Four Degrees of Separation: More on Wall Street and Obama

World Net Daily reports that an advertisement on Craig's List offers to pay anti "tea bagger" activists $24,000 per year to work for a group called Grassroots Campaigns. It would be interesting to learn who funds Grassroots Campaigns.

The real grassroots campaign is the Tea Party. The people who work for the Tea Party don't receive salaries from George Soros or similar kinds of Wall Street-linked sources. Calling a group "grassroots" and then offering salaries from unspecified sources is something of a contradiction. I would like to know where the money funding grassroots campaign comes from, and how many transactions separate it from the Fed. I would guess no more than four.

The WND article states:

>"Help-wanted ads are appearing on Craigslist that offer to pay citizens $24,000 a year, plus health insurance, to "counter the hysteria and lies of Glenn Beck and other talking heads" and "stop the tea-baggers!"

"The ads are being posted by Grassroots Campaigns, a canvassing group that has performed services for the Democratic National Committee and MoveOn.org. Its postings can be found among Craiglist listings in Chicago, Ill.; San Francisco, Calif.; Boston, Mass.; Philadelphia, Penn. and Austin, Texas."

More on Reappointment of Bernanke

I received the e-mail below from the Campaign for Liberty. As I previously blogged, although I have been concerned about the Fed for many years (blogging on this issue as long as six years ago) I am not convinced that the Democrats are able to produce a responsible chairman. I may be wrong. It is true that it was Carter (not Reagan, as many people mistakenly think) who appointed Paul Volcker. The shift to conservative monetarist Fed policy was under Carter, not Reagan. I remember very this clearly. I was an MBA student at UCLA then and I had somehow gotten an informal position at the UCLA Business Forecasting Project. I think I was the TA of one of the economics professors. Larry Kimball ran the project and a guy named David Shulman who later became the chief equity strategist at Salomon Brothers from 1992 to 1997 and is now director of the UCLA forecasting project was an advisor. I recall very clearly Shulman's exclaiming that the St. Louis Fed was breaking out champaigne because of the shift in monetary policy in 1979, which was my first semester there.

My point is that the Democrats can potentially come up with a decent Fed chairman but given the current crop of maniacs in the Senate (witness the recent health care bill) I remain dubious. I sent this note to John Tate:

>Dear John--I'm with you in spirit, but I'm not convinced that the Dems will come up with a better chairman. I can imagine Harry Reid's pick for Fed chairman will not be Paul Volcker. Do you have any evidence on this? I'll be glad to blog it.


>January 25, 2010


Dear Mitchell,

After a full year of rope-a-done and refusing to have his Federal Reserve audited, Ben Bernanke is on the ropes and could be knocked out for re-nomination.

Campaign for Liberty activists are in the lead insisting "No Audit, No Bernanke." Please immediately call Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Senator Chuck Schumer at the numbers below and tell them (again, if you've already called) "No Audit, No Bernanke."

Here's what's going on:

Campaign for Liberty launced a nationwide fight against a bailout for Bernanke last week. Now we are following it up with phones, email and banner ads targeting over a dozen swing-vote senators.

The Senate is boiling over with outrage about the Fed's abuse of the TARP program, bailouts, and money supply, as well as its refusal to submit to a full and complete audit.

Now is the time to deal the knockout blow!

Please call your senators at the numbers below and join in the fight:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: 202-224-4451
Senator Chuck Schumer: 202-224-6542

Tell them that Ben Bernanke must not be confirmed without an up or down roll call vote for Audit the Fed on the Senate floor.

This fight is really coming to a head, and the decision could will likely come in the next few days. Please call now.

In liberty,

John Tate

P.S. Thanks to the efforts of patriots like you, Ben Bernanke's days of secrecy at the Federal Reserve may be numbered!

That's because his confirmation is being held up until the Senate votes on Audit the Fed. Please call your senators at the numbers above and tell them plain and simple: "No Audit, No Bernanke."

On the Immorality of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee

Democracy Now! quotes Haitian authorities as saying that the death toll due to the earthquake may exceed 300,000. Public service organizations around the world have been donating to the relief effort. Police officers from New York City, the Red Cross and many other organizations have been donating time and money. CNN lists the highest rated American charities that have been helping the Haitians.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has failed to contribute to the Haitian relief effort. Much as Wal-Mart failed to contribute to environmental causes, so might the Nobel Peace Prize Committee be considered to have behaved selfishly and with disdain for world peace. Its self-centered commitment to its charter overlooks more important social justice considerations. If Wal-Mart ought to have breached its duty to shareholders, why might the Nobel Foundation be exempt from a parallel moral imperative? As of 2007, the Foundation had over $500 million laying fallow.

The mass deaths in Haiti would seem to outweigh the committee's obsession with fiduciary duty. If one might complain about a business firm's lack of corporate social responsibility, might we say that the morals of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee are tainted? And because they are tainted, the Committee has lost credibility in designating a peace prize, which by its own nature depends on good ethics.

Thierry Meyssan of Voltaire.net asserts that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee breached its fiduciary duty in an additional way. Meyssan claims that there was a "despicable relationship between Barack Obama and the Nobel Committee" before the Committee chose to grant the award to him. Meyssan writes:

"in 2006, the European Command (i.e. the regional command of U.S. troops whose authority then covered both Europe and most of Africa) solicited Barack Obama, a Senator of Kenyan origin, to participate in a secret inter-agency (CIA-NED-USAID-NSA)" task force that was meant to destabilize the Kenyan government. The goal was to use his status as a parliamentarian to conduct a tour of Africa that would defend the interests of pharmaceutical companies (against off-patent productions) and to counter Chinese influence in Kenya and Sudan..."

Washington wanted to topple the regime in Kenya, according to Meyssan and recruited Obama to make a much-publicized trip to Kenya, in which he interfered with local politics and indeed helped to destabilize the country and helped his cousin, Odinga. The intervention led to a political crisis, and Madelaine Albright invited the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights to mediate. The Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland chaired the Center. Jagland went on to become chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Meyssan seems to be asserting that Obama and Jagland cooperated in the destabilization of Kenya. As a result, there were elements of self dealing and a moral breach in the award to Obama.

In any case, it is evident that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has ceased acting as a socially responsible body. The appointment of a political hack like Jagland, who also has been appointed "Secretary General of the Council of Europe following a behind-the-scenes agreement between Washington and Moscow" is consistent with my letter last week that the Committee has become politicized and so no longer retains credibility. In particular, Madeleine Albright is a Democrat and the Committee has awarded two prizes to US Democrats in the past two years.

The public ought to demand that the Nobel Foundation end its self-centered and frivolous fixation on peace prizes and donate the large growth in Alfred Nobel's original endowment to dying Haitians. If Wal-Mart is expected to behave charitably, should we ask less of those who award peace prizes?

Republican Socialism, Obama's Second Term and the Tea Parties

The Obama presidency is so far a failure. Obama's bailout of money center banks and Wall Street coupled with his corrupt stimulus package amount to the largest effluence of waste in world history. This is the pattern that destroyed Athenian democracy and the Roman empire. In the case of Rome, Septimius Severus in the second century gave large benefits to the Roman army. Rome had long before adopted a welfare system that allowed the citizens of Rome free bread and circus. The Roman system was stable and took several centuries to decline. Rome's scale was the cause of both its stability and its decline as Rome was essentially a Ponzi scheme that depended on ongoing conquest. The extraction of wealth by interest groups contributed. In the case of Athens, the second greatest democracy in the history of the world, imperialism, its war with Sparta, and class warfare led to its failure.

Now, America is weakened by socialism of both the Roman and the Athenian varieties. The war on terror is a legitimate challenge, but the Bush administration handled both the Afghan and Iraqi wars incompetently, resulting in excessive cost. Fourth generation warfare, the use of embedded special forces, should have been adopted early on, but Bush preferred to defer to the second generation warfare concepts of Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. In any case, the two wasteful wars were coupled with subsidies to Wall Street, the TARP plan and the bailout of Goldman Sachs, AIG and other money center banks.

In a free economy these institutions would have been put into chapter 11, reorganized, the management replaced and the firms split up into more manageable components. This would have been done by bankruptcy courts. The opposite policy of direct subsidization and federal intervention, i.e., socialism, was pursued at the behest of the Republicans and George W. Bush. The Obama administration added some pirouettes, but the basic socialist policy and a large portion of the socialist spending was directly due to George W. Bush and the national GOP leadership, from Newt Gingrich to Karl Rove.

The recent victory in Massachusetts suggests that Americans are upset but that their views are confused. If Americans are upset about the bailout, why did they not question Scott Brown's position on the bailout? In 2000 America elected George W. Bush expecting a conservative, not a socialist. Now, they vote for Scott Brown without asking whether he too is a socialist.

Now that health care has stalled, my 2008 claim that Obama was chiefly elected to put the bailout into place increasingly looks true. Not that John McCain wouldn't have done it too, which raises significant doubts about the GOP at the national level. What makes the GOP different from the Democrats? In other words, in the end there may have been little difference between Obama and McCain.

Both would have given trillions of public money to banks and Wall Street and done little else. At the state and local level, yes, the GOP is still the smaller government party. Not so at the national level. The national GOP leaders are big government Progressives.

In 2012 Obama will have the advantage of incumbency, and if he now transitions to a more libertarian posture, which is what Clinton did, he is likely to win in 2012.

Perhaps the position of Scott Brown on the bailout seemed unimportant this month in light of the threat of the health plan, which served to galvanize the public, including many non-Republicans. If Obama is smart, he won't allow a repeat of the health care fiasco. He will avoid further drama and focus on reducing cost, winning the two wars and balancing the federal budget.

Had Al Gore pursued the Clinton strategy in the 2000 election he would have won. But he rejected Clinton's approach in favor of New Deal social Democracy. He lost.

Oddly, the GOP took Bush's election to mean that it should return to the Progressivism of Nelson Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt. It remains a puzzle why Newt Gingrich and his colleagues adopted a big government mindset, but the GOP only can win if it rejects it. Let me repeat that. If the GOP wants to win, it needs to adopt a small government mindset. The social conservatives coupled with the neo-conservative big business socialists were not enough to win the presidency. They won't be in future.

The rank and file in the GOP need to find new candidates to run. The 2008 leadership was entirely in favor of Wall Street socialism and big government and so is tainted. But in order to find new leadership, the rank and file needs to take action. The Tea Parties are playing this role, but I remain unconvinced, at least at the national level.

The Tea Parties have not demonstrated the ability to focus on key issues and resist the cooptation that the GOP's establishment will attempt. I will be delighted if they do, but so far few national leaders have emerged. While the Tea Parties can play a useful role at the state and local levels, it is at the national level where the GOP has floundered worst, and I have yet to see national level deliberation that reflects the ability to overcome the national GOP establishment and Obama.