Recently, people have started to notice that government employees, especially federal employees are starting to make more money than private sector employees. USA Today reported in March that federal employees had salaries of over 12% more than private sector employees in 2008. And, this noted that the benefits were even higher:

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

One would think that with regulators failing or watching porn and the public’s estimation of government at an all-time low, Congress would be interested in doing something about this. Not Chris Dodd or the Democrats. Instead, his financial regulation bill actually creates a whole office full of government bureaucrats with unlimited salaries. Let’s look at the text of Section 152 (d).

(d) OFFICE PERSONNEL
(1) IN GENERAL
—The Director, in consultation with the Chairperson, may fix the number of,
and appoint and direct, all employees of the Office.

This means that the Director of the Office of Financial Research picks the size of the department, not Congress. And their pay is set at the discretion of the office, not subject to the rules governing civil servants.

(2) COMPENSATION
—The Director, in consultation with the Chairperson, shall fix, adjust, anadminister the pay for all employees of the Office without regard to chapter 51 or subchapter III ofchapter 53 of title 5, United States Code, relatingto classification of positions and General Schedule pay rates.

Let me make sure I get this right.

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As President Obama vacationed in North Carolina this past weekend, concerned Americans decided to dedicate their time to freedom. The Post-Party Summits, hosted by American Majority, Smart Girl Politics and RedState, kicked off the first Summit in Pittsburgh, PA on April 23^rd. American Majority President Ned Ryun explained the idea behind the Post-Party Summits in a recent interview:

“The Post-Parties are about moving from protesting to implementing, and that’s what was so exciting about Pittsburgh: these people came to learn, realizing that the next iteration of the tea party movement is organizing into a potent political force. And I believe that is the answer to bringing about the change needed in this country: the tea party and 9.12 movements organizing into privatized political infrastructure to advance the great principles of free enterprise, individual freedom, and limited government.”

On Friday evening during the opening dinner, Erick Erickson of RedState gave a rousing speech regarding the next step for concerned Americans. The audience went wild when Erickson stated “The silent majority can no longer be silent.”

The Summit training courses were designed to equip citizens with the tools to effectively participate in the electoral process. Classes include, Creative Leadership,Micro-targeting Precincts, Building Effective Coalitions, Running for Office, Media Coaching: TV and Radio, and a host of other classes designed to train Americans to become more involved in the community. Ryun described it as being:

“A community organizer for Freedom”

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It’s time for your weekly dose of Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, a podcast brought to you by the fine folks at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com, your home for conservative podcasts. In this week’s edition, we discuss the upheaval in the marketplace in the wake of Greece’s problems and we talk about the White House plan, as advocated by Steny Hoyer and Paul Volcker, to institute a VAT.

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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

TNL: What Republicans Should Have Done About Financial Regulation
Andy Xie: The Chinese Housing Bubble
Obama: “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”
Hoyer: Shared Sacrifices Will Solve Debt Crisis
TNL: What the Tea Party Movement is Really About

The Hill reports that during a visit to a Macon, Missouri ethanol plant this week, President Obama said that he wants to triple ethanol production over the next twelve years:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday touted ethanol – both the current variety and next-wave fuels – as a key part of his energy strategy and a way to revive rural economies.

Obama endorsed expanded ethanol production during a speech at a Macon, Missouri plant owned by POET, the country’s largest ethanol producer.

“I believe in the potential of what you are doing right here to contribute to our clean energy future but also to our economy,” Obama said at the plant that produces 46 million gallons per year.

Obama noted funding for ethanol projects and research in last year’s stimulus law, and also cited his interagency biofuels working group. The administration wants to see ethanol production tripled over the next 12 years, he said.

The comments come as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering raising the fuel blend ceiling from 10 to 15 percent, a move heavily lobbied for by the ethanol industry as a way of forcing increased reliance on its product.

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Last month’s biggest busybody was the New York politician who’s waging a war on salt.

This month’s top honors could have gone to the US senator who wants to block betting on box office sales or the Silicon Valley pol who yanked toys from kids’ meals.

But the Nanny of the Month goes to the North Carolina cop who clamped down on tax day protestors’ right to carry flags and signs because he feared Old Glory might be used as a weapon. (Hey, we can’t have those tea party loons goring people with flag poles!)

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The passage of the Arizona border illegal immigration law is causing virtually unprecedented reactions around the Country.  The top California Senate Democrat (he of the state with huge deficits and serious unemployment) wants to ignite a trade war with Arizona.  San Francisco’s Mayor has cut “official” travel to Arizona.  Staged protests on the Left have turned violent (in contrast to the peaceful tea parties) and the White House is considering court actions in lieu of an immigration bill, i.e. they would rather sue than legislate.

Much Ado? It is worthy to note that the law passed by Arizona “merely echoes federal immigration statutes” – at least according George Will and PoliticalFact.com.  Existing federal law requires:

“Any alien required to apply for registration and to be fingerprinted in the United States who willfully fails or refuses to make such application or to be fingerprinted, and any parent or legal guardian required to apply for the registration of any alien who willfully fails or refuses to file application for the registration of such alien shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall, upon conviction thereof, be fined not to exceed $1,000 or be imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”

According to Arizona’s Governor : “”Despite erroneous and misleading statements suggesting otherwise, the new state misdemeanor crime of willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document is adopted, verbatim, from the same offense found in federal statute.”

So why are some on the Left going so far overboard?  It may well be it is because they have no issues to run on this Fall.

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President Obama has appointed three new doves to the Federal Reserve Board, thereby taking command of the nation’s central bank. But there’s a split developing inside the Federal Reserve System: The Reserve Bank presidents, appointed by their own district boards of directors, are increasingly likely to wage a battle royale against the central-bank headquarters in Washington and its free-money, ultra-easy policies.

The new Obama appointees include Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Fed, Peter Diamond of MIT, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, the top Maryland state banking supervisor who blames Wall Street greed for much of the financial crisis.

Now, Ms. Yellen is a highly credentialed and respected former Clinton economist. But the new Fed vice chair is also a devotee of targeting the unemployment rate as a key monetary-policy gauge. The Keynesian idea here is that too many people working cause inflation. So with a 9.7 percent unemployment rate, she can be expected to back Fed head Ben Bernanke in his quest for continued free money, with the other new doves following suit.

Make no mistake about it. These appointees (along with Daniel Tarullo, an earlier Obama appointee and another dove) make for an easy-money, pro-regulation Fed. As for monetary soundness, price stability, and a reliable King Dollar, these highly credentialed academics won’t pilot us there.

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Leave it to teachers unions: they sure know how to be obnoxious at the most inappropriate times.

The West Virginia chapters of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association have teamed up with the miners union and the AFL-CIO to produce a television ad attacking Democratic State Sen. Erik Wells.

Like President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Wells supports charter schools.  The AFT and NEA do not.  Therefore, exploiting the deaths of 29 miners, the unions find Wells unfit for legislative service.

It’s a perfect example of the depth teachers unions will stoop to attack political candidates – even Democratic candidates they traditionally support.

Wells contends that state law already protects mine safety whistleblowers, and no further legislative action is necessary, according to the Charleston Daily Mail. Now the unions want him to pay for that honest opinion.

But why should that stop the teachers unions?  What makes this particularly distasteful is watching the teachers unions – who supposedly look out for the interests of teachers – spend their resources to attack a candidate over mine safety.

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Drudge linked to two stories related to the Arizona immigration law recently signed into law.

Headline #1 – Illegals plan to leave AZ over law… Success! People who are here illegally are going to leave in a way that won’t cost the government money in deportation costs. How can anyone argue that people leaving, who have broken the law and are here illegally, is a bad thing. Let them all get in line and come in the legal way like others are expected to. Or are certain classes of people simply not expected to obey immigration laws?

Headline #2 – Bloomberg: ‘We are committing national suicide’…

Bloomberg says:

“This is not good for the country. I don’t agree with it,” he said. “We love immigrants here.”

Mike is half right. We do love immigrants here. Very very much. One way to show respect to those who have respected our laws and traveled here legally, in a documented way, is to be sure and not give a free pass to people who sneak in illegally. If the cost of labor goes up and jobs go to Americans instead of cheap undocumented workers, then that sounds like something the party of labor unions would be for. Or are they for something else entirely?

The sad truth is that so called Progressives are full of crap on this issue.

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The hardcore haters of the criminal left don’t forgive – and they don’t forget.

Ever since he saved the lives of who-knows-how-many Americans by thwarting the planned fire-bombing of the 2008 Republican convention by left-wing terrorists, Brandon Darby’s been a target.

Left-wing activists have tried to destroy Darby in the court of public opinion. It’s standard operating procedure when you become an informant and turn against the terrorist left, he says.

Darby and I sat down with G. Gordon Liddy on the “G. Gordon Liddy Show.”

Darby summed up the left’s pursuit of him this way:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, they have a program called the human source program, and I’m sure you’ve very aware of the informant program. And these are men and women, some of them have been in trouble and are trying to avoid charges but the vast majority are simply men and women like you and me who have discovered something or realized something bad, they brought information to the FBI and then in order to serve their country they decide to work undercover with the FBI on that matter and when they do so and their name becomes public, defense attorneys and the left have a tendency to completely try to destroy their character before they testify as to what they know and the information they hold.

And this is something that has happened throughout time and it’s something that’s happening right now and when that occurs those informants, for lack of a better term, usually end up changing their name, they usually end up very depressed or sad and they question what they’ve done because they’re attacked so heavily by the New York Times and by the other mainstream media establishment and that’s what I went through. I went through that.

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Today, in 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France.

California is broke.  Its nearly bankrupt status leaves residents with few financial resources to deal with imaginary threats to health and safety.

Yet in the face of an economic meltdown, the state still allows special interests to dictate high cost administrative procedures.

The reasons California is suffering severe economic woes is clear:  It has the highest sales tax in the country and the 6^th largest overall tax burden.  As its voluminous environmental restrictions are based on political interests rather than sound science, they significantly hamper the ability of California’s entrepreneurs to conduct business profitably.

According to a recent California Legislative report, regulation costs Golden State businesses approximately $493B in lost output and 3.8M jobs – resulting in a tax revenue loss of $16M.

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If America would like to see the millions of people who lost their jobs over the past year finally get off the unemployment line, you would hardly know it by the actions of our labor organizations. The AFL-CIO is currently waging a war on Wall Street and the companies that employ many of the 11.5 million AFL-CIO members in the United States. Given the track record of the AFL-CIO and its president, Richard Trumka, the outcome won’t be pretty.

Today the AFL-CIO will hold their “March on Wall Street,” a 10,000-person protest in New York City to show support for taxes on bankers’ bonuses, financial transactions, and private equity and hedge funds. And earlier this month, Trumka wrote a derisive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking private equity firms for supposedly reaping big profits while the portfolio companies’ employees lost jobs and the bondholders lost money.

These tactics are nothing new, because in his long career as a labor leader, Trumka has often resorted to overbearing tactics. After spending more than seven years in the coal mines of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Trumka became the youngest United Mine Workers president and claimed he would work cooperatively towards reform. Yet instead, he led a strike against the Pittson Coal Company, which led to the arrest of 3,000 miners and only served to cement his image as an old-school, labor-boss bully.

Why should we listen to Richard Trumka? He isn’t exactly the ideal messenger for honest criticism of business. When, under Trumka’s watch, the AFL-CIO allegedly laundered over $100,000 for the re-election campaign of Teamsters President Ron Carey against James Hoffa—does that name ring a bell?— Trumka pled the fifth and refused to address the allegations.

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While scouring the thousands of videos that exist on YouTube from the March 20th health care bill protests in Washington DC, we were able to uncover four different angles of the Cannon Office Building at the precise moment Rep. Andre Carson and Rep. John Lewis descended the steps on their way to Capitol Hill.

We have noticed that there is a mystery man positioned at the bottom of the steps of the Cannon Building with a video camera.  He is in the exact position to capture the moment that Rep. Carson later described to reporters.  He is dressed in a dark suit and he is wearing some kind of credential on his jacket.

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It’s amazing to watch the civil libertarians hide when Democrats propose the most sweeping intrusions of privacy in generations.  In addition to the litany of bad policies contained in the Dodd Financial Reform bill is this nugget on pages 1039-1040.  In short, it extends government reach to every deposit account of every citizen.

Subtitle G of the Dodd discussion draft bill requires that records be maintained and reported “for each branch, automated teller machine at which deposits are accepted, and other deposit taking service facility with respect to any financial institution, the financial institution shall maintain a record of the number and dollar amounts of deposit accounts of customers.”

What’s worse, banks will be required to submit these records to the new super regulatory agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (page 1041).  The CFPA will be allowed to use this information for any purpose “as permitted by law” under CFPA rules—rules set by CFPA themselves.

So, lets get this straight—the law requires banks to snoop on its customers MOST PERSONAL INFORMATION and submit it to another government agency so it can be used anyway the CFPA see’s fit.

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We have sought to call out haters and those that would cynically use race and the other political cards from the Democrats’ stacked deck because it is destructive our social fabric.  These phony charges create real hate, and do real damage to the cause of a civil, tolerant and colorblind society.

From day one, the good men and women who have risen up in peaceful dissent against the big government policies of the Democrats in power have been subjected to the worst kinds of ridicule, name-calling and downright hate.

DC Douglas is simply repeating the Liberal/Democrat talking points when he levels the false charges against “teabaggers” and FreedomWorks.

He says “If you have ire about this, focus it on FreedomWorks.”  That’s exactly what the Democrats and their friends on the left did.  The resulting emails and voicemails prove the point about the real damage caused by the Democrats tactics. (Warning: extremely offensive content.)

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Jim Hoft sent in this video of a child he spoke with in Quincy, IL. The child appears to know more about The Constitution than the Obama administration.

One priceless quote: “That was very rude!”

We Shall Overcome!

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) is at the center of negotiations shaping a bill that he promises will add transparency to the complicated, furtive world of financial derivatives, but he cannot remember how much he paid for his house on 10 waterfront acres in Ireland.  No wonder confidence in government’s competence continues to erode.

Dodd’s office told me early last year that he paid $127,000 in 2002 for his co-owner’s 2/3 interest in a house on 10 waterfront acres on the island of Inishnee in a tony region of western Ireland.  The next month he told reporters at The Hartford Courant that since he’d also paid off his co-owner’s portion of their joint mortgage on the property, he really paid about $50,000 more than what he’d said.

A month after that revision, Dodd told Newsweek that he’d paid $207,000 for the 2/3 interest in the property that he’d purchased with a Kansas City real estate developer William Kessinger in 1994.  The 5 term senator provided no details on what sort of Jethro Bodine ciphering he did to get that number.

None of those figures matches the amount Dodd reported to Irish authorities when he purchased Kessinger’s interest in the property.

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UNBELIEVABLE!
On Wednesday Team Obama called in the riot squad to deal with the Quincy Tea Party patriots outside the the Oakley-Lindsey/Quincy Community Center.

Team Obama ordered the riot police to march in and contain the violent tea party protesters.

They didn’t want any violence from these mobsters and radicals.

The police were in full riot gear when they marched in to deal with the protesters.

But, that’s not all.
They also called the riot police to the rooftops to quash the tea party mob.

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