Paying for Protection

The REAL Hunger Games--Food Rationing Coming to a Dinner Table Near You Courtesy of the U.N.

2013-05-21T15:41:00.002-07:00

The mega bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games, is set in a post-apocalyptic world where food is rationed and seconds are served up to the region whose champion can emerge as the games' victor. The books and now movies have been a huge success--partially because in America we have no real concept of what food rationing means. The last time we had rationing was during World War II when every American was encouraged to grow a "Victory Garden" and sugar was in short supply. But if global climate change enthusiasts and the leftists in our country have their way, we will soon be back to victory gardens and food rationing as a permanent fixture of our society.

To understand where the newest push for government control is coming from, it is essential to understand that the main premise of environmentalists and the entire climate change movement, which has been encapsulated in Agenda 21, is that the primary danger to the world is the affluence of the West, and particularly the United States. THE PROBLEM: We produce too much, we consume too much and we have too much. Our wealth is something that other countries aspire to emulate, but it is unsustainable. THE SOLUTION: Exchange the free market systems and freedom that created Western/American prosperity in the first place for a Central Planning system where are all resources are owned by the government and rationed to the populace. This will intentionally destroy American wealth and reduce us to the level of poor third world countries, thereby achieving the levels of social equality that Agenda 21 demands. Maurice Strong, the chair of the UN Earth Summit in 1992, expressed this goal in his opening remarks:

"The same processes of economic growth which have produced such unprecedented levels of wealth and power for the rich minority and hopes of a better life for everyone have also given rise to the risks and imbalances that now threaten the future of rich and poor alike. This growth model, and the patterns of production and consumption which have accompanied it, is not sustainable for the rich; nor can it be replicated by the poor. To continue along this pathway could lead to the end of our civilization."

Sixteen years later, Presidential candidate Barack Obama restated this goal in the language of the people in a stump speech in Roseburg, Oregon delivered May 17, 2008:

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes at 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the Tundra, and just expect that every other country is going to say, 'Oh, okay, you guys keep using 25% of the world's energy even though you only account for 3% of the world's population.'" (Emphasis added)

The past four and half years have seen huge strides in the advancement of the global environmentalist agenda. Through the proliferation of Smart Growth communities which ration land usage and make housing more expensive, coupled with the Dodd Frank bill which cuts off access to home mortgage loans for 60% of Americans, the government is remaking us into a nation of renters who will spend our lives in tiny urban apartments. Through subsidies of public transportation combined with energy policies that raise the prices of both automobiles and gasoline, the government is going to force as many of us as possible to give up our cars. The next stage--rationing our food and telling us what we can eat, is right around the corner.

Ever since President Obama took office, the first lady has been harping on the nation that we need to be eating healthier diets. We saw pictures of her White House garden where she supposedly grows vegetables for her family. Many thought that her new role as food police was just her "project". Then Mayor Michael Bloomberg began restricting the use of salt in restaurants in New York and limiting the size of soft drinks. He tells us that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens' health by dictating what we eat. So what's really going on? Why, with all of the problems we are facing as a nation, is the state and federal government so interested in what we eat?

Last year at the Rio + 20 Summit, the current Secretary-General of the U.N. launched the U.N.'s Zero Hunger Challenge. The Zero Hunger Challenge is one of the Ban Ki-Moon's top priorities, and on the surface a campaign to end worldwide hunger sounds very noble. But like everything else that the U.N. has proposed for the last twenty years, the Zero Hunger Challenge is not really about ending hunger; it's about controlling food and forcing the industrial nations of the world to adopt a system of "sustainable agriculture". Two of the goals give this away--eliminating over consumption and food waste. The EPA website features a page showing that Americans waste 35 million pounds of food each year. So how do we eliminate food waste? Cut back the amount produced and ration the amount of food available.

The problem with the obesity campaign is that for the most part it has not been well received. Even uber liberal Bill Maher has said that he has a problem with the government regulating how much we eat and drink. So now, the climate change people are trying a different tactic--after telling us for years that one in three American children is obese, they are now telling us that one in five American children is hungry.

That is the theme of a documentary A Place at the Table which was released in March of 2013. A Place at the Table takes statistics that nearly 20% of Americans are living in households with "food insecurity" and distorts them to imply that 1 in 5 children are malnourished or hungry as a result. This theme is being echoed in a current ConAgra Food campaign which shows little children carrying folding chairs to a long table where a good meal is waiting for them. The voiceover for this ad tells us that one in five children does not know where their next meal is coming from, but we can help by purchasing foods from the ConAgra family of foods, and they will donate funds to end hunger in America. This propaganda even made its way into this season's Dancing with the Stars as the band who performed the song in the ConAgra commercial sang the song they wrote for the ConAgra campaign on the show and then repeated the same statistic.

If you listen carefully, the ConAgra campaign never says that 1 in 5 children is hungry--although that is strongly implied. The reason for this is that the statistics are coming from the USDA's definition of families as "food insecure". According to the statistics about 20% of U.S. households is food insecure--meaning that they are struggling to provide food at some point during the year.

So...1 in 5 American kids is hungry--right? Wrong! In one of the most deliberately misleading attempts to deceive the American public into destroying itself ever to be imposed on us, the Administration and the U.N. are distorting and misrepresenting the facts about hunger in America. Food insecurity does not necessarily have anything to do with actual hunger at all because the USDA has two categories of food insecurity. The first category of food insecurity is food insecurity with no reduction in caloric intake or reports of missed meals. Because this category is so broad, The Texas Food Bank Network has a definition of food insecurity on their website. "Food insecurity is the most broadly-used measure of food deprivation in the United States. The USDA defines food insecurity as meaning 'consistent access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources at times during the year.'" The site goes on to define what food insecurity does NOT mean, "it is not correct to state that specific individuals in a food insecure household (such as children) definitely experience outright hunger or specific coping mechanisms. Rather than describing these individuals as food insecure they should be described as 'living in a food insecure home'...it is not correct to assert that every food insecure household is experiencing food insecurity 'right now', will experience hunger 'tonight' or 'does not know where its next meal is coming from.'"

So how many children are actually going hungry? The USDA has a separate category to classify families where the children have reportedly experienced hunger--food insecurity with hunger or a reduction in caloric intake. That percentage is not 20%; it's just over 1% or about 374,000 US families.

Look, even one hungry child in America is one too many, but 1% of children who are experiencing hunger is a much more manageable number that we could undoubtedly handle with the current safety nets in place. The other 19% are not actually going hungry--they are just eating less nutritious high calorie foods that cost less than those foods the USDA recommends as part of a balanced diet. Parents may be feeding them sugary or salty, high calorie foods. This is how the government and the left leaning media reconcile the problem of childhood obesity with the problem of childhood hunger--in the world of global environmentalist double speak, hunger and obesity are actually the same thing.

In the trailer for A Place at the Table the narrator, actor Jeff Bridges, tells us that the problem with food insecurity is not that there is no food available but that the right food is not available to families who need it, and he challenges us to finally make the tough choices to end this problem. What are those choices?

Environmentalists hate the U.S. system of agriculture because while they admit that it produces a lot of food, they complain that this "high output" system of agriculture which feeds our whole nation is bad for the earth and unsustainable. Cornell University has summarized this "problem" for us in their study on food mapping, food sheds and sustainable agriculture, "Our agricultural system currently provides a cheap and abundant supply of food. However, agriculture also causes negative impacts on the environment, rural economies and human health." We have too much, we produce too much, we consume too much, and apparently we waste too much.

The solution is to get rid of high output farming, and the fertilizers and pesticides that it requires, and move to a system of small, sustainable farms. These farms are to produce the food that is needed locally for each area so that we can stop the current transportation of food--the average vegetable travels 1500 miles from field to market--that leads to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. This new push is reflected in the "buy local" food campaigns that are popping up everywhere now. The Cornell Study on food sheds studied the possibility of growing all the food needed for upstate New York with the food coming from within 30 miles of population centers. The food sheds would be tied to population models, so in order for the food shed concept to work, mobility to and from cities would have to be greatly controlled and restricted or the food planners would not be able to accurately predict how much they needed. Rosa Koire talks about some of the potential restrictions on freedom that this might pose in her book Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21. One area that Koire does not cover--travel. If food is rationed per person based on the population, a resident of one of these cities would not be able to even entertain out of town guests!

Implementation of the food shed concept requires a plan for individual food rationing. This system of rationing is called a "food print"-the amount "needed to feed an average person in New York with a balanced diet from local land and crop resources with sustainable management practices." Cornell's model included 63 g of meat and dairy per day--about 1/3 of current average consumption of meat and eggs. By setting a maximum caloric intake for each individual per day and regulating the proportion of vegetables to meat and dairy, the experts at Cornell have calculated that they can feed most of upstate New York with resources within 30 miles. Unfortunately, researchers concluded that they cannot use these systems to feed any of the major population centers--including New York City.

Cornell's model is generous because it does include some meat and dairy. Many of the environmentalist proponents of sustainable agriculture and the accompanying food rationing want us on strictly vegetarian diets because livestock require large amounts of water and consume large amounts of vegetation--both of which make them an inefficient food source. According to the UN, 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock production. By moving Americans to a "same calorie" vegetarian diet, we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.

What the UN, the environmental /climate change lobby and the White House are not telling us is that the modern "high output" systems of farming are the reason that we are able to avoid famine and starvation. My mother comes from the mid-West and grew up around farmers. Farmers used to experience years where they lost a lot of their crops and finally the farms would fail. When people depend on local farmers for food and the crop fails, the "food shed" has no way to sustain itself. A rationed food system where the local population is forced to rely for its primary sustenance on whatever is grown within thirty miles would not lead to happy, well-fed people eating a healthful balanced diet--it will lead to people fighting and killing each other for every scrap of food available during times of scarcity. What the U.N. is proposing, and the Administration is promoting, is that we give up a system proven to produce a supply of cheap, plentiful food for everyone for a system that historically has proven to produce famine and starvation.

In the Zero Hunger Campaign and its promotion through the White House, the entertainment industry and the media, we see a repeat of a cycle that is becoming all too depressingly familiar. First, the government creates a problem--high unemployment and high dependency on government programs through anti-business policies which make it hard for Americans to find jobs. Restrictive energy policies increase the price of food. Then the government comes in with a ready-made solution to the problem they just created--more government control over still another sector of our society. All "sustainability" initiatives are about controlling consumption and producing rationing, scarcity, poverty, misery and need. Many Americans are suffering serious financial problems which have led to the growth of the first category of "food insecurity"--people who are strapped for cash and trying to make ends meet. This is not due to our system of food production. It is due to excessive government regulation that kills jobs and makes it tougher for people to find work that pays well. It is due to rising energy costs resulting from energy policies that raise the prices of transportation and energy usage. Nobody is denying that families in the U.S. are suffering financially. But the answer is not more regulation and greater central planning which will lead to more poverty and more suffering. The answer is energy policies that reduce costs so that the price of energy goes down, which will show up in the cost of those vegetables that travel 1500 miles. The answer is business-friendly policies that encourage growth so that the underemployed and those relying heavily on government assistance can find work and provide better for their families.

Next year we have a major opportunity to stop some of this madness. Many seats are up for re-election in Congress and the Senate. Find out where your candidates fall on the issues of the UN, sustainability, smart growth, smart code, climate change and all of the other monikers that Central Planners hide behind. Don't just rely on specific party affiliation to tell you who you should vote for--advocates of Agenda 21 and climate change operate in both parties. Read candidate interviews and policy statements to find out where they stand, and vote these globalists out of office while we still can. If we don't, we may find ourselves living out some version of The Hunger Games in our own lifetimes.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

They Have Found the Enemy and He is Us

2013-05-10T15:49:00.001-07:00

Last Friday, Huffington Post featured an article under its "Green" section--Climate Study: Religious Belief in the Second Coming of Christ Could Slow Global Warming Action. According to the article, 56% of Americans believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, and this belief reduces the possibility of strongly believing that the government should take action on climate change by more than 12%.

Over the past twenty-one years, since the UN Earth Summit introduced Agenda 21 and first began a massive global push to rebuild our society into a new "green" utopia, the US has been enduring growing indoctrination that our way of life is bad, that we are using up the world's resources and that we need to consume less and live less well because by doing so, we will preserve the planet in better condition for future generations.

The Obama Administration has accelerated this push as much as possible. I say as much as possible because although they have pushed the goals of Agenda 21 forward in every way that they were able to do so, the federal initiatives they hoped to pass, such as the Cap and Trade bill and Chris Dodd's Livable Communities Act, came under so much opposition that they could not be passed. Instead, Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, one city at a time, as city after city greedily grabs federal funds to build roundabouts and invest in public transportation and build low income "Smart" housing in the downtown areas and to restore and renovate downtown at the expense of the suburbs. On April 5th, I wrote about how the Obama Administration is cutting off funding for transportation projects that benefit the suburbs in favor of federal funding for environmentally-friendly sustainable housing projects. Without a federal law mandating sustainable housing or "Smart Growth" the government has to resort to a carrot and stick approach. While that has worked well in a lot of communities, such as El Paso, Texas, where we are currently investing $13 million in federal funds along with $14 million of state and local money to turn one of our main thoroughfares (North Mesa Street) into a Transportation Corridor for our notoriously inefficient city bus system, in other areas the country is experiencing a growing backlash against Agenda 21, Smart Growth, sustainable living, and the inherent threats to private property, individual freedom and Constitutional rights that these represent. Last June Alabama became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law outlawing implementation of Agenda 21 within its borders and banning membership of any of its cities or townships in ICLEI--the UN affiliated NGO charged with bringing Agenda 21 to local communities. The state of Oklahoma is now in the process of passing its own legislation to outlaw participation in Agenda 21 and yesterday I saw that the legislature of Missouri is reviewing similar legislation.

We who believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are not planet haters who want "dirty air and dirty water" as Sean Hannity so frequently says. We don't litter garbage about with the attitude that our actions don't matter because the Lord is coming back soon and the earth will be burned up anyway. Christians believe in stewardship and that includes stewardship of God's creation. But most of us who believe in the Second Coming do so because we have read the entire book of Revelations which also foretells a world government led by the Antichrist. Whether we individually believe that the AntiChrist is an individual person or a world system or both, we know that it will bring genocide and destruction on a level never before experienced. To believe in the Second Coming is to keep a watchful eye on world events at all times for signs that this world system may be coming to fruition.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the students and intellectuals were celebrating Marxism and collectivism, the Russian peasants, the only religious block of people in the nation, were alarmed. When the Communists ordered that the farms be collectivized, many of the peasants refused to do so because they believed that collectivism was a signal of the coming of the AntiChrist. Because of their lack of cooperation, whole communities of them were imprisoned in their own houses and starved to death by the Communist government as a means of silencing the opposition. Belief in the Second Coming and opposition to world systems that are at odds with the teachings of the Bible can and some times do have lethal consequences.

I was both interested and alarmed yesterday to read Erick Erickson's insightful Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community in which he addresses "a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a 'new legalism' of radical faith." Erickson's article makes some great points about unrealistic life expectations in the church, and I agree with a lot of them. But I wonder at whether the "radical faith" movement is really about trying to be "awesome" as Erickson supposes, or whether it is about evangelical leaders trying to protect their position in a world moving toward globalism by preaching a vision that is pretty much in lock step with what Big Brother wants.

Christianity Today published an article in March of this year written by Matthew Lee Anderson entitled, Here Come the Radicals detailing how David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne and Kyle Idleman are teaching "radical faith" and dominating the Christian bestseller lists by encouraging young believers to reject American materialism and middle class comforts in exchange for communal life and life in the inner city. Platt's book, Radical, released in May of 2010, was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. At his encouragement, his church in Brook Hills, Alabama raised more than $525,000 for Compassion International's child survival programs. His book, according to the CT article, takes the American church to task for the culture of "self-advancement, self-esteem and self-sufficiency," and upbraids us for our "individualism, materialism and universalism." His book, and Shane Claiborne' s The Irresistible Revolution, also strike out against American nationalism.

Look, as a life-long Christian--I asked Jesus to come into my life when I was five--I understand the conflict between balancing the demands of modern life and the call of Jesus to "come follow me." And I also acknowledge that God, on occasion, calls individual people to leave their lives and go do something extraordinary for Him. Our church supports a young woman who felt called by the Lord to go to the Philippines and start a mid-wifery clinic when she was about twenty years old. Now, ten years later, she is still there and is living out her faith in practical ways to help poor women with no access to medical care.

The danger of the radical faith movement is that it basically preaches the same dogma being currently trumpeted by the mainstream media and by the current leftist government and the progressive globalist movement worldwide. 1. The American way of life is bad. 2. American Nationalism is bad. 3. The middle class is bad. 4. Suburbs are bad, and people who choose to live in suburbs are selfish. The "radical faith" movement just files the goals and teachings of "radical environmentalism" under the heading "Gospel" and adds the hashtag #WWJD. And if I don't accept those ideas, I am not just an unworthy citizen of the planet who is greedily consuming the world's resources; I am probably not a "real" Christian at all. If we are not willing to embrace radical faith, perhaps we don't have any faith and our whole Christian life is a lie.

This brand of Christianity conveniently ignores some very important truths:

1. American nationalism and specifically the U.S. Constitution protect the freedoms of every citizen, particularly in the areas of religious liberty and speech, and therefore allow the uninhibited growth of Christianity. In countries where there are no constitutional protections, life for Christians is dangerous. For examples of life without these protections, think North Korea where 70,000 Christians are estimated to be imprisoned because of their faith, or Iran where Pastor Saeed is serving an eight year prison sentence in Evan prison for his work with evangelism. Yet, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was one of the speakers last year at the Rio 20 conference which was the 20th anniversary follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit which birthed Agenda 21 and he is active in the UN's efforts to remake America.

2. The American way of life and prosperity which the "radical faith" theologians decry makes it possible for one congregation in Alabama to raise over half a million dollars for Compassion International. Because of freedom and prosperity, America has been able to export Christian ideals and missionaries and aid throughout the world--a feat which would not be possible in their austere utopia.

3. The globalist movement currently underway to destroy the American middle class, rid our society of private property and single family housing in the suburbs,and force Americans into miserable crowded conditions in the inner cities, will not produce the levels of prosperity needed to maintain the lifestyles of evangelical leaders who are making themselves rich on books peddling poverty as a virtue.

What the Church, and this country needs, is something really radical--pastors and people who stand up for Freedom and the Constitution and property rights as gifts from God rather than liabilities to be discarded so that we can have greater personal growth. Real stewardship is protecting and preserving those rights and passing them on to the next generation along with our faith so that those who follow us can live and work and worship in freedom just as we have and so that they can have the opportunities that freedom affords to live their lives as they believe that God is calling them to do as individuals.. 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The pastors in this country who are willing to teach this message are the true revolutionaries.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

2013-04-25T14:55:00.004-07:00

In 1979, the modern Christian theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer and the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C.Everett Koop co-authored a book titled, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. Published within the decade that saw the legalization of abortion on demand through Roe vs. Wade, the book explored the premise that acceptance of abortion leads to a general devaluation of human life on at all levels. Abortion leads to infanticide, which leads to euthanasia, which eventually leads to genocide. Schaeffer and Koop wrote,

We are concerned that there is not more protest, outcry, or activism in regard to these issues of life and death. We can even recognize that there are people who are led to starve children to death because they think they are doing something helpful for society. Lacking an absolute ethical standard, they have only the concept of what they think is beneficial for society to guide them. But we cannot understand why other people, those with a moral base--and we know there are many of them--do not cry out. We are concerned about this because, when the first German aged, infirm and retarded were killed in gas chambers, there was likewise no perceptible outcry from the medical profession or from an apathetic population. It was not far from there to Auschwitz.

I read Whatever Happened to the Human Race over twenty years ago, but I have been reminded of it in the last few days watching the events surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial. Anyone who has followed this trial at all knows that Gosnell is the 71-year old abortion doctor and proprietor of the "Women's Medical Center" in Philadelphia who is on trial for murder of infants born alive and at least one adult patient. Various workers in the clinics have testified that when infants survived the abortion procedure, Gosnell snipped their spinal cords or in some cases slit their throats. Jack McMahon, Gosnell's attorney, argues that although Gosnell did perform abortions past the 24 week limit written into the state's statute, not one of the babies he is accused of harming was over 24 weeks and there is no evidence that any of them was born alive. His arguments persuaded the judge in the case to throw out three of the infant murder counts against Gosnell for "Baby A, "Baby B" and "Baby C" as well as five counts of corpse abuse. (Apparently, babies were kept in jars and their feet and sometimes entire legs were severed and preserved as well. Multiple babies appeared in photographs which showed their upper spinal columns had been cut in order to snip the spinal cords.) Four remaining counts of infanticide and one count of murder of an adult remained against Gosnell on Tuesday, April 23 after the judge's ruling.

Yesterday, in an apparent about-face, the judge reinstated the murder charge for "Baby C". "Baby C" survived its abortion procedure, and according testimony by clinic workers, was laid on a counter where it lived for twenty minutes and moved its arms. Workers testify that they "played" with the baby by pulling on its arms and watching it pull back before killing it.

The outcome of this hideous trial and Gosnell's ultimate fate remain to be seen but the reaction to it by our society reveals a lot about how far we have fallen morally. The mainstream press has remained silent on a trial that is one of the most grisly, scandalous, and shocking of my lifetime. I have seen photos of the empty courtroom seats reserved for the press. When Gosnell announced this week that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Huffington Post actually made that a headline. But when the judge reinstated the murder charge for a baby brutally murdered after twenty minutes of life, I saw the update on my Twitter feed because TheBlaze.com had covered the story. The disgusting, macabre details of this man's crimes are the stuff of nightmares, but in a society where grisly, bloody violence sells almost as well as sex, and people will pay high ticket prices to see slasher movies like the "Saw" series, nobody wants to talk about Kermit Gosnell.

Why? I have seen some conservative commentators speculate that the media does not want to cover the Gosnell trial because it shows abortion for what it really is--murder. That's part of it; but it really is only a part of media black out of this story. The other part is that our society is rapidly morphing into the society that Schaeffer and Koop predicted and feared--a society without compassion, without empathy, without concern. We are fearsomely close to pre-Nazi Germany in our attitudes about the value of human life.

In 1949, Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist from Boston who had been consultant to the Secretary of War and had served with the office of the Chief Council for War Crimes in Nuremberg from 1946-1947, wrote a paper titled, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship." He writes that before Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, a barrage of indoctrination had already begun against, "traditional, compassionate nineteenth century attitudes against the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view." This propaganda spread everywhere, from mass entertainment, as in a German film called, I Accuse in which the husband of a woman suffering from life-long multiple sclerosis finally euthanizes her while a sympathetic colleague plays the piano softly in another room, to the public education system which included high school textbooks such as Mathematics in the Service of Political Education, 2nd edition 1935, 3rd edition 1936, which included "problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled. One of the problems asked, for instance, is how many new housing units could be built, and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly-wed couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for 'the crippled and insane.'" In other words, the German people were fed a steady diet of a philosophy that some lives are not as important as others, and that the less worthy lives were draining funds which could be used for the happiness of those more deserving than they.

Hitler did not issue the first euthanasia order until 1939, after the German people had received a sufficiently steady diet of this philosophy to no longer object. The organization that he established to kill children under the Third Reich was called Realm's Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution. Patients who were being killed were transported by "The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick" which billed their relatives for the cost of their extermination while falsifying the death certificates so that they would not understand how their loved ones had actually died. Leo Alexander tells us, "It all started with the acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as a life that is not worthy to be lived." From there, Hitler was able to kill more than 9 million people in Europe.

What does all of this have to do Kermit Gosnell? Very simply, I believe that the media black out of the Gosnell trial has less to do with protecting the abortion industry than it does with an overall move to retrain our society away from respect for life and the sanctity of life and towards an overall apathy and callousness toward the deaths of others. We are now seeing our own media propaganda in this direction. In the last twenty four months, I have seen an episode of The Mentalist in which a regular character who is dying of cancer decides to commit suicide and asks the show's main character, Patrick Jane, to stay with him while he dies so that he will not be alone. Although Jane is at first very uncomfortable with this request, he does stay and performs sleight of hand coin tricks to distract the dying man until his life ebbs away. Criminal Minds last year featured an episode in which the ex-wife of one of the main characters also finds out that she is terminally ill and decides to commit suicide and asks that her ex-husband stay with her while she is dying. Again, he is uncomfortable, but she has already consumed a fatal dose of some toxin, and so he compassionately holds her while she expires. I want to note that in neither one of these shows did the principle character do anything to actively kill the person who died or to actually assist in the suicide, but the overall message was that they were compassionate good people by respecting the other person's right to die and by being a friend and not interfering. This is the first step in saying that death can be preferable to life.

There are going to be a lot of other steps. Next year many parts of The Affordable Care Act will be fully implemented. This coverage was supposed to provide every American with full access to health care regardless of health issues or pre-existing conditions. Are we still so naive that we really think that a government who can't manage to pay the air-traffic controllers in order to avoid long delays at the airport will be able to cover the cost of every American's healthcare? Even Democrats like Max Baucus are now calling the Affordable Care Act a "train wreck". What the Act will do is force Americans to think in terms of which lives are worth saving. The oft mocked "death panels" are a necessity when a society of finite resources takes it upon itself to make health choices for every person. As Alexander points out, "It is important to realize that this infinitely small wedged-in lever from which all this entire trend of the mind [the German mass euthanasia program] received its impetus was the attitude towards the nonrehabilitable sick." When we as a society have to start making these decisions what will we choose? Should healthy young people not be able to get as many benefits from the government because public resources are being used to treat people with chronic illnesses, or seniors with cancer? How many scholarships could be given to our best and our brightest if the money were not being spent caring for the "crippled and insane"? And so it begins.

Whatever happened to the human race? The Germans could have chosen not to listen to the propaganda. They could have chosen to reject Hitler and his social engineering and ethnic cleansing in favor of respect for all life and protection for all people. They didn't. The choice is now ours. Will more of us stand against Kermit Gosnell, not just for the sake of the 8 original infants he was charged with murdering and the many, many more who died as the course of his normal practice, but because we understand that more is at stake than the life of a 71 year old abortion doctor in Philadelphia and his victims? Will we allow ourselves to be lulled into apathy ("Those babies weren't wanted anyway. Who would have taken care of them if they had lived?") Hitler succeeded in his genocide in large part because German people from every walk of life supported him and furthered his goals. If the Germans had refused to participate, they could have stopped the Holocaust before it began. What will we do?

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 and how the Obama Administration is Using Housing Policies to Shape America

2013-04-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

The big story this week, besides the threats of imminent annihilation from North Korea, is the apparent push from the White House to encourage banks to loosen the current mortgage credit restrictions. So much media attention has been given to this that an uninformed observer would believe that the federal government is really working to expand homeownership back to pre-2008 levels.

I think this narrative, and the conservative furor/backlash being heard on conservative news shows like Hannity, is exactly the story that the White House wants the press reporting. By having this narrative in the media, the White House can make a case for a populist push to force "bad greedy banks" to make more loans to deserving Americans who have had their credit damaged during the recession, and they can make conservatives who oppose them out to be heartless bad guys. In reality, the true story of mortgage lending is very different than either side of this issue is reporting.

The truth is that the qualified mortgage standards being implemented next year will shut between 15% (according to the CFPB's estimates) and 40% (according to the QM critics estimates) of potential homeowners out of the market completely. Much is being made of the fact that FHA allows credit scores as low as 500, and down payments as low at 3.5%. In fact, most banks will not make an FHA loan without a credit score of at least 600 and many require 620 or 640. But new guidelines expected to be released in the next few months will raise downpayment guidelines for qualified residential mortgages up to 10%. While Fannie, Freddie and FHA have a seven year exemption before the loans they make have to qualify under the new guidelines, many mortgage professionals are looking ahead to the end of the seven years at a massive mortgage and housing constriction when the new guidelines are fully implemented for all lending types. And in the immediate future, the implementation of the Qualifed Mortgages and the Qualified Residential Mortgages and the 3% cap on points and fees next year is going to cut off access to mortgage credit and to mortgage credit providers.

So why is the Administration talking out of both sides of its mouth on this issue? Very simply, the Obama Administration wants to discourage private ownership, especially in the suburbs, and wants to encourage "sustainable development"--densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Manhattan. The problem is that Americans like homeownership, we like cars and we like suburbs. So the Administration does not want to say in a public forum that they are actively working against these aspects of American life. Instead, they have pushed through massive pieces of legislation such as Dodd Frank that contain thousands of pages of still to be written regulations that endanger private homeownership while they publicly claim to want to help Americans buy their own homes.

On March 18th, the National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz wrote an opinion piece entitled "Obama's Plans for the Suburbs: And How to Stop Them." On March 15, President Obama spoke at the Argonne National Laboratory and proposed $2 billion on an energy security trust fund for renewable fuel research and as part of the speech he promised "to shift our cars entirely...off oil" As Kurtz noted in his column, even the New York Times was skeptical since the President did not provide any real details as to how he would accomplish this.

On that same day, however, the Department of Energy released a series of reports called "Transportation Energy Futures" which outline a plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80% by 2050. Part of this report includes "the effects of the built environment on transportation." This report is a blueprint for restricting development in suburbs. Proponents of "smart growth" and "sustainability" hate the suburbs because they represent individual housing and private transportation, both of which are at odds with the United Nation's Agenda 21,an aggressive environmental blueprint to dramatically change the living conditions of the world. Agenda 21 has been in various stages of implementation on the local level for over 20 years as cities and communities embrace Smart Growth, but the Obama Administration is dedicated to using federal resources to stop suburban development, to limit private automobile ownership and to force Americans into small tightly packed apartments to and from which they will either walk or use public transportation.

To achieve this, the Department of Energy report recommends two policy options which are most likely to encourage dense development without exceeding the federal government's current authority. The first requires eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, which is perceived to incentivize many people to purchase homes who would not otherwise do so. The second is to tie future federal aid, federal grants, and federal funding to "Smart Growth" projects. The DOE suggests that federal funding for schools and roads could be forced to pass a population density litmus test which would mean that suburbs would not qualify for these funds.

Kurtz also notes that on March 15th--the same day of Obama's speech at Argonne and the DOE report-- Bloomberg reported that the Obama Administration has announced plans to order all federal agencies to consider global warming before approving large projects. As the Bloomberg report notes, this strategy could block highway construction and suburban development projects.

I agree with much of Kurtz's article, but I think he is overlooking some key factors. First, he states that he does not believe that the mortgage interest deduction will be done away with. That may or may not be true--but after spending 15 years in the housing industry I believe that tax exempt interest is a secondary consideration in whether people purchase homes. Homeownership is the American dream, and for many Americans being able to write the interest off their taxes is not a primary incentive to buy--it is an added perk of doing so. However, Obama already has a cadre of weapons in his legislative arsenal to stop the growth of the suburbs. The new qualified and qualified residential mortgages are going to ultimately have such a great effect on who can purchase and who cannot and how much they can purchase that additional disincentives to purchasing single family homes will probably not be necessary. Smart Growth and Sustainable development policies tend to make housing much more expensive. In Portland last year, the new "affordable housing" urban project was a one-bedroom condo selling downtown for around $160,000. The new qualified mortgage guidelines state that a borrower's total debt cannot exceed 43% of his or her total income. What many do not seem to realize is that lenders, who are afraid of punitive government actions, have already placed serious limits on how much income they will consider for a borrower. For instance, last Christmas I was working on a loan for a man who had been a self-employed attorney for 30 years. Because he was retiring, his income was declining from year to year, although he still earned more than enough money to more than meet all of his current obligations and buy a small investment property. But the lender did not want to be accused of making a mortgage loan to a person who did not "qualify" so they had a rule that if the income were declining for two years in a row, regardless of the current income filed on the taxes or the overall ability of the person to meet his financial obligations--they would not allow us to consider any of his self-employment income. In the case of the attorney, the only income the underwriter would consider was just his fixed Social Security monthly income.

Such practices are going to cause many self-employed or under employed Americans to not qualify to purchase housing period. Americans who have had their hours cut due to the economy or Obamacare or who are working more than one job to make ends meet are going to have an increasingly difficult time qualifying. Millions of others are going to qualify for such low loan amounts that all they will be able to afford is a small urban condo. The Obama Administration does not have to make controversial public policies regarding housing--they just have to continue writing regulations which make it impossible for average Americans to afford homes.

The other part of this "carrot and stick" approach to implementing Smart Growth is also already happening through federal grants for sustainable projects. Kurtz points out that House Republicans blocked funding for the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants in 2012. However, as he also mentions, there are a lot of grants out there now that builders and developers can use to build "Smart Growth" projects.

Consider "Block 21" in Aurora Colorado, a new mixed use urban housing project being built for the low, low price of $160 million through a joint partnership of Waveland Ventures LLC, Jackson Street Holdings LLC, and Arrival Partners LLC. The project includes a six story 200 room four star hotel (the brand will be announced later this month) with a pool and fitness center and a 30,000 square foot meeting room. It also features a four-story apartment complex with 100 units, a club house and a swimming pool, and 10,000 square feet of ground level retail space. Like all "Sustainable" communities, Block 21 will also feature the "Quadrangle" a heavily landscaped urban park.

The developers tell us that "Block 21" is named for Army hospital 21, a World War I hospital that once stood at the medical complex adjacent to the new development. Perhaps that is true, but it is an amazing coincidence that the name invokes images of Agenda 21, the United Nations aggressive environmental initiative which calls for "human settlements" very much like Block 21.

The most interesting part of Block 21 is the financing source. According to RE Business online, Waveland Communtity Development, a wholly owned subsidiary of Waveland Ventures, has received $312 million in tax credits since 2007. In addition to tax credits for Block 21, Waveland has also secured a commitment for the senior debt via the Federal EB5 program to finance the project.

That's exactly how this works--starve funds from the projects the government wants to kill and supply funds to the projects the government wants to promote. As Smart Growth projects are incentivized with tax credits and federal funding we are going to see more Smart Growth developments and less and less financing for suburbs. And as individual borrowers can no longer qualify to purchase homes in the suburbs, we will see more and more of these homes and ultimately more suburban communities going first into foreclosure, and then descending into "blight" only to be ultimately bulldozed and destroyed just as happened last year in Ohio with homes that could not be sold.

In his article, Kurtz recommends that Americans get involved in the process and let their Congressional

Representatives know that they need to block funding for Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants. That is a good start. Another good start is to support candidates who are informed about Agenda 21 and the threat that it poses to American freedom and the American way of life and to support only those candidates who stand against it. A third is to stop falling into the trap of pretending that lending and mortgages are evils of the 21st century. As long as Americans continue to pretend that cutting off access to credit is doing our country a favor, we are playing right into the hands of the politicians who are remaking our society into one in which private property and single family home ownership no longer exist--a society where everyone lives and works exactly where the government tells them to. That is not the future that I want to leave to the next generation. What about you?

Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings--Opposite Sides of the Same Coin

2013-03-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

About ten years ago I attended a spring time regulatory conference for the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. During these conferences, which were held in Washington DC and which always concluded with a grassroots lobby day on Capitol Hill, we heard various invited speakers. During this particular conference, one of the speakers who had been invited to meet with our group was a consumer advocate attorney who decried the fact that some borrowers paid higher interest rates for credit than did others.

The attorney began by lecturing us softly, "Wouldn't it be great if everyone could have a 7% interest rate?" At the time that this conference took place, the optimal rates for borrowers with good credit were probably between 5.8 and 6.5% so the consumer advocate assumed that she had padded the prime market interest rates enough to make them attainable to all.

Immediately, some of the men in our group stood up and took turns at the microphone which had been provided to facilitate audience interaction so that they could explain why it was not possible for everyone to have a 7% interest rate. Interest rates are based on both credit history (demonstrated history of paying one's bills) and credit depth (length of time accounts have been opened, number of accounts, type of accounts, etc.) as well as ability to prove income, employment, consistency of employment, length of employment, debt ratios and other factors which make loans more or less risky. Riskier loans have higher interest rates and less risky loans have lower interest rates. (At the time this conference was held there were a lot of loan products on the market, including stated income and no income loans).

After listening to reasons that her proposal was ridiculous and unworkable, the attorney responded, "Okay, okay. What if it were a 15% interest rate? It doesn't matter what the interest rate is, so long as it is the same for everyone."

The consumer advocate attorney was blissfully unaware that inherent in the "unfairness" of higher rates for some borrowers and lower rates for others is a system of built in rewards for desired behavior. If her suggestion were to be implemented and everyone got the same rate regardless of their credit profile or work history or savings history, responsible borrowers would no longer see any benefit to carefully managing their finances and irresponsible consumers would have no incentive to improve their credit rating, or to try to hang on that job longer in order to get a better work history, or to save some money for a rainy day. If everyone gets the same reward regardless of their level of effort or initiative, no one gets much of anything and no one has any motivation to try to improve their situation.

I was reminded of this today as I saw Elizabeth Warren's comments made last week in front a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension began circulating conservative news sites and the Internet. During the course of the hearing, Senator Warren wondered allowed why minimum wage isn't $22.00 an hour, adding that it would be if it had kept pace with the growth of the economy since 1960.

Since the State of the Union when President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour, I have read numerous commentaries about the problems that will be caused by increasing minimum wage. Many of these have been well written and researched, and they make valid points that higher minimum wage cuts jobs for entry level workers, does nothing to substantially help those in poverty--many of whom actually do not work at all--and ultimately hurts the business that create jobs and provide the economic growth in this country. Beyond these arguments, however, I believe that the push to increase minimum wage to higher and higher levels belies another huge issue that I have not heard anyone discuss--the desire for the government to determine and regulate how much everyone can make.

For that reason, I found it particularly interesting that Elizabeth Warren would propose that minimum wage should be $22.00 an hour. Remember that before Warren was a freshman Senator from Massachusetts, she was the interim director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the massive new government agency created by Dodd Frank. She was also one of the architects behind Dodd Frank, which created extensive new regulations for financial services and the mortgage industry, including regulating the maximum amount of compensation that mortgage loan originators can earn. Over the past two years, experienced originators have left the mortgage industry as the government has limited compensation more and more. Those restrictions began as regulations saying that originators cannot be paid by both the borrower and the lender, making it illegal for brokers to negotiate individual fees with borrowers. Next year, in 2014, the provisions of the Dodd Frank bill that mandate a set cap on fees and points will be implemented. As a result of these rules, many experienced originators have left and are continuing to leave the mortgage industry, leaving newer and less experienced originators in the marketplace.

The problem with setting maximum compensation for a profession is that it accomplishes very much the same effect as saying that every person should get the same interest rate. A free market system contains built in incentives for hard work, education, additional training, personal growth and long hours. Professionals who are willing to apply themselves, to get the additional training they need and to work the additional hours do so in the hopes of reaping financial rewards for that extra labor. But to liberals like Elizabeth Warren, being able to command higher fees for a greater level of expertise is not good business--it is cheating. To Warren, a loan originator with 20 years experience, numerous certifications and a track record of closing thousands of loans is no more valuable to the consumer than a newly licensed originator working on her first loan. They are the same and they should receive the same compensation.

Over the past three years that I have been writing this blog I have warned several times that the mortgage and real estate industries were a proving ground for policies that liberals plan to implement in industries across the board. Now that Warren is in Senator, she can advocate for $22.00 an hour minimum wage just as she advocated for capping our compensation at levels so low that experienced originators cannot keep our doors open as independent business people. By arguing that entry level employees should be making over $45,000 a year to flip hamburgers or answer the telephone, she is really saying that experience, hard work and education do not have any compensatory value.

To the socialist mindset, this argument makes perfect sense. To have a system where harder working, better educated, more competent people make more money than those who are less skilled or less well educated or less ambitious is inherently discriminatory. (And when I speak of education here, I am not only referring to formal education through degrees--I am also referring to industry specific training which is often expensive to obtain.) The solution to this discrimination is to raise the minimum wage and lower the maximum compensation--both through higher taxes and through regulations which set caps on compensation. By narrowing the wage gap between the entry level and the experienced professional, liberals remove any incentive to work harder or to become better trained. But, then again, to liberals the issue is not really how much anyone makes, so long as everyone makes the same amount.

Rejecting Big Government and Common Core Standards in Favor of Parental Rights

2013-03-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

Last week Glenn Beck's pantomime of giving triage to a dying Lady Liberty while she lay bleeding and gasping on the floor of his studio went viral across the conservative internet. Beck finished his pantomime by admonishing parents to get their kids out of government schools because the schools are turning the kids against the parents.

Beck is exactly right about this; one of the reasons that our country is sliding so far to the left is that progressive social engineering has been happening in this country for over 40 years. Now, however, social engineering is accelerating to a whole new level as the Common Core Standards are implemented across the country.

In today's column, conservative blogger and bestselling author Michelle Malkin explains that Big Government wants to control not only what your children learn, but how they process it, respond to it and feel about it. They also want to be able to track your children's behaviours, attitudes, likes and dislikes from infancy through high school graduation, and use that information both for research and for profit. Malkin cites a Department of Education report which underscores that the true intention of Common Core Standards is not to make sure that all children learn, but that the Federal Government has a firm grip on exactly what attitudes, beliefs and concepts the children leave school with. States Malkin,

"The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.”

Read Malkin's full article, which also contains a link to Glenn Beck's recent work on CCS, here.

In an era when our young people are graduating from school with minimal skills and competencies, but a strong foundation in liberalism, sex ed, and socialism, it is outrageous that politicians in both parties are pushing the Common Core Standards and this new federal tracking of students attitudes and behaviours. The CCS, along with President Obama's new push for universal preschool, the folly of which has been explained in today's Morning Bell, are designed to ensure that the government can get fully inside the head of every kid in America starting at age 4 and lasting through high school. Children who have been indoctrinated into this system are foundational to the liberal, socialist, godless society that our federal educational system has been building for the last generation.

After the 2012 elections, I saw Charles Krauthammer interviewed on Fox News. He was asked whether he believed that the young people who voted for Barack Obama the second time were a permanent block of reliable liberal voters. He responded that normally people become more conservative as they get older--as they get married and get jobs and mortgages and have children of their own, the desire for universal welfare is commonly replaced by the desire for lower tax brackets. Traditionally what Krauthammer says has been true; young radicals grow into middle aged accountants with values that more closely resemble their parents. But in the case of the new generation that is growing up, I think Krauthammer's formula no longer applies. The 60's hippies were rebelling against a "plastic culture". They understood the values of their parents--they just rejected them only to find out that liberal, leftist politics work better in theory than in practice. Unlike the previous generations of young people who grew up, got married, got jobs and cut their hair, this new generation is actually not rebelling against anything. They have been programmed and engineered into an odd conglomeration of Peter Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey and Karl Marx. They have been taught that they should never have to work, be responsible, or grow up, that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that intolerance is the only sin a person can commit and that traditional family structures are old-fashioned, boring, repressive, and no fun. People so indoctrinated at such an early age cannot "grow up" to be conservative, responsible adults--they don't even have a concept of what that means. Children who start out at age four in government daycare, spend their formative years in a completely socialist system, and then spend their college years enjoying "Sex week" at major universities are going to emerge so damaged ,that they will never rehabilitate into stable, productive, hard working Americans who support freedom and independence. (This is the 21st century "Jedi Mind Meld" that Obama complained two weeks ago that he could not use on Congress and Senate. Progessives know that they just have to be patient--they cannot change the attitudes of "set in our ways" freedom loving conservatives, but if they can get control of our children, they can make us as extinct as the dinosaur within one generation.)

And that takes me back to Beck's speech about getting kids out of the public school system. I am a product of homeschooling--my mother homeschooled me and my nine younger brothers and sisters starting in 1975, before the word "homeschooling" had even been coined. We did not meet another homeschooling family until I was fourteen years old. We used accredited correspondence schools and skipped no grades whatsoever, but each of us had a master's degree from California State University before our seventeenth birthdays--completely educated by a very hard working woman with only a high school diploma whose previous work experience consisted of being a secretary.

Homeschooling provides students with a completely different world view than that held by people in public or private schools. Today there are estimates of between 2 and 6 million homeschoolers in this country, including second generation homeschoolers such as my nieces and nephews. This block represents a small but significant segment of people who have been taught to think outside of the system. Homeschooling by parents who really want to not only educate their children but shape their character and prevent their indoctrination into the "New World Order" is the best hope that this country has for salvaging its future.

Homeschoolers beware, however, because the federal government's Common Core Standards are coming to a textbook near you. Many companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers have signed on to the Common Core Standards. Last week, homeschooling mother and conservative advocate Tina Hollenbeck began contacting companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers to find out whether their companies were not aligned with CCS, were coincidentally aligned, or were consciously aligned. She has compiled three lists which are now available on her website which you can visit here. Her website also contains a link to her Facebook group.

If you just simply cannot homeschool, you can still opt out of the Federal database tracking system being implemented through the Common Core System. Malkin's blog references a form that parents can sign and submit to school districts to protect the privacy of their children and prevent the federal government and major corporations from tracking their kids through school. This will at least protect their privacy, though it won't do much to protect their minds.

If you are interested in homeschooling, numerous resources are available to help you get started. The time and the money you will spend are not just an investment in your children--it is an investment in America's future, which is currently hanging in the balance.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

King John, the Bill of Rights, and Assassination by Drone

2013-03-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

When I was in school, I read a poem entitled, "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury". The poem relates how the Abbot of Canterbury was a kind and generous and loved man, who was well respected throughout England. He was also one of the wealthiest men in England--wealthier than King John himself. The king became increasingly enraged by stories of the Abbot's goodness, kindness and generosity, and he coveted the Abbot's wealth, so one day he summoned the Abbot to appear before him in court. When the Abbot arrived, the king told him that he must return to court in three days time to answer three questions for the king. If the Abbot failed to appear or if he were unable to correctly answer each question, he would immediately be executed and all of his wealth and property would be forfeited to the king. Following were the three questions for which King John demanded answers:

Question 1: How long, to the minute, will the king live?
Question 2: How much, to the penny, is the king worth as he sits on the throne with the royal crown on his head?
Question 3: What was the king thinking while the Abbot was answering the first two questions?

In the poem, the Abbot leaves the court in dismay and immediately travels to England's greatest scholars to try to find the answers to the questions. He goes to the universities--he travels to Cambridge and to Oxford, he asks the wise men of the church, but everywhere he goes, he hears only that no one can answer such questions for another person. Finally, at the end of the second day, he arrives back at his estate grief-stricken because he knows he will die the following day, and he is greeted by a faithful servant who tells the Abbot that he can answer each question for the King, and persuads the Abbot to allow him to go in his place to face King John.

I have been reminded of that poem several times lately as our government has reauthorized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens under the NDAA and most recently when the Attorney-General announced last week that the Administration does have the authority to kill American ciitzens on U.S. soil using drones. Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul spent more than 12 hours filibustering CIA nominee John Brennan's nomination simply to make the point that no Administration should have power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process. Paul made some excellent points, including the one that once we give up our rights and freedoms, we cannot expect to get them back.

What amazes me about the filibuster is that any American cannot see clearly that drone attacks against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil are an egregious violation of our Constitutional rights. Yet, this morning the Wall Street Journal attacked Paul for his "political stunt" saying that he had managed to rally "libertarian college students in their dorm rooms." How demeaning and insulting! I stayed at work an extra hour last night to send #standwithrand tweets so that he would know that, like millions of Americans, I appreciate what he is doing on behalf of liberty. I am certainly not a libertarian and I have not been a college student in over 20 years. The men and women with whom I interacted on Twitter last night were largely people like me--working professionals who care about the Constitution, freedom and the Bill of Rights. Regardless of what the WSJ, Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham like to pretend, we are not a mindless army of anarchists. We know that in a free society, the government must operate under the boundaries of its own laws. No person can be above the rule of law--not the Attorney-General, not the president of the United States, not anyone.

Our founding fathers understood this principle all too well. They had lived in a society where the king was above the law--his whims and wishes trumped any written legislation. While the story of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury is almost definitely fiction, it highlights the real abuses committed by King John against his subjects--abuses so severe that finally his nobles forced him to sign the Magna Carta guaranteeing some rights and protections to some portions of society. While the Magna Carta granted very limited protections, the document became the basis for the concept that the king is not above the law, and that concept became the basis for our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Each right we are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights--the right to freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to trial by jury, the right of due process, the right to keep and bear arms--all were guaranteed to us by people who understood what it meant to have no rights. They wrote down our freedoms for us so that we could learn them and live under them.

Today we have a society that has been free for so long that we have lost sight of what it means not to be free. When the current Administration tells the American people that a senior level official should have the right to examine the evidence and determine whether to assassinate a particular person, an alarming number of people in this country seem to think that this is acceptable. Many leaders of both parties, and many in the press, seem to believe that this power of assassination or imprisonment without trial would never be abused or used to destroy a person who was not guilty of a serious crime against the country and who did not pose an imminent threat to its security. History suggests the opposite. From the Old Testament Story of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who murdered their neighbor Naboth and stole his vineyard because they coveted his property and he refused to sell it, to more modern examples of citizens living in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years who reported fellow citizens as traitors to the government and had them executed to get their apartments, history teaches that people are often motivated by greed, pride, envy, lust and a desire for personal gratification and that these are often the driving forces in their decisions to execute another person. What is to stop the "senior official" from killing the rival for his lover's attention, or executing the owner of a home he wants, or assassinating any person who stands between him and some desired goal. Perhaps, as in the case of King John and the Abbot, envy could be the sole basis for determining that a certain individual or group of individuals was a threat, or, as in the case of most tyrants, an honest disagreement with a certain policy or idea could target a particular individual for termination. Due process and a trial by jury system is of paramount importance in a world where selfishness, greed and anger are basic human instincts.

Today, Jay Carney reluctantly read a statement from Eric Holder informing the American people that drone strikes are to be restrained under the guidelines of the Constitution and that the President does not have the power to assassinate non-combatant Americans on U.S. soil. I applaud Rand Paul and the fourteen Senators who stood with him yesterday in getting this admission out of the White House. As Paul said in his statement following Carney's announcement, "under duress and public humiliation" the White House decided to uphold the law. I am just disappointed that it took a 12 hour filibuster to get the White House to admit that it has a legal obligation to uphold the Constitution, and I am saddened that on the day after the filibuster so many Americans do not seem to understand the importance of protecting and defending this document that was created to protect and defend each of us.

The Absurdity of the Sequester Crisis

2013-02-27T13:46:00.002-08:00

What do you think is the single biggest problem with government today? I know that is an open-ended question that could generate pages of responses since there are so many clear problems with our government. But as I have watched and lived through the massive regulations of the past four years, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with our government is that we have two sets of rules--one for politicians and the other for everybody else.

Two days from now, the sequester is about to go into effect which will cut $85 billion over 10 years from a budget that will still be larger than the federal government's 2012 budget. I have spent the last few days watching and reading various commentaries on the sequester--ABC News reports that the sequester will lead to longer lines at the airport, cuts to Head Start, cuts to education, cuts to defense, and on and on. A few days ago, the Administration released non-violent illegal immigrants awaiting hearings to drive home the consequences of budget cuts to federal law enforcement. Much of this is an obvious attempt to create a public outcry against the government being forced to cut its budget by 2.3%. Unfortunately for Washington, no outcry is coming. The American people are fed up--we simply don't care that it's finally the government's turn to make do with less money than it would like to have.

I have also read some excellent commentaries on the fact that the all Americans were subjected to a 2% payroll tax increase in January of this year, so we all have to make do with 2% less money than we had last year. Yes, agencies may not be able to hire so many employees; yes, they may have to furlough employees. So what? Government workers earn an average of 16% more than workers in the private sector. In a climate where many businesses are struggling and millions of Americans remain unemployed, no one is going to shed any tears over a federal employee being furloughed. At least they have an excellent job to go back to as soon as the furlough ends.

Another possibly horrific consequence of the sequester--Congress might not be able to travel free on military jets as a result of defense cut spending. According to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley at the Air Force Association's Winter Conference, the reduced military budget might not allow for free transport of Congressmen and women. That would truly be sad--they might have to fly business class where they would stand in the lines created by TSA and sit next to their own constituents during flights to and from their districts. This might, however, have the positive effect of increasing business class air travel if people knew that they might actually have an opportunity to speak face to face to their elected representatives since anyone who has ever lobbied on a grassroots level knows that these people are virtually impossible to contact directly by phone or email and often do not see visitors from their districts who travel to their DC offices to meet with them.

What is hypocritical about the weeping and wailing over the cuts brought on by the sequester is that the same government officials who are warning that the Apocalypse is about to begin have spent the last four years imposing draconian regulations dictating how much private businesses can earn. In the mortgage industry, for example, two years ago the government implemented regulations mandating that a self-employed loan originator could no longer be paid both by the consumer and by the lender to whom he sold the mortgage loan. At that time, many experienced originators left the market, because the government had cut their pay. Last year, the government again cut the pay of originators--this time indirectly--through ruling against Wells Fargo in a discrimination case. In that case, the government determined that because some brokers had charged higher fees to some minority borrowers than had other brokers, Wells Fargo's policies, while not intentionally discriminatory, had a "disparate impact" on potential borrowers and therefore Wells Fargo was guilty of discrimination. The immediate effect of this ruling was that many lenders (including Wells Fargo) stopped working with independent loan originators completely, and those who remained changed our contracts effectively reducing how much we can earn once again. Now, in January, the CFPB announced its new rule federally capping all fees on qualified mortgages at 3% in a move that will finish destroying what is left of the independent mortgage market.

All of these regulations were touted as necessary for the protection of the consumer. Mortgage brokers were apparently charging too much money and their customers did not understand the hundreds of pages of forms provided to them to explain their costs and fees. In order to protect the consumer from being overcharged, the new regulations had to be implemented. No one ever protested, "But mortgage brokers with many years of experience have financial obligations--homes, mortgages of their own, children in school, debt, office expenses, payroll, etc. They have entered into those obligations based on past earnings. If we cut their incomes how will they meet those obligations? How we can expect them to do the same level of work they are doing now for substantially less money? What if they can't earn enough money to meet their expenses and they are forced into bankruptcy or foreclosure?" Rather, the bureaucrats who made these rules were smugly confident that what they were doing was for the greater good. The businesses they affected would just have to learn how to make do with less.

Now, it's the government's turn to experience some cuts--cuts they imposed on themselves, apparently thinking that when the time came they would never have to actually live under them. President Obama believes that the American public should rush to the government's defense and accept more tax increases--further reductions to our own income--in order to prevent any reductions to the government's budget. To make his case, he calls the cuts "brutal" and "severe" and warns that they will "eviscerate" key segments of the economy. In doing so, he is using the same reactionary strategy that he has successfully used several times in the past--the world is about to end, the wolf is at the door, and we are all going to die unless we acquiesce. Apparently, Obama never read the story of the boy who cried wolf or he would know that this particular strategy only works so many times before the people stop listening. I think that's where we are today.

While the mainstream media and the government want to pretend that a 2.3% reduction in the federal budget will mean the end of the world as we know it, the truth is that it's time the government learned how to adjust its spending and live within its means. If that means some pain for the agencies and employees, so be it. We the people need to let Washington know that the cuts imposed by sequester are necessary for the protection of the taxpayer--we are doing it for the greater good. The government will just have to learn how to make do with less.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned Me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Marketing Indefinite Detention to the American Public

2013-02-21T10:37:00.001-08:00

On Tuesday evening I watched an episode of NCIS-Los Angeles. NCIS-LA has a really openly liberal bent in most of its episodes, and for that reason I am not a fan of the show, but somehow I end up watching a few episodes each season in spite of this. But the episode this week featured more than just the normal "white rich people (especially men) are bad; socialism and liberalism are good" message that I have come to expect from a lot of television entertainment.

In Tuesday's episode, NCIS investigators played by Chris O'Donnell and LL Cool J were pursuing a terrorist group from the 70's called the "Gun Barrel Party." This anarchist organization was a sort of a cross between the uber-leftist terrorist organization "The Weathermen" and the current Tea Party, and in the episode they had been involved in a series of high profile bombings in the 70's and were now making a comeback with new followers and a new mission to get the attention of Americans through new attacks on the social order.

As the investigators tracked the members, they came upon the scene of one demonstration where bombs were set to go off, and they were able to arrest one young member of the group. The young man began quoting the Constitution to O'Donnell and demanding his right to see an attorney. O'Donnell quickly shot him down, however, by informing him that because the U.S. Government had designated "The Gun Barrel Party" as a terrorist organization, he no longer had any rights and that he had better cooperate. The suspect told them that he wanted to exercise his Fifth amendment right not to incriminate himself, but O'Donnell explained to him that under the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act the government now had the right to detain him as long as they decided they needed to and if he failed to cooperate he would end up at Gitmo. At that point, the suspect began talking and gave them the information they needed to arrest the leader of the organization.

Even though the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act have been in effect since New Years Eve of 2011, I am certain that most Americans still do not know that the U.S. government has empowered itself to imprison Americans without trial. That is one reason that this episode of NCIS is so shocking. The writers used the full name of the Act and explained that it trumps the constitutional rights of Americans, but they presented this information in a very positive light as the protagonist investigators used the law to take down the evil terrorists.

As Americans, we expect to have many disagreements with our fellow citizens about the issues of the day--welfare, deficit spending, entitlements, social issues, etc. But the right of each citizen to be protected by the constitution should never be open for debate--this issue should be so basic that no one, regardless of political affiliation, should ever question it. Yet, Hollywood is now doing a marketing campaign to let Americans know that some citizens can be marginalize and that anyone who is deemed to be part of a designated terrorist organization is not deserving of the rights or protections which are the framework of our society . This is very dangerous propaganda.

It is ironic that while "Gitmo" has become a national symbol of failure in our dealings with enemy combatants, it is now perfectly acceptable as a threat against American citizens. It is sad that Hollywood writers who, if they are going to address this subject at all, should be using their forum to explain the dangers of undermining the constitution, are instead championing a destructive law. And it is sad that many Americans watching NCIS-Los Angeles who had never heard of the NDAA before Tuesday night now see it only as a vehicle for "cool" investigators to use to bring "really bad people" to justice.

What is saddest of all though, is that our entire media system has become a propaganda machine for leftist policies. From news to entertainment, the media is preaching one big government, post-constitutional message and indoctrinating the less informed people in our culture to accept the trampling of our liberties as a good thing.

Real Economic Stimulus Happens Only Through Less Regulation and Lower Taxes

2013-02-12T14:59:00.000-08:00

Last night just after 5:00 PM I got a call asking me to stay another 30 minutes to visit with a homeowner to whom I have made a couple of real estate loans in the past. The man said that he needed to talk to me and wanted to come by about 5:30 and visit for a few minutes. The man's property is located in New Mexico, where I no longer hold a lending license, and I was getting ready to leave for the evening when the call came in, but as a courtesy to an old customer I stayed and waited for him.

When my borrower arrived he told me that he knew that I could not loan him any money on his New Mexico property but that he was very frustrated by current experience of trying to get a loan and he wanted to see if I could make some suggestions to help him. His property in New Mexico is very nice and he does not owe much money on it, but he wants to buy a home in Texas and in order to get the down payment for his new home he wants to do a cash out refinance on the New Mexico property where he currently lives. He complained that the companies that he is working with now don't return his calls, that the level of service is terrible, and that he is not getting the cooperation he needs. "I called over here and you agreed to see me right away, but I can't even get these other guys to return my calls."

He wanted to know why I stopped lending in New Mexico, and I explained to him that when the SAFE act was introduced requiring that mortgage brokers have federal licensure, the licensure fees for each state more than doubled. I had always had a New Mexico license for as long as I had been in business, but I could no longer afford to pay the fees to be licensed in two states, so I had to choose the state where I conducted the most business, which was Texas. Prior to the SAFE act, I could have handled the transactions in both states. It was true that I always met with him after hours, at times that were convenient for his work schedule and that I closed his loans quickly and was always accessible, but the elevated costs of doing business coupled with the drastic cuts to our income produced by regulations have made it impossible for me to work the way I once did.

I then explained that he needs to be aware that the mortgage debt ratios for borrowers refinancing their homes or buying new ones are tighter than they have ever been. In order to be able to purchase the new home after he refinances his current one, he is going to have to be sure that his debts do not exceed 45% of his income if he is going to be getting a conventional loan. His current plan is to rent out his home in New Mexico to offset the payment on his new loan so that he can qualify to buy his new home, but if he does not have 30% equity in the existing home after his new loan is finished as verified by the current appraisal he will not be able to use the rent to offset the payment which will mean that he will have to qualify for the house with both his current house payment with his new higher loan amount and the new payment on the new home he is buying. To make matters worse, his wife has a steady job with the school district but her credit is not very good, so she may not qualify to be on the loan which will mean that her income cannot be used. He is also working with the school district, and his credit has always been very good, but due to a mistake by his current mortgage servicer where they erroneously reported his payments late because of an escrow shortage, his scores are lower than they were when I was working with him and he may not make enough money to qualify by himself.

While we were talking, he received a text message from one of the mortgage loan originators he has been working with saying that the mortgage loan originator wants to meet with him. The originator wants $400.00 in order to order the appraisal on the house in New Mexico. My former borrower looked at me expectantly as he told me that he can't pay for the appraisal right now and expects it to be rolled into the loan. I explained that mortgage loan originators used to allow borrowers to pay for appraisals at closing--which often meant that if for some reason the loan did not close we had to pay for those appraisals ourselves. Although not collecting the money upfront meant that many times we had to pay those fees ourselves, because the lending environment was very competitive, we would often take the chance on not collecting the appraisal money at the time the appraisal was done because we were competing with other lenders who would not collect the money up front, so we could risk $350.00 or risk losing the deal totally. Now, however, since new appraisal regulations were introduced in 2009, we no longer hire the appraisers ourselves. Appraisers are selected by appraisal management companies contracted by the lender and the appraisal management companies demand payment in full upfront. Not only are appraisals considerably more expensive than they once were, but we no longer have the flexibility to call up our friendly local appraiser and ask if he will wait three weeks to get paid. Since loan originators no longer have the money to cover those costs themselves, and since most the competition is gone now, the borrower has to cover the cost of each and every appraisal up front. I explained that he will be paying for his appraisal on his refinance and his appraisal for his purchase at the time each is ordered--no exceptions.

As I talked to this man, he commented that if the market is slow and loans are difficult to originate, then everyone should be eager to work with him and eager to accommodate him, but that is really a very naive view of business. In a competitive, profitable environment, loans were affordable and loan originators worked hard to try to close the borrower. Today, loan origination is extremely difficult and laborious and not very profitable. As a result, there is very little competition and very little incentive to go above and beyond. I am sure from having known this man for a number of years that he voted for President Obama both times and that he has been completely in support of Obama's anti-business policies and his strangling regulations, but now he does not understand why increasing the regulation and the costs of doing business for lenders is making it difficult for him to get the loans, the pricing and the service he wants. I am sure that there are people all over the U.S. who would agree with him. They like to complain about evil business people, but they don't understand why high costs doing business and low profit margins kill the incentive of business people, increase costs to consumers and limit consumer choice by driving out competition.

Tonight President Obama will give his first State of the Union of his second term. One major focus of this speech is supposed to be jobs, the economy, and to paraphrase one commentator, "making sure that all Americans can participate in the economy while paying their fair share." We can look for a speech calling for more regulations, higher taxes and more top down economic stimulus in the form of taxpayer funded subsidies for pet projects such as union shops and green energy. We can be pretty certain that the speech will not call for any of the real actions that actually would stimulate the economy--unraveling the tens of thousands of regulations that have been implemented over the past four years, lowering taxes or reducing the cost of compliance. Yet, if the President were serious about improving the economy, these are the actions he would take. No matter what the left likes to tell themselves, the government does not create jobs. The government does not create opportunity. The government only has the power to kill jobs and opportunity. For profit businesses do not operate out of a sense of altruism; the owners and employees work hard and give their utmost effort so that they can experience the rewards that go with hard work. When those rewards are stifled, the incentive to produce and compete is gone. And when business becomes too difficult and expensive to conduct, business owners either close up shop completely or they raise the costs they pass on to the consumers and cut services. Either way, in the end, the American people end up paying the final bill, not only through higher taxes, but also through higher fees and costs and poor service.

The EPA, Water Rights, Property, and Freedom

2013-02-07T14:04:00.000-08:00

The EPA may have lost a round in their battle to seize regulatory control of all of the nation's water when Virginia attorney-general Ken Cuccinelli defeated them in court last month, but the agency is still working to get control of more and more regulatory powers over our country's water supply.

For anyone unfamiliar with the case, the EPA had determined that storm water runoff was a pollutant, or at the very least a conduit for a pollutant, and that the agency had the power to regulate such runoff in Virginia at considerable expense to the state and the individual residents. The EPA's argument in this case was that since Congress has not specifically excluded their authority to regulate storm water runoff, the agency is authorized to regulate it, and they have the rights to issue rules managing the runoff. Cuccinelli successfully argued that using the EPA's argument, the agency could also infer that it had the authority to invade Mexico since Congress had not specifically denied them this authority either. Judge Liam O'Grady ruled in favor of Virginia and against the EPA's overreach.

While Cuccinelli's victory was significant, it is only one battle in an ongoing war between the EPA and property owners. As of January 15, 2013, the EPA is still waiting for the White House to review its proposed new guidance regarding "Waters of the U.S.". Since 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineer have been trying to expand the Clean Water Act to expand the authority of the EPA beyond its current authority to regulate navigable waters and waters adjacent to navigable waters. (The EPA had tried unsuccessfully to expand their authority under the Bush Administration but they had been rebuffed.) By expanding the regulations to include virtually all waters and wetlands,the EPA will have increasing authority over developers and private land owners. Land owners will be subject to federal regulation and expensive federal permits when developing their property.

Although the EPA argues that the new proposals are merely "guidance" and do not rise to the level of rule making, in reality each new bit of authority that the EPA acquires increases federal authority and undermines the rights of property owners. And during the past four years, Director Lisa Jackson's EPA has issued 1824 regulations costing businesses and consumers billions. Of these, twenty are considered major regulations. By the EPA's own estimates, these rules will cost more than $7 billion in initial compliance and over $44 billion in annual direct compliance costs. Do we really believe that an agency this out-of control does not plan to act on a non-binding guidance document at the expense of every property owner and developer in their potential path? Every time the EPA flexes its muscles, Americans lose their rights and incur additional expenses, and they are able to reverse these losses only through lengthy and expensive legal battles.

One of the many troubling aspects of the EPA's guidance document is that it ignores the Clean Water Act's acknowledgement that some waters are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the states, and the federal government does not have jurisdiction over these waters at all. By claiming authority over all waters, the EPA and the ACE are undercutting states' rights in a powerful way.

We saw an example of this overreach last year when the federal government attempted to take control of the regulation of New Mexico's underground water supply. As I wrote last August in the post entitled Water, Water Everywhere, Southern New Mexico is home to a vibrant and prosperous farming community made possible through irrigation, both from the Rio Grande, which the federal government does have power to regulate, and through irrigation from ground water wells, which it does not currently regulate. Last August, the Feds sued the state of New Mexico for control of the ground water. Had they been successful in that case, which thankfully they were not, the federal government would have had the authority to pump out the groundwater from New Mexico and ship it to other states, leaving our state with insufficient ground water and rendering our properties completely worthless.

The federal government's desire to control and regulate the use of the U.S. water supply should be extremely troubling to every American. This is an unprecedented attack on property rights and on states' rights. Without access to water, ownership of land has no value. If the government can successfully gain control of the use of and access to water, they can successfully dictate where we can live and work. They can render entire communities dustbowls by simply cutting off the water. They can decide which farms are allowed to thrive and which ones become barren. They can charge taxes and fees on private wells on private property. The options for control are endless.

Last year, Congress and the Senate both introduced bills to prevent the EPA's final guidance document from ever being implemented or from being used as the basis for a final rule. But in the current gridlocked environment in Washington, bills limiting the power of the EPA have little chance of passage. Battles over water rights are more likely to be settled through legal battles, state by state, as brave attorneys-general like Cuccinelli fight in court to make sure that their states' property owners are protected. Every state victory against the EPA reinforces the principle of private property rights and states rights and preserves a piece of our freedom. But in order to win, we have to be willing to stand up and fight.

Everything's Coming up Roses?

2013-02-01T16:07:00.002-08:00

With all of the mainstream media reports about the surging economy, I am reminded of Bette Midler in the TV version of "Gypsy" belting out "Everything's Coming up Roses." This week saw the stock market surge over 14,000--levels it has not seen since 2007. We also saw reports that housing is recovering nationwide and that housing prices have increased 23% in Phoenix, Arizona. Although we do have reports that the unemployment numbers did tick up a point, the overall message is that life is good and getting better.

Unfortunately, that message does not mesh with reality for a lot of us. For many Americans--the top 1% that the supporters of the current administration seem to dislike so intensely--life actually is good. The policies of the last four years have benefited Wall Street enormously. The historic low interest rates fostered by quantitative easing are good for stock prices, and budget deals like the one we saw with the "Fiscal Cliff" provide investors with confidence. As long as interest rates and the price of oil remain low and the government continues to spend money, Wall Street is happy. So are the Americans who are invested in the stock market, the investment advisers who assist them, and the publicly traded firms. My wealthier clients are doing just fine. For example, one family of attorneys for whom I do a lot of transactions are taking advantage of the low real estate prices to pad their portfolio of commercial and residential real estate. They have plenty of disposable income since they derive their funds from a hugely profitable social security disability practice. For people like these, this is a good time.

For a lot of Americans in the middle class tier of the economic scale, however, these are not such good times. We are seeing continued high unemployment, hiring freezes, and a contracting job market. For those of us who do not have investments, we are supposed to take comfort in the fact that housing prices are improving and so the most important asset that most of us own is appreciating in value. But is it really?

In the areas of the country hardest hit by the housing crash, prices are rising. The appreciation was rapid, the crash was horrific, and now there is some recovery. But in other parts of the country, such as Texas, where property values did not ride the roller coaster to such great heights, we have seen more steady depreciation and no recovery.

Consider this--in 2012, I saw only two loans where the properties actually appraised as or better than expected. The first one was a custom remodel for a doctor I had financed in 2008. He had doubled his property's square footage, and his appraisal in May of 2012 came in considerably better than expected. The other property which appraised was a Fannie Mae owned foreclosure being purchased an investment property. Fannie Mae was selling the property for $170,000--the house appraised for $214,000. The borrower did not close on the loan, but if he had, the lower sales price would have effectively reduced the price of the house to $170,000, thereby lowering the values of the other properties in the same neighborhood.

All of the other properties that I financed last year came in below the expected appraised value--some significantly so. In January I closed a loan for a couple who had custom built their home several years ago. They spent $650,000 building the house and assumed that this was the value--especially since the house is in pristine condition, located in a great neighborhood and has desirable amenities including a three car garage. They were disappointed when the house appraised for $599,000. However, the underwriter did not accept the appraisal and questioned the appraiser's statement that one of the comparables in the immediate neighborhood sold for $610,000 when the information the underwriter had on file indicated that this property had in fact sold for $510,000. The underwriter also rejected one of the comparable sales on the basis that it was just over a year old and therefore unacceptable. After a month of working on this, the appraiser returned a report stating that the first comp was reported in error--the sales price was $510,000, and the new comps have all sold for substantially less. After making the adjustments, this beautiful custom built home appraised for a current value of $510,000. The homeowner was able to close but they were not able to pay off their second lien because we had to reduce the loan amount to get them to 80%.

This month I am working with another long-time borrower of mine. This man wants to take advantage of the low interest rates by refinancing his home to lower the payment. He purchased his house, new from the builder, in 2008 for a price of $200,000. At the time, the property appraised for $250,000. In 2009, he refinanced the house from his original 6.5% interest rate to a new rate of 4.875%. At that time the house appraised for $205,000. This year, when we appraised the house, the appraisal came in for $200,000. My borrower was extremely upset, because not only has the property actually lost $5000.00 in value since 2009, which was a very bad year for property values, but he is not able to roll in his closing costs without MI. (The property did qualify for a DU refi plus, and we will be closing him on that program.) He has also questioned whether he should even go to the trouble to refinance his home to a 3.49% interest rate, since he has just learned that there are a lot of changes coming to the company where he has worked for the past 20 years, and now, even though he has held a key position for two decades and by his own admission, "works cheap", he is afraid that at some point he will be told that there is no longer a need for his services. Although he is a person with specialized abilities whom I am certain will not have trouble finding more employment--and he does in fact have other jobs now, should his current employment end in the next year--he is anxious and nervous about his future and about even the remote possibility of having to look for work.

Unfortunately, his story is much more representative of the condition in which most of us currently find ourselves. In this brave new era, years of hard work and experience don't really seem to mean much at all. Consumer confidence is down partially because many of us have no assurance of a paycheck or a job or any security. We hear a lot about how the top 1% of the country needs to pay their share, but in reality we see the wealthiest class of Americans becoming increasingly wealthier while middle class Americans have less confidence, less assurance of finding work, and less to look forward to. That's a story that the media is not reporting much, and it is not rosy at all.

Qualified Mortgages, Loan Originator Compensation and the Law of Intended Consequences

2013-01-23T16:17:00.003-08:00

We are getting used to massive federal changes at the beginning of each year. Last January, we saw President Obama's controversial recess appointment of Richard Cordray as the first permanent director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (The appointment was controversial because the Senate was not actually in recess at the time.) This year we are seeing the new qualified mortgage rules and the 3% cap on loan originator compensation. These rules are mandated under the Dodd Frank bill, passed in 2010, and we have been waiting now for two and half years to see the final versions. Now, this month, the CFPB has rolled both out, along with other new housing regulations.

With the nation's attention turned to the president's second inauguration, the battle over the budget and debt ceiling and a growing fight over gun control, new mortgage rules barely have made a blip on the national radar. The morning that the new qualified mortgage rules were introduced, the local ABC affiliate in El Paso carried the story that new mortgage rules were being introduced. "This should cause banks to start lending again," the local morning show anchor added optimistically. Other press releases from non-industry sources seemed to indicate that the new rules would provide the certainty that the market needs in order to commence mortgage lending again.

Of course, those of us who work in housing know that nothing could be further from the truth. David Stevens, former Assistant Secretary of HUD under President Obama, who left his position to become President of the Mortgage Bankers Association, said bluntly that the new standards will do nothing to loosen credit and in some interviews he went on to add that the new standards will actually tighten credit. That is a more realistic picture of what is going to happen. Where Stevens and I disagree is how much the new standards will tighten credit--he appears to believe that there will be a slight tightening while I predict that ultimately, the new standards will make mortgage credit much more difficult to obtain.

Why? As industry participants have pointed out, the new standards are much less restrictive than the original proposal. For example, the new qualified mortgage calls for debt to income ratios at 43% rather than the originally proposed 36%, and loans which are being sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and government loans are automatically in the safe harbor so their debt-to income ratios can remain higher. Also, the final rule allows for smaller downpayments and equity requirements than the 20-30% minimum initially suggested. So why am I pessimistic?

First of all, we must consider the climate in which this rule was created. Sheila Blair, former chair of the FDIC who worked on the qualified mortgage concept, said initially that the qualified mortgages were meant to be a very small slice of the mortgage market. If a borrower receives a mortgage that does not meet the qualified mortgage standards, the borrower can use the lack of "ability to repay" standards to forestall foreclosure almost indefinitely, and the lender may be required to repay three years of finance charges to the borrower. That is a powerful incentive to originate only qualified mortgages. As Stevens properly mentions in some of the interviews I read, the trend is going to be to begin underwriting according to these standards before they are actually mandatory next January.

Any mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are considered to be covered under the safe harbor provisions, but we have watched both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac consistently tighten their own underwriting standards. I predict that prior to the effective date of the new rule in January of 2014, both Fannie and Freddie will have adjusted their automated underwriting systems to accept a maximum debt to income ratio of 43% and to comply with the downpayment standards of the new rule. Don't be misled; the qualified mortgages may not officially become effective until next January, but the industry is going to begin using these standards this year in preparation for their full implementation 12 months from now.

Many housing professionals are concerned about the impact of the new rule on the jumbo housing markets in higher cost places such as California and Nevada. Tighter credit standards are going to negatively impact the market. Most probably the major impact will be that housing prices will fall again in these states as borrowers struggle to qualify with the new guidelines. This is particularly true since the qualified residential mortgages do not allow homeowners to qualify with interest only payments.

Finally, there is the 3% cap on points and fees. There still appears to be some confusion about what this covers exactly. Fees include lender fees, originator fees (including yield spread premium) upfront private mortgage insurance on conventional loans (though not on government loans) attorney fees in states that require that attorneys prepare the documents, title and third party fees when affiliates companies are used, and in some cases appraisal fees.

Last night I watched a video by the National Association of Mortgage Brokers explaining the loan originator compensation rule introduced on Sunday January 20. NAMB's Government Affairs Chair, John Hudson, stated that by writing the 3% rule as it has, the CFPB is picking the winners and the losers, favoring large Wall Street banks over the small business owners. He stated that since the CFPB is unwilling to look at the impact of the rule on small business owners, we need to try to fix this problem legislatively as he does not believe that the intent of Congress when they passed the Dodd Frank bill was to restrict access to credit and to discriminate against small business owners.

As far as I am concerned, this whole conversation is wrong on so many levels. First of all, to have national underwriting standards codified into law is ridiculous. Lending is based on risk and reward. Just as we should never bail out failing firms--failure is part of risk--we also should not have national legal standards for mortgage loans. Such standards do not allow for underwriters or investors to make any decisions for the individual borrower's situation.

Second, the intent of Dodd Frank and all of its resulting rules IS to limit access to credit and to pick winners and losers. When Mitt Romney stated that Dodd Frank was the biggest "kiss" the Wall Street banks ever got, he spoke the exact truth. Every inch of the Dodd Frank bill benefits Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. The major banks can afford to salary their employees and since the money that they make selling their loans on the secondary market is specifically excluded from the 3% points and fees cap, they do not have to worry about staying in compliance. A mortgage broker, on the other hand, who is paying all of his own brick and mortar expenses and originating loans may be forced to reduce his fee to 1% or less to comply with these requirements. And since the advent of lender paid compensation and lender contracts, we cannot vary our compensation from loan to loan, so we will have to reduce our fees on all loans in order to stay within the 3% guideline. (There are provisions for smaller loans under $100,000 to exceed the 3% cap, but that will not help the loan originator much since the lender paid compensation is a set percentage of the loan.) In a tight market, more fee reductions simply mean that smaller originators cannot earn enough money to pay their expenses and keep their doors open.

Many in our industry are calling this "the law of unintended consequences." In an effort to protect consumers, Congress passed a bill that will cut off competition, limit access to credit and prevent consumers from having lending options. Again, I disagree. This is the law of completely intended consequences. Remember that Dodd Frank was passed by a Democrat house and Senate and named for the extremely liberal Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. The liberal agenda of the past four years is not to promote home ownership--instead it is to promote sustainable living as our government transitions us from a society of home owners to a society of renters living in sustainable housing. We know that this was particular goal of Chris Dodd because the last bill he sponsored before he retired was the "Livable Communities Act," which did not pass but which would have created federal frameworks for implementing Smart Growth and Sustainable living initiatives. The problem with making such a transition is that home ownership has traditionally been the American dream, and many Americans are not willing to just abandon that dream in favor of a lifetime of living in crowded, tiny multi-family housing. Micro apartments such as the ones Mayor Bloomberg is commissioning in New York--for more information see the post Dream Small--may find willing residents in the Big Apple, but in the rest of the country we want a house.

Very simply, in order to move toward the radical environmental agenda of tiny apartments and densely populated housing demanded by environmentalists and called for in Agenda 21, the government has to cut off other housing options. Access to credit gives Americans options to buy and sell housing and to live where they choose. By cutting off access to credit and limiting the availability of loans, the government can continue its current trend of rebuilding our society into one without a middle class--a society where the rich become richer and the poor stay poor. And since home ownership has been one of the defining characteristics of the middle class, Dodd Frank had to attack it at its foundation--access to and availability of mortgage credit for a majority of Americans.

Anyone reading this who wants a private home and can qualify for one should consider buying in early 2013. After these rules are fully implemented, buying, selling or refinancing is going to be much more difficult. And with each month that passes we are moving closer to the remaking of our society.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

A Tale of Two Cities in 2013

2013-01-16T16:19:00.001-08:00

Today we saw President Obama, flanked by school children who had supposedly written letters to the President asking him to act on the issue of gun control, signing his 23 executive orders on gun control and issuing new proposed regulations which he will ask Congress to act upon.

Of course, today is really just the opening round in the battle over the Second Amendment. The big wars--the fight to ban assault weapons or to limit the size of magazines--are already being strategized in Congress, in the media and in the court of public opinion.

According to several polls I have seen lately, a majority of Americans seem to favor bans on assault weapons as unnecessary. While over 70% of Americans support individual gun ownership and are opposed to gun laws that would restrict gun possession to the military and law enforcement, many Americans don't seem to understand the value of the average citizen being able to own a large capacity weapon with a large capacity magazine.

I was very glad to see Governor Perry's office stand up for the rights of gun owners today. The right to keep and bear arms is essential in a free society--to protect ourselves and our families and to reduce crime.

As a life-long resident of the El Paso, Texas, region I have gotten to witness up close and personal the difference between a society with limited gun control (Texas) and a society with restrictive gun control (Mexico) and to see the differences between the two.

Many who live off the border wrongly assume that Mexico's problems with violence are the product of the drug war between warring cartels. That is the current source of the murder and mayhem in Mexico, but Juarez has been a dangerous, violent city for many years--long before former Mexican President Felipe Calderon began the war that has torn the country apart. Several years ago, before the drug wars began, I did a mortgage loan for a woman living in the U.S. whose family owned a money-changing business in Juarez. She and her brothers had inherited the business, but she told me that her brothers did not want to work in it because it was too dangerous. The business had been robbed a number of times, and during one of these robberies her husband had been shot. Fearing that he would be killed if he continued to work in the business, she had encouraged him to go to work in a restaurant in El Paso. She, herself, continued to cross the bridge every day to open and operate her business, and she hoped and prayed each day that she would not be killed while doing so.

My client was unable to buy a gun to protect herself and her business because of the strict gun control laws in Mexico. These laws, which are among the strictest in the world, are designed to make gun ownership nearly impossible. According to an article in the Washington Post, the entire nation of Mexico has only one gun store, which is located in Mexico city and operated by the Mexican military. The clerks are soldiers. The store is located on a secure military base and to enter customers must provide valid ID, pass through a metal detector, give up their cell phones and cameras, provide proof of income, submit references, pass a criminal background check and provide proof that they have been honorably discharged from any military service. If they pass all of these checks, they are allowed to purchase just ONE small caliber weapon and a box of bullets. The weapons are allowed only at home. A business owner who wants to possess a weapon must apply for a separate permit. Business owners are normally encouraged to hire a private security company to protect themselves rather than getting a gun.

Mexico's no tolerance laws about gun control frequently cause problems for U.S. citizens who cross the border with weapons. The most recent case is, of course, that of former U.S. serviceman Jon Hammar who was imprisoned for months in Matamoros, Mexico after attempting to declare a shotgun that he was planning to take with him in his vehicle while driving across Mexico. Mexican officials agreed that the gun was not on the list of banned weapons, but that did not stop them from jailing Hammar for four months and threatening him with ten years imprisonment for entering the country with a weapon. Unfortunately, Hammar's case, while very well publicized, was really not an isolated incident. Several years ago, a member of our police force drove his vehicle across the border in pursuit of a suspect. Upon crossing to the Mexican side, he was immediately detained by Mexican authorities and jailed. (He remained in custody for months while U.S. officials negotiated his release.) Most recently, a young truck driver from Dallas, Texas, who was transporting a shipment of ammunition, crossed the border and was jailed in Mexico. Although the Mexican customs official who detained him said in her statement that he told her he had crossed accidentally and was trying to turn around before entering Mexico, and in spite of calls from various civic leaders for his release, he remained incarcerated for over six months for illegally bringing guns into Mexico.

So how has all of this gun control worked out for Mexico? Since 2008, over 51,000 people have been murdered in Mexico in the nation's drug war. (To put this figure into perspective, only about 58,000 Americans died during the entire Vietnam War). In 2010, over 3100 people died in the city of Juarez, Mexico, earning the city the title of the "murder capital of the world." In 2011 the number of murders in Juarez dropped to 1904. In 2012, murders declined but there is still incredible violence in the city. In 2012 over 60 women were murdered in a story that is being largely obscured by the larger story of the wars over drug territory; a total of about 100 women have been reported missing over the past two years. More women were killed in Juarez in 2012 than in any of the earlier years of "femicide."

As a nation we have grieved over the loss of innocent children at Sandy Hook, and many seem to believe that if guns were more difficult to obtain, this tragedy could have been avoided. But a look at international headlines shows that in Mexico, where guns are virtually impossible to legally obtain, a shooting that claims the lives of multiple people, including children, is a common occurrence:

1. October 23, 2010, at least 10 gunmen burst into a birthday party in a private home in Juarez, killing 13 people and wounding twenty. The party was for a 15 year old boy; at least four of the people killed at the party were teenagers, and one wounded was nine years old. This incident was the second shooting at a house party that month--in the first attack, gunmen stormed a house and killed six people.

2. February 12, 2011, LA Times reports that 8 people, six of them waitresses, were gunned down in the Las Torres bar in Juarez, Mexico. Assailants bearing assault rifles opened fire in the bar. Elsewhere throughout the city, an additional 10 people were killed in other shootings for a total of 18 deaths in 24 hours.

3. January 13, 2011, Mexican activist Susana Chavez was found strangled with one hand cut off in Cuidad Juarez. Chavez had worked during the 1990's to bring attention to the murders of hundreds of young low-income women in Juarez. The Chihuahua State Attorney General's office said that Chavez's death was not the result of her activism but was the work of teenagers who cut off her hand to make authorities think she had been killed by organized crime.

4. April 5, 2011, CNN World reports that 41 people were murdered in Juarez, Mexico in four days, including a 10 year old boy who was shot and killed in an attack meant to kill his father.

I have known many people living in Juarez who have not been able to continue to run their businesses because of crime and violence. Many are afraid to visit family members and loved ones because of the constant threat of violence. Danger is not confined to people involved in drug trafficking. In Mexico, business owners are routinely targeted for kidnappings. In Mexico in 2011, an average of 49 kidnappings took place every single day. In 2010, there were 13,505 abductions; in 2011 that number rose to 17,889. These figures do not include "express kidnappings" which normally last just a few hours and are facilitated by taxi drivers.

With the election of the new president of Mexico, there appears to be general consensus that the city is going to become less violent. Many attribute that to the fact that "El Chapo" Guzman and his Sinaloa Cartel have actually taken control of the city away from the Juarez cartel. A few months ago, our local news featured a story about business owners who are once again reopening restaurants and nightclubs in downtown Juarez to take advantage of anticipated visits from Americans as well as to serve the needs of residents of Juarez who are becoming less afraid to go out in public. These entrepreneurs admit openly that they are allowed to open these businesses only if they pay protection money to organized crime, but the "tax" that the cartels impose on them is just a cost of living and working in Mexico.

When the drug war started in 2008, many of us who own businesses and work in El Paso feared that the violence might spill over into our community. By and large, that has not happened. El Paso has been ranked for the past several years as one of the safest cities in the United States. In 2010, there were just a mere 5 murders in El Paso. In 2011 that number rose to 16, but six of those were proven to be domestic-violence related killings. I could not find specific statistics regarding kidnappings in El Paso, but I did find FBI statistics that in 2010 the FBI had identified 25 cartel-related kidnappings along the entire Southwestern border of the United States. Our city has made national headlines when bullets have strayed across the border and hit our city hall or bounced off a pedestrian, but the guns and gunmen connected to those bullets have remained on the other side of the border. (In a recent incident, a bullet grazed, but did not penetrate, the leg of a woman pushing a stroller near the border. The bullet was believed to have come from a shoot- out involving automatic weapons taking place between masked gunman and authorities on the streets of Juarez. The woman was treated for minor injuries and allowed to go home.)

So what is the difference? Why is Juarez, Mexico, so dangerous and El Paso, Texas, so safe? Some attribute the safety of our city to Fort Bliss, but the military is not allowed to function as a police force on U.S. soil. And the mere presence of military does not make a city safe--during the height of the violence the president of Mexico stationed military troops in tanks on the streets of Juarez, but it did not stop the killings or the extortion or the other crimes. In fact, residents just complained that they were now victims of crimes perpetrated by the soldiers.

Is it our law enforcement? We do have a lot of federal law enforcement here--FBI, DEA, and ICE all have a powerful presence in our city. But is that enough to keep armed gunmen at bay and to protect a population of over 800,000 people? I don't think so.

Is it demographics? No. Many of the residents of El Paso have family members living in Juarez or in other parts of Mexico. We are separated from Mexico by a few international bridges and a river--for the most part our culture and the dynamic of our community is the same.

The difference is guns. Whereas Mexico has restrictive gun laws that allow criminals to access weapons illegally while keeping weapons away from the citizenry, El Paso is the beneficiary of Texas' gun laws which allow residents to carry guns openly and to apply for concealed carry permits. Would be killers and kidnappers who operate without any real obstacles in Mexico know that if they enter an El Paso business to kill or extort money, they run a very good risk of being killed themselves. And those weapons that protect us include the maligned "assault weapons." Mexican drug cartels often use ex-military and renegade former police as enforcers. To stand up to them, we need weapons that compare with theirs. And this is a better deterrent than the world's finest law enforcement. Trained law enforcement may be able to successfully track down murderers after crimes have taken place and bring the perpetrators to justice, but an armed populace can keep those murders from ever happening in the first place.

I have received a lot of criticism of my anti-gun control stance. Many seem to think that mutually assured destruction is not a good deterrent. I disagree. Mutually assured destruction is often the only deterrent. A lifetime spent living a few miles from one of the most dangerous cities on earth has taught me that most violent criminals are also cowards. They may not mind slaughtering everyone else, but they don't want to risk getting killed themselves. Mexico is proof that complete disarmament of a society is not possible. We just have to decide who we want to be armed--only the violent criminals, or the whole of society. Having seen both situations up close, I definitely vote for the latter.

If we want to live in a free society, we have to protect our Second Amendment rights to protect ourselves. We cannot allow the mainstream media to spin this narrative--to tell us what types of weapons we may own or what types of ammunition we can keep or how many guns we should be allowed to have. An armed population is a free population--a disarmed population is the victim of every type of petty tyranny and crime imaginable. That crime and tyranny does not have to come from a government agency--it can simply come from a criminal a few blocks away who wants your money and is willing to hold you for ransom to get it.

The Price of Liberty

2013-01-09T12:47:00.001-08:00

It has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilence. As the first full week of 2013 unfolds, we are beginning to see true price of liberty all across the country as the federal government imposes onerous new mandates and crafts new legislation to undercut our freedoms.

For Hobby Lobby and the Green family, the price of liberty is $1.3 million a day. That is the cost of the fines that Hobby Lobby is facing for its refusal to comply with the Department of Health and Human services Obamacare mandate on supplying contraceptives including morning after and week after abortifacents through the Hobby Lobby health plan. Although other companies have been able to get these fines suspended, Hobby Lobby's judge was less understanding and refused to give the company a waiver on the fines while their case was going through court.

This morning I saw Jay Sekulow on Fox News Channel discussing the Hobby Lobby case. Sekulow is, of course, the lead attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice and while he is not involved in the Hobby Lobby case, he has successfully represented other companies who are currently suing to uphold their First Amendment rights to object to abortion and therefore not have to pay for contraceptives and abortifacents. When asked whether Hobby Lobby was actually paying these fines, Sekulow responded that they will not have to do so unless and until the fines are actually levied by the Treasury Department, which he hopes the Administration will choose not to do while the case makes its way through court.

At the heart of the Hobby Lobby fight against the Affordable Care Act is their First Amendment right not to be forced to violate their religious beliefs. The Obama Administration claims that the mandates which require private employers to pay for contraceptives do not violate the rights of private employers by virtue of the fact that private employers don't have any First Amendment freedom of religion rights, or as they explain “for-profit, secular employers generally do not engage in any exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment.”

The Heritage Foundation's newsletter today spotlighted three other employers who are in the same situation as Hobby Lobby--Autocam of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Grote Industries and KL Construction. KL Construction is a family-owned construction company facing $730,000 a year in fines if they refuse to violate the tenents of their Roman Catholic faith. (The fine is $100.00 per employee per day so it varies from company to company). All of these cases are headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The question that all of us are facing is one of Constitutional protections. Does the First Amendment protect all of us--or does it just protect non-profit institutions? In our society we vilify--and sometimes imprison--those who violate the consciences and their own ethics in order to meet the demands of an abusive boss backed by a greedy corporation who intimidates them into committing some moral infraction for the good of the company. Are we willing to stand up as a society for those who refuse to be bullied by an abusive government being backed by a greedy electorate which apparently believes that business people have no rights at all?

Of course, the question of whether the Constitution protects all of us or none of us goes far beyond the current First Amendment battles. This week Joe Biden is holding hearings on gun control and threatening that the president will act by executive order if necessary. It is ironic that the same group who will tell us that abortion is a Constitutionally protected right will also lecture us about gun control when the Constitution says nothing about the right to kill one's own child and has an entire amendment devoted to the right to keep and bear arms.

The Constitution can be amended only by a vote of 2/3rds of the states. It cannot be changed or rewritten, legally, by executive orders, or by Congressional legislation, or even by the courts, although the courts do have a long standing right to determine whether laws pass the test of being constitutional. But the Constitution is only as strong as the people who stand up for it, believe in its principles, and demand that it be upheld.

A little over 10 year ago, I heard NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani speak at an event here in El Paso. Guiliani was talking about the lessons he had learned from experiencing 09/11 as the mayor of New York. I have always remembered what he described as one of the most important, "Stand up to bullies." Guiliani made the point that the world is full of bullies, but when we encounter them, we can't back down. We have to stand strong and push back. And when we do, we often find that they are much weaker than we thought.

Hobby Lobby has chosen to stand up to bullies and pay the price of liberty, to the tune of a staggering $1.3 million dollars a day. I hope that their business survives, and that they win their battle to uphold their rights under the U.S. Constitution. I hope that all of us stand up for the rights that others have died for and protect and preserve the Constitution and the liberties it affords us all.

Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Chosen about one small group of Americans battle to uphold the Constitution, free on Kindle January 11th through January 15th.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

The Fiscal Cliff, Healthcare, Housing and You

2012-12-17T14:18:00.000-08:00

As we near the end of 2012 and the edge of the fiscal cliff, as usual the big debate is whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended or allowed to expire, and if they should be extended, for whom. As liberals and conservatives debate the impact on the economy, the focus of the media's coverage of the debate seems to focus mainly on the increases to the top income tax rate. After a two year reprieve on these extensions, most Americans seem to now believe that it is best to let the tax cuts expire for the top earners while ensuring that they are maintained for everyone else.

I think that framing the Bush tax cuts debate only in terms of income tax increases really minimizes the full effect of allowing the tax cuts to expire. Remember that the tax cuts did more than just lower the income tax rate; they also gave a hefty shot in the arm to the real estate market.

Under the Bush tax cuts, an individual could sell his or her primary residence and realize up to a $250,000 gain tax free. A couple could sell their primary residence and realize up to a $500,000 gain tax free. And this gain did not have to be reinvested in a new primary residence to reap the tax advantages; the sellers could choose just to put the money from the sale in an investment account and rent for the rest of their lives. The capital gains tax holiday gave a powerful boost to the real estate market because it allowed Americans to purchase a home and benefit in a very direct way from their properties' appreciation.

If all of the tax cuts are allowed to expire, next year the sales of primary residences will again be subject to capital gains tax. (Presumably the tax will revert back to the prior law before the tax cuts where no capital gains is owed if a new primary residence of equal or greater value is purchased within a set period of time.) But what if the tax cuts are extended to the middle class and only allowed to expire for taxpayers with incomes of $250,000 a year or more? What effect will that have on the housing market?

Remember that for the past couple of years Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's average borrower today has a credit score of 751 and a down payment of more than 30%. That means essentially that these two agencies, both of which have received hundreds of billions in tax dollar bailouts, are basically making loans to upper middle class borrowers--the ones who typically have higher incomes. A capital gains' tax on primary residences, combined with higher income taxes and a looming threat to discontinue the tax deduction for mortgage interest, may discourage these borrowers from investing in real estate. At the very minimum, it is going to discourage them from buying higher priced homes. Discouraging the very borrowers who are in the best position financially to purchase homes and pay the mortgages on them can only result in a further slowdown of the real estate market, and potentially greater declines in housing prices. Many of the taxpayers in the $250,000 bracket are actually small business owners. With increasing economic problems, and dropping market values, how comfortable are they going to feel going through the pain of purchasing a home knowing upon sale the gain will be subject to taxes because they earn over $250,000 a year?

I know that it can be argued that for many years primary residences were subject to capital gains tax upon sale, and that the tax did not stop people from buying or selling property. But I would counter that there is a strange phenomenon that comes into play when people are used to getting something (in this case a capital gains' tax holiday on their primary residence) and then see it taken away. We saw this with the home buyer tax credit. Buyers had bought and sold houses without an $8,000 tax credit since the beginning of civilization, but in the short time that it was implemented, buyers came to believe that they should expect a tax credit. Consequently, when the tax credit expired, buyers largely stopped putting in contracts on houses. The credit should not have provided all that much incentive--after all, the primary reward for purchasing a home is having a place to live--but once the inducement was offered and then removed, borrowers did not seem to see the point of buying a home for which they would not receive a tax credit.

Two years ago the tax cuts were extended for everyone. Now President Obama is adamant that they should be extended only for those earning less than $250,000. But this plan poses an additional set of challenges. The new health care law signed in March also contains a tax on real estate. The 3.8% tax on the sale of residential real estate applies to individuals with incomes higher than $200,000 and couples with combined incomes over $250,000. On a sale of a $300,000 home, the tax would be $11,400.00. This would be in additional to the capital gains tax. And since the health care tax is on the sales price and not on the gain, it would apply to any borrower in the income bracket being taxed. In other words, if you sell your house for enough to cover what you owe the bank plus the agent's commission and your costs as seller, you could still owe Uncle Sam a check.

We like to think that "rich" people, whom we as a society have defined as people with incomes over $200,000 or $250,000, have so much money that they don't feel these taxes at all and that any complaining that they do is only a result of greedy whining. But at what point do the more affluent people in our society decide that real estate is too heavily taxed and that they are better off renting rather buying? At what point do current homeowners who do have extra cash decide to offer their homes for rent rather than for sale because they are rebelling against a plethora of taxes which gobble up their equity? And what are the consequences of this shift in thinking for an already lethargic housing market?

In spite of reports that I have been reading all year, I personally have not seen a housing market recovery or improved housing prices. With one exception, none of the appraisals I ordered this year came in as well as expected. Properties that were purchased last year at lower than expected prices appraised this year for less than last year's purchase price. In my conversations with underwriters in other areas of the state, I have learned that this continued depreciation of the housing market is actually typical right now. Do we want to make a declining housing market worse than it already is by disincentivizing still more borrowers?

Raising taxes--even for the top income brackets--may generate a lot of money for the U.S. Treasury in the short term, but in the long term it will lead to increased unemployment which will lead to increased mortgage defaults and delinquencies at a cost to lenders, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and ultimately the American taxpayers. Taxing the life out of what is left of the housing industry is really just cooking and eating the goose that laid the golden egg.

Right to Work, Legalized Pot and the States vs. The Federal Government

2012-12-13T12:28:00.002-08:00

The second week of December has been most interesting. On Tuesday, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed Michigan's first right to work law, officially banning the practice of forcing workers to pay union dues in the state. What Michigan did was not really revolutionary--almost half of the states currently have right to work laws. What is extraordinary is that Michigan would pass such a law considering the long history of unions in the state. What is also extraordinary is the national attention that this law has gotten. I don't remember seeing all of this attention focused on Indiana in February when they chose to become a right-to-work state. But since Tuesday, the focus of cable news has been the Michigan right to work law. Distraught union members have protested loudly, and sometimes violently; and Jimmy Hoffa Jr. has promised civil war.

Amid all of the weeping and gnashing of teeth that has followed Michigan's passage of the right-to-work law, what appears to have largely been lost is that states have a clear right to determine the labor laws within their own borders. The primary impetus for this law is that Michigan is losing business opportunities to its right-to-work neighbor Indiana. In order to attract jobs and business opportunities, states have to compete, and right-to-work laws allow such competition.

As someone who has worked in a right-to-work state my entire life, I can tell you for a certainty that right-to- work laws do not destroy the worker--in fact they open up a lot of new opportunities. For instance, in Texas, the right-to-work laws mean, in part, that a non-compete clause from an employment contract cannot, in most cases, be enforced against an employee. In practical terms this means that the worker who has an opportunity to go to work for his employer's competitor for a higher wage can take advantage of that opportunity without any real fear of reprisal. It also means that a person who want to open his own business competing in the same field as his current employer has the opportunity to do so without waiting out the non-compete time of the contract. That means that he can take his contacts with him while they are still fresh and while he can still grow the business. Right-to-work helps employers, but it also makes life much easier for workers who now have a lot more options. And right-to-work states grow. Texas' right-to-work laws--coupled with no state income tax--account in large part for the state's maintaining a solid economy even in the current difficult times.

What I find most interesting about the current uproar about Michigan's new law is that the discussion by opponents of the new law is not being framed in terms of Michigan's right to regulate its own labor laws. Rather, opponents seem to believe that Michigan's new law is the outgrowth of a national conspiracy by conservatives in Michigan and other parts of the country to undermine the unions and by extension the Obama Administration. President Obama even spoke against the passage of the Michigan law saying that this new law was not about economics; it was only about politics and the "right to work for less money." Rather than acknowledging that the state has the same right as any other state to pass laws for the perceived betterment of the lives of its citizens, liberals seem intent on furthering their assertion that this law is somehow aimed at undercutting the Administration and that Gov. Snyder was acting outside of his authority in signing it.

While union leaders were rioting in Michigan this week, in Colorado the state's new law legalizing marijuana went into effect. Let me begin this by saying that I, personally, am opposed to drug legalization at every level as I believe that all recreational narcotic substances are damaging to the individual and to society at large. But there are much greater issues at play here than just personal morality about whether drugs should be legal.

Washington State and Colorado, of course, legalized recreational marijuana usage by popular vote on November 6, in a move that many have called "historic." Clearly, the signing of these laws actually was outside of the authority of the state governors who signed them. Federal law does not allow recreational marijuana usage, and state laws are not allow to preempt federal laws. However, on this issue, the left is remaining very quiet. I saw a portion of an interview with former attorney general Alberto Gonzales about possible actions that the Administration can take as a result of the passage of these laws. Gonzales said that basically the government has three options:

1. The Feds can arrest and prosecute citizens of the states under the current federal drug laws and then argue in court that federal laws always preempt state laws.

2. The Feds can sue the states in court for violating federal laws.

3. The Feds can withhold funding for local law enforcement since the local law enforcement is refusing to uphold Federal law.

There is also a fourth option which Gonzales did not mention but which many progessives and libertarians are demanding. The federal government can do nothing. Legalization of recreational marijuana is, after all, supported by a majority of the voters in Colorado and Washington--two states which voted for Obama in the 2012 elections. Additionally, big money backers including hedge fund billionaire George Soros and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance support legalizing drugs. For the Administration to enforce the current drug laws would be very unpopular with both monied backers and the liberal voting blocks in those states, so it might be politically advantageous for the Obama Administration to not get involved.

Maybe. Maybe not. Having two states pass laws legalizing drugs really is a clear affront to federal authority. As it turns out, Colorado and Washington's new laws violate not only federal law, but international United Nations' treaties--the 1961 International Convention on Narcotic Drugs outlaws marijuana and other drugs. That treaty is supported by two other treaties—the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Drugs and the 1988 Anti-Trafficking Convention. Whether the Obama Administration privately agrees with these state laws is not the point; the point is that by refusing to take any action on these laws, the Administration is sending a message that in some cases, at least, state laws can preempt federal laws and even international treaties. In speaking out against the Michigan law, the President and his Administration are interjecting themselves into a matter that is clearly the state's to decide. In refusing to stand up against legalized marijuana--if that is ultimately the case--the President and the Administration are conceding authority that the federal government actually does have to enforce laws. The only legal way around this is to back federal bills to legalize drugs nationally. Any such legislation would undoubtedly prove extremely contentious and difficult to pass in a government as gridlocked as this one.

It will be interesting to see how this issue of the state authority versus federal authority is ultimately resolved. After all, if the test of whether we have to obey federal laws is determined by whether a majority of citizens in a state agree with the laws or not, there are millions of citizens living in red states who do not agree with a lot of the laws that this Administration is passing. Could what happens in Colorado and Washington set up a precedent for red states to eventually vote to reject Obamacare? If popular will can nullify international treaties, could states down the road vote to disregard UN treaties such as the UN Small Arms Treaty and could the courts rule with them? Could courts rule that since the Administration has allowed two states to openly violate federal law, they have sent a message that state laws passed by popular vote have more authority than federal laws passed by the houses of Congress and signed by the President. If the courts do eventually determine that this is the case, the outcome could be a rebellion against federal control unlike anything we have witnessed in the past. The outcome should be fascinating to watch.

Jim DeMint, Sandra Fluke and the War of Ideas

2012-12-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

Our nation is at war. No I am not referring to the perennial war on terror or the constant threats that Middle Eastern dictators pose to America. Rather we are engrossed in a civil war--a war of ideas. The most recent battle in this war was the 2012 elections, a loss which conservatives are still grieving. But 2012 was just a battleground--it was not the war itself.

Through the events of 2012, many of us conservatives have come to really understand just how much ground we have lost in the culture wars over the last 40 or 50 years. All serious conservatives now acknowledge that we have totally lost broadcast television media--mainstream media outlets openly protected the Administration's errors and missteps while crucifying conservative opponents for relatively small infractions. We have lost the school systems which are educating an army of socialist, liberal young people who support drug legalization, gay marriage and redistribution of wealth. These losses are reflected in polls that show an increasing support for socialism and big government across the U.S. and, of course, they are reflected in the elections themselves.

I think Time Magazine's short list for Person of the Year may best reflect the ways in which liberal socialism is taking over our society. On the short list were E.L. James, author of the mega-best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, JayZ, and Sandra Fluke. Assuming that Person of the Year acknowledges the individual who has made the greatest impact in the year, this is an astonishing list. Using the criteria of accomplishment, James probably does deserve to be considered. While I personally find it horrifying that society's morals have eroded to the extent that a series on sado-masochism can become an all-time bestseller, I also acknowledge that James accomplished something else that no one ever has. She used modern technologies and social media to take an unknown book and make it into an international best seller. Whether or not you agree with the specific content of her work, she has demonstrated an extraordinary understanding of how to market in the digital age, and in the rapidly changing world of publishing I can understand why the editors of Time would consider her.

Likewise, with Jon Stewart and JayZ, while I do not think that they have done anything worthy of the title of Person of the Year, I acknowledge that both men have demonstrated a high degree of personal success. Although I disagree with their actions and their politics, I also acknowledge that to rise to national fame in media and to influence a generation of voters takes a lot of discipline and commitment.

That leaves Sandra Fluke. What makes Sandra Fluke an interesting choice for Person of the Year is that she is the one person on the list with no accomplishments whatsoever. She is famous only because Rush Limbaugh called her a "slut" on his radio show. Her sole achievement consists of being insulted nationally by a famous personality. She is a law student in her thirties who supports big government and insists that she is entitled to free birth control. There is nothing exceptional about her in any way, and yet everyone in America knows her name.

Perhaps Time Magazine's thinking is that Sandra Fluke is a composite for the single young women of America. In a way she is. Sandra Fluke and her sisterhood of single, liberal women who overwhelmingly supported President Obama's re-election last month are the spiritual daughters of Hillary Clinton, and like their "mother" these women believe that it takes a village to do everything--including, apparently, prevent pregnancy. The "Life of Julia" is these women's playbook--they expect and demand cradle to grave care from a huge federal government who will stand in the place of the husbands they choose not to have. They become enraged if anyone takes exception to being forced to bankroll their promiscuous lifestyles. I am certainly not saying that none of these women will ever marry--most of them undoubtedly will. However, they plan to continue to look to the government as their protector and provider throughout their lives, so the government needs to be big and strong and generous so that it can meet their needs and those of whatever children they have. They are life-long victims of mean, hateful, judgmental people who call them names in public. But they don't aspire to elevate their status in the world; they just want to silence the voices criticizing them. For these women, conservatism is a foreign language they do not wish to learn; the ideas are hollow and offensive.

By even giving Sandra Fluke honorable mention as a contender for Person of the Year, Time Magazine is acknowledging that these women are the new future of our country. They are also playing into the liberal, socialist mindset that accomplishment and achievement don't matter. Hard work does not matter; success does not matter. A person who has done nothing except demand government handouts and fend off insults is as worthy of recognition as the one who has worked hard and achieved something notable.

In the face of this new mindset, where work and achievement are denigrated, where unaccomplished people demanding a free ride are celebrated, and where promiscuity and irresponsibility are rewarded, how do conservatives restore the voice of reason? As I mentioned last week, liberals understand human nature much better than conservatives, and so they have done much better in this war of ideas than we have. But as I also mentioned, conservatives have a much better grasp on reality than liberals, and we know that liberal ideas do not work over the long haul. That is our strength--and our weakness.

With this in mind, I was initially very sad today to learn that SC Senator Jim DeMint is leaving the Senate and going to work as the head of the Heritage Foundation. It was DeMint who blocked the ill-conceived and dangerous LOST Treaty from being ratified this summer; it was DeMint who virtually single-handedly prevented the unionization of the TSA. DeMint has consistently stood for conservative principles--sometimes completely alone--and he has accomplished remarkable things in an often hostile environment. Salon.com called him the most conservative member of the Senate--a title I think he deserves. When I heard the news, therefore, I thought, with a lot of sadness, that we are losing a strong, consistent advocate for freedom in the Senate. But when I read DeMint's statement about why he is leaving now, I was heartened. He wrote that his intention has always been to be a citizen legislator--never a career politician. And then he added this:

"I’m leaving the Senate now, but I’m not leaving the fight. I’ve decided to join The Heritage Foundation at a time when the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas. No organization is better equipped to lead this fight and I believe my experience in public office as well as in the private sector as a business owner will help Heritage become even more effective in the years to come.”

He went on to say:

"This is an urgent time because we saw in the last election we were not able to communicate conservative ideas that win elections...We want to figure out what works at the local and state level."

As I have thought about DeMint's statement today and how the Senate will look without him, I have realized that we now have other strong true conservative voices in the Senate--Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and incoming Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Each of these men understands that freedom is essential, that U.S sovereignty is not negotiable and that we must stand up for the Constitution of the U.S. Perhaps DeMint knows that the Senate now has the principled, strong conservatives it needs in order to stand in the gap for our country in the short term. He also seems to know that the real war is not in the Senate--it is in the minds of Americans who read Time Magazine and watch broadcast news and are influenced more by celebrities than think tanks. The true war is in the thinking of the millions of women like Sandra Fluke who rejoiced at Obama's election as a victory for their futures, and in the thinking of Americans of all colors who routinely vote Democrat out of a sense that the Democrat party looks after the "little people" while the Republicans only look out for their own rich friends. If we cannot clearly communicate conservative ideas in a way that all Americans can understand, soon we will not able to elect enough people committed to the Constitution to any branches of our government to preserve our way of life, and then we will lose the country completely. If we don't win the war of ideas, in a short time none of the other battles will even matter.

Welcome to the fight, Senator DeMint.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me A Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Code Red

2012-11-27T13:14:00.000-08:00

It may come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog that I was not always as conservative as I am now. My parents were very conservative, and I always had pro-life, pro-traditional family values, but when I was in my late teens and early twenties I was much more supportive of welfare and government assistance programs than I am today. At that time, I held the views of many of the people who now seem to think that I am mean and unfeeling--I believed that the government needed to provide a hand up to people and that those recipients of this federal aid would go on to become grateful, producing members of society. These views were shaped in part by the fact that when I was a teenager my father lost his job and over the years that followed our family became destitute. We were never on any type of government assistance--including unemployment. My father had money saved and after he lost his job, he cashed in his retirement savings which allowed us to live until my brothers and sisters and I were old enough to start contributing to the family's support. From that time on we worked and paid the bills as best we could. I was deeply aware of how more affluent people looked down on us--and since virtually everyone was more affluent than we were I definitely sympathized with the underprivileged.

What changed? Was it starting my own business and working the long hours and paying the taxes that are part of self-employment? Not really. Certainly, owning and running a business for close to 15 years has made me understand much about how jobs are created, how wealth is built and how excessive regulation stifles and smothers initiative and opportunity. But the experience that really transformed my thinking about welfare and social programs occurred many years before I became a business owner. What fundamentally transformed my thinking about government assistance was having up close and personal exposure to it.

Shortly before my nineteenth birthday I began teaching at the local community college, where I worked for years. I was a part-time instructor in the history department but I also picked up additional classes in developmental education studies and English as a second language. Since I have a Master of Arts in Humanities Degree with a history major and philosophy minor, I was eager to teach what I had learned in graduate school to students whom I was convinced would prove to be eager sponges ready to soak in knowledge. I taught hundreds of students over the four years that I was at EPCC. I opened each semester the same way--by introducing myself and then asking each student to introduce himself or herself and tell me what specifically they hoped to get out of the course I was teaching. I learned over the years that these early introductions set the stage for the entire semester because in the twenty or thirty minutes that it took for me to meet the students and learn a little about them, I could predict who was going to succeed and who wasn't. I had many older students who had come back to school in an effort to earn a degree to improve their chances for promotion at work. When I taught English as a second language I had quite a few students who were taking those classes because they needed better English skills for their jobs and several students who were the mothers of English speaking teenagers who wanted to be able to understand their children's conversations. But every semester, in every class, I also had another type of student. These were the students straight out of high school who were enrolled for only one reason--their parents had told them they had to either get a job or go to school, and they had decided that school was the better of the two options.

Nearly all of my students were attending school on some sort of financial aid. And I did have some very motivated students who actually worked hard and were eager to learn, but they were invariably the older students who had gone back to school because they had some personal motivation for self-improvement. They virtually never came from that young group of students who were the majority of the class. In fact, after a few weeks, a good number of these would stop coming to class. They were still physically going to the campus--I would see them hanging around the halls smoking and chatting with their friends. They might even attend the minimum amount that they had to in order to keep from having me drop them from the class. But they weren't learning anything because they were not interested in working or studying or doing anything that they needed to do. They were simply kicking the can down the road a few years on the taxpayer dime--using federal financial aid to give themselves a place to crash so that they could delay going to work and accepting adult responsibilities. Seeing this colossal waste of opportunity in the form of grants and student loans handed to a group of people who did not appreciate them or take advantage of the education offered taught me the first simple principle of conservatism--what is obtained without effort is not valued. People only appreciate those things that they work for and sacrifice to get; they never really appreciate anything that is just given to them.

Twenty years later, we have just gone through a horribly disappointing election in which a majority of Americans--though not a very big one--voted to give President Obama a second term. Young people, minorities and women overwhelmingly voted for big government, more social programs, and more welfare. In the wake of this election, we see the GOP now trying to figure out how to reinvent themselves to make our party more "relevant". The GOP leadership appears to be bent on making our party more liberal so that its principles will more closely align with the desires of the electorate.

I am very certain that the problems that the GOP faced in this election are not the result of being too conservative. And I am equally certain that the solution is not to try to rebrand ourselves into a more marketable entity. As long as we continue to make our elections about which candidate gets the most or best looking celebrity endorsements, we are never going to be able to address any of the real issues that are plaguing either the party or the country.

As I see it, we need to start addressing a couple of fundamental truths:

1. Liberals have a better understanding of human nature than conservatives. As a result they are able to manipulate people using our basest instincts. They also have a better understanding of the laws of physics as they apply to humans--specifically the law of inertia which says that an object in motion has a tendency to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force while an object at rest has a tendency to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. (This principle of inertia makes it difficult to transform welfare recipients into productive workers overnight since they have a tendency to want to remain at rest.)

Because of these truths, conservatives can never win public relations battles using political theory. Liberalism simply sounds better. The idea of a big, benevolent cash-rich government spreading wealth around to make sure that all citizens are happy, well educated, fed and fulfilled is too good a sales pitch. It is certainly more appealing than a message that tells people to get up early in the morning, go to work, provide for themselves and their families and live as productive, contributing members of society. As a theory, liberalism will always prevail. But that leads me to the second truth:

2. Conservatives have a much better grasp on reality than liberals. In reality, socialism produces sloth and poverty. Government handouts disincentivize individual effort and achievement and produce a society where no one is productive. And the big government that can meet your every need can also strip away every freedom--enslaving the people who looked to it for protection. History teaches repeatedly that collectivism is a disaster and big, out of control governments become totalitarian and dictatorial. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Because of this truth, conservatives can win political battles by demonstrating the real world differences between conservatism and liberalism. Conservative principles produce prosperity, limited government and personal freedom. Liberal principles produce poverty, and bloated bureaucracy and destroy personal freedom. The question for us as conservatives now is not how we better market this message or how we rebrand ourselves. The question is whether we are willing to stand up for our principles and live under them.

Unlike many Americans, I do not support secessionist movements, for two reasons.

1. As a student and teacher of American history, I know that the last secessionist movement in America ended with over half a million Americans dead and the secessionist states being forced back into the Union under less than favorable terms. The southern states remained second-class states for many years after the Civil War. That is not a model that any of us wants to follow.

2. We have enough conservatives states that we can demonstrate the superiority of conservative principles if we are willing to do it. If we have the desire, and the will, we can prove in a real world setting that our principles still work and always will. But in order to do this, we have to be willing stop focusing on national politics for a time and instead we have to focus on what we can do within our own states. By fostering conservatism on a state level, we can showcase its strengths while highlighting the weaknesses of liberalism. This show and tell approach is going to be the best weapon against the growing popularity of socialism in the U.S. and I believe that it is our only real hope for turning the tide of American opinion.

The rest of my posts for this year will be devoted to some simple ways that I believe we can foster and grow conservatism on a local and state level. None of the ideas is very radical, and many are currently being explored. But I think that if all of us who believe in conservatism are willing to stand together and work towards our goals, we can make a big enough impact in our nation's thinking that when we do face liberalism again on a national stage, we can defeat it soundly.

Why, as an Evangelical Christian, I Stand with Israel.

2012-11-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

I wrote this in October as a pre-election post, but now with Israel and Gaza in the current conflict it seems even more relevant than it did when I first wrote it, so I have edited it a little to remove the election references and I am re-posting it today.

In the summer of 1997, my two youngest brothers were attending seminars at BYU in order to earn their undergraduate degrees. I took a two week vacation from my job and went to Provo, Utah, to be with them and with my mother during that time. Stefan and Judah spent every day in school from morning till late afternoon, and so Mother and I had to find ways to entertain ourselves during those hours.

During that two week period, BYU was hosting an exhibit of the artifacts from Masada, which was on special loan to the campus via the BYU Jerusalem Cultural Center. The exhibit traveled under guard with posted signs that the 1997 trip was the first time that these artifacts had ever been in the United States.

As I went through the exhibit, I was amazed. We saw portions of the book of Isaiah contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls, pottery from the Holy Land, and artifacts which had been excavated from the fortress at Masada, where the last Jewish rebellion against the Roman government occurred about 66 A.D. The residents of Masada had lived in the fortress for five years, before they finally committed suicide to avoid capture and execution by the Roman army.

Cassette tape recorders were provided to each visitor so that we could tour the displays while listening to an explanation of each item that we saw. We saw replicas of Herod's palace and the last temple, artifacts left by the Roman soldiers, and shards of pottery and makeup brushes and brass mirrors left by the women who had lived at the fortress. When we came to a collection of very small clay lamps which were about the size of the palm of an adult hand, Mother motioned to me to turn off my tape recorder. "Look," she pointed. "This explains the parable that Jesus told about the ten virgins--five had enough oil for their lamps and the other five did not. This explains why the five with the oil could not share theirs with the others." I looked more closely at the lamps and saw what she meant--each little lamp was made like a nightlight with only enough supply of oil for one night. When we had finished talking I clicked my cassette recorder back on to hear the narrator explain, "These oil lamps would have been the ones referenced in the parable of the ten virgins."

Of all of the experiences I have enjoyed over the course of my life, seeing the artifacts from Masada is in the top 5. The exhibit was a profound reminder that the nation of Israel was completely gone for almost 2000 years. As the child of parents who were in the Jesus movement, I grew up in a house where the star of David was prominently featured, and I learned from my earliest youth that the Jewish people are precious to God. To see the belongings of these people who were exterminated and scattered by the Romans was a profound reminder of the struggles of the Jewish people throughout history and particularly the long struggles of Israel as a nation to maintain its sovereignty.

As evangelicals, we believe that Israel is a nation that has a special and unique history and an important future. We believe that the promise of God in Genesis to Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you and the entire world will be blessed because of you," extends to the entire nation of Israel. We also agree with Benjamin Netanyahu that the reestablishment of the nation of Israel May 16, 1948 was a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and that it was God who re-established this nation as an independent state. Therefore, we reject statements such as the one made recently by Henry Kissinger that within ten years the nation of Israel will cease to exist. We stand against Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric not only because it is racist and genocidal but also because it stands against the purposes of God.

As the conflict continues between Israel and Gaza, we pray especially for the peace and safety of Israel. We pray that God will guide their military efforts and protect this nation which is so dear to His heart. And we pray for a speedy end to this conflict and for God to intercede in this situation so that the region can live in safety and so that Israel's neighbors will come to respect her national sovereignty and right to exist.

Abraham Lincoln said, "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right." When we stand with the nation of Israel in friendship and military support, we are on God's side. That's why, today, I stand with Israel.

Give Thanks

2012-11-16T14:27:00.003-08:00

Every Thanksgiving for as many years as I can remember, my mother had a tradition at Thanksgiving dinner. After my father prayed over the food, my mother asked each of us to name one thing that had happened in the last year that we were thankful for. As I got older, knowing that I would have to state what I was grateful for, I started thinking about the year a couple of weeks in advance of the holiday, and I found that even in difficult years, I had a lot to be thankful for. My mother's tradition, which she continues to this day, has helped me to really think about the meaning of Thanksgiving each year.

For many of us, 2012 has been an exceptionally tough year ending in an extraordinarily disappointing election. We have seen so many negative changes and so much bad news, while being painfully aware that that we are weeks away from another onslaught of bad news in the form of massive new regulations, that those of us who work in real estate and mortgage lending might feel stumped at my mother's dinner table next week. So in the spirit of Thanksgiving week, I have compiled a list of 4 things that all of us in our industry can give thanks for on November 22.

1. We still have low interest rates (for now at least). For all of the problems we have had with rule changes, underwriting changes and guideline changes, 2012 has seen record low interest rates. When I started in this industry in 1998, I would have never believed it possible that I would be financing people at fixed interest rates in the 2's. I realize that this is mixed blessing at best--a short term boon with long-term inflationary implications--but in the spirit of Thanksgiving I choose to focus on the bright side of the situation. Those low interest rates have allowed those of us in lending to weather tough times and perform a real service for borrowers who now have fixed rates lower than we ever imagined.

2. We are seeing lower housing prices (a trend which is likely to continue into 2013.) Yes, I know that this is also a mixed blessing at best, but think about it. With underwriting standards so tight, many borrowers could not qualify at all if housing prices had not dropped. Lower prices mean that many home buyers who had been priced out of an accelerating market can actually afford a home (provided that they can navigate the minefield of strict guidelines waiting for them.)

3. We still have access to great programs (for now at least). We have seen a huge number of products go away, but there are still some great loan programs that allow borrowers to qualify for financing. Programs like Fannie Mae's Home Path give borrowers an opportunity to buy a home with conventional financing, a reduced down payment and no mortgage insurance. I just finished quoting a loan on the Home Path investment program with 10% down and no mortgage insurance and a 3.875% fixed rate for 15 years. Although we mourn the loss of some of our past programs, great financing still exists for qualified buyers.

4. We are still alive, and we are not alone! "Don't worry about things--food, drink and clothes. For you already have life and a body--and they are more important than what to eat and what to wear. Look at the birds! They don't worry about what to eat--they don't need to sow or reap or store up food--for your heavenly Father feeds them...And why worry about your clothes? Look at the field lilies! They don't worry about theirs. Yet King Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as beautifully as they. And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and gone tomorrow, won't He more surely care for you....So don't be anxious about tomorrow. God will take care of your tomorrow too. Live one day at a time." (Matthew 6: 25-34 TLB)

Now that's something we can be thankful for every day! Happy Thanksgiving.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

For God and Country

2012-11-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is November 6th--a day many of us have been awaiting for several years. I work in a heavily liberal Democrat district of the United States. El Paso County, Texas voted for George W. Bush when he ran for his second term as governor, but Bush did not carry the county during his two presidential runs, although he easily carried the rest of the state. In fact, I cannot remember El Paso County voting for a Republican candidate for president at any time during the past twenty-four years that I have been voting in presidential elections. But even here, in this stronghold of liberalism, Romney-Ryan signs are appearing throughout the area. I am also seeing a number of professionally made signs saying some variation of "This is my business; I did build it," coupled with or without Romney Ryan signs. Yesterday on my way to church I noticed a new banner sign posted at a business that read in part, "I built this business without any help from the government." That sentence was followed by a crass, unprintable suggestion to President Obama. The tone of the banners and the whispered conversations of my clients who reluctantly tell me that they are not going to vote for Obama indicate to me that there is a huge amount of anxiety, concern and discontentment in the business community and in our society at large.

During the month of October, I wrote a series of posts on various reasons why I am voting FOR Mitt Romney tomorrow and not just Against Barack Obama. I am completely opposed to Obama's policies--not just in terms of the anti-business practices that he is using to crush the small business community, or the anti-Israel foreign policy that threatens our most important ally in the Middle East. I am opposed to this "remaking" of America that Obama is determined to impose on all of us. I stand against this idea that we need to be a socialist nanny state that has no room for God or freedom but plenty of room for an ever-expanding bureaucracy of government that should tell us where to live, what to eat, what to drink, where to work, what we can earn and what we should think.

Last week, President Obama told his supporters that the best revenge is voting. Revenge for what? Revenge against whom? Why does one group of citizens need to plan revenge against another group who disagrees with them politically? The revenge comments ties in nicely to comments made by White House advisor Valerie Jarrett last week that when the election is over it will be "payback" time for everyone who has opposed this Administration politically. Of all of the un-American rhetoric that has eminated from the Obama camp over the past four years, these final threats against political opposition have to be a first from our political leaders. The whole idea of voting for revenge is repugnant; it is the language of an angry, vengeful Administration that has nothing new to offer us and has therefore resorted to bullying and threatening the citizenry.

I will not vote for revenge tomorrow; I do not want revenge. I want to see freedom expanded, I want to see harmful, abusive regulations turned back, I want to see jobs added, I want to see greater opportunities made available for all Americans. I want to see the ranks of those on government assistance shrinking as those people who are currently receiving government assistance experience the self-respect that comes only from self-reliance. I want to see our Bill of Rights defended for all Americans. I want to see freedom of religion defended so that no one is forced by the government to violate his or her conscience. I cling to God and guns and Freedom, but I do not do so bitterly as President Obama once derisively commented. Rather, I cling hopefully to the values and freedoms that founded and built the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth. Tomorrow I am voting for the Constitution and the rule of law--for the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. That's why tomorrow, I am voting for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and I am praying that across this country tens of millions of other Americans will do the same. Tomorrow is our decision day; it is our chance to take a stand for God and country.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree At Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Do You Want to See Something Really Scary?

2012-10-31T12:14:00.001-07:00

Do you remember Twilight Zone--The Movie? I did not see it--my mother was extremely strict and never allowed us to watch horror movies or even light comedy containing anything that smacked of the occult. But I remember my father coming back from a trip and telling us that he had been driving with his nephew on a dark, wood-lined road when his nephew told about the scene from Twilight Zone where a set of characters are in a car at night trying to scare each other. Finally, one of them says to the driver of the car, "Do you want to see something really scary?" When his friend agrees, he turns his face away, and when he turns back he has become a monster who kills the young man who is driving.

If Hollywood were making that movie today, rather than having the actor turn into a monster, the director could just show him the dismal state of the economy and a list of the executive orders, taxes and new rules waiting for Americans in 2013. When he saw what is looming in front of us, he would die of a massive fear-induced heart attack.

Let's start with the executive orders issued by the Obama Administration. President Obama has repeatedly complained that our current system which requires that laws be passed by Congress is just too difficult to navigate, so he prefers to run the country by executive order. Below is a short list of some of the major executive orders which he has signed while President:

UPDATE NOVEMBER 1, 2012: Yesterday when I initally posted this, I took the executive order list from a popular email that is circulating. A reader commented that in reality many of these executive orders date back to the Kennedy Administration, although they are still in force and could be used by the president. However, I strive to always be accurate, so I have corrected my list today to include only executive orders signed by the President this year. Each of these is recorded in the Federal Registry:

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13602 signed March 15, 2012, creates the White House Council for Strong Cities and Communities to implement locally-driven community and regional planning approaches. Think Federally-driven implementation of Agenda 21 goals for Smart Growth and Sustainable living.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13603 signed March 16, 2012, gives the federal government via various federal agencies control over all food, agriculture, livestock, farm equipment, all energy, all modes of transportation, all waterways, and all other resources including construction, in case of a national emergency and allows the secretaries of various departments to prioritize and allocate resources in both emergency and non emergency situations.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13618 signed July 6, 2012, gives the federal government power over all modes of communication in a national emergency.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13624 signed August 30, 2012, call for increased investment in industrial energy efficiency, allowing federal agencies to set and enforce new standards for manufacturing energy use.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13625, signed August 31, 2012, calls for the Federal Government to do a more thorough job assessing the mental health and possible mental instability of our troops and requires that federal agencies enroll 100,000 troops in a comprehensive mental health study no later than December 31, 2012.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 13626 signed September 10, 2012, designates the Administrator of EPA and the Secretary of Agriculture as additional trustees for Natural Resource Damage Assessment and restoration solely in connection with injury to, destruction of, loss of, or loss of use of natural resources, including their supporting ecosystems, resulting from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. This order will give the EPA power over the areas affected by the Gulf Coast Spill of 2010 (effectively guaranteeing that they will never have any industry or drilling in these areas again.)

FURTHER UPDATE NOV 1. (This morning Janet Napolitano announced that since Congress has failed to act with a CyberSecurity bill sufficient to meet the needs of the nation, immediately after election day the President will be issuing an executive order restricting the internet.)

In addition to the executive orders, we have his signature legislative efforts which did pass through Congress--Obamacare and Dodd Frank. Obamacare imposes taxes and restrictions on freedoms of Americans which we will just begin to experience in January of 2013, such as the new 3.8% tax on the sale of houses. The taxes, fees and fines of Obamacare threaten individual access to healthcare and the very existence of small businesses nationwide. And Dodd Frank, one of the scariest pieces of legislation ever passed, is about to produce crippling new regulations that will put homeownership out of the reach of average Americans.

We can expect greater and greater central management of our lives from Washington D.C. as the President forces us out of single family suburban housing and into tiny cramped quarters in the cities as part of "sustainable living." And we can expect massive new powers bestowed on the EPA which will destroy the coal industry and cripple energy production while causing prices to skyrocket. These new regulations are ready to be implemented but have been specifically delayed until after the election.

We can also look forward to 2 trillion dollars in tax increases to pay for massive spending and more nationalization of industry as the President campaigns by telling us that he wants to do the same thing for every industry that he did for the auto industry. (Meaning, I suppose that he wants to take over all businesses and then sell them to foreign entities as he did Chrysler.)

We can expect greater inflation as fuel prices continue to increase, and we can anticipate even higher unemployment so that the ranks of the 23 million already unemployed will swell as more and more businesses shut their doors under the weight of heavy taxes and regulations. The ranks of the 47 million people on food stamps will also swell, while the number of seniors will begin to shrink as the government rations health care.

And let's don't forget about implementation of the indefinite detention provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. In September, the Obama Administration was able to get a three-judge panel to overturn the stay previously issued to prevent detention without trial or charges for Americans accused by the government of being threats to national security. In a second term, we can look for the president to begin to use these broad powers against those he deems "domestic terrorists."

Anyone of the above list could be the subject of its own horror movie. Taken together, there is nothing I can imagine that is scarier than an Obama second term.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Why, as a Small Business Owner, I Am Voting FOR Mitt Romney, and Not Just Against Barack Obama

2012-10-25T16:21:00.001-07:00

During the month of October, I have been doing a series on the reasons why I am voting FOR Romney and not just against the current president. The first two installments of this series dealt with why, as an evangelical Christian, I am supporting Mitt Romney. Last week, I wrote about my reasons as a freedom-loving American for voting for Romney. Today, I want to list some of the reasons why, as a small business owner, I am voting FOR Mitt Romney and not just against Barack Obama.

I have been self-employed for 14 and a half years. In 1998, when I was 27 years old, I cashed in an IRA with a little over $10,000 and opened a mortgage broker company in El Paso, Texas. My father had been working for another mortgage broker company in town, and he wanted to come into the company too, so we became partners. All we had to work with was the money in the IRA, so every penny had to count. I found two offices that we could sublease, fully furnished, for $245.00 a month to include utilities. We could not afford a computer, but the sublease did include a used portable Brother typewriter which we used heavily. My father and I split the cost of a multi-purpose fax/copy machine. We filed our incorporation papers as an S corporation in the state of Texas and we were in business. We didn't have a copier, but we had our fax machine for single paper jobs, and I drove to Kinkos several times a week to make copies of the loan packages we were sending out for approval. We did not have a refrigerator, but I brought our lunch and soft drinks to work each day in a Styrofoam cooler.

In 1998, the Texas home equity law had just been passed, and the overall housing market was pretty healthy, but competition was stiff. We had to prove ourselves to earn every deal. We did not have any money for advertising but I knew that through hard work and diligence we could prove ourselves and build a business, and although for the first year and a half we barely made enough to survive, within less than two years we were making enough to lease our own office suite and a copier and to purchase an office-size fridge. Within five years we were able to purchase our own building. By 2006, half of my family was employed by the company I had started with $10,000.

Owning a business is one of the most work-intensive, grueling journeys that any person can undertake. In good times, competition is fierce. In bad times, there is barely enough money to pay the bills. In all times, a successful small business owner can expect to work long days, week in and week out. For most of the 14 and a half years that we have had our mortgage company, my normal workday was 10 hours Monday through Friday, and I came to work many Saturdays and Sundays. Our business is one in which there are strict deadlines--especially since we did primarily purchase transactions in which borrowers had contracts with deadlines that had to be met. Any additional work that I did in the community, such as the service on boards of various organizations, had to be done outside of those hours. The borrowers had to be taken care of and their transactions had to be closed in a timely professional manner because our service was the primary commodity that we sold.

Anyone who thinks that all small business owners are rich has never owned a small business. I am now 42 years old. I have never owned an expensive car--my last three cars have been Honda Accords. I have never taken a nice vacation. The last time I took a week off was in 1998 when my youngest brothers graduated from BYU and I took a week to go be with them in Utah. Little did I know that I would never be able to have that much time off work again. Over the past four years, as the economy has continued to crash and mortgage guidelines have tightened until qualifying is nearly impossible, I have seen my income shrink dramatically but my hours in the office have not decreased commensurately. Our industry has been buried under a tsunami of regulations, paperwork and federal licensure requirements so expensive that I could no longer afford to keep a New Mexico license as well as a Texas license. I have looked around several times over the last few years with the idea of changing industries because the mortgage industry is such a mess, but everywhere I go I find other small business owners who are being buried under their own sea of regulations and paperwork, or whose businesses are strangling because of the overall poor health of the economy at large.

Small business owners are truly the engine that moves the economy. We are productive because we have to be. We don't get an "A" for effort or extra credit just for showing up. We earn our own paychecks with our direct efforts every day or else we shut down. Our reward for long hours of toil is that we get to come back and do it again tomorrow--we have made enough money to cover our office expenses and keep our homes out of foreclosure.

When I opened my business, I knew that it would be a lot of work, although honestly I was unprepared for the extent of the work and also for the fact that it would never get easier--I naively believed that sacrifices made in my twenties would be made up for with a life of greater comfort later. But I believed that opening and growing a business would provide security for the future. My father was fired from his job when I was a teenager, and the horrible financial problems that our family faced redefined many aspects of our lives from that time forward. As a small business owner, I believed that I was building something unique from which nobody could "fire" me. I might have individual disagreeable customers who did not like me and who did not come back, but I reasoned that if I worked hard and provided good service, I could build a strong business of repeat customers. I was not intimidated by my competition because I knew that I could compete and carve out a place for myself in this industry and that as long as I maintained a good reputation, I would be able to work. In that I was correct.

What I did not factor in was the runaway government regulations from newly created agencies full of overpaid, bloated bureaucrats that could destroy my industry and regulate me into oblivion and that no amount of hard work, or good service, or good will in the community would make even the slightest difference. And unfortunately, that is exactly what I have seen happen. This past January, when President Obama illegally appointed Richard Cordray--a recess appointment while the Senate was not in recess--as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he activated all of the massive powers of the CFPB, including the power to finalize new mortgage regulations and forms. So I sit here today, typing this post and wondering why I invested so many years in building a business that the government could wipe out with a few computer strokes and a 2000 page + piece of legislation called the Dodd Frank bill.

For that reason, I am dedicating today's post to 4 specific reasons that I am voting for Mitt Romney on November 6th. I am listing them in no particular order. Any one of these reasons would individually be enough for Gov. Romney to secure my vote; taken together they are very motivating for me:

1. Mitt Romney has promised to fire Ben Bernanke. I met Ben Bernanke last year when he was in El Paso to meet the troops at Fort Bliss. As the 2011 Chairwoman of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce I was invited to attend a luncheon round table of small business owners, and I sat next to Chairman Bernanke for about two hours at Carlos and Mickey's Restaurant. As the small business owners complained that they could not get credit from banks because of new regulations, Bernanke responded smugly that any small business owner being denied credit because of new banking regulations should question the banks further since new regulations do not impede small businesses from getting credit. (Sure they don't.) For more on this see Lunch with Ben Bernanke Part I.

Bernanke's Federal Reserve has been the author of regulations which have specifically and purposely destroyed the mortgage industry--discriminating against small business owners and in favor of Wall Street Banks as "legitimate" loan originators, so I am not a fan. But while his mandates have hurt me, his quantitative easing policies are damaging the entire country. Right now, as a result of QE3, mortgage interest rates are in the 2.75% range for 15 year fixed mortgages while 30 year mortgages are in the low 3's. Bernanke claims that quantitative easing does not cost taxpayers any money whatsoever--the Federal Reserve buys Treasury bonds and will resell them when the economy improves. But in fact, he is hurting taxpayers, because he is buying Treasury bonds from the U.S. Treasury--the taxpayers--at a volume designed to force the interest rates down artificially low, which in turn causes mortgage rates to drop to artificially low levels so that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--also owned by the taxpayers--can make thirty year mortgage loans at 3% interest rates. Fannie and Freddie (the taxpayers) will be servicing these loans long after interest rates have risen back to normal levels. Does that sound like a good monetary policy to you?

The Obama Administration would argue that this stimulates the housing market and helps homeowners but I strongly disagree. In El Paso, where mortgage values never saw the rapid appreciation of other parts of the country and therefore also did not see the degree of depreciation that other areas have experienced, property values continue dropping. Every home I have had appraised this summer, with one exception, has appraised for less than expected. Those homes being appraised now which were appraised last summer are appraising lower than they appraised in 2011--not exactly a banner year for real estate. And in my conversations with underwriters from Texas--a state not nearly as hard hit as many others--I have determined that property values are dropping around the state. So quantitative easing is not shoring up property values.

It is also not helping the average homeowner. The people who are refinancing into these historically low interest rates are certainly happy to get the loans, but they don't NEED the loans. In order to get a refinance with one of these incredibly low rates, borrowers have to have plenty of documentable income, good credit, good assets and equity in their homes. Borrowers who fit that description already have low interest rates--they are just getting a LOWER interest rate. Borrowers who are struggling because they are out of work or they can't make their payments must take their chances with a loan modification which they may or may not get. The legitimate need of many borrowers who really do need help because they are in mortgages they cannot pay due to job loss or reduction of income has given rise to a plethora of frauds and scams as unscrupulous con artists have taken the last savings from those who are desperate in exchange for help that is not coming. And then there are the millions of homeowners who are not desperate--they have not missed any payments and they are not going into foreclosure--but refinancing to a lower payment would make their lives easier. Most of them don't qualify under the stringent new requirements.

While the low interest rates do not impact everyone, the inflation that quantitative easing produces does affect all of us. From rising food costs, to rising prices of commodities, to rising gas prices, we all feel the effects of inflation. Those same families who don't experience the benefits of the low interest rates notice that they have much less money every month due to rising prices. Bernanke and his monetary policies need to go.

2. Mitt Romney will repeal Dodd Frank. Dodd Frank was sold to the American people as a populist effort to reign in Wall Street and the big banks, but Governor Romney was exactly correct when he said that Dodd Frank was the biggest "kiss" the Wall Street Banks had ever received. In reality, Dodd Frank discriminates against small businesses and community banks in favor of the Wall Street Banks. I personally bank at a local bank--as a result of Dodd Frank they closed their mortgage department last year because they cannot comply with the onerous new regulations. From new forms that change disclosure of costs to make bank loans artificially appear less expensive than broker loans, to new forms and procedures required only of brokers, each part of Dodd Frank dealing with mortgages is written to favor the Wall Street banks at the direct expense of smaller competitors. And the regulations and paperwork that we have seen until now are just the beginning--after the election the qualified mortgages are about to be unveiled which will effectively regulate average American families out of homeownership and which will make it impossible for small mortgage businesses to remain operational. Like so much of what we have seen from the Obama Administration, Dodd Frank does the exact opposite of what it purports to do--it concentrates wealth and power into the hands of an elite few while stripping everyone else of their opportunity to work and compete in the mortgage industry.

3. Mitt Romney will repeal Obamacare. I am particularly infuriated when I hear liberals smugly talk about companies with no health insurance as moochers. In 1995 my mother was in a horrible accident where she was run over by the family van. Because of the severe financial problems, she had no health insurance and, other than the surgery to repair the extensive damage done which included multiple broken bones, she had virtually no health care. When we started our business, I knew that eventually I wanted us to have a good health insurance policy. I had to wait until we were making enough money to pay the premiums, but after we got established our company set up a small business policy with Aetna which provided excellent coverage for everyone employed here. The business paid 100% of the premiums. A couple of years ago, we had to let the insurance go because we could no longer afford the premiums, and so now I am uninsured again--not because I don't value health insurance, but because the economic polices of this Administration have made it impossible for me to afford it. I cannot afford to pay fines in lieu of insurance to a government that is increasingly taking every additional dollar for taxes while regulating more and more strictly how much I am allowed to earn. If Gov. Romney wins this election and gets the economy moving, I will be glad to go out and purchase health insurance again, but when I buy it and what I purchase should be my decision and mine alone.

4. Last but certainly not least--Mitt Romney understands that small businesses matter. He said correctly that the policies of the last decade have heavily favored Wall Street corporations over small businesses. I cannot speak for every industry, but I can certainly affirm that this has been true for my industry. The fact that he understands this and recognizes that those of us who have small businesses are not going to work the hours we work and make the sacrifices we make only to be buried under regulations and see every extra penny consumed by taxes tells me that he has a proper perspective on the role of business and business owners.

On November 6th, I am going to go to the small, rural polling area where I have voted in every election since I was eighteen and I am going to cast my ballot for Mitt Romney and a straight GOP ticket. The outcome of this election will determine what my job title is in January of 2013.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

The Freedom Prayer

2012-10-19T13:06:00.001-07:00

A reminder to pray for our nation:

“Lord we come to You tonight to ask for Your forgiveness. The Bible promises that when we seek You, we will find You, if we search with all our hearts.

"Lord we confess that we have not followed Your commands. We have not loved You with our whole hearts--we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not stood for the truth of Your Gospel. We have sat by and said nothing when Your name was blasphemed and mocked. We did not take a stand when we saw Your laws despised.

“We know that many times we ourselves have been among the worst offenders. We have lived sinful lives that are contrary to the word of God. Like Esau, we have traded away our birthright for a little convenience; we have despised this incredible gift of freedom that You provided for us and allowed all of the liberty that our country offered to be trampled down. We have forgotten the words of King David who said that it is better to fall into the hands of God than to be at the mercy of men, and so we now find ourselves living under the rule of a cruel and despotic government who has stolen everything from us and shows us no mercy.

“We know that everything that is happening to us is a result of our bad choices, both individually and as a nation. You gave us the gift of being born into a free nation—the greatest nation the world has ever seen. You gave us a form of government unlike any other that had ever been known by any other people, and we did not value it enough to defend it.

“For all of these things, Lord, we ask Your forgiveness. We pray tonight that You will change our hearts so that each of us will begin to love what You love, to hate what You hate and to want what You want. We ask You to save our nation, for we know that the Bible teaches that salvation belongs to our God—no political party, no ideology, no government can save us. If we don’t find salvation in You, we won’t find it at all.

“Please turn Your face to us again, and give us back our freedom, and restore our country so that we can truly be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We ask all these things in the name of Your son, Jesus. Amen.”

Excerpted from The Planner.

Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

"'For I know the intentions of my plans for you,' said the Lord, "thoughts of peace and not of evil, so that I may bring you hope in the end. And when you call on me and (kneel down and pray) before me, And as you love me with all your heart, you shall find me,' said the Lord." Jeremiah 29: 11-13 as translated from the original by Victor Alexander.