About Me

Name: Patrick S. Adams
Email: patsworld1@comcast.net Biography
Loading...

Create Your Own Blog Find Other Townhall Blogs

Comments

Archives

Search

Blog Roll

 

Economic Rehab

Posted by Patrick S. Adams on Saturday, November 28, 2009 11:38:20 AM
America is not prepared for success. The bailout, the stimulus plan and the rising debt the federal government is running up to keep car companies, states, banks and brokerage houses afloat is no different than the enabling and denial you read about in books about substance abuse. A year ago, we saw our economy on the brink of "passing out" from excessive lending, poor corporate management and simply awfully written regulatory law. Rather than let it crash, experience the hangover and get back on its feet, we fed it another drink and hoped for the best. We continue to refuse to accept the fact that it's time for our economy to go to rehab.
 
Shortly before the innauguration of President Obama, this writer wrote this:

Instead of falling on their faces, the way they are supposed to in a free market system, these ineffective corporate managers are propped up and allowed to keep their failed businesses in tact because they are too big to fail all because some liberals are afraid too many jobs will be lost. So they interfere with that process instead of allowing the banks and the auto companies to fail in such a way that the strongest components of their businesses can be taken over by more qualified, more competent executives with better senses of integrity, industry knowledge and bigger bankrolls.

Our government looks to bailout banks and companies whose management approaches, structure, philosophy and accounting procedures are old school. Those in charge now have outlived their usefulness. In the socially Darwinist world of true capitalism, two of the big three auto makers would disappear, only to re-emerge as stronger, more fiscally sound businesses capable of competing with European companies because they will be owned by a new set of executives and stock holders. Free market capitalism would allow them to become efficient again.

The snapshot in time shows people losing their jobs. The long running movie shows them coming back to better jobs with stronger companies down the road. During the snapshot in time, the blow to the economy would be staggering. There is no sugar coating this. This is an economic crisis, and there are going to be bad things that are going to happen. But no one has ever remained permanently unemployed because their employer went under. They merely struggle until their next opportunity.

This blow can either happen now, with no bailouts, or it can happen later over and over again every time an industry runs into trouble and every time the government has to tap into taxpayer money to fix it.

Yes, I'm saying that bailout or no bailout, a lot of people are going to get hurt. The only difference is, if we can get the hurt behind us now, the companies and the economic system that redevelops later will be stronger, better and less and less likely to be subject to the same type of collapse.

That was written a year ago.
 
 
Has the unemployment problem improved after government bailouts and stimuli? Has the credit and housing market opened up (you know, those spickets the Fed was supposed to open with the TARP money)? Do individual households have more wealth today than a year ago? Are corporations any better managed now than they were a year ago? Are we taking in more tax revenue this year than we were last year?
 
Where are the jobs? Where are the new mortgage products for consumers and new loans for builders? Are even the wealthiest among us poorer today than a year ago? Why are the same practices continuing at companies who took stimulus money? How come taxes are so high and yet the treasury took in less revenue this year than they did the year before?
 
It's going to be a rough ride, a ride we've already delayed with the methadone of bailouts and stimuli. But the rough ride must occur before we can reignite and unleash the industrial giant that our nation truly is. We must allow old school economic thinking, corporate management styles, regulatory malpractice and taxation structures to go by the wayside before we can return our economic processes to the free market, allow corporations and small businesses to flourish based on free market principles and a tax policy that doesn't punish job creation, stop changing our regulatory policies at the whims of Congress and special interests and put into place long term fraud based oversight policies instead and open up new markets in energy development and health insurance.
 
Let's get our economy into rehab now, before it's too late. Then we can get on to the road to recovery by lowering taxes, creating jobs from energy development (both conventional and alternative) and lowering health care costs by expanding the role of private sector insurers by allowing interstate competition and focusing more on allowing the catastrophic health insurance market to grow.
 
If we continue with the policies of the Obama administration, we will end up with the double dip that economists are talking about, continued high unemployment, eventually inflation and finally permanent damage to our economy. If we have to suffer, at least we should benefit from the suffering by making the changes outlined above as part of our recovery program rather than continuing with the same old failed policies of the past.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Destroy the Wall, Then Take the Castle

Posted by Patrick S. Adams on Thursday, November 19, 2009 11:17:51 PM
While the GOP was wandering off the path, losing itself in the wilderness, Democrats capitalized on the opportunity and seized the reigns of power at a time when the media should have been examining the real reasons why our country nearly plunged into an economic catastrophe. Instead, our most revered "fourth branch" breached it's own rules of objectivity and jumped into bed with candidate Obama, accepting his untested proposals at face value instead of doing their homework while ignoring or criticizing proposals worth looking at from conservative leaders who today appear positioned to bring the GOP out of the wilderness and up to speed with the American people.
 
Lambs led to slaughter didn't act up until the moment of realization was upon them. And as the moment came, they organized TEA Party protests, exercised their rights as citizens at town hall meetings and became engaged in the political dialogue at such a level as never seen before. Those once dubbed "the silent majority" by Richard Nixon were labeled "teabaggers" by media and liberal elites who were stunned that they would dare to speak up against those who control our country politically in Washington, culturally in Hollywood and intellectually in New York.
 
Rather than look into what the motivating factors were and reporting on them, the media chose to to marginalize the grassroots and the resurgency in the conservative movement as if they could just whisk it a way with their own brand of "facts" and world view. From their ivory towers they were unable to notice that the luster they put on Obama's electoral victory has worn off.
 
Should Obama fail, it won't be because the media abandoned him. It will be because the people abandoned the media.

The one entity that our Founders thought would step to the plate for "we the people" failed us. Instead of informing us and acting as the watchdogs they traditionally have been, the media simply joined that which it was supposed to be watchdog over and became complicit in the effort to "fundamentally transform America" into something that our Founders would have never recognized.

The reason why the Republican party took such hits in the last election is because the press was a wall they could not get around. In the game of information dissemination, the McCain strategy was traditional: I state my positions, my opponent states his and the stenographer takes it down so the people can read it and decide . They didn't count on the stenographer doctoring the printout in favor of the opponent.

The loser in this of course was the American people who made a bad decision based on bad information. "We the people" figured it out on our own, though. That explains the torches and pitchforks outside the Capitol on 9/12. The media lied to us and we are p-ssed.
 
Polls show that the wall is crumbling now and the movement is getting closer to storming the castle.
 
The Pew Research Center found in its polling data that "The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows." In September 2009, only 29% of those polled said the press gets the facts straight and even worse only 18% said they dealt fairly with all sides.
 
The poster child for this assessment is Sarah Palin. The Fox News Poll today shows that Sarah Palin has gone from 38% favorable 51% unfavorable in July to 47% favorable to 42% unfavorable today. Yeah, I know, polls are polls; but this one is significant not in how Palin has jumped but why. Her book tour is helping her numbers because people are getting to know her unfiltered. The real question that jumped out was this one: Do you think Sarah Palin has been treated fairly or unfairly by the press? 61% say unfairly.

Elizabeth Scalia writes:

The American people have realized that they were played—by the very press charged with the public trust of information-gathering and presentment—into a bait-and-switch. They are not going to listen to the press, anymore. [...] Palin is that outlet, now Bush is gone, and the putzes in the press can’t mock, spite, roll-their-eyes or seethe enough about her. But their mugging and huffing and mocking is not working, this time.

If Barack Obama was elected with the blessing of the press and now most people think the press is unfair, what does that tell you for his future and the future of the Democrat party?

This underlying distrust of the media has made people turn away from the major networks and newspapers. They now look  toward social media and the blogosphere where they communicate freely and unfiltered, passing along facts and debunking myths. Facebook and Twitter have proven to be the big guns that conservatives didn't have in the 2008 election. Now they are firing away relentlessly as they soften the target for the ground assault in 2010.
 
The Democrats and the elites have a lot to be concerned about.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

The Revolution Has Begun

Posted by Patrick S. Adams on Tuesday, November 03, 2009 1:14:01 PM
Our Founding Fathers knew that we could never survive as a nation if our leaders were chosen by the barrel of a gun or a select few in a smoky back room . The United States of America is the greatest and most successful experiment in self governing. While other nations mark their political cycles with popular uprisings and violent revolution, we mark ours with elections. The Constitution stands the test when our country veers off course, as it did in 2008. With smoke and mirrors, grand oratory and the complicity of an adoring media which threw their objectivity out the window, a radical socialist who once called the U.S. Constitution "a flawed document" became President. Fooled once, the American people have awoken to not get fooled again. At ballot boxes in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, the revolution has begun.

Each citizen is a minuteman who uses buttons, levers or punchcards as his or her weapon. We mobilize via Twitter and Facebook. One if by mainstream media and two if by DNC, we stand watch, citizen activists, over the shining city that is now in the iron grip of Barack the Barbarian. We wield our metaphorical swords with cutting words on our blogs. We swarm the steps of the Capitol demanding our country back. We form groups and support candidates as we take up the call to "preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth," fearing that we may have inadventently sentenced "them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness" with our last electoral mistake.
 
Americans learn their lessons the hard way, but we learn them well. 2008 was our political Pearl Harbor. We fell asleep at the switch, assuming that this Democrat would be just like the last Democrat. We ignored the warning signs: Obama's associations with radicals. We didn't read deeply enough into Obama's own words in his books and writings. Noone has seen the video of him with William Ayers and noone has read his master's thesis. Like an employer who overlooked a job candidate's references, we hired the wrong guy and we now realize it.
 
So we begin a two tiered process toward correcting the mistake.
 
First, we take to task the good old boy network of the old Republican party. Integrity free centrism for the sake of winning elections, party insiders making decisions for the rank and file, silly rebranding themes such as compassionate conservatism or neo-conservatism and the business as usual gaming the system is about to meet their endings because America woke up and learned from a very bad mistake.
 
In cleaning up the party, we infiltrate it from the grassroots up. We speak out against party insiders picking liberal Republicans for the sake of winning elections and we pick our own candidates instead. We prove to the party insiders that we are smarter than them and that a conservative like Doug Hoffman can win. We don't water down our principals. We are true to the Founding Fathers, The U.S. Constitution and our last great warrior, Ronald Reagan. We re-embrace Sarah Palin and welcome her leadership. We elect an unapologetic conservative governor of Virginia and we win the first battles of the new revolution ON OBAMA'S TURF!
 
Second, we revive the Republican party and return it to its Reagan roots so that it can be the vehicle we need to end the madness in Washington. The new Republican party will be the vehicle by which the grassroots citizenry of this country focuses on the next step in the revolution: taking back Congress. By forging local leadership and recruiting strong local candidates, the states and their legislative districts now back in the hands of conservatives, we move to the national representative wing of our government. 2010 will be "politically bloody" for those who do not hear us now.
 
Finally, strengthened by our electoral wins locally, statewide and nationally, we will head into 2012 an army stronger and more powerful than ever before. There will be a strong bench of leadership to choose from this time. But the old guard of the Republican party is going to have to do what it has not always done best, back those that will help them win. No guts, no glory: those who fear choosing the right candidate based on what the left or the media will say about them need not apply. For some reason RINOs only seem to attract sheep. That can never happen again.
 
There must be no compromising on one principal. The party that brings in people of all walks of life and all socio-economic classes, and welcomes libertarians, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives to the table is not shutting anyone out. Those who feel they are being shut out are just not choosing to come in. The final leg of the revolution will only succeed if we are led into battle in 2012 by a strong, principled, Reagan devout and uncompromising conservative who understands that the biggest tent we can ever erect can only be built with the smallest government possible and in a way that looks nothing like business as usual.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive
« Previous1Next »