Unless one is living under a rock, on the moon, with their fingers in their ears, you've heard the news that America added ZERO JOBS in August 2011. No surprise here. THERE'S TOO MUCH UNCERTAINTY AND REGULATIONS TO WANT TO CREATE! Is there any more evidence needed that "President" Barak Hussein Obama IS A COMMUNIST?! This empty suit should be tried for treason and escorted back to Kenya before many of us take up arms and do it forcefully.
Our little farming community is suddenly having trouble with rampant thievery. Farmers are having their 'pivots' (those super larger sprinklers one sees in fields) pulled down and salvaged for parts. There are arrests for these crimes almost every month now. Our neighboring cities and countryside is having trouble with criminals coming into homes and stealing in broad daylight! Air conditioners and any other equipment found unguarded are being pilfered for copper or whatever. We NEVER used to have such crime here! It's quite frightening.
Anyway, below is a well written article about this quagmire the American people elected in office:
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This is by Victor Davis Hanson Hanson is a farmer in the lower San Joaquin valley of California, a historian and a fellow at the Hoover Institute.
Read his article, then read below it two of the responses.
Zero Jobs 101 — the Psychology of Alienating Employers
There Is No There There
Zero jobs last month — a net change of zero job growth? It was just announced that last month’s unemployment is still above 9% — despite the nearly five trillion dollars in Keynesian pump-priming, the near zero interest rates, the expanded unemployment and food stamp support, and the government takeovers and subsidies of businesses. There is a scary sort of deer-in-the-headlights look about Obama and Biden that is quite disturbing, as if they are thinking, “This was not supposed to happened to us. Geithner, Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers assured us that all this borrowing would turn things around — but they are all gone or leaving, so now we are alone? What to do? Hmmm. More them/us class warfare rhetoric? Embrace more of the California/Illinois/New York blue-state model? More European Union emulation? A national high-speed rail jobs program? Bring back Van Jones and “millions of green jobs”? Borrow another $5 trillion? Maybe negative interest rates? Seventy-five million on food stamps? Four years of unemployment insurance? A new Department of Jobs? Call in Jimmy Carter for advice about 1979? $100 billion more in green subsidies to progressive caring companies? Take over Ford? Another speech from Buffett? Unleash the Congressional Black Caucus?”
Two Sorts of Depression
Job growth is as often driven by psychological impulses on the part of employers as actual facts on the ground, given the requirement of a business that it must plan for the unknown future better than do its rivals. While business people don’t read every economic report or follow every political psychodrama, they do watch for trends, know hourly the pulse of their businesses, and talk to colleagues and rivals to form general opinions about business climate and government attitudes and future policies. I’ve been speaking a lot lately to civic groups, a few firms, investors, large and small farmers and farm suppliers, and individual employers. And the following would fairly sum up their current state of mind.
The Great Sit-Down Strike
In the last 30 months, the Obama administration has created a psychological landscape that finally just seemed, whether fairly or not, too hostile to most employers to risk new hiring and buying. Each act, in and of itself, was irrelevant. Together they are proving catastrophic and doing the near impossible of turning a brief recovery into another recession.
Here is the lament I heard: the near $5 trillion in borrowing in just three years, the radical growth in the size of the federal government and its regulatory zeal, ObamaCare, the Boeing plant closure threat, the green jobs sweet-heart deals and Van Jones-like “Millions of Green Jobs” nonsense, the vast expansion in food stamps and unemployment pay-outs, the reversal of the Chrysler creditors, politically driven interference in the car industry, the failed efforts to get card check and cap and trade, the moratoria on new drilling in the Gulf, the general antipathy to new fossil fuel exploitation coupled with new finds of vast new reserves, the new financial regulations, an aggressive EPA oblivious to the effects of its advocacy on jobs, the threatened close-down of energy plants, the support for idling thousands of acres of irrigated farmland due to environmental regulations, the constant talk of higher taxes, the needlessly provocative rhetoric of “fat cat”, “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” etc. juxtaposed, in hypocritical fashion, to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, and Vail First Family getaways — all of these isolated strains finally are becoming a harrowing opera to business people.
Despite enormous opportunity for many cash-rich firms to take advantage of the down cycles (low interest, plentiful potential employees, discounted prices, etc.), they are taking a pass, almost as if to collectively sigh, “This bunch doesn’t like me much and I’m going to hunker down, hoard my cash, and sit out the next year and a half until they are gone.” And the administration’s efforts to counteract these symbols and impressions by courting a high-profile, hyper-capitalist Warren Buffett, or a GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt have proven even more ironic: the former calls for higher taxes that his firms seek to avoid, or targets his post-mortem wealth to (more efficient?) private foundations that rob the Treasury of billions in lost inheritance taxes, or knows higher taxes won’t much matter to his tens of billions in net worth; the latter’s firm paid no 2010 U.S. income taxes on many of its profits and outsourced jobs overseas. And when Obama is told by his base to “get tough,” “get angry,” and “double-down” on the EU-like statist policies and Chicago-organizing, get-in-their-face rhetoric that got him into this jobs stagnation mess, should we laugh or cry? Get furious and demand — what? Snarl and scream about the right to go “big” from $1.6 trillion to $2 trillion in annual borrowing?
Highly publicized visits to bankrupt subsidized green plants, blaming George Bush, new racially-driven invective from some congresspeople against the Tea Party, sermons about the sensitivities of illegal aliens, politically-correct tutorials about Islam — all that might rally the base or in isolation be understandable, but again fairly or not, such liberal rhetoric simply adds to the problem from yet another dimension: confirming perceptions that employers are about the last people in the world that this administration is worried about.
The Upper-Middle-Class Lament
I talked to a gentleman in the Central Valley the other day; he voiced a rarely heard lament. He was a private business person who thought he had saved enough for retirement but could not see any income anywhere: (1) his cash is getting almost no interest in a variety of savings accounts; (2) he can’t sell his house without a loss and can’t see any foreseeable increase in its equity; (3) his 401(K) is still down and never quite recovered from the post-2008 dive and is now simply too volatile for him to know what to do; (4) he assumes taxes will go up to pay for the subsidies of others for which he does not qualify for —yet; (5) he has no public pension and has less income than those who used to make far less but worked for the federal government, state, or city. I could only say that Obama would say, “Well, your’re better off than many in my base.”
Vandal Watch
Last week, I mentioned that my local community is struggling with council members calling each other names and alleging serial conflicts of interest, theft of the city’s manhole covers by public employees, and child pornography charges lodged against a policeman. This week? An epidemic of the theft of honorific bronze plaques from the walls of the city’s schools, civic centers, and public buildings — the sort of commemoration for good deeds that are the stuff of civilization. It reminds me of Procopius’s description of post-Roman Italy in the 6th-century AD, when lost Ostrogoth and Visigoth souls drifted amid the great cities of the Old Romans, cannibalizing the ancients’ marble, bronze, and lead clamps, and melting down monuments for lime. What scares me is that the gang bangers, who are prying these plaques off the walls and selling them, for pennies on their original dollars, for scrap, have no idea of the now dead who built and created these buildings and institutions, but so often in extremis will expect to use them. Did the man who built a school or the woman who founded a civic club ever expect that their commemorative citations would end up in a melt-down pile in the local wrecking yard?
Copper wire torn out from agricultural pumps? Manhole covers stolen by their very custodians? Commemorative plaques pried out? We are almost an entire generation of parasites that cannot create anything new and so feed on the capital and labor of the past. Sixth-century Rome to the core, or maybe Dark-Age Greece around 1000 BC where the illiterate and ignorant were wandering beneath the walls of Mycenae or Pylos looking for shelter that they could not build for themselves, and swearing superhuman “gods” must have erected such walls. Who knows, just as the most fertile period of Greek myth-making came out of the oral traditions of the Dark Ages as an impoverished and illiterate age tried to make sense of the monumental traces of a lost civilization, so too soon we may think our forgotten dam builders and water project architects of the last century were Apollo or the Cyclops, as we watch their legacies erode and crumble.
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TWO COMMENTS LEFT BY READERS WORTH READING:
VDH, your description of the collective business mentality is right on target.
Every medium, small and micro business owner I know has developed and is implementing formal or informal “hunker down” plans. Most in these categories are NOT flush with cash. We’re struggling to sustain whatever “recovery” we’ve managed to achieve, working to rebuild depleted cash reserves, and trying to figure out if we can ride out the turbulence and uncertainty.
We’re not hiring, not expanding, not investing in growth and definitely not giving raises. More than a few have yet to reinstate drastic management and executive salary cuts instituted in 2008/09 as basic business-saving measures.
Obama has transformed an already risk-filled medium-small-micro business landscape into a bog of quicksand peppered with hidden landmines. Move ahead, you sink. Step right, you blow up. Each real or threatened regulation, each new attack, each tax-spend sound byte, each luxury campaign-trip-cum-vacation simply dumps more quicksand, pre-seeded with more landmines, into the bog – which extends as far as the eye can see.
Perhaps I’m just quibbling, but it’s not a sitdown strike. We show up and perform every day, no matter how much sleep we’ve lost to worry the night before, or how many hats we now wear to offset a radically reduced staff.
More than a few of us are suffering from battle fatigue, and the most pressing question of the day remains: Can we hang on another 12 (15, 18) months? It remains to be seen.
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Comment by Gylippus
“More than a few of us are suffering from battle fatigue, and the most pressing question of the day remains: Can we hang on another 12 (15, 18) months? It remains to be seen.”
We can do more than just wait it out. We can launch a counter offensive now. Van Jones helpfully outlined the leftist-globalist-statist strategy. So he has given us all we need to defeat them. He called it “Top Down, Bottom Up, Inside Out.”
The “Top Down” tier consists of elected officials or political appointees with legislative authority (not just domestic but also at the UN and other international organizations). So for instance the far-left members of congress or the senate who ram through redistributive legislation, not to mention the president and his cabinet).
The “Bottom Up” part refers to community level activist groups like ACORN, or Code Pink. It also refers to some of the more corrupt public sector unions, whose bosses use their members’ dues to manipulate them and acquire political power. This tier closely coordinates with the “Top Down” tier.
“Inside Out” refers to anyone who works inside “the system”, i.e. major civic, cultural and even business institutions, who use their position to advance the “progressive” cause. Teachers and professors, lawyers and judges, bankers, financiers and many in the entertainment and information industries, who themselves prosper thanks to capitalism but use their positions to undermine it. This tier is especially dangerous since it is the universities which indoctrinate the media elite, and the media elite who pump out the propaganda and the cultural attacks which have so weakened and divided the nation. In the long term we will not survive unless this vast propaganda wing of the leftist-globalist-statist elite is destroyed. Their tactic is to foment “bottom up” pressure, mainly through five main “narratives”: Class, Race, Environment, War (and the related theme of Imperial Exploitation), and Family (sexuality, gender etc.). The clashes that emerge from stirring these divisive topics also serve both as wedges and as smokescreens. So this Hollywood / MSM propaganda wing of the leftist-globalist-statist elite will have to be confronted. That is why Perry had the right idea by using the word “Treason”.
I contend that if we attack the top tier directly and defeat it, the other two tiers will largely be neutralized. By “attacking” I don’t mean physical attacks. I mean formally charging the President and his cabal with Treason, and conspiring to destroy America by deliberately hobbling it economically, sowing internal discord and weakening its defense posture. By now it is clear to a large number of us that Obama is working with an international clique of globalists who use the UN and the ICC to push their vision of world-empire with “Top Down, Bottom Up and Inside Out” techniques on a global scale. This cabal has as a primary objective the destruction of the U.S. as the last bulwark of democracy and freedom. I can think of a number of specific actions that substantiate this charge. Any competent prosecutor could easily show that Obama, his administration and many of the leading lights in the Democratic party are working with this foreign entity to achieve its goals. Without doubt, in my mind this qualifies as Treason, particularly since we are at war.
Many will say that it’s unlikely we could ever get convictions, but this is not the point. The point is to fight back with a direct and open counter-offensive. To create an opportunity to completely bypass the MSM and lay the whole sordid web of Dem treachery and deception out for all the see: The power they have seized at our expense, the lies with which they have wielded our highest ideals against us, the hypocrisy that permeates everything they do, and the misery they have inflicted on those they claim to champion.
It is the ideal strategy for it allows to us to completely turn the tables, take the initiative, take the moral high ground and, if we win our case, expose and discredit these enemies of the state. Furthermore this will serve as a reminder to future generations of how easily freedom can be lost. We will then have the momentum and support we need to deregulate and unburden the economy and let the private sector start creating jobs again. We will also have set the precedent, and will be able to go after the frauds in the media and elsewhere. I wonder of there is someone in congress or in the senate courageous enough to initiate proceedings?
Shades of McCarthyism? Hell yes! On steroids. Only this time we do it right. Our goal is not to create hysteria and go after average citizens, but rather to identify only those who knowingly conspired to topple American power, particularly in the “Top Down” and “Inside Out” tiers, though there are a number of leaders in the “Bottom Up” layer that qualify too. Fortunately they have made themselves highly visible these last three years.
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I completely agree! And pray for peace, but prepare for war.
h/t Pappy at Pappy's Balderdash
