Many have wondered why Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former Obama administration official as Ambassador to China, climate-change believer, ally of Harry Reid and all-around anti-Tea Party candidate is running for the Republican presidential nomination.  Were the 2012 Republican primaries your typical RINO race (not that there aren’t abundant RINOs in the current field, at least in this author’s view), it would be clear that Huntsman would be setting himself up as the establishment, “civil,” “grown up” candidate, in the mold of a more liberal Mitt Romney.

However, primaries are determined by the most ardent partisans, which for the Republican party today certainly means Tea Partiers, and conservatives and libertarians who hold similar views to those of the Tea Party.  Given that it is abundantly clear that those who will determine the Republican nominee will never accept a person with Huntsman’s political views, one must wonder why he is in the race.

I believe I have found a plausible answer.  Jon Huntsman Jr. is potentially the key to four more years of Barack Obama, not by running as a Republican but by running as an Independent.  Allow me to explain.

By running to the left of the rest of the Republican field, Huntsman likely has no intention of competing in the Republican primary.  Instead, he may use the Republican primary and his substantial personal wealth to set up for a run in the general election as an Independent — as the “reasonable” candidate in a field characterized by the mainstream media as consisting of terrorist Tea Partiers practicing radical brinksmanship and wanting to take us back to the Antebellum era, and President Obama who has proven ineffective, weak and ever-willing to compromise.

Independents who buy this line thus may look to spend their vote on a more moderate and palatable candidate.  Jon Huntsman would be their man.

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Recently, I got into a big fight with my cube-mate.  After attacking him for his listening to Bill Maher during the workday, he shot back and mocked my Glenn Beck listening.  As if there was some moral equivalence between the two.

“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years.  Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned.  My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”  Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?”  Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.

As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.”  In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves.  This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.  Why is it fatal?

First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education.  Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum.  A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically.  Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.

Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades.  And what is this ethic?  The elite must decide for the sheep.

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Our current administration and swarms of socialists for decades before it have repeated the dogma that the rich get rich on the backs of the poor.  This fallacy deserves no place in genuine political discourse.  In fact, the opposite will be true given the policies that come from such a premise – all of society will get poor on the backs of the ‘rich’ chained by government.

First off, if a rich person can only get rich by bilking the poor person, this implies that there is a finite amount of wealth in an economy.  This defies all logic.  There is an infinite amount of wealth because there are an infinite amount of ideas that can be converted into goods and services, the competition of which increases quality, decreases cost and spreads the wealth to all of society.  The imagination of the entrepreneur is boundless, and the transformation of ideas to tangible wealth can only be constrained by taxes, regulations and the economic uncertainty generated by a political class responding to constituents who seek to use the law to benefit themselves at the cost of others.

Taking a step back, when those like Barack Obama speak about the “rich,” they never define who these heartless souls are.  The term ‘rich’ as regards tax policy is a misnomer.  It is the highest earners that are the rich; it is the highest earners in society that provide the disproportionate amount of wealth that the government forcibly takes and redistributes.  This is not a static class.  People can move from high income brackets to low income brackets at any time in a free economy.  Only in a socialist economy do the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor at the whim of the political class, whereas in the free economy it is determined by how much society values one’s services.

Which brings us to the fact that when Obama and his comrades speak of the ‘rich’ in derisive terms, there is never any discussion of how the high earner becomes the high earner.

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To listen to the debates on the deficit and the debt, one would think that wealth emanates from the government. Underlying every argument is the notion that government cuts imply pain and pose a drastic threat to our economy.

But government spending itself is pain because all money spent by the government represents the confiscation of today’s wealth or future wealth, via direct taxation, currency devaluation or debt ad infinitum. By taking current wealth out of private hands, it is allocated not according to a market economy driven by the people but by a political economy in which “investment” yields returns solely for the politicians in the form of votes and favored classes in the form of monetary or regulatory handouts; by devaluation, savers are wiped out and borrowers and spenders are rewarded, a sure-fire way to bankrupt a people, given that economies grow through savings and investment, not consumption; by piling on the debt, the government pushes up interest rates for all of us, leading investment to flow out of the US and crushing corporations and individuals alike.

All government today rests upon a premise that people should be lucky that they get to keep a percentage of the fruits of their labor, with government rightfully conferring benefits on the interests that support it. Which is why it was never intended for government to be in the business of conferring benefits in the first place – and I mean benefits to anyone, be it labor unions, corporations or particular classes of people.

The burden should have always been on the politician to prove to his elector why ANY dollar taken from the individual should be redistributed to someone else. For government’s clearly defined bounds were created to ensure that the usurpation of wealth from private citizens would be minimal, and occur only when it supported a service that all people benefitted equally from, such as our national defense.

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When Americans voted in Barack Obama in 2008, they thought they were getting a “post-racial,” “post-partisan” President.  For Barack Obama himself had declared that having merely won the Democratic nomination, “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  What Americans didn’t realize however was that Barack Obama was only to be President for certain subsets of the population; this new era of good feeling was only to be for those of a select few classes, races and ethnicities.  This was to be a world in which all of the old injustices would be righted not by tolerance for all, but with intolerance for the presumed intolerant, with the vengeful Barack Obama correcting past wrongs with his redistributive justice.

And so in America today if you are black, a union member, Muslim, Hispanic, gay and/or profligate you can expect preferential treatment from this administration.  For most everyone else, tough luck.  I know of no other way to interpret the pattern of the words and actions of this President and his cronies.  We need not judge Obama on the Bill Ayers, Edward Said/Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright influences.  The true instincts of this administration show quite clearly in its deafening silence on so many true injustices, only to be outdone by its knee-jerk reactions to issues either not germane to it, or on which it consistently sides against the majority of Americans.

Witness the fact that the President cannot help but interject when it comes to the actions of a white cop in Cambridge, a mosque being built by Islamic supremacists near Ground Zero, a Governor trying to return his state to fiscal sanity by taking on an obfuscatory union or the evil fat cats trying to make their undeserved profits, nor can Eric Holder admit that perhaps even the word “jihad” exists, let alone that the nightstick-wielding Black Panthers in Philadelphia were anything more than “inappropriate,” though they threatened the citizenry in the very way that his “people” were threatened decades ago.  The notion of the keeper of justice defending above all his “people” poses a challenge to Justice Sotomayor’s wise Latina women quip in the volumes it speaks with regard to the “soft” bigotry of this administration.

This administration does not represent the people, but only the narrow majority which elected it, save for a handful of Independents they have thrown under the bus along the way.  But as Lenin said, “if you want to make an omelet, you have to be willing to break a few eggs.”

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Universally, democracy is being exalted.

Everywhere one turns, one hears of its virtues: how democracy ensures human rights, fosters prosperity and shepherds in modernity.

Yet democracy represents nothing more than the tyranny of the majority.  In other words, contrary to the ideals of western liberalism, democracy does not ensure that the smallest minority, the individual is protected.

In the vast majority of circumstances, people free to choose their government get the government they desire.  In Russia, the people have chosen again and again to elect KGB criminals.  In Gaza, the people have chosen to elect either Hamas or Fatah, terrorist parties in perpetual war.  Democracy does not a free society ensure.

Democracy is merely a system of election – it is not inherently good as its results are entirely predicated on the voters themselves.  Freedom-loving peoples will generally establish a political system to protect freedom.  Those who prefer strict rule will devise a political order that squelches it.

I would argue that any Islamic society will refuse to establish a system grounded in property rights, individual liberty and free market principles because it is completely anathema to Islamic culture, history and religious tenets.

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Predictably, the media is describing the goings on in the Arab world as consisting of revolutionaries fighting their oppressive leaders for democracy and human rights.  Never mind that democracy does not ensure liberty.  Never mind that the governments that will likely ultimately take over will consist of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.  Never mind that in our words and actions we are implicitly if not explicitly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, undermining anyone who might be helpful in the region, just as we did by sitting on our hands while actual moderate and secular people sought our help in Iran.

Egyptian rebellion in the liberal narrative, along with rebellion among any group hostile in nature to the US and Israel by default has to be good, as is any shakeup of the existing structure.  Crises are useful things.

And the useful idiots in our society, brainwashed by handlers in the media and academia can no longer recognize the difference between good and evil.  Whether it is “Palestinians” launching rockets at Israelis, or the obligatory disclaimer that there are plenty of patriotic Muslims in a State of the Union speech, leftists will always support anything that challenges the status quo, and pay lip service to Islam; anything that represents a threat to traditional Western civilization is a positive in the battle to create their Utopic socialist world.

Hope and change is inherently good, no matter what the hope is and what the change entails.  And why put up this facade instead of calling things what they really are?  Because pleasant and airy words hide the horrors of a socialist world or an Islam-dominated one (which are quite similar incidentally); these words distract us from despicable actions, and sound palatable to an apathetic public.

The leftists and the Islamic world understand public relations specifically and how to exert mass influence generally.  They know how to manipulate through media and propagandize in public institutions from the time our children are young, while committing enough people to their causes out of their own self-interest that given our quiescence heretofore, they appear to be well ahead in the fight to win the future.

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Time was when countries believed in strong currencies — strength measured not in the rhetoric of bearded wise men but of bank vaults flush with gold coin.

Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez recently announced that he would be devaluing his currency on New Year’s day.  As the Wall Street Journal reported:

News of the devaluation came just after the central bank said the Venezuelan economy contracted 1.9% in 2010, the second consecutive year of declining output in the oil-rich nation after a 3.3% decline in 2009.

Both pieces of news suggest Mr. Chávez is having an increasingly difficult time balancing his populist policies with economic reality, according to economists. His government’s widespread nationalizations of private industry have sapped economic growth, while public spending has sparked inflation that the government has tried to contain by measures such as price controls.

There are a couple of striking aspects to this news.  First, in the above excerpt one could easily replace Mr. Chávez’s name with Mr. Obama’s.  Nationalizations or de facto nationalizations cripple an economy by replacing functional markets driven by the people with dysfunctional economies driven by central planners and have a secondary effect of chilling entrepreneurship, and thus competition, innovation and capital formation that drive economic growth.

Constantly imposing costs implicit and explicit on the private sector (i.e. those who must survive by providing a product demanded by consumers in quantities, of qualities and for prices willingly paid by these consumers), including the cost of propping up failed businesses and inflating asset prices, disincentivizes people from partaking in mutually beneficial commercial activity.

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As we embark upon a new year of trying to save this country and restore its founding principles, I have spent much time contemplating questions of readers — most important of which is that given the massive problems we continue to face, and would face even with the most principled conservative Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, what can be done?

But in order to deal with our current struggles, we must recognize that they are symptoms.  The cure to these symptoms lies in dealing with their root causes.  However, even before dealing with our struggles and their root causes, we must ask, what is our vision for America, and what is the role of government in helping to ensure it rather than dooming us to never reach it?

My view of America is a country in which people are free to pursue their greatest good as they see it, or as the founders put it to create a land in which people can pursue their happiness.  This system presupposes that the people are protected.  Before people can partake in mutually beneficial trade and activity, they must be reasonably secure in their persons and their property.  As such, free markets and the free people that create these markets require strong national defense.

So the vision should be clear — government’s role is to lay the foundation for people to be free, furnishing and preserving prosperity by providing defense for it, both against external aggressors and internal ones by providing a set of stable laws protecting private property and contracts specifically and the individual generally.

Where we stand today is that the government, created to ensure these things is instead imperiling them.  Rather than securing private property it consumes and redistributes it.  Further, at every avenue government creates barriers to the free voluntary exchange of goods and services that heretofore have provided such unparalleled levels of comfort for us all.  Rather than defending us from foreign enemies it cuts deals with them, concedes to them and generally submits to them out of political correctness, moral relativism and an inane commitment to multiculturalism.

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Amidst the requisite election-year class warfare being played across the country, one of the common arguments being made by the left and accepted begrudgingly by the right is that those who earn the most should pay their fair share.  While both sides might differ over the size of one’s “fair share,” nevertheless even the most sober conservatives will usually concede this point.  Yet when one looks at how wealth is created, especially in spite of an economy as increasingly shackled as ours, this proves to be a specious argument.

The “fair share” arguments insinuate that the businessman, the entrepreneur, the inventor greedily piles their money on the backs of the poor.  Even for those who don’t see the world this way, there is a pervasive feeling that because one lives comfortably, one should be forced to support others because one has had such good fortune.  While you or I may agree that there is great merit to being charitable, I think we can also agree at least in principle that it is immoral for us to force someone to be charitable — especially if that “charity” is a government-run one for a government-determined cause, which is to say that it bears little resemblance to a charity at all.

But more importantly, what is forgotten are all the benefits that accrue to society as a result of the efforts of the wealth producer.

For it is the producer who generates wealth by applying his skills, energies and ideas and taking risk, generation which requires the creation of jobs both within his firm and within the firms that make up the other cogs in the chain of production, the proper allocation of capital by investors to fund the idea and the provision of a product that society values.  For one to make a lot of money, all of these disparate parts must come together, leading not just to success for the the producer, but food, an education and healthcare for the family of the employee and all of the employees at the firms that helped in the production of the good, a return for investors that can be reinvested in other profitable ventures to grow the overall economic pie and over time better and cheaper goods for the consumers, those who solely determine which producers are rewarded with profits and which are penalized with losses.

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Suddenly the American public is shocked.  Perhaps there is no economic recovery.  Perhaps the One really does favor Islam.

Democrats and Republicans shake their heads and wonder, how could our President pursue such divisive and unpopular policies?  What is the rationale for his decisions?  Is he incompetent?  Is he naive?

The answer is none of the above.

I have said before and I will say again, Barack Obama does not share the values of Americans.  His vision is completely anathema to an America based on individualism, private property rights and Judeo-Christian morality.

When one argues that Barack Obama is merely mistaken in his economic program, they completely discount the notion that he knows exactly what he is doing and that he has been 100% successful in achieving his policies and their intended ends, means and ends that any objective viewer would realize were insane.  After all, an economy is nothing more than the collection of mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges of labor and the fruits of labor.  Anything that impedes one’s labor, or the trading of its fruits is necessarily bad for the economy.  Hence, almost everything a government does to try to stimulate an economy, impeding the natural spontaneous harmony of such a system necessarily postpones any recovery.

We were in major trouble with unsustainable public and private debt prior to this President, coupled with a completely insolvent financial system, a destined to fail monetary system and numerous stagnant businesses sucking up economic resources.  A real financial restructuring would have taken significant time, and even the most “fiscally conservative” President and Congress would not have been able to move enough roadblocks out of the way to make this recovery painless or quick.  I question whether or not anything could change the direction of the economy in the long run, save for a collapse that would force us to let the free market work and liquidate the welfare state.  But this President ensures that there will not even be a chance for recovery for many many years, regardless of who the next President is.

And it is all by design.

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Liberals, progressives, socialists, statists, communists — all enemies of civilization argue all issues on the basis of moral relativism, one odious derivation of which is multiculturalism.  There are many arguments for why such principles are wrong.  But perhaps the most obvious problem with moral relativism and its counterparts is that from which moral relativism springs: the idea that there is no objective truth.

If there is no objective truth as the Sophists argue, then how can the statement that there is no objective truth be true?  If nothing is true, then how can the assumption be made that it is true that there is no such thing that is truly inherently good or inherently bad, or that it is true that there is no culture that is truly better than any other culture?  To argue in favor of moral relativism or multiculturalism requires a belief that there is objective truth; this is a conundrum that Leftists cannot argue away.

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As many thrills as he sends up Chris Matthews’ leg and despite his ability to walk on water, Barack Obama like all legislators cannot create jobs.  All any politician can do is take resources from the private sector and allocate them according to his or her own fancy, often towards favored constituencies, at a prohibitive and wasteful cost.

Instead of letting individuals determine how best to allocate land, labor and capital based upon their own subjective values and aspirations, the government in its self-attributed divine wisdom believes it is morally right for it to squander other people’s money.  Apparently, we are not ourselves capable of deciding how to dispense with our property, and deal with the consequences of such actions good or bad.

Then again, in our “social”ist democracy we feel it proper that government take care of our health and our retirement under the auspice of the “public good.”  So what of a little more state paternalism?  To that I say, the so-called public good is a public bad because when the collective supplants the individual, society fails.  If people would rather have the government take care of such things then take care of them themselves, then the best we can hope for is that the government not monopolize such goods and services but allow for unobstructed private competition.

In any event, to ascribe the word “sector” to the limitless Unconstitutional and unnecessary public “businesses” is pure subterfuge.  The plunder sector is the only accurate title for what the government does outside its strict Constitutional scope.

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Alexander Litvinenko was a hero in the mold of Mosab Hassan Yossef, the so-called “Son of Hamas,” who the US is sickeningly threatening to deport.  In fact, their fates may be quite similar if this is to happen, as in 2006 Litvinenko as you may recall was poisoned with Polonium-210, an extremely rare radioactive substance, and essential ingredient to early nuclear bombs.

Why was he poisoned?  Litvinenko, a former KGB/FSB agent who left the service and defected to London was a staunch critic of the Putin regime, and apparently knew too much for the Kremlin to bare.  For Litvinenko implicated the Russian government in a variety of terrorist attacks, abroad for example through their training of Al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998, and disgustingly at home through an attempted bombing of an apartment complex in 1999, and the infamous 2002 Moscow theater and 2004 Beslan school attacks.

I recently read his book Allegations, which in light of recent events is proving quite prescient.

One argument he makes that should resonate with all of us regards political resistance to the criminal Russian government:

There is no need to break any law, even most cruel one, in order to remain humans and citizens.  All we need to do is to take a civic stance, to demand that the authorities strictly obey the constitution.  Putin and his propaganda team know this, so they try to divide us, to set us against each other.  In doing so, the Kremlin strategists appeal to the lowest instincts, using every ethnic, religious or property differences we may have.  That is exactly why we must understand that our common enemy now is Putin’s regime (Allegations, 100).

Is this not precisely what we are witnessing today?  Our citizens are peacefully demanding a return to the Constitution, while our Progressive Putins try to spark racial and class warfare to divide and conquer us.

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In a June 14th editorial entitled “Politicizing the Fed,” the Wall Street Journal sheds light on one of the dubious regulations of the upcoming financial reform bill.  The Journal states:

The biggest underreported threat comes from Subtitle I, Section 1801 of the House financial reform bill titled “Inclusion of Minorities and Women; Diversity in Agency Workforce.” Sponsored by California Democrat Maxine Waters, the provision requires each federal financial agency, the Fed Board of Governors and the 12 regional Fed banks to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.”

So what else is new, you say? Don’t the feds already dictate racial and gender hiring? Yes, they do, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and assorted other federal laws. As a matter of racial and gender diversity, the Waters provision is at best redundant.

But Ms. Waters and the House are hunting bigger game—to wit, the political allocation of credit.

[...]

The House provision makes that very clear by making each diversity officer a Presidential appointee who must be confirmed by the Senate.The post, says the bill, will be “comparable to that of other senior level staff.”  The post, says the bill, will be “comparable to that of other senior level staff.”

The law says this diversity czar will “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the work force and senior management of these institutions. More ominously, this creature of Congress and the White House will also be charged with “increas[ing] the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency and conducting “an assessment” of stated inclusion goals.

Mull over that one for a minute. Having recently lived through a financial mania and panic caused in part by political pressure for “affordable housing,” Congress will now order regulators to allocate credit by race and gender.

In an article I wrote on February 28th entitled “Fiscal Death by Welfare,” I argued: “I believe that as the downturn goes on the government will blame the banks for the lack of economic growth and force them to allocate credit to chosen political entrepreneurs and other bad credit risks…”  I truly wish I had been wrong in my assessment.

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If we are to stop the march of this nation towards socialism, it is imperative that we understand and educate our fellow citizens as to what socialism is like.  This need not be limited to distant readings of history books about the gulags in Russia.  Indeed we get a very gripping modern-day reminder of the horrors of socialism from a recent article in the New York Times on North Korea.

The piece begins:

YANJI, China — Like many North Koreans, the construction worker lived in penury. His state employer had not paid him for so long that he had forgotten his salary. Indeed, he paid his boss to be listed as a dummy worker so that he could leave his work site. Then he and his wife could scrape out a living selling small bags of detergent on the black market.

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

Such is the horrifically arbitrary nature of communist regimes.  With the swift stroke of a pen the fruits of one’s labors can be reduced to nothing overnight.

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The media in the backdrop of Barack Obama’s now infamous “whose ass to kick” comment has argued that this President’s critics are angry at him for not showing more emotion.  That conservative bastion CNN features an article entitled ‘Why Obama doesn’t dare become the ‘angry black man’ that reads:

Who would have ever expected some white Americans to demand that an African-American man show more rage?

If you’ve followed the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, you’ve heard the complaints that Obama isn’t showing enough emotion.

But scholars say Obama’s critics ignore a lesson from American history: Many white Americans don’t like angry black men.

[…]

“Folks are waiting for a Samuel Jackson ‘Snakes on the Plane’ moment from this president as in: ‘We gotta’ get this $#@!!* oil back in the $#!!* rig!’ But that’s just not who Obama is,” says Saladin Ambar, a political science professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

A few observations here.  First, notice how it is only leftists like Bill Maher, Spike Lee and the elites in academia and the media coming out and making this a race issue.  Second, how unintelligible is this argument?  People are upset because the President is not getting upset, but they are wrong to be upset because they don’t like President’s that play into stereotypes?  What exactly does this have to do with an oil spill that is crippling the nation?  And who is perpetuating such a stereotype?  Third, which Americans are demanding that Barack Obama show rage?  People of all stripes and colors are looking for a President to stand up and show calm but confident and steadfast leadership, irrespective of the President’s race.  If Barack Obama happened to be purple it wouldn’t make a damn difference.

The race issue is simply devised as a smokescreen by which the left seeks to distract us.  Since the President has done a poor job leading the nation in the wake of the ongoing BP spill, the media pulls the race card to shift the focus away from Obama and towards his critics who after all are all clansmen.  Yet notice again that throughout this Presidency, the only people talking about race are the leftists themselves.

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On April 22nd we published an article entitled IndyMac Attack: Did Schumer, Paulson, Soros, and the CRL Kill the Bank and Profit From Its Collapse? We summarized the story as follows:

At the end of 2007, hedge fund billionaire John Paulson invested $15 million in the leftist non-profit, Center for Responsible Lending, their largest single donation ever. Around the same time, Paulson and his employees contributed over $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, headed, at the time, by Sen. Chuck Schumer. Roughly six months later, CRL and Sen. Schumer both launched a highly public attack on the California-based mortgage lender, Indymac. The lender failed, wiping out the investment of thousands of people. Roughly six months after that, John Paulson, in partnership with George Soros, bought up the remnants of Indymac for pennies on the dollar.

…a top executive of CRL when this deal went down, Eric Stein, is now working at the Treasury Department, heading up the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Mr. Stein will be the chief federal official designing regulations to protect consumers. Right.

At the time, we asked if this could all be coincidence.  Today, we are getting closer to answering this question.

As reported by hedge fund blog AbsoluteReturn+Alpha, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is probing John Paulson on his relationship with the Center for Responsible Lending.

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On June 6^th, the date of D-Day, scores of patriots from across the nation poured into Zuccotti Park at the corner of Liberty and Trinity, across the street from Ground Zero to protest the 9/11 mosque being built just 600 feet from our country’s most painful wound.

Many have spoken to the horrible insensitivity of this mosque, arguing that it is an affront to American sensibilities, a planting of the victory flag as evidenced by its 9/11/11 opening date and the name of the project itself, the “Cordoba Initiative,” and a reflection of the growing stealth Sharia in the United States given the mosque’s Imam’s pro-Islamic law stance.  Indeed Muslims have been building mosques for centuries as symbols of conquest and dominance, and this one in particular will mark the first to stand on US soil.

The 9/11 mosque however has far greater implications with regard to the fundamental principles of our nation.  As reflected by the guffaws of many in the crowd when one of the speakers at the rally argued in favor of the mosque on Constitutional grounds regardless of the abhorrence of its location, many find it hard to reconcile that Islam is allowed to use our freedoms to subvert or mock our freedoms.  The religious tolerance of our culture alone deems us largely unable to prevent against mosques in which Islamic supremacism is preached, creating fertile protected grounds for jihadists both peaceful and violent.

If in fact we are unable to safeguard against such institutions, or even criticize the ideology of Islam at all, then we are going to be neutered in a war against those who use Islam to justify murdering innocents and implementing universal Sharia law both overtly and stealthily.

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Anthony Weiner honed his political craft working for New York Senator Charles Schumer, and it shows in his recent attack on Glenn Beck and his sponsor Goldline.

Weiner and his comrades’ views are well reflected when he says in his Goldline Report:

…during troubling economic times it seems there is always someone ready to take advantage of the situation and profit from people’s fears.

In the past there is always the “product” that is either the next big thing (the dot com boom) or the investment that will never go down in price (the housing market), and in the past much of the media has failed in its duty to conduct due diligence, but never before have they worked so hand in hand to cheat consumers.  Commentators like Glenn Beck who are shilling for Goldline are either the worst financial advisors around or knowingly lying to their loyal viewers.

Goldline’s high pressure sales tactics and fear mongering about big government as well as their ability to hire sales staff and spokespeople who misrepresent their roles are case studies in why entities like the SEC and FTC are necessary.

Of course, it is the unscrupulous businessmen and their shills in the media who are preying on people’s fears to make a buck.  Guess what Mr. Weiner? It is because people like you are running our nation that is precisely why people are turning to gold, and precisely why places like Goldline can charge a premium.

You see, the reverse is true when it comes to your argument that because of the sales representatives at Goldline who “misrepresent their roles,” the SEC and FTC are necessary entities.  We need gold and thus gold salesmen because agencies like the SEC and FTC, along with you and your colleagues in Congress and over at the Fed help sanction and blow the very bubbles that you speak to and debase our currency, stealthily taxing us and leading us on a path to monetary and fiscal collapse.  It is because of your “consumer protections,” that consumers are made unsafe.  It is because of your regulations that we have distorted markets and the moral hazard that encourages imprudent risk-taking.

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