George Rebane

The progressives in Congress keep rolling over the country like a cloud of locusts.  Next week President Obama will sign his ‘finance reform’ bill that just passed Congress.  The legislation will do nothing to secure us against the kind of financial calamity we went through, but will create another very expensive and large government department, and make us uncompetitive in the world’s financial markets.

Fannie and Freddie are untouched and continue to make and guarantee disastrous loans.  The legislative goads to irresponsible consumer borrowing remain in place.  The causes of the current recession remain politicized and unstudied.  Remember that the ballyhooed financial commission empanelled to figure all this out and then recommend new legislation will not even issue its report until after the election.  When the Dems figured out they may lose the key to their congressional steamroller, they exposed their hand and said ‘Hell, let’s get done what we were going to do anyway, commission report or no commission report.’

This 2,000 plus page monstrosity is an iceberg, the part we see is already bad and the parts that will come to light in coming months (years?) are guaranteed to be worse.  Our financial industry was supposed to be the great hope to fill in for American manufacturing that has and continues to go overseas.   Now that possibility will go by the board.

Apple Corporation was recently advised to get in there and start playing the ‘Washington Game’ before something bad happens to the company.  This entails hiring the obligatory phalanx of K Street lobbyists and making the rounds of political contributions (read bribes) to the appropriate worthies in Congress.  Microsoft was so co-opted years ago, and Google just recently.  Players in the Washington Game trade corporate focus on innovation and the market for getting regulatory relief, business sector ‘favors’, and tax breaks.  This is the cost of becoming big and successful and then transiting to stable and compliant.  Another dimension of parasitics, but I digress.

Those of us who warned of the fraud, waste, and costs in TARP, ARRA, and Obamacare were vilified for our rightwing excesses.  Now EVERY ONE of those admonitions have come true with more arriving daily that even we could not see.  America continues to be pummeled by the progressives busy ushering in the socialist era.  And the worse it predictably gets, the more the sheeple will clamor for ‘protection’ by a bigger redistributionist government.

The President’s lie du jour on this bill is, “Unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking your customers, you have nothing to fear.”  Remember about ‘you get to keep your doctor’, ‘you get to keep your insurance’, ‘no federally funded abortions’. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.