Obama’s Mission: Government Command and Control of Economy

RUSH: But I noticed that the TARP extension money, the TARP extension by the tax cheat, Timothy Geithner, that extended TARP until 2010 — I happened to notice that they extended it in 2010 to right before the congressional elections. So I’ve always known, I have always — ’cause I know these people. These are slush funds, both the stimulus and TARP, slush funds for the election of Democrats.

Now, here’s a story from CNNMoney.com. ‘Fourteen months and $700 billion later, did the federal TARP bailout do the job? A bailout watchdog group, addressing those questions in a report released [today], gave the Troubled Asset Relief Program a mixed report card. The Congressional Oversight Panel found that TARP stopped the financial panic and stabilized the banking system after the once-in-a-lifetime measure was hurriedly enacted in October [last year]. But, the panel wrote, that the bailout failed to stem problems like lackluster lending and growing foreclosures that still plague the economy. It even suggests that TARP may have done harm by making some banks and firms, considered too big for regulators to allow them to fail, even bigger and be creating a new expectation that banks will always be saved.’ So the watchdog group says (paraphrase), ‘You know, on balance, it isn’t any good. On balance it may have done harm.’ This should be ended as quickly as possible. And Obama is salivating at the chance to get his hands on this money to, quote, unquote, create jobs. This is going to be one of the biggest stashes of walking-around money that any politician has ever had to dispense.

‘The main committee report lays out the key areas where TARP has missed its mark: Many consumers and businesses are still having trouble getting loans. Banks are still failing at a fast pace. Toxic assets remain on balance sheets of large banks. Foreclosures continue to grow, and jobs remain scarce.’ Now, TARP stands for Troubled Asset Relief Program. Do you remember when it was originally for, Snerdley? What was the original stated purpose of TARP? Right. To buy toxic assets from the banks left over from the subprime mortgage crisis, worthless paper that they created, new investment products to try to give themselves a little insurance with and get those off the books of the banks. They’re still there. And then the Treasury secretary was given sole discretion how to use the money. After it was then signed and authorized, Henry Paulson, the Bush Treasury secretary said (paraphrase), ‘Hey, you know what? We’re going to change this, we’re going to give money to some of these banks so they can start lending.’ And, remember, some institutions were not chartered as banks, so they changed their charter to become banks so that they could get some of the money. Some Wall Street firms became banks so that they could get some of the money. I always thought that one of the things going on here was Paulson taking care of his buddies who also have homes in the Hamptons and didn’t want to lose ’em. I mean, these people do tend to hang together.

Here’s another CNNMoney.com story. ‘Residential real estate owners suffered through another down year, but losses were much lower than 2008.’ I have discovered the media trick here in reporting this bad news. The trick is that they report things as being not as bad as last year. I have seen articles saying retail is not down as much as last year. What is not said is that last year and this year are all down from record lows. It doesn’t matter. They’re using last year as a benchmark: ‘It’s not quite as bad as last year, so things are improving.’ They’re not. Both years are at record lows. They can spin it all they want, but the news is bad.

Here’s how they do it. ‘American homeowners will have lost nearly $500 billion in home value by year’s end.’ Poof! Gone, after one year of Obama. Five hundred billion dollars in home value, gone. ‘Still’ — next paragraph — ‘that’s a big improvement over 2008, when values fell by $3.6 trillion, according to a report released’ — So the total now then would be $4.1 trillion in two years, and they want to try to spin that as good news! And, by the way, you watch these job numbers that gave us 10% unemployment — they’re going to be revised. The Labor Department’s already admitted that they undercounted some 400,000 people out of work. It’s not 10%, it’s much higher, they’re going to revise those numbers. They’re going to be revising these numbers all the way through the spring, by the way. ‘The gigantic Los Angeles market suffered the largest total loss in home value, at $60.8 billion. Metro Chicago values fell $49.6 billion and New York dropped $49 billion.’ Negative equity is the most important predictor of default.

And here it is. ‘Administration Warns of ‘Command-and-Control’ Regulation Over Emissions — The Obama administration is warning Congress if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a ‘command-and-control’ role over the process in a way that could hurt business. The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen[.] Jackson, however, tried to strike a tone of cooperation in her address Wednesday, explaining the EPA’s new powers to regulate greenhouse gases will be used to complement legislation pending in Congress, not replace it. ‘This is not ‘either-or’ moment. It’s a ‘both-and’ moment’… [But the official said,] ‘If you don’t pass this legislation, then… the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area… and it’s not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

This is exactly what they want. They’re holding this out here: ‘You guys in Congress, you better act or we’re going to have to do it.’ Basically what’s happening here is that the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate are being blackmailed by Barack Obama through Lisa Jackson at the EPA: ‘If you guys don’t do it, we are. You don’t pass cap and trade it won’t matter, because we’re going to implement it anyway by fiat.’ United States of America. Home of the free, land of the brave — but not for long.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Mark in Waterbury, Connecticut, Mark, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Longtime listener, first-time caller, very nervous, so bear with me.

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: It just seems to me that the common denominator of all these compromises are unfunded mandates. I mean now they’re going to say, okay, private insurance companies, yeah, we can involve them but they gotta be nonprofit private insurance companies. Well how are they going to stay in business if you can’t make a profit?

RUSH: Well, the government. A nonprofit insurance company overseen by the government is the government.

CALLER: They’re also saying that the insurance companies will have to cover preexisting conditions. So if your house burns down then you can get house insurance and everything will be taken care of, or as Obama said in his speech in Colorado, the government will make it so that people can’t pay more than such-and-such out of their pocket. I mean it just seems to me that the premiums are going to increase to the point of, you know, there will be no option but the public option. So all these compromises, it just seems that all roads lead to the public option.

RUSH: Exactly right. You’ve got it. You’ve nailed it. And you did it even while you were nervous.

CALLER: And I mean just as they did to the banks, I mean they mandated banks out of businesses by making them, you know — telling them to lend to unqualified borrowers, you know. And so they went out of business, or else they were accused of predatory lending because they couldn’t pay it back, you know? Mandates alone kill all these businesses, banking and insurance, you know?

RUSH: Look, you’re saying things here to which there is an obvious conclusion, and you probably have arrived at it on your own, but if not, let me help. What you have just described is liberals lie. It’s no more complicated than that. Whenever any liberal politician or leader announces a plan, it’s a lie. They also, in order to move their agenda, have to have at least one demon, preferably several. In this cycle, they have demonized doctors; they have demonized pediatricians; they have demonized the insurance companies; they demonize every entity or as many entities in the private sector as possible to convince people they’re being ripped off by people in order to get people to side with government solutions to problems. Everything is a lie! You can go into as much detail to point it out to people as you want but the simple way to understand these people is: they lie.