Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Friday, October 05, 2012

CHART: Labor Commissar Announces Obama Created 8.4 Million Jobs in September, Unemployment Now at 0.3%

Fiction. It's not just for novels any more. Biff Spackle created today's Soviet-style jobs chart


Noel Sheppard, writing at NewsBusters, describes why today's jobs report was just as legit as a Timmah Geithner $7 bill.

....more shocking, total employment, as measured by the Household Survey, rose by 873,000 in September... the biggest one month jump since June 1983.

As such, total employment now stands at the highest level it's been since December 2008 before Obama was inaugurated.

But even more mysterious is the divergence in the two surveys done by the Labor Department.

The Household Survey showed a gain of 873,000 people employed in September - resulting in the surprise drop in the unemployment rate - while the Establishment Survey only showed a rise of 114,000.

Seriously: why not 8 million jobs added? That makes just as much sense.



TURBOTAX SHERROD BROWN: Ohio's far left Senator keeps hiking our taxes while dodging his own

According to the National Journal's rankings, Sherrod Brown was the most left wing Senator based upon his votes in 2010.


But that's not the worst of it. While voting for some of the most massive taxpayer ripoffs in history -- including Obamacare -- Brown was avoiding paying his own taxes.

Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown was more than four months delinquent in paying taxes on his Washington, D.C., apartment and had to pay a penalty and interest last week.

This was not the first time, records show.

Brown also was delinquent in 2006 and 2007 and paid penalties and interest, according to tax records from the District of Columbia.

"I was late," he said on a conference call with reporters when asked about the recent delinquency. "I misplaced the bill and I paid it as soon as I found out. I paid a penalty for being late, and it won't happen again."

When a reporter noted that it also happened five and six years ago, Brown said: "I misplaced it then. This is a small apartment. I'm not in D.C. nearly every week, I'm here when the Senate's in session, I'm here three or four nights a week. I paid the penalty. And in no way, obviously, was I avoiding taxes."

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel -- an ex-Marine and a brilliant financial mind -- has faced an onslaught of negative advertising from Sherrod Brown and his far left cronies.

Click here to pink-slip this disgraceful hack and send him back to wherever the hell it is he came from.


KRUGPRESSION: Single Graphic Obliterates the Obama-Axelrod-Cutter Economic Talking Points

As Investors Business Daily puts it, President Obama's case for reelection rests on five economic claims, every single one of which is false. Every. Single. One.


Paul Krugman, Taegan Goddard, and Cher hardest hit.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Monday, October 01, 2012

The Most Brutal Jobs Graph of the Year

The Economic Populist blog does an outstanding job breaking down the most recent Labor Department numbers.

The press quotes all sorts of figures for the number of monthly job gains needed to keep up with population growth. We see numbers like 80,000, 100,000, 125,000 and 175,000 thrown around like statistical snow as the number of jobs needed each month just to keep up. What's the right one? How many jobs are needed each month just to keep up with population growth?

The actual monthly amount can be calculated and the Atlanta Fed even did us a huge favor by publishing an interactive monthly jobs calculator so you can go check for yourself. This month shows we need 104,116 payroll jobs to maintain the same unemployment rate of 8.1% with all of the other same terrible conditions the state of employment is in.

That's the key, the current terrible conditions the state of employment is in today. One of the reasons the number of jobs to keep up with population growth is so low is due to so many having dropped out of the labor force. If we had more people being counted as needing a job, the number of jobs to keep up with population growth would be much higher...


...our favorite and never reported BLS statistic amplifies the terrible situation for labor in this country. The BLS surveys people considered not part of the labor force and asks if they want a job right now. [Above] is a graph of the people who said yes and watch how this figure swells.

For August 2012, those not counted in the labor force but report they actually want and need a job increased by 403,000 in a month. That, folks, should have you horrified. Literally we have desperate and destitute people falling through the statistical crevasse, into the abyss where they can only shout out from the numerical darkness, yes I want a job!

The ongoing jobs catastrophe represents reason #3,054 that this ad...


...is the most terrifying political advertisement ever created.


Hat tip: BadBlue Money Channel.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

FINISHING WHAT HE STARTED: Scariest Ad Ever

Tell me whether you agree that this may be the most terrifying ad ever created:

1. THE SCARIEST AD EVER

2. FINISHING WHAT HE STARTED, FOOD STAMP EDITION

3. FINISHING WHAT HE STARTED, LAWLESSNESS EDITION

For those willing to examine the research, the "War on Poverty" has turned out to have been a $15 trillion failure. It has actually caused more misery, more poverty, and more violent crime than if we had never spent that money in the first place. And those trapped in the inner cities have been the hardest hit of all.


PREVIEW OF COMING DEFICIT ATTRACTIONS: Greek Neo-Nazis Granted 'Police Powers' Over Immigrants

Because -- historically speaking -- giving Nazis authority over others has worked out so well:

Greece: Neo-Nazis Golden Dawn Given 'Police Powers' over Immigrants

Support for the Neo-Nazi party is soaring amid claims that anti-immigrant violence is deliberately ignored by police

Greek police have been accused of directing the victims of crimes allegedly committed by immigrants to seek retribution from the violent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.

Golden Dawn is increasingly taking the law into its own hands with the complicity of security forces, the Guardian reported.

Numerous Athenians told the British newspaper that police are openly advising people to seek Golden Dawn protection instead of dealing with their complaints.

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," explained a US-trained civil servant who called police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants.

Support for the Neo-Nazi party is soaring in the near-bankrupt state, as are racially motivated attacks on immigrants... Immigrant communities accuse police of turning a blind eye to this sort of crime.

"In the past six months, knife-wielding fascists have attacked some 500 persons with impunity," Javied Aslam, the head of the Migrant Workers' Association in Greece and leader of the Greek Pakistani community told the BBC.

Although it sounds unrelated to the American economy, in truth this should serve as a dire warning to anyone concerned with the future. Unchecked deficit spending will lead to bankruptcy as certainly as night follows day. And civil unrest, despotism and tyranny follow close on bankruptcy's heels.

Unlike Greece, however, no country is large enough to bail out the United States.


Hat tip: @CapFlowWatch.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

OUR FUTURE UNDER OBAMA: Anti-Austerity Protests Rock Capitals of Spain and Portugal

Tens of thousands of protesters rallied in the capitals of Spain and Portugal to demand ends to the austerity cuts to government spending programs. The Associated Press reported that demonstrators were expressing their anger over tax hikes, government spending cuts and high unemployment rates.

As Margaret Thatcher famously observed, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."


This kind of civil unrest will look like a garden party if Barack Obama is reelected and permitted to continue his Cloward-Piven-inspired destruction of the economy.

And, no, you won't be getting free Obama-Phones if the economy collapses, drones.


Friday, September 28, 2012

"UNEXPECTED": Yet another downward revision of GDP confirms we're now in year four of the Obama Depression

Who would you believe? A man whose ads never refer to his track record -- or your lying eyes?

On Thursday, the Department of Commerce revised its second quarter estimate of economic growth (in terms of real gross domestic product, or GDP) down to 1.3 percent from 1.7 percent... Anything less than a 2 percent rate of growth is more typical of an economy wilting toward recession than an economy recovering from a recession...

Indeed, bad policies emanating from Washington are creating an environment where recession is more and more likely.


...Taxmageddon, a $500 billion tax increase, waits in 2013 if Congress and President Obama fail to act. The Heritage Foundation has argued that uncertainty associated with Taxmageddon is already dissuading businesses from investing in capital goods and hiring new workers. Domestic uncertainty is compounded by uncertainty about the future of Europe.

Confirming our analysis, the Census Bureau measured a 13 percent fall in new durable goods orders in separate data released Thursday. Orders of aircrafts fell sharply, leading an overall decline in investment.

Reagan inherited a far worse situation from Carter than Obama did. Inflation was nearing 20 percent. Unemployment was headed for double digits. Tax rates were crushing the private sector. And within two-and-a-half years -- working with a Democrat Congress -- Reagan had turned the entire economy around.

Obama's priority, on the other hand, was passing massive government programs: from housing "relief", to Obamacare, to cap-and-trade, to financial "reform", to a takeover of the student loan industry, to gutting welfare's work requirements, to expanding the food stamp state, and so on. He paid as much attention to his "Jobs Council" as he did to the bipartisan Deficit Commission. Which is to say: none.

Obama's priority isn't recovery. It's control. Control over you, the individual.

We have one chance to turn this mess around, and it comes on the first Tuesday in November. Tell everyone you know. This is it. It's the Superbowl for America.


Thursday, September 27, 2012

And now, a public service message from Obamaphone

The following is a public service message from ObamaPhone.


Yes, everybody in Cleveland who's a minority got an Obama phone!


Keep Obama in President, you know!


He gave us a phone!


He gonna do more!


You shine up, if you on food stamps, you on social security, you got low income, you disability...


Romney? He sucks! Bad.

For more more information about free government giveaways, visit ObamaPhone.com. And don't worry about who pays for it... that's for future generations to worry about!

Chart: The [holding two fingers up] recovery

We've been reading about the "recovery" ever since Barack Obama took office. For most Americans, however, the recovery has yet to materialize. Cafe Hayek relays the following chart from the St. Louis Fed:


In [an] interview I did with John Taylor, he pointed out that the ratio of employment to population hadn’t rebounded at all in the current recovery. How common is that? Here is data from FRED that looks at the ratio of employment to population. You have to go back to the recession of the early 1960′s (and it wasn’t much of a recession) to see anything like the lack of rebound.

The gray periods are recessions. The ratio usually rebounds sharply in the recovery. But not for this one...

Question for you drones: what makes you think that after three-and-a-half years of this miserable failure on the employment front that things are going to get better?

Here's a hint: with 2013's fiscal cliff, the deficit cliff, and the Obamacare cliff, things are about to get decidedly worse if this disastrous administration is returned to office.


Hat tip: BadBlue Money.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

BUT THEY'LL DO BETTER WITH THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM: Postal Service to File For Second Default in Two Months

But I'm sure they'll do a much better job with 16 percent of the entire economy, i.e., the country's health care system:

Postal Service Prepares for Second Default in Two Months


The U.S. Postal Service will default this week on a $5.6 billion congressionally mandated obligation to pre-fund retiree health benefits, marking the second time in two months the cash-strapped agency has done this.

The Postal Service last month failed to pay $5.5 billion for its fiscal 2011 prepayment obligation, which originally was due in September 2011 but was deferred by Congress until Aug. 1. That was the first time it ever defaulted on a payment to the Treasury Department. The $5.6 billion due this week, on Sept. 30, represents this fiscal year’s obligation.

Before this year, Congress helped USPS defer pre-funding payments required by a 2006 congressional mandate. Postal reform has challenged this Congress. Lawmakers warn that when they revisit the issue after the November election they likely won’t reach agreement on as major an overhaul as some deem necessary. USPS lost $5.2 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2012, $2.1 billion more than during the same time period in 2011.

Let me get this straight. The federal government's recent track record, just off the top of my head, is as follows:

• Medicare is bankrupt and headed for collapse in just six or seven years.

• Social Security is bankrupt and headed for collapse in the next 18 years.

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went bust in 2008, taking with it the entire housing sector.

• The Postal Service can't adjust to the digital age and is hemorrhaging cash like a giant version of Solyndra.

But Obamacare will be the first government program of its size -- in fact, the biggest government program in world history -- to succeed?

You have to have a serious mental disorder to believe that. Or be a hard-core Democrat. Not that I'm sure there's a difference at this point.

BUMBLER-IN-CHIEF: ‘I Want to See Us Export More Jobs’

Of course he does. Each of our 57 states must export more jobs, according to the smartest man ever to serve as president, although we can't be sure just how much of a genius he is because his college transcripts are unavailable.

Obama misspeaks: "I want to see us export more jobs"


Speaking at Kent State University in Ohio on Wednesday, President Obama misspoke, stating, "I want to see us export more jobs." Quickly correcting his remark to be, "export more products," he joked, "I was channeling my opponent there for a second."

In fact, if you listen to the recording, he says, "Actually, I - I - I - I - I - I was channeling my opponent there for a second."

Maybe we should have a Navy corpse-man check him out.

Yet another reason that SCOAMF is the quintessential description of First Air Marshal Obama, the failiest man ever to serve as President.

Jimmy Carter just breathed a huge sigh of relief.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

HE JUST NEEDS MORE TIME: Household incomes fell again in August; have now dropped a shocking 8.2 percent under President Obama

Anyone who wants to give this man four more years seriously needs to have a full psychiatric evaluation (unless they're a campaign bundler, in which case they're simply taking advantage of the President's Solyndra-style payoffs).

In another sign that the economic recovery under President Obama is not producing gains for average Americans, median household incomes fell 1.1% in August to $50,678, according to a report released Tuesday by Sentier Research.

Since the economic recovery started in June 2009, household incomes are down 5.7%, the Sentier data show, and they are down more than 8% since Obama took office.

...Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released its annual report showing that the number of people in poverty was nearly 3 million higher in 2011 than in 2009, an increase of 6%.

That report also found that average incomes for middle- and lower-income households fell in 2011 after adjusting for inflation. They rose only for the wealthiest 20% of households.

I'm guessing those wealthiest 20% include Obama's campaign bundlers who profited from green scams like Solyndra, Abound Solar, and the dozens of other payoffs.

I've found the SCOAMF-o-Meter particularly helpful in educating intelligent Democrats. Drones, on the other hand, are a lost cause. Trying to use facts, logic, reason or arithmetic with them is roughly equivalent to trying to teach calculus to a goldfish.


THE FAIL IS STRONG WITH THIS ONE: Health Care Premiums Skyrocket. Unexpectedly.

On no fewer than 19 separate occasions, President Obama promised his new health care plan -- since dubbed "Obamacare" -- would lower premiums by $2,500 per family, per year.


The results are in. Try and contain your surprise:

John Merline over at Investor’s Business Daily reports that the new Kaiser Family Foundation employee benefits survey reveals that employer-based health insurance premiums have risen a whopping 9.5% in 2011 and another 4.5% so far in 2012, due in large part to the insurance “reforms” of Obamacare such as mandatory coverage of kids to age 26, mandatory loss ratios of 85%+, mandatory free preventive care, etc. So much for President Obama’s pledge to cut health insurance premiums by $2,500 in his first term.

Even worse news? Premium increases will skyrocket in 2014, when the (most expensive) remainder of Obamacare health insurance “reforms” kick in, including the mandate to buy health insurance, elimination of annual and lifetime coverage caps, mandatory community rating bands and prohibition of the use of pre-existing conditions for underwriting.

To get a sense for the problem with trying to cover preexisting conditions, picture the following scenario:

Lindsey Lohan (not the actress, some other made up person) crashes her $106,000 Porsche 911 into a school-bus while drinking from a flask of vodka and texting. Before the police can show up, she purchases full automobile coverage and a $15 million umbrella liability policy from Flo (not the Progressive spokesperson, some other made up insurance pitchman). Moments after getting her policies, she calls the insurer's Claims Department to begin collecting.

Whatever you call that kind of "underwriting", it has nothing at all to do with "insurance". In fact, it's specifically designed to bankrupt insurers and move the country to a Soviet-style, single-payer system.


Sunday, September 23, 2012

Handy SCOAMF-o-Meter You Can Show Friends, Family, Neighbors

I found this chart, originally produced by John Thune's office, quite helpful:


Share it with any undecided voter you know. Because, as Terresa Monroe-Hamilton explains in a comprehensive post on the economy:

We are in a depression. The only reason the government achieves any plausible deniability with their assertions that “we are not in a depression” is by comparing the “obvious” visuals: we “don’t have bread lines” like they did in the 1930s. No. No, we don’t. Because the “bread lines” of today are concealed electronically.

Read the whole thing.


ANOTHER DEMOCRAT SUCCESS STORY: Estimate of California's real debt upped from $28 billion to... $335 billion

It must be fun to be a progressive. You get to spend money wildly without regard for who earned that money nor who will have to repay the loans you take out. I refer, of course, to Democrats in general... but also to Blue States like New York, Illinois and -- especially -- California:

Oh look, California is actually $335 billion in debt

The independent State Budget Crisis Tax Force [PDF] has released its analysis of California's finances and found that rather than being a whopping $28 billion in debt, as Gov. Jerry Brown alleged with he came to office, the state is actually a nearly unfathomable $335 billion debt. Brown called it a "wall," as the New York Times noted. But it's really more like a dozen walls. All stacked on top of each other to make a mega-wall that blocks out the Sun. 

This is not an exaggeration. Californian's total level of debt, on an off the books, is pushing a fifth of the total annual economic output of the state, which is about $2 trillion.


Some of the usual suspects are responsible for this: overspending and undertaxing during boom times, colossal pension liabilities, taking on too much debt. But the report zeroed in on ... a California tax system that relies far too much on the incomes of the wealthy, and in particular on income derived from capital gains, or the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets...

...new taxes will be approved or disapproved by California voters in November, via the ballot process. But the underlying problem of a tax structure that's exposed to boom-and-bust asset markets, from which the wealthy derive most of their income, remains... There is no easy way to change this, except to build an economy in California where a stable middle class can contribute more substantially to the tax coffers and have enough earnings to spend at a level that can enable sales taxes to address imbalances. 

Until spending and outlandish union contracts are reined in, California's efforts to tax its way out of the debt crisis are guaranteed to fail. Sucking more money from the productive sector to fund an increasingly out-of-control government can't succeed and won't succeed. It will simply drive more of the productive class away.

And the dichotomy of how the Left behaves with its own money versus how it treats the taxpayers' funds is best explained by Mark Levin.


Saturday, September 22, 2012

Unmasking Obama: A Special Report

Who is Barack Obama? A must-read special report by The Washington Examiner is excerpted and illustrated below.


The Image and the Reality



Over the years and in two autobiographies, Obama has presented himself to the world as many things, including radical community organizer, idealistic civil rights lawyer, dynamic reformer in the Illinois and U.S. senates, and, finally, the cool presidential voice of postpartisan hope and change...

...Beyond the spin and the polls, a starkly different picture emerges. It is a portrait of a man quite unlike his image, not a visionary reformer but rather a classic Chicago machine pol who thrives on rewarding himself and his friends with the spoils of public office, and who uses his position to punish his enemies.

Peter Schweizer captures this other Obama with a bracing statistic in his book "Throw Them All Out," published last year...

In the Obama economic stimulus program's Department of Energy loans, companies owned and run by Obama contributors and friends, like Solyndra's George Kaiser, received $16.4 billion. Those not linked to the president got only $4.1 billion. The Energy Department is far from the only federal program in which favoritism has heavily influenced federal grants.

To paraphrase Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt, Obama has seen his opportunities and taken them, over and over.

A Childhood of Privilege, not Hardship



First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions."

But... Obama lived in a "well-off neighborhood near the University of Hawaii where Barry, as he was known, resided in a comfortable home with his mother and her parents before she took him to Indonesia."

Tellingly, Obama has never lived in a black neighborhood. Maraniss reported in his book that when leftist activist Jerry Kellman interviewed Obama for a community organizing job in Chicago, he asked Obama how he felt about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life.

Obama accepted the job but chose not to live among those he would be organizing. Instead, he commuted 90 minutes each way daily from his apartment in Chicago's famous Hyde Park to the Altgeld Gardens housing project where he worked...

A Pattern of Minimal Performance



In the state Senate during the same years he was lecturing, Obama voted "present" nearly 130 times, the most of any legislator in the chamber.

When then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made Obama's state Senate voting record an issue in their Democratic presidential primary contest in 2007, the New York Times said it found at least 36 instances when Obama was the lone "present" vote or was one of six or fewer lawmakers casting that vote.

And during his lone term as a U.S. senator, according to Gov Track.us: "From Jan 2005 to Oct 2008, Obama missed 314 of 1300 recorded or roll call votes, which is 24.0%. This is worse than the median of 2.4%."

The 1997 Speech That Launched Obama



Few doubt that Barack Obama's stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight... But another, less-heralded Obama address -- delivered on Valentine's Day 1997 at First Chicago Bank -- was equally essential to his later successes. Without it, it is doubtful that he would have ever been in position to assume so prominent a role in 2004.

...people interviewed by the Examiner who heard him speak say Obama laid out a powerful vision for a political strategy that ultimately reshaped housing activism on the Left, first in Chicago and then nationwide...

...He was drawing from the same well that had produced the Community Reinvestment Act, relaxed federal standards for mortgage qualifications, and creative financial packaging of subprime loans, but doing so in a manner uniquely matched to conditions on the political ground of Chicago...

Chicago thus became the proving ground for Obama's vision, which, according to LISC spokesman Joel Bookman, "really changed the direction of community development in Chicago and ultimately nationally." ... It was an irresistible combination of money, politics and idealism that also offered endless opportunities for greed and tragic abuse of the poor.

For the Slumlord's Defense, Barack Obama, Esq.



In March 1994, a year before "Dreams" was published, Obama was the lead defense attorney on an obscure case in Cook County Court that has heretofore escaped examination by the national media.

In this case, Obama defended a Chicago slumlord and powerful political ally who was charged with a long list of offenses against poor residents... Brazier's WPIC had failed for nearly a month to supply heat and running water for the complex's 15 crumbling apartments. On Jan. 18, 1994, the day the heat went off, Chicago's official high temperature was 11 below zero, the day after it was 19 below... Even worse, the residents were then ordered to leave the WPIC complex in the winter chill without the due process they would have been afforded by an eviction procedure.

...In court documents, Daniel W. Weil, commissioner of Chicago's Buildings Department, slammed WPIC for multiple municipal code violations, including "failure to maintain adequate heat," failure "to provide every family unit with approved heating facilities," and "failure to provide adequate" supplies of either hot or cold running water.

...Obama also did legal work involved in the establishment of four Brazier-Rezko limited partnerships: Woodlawn Partners Ltd., Central Woodlawn Partnership, KRMB Limited Partnership and Woodlawn Drexel Ltd. Partnership. Rezko is now serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for fraud and attempted bribery on state government contracts.

Obama's Harshest Critics on the Left



Robert Stark, director of the liberal Harold Washington Institute for Research and Policy Studies, told the Examiner that the demolition effort required to clear the way for the new affordable-housing projects advocated by Obama was disastrous for low-income blacks on Chicago's South Side...

...Obama's toughest critic on the Left, however, was the late Robert Fitch. Fitch, a radical leftist and freelance journalist who specialized in urban politics and economics, said Obama surrounded himself with people who got rich on Chicago's $1.6 billion neighborhood demolition program known officially as the Plan for Transformation.

At least 25,000 low-income apartments in Chicago were destroyed under the program, which forced thousands of black families -- many of whom lived in Obama's state Senate district -- to move out of the city. Obama's political allies directed the effort.

"What we see is that the Chicago core of the Obama coalition is made up of blacks who've moved up by moving poor blacks out of the community," Fitch charged in a 2008 speech before the Harlem Tenants Association... Obama sold out to a corrupt Chicago establishment. "Obama's political base comes primarily from Chicago FIRE -- the finance, insurance and real estate industry," he said.

...Obama's political endorsements also worried liberal reformers concerned about good government. Cynthia Canary, former head of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, recalled Obama's endorsement of corrupt officials like the imprisoned Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Chicago City Council members.

The Poor People Obama Left Behind



Four years after Barack Obama's historic election as president, little seems to have changed for the African-American communities on Chicago's South Side. The lack of change -- or the sense that these neighborhoods are getting worse -- is eroding the president's standing among African-Americans in his hometown.

In 2011, Chicago suffered the third-highest black jobless rate among the nation's major metropolitan areas, at 19 percent, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute... Chicago still lacks enough affordable housing. Not only did the city demolish 25,000 public housing units in the previous decade, it also experienced more than 80,000 foreclosures, mainly in low-income neighborhoods.

Chicago "black nationalist" Eddie Read contends Obama has never fought for the black community. "I would not honestly tag Obama as a fighter for black people, black agenda or black issues," Read told The Washington Examiner... After Obama's election, Read said, "I hoped that it would change."

...D'Anna Carter, a neighborhood activist in Chicago's Woodlawn section, singled out the Habitat Co., which was run by Jarrett, now Obama's closest White House adviser... "They were never interested in poor people," she told the Examiner. "They would sell poor people a bill of goods," she said bitterly in an interview.

The Myth of Obama as State Senate Reformer



An Examiner review of a reform-minded state legislative caucus known as the "Fab Five" from 1995 to 2000 identified 22 proposals, including sweeping government procurement reforms like requiring open, competitive bidding for state contracts. Obama missed votes on several of the proposals, and those he supported were approved unanimously.

"He was nowhere to be found on reform," Fab Fiver Chris Lauzen told the Examiner. "I reached out to Barack. My wife and I took Barack and Michelle to dinner."

...Some of Obama's reluctance about the Fab Five may have stemmed from his occasional golf outings and lunches with the state's top gambling lobbyist, Alfred G. Ronan. Ronan was well-known in Illinois political circles for passing out cash contributions to supporters off the floor of the legislative chambers. Obama himself took $10,500 from Ronan and changed his position on a gambling bill afterward, according to the Los Angeles Times...

Cynthia Canary, former director of the largest statewide reform organization, said Obama's endorsement of Rod Blagojevich and other Daley allies worried her... "Obama has made a number of endorsements, not just the Blagojevich one -- he gave a number for the Chicago City Council that were complete whack jobs. I have never understood it or why he felt he needed to it," she said.

Obama's State Pension Scandal



State Sen. Barack Obama and members of an Illinois lobbying group representing politically connected minority-owned businesses launched a campaign in 2000 to pressure state pension funds to help their friends and donors... Obama and his cohorts targeted state officials in charge of pension funds for teachers, police and firemen, and regular government employees.

Much as the Rev. Jesse Jackson had been doing for years to Fortune 500 corporations, Obama and the Alliance of Business Leaders & Entrepreneurs, or ABLE, demanded that the officials set aside at least 15 percent of pension assets for management by minority-owned investment companies...

The campaign succeeded in early 2001 when more than $500 million from the pension funds was transferred to Ariel and Holland... Ariel's assets increased dramatically following the infusion from the pension funds, rising from $2.8 billion to $15 billion between 1999 and 2002, according to the firm's Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

John Rogers, Ariel Capital Management's CEO, and James Reynolds, founder of Loop Capital, were ABLE leaders and longtime Obama supporters... Even so, things did not go well a few years later. Ariel and Holland were terminated by ISBI and SURS for what pension board officials described as "underperformance."

Rogers also wasn't helped when U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald revealed in federal court proceedings that Rogers had given $22,500 to bundler Tony Rezko, who was later convicted of influence peddling... Rogers' money was destined for the campaign of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who, like Rezko, is now serving a federal prison sentence for public corruption. No charges were ever filed against Rogers in connection with the $22,500.

Rogers remains an Obama confidant. He has visited the White House at least 37 times since Obama's 2009 inauguration for both business and social meetings.


Based upon: Washington Examiner Special Report - The Obama You Don't Know. This is Part I of the report. Stay tuned for Part II.

"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Barack Obama loses his."

Peter Brady analyzes this week's depressing jobs report.

Initial jobless claims were just announced at 382K, much higher than the expected of 375K.

Last week's claims were announced at 382K, but revised up to 385K.

Today's headlines across all media outlets: JOBLESS CLAIMS FALL BY 3K

Wash, rinse and repeat.

Real unemployment is 11.7 percent... and still rising.



Title borrowed from Ronald Reagan.