About Me 0059: Making Money Without

The national Tea Party Nation group is planning to send a letter to Sarah Palin asking the former governor of Alaska and John McCain sidekick to run for chair of the Republican National Committee.

Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips says in his letter to Palin that without her at the helm of the RNC, the party will fall back into “establishment” hands.

“We need you as Chairman of the RNC. You have shown in the past no hesitation to take on the establishment. You did it in Alaska,” Phillips writes in the letter. “If we end up with establishment control of the GOP and their support for an establishment candidate in 2012, Obama and the socialists will have won…We need someone who will put conservatives in control of the party apparatus, not RINOs.”

The letter takes a shot at current RNC chair Michael Steele, who Phillips writes has “spent Republican money with the gusto of a liberal.” The letter references the numerous criticisms of Steele’s fiscal management of the RNC.

“Something is really wrong with the GOP when the RNC cannot fund a get out the vote campaign for mid-term elections,” Phillips writes.

Phillips writes that Palin has the collection of skills and national appeal to right the RNC ship in time to take on President Obama in 2012.

“You have an unbelievable ability to light up a crowd and to raise money. Both of which the Republican Party needs,” Phillips writes. “The GOP needs a conservative who can raise money and energize the troops. You are the only one out there with these unique talents.”

Palin has been seen as a natural ally of Steele’s heading into the January chair election, which Steele has not officially said he’ll be a part of yet. While many other prominent Republicans kept their distance from the gaffe-prone Steele over the past year, Palin joined Steele at several stops on his GOTV bus tour this fall and there’s been speculation that Palin might endorse Steele’s bid for a second term if he runs.

For his part, Phillips is prone to making big promises on behalf of the tea party movement other activists often distance themselves from. Phillips planned to play host to the second national tea party convention in Las Vegas before the event collapsed under open hostility from Nevada tea party and what appeared to be a lack of ticket sales.

Phillips has become a source of tea party headlines however, recently causing a national stir with his call to “retire” Muslim members of Congress.

Read the full Tea Party Nation letter, which the group says on its website will be “sent to Sarah Palin in the next few days,” here:

Dear Governor Palin,

John Kennedy once said, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Right now, your country needs you as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

We are in a fight for the survival of our country. The Democrats have walked off the socialist cliff and are driving the country headlong into the abyss. Unfortunately, there are many on the Republican side who do not seem to get it. They are the embodiment of the old political joke that says, with the Democrats you get more of the same and with Republicans you get less of the same.

We need you as Chairman of the RNC. You have shown in the past no hesitation to take on the establishment. You did it in Alaska. If we end up with establishment control of the GOP and their support for an establishment candidate in 2012, Obama and the socialists will have won. An establishment candidate will not work to repeal Obamacare and the other programs Obama, Pelosi and Reid have put in place. We need someone who will put conservatives in control of the party apparatus, not RINOs.

Michael Steele has spent Republican money with the gusto of a liberal. You showed in Alaska, you know how to put the brakes on unnecessary spending.

Finally, you are a superstar. You have an unbelievable ability to light up a crowd and to raise money. Both of which the Republican Party needs. Something is really wrong with the GOP when the RNC cannot fund a get out the vote campaign for mid-term elections. The GOP needs a conservative who can raise money and energize the troops. You are the only one out there with these unique talents.

We, the undersigned, are asking you to ask yourself what you can do for your country and to step up and become a candidate for Chairman of the RNC.

Thank you for your consideration and for what you continue to do for this great country.

Judson Phillips, Founder – Tea Party Nation

Note – this post was written by Evan McMorris-Santoro. for Talking Points Memo and is re-purposed here via a content sharing agreement.

Yesterday we all had the displeasure of reading the latest piece of sycophantic brownnosing by what has become everyone's most hated hypocrite. Today, the brilliant Sean Corrigan of Diapason Securities strikes again with the letter that should have been written. We hope someone of greater repute (not to mention circulation, reach and net income) than the NYT will grow some balls and post this.
Dear Uncle Sam,
My mother told me to send thank-you notes promptly. I've been remiss, but you know, with my firm's revenues up 30% and its net income up nearly threefold since the Crisis struck, I thought I'd better be careful in case anyone considered my praise was a little less than disinterested.
Just over two years ago, in September 2008, the country faced an economic meltdown. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the corrupted, corporatist rent-seekers you had long encouraged to disrupt the proper allocation of scarce means in the mortgage system in the lust for venal political advantage, had been forced into 'conservatorship' (i.e., they were permanently battened on the teat of the long- suffering tax-payer). Several of the largest commercial banks were teetering as a result of their leaders' blind pursuit of short-term gain in the regime of extreme moral hazard instituted by you and your central bank. One of Wall Street's giant investment banks had gone officially bankrupt, and the remaining three were poised to follow (at least until you allowed them to practice the legal fraud of what I then called 'mark-to-myth' in assessing their net worth) — but, of course, the full impact of flouting the eternal capitalist imperative of loss- avoidance and profit-seeking could not be allowed to be borne by them, now could it? Fortunately, the fact that AIG, the world's most notorious mispricer of credit risk, was at death's door offered you a way to make those same investment banks nearly whole through the back door. I believe the gamblers-in-charge who needed such unheard of levels of assistance are largely still in place and still making out like bandits at the expense of everyone else. Way to go!
Many of our largest industrial companies, foolishly over-reliant on hot-money, short-term financing via a commercial paper market that had disappeared up the tail-pipe of the mythical 'global saving glut' were weeks away from exhausting their cash resources. Indeed, all — well, many — oh, alright: some of the most badly run - of corporate America's dominoes were lined up, ready to topple at lightning speed. My own company might have been the last to fall — since I am not only a recognised investment genius, but very thick with a number of your more influential servants - but that hypothetical distinction provided little solace with even my stock price back at 1998 levels, before reckoning for inflation or the weaker dollar.
Nor was it just business that was in peril: 300 million Americans were in the domino line as well and it is, of course, not just a constitutional right, but a precept of natural law, that you must act as that vast, tutelary deity of whom de Tocqueville spoke when you were still little more than a lad and so spare the improvident, the indolent, and the plain unfortunate the consequences of their actions, even if it costs the thrifty, the industrious, and the innocent very dear in the process. Just days before, the jobs, income, 401(k)'s and money-market funds of these citizens had seemed secure. Then, virtually overnight, everything began to turn into pumpkins and mice — but, then again, if you take my strictures (q.v., below) about 'bubbles' into account, maybe they were nothing more than Bibbedy-bobbedy-boo all along (except where they held shares in MY company, of course). There was no hiding place. Thanks to your misplaced efforts in trying to keep a lid on the volcano for at least the previous decade (some would say ever since the early 1930s), instead of allowing it to depressurize in its own good time, a destructive economic force unlike any seen for generations had been unleashed.
Only one counterforce was available, and that was you, Uncle Sam. Yes, you are often clumsy, even inept (allow me a little euphemism here: I'm trying to be nice). But when businesses and people worldwide race to get liquid, you are the only party armed with the printing press and primed with an utter disregard for the long term consequences of using it and so can take the other side of the transaction. And when our citizens are losing trust by the hour in institutions they once revered — institutions which you fostered, pretended to regulate, and from which you continue to take hefty political contributions - only you can prop up a house of cards of your own construction.
When the crisis struck, I knew you would not waste the opportunity to expand the role you could play — Crisis and Leviathan, and all that. But you've never been known for speed, and in a meltdown minutes matter. I worried whether the barrage of shattering surprises would disorient you. Absent any guiding principles, drunk on the unbridled power of executive privilege, and utterly contemptuous of due process, you would rush ('like a fire-engine going the wrong way down a one way street') to improvise ill-thought out - and often conflicting - solutions on the run, violate legal boundaries and avoid constitutional inconveniences, like Congressional hearings and studies. You would also need to get turf-conscious departments to work together in mounting your counterattack. Ah, well, better luck, next time! The challenge was huge, and many people thought you were not up to it - who says you should always discount the consensus?
Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. Oh boy did you deliver! People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that, just as you can count on the resulting uncertainty about exactly what stunt you're gonna pull next to paralyze entrepreneurial decision-making and so prolong the slump far beyond its natural span. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic and under its veil you certainly did a number of things which would not stand up to scrutiny in the unlikely event you ever honoured a FOIA appeal to reveal exactly who did what to (or for) whom and why. Overall, your actions were remarkably effective in taking the failure of a few egregiously over-leveraged, private- sector companies and magnifying it into a global collapse, passing the losses of the billionaire financier class onto the individual saver and the small businessman, wherever they might be found.
I don't know precisely how you orchestrated these - certainly, the noise that came out was much more Berg than Bach. But I did have a pretty good seat as events unfolded (don't I always?), and I would like to commend a few of your troops. In the darkest of days, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair finally grasped - after much prior public denial - the gravity of a situation in whose development at least the first three had been actively instrumental. As for dear ol' Dubya, I give him great credit for leading, even as Congress postured and squabbled, for if there's one thing that sells tickets in this Theatre of the Absurd, it's Leadership (capitalized, naturally, just like Fuhrerprinzip), even if too few care to check quite where they are being led until it's far too late to do anything about it.
You have been criticized, Uncle Sam, for some of the earlier decisions that got us in this mess — most prominently for not battling the rot building up in the housing market (though to limit ourselves to this narrow field is to deny much of the discredit due you). But then, few of your critics saw matters clearly either (even though several of them now tediously hog the headlines by pretending that they did) since, they, too, are all Neo-Keynesian, macroeconomic-aggregate astrologers with no real grasp of economic theory. In truth, almost all of the country became possessed by the idea that home prices could never fall significantly - a mania which never could have taken hold had we had abolished the Fed and put in place an honest monetary system, of course. (Since you ask, my S&P put shorts and my bearish USD position are again doing quite nicely, thanks).
That was a mass delusion, reinforced by rapidly rising prices that discredited the few skeptics who warned of trouble. Delusions, whether about tulips or Internet stocks, produce bubbles. And when bubbles pop, they can generate waves of trouble that hit shores far from their origin. This bubble was a doozy and its pop was felt around the world. Thank the Lord, you've been trying might and main ever since to reinflate a new one on the wreckage of the old (see my comments about pumpkins and
mice, above).
So, again, Uncle Sam, thanks to you and your aides. Often you are wasteful, and sometimes you are bullying. On occasion, you are downright maddening (this is meiosis, not euphemism, in case you were wondering). But in this extraordinary emergency, you came through — and the world would look far different now if you had not. What a shame we'll be picking up the multi-trillion tab for that utterly ill-advised intervention for many a long year to come (I use the term 'we' loosely, of course, since I'm reaping what I did not sow as per usual).
Your grateful nephew, W
PS: Do I get my nice, shiny new medal now, please?
PPS: Please excuse the shocking punctuation, left largely unamended by the editorial staff at the nation's premier newspaper.

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Wednesday, 8 December 2010

Making Money Without

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