SIMPLE, TRUE, AND STRAIGHT FORWARD…

They came from AIG employees.

Do you think they should give that money back, campaign contributions?

They gave over a hundred thousand dollars to Chris Dodd and Obama.  Should they give the money back?

Ed Morrissey at the blog, HotAir.comI think as much of the capitalist system as they can destroy, they will.  They will at least send it on a downward cycle, which creates the need for government. :

“While everybody assails AIG for using less than one-tenth of 1% of the taxpayer bailout money, another recipient of government largesse has its own bonus program in operation.  According to their annual report, Freddie Mac…”

Now, Freddie Mac is another GSE, Government Sponsored Enterprise.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are basically the same thing.  Fannie Mae was first.  These are “private sector businesses owned by the government,” which of course is an oxymoron.

It’s not possible, and we all know the controversy about Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines and all these guys taking a $90 million. When are they going to give their bonuses back, by the way?

Jim Johnson and Daniel Mudd and Franklin Raines, when are they going to give their bonuses back?  They were kicked out of there for fraud at Fannie Mae?

There’s a story that Freddie Mac is going to need maybe $150 billion in bailout money to stay solvent because it just is not working out for them either.  But Morrissey points out that in the annual report, Freddie Mac…

“has a generous retention bonus plan built into its operation for the next year.  Eligibility includes all of the senior and executive VPs.  It comes in four payouts, and only the last has any connection to company performance.  It’s Exhibit 10-4 on page 414-5.”

It lays out the program.  Retention bonuses scheduled next year at Freddie Mac, and they are sizeable bonuses to be paid out four times to executives.

I’ll tell you, you’re being worked up into a frenzy here and you are being SCAMMED.

As much of the capitalist system as they can destroy, they will.

They will at least send it on a downward cycle, which creates the need for government.

They did it with Hurricane Katrina.  They do it with everything that goes wrong.

Any damage they can inflict in the capitalist sector of this country, they will do so to create a crisis and say,

“Only we can fix this.  See, this doesn’t work.  See, this is immoral.  Look at all the people hurting, look at all the people in pain.”

And then they’ll point to AIG which got bailed out,

“Look at all these rich people, look at all their bonuses.”

And nobody will remember that the bonuses were authorized by Obama.

These bonuses were authorized, they were required to be placed by Obama in the stimulus bill.

These tea parties are blossoming and growing all over the fruited plain.

People are fed up, and I’ll tell you what, it’s not about bonuses to AIG people.  That’s not why these tea parties are taking place.

These tea parties — God love you people doing them. These tea parties are taking place because people are tired of paying the freight for people who refuse to work, they’re tired of paying mortgages for people who are making no effort to pay them.  They are tired of bailing out failed companies.  They are tired of things like unions and card check being forced on small business.

These tea parties are a direct result of an outrage at this administration for trying to wipe out the fundamental building blocks of this nation’s founding.

That’s what’s under assault, capitalism and this nation’s founding, and that’s what these tea these tea parties are all about. They’re not happening because of bonuses to people that work at AIG.  One hundred fifty tea parties have taken place or are planned across the fruited plain.

Notice how we never hear about all these from the Media.  Boy, didn’t they enjoy the Anti-War Protest?

I guess destroying the country from the inside of government doesn’t seem to interest all the elites in the media now the Democrats are running the show.

For the last 8 years, I remember being told…

“It’s Patriotic to criticize the President, the Military and about anything they could come up with…”

Aren’t we just being patriotic?

Our domestic oil companies are huge within the context of the continental United States — well, including Alaska and Hawaii, but in terms of the world, they’re tiny. They’re among the smallest oil companies out there.

“US Senate Republicans have blocked a Democratic plan to tax the windfall profits of the largest oil companies. Democrats on Tuesday failed, 51-43, to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican delaying tactic on the energy package, and bring the bill up for consideration. Democrats said the huge profits enjoyed by the largest US oil companies should be reined in with motorists paying more than $4 a gallon (0.64 per liter for gasoline and oil prices soaring well beyond $100 a barrel.) But Republican critics said higher taxes on oil companies would increase — not lower — gasoline prices.”

Look, Jimmy Carter did this. Jimmy Carter, windfall profits tax on the big oil companies during that four years of malaise, and you know what happened…

Jimmy Carter did his windfall profits tax, and the oil companies said, “Okay, fine, we’ll stop producing as much in the United States. We’ll lower our production so we’re not paying taxes,” and that’s exactly what happened. They cut back production domestically. They went back and produced more in their offshore properties and tracts.

The Democrats know this.

This is not about revenue, it’s not about oil; it’s about punishment. It is about punishing risk takers. It is about class envy. It is about punishing people who then have success after taking a risk.

It’s like the minimum wage. They raised the minimum wage, it’s one of the few achievements that Nancy Pelosi had. And so we got the most recent unemployment report, 5.5%.

And of course, all hell broke loose on Wall Street, and everybody was panicking. Bbut very few people put together the fact that this new increase in the minimum wage rate combined with a flooded job market of both high school students and college graduates is what led to the 5.5% employment number.

Jerry Bowyer was posted a piece at Townhall.com called: “What the Media Didn’t Tell You About Friday’s Unemployment Spike.”

“It wasn’t Bush, it wasn’t greedy corporations, or free trade, or history’s most over-predicted recession. It was not the oil companies, income inequality, or the excesses of cowboy capitalism. None of these things caused the unemployment rate to jump a half a percentage point in one month. Ask yourself a few questions: Why did unemployment surge at a time when unemployment compensation claims are historically low? More to the point, how could unemployment spike this much without a coinciding spike in corporate layoffs?”

If unemployment went up this high, where in the hell were all the people that lost their jobs, is what he’s saying. There weren’t lost jobs and yet unemployment is up a half a point?

“The answer to all of these questions is the same: because very few people lost jobs last month. This huge jump in the size of the unemployed comes from new entrants to the economy — hundreds of thousands of them. In short, well over 600,000 people who were not job seekers in April became job seekers in May. And who starts looking for work at the end of spring? That’s right — students. Hundreds of thousands of students are looking for work right now, and they’re not finding it. Congress is to blame. Last year Congressional Democrats passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which started a phased hike of the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25.
…
Free market economists warned them that this would increase unemployment — that rapid increases in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest.”

You know the percentage of people earning the minimum wage in this country on any given day is well over 50% teenagers. It’s not people who are providing for a family of four or a family of two.

“Rapid increases in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest. But the class-warriors are running the people’s house now, and they would hear none of that, so they took to the floor, let loose the dogs of demagoguery, and saddled America’s pizza parlors, municipal swimming pools, house painting businesses and lawn mowing services with a huge cost increase. Now, we see the perfectly logical outcome of wage controls.”

Which is exactly what the minimum wage is. It’s a wage control, and it is an arbitrarily established number that has nothing to do with productivity, experience, qualification.

So it’s a wage control. And the logical outcome of such “rising unemployment among the most economically vulnerable.

Friday’s unemployment spike occurred overwhelmingly among teenagers, and secondarily among African Americans. Just like we said it would. A kid who is at entry level of job skills may be a good deal at 5 bucks an hour, but not at 7.

Our anointed leaders gets to glory in their generosity (with other people’s money) and just so long as very few people in the media know that a demand curve slopes downward (a good bet, there), no one calls them on it. This summer the left will make political lemonade out of a tough student job market. Heck, it may provide a small army of angry unemployed youth to man the campaign, hungry for hope and (loose) change, never once realizing that they’re working to entrench the leftie war on business, which left them jobless this summer in the first place.

The key to understanding this is very simple.

Hardly anybody lost a job in May when the unemployment rate went up half a point, five to five and a half percent. And those who couldn’t find work were the new job market entrants.

What’s all this got to do with price of oil, the windfall profits tax? Because none of this is aimed at actually helping anybody, and it’s typical liberalism, it ends up harming the very people it’s intended to help.

Look at Obama and his predicted, at least he says this is what he wants to do, tax increases. He wants to raise taxes to 39% on people who make $200,000 a year or more. To him that’s rich. Current rate’s 35%.

He wants to take it back to the glory days of the Clinton administration of 39%.

All right, fine and dandy. Well, what’s going to happen here?

Well, how many small business owners, the largest employers collectively in the country, they file their sub-S, Subchapter S corporations, but they file their returns on a personal return, or 1040. So their rate’s going to go from 35 to 39, guess what?

The very people that Obama says, look, I’m going to get even with the rich people for you. I’m going to raise their taxes. I’m going to make things fair. And these people are going to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, you stick it to them. And who gets it stuck to ’em? The guy who loses his job who’s not making $200,000 because his employer has to fire him in order to pay the federal government’s new taxes authored by Obama.

When Congress directs small business, everybody, to raise the minimum wage on a graduated scale up to $7.15, well… small business owners are not going to sit there and say, oh, well, okay, because they don’t have, just like you probably don’t at home, they don’t have an unlimited supply of cash sitting around that they’re not doing anything with. They might have some cash flow, but it’s allocated or it’s there for insurance or what have you.

But if somebody comes along and says, “Look, the four guys you’re paying minimum wage you’ve gotta increase them by X,” one of them is going to lose a job because the business owner is going to do his best not to sit there and lose money, ’cause if he loses money for too long he’s out of business, and then everybody that works there is fired.

This is the incremental loss of basic liberties and freedoms.

All of these well-intentioned people who have convinced way too many Americans that their intentions are honorable and they love people and they’re filled with compassion and yet everything or most everything they try as a remedy to some social problem, not only doesn’t work, it exacerbates the problem.

McCain went down to talk to Big Oil execs. He gave a speech on energy and conservation. Here is the first of two portions.

MCCAIN: We have proven oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States, but a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production, and I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and put our own reserves to use.

All right, all right, all right, drill here, drill now, pay less.

Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.

Folks, this is the issue. It’s not the equivalent of going to the moon, but it is close. This is a goal, a national goal, to become energy independent.

We have the crude. We have the supply. We have it. We just have to go get it. And you don’t get it by sitting around waiting.

You gotta take the first step. In building anything, it takes time. So this is something to rally the people behind. We’ve got the tipping point here, four dollar a gallon gasoline, and it’s going to be great because the Democrats are going to oppose this. They’re going to stand in the way of it. They’re going to be easy to caricature. It will be easy to explain to people. This is not a complicated issue at all. Here’s another McCain qoute.

MCCAIN: He wants a windfall profits tax on oil. To go along with the new taxes he also plans for coal and natural gas. My friends, if the plan sounds familiar, it’s because that was President Jimmy Carter’s big idea, too. And a lot of good it did us.

He’s right about that. It’s accurate, it’s correct, and he’s telling the truth about Obama.

He wants to raise taxes on all these things. The more you tax an activity, the less of that activity you get.

It’s just that simple, proven by years and years and years of human existence.

Here is Obama. This is aboard his campaign plane, he’s trying to paint McCain here as a flip-flopper while he has on his staff the original flip-flopper, John Kerry. Here’s Obama, first of two.

OBAMA: This is yet another reversal by John McCain in terms of his earlier positions, and I think we could set up an interesting debate between John McCain 2000 and John McCain 2008.

Let me help out here, Senator Obama…

If you say no to offshore drilling or drilling in ANWR when oil is at $20 or $30 a barrel, and then you change your mind and say yes to offshore drilling when oil is $140 a barrel, sir, that’s not a flip-flop. That’s just common sense.

It’s like John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, was asked, “Sir, how come you’ve changed your mind?” He said, “Sir, when the facts change, I change my mind.”

The facts have changed here. Oil is no longer $30 a barrel, it’s $140. It’s now profitable to get the shale oil the president was talking about. This is not a flip-flop.

What we have here, the “No-Drill Democrats“ — are on a crash course not to meet our energy needs. They are in a full-court press to cover their rear ends.

This is almost, not quite, but similar to what’s happening in Iraq. Last year at this time and the year before that, the Democrats were openly embracing defeat, saying our troops couldn’t win, they had no chance, we were fighting an unjust war, we need pull out, we need to lose, and Harry Reid was saying we already have lost.

Now we’ve done a 180 and all of a sudden the news out of Iraq is good, but Democrats don’t dare admit it. Same thing’s happening here with the price of oil, energy independence. They continually are on the wrong side of every major issue facing this country and its growth and its future.

So the Democrats are doing everything they can to cover their rears here, not meet our energy needs. As the law of supply and demand jacks up prices, as more voters realize they’re paying the price for liberal special interests, as the polls swing in favor of more drilling, which they are doing, the last refuge of liberals is always to lie and mislead.

They pop up on television, they smile, they say drilling will not lower prices now.

— Wake up people: Nothing will right now.

DEMOCRAT: There’s not one thing we could do to lower prices right now. ANWR alone won’t make us energy independent for more than six months.

–– Nobody ever said that it would. But I’ll tell you what, just this announcement, just the announcement of this initiative, I’m going to be curious to see what goes on in the speculation market, in the futures market.

I’m going to be interested to see how it affects the overall market.

I’ll guarantee you that if the Democrats ever got wise and went along with this and we lift the executive order that prohibits offshore drilling, you watch what happens to the price of oil, once the world knows that the United States of America is going to go get.

They know it, they resent it, and they fear it, as do the Democrats. Democrats don’t like us being this big. They don’t like us being a superpower. They think it creates victims in the rest of the world; we need to be cut down to size.

This issue fits perfectly.

We could probably have a fairly immediate effect on price just by announcing our intention to start drilling. Democrats are saying that there are drilling leases out there. Is it, what, millions of acres?

Well, the leases are too short-term to allow for EPA rules and test drilling. So then they blame it on Big Oil or Big Speculators or Big Bush or Big Cheney.

They blame it on everything but themselves, and their no-drill, no-refine, no-nuclear-plant policies, and that’s exactly who they are: the no-drill, no-refine, no-nuclear-plant Democrats.

Links to series post:

1. OBAMA; the solution to the rising gas prices…

2. Democrats attack failed policies of the past.

3. Simple TRUTH about oil in the U.S.A.

4. Domestic drilling – only to reduce price by a few cents?