Alexandra Swann's Blog, page 9

Climate Change as an Excuse for the War on American Prosperity Part I

In my February 25 post in which I briefly profiled four notable scientists who dispute the "settled" science of climate change, I made the point that John Kerry's comments about man-made climate change being a weapon of mass destruction are designed to justify a new war--a war on American prosperity.  Climate-change legislation has been a hallmark of Obama's presidency--though he has, mercifully, never managed to get a Congressional bill passed, he is working through executive order to promote his "green" agenda.  Last night, the U.S. Senate pulled an all-night talkathon to discuss the evils of man made climate change and presumably propose legislation to stop it.  Some on the right have suggested that this is merely a stunt to detract attention from the myriad problems with Obamacare, but I disagree.  Climate-change legislation is an end in itself--a means for the left to seize control of resources, housing, land, energy, and water under the pretext of protecting Americans and the rest of the world from global warming.
Take for instance the "climate hubs" which were announced on February 5.  The Obama Administration has created seven hubs nationwide, including one in nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico.   In his announcement of the establishment of the hubs, USDA secretary Tom Vilsak stated that the hubs are necessary to move the Obama's goals for combating climate-change forward.  Vilsak notes that 51% of the country's landmass is engaged in either agriculture or forestry and 14% of our manufacturing derives its basis in either agriculture or forestry.  Agriculture is responsible for 5% of our nation's GDP, so the health of our land and the well-being of our farmers is essential to the success of our country.
How the climate hubs are supposed to protect these resources is a bit fuzzy.  Nat Geo tried to explain the role of the climate hubs this way:
"The idea is to dispatch a cadre of climate change specialists across the nation to gather the latest science on how climate shifts may affect crops and animals and to disseminate the info to farmers, ranchers, local officials and others."
On the surface, the stated goals of these hubs see innocuous enough.  For instance, the hubs will supposedly help farmers find and plant drought-resistant wheat seed.  Farmers and ranchers can find new pesticides that will work better on insects in drought- ridden areas. 
As we dig a little deeper, however, we see less actual help and more big government intrusion. The climate hubs are supposed to help farmers and ranchers assess their carbon footprints and look at their greenhouse emissions.  Farmers and ranchers are encouraged to think about how they could utilize carbon credits with the idea in mind that in the future they will be able to purchase credits from a carbon marketplace--sort of like Al Gore's failed Chicago Climate Exchange.  Perhaps of greatest  interest to us in the southwest, the hubs are to help local farmers and ranchers find and learn improved irrigation techniques.
Having lived in a rural agricultural community my entire life, I do not disagree with Vilsak's statement that our nation's land and farming communities are essential to the health of the nation.  But the Administration for which Vilsak works, and particularly the  EPA, is mandating more and more control over the land and especially the water, including ponds, rivers, lakes and even puddles.  In farming communities like Southern New Mexico, where irrigation is essential for survival, access to water is the difference between prosperity and poverty.   In August of 2012, the federal government sued New Mexico for control of its groundwater. I wrote about this suit and the inherent problems with federal seizure of control of the groundwater in my post Water, Water Everywhere.   At that time, state officials from both sides of the political spectrum promised to defend the state's groundwater against federal takeover. 
Since I wrote that post, the groundwater situation in Southern New Mexico has become increasingly worse.  Last year, Elephant Butte Irrigation District released a small amount of water  (we understood that they would release water only twice, in mid summer, but they did release additional water in September due to 4 inches of rain which fell in one week).  The justification for the small release of water was the lack of snow in Colorado which reduced the amount of water in the Rio Grande.  Without the water, the farms fail unless the farmers can afford to dig new water wells and irrigate from the underground water.  That is exactly what the wealthier farmers did, but the end result of all this irrigation is that the water table has dropped so much that the individual residents no longer have water.  My parents home, on the south end of highway 28, experienced more than its share of water problems last year because of the low water table. The 150 foot deep well that always serviced the house is no longer deep enough to make up for the ever-falling water table.  My sister's father-in-law, who lives on the north end of highway 28, was told that he would have to drill a new well 200 feet deeper than his current well in order to be able to continue to receive water.  He just bought a home in Dallas and has put his current home, a picturesque two-story house on two acres, abutting the gorgeous Stahmann Farms pecan orchards, up for sale.  My parents are also putting their house up for sale.
Democrat Senator Martins Heinrich petitioned to have the climate hub in Las Cruces because he said that the locals are suffering because of drought conditions.  We are suffering, but our suffering is caused by the refusal of the authorities to release river water.  We can see the writing on the wall--in Water, Water, Everywhere, I mentioned that my mother had received an agricultural survey about how large her house is, how many people live there, etc.  The government's solution to the problem of drought is going to be to further restrict access to the water, starting first with the individual homeowners, then the small farmers, and then large farms.
It breaks my heart to see a beautiful community, once filled with chili farms, lettuce and onion fields, and stunning pecan orchards, to be reduced to a dust bowl.  It is also distressing to see beautiful homes sold for a fraction of their value because the cost of drilling new wells has reduced the value, and people at retirement age who had paid for their homes having to move because they can no longer live in the community.
What is most ironic about this situation is that the federal government, and specifically John Kerry's State Department, could actually provide meaningful assistance if they wanted to.  The irrigation water which is now so restricted is divided by international treaty among Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and Mexico.  Mexico also has a treaty to provide water to the United States--350,000 acre feet for five years.  The U.S. International Water and Boundary Commission sets aside Mexico's allotment of water first, ahead of that which goes to the U.S., so that the terms of the treaty are always fulfilled.  Unfortunately, Mexico does not return the courtesy by setting aside their water allotment to the U.S.--in fact they go for years without paying since they can technically pay their entire allotment at the end of the five year cycle. (And they have actually defaulted completely on their water obligations in the past.)  If Heinrich and his Democrat colleagues in the Senate and Kerry's State Department were genuinely interested in the impact that drought conditions have on the living standards of people along the border, they would start pressuring Mexico to release the water, or else renegotiate to withhold the water that we are sending to Mexico during this drought since they have not paid their water stipend to us.   As with all the government expansion we have seen over the past five years, the government is taking a legitimate problem--the drought--and using it as an excuse to regulate resources and micromanage the lives of people living in Western states rather than the using the authority it already has to work to provide genuine solutions to problems. We saw this same misdirection with Obamacare--the Administration using high insurance costs and medical costs created in part by billing systems of Medicare and Medicaid to justify completely restructuring the entire medical system to the detriment of the American people.  Using the threat of the destruction of civilization through man-made climate change, the Obama Administration has a huge lens through which it can monitor and regulate every aspect of American life--starting with the way the Western states use one of our most valuable resources: water.  Maybe that's why Reagan famously said that the most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." 

To Big Government Socialist Education--Just Say No

On February 28, 2014, my mother Joyce and I finished a month of guest hosting a local women's program for KSCE-TV. For our final show, we chose to discuss Common Core and our family's own experiences with homeschooling.

Common Core was funded through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the "standards" it imposes greatly accelerate the decline of academics that we have been witnessing in our country over the past forty years.  Common Core seeks to replace English literature with non fiction works, seeks to shift all emphasis from classical education to social engineering and works to create a system of learning math in which the right answer does not matter as long as the student can explain to the teacher how he got the answer he did.  Teachers are now "change agents" who are instructed to read the Gettysburg Address with no emotion and no context.  This complete lack of standards for students also comes with its own language for parents--an Orwelian speak designed to prevent the parents from understanding anything that is being said.

Perhaps most disturbing are the tracking and data mining aspects of Common Core.  Schools are creating systems that will allow them to track the preferences, poltical leanings and prejudices of the students and their families from kindergarten through high school graduation.

Parents still have alternatives, but they have to know that those alternatives exist and that they are worth the sacrifice that they involve.  That is one reason we wanted to talk about the struggles our family faced during our own homeschooling journey.  It is our hope that our family's experiences with homeschoolung will help other parents understand that they can take control of their children's educations and will inspire them to do so while they still can.



I am linking the video of our show here:

 




As background on Common Core, I am also reposting my post on this subject from last year:  Rejecting Big Government and Common Core Standards in Favor of Parental Rights:

Last week Glenn Beck's pantomime of giving triage to a dying Lady Liberty while she lay bleeding and gasping on the floor of his studio went viral across the conservative internet.  Beck finished his pantomime by admonishing parents to get their kids out of government schools because the schools are turning the kids against the parents.
Beck is exactly right about this; one of the reasons that our country is sliding so far to the left is that progressive social engineering has been happening in this country for over 40 years. Now, however, social engineering is accelerating to a whole new level as the Common Core Standards are implemented across the country. 
In today's column, conservative blogger and bestselling author Michelle Malkin explains that Big Government wants to control not only what your children learn, but how they process it, respond to it and feel about it.  They also want to be able to track your children's behaviours, attitudes, likes and dislikes from infancy through high school graduation, and use that information both for research and for profit.  Malkin cites a Department of Education report which underscores that the true intention of Common Core Standards is not to make sure that all children learn, but that the Federal Government has a firm grip on exactly what attitudes, beliefs and concepts the children leave school with.  States Malkin,

"The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.” 

Read Malkin's full article, which also contains a link to Glenn Beck's recent work on CCS, here.
In an era when our young people are graduating from school with minimal skills and competencies, but a strong foundation in liberalism, sex ed, and socialism, it is outrageous that politicians in both parties are pushing the Common Core Standards and this new federal tracking of students attitudes and behaviours.  The CCS, along with President Obama's new push for universal preschool, the folly of which has been explained in today's Morning Bell, are designed to ensure that the government can get fully inside the head of every kid in America starting at age 4 and lasting through high school.  Children who have been indoctrinated into this system are foundational to the liberal, socialist, godless society that our federal educational system has been building for the last generation. 
After the 2012 elections, I saw Charles Krauthammer interviewed on Fox News.  He was asked whether he believed that the young people who voted for Barack Obama the second time were a permanent block of reliable liberal voters.  He responded that normally people become more conservative as they get older--as they get married and get jobs and mortgages and have children of their own, the desire for universal welfare is commonly replaced by the desire for lower tax brackets.  Traditionally what Krauthammer says has been true; young radicals grow into middle aged accountants with values that more closely resemble their parents. But in the case of the new generation that is growing up, I think Krauthammer's formula no longer applies.  The 60's hippies were rebelling against a "plastic culture".  They understood the values of their parents--they just rejected them only to find out that liberal, leftist politics work better in theory than in practice.  Unlike the previous generations of young people who grew up, got married, got jobs and cut their hair, this new generation is actually not rebelling against anything.  They have been programmed and engineered into an odd conglomeration of Peter Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey and Karl Marx.  They have been taught that they should never have to work, be responsible, or grow up, that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that intolerance is the only sin a person can commit and that traditional family structures are old-fashioned, boring, repressive, and no fun.  People so indoctrinated at such an early age cannot "grow up" to be conservative, responsible adults--they don't even have a concept of what that means.  Children who start out at age four in government daycare, spend their formative years in a completely socialist system, and then spend their college years enjoying "Sex week" at major universities are going to emerge so damaged ,that they will never rehabilitate into stable, productive, hard working Americans who support freedom and independence.  (This is the 21st century "Jedi Mind Meld" that Obama complained two weeks ago that he could not use on Congress and Senate.  Progressives know that they just have to be patient--they cannot change the attitudes of "set in our ways" freedom loving conservatives, but if they can get control of our children, they can make us as extinct as the dinosaur within one generation.)
And that takes me back to Beck's speech about getting kids out of the public school system.  I am a product of homeschooling--my mother homeschooled me and my nine younger brothers and sisters starting in 1975, before the word "homeschooling" had even been coined.  We did not meet another homeschooling family until I was fourteen years old.  We used accredited correspondence schools and skipped no grades whatsoever, but each of us had a master's degree from California State University before our seventeenth birthdays--completely educated by a very hard working woman with only a high school diploma whose previous work experience consisted of being a secretary.
Homeschooling provides students with a completely different world view than that held by people in public or private schools.  Today there are estimates of between 2 and 6 million homeschoolers in this country, including second generation homeschoolers such as my nieces and nephews.  This block represents a small but significant segment of people who have been taught to think outside of the system. Homeschooling by parents who really want to not only educate their children but shape their character and prevent their indoctrination into the "New World Order" is the best hope that this country has for salvaging its future.
Homeschoolers beware, however, because the federal government's Common Core Standards are coming to a textbook near you. Many companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers have signed on to the Common Core Standards.  Last week, homeschooling mother and conservative advocate Tina Hollenbeck began contacting companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers to find out whether their companies were not aligned with CCS, were coincidentally aligned, or were consciously aligned.  She has compiled three lists which are now available on her website which you can visit here.  Her website also contains a link to her Facebook group.
If you just simply cannot homeschool, you can still opt out of the Federal database tracking system being implemented through the Common Core System.  Malkin's blog references a form that parents can sign and submit to school districts to protect the privacy of their children and prevent the federal government and major corporations from tracking their kids through school. This will at least protect their privacy, though it won't do much to protect their minds. 
If you are interested in homeschooling, numerous resources are available to help you get started.  The time and the money you will spend are not just an investment in your children--it is an investment in America's future, which is currently hanging in the balance.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Meet Four Notable Scientists Who Disagree with the "Settled Science" of Manmade Climate Change

Remember the furor over the existence of WMD's in Saddam Hussein's Iraq?  George W. Bush asserted, based on reports that actually hailed back to his predecessor, that Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that these made him an imminent threat.  This assertion was much of the justification for the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent decade-long war.  When the weapons were not found, the media and many Americans cried foul, arguing that Bush had deliberately misled the country in order to pursue his own personal  and political agenda.  Eventually the evidence for or against the WMD's became more of a central focus than the war itself or the dissolution of the Hussein government.
Now, let ME be clear--this post (and the one to follow) are not referendums on the war or whether we should have invaded Iraq.  But considering the political hay that the left made over the specific term, "weapons of mass destruction" I find it odd that Secretary of State John Kerry has recycled exactly this same argument as a justification for the Obama Administration's newest push for climate-change legislation via executive fiat and agency regulation. 
Speaking in Jakarta, Indonesia, on February 16, Kerry described climate change as a threat to the way of life of all people, and  a "fearsome weapon of mass destruction," while denouncing skeptics as "shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues."  "The bottom line is this: it is the same thing with climate change. In a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction."  Obama had previously dismissed critics of his administration's policies regarding man-made climate change saying that his administration does not have time to attend meetings of the "flat earth society."
The Obama Administration's new line is that man-made climate change is a "settled science" and that the time has come for Obama to use his now infamous phone and pen to save us from Armageddon via draconian new regulations.  With that in mind, I want to introduce to you four prominent climate-change skeptics from the scientific community.  Although the Obama Administration dismisses all those who disagree about man-made climate change as "shoddy" scientists, these four prove that there is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community about the "science" of global warming.  You can use their resumes to defend yourself in your next argument with liberal friends and co-workers.  And if you plan events for a local chapter of the "Flat Earth Society" you might consider inviting one of these men or women to speak to your group. :)

JUDITH CURRY:  A professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
 
Because of her impressive resume, Curry was called to testify about man-made climate change before the U.S. House of Representatives last summer.  According to NPR.org, her message that day on Capitol Hill was, in essence, that while humans may be contributing to climate change, we simply don't know how the climate will behave in the coming decades, so there may be no point in trying to reduce emissions.  In her interview with NPR she explained that there is no way to predict how the climate will look in a few decades, and she is more concerned with the immediate economic impacts of climate change legislation on her six nieces and nephews who deserve an opportunity to build a sound and prosperous economic  future. 
Read Judith Curry's interview on NPR.org.

DR. WILLIAM HAPPER:  Award-winning Princeton Professor of Physics, former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, author of over 200 published scientific papers, and  a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. 
Happer was reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore’s scientific views.   In 2009 he testified before Congress about CO2 levels:

“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million - ppm) – that’s unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it’s been quite higher than that."  

“Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” Happer explained. Happer also noted that “the number of [skeptical scientists] with the courage to speak out is growing” and he warned “children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.”

“I keep hearing about the ‘pollutant CO2,’ or about ‘poisoning the atmosphere’ with CO2, or about minimizing our ‘carbon footprint.’  This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: ‘But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning."  (Emphasis added.)

Most recently, in January of 2014, in an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Happer spoke out against the notion being popularized by the media that the extremely cold winter weather conditions and polar vortex were the result of man-made climate change saying, "Polar vortices have been around forever. They have almost nothing to do with more CO2 in the atmosphere.”  

LARRY BELL:  professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where he founded and directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and heads the graduate program in space architecture.


Bell is author of Climate of Corruption, Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax and a regular contributor to Forbes.   He has written extensively about Agenda 21 and the threat that legislation aimed at stopping global warming and man-made climate change pose to U.S. sovereignty, American freedom and our way of life.  In his article in Forbes entitled, Confessions of a Climate-Crisis Skeptic , Bell addresses the realities of climate variations and then adds:

This picture is far different from the really scary “climate crisis” reports we constantly receive in the media. And this circumstance isn’t the first time prominent news producers, supported by “scientific experts”, have warned about impending doom. An October 7, 1912 Los Angeles Times feature proclaimed “Fifth Ice Age is on the Way: Human Race Will Have to Fight for Existence in Cold”. By August 9, 1923 the situation had become desperate, prompting the Chicago Tribune to declare “Scientists Say Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada”. Then, after a short period when the world appeared to be warming again, the March 1, 1975 cover of Science News magazine depicted New York City being swallowed by a glacier. The New York Times followed with a headline story “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable”. The prestigious National Academy of Sciences agreed: global cooling was a real threat.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Professor Emeritus at MIT.  Lindzen won numerous awards in the 1970’s for disproving an accepted theory about how heat moves around the Earth’s atmosphere.  Accepted to the National Academy of Sciences before he was forty years old, he moved to MIT in the 1980’s.  In the 1990’s he was invited to join the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), where he helped to author a report in 1995 on climate change and co-authored chapter 7 of the 2001 report on climate change.  Lindzen left the IPCC after he claims the panel rewrote his work, and while he does not dispute that people have some impact on the climate, he says that impact is very small.  In part, Lindzen takes exception to the  IPCC's entire process. Though the panel claims that more than 2,500 respected scientists and policy makers work together to produce its climate change assessments,  Lindzen argues that less than a tenth of these ‘experts’ actually hold qualifications in climatology.  Instead, most are educated in political and social sciences.  The panel that edits and approves the reports are appointed by the United Nations; more than half are actually UN officials, and they rewrite the Summary for Policymakers  to reflect  political and social agendas rather than scientific realities. 
 "It's not 2,500 people offering their consensus, I participated in that. Each person who is an author writes one or two pages in conjunction with someone else. They travel around the world several times a year for several years to write it and the summary for policymakers has the input of a handful of scientists, but ultimately, it is written by representatives of governments, and of environmental organizations, each pushing their own agendas."
In an interview with The Weekly Standard for a piece entitled "What Catastrophe?" published in January 2014, Lindzen adds that the IPCC reports contains significant doubts from various participants about the scope and consequences of man-made climate change, but these are scrubbed from the Summary which "rips out doubts to a large extent. .  .  . [Furthermore], government representatives have the final say on the summary." And the reason for all of the editing and scrubbing and monolithic messaging of climate change as the threat to mankind?  Lindzen says it all comes down to money.After World War II, the nation was grateful to the scientific community for their contributions to ending the war, and funding for many projects was flowing. After Vietnam, however, "it was recognized that gratitude only went so far,” Lindzen says, “and fear was going to be a much greater motivator. And so that’s when people began thinking about .  .  . how to perpetuate fear that would motivate the support of science.”  As the scientific community began looking for scary-sounding projects that would drive funding, they settled on climate change.  What is scary is that all scientists who are openly skeptical of man-made climate change and its apocalyptic threat to the future of mankind are demonized as inept fools who deny that the earth is round, while proponents like Al Gore, whose most notable achievements are having served eight years as Vice President and having invented the internet (wait, I think there might be some disagreement about that second one!) win the Nobel Prize. And so we are embarking on a new war, justified by rumors of weapons of mass destruction.  But this time, the enemy to be vanquished is American prosperity.  More on that tomorrow. 

Four Suicides in Two Weeks--What's Going on?

The rash of suicides from bankers and investment advisers that has taken place over the last two weeks is catching the attention of industry publications like Housing Wire and Business Times.  When I first saw this story a few days ago I did not pay it much attention.  Then this morning I saw a snippet about it again with a commentary that some of these deaths might not actually be suicides.  My interest was piqued, and I decided to look up the details.  Something truly strange is happening here, and it makes all of us who watch the housing and finance industry wonder what is coming next.  Housing Wire's financial reporter Trey Garrison first reported this story on January 31, 2014 when 50 year old Mike Dueker, a former Federal Reserve Economist was found dead from in Tacoma, Washington. The death was an apparent suicide.  At the time of his death, Dueker was the chief economist for Russell Investments and he had been missing since January 29, 2014.   A few days before, on Sunday January 26, fifty-eight year old William Broeksmit, a former senior manager for Deutsche Bank, was found in his home dead of apparent suicide.  The following Tuesday, 39 year old Gabriel Magee, a vice president at JP Morgan Chase's London headquarters, apparently jumped to his death from a building in Canary Wharf. Garrison reports that all of these men worked for companies that were under investigation for fraud, but as the San Francisco Business Times  points out in their commentary, the list of companies not under investigation is getting shorter and shorter.  Russell Investments was being investigated by New York State banking regulator Benjamin Lawsky, who had subpoenaed its records in an attempt to discover if there were any impropriety in the way that advisers recommended pension-fund investments.  (This is the same Lawsky I mentioned in yesterday's post who is publicly suspecting Ocwen Servicing of wrongdoing simply because their efficiency is "too good to be true.")  Specifically, Lawsky wanted to determine whether the advisers were receiving any type of benefits from the companies they recommended including job offers or payments in kind.  Deutsch Bank and JP Morgan Chase are also under investigation. The parents of Gabriel Magee are apparently arguing that they do not believe that their son committed suicide and questioning many aspects of the suicide findings, including how Magee could have made his way to the roof of the building. Most bizarre is the February 4th death of fifty-six year old Richard Talley, founder and CEO of American Title Services in Centennial, Colorado. Talley was found shot to death "seven or eight times" with a nail gun.  Colorado authorities have ruled his death a suicide also. (How many people do you know who would commit suicide that way? )   American Title Services is under investigation by Colorado authorities. That is four deaths of prominent individuals in financial services and real estate in two weeks. Just a series of unlikely coincidences, or is something bigger coming that we need to be aware of?  At this point nobody knows, but this is all definitely very strange. 

Liberal Logic: Punishing Efficiency and Rewarding Ineptitude (Or How the Post Office is About to Become Your Bank)

Of all the exasperating creatures on this planet, there is none so strange and difficult to comprehend as the American liberal.  They see the world through a lens which apparently strips away all logic and common sense and allows them to make recommendations completely devoid of past experience or future expectations.
One day apart I found two striking examples of this absurdity. The first comes from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. You may remember that this former professor was one of the architects of the Dodd Frank bill which has destroyed small mortgage businesses and crafted rules which have shut millions of Americans permanently out of the mortgage markets.  Warren was the first interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but due to her extreme left-wing political views she was not deemed suitable for confirmation in the U.S. Senate as a permanent director of the agency.  (And those same extreme left-wing political views made her the ideal senator from Massachusetts, so the story turned out just fine for her.)
Since becoming senator, Warren has proposed a number of ridiculous, unworkable ideas including raising the minimum wage to $22.00 an hour.  Now, she is back with a doosy of a suggestion--turn the bloated, inefficient, and financially insolvent United States Post Office into the nation's newest banking system.
The idea here is that the Post Office can generate $9 billion annually by providing financial services to the nation's "underserved" citizens who are currently using payday loans.  The U.S.P.O. could offer prepaid debit cards, a bitcoin exchange, mobile money transfers and small loans.  Proposed interest rates for these loans would be in the mid-20% range, which is significantly lower than the interest rate on payday loans and possibly substantially too low considering the risk involved in such loans.  Breitbart's Christopher Whalen notes that the average default rate on payday loans is around 50% and then cites a 2007 report explaining why payday lenders are able to cover this risk:

First, over half of payday borrowers default on a payday loan within one year of their first loans. Second, defaulting borrowers have on average already repaid or serviced five payday loans, making interest payments of 90% of their original loan's principal.

Of course, Warren and her compadres aren't worried about default because they are planning to have the IRS collect any unpaid amounts by withholding tax refunds due to the borrowers.
Never mind that the U.S. Postal Service is a byword for waste and inefficiency.  Never mind that, as Whalen correctly points out, bringing in $9 billion in revenue does not translate into $9 billion in profit.  Never mind that an  agency that can't successfully compete with private mail carriers now wants to approve loans and sic the IRS on those who can't pay.  None of this matters to the staunch liberals like Warren.  What is important is that the Post Office is a branch of the federal government and government is deeply, inherently, instinctively good.
Contrast this with a story that appeared today in the National Mortgage News about Ocwen Servicing. At this month's annual meeting of the New York Banker's Association, New York's banking regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, verbally attacked Ocwen--while never naming them specifically he made sure that all industry participants in the room knew exactly whom he meant. What did Ocwen do to deserve being singled out for a public thrashing?  According to Lawsky, Ocwen's "explosive" growth in the area of mortgage servicing "raises red flags" and the company's investment in technology to better serve distressed borrowers is "too good to be true."  Ocwen has announced to its investors that it has identified $400 billion in servicing rights to loans it plans to acquire in 12 to 18 months and that $1 trillion will change hands within a few years.  To Lawsky, that growth signals that Ocwen must be doing something wrong. Most of all, Lawsky is offended by Ocwen's claim that it can service delinquent loans at a cost 70% lower than the rest of the industry.  "These kinds of cost-saving claims bear special scrutiny...Regulators have to ask whether the purported efficiencies at non-bank servicers are too good to be true."
I don't know whether Ocwen's claims about its abilities to service loans effectively and cheaply are true--I have never had any experience with Ocwen on the servicing side.  I do know that this is a private company--a non-bank lender--that is experiencing rapid growth at a time when many in the private mortgage sector are suffering.  To liberals, that makes Ocwen evil.  Never mind that they have invested in cost-cutting technology.  Never mind that there is no public evidence that Ocwen's claims are untrue.  What is important is that Ocwen is a privately-owned company that is making money, and private companies that are profitable are deeply, inherently, instinctively bad.
What is absurd in both cases is the Post Office is being rewarded for their gross inefficiency while Ocwen is about to be punished for their profitability.  (Punished at least in the sense that Lawsky is signaling an unwillingness to allow the company to acquire new servicing rights--at least in the short term).  The evidence of Ocwen's wrong doing is that they are turning a profit--a fact of which no will ever be able to accuse the Post Office.  This could only make sense to a liberal.
When the mafia extorts money from you to allow you to live, they call it "protection money." When the government does it, they call it "consumer protection." Either way, you are paying for protection from someone who has the power to take everything you have.

When You Have No Choice but to Walk Away--What You Should Know if You Are Facing Foreclosure

A few years ago I wrote a post entitled, Suze Orman is Wrong, Don't Walk Away.  That post is my all-time highest-read post in the nearly four years that I have been writing this blog.  The content of that post was a response to a practice called "strategic default" which encouraged homeowners to walk away from mortgages they had the ability to pay on properties that had lost value.  As the idea of "strategic default" grew popular and as housing values sank, more and more property owners began to toy with the idea of "letting their houses go" simply because they had no equity or now had negative equity, and Orman encouraged homeowners to do so.  I wrote that this is a terrible idea, and that homeowners who have the ability to pay for their homes should do so.
Three years later, a lot has changed.  I still stand by the original article--no one should stop paying a mortgage simply and solely because their equity has dropped in the house.  For those who are worried about negative equity, property values are rising nationwide, and housing prices are correcting, so negative equity is going to be much less of a problem than it was three years ago. However, as Obamacare strips hours from the workforce and turns more and more people into part-time employees, and as the workforce participation continues to drop, unemployment and inability to cover expenses is going to be a growing problem for many Americans.  Right now there are an estimated 92 million unemployed Americans--almost one-third of our workforce.  Each month the jobless numbers reveal a stagnant economy.  Last week we learned from the CBO that Obamacare will cost our economy an additional 2.5 million full-time jobs over the next ten years.  Bearing in mind that unemployment filings do not include self-employed business owners who pay unemployment taxes in their states but are ineligible to file for unemployment when their businesses fail, our country has serious economic issues.  A real-life consequence of long-term unemployment and being unable to secure new work at pay commensurate to your previous position is often mortgage delinquency and foreclosure.  For that reason, I have decided to write this follow-up post to help anyone who is unemployed or underemployed and struggling with mortgage delinquency and foreclosure.  I hope that no one reading this has to experience loss of a home through financial crisis, but if you do so, hopefully this information will help you.
First, you need to communicate with your mortgage company as soon as you realize that the mortgage is going delinquent.  Although it sounds trite, mortgage servicers in 2014 really are under pressure from the government not to foreclose, so the sooner you talk to your mortgage company and complete the paperwork that they send you, the sooner you may be able to find some kind of resolution.  And there are solutions that can help you avoid foreclosure, even if you still lose your home.
Your mortgage company will assign you to a specialist, but you will probably continue to receive mail with conflicting messages from other departments of the company.  Stay in touch with your assigned specialist and let him or her know about each document your receive.  Because multiple departments are at work attempting to collect your mortgage payment, you may receive multiple, conflicting messages from various departments about the state of your mortgage. Likewise, you may receive notices that you have been turned down or denied for specific programs that you have requested when in fact your request is actually being processed.  Let your specialist know about each offer you receive--don't take for granted that a letter or an offer or even a denial for assistance is correct just because the mortgage company has sent it out. 
If you have a good solid payment history with your mortgage company prior to the loss of income, they may offer you a forbearance--an opportunity to waive the payments for a set period of time--or a loan modification.  Bear in mind that if you take a loan modification you and the lender are doing so with the understanding that you can make the payments on time for at least six months, so you need to make certain that you are working again before you enter into such an agreement.  If you do not successfully complete the modification process, your loan will be referred for foreclosure.
Under the Dodd-Frank servicing rules, you cannot be referred for foreclosure until you have missed 120 days of payments--four months.  If during that time you are able to secure new employment, you may be able to get a modification with a lower payment based on your new income.  If after 120 days you are still not employed, you may need to look at your other alternatives--a short sale or a deed in lieu of foreclosure.
When I wrote the Suze Orman piece, lenders and credit providers were looking at short sales and deeds in lieu of foreclosure the same as they did a foreclosure.  For that reason, homeowners had little incentive to try to avoid foreclosure through either of these methods.  This is no longer the case.  New guidelines released last year allow a homeowner who has successfully completed a short sale or a deed in lieu of foreclosure to secure Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac financing for a new home in two years, provided that you have a new job and have worked out your other credit issues.  If at all possible, you want to avoid a foreclosure for several reasons:
1.  It's horrible for your credit.  A foreclosure will shut you out of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac financing for seven years--although I believe that FHA still has only a three year moratorium on financing a homeowner who has been through a foreclosure.  A foreclosure can have a long-lasting impact on your ability to get anything financed.
2.  You may have tax consequences.  If you go through a foreclosure, the mortgage company can send the IRS a 1099 for the difference between what you owed on the house and the amount they received for it at the foreclosure sale. That 1099 is reported as income to you.  In other words, if you owe $150,000 on your home and the mortgage company receives $100,000 in the foreclosure sale, you are liable for the taxes on $50,000 of "income".  (If you can prove that you were insolvent at the time the foreclosure took place, you may not have to pay the taxes, but you will probably have to hire a tax attorney to make your case for you.)
3. In some states, the mortgage company can file a deficiency judgment against you for the difference between the debt you owed and what they received when the house was sold.  In my example above, that would mean a $50,000 judgment.  Such a judgment can effectively keep you from ever buying another home, getting an SBA loan to start a business, or securing certain professional licenses or jobs that require credit and background checks.
If all else has failed, a short sale or a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure are your two primary alternatives.  For the short sale you need a contract from a pre-approved borrower and you need to send that to the mortgage specialist assigned to you by the mortgage company.  Remember that the mortgage company has to approve the short sale since they are agreeing to take less than the balance owed to let you sell the home.  Short sales were very popular a few years ago, but over the last few months, mortgage companies have begun refusing short sales on the grounds that they make more money through their REO's.  As values have risen across the country, mortgage companies are increasingly taking the view that property values are rising, and they won't sell the house for less than is owed.  Of course, in practical terms, the fact that values are rising nationally does not mean that they are rising in your specific spot on this planet.  There could be a very real problem in your development or subdivision which prevents you from getting an offer that will match what you owe on the house, regardless of how nice your individual property is.  If they decline your short sale, then you need to ask for a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure (a mortgage release.)
A mortgage release will release you from all liability in the property.  The mortgage company does not have the legal expense of foreclosure; you do not have any liability for any losses they incur.  To secure a release, you need to have a property that is clean and in good condition.  You will have to vacate the property before they send a third-party inspector.  The title must be clear of defects--you cannot have a second lien, mechanics' lien or tax lien.  If the property and the title pass inspection, you can deed the property back to the mortgage company, and they will release you from any future claims.  This is a good solution if you need to move to another area for work, if you cannot secure employment that will allow you to cover the payments on your mortgage, or if you have a house you simply cannot sell at a price which will cover the mortgage.
If you have a mortgage secured by either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and you are not getting the help you need, surprisingly these two agencies may be able to help you.  A counselor from Fannie or Freddie can work with your mortgage company to cut through the red tape and get them to be responsive so that you don't end up in foreclosure.  Again, communication is key here--when you get the letters from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac offering assistance, call the number provided and explain your situation as clearly and accurately as possible.
If none of these options works for you, and you are going through the foreclosure process, you may still be able to save your property by enlisting the help of a foreclosure attorney.  In states that require judicial foreclosure, foreclosure is a long process, and an attorney can buy you some time while you get back on your feet.  He or she may also be able to stop the foreclosure process and get your payment reinstated when you are able to find a job.
Loss of a property is devastating, but by knowing your options and how to navigate the red tape you may be able to salvage your future finances and get through this process with the minimum amount of suffering, so that you can get on with your life.


When the mafia extorts money from you to allow you to live, they call it "protection money." When the government does it, they call it "consumer protection." Either way, you are paying for protection from someone who has the power to take everything you have.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

This week marks the forty-first anniversary of Roe vs. Wade and the legalization of abortion on demand in the U.S.  In the forty-one years since the Supreme Court ruling, over 50 million babies have been murdered through abortion--more than were killed by Adolf Hitler (nine million) and Josef Stalin combined (twenty-five million) combined.   To remember those who have been lost, I am reposting this post from last year:
In 1979, the modern Christian theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer and the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C.Everett Koop co-authored a book titled, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. Published within the decade that saw the legalization of abortion on demand through Roe vs. Wade, the book explored the premise that acceptance of abortion leads to a general devaluation of human life on at all levels.  Abortion leads to infanticide, which leads to euthanasia, which eventually leads to genocide.  Schaeffer and Koop wrote,

We are concerned that there is not more protest, outcry, or activism in regard to these issues of life and death. We can even recognize that there are people who are led to starve children to death because they think they are doing something helpful for society. Lacking an absolute ethical standard, they have only the concept of what they think is beneficial for society to guide them. But we cannot understand why other people, those with a moral base--and we know there are many of them--do not cry out. We are concerned about this because, when the first German aged, infirm and retarded were killed in gas chambers, there was likewise no perceptible outcry from the medical profession or from an apathetic population.  It was not far from there to Auschwitz.

I read Whatever Happened to the Human Race over twenty years ago, but I have been reminded of it in the last few days watching the events surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial.  Anyone who has followed this trial at all knows that Gosnell is the 71-year old abortion doctor and proprietor of the "Women's Medical Center" in Philadelphia who is on trial for murder of infants born alive and at least one adult patient.  Various workers in the clinics have testified that when infants survived the abortion procedure, Gosnell snipped their spinal cords or in some cases slit their throats.  Jack McMahon, Gosnell's attorney, argues that although Gosnell did perform abortions past the 24 week limit written into the state's statute, not one of the babies he is accused of harming was over 24 weeks and there is no evidence that any of them was born alive.  His arguments persuaded the judge in the case to throw out three of the infant murder counts against Gosnell for "Baby A, "Baby B" and "Baby C" as well as five counts of corpse abuse. (Apparently, babies were kept in jars and their feet and sometimes entire legs were severed and preserved as well. Multiple babies appeared in photographs which showed their upper spinal columns had been cut in order to snip the spinal cords.)  Four remaining counts of infanticide and one count of murder of an adult remained against Gosnell on Tuesday, April 23 after the judge's ruling.
Yesterday, in an apparent about-face, the judge reinstated the murder charge for "Baby C".  "Baby C" survived its abortion procedure, and according testimony by clinic workers, was laid on a counter where it lived for twenty minutes and moved its arms.  Workers testify that they "played" with the baby by pulling on its arms and watching it pull back before killing it.
The outcome of this hideous trial and Gosnell's ultimate fate remain to be seen but the reaction to it by our society reveals a lot about how far we have fallen morally.  The mainstream press has remained silent on a trial that is one of the most grisly, scandalous, and shocking of my lifetime.  I have seen photos of the empty courtroom seats reserved for the press.  When Gosnell announced this week that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Huffington Post actually made that a headline.  But when the judge reinstated the murder charge for a baby brutally murdered after twenty minutes of life, I saw the update on my Twitter feed because TheBlaze.com had covered the story.  The disgusting, macabre details of this man's crimes are the stuff of nightmares, but in a society where grisly, bloody violence sells almost as well as sex, and people will pay high ticket prices to see slasher movies like the "Saw" series, nobody wants to talk about Kermit Gosnell.
Why?  I have seen some conservative commentators speculate that the media does not want to cover the Gosnell trial because it shows abortion for what it really is--murder.  That's part of it; but it really is only a part of media black out of this story.  The other part is that our society is rapidly morphing into the society that Schaeffer and Koop predicted and feared--a society without compassion, without empathy, without concern.  We are fearsomely close to pre-Nazi Germany in our attitudes about the value of human life.
In 1949, Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist from Boston who had been consultant to the Secretary of War and had served with the office of the Chief Council for War Crimes in Nuremberg from 1946-1947, wrote a paper titled, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship."  He writes that before Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, a barrage of indoctrination had already begun against, "traditional, compassionate nineteenth century attitudes against the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view."  This propaganda spread everywhere, from mass entertainment, as in a German film called, I Accuse in which the husband of a woman suffering from life-long multiple sclerosis finally euthanizes her while a sympathetic colleague plays the piano softly in another room, to the public education system which included high school textbooks such as Mathematics in the Service of Political Education, 2nd edition 1935, 3rd edition 1936, which included "problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled.  One of the problems asked, for instance,  is how many new housing units could be built, and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly-wed couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for 'the crippled and insane.'" In other words, the German people were fed a steady diet of a philosophy that some lives are not as important as others, and that the less worthy lives were draining funds which could be used for the happiness of those more deserving than they.
Hitler did not issue the first euthanasia order until 1939, after the German people had received a sufficiently steady diet of this philosophy to no longer object.  The organization that he established to kill children under the Third Reich was called Realm's Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution.  Patients who were being killed were transported by "The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick" which billed their relatives for the cost of their extermination while falsifying the death certificates so that they would not understand how their loved ones had actually died.  Leo Alexander tells us, "It all started with the acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as a life that is not worthy to be lived."  From there, Hitler was able to kill more than 9 million people in Europe.
What does all of this have to do Kermit Gosnell?  Very simply, I believe that the media black out of the Gosnell trial has less to do with protecting the abortion industry than it does with an overall move to retrain our society away from respect for life and the sanctity of life and towards an overall apathy and callousness toward the deaths of others.  We are now seeing our own media propaganda in this direction.  In the last twenty four months, I have seen an episode of  The Mentalist in which a regular character who is dying of cancer decides to commit suicide and asks the show's main character, Patrick Jane, to stay with him while he dies so that he will not be alone.  Although Jane is at first very uncomfortable with this request, he does stay and performs sleight of hand coin tricks to distract the dying man until his life ebbs away.  Criminal Minds last year featured an episode in which the ex-wife of one of the main characters also finds out that she is terminally ill and decides to commit suicide and asks that her ex-husband stay with her while she is dying.  Again, he is uncomfortable, but she has already consumed a fatal dose of some toxin, and so he compassionately holds her while she expires.  I want to note that in neither one of these shows did the principle character do anything to actively kill the person who died or to actually assist in the suicide, but the overall message was that they were compassionate good people by respecting the other person's right to die and by being a friend and not interfering.  This is the first step in saying that death can be preferable to life.
There are going to be a lot of other steps.  Next year many parts of The Affordable Care Act  will be fully implemented.  This coverage was supposed to provide every American with full access to health care regardless of health issues or pre-existing conditions.  Are we still so naive that we really think that a government who can't manage to pay the air-traffic controllers in order to avoid long delays at the airport will be able to cover the cost of every American's healthcare?  Even Democrats like Max Baucus are now calling the Affordable Care Act a "train wreck".  What the Act will do is force Americans to think in terms of which lives are worth saving.   The oft mocked "death panels" are a necessity when a society of finite resources takes it upon itself to make health choices for every person. As Alexander points out, "It is important to realize that this infinitely small wedged-in lever from which all this entire trend of the mind [the German mass euthanasia program] received its impetus was the attitude towards the nonrehabilitable sick."  When we as a society have to start making these decisions what will we choose?  Should healthy young people not be able to get as many benefits from the government because public resources are being used to treat people with chronic illnesses, or seniors with cancer?  How many scholarships could be given to our best and our brightest if the money were not being spent caring for the "crippled and insane"?  And so it begins.
Whatever happened to the human race?  The Germans could have chosen not to listen to the propaganda.  They could have chosen to reject Hitler and his social engineering and ethnic cleansing in favor of respect for all life and protection for all people.  They didn't.  The choice is now ours.  Will more of us stand against Kermit Gosnell, not just for the sake of the 8 original infants he was charged with murdering and the many, many more who died as the course of his normal practice, but because we understand that more is at stake than the life of a 71 year old abortion doctor in Philadelphia and his victims?  Will we allow ourselves to be lulled into apathy ("Those babies weren't wanted anyway.  Who would have taken care of them if they had lived?")  Hitler succeeded in his genocide in large part because German people from every walk of life supported him and furthered his goals.  If the Germans had refused to participate, they could have stopped the Holocaust before it began.  What will we do?
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Just Enough to Keep You Poor

When the disappointing jobs numbers for the month of December were released last week, the media immediately began scrambling to defend the deplorable state of the economy and the labor participation numbers.  I learned of the jobs report as breaking news on MSNBC while I was at the gym. (No, I was not actually watching MSNBC, but it was airing on one of five screens filled with programming, and I happened to be on an elliptical directly in front of that particular screen.)  The MSNBC captions screeched the breaking news that only 74,000 jobs were created in December, followed by another breaking news caption announcing that unemployment had fallen to 6.7% but only because so many Americans stopped looking for work.
Over the past few days, the media has been speculating about how much of this drop in workforce participation is due to the aging of the American worker and how much of it is due to the weak economy.  In other words, if the jobs were available, how many Americans would actually get up today and go back to work?
On Tuesday I wrote about what I call a "lethal cocktail" of heavy regulations which are crippling businesses coupled with easy government incentives to not work.  I believe that both are poisoning our economy and our country.  Regulations, taxes and fines are choking small business owners and killing their incentive and ability to make a living.  But at the same time, we have an expansion of our "safety net" in the form of long-term unemployment, welfare and social programs unlike anything we have ever experienced and this expansion of easy money is just as toxic to our system as the regulations which are destroying jobs.  One such incentive is the Social Security Disability system. Since 2007, 1.8 million Americans have begun drawing Social Security Disability checks.  Although these checks are supposed to help people who are severely disabled and unable to work, the red tape of the Social Security system has led to an industry of attorneys who advertise for workers wanting to drop out of the workforce and draw disability checks. Since the government pays the attorneys for each case they win, this has become a hugely profitable area of legal practice with a very high success rate.  But as James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation recently told the Saint Louis Dispatch,  “There’s a lot of evidence that applications for disability insurance are substituting for unemployment in many cases..The huge problem with this is that once people go on disability insurance, they basically never come back.” 
When I was a loan originator, I did some mortgage financing for a group of attorneys who specialized in getting Social Security Disability checks for their clients, and they were happy to explain to me in detail how it works.  For those who don't know, this is basically the process:
A person who wants to get on Social Security disability applies to the Social Security Administration for disability.  In over 90% of cases, they are denied.  A young person who is seeking such a check must demonstrate that he is so disabled as to be completely unable to work.  Therefore, in most cases, the young guy who lost his leg in a motorcycle is not going to qualify, because although he does have a genuine disability, the nature of his disability does not mean that he can no longer work at any job; it just means that he is going to need to make some life changes to continue to be productive. Permanent disability is just that--permanent.
After at least two rejections of the claim by Social Security, the claimant can go visit an attorney.  Most successful applicants are between 50 and 60 years of age and have worked in day labor jobs.  They have back issues, diabetes, or other documentable health issues that, combined with their age, make them sympathetic to a judge.  The attorney collects the evidence of disability and files the case with Social Security.  The process takes two years, but the success rate is very high--the majority of those represented by the attorneys I knew were accepted in the Social Security system.  They start getting a permanent disability check--based on the assertion that they can never work again.  The attorney's fee is paid by the government.  The last time I spoke to my client-attorneys this fee was $4000.00 per case.
Because of the nature of the process, the Social Security disability system opened the door for attorneys to become millionaires.  As the managing partner of the law firm explained to me, the two-year window that it takes to get the cases approved combined with the heavy paperwork required shut out a lot of attorneys and created a field of legal expertise with guaranteed paydays and relatively little competition.  But for those attorneys who had the financial means to work through the system and get started, Social Security disability law led them to the land of milk and honey.  Attorneys who got established became multi-millionaires.  These law firms had both incentive and funds to advertise, which led to a steady stream of new applicants seeking a disability check from the government.
And their clients?  In exchange for a few hundred dollars a month, their clients traded away their ability to ever work again.  Few working Americans realize just how little free money it takes to keep people poor.  El Paso, Texas, is a very liberal city and I have met a lot of people drawing some form of welfare.  The funny thing about government assistance is that it eventually becomes an end in itself.  Fear of losing that "free" money becomes all-consuming; I have seen people who weigh every decision based on whether it will impact their government money.  What is supposed to be temporary assistance or "a hand up" in times of trouble becomes a crutch and then a life-style, and then eventually the family business as new generations are born into households where the parent or grandparents do not work but receive "free" money from the government.  Eventually, this "free" check costs the receiver his independence, his creativity, and the profits of any gifts or talents he might possess that he would have otherwise used to improve his own life and that of others.  
As Congress debates the budget and the Senate debates extending unemployment benefits, we in America need to take a hard look at the government programs and entitlements that we are bankrupting our country to secure.  We cannot fix the budget or the economy or the labor participation statistics unless we are willing to radically transform the way we handle welfare and social programs.  These programs are costing us more than mere money--they are draining our nation of its incentive, its creativity, and its opportunity.  We are creating a society that is content with receiving just enough to keep it poor.  And we are teaching the next generation that work is for suckers.
When the mafia extorts money from you to allow you to live, they call it "protection money." When the government does it, they call it "consumer protection." Either way, you are paying for protection from someone who has the power to take everything you have.

The Real War on Women--The Life of Julia in 2014

When you were a child, what did you dream of being when you grew up? If you are a man, you might have wanted to be a politician, or a business owner, or a professional athlete, or an astronaut, or a doctor or attorney. If you are a woman, you might have wanted to be a politician, or a business owner, or a professional athlete, or an astronaut, or a doctor, or an attorney. Depending on how you were raised, you might simply have dreamed of being a wife and mother--still a very noble calling that many women choose. Whether you are a man or a woman, I am going to step out on a limb here and guess that you did not dream of being unemployed and broke, working part-time and living on government assistance. Children tend to have big dreams for their lives which are unsullied by the difficulties that achieving those dreams can pose, and they tend to view the world as a place of opportunity. It is only as we get older that we have a tendency to trade in our dreams for stability and then to continually lower our expectations until finally just getting out of bed in the morning becomes an accomplishment.
America has always been an aspirational society, full of hope and promise. Of course, we have always had poverty and inequality--and we always will. There are many factors that contribute to individual poverty, and many people go through periods of financial hardship at one point or another in their lives. But today, poverty and unemployment are increasing at a rate that far outpaces jobs in an atmosphere that is killing opportunity with a lethal cocktail of excessive regulation combined with welfare and government subsidies. These two factors--over-regulation and taxation that destroy small businesses and jobs, and the promise of government incentives to not work--are robbing this nation of any incentive to work, to take risks, to aspire to do anything.
Some of you may remember "The Life of Julia" the Obama campaign's cartoon about a fictional woman named Julia who is helped by the government her entire life. Julia is without family and although she does have a child she is without a man in her life. She works--she gets an SBA loan to start her own business as a web designer--but her true safety net is the government. The government guarantees her student loans, the government provides child care for her child, the government provides her retirement when she turns sixty-five. At no point does Julia to try to find a free market solution to any of her needs--or even apparently to get married--because dear old uncle Sam is there at every stage of her life to make sure that her basic needs are met.
The Life of Julia was a major part of the Obama campaign's re-election strategy in 2012. The campaign promoted the concept that there is a "war on women" waged by heartless conservatives who believe welfare and entitlements drain the society, marriage and two-parent households contribute to a prosperous and stable society, and every adult needs to use whatever skills she has been blessed with to her utmost abilities in order to improve her life and the general society around them. (And the same applies for men, but since this post is about the war on women I am using female pronouns.) The leftists insist that this worldview is sexist and cold, and that their approach of cradle to grave security provided by Big Government is the road to happiness whereas our road map of personal responsibility leads to some sort of moralist enslavement.
So how is all this big government working out for women? Apparently not too well. Labor participation for women in the U.S. today is the lowest that it has been for 24 years. The jobs numbers released last Friday show that only 74,000 new jobs were created in December of 2013.  The overall labor participation rate(the number of Americans who have a job or want one) is at the lowest point in 36 years.  We have gone from a society that says women can "have it all" to a society that says, "Don't worry honey; the government will take care of you." (Liberals don't ever seem to think that the implication that anyone can be successful without the government is racist or sexist or demeaning.)
Nearly 90 million Americans are now unemployed in the U.S.. Americans who have not looked for work in the prior four weeks are considered to be no longer seeking work and are not counted in the Department of Labor's unemployment statistics. Nearly one-third of our workforce now falls into this category. In 2007 63% of Americans over age 16  held jobs; today only 58.6% do so according to an article this week in the Christian Science Monitor.  Traditionally, when Americans have lost their jobs and not been able to find  work, they start businesses of their own, but in the super-regulated climate of the Obama administration, this is getting increasingly more difficult to do. Obamacare has ensured that most businesses will not expand, and it is rapidly turning the U.S. into a society of part-time workers with no real opportunity. Small wonder that so many Americans are dropping out of the system and deciding that a small government check for which they don't have to work is better than a paycheck from a part-time job with no future.
In The Life of Julia, Julia's web design business succeeds throughout her lifetime.  In real life, when the economy is weak and labor participation is low, everyone suffers.  The small business owner may not be able to find enough clients to support her business when those clients are worried about how to pay for the rising costs of insurance and taxes that are hurting their cash flow.  These economic problems trickle down to everybody and the government subsidies do not make up for the loss of income through taxes or the massive costs to the whole society of programs like Obamacare. 
Yet the Obama Administration persists in insisting that Obamacare is a boon for women.  In November, Colorado ran a series of ads last fall promoting the benefits of Obamacare to women. More than anything else, these ads demonstrate the true sexism of the left who apparently see all women as mindless nitwits who don't care about the loss of our jobs, businesses and future opportunities as long as we get free birth control. My personal favorite of these was this ad which got a lot of play across social media for its offensive messages:

Women have an important role to play in our nation's immediate future. This year, that poster gal for unrestricted abortion on demand--Wendy Davis--is running for governor of Texas on a platform of promoting women. Texas' pro-business, pro-growth policies have made the state a model for what the rest of the country should be. Yes, it is run by good old boys. There is not a thing wrong with that. Good old boys gave us a state with no income tax, a state where businesses can prosper, a state where, in most areas, the housing market remains strong. Austin, Texas, topped yesterday's list of best places to seek work in the country. Texas is a state where women can succeed without big government interference--where they can work to reach their own individual potential instead of lowering their aspirations to those of "Julia."
Wendy Davis is hoping that we don't see that. She is planning to take a thirteen-hour filibuster in support of abortions after twenty weeks--a truly horrific cause if there ever were one--and turn it into a job as manager of an economy that is larger and more vibrant than that of many small European countries. She and her leftist counterparts are hoping that all Texas women are just as dumb as the one in the ad I shared above--that we don't care about opportunity or freedom, or traditional morality or marriage or building a stronger society in the future as long as the government will give us free birth control today and the opportunity for a late-term abortion tomorrow. She is hoping that we care more about personal ease today than what kind of world our children will inherit from us tomorrow, and that we would rather have a government handout than real opportunity for success. That's what I call genuinely sexist. Let's keep Texas red in 2014 make sure Davis doesn't succeed. 
When the mafia extorts money from you to allow you to live, they call it "protection money." When the government does it, they call it "consumer protection." Either way, you are paying for protection from someone who has the power to take everything you have.

Eminent Domain, Senate Bill 1 and the Death of Private Property Rights in California

Lately California has been awash with scary ideas about private property rights and new uses for eminent domain. In September I wrote about Richmond, California's plan to use eminent domain to cancel mortgages and rewrite notes of underwater homeowners.  As I explained  in that post, this plan is extremely dangerous because it threatens private property rights and the rights of mortgagors and endangers the future of mortgage financing in any city where it is adopted.  At least, however, the Richmond plan pretended that it had the end goal of helping homeowners retain their property.
The National Real Estate Post is reporting today that the Richmond plan is fizzling out because the city and its private partner are unable to find investors to buy the municipal bonds needed to finance the confiscation of the properties.  This bodes well for the rest of the country--several cities across the U.S. have been considering adopting a similar plan, and the failure of Richmond's plan--if it does indeed fail--will discourage others from following suit.
Now, however, the California Senate is considering a bill so drastic that it makes the Richmond idea pale in comparison.  Senate Bill 1 will allow cities to set up bureaucracies to use eminent domain to confiscate private property, including private homes, for the purpose of setting up public transportation and sustainable communities.  In my novel The Planner, published in 2012, the government uses eminent domain to facilitate sustainable communities, so this is something of a case of life imitating art.

BenSwann.com is reporting that the bill will allow municipalities to use eminent domain not only to create public transportation but to confiscate homes within half a mile of that public transportation for sustainable communities.  Sustainable communities have been sweeping the country under the names "Smart Growth" "Smart Code" and "walkable" communities.  These are mixed use, mixed income communities where housing is tightly packed, neighborhoods are designed so that the housing does not have individual yards but rather relies on community parks, and public transportation is encouraged rather than the use of private automobiles.
What makes Senate Bill 1 unique is that the bill specifically allows governmental entities to confiscate properties where there is no traditional definition of "blight." The bill, "provides that an Authority is not required to make a finding of blight or conduct a survey of blight in a project area, but can rely upon the legislative findings in the bill to establish blight."  What that means to you is that you may live in the loveliest home in the loveliest subdivision in California, but if a bureaucrat decides that your neighborhood is consuming too much energy and needs to be transformed into a "walkable" community, you can lose your property.
And being outside the city won't protect you.  The bill allows counties to create similar boards to deal with unincorporated areas of the state to confiscate property and redevelop it as "sustainable development."
Other gems from this bill include:
1. Developing strict parking ordinances in sustainable communities to discourage the use of cars and encourage public transportation.
2. Requiring a residential construction plan for these newly created "small walkable communities" of no less than 20 units of residential housing per net acre.
3. Requiring that a certain number of units be set aside for extremely low, very low, and low income housing at all times.
Each plan for a sustainable community must include a study of the ways in which the community will conserve energy and water and reduce parking.
The use of eminent domain to promote sustainability strikes deeply at the heart of one of our most precious freedoms as Americans--the right to purchase and own private property without fear of government confiscation.  To abolish that right in an effort to build a new green utopia on the backs of private property owners is not only dangerous, it's morally reprehensible.
Read the summary of Senate Bill 1 here.
Understand what smart growth, and sustainable development really mean and why advocates believe private property is the enemy by watching this short video:

When the mafia extorts money from you to allow you to live, they call it "protection money." When the government does it, they call it "consumer protection." Either way, you are paying for protection from someone who has the power to take everything you have.