The financial reform bill now winding through the Senate which is supposed to reform Wall Street, and prevent financial meltdowns appears to do a whole lot more.  Like track every bank transaction by everyone one with a bank account.  I am sure that the regulators will never do anything to break their trust with the American people.  The power grab is continuing and it is getting a lot worse by the day.

Draft financial reform bill

Page 1216

1.  
2.  
3.  Subtitle G—Regulatory
4.  Improvements
5.  SEC. 1071. COLLECTION OF DEPOSIT ACCOUNT DATA.
6. (a) PURPOSE.—The purpose of this section is to pro-
7. mote awareness and understanding of the access of indi-
8. viduals and communities to financial services, and to iden-
9. tify business and community development needs and op-
10. portunities.
11. (b) IN GENERAL.—
12. (1) RECORDS REQUIRED.— For each branch,
13. automated teller machine at which deposits are ac-
14. cepted, and other deposit taking service facility with
15.  respect to any financial institution, the financial in
16. stitution shall maintain a record of the number and
17. dollar amounts of deposit accounts of customers.

This information will be publicly available, I am sure that no one will ever be able to trace these transactions back to an individual. It could never happen. Trust them.  -- What could go wrong?

See Big Government for an article on this ridiculous bill.

What do the 'energy bill', Barack Obama, Al Gore, Franklin Raines, and Goldman Sachs all have in common? What they have in common is a method to fleece America, buy taxing (trading) dollars for the right to pollute. The scheme allows large emitters of greenhouse gases to continue to emit those gases by taxing those invisible gases. Those gases, which don't really affect the climate nearly as much as natural causes.

Investor's Business Daily has a great editorial on these connections and why Obama wants this energy bill passed.

"The climate trading scheme being stitched together here will do more damage than Goldman Sachs, AIG and Fannie Mae combined. But it will bring power and money to its architects."

The cap-and-trade system will drive up prices of energy to everyone by heavily taxing nearly all energy production in the US. This will cause the price of energy to rise, and the price of products relying on energy to also rise.  Why would our government want to do this to America. Only one reason; More control over us and more power for the elite, or those that think they are elite.

Attributed to Wstera2 on Flickr

We have already seen the charges corporations are required to take because of lost tax deductions in ObamaCare.  Now Health and Human Services have reported  that the health care legislation will drive up costs.  Is this the old unintended consequences problem? Or was this the plan all along?

But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president's twin goal of controlling runaway costs. It also warned that Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15% of hospitals into the red and "possibly jeopardizing access" to care for seniors.

The mixed verdict for Obama's signature issue is the first comprehensive look by neutral experts.

In particular, the warnings about Medicare could become a major political liability for Democratic lawmakers in the midterm elections. Seniors are more likely to vote than younger people and polls show they are already deeply skeptical of the law.

Read the article in USA Today

Now consider this. Coverage under ObamaCare except for a few items does not begin until 2014. But all the bad stuff like taxes, and penalties, and mandates begin now. Sometime in October 2010 corporations across the country will be rolling out changes to their health care coverage for 2011. Just in time for the election, employees will be getting the bad news; like much higher premiums, higher deductibles, and more.  Ah!! It makes one dream of a revolution, a voters revolution.

Sarah Palin has such great insight into the warped minds of the Democrats, with her critique of the Democrat's Financial Reform Bill.

" Moreover, the financial reform bill gives regulators the power to pick winners and losers, institutionalizing their ability to decide “which firms to rescue or close, and which creditors to reward and how.” Does anyone doubt that firms with the most lobbyists and the biggest campaign donations will be the ones who get seats in the lifeboat? The president is trying to convince us that he’s taking on the Wall Street “fat cats,” but firms like Goldman Sachs are happy with federal regulation because, as one of their lobbyists recently stated, “We partner with regulators.” "

Read the rest of her Facebook post here.

The vivid imagination of William Labovitch,

"I looked at what President George W. Bush and Sen. Norm Coleman were doing and I saw it as wrong. They were cutting budgets from assistance programs like Medicaid, HUD and FEMA and used clauses to get what they want."

Having observed Congress for many years, I can honestly say I have never seen a budget cut for anything. But maybe it was those clauses that got things done. I hear Congress critters uses clauses all the time. It could be Mr. Labovitch is thinking of Santa Claus.The tax-payer Santa Claus that is.

"I have even checked the SD 56 GOP website and found it has become a smear blog against Democratic office holders." William Corey Labovitch, Outreach Director, DFL Senate District 57

Yeah this is quite a smear blog. But what do we do, show Democrats making fools of themselves with their own words.

Read his letter to the editor here

Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation has written this editorial on the vast dis-similarities between their idea of health care reform and that which passed for health care reform by Congress and President Obama.

The Obama health-care law "builds" on the Heritage health reform model only in the sense that, say, a double-quarter-pounder with cheese "builds" on the idea of a garden salad. Both have lettuce and tomato and may be called food, but the similarities end there.

That doesn't sound like something similar at all.

[...] the health insurance exchange is to be designed by the states. It is conceived as a market mechanism that allows individuals and families to choose among a wide range of health plans and benefit options for those best suited to their personal needs and circumstances. People would have a property right in their health policy, just like auto or homeowners' policies, and be able to take it with them from job to job.

But Congress had other ideas;

Under the president's law, however, the congressionally designed exchanges are a tool imposed on the states enabling the federal government to standardize and micromanage health insurance coverage, while administering a vast and unaffordable new entitlement program.

Read the entire article at the Washington Post or at the St. Paul Pioneer Press

Michele Bachmann will be speaking at the annual Defenders of Freedom Dinner in Iowa. She will be there with Rep Steve King.  The event will be available online on USTREAM. It begins at 6:30 PM tonight (April 10th).

Read more about this event at BigGovernment.com

I managed to take a few pictures at the Tea Party Express III rally on the St. Paul Capitol grounds with a nearly dead battery in my old Nikon. These are straight from the camera with no processing. Maybe I can improve a few of them later.

Pictures

The TeaPartyExpress will make a stop in St Paul on April 8^th,  9:30 AM at the state capitol.  The TPE started it trek across America in Searchlight Nevada on March 27 where Sarah Palin was one of the guest speakers.  It will arrive in Washington DC for a large teaparty rally on April 15^th.  

The MN Tea Party Patriots are encouraging people to form a caravan to accompany the TPE to its next stop in Duluth.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame, and written an insightful article on the failures of central planning.  Central planning like ObamaCare are destined to fail because the planners lack knowledge about markets in a timely manner which causes them to react and make mistakes.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Hayek's premise on markets has expanded to include regulations. The central planners (Congress) does not understand its own regulations. This became obvious as companies began to write of the costs related to ObamaCare since its passage.  Oops! GAAP rules require compaines to take such actions caused by regulations as soon as they learn about them. 

Read more at the Washington Examiner