Press 6-30-11.pdf · By VICTOR JOECKS Special To The Penny Press Nevada’s teenage (16-...

Penny PressNevada, USA Volume 8 Number 41 JUNE 30, 2011

THE PENNY PRESS,JUNE 30, 2011 PAGE 2

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Credits:Publisher and Editor: Contributing Editors:Fred Weinberg Floyd Brown Al Thomas Doug French Chuck Muth John Getter Pat Choate

The Penny Press is published weekly by Ely Radio LLC All Contents © Penny Press 2011

Letters to the Editor are encouraged. They should be sent to our offices at 335 W. 4th Street Winnemucca, NV 891445 They can also be emailed to: [email protected] No unsigned or unverifiable letters will be printed.

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By VICTOR JOECKSSpecial To The Penny Press

Nevada’s teenage (16- to-19-year-old) unemployment rate is a staggering 34.5 percent, the second highest in the nation. And while many factors influence economic decisions and statistics like unem-

ployment, Nevada’s inflated mini-mum wage is a substantial factor in teenage unemployment.

In Nevada, one of about a dozen states with a minimum wage higher than the national rate, minimum pay has jumped 60 percent since 2006, from $5.15 to $8.25 for uninsured hourly workers. (For hourly work-

ers with employer-sponsored health insurance, the state’s rate equals the national rate.) The minimum-wage gains far outstrip broader pay trends, which have been flat.

Employers have responded to higher minimum wages in three ways: They’ve replaced their low-est-skilled workers with technology — consider self-checkout grocery lines — and they’re making higher-paid workers do more, such as res-taurants asking waiters to bus their own tables. They’ve also gravitated toward more experienced workers. All of those approaches displace teens, Saltsman said.

Increased unemployment isn’t just hitting teenagers, it’s impacting all lower-skilled workers. Why?

Because if you’re a lower-skilled or inexperienced worker, often times you aren’t worth $8.25 an hour. But

if individuals work hard for a year gaining skills and experience, many will end up earning more than $8.25 an hour. The tragedy is that Nevada government — through a constitu-tional amendment, no less — pro-hibits employers from hiring 18- and 19-year-olds (under-18 employees are exempt from the state mini-mum wage) at what they’re actually worth, thereby negatively impacting not just their ability to earn summer spending cash, but also their ability to gain valuable experience.

“A job is more than a paycheck. Some people call it an invisible cur-riculum,” said Michael Saltsman, a research fellow at the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. “It’s what you get from learning to report to a manager, working with customers and assuming the respon-

sibilities that come with that first job. Teens who don’t have that are taking a step back, and they’ll be at a disadvantage relative to their peers who have experience.”

And why does Nevada have a job-killing minimum wage enshrined in its constitution? Well, Danny Thompson, executive secretary trea-surer of the Nevada State AFL-CIO, brags on his bio that “Danny was also the architect of the successful Constitutional Amendment to raise the minimum wage in Nevada.”

While some voters also bear responsibility for approving the min-imum-wage constitutional amend-ment in 2004 and 2006, Thompson and the AFL-CIO were the driving force behind the higher minimum wage and the loudest voice oppos-ing Sen. Joe Hardy’s SJR2, which would have removed the minimum

Penny PressWINNEMUCCA, NEVADA 16 PAGES VOLUME 8 NUMBER 41 JUNE 30, 2011

Penny WisdomThere is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking. — Thomas A. Edison

The Conservative Weekly Voice Of Las Vegas

Inside:Smoked BearSmarter Than SmokeySee Editorial Page 6

JERRY ROGERS PAGE 4FLOYD BROWN PAGE 5FRED WEINBERG PAGE 6DOUG FRENCH PAGE 7AL THOMAS PAGE 10MATT, JARED BARBER PAGE 11CHUCK MUTH PAGE 14PETS OF THE WEEK PAGE 15

No Job For Your Kid? Blame The AFLCIO

Commentary

Continued on page4

wage from the constitution. So if the inflated minimum wage is so important, surely Thompson

applied it to all union workers ... right? Nope, Thompson and the AFL-CIO specifically excluded employees working under a collective bargaining agreement.

All of the provisions of this section, or any part hereof, may be waived in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement, but only if the

waiver is explicitly set forth in such agreement in clear and unambiguous terms. [Emphasis added]

So while AFL-CIO lobbyists argue that repealing the minimum wage will take “income away from individuals struggling to put food on their tables,” they’re totally fine with taking that income away if those individu-als are paying union dues.

Hypocrites.


www.choateweinbergreport.com

Kid Can't Find A Job? Blame The AFLCIOContinued from page 3


Commentary: Jerry Rogers A Big Bank Price-Fixing Scheme

Today, every time a consumer swipes a debit card, the business pays a fee of 1 to 3 percent to the bank that issued the card. These fees average 44 cents per transaction — but on July 21, a new policy will go into effect limiting them to 12 cents for big banks.

As one might expect, banks have cried foul. And they recently recruited Sens. Bob Corker (R.-Tenn.) and Jon Tester (D.-Mont) to try to pass an amendment that would have delayed this new fee limit.

Fortunately, last week, the Senate struck the Corker-Tester proposal down. This is a big win for Americans. Exorbitantly high swipe fees have been driving up the price of basic goods and services. Capping them will lead to lower prices for everyday purchases.

It’s imperative that Congress keep steady and avoid delaying the imple-mentation of this much needed-reform.

Conservative critics of this cap do have one thing right: The business world tends to correct itself without government involvement. Most of the time, if a company jacks up its prices for no reason, consumers will go else-where.

I am a conservative, so I’m sympathetic to this line of reasoning. But that is not how swipe fees work. There is no market force keeping them in check. That’s why a bank can charge 44 cents on average for a service the Fed has determined actually costs 4 cents on average to perform, without being put out of business by a lower-priced competitor.

Essentially, banks have banded together to fix prices. They do this by routing their debit-card transactions through the electronic “interchanges” run by credit-card companies. Two companies — Visa and Mastercard — control 80 percent of debit cards, and they set the fees, even though it’s the banks that receive the money. Banks don’t have to compete with each other.

So what happens when, say, Visa decides to jack up debit-card rates — as it has done repeatedly in recent years? The banks hardly mind, because

they get more money, which encourages them to issue more cards, which is good for Visa.

Businesses have next to no recourse. They can stop accepting Visa debit and credit cards entirely — under the Honor All Cards rule, if you accept one Visa card, you have to accept all of them.

But given how many consumers use Visa, that’s not really an option. True, thanks to a recent settlement in an antitrust suit, retailers can offer customers a discount for using lower-fee cards like Discover, but such dis-crimination is confusing and consumer-unfriendly.

Of course, retailers don’t just eat the swipe fees. Rather, they pass the costs to their customers, at a yearly average of $427 per household. If you have a rewards program, you can get some of that back. If you don’t have a rewards program — or if you’re poor and don’t have a bank — you’re just out the money.

Certainly, banks will make less money from swipe fees after this 12-cent cap goes into effect. Some customers might switch to credit cards, which aren’t covered, to preserve access to rewards programs if debit cards start dropping rewards.

According to one line of argument, banks will try to make up the lost revenue by increasing other fees, such as for overdrafts. This is probably an empty threat. Before Visa took over the market in the ‘90s, banks offered debit cards with no swipe fees whatsoever, and at that time, other fees were lower, too. After Australia reformed debit-card swipe fees, usage of debit cards grew faster than usage of credit cards, banks did not increase other fees, and retailers passed the savings on to their customers.

Swipe fees present us with a rare situation in which the market itself does not force corrective action. Let’s not give big banks another bailout by allowing this to continue. JERRY ROGERSJerry Rogers is president of Capitol Allies and founder the Six Degrees Project, an independent, nonpartisan effort that promotes entrepreneurship, economic growth, and free-market ideals.

Americans To Learn If Republicans Differ From Democrats

Speculation is running rampant about why House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of debt ceil-ing talks with Democrats. Most of the speculation is credited by pun-dits to insider maneuvering between Speaker John Boehner and Cantor. The Washington Post reports debt deal maneuvering this way, “One

analysis of the House GOP right now is that there are two players in the GOP who can cut a budget deal: Eric Cantor and John Boehner â€¦ One of them is going to have to do it. Which means one of them is going to lose his job. The optimistic take is that what we’re seeing right now is a game of musical chairs over which one of them it’ll be.”

Our analysis is different, and the Washington media will never under-stand it. The GOP’s inability to make deals is a direct result of the effec-tiveness of the Tea Party Movement. Washington media always wants a deal between the forces for perma-nent government growth. For the first time in our lifetime the forces in support of actually limiting gov-

ernment have gained power. John Boehner and Eric Cantor understand this new dynamic. The very future of the Republican Party depends on it.

Clearly, John Boehner is frus-trated by the new political realities. He wants to play golf with President Obama on the weekends and make nice with him during the week. Boehner has done his best to strong arm Republicans into forfeiting their only budget leverage and vote to raise the debt ceiling. His problem is he doesn’t have the votes, and a speaker that cannot pass legislation is doomed to be replaced.

Republican members of Congress have been flooded by messages from citizens to not raise the debt limit. They pour in daily by fax, FedEx, mail and telephone. Citizens intui-tively understand that the solution to a debt problem is not more debt. The solution to the problem needs to come in the form of budget cuts. The Tea Party Caucus, Michelle Bachmann and a movement called “Cut, Cap, Balance”. are winning the battle inside the Republican Party. Tea Party leaders are threaten-ing to bolt the Republican cause if Boehner and Cantor don’t produce an acceptable deal. The mainstream media, like usual is oblivious.

The rubber meets the road in a new poll by the Rasmussen organization. This poll shows that Republicans have everything to lose by disappointing the Tea Party. If the Tea party begins to field candidates against Republicans, Republicans go down in flames. According to Rasmussen, three way races will break down like this: Democrat 36 percent, Republicans 25 percent, and Tea Party 17 percent.

The Tea Party candidates will draw votes from the Republicans, and the Democrats in this scenario could pick up as many as 40 seats in the House of Representatives. Obama and the Democrats know this and that is why they won’t even give Boehner and Cantor a fig leaf of cover on taxes. Biden and the Democrats in the debt limit talks therefore have been demanding a tax increase as the price they require to get even modest spending cuts.

So the real dynamic isn’t an intra-mural squabble between Boehner and Canter. The real fight is for the soul of the Republican Party. Tea Party activists gave Republicans the majority by supporting their candi-dates for Congress in 2010. If the Republican leaders raise the debt limit, the Tea Party likely will bolt in 2012. It only takes a few Tea Party voters to demolish Republican candidates on the margins, and Tea Party leaders have never felt com-fortable in their alliance anyway.

We personally look at this as vic-tory for the people. The Republican/Democrat big government duopoly has run the country unchallenged for too long. The Tea Party activists need to stick to their guns and bring the Republican Party to its knees. If Boehner, Canter and company cave and vote to increase the debt limit, they deserve to lose power.

Scare tactics by the establishment elite in DC and Wall Street must be ignored and sanity must return to government spending. Right now is the time in history to achieve this victory. Thank you, Tea Party.FLOYD and MARY BETH BROWN


Commentary: Floyd Brown

The Penny Press Tips Its Cap To:The quick response of the rural first responders from Fallon and the sur-rounding areas to the horrifying AMTRAK-gravel hauler crash on June 24 between Fallon and Interstate 80. At press time, two people had died and a number of critical injuries were being treated at Renown Medical Center in Reno. Rural first responders almost never get enough credit. They also don't make $168,000 a year like the Clark County firefighters do.

Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a frequent target of this column, for a criminal complaint filed Friday against former Assemblyman Morse Arberry Jr., D-Las Vegas, who served 25 years in the Legislature, including time as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.

The Penny Press Sends A Bronx Cheer And A Bouquet of Weeds To:Big political influence buyers like MGM Resorts who kept paying (I mean contributing to) longtime Nevada lawmaker-turned-lobbyist Morse Arberry Jr., D-Las Vegas, indicted for stealing his campaign funds and putting them into his personal bank account. This stuff is a matter of public record and it is amazing that a company the size of MGM didn't look to see how its money was being used. Unless they didn't want to know.

I have a friend in Elko who many of our readers also know.

His name is Grant Gerber and, in addition to being an extraordinarily skilled lawyer, he is willing to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to East-coast yuppies telling us Nevadans how to live.

About 92 per cent of this state is controlled by the Federal Departments of the Interior and Agriculture in the form of the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and they rule the Western United States with a heavy and relatively incompetent hand.

There are some activists who want to go after them with a brute force approach.

An example of that would be the late Nye County Commission Chairman Dick Carver, who opened a road the Feds had closed with a dozer scat-tering several gun toting agents who, it turns out, didn’t believe in the Federal Governments’ cause nearly enough to get run over by a Cat D-8.

It earned him the cover of Time Magazine and the lifetime enmity of the Feds.

Gerber is far more subtle.

He took the Federal Government’s cartoonish actions and reduced them to, well, a cartoon character named Smoked Bear.

Perhaps you’ve heard Mr. Bear in radio announcements which have been running on Nevada radio stations during the past two years.

You see, Gerber found the weak underbelly of the yuppie land use poli-cies in the statistics regarding Western United States wildfires.

It seems that if you don’t put cattle and sheep out to graze on public lands, you get less cow plop for Pennsylvania Yuppies to step in when they make their lifetime pilgrimage out here to see the wild west.

But you also get a lot of extra fuel for all of those forest fires which another bear once told us that only we can prevent.

The numbers go like this:

Before 1980 there were less than 25,000 acres burned in Nevada wild-fires each year. Now over 600,000 acres are burning in Nevada wildfires each year.

The difference?

Before 1980, those unsightly cattle and sheep grazed public lands almost at will, dropping plop on the land and sending some methane into the air.

That, somehow, upset yuppies from all over who fancied themselves “environmentalists” as if cow plop was bad for the environment.

People such as then, Muskogee, Oklahoma Congressman Mike Synar decided that somehow people who want to backpack into National

Forests and on BLM land were more important than the folks who grazed cattle and sheep so he started crowing about how much all of this graz-ing and resultant cow plop was costing the taxpayers.

Talk about Cow Plop.

It happened that I owned a bunch of radio stations in Synar’s district at the time and causes like this were his excuse to let his staff deal with the VA Hospital in Muskogee and let him travel the West at our expense. We removed him from Congress in 1994 and, unfortunately, he died in 1996.

He never had a chance to see what the law of unintended consequences had wrought.

I’m sure Mike—who was a friend even though he was a political foe—never intended that his little jihad against Western ranchers would help result in an annual burn of 600,000 or so acres in Nevada and the deaths of literally millions of wild animals who inhabit those lands.

Not to mention the millions of dollars the taxpayers spend each year fighting those fires.

He might even have changed his mind.

Unfortunately, the East coast yuppie mind-set is so entrenched in plac-es like the Forest Service that they will have to be embarrassed into change.

That’s where Gerber and his Smoked Bear character come in.

Smoked Bear is a nice, warm, talking bear with feelings and a point of view.

Like his brother Smokey T. (Don’t tell the forest Service I’m using Smokey’s middle initial. They get very upset.) he doesn’t wish to be burned up in a forest fire.

But his approach is more pragmatic.

If a human Yuppie backpacker leaves a still warm campfire, it’s true that a forest fire could result.

But if the cattle and sheep have grazed off most of the fuel—as the pre-1980 numbers show—it won’t burn very much.

There’s room for both Bear brothers and their respective philosophies.

But Smoked (That’s Mr. Bear to young folks) has a philosophy which is far more pragmatic and will result in a far quicker solution to reducing the annual burn.

If that results in a few red faced Federal employees, well, I can live with that.

So, can Mr. Gerber.

FRED WEINBERG


OPINIONFrom The Publisher...

Is Smoked Bear Smarter Than Smokey?


They Won’t Stay Stupid Forever“I don’t think people can stay stupid forever,” says Richard Plaster, pres-

ident of Las Vegas homebuilding company Signature Homes, and a leading advocate for people to walk away from their homes. He thinks more people will walk away as home prices continue to fall. “People who keep paying on their mortgage are going to lose.”

And plenty will lose if A. Gary Shilling is right. He points out that normally the housing inventory is 2.5 million units. Currently it’s 4 mil-lion, but that’s not all, writes Shilling, “As foreclosures keep mounting, a “shadow” inventory of as many as 500,000 additional homes will become visible as many more Americans choose to sell rather than endure further price declines.”

Because of this overhang, Shilling sees prices dropping another 20 per-cent from here, leaving prices nationally 45 percent below their April 2006 peak.

The latest data aren’t promising. US home sales declined in May to their lowest level in six months, with the median pricing falling to 4.6 percent below its level a year ago.

But why do some people still keep paying into this losing proposition? Economically and emotionally it just doesn’t make sense. Are these people saying, “a contract is a contract; I’ll pay no matter what. I’m resigned to committing financial hara-kiri on my mortgage sword?”

After all, a mortgage is like the marriage contract: “To honor, love, and cherish till death do us part. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.”

Plenty of spouses stay in marriages gone bad. There is no honoring or love, just sickness and hate. But some couples stay together for the kids or because their religious beliefs forbid divorce or because of family pressure.

And in the extreme of one spouse battering the other, why on earth does the battered spouse stay — wearing sunglasses to hide black eyes and mak-ing up phony excuses for broken limbs and bruises? Why does anyone stay in that sort of relationship? It’s just plain irrational.

“Because you took those wedding vows to honor, love ….”Lenore Walker is the pioneer in the field of battered-spouse syndrome,

with her book The Battered Woman. She believes that experiencing the repeated cycles of violence can result in a spouse developing “learned help-lessness,” a psychological state identified by psychologist Martin Seligman. The abused believe they lack control over their situation and are convinced escape is impossible. Their motivation to escape diminishes as they become increasingly passive.

Walker explains that the constant cycles of violence and reconciliation result in the following beliefs:

The abusedbelieves that the violence was his or her fault,has an inability to place the responsibility for violence elsewhere,fears for his/her life and/or the lives of his/her children, andhas an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.These beliefs are strikingly similar to what underwater homeowners

feel.The abused believes that the violence was his or her fault. “It was my

own fault for buying a house at the top of the market in the first place and borrowing too much money to do it.” “I made my bed, now I must sleep in

it, no matter how much financial pain it causes me.”The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for violence else-

where. “It’s nobody’s fault but my own,” say people with 20/20 hindsight. “Nobody made me sign the mortgage. I’m so stupid. The bank doesn’t have to negotiate with me.”

The abused fears for his/her life and/or the lives of his/her children. “My credit will be ruined. I won’t be able to rent an apartment. My low credit score may keep me from getting a job. I don’t want to uproot the kids and have to admit that daddy and mommy made a financial mistake.”

The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient. The abuser in this case is the lender or owner of the mortgage. The borrower fears that these lenders can take everything they have, leave them with nothing, and make their lives miserable forever.

At the same time, default moralizers reinforce these feelings. They have no sympathy for those making a poor housing and mortgage choice. A per-son must suffer the consequences of their actions, it’s claimed.

Battered-person syndrome was first known as battered-woman syn-drome (BWS), and according to Lauren Fernandez, “every jurisdiction accepts expert testimony on Battered Woman Syndrome to support claims of self-defense. In fact, several states have codified its use by statute.”

However, as BWS has increasingly been used in expert testimony, the theory comes under criticism for painting victims as one-dimensional. When the victims, who have killed their abusers, testify to struggling emotionally and physically with their situation, their behavior show “signs of initiative and agency that are inconsistent with [BWS],” writes Katherine Baker.

Strategic defaulters also struggle emotionally with their decision to walk away. These aren’t people who bought a house and never made a payment. They sell assets, cut back, and do everything possible to pay their note. Eventually they seek out their lender to negotiate a compromise but are most times rebuffed.

Dayna and Scott Merritt bought their 2,000-square-foot home in North Las Vegas, Nevada, for $385,000, but five years later it will only fetch $180,000 and the couple is wondering if they should keep paying for a house that may never be a (net) asset.

“We’ve stuck it out. But there’s been no ‘attaboy,’” Dayna Merritt, 43, a substitute teacher told the USA Today. “We’re paying on something that seems like it won’t work out for us.”

The Merritts put $80,000 down, and still Scott’s father has calculated that the couple will remain underwater until 2020. “Every month,” Dayna Merritt says, “I ask myself, ‘Why are we paying this?’”

After starting the loan-modification process two years ago, the Merritts dropped it, “as reports of others’ failed attempts flew through the neighbor-hood and the news media.”

The Merritts’ friends across the street, Rachael, 41, and Joseph Stewart, 46, likewise have run out of patience with their mortgage and have stopped paying in hopes that their lender will alter their loan.

The Stewarts have cut expenses and even tried to clean up the front yards of vacant houses in the neighborhood. But, when a law-enforcement officer came to their door looking for a neighbor who was renting a house similar to theirs for much less, that was the last straw. The neighborhood originally barred rentals.

Belinda and William Haag put $82,000 down on their North Las Vegas home. The couple pays over $2,000 a month on the mortgage, but could rent

Continued on page 8

Commentary: Doug French


www.choateweinbergreport.comwww.pennypresslv.com

the same house for half that. The Haags hope to short sell, but will walk if the lender won’t cooperate.

Some analysts believe that the number of strategic defaults has peaked, but these stories reveal the truth. Those who have been paying are wearing down — financially, mentally, and emotionally.

Real-estate service Zillow says 85 percent of Las Vegas homeowners are underwater. CoreLogic believes 66 percent of Nevada homeowners owe more than their homes are worth. The percentage nationally is 23 percent.

“I do have concern because as the prices go down further, it might pro-vide more incentive for people to strategically default,” Nasser Daneshvary, director of the Lied Institute for Real Estate Studies at UNLV told VEGAS INC. “They still owe the same amount of money to the banks, but I think it’s getting bad enough that the ethical issues become less important to people.”

And as the market continues to worsen, Las Vegas broker Frank Nason worries, “Friends and associates that would have never considered walking away a year ago to 18 months ago are. It’s about the dismal outlook going forward. They see it’s going to take a decade before there is any daylight in their house.”

There are those who pass judgment on spouses who leave a bad mar-riage as well as those who choose to stay. It’s immoral in one person’s eyes to leave even the most abusive relationship, because of those wedding vows. At the same time, many people can’t understand why a battered spouse doesn’t just leave, thinking it’s stupid to jeopardize life and health.

Libertarians might jump in and say that if a spouse has been aggressed against, the law-enforcement provider will step in to protect the battered from the batterer. The batterer would be punished and the battered would be compensated.

But that’s not how the criminal-justice system works. Batterers were protected in the past and are still hard to prosecute. And if the batterer had friends down at the police station, worked there, or had pull at city hall, the state protected the batterer. “The marriage license in our society also seems to serve as a license to violence,” Walker writes.

In the case of the mortgage mess, the federal government is protecting the lenders and mortgage owners. Fannie and Freddie are the government, and the other big mortgage holders have many friends in Washington. Instead of being allowed to go broke — with these undercollateralized mortgages sold in a bankruptcy auction to fresh buyers who in all likelihood would negotiate with borrowers — the mortgage holders, who often can’t prove they own the mortgages, refuse to deal with borrowers until a payment

default gets the lender’s attention. In the rare case of a modification being consummated, it only adjusts payment terms. But it’s the principle amount of the note that must be lowered.

Libertarians will say, “Wait a minute. Homeowners knew what they were getting into when they signed the documents. The terms of the deal didn’t change. Banks haven’t turned into batterers. Besides,” they claim, “your analogy doesn’t work because no woman would marry a man who displayed violent tendencies.”

But of course that’s not true. One victim, whose story is told in The Battered Woman, asserts, “I had no idea that he was physically violent until six months into our marriage. Before we were married, he had threatened to burn down my house and kidnap me if I didn’t marry him. He also threat-ened to kill my parents.”

That didn’t stop “Anne” from marrying this abusive man. When he had said those things, she says, in a way she believed him and in a way she didn’t.

Well, she asked for it, some would claim. She better stick it out and hope for the best. But it’s hard to imagine even those people believing that if the victim were their own sister or daughter. Similarly, people who know some-one who has strategically defaulted are 82 percent more likely to at least declare their willingness to strategically default, according to the research of Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. “Social considerations are directly affected by the frequency of foreclosures and the probability that somebody knows somebody else who strategically defaulted,” write the three researchers.

Even though the note or mortgage terms didn’t change, the perception of those terms does change. Paying $2,000 a month for a 2,000 square foot house in North Las Vegas was fine in the boom. But if the same house can be had for half that now, being forced to pay double each month for nothing is a financial beating.

The borrower feels trapped and helpless. And when the other side of the transaction refuses to negotiate, does not communicate, drags their feet, or gives mixed signals, the lender (backed by government force) is seen by the borrower as abusive.

So while you may see those who walk away from underwater mortgages as morally wrong for breaking their mortgage vows, others see those who stay for the financial beating as stupid. No matter. As prices continue to fall, millions more will make a run for it. DOUG FRENCH

Doug French Continued from page 7


Commentary: Albert ThomasThe New America

We voted for it and now we are getting an idea what we voted for.Our new president promised us he was going to fundamentally change

the country. He did not say a chicken in every pot or a car in every garage, but we will have them.

We won’t get to choose the restrictions to make our food more healthy; they are already happening. Nor will we be able to say what kind of car. General Motors has become Government Motors. The sales of their electric car shows no one wants it, but that is what you will get anyway – and pay extra so your neighbor across town who does not have a job can also have one. Everyone must share the wealth – even if there isn’t any.

Everyone must be treated equally.All kids can go to college whether they have the brains or ability for it

or not. No kid will fail. All will get a degree. History is being rewritten. We will no longer study that outdated Constitution. It was written by a bunch of rich slave owners so cross it off Everyone now is “equal”.

All children will be “average”. No person can be “better” than another. Rich is bad; poor and dependent on the government is the way for every-one.

Our president no longer follows the Constitution. Congress has become irrelevant. Like any Emperor he issues edicts called Executive Orders. The most efficient method of producing electricity is now on his list to be banned – COAL. He is the boss and knows more than us little people.

Our new central government (like they had in Russia, but failed) will issue decrees for everything. Maybe they will make the “poor” and “under-privileged” report for work every day like they do in the Philippines. There, if you don’t sweep the streets or do some other local job, you don’t get the welfare check. Maybe that would not be “fair” or more likely the unions would not allow it.

Our leader has just about stopped all oil drilling – in this country. He did give Brazil 2 Billion dollars to drill for oil and said we could buy it from them. No more drilling in the US where we have more oil than Saudi Arabia. That would drop gas prices about $2.00 per gallon and create more than a million new jobs. But he knows best.

Everyone is going to be able to have his own house. The president and his friends – Bernanke, Dodd and Frank – have passed new laws that will make that happen. As of this moment there are 4,000,000 (yes, 4 million) vacant homes. Why isn’t he passing a law giving us a new house?

Gosh, Mr. President, I want to thank you for the “CHANGE”. I am look-ing forward to the new house, healthy food, a new electric car and a college degree for my kid. You have my vote in the next election. AL THOMAS Al Thomas’ new book, “If It Doesn’t Go Up, Don’t Buy It!”, 3rd edition, has helped thousands of people make money and keep their profits with his simple 2-step method. The method made 10% during 2008. Read the first chapter at www.mutualfundmagic.com and discover why he’s the man that Wall Street does not want you to know.

Energy Independence, Jobs Within Reach

Fuel prices got you down? Need a job? Well, prepare to unlearn every-thing you’ve learned about domestic energy production. Don’t ever let another green “warmer” tell you, “We can’t drill our way out of this mess.” That’s a lie.

Contrary to environmentalist talking points, we know that by conserva-tive estimates, the United States enjoys three times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Additionally, we have enough natural gas reserves to last nearly a century. Let that sink in.

Developing these resources could create nearly a million jobs and pump revenue into a desperately deflated economy. Imagine an America no longer forced to rely for our key energy supplies upon those who would just as soon see us dead.

If President Obama and the alarmist green lobby would simply get out of the way, we even might use our wealth of resources as a bridge to cleaner, renewable energy sources, creating jobs and boosting the economy along the way. Everyone wins.

Consider that according to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are as many as 1.8 trillion recoverable barrels of oil in the Green River Formation in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming alone. This is in the form of oil shale - organic-rich rock from which oil and gas can be extracted.

A more conservative estimate by the Rand Corp. puts it at 800 billion barrels. To put this in perspective, the United States has 75 percent of the world’s oil shale, and those 800 billion barrels represent more than three times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.

The Rand study, conducted in 2005, predates recent advances in shale-oil extraction, including horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (frack-ing). These are revolutionizing oil and gas production.

Environmentalist naysayers simply have it wrong. It won’t take decades to tap this oil. In fact, we can produce enough oil to free ourselves entirely from foreign oil imports in the next 10 years. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) supplies more than a third of our oil. Why? We have all we need and more.

Yet Mr. Obama fatalistically projects that via a combination of natural gas use and oil drilling, we can only reduce our foreign oil imports by one-third by 2025. In reality, we can reduce them by half in just five years.

Still, in his trademark fashion, this president says one thing and does another. He has aggressively rescinded policies enacted by his predecessor to encourage drilling, making it extremely difficult for independent com-panies to get leases on federal lands, where roughly 65 percent of this oil lies. This means fewer jobs, greater foreign fuel dependency and a weaker economy.

Natural gas is another part of the solution. It’s a cheap, clean-burning fuel source and, according to a 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

study, it lies within our borders in 92 years’ worth of rich abundance.Here’s the problem: Most of this natural gas is accessible only via frack-

ing. In Colorado, for example, 90 percent of gas wells require fracking. The technique, which occurs thousands of feet below ground, involves pumping a solution of water, sand and .5 percent lubricating chemicals at high pres-sure to create cracks in the rock that will allow oil and gas to flow out and be collected.

Yet, where free-market innovation and progress occur, Berkeley-type liberals are sure to tread. A huge anti-fracking lobby has emerged, assert-ing - against all the evidence - that fracking is harmful to the environment (mustn’t disturb the Sugarloaf tree).

The lobby’s primary claim is that fracking contaminates groundwater - a claim refuted by Mr. Obama’s own head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who recently admitted, “I am not aware of any proven case where the fracking process has affected water.”

Yet the anti-frackers demand that this clean, safe technology be banned or at least regulated into nonviability. When greenie activists say “jump,” Mr. Obama asks “how high?” His administration’s regulatory heavy-hand-edness has rendered 90 percent of this natural gas and oil inaccessible.

According to studies by Penn State and the energy consultant Wood Mackenzie, if the president would back-off the frack-off and allow those who actually produce something to use these fantastic new oil and gas tech-nologies, more than 800,000 new jobs would materialize quickly.

Imagine an immediate need for natural gas vehicles and new natural gas power plants. Someone has to build them. Every drilling project stimulates the local economy as landmen, roughnecks and drilling crews fill hotels and restaurants and shop locally with their honorably earned greenbacks.

According to an ICF International study, the industry could produce nearly $2 trillion in government revenue as well through lease payments, royalties and taxes. Billions more would stay here at home that would oth-erwise go overseas to OPEC and other foreign oil interests.

Over the years, the left has successfully seeded major misconceptions about the “Big Oil” boogeyman. The fact is that hundreds of small, indepen-dent oil companies help supply the country with energy. They pump millions into the economy through private and government leases and royalty pay-ments. They employ hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Economist Peter Ferrara, writing recently in Forbes magazine, observed, “While [Ronald] Reagan used to say that his energy policy was to ‘unleash the private sector,’ Obama’s energy policy can be described as precisely to leash the private sector in service to [his] central planning ‘green energy’ dictates.”

Mr. Obama, tear down this leash. Who knows - Brazil and Saudi Arabia might actually become two of our “best customers.” MATT BARBER and JARED BARBERMatt Barber is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as Vice President of Liberty Counsel Action. Jared Barber, Matt’s brother, is an Independent Petroleum Landman working in the Oil and Gas industry. He is a member of the AAPL.


Commentary: The Barber Brothers



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Past GRPCs have outlined victory plans and made public the latest firearms trends. They allowyou a first-hand chance to hear movement leaders--and make your voice heard.

This year we’ll take a look at critical issues such as: city gun bans, youth violence, “smart” guns,concealed carry, federal legislation, legal actions, gun show regulation, state and local activity. We’ll

also preview the upcoming elections and analyze the U.S. Supreme Court McDonald decision.The full roster of GRPC 2010 speakers has not yet been set. Past speakers have included: Alan M.

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Republicans Rising?When it comes to criticizing Republicans, Democrats are pikers com-

pared to me; however, now would be a good time to give a little credit where credit is due. And the Nevada GOP is showing not only some signs of life, but political competence as well.

Exhibit A is the party’s recent special meeting in Sparks to select its nominee for the Second Congressional District race scheduled for this September. And while the Nevada Supreme Court could still throw a mon-key wrench into the process, the selection of Mark Amodei was made with-out bitterness or rancor or even too much soapbox pontificating by the usual gaggle of gadflies.

Ditto the election of a new party chairman to replace Amodei. After it was announced that Amy Tarkanian had been elected, her opponent, Patrick McNaught, showed considerable class by immediately making a motion for the committee to elect Tarkanian by unanimous consent. Which it did.

Indeed, the entire meeting was conducted by acting Chairman Sherry Dilley with a level of efficiency and competence not usually associated with the GOP....but why bring up the 2008 convention again, right? (Oops)

By the way, the Nevada GOP also reportedly has several thousand dol-lars already in the bank.

In addition, the party landed and will host the Western Republican Leadership Conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas next October....and if they’re not careful, they might be able to use the February presidential caucus to wipe out the Democrats’ voter registration advantage which they

gained using their own caucus in 2008.Meanwhile, over in the state Senate, conservatives now rule the roost

and Sen. Michael Roberson was recently tapped to head up the caucus’ cam-paign operation next year.

This job has been handled, almost unilaterally, by moderate Sen. Bill Raggio in the past. That the caucus leadership has enough confidence in itself to task this critically important slot to a freshman conservative who is not in leadership says a lot about how fast and far these Republicans have moved beyond the Raggio era.

And while Gov. Sandoval still has some fence-mending to do with con-servatives over breaking both his promise not to extend the sunsets and to roll back general fund spending to the 2007 level, there’s no outright “RINO Revolt” festering in the grassroots the way there was against Gov. Guinn in 2003.

Sen. Dean Heller is well-positioned - showing only slightly behind his Democrat opponent, Shelley Berkley, in early polling - while Rep. Joe Heck seemingly gets stronger in his district with each passing attack by the Democrats. Indeed, other than the continued incompetence by Republicans in the state assembly, Nevada Republicans are looking pretty darned good these days.

If only they don’t blow it. Alas, a big *if* if history is a guide. CHUCK MUTHChuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach and publisher of NevadaNewsandViews.com. He may be reached at [email protected].


Commentary: Chuck Muth


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