Ryan Price's Soapbox

This week President Obama unveiled a a new story intended to show how his policies have assisted in helping people from start of life to end of life. The truth is non delusional American’s do not want a utopian cradle-to-grave society. For those of you who haven’t read about “Julia” I advise you to go to BarackObama.com and read the story. It narrates her life from age 3 to 67. At the beginning Obama credits Head Start not her two parents with her being ready to learn and succeed in kindergarten.

Instead of individual teachers, private mentors, home-school organizers, or charter-school leaders, Obama extols his federal Race to the Top program for implementing the high-school “classes she needs to do well” in college. As she gets older it gets worse – instead of thrift-minded families who save for their own kids’ higher educations (or who opt for non-college alternatives) and who encourage those kids to work in private-sector summer jobs, Obama praises his “opportunity tax credit” and Pell Grants for putting Julia through college.

Moving on to age 22-26 – Instead of acknowledging how costly Obamacare mandates have caused individual-market health-care insurers to drop plans altogether, Obama promotes the government-manufactured umbilical cord tethering “children” like Julia to their parents’ health-care plans until age 26. Instead of accepting that the costs and consequences of a woman’s sexual choices should be a matter of personal responsibility, Obama heralds his religious-liberty-crushing birth control/abortion mandate for allowing Julia to “focus on her work instead of worrying about her health.”. As for better schools for Julia’s new son, Zachary. Nope. It’s Obama’s “investments” in education and “programs like Race to the Top.”

Julia starts her own web business. She qualifies for a Small Business Administration loan, giving her the money she needs to invest in her business. President Obama’s tax cuts for small businesses like Julia’s help her to get started. She’s able to hire employees, creating new jobs in her town and helping to grow the local economy.

In the real world, according to Dun and Bradstreet, the SBA supported fewer than 62,000 small-business loans: a measly 0.2 percent of the nation’s 27.5 million small businesses. The vast majority of entrepreneurs get their start without the SBA’s “help” and want only one thing: for Obama and his wealth-confiscators to leave them the heck alone.

As soon as “The Life of Julia” hit the web, conservatives swarmed Twitter to provide real-world counter-narratives. “I’m no Julia,” one wrote. “As a small-business owner I’m being taxed to death. I need the (government) to get out of my way and let me make money.” Another young conservative female tweeted: “As a woman business owner I’m offended that POTUS thinks I need him to survive and thrive.” Conservative writer Kemberlee Kaye added: “What the Julia example really shows is the Democrat ideal. Complete and total reliance on the government.”

My story? I am starting my own small business IT firm and want no help from the government nor would I ever expect tax payers to front the bill. What the administration fails to see is that the American people are very resilient and capable of improving local schools, the community, and raising our kids just fine without government intervention. Thanks but no thanks Obama.

Recently the drums of war have been getting turned up again as the US looks at the possible prospect of going to war with Iran. It recently got me thinking because I caught an episode of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC which she was actually covering America’s seemingly abnormal obsession with war. Since when did the US and its citizenship as a whole become comfortable and unaffected by not one but TWO wars which have been ongoing for the last decade.

The problem seems to arise from the fact that since the 1970’s, the people in power in the executive branch and the legislative branch have made it easier to go to war than it use to be. Our founding fathers never intended to have this military industrial complex that exists now. When the US had to declare war, it was congress who voted on sending our families to wars in foreign lands. Back in World War II, war was something that affected families. It affected families because so many people went to serve versus the minute number with have today. This evolution of how we view war has put us on the wrong track, has tarnished out image world wide as the country who supported freedom where ever.

The Iran-Contra scandal which is thought of being a scandal about a cabal of zealots gone slightly rogue that maybe Reagan knew something about. I think what’s really important about Iran-Contra is that, in trying to save Reagan’s neck, his administration came up with this very radical notion of executive power. Then fast forward to Iraq in 1991, Kosovo and Bosnia in the mid 90’s, and under George W. Bush – Iraq and Afghanistan. Even under our current president Barack Obama, an unsanctioned war in Libya allowed us to be involved in the conflict for a few months under the War Powers Act (which by the way should never have been passed for this purpose alone). The reason why most of us have simply forgotten or become desensitized to war is because it does not affect the population like it did 50+ years ago. We are surely on the wrong track and we are doing our soldiers a huge disservice but going on these endeavors overseas under the pretense of fighting terrorist and preventing another 9/11 from happening. Roughly half of the American people have not felt any effects of the nation’s involvement in two separate wars much less know they are still ongoing.

Each successive administration has made all of these little accommodations that let the president do more in the national security arena without getting political permission, without having to make the case for it, without having to make the case to Congress, without having to face the public that may disagree with it. They’ve come up with ways to do more and more stuff unilaterally to the point where our national security policy isn’t much under democratic control anymore.

It’s time we started rolling back all these policies that have given both upper branches of government this power, public support should be a huge factor on if we go to war or not, and the President should not be the sole person deciding if we go to war , it should be Congress which decides regardless if the conflict is small or large.

Not very long after President Obama singed into law the National Defense Authorization Act. Our wonderful 9% approval rating Congress has now taken things a step further. With everyone recently distracted on PIPA and SOPA in the last few weeks. I give to you HR 3166/ SB 1698. It is apparent that after the passage of the NDAA bill, they modified the language of the NDAA to satisfy most people under the guise that they’re American citizens and it doesn’t apply to them. Lo and behold we now have this piece of legislation that is separate from the NDAA that allows them to remove your citizenship on a whim. The Obama administration as well as Congress know full well what they are doing.

They tried the same thing before they assassinated Anwar Al Awlaki; they tried passing legislation then that would allow them to revoke his citizenship even though he had not given it up, so that they could "legally" kill him. The legislation didn’t make it through in time, and Obama got trigger happy, so now he has the Assassination of 3 American citizens on his plate. Under any circumstances you’d think some sort of impeachment would be at hand but people don’t seem to pay much attention much less care. They continue to think and believe what the mainstream media tells them and only wants them to hear and know about. Well I’m telling you right now, This law is as dangerous as the NDAA bill that passed and if it is passed it will finally complete the agenda that is being laid out that will allow for a sitting president to hit the kill button on anyone US national or not. That people should scare you and more importantly it should prompt you to get up and do something about it. Exactly how people are up in arms over PIPA & SOPA.

January 3rd 2012 should be remembered for the day that our President ; The man who swore to uphold the Constitutional rights of the US people and everything this country stands, went back on his word and his oath and on that day, signed the NDAA into law. For those who don’t understand what the NDAA is, it basically permits the indefinite detention of people. After condemning the Bush Administration for such power grabs – Patriot Act comes to mind – Obama takes the biggest grab possible and wants to permit the indefinite or in his words ‘prolonged’ detention without charges, without any trail or evidence of any wrong doing. The threat he says makes this law necessary – there are people plotting to take American lives a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. So for actions that haven’t even been taken yet – we’re going to detain people for long periods of time?

A famous quote comes to mind from Benjamin Franklin -

Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither

Since the attacks on September 11th we have continued to give our freedoms up for the thought of security which for all intents and purposes is not 100% flawless. As our previous president has stated: “The enemy only has to get lucky once, we must be right 100% of the time”. I’m sorry but this logically is not possible, unless we want to become a police state which we have obviously continued taking steps in that direction. The Patriot Act got some pretty important extensions back in may that appear to have gone unnoticed. The measure adds four years to the legal life of roving wiretaps, authorized for a person rather than a communications line or device; court-ordered searches of business records; and surveillance of non-American "lone wolf" suspects without confirmed ties to terrorist groups. Think about it – prolonged detention…at what point are we going to start righting for our rights or do we simply wait until they are all gone when it’s too late to do anything.

Looks scary doesn’t it. It could become a reality if the House of Representatives and Senate agree to pass the law known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA as it’s known in the Senate (Protect Intellectual Property Act). So what exactly is SOPA and why should you care?

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a proposed bill that would allow owners of intellectual property to block or disable any website that they consider infringes on their intellectual property.

Unfortunately, the bill takes a “carpet bombing” approach to piracy and gives intellectual property owners unprecedented powers in being able to take websites down without any sort of due process. With this bill the government will assign liability to site owners for everything users post, and fine or block websites on which even one user posted material that a copyright holder considers infringing. Sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter will be forced to monitor and filter everything posted to prevent this, which is likely impossible. Blacklisting could be initiated solely based on an assertion by a copyright holder, blocking access to websites before even proving infringement occurred. User generated content will become a liability that makes it nearly impossible to host. Do you want that? I sure don’t. We’re looking at something that can and will fundamentally change the internet and how we use it because a handful of congress people want to create the exact same system China has in place where they filter out everything.

So I ask of you this: PLEASE write your representatives, call them, do what ever it takes to convince them that this is bad for us and bad for all parties involved.

For a list of growing companies who support it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xjisu18X6s7lPtAsIQg5Ol3KJjymPT2az1kasQVwGiw/edit?pli=1

For the list of those who support it look below:

Representatives(with email Addresses):

Lamar Smith [R-TX21]    lamars@hr.house.gov
Robert Goodlatte [R-VA6]    talk2bob@mail.house.gov
Marsha Blackburn [R-TN7]    unknown
Mark Amodei [R-NV2] unknown
Jim Cooper [D-TN5]  unknown
Peter King [R-NY3]  peter.king@mail.house.gov
Lee Terry [R-NE2]   unknown
John Barrow [D-GA12]    unknown
Dennis Ross [R-FL12]    unknown
Joe Baca [D-CA43]   unknown
Adam Schiff [D-CA29]    unknown
Elton Gallegly [R-CA24] unknown
Tim Griffin [R-AR2] unknown
Karen Bass [D-CA33] unknown
Debbie Wasserman Schultz [D-FL20]   unknown
Tim Holden [D-PA17] unknown
Howard Berman [D-CA28]  unknown
Mary Bono Mack [R-CA45] unknown
Steve Scalise [R-LA1]   unknown
Melvin Watt [D-NC12]    melmail@hr.house.gov
John Conyers [D-MI14]    jconyers@hr.house.gov
Ben Luján [D-NM3]  unknown
Steven Chabot [R-OH1]   unknown
John Carter [R-TX31]    unknown
Brad Sherman [D-CA27]   brad.sherman@mail.house.gov
John Larson [D-CT1] unknown
Alan Nunnelee [R-MS1]   unknown
Thomas Marino [R-PA10]  unknown
Judy Chu [D-CA32]   unknown
William Owens [D-NY23]  unknown
Ben Quayle [R-AZ3]  unknown
Ted Deutch [D-FL19] unknown

Senators(With their date of initial support):

Sen Alexander, Lamar [TN] – 5/25/2011
Sen Ayotte, Kelly [NH] – 6/27/2011
Sen Bennet, Michael F. [CO] – 7/25/2011
Sen Bingaman, Jeff [NM] – 10/19/2011
Sen Blumenthal, Richard [CT] – 5/12/2011
Sen Blunt, Roy [MO] – 5/23/2011
Sen Boozman, John [AR] – 6/15/2011
Sen Boxer, Barbara [CA] – 12/12/2011
Sen Brown, Sherrod [OH] – 10/20/2011
Sen Cardin, Benjamin L. [MD] – 7/13/2011
Sen Casey, Robert P., Jr. [PA] – 9/7/2011
Sen Chambliss, Saxby [GA] – 11/2/2011
Sen Cochran, Thad [MS] – 6/23/2011
Sen Coons, Christopher A. [DE] – 5/12/2011
Sen Corker, Bob [TN] – 6/9/2011
Sen Durbin, Richard [IL] – 6/30/2011
Sen Enzi, Michael B. [WY] – 9/7/2011
Sen Feinstein, Dianne [CA] – 5/12/2011
Sen Franken, Al [MN] – 5/12/2011
Sen Gillibrand, Kirsten E. [NY] – 5/26/2011
Sen Graham, Lindsey [SC] – 5/12/2011
Sen Grassley, Chuck [IA] – 5/12/2011
Sen Hagan, Kay [NC] – 7/5/2011
Sen Hatch, Orrin G. [UT] – 5/12/2011
Sen Isakson, Johnny [GA] – 11/2/2011
Sen Johnson, Tim [SD] – 10/3/2011
Sen Klobuchar, Amy [MN] – 5/12/2011
Sen Kohl, Herb [WI] – 5/12/2011
Sen Landrieu, Mary L. [LA] – 10/17/2011
Sen Lieberman, Joseph I. [CT] – 7/7/2011
Sen McCain, John [AZ] – 7/26/2011
Sen Menendez, Robert [NJ] – 10/31/2011
Sen Nelson, Bill [FL] – 9/23/2011
Sen Risch, James E. [ID] – 11/7/2011
Sen Rubio, Marco [FL] – 5/26/2011
Sen Schumer, Charles E. [NY] – 5/12/2011
Sen Shaheen, Jeanne [NH] – 6/30/2011
Sen Udall, Tom [NM] – 7/7/2011
Sen Vitter, David [LA] – 11/7/2011
Sen Whitehouse, Sheldon [RI] – 5/12/2011
Sen Moran, Jerry [KS] – 6/23/2011

PS: By the way I have wrote to both of our representatives in congress. They also will not get my vote come re-election time.

For most of you not well versed in law Habeus Corpus is a legal action that allows a prisoner to be released from unlawful detention. An example of this would be prisoners at Guantanamo which are being held there indefinitely and might not be guilty of anything at all which some cases have found. Another use for this albet extreme it’s still plausible. If things were to get out of hand with say the tea party protests, or occupy protests this could be invoked and law enforcement could hold you in jail indefinitely. The only other known time this has ever happened in our history is during the Civil War when southern states were leaving the union about 200 years ago.

They voted for an amendment to the Defense Authorization act, the indefinite suspension of Habeas Corpus. We are now officially a police state. Read the Amendment provision here. The house version of the bill is available here, 920 pages. Senate text is available here and a PDF of the full senate bill is available here, 682 pages. The amendment to the Defense Authorization act (the Udall amendment) would have removed some of the more draconian measures of the bill. To clear up some of the confusion, Sen. Udall was the good guy here.

We need to remember that the text of the bill would have provided issues for people who had not been legally found guilty (no due process), just suspected. If we look back at our recent history, we can see similar legislation being misused to silence political dissidents. Are you calling for the Federal Reserve to be abolished? Are you a John Bircher? Like the Tea Party better than Occupy or vice versa? Who knows how it can be misused. Not trying to be more alarmist than needed, but we do need to remain vigilant. Ignore your rights, and they will go away. I find it oddly coincidental that with the wind down of the Iraq conflict that this would come to light as an possible excuse to hold on to those prisoners in Guantanamo Bay even after the war is over.

Those that voted for this are as follows:

Ayotte (R-NH)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Blunt (R-MO)
Boozman (R-AR)
Brown (R-MA)
Burr (R-NC)
Casey (D-PA)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coats (R-IN)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Hagan (D-NC)
Hatch (R-UT)
Heller (R-NV)
Hoeven (R-ND)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Inouye (D-HI)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Johnson (R-WI)
Kohl (D-WI)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lee (R-UT)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lugar (R-IN)
Manchin (D-WV)
McCain (R-AZ)
McCaskill (D-MO)
McConnell (R-KY)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Moran (R-KS)
Nelson (D-NE)
Portman (R-OH)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Rubio (R-FL)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Shelby (R-AL)
Snowe (R-ME)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Thune (R-SD)
Toomey (R-PA)
Vitter (R-LA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wicker (R-MS)

Looks like we know who to throw out in the next elections now.

I don’t expect most people to really understand Wall Street, as a matter of fact even I don’t understand what they do most of the time but after I read something that I feel is relatively important – I feel the need to pass the knowledge around because being an informed citizen is the most important thing you can be as an American. Sitting around doing nothing will only prolong the status quo in Washington and in Wall Street. Yesterday, Bank of America began shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC. So what exactly does this mean to the average American?

This means that the investment bank’s European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers.  Bank of America didn’t get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties.  Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound.  The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input.  You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve. No I didn’t mistype that.. 79 trillion dollars of derivatives…that’s well over 5 times the GDP of our country.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan.  Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.

Most people should be very afraid of this. The banks are basically putting us on the hook again so they don’t have to be responsible for the huge amount of risk they are dealing with. When Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland default on their sovereign debts and the EU can’t bail them out anymore there will be a massive run on the banks and it will be 10 fold what 2008 was when everything collapsed. It sure would be nice to have the gold standard right about now…even at 1600 dollars an ounce and holding over 5700 tons of Gold the total wealth of our gold holdings could theoretically end out debt, and back all this risk with plenty left over…to the tune of 278 trillion dollars. Unfortunately I don’t see us going back to the gold standard anytime soon nor reenacting the Glass-Steagall Act which would get the banks out of investment banking. If anything – this is what Occupy Wall Street should definitely include for reasons to protest.

Regardless of political affiliations anyone should find this as grotesque as I do. Now contrary to what has been said; Citigroup paid back their loan plus a profit. It is a lie. The Fed has kept interest rates low to essentially allow Citibank to pay us back with our own money. You can take it from the former head of TARP: The Fed not only wants to stimulate the economy but also to recapitalize the banks. So basically what we have here is no punishment what’s so ever that fits the crime. $285 million is a drop in the bucket.

With the onset of aggressive lending people like Barney Frank pushed this type of lending. Citibank is a monster, and we need to blame the right people. The mortgage industry has been corrupt for the last 30+ years . The politicians made the rules, and the lenders followed and were forced to do so least they be punished severely. Ever since the Citizens United case in the Supreme Court ;corporations are protected by the same rights as individuals, yet they aren’t subjected to the same accountability. This is what got us into this mess even worse was removing any responsibility from the hands of the people doing the loan giving. In the end you have an underwater mortgage with Citi that is for the most part based on fraud. They hold these toxic mortgages and pass them off to the ratings agencies as golden AAA securities while betting against them with credit default swaps. and yet These pricks got off easy.. Where’s my pitchfork?

May I present to you some of the most damning proof that banks really do not care about their customers. News has been circling the web after Bank of America announced plans to start charging monthly fee’s for customers to simply use their debt card. Something they have had the freedom to do since well..I’ve been alive. Since news of this broke, people have been fed up with the large number of changes Bank of America is making that negatively affect their customers. So what are the customers doing? Closing their accounts! Well…at least attempting to close their accounts. In St. Louis, numbers of people went to their local Bank of America to protest and close their accounts, what they were confronted with were police guarding the bank entrance and refused to let them do so. It is projected that the $5 monthly fee will allow Bank of America (one of the recipients of the 2009 Bailout) will allow them to make an additional 1 BILLION dollars on top of their 2 billion dollar profit they made in 2010. I believe it’s time for me personally to part ways with Bank of America, I refuse to do business with scumbag banks that treat their customers like crap. I’ll stick with Arvest and USAA from now on.

Wow I can’t believe it’s been ten years since the events of 9/11. Being a resident of Arkansas I did not experience it first hand like the people of New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC. But on that day, 10 years ago – America lost a part of itself. Gone now are the days where America lived in a type of bubble where we thought we were safe from an attack on our own soil. Kids who experienced such unimaginable loss and lost fathers, mothers, siblings still deal with the pain today. Of the over 3000 who died that day, as many as 90 countries lost people in these attacks. It was not just an attack on Americans but also people from other nationalities and who came to America for the one thing we’re known for…freedom and opportunity.

In May of this year, America got its revenge on the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden. All though his death will not bring back those 3000 lost, we know he will never again think or plan another attack where he can take another 3000. America has definitely changed, and I think besides wounding the US and giving it a black eye per say, Osama succeeded in two ways – he successfully lured the US into a war that has been raging since October 2001 and has no current timeline of ending. On top of that we are entangled in Iraq and between these two wars, we are bleeding money. Much of the weight of this year’s ceremonies lies in what will largely go unspoken — the anniversary’s role in prompting Americans to consider how the attacks changed them and the larger world and the continuing struggle to understand 9/11′s place in the lore of the nation. Too many people have pushed from their minds the events of that day because it’s either ‘too saddening” or “too painful" to think bout. The people that died that day deserve more respect than to be forgotten or be spoken about in a negative light.

So where exactly are we 10 years later – We have 3 locations where memorials are still being erected 10 years after the fact. Of the 5 buildings destroyed that day near the World Trade Center complex, Building 7 has been built back and completed with the Freedom Tower expected to be done in 2013.

On this day, we need to remember and reflect on how Americans…all came together: Democrats, Republicans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Black, White, Indian, Asian…to come to the aid of our fellow countrymen. Do not let these people’s memory perish, remember them. Remember the day, and pass down this day to your kids because in light of all the sadness and pain…it shows the resilience and the strength of the American people to get right back up and show the people that did this horrible attack that knocking down a few buildings or hijacking a few planes isn’t going to destroy us.

God Bless America… and never forget.