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Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Chris Charles: Financing Revolution
Part
II Risky Business
If
private sector companies want to make bad business decisions that is their right. The government should not tell a hot dog
stand how to sell hot dogs nor should they tell big financial corporations how to run their businesses. Companies either thrive
or fail based on their business decisions. If a hot dog stand charges only twenty-five cents for a hot dog, they probably
won’t make enough money to stay in business but should some federal bureaucracy mandate how much a hot dog should be
sold for?
If banks
and other lending institutions want to make risky loans or gamble on the stock market, they should be able to do so at their
OWN risk, not the tax payers. It is up to the people invested in the company to ‘regulate’ big Wall Street corporations.
Stock holders own these companies; they should make the rules and decide the level of risk a company should take to try to
earn a profit.
Generally,
businesses (if left to their own devises) will make prudent choices because if they don’t they will eventually fail.
It is when government get involved and takes some of the risk out of the equation that some businesses will be emboldened
to take greater risks to try and cash in because they know there is a government ‘safety net’ underneath them.
When you are in the business
of lending money, the more people you lend to the more money you will make, provided the people you lend to actually pay that
money back. Some lenders took big risks and for a while it paid off for them. Eventually though, their luck ran out and their
lax lending standards caught up with them. What should the government have said? Don’t loan to people that might not
be able to afford their loan? Perhaps, but the fact is the government was saying just the opposite! They not only okayed,
they insisted that banks and firms lend to low income people and people with poor credit scores that would not ordinarily
qualify for mortgages.
In
a free market, the lender has the choice of who to loan money to, based on the resources of the borrower. If a lender wants
to give a million dollar home loan to a borrower that makes $6.75 an hour part time at Burger King, the government should
not get in the way but they sure as heck shouldn’t be encouraging it either.
Even if you feel that the banking industry should be regulated,
government bureaucrats would be the last people you would want in charge. How can government regulate the banking industry
when the governments own banks are out of control? Government lending institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were front and
center in the housing meltdown. Remember it was Fannie and Freddie that gave mortgages to people that could not afford them.
Where was Fannie
and Freddie’s oversight? Who was in charge? Chris Dodd the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and
Urban Affairs and Barney Frank, his counterpart in the House. Why aren’t these guys on the hot seat? Instead they are
sweating the leaders of private banks and financial firms; they have laid all of the blame on Greedy Wall Street fat cats
for the housing meltdown. Should at least part of the blame lie with the fat cat liberals in government like Dodd and Frank
that mandated that everyone be given a home loan regardless of their ability to afford it?
The government was not only encouraging the practice of lending
to unqualified borrowers, they were actually do so themselves with Fannie and Freddie!
So it seems that if anyone is in need of reform and overhaul it
is the federal government. It was the Feds that gave loans to people that could afford to pay them. It was the feds that encouraged
private sector banks to loan to people that did not qualify for them. And it was the Federal government that bailed out the
private sector banks with your tax money when it all went south.
12:13 pm pdt
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Chris Charles: Financing Revolution
Part I: Dollars & Sense
There is a push in Congress
and in the White House for more governmental control over the financial industry. Of course more government is always the
answer from the left. But many normal people look at the subprime mortgage disaster and subsequent worldwide financial recession
that stemmed from it and think that maybe a little government oversight would not be so bad. Problem is there is no such thing
as a little government control, only a lot of government control and I don’t think the government can make better decisions
than the people themselves can. I don’t even think the government can make better decisions than big greedy Wall Street
investment firms can.
It
should not be of the concern of the federal government how a private sector company runs its business, nor should the government
bailout companies that would otherwise go bankrupt. In a Capitalist system, successful companies are allowed to succeed; unsuccessful
companies are allowed to fail. If the feds deem it is in the national interest for a certain company to remain in business,
like for instance a major US Airline, the government could always LOAN struggling company money but tax payer money should
not be used to bailout companies that have made poor business decisions. Winners and losers should not be determined by the
federal government, they should be determined by the free market.
Businesses large and small fail every day, that’s the hard truth. For
every business that succeeds, there are many more that do not. Where was the federal government after the internet bubble
in the late 1990’s? Why didn’t they have a TARP program for all of the dot-com’s that failed?
Companies are in business to make money,
if they are not successful to that end, something has to give. But most of the time businesses that are unsuccessful do not
just go away; they can reorganize under bankruptcy laws, reemerge and attempt to once again be successful. Other companies
are sold to other, more successful businesses so that the failed company’s resources can be combined with a more successful
company’s business strategy. Bailouts only reward bad decision making and poor business practices, they do nothing to
address the reason why a company finds itself in need of a bailout.
Do we really want the government, which currently has a multi-trillion dollar
deficit, spending billions more to bail out failed companies? What does government know about running a business anyway? Government
owned businesses are notoriously poor performers. Do you think that Fed Ex would still be in business if they lost as much
money as the US Postal Service does every year? The feds have financial situation that is much worse than any private sector
company. If the government was not the government they would have gone out-of-business a long time ago.
The two ‘companies’ most
involved in the subprime mortgage mess were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, guess who owns and operates them? If you guessed greedy
Wall Street tycoons you’d be wrong. It is none other than the all knowing, all wise, federal government lead by Senator
Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank. These are the very people now crafting all of the new rules and regulations that
all financial companies will be straddled with. Why not just put Bernie Madoff in charge of regulating the financial industry?
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Chris Charles: The Fight Of
The Right
Part II: Hoax & Change
Left wing
media types could hardly control themselves after pictures of President Obama with a Hitler mustache started showing up at
tea party rallies. I don’t remember them getting upset at all when left wing protesters carried giant pictures of President
Bush with the same Hitler mustache and/or devil horns. Why are they upset now?
And if they are so outraged they should take it up with the group
responsible for printing those posters, supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, a far left guy that is even more liberal than the Democrats!
Only crazy people (or liberals trying to make tea partiers look like crazy people) would compare Barack Obama, a big government
liberal, with Adolf Hitler, a mass murdering dictator. If you ask me, President Obama is more a kin to Jacques Chirac.
Liberals are so eager to paint
conservatives as racists; they are willing to manufacture the hate themselves. In addition to far left crazies printing up
those Hitler/Obama posters, others have begun infiltrating tea party’s across the country in order to marginalize the
grassroots effort. One leftist organization is claiming that scores of ‘open minded’ liberal fascists are going
to attend tea party rallies and shout racist, homophobic, and other wise disgusting rhetoric so that their cohorts in the
left wing media can dutifully report the hate being spewed by ‘right wingers’.
One depraved and depressed leftist even went as far as to commit
suicide and try to frame conservatives for his murder! This miserable government census worker scrawled ‘fed’
across his own chest before hanging himself in Kentucky. For weeks the left was convinced right wing fanatics had killed the
man, but when the truth came out it was yet another fabrication by a leftist and not right wing extremism.
In the aftermath of the health care vote,
liberals and the liberal media claimed another one of those right wing psychopaths threw a brick though Democratic Congressmen
Steve Driehaus’ office window. The only problem with that is Driehaus’ office is located on the 30th
floor of a high rise building in Cincinnati! Who was throwing the brick, Brett Favre? Even if you would buy that a tea party
fanatic hurled a brick through a 30th story window, it’s still not as serious as the Bullet that shattered
a window at Republican Eric Cantor’s office. Wait, I thought leftists hated guns.
Given liberal’s track record of manufacturing right wing
‘hate’ excuse me if I don’t buy claims made by Democratic lawmakers on the day of the health care vote.
One Democrat even accused tea partiers of calling him the N-word, although not a single shred of evidence can be found to
corroborate his claims. He may have been called the S-word (socialist) but nobody present at the rally heard any racist language
nor did any video cameras record any (racial) slurs.
Why were the Dems even in a position to be confronted by tea partiers anyway? Congressional office buildings
are all connected to the Capitol Building by underground walkways and trains far from the angry mobs of protestors. There
is no need for members of congress to walk out into the street only to then walk back into the Capitol, plus they would have
to go through security screening, again. Not to mention the fact that thousands were outside that were protesting the legislation
the Dems were pushing. Why would the members of Congress go so far out of their way AND subject themselves to all of the ‘hate’
outside? They would never walk to the Capitol outside on an average day, why then would they on the day of the health care
vote? The only reason to do so would be to provoke a rouge tea party member into saying something ‘hateful’, which
is why some of the lawmakers carried video cameras with them.
This publicity stunt by House Dems allowed the media to portray them as victims and
allow them to claim they had been called racist names by protesters. In any large group, there will always be a few whack
jobs, that is inevitable but I am certain that there are far more lunatics on the left than there are on the right. I’m
sure the tea party crowds do include a few right wing crazies but so far we have seen little evidence of this. If there were
REAL tea party people expressing racist or hateful sentiments, you could bet the left wing media would be all over it. They
already are nonstop with their coverage of right wing hate that later turns out to be left wing hoax-ery.
1:27 pm pdt
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Chris Charles: The Fight Of
The Right
Part I: The
Lunatics of the Left
Every single Republican in Congress along
with over thirty Democrats and a majority of the American people opposed the Democratic leadership fundamentally changing
the American health care system. They did it anyway and now they are upset by the blowback they’re getting? The Democrats
now want civility and proper discourse? Where was there civility during the later years of the Bush administration? In fact,
when has the left ever had civility? Just look at what passes for ‘patriotic dissent’ in liberal circles.
During Vietnam, soldiers
would return from the living hell that was South East Asia only to find themselves spat upon and called murderers by left
wing war protesters.
In
more recent times, hard core leftists demine and disparage heroic soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan by saying that
they only serve in the military because they have ‘no other choice’.
They held about as much respect for former President Bush and
I do for Adolf Hitler and they held equal contempt for Bush administration officials. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney routinely
had violent protests held outside their respective homes, some ‘tolerant’ leftists called black administration
officials Condi Rice and Colin Powell ‘uncle toms’ and even ‘house niggers’.
Don’t forget about race-baiter Jesse
Jackson calling Jews ‘hymies’ and referred to New York City as ‘hymietown’ at a demonstration. Not
to be out done fellow agitator Al Sharpton referred to people of the Jewish faith as ‘diamond merchants’.
Code Pinkers are still following
around harassing former Bush White House staff, just last week they tried to slap handcuffs on Karl Rove at a book signing.
They sought to make a citizen’s arrest for ‘crimes against humanity’. Crimes against humanity? Isn’t
that a little melodramatic, even for you Code Pink? How about the more straight forward crimes of stocking, false imprisonment,
and assault that you engage in?
Left wing thugs not only target senior Bush administration officials, they target regular folks too. After Prop 8 banned
gay marriage in California, liberal activists targeted businesses of Prop 8 supporters.
Just a few days ago a
group of protestors led by the Latin supremacist group ‘La Raza’ broke in and took over a private home in San
Francisco to protest a lack of public housing for the poor.
Liberal protestors are not as much protestors as they are rioters! Anything is fair
game to these people but when we on the right want to voice our opposition, the left quickly tries to silence any dissent.
Thanks to the first amendment,
we are free to free to voice our opposition without fear of being arrested. Fortunately for us we don’t live in Castro’s
Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela, although sometimes I get the feeling liberals wish we did! Since they can’t arrest
us like their communist counterparts in Latin America, liberals must find a different way to silence or marginalize their
political opponents.
Because
the vast majority of outspoken conservatives do not resort to the kinds of vitriolic hate filled rhetoric that the left does,
the left must exaggerate, embellish, and even invent instances of right wing hate and extremism so that mainstream media and
others will be rightly appalled.
During the Bush years, some on the left went as far as to accuse President Bush of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks so
that he could go to war to make money for his Texas oil buddies. There was never any evidence of this, but committed liberals
don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
Sometimes facts and/or proof of right wing or Republican malfeasance is simply faked or forged. Just days
before the 2004 Presidential election, CBS and Dan Rather reported that President Bush had not fulfilled his obligation to
the Texas Air National Guard based on documents obtained by Rather. Only problem was the documents turned out not to be genuine,
they were faked by liberals.
There are also the numerous instances of left wingers vandalizing property in order to blame it on right wing extremists.
Like Claremont College Professor Kerri Dunn who, after giving a lecture about ‘hate speech’, went to the faculty
parking lot to find her car spray painted with hateful and racist terminology. Dunn accused her own students of the ‘hate
crime’ but as it turned out, it was all a hoax. The Professor had vandalized her own car.
Given the lefts long track record of hate toward the right as
well as their made up claims of right wing hatred it is hard to feel for the plight of the leftist. Any backlash they are
facing now is more than deserved. They chose to thwart the will of the people, they should have stood up faced the heat. Instead,
they are predictably making themselves look like the poor oppressed victims. Excuse me if I don’t shed a tear.
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