In France, Socialist François Hollande said he will move quickly to implement traditionally Socialist tax-and-spend programs, which call for boosting taxes on the rich, increasing state spending, raising the minimum wage, hiring some 60,000 teachers and lowering the retirement age from 62 to 60.

Meanwhile, in California, Gov. Jerry Brown is calling for more social services cuts to help eliminate $15.7 billion deficit. Brown revealed a revised budget that calls for higher income and sales taxes to avoid deep cuts to K-12 and higher education. Rather than canceling an ill advised bullet train to nowhere that will cost the state at least $6 billion to build, Gov. Brown chose to scare Californians into voting for tax hikes by threatening cuts to education.

What do these three states have in common? They’re either already broke or will be soon due to government spending money it doesn’t have on socialist welfare programs, characterized within institutionalized “progressive” leftist circles as “entitlements”.

Greece, where the population is already suffering from 20% unemployment, describes austerity measures they’re expected to follow in order to receive additional bailout money from the EU as “barbaric”. With an economy so weak that it can’t employ one fifth of its own citizens, where does Greece expect to find the money necessary to become financially solvent?

France, if it enacts Hollande’s pledge to mimic Greece’s socialist welfare spending, will soon experience similar fiscal troubles. By following Greece down the road to fiscal insolvency, France will ensure that Germany stands alone in continental Europe as the sole, fiscally responsible, productive society.

California has been on a similar, European style path for decades, which is why California is closer to a fiscal cliff that most of the United States. The legislature in California continuously acts on the belief that it can spend the state into prosperity. California has taxed the rich, spent money on socialist programs, established sanctuary cities that fund the lives of millions of illegal aliens and spent huge amounts of money on education. Much of the cost of that education goes for the children of unlawful residents.

On the list of most business friendly states, California is currently ranked fiftieth. California has held that rank for the last eight years. Meanwhile, businesses are fleeing California in droves, seeking residence in states like Texas, where tax and regulatory policies are friendlier to business. The California tax base is fleeing along with those businesses.

In Sacramento California, government employee unions are running the show. Not only do “progressive” politicians vote overvalued salaries and perks for themselves, they also obediently kowtow to union demands for ever escalating salaries, benefits and pensions. This occurs because those politicians depend on union money, muscle and turnout for their own re-election. Rather than choosing to run the state responsibly, self interested career politicians continuously submit to demands from “civil servants” who are too often far from civil. The looming, unfunded costs of union benefits and pensions are among the largest liabilities contributing to the state’s $15.7 billion deficit.

These are precisely the results all Americans can expect for future generations if the cradle to grave mentality continues to be legislated by “progressive” me first career politicians. These results are predictable if the cradle to grave lie remains propagandized in schools, promoted in television programs, glorified in the movies and dutifully drubbed into the minds of sound bite voters by the news media.

If America is to be saved, these combined forces of the institutionalized “progressive” left must be stopped; starting with voting “progressive” politicians out of office. That’s the first order of business. When a patient arrives in an emergency room, stopping the bleeding receives top priority. The detailed surgery needed to excise the root problem, while still necessary, comes later. It took years for “progressives” to infiltrate and infect academia, Hollywood, the media and political class with their cancerous agenda. And while delay is not an option, it will take years to repair those institutions.

Unless that happens, today’s Americans will spend their declining years describing to young people who’ll listen, how the United States was once the place where the world’s people came for otherwise unavailable opportunity. How the land of the free and the home of the brave was more than just a line in a song.

In America, for an increasingly limited amount of time, cradle to grave suicide is still an option.

http://mjfellright.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/cradle-to-grave-suicide/

Between October 2010 and June 2011, the IRS received phony tax returns based on stolen Puerto Rican identities that would have led to the disbursement of $5.6 billion to alleged fraudsters, two of these people said. It is unclear how much money the IRS ultimately sent but one person familiar with the matter said an estimated $2 billion in checks was distributed.

Bronx mail carrier Robert Anthony Warren and at least two other USPS employees have been convicted and are doing prison time for their part in the scam. Back in September five men were also convicted of participating in the same scam and sentenced to between 40 and 98 months in prison, while also being ordered to pay a whopping $12 million in restitution. Good luck recovering any of that cash there. With all of these arrests and convictions, has the oh-so-competent federal government shut down this scam for good? Not quite, as can be seen in a statement from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office was among the first to investigate the group: (emphasis added)

“What we have uncovered may very well be the tip of the iceberg,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office was among the first to investigate the group. “It’s a massive fraud.”

With a federal government that is running up trillion dollar deficits faster than the Roadrunner rocketing past the outgunned Wiley E. Coyote in cartoon-land,  as the federal bureaucracy grows bigger by the minute….so increases these numbers of incidents that highlight their incompetence and dysfunctionality. In the meantime, Senate progressives are currently working tirelessly (yes.. sarcasm intended) to rig up a massive $42 billion-dollar-bailout of the USPS UNION pension fund under the guise of…. reform.  From the thieves that are scamming the taxpayers from the Dominican Republic through fraudulent tax refund checks, to today’s Senate Socialists giving their Democrat-supporting labor [USPS] Unions $42 billion tax dollars, America is being robbed blind on a daily basis, in more ways than one. Americans should keep this in mind as they head to the voting booth in November.

The Spanish government introduced a mix of spending cuts and new taxes amounting to roughly 27 billion euros in public sector cuts. The Spanish government plans to raise corporate tax rates, which will augment higher income and capital gains tax rates already implemented in December. Civil servants will see pay increases stop and consumers will pay higher fees to use electricity and gas. To be sure these are tough pills to swallow, especially in a weak Spanish economy suffering unemployment levels above 20% – the highest in the eurozone.

Tensions flared Thursday between the estimated 800 thousand protesters and riot police, causing injuries, detentions, and burned trash containers. Despite these disruptions Spanish officials have remained steadfast in their commitment to austerity.

Economy Minister Luis de Guindos, commenting from Copenhagen, said “Spain is going to stop being a problem, especially for the Spanish people but also for the European Union.” The new conservative government, less than 100 days old, has put concerns over the debt at the top of their priority list.

De Guindos and his government’s main concern is averting a financial disaster. The danger of rising interest rates on government bonds threatens total economic collapse. The bond yield on ten year Spanish bonds was at 5.4% last week though it was only 4.96% just a month ago (the US is about 2.2%). If investor confidence is shaky borrowing costs soar, something already witnessed in Greece where rates on government bonds exploded. When borrowing costs go up financing becomes very difficult if not impossible, particularly in times of sluggish economic growth and falling revenues.

But Spain’s situation, like that of Greece, is soon to be repeated throughout the Eurozone. Like it or not the austerity express is scheduled for trips to Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and even France and Germany. Even said, the eurocrats continue to discuss still more bailout funds with plans to combine ESFS (European Financial Stability Facility) and ESM (European Stability Mechanism) funds while others are pushing for greater IMF lending capacity all in the hopes of strengthening the euro “firewall.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic conservative lawmakers in Washington continue to fail to make any headway with major budget reform. House Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan and Congressman Jim Jordan of the Republican Study Committee have put forth viable proposals that could prevent a financial crisis in America, but none of them have any chance of passing.

Plus, as long as prominent Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers continue to demote budget problems as “long term,” many Americans will remain convinced that Washington’s fiscal problems are remote from what is happening in Europe – an utter fallacy.

Ironically, instability in the Eurozone has been a source of strength for America’s bond markets thus far, making them a safe haven for investors fleeing Europe. However, that blessing won’t last long. What very few people in the Eurozone and in the US realize is that the game is over, the markets have already decided. As such the developed countries of the world face a very difficult choice: painful austerity now or financial catastrophe later.

Cameron Macgregor is a USNA grad and former Naval officer. He is writing his first book America Resurrected.

I know that everything Gen. Boykin says is true. I was trained in counter insurgency techniques, including how they operate, what military and psychological tactics they use, and how they subvert the social system of a country to take over and enslave the people. I was also taught how to overcome those tactics and to present a way of life that highlights freedom and self-determination.

Marxists take control of every aspect of society (Nationalization) under the auspices of making life better for the “downtrodden”. The story sounds good, “some have more than they deserve and others have less than they deserve” (sound familiar?). They will tell the populace how life can be “more fair” for society in general. They gain control of everything and then a very small group of people decide who gets what. Have you heard “a matter of fairness” from Barack Obama and the media?

The Democrat Party, with help from many Republicans, essentially nationalized the auto companies by giving them “stimulus” bailout money. Who benefitted from this, the stockholders? No, the unions benefited in a case of cronyism over law. Obama’s friends came out good; their enemies, We the People, lost.

Look at the situation in the banking industry and Wall Street. The few banks that were “too big to fail” got billions in taxpayer funds while your home value and your stock values plummeted. How many retired people lost 60% or more of their savings, money they had put back for their retirement so they would not have to look to a broken social security system for their golden years? AIG got billions to prop them up, but what happened to that money? If you will do some looking you will find that most of the money wound up in foreign banks in The United Arab Emirates, Oman, and several other countries.

How many Wall Street and “too big to fail” bank executives took a beating when the economy tanked? Have you seen the figures on the bonuses they received? I heard about the proposed 90% tax on those bonuses from “outraged” members of Congress. Was that 90% tax ever implemented or was it bluster over substance to cover political tracks? Cronyism over “fairness” again? We see Socialism/Marxism at its finest in the bank bailouts.

General Boykin mentions the Marxist tactic of discrediting the opposition. The memorandum he refers to is real, not a figment of his imagination or some “out-there” conspiracy theory. Homeland Security actually labeled veterans, those like myself who have served the United States of America honorably, as a terror threat. They also labeled anyone belonging to any gun rights organization, the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, or the National Association for Gun Rights, for instance, as right wing terrorists.

The memorandum Gen. Boykin talks about never mentions the groups that set off a bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, blew up the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. There isn’t any mention of Flight 93, diverted to a Pennsylvania field thanks to the actions of heroes who gave their lives to save people they didn’t know. The Flight 93 disaster was averted by those who DHS would today call terrorists. I call those brave men heroes and patriots but to Obama, Holder, and Napolitano they are terrorists.

Boykin is correct that most of the media is in the pocket of those who would subjugate us. In the summer of 2010 a Saudi prince bought a substantial piece of FOX News. Have you noticed FOX no longer reports the news the same way they used to? They are no longer what I consider a reliable source of news.

He also nails the “hate crime” issue. Pastor John Hagee is fighting against those who would shut him up; but he has the finances to do so. How many churches can afford to defend the myriad of lawsuits and criminal charges if they speak biblical truth openly and plainly? Pastors have been silenced by the IRS with the threat of losing their tax exempt status, and long prison sentences if they speak out. I believe they should speak out anyway but most won’t. I am not in a pulpit so I can only disagree with tolerating this. Truth is the enemy of Marxism and they will go to any means necessary to stifle the truth. Dietrich Bonheoffer, German a pastor, stood up to Adolf Hitler on the same grounds and died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Let me give you an example of Marxist stealth moves in the name of “crime fighting”. Does Operation Gunrunner/Fast & Furious sound familiar? If not let me clue you in. In 2009 Arizona gun dealers reported suspected “straw purchases” of weapons to BATFE as required by federal law. They were told to let the buyers walk and BATFE would follow the guns to see where they wound up. In December 2009 a border patrol agent, Brian Terry, was killed with one of these guns. And what was the reaction of the Obama administration? Do they express sympathy to Terry’s family? No, they want more gun control laws. When the truth came out so did the spin machine. The Obama machine wants to shut these dealers down for “violating” laws regarding the “non-reporting” of firearm purchases while Eric Holder sits and lies to Congress. A little ironic don’t you think?

Hillary Clinton says 90% of the crime in Mexico is committed with guns illegally purchased in the United States through “the gun show loophole”. This is a total lie but once again they cannot let the truth interfere with the implementation of tyranny. A few months ago I saw a video of weapons captured in Mexico. Included were M-79 grenade launchers, M-60 machine guns, Claymore mines, 60 mm mortars, and more. I often attend gun shows and can guarantee that none of those items are sold at gun shows in Oklahoma.

Obama also wants his own private army, pledging allegiance to him not the Constitution. He has made provisions for that army in the obamacare bill, passed by bribery and arm twisting. Is anyone aware of Hitler’s Brown Shirts or the terror brought by the Gestapo?
Please watch and listen to the video very carefully. Our very freedom is teetering on the brink of extinction. We the People, and our nation, are not finished yet but will be if we don’t turn things around very soon. Our children and grandchildren, the future generations, are depending on us to act now to save them from tyranny. The “Greatest Generation” suffered a great deal, and tens of thousands died, to leave my generation a free nation. I will not sit back and allow my heirs to inherit anything less, will you?

The big question is: What do we do to turn this around? First and foremost we need God, we need to PRAY. Every morning my wife and I pray 2 Chronicles 7:14, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and will turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear them from Heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land”. My wife and I pray for our nation, our leaders, our military, their families, our family, and a host of other issues every day.

Attend TEA Party rallies when you can. Meet with your state and federal elected officials when possible. If they have the courage to hold a Townhall type meeting, attend and have your voice heard. Call, write, or fax them on a regular basis to let them know where you stand on issues. Please share this message with others. Many want to wait until violence is the only answer but I see that as a lose/lose option. Those nations who wait that long usually trade one despot for another. Our founding fathers were a unique group at a unique time in history. They gave us the guide for a free and prosperous nation. All we have to do is to take our country back to those principles and stand strong on individual responsibility, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. You have an opportunity now to stand for freedom, will you take that opportunity?

I submit this in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, in faith, with the responsibility given to me by Almighty God to honor His work and not let it die from neglect.

Bob Russell
Claremore, Oklahoma
March 14, 2012

According to the Jan 2012 SIGTARP report:

U.S. Taxpayers are stilled owed approximately $133 billion dollars.

As of the end of 2011, the Treasury has written off $4.2 billion and realized  losses of $7.8 billion, of which the U.S. taxpayer will never see a penny of repayment, with more losses expected in the future.

While the TARP bailouts  were enacted in 2008, TARP bailouts will in fact, continue through the year 2017. Treasury has been authorized to spend another  $51 billion tax dollars on TARP supported housing programs and “certain securities markets.”

As of Jan. 2012, there were “criminal convictions of 31 defendants, of whom 22 have been sentenced to prison, a reported total ofcriminal actions against 61 individuals, including 45 senior officers (CEOs, owners, founders, or senior executives) of their organizations,and another 18 civil cases naming…corporate or other legal entities as defendants.

Look who still owes the taxpayer a whopping $75 billion dollars according to the latest SIGTARP report: AIG still owes $50 billion while GM still owes $25 billion dollars. Ally Financial also still owes the U.S taxpayers another $12 billion dollars.

The U.S. Treasury also handed out TARP “loans” and then took stock as a form of payment. The G.M. stock held by the Treasury ( thus the taxpayers) was currently trading at $24.72 on Thursday of last week. The break even price needed to recover the taxpayers cost of that part of the G.M. Bailout? $53.98 a share, or more than double it’s current value! 

The bottom line: The taxpayers have lost tens of billions of TARP dollars already through fraud and other criminal methods of theft, and there is a lot more to come. Check out the above-linked SIGTARP report. While the media refuses to report on this massive taxpayer fraud, there are some names of those already convicted right in that report. AIG and the “Largest Automaker in the world” G.M. as Obama and company like to brag about still owes the taxpayer $25 billion dollars, and AIG owes them double that! One last fact: TARP was passed in 2008, when Nancy Pelosi was running the U.S. House of Representatives and Harry Reid was running the U.S. Senate. Yes they are both Liberal Democrats.

Other fast facts about TARP from the NY Times:

The final tally in the House was 263 to 171, with 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in favor. That was a wider bipartisan majority than vote-counters in both parties had expected,  completing a remarkable turnabout from Monday, when the House defeated an earlier version of the bill by 228 to 205.

In the end, 33 [ Senate] Democrats and 24 Republicans who had voted no on Monday switched sides on Friday to support the plan. Both Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, voted for the measure when the Senate approved it on Wednesday, and both hailed Friday’s outcome.

The financial markets, however, were not enthusiastic. Already weighed down by another round of bleak economic data, including a report showing that 159,000 jobs were lost in September. (emphasis added)  [While current President Barack Obama constantly states that the U.S was bleeding 700,000 jobs a month when he took office, in late 2008 it was in fact, 159,000 jobs lost for the entire month of September, 2008, just before he took office. Just last week, according to CNN Money,  we lost another 377,000 jobs!]