What a difference!

You don't think the president of the United States has power? Walmart and GM are the latest to announce thousands of new jobs in America, and investment in American made product. The crony capitalists were emphasizing other things during the Obama years, like green energy and climate change.

Graft and crony capitalism

Investors Business Daily got the Wikileaks transcripts of Hillary's three questions and answers sessions with Goldman Sachs, and IBD asks,

Goldman Sachs Paid Hillary $675,000 For This?

Read more from the Wikileaks transcripts here.

We've tried being slaves. Let's try being free.

Richard Fernandez writes at PJ Media,

We expect revolutionaries to be indifferent to money. Yet in reality the Left thinks about nothing but money as the Venezuelan socialists who have stolen $350 billion from the treasury, according to the Basel Institute on Governance, should have proved to the world. If it's any consolation to the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders is not as indifferent to lucre as he seems. Sanders' filings show he's received money from Super PACs and donors with links to Wall Street -- so he may be normal after all.

...The progressive campaign is essentially predicated on the assumption that a sufficiently resolute government can defy the laws of financial gravity. There is now some doubt on that point.

...It's not just the Government that's broke but also its political partners. Recently the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund announced that it was bust. Unless it gets an infusion of taxpayer money, pension benefits for about 407,000 people could be reduced to "virtually nothing."

...Teamsters who are able to intimidate everything find they are finally helpless against addition and subtraction. At the end of it all they, like everyone else who has mismanaged their pensions, can pay their retirees "virtually nothing."

...Lincoln Steffens thought he saw a future that worked but it was cruel fraud. Why not try property this time instead of slavery? We've tried being slaves. Let's try being free.

"The dung of the devil"

Robert Godwin writes at One Cosmos,

I see that Pope Francis just called capitalism "the dung of the devil." But I wonder if that is what he actually said, for the piece later quotes him as referring to "the unfettered pursuit of money" as "the dung of the devil," which is something else entirely.

For example, Greece -- an anti-capitalist pile of devil dung if ever there was one -- is clearly engaging in an unfettered pursuit of money, the difference being that capitalism actually earns the money by producing something people want. Conversely, Greece produces nothing anyone wants and wants to be paid for it.

Robbing a bank is an unfettered pursuit of money. Offering things people want at prices they can afford is definitely fettered, as any businessman knows. Among other things, it is fettered by production costs, by taxes, by regulations, by competitors, by consumer preferences, and by civil law.

Where but in a socialist tyranny is the pursuit of money unfettered? Even Obama- or Clinton-style crony capitalism is somewhat fettered, unless you believe people send all those millions to the Clintons with no expectation of a return on their investment.

...More generally, the whole concept of sacrifice -- present in all religiosity -- entails an implicit awareness of spiritual exchange, however warped. For example, the Buddhist sacrifices the ego to nirvana, the leftist our prosperity to his resentments, the Islamist innocent men, women, and children to his transcendent sadism.

Read more here.

Trump is both a RINO and a CINO

Jonah Goldberg on Donald Trump and RINOS:

I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative.

Trump supporters need an intervention. I want to sit them down at the kitchen table, reach into a manila envelope, and pull out the proof that he’s a fraud. The conversation would go something like this:

Immigration: You seem to think he’s an immigration hardliner, and he’s certainly pretending to be. But why can’t you see through it? He condemned Mitt Romney as an immigration hardliner in 2012 and favored comprehensive immigration reform. He told Bill O’Reilly he was in favor of a “path to citizenship” for 30 million illegal immigrants:

Trump: You have to give them a path. You have 20 million, 30 million, nobody knows what it is. It used to be 11 million. Now, today I hear it’s 11, but I don’t think it’s 11. I actually heard you probably have 30 million. You have to give them a path, and you have to make it possible for them to succeed. You have to do that.

Question: Just how many rapists and drug dealers did Donald Trump want to give green cards to?

Abortion: In 1999 he said, “I’m totally pro-choice. I hate it and I hate saying it. And I’m almost ashamed to say that I’m pro-choice but I am pro-choice because I think we have no choice.”

Man, it’s like he’s channeling Thomas Aquinas there.

Now he says he’s pro-life. But I’ll spare the mocking on this because at least he’s flip-flopping in the right direction, and I don’t like to second guess peoples’ professed religious convictions.

Obamacare: The man wrote in his own book and said elsewhere that he was in favor of Canadian-style socialized medicine — which would put him to the left of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and on pretty much the same page as Bernie Sanders.

Hillary: Speaking of her, Trump praised Hillary Clinton and her healthcare reform plan — in 2007! She attended his (most recent) wedding. He donated to her campaigns and to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, he couldn’t get his head around the fact that Obama didn’t pick her for VP. “I’m a big fan of Hillary. She’s a terrific woman. She’s a friend of mine.”

Economics: People tout the guy’s business record. But he represents almost exactly what his supporters think he opposes. He’s a crony capitalist par excellence. He gives to whatever politician can grease the skids for his next deal — and he makes no apologies for it. He’s an eminent domain voluptuary. He abuses bankruptcy laws like a stack of homemade get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Parlez vous Conservative?

The most troubling defense is this claptrap that he “tells it like it is.” Well, first of all, no he doesn’t. He tells it the way you want to hear it, which is an entirely different thing. He is like William Jennings Bryan, only his cross of gold has an all-you-can-eat buffet under it, and looks remarkably like a capital “T.”

'The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver,' Bryan announced. 'I will look up the arguments later.' That is Trump’s approach. He’s saying what understandably angry people want to hear him say.

He reminds me a lot of Mitt Romney, at least in one respect. I always said that Romney “spoke conservatism as a second language” (a line some people ripped off, btw). That’s why Romney called himself a “severe conservative,” talked about how he “likes to fire people,” and anathematized the “47 percent.”

Trump is even less truly conservative, but he’s trying to speak in an even grubbier dialect of conservatism. And, having grown up in the tabloid politics of New York, he’s better at faking it.

Eventually, I suspect, this will be the cause of his undoing. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about conservatism, and at some point he will say something that even his biggest fans will recognize as a damning revelation about the real man beneath the schtick. The only question is whether he implodes before or after he does permanent damage to the GOP’s chances in 2016.

Read more here.
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In another article for National Review, Goldberg mentions Trumps contributions to politicians:

He’s given money to Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, Andrew Cuomo, Eliot Spitzer, and the Clinton Foundation. Asked to explain why, he said, “You’re gonna need things from everybody.” (One does wonder what Trump hoped to get from the Clinton Foundation.)

...This attitude helps explain why Trump is such a fan of eminent domain. The man seeking the Tea Party’s support loves to use the government to seize private land he can’t — or doesn’t want to — buy fairly. Given the fetid swamp of sanctioned corruption that passes for commerce in New York, it’s no wonder he sees nothing wrong with greasing the skids by funding liberal politicians. But one might expect a person who claims to be a conservative to at least pay some rhetorical tribute to virtue while admitting his vice. Alas, it is axiomatic that the shameless are incapable of exhibiting shame.

Read more here.

Snuffing out competition

Gregory Conley writes:

When the success of America’s largest companies is threatened, they often turn to the government for a helping hand. They have been doing that for at least the past century. In recent years Congress gave more than $1 trillion in bailouts to banks, car companies, and credit lenders in the midst of great financial turmoil. But that kind of generosity isn’t the only way Uncle Sam has helped many of America’s biggest companies maintain market share. Using the growing bureaucracy’s powerful regulations, many corporations have worked hand in hand with government to snuff out competition.

A recent example of this offensive is Big Tobacco’s actions against the thousands of small startups that are helping people quit smoking. Cigarette companies are spending millions of dollars to push product bans, higher taxes, and expensive regulations on their competitors.

The cigarettes sold by Reynolds American Inc. and Altria (formerly Philip Morris) are highly taxed and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, and over the past several years cigarette consumption has declined more rapidly than forecast by analysts and shareholders. Electronic cigarettes (“e-cigs,” or “vapor products”) have accounted for a significant portion of this reduction. These battery-operated and smokeless devices represent a free-market solution to a grave public-health problem. As alternatives to cigarettes, which kill more than 400,000 people each year, vapor products are far less hazardous.

In this excellent article Conley explains the difference between "cigalikes" developed by big tobacco companies such as Reynolds and Altria, and premium vapor products (PVs).

Reynolds also has urged the FDA to ban all PV and e-liquid products as well as most flavored vapor products. That’s right. A company that made $4.6 billion in profits in 2013, selling products that cause cancer, illness, and disease, asked the FDA to ban the products that are both preferred by consumers and proven to help people quit smoking.

In Big Tobacco’s war on these innovative technology products, it’s not just adult smokers and ex-smokers who will suffer at the hands of misguided regulators and lawmakers. Most of the sales in the $1.5 billion vapor product market are taking place in the more than 5,000 specialty retail outlets (“vape shops”) across the country. These new businesses are occupying what may otherwise be empty storefronts. They are also providing local jobs, paying sales and income taxes, and improving communities by helping reduce the toll from smoking.

Reynolds’s push for more-coercive taxation, burdensome regulations, and even bans on their competitors make sense, as no company wants to see its consumers switch to products it doesn’t sell. Unfortunately, if the FDA and state lawmakers merely accept the agenda being pushed by Reynolds and other large cigarette companies, public health and market freedom will suffer. It’s time lawmakers and bureaucrats realize this and stop trying to protect cigarette companies from consumer choice.

Read more here.

The left and the right have a common enemy

Dick Morris writes:

Ralph Nader’s new book may be the most important of the year. Unlike the usual beltway pundit, he grasps the essential nature of the joint outrage of liberals and conservatives at the crony capitalism that has gripped Washington under the likes of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. While these three men differ on almost every issue, they are united in their subservience to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and the other titans of Wall Street.

Income inequality, Nader argues, is an essential by-product — if not the goal — of policies that enrich the favored few who spread their campaign contributions to the establishments of both parties. Their return on this investment goes to the core of how the Federal Reserve treats them.

Once, the Fed was there to safeguard the currency against inflation. Then, in the Full Employment Act of 1947, its mandate grew to fighting joblessness. Now, in the era of quantitative easing, it has abandoned both missions in favor of pumping money to Wall Street (until recently $85 billion/month) to sustain and grow the stock market bubble. Its goal, very simply, is to enrich its friends on Wall Street and keep its allies in power in Congress and the White House.

These Wall Street abuses have united the Tea Party with the Occupy Wall Streeters. In Unstoppable, Nader explores their common ground.

He begins by identifying their common enemy: the Democratic and Republican coalition with Wall Street that aims all federal policy at enriching the verify top of the income spectrum.

He explains how their alliance

• Keeps money flowing to the biggest banks to fund their speculation

• Assures that when their irresponsible bets on derivatives and such go bad, the taxpayer will bail them out

• Funds every sort of tax break for special interests, keeping rates so high on less favored businesses that it slows economic growth

• Increases government regulation of community banks, so that they cannot afford to survive and are forced to merge with the big banks.

• Turns a blind eye to China’s currency manipulation that so brings down the cost of their products that they are de-industrializing America.

• Encourages Americans to go into deep debt to fund the corporate economy, colleges, and home builders, leaving them financially disabled and dependent on government charity.

• Encourages a permanent war economy and the profits that accrue to big businesses and defense contractors.

• Maintain the perverse incentives of the welfare state to keep people in poverty so they qualify for government largesse.

• Keep mega-corporations like General Motors going even as they outsource jobs to other countries and build unsafe cars.

Nader has his blind spots. He does not seem to realize that public employee unions have turned against the poor they were supposed to serve, advancing the privileges of their members over the needs of their clients. He also does not grasp that immigration is taking away the jobs of blue collar Americans. (Since 2000, the number of employed native born Americans has dropped by 100,000 while the rolls of employed immigrants — legal and illegal — have risen by 5.6 million (from Center for Immigration Studies).

Read more here.

Hillary Clinton, the crony capitalist who laughs about getting rapists off

Dick Morris has two videos this week on Hillary Clinton. One is about Hillary gloating and laughing about getting off a rapist who raped a twelve year-old girl in Arkansas in the 1970s. Watch that video to see how Hillary smeared the sixth grader who was raped.The other video is about Hillary's crony capitalism game. Goldman Sachs hosted her recently when she used their board room for a fundraiser with big bucks donors. You can watch both videos here.

Who benefits?

Why has the Clinton foundation become a "popular charity for major corporations?" Isn't it obvious? Some big corporations need help from people like Hillary or Bill to get big contracts with countries like Russia and China. The Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman writes that Boeing's ties to Clinton

came into play again this month when its in-house lobbyist, former Bill Clinton aide Tim Keating, co-hosted a fundraiser for Ready for Hillary, the super PAC backing her potential presidential run.

Paul Mirengoff has more here.

More regulations coming our way

Glenn Reynolds writes about

the increasing politicization of Silicon Valley, and the transformation of its leaders from rebels into what Joel Kotkin calls "the new oligarchs," people who once talked about technology as liberation, but who now seem more interested in using technology as an instrument of control. It's not just NSA spying; it's that the companies gather data on everyone, with comparatively little legal oversight.

These giant tech companies are

political players now.

Glenn reminds readers of the 1984 commercial introducing Apple's MacIntosh computer as the enemy of control.


Reynolds concludes,

And in the past, when people proposed laws to regulate data-gathering and collection by tech companies, tech lords benefited from the presumption that they were the good guys. As perceptions of them change, that presumption is fading. Expect more regulation to follow.

But no system of regulation will inspire the kind of trust that the tech leaders once enjoyed for free. They may come to miss it, in time.

Read more here.