I find it fascinating that the rest of the country has an unemployment rate exceeding 9% and Washington DC has a rate of 5.9%. Home prices are falling all over the country, except in the DC area. The place is a literal boom town. Lobbyists are crawling the hallways of Congress buying votes. Deals are made in backrooms between Republicans and Democrats. Everyone is fat and happy. Everyone gets rich. All is well in this den of iniquity. We need Jesus to show up in Congress and throw these corrupt money changers out.
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Return to Main Street
Monday, April 11, 2011
Star Parker
Although my organization’s home office is in Washington, D.C., I log some 150,000 miles a year flying around the country.
Traveling back and forth from the nation’s capital provides good perspective on the bold contrast between the realities there and the rest of America.
Washington is booming today while working Americans in cities across the rest of our nation struggle to see the economic light of day.
Washington Business Journal reports that, based on their latest annual job growth data from February 2010 to February 2011, D.C. is the No. 1 job market in the nation. Compared to a national unemployment rate that just dropped below 9 percent, the Journal reports unemployment in the D.C. area at 5.9 percent.
According to the S&P/Case-Schiller Index, the leading index of home prices in the U.S., the latest composite of home prices from 20 cities around the country shows an annual decline of 3.1 percent. Of the 20 cities in the composite, only two showed annual home price increases. San Diego — barely — at 0.1 percent, and Washington, D.C., with a solid increase of 3.6 percent.
Yes, Washington is booming, its malls are filled and the wine flows in our capital’s fancy, expensive restaurants. The Democratic regime has been good to Washington.
Although our president famously campaigned about purging Washington of “special interests,” I wrote then that this was ridiculous. The business of Washington is special interests. So anyone with an agenda to grow the federal government by definition grows these many special interests. And the data bears this out.
Combined lobbying expenditures in our nation’s capital for 2009 and 2010, the first two years of the current administration, were at an all-time high of $7 billion.
Over the course of eight years under the George W. Bush administration, when federal spending increased at the highest rate since the Johnson administration in the 1960s, a little over $1 trillion was added to annual federal spending. The Obama administration has managed to add on another trillion in less than three years.
Yes, friends, the great sucking sound we hear today is the liberal regime in Washington sucking the living daylights out of this nation.
Almost 80 percent of Americans feel today that the country is on the wrong track. Last November, voters fired one-quarter of the sitting Democrats in Congress in the name of change.
Now Republicans in Congress, in response to this voter mandate, have tried, in their first shot at the federal budget, to cut $100 billion out of $4 trillion in 2011 expenditures, and Democrats have cried foul.
One hundred billion dollars is wasted in Washington on any given day by the time President Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have finished breakfast.
Democrats have dusted off their predictable talking points. Cutting $100 billion out of $4 trillion is “extreme.” Yet, somehow $14 trillion of debt is not.
Or pushing to cut $300 million from Planned Parenthood is “ideological,’’ but spending $300 million of taxpayer funds on Planned Parenthood to begin with is not.
Or perhaps most pathetic of all: That furloughing “nonessential” federal government workers, when the federal government is taking one-quarter of the American economy, would “harm” economic recovery.
Giving USA, a group that tallies charitable giving, reported that the $303.8 billion in private charity that Americans gave in 2009 marked the largest annual drop since it started reporting this information in 1956.
It’s time to return America to Main Street. Main Street should not be strangling while Washington parties. Republicans hear the wheezing on Main Street and want to get the oxygen back to where it belongs.
It’s time to get this nation back on track. On this there is no compromise. There is just right and wrong.
Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker@urbancure.org.
TeresaE says:
Nice article, with this one exception
“…Republicans hear the wheezing on Main Street and want to get the oxygen back to where it belongs…”
REPUBLICANS started this crap, REPUBLICANS pulled the rug out from the bubble with “Bankruptcy Reform” and REPUBLICANS are just as guilty as screwing us as the Democrats.
Continuing to tout the party lines and believe that either party has the will to “fix” anything is absurd.
DC will burn eventually, because this gutting of the lobbyists’ customers, formerly known as the middle-class consumer, will catch up with their caviar and martini lifestyles.
Just as a rising tide floats all boats, a sinking ship kills all rats.
I’m sure I won’t be the only one to find a little bit of humor and irony in the upcoming disaster. Hell, will have to laugh to keep from crying.
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12th April 2011 at 4:23 pm
flash says:
Look to the heavens for salvation. I wouldn’t miss NY either,
Why We Need an Asteroid Strike
Toward A Salubrious Suicide
By Fred Reed
Me, I reckon that what we need is an asteroid strike. I don’t know how to start an asteroid, but I’m going to think about it. I see it as a matter of social responsibility.
See, societies are like people in that they get old, clot, lose flexibility, and then croak. They can’t get better. Like most things, they just get worse. A rule of thermodynamics says that rivers don’t flow backwards, plaque does not voluntarily leave arteries, and governments do not become more reasonable, efficient, or interested in the well-being of their populations.
What happens is that a government needs money, typically to do badly what it shouldn’t be doing in the first place, so Congress passes tax laws. These may at first inadvertently be simple, comprehensible, and tolerably light. Then the unscrupulous, and bureaucrats, who would be unscrupulous if they had the intelligence, discover that it is easier to have the government drain money from the people and give it to the sharpers than it is to work for a living. Taxes grow heavier to feed the growing number of trough-feeders.
The people who actually pay the taxes grow weary of playing udder to innumerable ticks and invent ingenious ways to avoid the taxation. Each new dodge inspires Congress to pass a new and more complex law to prevent people from keeping their money. Humans are ingenious when they feel someone else’s hand in their pockets. Thus regulations grow like kudzu on a Georgia road cut until you have three hundred shelf-feet of impenetrable law that no one understands, even the government. This is good for the ticks because when law metamorphoses into mysticism, the shifty can find loopholes. Meanwhile every special interest on the planet bribes Congress, which amounts to an inexplicably exalted garage-sale, to pass laws exempting the special interest. The result is an unworkable thicket infested with vipers, leeches, and hag fish. Hello.
Actually, I’m not sure that hag fish infest thickets. They may, though.
There is no way to fix the thing because too many people are employed in mismanaging this legal linguini, or profit from sweet-heart deals bought from it. Coagulation works only in one direction.
Consider the space program. In 1957 the Russians put a sort of metallic grapefruit into orbit that said beep-beep-beep. No country can hope to survive that lets another country say beep-beep-beep to it, so the government built a vast buzz-cut technical bureaucracy to go to the moon. It turned out that nothing was there but rocks, and we already had lots. To keep the contracts flowing to aerospace industries which now depended on space, we built a space ship, which we barely had any use for, and then the International Space Station, which we don’t need at all. It is just orbital arterial sludge.
Actually I’m not sure why we went into space at all. There’s nothing there. I mean, that’s how you it’s space.
The military is yet another example of a frozen national joint. We had a gret biggun after WWII which immediately clotted into the Pentagon which, if countries could have rheumatoid arthritis, it would be. A geometric embolism. We have it because we had it, not because we need it. If we want to deal China a staggering blow, we can just shutter Walmart.
Think. Why are we buying groovy new fighter-bombers, each of which costs more than Manhattan? We don’t have any military enemies, so plain old boring F16s are perfectly adequate for what the military really does, which is to butcher defenseless peasants. We are buying the whizzy bangy new birds because we always have bought them, and can’t stop. Too many jobs at stake, pokketa pokketa.
The Pentagon’s mind is frozen in amber, or perhaps solidified napalm, but anyway it can’t move. Obviously manned military aircraft are well into their, er, golden years, rolling their wheelchairs into the great aircraft graveyard at Davis Monthan. Afghanistan has shown that unmanned drones can kill unsuspecting children far more cheaply than great, swooshy, motingator contracts—airplanes, I meant to say—which raises the question of why we need aircraft carriers, which raises the question of why we need the Navy when we have a perfectly good Coast Guard. But things get worse with age. We could give the military Botox, face-lifts, liposuction, or human-growth hormone. Nah. Juices congeal. They don’t uncongeal.
Ponder education, if any. Once it concerned itself with instructing the young in such things as reading and writing and calculating. It too has clotted, and putrefied, and shed its former nature. Fem-lib removed from the classroom the intelligent women who gave it class and turned them into yet more useless lawyers. The vacuum filled with culturally blue-collar angry gals with what they believed to be college educations, a concept alien to them, and became a swamp of low-voltage feminist therapy intended to cure boys of being themselves, to nourish the hopeless, and instill a drab moralism they couldn’t articulate, much less spell.
That too has clotted. The link of schooling has broken, those coming up having no exposure to what “education” once meant. You can’t pass on what you have never had. This consumerist Dark Age has spread to what once was in fact higher education but has become a way of extracting years of interest on student loans. Clotted. There’s no going back. It’s over.
These bureaucracies, like gunch plugging a coronary artery, like filth occluding a drain, get thicker and denser with time. The problems they were supposed to solve go away, but the bureaucrats remain, and hire more equally pointless crats so they can feel important, and the forms we have to fill multiply, and the administrative burden grows, and money and business leave the country.
More cosmetic bureaucracies spring up. We now have TSA, which couldn’t catch cholera in a sewage outfall in Mumbai, but it has a huge payroll and a degree of corruption that would make the sewage outfall a cause for nostalgia. And it will never go away. Noting does in government.
I figure that what we need is to tear the whole sorry system down and see what comes next. The best hope is that a patriot will learn how to impel some unused interplanetary object, Phobos or Deimos or Ganymede maybe, into Washington at ninety percent of the speed of light. This would eliminate the teachers unions, the Pentagon, AIPAC, Fox News, Langley, the Washington Post, lobbies, and my mother-in-law. Cockroaches would doubtless survive, that being what they do best, and evolve into a civilization less degraded than ours, briefly.
Fred Reed (born 1945 in Crumpler, West Virginia) is a technology columnist for The Washington Times[1] and the author of Fred on Everything, a weekly independent column. He also writes books and other material. He has also written for The American Conservative[2] and LewRockwell.com.[3] A former Marine, Reed is a police writer, an occasional war correspondent, and an aficionado of raffish bars. His work, written in a unique and articulate style, is often satirical and opinionated.
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12th April 2011 at 4:23 pm
StuckInNJ says:
Jesus associated with tax collectors, murderers, thieves, and prostitutes.
Washington DC, therefore, would be his dream location to set up shop!!
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12th April 2011 at 4:32 pm
Anonymous says:
The one time in scripture Jesus gets angry and heaps violence upon others is with the money changers.
I don’t think for a second that the it is only the liberal regime the liberal regime in Washington ‘sucking the living daylights out of this nation’. This republican group will slash & burn everything, like Sherman’s march to the sea. The only exception being defense spending. These people will get millions killed. Who said social security was an entitl;ement, when I’m putting my dollars that have already been taxed into it & will probably get nothing. If I get, it these republicans will tax it. Screwed both ways from the left & right. Our government is an archon structured plutocracy.
Jesus preached to those in need for it, left instructions to follow, if the instructions aren’t there will be ‘wailing & knashing of teeth.’
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12th April 2011 at 4:58 pm
bigargon says:
Jesus got angry a number of times. usually his anger was directed to religious authorities of his day.
I think Stuck is right he would go to DC and hang out with politicians and prostitutes. those are the people he would look to save.
Rome, Nineveh, Babylon were all capitals of great world empires, now the remnants of those empires are ruins. I fear DC will have the same fate.
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12th April 2011 at 5:40 pm
Axel says:
“I’m sure I won’t be the only one to find a little bit of humor and irony in the upcoming disaster. Hell, will have to laugh to keep from crying.”
Thats what Jack Daniels is for.
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12th April 2011 at 5:54 pm
Imaginarium says:
It seems this article with Admin’s assesment that Jesus should take care of these corrupt money changers has set in motion religious toned commentary. OK. Jesus did get angry many times, but I think this is the only time he resorted to physical violence against another person-the money changers. If the Fathers House has many mansions, then the Father’s hell has a special mansion ready for these people today.
The only remnant of Babylon that remains that is so ingrained is the money system. The Babylonians started the fractional reserve money system.
Revelation18 [2] And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
[3] For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.
Revelation18 continues [12] The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,. . .
15] The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,
Even the little book ‘The Richest Man in Babylon’ uses fractional reserve as a basis.
Once the global money system (whore of Babylon) collapses the shit is going to hit the fan and untold numbers will die.
He came once, I won’t argue. When Jesus comes again it won’t be pretty. . .he cursed the fig tree that bore no fruit & it whithered. He told everyone how to live in peace, we have ignored this to our own demise.
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12th April 2011 at 6:32 pm
.44 mag says:
One more sign the country is going to hell in a bucket is the number of paragraphs in news stories and other articles (like the one in this post) that have only one or two sentences. If the average citizen could read, write, and actually pay attention, we might not be in this mess.
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12th April 2011 at 7:52 pm
Steve Hogan says:
Comparing Congressmen to money changers is an insult to the money changers.
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12th April 2011 at 8:07 pm
Lisa says:
Entertaining article – except for the misogynist paragraph.
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12th April 2011 at 8:22 pm
KaD says:
Lisa, it always amazes me the scorn that’s heaped upon Planned Parenthood when we spend $100 Million per DAY on Libya alone. WTF is wrong with taking care or our own people?
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12th April 2011 at 8:38 pm
RT says:
lol KaD, Planned Parenthood is a serious sham and social manipulation/conditioning device. time for you to go do your research before commenting with the big boys.
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12th April 2011 at 7:55 am
Opinionated Blovaitor says:
Most congress members have souls of dog shit. They are beyond saving.
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12th April 2011 at 11:02 am
Kill Bill says:
DC is a nest of parasites that decry government spending – but only when its not feeding them.
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12th April 2011 at 12:33 pm
KaD says:
RT, I’ve BEEN to Planned Parenthood, have YOU? And not for an abortion or STD. They treated me like a human being, better than most doctors offices, when I didn’t have the money to go to a doctor.
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12th April 2011 at 3:55 pm
TeresaE says:
KaD
Me too.
Back around 2005, I was working for a couple bucks more than minimum wage without healthcare. I had an abnormal pap and was recommended for a cone biopsy.
NO hospital/OB-GYN would touch me without a couple thousand dollars. I barely had a car then, let alone money in the bank.
PP was the ONLY place to help me. Thankfully in the end, nothing was wrong.
Once we do away with PP, count on thousands more enrolled in the FSoA. Save a dime, cost us thousands of bucks.
Short-sighted to say the least, unless we really think women that don’t want children somehow manage to raise productive, law-abiding members of society. Cause with Section 8, food stamps and all the others perks, very few would ever voluntarily give away these little checkbooks.
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12th April 2011 at 4:35 pm
TeresaE says:
OOPs, back around 1995! In 2005 I was insured and had a baby. My insurance cost around $9k per year, my out of pocket cost around $5000. What a rip!
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12th April 2011 at 4:36 pm
Josey Wales says:
1/2 of the population has the Government they deserve. The other 1/2 are getting screwed by the other 1/2 soon all of us will be screwed.
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12th April 2011 at 6:32 pm
StuckInNJ says:
Continuing on the religious overtone commentary … some cultural background
Some may think Jesus & the moneychangers incident may be comparable to him going to Chase Bank and messing them up a bit. Not a good comparison …
The Temple was THE seat of power. The moneychangers were THE financial elite of the time.
So … by overturning the tables Jesus was defying the ENTIRE WAY OF THINGS. He was saying the entire system was corrupt, and that the entire system would soon be replaced. In modern terms, it would be akin to him overthrowing the Fed and then disbanding Congress.
That’s why it was such a big deal.
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12th April 2011 at 6:52 pm