From the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) home page:

Protestors [sic] are assembling in New York and around the country to let billionaires, big oil and big bankers know that we’re not going to let the richest 1% force draconian economic policies and massive cuts to crucial programs on Main Street Americans.

Out-of-touch Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor said he is “increasingly concerned by the growing mobs.” Mobs? That must be what Republicans refer to as the middle class, or maybe the millions of unemployed Americans across the country.

As Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters, “The message of the American people is that no longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street…”

Send a message straight to Eric Cantor, Speaker Boehner, and the rest of reckless Republican leadership in Congress: (more…)

I was watching coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests the other day and couldn’t help but laugh at how pitiful the whole ordeal has become. It’s almost become a cliché to note how the protesters go on and on about big business when they sport corporate swag such as iPads and Rolexes. Now, the burnout kids who started the protests are being co-opted by labor unions, the type of  people who are so charismatic and idealistic they have to pay demonstrators to march with them.

Despite the sympathetic — even fawning — media coverage they’ve received, the message of Occupy Wall Street protesters isn’t being taken seriously by America. Take, for instance, a manifesto posted online by an early O.W.S. participant. This is the most laughable lefty pipe dream list ever. Here are a few of the demands:

Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Put more simply, they want free healthcare because saving money for emergencies will cut into their nachos budget. They lack the basic self-awareness to understand that cutting into the profits of hospitals will destroy the healthcare industry’s ability to improve equipment and competitively compensate the best doctors and nurses, thus giving incentive for doctors to leave their trade due to lower wages and higher work loads. (more…)

This week, while walking to classes at Minnesota State University Moorhead, I kept seeing members of the Occupy MN movement walking around with signs, trying to recruit students to go down to Minneapolis and join their protest. I decided to go talk to two of the men and get more information about their movement; more specifically, I asked why they were personally involved. They told me how they both worked at fast food restaurants and were worried about getting a better job after they graduate this year.

As a college student and journalist, I can totally relate to their concerns; however, I totally disagree that forcing the “rich” (for this movement, that seems to be anyone making more than I am at a given moment) to pay higher taxes than they already do will somehow create jobs. I wanted to see what the rest of their members were thinking, so I decided to go to the meeting that night with them.

Everyone in the movement was extremely nice to me and genuinely cared about the direction our country was heading. Some of the members did make some, in my humble opinion, absurd comments. One of the older women there tried to recruit us to help the union members protest American Crystal Sugar. She told us about the importance of unions:  “Labor has made this country great. Many people are telling us that unions aren’t important anymore, but unions have got the middle class where we are today and are just as relevant as ever.”

Many of the people there didn’t identify themselves with either political party. They all talked about corporate greed and how both sides were maintaining the status quo, acting as puppets of the wealthy. One man said, “As long as both sides get paid by the same people, nothing will change. We aren’t a democracy by the people anymore; it is controlled by the corporations. Take the money out of the system or you are just spinning your tires. I don’t think the liberal model of trying to make them feel guilty is working; we need a group of protestors like in New York to scare the shit out of people — legally of course. It scares the hell out of the right wing media who is trying to turn us into an angry mob with no purpose.”

Another man built upon the previous statement, “Egypt showed the world you can show up and change things. We will be worse off and the corporations will be better off unless we are engaged like the protestors in New York. They got arrested, but they keep coming back. That’s the type of determination we need.”

(more…)

Big Government has learned that anarchist groups, led by Lisa Fithian and working with Democrats and unions on the ground in Chicago, intend forcibly to disrupt the Mortgage Bankers’ Association meeting at the Hyatt Regency Chicago and other locations this afternoon.

Violence is possible, as local police and security officers seem unprepared for a confrontation with thousands of activists converging on the Hyatt from multiple other staged demonstrations in Chicago.

Fithian, a veteran anarchist organizer who is widely credited with shutting down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, has apparently arrived in Chicago after participating in the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration in New York.

According to Big Government sources, Fithian is currently training union leaders from the Service Employees’ International Union and the Teamsters Union in preparation for today’s demonstration. Her strategy may be to draw law enforcement officers to multiple protest sites, then to shift demonstrations suddenly to one central site.

Democratic activists and leaders, including Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), are expected to address the demonstrators today as part of “Stand Up Chicago,” a broad coalition of community organizing groups coordinated by the SEIU and promoted by left-wing bloggers in the area. (more…)

As you will recall, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senate and Congressional investigators on Friday, October 7^th. It was a self-serving attempt to get Congressman Issa and Senator Charles Grassley to call off the chase that was clearly leading investigators to Holder’s front door.

To make a long story short, I just received an email from Congressman Issa’s office that proves the investigators are not only going to continue their pursuit, but that Holder is their central focus.

The email contained a copy of an absolutely scathing letter which Issa has sent in response to Holder’s not-so-veiled attempt he stall the investigation last Friday.

Here are pertinent excerpts:

Dear Attorney General Holder:

From the beginning of the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, the Department of Justice has offered a roving set of ever-changing explanations to justify its involvement in this reckless and deadly program.  These defenses have been aimed at undermining the investigation.  From the start, the Department insisted that no wrongdoing had occurred and asked Senator Grassley and me to defer our oversight responsibilities over its concerns about our purported interference with its ongoing criminal investigations.  Additionally, the Department steadfastly insisted that gunwalking did not occur.

Once documentary and testimonial evidence strongly contradicted these claims, the Department attempted to limit the fallout from Fast and Furious to the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).  When that effort also proved unsuccessful, the Department next argued that Fast and Furious resided only within ATF itself, before eventually also assigning blame to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.  All of these efforts were designed to circle the wagons around DOJ and its political appointees.

To that end, just last month, you claimed that Fast and Furious did not reach the upper levels of the Justice Department.  Documents discovered through the course of the investigation, however, have proved each and every one of these claims advanced by the Department to be untrue.

(more…)

The #OccupyWallStreet movement that been embraced by Democratic politicians, liberal pundits, progressive groups, Big Labor and celebrities was actually created and is being led behind the scenes by far-left anarchists whose goal isn’t reform, but the total annihilation of the American economic and political system.

“Occupy Everything” is the culmination of a decades-long effort by militant radicals to create and fund a mass movement that has broad popular appeal. With the enthusiastic help of the institutional left, that effort finally seems to be working.

Case in point: Lisa Fithian. Fithian is a career “community organizer” and anarchist who specializes in “direct action” protests, and who has close ties to labor unions. She has been on the ground at the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration since its inception.

Local television station NY1 interviewed her as an ordinary “woman on the street,” presenting her as just another well-intentioned New Yorker who’s worried about the big, mean banks.

NY1 did not mention that Fithian lives in Austin, Texas, and failed to inform its audience about Fithian’s true motivations or her lengthy activist resume.

“Wall Street is certainly the heart of why we’re here. It’s the corporations — the big banks in this country have been destroying this country.”

Lisa Fithian says she’s not part of any official group–that this event is the work of many people coming together with the same message.

“Overfees or high mortgages, student loans–the banks are touching every aspect of our lives.”

She says banks and the wealthy have taken money for their own interests and their own survival.

“And the people here are saying enough of that.”

Inspired by events around the world, she drew the analogy to Tahrir Square in Egypt, and says the power of the people is leading to change.

It doesn’t take much digging to discover the real Lisa Fithian. (more…)

The budget fights this year began with the “shutdown” battle, followed by the Ryan budget and then the debt limit. These fights have mostly led to uninspiring kiss-your-sister outcomes, which is hardly surprising given divided government.

Now the crowd in DC is squabbling over Obama’s latest stimulus/tax-the-rich scheme, though that’s really more of a test run by the White House to determine whether class warfare will be an effective theme for  the 2012 campaign.

The real budget fight, the one we should be closely monitoring, is what will happen with the so-called Supercommittee.

To refresh your memory, this is the 12-member entity created as part of the debt limit legislation. Split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the Supercommittee is supposed to recommend $1.2 trillion-$1.5 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years. Assuming, of course, that 7 out of the 12 members can agree on anything.

There are two critical things to understand about the Supercommittee.

o The Democrats have openly stated that their top political goal is to seduce Republicans into capitulating to a tax hike.

o Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi appointed hard-core leftists to the Supercommittee.

With these points in mind, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that the Supercommittee is designed – at least from the perspective of the left – to seduce gullible Republicans into going along with a tax hike.

(more…)

Convicted bank fraudster Robert Creamer, who recently set up a nationwide political consultancy to boost Democrats’ 2012 campaigns, and who wrote the Democrats’ political strategy on health care from federal prison, is promoting efforts by Democrats and the #OccuptWallStreet protestors to single out Bank of America.

Bank of America has been a focus of the #Occupy demonstrations across the country. Last Thursday, in downtown Los Angeles, eleven #OccupyLA protestors were arrested after illegally occupying a Bank of America branch.

(The demonstration was filmed by Andrew Breitbart and myself; footage of the bank occupation appears at the beginning of the video below.)

Creamer, who is married to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), went to prison in 2006 for bank fraud and tax evasion. That has not stopped him from demanding that Americans pay higher taxes and attacking Bank of America for introducing–as other banks have done–a monthy fee for debit card usage.

It is unknown how closely Creamer is involved in the #OccupyWallStreet movement, but he has visited lower Manhattan as the protests have unfolded, and has been promoting the demonstrations at his Huffington Post blog. (Schakowsky has described visiting the #OccupyWallStreet protest at the same time that Creamer was in Manhattan, and has claimed ignorance about “who’s organizing it or how.”)

Indeed, Creamer may be an important link between the fringe “community organizing” and anarchist groups behind the #Occupy protests, the unions that have joined the demonstrations, and the Democrats’ campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama. (more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the plan for a plan to save the Euro Zone, the possibility that high unemployment is here to stay, and the impending death of America’s middle class.

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

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Can we afford to wait for the Supreme Court to rule on ObamaCare? Perhaps not. If the Left is anything, it is relentless. The Right needs to push back every bit as hard and consistently, or we will lose this fight, among others.

Many are focused on the Supreme Court’s take-up of the question of the constitutionality of the individual mandate clause in Obamacare as the means to stop President Obama’s signature legislation. However, some of the law has already been funded and put into place, and, until the High Court rules- and if it rules that the individual mandate is unconstitutional- there are already clear plans to change healthcare in this country as we know it.

While Wall Street remains occupied, the San Francisco version looks more like a yeast infection. Should we be surprised?

Harlem brewed up a teaparty of sorts.

“This is a Harlem tea party,” said Chet Whye, director of Harlem 4 Obama. “This is about ‘civilitea.’ But don’t let the smooth taste fool you.”

No word on whether or not Herman Cain was invited to speak.

Presidential candidate Herman Cain said Sunday that he didn’t believe racism was a major factor holding minorities back in America, asserting instead that African Americans had a level playing field on which to advance economically.

Along with reports that Sharpton will broadcast from Occupy Wall Street, the NYT’s Paul Krugman is now supporting them. I’m putting both those developments in the Right’s win column.

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

Hmmm…the owner of #OccupyWallSt’s “Liberty Plaza” (Zuccotti Park) got one of those juicy “green energy” loans from the feds. Funny that the protesters are relying on a crony capitalist for their demonstration.

The Hermanator has seen enough of the #Occupy silliness. He has jumped out in front of the other GOP candidates in criticizing the protesters. He’s in good company. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize co-winner, Leymeh Gboowee also criticized those crazy kids.

(more…)

Ben&Jerry’s Ice Cream, which is of course owned by giant multi-national corporation Unilever, has jumped on the #OccupyWallSt bandwagon:

We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity. The issues raised are of fundamental importance to all of us. These include:

The inequity that exists between classes in our country is simply immoral.

• We are in an unemployment crisis. Almost 14 million people are unemployed. Nearly 20% of African American men are unemployed. Over 25% of our nation’s youth are unemployed.
• Many workers who have jobs have to work 2 or 3 of them just to scrape by.
• Higher education is almost impossible to obtain without going deeply in debt.
• Corporations are permitted to spend unlimited resources to influence elections while stockpiling a trillion dollars rather than hiring people.

We know the media will either ignore you or frame the issue as to who may be getting pepper sprayed rather than addressing the despair and hardships borne by so many, or accurately conveying what this movement is about. All this goes on while corporate profits continue to soar and millionaires whine about paying a bit more in taxes. And we have not even mentioned the environment.

(more…)

This Rick Perry video — which is really all about Mitt Romney — has caught some attention on the heels of a front page story by the Wall Street Journal raising the issue of Mitt Romney’s record on energy and environment issues. It’s not on the editorial page, mind you, but the less market-friendly news pages. This is a good thing, and wherever it leads, I do not believe the video can be shown, viewed or written about too often.

Mr. Romney finds himself needing to detach himself from these past positions on environmental issues without painting a target on his back for more accusations of flip-floppery. Otherwise, he must plainly state that voters should expect him to stick to his prior instincts on these issues.

This is too big a topic to pussyfoot around. The importance of Romney’s views on energy and his courting of environmental lobbyists — including a venture capitalist about to take the reins of what has become the world’s largest (and worst) VC slushy fund — cannot be overstated at this point.

This would be true even without Solyndra having exposed many voters to the growing fiscal disease in “green” industries, which is so typical and predictable that some of us foresaw it long ago.

Romney’s seeming embrace of the corrupt environmental lobby is made all the sadder by the fact that this country has a real opportunity for a spectacular revival with a domestic energy production boom. But such a change will require a leader with both strong vision and the will to stand up to anti-business, anti-energy extremists. (more…)

From Reuters:

China warned the United States that it would damage relations, and American jobs, if it forces Beijing to let its currency rise under a law to be voted on in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.

Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai on Monday underlined Beijing’s opposition to the bill, saying it could trigger a trade war and hold back global economic recovery. He said that relations could also be hurt by U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

(more…)

On Fox Business’ Freedom Watch last week I sat down with Democratic strategist and former Chuck Schumer aide Christopher Hahn to discuss the “ Durbin amendment” to the Dodd-Frank Bill.  If you are unfamiliar with the attachment to the bill, you may nonetheless be feeling the effects soon enough in the form of higher banking fees from checking account maintenance to debit card usage.

What the amendment (that went into effect on October 1st) does is place a cap on per-transaction “swipe fees” that banks charge retailers when purchases are made via debit cards.  They used to charge retailers roughly 44 cents per transaction.  Dodd-Frank limits this to 21 cents.  Since these fees are absorbed by the retailers, it doesn’t take a Wharton Business School degree to see that the immediate beneficiaries of this government intrusion into the private sector are the so-called big-box, high-volume retailers such as Walmart, Walgreens, Home Depot, Target, and others.

Mr. Hahn may have offered the weak Democratic operative/apologist defense of the bill in that Durbin was just doing what Senators do by helping his constituents, but I made it a point to remind him that the populist senator’s constituents in this case are not the consumers in his state but rather Big Retail.  The last time I checked, many retail titans are far wealthier than most Wall Street “fat cats” already.  The Walton family’s combined wealth far outstrips Warren Buffett’s (or Bill Gates’, for that matter), making them the de facto richest family in the world.  They are about to get a little wealthier as Walmart reaps its share of this estimated $7 billion annual windfall the Durbin amendment shifts from the banking to the retail sector. (more…)

The past week was very interesting in Presidential politics.  The darlings of the rank and file Republican Party, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, have concluded it is not time to run for President. Herman Cain (who was recently labeled a racist by a Democrat strategist on CNN) has become the sweetheart of the white-supremacist, right-wing Tea Party.

The popular press is lauding liberal Democrats for having finally found their own voice in the Occupy Wall Street protests. And Missouri’s Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill, did not even show up for President Obama’s (who polls below 30% in MO) fundraiser in St. Louis. And a rumor is circulating that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has told Obama he cannot win passage of the jobs bill as proposed and will only take it in pieces to the Senate floor, thus distancing himself from the President.

Does anyone need to know anything else about the 2012 elections?

The problem for decades in Washington has been that lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, have spent their way to political success. Now that there is no more money, nobody knows what to do.  In fact, there is only one Congressman, Darrell Issa (R-CA) who has started (not inherited) a successful company that sold a product and wasn’t just in the service industry, law, accounting, insurance, medicine, banking, you get the idea.  The genesis of American capitalism is an agrarian society taking the risks necessary to make something from nothing and selling it.  He is likely the only one that has made the sacrifices necessary to build something from nothing, and make a profit.  The concept is that without actual profit you can’t spend money.  Everyone else, Democrat and Republican more resembles the Occupy Wall Street group who want to tell everyone where money should be spent, decisions based on personal interests and taxes, not capitalism.  The situation is exacerbated by the contempt and lack of cooperation between the congressional parties, as well as between members of Congress of both parties and the executive.

For some time, the question of when that animosity began has gone unanswered. Certainly there have always been hard-fought ideological battles in the halls of government. But there have also been famous relationships between party leaders, relationships that helped bring these leaders and the country together. When did our modern politics deteriorate so much? Recently a longtime friend and Washington insider suggested that it began with the defeat of the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, the highly respected and superbly qualified candidate, for the Supreme Court. (more…)

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads like a, well, financial contagion through global markets, intergalactic Internet sensation Remy and Reason.tv give the movement its anthem.

(more…)

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder tried to stall the momentum building behind the Fast and Furious investigation by submitting a letter to Senate and Congressional investigators in which he continued to plead ignorance, and in which he did his best to undercut the progress of the investigation to this point.

In the letter, Holder actually had the gall to re-affirm his feigned ignorance of Fast and Furious:  “[I have] no recollection of knowing about Fast and Furious or of hearing its name prior to the public controversy about it.” (In other words, Holder’s holding to the timeline he provided to the House Oversight Committee on May 3^rd, when he claimed he’d only learned of Fast and Furious over the last “few weeks.”)

However, as I wrote last week for Big Government, documents have been released that show Holder has been receiving briefings on Fast and Furious since July 2010 (and a recently uncovered ATF slideshow makes it feasible that he was briefed as early as March 2010).

Anyway, the good news is that Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) isn’t deviating from his pursuit of justice. Therefore, instead of dropping or slowing the Fast and Furious investigation (in light of Holder’s letter), Issa appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace on October 9^th and announced that “new subpoenas” will soon be headed Holder’s way.

This news was made worse for Holder by the weekend revelation that 40 Fast and Furious weapons were found in the arsenal of a single cartel member – Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo – and that there is hard proof that approximately 100 Fast and Furious weapons were moved to El Paso, TX (after being purchased in Phoenix) for distribution purposes.

(more…)

A protest against corporations, brought to you by corporations…

Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)