Following my exposé this past spring of two Labor Studies professors at the University of Missouri who were using their positions to recruit students to the Communist Party and encourage the use of industrial sabotage, several universities have attempted to crack down on the recording of professors by students.

There are, no doubt, professors all over the country who are engaging in equally egregious teaching practices as Don Giljum (who reportedly resigned) and Judy Ancel (who’s now enjoying life as a Kansas City Occupier; she addresses #OccupyKC in the video below from 3:44 to 3:54 – hat tip to KansasWatchdog).

My guess is that enough professors complained to prompt faculty associations at both the University of Missouri and Washington University in Saint Louis (my alma mater) to pass resolutions calling for a ban on recordings in the classroom without the written permission of the instructor.

Unsurprisingly, students at both universities found these bans unnecessary and overreaching. (more…)

Protestors at #OccupyAtlanta have been ordered by police to leave Woodruff Park. The first arrests have apparently been made.

Mayor Kasim Reed, having once apparently coddled the Occupy activists, recently revoked the executive order allowing them to stay, warning that they were on “a clear path to escalation.”

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

State Sen. Vincent Fort (D) objected, comparing Mayor Reed–who is black–to Bull Connor, the white police official (and Democrat) in Birmingham widely reviled for his brutal response to civil rights protests in the 1960s. (more…)

UPDATE 4 – Smashing a police car (hat tip: San Francisco Chronicle reporter Matthai Kuruvila):

UPDATE 3 – Tear gas, apparently:

UPDATE 2 – Video of paint bombs (first bomb at 0:21):

UPDATE: Paint bombs.

Credit: @northoaklandnow

Actually… no. There are constitutionally permissible time, place, and manner restrictions on freedom of speech. And Occupy Oakland has violated them.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

A crowd of about 400 people marched from the public library at 14th and Madison streets toward Frank Ogawa Plaza at about 5 p.m., promising a confrontation with police, who had the plaza barricaded.

The conflict quickly grew violent. When officers in riot gear went to arrest one protester, about 50 more surrounded them shouting, “Let him go, let him go.”

Protesters threw turquoise and red paint at the riot police officers’ faces and helmets. Some led the crowd in chanting, “This is why we call you pigs.” Protesters trying to fight with police were clubbed and kicked in return. (more…)

If you haven’t already, take a gander at a column authored by former Treasury Secretary and Clinton economic adviser Larry Summers in yesterday’s Washington Post.

In it, Summers contends that to truly turn around the nation’s housing market – a key economic indicator and driver – one must, in effect, double down on the sector, spending more in both public and private dollars.

“The central irony of a financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, borrowing and lending, and spending,” argues Summers, “it can be resolved only with more confidence, borrowing and lending, and spending. This is true, above all, of housing policies.”

That’s just dandy. True to the dogma of his former boss, Summers apparently believes we haven’t done enough damage to the housing market through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and Uncle Sam needs to be more involved in driving home construction and sales.

That is best carried out through financing, he posits. “[C]redit standards for those seeking to buy homes are too high and too rigorous,” Summers argues. Uhh, can someone quickly get him a history book and turn to the chapters from a few years ago where the housing market began to collapse? The reason wasn’t tightened credit but the exact opposite. Our lending institutions sponsored by the feds such as Freddie and Fannie were practically giving loans to anyone who asked for them – senseless amounts of money with little-to-no credit backing to vouch for the security of the loans. (more…)

The federal government, as part of Obamacare implementation, is trying to figure out how to get its hands on everyone’s healthcare records.

It may seem like a small boat in the ocean of bureaucratic incursion that is Obamacare, but given the construction of the new law and the priority its authors and supporters place on “bending the cost curve,” allowing government access to American’s most personal records is a critical step in its effort to control healthcare costs at the expense of care.

The path to achieving this is to use treatment outcomes and other health data as instruments of rationing and denial of care through the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research — created by President Obama — and based on European rationing boards.

There are several ways for the government to access our health records, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is already contemplating options.  One would be for the federal government to collect them directly. Another is mandating that the states, as part of Obamacare’s new healthcare exchanges, collect the information and pass it along to the federal government.  A third would be to force private insurance companies to make the data available to the feds.

Notwithstanding any discussion of the government’s right to our private records, none of these are good ideas but not as bad as another option that some have floated; let a private contractor bid on the project to collect and maintain the information on behalf of the government.

Allowing a private company to access everyone’s healthcare records is an open invitation to disaster and a gross invasion of personal privacy.  And more so as about the only company that could handle the job with any degree of competency appears to be Google.

Google’s business model is tracking and collecting preferred sites and other information from its users. Everything from favorite restaurants to marital status is fair game for the Internet behemoth, which uses sophisticated algorithms to identify who accesses the web in a given home — capturing birthdates, age, gender, imputed income and other information useful to determining what products and services might be of interest to a person when they go online.

Google collects and utilizes this information whether it has permission from the user or not, which is where the issue of private healthcare records comes into play.

(more…)

The image that sticks out most in mind from time spent at the Occupy Wall Street protests was a mask. Sitting on pavement, a protester was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Aware of the protesters’ supporters support of the government–the Obama portion, that is–I asked, “Why Guy Fawkes?” He looked at me as if I was the saddest thing on earth and said, “Dude, this is ‘V For Vendetta.’”

This is more grist for the mill for those who see the protesters as illiterate jargon merchants, for only someone who opened a book on English history would know who Fawkes was; knowledge of ‘V’ is obtainable by watching the film based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore. The protesters either haven’t thought through their fashion statement, or they do not have the mental capacity or attention span to grasp what either pop culture representation of Fawkes was about. ‘V for Vendetta’ concerns the exploits of a superhero type against a British fascist government. He accomplishes what Falkes only tried to do: he blows up Parliament—Parliament, mind you, not a financial center. In the film, this moment is presented glamorously as V sails through the air against the backdrop of the explosion.

Clearly it is this image–not the target of the explosion, but the fact that something is blowing up–that has the protesters donning the mask. They, too, want to detonate a building, preferably one on Wall Street. V, in entrancing slow motion, skewers cops; they too are begging for the chance to emulate this.

But there the resemblances end.

(more…)

The #OccupyWallStreet movement has an agenda and has made it available for all to see.  Among their demands is that government eviscerate existing contracts by “eliminating all debt, everywhere.”  Imagine there was a government agency with the power to make decisions like that.  With a sleight of hand, one person could vitiate contracts and overturn years of business decisions, destroying marketplaces through government intervention.  You don’t have to imagine very long.  If President Obama and his progressive supporters get their way, the Director of the newly created regulatory agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will have similar powers.

Created by the flawed Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, the CFPB Director will be the most powerful regulator in government with little checks and balances from Congress.  President Obama said last week that if confirmed, the Director of the Bureau would be able to overturn any private market action it deems abusive.  Obama specifically cited the increase in debit card fees as an example of an area where the CFPB could take action to overturn the fee.

Let that sink in for a moment. A legitimate, legal business in America raises its prices by $5 and some bureaucrat would veto it, or worse, punish the business for raising its prices – in order to “make less profit,” as the president said.  This is the world Obama and the Democrats seek, a world in which an elite few are empowered to override the marketplace based on their own whims or, in this case, to mollify their voters.

No one likes bank fees, but in a market economy, you could take your money from one bank and move it to another. Avoiding this and keeping you happy is what keeps your bank in line. That’s how the market works, but that’s not good enough in Obama-world. On this fantasy island, the government singlehandedly keeps the electoral mobs happy through the utilization of a financial death squad. It’s government by organized mob.

This case becomes even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that the reason the banks are adding new fees is to cover the cost of a new federal price fixing law that took billions from banks and allocated it to giant retailers like Wal-Mart. And even more absurdly, the pricing fixing law that caused the fee increase is the very same law that created the agency that Obama wants to use to overturn the fee increase.

(more…)

#OccupyWallSt proudly features this statement, from ‘comrades’ in Cairo on their home page:

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

(more…)

Former Weather Underground terrorist leader, and long time colleague of president Barack Obama, Bill Ayers  is actively supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement, in his home town of Chicago – while his education activist brother Rick Ayers wants to see the movement extended to the nation’s schools.

In an October 16 interview with Chicago Sun-Times journalist Laura Washington, Bill Ayers described the” Occupy” movement as a “North American Spring,” akin to the “Arab Spring” still playing out in North Africa and the Middle East.

Said Ayers:

“These kinds of movements expand our consciousness of what’s possible…Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.”

Ayers’ support took a more practical form October 19, when the retired UIC professor led a “teach-in” with Occupy Chicago protesters on “ non-violent direct action” at the group’s  HQ (in front of the Federal Reseve Bank at Jackson and LaSalle).

Ayers  detailed the tactics and history of the Civil Rights movement, drawing analogies to the group before him. “You created power where there was none,” the famed agitator said.

Ayers spoke naturally to the crowd of 40, who sat in rapture, registering their approval by lifting silent fingers.

“It’s critical that you maintain your independence,” Ayers told the crowd – warning them not to be  co-opted by labor unions or the Democrats. History, Ayers told the assembled activists, shows his preferred approach to political power. “Martin Luther King didn’t go begging for a meeting with Lyndon Johnson,” Ayers said. “Lyndon Johnson begged for a meeting with Martin Luther King.”

The protesters seem to have already followed Ayers’ advice. The group turned down Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposition for a meeting, demanding the misdemeanor charges from last Saturday’s arrest of more than 170 activists be dropped first.

(more…)

NEW YORK (AP) – Dressed as protesters, complete with toy megaphone, Mitch Robinson and his wife unrolled a sleeping bag and “occupied” their friends’ Halloween party. Unlike the real-life Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, they had a detailed, numbered list of demands for their hosts.

Among them: Equal time on the karaoke machine, more meat on the grill and extra alcohol in the drinks.

So went the party in Tacoma, Washington, last Saturday night—Robinson in jeans, flannel shirt and a “Live Free or Die” cap and wife Mary Boone in beret, baggy sweater and a “Peace, Love Bieber” button.

“We were a big hit,” said Robinson, 48, a marketing executive. “We tried to incite the other partygoers. Plus I loved that basically what I wore was perfect for raking leaves the next day.”

(more…)

Obama at anti-war protest, 2002 (Source: Verum Serum)

Just twenty or so years ago, Barack Obama wouldn’t just have supported the Occupy protests.

He would have organized them.

From Stanley Kurtz’s essential Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, pp. 117-8:

In fact, Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties [in 1988]: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders into dropping a landfill expansion deal.

We know of Obama’s involvement in this demonstration only because his supporters in 2008 felt it necessary to rebut charges that, contrary to his claims of inter-racial healing, he had organized exclusively with blacks. Only then did Obama’s former colleagues from UNO [United Neighborhood Organization, a largely Mexican group] of Chicago reveal that he had helped to plan and lead this multi-ethnic demonstration against landfill expansion on Chicago’s South Side.

…Shouting “No deals!” somewhere between eighty and a hundred UNO-DCP [Developing Communities Project, a black group organized by Obama] marched to a local bank. There they broke into a meeting being conducted by the bank president and local community leaders. The group was exploring the possibility of a deal with Waste Management. The protestors, presumably including Obama, surrounded the meeting table while [Mary-Ellen] Montes [of UNO] told the negotiators, “We will fight you every step of the way.” (more…)

From Gallup:

Small-business owners in the United States are most likely to say complying with government regulations (22%) is the most important problem facing them today, followed by consumer confidence in the economy (15%) and lack of consumer demand (12%).

Rounding out small-business owners’ top five problems in the Oct. 3-6 Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index poll is lack of credit at 10% and poor leadership by government and the president at 9%.

Looking ahead to 2012, approximately one in three small-business owners say they are very or moderately worried about going out of business.

(more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Zeke Miller to discuss the burst of the housing bubble, Obama’s latest push for mortgage relief efforts, and how proposed changes in federal policy changes will impact the 2012 elections.

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.

Related Links:

Obama’s efforts to aid homeowners, boost housing market fall far short of goals
Here Is Obama’s Latest Plan To Stave Off The Housing Disaster
Obama Knew Housing Aid Wasn’t Likely To Work, But Promised Big Anyway
Obama Tries Again At Housing Fix, Will Announce New Refinancing Rules In Las Vegas
Obama Refi Plan is Not Housing Stimulus
Obama administration tries to reset federal response to mortgage crisis
How Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Guarantees Work In Brief
Zeke Miller at Business Insider

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The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) have never tried to hide their leftist leanings.  In fact at times each of the groups have put its progressive politics ahead of its duty to the Jewish Community.  Now these groups have a message to the Jewish Community, “If you don’t support Barack Obama, Shut The Heck Up!

On Monday, the two organizations released a joint statement asking Jews not to make Israel a political Issue

The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have joined together in an effort to encourage other national organizations, elected officials, religious leaders, community groups and individuals to rally around bipartisan support for Israel while preventing the Jewish State from becoming a wedge issue in the upcoming campaign season. Join the ADL and AJC in taking the “National Pledge for Unity on Israel” — and sign our pledge.

This is the most anti-Israel administration in the 63 year history of the Jewish State.  Israel is at a crucial point in her history, she is surrounded by terrorists who are appeased by most of the world, and her historic friendship with the United States is being abused by a President who, because of incompetence or intention,  is throwing the Jewish state to the wolves.

Although the prose in their pledge is pretty, its real purpose is to shut up Jews who wish to point out the failings of Barack Obama’s Israel policy. These organizations have a vested interest in ensuring that the Jews continue to vote Democratic and re-elect this president—Political Power.

(more…)

From OccupyWallSt: (Seriously)

The occupation of Liberty Square is a symbol of the growing international movement fighting against neoliberal economic practices, the crimes of Wall Street and the resulting income inequality, unemployment, and oppression of people at the front lines of the economic crisis. More than a week ago we successfully rallied to defend our occupation from eviction. Knowing that the neighborhood we built was important to our movement, occupiers reorganized the space and prepared for eviction defense, community board and local elects pressured Brookfield Properties, and local organizations and unions mobilized their members in defense of Liberty Square. Brookfield and Bloomberg backed down in the face of this joint effort. #ows has international support, and is part of a global movement for economic and social justice that is only just starting to take form. It is within this context that we must drill down, look inward and converse with each other about our actions in this space.

For weeks, occupiers, working groups, individuals from the community board, and neighbors have approached the drummers on the west side of Liberty Square in an effort to involve them in conversations revolving around their constant presence. The drummers have been asked to stop drumming during quiet hours, to not drum during GA, and to allow other music to enter the square. The drummers, who feel that they are bringing rhythm to the revolution and have a voice that must be heard have felt disrespected and disparaged. The situation has been heated.

(more…)

Governor Rick Perry of Texas has announced a plan, which he outlines in today’s Wall Street Journal, to replace the corrupt and inefficient internal revenue code with a flat tax. Let’s review his proposal, using the principles of good tax policy as a benchmark.

1. Does the plan have a low, flat rate to minimize penalties on productive behavior?

Governor Perry is proposing an optional 20 percent tax rate. Combined with a very generous allowance (it appears that a family of four would not pay tax on the first $50,000 of income), this means the income tax will be only a modest burden for households. Most important, at least from an economic perspective, the 20-percent marginal tax rate will be much more conducive to entrepreneurship and hard work, giving people more incentive to create jobs and wealth.

2. Does the plan eliminate double taxation so there is no longer a tax bias against saving and investment?

The Perry flat tax gets rid of the death tax, the capital gains tax, and the double tax on dividends. This would significantly reduce the discriminatory and punitive treatment of income that is saved and invested (see this chart to understand why this is a serious problem in the current tax code). Since all economic theories – even socialism and Marxism – agree that capital formation is key for long-run growth and higher living standards, addressing the tax bias against saving and investment is one of the best features of Perry’s plan.

3. Does the plan get rid of deductions, preferences, exemptions, preferences, deductions, loopholes, credits, shelters, and other provisions that distort economic behavior?

A pure flat tax does not include any preferences or penalties. The goal is to leave people alone so they make decisions based on what makes economic sense rather than what reduces their tax liability. Unfortunately, this is one area where the Perry flat tax falls a bit short. His plan gets rid of lots of special favors in the tax code, but it would retain deductions (for those earning less than $500,000 yearly) for charitable contributions, home mortgage interest, and state and local taxes.

As a long-time advocate of a pure flat tax, I’m not happy that Perry has deviated from the ideal approach. But the perfect should not be the enemy of the very good. If implemented, his plan would dramatically boost economic performance and improve competitiveness.

(more…)

Photo credit: Pajamas Media

UPDATE: A source reports that 30-40 arrests have been made, which suggests that 100-300 activists left when police arrived.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

(10-25) 05:58 PDT OAKLAND — Oakland police arrested dozens of people at a plaza outside City Hall, two weeks after the protesters began building an intricate encampment as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement against corporate greed and economic inequality.

At about 4:57 a.m., officers began making arrests and removing tents and makeshift shelters at the Occupy Oakland protest at Frank Ogawa Plaza near 14th Street and Broadway. By 5:05 a.m., the bulk of the arrests had been completed, and arrestees were led away in plastic handcuffs.

…

Officials said protesters had plugged power cords into city utility poles and had denied access to emergency responders who needed to get into the plaza. The city was also alarmed by the activists’ decision to try to police themselves with a volunteer security team.

Protesters had vowed to resist eviction and protect an encampment of about 150 tents, where pathways made of wooden pallets connected a kitchen, a garden, a medical station and an area for children to play.

For more than an hour before the police moved in, several hundred people appeared ready to defend the camp, placing Dumpsters, boards, pallets and even metal police-style barricades around the plaza as blockades.

After the mass arrests, protesters vowed to return. (more…)