Frontline Series: Money, Power And Wall Street

Note:  I have no idea why searches for the "torrent" version of these videos keep getting directed here, but I don't have a clue about "torrent" and it is not here.

This appears to be a pretty good series from anybody, especially PBS.  Unknowingly, PBS exposes how Nationalized Socialism was fast tracked by the Republican George W. Bush administration and injected with steroids by the Barack Hussein Obama administration.

The first is mostly about the sub-prime mortgage beginnings.

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Moral Hazard: This episode is fantastic if you know what to look for.  It shows how the moral hazard risk of a relatively free market (segments of little regulation within a heavily regulated industry) was short circuited by the federal government.

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Two on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Episode Three - The Obamatrons take over. When Obama comes face to face with the biggest bankers in the United States, he folds like cardboard against a blowtorch giving the bankers all the money they wanted with no strings attached:

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Three on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Episode Four - From shady American municipalities to shady European governments, public officials around the globe jump into financial transactions they had no business getting near and the schemes blow up one by one:

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Four on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Would You Like Borders With That Socialism?

Obamacare: All Unfunded Mandates are not Created Equal

A followup to this post here:
Again, Republican ≠ Conservative


Back in my days as a resource manager in the defense industry, I got to hear some of the worst excuses ever contrived by people who just did not want to do what they were supposed to do.  One of them was the unfunded mandate objection, as if it were some sort of automatic absolution of responsibility.

This is not to say that unfunded mandates are always proper or fair, not in the slightest.  However, the way that federal bureaucrats use the term stands the concept on its head.

One incident was in the Information Technology field where the Congress had proscribed that the whole government would begin keeping better track of all systems that it had, all of the systems that the Congress funded needed to be tracked.  With that came system certifications and compliance measures, along with the requirement that some human being actually check off the blocks on electronic forms certifying that indeed the systems under their domain were in compliance.  To those of us paying the bills, this sounds perfectly reasonable, yes?

Not to one of the bureaucrats.  The powers that be in her directorate had her designated as the "block checker" for certification of a substantial number of systems. I was the next person in the line to certify her work, which she never did, claiming that it was an "unfunded mandate."  This situation went on for at least two years while I was dealing with that stuff and I heard it continued long after I moved onto another project.

Changing duties and responsibilities within a job one is already being paid for can be called many things, but an unfunded mandate it ain't.  If the load becomes too great you can always move on to better conditions or just quit.

This brings me to the latest federal debacle that had potential to be correctly labeled an unfunded mandate (by those who stretch the term), but somehow has escaped that label: Free-riders in the healthcare system.

The Leftist script has gone in generally the same direction for 100 years, beginning with Progressive Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 proposing a national healthcare system based on the German national model and the proposal was continually rejected until Obamacare came along.  This is not to say that bits and pieces were not adopted, and each of them were accompanied with a new list of demands.

In the years leading to the passage of Obamacare, the Left's complaint was that everybody did not have access to healthcare.  The list of victims were the usual: poor, minorities, women hardest hit.  That complaint did not last long when it was revealed that poor minorities were filling up emergency rooms across the country and quite a few of them were uninsured.

As Leftists are want to do, they morphed that complaint into a different lie: Emergency rooms are forced to treat people without insurance, so we need a law to make everybody buy insurance.  As reasonable as that complaint sounds, and the evidence is not a complete lie, it is only a partial truth, rarely does anybody stop to ask who is forcing hospitals to take uninsured patients?

That answer is, of course, the federal government.  Under the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986, all hospitals that participate in Medicare must take all emergency patients regardless of means to pay.  The case for this being an unfunded mandate would revolve around the issue of how Congress moved the goalposts on what hospitals are required to do to get Medicare funds, decades after the program began.  The case against: No federal requirement to take Medicare patients or Medicare money.

Many States, like Tennessee, have State hospitals that are open to anybody who shows up and everybody receives the same care, regardless of means.  From personal experience I can tell you that if you show up in their emergency room, they will indeed care for you.  If you give them insurance information, the bill goes to the insurance company.  If you do not have insurance, the bill goes to your house.  I do not know how they handle a failure to pay, but feel free to research that one on your own.

So, where is the problem?  According to the Leftists there was a crisis caused by people who could not afford healthcare getting free healthcare and the hospitals were unfairly burdened with the costs, or passed those losses onto other patients.  (Whenever you see that last bit in a story, it is a rare acknowledgement that business do pass on costs that fails to get factored into any other business.)

There solution to this 'problem' created by government was more government, more regulation (2,700 pages worth), and of course another tax.  In the name of paying for people who cannot afford to pay, who need free healthcare (you know, the people who already get free healthcare), a national socialist solution was struck whereby all Americans would be required to buy healthcare insurance.  And by all Americans, they mean only those who can afford to pay for it, those who cannot afford to pay are exempt.

Simpler version: some people could not afford to pay their emergency room and other healthcare bills in the past, so everybody else (even those who did not have medical bills, through their Medicare tax) covered those losses.  To solve this problem, a massive bureaucracy was created to make the people who can afford to pay for healthcare cover the bills of those who cannot pay.  Added bonus: All those people who paid for routine medical services in cash are now required to pay an insurance company.

Another added bonus: A mountain of actual unfunded mandates for the States.

The next time someone brings up the issue of "free-riders" in the healthcare market, ask them who created the free-rider system in the first place.  If they respond with anything besides EMTALA, direct them to the nearest internet connection for some self education.

Socialists Just Can't Help Themselves (Video)

Janeane Garafalo: National Socialist, Liberal Fascist

Here is a modern example of how the Socialistic Left likes to spin things around and then complain when they get caught in the undertow.  Below is a video of Janeane Garafalo and Keith Olberman calling people who just want the government to be fiscally responsible a bunch of "teabagging rednecks," racists, and other unkind things.  The closest that they come in the evidence category is hurling these ridiculous accusations.

How is a movement that began in response to Bush policies that a Democrat congress adopted supposed to be "racist" for that opposition?  Because they got more intense along with the policies?

They also accuse the Teaparty of creating birtherism.  Interesting accusation, since Hillary Clinton has never been associated with the Tea Party, yet it was her campaign that got the rumors rolling.  They were easy enough rumors to start, since Michelle Obama says her husband's home country is Kenya.  She was saying that well before Barack Hussein Obama was nominated and references to those words can now only be found on YouTube.Com, since those words have been erased from every transcript.

Candidate Obama claimed to have been conceived at the time of the famous Selma, Alabama march.  An event that happened about four years after his Hawaii birth certificate says that he was born.

In 2004 there was this news item:

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Kenyan-born Obama all set for US Senate Kenyan-born US Senate hopeful, Barrack Obama, appeared set to take over the Illinois Senate seat after his main rival, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race on Friday night amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations. The allegations that horrified fellow Republicans and caused his once-promising candidacy to implode in four short days have given Obama a clear lead as Republicans struggled to fetch an alternative. Ryan’s campaign began to crumble on Monday following the release of embarrassing records from his divorce. In the records, his ex-wife, Boston Public actress Jeri Ryan, said her former husband took her to kinky sex clubs in Paris, New York and New Orleans.

To Socialists like Garafalo and Olberman, every contradiction is the fault of their political opponents.  The term "racism" has been reduced to opposing a Socialist agenda and a Socialist president.


I visited this discussion earlier with this video.

Another Memory Hole: The Buchanan Committee

Congressman Frank Buchanan

Did you ever hear of the House of Representatives Buchanan Committee aka United States House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities?  What about one by Clinton Anderson in 1944? I hadn't either until the great Brian Doherty of Reason informed me of its existence during a Book TV interview with Doug Bandow of the CATO institute.  You can find a link to Doherty's book Radicals for Capitalism in the left column of this page.

What was the Buchanan Committee?  It was a 1950s congressional committee to suppress freedom Franklin Delano Roosevelt style.  In this case, any speaking against the government, not unlike similar activities during the Wilson administration.

Good luck finding out much about it.  For some reason, anything that does not fit the Socialist narrative either fails to emerge in WikiPedia and gets deleted from YouTube.  Compare to the McCarthy hearings where every single person called before the joint House and Senate Committee was in fact guilty as sin, but not a one of them spent a day in jail and none were falsely maligned.  If you do not believe that last sentence, then produce one.  Nobody can, but that does not stop Leftists from claiming that there were.  After the release of the Venona Decrypts and the Soviet Archives, every single person who appeared before McCarthy, Kennedy, and Nixon has been confirmed as working for Stalin's Soviet Union.

One of the only places to find information on this Liberal Fascist commission is at TheFreeManOnline.Org. (Italics and links mine)

The Day FEE Was Called before Congress

After a failed effort to set up a Senate-House joint committee, the House assigned the investigation to a committee led by Rep. Frank Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Buchanan was not only a stalwart Fair Dealer but had his own axe to grind because the CCG (Committee for Constitutional Government) had successfully fought expanded public housing, a goal he had championed. He defined lobbying in the broadest possible terms to include groups that had an indirect influence on the formation of public opinion. The committee sent out a probing questionnaire to 166 businesses and organizations, most of them opponents of the Fair Deal. The Buchanan committee ignored lobbying by government agencies, but perhaps for the sake of balance a questionnaire also went to the Civil Rights Congress, an organization with close ties to the Communist Party.

When Buchanan’s staffers, armed with a dragnet subpoena, arrived in force at FEE’s (Foundation for Economic Education) headquarters in early 1949, Read reluctantly cooperated. It became readily apparent to him, however, that the investigators were leaving no stone unturned in the hope of finding something—anything—to discredit the organization. It was also clear that the committee had formed a working alliance with key New Deal interest groups and journalists. Almost immediately after the committee rummaged through FEE’s offices, someone leaked the information to Drew Pearson. Pearson’s column publicized the best-known names on FEE’s “secret” contributor list and quoted liberally from internal correspondence. Mullendore expressed his outrage about the leak in a letter to Buchanan: “Those who seek to extend the power of government try to close the mouths of citizens who dare to oppose them. . . . Your inquisitorial and extremely burdensome demand for information which you have no moral right to demand is a most alarming example of the use of this means of intimidation.”

Read the whole thing. Some of the names mentioned are researchable.  Fair warning, if you think the MSM has a left bias, just wait until you read this stuff.

The Socialist Workers Writers at the Village Voice made mention of the CGC once, in 2010, while praising a Marxist takeover of the Albany Senate.  Note: it was really a Democrat takeover, but leave it to the Village Voice to wordsmythe it into a second coming of Lenin.  Beyond that, it is difficult to find anything about the group that committed the sin of opposing oppressive government regulation.

Leading up to this was an FDR tactic, later to only be mentioned in articles about Richard M. Nixon, the Treasury Department was ordered directly by the President (FDR) to "audit" newspaper publisher Moses Annenberg, and others who were vocally against the New Deal, even after major portions of it like the National Recovery Act (NRA) were ruled unconstitutional and FDR advocated packing the United States Supreme Court with National Socialism friendly Justices.

How, seriously, do the Socialists get away Scott free with these shenanigans?

Obama and the Telephone Operators

Rough Rider Obama

Obama's 6 December 2011 Speech, Osawatomie, Kansas

What is this love that president Obama has for a pre-Industrial Revolution society?  He has been on a kick about automation for months.  He is still yammering about ATMs, travel agents, and the Internet.  Now he has added telephone operators?  It goes hand-in-hand for his hate of the Industrial Revolution.  A few months ago, on 17 August, 2011, he was using the bank teller example:

Abolish the Drive-Thru too?

When I go into factories these days, what’s amazing is how clean and how quiet they are, because what used to take 1,000 folks to do now only takes 100 folks to do. And one of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is businesses have gotten so efficient that -- when was the last time somebody went to a bank teller instead of using the ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online?

This was on Obama's meandering path to telling his audience that he wanted more public education money.  The sad thing is, the ATM was an invention to make banking more convenient for people.  Over-regulation of the banking industry made the ATM indispensable.

Ernestine the Operator

On December 6th 2011, in Kansas, Obama bleated this:

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet. 

So, let's go back to the days before automatic switching and see how this works out.  Via PBS, we can see that calls per person per year in 1940 was around 250 (PDF).  The US population was 132,164,569, according to the 1940 Census, so that is about 33,041,142,250 telephone calls annually, handled by about 350,000 operators.  Each operator handled about 94,403 calls per year.

In 2000 (the last year in the PBS chart) US population was 281,421,906. At the call rates of 1940, that is 70,355,476,500 calls and a demand for 745,267 operators.  However, by 1997 (last year noted in the PBS chart) Americans made an average of 2,325 calls per year.  If we use the 2000 census, that is 654,305,931,450 calls that would demand 6,930,986 operators for voice calls only.  Forget about text messages, Facebook, chat or the like.  The technology that Obama approves of does not support that.  Also remember, if we kept 1940s technology it is highly unlikely that people would make 2,000-plus calls per year either.

There is a lot of mythology around the telephone operator profession in America that built over the years that the Bell System as a government protected monopoly.  "Ma Bell" was generally hated by everybody in the USA.  Since they were a monopoly, by edict of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the customer service experience Americans had with them was not much better that the worst department of motor vehicles office in America today.

Sexism and "unfairness" emerged as epithets against the Bell System and that got mixed in with 1970s hate for the phone company.  The sexism narrative was that Alexander Graham Bell himself hired only women as operators because they were cheaper.  Of course, as most socialist narratives, this was false.

It is well documented that boys were originally hired as telephone operators, just as they had been hired as telegraph operators.  A few choice mentions:
In One Man's Life: A Telephone Set About 1889-90

Holmes had presently dis- missed his staff of boys as being noisy and unruly, replacing them with girls

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap. 

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

Nobody tell Obama.  Next thing you know, he will want us to go back to the pre-telephone days of the telegraph, or earlier.

Maybe mentioning jobs that people are used to being filled by women ties into the Obama nostalgia for the days when a budding Progressive National Socialist movement was all the rage?

Now, for this, Roosevelt was called a radical. He was called a socialist -- (laughter) -- even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women -- (applause) -- insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax. (Applause.) 

(for more bizarre politicians invoking Teddy Roosevelt, see this)

Obama is steeped in mythology in many areas.  From the earlier quoted part of his Kansas speech, Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Not exactly.  Overregulation of many forms deove American factories overseas where the total cost of production was lower.  Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle.  In the past, Obama has invoked the images of South Side Chicago steel mills "leaving".  Now he says American steel mills are more efficient, so now that is a problem to him.  In reality, overbearing environmental regulations ran the steel mills out of the country.  Mini-mills, like those from Nucor Steel, operate today reprocessing scrap steel.  It is no mistake that they generally operate in right-to-work States.

David Bernstein wrote about the myth of early 20th century Progressives and minimum wage for women in response to Obama's speech:

Oddly enough, Obama also praises Roosevelt for supporting a minimum wage for women. Chapter 4 of Rehabilitating Lochner describes the impetus for such laws, and much of the relevant the information in that chapter can be found in this paper published in Law and Contemporary Problems. The history is too rich to give an adequate summary here. Let’s just say that the history of such laws is not pretty. The laws’ primary supporters included male-only labor unions that wanted to keep women out of the workplace–women-only minimum wage laws almost never passed without strong from unions that typically opposed minimum wage laws for men; eugenicists who wanted women to stay home and take care of their children; bigots who thought that only the lower order of men (including Eastern European immigrants) would allow their women to work for wages; moralists who believed that low-wage women were susceptible to vice and should therefore stay out of the workforce; and economists who believed that, as Felix Frankfurter summarized in his brief in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, women who wanted to work but could not command a government-imposed minimum wage were “semi-employable” or “unemployable” workers who should “accept the status of a defective to be segregated for special treatment as a dependent.”

You really cannot trust anything that comes from the mouth of a Socialist.

Now for a lesson in doing your own research, something that Obama's people might want to try.  As soon as I heard Obama say "operators" I was reminded of this interesting statistic from William F. Buckley, Jr. that he voices at a 1991 Young Americans for Freedom forum (unembedable video at the link):  

10:40 - If we had frozen our technology at the level of nineteen-hundred-and-forty, and the same number of telephone calls were made today, per capita, as were made then, every woman between the age of twenty and sixty-six would have to serve as a telephone operator to make possible these transactions.

As soon as I began checking the numbers, I realized that the notion was flawed.  It sounds good, a nation of nearly 300 million people would make a lot of telephone calls, even at the 250 per capita rate of 1940.  However, the female population 20 - 24 of 1991 could easily handle the load with millions of women left to do other things.

The 1st Amendment As A Vehicle For Socialism?

New York Judge Lucy Billings: ACLU activist

Those #Occupy clowns and their ACLU allies have "discovered" that the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution applies to private property.  Who knew?

Well, this nonsense goes beyond that. Mayor Bloomberg is quoted saying:

“The First Amendment protects speech,” Bloomberg said in a press conference at City Hall . “It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space. Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”

No, little man, the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting certain forms of free speech, especially political speech.  It does not give anybody the right to take over private property at all, even to make speeches that the government cannot prohibit in a public square.  Easement law and some other crazy bits of British Common Law that still float around like landmines in American real property law might apply, but the 1st Amendment don't.

Bloomberg made another statement, probably by accident, that gets to the core of the problem:

The mayor, at his news conference, read a statement he had issued around 6 a.m. explaining the reasoning behind the sweep. “The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day,” the mayor said in the statement. “Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with” because the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

Zuccotti Park

What law could possibly be in effect to force a private property owner to make their property available for any delinquent or Nazi who wants to hang out there?  Sounds like some sort of Socialism from on high, which it is.  It is called "Privately Owned Public Space" which is a short name for an element of National Socialism where private property owners are forced to provide services that the government would/should provide if the government would just buy property for public use.

The 1961 Zoning Resolution inaugurated the incentive zoning program in New York City. The program encouraged private developers to provide spaces for the public within or outside their buildings by allowing them greater density in certain high-density districts. Since its inception, the program has produced more than 3.5 million square feet of public space in exchange for additional building area or other considerations such as relief from certain height and setback restrictions.

Of course, a heavy helping of rent-seeking is at play for owners of enough property to make some "public space" in return for privileged zoning rules just for them.

Here is a thought: if government wants public parks, let them buy the land on the free market (or use donated land) and build them, taking public responsibility for them, and let the private property owners do what they will with their own property?  Of course, that is too simple.