Fed Ex CEO Fred Smith, in an interview with Stephen Moore, argues for a return to basic value-add entrepreneurship as the antidote to our Wall Street driven financial crisis.
He has come to hold the get-rich-quick Wall Street financiers in more than a little disdain. He views the heroes of the U.S. economy as the companies that actually produce real goods and services. He sees the Wall Street collapse as an inevitable byproduct of investment bankers building multitrillion dollar debt pyramid structures.
So how do we fix this problem and retool our industrial sector in a pro-competitive fashion? “We’ve got to reduce the taxes on equity. Let companies expense their capital purchases.”
I’ve often wondered why this hasn’t happened before:
In the passionate world of Civil War re-enactors, authenticity is everything — from uniforms with historically correct stitching to hardtack made from scratch.
A battle re-enactment last month pushed realism to the limits: A retired New York City police officer portraying a Union soldier for a documentary film was shot in the shoulder, possibly by a Confederate re-enactor.
The shooting sent the 73-year-old to the hospital and left the Isle of Wight Sheriff’s Office in rural southeastern Virginia with a Civil War-style CSI case.
Re-enactors take their hobby seriously, but come on, real musket balls??
Christopher Orlet documents the creepy behavior of the Obama cultists, and predicts a major disappointment once the limitations of their Messiah become apparent.
I suspect these young hipsters genuinely want to change the world in some vague, utopian, environmentally friendly way, and they have deluded themselves into thinking that Obama’s big government solutions will do the trick. They are in for a big letdown following if their candidate wins, but that’s all part of the maturation process.
Journalist Michael Malone doesn’t mind the grilling that the media has been giving McCain and Palin. But he is outraged that the media refuses to apply the same treatment to Obama.
What I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side – or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
If the media succeeds in getting Obama elected, Americans will eventually figure out that they’ve been duped, perhaps after we pay a terrible price for the mistake. But the real losers will be the media, who will learn too late what their duplicious behavior has cost them — their credibility. They will be finished.
This “open letter to the local daily paper” by Orsen Scott Card has gotten a lot of exposure in the alternative media the last few days — Rush, Instapundit, Drudge, etc. And for good reason: Card (a Democrat, by the way) shames the media for their outrageous disrespect for the foundation of their profession: Truth.
These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.
Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?. . . . .
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.
Someday someone will write a book — maybe several books — about the media’s role in this campaign. The media will come off looking pretty corrupt, because the evidence is so overwhelming and incontrovertible.
Kathleen Parker offers this advice for media elites who are trying to figure out why they are so disconnected from the rest of the country: Study Sarah Palin.
These are the folks who have found light in Sarah Palin and who have been a major part of the Palin frenzy. They will vote the McCain ticket regardless of whether Palin can rattle off Supreme Court cases with which she disagrees. They recognize themselves in her. To them, her lack of polish and knowledge feels like an absence of slickness and glibness.
McCain’s hunch that Palin would catapult him into the White House ultimately may prove wrong, but the Palin phenomenon and the mainstream media problem are of a piece. Therein lies the answer to the media’s self-inquiry.
Contempt for one’s audience is not a sure way to its heart. Palin’s people feel that contempt and they have identified its source as the enemy.
Robert Kaplan looks beyond a predicted surgical strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, to the Iranian response from their unconventional but highly effective naval forces.
Some of the promoters of a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities have sold the strike as a high-tech, airborne surgical attack. But a look at the naval environment indicates that like the Iraq invasion, what starts surgically could end very messily indeed.
Hawaii recently adopted a health care program to provide guaranteed health for all children from birth to 18, who were not already covered by other insurance. Guess what happened.
Parents who could afford coverage began dropping their private plans and placing their children in the program. Gov. Linda Lingle’s office, seeing a sure disaster ahead, pulled the plug on the patient last week, citing “budget shortfalls.” There simply isn’t enough money in the state treasury to fund it.
Well, whaddaya know — guaranteed government sponsored health care is prohibitively expensive.
If it’s too expensive for a few thousand Hawaiian kids, wait until the federal government assumes responsibility for the health care of all 300 million of us. The government cannot possibly pay for it, so the only alternative will be to ration the care, i.e., the quality will go down.
William Stuntz looks at the numbers, and concludes that the next administration — regardless of which party — will have no choice but to trim government spending.
Unless middle-income Americans are sold on the idea that their taxes should be not just higher but much higher, we are entering the Age of Spending Restraint. Not the Age of the Federal Checkbook, and certainly not the Age of American Socialism. Whatever he says in the midst of his campaign, the next president is more likely to be a twenty-first-century Calvin Coolidge than an up-to-date FDR.
Sorry, but I have trouble accepting that conclusion. Driven by millions of voters who pay little or no taxes now anyway, the more likely scenario is that the government will dream up ever more exotic ways of raising cash (i.e., squeezing the rich), to the point that the foundation of our economic engine will be irrepairably damaged. It will be the beginning of the end of American dominance on the world stage.
UPDATE: My scenario is a sure bet if the Dems control both the executive and legislative branches of government.
If Democrats are willing to seek massive spending increases in the midst of a severe economic crisis where credit is scarce, budget deficits are high and a Republican still occupies the White House, imagine the chill that must be running up and down the respective legs of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid thinking about the prospects of an Obama administration and a filibuster-proof Senate.
Nuclear power and all other ways to produce or save energy should be allowed to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership.
In other words, allow the free market to chart the course, not government regulators. Fantastic idea — which it why it will never be implemented.
Evidence continues to mount that the fears raised by the global warming alarmists are bogus. It’s only a matter of time before the whole sorry mess is quietly forgotten.
Global warm mongers are rapidly losing credibility. Mainstream journalists will still believe them because climate change fits the narrative they’ve so carefully nurtured. But eventually the error will have to admitted. It won’t happen publicly, though, because by the time they come to their senses, the issue will have been long forgotten by the public.
The current financial crisis, fueled by out-of-control real estate speculation, is not new. America has experienced something like it before. The great crash of 1836 has elements that are eerily similar.
Wall Street forgot that the laws of economics are as ineluctable as Newton’s law of universal gravity. (It seems politicians will never learn this.) Prices do not rise forever, risk must always equal reward, and supply and demand must balance each other over the long term.
The chief difference is that the crash of 1836 led to a full-blown depression. The current crisis is unlikely to reach that end.
Sam Dealey, US News & World Report, on Rep. Barney Frank’s ridiculous charge that racism is driving Republican criticism of Democratic involvement in the housing crisis:
Fannie-Freddie criticism is hardly the special provenance of Republicans. Feckless lawmakers of both parties have a lot to answer for in failing to rein in the siblings. But chief among those lawmakers is Barney Frank, who kicked hardest against prescient reform efforts and pushed hardest in expanding Fannie and Freddie’s risk-taking. (See here for more.)
But, suddenly, to criticize his poor judgment amounts to racism?
Frank’s argument is as tacky as it gets, and it’s yet another measure of what a political buffoon he is. But if Frank insists on finding a racist angle to the catastrophe, he might reflect that it was his own actions that drove poor, black homeowners to financial ruin. And it is the lawmaker’s critics who now vow not to let it happen again.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services committee, is loath to accept any responsibility for the credit crisis, preferring to heap all the blame on “racist Republicans.”
But Barney should listen to one of his fellow House Dems on this. Here is what Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) said about the crisis:
Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.
Davis is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
John Hinderaker documents some examples of how the media reported on a recent McCain speech on the economy, to illustrate their deliberate attempt to shape the news:
The Los Angeles Times quoted McCain’s speech right up to the point where he started talking about the economy. Then without, acknowledging that the economy was in fact the main subject of the speech, the Times jumped to a quote from Barack Obama to the effect that McCain is afraid to talk about the economy.
Wayne Curtis takes a closer look at the picturesque island that inspired L. M. Montgomery’s beloved Anne of Green Gables series.
The island, Anne said more than once, allowed “scope for the imagination,” which the orphan asylum assuredly did not. Most of the descriptive passages are rendered through Anne’s eyes, and she was enchanted by everything—from a farm lane overarched with apple blossoms, at the end of which a “painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle,” to the red sandstone cliffs along the shore, where “scrub firs, their spirits quite unbroken by long years of tussle with the gulf winds, grew thickly.”
The women in my family are all huge fans of the Anne books and movies. And I have to confess to a fondness for the simpler time and place enshrined there.
