Georgia farmer Willie Head discusses how and why the government and USDA county committee members who had no oversight and their own agenda, were able to create a situation where black farmers have lost their land.

Be wary when you hear, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

Ten years from now university economists will analyze Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s recent presentation to the U.S. Senate Budget Committee as the successful turning point in American economic policy from a focus on demand side consumption spending to supply side production investment.

As Bernanke clearly stated:

“We need to think about making investments for the future as opposed to simply spending our seed corn on current needs. So thinking about government programs, we should ask the question, will this provide benefits in the future.” …

“On the tax side, I don’t think it’s really very controversial among economists that rising rates, combined with a multiplication of exemptions, deductions, credits and so on, leads to a tax code which is very complex and can distort economic decisions.”

For the last decade our nation’s economy grew at an above average rate of 3.8% rate, tax revenue grew at the average rate of 2.5%; but government spending exploded at 13.7% growth rate. Fed Chairman Bernanke’s new found appreciation for getting government out of the way of the private sector only comes after America’s government debt burden has reached a Greek like 127% of our economy. With gold soaring, unemployment at record highs and serious efforts underway to eliminate the dollar as the world’s reserve currency; the US is clearly in trouble. To put the debt in personal terms, the US government debt burden equals $103,692.20 for every working American.

The Chairman’s rejection of bailouts nullified the intensive lobbying efforts by California and other state and local municipalities for a Federal debt guarantee. Having run-up over $3.5 trillion of municipal bond and pension obligation debts in the last decade, state and local governments are now facing widespread defaults. Newly inaugurated California Governor Jerry Brown, who many blame for passing legislation 30 years ago that permitted the Golden State to become the perennial poster child of deficit spending, just announced a six month moratorium on all state borrowing.

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Today on Coffee and Markets Francis Cianfrocca and I discuss the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” warning, Defense spending and cuts, and the challenges of Fed policy on inflation.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. You can find our iTunes feed at CoffeeandMarkets.com. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Looking Back on Ike’s Farewell Address
Bromund on the Constitutional Mandate for Defense
RCW: Tea Party Views on Afghanistan
The Philly Fed’s Plosser: Speech in Chile
McArdle and Tamny: A Debate on Fed Policy

ACORN partner SEIU intends to put lipstick on the public sector unionism pig.  They are trying to change the focus away from the inherently flawed system of public employee union monopolies, and put the focus on the many good public employees who manage to excel despite union boss interferences.

No matter how SEIU dresses it up, monopoly bargaining power over public employees is a bad idea.   For one, it gives un-elected union bosses access and control over public officials and employees that other taxpayers and citizens are denied.  Monopoly bargaining creates an additional extra-governmental monopoly over the governmental monopoly of public service, thus diminishing the ability of citizens to directly influence their own government services.  In addition, many government-union contracts include “union time” payments which forces taxpayers to subsidize union activity – including partisan political activity.

Here’s an interesting observation about the National Labor Relations Board Union (NLRBU) and union time.  In 2008, taxpayers spent more money on union personnel’s union time (time spent on union business) than the NRLBU collected in dues.

Bob Gilson: “In other words, you and I (taxpayers) spend three quarters of a million a year to subsidize a union that doesn’t raise a quarter million in dues and has a half a million in the bank. Plus [taxpayers] likely provide such amenities as computers, printers, internet access, office space, phone service, copy services, paper, desks, file cabinets, and stationery. Ain’t America wunnerful.  Talk about a stimulus package,   if you work at NLRB” taxpayers give almost three dollars for each dollar union members give.

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We’re now 25 billion dollars in the red in California.  The governor along with his Democrat controlled legislature will never do the right thing. They’re the same folks who brought you this mess.  When Governor Brown was previously the governor he signed the Dills Act in 1978 that gave civil servants the right to collective bargaining.  He did this on his very first day in office as governor.  This revolutionary enactment was the beginning of the end or our state. Now, with the power of government labor unions unchecked, state employees, now the largest unionized force of any state, have controlled the legislative agenda for the past 30 years.  Their sweetheart pension plans are a marvel to their political strength and are unmatched anywhere in the private sector.  This is why although state workers’ pensions are the single largest problem in this budget crisis, Brown has not even mentioned it in his new “reform” proposals.   He has however mentioned tax increases, or as he calls them tax “extensions”. A two-thirds margin of Californians overwhelmingly opposes tax increases as a solution.

Here’s the problem, notwithstanding a current state budget deficit of 25 billion dollars, the state has 700 billion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities.   This is ticking time bomb. No matter how much we cut and balance today’s budget, we will never catch up and meet the needs of the ridiculously high unfunded pensions.  This is the problem.   Brown’s budget may take away state workers’ cell phones and some social services dollars, but seriously, big deal.  This is just more smoke and mirrors. It just kicks the can down the road. This will not solve our major structural problem.

Legalizing online poker, taxing marijuana (both proposed) and taxing air (already passed through cap and trade) will not solve the budget problems.  The latter is a way of taxing the few manufacturing industries still dumb enough to be creating jobs in California.  If they hadn’t got the memo earlier, this bill should be a neon sign. Get out of Dodge.  We don’t see many folks clamoring for yet cleaner air, but we see millions looking for work.

Our legislature has been hallucinating for decades. They didn’t see the current budget crisis coming?

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Today is the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday.

In 1988, musician and activist Peter Gabriel traveled the world with Amnesty International’s “Human Rights Now!” tour. He brought a big, bulky camcorder with him and used it to interview victims of human rights abuses. Gabriel realized that capturing those stories made it harder for them to be forgotten, and that’s what spurred him to found WITNESS, a Brooklyn-based human rights organization.

“The aim is always to turn a personal story of abuse into a powerful tool for justice,” says Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, who sat down with Reason.tv to discuss how WITNESS uses the power of video to fight human rights abuses around the world.

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George Will in today’s Washington Post:

Unlike most of the 111 that preceded it, the 112th Congress must begin the process of restoring the national regime and civic culture the Founders bequeathed. This will require reviving the rule of law, reasserting the relevance of the Constitution and affirming the reality of American exceptionalism.

Many congressional Republicans, and surely some Democrats with institutional pride, think Congress is being derogated and marginalized by two developments. One is the apotheosis of the presidency as the mainspring of the government and the custodian of the nation’s soul. The second is the growing autonomy of the regulatory state, an apparatus responsive to presidents.

The eclipse of Congress by the executive branch and other agencies is Congress’s fault.

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From LA Times:

Fuller, a disabled veteran and former campaign volunteer for Giffords, was charged with making threats, intimidation and disorderly conduct and was involuntarily committed for a psychiatric evaluation, Ogan said.

In an interview with Democracy Now on Thursday, Fuller linked the shooting to conservative leaders associated with the tea party, including Sarah Palin, Fox News commentator Glenn Beck and Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle. “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target,” Fuller said.

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Tom Brokaw said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on January 13:

“Gun control is too simple a phrase to define all the complications and nuances of it, frankly. In Arizona they have a wide open system. I would be nervous about going into a bar or restaurant in Arizona on a Saturday night where people can carry concealed without permits.”

Well, if he is really concerned about guns in bars, poor Mr. Brokaw is not going to be able to frequent bars in very many states. Arizona does allow guns in bars, though, despite his claims to the contrary, actually require a concealed handgun permit to go into an establishment that serves alcohol. The following figure is from Opencarry.org (more details are available at their website).

On a more serious note, despite the fact that permit holders are allowed to go into bars in Arizona and other states, there is no evidence that they pose a risk to anyone. As of December 1, 2007 in Arizona, there were 99,370 active permits. During 2007, 33 permits were revoked for any reason — a 0.03% rate — cases that did not involve using the gun to harm others.

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Today, in 1991, the first Gulf War against Iraq began. Twenty years later, we’re still there.

Tucson tea party leader Trent Humphries was threatened today during an interview with ABC.

While Trent was speaking at the event, an audience member screamed, “Trent Humphries, you’re dead!

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Tucson Tea Party leader Trent Humphries. (New Leader)

ABC News held a town hall event today in Tucson, Arizona. Local officials, friends and heroes were at the event. News anchor Christiane Amanpour was the host. The segment will air tomorrow. ABC gathered members from the Tucson community to discuss the tragic shooting last Saturday that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and left 6 people dead.

State Representative Terri Proud was at the event sitting between Trent and the violent audience member. Terri was there to speak about the local gun laws. She described the scene to me just minutes ago:

Trent Humphries, the Pima County tea party leader, stood up to speak during the event. He was being very respectful. Trent told the audience that before we start placing blame on individuals we need to get all the facts. Trent then told everyone that one of those killed during the shooting was his neighbor and that he was affected like everyone else by the tragedy… While Trent was speaking- And it was planned that he would speak- One member in the audience and reportedly one of the victims of the tragedy started screaming, “Trent Humphries you’re dead!” The police immediately escorted him out. On his way out he screamed, “You’re all whores.”

The ABC producer said he was not sure if they will show incident tomorrow, or not.

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Maybe St. Peters’ ‘potato lady’ should be mayor.

The words above appeared as the headline of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article Nov. 27, 2005, and could be considered prophetic if not for the fact that the woman in question, Dolores Sherman, isn’t running for mayor.

Sherman, 85, is running for one of two Ward One seats on the Board of Aldermen in St. Peters, Mo., the city in which she says she was prosecuted more than five years ago for a crime she didn’t commit and dubbed, “The Potato Lady.”

A mother and grandmother who owns and operates a seasonal crafts business in St. Peters, Sherman filed for the alderman post late Tuesday morning. During a mid-afternoon news conference the same day, she detailed her belief that St. Peters city officials were involved in her unfair prosecution and other events leading to it and need to be replaced.

“I want to make people aware of what happened to me for an incident that should have never occurred,” Sherman said. “I was railroaded!

“They accused me of throwing a red potato, and I said, ‘I don’t have red potatoes, I have Idaho, six inchers, baking potatoes,’” she continued, recalling a conversation she had Sept. 24, 2004, with two St. Peters police officers who had responded her home after receiving a complaint phoned in by one of Sherman’s neighbors in the suburb 20 miles west of St. Louis. “But they gave me a citation — a peace disturbance, then the city prosecuted me.

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From Reuters:

President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Friday loosening more restrictions on U.S. travel and money remittances to Cuba, a further step in his efforts to reach out to the people of the communist-ruled country.

The latest measures, which stop short of lifting a ban on tourist travel to the island by Americans, are aimed at developing “people-to-people” contacts by allowing more travel for college professors and students, artists and church groups.

The regulatory changes also allow all U.S. international airports to apply to service licensed charter flights to Cuba.

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The anti-energy lobby, surrogates for Big Wind and Big Solar, is now backed into a rhetorical corner in its effort to impose its agenda of protecting the world from the horrors of affordable, abundant energy. Remember, although they say their objective is to use policy to force invention of Flubber or pixie dust to satisfy our future energy abundance, this doesn’t square with their decades of saying that “If  you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it” (green Energy guru Amory Lovins).

Or that it would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child” (green leader, Paul Ehrlich), that “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet” (Eco-writer Jeremy Rifkin). That’s what drives them. They want you limited to stuff that doesn’t and won’t work because it doesn’t and won’t work. But to get you there they swear it will. Despite saying for decades that would actually be their worst nightmare.

You figure out which of their stated positions is the lie. I’ll wait.

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This past week’s “blood libel” comment from Sarah Palin brought forth the seeming unlikeliest of defenders, Alan Dershowitz, who, in an exclusive to Big Government, defended the former governor’s comments from her obsessed detractors.

Conservatives are justifiably pleased that their erstwhile foe has become their ally on this. They think that maybe the spirit of civil in our politics really is happening and we need look no further than Professor Dershowitz.

But to those of us who know Professor Dershowitz well, it is par for the course for Professor Dershowitz is a national treasure. He is perhaps America’s last honest liberal – and a genuine friend of America’s only real ally in the Middle East, Israel. I hope what I am writing here should finally put to rest any lingering doubts that conservatives have about him.

A couple of examples will illustrate my point:

• For years Professor Dershowitz has been a one-man publishing house in defense of Israel, hand writing (yes, really) the impressive The Case for Israel, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace, and The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza, each of which is a must read for Americans struggling to make sense of the Middle East. In each, and in innumerable op-eds, with a prosecutor’s panache, Dershowitz brings the fight to the increasingly unhinged enemies of the Jewish state. Professor Dershowitz defends Israel from the left – as a secular, multi-cultural, human rights-respecting, gay-friendly, technologically-advanced democracy in a land where militant extremists run oil fiefdoms masquerading states.

• Dershowitz endorsed my friend, Joel Pollak, a Big Government contributor, former Dershowitz R.A., and one-time candidate for congress, over the reliably socialist, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. Dershowitz even went so far as to fundraise with Joel, while Schakowsky, to her shame, fundraised with the Jew-hating Helen Thomas.

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“Kids Aren’t Cars” is a new short film series set for release February 1st.  Using examples from the Midwest, it documents the impact organized labor has had on the American education system, creating a one-size-fits-all assembly line model that leaves students behind and treats teachers equally, stifling innovation and improvement.

Our government education system has been spending more and more each year, yet the results have been the same.  While unions demand higher spending – which of course ends up in the pockets of their members – money is not fixing the problem.

Those that have been in the trenches gave shocking interviews – stories of money grabs by adults while children are left behind.

An executive director of a literacy clinic in Detroit – where high school graduates go to learn how to read – compared the actions of the school board to the Ku Klux Klan.  “If they were sitting up there in Klan robes,” she said, no one would be tolerating what is going on, but the effect is the same. [Eight of the 9 school board members are black.]

We tell the story of two Indiana teachers recognized state-wide for their impact on students, only to be fired literally the next day because they lacked seniority of their co-workers.

Numerous leaders sound the alarm, but do elected leaders have the courage to stand up to the all-powerful teachers’ unions?  The tide seems to be turning, but the need is dire.  The United States continues to slip globally, with student achievement lagging behind Iceland and Hungary.

In short, it’s because our public school system is designed to benefits adults, at the expense of children.  The focus has been on spending – which invariably ends up in pay, health benefits and retirement for the employees.

“Kids Aren’t Cars” is an unflinching look at the state of public education in America and what can be done about it.

The film’s Facebook page is here.

Today, in 2001, Wikipedia was launched.