Tag Archives: government

The Obama Administration and Racism

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[Ally Financial Inc] agreed to pay borrowers at least $80 million to settle allegations of racial or ethnic discrimination….

This is the settlement that Obama’s CFPB and DoJ browbeat Ally into accepting. There’s a catch, though:

the lender is prohibited by law from collecting data on the race or ethnicity of its borrowers.

But never mind. Obama and his Executive Branch minions cried racism, and so it must exist, regardless of actual data.

Unfortunately, though, Obama isn’t alone in this sorry charade. Ally management shares shame in this tragedy: they cravenly agreed to a penalty for something they didn’t do, or at least the government persecutors had no hope of demonstrating.

“Justice” Redux

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It turns out the Secret Service Director, Joseph Clancy, not only can’t keep his Secret Service straight, he can’t even keep his own stories about what he heard about his Secret Service’s misbehavior straight. The AP has reported, via Fox News, that Clancy’s claims of when he heard “rumors” of his agency’s illegal search of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz’ personnel records keeps changing.

What’s interesting to me about this, though, is what the AP buried at the end of its article.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that his department will proceed “expeditiously” to determine whether any laws or policies were broken. To avoid a conflict of interest, Johnson said the determination about accountability will be made by him and not Clancy.

DHS will decide whether any laws were broken? Whatever happened to DoJ and its role in determining whether any laws were broken?

Oh, wait….

Government Responsibility

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At least one charity is figuring out the impediment that is government involvement in what is, at bottom, an individual responsibility.

Andrea Koppel, Mercy Corps’ Vice President of Global Engagement and Strategy, wants the UN’s involvement in the current Middle East refugee crisis severely downsized. Her focus is on the UN as a quasi-government, but she’s also moving further and wanting sovereign government roles downsized, too.

The better idea, Mercy argues, would be to sweep away the old institutions where they are not likely to be effective and place greater reliance on new combinations of private-sector organizations, civil society groups and different levels of government. This, the report says, would allow humanitarian organizations to take bigger risks to support local victims regardless of government response, and work faster and more easily with local communities when national governments are virtually non-existent.

It’s not an explicit call for government(s) to be the last resort rather than the first, but it’s a move in that direction.

A Step in the Right Direction

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But it remains woefully insufficient, and further changes need to be pushed—apparently from outside—and those additional changes need to happen quickly.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday it will overhaul its in-house tribunal following months of escalating legal challenges and criticism of its increased use of its own judges.

Under the new rules, defendants will get more time to prepare: up to eight months, instead of the SEC’s “rocket docket” of pacing that suits the agency, regardless of the time actually needed to prepare. Defendants also will be able, for the first time, to get sworn testimony as part of their defense preparation.

These are crucial changes, to be sure.

However.

The SEC still will use judges that are explicitly on the SEC payroll to hear the cases the SEC brings against defendants. The SEC still will use judges that are explicitly on the SEC payroll to hear defendants’ appeals of the SEC’s house judges’ decisions.

Absent corrections to those failings, the SEC’s “courts” will remain very much kangaroo courts.

The Democrat in the Socialist

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Or is it the other way around? At any rate, here’s the Bernie’s Bill for what he wants his fellow Democrats to help him do once he’s elected President.

His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American….

He wants, also, $1.2 trillion to expand Social Security and its benefit payouts, so as to increase the dependence of Americans on government for our well-being.

He wants $750 billion for tuition-free public schools and easier “refinancing” of student debt. With the cynicism typical of today’s Democrats, he knows full well the tuition won’t be free, it’ll be paid for by the rest of us in higher taxes and greater Federal debt—which is higher taxes tomorrow. What he carefully elides, too, is that his easier “refinancing” amounts to converting student debt to taxpayer-funded grants. Behind our backs.

And on, and on.

The full Bernie’s Bill runs to $18 trillion over the next 10 years, a sum for which he’ll pay over those same 10 years with tax increases of $6.5 trillion and…debt: an additional $11.5 trillion in higher taxes later on.

The bottom line, and the carefully shrunken fine print, of all this is the enormous expansion of the Federal government. This is the Democratic Party. This is the Progressive Party of Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama…and Bernie Sanders. The Party holds that the

average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

We need our betters, these Democrats, these Obama/Clinton/Progressives, to tell us what we must do, what our moral and intellectual responsibilities are. And as Clinton herself put it, they’re going to take things away from us on behalf of their common good.