Take those evil banks that wouldn’t lend to minorities, closing them out of the housing market. Everyone deserves a good home, so government had to step in with new laws and create the taxpayer-backed Freddie and Fannie, in order to force those greedy bankers to loan money to minorities so they could buy houses. The next thing we knew, those evil speculators tricked a bunch of poor people into purchasing houses they couldn’t afford; and other evil speculators bundled the loans; and the evil Wall Street executives bet American’s retirement money on the bundles, until it all came crashing down on itself. Then the government had to bail out those “too big to fail” on Wall Street and the banks. Now the greedy Wall Street and bank executives are getting paid too much, so the government has to restrict their pay and realign it to lower the risks they take.

Another example is our current healthcare market. We’ve been told the evil insurance companies don’t care about patients and do everything they can to restrict necessary procedures. (Don’t ask me why the healthcare plans include forcing every American – strike that and change it to every resident in America – to purchase health insurance.) Additionally, doctors are cutting off diabetics’ feet and removing children’s tonsils to make a profit. (Maybe we should keep diabetics and children away from these greedy doctors.) The healthcare market is so bad that the government believes it will be able to squeeze out the waste in order to cover more people at a lower cost per person. And we can’t even consider ideas like selling insurance across state lines or allowing individuals the same tax breaks that employers receive for purchasing health insurance. We all know that allowing more market freedom would just cause more greed and evil-doing, which would then require additional government involvement in order to save us all.

Geez - with all of this evidence of market evil, the last thing we need is to create a new market. J

According to Investors Business Daily, Apollo Alliance wrote the majority of the bill in 2008, and President Obama and Congress accepted it nearly as-is.[1]

Apollo Alliance is a group of liberal activists focused on redistribution of wealth, environmental justice (which is the same thing as redistribution of wealth), and saving the Earth (basically through the redistribution of wealth).

Board members of Apollo Alliance included the self-described communist Van Jones (who Obama recently ousted from his growing list of Czars); the co-founder of Weather Underground Jeff Jones (yes – the other founder is Bill Ayers, the ghost author of Obama’s books and one of the key launchers of Obama’s political and community-organizing careers); Gerard Hudson (SEIU), Leo Gerard (United Steelworkers of America) and Terence M. O’Sullivan (Laborers’ International Union of North America); the founder of ACORN Wade Rathke; and the CEO of the Center for American Progress (a George Soros funded progressive think-tank) John Podesta. Mr. Podesta also co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition Project, which likely is how the Apollo Alliance economic stimulus bill was brought to Obama’s attention.

We don’t know exactly where the estimated 1/3 of the economic stimulus has gone, since the Recovery.com website still isn’t complete even with its $9.5 million redesign. My guess is the ARRA was written to redistribute the wealth into the pockets of those who authored it.  One thing we do know is that our economy is not recovering.  Then again, it is becoming evident that ARRA was not written to improve our economy. 

I will spend some time investigating the board members, staff, and financiers of Apollo Alliance over the coming days to understand their views and whether any of them received taxpayer money under ARRA. Stay tuned…