by Flint Whitlock, The Beasts of Buchenwald, pg. 15.

“It mattered not to a great many people that this man, Adolf Hitler, had a funny, postage-stamp moustache and a raspy voice and had failed at his dream of becoming an artist or an architect and had been a homeless beggar on the streets of Vienna before the war and wasn’t even a native-born German. What mattered was the mesmerizing, hypnotic spell his speeches cast on those listening to him. What mattered was the way his talks always began slowly and quietly and haltingly, so that everyone had to strain to hear his words, then built to a thundering crescendo, much like an opera by his favorite composer, Richard Wagner. What mattered was the fire in his messianic eyes as he told his audience what they wanted to hear—that it had been the Jews and the communists working secretly behind the scenes that had undermined the German Army and had brought about the catastrophic defeat. What mattered was his message that he and his Nazi Party were the only ones who could reverse the nation’s descent into certain chaos and irrelevancy. What mattered was that he and he alone could stop the contamination of “impure” races that threatened to weaken the pure, Germanic, “Aryan” race. What mattered was that Hitler and his steadfast vision and his unshakeable will promised to restore Germany to its former greatness. What mattered was that Hitler saw the Germanic people as a species of super humans, destined to rule the world.

Hearing what they were fervently desperate to believe, millions of otherwise sensible Germans decided to join the Nazi Party, slip on the swastika armband or pin on the Nazi Party lapel pin, yell Sieg Heil! (”Hail Victory!”) at the inspirational mass Party rallies, give each other the stiff-armed fascist salute, and blindly follow their Fuhrer, no matter where he led.

So it came to pass that in 1932, through a series of bizarre, almost comic-opera occurrences, and the naive belief by those in power who thought they could control the upstart Austrian radical by bringing him into the government, Hitler proved more cunning than any of his foes. His Nazi Party quickly became a force to be reckoned with in Parliament and Hitler himself was named Chancellor of Germany.

Of course, not all Germans held the fervent belief that Hitler was Germany’s savior. Not every German thought that nazism was good for the country, nor that the Jews should be excluded from German society, nor that government control of almost every aspect of civilian life was a worthy goal.

For these people—these non-believers—Hitler and his minions had a special place.

It was called the Konzentrationslager—the concentration camp.”

Curing illegal immigration is a sequence.  Here’s my plan:

1. Eliminate incentives. These two laws attract illegals from all over the world.

   • Congress must disallow anchor baby citizenship under the 14th Am.

   • Congress must repeal the unfunded health care mandate of EMTALA which requires all hospitals receiving federal funds to treat and stabilize without regard to ability to pay.

2. Improve border security by all means appropriate for each geographical area.

3. Empty prisons of all illegals — who comprise 20% of current populations. Send them back.

4. End all affirmative action and tuition entitlements.

5. Eliminate non-english language official publications from all government functions.

6. After all the above, illegals who remain on a level playing field with Americans should be granted a path to citizenship or the option to leave.

7. After a reasonable time frame when all the above is complete, strictly enforce citizenship credentials in the work place.

In the context of this election season with Republicans engaged in presidential policy debates each week, “Capitol Punishment” should be read right now by every American interested in curing the abuses in Washington.

Jack Abramoff’s prescription for real reform in Washington:

• Entirely eliminate any contribution by those lobbying the government, participating in a federal contract, or otherwise financially benefiting from public funds. If you get money or perks from elected officials—be “you” a company, a union, an association, a law firm, or an individual–you shouldn’t be permitted to give them so much as one dollar
• If you are going to lobby the federal government, take from the treasury, or work as a contractor, you shouldn’t be permitted to give one penny to any elected official or staff, including the executive branch.
• If you choose to serve in Congress or on a congressional staff, you should be barred for life from working for any company, organization, or association which lobbies the federal government.
• Representatives should be allowed to serve for three terms of two years, senators for two terms of six years. Then they should get out of town.
• Representatives should be barred from proposing, lobbying for, and perhaps even voting on projects in their own districts and states.
• Apply every federal law enacted by Congress to Congress itself.
• Repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution and restore the election of senators to the state houses.
• Permanently stop the special interests and lobbyists who control much of our federal government and budget—and who exacerbate, if not cause, the crises which threaten to bring down this great Republic—by returning the federal government to its constitutionally limited boundaries.

If a recovered alcoholic told you how to quit drinking, you’d listen.

By James Lewis

The Only Good Occupation…

• Is getting a job. So you won’t have to leech off Mom and Dad anymore.

• Is taking responsibility for your own neurotic hangups, and not blaming your gnawing feelings of inferiority on the most miraculous, creative, and popular economic system in the world — including the parts of China, India, and Russia that actually work.
• Is learning about capitalism, before revealing your fathomless ignorance to the world. And no, Das Kapital is not about capitalism. It’s about the personal alienation and greed of an angry kid who grew up in Prussia almost two hundred years ago, and who thirsted to make the whole world like the Prussian Empire, complete with millions of marching robots. (See North Korea today).
• Is not getting manipulated by a sinister cabal of billionaire lefties who want to buy political power for themselves, and thinking that you’re doing something noble, idealistic, and unselfish. You’re not. You’re just flattering your own neurotic egomania, the personality disorder that kept getting you in trouble with your family, your friends, and your impersonal sex partners.
• Is growing up.
• Is respecting other human beings, who know a lot more about living than you, in your arrogance, think you do.
• Is understanding that the Nazi Occupation of Europe, the Chinese Occupation of Tibet, the Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe, and the Radical Occupation of American Universities are all the same, evil, and deeply selfish thing. They always lead to tyrannies and dictatorships, and they always, always end in killing people by the hundreds of thousands. Or more.
• Is to get that Communism has been more humanly destructive than Hitler, because Hitler lasted only 13 years before he shot himself in that bunker. Communist regimes lasted 70 years in the Soviet Empire, and killed 100 million people in that time, while making everybody else poor, miserable, and brainwashed.
• Is to realize when you’ve been cultified and suckered, but good, by Crony Capitalists who have convinced you and a million other dead-heads to believe that you are going to bring peace, love, and proper obedience to the whole wide world. They are making out like bandits for themselves, and you’re just the junior storm troopers.
• Is to get that:
  • the leftie media are owned by Giant Corporations, you moron.
  • That the mind set of Occupy is identical to the mind-set of the Hitler Youth, of Mao’s Red Guards who killed 40 million of their fellow Chinese, and of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who killed three million innocent Cambodians — while your kind did nothing but cover up those murders.
  • That Islamic mobs are just another version of your kind.
  • That the American people are learning from your Rich Kids’ Revolution what you really are.
  • That capitalism is the engine of prosperity, technology, real science, and real progress.
  • Is to get it straight through your thick skull that we’ve seen your kind before — we fought three major wars against your kind in the last 100 years — and that the West, as decadent as it is, will gather itself together and win.
  • That normal people will win in the end, because capitalism, individualism, personal creativity, and electoral democracy are more powerful than a gaggle of power-hungry freaks.

So look, kids. There are all kinds of useful Occupations. But first one is to get a job and stop bothering productive people who are paying to keep your sorry hide in food, clothing, shelter, and police protection.

Lotsa luck, kids.

Don’t forget to grow up.

We were downtown last night, taking our son to visit with the USC Marching Band who are in town for the CU game this evening.  As it turned out we spent an hour in a small v.i.p. setting with Dr. Bartner, his wife, and a dozen or so leaders of the USC program, who gave us a presentation of the amazing history of the USC band and Dr. Bartner’s career, with the experience capped by hearing some warm up routines with a contingent of senior players brought here for the game.  All in all, a superlative experience we had not expected - we looked through a window into a truly amazing world that any kid would give his eye teeth to join.

So, it was a rare occasion for us downtown and coincidently the occupation is the subject of probably half of the broadcast TV news and talk radio shows.  Michael Moore was in town today to pump up the faithful, and we decided to cruise Broadway in front of the capitol on our way home to see what all the fuss is about.

We saw thirty or forty people huddled around each other on the sidewalk directly across the street from the capitol, and about a half a block of various sized piles of messy human belongings, and a fair amount of trash.  It looked like a refugee camp, very sad, even pathetic.  The righteous democratic outpouring we’re bombarded with by the media is rooted in a fiction, a delusion of grandeur.

The tea party had significant numbers in the streets across the country and in Washington and the media all but ignored them.  This scamming bunch of several dozen pathological malcontents is getting enough media coverage to make it look like the second coming.  Go see for yourself.  As Gertrude Stein once wrote about Oakland, “there is no there there.”

Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending.  Federal Register April 15, 1994.

Smoking-Gun Document Ties Policy To Housing Crisis

By PAUL SPERRY, FOR INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 10/31/2011 08:05 AM ET

View Enlarged Image

President Obama says the Occupy Wall Street protests show a “broad-based frustration” among Americans with the financial sector, which continues to kick against regulatory reforms three years after the financial crisis.

“You’re seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place,” he complained earlier this month.

But what if government encouraged, even invented, those “abusive practices”?

Rewind to 1994. That year, the federal government declared war on an enemy — the racist lender — who officials claimed was to blame for differences in homeownership rate, and launched what would prove the costliest social crusade in U.S. history.

At President Clinton’s direction, no fewer than 10 federal agencies issued a chilling ultimatum to banks and mortgage lenders to ease credit for lower-income minorities or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related adverse publicity. They also were threatened with denial of access to the all-important secondary mortgage market and stiff fines, along with other penalties.

Bubble? Regulators Blew It

The threat was codified in a 20-page “Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending” and entered into the Federal Register on April 15, 1994, by the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending. Clinton set up the little-known body to coordinate an unprecedented crackdown on alleged bank redlining.

The edict — completely overlooked by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the mainstream media — was signed by then-HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, Attorney General Janet Reno, Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, along with the heads of six other financial regulatory agencies.

“The agencies will not tolerate lending discrimination in any form,” the document warned financial institutions.

Ludwig at the time stated the ruling would be used by the agen cies as a fair-lending enforcement “tool,” and would apply to “all lenders” — including banks and thrifts, credit unions, mortgage brokers and finance companies.

The unusual full-court press was predicated on a Boston Fed study showing mortgage lenders rejecting blacks and Hispanics in greater proportion than whites. The author of the 1992 study, hired by the Clinton White House, claimed it was racial “discrimination.” But it was simply good underwriting.

It took private analysts, as well as at least one FDIC economist, little time to determine the Boston Fed study was terminally flawed. In addition to finding embarrassing mistakes in the data, they concluded that more relevant measures of a borrower’s credit history — such as past delinquencies and whether the borrower met lenders credit standards — explained the gap in lending between whites and blacks, who on average had poorer credit and higher defaults.

The study did not take into account a host of other relevant data factoring into denials, including applicants’ net worth, debt burden and employment record. Other variables, such as the size of down payments and the amount of the loans sought to the value of the property being bought, also were left out of the analysis. It also failed to consider whether the borrower submitted information that could not be verified, the presence of a cosigner and even the loan amount.

When these missing data were factored in, it became clear that the rejection rates were based on legitimate business decisions, not racism.

Still, the study was used to support a wholesale abandonment of traditional underwriting standards — the root cause of the mortgage crisis.

For the first time, Washington’s bank regulators put racial lending at the top of their checklist. Banks that failed to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities were denied expansion plans by the Fed in an era of frenzied financial mergers and acquisitions. HUD threatened to deny them access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which it controlled. And the Justice Department sued them for lending discrimination and branded them as racists in the press.

“HUD is authorized to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to undertake various remedial actions, including suspension, probation, reprimand or settlement, against lenders found to have engaged in discriminatory lending practices,” the official policy statement warned.

The regulatory missive, which had the effect of law, advised lenders to bend “customary” underwriting standards for minority homebuyers with poor credit.

“Applying different lending standards to applicants who are members of a protected class is permissible,” it said. “In addition, providing different treatment to applicants to address past discrimination would be permissible.”

To that end, lenders were directed to “make changes in marketing strategy or loan products to better serve minority segments of the market.” They were also advised to “change commission structures” to encourage brokers and loan officers to “lend in minority and low-income neighborhoods” — a practice Countrywide Financial, the poster boy of the subprime scandal, perfected. The government now condemns the practice it once encouraged as “predatory.”

FDIC warned banks that even unintentional discrimination was against the law, and that they should be proactive in making “multicultural” loans. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” the agency said in a separate advisory.

Confronted with the combined force of 10 federal regulators, lenders naturally toed the line, and were soon aggressively marketing subprime mortgages in urban areas. The marching orders threw such a scare into the industry that the American Bankers Association issued a “fair-lending tool kit” to every member. The Mortgage Bankers Association of America signed a “fair-lending” contract with HUD. So did Countrywide.

HUD also pushed Fannie and Freddie, which in effect set industry underwriting standards, to buy subprime mortgages, freeing lenders to originate even more high-risk loans.

“Lenders should ensure that their loan processors and underwriters are aware of the provisions of the secondary market guidelines that provide various alternative and flexible means by which applicants may demonstrate their ability and willingness to repay their loans,” the policy statement decreed.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not infrequently purchase mortgages exceeding the suggested ratios” of monthly housing expense to income (28%) and total obligations to income (36%).

It warned lenders who rejected minority applicants with high debt ratios and low credit scores to “be prepared” to prove to federal regulators and prosecutors they weren’t racist. “The Department of Justice is authorized to use the full range of its enforcement authority.”

It took a little more than a decade for the negative effects of the assault on prudent lending to be felt. By 2006, the shaky subprime mortgages began to default. In 2008, the bubble exploded.

Clinton’s task force survived the Bush administration, during which it produced fair-lending brochures in Spanish for immigrant home-loan applicants.

And it’s still alive today. Obama is building on the fair-lending infrastructure Clinton put in place.

As IBD first reported in July, Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a witch hunt vs. “racist” banks.

“It’s a more aggressive fair-lending enforcement approach now,” said Washington lawyer Andrew Sandler of Buckley Sandler LLP in a recent interview. “It is well beyond anything we saw during the Clinton administration.”

Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, recently testified that his division “continues to participate in the federal Interagency Fair Lending Task Force.” And he and the task force are working with the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to “enhance fair-lending enforcement.”

The fair-lending task force’s original policy paper undercuts the notion the financial crisis was all about banker “greed,” though it certainly played a role after the fact. Rather, it offers compelling evidence that the crisis evolved chiefly from government mandates and threats to increase lending to applicants who could not afford them.