One school of thought attributes the tragedy to politically-correct double standards imposed on the military that kept the alarm bells from going off.

Other commentators point to a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Doubtless other factors could have contributed to the tragedy as well.

Charles Huang

Web and Media Associate

Competitive Enterprise Institute

chuang@cei.org

http://www.cei.org

http://www.openmarket.org

202-331-1010

Intel gives them money and rebates to use Intel chips. Think about that; they don’t have to pay as much, and get paid themselves, to use Intel chips rather than AMD ones.

I like it when I get rebates and cash, myself, but I’m just crazy.

Let’s remember what abusive monopoly power is supposed to mean: reduced quantity sold, higher prices, suffering consumers. They’re “suffering” all right, with a plethora of wildly popular sub-$400 netbooks, thanks to a complex and efficient marketplace in which Intel plays an important role, along with all its business partners.

Intel does not enjoy government protection of its market share, nor does it operate in a vacuum, immune from discipline if if its rebates and “bribes” (note the language used by enforcers!) are somehow bad deals for consumers or computer makers. Intel has upstream suppliers, and downstream business customers that can revolt against and thereby discipline any monopolistic behavior, or exclusive arrangements that are unsatisfactory. If the downstream partner doesn’t make a sale, neither does Intel. If the downstream partner’s hardward sales suffer because of Intel, it can retaliate. Thus as far as abusive behavior is concerned, the market is self policing. The only thing that could prevent computer makers themselves from ganging up against Intel abuses would be the antitrust laws themselves.

Antitrust, more often than a consumer-protection phenomenon, is often protectionism. In this case, government bodies are deciding we have to buy from AMD and not Intel, and AMD gets protected from the ravages of competition. Consumers lose.

As far as competing chipmakers are concerned, they of course have no fundamental right to Intel’s customers. However they do have a right to make their own deals with computer makers more satisfactory than Intel’s. Opportunities abound in PCs, laptops, and netbooks; and moreso in handhelds that are gaining appeal and yet don’t rely on Intel.

Furthermore, why should AMD be the beneficiary of antitrust interference? Most chips are not found in PCs at all, but in vehicles and in appliances and handheld devices and gadgets of all sorts. You’ll find chips in new automobiles, coffeemakers, rice cookers, cell phones, watches, calculators, the pump at the gas station. They flush the toilet for you at the airport and turn on the sink; you don’t have to touch a thing thanks to the microchip. These might want a piece of the PC action; it’s a rhetorical and nonsense question, but why not forbid AMD from getting the market share and give it to these guys?

As particle physicist Michio Kaku noted in his remarkable book Visions, “By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper, scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere.” Chips in “Wintel” desktop computers increasingly constitute just one subset of a vast semiconductor market. And guess what; fewer and fewer of the chips in non-PC devices are Intel’s. The trajectory of the marketplace is hyper-competitive, and there is no need for this antitrust action to warp things.

Some of us might be more impressed if Cuomo presented a thoughtful critique of governmental licensing and protection in his own legal industry, so that paralegals and other professionals could compete with monopoly lawyers. Now there is a realm of genuine monopoly power.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits left behind by the Bush administration from $4.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. His record-setting budgets flagrantly violate his promise to propose a “net spending cut.”

Obama broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year by signing into law a regressive excise tax increase to expand the SCHIP program, and by proposing a cap-and-trade energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion, a massive cost that Obama himself has said will be passed “on to consumers,” as well as homeowners and motorists. (In 2008, Obama privately admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle that if he was elected, electricity bills would “skyrocket” under his administration, but it didn’t report that.)

He also broke his promise not to raise taxes by backing health-care bills that would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people.  Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

The costly cap-and-trade energy bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”  (Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.   It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests.   By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and by diverting cropland to fuel production away from food production, they have already caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Over and over again, Obama has broken his campaign promise to give the public five days of notice before signing bills into law, including his very first law, the trial-lawyer backed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Obama also repeatedly made false claims about the Supreme Court decision that the Ledbetter law overruled, misstating the facts of that case and how long it gives employees to sue over pay discrimination (the Court did NOT say that employees have to sue even before discovering discrimination).

Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it.  (It repealed welfare reform and contained loads of welfare, pork, and waste, while wiping out jobs in the export sector.)

Obama’s broken promises are part of a larger pattern of dishonesty. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed.

The Washington Post admits that the ex-president, Manuel Zelaya, was trying to make himself into a dictator, like his mentor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.  But the Post demands that he be returned to power anyway because he was “illegally deported” by the military after being removed from office.

But the ex-president is busy spinning the agreement as an unqualified recognition of his right to rule, which it isn’t.  And Obama Administration officials, like the State Department’s Thomas Shannon, are busy threatening Honduran legislators with sanctions and cancellation of their visas if they vote against reinstating Zelaya, in a manner seemingly at odds with the agreement itself.

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers: he sought to circumvent constitutional term limits, used mobs to intimidate his critics, threatened public employees with termination if they refused to help him violate the Constitution, engaged in massive corruption, illegally cut off public funds to local governments whose leaders refused to back his quest for more power, denied basic government services to his critics, refused to enforce dozens of laws passed by Congress, and spent the country into virtual bankruptcy, refusing to submit a budget so that he could illegally spend public funds on his cronies.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen.

Even before the current crisis, the World Food Program noted that “One out of  four Honduran children under 5 years old falls  to chronic malnutrition. In some rural communities to the west of the country, chronic malnutrition can reach 48.5 percent.”  Since the crisis, things have gotten much worse: “A woman caring for six grandchildren can no longer afford milk. A bricklayer who used to work six days a week now is lucky to get two. A shop manager has seen his earnings evaporate.”

The Obama administration insisted that Zelaya’s removal was illegal, although many legal commentators said that Honduras’s removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was legal — and thus, not a coup. The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many lawyers and foreign policy experts, including attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.  Former Secretary of State James Baker, a lawyer, says that Honduras’s removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers: he sought to circumvent constitutional term limits, used mobs to intimidate his critics, threatened public employees with termination if they refused to help him violate the Constitution, engaged in massive corruption, illegally cut off public funds to local governments whose leaders refused to back his quest for more power, denied basic government services to his critics, refused to enforce dozens of laws passed by Congress, and spent the country into virtual bankruptcy, refusing to submit a budget so that he could illegally spend public funds on his cronies.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama Administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen.  Even before the current crisis, the World Food Program noted that “One out of  four Honduran children under 5 years old falls  to chronic malnutrition. In some rural communities to the west of the country, chronic malnutrition can reach 48.5 percent.”  After it, things have only gotten worse: “A woman caring for six grandchildren can no longer afford milk. A bricklayer who used to work six days a week now is lucky to get two. A shop manager has seen his earnings evaporate.”

The Obama Administration insisted that Zelaya’s removal was illegal, although many legal commentators said that Honduras’s removal of ex-president Zelaya was legal — and thus, not a coup. The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many lawyers and foreign policy experts, including attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.  Former Secretary of State James Baker, a lawyer, says that Honduras’s removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

While attacking Honduras’ democratically-elected Congress and Supreme Court for their role in removing and replacing the country’s ex-president and would-be dictator, the Obama Administration has paid little attention to human-rights abuses in countries ruled by dictatorships.  Those countries include Guinea, where troops recently committed mass rapes against women in broad daylight; Niger, where the president recently turned himself into a dictator; Iran, where vast numbers of pro-democracy demonstrators have been tortured or killed; and Nicaragua, right next door to Honduras, where the unpopular president, who routinely engages in vote fraud, is busy trampling on constitutional term limits in order to turn himself into a president-for-life.

“A month ago, the Law Library of Congress reviewed the removal of Manuel Zelaya from his post as President of Honduras, an act that the Obama administration called a ‘coup’ and demanded reversed for its illegality.  To the embarrassment of the White House and State Department, the Congressional body determined that Honduras acted lawfully in removing Zelaya for his crimes against their constitution, although they determined that his exile broke Honduran law.  Now John Kerry wants the Law Library to retract its findings, apparently trying to rewrite history to hide the facts of the case.”

Earlier, the Obama administration overruled career justice department lawyers in voting rights and voter intimidation cases, to give a green light to unconstitutional legislation, and protect an Obama poll-watcher and Democratic Party official from being held accountable for wrongdoing.  Obama also fired an inspector general for uncovering wrongdoing by a prominent Obama supporter.

Contrary to what Senator Kerry claims, there are many legal commentators who say that Honduras’s removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was legal — and thus, not a coup.

The ex-president’s removal was perfectly constitutional, say many lawyers and foreign policy experts, including attorneys Octavio Sanchez, Miguel Estrada, and Dan Miller, former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes, Stanford’s William Ratliff, and The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady.

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a lawyer, says that Honduras’s removal of Zelaya from office was legal, although its exiling of him was not.

Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers: he sought to circumvent constitutional term limits, used mobs to intimidate his critics, threatened public employees with termination if they refused to help him violate the Constitution, engaged in massive corruption, illegally cut off public funds to local governments whose leaders refused to back his quest for more power, denied basic government services to his critics, refused to enforce dozens of laws passed by Congress, and spent the country into virtual bankruptcy, refusing to submit a budget so that he could illegally spend public funds on his cronies.

Journalists nonsensically refer to Honduras’s removal of its ex-president as a “coup” even while admitting that it was approved by the country’s supreme court. But if it was legal, by definition, it cannot be a coup, since a coup is defined as “the unconstitutional overthrow of a legitimate government by a small group.”

Moreover, the ex-president’s removal was not a “coup” because it was not committed by a “small group,” as the definition of “coup” requires. The removal of Honduras’s president was supported by the entire Honduran Supreme Court, an almost unanimous Honduran Congress, and much of Honduran society. Honduras did not lose its government, but merely replaced one illegitimate part of it: its overbearing president. And his removal from office (as opposed to his subsequent exile) was clearly legally justified.

Law professors like James Lindgren, Jonathan Adler, Glenn Reynolds, and William Jacobson have also criticized the administration’s position on Honduras.

By levying sanctions on Honduras, and refusing to recognize its current government, the Obama administration has destabilized the country, one of the poorest in Latin America, resulting in mass layoffs leading to 65% unemployment among workers at small and medium-size enterprises in Honduras.  Vulnerable social groups in Honduras, like orphans, have suffered especially acutely, and malnutrition has risen.

While attacking Honduras’ democratically-elected Congress and Supreme Court for their role in removing and replacing the country’s ex-president and would-be dictator, the Obama administration has paid little attention to human-rights abuses in countries ruled by dictatorships.  Those countries include Guinea, where troops recently committed mass rapes against women in broad daylight; Niger, where the president recently turned himself into a dictator; Iran, where vast numbers of pro-democracy demonstrators have been tortured or killed; and Nicaragua, right next door to Honduras, where the unpopular president, who routinely engages in vote fraud, is busy trampling on constitutional term limits in order to turn himself into a president-for-life.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime affect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal court.  It also adds sexual orientation, gender, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law that was originally designed to protect racial minorities.

The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court.  The Commission called the new law a “menace to civil liberties” because it is an end-run around constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy.

As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy.  Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds.   Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial.  When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which some journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.

But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.”  Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration has long supported the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

As law professors like Jonathan Turley and Eugene Volokh have noted, the Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech at the United Nations, joining in calls to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation in violation of international human-rights treaties. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, discussing the racial implications of the death penalty, and calling homosexuality immoral.  In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite!

A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East Valley Tribune. But as even liberal law professor Jack Balkin, who was initially fooled by the story, now admits, it’s pure bunk: a video recording of the event shows that Scalia actually said he would have voted to strike down segregation.

Before the error was uncovered, the story circulated all around the internet, including at CQ Politics’ Political Wire, and as a result, we can expect to see the false claim repeated for weeks in the press. (Political Wire, for example, contains a commentary by Taegan Doddard entitled, “Scalia Would Have Voted to Keep School Segregation.”)

This sort of reporting is typical for liberal court reporters, who routinely make false claims that make conservatives or businesses look bad or politically-correct constituencies look good. A classic example is the Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision, which Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times deliberately distorted to make it seem like the Supreme Court had created a rule that discrimination plaintiffs have to sue even before they could have learned about pay discrimination. (In fact, the plaintiff in the Ledbetter case had known of the pay disparity she later claimed was discriminatory for at least 5 years before complaining to the EEOC. By distorting the facts of the case, and what the Supreme Court actually held, the press also created a political weapon for the Obama campaign to use against McCain in the 2008 campaign.)

Another example is the Duke Lacrosse case, where the prosecutor was later jailed for misconduct for pressing a baseless interracial rape case against innocent Lacrosse players. DNA evidence proved the players were innocent, and North Carolina’s attorney general admitted that they were in fact innocent. But the New York Times’ Duff Wilson claimed that a substantial “body of evidence” pointed to the defendants’ guilt.

CBS News legal “analyst” Andrew Cohen repeatedly denounced the Duke lacrosse players, calling for the gagging of their attorneys. At a time when few journalists dared question the rape claim for fear of being seen as politically incorrect, Cohen absurdly claimed that the media had rushed to the “defense” of the players and that “there is no balanced coverage in the Duke case. There is just one defense-themed story after another.” He demanded for prosecutor Mike Nifong “the privilege of seeing the case unfold at trial” against the players, rather than dropping the prosecution.

Sadly, both Wilson and Cohen still have their jobs, suggesting that liberal bias is viewed as a plus when it comes to employment with the “mainstream” media. (Cohen’s “evidence-free” commentaries denouncing Justice Scalia are a self-parody of left-wing bias.)

I don’t agree with Justice Scalia on everything. (See my law journal article criticizing the ruling he and the “conservative” justices issued in Morse v. Frederick.)  But the liberal bias of Supreme Court press coverage is obvious to me.

UPDATE, Oct. 27, 4:12 p.m.: the reporter who made the false claim about Scalia (Howard Fischer) has now deleted his claim that Scalia would uphold segregation from his story, tacitly admitting that he was wrong.  But he did not disclose the error in his original story for readers.  As a commenter to his story, jayr23, notes

“Sorry Scalia. I disagree with you in general but it looks like you were terribly misquoted here. The only hack is the reporter.

Mr. Fischer should probably correct this and then apologize.

BTW, a correction is not simply a deletion of the offending material! Sheesh. Journalism has sunk to an all time low.”

SECOND UPDATE, Oct. 27, 6:22 p.m.: The erroneous story’s internet version has now been revised to contain a vague reference to its error, in a passage that reads:

“Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story that was originally posted Oct. 26. It removes an incorrect reference to Brown v. Board of Education in the initial version.”

The federal government does, however, have a problem with big compensation packages at private banks like Bank of America and Citigroup, even for new executives and talented managers who had nothing to do with any financial mismanagement.  Obama’s pay czar, Ken Feinberg, a major donor to liberal politicians like Senator Chris Dodd (who recommended Feinberg for the job after he gave Dodd more than $9000), is now chopping compensation more at basically self-supporting institutions like Bank of America than at completely-bailed out entities like Chrysler.  (Many expect Chrysler to go under despite a $70 billion auto bailout.  Even the recently departed car czar, Rattner, admits Chrysler should perhaps have been allowed to go under, from a coldly economic point of view, given its gross mismanagement and dim prospects. Bank of America’s recently departed ex-CEO was a moderate Republican; by contrast, Chrysler is owned mostly by the left-wing United Auto Workers Union, which received majority ownership from the Obama administration at taxpayer expense, through a politicized bankruptcy process).

Some of the “bailed-out” banks subject to the pay czar weren’t really bailed out: they gave the federal government preferred stock in exchange for federal bailout money only under duress, after they were told that for them not to take federal bailout money would stigmatize the banks that truly needed it, and that if they failed to take the money, bank regulators would make their lives hell. As the Treasury Secretary told the banks, “if a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware your regulator will require it in any circumstance.” Regulators also forced Bank of America to take over failing investment bank Merrill Lynch, and pressured it to hide the resulting losses from its shareholders.

Feinberg’s actions have already left taxpayers worse off by forcing Citigroup to get rid of a profitable subsidiary. As finance professor Roy C. Smith noted in Sunday’s Washington Post, “Feinberg’s actions . . . are not going to improve either the government’s chances of getting its money back or the prospects of repairing these damaged companies. Because of his recommendations, Citigroup agreed to sell its profitable Phibro unit at an extremely low price of only one or two times earnings in order to avoid having to pay a talented trader a $100 million contractual share of the profits he had earned. The most successful of the remaining employees of Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America have been given an incentive to leave their posts, and the firms will be constrained in hiring replacements.”

Many competent executives whose pay is threatened by the pay czar are now leaving for other firms that (for the moment) are beyond his reach. The result is lousier management at banks that the FDIC insures, and that the federal government now owns stock in.

The pay czar’s political patron, Senator Dodd, received sweetheart loans from the reckless, bankrupt subprime lender Countrywide, and a massive gift from Edward Downe, in the form of a luxurious “cottage” in Ireland he received in a “cut rate real estate deal” for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than fair market value.

Banks will now be pressured to make even more risky, low-income loans. Obama has sent to Congress his proposal to create a politically correct entity called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.”

Government pressure on banks to make low-income loans was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Yet Obama’s disturbing proposal would empower the new agency to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness.  The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.

The mortgage crisis was also caused by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants (”GSEs”) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates.

But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.” (The government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went broke, costing taxpayers perhaps $200 billion.  Fannie Mae apparently has engaged in massive accounting fraud, and has used intimidation to fight reform).

Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and it expands the reach of regulations that have been used by left-wing groups to extort payoffs from banks.

Government pressure on banks to make more risky loans in low-income neighborhoods was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown. Yet President Obama’s disturbing proposal would empower the new agency to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness.  The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.

The mortgage crisis was also caused by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants (”GSEs”) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates.  But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.”

Part A of Title VII of Kerry-Boxer sets forth the emission reduction targets and timetables of the bill’s proposed greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade program. It is nearly identical to the corresponding section of the Waxman-Markey bill, the main substantive difference being a tougher emissions reduction target for the year 2020. Waxman-Markey requires a 17% reduction below 2005 levels by 2020; Kerry-Boxer, a 20% reduction. 

It would be a mistake, though, to suppose that those numbers reflect the full extent of the regulatory burdens Title VII Part A could impose on the U.S. economy. Identical language in both bills could (1) unleash a torrent of lawsuits against tens of thousands of relatively small emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2), and (2) put pressure on future presidents and congresses to adopt substantially tougher emission reduction targets. 

Section 701 Findings: Setup for CO2 Tort Litigation

Under the Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey bill, business entities would be subject to the cap-and-trade program only if they emit at least 25,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2-e) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. So on superficial inspection, if you are small manufacturer or just about any type of non-industrial facility, you will have no emission reduction obligations. That perception helps the bills’ proponents divide-and-conquer the business community.

In reality, the Findings in Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey are the setup for litigation demanding additional emission reductions beyond those specified in the bills’ cap-and-trade programs. This is particularly worrisome because state attorneys general and environmental groups are already suing energy companies under tort law for emitting CO2.

The Findings say that “each increment of emission … causes or contributes … to the acceleration and extent of global warming and its adverse effects,” and “accordingly, controlling emissions in small as well as large quantities is essential” to reduce “threats” and “injuries,” including disease, death, property damage, bad weather, business losses; harm to forest, plants, wildlife, water resources, and air quality; and – as if that list weren’t inclusive enough — “other harm.”
 
Worse, the Findings go on to equate risk of harm with actual harm: “the fact that some of the adverse and potentially catastrophic effects of global warming are at risk of occurring and not a certainty does not negate the harm persons suffer from actions that increase the likelihood, extent, and severity of future impacts.” Get that? All plaintiffs will need is some remote, speculative possibility of catastrophic impacts — and of course that’s what the global warming scare is all about — and voila, harm has been done, injuries cry out for redress.
 
If the language in the Findings becomes the law of the land, there will be no stopping the flood of common law nuisance suits. Any increment of emissions, no matter how small, will be deemed to cause or contribute to global warming and its harmful effects. And even if no harm can be proved, the risk of harm will count as actual injury.

Bottom line: Although EPA, initially, may only regulate entities emitting at least 25,000 tons of CO2-e per year, the Findings implicitly authorize litigation targeting vast numbers of small entities.

Section 705 Review and Program Recommendations: Setup for Moving Goal Posts
 
There’s a lot of mischief in this section, too. To begin with, Sec. 705 requires the EPA Administrator, every four years, to address “existing scientific information and reports, considering, to the greatest extent possible, the most recent assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reports by the United States Global Change Research Program … ” This provision will turn EPA into an even more uncritical rubber stamp for the IPCC and USGCRP than it already is. More than ever, IPCC and USGCRP will write their reports to influence U.S. policy (i.e. they will be even more politicized) and their influence will increase. Cheer if you like agenda-driven science!
 
Sec. 705 also requires EPA to report on annual emissions and annual per-capita emissions by country. Not a word, though, about tracking emission intensity (greenhouse gas emissions per dollar of output) by country. In other words, the metrics have been selected to paint the United States in the worst possible light.
 
Also, as you’d expect, the Administrator is required to assess the impacts of climate change on everything under the Sun — populations, health, livelihoods, tribal culture, weather, fresh water, ecosystems, agriculture, etc. — but there is no requirement to assess the impacts of climate policy on anything. This despite a requirement that the Administrator use a “risk management framework.”
 
Similarly, the Administrator is supposed to assess the potential non-linear, abrupt, or essentially irreversible changes in the climate system but he is under no corresponding obligation to assess factors that might stabilize the climate and counteract the forcing effects of greenhouse gases.
 
Now here’s where it gets serious. The Administrator is also required to assess what terrible things won’t be prevented by limiting CO2 equivalent emissions to 450 ppm or global warming to 2°C (3.6°F) beyond pre-industrial temperatures. This sets up the Administrator to advocate 350 as the new 450. It specifically requires the Administrator to identify “alternative thresholds or targets that may more effectively limit the risks” of climate change.
 
Similarly, the Administrator must assess whether the Kerry-Boxer bill, taking into account international actions and commitments, is sufficient to limit GHG concentrations to 450 ppm and global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, or whether ”other temperature or greenhouse gas thresholds identified” by the Administrator would be more protective.
 
So the U.S. Climate Action Partnership gang are naive if they think the Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey emission reduction targets, once enacted, will be set in stone. These bills are just the framework for more aggressive emission reduction requirements to come. Regulatory certainty is an illusion.
 
Perhaps because some people just don’t trust EPA — imagine that! — Kerry-Boxer requires the National Academy of Science (NAS) to undertake a similar four-year review of climate science and policy. If the NAS concludes that the United States will not meet the Kerry-Boxer targets, or that 450 ppm and 2°C are not sufficiently protective, the President “shall” submit a plan to Congress identifying the domestic and international actions that will achieve the additional reductions. This language implicitly makes the president a handmaid of the National Academy. Once Jim Hansen and his NAS buddies decide that 350 is the new 450, the president “shall” submit a plan explaining how we get there.

Much of the debate on Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey has centered on the bills’ emission reduction targets. Meeting those targets could destroy millions of jobs. The not-so-hidden fangs lurking in Sections 701 and 705 pose additional significant threats to the economy — and provide additional reasons to oppose such legislation.

The measure was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on double-jeopardy grounds.  As I previously explained at length, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy.  Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer also object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds.   Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of trying all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial.  When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill contains speech-related provisions designed to allow prosecution of people who are not violent and do not intend to cause hate crimes, but whose speech inadvertently incites a hate crime by some violent, bigoted nut.  For now, courts are likely to block such prosecutions on First Amendment grounds, under the Supreme Court’s Brandenburg decision banning prosecutions of people whose speech unintentionally incites violence or other illegal acts (and the federal appeals court ruling in White v. Lee faithfully applying that principle to speech that incites violations of federal civil-rights and anti-discrimination statutes).  But if the ideological composition of the Supreme Court changes substantially, it is conceivable (although far from certain) that that could change.  Although the provisions will probably prove unsuccessful in censoring speech, it speaks volumes about the mindset of the hate-crimes bill’s backers that they would even try.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision, as I explained earlier.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.

But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.”  Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration supports the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

The Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech and blasphemy at the United Nations, joining in calls by left-wing lawyers and conservative Islamic countries to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation.  Religious minorities have often been persecuted for “blasphemy” in Islamic countries for disagreeing with Islam, criticizing the prophet Mohammed, or interpreting Islam’s holy book, the Koran, differently than the majority of Muslims do.  In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, defending the death penalty against racism charges, and calling homosexuality immoral.  In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

As Michael Barone notes, Congress is now seeking to pass costly legislation that could reinflate the housing bubble, threatening future financial meltdowns.

The Obama administration is also busy promoting the junky, risky mortgages that fueled the housing bubble, showing that it has learned nothing from history.

Obama has sent to Congress his proposal to create a politically-correct entity called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.”

Government pressure on banks to make low-income loans was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Yet Obama’s disturbing proposal would empower the new agency to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness.  The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.

The mortgage crisis was also caused by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants (”GSEs”) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates.

But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.”

Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and it expands the reach of regulations that have been used by left-wing groups to extort pay-offs from banks.

Granted, blasphemy may be patently offensive to significant numbers of people, but it is precisely such hard cases for which First Amendment protection is most important. Consider the fate of those unfortunate enough to live in countries without such protections. (Note: Some readers may find the following examples shocking.)

Religious minorities have often been persecuted for “blasphemy” in Islamic countries for disagreeing with Islam, or interpreting Islam’s holy book, the Koran, differently than the majority of Muslims do. Turley says that Western blasphemy cases have included the arrest of a Dutch cartoonist for depicting a Christian fundamentalist and a Muslim fundamentalist as zombies who want to marry and attend gay rallies; the investigation of an Italian comedian for joking at a rally that in 20 years, the Pope will be in hell, tormented by gay devils; the exclusion of a Dutch politician from Britain because he made a movie describing the Quran as a “fascist” book and Islam as a violent religion; and the prosecution of writers in Austria, India, and Finland for calling Mohammed a “pedophile” because of his marriage to 6-year-old Aisha (which was consummated when she was 9).

Earlier, conservatives and civil libertarians criticized the Obama administration for endorsing restrictions on so-called “hate speech” at the United Nations. The administration is backing proposals to classify hate speech as a violation of international human rights law. Left-wing lawyers are now likely to argue that these proposals constitute “customary international law” binding on the U.S., as a consensus interpretation of treaties the U.S. has already signed, like the CEDAW equal rights treaty. The U.S. courts are unlikely to accept such arguments in the near future, although if Obama manages to appoint enough left-wing judges, the chances of such arguments prevailing will increase.

In Canada, hate speech laws have been used to punish ministers for anti-gay sermons. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, defending the death penalty against racism charges, and calling homosexuality immoral. Ironically, hate speech laws have often been used against minorities in the Third World, with prosecutors arguing that advocating the rights of minorities is an inflammatory form of racial separatism.

Left-wing lawyers claim that “customary international law” dictates a host of controversial requirements that few countries would voluntarily adopt on their own, like mandating quota-based affirmative action. For example, the CEDAW equal-rights treaty has been construed by an international committee as requiring “redistribution of wealth,” “affirmative action,” “gender studies” in academia, government-sponsored “access to rapid and easy abortion,” “comparable worth,” and “the application of quotas and numerical goals and measurable targets aimed at increasing women’s political participation.”

The UN is quite hostile to human rights, as is its “Human Rights Council,” which has included genocidal dictatorships among its members.  The U.N. recently declared Fidel Castro, the longtime Communist dictator of Cuba, a “World Hero.” Castro killed thousands and thousands of people during his rule, torturing some to death (including a few American citizens), and Cuba remains an oppressive dictatorship even today.

While advocating bans on hate speech, the Obama administration has turned a blind eye to hate speech and hate crimes by its allies and supporters.  It turned a blind eye to voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party, which is a racist, anti-Semitic hate group that backed Obama and included an Obama poll-watcher and Democratic Party official in Philadelphia.  It was silent about the violent, racially-charged SEIU assault on a black conservative critic of Obama’s health care proposals.  The administration and its allies use the SEIU as shock troops at town hall meetings, and Obama recently appointed a high-ranking SEIU official, Craig Becker, to the NLRB.  (The SEIU is closely linked with, and even overlaps with, the controversial group ACORN, which gave Obama his start, and whose affiliate received $800,000 from his campaign.  ACORN was recently involved in a high-profile scandal promoting underage prostitution.)

While turning a blind eye to hate and prejudice from the Left, the administration has backed a bill in Congress, now virtually certain to become law, that will allow some people found innocent of hate crimes in state court to be reprosecuted all over again in federal court, taking advantage of a loophole in Constitutional protections against double jeopardy.

1) Require, by law, that people buy health insurance.

2) Remove health insurers’ antitrust exemption. But only after legally requiring everyone to buy their product.

You figure it out. Insurers are set to receive one of the largest coroporate welfare grants in history. No wonder so many firms are salivating over this year’s health care legislation. But they may pay an antitrust price for their legally mandated windfall.

Perhaps this is a warped Washington version of what one hand giveth, the other taketh away.

The CARD Act has also wiped out many cash-back and rewards programs and rebates on credit cards, something earlier chronicled here.  Despite that fact, its passage was trumpeted by President Obama and liberal congressional leaders, who are engaging in a form of class warfare against financially responsible people.

Earlier, the government pushed through $250 billion in mortgage bailouts, to bail out even reckless high-income borrowers, and forced financial institutions the government took over in the name of fiscal responsibility, like Freddie Mac, to run up billions in losses bailing out irresponsible borrowers.  It also pushed through $70 billion in auto bailouts to enrich the United Auto Workers union, bailouts that ripped off taxpayers and pension funds and illegally diverted funds from the bank bailout to an auto bailout.  (The bailouts would not even have been necessary if the companies had obtained regulatory relief and greater wage concessions, and may not even succeed, requiring billions more in taxpayer dollars by 2010.)

In today’s Washington Post, Allan Sloan writes about how the government has deliberately ripped off responsible people to bail out irresponsible people over the last year, by spending trillions of dollars to force down interest rates.  That has resulted in extremely low interest rates on savings accounts and bonds, while also, to a lesser extent, reducing interest rates paid by irresponsible borrowers, despite their rising default rates.

Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors from requiring arbitration of employment discrimination disputes and sexual assault cases, including “arbitration” of “any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment.”  The language about sexual assault was irrelevant to most employers: Lawsuits against employers for employment discrimination vastly outnumber lawsuits over sexual assault, which are a tiny fraction of all court cases, so the bill’s real purpose was to ban arbitration of discrimination cases, not to do anything for rape victims.  Few rapes occur in the workplace, as opposed to private settings like homes; and even rapes that do occur in the workplace often fall outside the scope of arbitration clauses.  (Arbitration does not, of course, prevent criminal prosecution.)

Liberal trial lawyers have long objected to Supreme Court decisions like its 7-to-2 Gilmer decision upholding contractual provisions that require binding arbitration of employment discrimination cases, even though arbitrators often rule in favor of employees and consumers, and award them substantial monetary damages (although they do permit plaintiffs less discovery than courts do; on the other hand, arbitration typically results in “lower litigation costs and expenses“).   Franken’s amendment largely fulfills their fantasy of banning arbitration in discrimination cases.

Although Franken’s amendment has a big effect on discrimination cases — and no effect at all on most rape cases — it has been falsely described ever since as an “anti-rape amendment,” and the 30 senators who voted against the amendment have been depicted ever since by liberal sites such as Huffington Post as the “Republicans for Rape“  — even though the Defense Department opposed Franken’s amendment, and even though Senators like Bob Corker said they might have voted for the amendment had it merely covered rape and violence claims, rather than a vast array of unrelated employment disputes.

Jon Stewart, for example, depicted the amendment as being all about rape, asking his viewers “How is ANYONE against this?” and suggesting that only a nut or a misogynist could do so.  (This is the same Jon Stewart who selectively edits taped interviews to make conservatives look stupid, or make them appear to say the opposite of what they actually said).  But the liberal Stewart has aimed this criticism only at conservative lawmakers, not at the Obama Defense Department (or the liberal Supreme Court justices who voted with their conservative colleagues to allow all employment disputes, including those involving sexual assault, to be governed by contractual arbitration provisions in the Gilmer case).  So has Huffington Post, whose first inflammatory article on the vote generated over 2000 comments, many of them angry and vituperative.  The inflammatory coverage has resulted in Senators who voted against the amendment receiving hate mail and angry and hateful messages.

Liberal journalists and bloggers complain a lot about the use of so-called “wedge issues,” but they themselves are the ones who typically use inflammatory wedge issues, as the Franken amendment illustrates.

Another example is the many false claims made by liberal journalists and Obama about the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a subject I addressed at length here.  In the Ledbetter case, the press claimed that the Supreme Court had created a rigid 180 day deadline for suing over pay discrimination — when in fact it did no such thing.

By the way, studies show that Jon Stewart’s viewers aren’t any smarter than Bill O’Reilly’s — contrary to what liberal journalists believe.

Peter Glaser, an environmental attorney with Troutman Sanders, just sent around his analysis. Here it is:

California Federal Court Dismisses Global Warming Common Law Nuisance Lawsuit

In another chapter in the continuing saga of whether energy companies can be sued under tort law for emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs), a federal district court in California yesterday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Kivalina Alaska Native Village and others against a large number of energy companies.  The Court became the fourth federal district court to find, in essence, that there is no common law nuisance tort of global warming.  One of those district court decisions, however, was recently reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the Connecticut v. AEP case, which we reported on extensively in a previous client alert available at the link provided below. 

The lawsuit dismissed yesterday alleged that the defendants’ GHG emissions contribute to global warming that has diminished the Artic sea ice that protects the Kivalina coastline.  As a result, the plaintiffs argued that their protection from winter storms has diminished, resulting in erosion and destruction of the land which will require that Kivalina’s residents be relocated.  Plaintiffs sought monetary damages for these impacts, which they estimated in a range of $95-400 million.

The United States District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that the case involved a political question more properly decided by the legislative and executive branches.  The court also concluded that the plaintiffs lacked standing.  On the political question issue, the Court ruled that:

Regardless of the relief sought, the resolution of Plaintiff’s nuisance claim requires balancing the social utility of Defendants’ conduct with the harm it inflicts.  That process, by definition, entails a determination of what would have been an acceptable limit on the level of greenhouse gases emitted by Defendants….the allocation of fault - and cost of global warming is a matter appropriately left for determination by the executive and legislative branch in the first instance.

On standing, the court ruled that “[i]n view of the undifferentiated nature of greenhouse gas emissions from all global sources and their worldwide accumulation over long periods of time, the pleadings make clear that there is no realistic possibility of tracing any particular alleged effect of global warming to any particular emissions by any specific person, entity, group at any particular point in time.”

The decision will undoubtedly be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a court known for its liberal outlook.  At the same time, one of the other lawsuits, involving allegations that energy companies’ emissions contributed to Hurricane Katrina, is now pending and awaiting decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  Defendants in the Second Circuit Connecticut v. AEP case are currently considering whether to seek rehearing.  Ultimately, this issue may end up in the Supreme Court.

See our discussion of the Second Circuit Connecticut v. AEP case and the issues these global warming tort lawsuits raise.

* * *

P.S., I also blogged on the Second Circuit case here.

(The Obama administration doesn’t seem to have learned history’s lessons overseas, either.  White House Communications Director Anita Dunn cites as her favorite political philosopher the Chinese communist tyrant Mao Zedong. That may explain why it has sometimes pursued left-wing policies overseas.)

President Obama is also pushing for financial regulations that reinforce the worst features of the status quo.  They would increase pressure on lenders to make the risky, low-income loans that helped spawn the financial crisis.  At the same time, they would worsen the credit crunch by shutting down banking operations known as “industrial loan corporations,” that are convenient for consumers.  Earlier, Obama backed a new law that is wiping out many credit-card rewards programs and rebates, and leading to the return of annual fees on some credit cards.

Even though Obama’s proposals would lead to even more junky loans in the future, both he and Senate banking chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) claim that his proposals would fight the “status quo.”  But they are part of the status quo.  Dodd is famously corrupt, having received sweetheart loans from the reckless, bankrupt subprime lender Countrywide, and having received a massive gift from a crook, Edward Downe, in the form of a luxurious “cottage” in Ireland he received in a “cut rate real estate deal” for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than fair market value.  Obama was the third biggest recipient in Congress of campaign contributions from the government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which went broke, costing taxpayers perhaps $200 billion.  (Fannie Mae was a corrupt bully that engaged in massive accounting fraud and used intimidation to fight reform.)

Banks will now be pressured to make even more risky, low-income loans. Obama has sent to Congress his proposal to create a politically-correct entity called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.”

Government pressure on banks to make low-income loans was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Yet Obama’s disturbing proposal would empower the new agency to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness.  The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.

The mortgage crisis was also caused by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants (”GSEs”) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates.

But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.”

Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and it expands the reach of regulations that have been used by left-wing groups to extort pay-offs from banks.