Congression Reform Act of 2011 - LET"S DO IT!!!!!!!

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:
"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971... before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffett is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no
pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS

If you agree with the above, pass it on.

The Ladies in White of Cuba

Freedom: Laura Pollan Toledo was a humble schoolteacher who led Cuba's defiant Ladies in White. She died Friday in Havana. But she left a legacy of untold courage that terrified Cuba's long-communist dictatorship.

As surely as the sun will rise, a day will come when Cuba is free of its 52-year Marxist nightmare. And when its history is written, it's likely to begin with the story of Laura Pollan Toledo, the wife of an arrested dissident who shined a light on the totalitarian nature of the regime for all the world to see.

Pollan was a founder of the Ladies in White, the noted group of dissidents' wives who silently walked in procession, wearing white and carrying gladiolus flowers. They attended Mass together at St. Rita's Church to pray for their husbands' return.

They never made public statements, but the Castro regime understood the power of their silent protest and its global impact. For that, they considered Pollan a threat.

Pollan and the others, mostly wives of 75 dissidents arrested in the Black Spring of 2003, were followed, insulted, harassed, threatened, beaten by mobs and menaced for silently witnessing to the truth about Cuba's lack of human freedom.

Pollan died in a Cuban hospital of dengue fever and a viral infection, in the end at the mercy of Cuba's collapsing state health system, refusing transfer to an elite medical facility as the publicity-nervous regime offered.

It's hard to imagine the courage that Pollan's simple act of witness took, in a regime that considers going to church a threat to the state.

In Castro's island hellhole, praised by the Hollywood and congressional left, free speech is forbidden. Calling for elections brings a knock on the door at midnight. Trying to leave the island brings prison — even death. (READ Cuba's Lady of Valor),

The Smell of Decaying Brains

Our young are so ill educated (in more ways than one) that they don't even understand the difference between socialism/communism and capitalism. It's time they learned why they don't have jobs, why everything costs more and why our future as far as the eye can look is bleak unless we get rid of the occupier of The White House. Maybe it's time for these youngsters to learn the lessons of government intervention in the economy and to recognize anti-American sentiment in our leaders. Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot for a moment that our young don't know history - thanks to our ah,,,,,,,government run schools. So we have a bunch of nitwits barricading Wall St who probably attended public schools who are protesting the rich and blaming Wall Street for THEIR problems. It's the lunatics running the asylum syndrome. I say after we rid ourselves of the socialist/communist Obama and his incompetent appointees (Eric Holder comes to mind) we then get rid of the totality of our public schools and allow the free market to function. Then maybe we'll be lucky and get some Thomas Jefferson clone who will remind us of what America was meant to be..

...Still, if anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement wants an intellectually honest explanation for why they can't find a job, they might start by considering what happens to an economy when the White House decides to make pinatas out of the financial-services industry (roughly 6%, or $828 billion, of U.S. GDP), the energy industry (about 7.5% of GDP, or $1 trillion), and millionaires and billionaires (who paid 20.4% of all federal income taxes in 2009). And don't forget the Administration's rhetorical volleys against individual companies like Anthem Blue Cross, AIG and Bank of America, or against Chrysler's bondholders, or various other alleged malefactors of wealth.

Now move from words to actions. Want a shovel-ready job? The Administration has spent three years sitting on the Keystone XL pipeline project that promises to create 13,000 union jobs and 118,000 "spin-off" jobs. A State Department environmental review says the project poses no threat to the environment, but the Administration's eco-friends are screaming lest it go ahead.

Then there are the jobs the Administration and its allies in Congress are actively killing. In June, American Electric Power announced it would have to shutter five coal-fired power plants, at a cost of 600 jobs, in order to comply with new EPA rules. Those same rules may soon force the utility to shutter another 25 plants. Bank of America's decision last month to lay off 30,000 employees is a direct consequence of various Congressional edicts limiting how much the bank can charge merchants or how it can handle delinquent borrowers.

These visible crags of the Obama jobs iceberg are nothing next to the damage done below the waterline by the D.C. regulations factory, which last year added 81,405 pages of new rules to the Federal Register, bringing the total cost to the U.S. economy of regulatory compliance to an estimated $1.7 trillion a year.

Less easy to quantify, but no less harmful, are the long-term uncertainties employers face in trying to price in the costs of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the potential expiration next year of the Bush tax cuts, the possible millionaire surcharge, the value of the dollar and so on. No wonder businesses are so reluctant to hire: When you don't know how steep the trail ahead of you is, it's usually better to travel light.

This probably won't do much to persuade the Occupiers of Wall Street that their cause would be better served in Washington, D.C., where a sister sit-in this week seems to have fizzled. Then again, most of America's jobless also won't recognize their values or interests in the warmed-over anticapitalism being served up in lower Manhattan. Three years into the current Administration, most Americans are getting wise to the source of their economic woes. It's a couple hundred miles south of Wall Street. What's Occupying Wall Street?

Social Security Scam Keeps Playing on and on and on

If Chile can reform their Social security why can't we? We can't even START the conversation!

Posted 09/29/2011 06:33 PM

Cain's 'Chilean Model'

Election '12: Herman Cain's victory in Florida's straw poll is notable, among other things, for his advocacy of "Chilean Model" Social Security reform in a state filled with retirees. It ought to be a wake-up call to all candidates.

Aside from the insta-analysis about Cain's victory being a protest vote against Texas Gov. Rick Perry, it's worth noticing that — in Florida, no less — both Cain and Perry, who finished first and second in the weekend's GOP straw poll, were the two most outspoken candidates about confronting the U.S. crisis in Social Security.

It completely ends the notion that addressing the issue of unfunded pension liabilities — in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — is the third rail of politics.

Voters migrated from Perry to Cain, but there were multiple Tea Party favorites to choose from. In moving to Cain, they went from a moderate to a strong stance on Social Security reform.

Perry did call for a national dialogue on the matter. But Cain went much further, at least three times in debates calling for "The Chilean Model" to replace Social Security, bringing the idea to as many as 15 million viewers.

Chile's system, enacted in 1981, took government out of the pension business altogether and replaced it with a system of personal retirement accounts.

It's one of most successful fiscal reforms in history.

It outperforms Social Security on returns, yielding about 9.23% compounded annual returns over 30 years under private management. READ THE REST AT IBD

Tea Partiers and TheWall Street Mob

Ann Coulter notes the difference between these two groups. It's one of principle and love for our Founding Principles vs the mob crying for handouts on the alter of envy for those who have been successful.

The Difference Between the Wall Street Protesters and the Tea Partiers:

"I am not the first to note the vast differences between the Wall Street protesters and the tea partiers. To name three: The tea partiers have jobs, showers and a point. ...

"The tea partiers didn't arrogantly claim to be drafting a new Declaration of Independence. They're perfectly happy with the original.

"Tea partiers didn't block traffic, sleep on sidewalks, wear ski masks, fight with the police or urinate in public. They read the Constitution, made serious policy arguments, and petitioned the government against Obama's unconstitutional big government policies, especially the stimulus bill and Obamacare.

"Then they picked up their own trash and quietly went home. Apparently, a lot of them had to be at work in the morning."

"For America to remain a capitalist nation, America's banks must remain free. Remember this as you listen to anti-bank slanders from the White House"

Socialism: The mob assaults against our banking system by unemployed leftists and their political allies are part of a larger strategy to control the commanding heights of our economy. And we'll all be much poorer for it.

The White House has thrown in with the anticapitalism crowd, and banks had better watch out. You only had to hear President Obama's cynical, politicized expressions of sympathy for the unwashed legions "occupying" Wall Street this week to be worried.

"Not only did the financial sector, with the Republican Party in Congress, fight us every step of the way," Obama said at his news conference Thursday. "But now you've got these same folks arguing we should roll back all those reforms and go back to the way it was."

But no criticism of the demonstrators.

In fact, added Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, "We are going to push back harder," making what sounds like a fairly explicit threat against the banks.

Welcome to class warfare, 2011-style. Obama's ratings have never been lower, and administration policies leading to a dead-in-the-water economy with 9%-plus unemployment are incredibly unpopular.

So he must think his only hope for re-election is to somehow tie the GOP to fat-cat bankers on Wall Street and then convince voters that the banks are to blame for all their ills.

Sound cynical? It is. But this is what Obama and the Democrats are doing. They've even put out a video: "Republicans: On the Side of Wall Street, not Consumers."....(READ THE REST HERE at Investors.com)