans are angry – angrier than I have ever seen them in my nearly seven decades on the planet. They believe, and rightly so, their government is out of control. The facts certainly seem to bear them out.

A number of national grassroots movements (the best known is the Tea Party) have spread across America, like wildfire, as Americans, afraid of losing their country band together to fight for the preservation of their freedom and liberty and their constitutional republic.

The battle cry is “ENOUGH!”

Enough taxes.

Enough spending.

Enough borrowing.

We have had ENOUGH of their elitist arrogance.

We are sick to death of the left’s limp-wristed political correctness. Again, we say, ENOUGH!

Enough of the Globalists “Open Borders” policy! We want our borders secured. (And Obama can forget about amnesty for Illegal Aliens – unless, of course, he does it as a king would do it, as a dictator would do it: by executive order.)

We have had enough of the Democrat Party’s socialism/Marxism, communism, statism, collectivism, and progressivism in the Congress AND in the Oval Office.

We are fed up! We will not tolerate being pushed around by our very own government -- the one WE elected at the ballot box!

Again, and again, and again, we say: ENOUGH!

Understand, dear reader, WE ARE AMERICANS, DAMNIT! AMERICANS DO NOT TOLERATE THIS KIND OF GOVERNMENT! It is a threat to our liberty! It is a threat to our Freedom! It is a clear and present danger to our republic!

We MUST begin now to fight back -- all the way to the ballot box this coming November. We MUST purge our Congress of as many socialists, communists, Marxists, collectivists, Statists, progressives, and yes, liberals as are offered to us on the ballots.

We have NO CHOICE if America is to be rescued – if America is to be saved!

J. D. Longstreet

The Plantation Politics of the Democrats/Socialists in Washington

The Plantation Politics of the Democrats/Socialists in Washington
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
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Those who have made a study of American history, especially that portion of history before and during the War Between the States, know it was the democrats who held the black man in slavery in both North and the South.

The Democrat Party held the southern states in a fierce grip and continued to do so until a hundred years later when President Richard Nixon successfully broke that grip and began -- what would turn out to be -- a mass migration of southerners from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Now the Democrats are in the “Big House” in Washington. The rest of us are “field hands.” But many of us field hands are writhing under the yoke of the socialist slave masters in Washington and are desperate to break free.

But there are some Americans who find themselves quite happy with the current arrangement between the masters in the Big House and the modern day field hands.

You see, there really is a sub-class in America. A class of US citizen, which may be accurately referred to as “wards of the state, or government.” There have been several generations of these folks and they are joined with the folks in the Big House, today, exactly as the slaves in the days prior to the “War for Southern Independence.”
They depend upon the folks in the Big House for their sustenance, for their very existence. In many ways, the folks in the Big House own them.

In return the “wards” blindly support the Big House folks in anything and everything they try to do. Their vote and support can always be counted on, IF the folks in the Big House are Democrats. And these days they appear to be Democrats -- although WE know that is only a façade to hide their socialism.

The “wards,” we speak of, are the Americans who will argue you down that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat! He had to be! He freed the slaves, didn’t he? Actually, Lincoln did not free a single salve. Read the “Emancipation Proclamation” and you will quickly see that no slaves were freed by it. In fact, in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the US Treasury, dated September 3rd, 1863, Lincoln said the following: “ The Emancipation proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification except as a war measure.”

Lincoln actually proposed three constitutional amendments in his State of the Union Address to Congress in 1862:

1 – Slaves not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation to be freed over a 37-year period, to be completed by January 1st, 1900.

2 – Provided compensation to owners for the loss of their slave property.

3 – The government would transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and relocate them in Latin America and in Africa.

You see, when Lincoln truly had it in his power to bring real and immediate freedom to approximately 832,000 enslaved people (In the border states that were loyal to Lincoln and the federal government) he, LINCOLN, instead, carefully ensured that they would remain slaves!

But, hey! Lincoln was a Democrat – right? Well, YOU try to convince them!

Black Americans are being used and abused by the Democrats just as they were before the War for Southern Independence. They lie to Black people over and over again, and yet -- Black Americans continue to blindly support their democratic oppressors. WHY? Could it be because the federal government feeds, clothes, and houses them?

It is Plantation Politics! Plantation politics goes back generations in American Democratic Party politics and is a large part of the old “machine politics” of the big urban centers.

Francis Rice, of the National Black Republican Association, in an article entitled: “Obama and Plantation Politics,” says the following: “To his eternal shame, in order to acquire and maintain power, President Barack Obama has adopted the Democratic Party's strategy of keeping blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats.” (SOURCE).

The Democrats are in charge of the US Government these days -- just as they were in the South before this nation tore itself apart in the latter part of the 19th century. As long as they can maintain Black Americans in a state of poverty, in a state of anger, and continuing to vote, as a large block, for Democrats/Socialists, Plantation Politics will continue to thrive and reap huge benefits for those in charge -- the Democrats/Socialists.

Democrats/Socialists are occupying the “Big House” these days. It is they who are practicing modern day Plantation Politics. But, then again, it has always been the Democrat’s plantation – now hasn’t it?

J. D. Longstreet