We all know now that Obama has not merely made “ObamaCare” a giant joke, but has in fact jeopardized the entire American health care system.
What many Americans DON’T know – because we’re so busy looking at the colossal train wreck a.k.a. ObamaCare – is that Obama has similarly destroyed several other sectors of the country and the economy.
Here are two more for your perusal:
#1: Education:
Protests widen against Obama-backed Common Core education reforms
Parents, teachers want local control
By Alex Hopkins – The Washington Times
Sunday, November 17, 2013
A fierce battle in New York is the latest sign that populist resistance to the Obama administration-backed Common Core education reforms shows no signs of slowing — and that the opposition isn’t limited to red states.
Since 2010, 45 states have adopted the Common Core benchmarks for proficiency in English and math for schoolchildren at the end of each grade.
Critics say several states are experiencing buyers’ remorse after complaints from parents and scholars that the reforms are untested and poorly designed and put additional burdens on teachers and students. They also say Common Core represents a federal government intrusion into an area traditionally operated at the state and local levels.
Common Core, backed by $4.35 billion offered to states through President Obama’s 2009 stimulus, appeared to be overcoming opposition when it was implemented.
Now, however, backlash has been gaining force. Blogger Michele Zipp of The Stir last week said Common Core “is kind of turning into the Obamacare of education.”
Common Core opponents have organized a social media campaign to make Monday a “National Don’t Send Your Child to School Day” and have planned protests at local education administration buildings. A Facebook page for protesters had more than 5,500 supporters by Sunday.
Opposition to Common Core has been roiling in recent weeks since New York state Education Commissioner John King conducted a series of meetings that highlighted deep concerns about the reforms.
“We are abusing the children in the state of New York,” Beth Dimino, president of the Port Jefferson Station Parent Teacher Association, said at a forum last week at Ward Melville High School, according to an account on Patch.com.
Lana Ajemian, the head of New York’s Parent Teacher Association, said standards have moved far too quickly for students to keep up. “It’s like the train’s pulling out of the station without everybody on board,” Ms. Ajemian told NBC New York during the public forum on Long Island.
Conservative education scholars have led opposition to Common Core reforms, but the resistance appears to have taken the Obama administration and the education establishment by surprise. The bipartisan National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have led state-by-state adoption of the standards.
“Development of these standards was not driven by the federal government, but by the states,” wrote Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Governors on both sides of the aisle, the business community, and most importantly educators, came together to ensure one thing: that students learn what they need to live a successful life in a 21st century global economy.”
Although adoption of Common Core was voluntary, states that rejected the standards were considered effectively ineligible for federal stimulus funds tied to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.
The four states that have rejected Common Core completely are Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia. Minnesota has accepted the English standards but not the math standards.
But much of the energy in recent months has come from opponents, who include an unusually broad mix of scholars, teachers, parents and state legislators.
In one of the first signs of resistance, the Republican National Committee unexpectedly adopted a resolution opposing Common Core. At its spring meeting, the RNC called Common Core an “inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived ‘normal.’”
Under pressure from parents, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, sent a letter last month informing Education Secretary Arne Duncan that his state was leaving Common Core, citing a “federal intrusion in education policy.”
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, also a Republican, signed the Common Core Pause Bill this year to allow deliberation among state agencies until a consensus could be reached on governmental education.
In a move that sparked sharp debate within the American church, a group of 132 respected Catholic scholars and educators released an open letter last week calling on U.S. bishops to block the Common Core standards from being imposed on the Catholic Church’s extensive network of parochial schools.
“We believe that, notwithstanding the good intentions of those who made these decisions, Common Core was approved too hastily and with inadequate consideration of how it would change the character and curriculum of our nation’s Catholic schools ,” the letter said. “In fact, we are convinced that Common Core is so deeply flawed that it should not be adopted by Catholic schools which have yet to approve it, and that those schools which have already endorsed it should seek an orderly withdrawal now.”
Other states, including Alabama, have mixed feelings about Common Core.
“I am adamantly opposed to Common Core, and I hope the Legislature will do something about it,” state Sen. Scott Beason, Gardendale Republican, said last week. “There are some people who would like to avoid it one way or another. But I believe it’s one of the biggest issues facing the Republican Party, and this is a red state.”
Let me slightly rephrase one paragraph:
Although adoption of Common Core was voluntary, states that rejected the standards were considered effectively ineligible for federal stimulus funds tied to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.
To:
Although adoption of Mafia Protection was voluntary, local businesses that rejected the racket were considered effectively ineligible for mob protection tied to the mafia’s Buy Our Protection Or We’ll Firebomb Your Store initiative.
Buy Obama’s foolheaded education takeover or forfeit – get this – $4.35 BILLION in bribery funds to the states. That’s “voluntary” my butt.
Yep, it’s voluntary. And if you don’t volunteer, you’re fired. Or you get to see the firing squad. Or whatever alternate nasty scenario you can think of.
$4.35 billion is $87 million per state. And since five states had the courage to outright reject the ObamaCare-style education hijack, the remaining states would have been saying “no” to $97 million.
Easier to say no to the mob when they come by offering to “protect” your business from “vandalism” or “fire damage.”
But, of course, once your business (or state) accepts mob “services,” it becomes a mob business by fiat.
Lots and lots of businesses that gave in to the bribery or the extortion of the mob regretted having ever done so in the first place.
A little more about opponents of Common Core and why they oppose it:
The following guest column is by Kelly Kohls. She is president of the Springboro school board and is a member of the Warren County Career Center board. She writes in opposition to the Common Core education standards.
Common Core state standards, as well as the testing called Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, are quickly becoming controversial issues in Ohio and around the country. It is not a right or left issue – both ends of the political spectrum have raised concerns.
Teachers are worried the computerization that accompanies Common Core and PARCC assessments will render them irrelevant at worst or be used to justify less pay if teachers are reduced to “coaches” for online curricula.
Folks on the political right view the assessments as a top-down take over of education by the Obama administration and some now refer to it as Obamacore.
Common Core, and the idea that all states should have a common set of national education standards, is nothing new. Common Core is the new name but it is the continuation of the education reform movement that began in the 1960s and brought us Outcome Based Education in the 1990s and Evidence Based Education in the 2000s.
Next came the implementation. To force acceptance of the standards, President Obama and his education director Arne Duncan, worked with Congress to provide over $4 billion in the form of Race to the Top grants. These grants required adoption of Common Core. [...]
As the role of the federal government in education has grown, our test scores have fallen and our standing in the world has fallen with it. Ohio is moving in the wrong direction and embracing failure. Our kids deserve better.
The “Republican” governor of Ohio is also defending his decision to fully participate in the ObamaCare fiasco while actual REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS WISELY STAYED OUT OF THE HEALTHCARE ABORTION.
Here’s another one:
Parents applauded and cheered wildly when educator Beth Dimino took on New York Education Commissioner Jonathan King at a heated meeting about Common Core. She gave a powerful description of how the new Common Core test regime amounts to “child abuse”:
New York parents and teachers have been in turmoil over the new Common Core school standards, which have resulted in a 30% drop in student test scores state-wide.
A 30% drop in test scores. And do you want to know how liberals react to this fiasco?
This liberal Washington Post title quoting Obama’s Secretary of Educashun ought to tell you:
Arne Duncan: ‘White suburban moms’ upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t ‘brilliant’
You don’t like the fact that your kid is flunking school under ObamaCare? It’s only because you’re a) white – and therefore racist – and b) an arrogant snob who can’t accept reality for her drooling idiot kid.
You want your kid “edyoocayted”? Vote out Obama.
How else has Obama turned the whole nation into the equivalent of “ObamaCare”???
#2) Try to buy a house, or for those of you whom Obama has impoverished out of ever hoping to buy a house, try to do something else you used to be able to do like get a free checking account:
Dodd-Frank: Making it Harder For You to Get a Mortgage
Rachel Alexander | Nov 18, 2013
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, sarcastically known as Dodd-Frankery and Dodd-Frankenstein, was passed into law in response to the financial crisis and recession of 2008. It contains the most drastic changes to financial regulations since the regulatory reform after the Great Depression. Proposed by Obama in 2009 and signed into law in 2010, the Democratic bill was the handiwork of former Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) in the House and former Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) in the Senate. It was supposedly going to stop banks from making loans to risky buyers who could not pay them back, reducing foreclosures. It was also supposed to change the rules so banks could no longer receive taxpayer-funded bailouts due to their poor business practices.
It hasn’t worked out the way its Democrat proponents claimed. This is because the people who got us into this mess are the same ones who drafted the law. Dodd-Frank contains more of the same things that precipitated the financial crisis; government meddling in the mortgage business and financial markets. Lobbyists for special interests carved out loopholes, resulting in merely different lists of winners and losers. As one author in U.S. News & World Report observed, “These exemptions are less about protecting unsophisticated borrowers than about protecting the taxpayer-guaranteed business models of favored entities.” Hedge funds and some other firms lost big; they are now required to fill out a 192-page form that has been estimated to cost each firm $100,000-$150,000.
Speaking of winners or losers, most outrageously, Dodd-Frank didn’t bother to reform Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the biggest culprits for handing out mortgages to high-risk borrowers who should never have qualified for them. They received the largest bailouts of all financial institutions in 2008.
The 848-page-long act created numerous new federal agencies. It grossly expanded oversight by federal agencies to non-bank financial institutions and their subsidiaries. It required federal agencies to write 398 new rules in order to put the act’s 1,500 provisions into place. It will cost taxpayers millions to run all the new agencies and enforce the rules, and will hurt economic growth and harm the competitiveness of U.S. firms relative to their foreign counterparts.
Over 14,000 pages later, less than half of the rules have been implemented, and numerous deadlines have been missed. Imagine what would happen to employees in the private sector who repeatedly missed deadlines.
The Economist speculated that “the harm done by the massive cost and complexity of its regulations, and the effects of its internal inconsistencies, will outweigh what good may yet come from it.” Even more disturbing, “Officials are being given the power to regulate more intrusively and to make arbitrary or capricious rulings.”
Dodd-Frank came down hard on loan officers and mortgage brokers. Many mortgage brokers are expected to go out of business next year. All loan originators must now be qualified, licensed, registered, and issued a unique identifier. They are restricted from charging more than a three percent fee for all loan origination costs, which is hampering the ability of banks to offer mortgages on homes priced between $100,000 and $160,000. Many may simply shut out this working-class market.
While it superficially sounds good to impose stringent requirements and qualifications in order for borrowers to qualify for mortgages, the one-size-fits-all model really doesn’t fit everyone, and is resulting in investors gobbling up home sales, since fewer average Americans now qualify. According to real estate guru Martin Andelman, since 2009, cash sales to investors represent a third of all sales, and in some areas are responsible for up to 60 percent of all real estate transactions. This will wreak havoc on the economy when the investors all inevitably rush to start dumping houses in the future.
Homeowners are paying more for mortgages because of all the new restrictions and requirements. The regulations simply embolden lenders to work around them, working within “safe harbors” and loopholes to engage in alternative forms of risky lending. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans are exempt from the new regulations, as are timeshare loans, due to stellar lobbyists. So the Dodd-Frank cap on debt-to-income-ratio of 43 percent won’t apply to the riskiest of all loans.
The home vacancy rate is fairly high, over 10 percent, and home values have started dropping again. Around 25 to 50 percent of mortgages are still underwater. Andelman doesn’t see any decrease in foreclosures in the future. He reports that three quarters of the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and only about the top one percent have significant savings.
Banks are passing the costs of Dodd-Frank on to consumers. Dodd-Frank arbitrarily cut down on some bank fees, resulting in the banks diverting costs to customers in other ways. Since Dodd-Frank cracked down on banks charging debit card fees, the banks turned around and started eliminating free checking accounts.
Bank bailouts are still authorized, with certain banks designated as “systemically important financial institutions,” code words for too big to fail. Even worse, the government is then authorized to essentially take over the institution. Sadly, bankers don’t dare criticize Dodd-Frank publicly, or they run the risk of retaliation by the regulators.
Dodd-Frank looks a lot like campaign finance reform; lobbyist-influenced changes being made to a system that pick winners and losers, perpetuating the problem as players find ways around the regulations. It fails to address the principal causes of the 2008 meltdown: The banks made risky loans, knowing the government would bail them out once the loans went south, then sold them to murky institutions on Wall Street where they sometimes became untraceable. These derivatives were driven by a combination of Wall Street banks and politicians. Until the government stops bailing out these kinds of practices, the banks have no incentive to change their risky behavior. Dodd-Frank must be repealed.
The mainstream media has covered the fact that average Americans have largely been shut out of buying homes as investors swoop in and buy up houses. I quote an LA Times ”news” piece titled in the physical paper “Investors moving to new turf” by Alejandro Lazo and appearing in the Business section on page B-1 on September 13, 2013. As is so often the case, the liberal snot rag has purged this article – but I still have the physical copy of the article:
Just last year, policymakers turned to real estate investors to rescue the housing market.
Fearing the foreclosure crisis could drag on for years, the Federal Reserve advocated renting out foreclosed homes as a market-based solution. Government-controlled mortgage titan Fannie Mae experimented with selling big pools of them to deep-pocketed buyers.
Few realized then that investors would respond with overwhelming force: Big and small players have injected billions into the market, racing one another to buy up foreclosed homes in post-crash markets. Wall Street launched a sophisticated industry based on buying and renting out homes in bulk. The suburbs of Southern California, Arizona and Nevada saw a virtual land run, creating frenzied demand that has pushed up prices more than 20% in a year.
Now the foreclosed homes in those markets are almost gone — yet investors have kept buying, competing with individual buyers in standard sales.
The number of so-called absentee buyers, usually cash investors, has dropped slightly in Southern California since hitting a record in January. But they still account for more than 1 in 4 home purchases in the region. And just 8% of those deals were on foreclosed homes in June, compared with 25% a year earlier and a peak of 55% in February 2009.
Another site runs a portion of the above LA Times “news” article among a slathering of other articles under the title, “Flippers Are Selling To Other Flippers.”
That’s what’s going on BECAUSE OF DODD-FRANK. And oh, look, THERE’S FANNIE MAE AGAIN AT THE EPICENTER OF YET ANOTHER FIASCO.
That’s why when I see articles like this from liberal “newspapers,” I KEEP THE DAMN ARTICLES. Because when you’ve got a Big Brother like Obama, you’ve got a Ministry of Truth situation like in the novel 1984. And “stories” become “unstories.”
But again, that initial story that the Los Angeles Times in its ubersocialsm purged nevertheless failed to mention that this was because of OBAMA and HIS BIG GOVERNMENT meddling.
Just realize that Barack Hussein Obama has ruined this nation such that for most Americans, more Americans identify as ‘lower class’.
And that’s #3) the lowest labor participation rate since Jimmy Carter last tried to destroy America with socialism back in 1978. And just try to get a full-time job today thanks to ObamaCare hell.
We’re either going to vote out Obama and every Democrat in America, or we’re going to learn to become content with less health care for more money, less education for our children – again, for more money – and a middle class permanently frozen out of every being able to buy a home and participate in the American Dream. And over everything, fewer and fewer Americans working at all, and working part time because employers can’t afford to hire them due to ObamaCare and myriad other Obama regulations.
