Posted on 05/03/2010 6:09:23 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
That's the question Ed Morrissey asks at Hot Air. Commenting on an under-publicized portion of the House version of financial reg legislation that would, in the Wash Post's summary, "allow the FTC to issue rules on a fast track and permit the agency to impose civil penalties on companies that hurt consumers," Morrissey raises a series of disturbing queries:
Neither the FTC nor the Internet had anything to do with the Wall Street meltdown in 2008. If this financial-regulation bill is so desperately needed, why did House Democrats lard it up with this power grab at the FTC? Why does the FTC need any further authority over the Internet, where fraud and abuse regulations apply already? The Internet economy has been one of the bright spots throughout a dismal period of recent history. Do we need to attack the one area that shows growth and promise?
1) looking to tax it
2) looking to silence political dissent
then, what a wonderful world, this will be...
Just another facet of their plot to destroy our country and steal our freedom that’s been unfolding since the Fuhrer took office with the aid of his goons in Congress.
Why? Commerce Clause—the answer to every government expansion question.
Pig-snout man Henry Waxman also inserted some language giving FTC regulatory powers over vitamins and supplements. Seems we have a pattern here
For the same reason they took over student loans in the Health Care bill. Because they could. The radicals lust for power and privilege will never end. The democrat bases wants will never be quenched.
This is why Beck was saying, “Don’t let them pass ANYTHING!”
He said there were pieces of totalitarianism in everything they were doing and one day, they’d assemble the pieces.
Government control of the INternet should be against the law especially when it comes to issues of free speech.
Bingo! We have a winner.
REMEMBER NOVEMBER IS COMING!
Scoarched earth is in order.
So that later they can just “move” it to control by another department in a reshuffling of the government, you know, to make things work better, “for the people”................
No, the pieces will fall into place, one by one, until the monster gets off the table............
And what time today will that be? /semi-sarcasm
.
Once there is no means of rallying the citizens to elect advocates of small government, big government will become permanent.
“”also inserted some language giving FTC regulatory powers over vitamins and supplements.””
I’m glad you got that in there - the internet and food supplements have a lot to do with finance reform, don’t they? Please contact your senators right away to make sure this is taken out when it is debated in the senate.
I purposely use lower case for anything to do with congress.
Washington Takes Break From Porn Surfing to Bailout Wall Street
by Ann Coulter
04/28/2010
Democrats have decided that in order to prevent Wall Street from starting more financial meltdowns, wrecking the economy and leaving the American taxpayer holding the bag, we need to give more oversight authority to the same government employees who were busy surfing Internet porn as private investors frantically tried to warn them about Bernie Madoff.
The Democrats’ financial “reform” bill also includes a $50 billion bailout fund — that’s million with a “B” — that will save the Democrats from the unpleasant task of having to go on record voting for another Wall Street bailout.
Under the Democrats’ bill, the FDIC will distribute the bailout money to Wall Street bankers without Congress having to take any action at all. (In the House version, the slush fund for the Democrats’ Wall Street friends is $150 billion.)
True, the billions of dollars will be doled out to banks for the purpose of “dissolving” them. So what? They’ll come back under a new name. But the guilty parties will lose no money for making bad bets — although if the bets paid off, they’d take all the profits. That’s what Democrats mean by “accountability.”
Not surprisingly, the only politicians opposed to a permanent bailout fund for bankers are the politicians not owned by Wall Street — that is, most Republicans, and one socialist, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The Democrats’ defense of Wall Street’s golden parachute is to say Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell used a “talking point” formulated for him by pollster Frank Luntz in opposing the bailout fund.
As Frank Rich explained in The New York Times, the bailout fund is not a bailout fund because “Sen. Mitch McConnell went on CNN to flog his big lie that the Senate reform bill somehow guaranteed bank bailouts — a talking point long ago concocted for the GOP by its favorite spin strategist, Frank Luntz.”
In other words, it must be a lie because ... because Frank Luntz told McConnell what to say and then McConnell said it on CNN!
Yes, and Steve Jobs gets his best ideas from parishilton.com.
Sen. McConnell doesn’t need Frank Luntz to explain anything to him, least of all the financial reform bill. A fifth-grader could find out about the permanent bailout fund simply by reading the bill.
You will notice that neither Rich nor any of Wall Street’s defenders specifically deny the existence of a permanent bank bailout fund in the Democrats’ bill. They just say McConnell used a “talking point” to denounce it. (You might say this has become a “talking point” for Democrats defending the bill.)
Wall Street’s defenders also crow that the money in the bailout fund won’t come from taxpayers! (There’s a newfound sympathy.) No sir, it will come from “the banks.”
That’s like saying that the original bailout money didn’t come from the taxpayers — it came from the government! Where do Democrats imagine banks and the government get their money?
Banks, like the government, are entities that spend money they collect from human beings. We’ll all be charged up front to cover Gordon Gekko’s future bad bets.
In other words, the Wall Street slush fund will be paid for by a group of despicable fat cats recently discovered by the Democrats known as People Who Have Bank Accounts. Damn them!
Another idea, based on the ancient concept of personal responsibility, comes from financial writer James Grant. He proposes that the bankers — are you sitting down? — take their own losses.
Let them keep their humongous salaries, Grant writes, but if their bank fails, “let the bankers themselves fail. Let the value of their houses, cars, yachts, paintings, etc. be assigned to the firm’s creditors.”
There’s nothing wrong with speculation, creating derivatives or selling them, especially to sophisticated investors. The problem is that when the bets go bad, the speculators keep being back-stopped by the government — i.e., “by me and people like me.”
Strangely enough — for a bill that allegedly sticks it to Wall Street — during the Senate Banking Committee hearing this week, Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein endorsed the Dodd bill. Someone should have asked him who from Goldman wrote it.
In 2008, Goldman employees gave a record-breaking $1,007,370 to the Obama campaign.
This year, the “securities and investment” industry has already given twice as much money to the Democrats as to the Republicans.
ABC News reports that “the five biggest hedge fund donors all gave almost all their donations to Democrats.” Among the biggest recipients of hedge fund money were Senators Harry Reid (Democrat), Chris Dodd (Democrat) and Charles Schumer (Democrat).
Even with the evidence right in front of their eyes, people still believe that it’s the Republicans who are in Wall Street’s pocket.
How out of touch with reality would a comedy writer have to be to write the following joke for Jay Leno this week: “The head of Goldman Sachs was going through security and was asked to empty his pockets — and five Republican senators fell out.”
Why didn’t Barack Obama or Chuck Schumer fall out? Why not Rahm Emanuel, who worked for Goldman? Or Greg Craig, who used to work for Obama but just took a job with Goldman?
The fact that anyone laughed at that joke proves that Republicans have a serious PR problem.
Financial Regulation Bill Is a Disaster
Thursday, 29 Apr 2010 10:25 AM
By: Dick Morris
The Republican Party is showing some starch by standing up to Harry Reid on the financial regulation bill. We can only hope they keep it up.
The Obama administration is selling a bill of goods inside the Beltway by saying that the GOP is getting into bed with the worst of Wall Street by opposing its bill.
The truth is that the rest of the country fears big government a lot more than they fear big business and recognizes that Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street giants feed at the Democratic trough as much or more than at the Republican one.
Republicans just need to keep pointing out that Goldman was the biggest donor to the Obama campaign, contributing $970,000 from its employees and PACs. (The combined donations of the staff and faculty of the University of California totaled $1.5 million, but they are hardly a coherent corporate entity like Goldman.)
Editor’s Note: Get Dick Morris’ Latest book FREE! Go here now.
The financial regulation bill is a disaster in three major respects:
1. It gives incentives for irresponsibility by, in effect, guaranteeing banks’ survival by establishing a $50 billion rescue fund. In doing so, it gives the large banks a huge advantage and extends to them the same kind of implicit guarantee that once encouraged the likes of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to go on their lending spree. It is a key step in the conversion of big banks into quasi-public institutions, ultimately controlled by the government, levers through which the public sector can control the private.
2. By vesting the secretary of the Treasury with the power to seize — in a hostile takeover — any financial institution he deems too big to fail, it puts at risk of public takeover every such company in the nation. Granted, the FDIC now has the power to seize any bank. But the FDIC is headed by a nonpartisan board with a heritage of nonpolitical regulation.
The secretary of the Treasury is an arm of the president. If a political appointee has the power to take over any financial institution — bank or non-bank — fire the board, replace the management, wipe out stock equity and sell off pieces of the company, it gives him a power that is so awesome it can undermine our democratic freedoms.
What corporate executive will feel free to donate to Obama’s opponents or to speak out against the administration when doing so could cost him his job and his bank?
3. The newly established Consumer Financial Protection Agency will have the power to approve or reject any loan instrument offered by any company in the land. A mattress company that wants to let customers go 60 days before paying will have to get CFPA approval before extending credit. The bureaucratic bottleneck will slow economic activity, encourage corruption and retard consumer spending. It will be big government at its worst.
The entire political premise of the Obama administration’s efforts to pass this bill is flawed: Republicans will not be blamed for protecting the banks if they vote down this bill. Voters will not believe that the GOP is in cahoots with Wall Street. They will understand that the Republicans in Congress protected them from the massive growth of government.
Obama’s power-grabs have been so frequent and so blatant that he has no credibility on this subject. Voters expect him to be fighting to grow government and to be hostile to private enterprise. And they are wise to his close connection with Wall Street despite his occasional forays into populism.
This is a bill the Republican Party can kill with political impunity, and hopefully they will have the courage to do so.
© Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
CONTROL, SPYING are the two foremost in my thoughts, taxing it is next in line.
This is why Beck was saying, “Don’t let them pass ANYTHING!”
Yep, we need to call a TIME OUT!
(this would be very clever marketing strategy if anyone in the GOP had the brains to think of it)
Ooops. You mean "Scorched" earth, right?
Yes.
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