Victor Davis Hanson: The Liberal Super Nova

By Victor Davis Hanson | June 11, 2012 | PJ Media

Two parties, left and right, are central to good consensual government — one the perennial check on the other, both within the general boundaries of constitutional free-market capitalism.

Yet the hard-Left takeover of the Democratic Party has meant that there is no longer a credible balance in our system, as almost all the tenets of contemporary left-wing ideology are blowing up, imploding super nova style — unsustainable ideas that are contrary to human nature and demand coercion for their implementation, given that they are increasingly anti-democratic and have to be implemented from high by an elite technocracy whether in Brussels, Sacramento, or Washington.

Far too much is always seen as not enough: Greeks are angry that there was too much “austerity” and not enough of the old borrow and spend; Obama is blamed for only borrowing $5 trillion for too “little” stimulus; Democrats threaten to withhold from the community-organizer Obama because he was not hard enough on “fat cats” and the capitalist state; in California, a 10.3% income tax is too low, not too high. When the remedy is seen worse than the disease, then the patient is indeed terminal.

Let me do a brief survey of the fissuring liberal world in which we live:

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A Republican Liberation Movement [Video]

By Daniel Greenfield | June 10, 2012 | Sultan Knish

The real lesson of Wisconsin is that the Republican Party is at its strongest and greatest when it acts as a revolutionary liberation movement, breaking apart the power relationships of the Democratic Party that stifle people’s personal, economic and religious lives.

The Democratic Party has made it its mandate to politicize and collectivize the personal. It has done this to militarize every area of life, to transform all human activities into a battlefield and to bring every area of life under the aegis of its power relationships. These power relationships form its infrastructure, fusing together governmental and non-governmental organizations, to form the true ruling class.

These power relationships act as dams, walling up human energy into organizational structures, they create the mandates that provide power and money to the organizations, which are fed throughout the infrastructure to create a massive cage of bureaucrats, activists and think-tanks that set the agenda, which becomes law, and is then enforced by governments at every level.

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Legislative Lowdown: The secret plan to raise your taxes

By  | June 8, 2012 | The Daily Caller

Republicans are secretly negotiating with Democrats to raise your taxes after the election.

“A dozen senators ranging from Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn to Delaware Democrat Chris Coons have begun to organize closed-door briefings with leading economic experts to prod Congress into action,” Politico reports.

Evidently these leading experts include Robert Zoellick of the World Bank and William Dudley, president of the New York Fed. These guys are experts in fear-mongering. Unfortunately, members of Congress, motivated by fear, will likely cut a terrible deal for the taxpayer.

Congress is taking action to address “the year-end fiscal cliff” set up by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, cuts to defense spending, a possible debt ceiling hike and a scheduled Obamacare tax increase. Details are scarce, but we know these squishy members want a deal after the elections so they can feel free to violate Americans for Tax Reform’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge not to vote for tax hikes.

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Glenn Beck: Why are leftists complaining about Obama? [Video]

By Staff Report | June 1, 2012 | GlennBeck.com

[…]

“If you are a Marxist, if you are a revolutionary, if you’re a communist, really, if you’re an anarchist, if you’re an extreme leftist, if you’re somebody who doesn’t like the system as it is on the left, what more could this President do for you,” he asked.

[…]

Just a quick look at President Obama’s first three years reveals he has: [Read more…]

Are Democrats Finally Seeing What We Knew About Obama Four Years Ago?

By Rush Limbaugh | May 25, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Last night, PBS, Charlie Rose had as his guest a guy named Donald Gogel, president, chief executive officer at private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.  Charlie Rose said to Donald Gogel, “You were a strong supporter of the president in 2008.  Are you concerned about the nature of the president’s rhetoric on private equity and Bain Capital and Mitt Romney?

“GOGEL:  I’m concerned that in the noise, in the tornado of politics (and unfortunately it’s become a tornado) we’re gonna lose what is most essential to this country, which is the ability for individuals to band together, free association, free enterprise, create businesses, and create jobs.

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Is GOP Headed for Ash Heap of History?

By Patrick J. Buchanan | May 17, 2012 | WND

Pat Buchanan applies latest racial data to realities of Republican Party policies

 Among the more controversial chapters in “Suicide of a Superpower,” my book published last fall, was the one titled, “The End of White America.”

It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity.

That book and chapter proved the proximate cause of my departure from MSNBC, where the network president declared that subjects such as these are inappropriate for “the national dialogue.”

Apparently, the mainstream media are reassessing that.

For, in rare unanimity, the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today all led yesterday with the same story.

“Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.,” blared the Times headline. “Minority Babies Majority in U.S.,” echoed the Post. “Minorities Are Now a Majority of Births,” proclaimed USA Today.

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45 Signs That America Will Soon Be A Nation With A Very Tiny Elite And The Rest Of Us Will Be Poor

By Staff Report | April 2, 2012 | End of the American Dream

The middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in the United States today.  America is a nation with a very tiny elite that is rapidly becoming increasingly wealthy while everyone else is becoming poorer.  So why is this happening?  Well, it is actually very simple.  Our institutions are designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very limited number of people.  Throughout human history, almost all societies that have had a big centralized government have also had a very high concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite.  Throughout human history, almost all societies that have allowed big business or big corporations to dominate the economy have also had a very high concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite.  Well, the United States has allowed both big government and big corporations to grow wildly out of control.  Those were huge mistakes.  Our founding fathers attempted to establish a nation where the federal government would be greatly limited and where corporations would be greatly restricted.  Unfortunately, we have turned our backs on those principles and now we are paying the price.

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If Nick Hanauer is right about the middle class, then America’s job creation engine is being destroyed

Nick Hanauer: “It is astounding how one idea can shape a society.” [Video]

95 Percent Of The Jobs Lost During The Recession Were Middle Class Jobs

By Staff Report | May 1, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

95 Percent Of The Jobs Lost During The Last Recession Were Middle Class Jobs Photo By Infrogmation of New OrleansWho is the biggest loser in the ongoing decline of the U.S. economy?  Is it the wealthy?  No, the stock market has been soaring lately and their incomes are actually going up.  Is it the poor?  Well, the poor are definitely hurting very badly, but when you don’t have much to begin with you don’t have much to lose.  Unfortunately, it is the middle class that has lost the most during this economic downturn.  According to Bloomberg, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.  That is an absolutely astounding figure.  Yes, some executives lost their jobs during the last recession as did some minimum-wage workers.  But overwhelmingly the jobs that were lost were middle income jobs.  Sadly, the limited number of jobs that have been added since the end of the last recession have mostly been low income jobs.  A higher percentage of Americans are working low income jobs than ever before, and the cost of living continues to rise at a very brisk pace.  This is causing an erosion of the middle class unlike anything we have ever seen in American history.

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The Psychology of the liberal Mind: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game [Video]






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House Dems Receive Training on Portraying Conservatives as Racist

By William Bigelow | May 13, 2012 | Breitbart

Maya Wiley is the founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion. (photo via website)

In the latest transparent attempt by the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to make the 2012 election a referendum on supposed racism and not Obama’s dismal performance, House Democrats received training this week on how to portray neutral free-market rhetoric as racially charged.

Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion, whose statements were distributed at a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, cynically called conservative messages “racially coded … right-wing rhetoric has dominated debates of racial justice – undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process” for over 25 years.

Wiley was invited to the caucus by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif  to run the Democrats “through their strategy and how they message and talk about stuff” pertaining to race and fiscal policy.

Read the full article here.

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Cloward-Piven Strategy Working Perfectly — in Europe

By Zombie | May 6, 2012 | PJ Media

The now-infamous “Cloward-Piven Strategy” outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in 1966 proposed a clear roadmap to socialism: get so many people addicted to government entitlements that the economic system collapses, and in the resulting chaos the populace will demand and vote for a new economic system in which everyone is supported by the state.

Sounds logical (if nefarious), and President Obama seems hell-bent on bringing it to fruition in the United States. The problem for Obama’s inner socialist is that he’s also required for appearance’s sake to attempt a rescue of the American economy using Keynesian principles. This self-cancelling combo-strategy is the underlying cause of our economic stagnation, as outlined in “The Obama-Piven Strategy,” an earlier PJM post I made last year that made some waves. What I noted back then remains true:

I propose that President Obama is simultaneously trying to rescue the economy using the Keynesian/Democratic model while at the same time also trying to destroy the economy through the Cloward-Piven Strategy. His two mutually contradictory plans cancel each other out, rendering all his efforts self-negating, and this explains why the American economy has stalled.

I dub this the Obama-Piven Strategy. And it’s the reason why we remain mired in a deep recession. We are neither recovering, as the Keynesian model predicts, nor is capitalism collapsing, as the revolutionaries hope; the Obama-Piven strategy ensures that we remain in suspended animation between the two extremes.

But something interesting happened on Sunday in Europe: Voters in both France and Greece, two countries ruinously addicted to government entitlements, rejected the “austerity” model of debt-reduction and instead doubled down on unsustainable spending sprees. France elected Socialist Francois Hollande as president, and in his acceptance speech he promised to increase government benefits and amp up “stimulus” spending programs — the exact things that got France into a metaphorical debtors’ prison in the first place. But exactly as Cloward and Piven had surmised, once you get 50+% of the population hooked on “free” government money, there’s no turning back — they will vote for socialists every time. The election of Hollande is the culmination of Cloward-Piven; the strategy worked, but in the wrong country.

Read the full article here.

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It Was the Power, Stupid!

By Victor Davis Hanson | April 22, 2012 | PJ Media

I. Power—Always Was and Always Will Be

In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility.

But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.

II. The Year 4

We are in the year four of our lord, when darkness was made light, the seas gently receded, and the planet cooled. In the space of 24 hours in January 2009 the world was turned upside down: massive deficits were no longer “unpatriotic”; 5% (heck, even 9%) unemployment was no longer to be seen as a “jobless recovery”; $4 plus gasoline no longer would become “intolerable.” Filibusters suddenly became ossified obstructionism. Recess appointments were now quite legitimate; lecturing the media about the myth of objective fairness was salutary. Pay-for-play time with the president was consulting; attacking the “unelected” courts was progressive. Voter fraud was not thugs eyeing polling monitors with clubs, but officials asking voters to present a picture ID—and mentioning any of these inconsistencies or writing about the Trostkyzation of American life was either racism or Palinism.

Around March 2008, the Ministry of Truth had issued new edicts about campaign financing, big Wall Street money, and the supposedly pernicious role of contributions: all bad if Bush trumped Kerry, all now good if Obama trumped McCain. So when Obama became the first candidate in the history of the law to renounce public campaign financing in order to shake down $1 billion, there was silence. The Left never really worried about Big Money, but only if more Big Money went to conservatives than to themselves. (Consider the current shameless money grubbing of Jon Corzine to raise cash for Obama after Corzine’s looting of thousands of individuals’ lifetime investments, or the shrillness over Mitt Romney’s supposed mansion in La Jolla juxtaposed to the prior silence about the Kerry mansions, the multiple Gore residences, or “John’s room,” as in the huge and crass Edwards estate.) What was interesting about Hilary Rosen was not her stupid thoughts on Ann Romney, but her cursus honorum that led to hired-gun riches by parlaying political contacts into commerce.

III. Tongue-tied Presidents

We can play this Orwellian game with almost everything these days. Take presidential cosmopolitanism and the Bush-as-oaf trope. The disdain was not for an inept president, but rather a simple means to destroy an ideological opponent. Why again the cynicism? Because the Left cares little that Barack Obama has no clue where particular islands in the news are and cannot even do political correctness right when he wishes to ingratiate himself to his South American hosts by wanting to trill the “Maldives.” We have a president who can say Talêban, drop the g’s in a black patois, and trill his Spanish words in front of Latin American hosts, but is off 8,000 miles in his geography.

Ditto “corpse-man,” the Austrian language, 57 states, and all the other parochialism and gaffes that remind us not only that it is hard being a president without making gaffes, but that it is especially hard as a conservative president when each gaffe is cited as proof of ignorance.

IV. So What?

What is going on? Two things, really. One, the media believes that the noble ends justify the tawdry means. So if it is a choice between emphasizing the latest Obama embarrassment by digging into the scary Fast and Furious, the “millions of green jobs” Solyndra insider giveaways, the Secret Service decadence, the GSA buffoonery, and the work while getting food stamps con in Washington OR endangering Obamacare and by extension “the children,” or the war to eliminate autism, or the right to breath clean air–well, why would one ever wish to derail all that by weakening a landmark progressive and his enlightened agenda?

Or for you more cynical readers, why would you wish to enervate the present comfortable culture in Washington in which the press and politics are at last one? Or why undermine the first African-American president, who is a constant reminder of our progressive advancement? Or why weaken our only chance some day to have open borders or gay marriage?

Two, the Left has always operated on the theory of medieval penance. We surely must assume that Warren Buffett has never had problems with the ethics of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. or had a company he controls sued by the IRS for back taxes. Why? Because he has confessed his sins, and accepted the faith and paid his tithe to the Church. Ditto a Bill Gates or a rich celebrity like Sean Penn or Oprah. In the relativism of the left, if the one-percenters will simply confess that their class is greedy and needs to pay their fair share—even if they are entirely cynical in the manner of GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and penance is written off as the cost of doing business—then they become exempt from the wages of them/us warfare and the “you want to kill the children” rhetoric.

V. Good and Bad Fat Cats

There is no difference in the way the Koch brothers or Exxon run their empires and the way that  GM, GE, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google do. But the former are enemies of the people, while the latter are protectors who have have confessed to their bishops and agreed to mouth doctrine and thereby obtained penance to make as much money as they want and to spend it as they damn well please. Suddenly in America after 2009 there are good and bad cable networks, good and bad celebrities, good and bad CEOs, good and bad sports teams (ask Lovie Smith), good and bad states, good and bad everything—not adjudicated on the actual basis of behavior, but rather on whether some are willing to go to reeducation camp, admit their errors, and join the effort to clean the air and feed the kids.

Or do any of you believe there are not Google “corporate jet setters,” or Facebook “fat cats,” or GE executives who didn’t know when it was time not to profit, or Microsoft grandees who ignored the point at which they had made enough money? (For that matter, why could not Barack Obama have made $550,000 last year; had he not reached the point where he didn’t need any more cash?)

Read the full article here.

He’s Made It Worse: The Obama Economic Record [Infographic]

25 Horrible Statistics About The U.S. Economy That Barack Obama Does Not Want You To Know

Staff Report | April 27, 2012 | End of the American Dream

The human capacity for self-delusion truly is remarkable.  Most people out there end up believing exactly what they want to believe even when the truth is staring them right in the face.  Take the U.S. economy for example.  Barack Obama wants to believe that his policies have worked and that the U.S. economy is improving.  So that is what he is telling the American people.  The mainstream media wants to believe that Barack Obama is a good president and that his policies make sense and so they are reporting that we are experiencing an economic recovery.  A very large segment of the U.S. population still fully supports Barack Obama and they want to believe that the economy is getting better so they are buying the propaganda that the mainstream media is feeding them.  But is the U.S. economy really improving?  The truth is that it is not.  The rate of employment among working age Americans is exactly where it was two years ago and household incomes have actually gone down while Obama has been president.  Home ownership levels and home prices continue to decline.  Meanwhile, food and gasoline continue to become even more expensive.  The percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at an all-time record high and the U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars under Obama.  We simply have not seen the type of economic recovery that we have seen after every other economic recession since World War II.

The horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that you are about to read are not talked about much by the mainstream media.  They would rather be “positive” and “upbeat” about the direction that things are headed.

But lying to the American people is not going to help them.  If you are speeding in a car toward a 500 foot cliff, you don’t need someone to cheer you on.  Instead, you need someone to slam on the brakes.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was four or five years ago.

We have never come close to recovering from the last recession and another one will be here soon.

The following are 25 horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that Barack Obama does not want you to know….

#1 The percentage of Americans that own homes is dropping rapidly.  According to Gallup, the current level of home ownership in the United States is the lowest that Gallup has ever measured.

#2 Home prices in the U.S. continue to fall like a rock as well.  They have declined for six months in a row and are now down a total of 35 percent from the peak of the housing bubble.  The last time that home prices in the United States were this low was back in 2002.

#3 Last year, an astounding 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

#4 Back in 2007, about 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer.  Today, that number is above 30 percent.

#5 When Barack Obama first became president, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in the United States was 2.6 million.  Today, it is 5.3 million.

#6 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

#7 Despite what the mainstream media would have us to believe, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is not increasing.  Back in March 2010, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed.  In March 2011, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In March 2012, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed.  So how can Barack Obama and the mainstream media claim that the employment situation in the United States is getting better?  The employment rate is still essentially exactly where it was when the last recession supposedly ended.

#8 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#9 In 1962, 28 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.  In 2011, only 9 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.

#10 In some areas of Detroit, Michigan you can buy a three bedroom home for just $500.

#11 According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.

#12 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the price of gasoline has risen by more than 100 percent.

Read the full article here.

Dems’ Perks, Privilege and Patrimony

By Patrick J. Buchanan | April 23, 2012 | WND

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of nine books. His latest book is “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

Pat Buchanan cites latest skullduggery involving ‘the Party of Government’

With the number of Secret Service members and agents caught up in the partying-with-prostitutes scandal in Cartagena now at a dozen, and six already gone, how much wider and deeper does this go?

No one can take pleasure in seeing Secret Service agents – whose deserved reputation is that they will “take a bullet” for the president, his family and all whom they protect – shamed and disgraced.

Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day’s work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team.

And Sen. Charles Grassley asks a relevant question.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Hostile intelligence services often use “honey traps” to ensnare U.S. diplomats and journalists. Thus this hookers-and-agents scandal is no laughing matter.

And it hit just as we learned that the General Services Administration, purchasing agent for the U.S. government, shelled out $823,000 on a party for 300 employees at a casino-spa in Las Vegas, where the hired entertainment included a mind reader, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise.

Jeff Neeley, the GSA western regional commissioner, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify to Congress about what is now being investigated as criminal misconduct.

President Obama’s appointee to head GSA, Martha Johnson, has resigned.

Infinitely larger in terms of the tax dollars looted or lost is the Solyndra scandal, where a green technology company favored by the White House went belly up after receiving an endorsement visit from Obama and an astonishing half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.

These events all point to a culture of entitlement born of a belief that now that the Democratic Party, the Party of Government, is again running the government, we can “let the good times roll” once more.

And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers.

Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election?

The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family.

Read the full article here.

25 Signs That Middle Class Families Have Been Targeted For Extinction

Staff Report | April 16, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

The middle class in America is being systematically wiped out, and most people don’t even realize what is happening.  Every single year, millions more Americans fall out of the middle class and become dependent on the government.  The United States once had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but now the middle class is rapidly shrinking and government dependence is at an all-time high.  So why is this happening?  Well, America is becoming a poorer nation at the same time that wealth is becoming extremely concentrated at the very top.  At this point, our economic system is designed to funnel as much money and power to the federal government and to the big corporations as possible.  Individuals and small businesses have a really hard time thriving in this environment.  To most big corporations these days, workers are viewed as financial liabilities.  Most corporations want to reduce their payrolls as much as possible.  You see, the truth is that most corporations want to be just like Apple.  If you can believe it, Apple makes $400,000 in profit per employee.  Big corporations don’t care that you need to pay the mortgage and provide for your family.  Their goal is to make as much money as possible.  And most of the control freaks that run our bloated federal government don’t care much about middle class families either.  To many politicians and federal bureaucrats, middle class families are “useless eaters” that are constantly damaging the environment with their “excessive” lifestyles.  In this day and age, neither the federal government nor the big corporations really have much use for middle class Americans, and that is really, really bad news for the the future of the middle class family in America.

There are three key factors that are constantly chipping away at the middle class….

-Globalization

-Inflation

-Taxes

Labor has become a global commodity, and American workers are often 10 to 20 times as expensive as workers on the other side of the world are.  Middle class jobs (such as manufacturing, etc.) have been leaving this country at an astounding pace.  Competition for the jobs that remain has become extremely fierce, and this has driven wages down.  The following is from a recent article in the New York Times….

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

As paychecks have stagnated, the cost of living has continued to escalate.  Middle class families are finding that their paychecks simply do not go nearly as far as they did before.  This is creating a tremendous amount of financial stress in households all over America.

Meanwhile, our politicians are taxing the middle class like crazy.  Most people only focus on federal and state income taxes, but that is only a small part of the story.  As I detailed the other day, our politicians are taxing us in literally dozens of different ways and it is almost always the middle class that ends up getting hit the hardest.

If America wants to be great again, it is going to need a thriving middle class.  But right now the federal government and the big corporations are gobbling up all of the power and all of the money and the middle class is shrinking rapidly.

If current trends continue, eventually there will not be much of a middle class left.

The following are 25 signs that middle class families have been targeted for extinction….

#1 Over the past several decades, millions upon millions of middle class Americans have been systematically turned into government dependents.  Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages.  In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages.  Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.

#2 Unemployment is at epidemic levels and the vast majority of the new jobs that have been “created” in recent years have been low paying jobs.  Of those Americans that do have a job at this point, one out of every four works a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

#3 The “working poor” is a group that is rapidly growing in this country.  If you can believe it, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

Read the full article here.

The Obama Presidency by the Numbers [Infographic]

To view the original infographic go here.

Rush Limbaugh: How to Respond to Obama’s Lies?

Rush Limbaugh | April 04, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Jan Crawford.  She’s at CBS News.  She was on television this morning, CBS This Morning, reporting about the reaction to Obama’s remarks that the court, Supreme Court, should not overturn the health care reform law. CRAWFORD:  The president appears to be laying the groundwork to take on the court if it strikes down that law.  For the second straight day President Obama gave his take on what the Supreme Court should do:  uphold his signature domestic achievement.  Monday he seemed to suggest the court didn’t even have the power to strike down the law.  On Obama’s comments, Republicans pounced.

RUSH ARCHIVE:  What is this, the court must understand?  That is a threat.

CRAWFORD:  It went beyond talk radio.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell released a statement saying the president lacked fundamental respect for the separation of powers.  Yesterday afternoon the judges struck back.  A federal appeals court in Houston issued an order to the Justice Department to explain whether the president really meant the court had no power to strike down the law.

RUSH:  And that’s the key, and I just saw Attorney General Holder on television, (paraphrasing) “Of course we’re gonna respond. Of course it will be an appropriate response. And of course we understand Marbury v. Madison. Of course we understand the court’s final say-so on whether laws are constitutional. But we must remember that the court has always practiced deference,” said Holder. The court’s always been deferential.  So he’s trying to have it both ways.  “Oh, yeah, we understand the court strikes down laws of Congress.  They better not strike this one down.”  But, again, at the risk of being redundant, Obama knows that there’s judicial review. He knows that the court does this.  He’s not ignorant or stupid or uneducated.  What he did yesterday had nothing to do with the court, not purposely.

The unintended consequence is that he has shown a profound disrespect for the court, and he is relegating them to a status in his mind of being inconsequential.  They’re simply there to rubber stamp him.  And if they don’t rubber stamp him, they are in the crosshairs, and that’s his message to ’em.  They had better rubber stamp his health care bill, and if they don’t, then they’re targets.  And the way they’re targets is he’s telling the American people, “Those guys, those judges, they’re taking away your health care. They are the ones that are gonna make it so that you have financial ruin if you get sick.  They are taking away what I gave you.”  Ladies and gentlemen, it is so beneath the dignity of the ofice of the presidency.  It’s just striking, it really is.  It defies description.

I must be honest with you here.  We’ve faced this countless times before during the Clinton years with the Democrat Party and the people at the highest levels of their leadership showing total disregard and disrespect for traditions, ethics, just being polite, manners, showing respect.  And I don’t know about anybody else, but I’ve always struggled with how to react to it and how to explain it to people in a way that is persuasive.  I guess I’ve always struggled with the way to explain to people to pierce the partisanship.  ‘Cause I don’t need to persuade you.  You all know how atrocious this is.  You know how shameful, how embarrassing this is.  But his audience doesn’t, the people he’s speaking to you.

Read the full article here.

45 Signs That America Will Soon Be A Nation With A Very Tiny Elite And The Rest Of Us Will Be Poor

Staff Report | April 2, 2012 | End of the American Dream

The middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in the United States today.  America is a nation with a very tiny elite that is rapidly becoming increasingly wealthy while everyone else is becoming poorer.  So why is this happening?  Well, it is actually very simple.  Our institutions are designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very limited number of people.  Throughout human history, almost all societies that have had a big centralized government have also had a very high concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite.  Throughout human history, almost all societies that have allowed big business or big corporations to dominate the economy have also had a very high concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite.  Well, the United States has allowed both big government and big corporations to grow wildly out of control.  Those were huge mistakes.  Our founding fathers attempted to establish a nation where the federal government would be greatly limited and where corporations would be greatly restricted.  Unfortunately, we have turned our backs on those principles and now we are paying the price.

When you have great concentrations of wealth and power, the economic rewards of a society tend to go to just a few.

In the United States today, big businesses and wealthy individuals fund the campaigns of our politicians, and in turn our politicians pass laws which rig the game in their favor.  It is a symbiotic relationship which is very bad for America.

Sadly, most conservatives tend to cheer on the big corporations, but this is not how our founding fathers envisioned our capitalist system working.  Our founding fathers envisioned large numbers of similar companies competing against one another for customers.  They did not envision a very small number of giant corporations buying up all of their competitors or smashing them into oblivion with their giant piles of money.

True conservatives should want to see more competition instead of less competition.  Competition helped make America great, and we need to get back to that.

Instead of an economic landscape dominated by monolithic predator corporations, we need an economic environment where millions of small businesses can thrive and compete directly with one another.

Our founding fathers never intended for us to have the kind of system that we have today.  As I have discussed in previous articles, our founding fathers greatly restricted the size and scope of corporations in early America.  The following is how author Stephen D. Foster Jr. described the attitude toward corporations in the early years of the United States….

The East India Company was the largest corporation of its day and its dominance of trade angered the colonists so much, that they dumped the tea products it had on a ship into Boston Harbor which today is universally known as the Boston Tea Party. At the time, in Britain, large corporations funded elections generously and its stock was owned by nearly everyone in parliament. The founding fathers did not think much of these corporations that had great wealth and great influence in government. And that is precisely why they put restrictions upon them after the government was organized under the Constitution.

After the nation’s founding, corporations were granted charters by the state as they are today. Unlike today, however, corporations were only permitted to exist 20 or 30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense. A giant central government that spends more than 20 percent of our GDP is a collectivist institution.

Enormous predator corporations that are constantly sucking up even more money and power are collectivist institutions.

Our founding fathers did not intend for our society to be dominated by collectivist institutions.

Very large institutions tend to reward the people that own and run them at the expense of everyone else.

And you know what?

A lot of these giant corporations have figured out that they don’t even need American workers anymore.

Instead, many of them are shipping our jobs to the other side of the world where it it legal to pay slave labor wages.  That means bigger profits for them but less jobs for the rest of us.

In America today, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and big government and big corporations are the mechanisms by which this is happening.

Posted below are 45 signs that America will soon be a nation with a very tiny elite and the rest of us will be poor….

Read the full article here.

New Video Reveals ‘The Road We’ve Really Traveled’

The Blaze reports on a “variation on a theme” video produced by Glenn Beck that effectively rebuts the Obama campaign’s fawning  “docu-ganda” narrated by Tom Hanks:

The video reveals that if a more earnest picture of the modern-day U.S. were painted, it would show a number of “inconvenient truths,” including: a ravaged housing market, an S&P downgrade to the nation’s credit rating for the first time in history, “out of control spending,” record-high levels of Americans at poverty level and on food stamps, soaring unemployment rates, and vast increases in the national debt and gas prices. The list goes on…

To rub salt in the nation’s “economic” wounds, the President continues to engage in destructive class warfare for his personal benefit while millions of Americans are suffering. The Blaze report provides the cold, hard numbers of this economic devastation:

  • Unemployment has risen 7.8% — 8.3% on average
  • The National Deficit has risen $10.7 — $15.3 Trillion 
  • Gas prices have risen $1.84 on average
  • 7.7 Million foreclosures 
  • A record 46.2 Million at poverty level
  • 46.1 Million on food stamps 

Watch both videos back to back to see which one more closely resembles realty.

Read the full article here.

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