Rep. Darrell Issa of California has released a report that shows how Democrats in power caused the depression that has spread through the world. It demonstrates how the pursuit of ‘social justice’ can bring economic disaster. And how the worst sufferers from the break-down of the free market will be precisely those for whom the whole ill-advised policy was implemented in the first place.

Investor’s Business Daily lists the main points of the report. Here are some of them: 

• In 1995, the Clinton administration issued a National Homeownership Strategy, loosening Fannie and Freddie’s lending standards and insisting that lenders “work collaboratively to reduce homebuyer downpayment requirements.”

• The administration complained that in 1989 only 7% of mortgages had less than a 10% downpayment. By 1994, it wanted that raised to 29%.

• Reduced underwriting standards spread into the entire U.S. mortgage market to those at all income levels.

• A complete decoupling of home prices from Americans’ income fed the growth of the housing bubble as borrowers made smaller down payments and took on higher debt.

• Wall Street firms specializing “in packaging and investing in the lowest-quality tranches of mortgage-backed securities, profited hugely from the increased volume that government affordable lending policies sparked.”

• Wall Street firms, homebuilders and the GSEs used money, power and influence to block attempts at reform. Between 1998 and 2008, Fannie and Freddie spent over $176 million on lobbyists.

• In 2006, Freddie paid the largest fine in Federal Election Commission history for improperly using corporate resources to hold 85 fundraisers for congressmen, raising a total of $1.7 million.

As the Issa report points out, “the real tragedy of the government’s affordable housing policy is the impact on average Americans, particularly those of modest means. Millions of these borrowers, who were supposed to have been helped by federal affordable housing policy, have now been forced into delinquency and foreclosure, destroying their asset base, their credit, and in some cases their families.”

The BBC, once  renowned for its truthful and objective reporting, now a shill for terrorists and lefty despots, legally extorts money from every TV watcher and radio listener in Britain under the age of 75. Although it depends on public money, it ignores all public criticism. Its arrogant self-righteousness is almost as sickening as its sustained propaganda for immoral causes.  

The admirable Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph wrote this to the BBC operations director of TV licencing: 

Dear Mr Shimeild,

On October 18, 2008, The Russell Brand Show on BBC Radio 2 broadcast a nine-minute sequence in which the presenter, Brand, and his guest, Jonathan Ross [a low, filthy-minded, cruel, altogether disgusting  show-off – JB], left messages on the answering machine of the then 78-year-old actor, Andrew Sachs [a great actor, refugee from Nazi Germany – JB]. In these, Ross shouted that Brand had “****** your granddaughter”. Further obscene and insulting messages broadcast included remarks about Mr Sachs’s granddaughter’s menstruation, and whether Mr Sachs would now kill himself because of the shame. The pair joked, on air, that they would “find out where Andrew Sachs lives, kick his front door in and scream apologies into his bottom”.

As a result of public outrage at this broadcast, several people left the BBC. Jonathan Ross, however, was only suspended for three months. It has been reported that Jonathan Ross earns £6 million a year from the BBC. Despite being a corporation mainly funded by the taxpayer, in the form of the licence fee, the BBC refuses to reveal the figure for Ross’s contract, but it has not denied it. If the reported amount is correct, Ross is by far the best-paid person in its history.

The Public Purposes of the BBC are, says its Charter, the “main object” of the BBC’s existence. They state that the corporation must take the lead in “sustaining citizenship and civil society” and “stimulating creativity and cultural excellence”. The Ross/Brand obscene broadcast – and several other broadcasts by Ross – are clearly contrary to the Public Purposes. The fact that Ross remains in post, paid an enormous sum, shows that the BBC has contempt for its own Public Purposes.

Since the BBC is breaking its own Charter, it has forfeited its right to collect a compulsory tax – the licence fee – from everyone who possesses a television. I wrote in public, at the time of the broadcast last autumn, that, in the circumstances, I would not pay my licence fee again. The circumstances have not improved. I hereby inform you, therefore, that I refuse to renew my licence, but I shall continue to keep and watch my television…

The BBC may take Mr Moore to court. We await developments. 

Jeff Durstewitz writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Europe has been riding on our economic coattails and sheltering under our defense umbrella since the end of World War II nearly 65 years ago. Our markets have been open to European goods, and our strong currency and relative affluence — the product of our much-maligned free-market economic model — have provided Europe with a ready buyer. (Question: How worried were French wine-makers about Americans boycotting French wines in 2003? Answer: très worried.)

While providing a huge market for Europe’s goods, we’ve also substantially relieved the European powers of the burden of defending themselves. Yes, France has an aircraft carrier and a nuclear force de frappe, but it’s not really capable of projecting significant force around the world anymore. Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, has a vestigial high-seas fleet and a modest air force. Even the Royal Navy is a shadow of its former self. “The U.S. last year spent about 44% more on defense than all other NATO members combined,” Robert Wall recently noted in Aviation Week.

By assuming Europe’s defense the U.S. has, in effect, allowed it the luxury of extremely expensive and ultimately unsustainable social-welfarism.

The great irony here is that the European model American leftists envy couldn’t survive without its despised cowboy counterparty. If the U.S. economy weakens because of increased regulation, heavy-handed unionization, and higher taxes and debt to support an expensive social agenda — all policies Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress are pushing hard — it will hurt Europe.

The market for Europe’s exports will shrink, and the U.S. will be less able to defend Europe. Europe is also facing a demographic cataclysm in the near future because of low birth rates (under 1.3 children per woman in the EU, well below the 2.1 necessary to maintain the population). Thus Europe will be increasingly unable to sustain its current welfare state, the very model that the left in the United States adores.

Deroy Murdock writes at ScrippsNews:

Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.”

Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half-century.

For December 1958, the Laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.

This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global warming as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.

So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Kyoto Protocols, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.

It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our healthcare system’s serious maladies.

But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.

Charles Krauthammer comments on the reduction-of-arms negotiations between Obama and the Russian leadership:  

We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into penury, as did their Soviet predecessors, stockpiling weapons that do nothing more than, as Churchill put it, make the rubble bounce.

Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama’s intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension [but why doesn’t this cause CK to revise his opinion that Obama is intelligent? – JB]. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers — the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) — induced the curtailment of anyone’s programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.

The pursuit of such an offensive weapons treaty could nonetheless be detrimental to us. Why? Because Obama’s hunger for a diplomatic success, such as it is, allowed the Russians to exact a price: linkage between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons.

This is important for Russia because of the huge American technological advantage in defensive weaponry. We can reliably shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. They cannot. And since defensive weaponry will be the decisive strategic factor of the 21st century, Russia has striven mightily for a quarter-century to halt its development. Gorbachev tried to swindle Reagan out of the Strategic Defense Initiative at Reykjavik in 1986. Reagan refused. As did his successors — Bush I, Clinton, Bush II.

Obama, who seeks to banish nuclear weapons entirely, has little use for such prosaic contrivances. First, the Obama budget actually cuts spending on missile defense, at a time when federal spending is a riot of extravagance and trillion-dollar deficits. Then comes the “pause” (as Russia’s president appreciatively noted) in the planned establishment of a missile shield in Eastern Europe. And now the “Joint Understanding” commits us to a new treaty that includes “a provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms.” Obama further said that the East European missile shield “will be the subject of extensive negotiations” between the United States and Russia.

Obama doesn’t even seem to understand the ramifications of this concession. Poland and the Czech Republic thought they were regaining their independence when they joined NATO under the protection of the United States. They now see that the shield negotiated with us and subsequently ratified by all of NATO is in limbo. Russia and America will first have to “come to terms” on the issue, explained President Dmitry Medvedev. This is precisely the kind of compromised sovereignty that Russia wants to impose on its ex-Soviet colonies — and that U.S. presidents of both parties for the last 20 years have resisted.

Resistance, however, is not part of Obama’s repertoire. Hence his eagerness for arcane negotiations over MIRV’d missiles, the perfect distraction from the major issue between the two countries: Vladimir Putin’s unapologetic and relentless drive to restore Moscow’s hegemony over the sovereign states that used to be Soviet satrapies.

That — not nukes — is the chief cause of the friction between the U.S. and Russia. You wouldn’t know it to hear Obama in Moscow pledging to halt the “drift” in U.S.-Russian relations. Drift? The decline in relations came from Putin’s desire to undo what he considers “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century — the collapse of the Soviet empire. Hence his squeezing Ukraine’s energy supplies. His overt threats against Poland and the Czech Republic for daring to make sovereign agreements with the United States. And finally, less than a year ago, his invading a small neighbor, detaching and then effectively annexing two of Georgia’s provinces to Mother Russia.

That’s the cause of the collapse of our relations. Not drift, but aggression. Or, as the reset man referred to it with such delicacy in his Kremlin news conference: “our disagreements on Georgia’s borders.”

David Limbaugh points this out in writing about the Waxman-Markey ‘cap-and-trade’ bill: 

Climate scientist Chip Knappenberger, of New Hope Environmental Services, calculates that the bill would only reduce Earth’s temperature by 0.1 to 0.2 degree Celsius by 2100. The Heritage Foundation’s Ben Lieberman says he’s found no “decent refutation of the assertion that the temperature impact would be inconsequential.”

Unfortunately, the bill’s negative impact on the economy would not be inconsequential. Lieberman says the bill would cause estimated job losses averaging about 1.15 million from 2012-2030, and the cumulative projected loss in gross domestic product would be almost $10 trillion by 2035. The national debt from this bill alone, disregarding the multiple bailouts, stimulus packages and health care “reform,” would increase by 2035 for a family of four by 26 percent, or $115,000…

In addition to all the economic destruction the bill would cause, in the end, it is not so much about global warming as Obaman wealth redistribution. “The Foundry” says Obama’s own budget “promises to raise $650 billion in revenues by selling carbon permits (which are the exact same thing as an energy tax),” only $150 billion of which will go to alternative energy production. The rest will be redistributed to people who “don’t pay income taxes.”

Read the whole article here.

Whatever a government does, it does badly. That is the rule. Therefore, the less a government does the better for the nation. It should do only those things that it alone can do – chiefly, defend the country, protect the citizens by enforcing the law.  What it should never do, above all, is manage the economy. That’s the lesson socialists never learn. 

Only a small part of the $787 billion ‘stimulus package’ – money stolen from future tax-payers by the Democrats in power –  has been spent, but a second such governmental act of theft is already being mooted. On what have the ill-gotten government gains  so far been spent?

Mona Charen gives examples in Townhall:

The Social Security Administration admits that it mailed out 10,000 checks (using stimulus funds) to “deceased persons.” The SSA blamed pressure to spend the money quickly.

A non-existent lake in Oklahoma is going to get $1 million for a guardrail.

Union, N.Y., (population 56,000) was notified that it would be receiving a $578,661 stimulus grant to prevent homelessness. The town fathers were nonplussed as 1) they had never applied for the grant, and 2) they do not have a homelessness problem. But note the number: It’s so non-round, so specific. Is there a department at HUD responsible for inventing plausible-sounding numbers?

The state of Wisconsin, Coburn reports, has 1,256 structurally deficient bridges, more than Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Alaska combined. Yet no stimulus funds are flowing to repair those bridges. Instead, the feds are sending $15.8 million in transportation stimulus money to repair 37 rural bridges that hardly anyone uses. Why? It seems the rural projects were more “shovel-ready” and got pushed to the head of the queue.

But perhaps the most emblematic example of your tax dollars at work is this one: Road signs are being purchased at a cost of $300 apiece advertising that “This construction project” is being paid for with stimulus funds. Illinois alone has already spent $150,000 on such signs.

    Read the whole article here.

From Power Line:

The Obama administration quietly announced last week that as much as $16.1 million from the stimulus program is going to save the San Francisco Bay area habitat of, among other things, the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.

That has revived Republican criticism that the pet project was an “invisible earmark” in the massive spending bill for Mrs. Pelosi, whose San Francisco district abuts the bay, and epitomizes the failure of stimulus spending to help an economy still shedding jobs.

“Lo and behold, the government has announced that the mouse is getting its money after all,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said while standing beside a poster of the furry varmint. “Speaker Pelosi must be so proud.”