For The Record (FTR)

FTR #1. There will be a lot of hoopla for the next few weeks about the greedy, inglorious basterds that we all know and love as “Wall Street.” Wall Street people are not wealth creators, regardless of the nonsense coming from their public relations machines. If they fail, as well many should, there will be some passing disruption akin to weeding out a vegetable garden. There may be limited, temporary disruption to the healthy productive plants but during harvest season the garden will be much more productive as a consequence of the weeding disruption. So it should have been when the greedy bastards (not everybody on Wall Street meets this definition) got caught outsmarting themselves with their aggressive holdings of crap securitized mortgage instruments. But, alas, the government, creator of all 20th century and now 21st century financial problems, decided to bail them out lest someone investigate their role in the fiasco. Well let’s set the record straight. The SEC has a budget of almost one billion dollars per year for an essentially recordkeeping oversight role that could be done in the private sector with computers for a fraction of the cost. The SEC should have done several things to blow the whistle on the greedy basterds. They did not. Instead, one sharpie and then a few others, with a computer and the $100 annual subscription fee to access the documents attached to the crap securitized mortgage instruments, analyzed them and concluded that they were a financial disaster waiting to happen in a very short time. So, they bet against the crap securities and made fortunes. They could have blown the whistle but as we subsequently have learned in the Madoff case, it would have been for naught. The SEC is way too important to listen to someone who is not in the territorial limits of the District of Columbia. Just to set the record straight, the greedy Wall Street basterds had more than casual support from their ignorant rating agency cohorts. More importantly, the finger prints of the national government in the form of the SEC, Department of the Treasury and Federal Reserve are all over this debacle. No one has paid for their complicity in this fiasco. This government refuses to self discipline. FTR.

FTR #2. The silly boy cum community organizer cum el presidente now wants to increase exports. His public relations releases for this cause du jour includes the following statement repeated sycophantly reported by NBC which appears to be the principal apologist/supporter for this rapidly failing (and that’s a fairly optimistic opinion) administration: “America is already the world's No. 1 exporter and the White House intends to stay in the lead, said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the president's National Export Initiative ahead of the speech.” Read it all, if you have a couple of minutes to waste, at http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/03/11/2225323.aspx  Now, just to set the record straight, there are problems with this statement and this “initiative.” As carefully researched and analyzed and presented by TheFundamentals is its February 23, 2010 posting, the US is not only not the “world’s No. 1 exporter” it is not even the No. 2. In dollar volume it is No. 3. Further, when analyzed on a per capita basis which means dollar value of exports per citizen, it drops to No. 9. Why does the government lie about our position? Well, if you have been reading TheFundamentals you know. For fifty years the US national government aided and abetted in many cases by state governments has taken a series of legislative actions designed to promote and protect certain groups of people which we know today as special interest groups. The most significant among these are public sector unions, attorneys and certain private sector entities. In so doing, these government bodies have forgotten the basics of economic intercourse which are price, quality and competitive features. The government has nothing to do with wealth creation. The government is a wealth destroyer. That is why it must be limited (see: USConsitution.) Wealth creation exists where enterprises are free to produce unfettered by government interference in the form of union promoting legislation, layers of rules and bureaucratic meddling and high taxes spent on non productive activities such as transfer payments and massive bureaucracies. There is as much chance of Obama increasing US exports as there is of Obama balancing a budget as there is of Obama paying down the national debt as there is of Obama even grasping that only through these aforementioned acts will US exports increase. FTR.

FTR #3. Let’s quit kidding ourselves about the failure of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid (OPR) health care entitlement legislation that will add massive spending to the annual deficits of the US long after this gang is enjoying their government pension checks. OPR run the national government in every sense of that term. They control all electoral and bureaucratic offices and personnel – over 2 million employees. Their majority in the senate is 59 – 41 and in the house they have about a 70 seat majority. And yet, they can’t get a simple majority to pass this legislation. Duh? Even Homer Simpson could see through the spin coming out of OPR about this legislation. What does it tell you when they can’t get any party out of power (POOP) votes and, even in their own party where they control all the goodies such as legislative favors and committee chairmanships, they cannot muster a simple majority out of a 70 vote absolute majority? The legislation stinks! All 2000+ pages of it. FTR.