Seriously?

New York Times

June 15, 2011
Our Lefty Military
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

As we search for paths out of America’s economic crisis, many suggest business as a paradigm for cutting costs. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, top C.E.O.’s earn as much as $1 a second around the clock, partly by cutting medical benefits for employees. So they must be paragons of efficiency, right?

Actually, I’m not so sure. The business sector is dazzlingly productive, but it also periodically blows up our financial system. Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.

The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, C.E.O.’s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That’s right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty.

“It’s the purest application of socialism there is,” Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. And he was only partly joking.

“It’s a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well,” he added. The country can learn from that sense of mission, he said, from that emphasis on long-term strategic thinking.

The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. This is a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it continues with a veterans’ health care system that has much lower costs than the American system as a whole.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the American military isn’t its aircraft carriers, stunning as they are. Rather, it’s the military day care system for working parents.

While one of America’s greatest failings is underinvestment in early childhood education (which seems to be one of the best ways to break cycles of poverty from replicating), the military manages to provide superb child care. The cost depends on family income and starts at $44 per week.

“I absolutely think it’s a model,” said Linda K. Smith, executive director of the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, which advocates for better child care in America. Ms. Smith, who used to oversee the military day care system before she retired from the Defense Department, said that the military sees child care as a strategic necessity to maintain military readiness and to retain highly trained officers.

One of the things I admire most about the military is the way it invests in educating and training its people. Its universities — the military academies — are excellent, and it has R.O.T.C. programs at other campuses around the country. Many soldiers get medical training, law degrees, or Ph.D.’s while in service, sometimes at the country’s finest universities.

Then there are the Army War College, the Naval War College and the Air War College, giving top officers a mid-career intellectual and leadership boost before resuming their careers. It’s common to hear bromides about investing in human capital, but the military actually shows that it believes that.

Partly as a result, it manages to retain first-rate officers who could earn far higher salaries in the private sector. And while the ethic of business is often “Gimme,” the military inculcates an ideal of public service that runs deep. In Afghanistan, for example, soldiers sometimes dig into their own pockets to help provide supplies for local schools.

Granted, it may seem odd to seek a model of compassion in an organization whose mission involves killing people. It’s also true that the military remains often unwelcoming to gays and lesbians and is conflicted about women as well. And, of course, the opportunities for working-class Americans are mingled with danger.

But as we as a country grope for new directions in a difficult economic environment, the tendency has been to move toward a corporatist model that sees investments in people as woolly-minded sentimentalism or as unaffordable luxuries. That’s not the only model out there.

So as the United States armed forces try to pull Iraqi and Afghan societies into the 21st century, maybe they could do the same for America’s.

Hoo-ah!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=1

My Rant*

I love the Military and probably will to the day that I die. This author has no idea what he is writing about. The systems that the US Military uses are the best that can be used with such a totalitarian system. They are all geared for the battle readiness of the force and not for any luxury. The entire system is spartan and lean in order to maximize it's effectiveness.

It is not a Lefty system but an authoritarian system. The ultimate goal of the military is to win wars and that it does flawlessly. To try to implement this system on a civilian society will produce what you find in China, North Korea and Cuba. Those are very unpleasant societies and they spend a lot of resources keeping their populace from fleeing.

The author also fails to mention that the only reason that our military can have these programs is because we have our unique free capitalist system. This free capital system is the engine that provides the money to have the greatest military that the world has ever seen.

I believe that this author is trying to prepare us for two things. The first is the garbage that we will be getting from Obamacare. The second is the type of lifestyle change that will have to forced upon our population in order to keep us from throwing off this yoke that they want to put around our necks.

The Progressives have an agenda and their propaganda machine is busy trying to ensnare us into it. Be careful, you've been warned.

The Army's 236th Birthday

June 14, 1775

Hurricane Adrian

Hurricane Adrian heralds in the large storm season for 2011.

NarcoTanks

The Mexican Drug cartels are now going Armor.

CNN/MSM Propaganda Machine

CNN did everything it could to not let their audiences hear what Andrew Breitbart was saying about Rep. Anthony Weiner (D), deplorable actions. The MSM was doing everything that they could to continue their defense of one of their Progressive cronies. The People of the United States are becoming more and more aware of what a propaganda tool CNN has become for the Left.

This is CNN's coverage of the event:

This is what actually happened. Why was CNN blatantly avoiding letting the truth to come out?

The old media is dying out. Newspapers are going to be used mostly for bird droppings and wrapping fish. The television and cable media is also going to become part of the worthless propaganda machine of the Left that they have become. What was once a proud profession that kept our Government honest, has become an instrument to control us.

Obama is trying to raise one billion dollars next year. He is doing this because he cannot run on his failed record. He has actually succeeded in his mission to remake America in his vision of a third world nation. Get ready, next year will be crucial if we are to survive.

U S Army Paratrooper

D-Day, June 6, 1944

Decline and fall of the American empire

The economic powerhouse of the 20th century emerged stronger from the Depression. But faced with cultural decay, structural weaknesses and reliance on finance, can the US do it again?

• Larry Elliott, Economics editor
• The Guardian, Monday 6 June 2011

America clocked up a record last week. The latest drop in house prices meant that the cost of real estate has fallen by 33% since the peak – even bigger than the 31% slide seen when John Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath.

Unemployment has not returned to Great Depression levels but at 9.1% of the workforce it is still at levels that will have nerves jangling in the White House. The last president to be re-elected with unemployment above 7.2% was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The US is a country with serious problems. Getting on for one in six depend on government food stamps to ensure they have enough to eat. The budget, which was in surplus little more than a decade ago, now has a deficit of Greek-style proportions. There is policy paralysis in Washington.

The assumption is that the problems can be easily solved because the US is the biggest economy on the planet, the only country with global military reach, the lucky possessor of the world's reserve currency, and a nation with a proud record of re-inventing itself once in every generation or so.

All this is true and more. US universities are superb, attracting the best brains from around the world. It is a country that pushes the frontiers of technology. So, it may be that the US is about to emerge stronger than ever from the long nightmare of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The strong financial position of American companies could unleash a wave of new investment over the next couple of years.

Let me put an alternative hypothesis. America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. The high levels of violent crime, epidemic of obesity, addiction to pornography and excessive use of energy may be telling us something: the US is in an advanced state of cultural decadence.

Empires decline for many different reasons but certain factors recur. There is an initial reluctance to admit that there is much to fret about, and there is the arrival of a challenger (or several challengers) to the settled international order. In Spain's case, the rival was Britain. In Britain's case, it was America. In America's case, the threat comes from China.

Britain's decline was extremely rapid after 1914. By 1945, the UK was a bit player in the bipolar world dominated by the US and the Soviet Union, and sterling – the heart of the 19th-century gold standard – was rapidly losing its lustre as a reserve currency. There had been concerns, voiced as far back as the 1851 Great Exhibition, that the hungrier, more efficient producers in Germany and the US threatened Britain's industrial hegemony. But no serious policy action was taken. In the second half of the 19th century there was a subtle shift in the economy, from the north of England to the south, from manufacturing to finance, from making things to living off investment income. By 1914, the writing was on the wall.

In two important respects, the US today differs from Britain a century ago. It is much bigger, which means that it benefits from continent-wide economies of scale, and it has a presence in the industries that will be strategically important in the first half of the 21st century. Britain in 1914 was over-reliant on coal and shipbuilding, industries that struggled between the world wars, and had failed to grasp early enough the importance of emerging new technologies.

Even so, there are parallels. There has been a long-term shift of emphasis in the US economy away from manufacturing and towards finance. There is a growing challenge from producers in other parts of the world.

Frenzy

Now consider the stark contrast between this economic recovery and the pattern of previous cycles. Traditionally, a US economic recovery sees unemployment coming down smartly as lower interest rates encourage consumers to spend and the construction industry to build more homes. This time, it has been different. There was a building frenzy during the bubble years, which left an overhang of supply even before plunging prices and rising unemployment led to a blitz of foreclosures.

America has more homes than it knows what to do with, and that state of affairs is not going to change for years.

Over the past couple of months, there has been a steady drip-feed of poor economic news that has dented hopes of a sustained recovery. Optimism has now been replaced by concern that the United States could be heading for the dreaded double-dip recession.

In the real estate market, which is the symptom of America's deep-seated economic malaise, the double dip has already arrived. Tax breaks to homeowners provided only a temporary respite for a falling market and millions of Americans are living in homes worth less than they paid for them. The latest figures show that more than 28% of homes with a mortgage are in negative equity. Unsurprisingly, that has made Americans far more cautious about spending money. Rising commodity prices exacerbate the problem, since they push up inflation and reduce the spending power of wages and salaries.

Macro-economic policy has proved less effective than normal. That's not for want of trying, though. The US has had zero short-term interest rates for well over two years. It has had two big doses of quantitative easing, the second of which is now ending. Its budget deficit is so big it has led to warnings from the credit-rating agencies, in spite of the dollar's reserve currency status. And Washington has adopted a policy of benign neglect towards the currency, despite the strong-dollar rhetoric, in the hope that cheaper exports will make up for the squeeze on consumer spending.

Policy, as ever, is geared towards growth because the great existential fear of the Fed, the Treasury and whoever occupies the White House is a return to the 1930s. Back then, the economic malaise could be largely attributed to deflationary economic policies that deepened the recession caused by the popping of the 1920s stock market bubble. The feeble response to today's growth medicine suggests that the US is structurally far weaker than it was in the 1930s. Tackling these weaknesses will require breaking finance's stranglehold over the economy and measures to boost ordinary families' spending power and so cut their reliance on debt. It will require an amnesty for the housing market. Above all, America must rediscover the qualities that originally made it great. That will not be easy.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/06/us-economy-decline-recovery-challenges

* I find it disturbing that in order to find out what is really happening in this country that you have to read about it in European media. Our MSM is such a tool of the Progressive Propaganda Machine that is the root of many of the above problems.

Karma is a Bitch

Karma is a bitch sometimes. Yet in a strange way, I smiled.

Osama's Sea Burial

TOP SECRET

Mideast Peace

McCrony Capitalism

There is a big fear among many citizens in this country who believe that we will become Socialists soon. You can put your fears behind you because we are already there. We have made this incredible journey and didn't even knew we were doing it. It has be slow and methodical, always creeping along. It has been cleverly disguised with a pretty face, logo or slogan. We kill rape pillage and burn with impunity and we don't even know that we're doing it. Unfortunately, it is also very evil. An ancient evil that has been around with us since our creation. Today, we slaughter our unborn children at a rate that would make even Hitler or Stalin gag. We place unseen bonds around our necks and wrists to unknown Overlords who control our lives. The Progressives are just now tying up the loose ends and some of us are starting to see what is going on.


Let's Take the "Crony" Out of "Crony Capitalism"
It's time to choose the free market

John Stossel January 14, 2010

When Judge Richard Posner, the prolific conservative intellectual, released his book A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression last year, you might have thought the final verdict was in: Capitalism caused the economic downturn and high unemployment.

That this verdict was pronounced by someone like Posner, who is associated with the University of Chicago and the free-market law and economics movement, gave moral support to all the politicians who were intent on exploiting the recession (as they exploit all crises) to increase government control of the economy.

But what exactly is this "capitalism" that is blamed?

The word "capitalism" is used in two contradictory ways. Sometimes it's used to mean the free market, or laissez faire. Other times it's used to mean today's government-guided economy. Logically, "capitalism" can't be both things. Either markets are free or government controls them. We can't have it both ways.

The truth is that we don't have a free market—government regulation and management are pervasive—so it's misleading to say that "capitalism" caused today's problems. The free market is innocent.

But it's fair to say that crony capitalism created the economic mess.

Crony capitalism, by the way, will be the subject of my TV show this week on the Fox Business Network (Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern; Friday at 10).

What is crony capitalism? It's the economic system in which the marketplace is substantially shaped by a cozy relationship among government, big business, and big labor. Under crony capitalism, government bestows a variety of privileges that are simply unattainable in the free market, including import restrictions, bailouts, subsidies, and loan guarantees.

Crony capitalism is as old as the republic itself. Congress' first act in 1789—on July 4, no less!—was a tariff on foreign goods to protect influential domestic business interests.

We don't have to look far to see how crony-dominated American capitalism is today. The politically connected tire and steel industries get government relief from a "surge" of imports from China. (Who cares if American consumers want to pay less for Chinese steel and tires?) Crony capitalism, better know as government bailouts, saved General Motors and Chrysler from extinction, with Barack Obama cronies the United Auto Workers getting preferential treatment over other creditors and generous stock holdings (especially outrageous considering that the union helped bankrupt the companies in the first place with fat pensions and wasteful work rules). Banks and insurance companies (like AIG) are bailed out because they are deemed too big to fail. Favored farmers get crop subsidies.

If free-market capitalism is a private profit-and-loss system, crony capitalism is a private-profit and public-loss system. Companies keep their profits when they succeed but use government to stick the taxpayer with the losses when they fail. Nice work if you can get it.

The role that regulation plays in crony capitalism is unappreciated. Critics of business assume that regulation is how government tames corporations. But historically, regulation has been how one set of businesses (usually bigger, well-connected ones) gains advantages over others. Timothy Carney's book about this, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, explains why Phillip Morris joined the "war on tobacco," General Motors pushed for clean-air legislation, and Archer Daniels Midland likes ethanol subsidies.

As economist Bruce Yandle writes, "(I)ndustry support of regulation is not rare at all; indeed, it is the norm."

If you wonder why, ask yourself: Which are more likely to be hampered by vigorous regulatory standards: entrenched corporations with their overstaffed legal and accounting departments or small startups trying to get off the ground? Regulation can kill competition—and incumbents like it that way.

When will Michael Moore figure this out? His last movie attacked what he calls capitalism, but his own work shows that it's not the free market that causes the ills he abhors. Had he called the movie Crony Capitalism: A Love Story, he would have been on firmer ground.

It's time we acknowledged the difference between the free market, which is based on freedom and competition, and crony capitalism, which is based on privilege. Adam Smith knew the difference—and chose the free-market.

What's taking us so long?

John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.

COPYRIGHT 2010 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS, INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/14/lets-take-the-crony-out-of-cro

So Dear Reader, the dilemma is that the 'free market capitalism' is as real as the 'Tooth Faerie'.

Can we say, US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank? Be prepared, you will learn about these two private entities soon enough if you aren't aware already.

Ronald McDonald has been using his fast food world empire and is playing patty-cakes with Obama. They just received an exemption from Obamacare. Why, do you ask? Perhaps, it could be this:

Half of Last Month's New Jobs Came from a Single Employer — McDonald's
11:13 AM, Jun 3, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY

According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent. However, this report from MarketWatch suggests data is much worse than that:

McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 — after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted — in which 62,000 jobs were added. That’s not a net number, of course, and seasonal adjustment will reduce the Hamburglar impact on payrolls. (In simpler terms — restaurants always staff up for the summer; the Labor Department makes allowance for this effect.) Morgan Stanley estimates McDonald’s hiring will boost the overall number by 25,000 to 30,000. The Labor Department won’t detail an exact McDonald’s figure — they won’t identify any company they survey — but there will be data in the report to give a rough estimate.

If Morgan Stanley is correct, about half of last month's job growth came from the venerable fast-food chain. That is hardly the sign of a healthy economy.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/half-last-months-jobs-came-single-employer-mcdonalds_573220.html

GE, you're not forgotten either. Your company has profited so much from Obama that you joined the 51% of Americans in this country that did not pay taxes.

James Catron

This story will receive little media attention. It is a story of an American that should be told.


Korean War Veteran Dies While Replacing Flag at Ohio Home on Memorial Day
Published June 02, 2011
FoxNews.com

An 83-year-old Korean War veteran died on Memorial Day while trying to replace a weathered American flag outside his Ohio home, his family said Thursday.
James Catron, of Richville, Ohio, died of natural causes as he was replacing the tattered flag on his 20-foot TV tower with a new one, his daughter, Sharon Harold, told FoxNews.com.
"He served his country and he thought it was so important to display the flag, " Harold said. "He was so proud to be a veteran."
Harold described her father as a humble man who never boasted about his service and who worked as a volunteer driver for "Meals on Wheels," a program that delivers food to the elderly.
"He had received two bronze stars during his service but never told us," she said. "He was a great man."
A neighbor saw Catron slumped over the tower Monday and called 911. Rick Walters, with the Stark County Coroner's office, said Catron, who had a history of heart trouble, may have died about an hour earlier and was safely belted to the tower. Catron was brought down by fire department paramedics.
Perry Township Fire Chief Larry Sedlock tells The Repository firefighters with a ladder truck returned later on Memorial Day to replace the flag.

FoxNews.com's Cristina Corbin and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/02/korean-war-veteran-dies-replacing-flag-on-memorial-day-at-ohio-home/?test=latestnews

Thank you for your service.../SALUTE.

FEAR PALIN

The Progressives fear Gov Sarah Palin so much that they are bending over backwards churning out as much negative propaganda that they can about her. This never before seen media blitz to destroy the character of a person is an example at the length that the Left will go to. They were successful in getting their underperforming and lackluster candidate elected but that was caused by their manipulation of who we got as the Republican candidate. Obama's victory would have been much greater if Sarah Palin had not been John McCain's running partner. She was the reason that the election was so close. She has not even declared that she is running for President in 2012, but the Mainstream Media cannot stop their rabid attacks on her.

The Progressives FEAR PALIN.

2010 Spyders