The recent exposure of how Congressmen benefit from inside trading information that is illegal for anyone else  should be a common theme for everyone who is upset with the current state of affairs.  It should be a common thread that unites the Tea Party with Zuccotti Park.

Sarah Palin strikes this point very well  in The Wall Street Journal in How Congress Occupied Wall Street, 11/18/11.

Excerpt:

How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians’ stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers’? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

What are the solutions? We need reform that provides real transparency. Congress should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act like everyone else. We need more detailed financial disclosure reports, and members should submit reports much more often than once a year. All stock transactions above $5,000 should be disclosed within five days.

We need equality under the law. From now on, laws that apply to the private sector must apply to Congress, including whistleblower, conflict-of-interest and insider-trading laws. Trading on nonpublic government information should be illegal both for those who pass on the information and those who trade on it. (This should close the loophole of the blind trusts that aren’t really blind because they’re managed by family members or friends.)

No more sweetheart land deals with campaign contributors. No gifts of IPO shares. No trading of stocks related to committee assignments. No earmarks where the congressman receives a direct benefit. No accepting campaign contributions while Congress is in session. No lobbyists as family members, and no transitioning into a lobbying career after leaving office. No more revolving door, ever.

This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party’s mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been “Occupying Wall Street” long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

HKO comment:

When Palin entered the political scene I was impressed by her as a fresh and honest voice outside the Washington elite, but was quickly disappointed at her lack of depth on critical political issues.  I find Herman Cain to be a similar welcome fresh voice with great experience outside the beltway,  but also lacking in necessary political thought and experience.   While Palin was devoured by the MSM and marginalized by many within the GOP,  her record at reform as governor of Alaska may be her best accomplishment and her thoughts on the corruption in D.C. are well worth noting.

It is just when you hear the words that “this is not a war on the wealthy” that you can expect exactly that.

During the Clinton years they put a cap on the wages of corporate executives. Only the first million dollars would be deductible.  Did this cap apply to athletes or movie stars?  The irony was that to avoid the consequences of the limit,  stock options  became popular and after the boom of the 1990’s many of the wealthy became much more wealthy as a result of the attempt to make them less so.

Ralph Nader

I heard Ralph Nader on the radio criticizing Apple computer and other corporations for sitting on so much cash.  If we forced them to dividend their cash it would be a stimulus that would make everybody wealthier.  So it is not the profligate waste of government, 99 weeks of unemployment  and wasted delayed stimulus of the government that has us mired.  It is the greedy corporations sitting on their ill gotten cash from all those iPhones and iPads  that poor consumers were duped into buying.

What product has Ralph Nader ever invented that we want?  What innovation has he ever offered  that any consumer would pay for?  What company has he ever managed?  What recession has he ever had to face with the demand of thousands of employees, shareholders and customers to consider?  What fool would heed financial management advice from such inexperienced arrogance?

Why is the fortune of Al Gore made from his increasingly unfounded climate theories not suspect, yet the fortunes made by those who provide products we actually want and need criticized as greedy gains?

How can Hollywood celebrities who make millions criticize those in the financial sector who do the same?  Where do they think the capital came from to make and distribute the movies that made them rich?

This war on the wealthy, from the lips of Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore and all the rest is a distraction from the failure of their dream candidate.  The ‘Blame Bush’ song is getting stale,  so they sought another scapegoat; anything rather than the failure of their own actions and ideas.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd is boring ignorant theatre.  This picture of  Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein at the OCW rally is incredibly violent and offensive.  If this was seen at a Tea Party rally it would have been proof that the Tea Party was anti-Semitic, vilifying a Jew in the tradition of the worst European tradition. Where is the media call for civility?

These protesters and their supporters are not against all wealthy people; just those who make more money  than them or make it  in an industry other than their own or one that they approve of.    It is hard to take them seriously and I imagine that few outside of the media hucksters do.

Some Random thoughts:

Home prices are falling. Is this a bad thing? Hasn’t the misguided federal housing policy sought to expand home ownership?  Could they be more successful in their failure than they thought they were when they were ‘successful’?    In an effort to create home ownership for those who could not afford it, they destroyed it for those who could.

Socialism is simply the supremacy of political self interest for economic self interest.  Every new exemption from the disastrous health care bill proves that further.  Every exemption is a frank admission of failure of central planning applied to health care.  Exempt everybody.  It’s called a free market.

Does anybody believe the official inflation numbers?

Humanitarian aid usually looks like food and medical supplies, not cruise missiles.  There is a difference between humanitarian relief and taking sides in a civil war.  See The Discovery and Use of American Exceptionalism,  my article in today’s American Thinker.

The Coffee Party is a top down effort from progressives to counter the bottom up Conservative Tea Party Movement.  Top down is already in disarray.  If you cannot define your mission, changing names will not help.  It will only confuse and weaken the existing organization.  The No Name party and the Coffee Party are just very unoriginal efforts to distance themselves from existing labels that have lost their luster.  It’s the ideas that are failing, not the labels.

There was once an effort to counter the effect of conservative talk radio by launching a liberal talk radio net work, Air America.

It failed.

Now there is an effort to counter the Tea Party movement with the progressive alternative- The Coffee Party.

It too is failing.

Beside the total lack of any originality the reasons are similar. Both conservative talk radio and the Tea Party were  bottom up movements.  There was no top GOP official that made a decision to solicit political converts via AM radio, and there was no GOP elite who designed and launched the Tea Party movement.  What frustrated the media, the Democrats, and the Republican establishment was that there was no leadership structure.  Nobody know who to hold accountable for the movement.

Yet is spite of some failures the Tea Party exercised considerable influence on the outcome of the 2010 elections, still with nobody in charge.

The Coffee Party is doomed to fail because it is beginning with an organized elitist directive, a board and an organization that is already quarrelling before they have accomplished anything.  There is no groundswell support for the Coffee Party because it is already represented by the Democratic Party.  In fact I can detect hardly any difference between the Coffee Party and the Democrats.

The Tea Party formed because they found a large group who felt unrepresented by the Democrats and many Republicans, but felt that the Republicans was close enough to merit using them as a base.  This made them far more successful than creating a third party.

Read more about the implosion of the Coffee Party at Politico in The Coffee Party and It’s Discontents by Ben Smith.

The real test of the Tea Party and the new conservative majority in Congress is how committed they are to cutting the expenses of government. It is foolish to think it can be cut by a meaningful amount without cutting  the big and popular entitlement items like Medicare and Social Security. It will likely require cutting popular pork barrel spending on farm programs and other programs that have long outlived their usefulness and purpose.

Every program has a constituency that can justify their program in isolation.  It is considering the programs in context of the total that requires a decision.  It is the duty of our elected officials to say “no” to worthwhile programs we can no longer afford.

The cuts must be broad and should affect everybody, but inevitably some will be hurt more than others. Those that have benefitted the most from excess government largesse will probably feel the pain the most.

Congress will be tested by the onslaught of lobbyists and special interests.  But lobbyists are a byproduct of  excess regulations. And excess regulations favor established large enterprises over small and startup companies, because the regulations often require an extensive infrastructure that small businesses do not have.

It is not enough to just cut government expenses, though that is critical. The regulatory environment must be streamlined to allow new companies from the private sector to find profitable solutions to issues that this government thinks only they can solve.

We keep hearing that citizens want more from their government, but the question is rarely raised while the cost is included.  Asking what they would want from the government without telling them what it will cost is worthless wishing.

The new Congress must face the hard reality that a lot of programs must be cut and must respect that more voters, who are now more aware of the cost, are willing to do without.  The test will come when they must get clear and specific about meaningful cuts.

Until then it was all just more campaign rhetoric.