Re-visiting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Many in the Cleveland Tea Party became aware of the mis-named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when Ohio’s Richard Cordray was appointed as the Bureau’s first Director in 2012. I was hoping that President Trump would find a way to eliminate this agency, since it is not accountable to Congress or the Executive branch. This agency is now back in the news, since Elizabeth Warren has a chance at becoming the Democrat Party’s nominee for President. Lloyd Billingsley at Front Page Magazine has an update:

As announced this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The case involves constitutional issues such as the separation of powers, but there’s a lot more going with this agency. As Judicial Fortitude author Peter J. Wallison notes, the CFPB is “the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” and that makes a case for closer examination.

Her claims to Cherokee ancestry have been exposed as a fraud, yet Warren remains a leading contender for the Democrat nomination for president. In her 2014 A Fighting Chance, Warren maintained the fake Cherokee claims and also billed herself as an economic expert.

Nobody in this country “got rich on his own,” she explains. Rather, “you moved goods on the roads the rest of us paid for” and used workers “the rest of us paid to educate.” You were safe in your factory “because of police and fire forces the rest of us paid for.” And so on, the same Big Brother view as POTUS 44. If people are in financial distress, Warren blames their problems on the banking industry, portrayed as the flywheel of capitalist greed and trickery. That view comes across in the structure of the CFPB.

As Wallison notes, the CFPB was given plenary authority to enforce all federal laws that apply to financial transactions with consumers, and more. CFPB power was “broadened beyond existing laws” to take enforcement action on any action it finds “unfair, deceptive, or abusive.” Since “abusive” is not defined, this served up “a vast field for the agency to define and pursue.” Wallison finds this a “dangerous step in support of an even more powerful and uncontrolled administrative state.”

For example, the CFPB director gets a five-year term fully protected from removal by the president other than for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” This places the director outside the control of the president, “whose ability to pursue the policies he was elected to implement depends crucially on the ability to remove and replace the senior officials of executive agencies.” Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh is already on record that the CFPB director is the most powerful person in the federal government, aside from the president. And it gets worse.

The CFPB gets funding not from Congress but the Federal Reserve, and the money comes at the request of the CFPB director. And under the enabling Dodd-Frank legislation, the Fed has “no ability to affect the agency’s actions.” So Warren’s CFPB is beyond the control of Congress, and if the Supreme Court upholds the status quo, “it would be possible for Congress to create other agencies that are beyond the control of any elected body.”

. . .

The full article is here. Scary stuff.

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The Media Threat to America

Daniel Greenfield analyzes the insidious influence of the mainstream media on American values and culture. In his article at Front Page Magazine (“The Media is a Threat to America: and it’s destroying the country”), he concludes:

The media has gone from taking part in a political debate to turning into a James Bond villain.

The problem is not, as the media insists, the First Amendment, or Russian bots, or Facebook. The problem is an industry that built monopolies around investments in outdated technology. These technologies, from the printing press to radio to cable news, were revolutionary at the time.

The internet killed their monopolistic power, and they’ve been trying to rebuild it ever since.

The media would rather have a monopoly in a broken country, than live in a thriving country where internet content is too diversified to support traditional media organizations. Like Milton’s Satan, it would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And it’s turning the country into its own private hell.

The First Amendment was meant to protect speech, not industries. The media industry is trying to kill speech and is willing to kill the country to make it happen. 

But it’s the industry that needs to die.

Full article is here.

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Propaganda vs expanded sources of news

image credit: vectorstock.com

Cherie Zaslawsky’s article, “Trump Derangement Syndrome: A Misdiagnosis” starts off:

Listen to Fox News, and you'll hear phrases such as “Trump derangement syndrome” and “liberal heads are exploding” on a daily basis. 

Conservative newscasts are peppered with comments like these: “They're delusional!”  “The Democrats just can't seem to accept that they lost the 2016 election.”  “They've gone crazy!”

Crazy like a fox.

. . .

From the beginning of its “long march through the institutions,” the Left has been playing the long game.  That hasn't changed.  Leftists are playing it today.

Why did they take over the media?  The universities?  Hollywood?  To get their hands on the key levers of propaganda.  Add to this the leftward tilt of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and we're looking at a virtual lockdown on the primary sources of information and public influence.

. . .

What can be done?

I suggest that, rather than only responding to each of the Left's baseless attacks on our president, those on our side change the debate by exposing the radical leftists' use of propaganda — by shining a light into the dark recesses of their strategy.  This may wake up some of their followers and maybe even begin to free America from the dark power of the Left.

I have had limited success pointing the media’s corruption to people I know who still rely on The New York Times or NPR or CNN for their news. One suggestion that has worked a few times is to propose that a person expand their sources of news. Tuning in to conservative talk radio can be traumatic, but browsing through aggregators and at least comparing headlines has made a difference with some friends and relatives. These days my go-to sites are Politipage, Instapundit, Lucianne, and a few others (but not Drudge any more). Full American Thinker article is here.

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Claws of the Red Dragon

“Claws of the Red Dragon” will air on One America News Network this Friday Oct. 25 at 8PM (runs 1 hour). Thomas McArdle and the Editorial Board at Issues and Insights report:

To twist Lenin’s quip, it will be a communist who sells capitalists the cheap advanced telecommunications technology with which China hangs them.

A new and exciting movie was just released illustrating through semi-fictional dramatization how the Chinese government-controlled telecom company Huawei is a primary economic weapon in an arsenal through which Beijing seeks global domination.

The names of the people and the company are all changed, but “Claws of the Red Dragon” dramatizes Canada’s arrest at U.S. request last year of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s financial chief and daughter of its founder, for violations of sanctions on terrorist Iran and other offenses. In retaliation, Beijing detained two Canadians, an ex-diplomat and a businessman, for spying, and retried a 36-year-old tourist serving a 15-year drug offense, sentencing him to the death penalty.

It depicts a real life-based Chinese-Canadian reporter reluctantly taking on the story and risking her life to connect the dots between the company and the Communist Party and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. And the film goes behind closed doors to show the scheming of party operatives whose sights are set on global dominance in our lifetimes.

Having premiered over the weekend on the One America News Network, which will show it again Friday evening, the film is the work of New York-based Chinese-American New Tang Dynasty Television. The production values and acting, particularly Dorren Lee as journalist Jane Li, are top notch. Ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who’s an executive producer, hosted a press screening in New York City last week, where he brandished a well-worn copy of “Unrestricted Warfare,” a 1999 book by two senior Chinese air force colonels. They argue that economic warfare, attacks on digital infrastructure, and terrorism can enable a lesser power to win a war against the U.S., especially as part of a “grand warfare method” pairing military and non-military tactics. Beijing hasn’t veered far off that strategy in the two decades since.

. . .

Full report is here. I have not seen this program and am giving it the benefit of the doubt -- in spite of Steve Bannon’s involvement.

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Surveillance by Google: alternatives

image credit: Tutanota

Never heard of Tutanota? Neither had I. Via Lucas Nolan at Breitbart:

A recent report from security and privacy experts Tutanota, which bills itself as a Google alternative, outlines how mass surveillance has become commonplace online and the effect it has on free speech.

The report is here, and it concludes:

Tutanota states that “Any social credit system — be it private or public — undermines freedom of speech,” and encourages users to keep their private data private. One of the ways that users can do this is by leaving Facebook and Google, here’s how they suggest that users do that.

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Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary Death of A Nation

Over the weekend, our household watched Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary Death of A Nation. From the documentary website: 

Not since 1860 have the Democrats so fanatically refused to accept the result of a free election. That year, their target was Lincoln. They smeared him. They went to war to defeat him. In the end, they assassinated him.

Now the target of the Democrats is President Trump and his supporters. The Left calls them racists, white supremacists and fascists. These charges are used to justify driving Trump from office and discrediting the right "by any means necessary."

But which is the party of the slave plantation? Which is the party that invented white supremacy? Which is the party that praised fascist dictators and shaped their genocidal policies and was in turn praised by them?

Moreover, which is the party of racism today? Is fascism now institutionally embodied on the right or on the left?

Through stunning historical recreations and a searching examination of fascism and white supremacy, Death of a Nation cuts through progressive big lies to expose hidden history and explosive truths.

Lincoln united his party and saved America from the Democrats for the first time. Can Trump—and we—come together and save America for the second time?

Progressives will not like this film (for example, see here). We had some quibbles, but overall, it is excellent. The film includes some historical footage as well as some impressive re-enactments.

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Weekend fun at Powerline’s Week in Pictures

Cartoon credit: Mike Harris Artwork

(click to embiggen or scroll down at the link below)

And this weekend, it’s the “Powerline Week in Pictures LeBron 2020 Edition.” Click here.

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