themarketswork

a common sense approach to a liberal world

The Injustices of Obama’s Department of Justice

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) is comprised of 60 Agencies. The organizational view is presented here. There are 93 U.S District Attorneys and 94 Districts (Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands share a District Attorney). The DOJ employs approximately 115,000 individuals with about 35,000 of these contained within the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). In 2015, the DOJ had an operating budget of $31 billion.

And the DOJ is a swamp.

Under Obama, the DOJ was fundamentally pushed to the left by Attorney General Eric Holder and then by his successor, Loretta Lynch. Sally Yates rounded out the Obama appointed DOJ leadership with her famously short stint before being fired by President Trump.

J. Christian Adams—who served in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush – points to the DOJ’s notoriously left-leaning  Civil Rights Division, saying that “it touches more parts of American’s lives than any federal agency and impacts issues like police, voting, schools, transgender, hiring practices, education. It’s not just voting rights, it’s everything.”Continue Reading

Congressional Review Act – A Regulatory Killer

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A little-known law has suddenly been getting a lot of attention in our nation’s Capital. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) – put into law in 1996 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America – is an oversight tool that Congress may use to overturn a rule issued by a federal agency.

The CRA was put into law as a means for Congress to oversee and control regulations issued by agencies, yet it has only been successfully used one time – during the start of the Bush Administration. The reason for this is simple. The law requires a Presidential signature for final approval – or a veto. A sitting president is unlikely to sign a resolution overturning regulations issued by his own agency and would therefore veto any CRA resolution passed by Congress.

The CRA applies to rules implemented in the last sixty legislative working days.

The Obama Administration issued literally tens of thousands of regulations (see: Trump’s Deregulation Gift). The 2016 Federal Register (the daily depository of rules and regulations) contains 97,110 pages, the highest page count in its history – dwarfing the previous record set in 2010 (also Obama) of 81,405. The Federal Register page count stood at 81,640 at the start of December 2016 when I wrote the Trump deregulation article – 15,470 pages were added in the last month of 2016 alone. There has never been a time more primed for the revival of the Congressional Review Act.Continue Reading

Obama’s Betrayal of Israel

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“Israel can either be Jewish or democratic – it cannot be both” – John Kerry

“The entire Middle East is going up in flames, entire countries are toppling, terrorism is raging and for an entire hour the secretary of state attacks the only democracy in the Middle East.” – Benjamin Netanyahu

“There are roughly 50 majority-Muslim countries in the world. There is one — only one — Jewish state. The Israeli Knesset has 17 elected Arab members. It has Muslim members and Christian members. In contrast, one searches in vain for Muslim countries that have elected Jewish representatives. Obama and Kerry choose to attack the only inclusive democracy in the Middle East, while turning a blind eye to the Islamic terrorism that grows daily.” – Ted Cruz

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The Syrian Cost of Obama’s Iran Deal

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“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” – President Barack Hussein Obama – August 20, 2012

On July 14, 2015, six world powers – United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France and Germany – reached an agreement with Iran on Iran’s Nuclear Program. When Obama decided to assume personal leadership of the Iran nuclear negotiations, the Iranian economy was straining under a decades old series of economic sanctions. Rather than support Congressional wishes to further tighten sanctions, thereby maintaining pressure on the ruling Mullahs, Obama decided to loosen economic restrictions as a prelude to his negotiations. The Iranian economy began growing again in 2014 and so did Iran’s negotiating power. And so, in 2015, the U.S. signed a deal with Iran that allowed the Iranians to hide much of their nuclear activities, lacked any semblance of enforcement and penalties, ended all economic sanctions, ended embargoes on ballistic missiles – and begins to expire in ten years – on January 2027 Iran can replace and upgrade its centrifuges. Obama himself has admitted that Iran will have full nuclear capability almost immediately after the deal expires. And for this we gave the Iranians access to almost $120 billion – perhaps more – Iran itself says it has already accessed $100 billion. It has been called the worst agreement in diplomatic history.Continue Reading

Trump’s Deregulation Gift

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The United States’ 39% marginal corporate tax rate is the third highest in the world and the highest of the 34 industrialized nation members of the OECD.

Regulatory burdens placed on business under the Obama Administration have become staggering – and even more costly. Here are some data points directly from the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

  • Federal regulation amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year.
  • In 2015, 114 laws were enacted by Congress during the calendar year, while 3,410 rules were issued by agencies. Thus, 30 rules were issued for every law enacted last year.
  • Many Americans complain about taxes, but regulatory compliance costs exceed the $1.82 trillion that the IRS is expected to collect in both individual and corporate income taxes from 2015.
  • Some 60 federal departments, agencies, and commissions have 3,297 regulations in development at various stages in the pipeline. The top five federal rule-making agencies account for 41 percent of all federal regulations. These are the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services, and Transportation.
  • The 2016 Federal Register (the daily depository of rules and regulations) currently contains 81,640 pages, the highest page count in its history – and is still climbing. Obama also held the prior record, 81,405 pages in 2010. The 80,000 page mark has been passed in only three previous years (2010, 2011, 2015).
  • Of the ten all-time-highest Federal Register total page counts, seven occurred under President Obama.

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The Renaissance of the Right

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The full enormity of what is happening within the GOP and Washington is just beginning to sink in, the possibilities just beginning to take hold.

A glimmer into what’s coming was revealed last night when Newt Gingrich, in talking about what position he might want in a Trump Administration, calmly and matter-of-factly uttered these words;

“I want to be the general planner, looking out over the next eight years, and trying to design how we fundamentally reshape the federal government”

“and that’s a very broad job. The closest analogy probably would be Harry Hopkins and the work he did for Franklin Delano Roosevelt”.

And that was the moment I began to truly grasp how enormously fundamental this structural change will be.Continue Reading

Reversal of Fortune

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It’s hard to know where to start.

How to put things in perspective? So very much has changed in such a short space of time. Even when it was so very long in coming.

The financial markets have responded to Trump’s election with a thunderous roar of approval. The equity markets have been on fire  – the Dow Jones is up 5% for the week and closed at a new high. Bonds got rocked with the yield rising to 2.12% on the 10-year Treasury in anticipation of future economic growth and inflation (bear in mind the Fed’s target rate for inflation is 2% – some inflation is healthy). Investors are cheering the prospects of actual economic growth – along with an end to the perpetual Federal Reserve quantitative easing – that comes with tax cuts, a fiscal stimulus plan and…regulatory rollback. There is the very real possibility that we will get a repeal of the truly awful Dodd-Frank Act.Continue Reading

Chickens Roosting

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Quite the presidential mess. And deservedly so for some. Hillary Clinton Inc, FBI Director Comey, President Obama, The Department of Justice, The State Department. They all deserve what they are reaping with this literally unprecedented re-opening of the Clinton Email Investigation.

But the United States of America and its voters? They deserve none of this.

You and I deserve none of this.

Director Comey was either already biased in favor of Clinton from the very start of this investigation or he was pressured into becoming biased by…well, there really are only a couple of places the finger can point.Continue Reading

Wiki(d) Leaks

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What follows is an attempt to sort through many of the quotes from emails that have been released via Wikileaks. Some have been taken directly from the Wikileaks released emails. Others were simply compiled via the internet. I have attempted to identify the noted source, position and/or title pertaining to each quote. The quotes have been grouped under appropriate topic headings. Obviously, this is far from exhaustive but I feel it does provide a fairly good sampling of the inner thought process of the Clinton Campaign. It should be noted that the Clinton Campaign has not, to my knowledge, confirmed or denied the authenticity of these leaked emails.

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