Tag Archives: morality

Whither Responsibility?

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The financial crisis threatening the Spanish government deepened Thursday as its borrowing costs hit a new euro-era high, touching levels that previously forced other euro-zone countries to seek sovereign debt bailouts.

So writes Jonathan House in a recent Wall Street Journal article.  Emese Bartha echoed the sentiments in her own WSJ article.

The Italian government’s borrowing costs soared at a bond auction Thursday, a development that will make it more difficult for Prime Minister Mario Monti to avoid having to seek financial help from other euro-zone members.

And just what are these nose-bleed borrowing costs that send whole nations scurrying for OPM?  They’re in the range of 6.0%-7.5% interest rates.  The Spanish 10-year bond, for instance, now runs for 6.96%, “a new euro-era record,” while the Italian 10-year bond goes for 6.23%.

What were the interest rates in another one-among-twenty or so nations (which august club includes these nations of the EU), the US at  the end of the Carter/beginning of the Reagan era?  In 1980, the US 10-year bond rate peaked at 12.84%; in 1981, it got as high as 15.32%.  Our 10-year bond rates had been above 6.96% since early 1974, and they didn’t fall below that level again until mid-1992.

Who bailed us out when we had such trouble?  We did.  We handled our own problems.

But there was a sense of responsibility in those days.  Today, it’s all OPM, and that’s a bottomless piggy bank from which every nation should be able to draw.

How is this Possible?

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In an apparent attempt to obviate the need to move forward with a Congressional contempt citation of the Attorney General of the United States, that AG, Eric Holder, last Thursday sent a letter to the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Congressman Darrell Issa (R, CA).  In this letter, Holder offers to provide to the Committee many of the “Fast and Furious” documents subpoenaed and heretofore withheld by Holder, and Holder offered personally to brief Issa in the subject.

This is a good start, but there’s more to this story.  Here’s an amazing paragraph from that letter [emphasis added].

The record in this matter reflects that until allegations about the inappropriate tactics used in Fast and Furious were made public, Department leadership was unaware of those tactics.  Indeed, as the documents we provided to the Committee relating to the drafting of the February 4 letter reflect, Department leaders were assured by the heads of Department components in the best position to know the true facts that the allegations being made were “categorically false.”  However, over a period of months in 2011, as documents to be provided to the Committee were collected and reviewed, and as witness testimony before the Committee was evaluated, Department leadership learned more and began to assess the facts of this matter independently.  The Department’s understanding of the facts underlying Fast and Furious became more developed, particularly as evidence came to light that was inconsistent with the initial denials provided to Department personnel.  Over time, Department leadership came to recognize that Fast and Furious was fundamentally flawed, as I noted in my October 7, 2011 letter to you and other members of Congress….

This fast and Furious operation was conducted under the auspices of the DoJ.  These data, concerning the misbehavior, were in the DoJ’s hands all along.  “Department leadership” (read: Holder) didn’t know these data?  How is he leading his Department if he can’t even get his own subordinates to talk to him?  How is he leading his Department if, alternatively, he chooses to be ignorant of the data in his subordinates’ hands until outside agencies force him to look at them?

What level of competence produces this quality of performance?

Finally, keep in mind that the House Committee didn’t begin its own investigation until well after Agent Terry’s murder.  Holder could have put this whole matter to rest—indeed he could have avoided all of  this hoo-raw, all of this expenditure of taxpayer money—if only he’d listened to the Clue Bird when it presented him with the murder of a government agent, presented him with a murder victim with weapons his own Department was turning over to drug cartels near the body.

The complete Holder letter can be seen here.

Democrats Just Don’t Understand

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President Obama said, at a campaign stop at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on the 12th of June,

They [voters] have pretty good instincts about what works and they’re not persuaded that an economy built on the notion that everybody here is on their own is somehow going to result in a stronger, more prosperous America.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this statement, which demonstrates an utter lack of understanding of what life is like without government intimately involved in it, without government ensuring that we’re not being too selfish to help each other out.  But with remarks like this, Democrats are only projecting their own selfishness onto the rest of us.

Americans as a whole donated over $300 billion to charity in 2009, for instance, the third year in a row we donated more than $300 billion in a single year.  In 2008, within these $300 billion, Gallup says that conservatives donated 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes; liberals donated 1.25% to 1.5%.  Senator Joe Biden, who now considers it the patriotic thing to do to pay lots of taxes, donated 0.1% of his income in each of the years 2001-2004.  Last year, Vice President Biden bumped his giving to the lofty level of 1.5%.  It’s certainly true that Obama, and a fellow Progressive, President Bill Clinton, give significantly more, but these two are not typical Democrats, as those numbers above demonstrate.

Americans—conservative Americans, at any rate—do our duty, we help our fellows.  We don’t need government hands in our pockets to do that.  We need government hands out of our pockets so we can do that better.

Democrats assume all of America is like them.  Fortunately, we’re not.  Not by a long shot.

Government Censorship

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Readers know that I’m no fan of the NLMSM.  However, now we hear of a naked attempt to turn the press—that erstwhile bastion of freedom—into an arm of the Federal government, all at the behest of President Obama’s Labor Department.

Labor officials have put forward a plan to require reporters who analyze and write about economic data which Labor provides in its “lock up” room to use government—Labor—computers, software(!?), and Internet accesses so the government, they claim, can protect itself against potential security hacks.

I have some beachfront property in central New Mexico on offer for those who believe this claim.

This is nothing but the government’s attempt to dictate to the press what they will be permitted to see and what they will be permitted to say about what they will see.  Bloomberg News Executive Editor, Dan Moss, testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has the right of it:

This proposal threatens the First Amendment.  The government would literally open the reporters’ notebooks.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee isn’t conducting any hearings on the matter.)

Carl Fillichio, a Labor communications specialist, told committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R, CA) after Wednesday’s hearing that he, Fillichio, would provide “some flexibility” on a June 15 deadline for the plan’s implementation.  Notice that: a communications specialist, not a Labor official with actual authority, claims to be in a position to commit the Department.  Fillichio did then send an email to Bloomberg, The Washington Examiner, and others, saying in part

Per my commitment to Chairman Issa’s request, we are going to move the effective date on changes to the lock up[.]

Notice this, too: there’s no commitment by this underling—or by anyone in authority at Labor, or by anyone in Obama’s White House—to eliminate this plan; there’s only a “commitment” to move its effective date.

Fox News‘ headline in the linked article is naïve.  This isn’t a backing off.  This is just cynical delay and a weasel-wording of a pseudo-change made by a junior functionary.  This obfuscation is of a piece with the HHS contraceptive, sterilization, and abortifacients insurance coverage “compromise.”  The plan will go into effect essentially unchanged, unless there’s more outcry and more pressure put on our Congressmen to withdraw by legislation this plan’s attack on our freedom (which also will force Obama’s explicit veto).

Regulations and Foreign Law

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The Fed wants to put our own banking system under the aegis of international banking regulators.  Not directly, but by requiring all American banks—including even our smallest institutions—to meet the capital requirements of Basel III.  Basel III is an international standards “agreement” carrying international bureaucrats’ view of what constitutes a bank’s capital adequacy; those bureaucrats’ view of proper stress testing of a bank; and those bureaucrats’ view of the adequacy of a bank’s liquidity, apart from its capital adequacy.

There’s more: the Fed intends to impose on each bank a 1%-2.5% surcharge on its (increased) capital—because the Fed has a better understanding of how the bank’s capital should be used than does the bank.

Aside from whether US businesses should be under the control of foreign quasi-governmental agencies—a meme this administration is increasingly embracing—smaller financial institutions will have trouble meeting the additional requirements.  This is apparent from the results, in market share and profit margin, of this sort of intervention.  Lenders with $1 billion or less in assets have seen their market share fall to the neighborhood of 10% from the 31% they held in the early ’90s, and smaller banks had a return on assets of 1.22% for the first quarter of this year, compared with 1.52% for those with more than $1 billion in assets, just from the existence of the Fed’s domestic regulatory requirements.  So much for too big to fail.  The Fed is busily instituting too small to survive.  (And as an aside, notice those profit margins.  So much for fat cat bankers.  Those are the margins of chain grocery stores.)

There’s yet more.  The Fed doesn’t want banks to rate their riskiness in any effective way.  It intends to  force banks to stop relying on credit ratings when looking at their own assets’ riskiness.  Instead, the risk classifications of another foreign entity, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, are to be used.  The OECD Knows Better.

Hmm….