The Patriot Post Digest 9-19-2016

[nChrist]

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 9-19-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Mid-Day Digest

Sep. 19, 2016

THE FOUNDATION

“It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute.” —James Madison (1816)

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Liberals' Willful Terror Blindness1

On Saturday evening Barack Obama, speaking at a dinner with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, jokingly said, “I don’t know about you guys, but I am so relieved that the whole birther thing is over. I mean, ISIL, North Korea, poverty, climate change, none of those things weighed on my mind like the validity of my birth certificate.” Around the same time as Obama’s remarks a bomb exploded in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, injuring at least 25 people. In New Jersey a pipe bomb exploded at a Marine Corps charity race (fortunately, no one was injured there). And in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a knife-wielding self-proclaimed Islamic radical went on a stabbing spree, wounding eight people before he was shot dead by police.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, evidently fearing negative optics regarding the latest terror bombing, said, “We … want to be upfront saying that there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection to this incident. This is preliminary information. It’s something we will be investigating very carefully, but there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection.” While de Blasio did acknowledge that it was “an intentional act,” his claiming there is no “terror connection” is simply asinine. As the investigation unfolds, Americans will learn who is responsible for these acts of terror — jihadis. But Democrats like Obama and de Blasio seem more concerned about Americans' perception of terrorists than actual Islamists and their hateful violence.

Consider the wise words of George W. Bush from a speech in 2002 to West Point cadets: “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

Leftmedia’s Racial Bias2

According to the Leftmedia, Donald Trump is the modern example of a bigoted racist. Story upon story go after Trump for such things as David Duke’s endorsement, which Trump rejected, or Trump’s call to limit immigration from Islamic countries or his plan to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. But which side is most responsible for injecting racism into the campaign?

On Saturday Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, “There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. It all matters, and after we have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote!” In other words, if you’re black and you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton because Obama supports her, then you are insulting him. This statement is blatantly racist, yet there are no accusations from the media of Obama being a racist.

The New York Times on Monday ran a story with the following headline: “White Voters Keep Trump’s Hopes Alive in Must-Win Florida.” Once again, the media is fixated on maintaining a carefully crafted image that implies racism because a majority of Trump’s supporters are white.

As Dallas police sergeant Demetrick Pennie has recognized with his lawsuit against Black Lives Matter and other prominent liberal black leaders including Barack Obama for inciting violence against law enforcement, it is not Donald Trump who is responsible for inciting racial polarization but liberals with their obsession on viewing all political perspectives through the lens of race.

Why Are Taxpayers on the Hook for Student Loans?3

We recently relayed the story4 of Barack Obama’s efforts to pick winners and losers in the for-profit college market. Obama yanked federal aid from ITT Tech, leading to the entire operation shutting down — leaving 40,000 students and 8,000 teachers out in the cold. Our aim was primarily to note that Obama attacks the private sector at every opportunity, but that isn’t the only angle. The Washington Post reports5, “Former students at ITT Technical Institutes are refusing to repay their federal student loans in a protest designed to pressure the government into canceling the debt of everyone who alleges they were defrauded by the now-defunct for-profit chain.” The Post quoted one 39-year-old graduate with $80,000 in student loans who said, “We’re not irresponsible brats whining about our loans. ITT lied to us. It’s fraud.”

Simply being a for-profit company doesn’t make a business the good guy, and if the accusers are correct, then the college network didn’t deserve to survive. The Post reports that “ITT spent years battling allegations of fraud, deceptive marketing and steering students into predatory loans.” Indeed, by the accounts of many former students, ITT provided a terrible education, handed out a worthless piece of paper, and charged ridiculous rates for it. ITT is hardly alone either. Corinthian Colleges went out of business in 2014 after evidently running a similar scam, and last year Obama agreed to forgive millions in student debt6 for that institution. We warned last week that the government may end up forgiving as much as $500 million in federal student loans to ITT students. ITT has about $90 million on hand to cover loan forgiveness. Who will be stuck with the bill for the remaining $410 million? Got a mirror handy?

Indeed, that’s just it. The larger problem is guaranteed access to federal money for education, which puts taxpayers on the hook. Guaranteed access means every education entity public or private is going to do whatever’s necessary to get a slice of the pie. Nowhere does the Constitution enumerate such a federal power or individual right to the fruits of someone else’s labor. Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt7, of which $1 trillion is held by the federal government. The policy consequences of the federal government’s massive role could be a greater fraud than anything ITT or Corinthian ever dreamed of.

Air Force Birthday8

Relentlessly committed to the defense of liberty, the United States Air Force celebrated its 69th birthday yesterday, Sept. 18.

The Air Force began life as the Army Air Corps but became a separate Armed Services Branch when the Department of the Air Force was created by the National Security Act of 1947. As the U.S. Air Force continues its critical mission “to fly, fight and win … in air, space and cyberspace,” we ask that you pray for these brave Patriots prosecuting “The Long War”9 against Jihadistan10, and for their families awaiting their safe return.

And a brief reminder of an important victory at the Air Force Academy11, where the words “So Help Me God” have now been rightfully restored to the USAFA Cadet Handbook oaths. Keep up the good fight! Finally, don’t miss Mark Alexander’s recounting of his son’s graduation12 from the Air Force Academy in May.

[nChrist]

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 9-19-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

    Peggy Noonan: Travel Back to an Early Clinton Scandal13
    Burt Prelutsky: Karl Marx Was an Idiot14
    Joseph Horton: Born That Way? A False Hypothesis15

For more, visit Right Opinion16.

TOP HEADLINES

    U.S. Made Wire Payments to Iran Before and After Cash Payment17
    Syria Truce Hangs in the Balance18
    The Myth of Chicago’s ‘Lax’ Gun Laws19

For more, visit Patriot Headline Report20.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
Banks and Banksters: Too Big to Fail or Jail?21

By Arnold Ahlert

In 2008, when a combination of government mandates severely compounded by Wall Street greed nearly blew up the world’s financial system, Congress and the Bush administration conjured up the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)22 to save institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Ever since, too big to fail has rendered large financial institutions, and the executives that run them, virtually immune from criminal prosecution. And nothing speaks more forcefully to this reality than the latest scandal perpetrated by Wells Fargo.

Two weeks ago, federal regulators revealed23 the country’s third-largest bank spent the last five years opening 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts without customer permission. A staggering 5,300 employees were involved in the scam that included using a customer’s personal information from a legitimate account to open a bogus one and moving money from one to the other. Workers even created fake email addresses and PIN numbers to facilitate the corruption.

The reason? They were trying to meet sales quotas, even though this practice, known24 as “sandbagging,” resulted in $50 fines for the customer.

Wells Fargo’s punishment? The 5,300 employees were terminated, and the bank paid a $185 million fine levied by officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which boasted that “Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed” since its creation following the financial meltdown.

Yet those officials didn’t mention a despicable reality revealed by The New York Times, which explained25 the deal “was classic Wall Street.” In short, no matter how egregious the activity, many cases are settled “without a bank having to admit doing anything wrong.”

Enter Wells Fargo Chief Executive John Stumpf, who offered26 the standard faux-mea culpa. “Our goal is to get it right with every customer 100% of the time,” he stated. “When we fall short of that goal, I feel accountable and our leadership team feels accountable — and we want all our stakeholders to know that.”

Feeling accountable? Stumpf and his senior management team have suffered no consequences whatsoever for the bank’s malfeasance. And adding insult to injury, Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo executive who ran the phony accounts unit she resigned from the firm in July, received a $124.6 million golden parachute27. At the time, Stumpf referred to Tolstedt as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

Champion sandbagger is more like it.

Moreover, those boastful CFPB officials apparently looked the other way. “Regulators never determined the extent of Tolstedt’s knowledge about the abuse, and she was never named directly in the lawsuits brought over it,” reports24 the New York Daily News. “But she took over the division in 2008, meaning she oversaw it for the entirety of the racket.”

Even worse, this racket was exposed three years ago by Los Angeles Times reporter E. Scott Reckard, who chronicled28 the frenzied level of company-pressured “cross-selling” and the concomitant threats of termination that battered employee morale to the point where it led to ethical breaches. “To meet quotas, employees have opened unneeded accounts for customers, ordered credit cards without customers' permission and forged client signatures on paperwork,” he revealed.

Three years later, Americans are supposed to believe this scam was the sole handiwork of middle management and staffers, “some of whom were being paid as little as $10 an hour,” as the Chicago Sun Times put it29.

Hopefully it won’t fly. Tomorrow, Stumpf is scheduled to appear at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that will focus on Wells Fargo’s sales practices. While he’s there, maybe he’ll be asked to explain how his insistence there was no incentive to perpetrate this fraud squares with a series30 of videos — many of which were posted in 2011 — blasting those sales incentives.

Even more important — maybe — the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas31 to Wells Fargo. Maybe because the DOJ has yet to characterize its involvement as a criminal investigation, without which any subsequent penalties will amount to the aforementioned “classic Wall Street” outcome. And maybe because the DOJ’s track record is utterly dismal in that regard. As Fortune revealed32 in 2013, despite a total of $62.2 billion in fines paid by the nation’s six largest banks over three years, and another $24.7 billion needed to settle pending lawsuits, not a single bank has had to admit any wrongdoing, and not one dollar of these billions in fines has been paid by any bank executive.

It was shareholders who took all the hits.

Why? The title of a report prepared33 by the Republican staff of the House Financial Services Committee and issued on July 11 says it all. “Too Big to Jail” reveals the depredation of British banking giant HSBC, which laundered nearly $900 million for drug traffickers and processed transactions for Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Myanmar/Burma, despite them being subject to U.S. sanctions. HSBC paid a $2 billion fine — and the DOJ granted the bank a “deferred prosecution” arrangement that amounts to a delay, or no prosecution whatsoever, because it promised to change its behavior.

That would be the same HSBC whose clients donated34 $81 million to the Clinton Foundation. The same HSBC that in 2013 appointed35 as a Director of HSBC Holdings … current FBI Director James Comey.

“Back in 2008, the smart people said we had to bail out the banks — because if we didn’t, we’d get an economic catastrophe,” writes New York Post columnist Nicole Gelinas. “Maybe. We know what we did get: generations of voters, liberal and conservative, who are disillusioned with capitalism. They can see that the chief of Wells Fargo gets $19.3 million annually to preside over systemic fraud, while they get blots on their credit reports.”

We also know what we didn’t get: Not a single resignation required in exchange for the $700 billion taxpayer-funded TARP bailout. Thus, it’s not just the banks the ruling class considers too big to fail. The bankers themselves who ran the system into the ground also remain conspicuously immune from anything resembling genuine accountability.

[nChrist]

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Digest 9-19-2016
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

In an appearance on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” Stumpf resisted36 the suggestion he should resign, telling host Jim Cramer the best thing he could do now is provide leadership for his company.

Really? Stumpf became37 chairman of Wells Fargo in 2010. Under his “leadership” between then and now, the bank has paid out38 billions of dollars in fines and lawsuit settlements related to a host of infractions that include fraud, reckless underwriting, improper certification of home loans, and illegal student loan servicing practices.

This nation remains divided over a host of issues. But one suspects an overwhelming majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide are thoroughly disgusted with the reality that there appears to be one set of laws for the ruling class elitists and another set for the rest of us “deplorables.” Few things would restore a sense of justice more effectively than tossing the odious concepts of too big to fail and too big to jail on the ash heap of history.

The alternative? Abiding criminal activity mitigated solely by fines. Fines large financial institutions see as little more than the cost of doing business.

MORE ANALYSIS FROM THE PATRIOT POST

    Trump Plays Media Like a Charlie Daniels Fiddle39 — The issue is whether Obama is proud to be an American.
    Lessons From Venezuela40 — A clear example of why socialism fails to raise people’s standard of living.
    Delay, Defer, Deny41 — DHS delaying its report on illegal immigration seems too politically convenient.
    ‘Show Me’ Constitutional Carry42 — Missouri becomes the eleventh state in a growing trend.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Burt Prelutsky: “Competition is natural to human beings. You see it in ballparks, on school playgrounds, at the Olympics and in the workplace. Humans compete for money, prestige, position, mates, even for prom dates. But Karl Marx, a pinhead who rarely bathed, decided that on his mere say-so, he could reverse thousands of years of human nature. And just in case he couldn’t, he also came up with communism, an inevitable adjunct that supplies a few individuals with the dictatorial power to enforce socialism on the masses. You may have noticed that whenever the eventual failure of socialism is pointed out, be it in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or even in its less despotic forms, as in Greece, Puerto Rico and Italy, its moronic adherents — Bernie Sanders, for example — insist that socialism itself is perfect, but that it hasn’t yet been done properly. All that’s required to make it work the way it’s supposed to is to have the right person at the helm, someone like, well, themselves. The problem is that along with competing for money, awards and those all-important prom dates, there is another, less benign competition that is constantly taking place. That’s the one involving the despotically inclined who seek to be the bully who gets to boss the rest of us around. Some of those over-achievers have included Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, Che Guevara, Kim Jong-un and the Ayatollah Khamenei.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, ‘The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.’”

Upright: “Don’t mistake the sidelines for the moral high ground.” —Mark Steyn

Non Compos Mentis: “[I’m] just grateful that nobody got hurt.” —Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson on this weekend’s terrorism in New York City

For the record: “Mrs. Clinton has been in America’s national life for a quarter-century, and in that time people watched, observed and got an impression of her character. If you give the prompt ‘Clinton scandal’ to someone under 30, they might say ‘emails,’ or ‘Benghazi’ or ‘Clinton Foundation,’ or now ‘health questions.’ But for those who are older, whose memories encompass the Clinton era, the scandals stretch back further, all the way to her beginnings as a national figure. … You have to wonder, what are the chances it will change?” —Peggy Noonan

Belly laugh of the week: “Every time I hear Hillary Clinton, I’m always inspired by her. I’m inspired by her example, because she’s someone who will lead us. … Although she had to be lifted into that van [on 9/11], you know what? She got up, like most of us, she got up and she kept fighting, so that’s the Hillary Clinton that I hope people get to know.” —Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile

Alpha Jackass: “This should not be a close election, but it will be and the reason it will be is not because of Hillary’s flaws, but because, structurally, we’ve become a very polarized society. … We as a society still grapple with what it means to see a powerful woman. And it still troubles us in a lot of ways, unfairly.” —Barack Obama

And last… “Hillary Clinton is featured in the upcoming issue of Women’s Health magazine. While next month she’ll be featured in ‘Bad Timing’ magazine.” —Jimmy Fallon

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.