You Might Be a Liberal

by C Edmund Wright

  Oh wait.

  But $15 gasoline is no crazier than intentionally applying the very home lending tactics that crashed our economy to an automaker that is now owned by the government and their union thug pals. And yet, this is exactly what is happening.

  This, of course, is not going to pull the “car out of the ditch,” as Obama likes to say. This guarantees the car will stay in the ditch, because the repo man will be looking for it in the driveway! And what Obama is hoping that people won’t notice is how many cars, as well as homes and businesses and, frankly, government owned car companies, are buried in the ditch. At least not until after Election Day 2012.

  In 2010, GM bought “subprime specialist” Americredit and renamed it GM Financial. GM Financial provides more than 8% of the loans offered by GM. And of those, 93% are to buyers with credit scores below 660, the cutoff between prime and subprime. But it gets worse. Not only is government-owned GM making more subprime loans than before, the loans it is making are increasingly going to those with the worst-of-the-worst credit scores. Investors Business Daily reports that “from Q4 2010 to Q1 2012, GM Financial loans to customers with the worst FICO scores—below 540—shot up 79% to more than $2.3 billion.”

  What are they doing, asking the Sheriff’s deputies to drop off auto loan advertising coupons while they are issuing repossession warrants to folks who aren’t paying their mortgages? Below 540? Yes, $2.3 billion of worthless auto loans were put on the books in just a year and a half. When you add in all the phony Volt sales that GM is reporting thanks to Obama crony corporations GE, I’m beginning to wonder if GM ever plans on selling cars that people want to people that can actually afford the damned things.

  Apparently not. During that same time frame, credit worthy purchases went down 42%. Over all, prime loans represented about one sale out of every eleven, and likely future repos represent the other ten. GM is selling more and more cars with loans that will obviously default, and less and less cars with loans that will be repaid. “Chevy Runs Deep.” Indeed. Deep into our pockets. This could be why Sirius talk show host Andrew Wilkow has flatly predicted that General Motors will indeed fail one day, and fail so badly that there will be no bailing them out. And is it just me, or does this lending model sound vaguely familiar? Oh, let’s not forget that we, as taxpayers, still own 500 million shares of this company. Ironic, since apparently all of GM’s new customers are in the 49% that do not pay income taxes anyway. And remember, the GM “success” is something Obama is touting as one of the reasons to reject Mitt Romney and vote for him. This is a ticking time bomb, and even an economic illiterate like Obama must know that it is only a matter of time before it explodes.

  Bain Capital may have outsourced jobs to save some companies, but Obama is outsourcing debt to the rest of us to save his career. And the careers of his union buddies.

  And yet, like all tales of liberal economic insanity, no tale is complete without the obligatory “but wait, it gets worse” part. And it does. According to William Tucker of the American Spectator, the Federal Government is already well down the road of replicating the last sub prime mortgage disaster, using the very same reasoning and the very same techniques to force the very same type of lending.

  No doubt, they’ll blame the banks and “predatory lenders” and George W. Bush and Chick-fil-A and the Tea Party and the fact that we haven’t hired enough “teachers, firefighters and cops” when we end up with the very same results. With any luck, the economic illiterate John McCain will join them by blaming “unfettered capitalism” and perhaps Jack Abrahmoff.

  According to Tucker, “believe it or not, the federal government is now starting another initiative to force banks to lend to low-credit-rated blacks and Hispanics—not just anybody but specifically blacks and Hispanics—and is threatening—and already imposing—huge punitive fines if they don’t. Moreover, this time they’re going even further. They’re going to take over the credit rating agencies and force them to change their standards to accommodate blacks and Hispanics so that nobody will have any idea who is a bad credit risk and who is not.”

  Well, on the bright side, by this time next year, we won’t be able to blame GM Financial for bad loans because the entire credit system will be useless.

  Tucker adds that “the government is about impose its will on the whole home-lending market and force another round of bad loans so that the banks are going to be looted once again so that even the federal government may not be able to bail them out this time.”

  This time Barney Frank’s Fannie and Chris Dodd’s Countrywide will not be at the center of the earthquake, but these two clowns nonetheless have their fingerprints all over this by way of Dodd Frank. Something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) is at the root of this coming disaster, and the CFPB is part of Dodd Frank.

  The only thing that could make this screwier is if the CFPB was the brainchild of one of the left’s real loons. I give you Elizabeth Warren. Yes, exit stage left the fake man, Barney Frank, and enter the fake Indian, Princess Warren. She is largely given credit for dreaming up this monstrosity, which should be more than enough evidence to have Peyote banned from the Harvard Faculty Lounges.

  And the nightmare deepens.

  Hoover Institution Media Fellow Paul Sperry reports that the CFPB has adopted a twenty page ‘Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending’ issued by the Interagency Task force on Fair Lending in 1994, which “kicked off Attorney General Janet Reno’s draconic enforcement of the Community Renewal Act.”

  Are you speechless yet? There is no analogy for this. There is no satirizing this. This will be the stupid liberal analogy of all time. This is Germany re-electing the Nazi Party. No, this is more like Penn State reinstating Jerry Sandusky while having pre-teen boy open house shower parties!

  According to Perry, “the policy statement reads, ‘Applying different lending standards or offering different levels of assistance to applicants who are members of a protected [i.e., minority] class is permissible in some circumstances. Providing different treatment to applicants to address past discrimination would be permissible if done in response to a court order.’”

  Let me translate. Blacks and Hispanics will be given the money regardless of their credit and we’ll fine the hell out of you if you don’t give it to them. And should you doubt that translation, Perry reports that “just two weeks ago Wells Fargo caved to a Justice Department offensive and paid $175 million for alleged past discriminating against minority borrowers.”

  That’s right, they fined a bank that we bailed out several years ago $175 million for failing to do enough of what it was that screwed up the economy in the first place, in order to make it clear to them that this go-round, they will do more of what screwed up the economy.

  This is bizarre world come to life. This is what liberals do. They screw something up, blame the very folks who had nothing to do with it, then hire the very same folks and employ the very same tactics in order to fix it.

  The next thing you know, they’ll be telling us that canceling the Keystone Pipeline will help wean us off of foreign oil.

  YMBAL’S #21

  If you cannot properly apply the historical phrase “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” from the Soviet Union to our country today…

  If you use the term ‘dedicated government employee’ with a straight face…

  If it never dawned on you that all of the best stuff you have came as a result of ‘greedy capitalists’ trying to separate you from your money and the worst things you do result from ‘dedicated public servants’ separating you from your freedom…

  If you think the world is safer when America is not the lone super power…

  If you are passionately in favor of lowering student teacher ratios but ardently against home schooling…

  If you think you have anything to learn about the real world from a life long college professor who has never had anything but a government paycheck…

  If you are not
sure which political party benefits from felons being allowed to vote…

  If you missed the irony in Wesley Snipe’s tax evasion case…

  If you think criminals will be turning in their guns to comply with gun control legislation…

  If you think “the rich” got that way on the backs of “the poor”…

  If you think a job is something “tha man” owes you…

  If it never dawned on you that 9-11 was dreamed up, planned, rehearsed and financed on “Bill Clinton’s watch”…

  If you think the 9-11 Commission really had any intentions of getting to the truth behind the 9-11 attacks…

  If you missed the irony of the Occupy Movement putting $500,000 they raised in a Wall Street bank…

  If you think CNN provides balanced news coverage…

  If you think freedom means the Boy Scouts should be forced to accept gay youth and leaders instead of having gay youth and gay leaders having the freedom to start their own organization…

  If you think more of your gas money goes to “Big Oil” profits than it does to taxes…

  If you find the team of “The Morning Joe Show” balanced and intelligent…

  If you have a large collection of ‘VOTE OR DIE’ tee shirts…

  ...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)

  “And some of us… are going to have to start getting a little bit uppity. How’s that capitalism working for ya?”

  —Obama Green Jobs

  Czar Van Jones

  “The record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people, that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”

  —Milton Friedman

  22: MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL

  If you’ve ever obsessed about the mirrors in a ballpark bathroom...

  I’m not exactly sure what it is, but there is something in the liberal soul that is repelled by whatever it is in the soul of the entrepreneur that makes him do what he does. Like the smell of a rotten egg, this liberal bureaucratic essence is a bit difficult to put into words but unmistakable when you are around it. I guess part of what drives the self-important bureaucrat is the ability to have a nice little meaningless forty hour a week job in some hidden cubicle, yet have just enough paper to push and just enough power to screw up an entrepreneur’s business and life. These folks hide behind “the rules.” They love “the rules.” It’s the source of their power. It gives them the ability to wipe out decades of blood, sweat and tears with some obscure form in triplicate.

  This is bad enough on its face, but this is also part of a much bigger machinery that hums along automatically, growing its own power and shrinking opportunity for everyone else. People in this system really do live in a world where they take the notion that “the rules are the rules” to the nth degree. In this bizarre world, the rules and the accompanying forms and paperwork are more important than whatever underlies the need for the rules and the paperwork in the first place. It is totally bass-ackwards. Not only that, a compelling case can be made that just this sort of inverse proportional focus led to the collapse of our entire economy. More on that later.

  In examining the motivation behind this unnatural affection for mundane rules and paperwork, we discover the fact that it takes armies of bureaucrats to keep track of and enforce all of these rules. Who do you think was cheering and high-fiving and giving ‘amens’ to Brother Barack of Roanoke as he assured his supporters that he understands that folks who own businesses didn’t really “build that?” The reaction Obama got from the live audience in reaction to that pronouncement says it all. His handlers and his spinners can say all they want to that Obama was taken out of context, but the cheering crowd gives us all the context we need.

  This was that rotten egg, liberal, paper pushing psychosis on display. Obama was demeaning the business owner part of the Republican base for the amusement of the government bureaucrat part of the Democrat base. They loved it, and he loved that they loved it. He clearly thought he had hit a grand slam home run when he delivered that speech, not realizing that it would not play well in the real world.

  In Roanoke, Obama was, in effect, giving the audience permission to feel good about their little jobs and their inferiority, which gives them such pleasure when government red tape messes things up for entrepreneurs. As ridiculous as it may seem to give credit for a successful business to the folks who took government paychecks while that business was being built, it is easy to believe if your ego depends on your believing it.

  Moreover, it is simply self-serving, in a purely practical sense, for government workers and Democrat politicians to align themselves. Both groups benefit from more government and more government power and more government employees. We dig into this in the chapter on public sector unions a bit deeper.

  Meanwhile, out here in the real world where people like us, who are not creatures of government, exist, all of this government power and all of those government employees are bankrupting us while making life miserable for us at the same time. We are paying for our own demise and our own misery.

  As we learned from Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Kelly in his fabulous rant on the floor of the House that went viral on You Tube, government spending and government bureaucrats are indeed swallowing us whole. They are screwing up Kelly’s automobile dealership with paperwork from Dodd Frank, for one thing. As he told the foreman of his body shop, don’t worry about the price of painting tape doubling—rather worry about the price of government red tape skyrocketing.

  A little background on Congressman Kelly is in order here. While this particular venting that went viral was the first time many people had heard of him, he actually has had a lot of great moments in Congress. He is known to start his comments on the House floor with something like, “I speak from the standpoint of someone who has actually been in the private sector his entire life.” Frankly, if more members of Congress could say that honestly, we’d have much less government and a much freer and more prosperous society. Instead, most office holders can only say something like ‘in all my years of public service, blah blah blah…’

  Now in this particular speech, true to form, Kelly started by saying, “Now let me tell you what it’s like to be in the real world and not inside the Beltway.” And tell them he did! We learn in the speech that Kelly’s banker is a life long friend who has seen his business grow up, and happens to have an office across the street. This banker obviously has access to everything he needs to know to assess the credit worthiness of Kelly and his business, simply by the definition of their relationship and proximity.

  But that’s not good enough for the government. Dodd Frank legislation has now put nameless, faceless bureaucrats in Washington DC between Kelly and his neighbor banker – and given them 1100 pages of paperwork to fill out, to boot. The bureaucratic rules say that you cannot assess credit worthiness by actually knowing the applicant and his business. This can only be done by bureaucrats who have never met the applicant and never seen his business. The “rules are the rules,” after all.

  But it gets even sillier in Kelly’s District, Pennsylvania 3. And by sillier, I mean frightening. There is an aging local ballpark that Kelly’s community had refurbished to the tune of $2 million. The money to renovate the park was donated by a private citizen, a veteran, according to Kelly. The grand re-opening of the park was quite an important deal to the locals, and there was much anticipation. And while he didn’t specify, apparently Kelly was one of those spearheading this entire effort.

  Which is why he got the disturbing call on the day the park was to re-open. “You need to come down here. We’re having trouble with the occupancy permit,” he was told by the county inspector. When Kelly got to the park, he reminded the inspector that there were 1,500 people planning on coming to the ballpark that night. “Yeah, but we have a major problem,” said the government bureaucrat, who is not only paid by the taxes of Ke
lly and of the veteran who had funded all of this, but also by the taxes of the 1,500 people who wanted to use the park that night. “You see, the mirrors in the men’s room are a quarter of an inch too low. So you can’t possibly open that ballpark.”

  Now, if you are a normal person, you are probably asking too low for what? And a quarter of an inch? Is this really a major problem? But we are not talking about a normal person here. We are talking about a government bureaucrat who has the power to screw up the lives of the very folks who pay him. In his infantile mind, this was major, and they are too low. The rules say they are too low. The rules say they are too low for him to put his checkmark on some damned government inspection form. And for anyone in government, the form is more important than whatever it is the form is supposed to regulate in the first place. If you’ve ever been to the DMV, you understand this. Obama Care anyone?