Free Republic

On Tuesday night, Senator Ted Cruz appeared on Fox News to respond to the State of the Union address — and talked about how the US economy was only working for the "top 1 percent," who he said have gotten "fat and happy" under Obama's administration.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Cruz's rhetorical move is unusual for a prominent Republican, particularly a presidential contender. This emphasis on the "the 1 percent" has long been condemned by many in the party as class warfare. For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio said in 2012 that "convincing one group that their life isn't doing better because another is doing too...

.........For many on the Left, the Arkansas company is emblematic of all that is wrong with corporate America. It is particularly detested by organized labor — a key Democratic constituency — because the company has doggedly fought all efforts to organize its workers. Clinton's ties to Walmart go back to 1986, when she joined the company's board of directors. She remained there until 1992, when husband Bill Clinton ran for the White House. For years afterwards they both maintained close ties to the retail giant. More recently, Clinton has distanced herself from the company and criticized some of its business...

I have just recently become an active poster (responder), and have seen the term "Crony Capitalism" used without explanation. Recently I saw the term associated with Communism, which confused me further. A "google" does little to clear things up, particularly in regards to how it might be interchangeable with communism. Can anyone help clear things up?

The House-passed $1.1 trillion Continuing Resolution contains a clause that exposes taxpayers to a potential $300 trillion liability for bank losses in derivatives trading. The rider to the CR was the “brain child” of Citigroup. The rider is opposed by both tea party Republicans and left wing Democrats, but is strongly supported by House GOP leadership and President Obama. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), charged that “this maneuver puts the lie to the contention that the GOP is the Party of small government. This is a big government pay off to Wall Street financiers. I’m enormously disappointed that the...

Given that our Commander in Chief is a surprisingly decent firearm salesman, it’s a little odd that one of America’s most prolific gun manufacturers might soon be facing an agonizing financial death. But, that’s exactly where Colt is headed if things don’t change drastically. It takes a very specialized form of failure for a gun company to miss out on the Obama-inspired run on guns, the “assault weapon” craze of the 2000’s, and the proliferation of Concealed Carry in the 1990’s, but that’s exactly what happened. And, worse, this isn’t Colt’s first foray into fiscal failure. In fact, this...

What’s the easiest way to avoid getting sued by the Obama Administration? Well… If you come up with an answer, let the rest of us know. A company that has supported the President and his Affordable Care Act, is currently being sued by Obama for following the law. (Wait… “Affordable” Care Act? Can we sue Democrats for false advertising yet?)Welcome to Obama’s America. Where you can literally get sued for trying to comply with the law. (Boy… That’ll teach you.)Honeywell International Inc., and two smaller firms, are being sued for taking advantage of a specific provision in the ACA that...

“What too few in Washington appreciate — and what the new Republican Congress must if we hope to succeed — is that the American people’s current distrust of their public institutions is totally justified.” So wrote Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in The Federalist shortly after the big election earlier this month. “Americans are fed up with Washington, and they have every right to be.” You can say that again. When Democrats swept the 2006 mid-term elections to re-take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, it was much more a repudiation of the pork-barreling, corrupt crony behavior of that Republican...

Crony Capitalism: The New York Times this week reports that ObamaCare has made strange bedfellows between the insurance industry and the federal government. Who could have imagined that?

Republican oil mogul Harold Hamm says Congress is wasting its time debating the Keystone XL pipeline. “It’s not relevant at all, in my opinion. And here we are making it relevant now? Forget it,” the billionaire CEO of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources told Politoco in an interview Friday, just before the House passed a bill aimed at approving the pipeline. […] Hamm said his company, which had planned to use Keystone to ship some of its North Dakota crude, is already using other pipelines for half of its oil. And the percentage is growing. “We’re supporting other pipelines out there; we’re...

... The White House calls — and the president’s decision itself — reflected the clout the immigrant movement has built up in recent years, as it grew from a cluster of scattered Washington lobbying groups into a national force. A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the last decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for...

Managers at one of the nation’s premier federal laboratories improperly used taxpayer funds to influence members of Congress and other officials as part of an effort to extend the lab’s $2.4 billion management contract, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General said in a report Wednesday. A review of documents determined that Sandia National Laboratories formed a team and worked with consultants beginning in 2009 to develop a plan for securing a contract extension without having to go through a competitive process. That plan called for lobbying Congress, trying to influence key advisers to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu...

After the 2012 election, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s top political adviser, Scott Reed, surveyed the damage – tens of millions of dollars spent only to lose the White House and a slew of winnable Senate races — and vowed that 2014 would be different. Some $70 million and a Republican wave later, the business lobby, one of the biggest spenders in the midterm elections, is feeling very good about its return on investment. Its conclusion after 2012 — that they had to take on tea party challengers in primaries and create a more business-friendly slate of general election candidates...

<p>I feel like I have to say this every time a story like this comes out of California, and stories like these come out of California all the time.</p> <p>California’s health insurance exchange has awarded $184 million in contracts without the competitive bidding and oversight that is standard practice across state government, including deals that sent millions of dollars to a firm whose employees have long-standing ties to the agency’s executive director.</p>

residents within and near the monument's footprint, say they've been kept in the dark about the effects of the designation, and fear that the new status will hamper growth and fire safety. (A)bout 150 people protested Monday in front of the Pasadena office of Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park). Many said they were unsure about its potential effects on private property rights, flood control and emergency services. And the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors recently approved a resolution opposing a monument designation in its region, where there has not been a public meeting held to discuss the issues.

We don’t like to concede that a primary cause of the financial crisis was a Wall Street compensation system that rewarded executives, bankers and traders for taking big risks with other people’s money without holding them the least bit accountable. And because we don’t like to discuss such things in polite company, it is certainly unsurprising that six years later, not a single fundamental aspect of how Wall Street pays its top people has changed. The incentive system that handed out millions of dollars in bonuses to bankers and traders who packaged shoddy mortgages into securities and sold them as...

The Chinese economy just surpassed the U.S. economy to become the world’s largest in terms of purchasing power, according to the International Monetary Fund.The IMF measures economic strength by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in both market exchange rates and average purchasing power, the latter being where China has overtaken the U.S. with a GDP of $17.6 trillion by the end of 2014 — 16.4 percent of the world’s purchasing power. The U.S. will close out the year with a purchasing-power adjusted GDP of $17.4 trillion, or 16.2 percent of the world’s total.Financial Times predicted the change in April and illustrated...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has called for congressional hearings regarding conduct at the Federal Reserve following the ProPublica and This American Life report from last week, told NPR in an interview on Wednesday that the report, “tells us exactly what we already knew.” Warren told NPR’s Steve Inskeep that the report, “ultimately this report tells us exactly what we already knew—that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that's really needed.” […] Listening to the tapes, Warren said two things jumped out: the lack of truthful...

A top Boeing official criticized Congress on Tuesday for failing to pass a long-term reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank. He also argued that an extension of the Bank’s charter until next summer leaves supporters in a worse position than they were in before. “Mostly far-right political consultants, think tanks and congressmen banded together in a fit of ideological road rage to kill the bank,” Boeing senior vice president Timothy Keating said in prepared remarks at an aerospace conference in Everett, Wash. “The temporary extension recently enacted in many respects leaves us worse off than before,” Keating continued. “The extension is...

The median American household saw its net worth decline by 36 percent during the Great Recession. That is a hard reality. A Republican held the White House when the crash hit, and voters, in no mood to be charitable, blamed the GOP. Besides, Democrats were ready with an explanation that slid right into an existing groove of American thinking: The financial crisis was caused by Republicans going easy on their big banker friends. By 2012, the recession had been over for three-plus years, and yet the average American saw little improvement. Average net worth continued to drift downward. Long-term unemployment...

Last year I took an Ethics class at school. Our professor gave us a lecture about the pros and cons of Capitalism. And at the end of the lecture, he asked us if we could define "crony capitalism". We all drew a blank. We'd all heard the phrase, but we didn't quite understand it. So he broke it down to us in very simplistic terms: "Let's sat that you own a cow. And your neighbor owns one hundred cows. But he's so greedy that he wants your cow, too. So he bribes corrupt politicians to pass laws that will take...