www.dailycorinthian.com
Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Corinth, Miss.
Fed pursuing crony capitalism BY DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN Columnists
How can Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke justify his decision to approve another round of quantitative easing by citing the lack of an assured recovery in the U.S. economy? How can he pretend that his decisions to continue or discontinue the wholesale printing of money and to maintain or end zero-interest rates have anything to do with unemployment or the inflation rate? The obvious fact is that quantitative easing is not filtering down into the mainstream economy. Whether or not other forms of trickle down work, this one sure doesn’t. The quantitative easing has done nothing to increase the anemic growth rate which remains mired in the 1-2 percent range despite the printing of $85 billion each month. The flow of newly minted money goes directly into the top echelons of our financial establishment -- banks and brokerage houses -- and stays there as the nation’s richest executives use the funds to pay for their gambling habits in stocks and derivative bets. Crony capitalism has taken over the government. The Fed prints the money. The money is given away for no interest in exchange for moribund mortgage-backed securities. The recipients gamble the night away playing the stock market and the $1.4 quadrillion derivative market, content in the assurance that, if they fail, the feds will prop them back up. Too big to fail covers their downside risk. Free money encourages the upside gambling. Record bank profits amid a stalled economy attest to this ongoing misdistribution of resources. The stock market has investors hypnotized. They pay no attention to the near-zero economic growth rate or the miniscule job creation numbers, instead focusing on the dizzying heights of the Dow’s record highs. But the Olympian levels are themselves artificial, impelled by “QE3,” which puts free money in the hands of the banks and brokerages that they can invest in the market as they wish. At some point soon, they will tire of the game, pull their money out, and the market will crash. Quantitative easing increasingly resembles the foreign aid program. The U.S. taxpayer sends tens of billions overseas in the idealistic expectation that the money will alleviate poverty and suffering in the third world. Instead, dictators and petty tyrants pocket the money, all the while pleading for more aid to their countries’ poor. When Bernanke says he will end “QE3” when the unemployment rate drops to 6.5 percent or inflation rises above 2 percent, he is citing ridiculous and irrelevant yardsticks. The only way unemployment is going to drop in an economy as moribund as this is if sufficient numbers of us are persuaded to give up looking for work and drop out of the labor force as a result. The inflation rate will likely remain comfortably below 2 percent as long as food and fuel are excluded from its calculation, the two most inflation-sensitive aspects of our consumer spending. Of course, Bernanke is not limited by these statistics. He is limited only by the greed of his cronies, so “QE3” will continue on and on.
Prayer for today Eternal God, may I become more like thee. Give me the desire to associate myself with people and places where the divine spirit is supreme. May my soul breathe in the influence of all that is good and true; and may I use my life for thy honor and praise. Amen.
A verse to share “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shave be saved.” -- Romans 10:13
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Random thoughts from wise thinkers “We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.” (F.A. Hayek) “Many respectable writers agree that if a man reasonably believes that he is in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm from his assailant he may stand his ground and that if he kills him he has not exceeded the bounds of lawful self-defense. That has been the decision of this court.” (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brown v. United States, 1921) “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” (John Adams) “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.” (JeanFrancois Revel) “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.” (J.A. Schumpeter)
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel imporThomas tant. They Sowell don’t mean to do harm Columnist -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” (T.S. Eliot) “The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections.” (Richard A. Epstein) “We do not live in the past, but the past in us.” (U.B. Phillips) “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
(James Madison) “A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.” (Milton Friedman) “...leniency toward criminals contrasted starkly with severity toward the lawabiding citizen’s right to defend himself or herself.” (Joyce Lee Malcolm) “A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.” (John Stuart Mill) “Criticism is easy; achievement is more difficult.” (Winston Churchill) “Everybody has asked the question ... ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing
with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!” (Frederick Douglass) “The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” (Paul Johnson) “It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.” (President Calvin Coolidge) (Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www. tsowell.com.)
Obama leading from behind Al Sharpton “The First Black President ... Spoke First as a Black American,” ran the banner headline of Sunday’s Washington Post. But why, when the fires of anger over the Zimmerman verdict were dying down, did he go into that pressroom and stir them up? “A week of protests outside the White House, pressure building on him inside the White House, pushed him to that podium,” said Tavis Smiley on “Meet the Press.” Black leaders demanded Obama come out of hiding and stand in solidarity with the aggrieved and outraged. Belatedly and meekly, Obama complied. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said Obama. But which Trayvon? The one walking home with Skittles and tea? Or the one who sucker-punched Zimmerman, decked him, piled on, pummeled him martial arts style, hammered his head on the sidewalk, ignored his screams for help and got shot by the guy he was assaulting? For that is the story Zimmerman told, Sanford police believed, the lone eyewitness confirmed, the defense argued, the prosecution
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
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could not shake and the jury believed. Not guilty, on all counts. If Obama Pat thinks the Buchanan verdict was justified, Columnist why did he not urge that the demonstrations, marches, vandalism and violence cease? If he agrees Zimmerman got away with murder -“an atrocity,” Al Sharpton said of the verdict -- why did Obama hide behind this mush: “Once the jury’s spoken, that’s how the system works.” Obama moved swiftly off the trial and into a rambling discourse on the black experience and racial profiling. But why? The jury said Trayvon was not profiled. What is Obama up to? Answer. A law professor, he knows this case, based on evidence and testimony, was open and shut. And he knows Eric Holder is not going to file any hate-crime civil rights charges. Because Holder and Obama know they would be seen as caving to Sharpton & Co., they would get stuffed in court, and the nation
would react with outrage to a double-jeopardy, murdercharge, racial prosecution of this persecuted man whose innocence was established in a court of law. So Obama swiftly changed the subject. “There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.” “That happens often,” said Obama. Undeniably. But why do black males awaken such apprehensions and fears? Is it their color? Well, 13 percent of our population is black. Half of that -- say, 6 plus percent -- is male. Of that 6 percent, one in six -- just 1 percent of the U.S. population -- consists of black males age 18 to 29. Of all black males 18 to 29, writes Ron Unz in “Race and Crime in America,” 28 percent are in jail or prison, or on probation. The “liberal Sentencing Project organization,” says Unz, estimates that “onethird of all black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban ar-
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eas.” Twenty years ago in Chicago, where black kids are gunned down daily, Jesse Jackson was quoted, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” That’s the same apprehension, Mr. President, those women feel on that elevator. Why are white folks nervous about strange young black men in the neighborhood? Perhaps because they commit interracial muggings, robberies and rapes at 35 times the rate of whites. As newspapers avoid the issue of black racism and rarely give the stats on interracial crime, Obama dwelt lovingly on the indignities of racial profiling -- without really addressing the root cause. It was an uncourageous commentary. Weak as KoolAid, said Tavis. But Obama was where he likes to be, leading from behind -- this time behind Al Sharpton. (Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”)
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