Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal wrote one of his best columns. And the title of it: Silicon Valley Bank and Joe Biden’s $19 Trillion Money. And what Mr. Jenkins points out are things that really need to be pointed out about what Biden did and what the ramifications are and then whether or not what Biden did solved the underlying first mover problem.
Which it did not. I’ll give a little advanced warning that it didn’t solve the underlying problem. And he identifies the underlying problem. He goes on to say, and I will give some quotes here from the article, “If Monday’s routes and bank stocks further spooked uninsured depositors, it was just one more way government was working against itself.”
“Shareholders had a reason for fright as the government suddenly, and unilaterally rewrote the terms of their investment. In essence, out of the blue, the risks that large sophisticated, uninsured depositors had willingly accepted were shifted to bank shareholders and US taxpayers so Biden could have a pleasanter start to his week, and otherwise would’ve been the case.”
He says it goes on. Don’t buy the claim that bank shareholders and CEOs have been taught a lesson. He says the government doesn’t actually eliminate failure. It transfers the risk to itself with enough risk transference, government’s own solvency, and ability to maintain the value of its currency are placed at risk.
We aren’t there yet, but hard to miss are the whispers that the Fed should now back off the inflation fight to support the administration’s priority to avoid more political noise in bank failures. Here’s the key paragraph. When he gets into what the underlying problem is that is causing all of the distress across our economy.
The biggest problem of all is the size, inefficiency, indebtedness, and unsustainability of government. This is why I said earlier this week, the key is the governments of incredibly high government spending and incredibly high overreach by the bureaucracies of our country. Our political class has a silent strategy here too.
Hope it blows up on somebody else’s watch. Now that’s a key one. Hope it blows up on somebody else’s watch. If the politicians like Barney Frank who passed the Dodd-Frank Bill, then retired, oversaw them, and was responsible for the 2008 and 2009 mess. Then he goes on the board of Signature Bank in New York and watches it proceed to have a whole bunch of terrible woke policies.
He collected hundreds of thousands of dollars as a bank board of directors as a bank board member. The question is whether or not he’s gonna be sued, which he ought to be because he didn’t do his job. There are fiduciary responsibilities to being a board member, especially of a bank. Already written into law are set 25 percent cuts in social security benefits.
Medicare can always balance its books. Listen to this. Medicare can always balance its books by cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals and letting declining service and wait lists drive patients to seek care elsewhere. That’s what’s happened in Canada, by the way.
That’s what’s happening in Great Britain as we speak. Those are exactly the things that are going on, and anyone who does not understand that our biggest problem facing this country is the vast overreach of our federal government is simply wrong. It’s just that simple.
And unfortunately, saving Silicone Valley Bank and the depositors in the method that they’ve done it, kicks the can down the road. The question is, does it kick the can down the road a couple of hundred yards, in which case it’s gonna rear its ugly head fairly soon, or does it kick the can down a mile or so, which pushes it out? Maybe two or three or four years.
We will see. But, Kevin McCarthy has a chance with the Republicans on the debt ceiling increase to force the Biden administration to do the right thing and to cut government spending by at least half a trillion dollars which shouldn’t be that difficult because Biden’s increased government spending by at least one and a half trillion dollars. So in two years, it shouldn’t be very difficult to get him to give up a third of his increases. But we’ll see.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “U.S. Capitol” by The Free Birds.
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss Joe Biden’s right to rule as a Marxist with hopes that Republicans will exert their power once the tables are turned in 2024.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. Good morning, Crom.
Carmichael: Good morning, Michael. Yesterday afternoon, the legal but not legitimate current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden, gave what I thought was one of the most divisive and ignorant, dishonest speeches by a modern American president in some time. I don’t know if you saw it all. Did you see it?
Carmichael: I saw sound bites.
Leahy: He claimed that January 6 rioters are worse than slave-owning Confederates in the Civil War because they breached the U.S. Capitol.
He also said that basically everybody who supports Donald Trump is an awful person because they actually want to have election integrity laws that make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat. It was extraordinarily divisive and mean.
Carmichael: Let me just ask, Michael. Of the sound bites I saw, not one of them surprised me. Are you actually surprised?
Leahy: Well, not that he believes this crime, but that it is his overt strategy to be so dishonest and divisive at a time when supposedly can’t we all get together.
Carmichael: But he’s always been like that.
Leahy: I agree. He has.
Carmichael: I think it’s instructive. And actually, I take a little bit different position than you do. I agree that it was reprehensible what he said, but the American people need to have a choice.
And Joe Biden, if you want the biggest, most oppressive, most regulatory, high-taxing government, perhaps since FDR – and let’s remember when FDR left office, the top marginal tax rate was 94 percent – and Biden wants to be what he considers to be greater than FDR.
I suppose in Biden’s perfect world, we’d be a Marxist state, that Washington, D.C. would control all the means of production. I have some friends who were anti-Trumpers, and they wouldn’t discuss the possibility of a Marxist Democrat party.
They wouldn’t discuss it because if they discussed it, they had to agree that Trump was better than that. And it’s a really interesting thing when you discuss things with people.
If they are uncomfortable talking about the alternative, then they’re not willing to think through the choices that we have.
And what Biden is doing both by what he says in this case – not all of the things, a lot of things he says are distractions – but his deeds calling for a whole-of-government approach.
Now, we’re going to talk a little bit later in the show.
In fact, we could talk about it right now. There was a guy that Trump appointed to be head of the Social Security system. That’s no big deal except that you’re appointed for a term.
Leahy: Right.
Carmichael: Biden has fired him.
Leahy: I didn’t know that. On what grounds?
Carmichael: Because he can. And I’m okay with that. Let me say why. When Trump was president, the media believed that he didn’t have the authority to fire people.
I hope that the next president, assuming that when Republicans take charge again and have control of the executive branch, it’s my hope that the next president takes Biden’s approach where he will use the whole of government, he or she, to rein in the government and to fire people who do not carry out in the executive branch.
Every employee in the executive branch is under the chief executive. There are people who disagree with that. There are people who say that the union contracts say that the President cannot fire somebody who’s a civil servant.
And my argument is I don’t think that’s been constitutionally tested if somebody will not carry out the policies of the administration and whether or not they can be fired.
Leahy: The whole point of having an election and having a president to head the executive department is the people are saying we support the policies of this president. And he should be able to fire people who don’t implement his policy.
Carmichael: Right.
Leahy: I agree with you on that principle.
Carmichael: And so what Biden is saying and making it clear to everybody, that he wants Washington to be the end-all and the be-all of government.
He doesn’t want people in Tennessee to have the right to live the way people and, under the laws, that the people of Tennessee want to live.
That’s what he is saying. I’m glad he is saying that because it shows there’s no obfuscation at all. My word of the day. Obfuscation.
There’s no obfuscation at all as to what the Democrat Party stands for. I have said over and over again, the Democrat Party is the party of government.
Leahy: Absolutely. And, in fact, Crom, if I could just add to that point, Mark Levin has a new book out called American Marxist.
Carmichael: I have ordered it. I don’t think it’s in print yet. Maybe it is.
Leahy: Here is what we ought to do, because we know Mark Levin and Mark Levin is a friend of ours. I’m going to invite them to come to Nashville.
And maybe the three of us could have, like, an evening that – with Mark Levin. An evening with Mark Levin, Crom Carmichael, and Michael Patrick Leahy.
And we’ll talk about American Marxism. Because let us be honest about the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is American Marxism.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: That is exactly what it is. And Mark Levin is totally on point.
Carmichael: Let me say this. You’ve heard the old expression. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and whatever else it is, it’s probably a duck. It’s a duck.
And so just because Democrats claim that they are not Marxists doesn’t mean that they’re not Marxists. If it walks like a Marxist, if it governs like a Marxist, if it talks like a Marxist, it’s a Marxist.
Leahy: Now, that’s very good, Crom. That’s very good.
Carmichael: Thank you. You’re having low standards today.
Leahy: No, no, no. I don’t think anybody’s quite taken that twist on it. But it’s good.
Carmichael: Well, thank you. What Biden is doing, the question is, is whether or not it is legal and whether or not the president has a right to place people in positions of power to carry out their policies and to remove people who resist their policies.
And I believe that the President of the United States has that authority. You also have Neil Gorsuch who talks about how we need to be very concerned about the bureaucratic state.
Well, under Biden, the bureaucratic state will control everything including elections, by the way.
Leahy: Oh, yeah. The national bureaucratic state.
Carmichael: Yes. He would like to control everything. And when you look at the industries that the FTC is now trying to regulate.
In fact, I would challenge somebody to name a large industry that Biden doesn’t want to regulate from Washington. I would challenge them to pick a single large industry.
Not a company, but a large industry that Biden does not want to regulate. And so we’re seeing what Biden wants and what the Democrats want.
Therefore, when Republicans retake power and if the Democrats are unsuccessful at changing the election process and making it so that there’s a permanent party.
Leahy: The permanent cheat. Because, that’s what the Democrats – that’s what they want to do. They want to codify cheating for Democrats.
Carmichael: So if they’re unable to do that…
Leahy: We hope they are unable to do that.
Carmichael: I said if they’re unable to do that, Republicans retake the House in 2022 and control the Senate and the presidency after the 2024 election, then it’s my great hope that the next president – be it Trump or some other Republicans – uses the power of the executive state to shrink government.
Another thing Biden has done is the Congress appropriated and Trump signed a bill that allocated two billion dollars to complete the wall. Biden chose not to spend that money.
Leahy: He’s violating the law.
Carmichael: No, he chose not to spend that money. If he were violating the law, he would be impeached, or there would be a lawsuit or something.
There would be criminal activity, which shows you that if Biden has the right as president to not spend money appropriated by Congress, then that means that a Republican president would have that same right.
And so I think it’s a fascinating thing to think about all the different things that Biden is doing. And then the next president can simply say: Biden did it. I didn’t think that what he did was right, but I think he had the right to do it. Therefore, I’m doing it my way.
Leahy: A very interesting point.
Listen to the second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – guest host Ben Cunningham welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who weighed in on Joe Biden’s claim that white supremacy is America’s greatest threat and a myriad of Democrat Party power plays.
Cunningham: And joining us in the studio this morning, Grant Henry with Americans for Prosperity. Grant, thank you again this morning for driving up from beautiful Spring Hill, where you kind of have a new battery plant down there? General Motors?
Henry: All kinds of things going on through there in the Columbia area. It’s the up-and-coming site in Galeton.
Cunningham: I drive every day. We’re talking about Facebook. I drive by the construction entrance to the billion-dollar Facebook data Center in Gallatin when I’m going to take my walks.
Christina Botteri, the Chief Technology Officer of Star Media in from California, to join us in the studio. Christina, thanks so much for coming in this morning so early. I appreciate it. And the original All-Star panelist, Mr. Crom Carmichael. And Crom, we have got the question of the day for you. Are you ready for the question of the day?
Carmichael: Okay.
Cunningham: Is white supremacy the major threat to the United States of America, above China, Russia, Al Qaeda, you name it. White supremacy is the greatest threat, our President just told us. Is that true Crom? (Laughs) Think about it.
Carmichael: Well, I’m having a hard time identifying the name of a white supremacy group that is burning down buildings and mostly peacefully protesting.
Cunningham: Yeah.
Carmichael: I’m having a hard time finding that.
Cunningham: Peacefully jumping on top of police cars.
Botteri: I think you’re talking about Antifa, right? (Chuckles)
Carmichael: That would be Antifa. And they are not a white supremacy group. Neither is Black Lives Matter. And that is another protesting group that’s mostly peaceful. The only thing that I can say is they generally need to have lots of fires going on around them.
Cunnigham: To warm them?
Carmichael: So they can see. They don’t want to be blinded by darkness.
Cunnigham: The illumination.
Carmichael: They illuminate the landscape by setting things on fire.
Cunningham: But really, seriously, how depressing is that our President of the United States just elected, recently and talked about unity and he takes every opportunity he can to split us apart and to create this Marxist class separation between the virtuous victims and the evil oppressors. It’s depressing.
Carmichael: There are so many other things that are similar that are going on in California. The House passed a bill called the Equity Act in California.
Cunningham: That sounds ominous.
Carmichael: The Senate has not passed it, but in California, they have passed it. And what they’re doing in California under the Equity Act is they are transferring transgender prisoners who are formerly men who now claim to be women.
They are now transferring them to women’s prisons even if they have not done anything to transform themselves, including even taking hormone pills. If the men simply claim to feel like a woman, they are being transferred.
Some of them are as tall as 6’5 and weigh 300 pounds. They’re being put in rooms with female prisoners with eight in a room. And they are confined in there together 24 hours a day.
Cunningham: How did we get this far? This insanity.
Carmichael: But they’re no feminists.
Cunningham: Grant was just making the where are the feminists defending the women? And what we now know is that the feminist organizations, the way old ones actually did care about women.
The newer ones in the last 10 to 15 years care only about liberal far-left policy. They don’t care about women at all. They just care about far-left policy.
Cunningham: How can you be a person and deal with that kind of cognitive distance within your own mind and believe two separate things at the same time.
Carmichael: It’s not difficult at all. If what you lust for is power, if that’s your primary objective, then whatever it takes to get power is what you should do. And that is the nature of the left.
I’ve said since Michael started having me on the show that the Democrat Party is the party of government. That’s all it is. Plain and simple. Anything that expands government is good.
Anything that shrinks government is bad, period. And anything that expands unions is good. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but unions now currently are taking 11 million dollars a year in dues and those are compulsory dues.
And under the ProAct, which is the Labor Union Expansion Act, which is also past the House, it would go up to 20 billion dollars a year. 20 billion dollars a year.
Cunningham: And most of that recycles back to Democrats.
Carmichael: 99 percent. 99 percent.
Cunningham: 99 percent.
Carmichael: 99 percent of all political contributions made by unions. There are many other contributions that unions make to the Democrat Party that are not financial, that are simply time.
In fact, that might even be stronger and more politically powerful is that they employ tens of thousands of people at the local, state and national level to advance the Democrat Party agenda.
And that’s why Nancy Pelosi can pick up the phone and call the heads of five unions. I call them the five families. And call them and say this particular Democrat in the House is getting out of line.
I want them primaried and beaten in the next election. And that’s why Nancy Pelosi can treat her Democrat Party members more or less as indentured servants. One might even call them slaves.
Cunningham: It’s like an on-call hitman ready to take out your enemies.
Carmichael: Or compliant. Whatever you want to call it. They’re just compliant.
Cunningham: And what’s scary to me is that the unions are getting even bolder in their far-left policy.
Carmichael: This is government unions. We need to separate because the private sector unions to the extent they still exist, and they’re not that many of them.
Cunningham: No. It’s like eight percent now?
Carmichael: What I’m trying to get at is in the old days, the automobile unions ran the factories. They literally ran the factories. If management came up with a better way to build a car and if the union didn’t agree with it, it did not get implemented, period.
Well, once all of the car manufacturers went bankrupt, the unions gave up that privilege. They gave up running the factory floors. Now they still negotiate on behalf of all workers for the big three. The transplant companies are not unionized. For example, Nissan here in Smyrna is not unionized.
Cunningham: Right.
Carmichael: And so the private sector unions, they’re not terrible. In fact, many of them supported Trump or they support Republicans.
Cunningham: Absolutely.
Carmichael: Like the Teamsters, for example. They represent truckers. And then the Keystone Pipeline. Biden just snapped his finger in 11,000 union jobs disappeared. Those union jobs were worth over $80,000. each.
Henry: And that distinction is important there. It’s all about compulsory action. The ProAct you’re talking about. It would do away with right-to-work States and for listeners right now, a right-to-work state says if you want to join a union, fine.
But you can’t be compelled to do so at the condition of your employment. It’s a major distinction of the aspect of free choice, free will.
Cunningham: So this act would, in effect, nationalize the no right to work. You don’t have a right to refuse union membership.
Carmichael: That can only pass if 10 Republicans go along with it, and that’s not going to happen. And so there are certain acts in HR1 and S1 Senate bills. This is the one that they’ll essentially nationalize all election law and just ignore what the Constitution says. The Constitution is the document of convenience for the Democrats. That’s all it is.
Cunningham: If that.
Carmichael: They are perfectly happy to cite it when it’s convenient. When they don’t like it, then it’s inconvenient and they disregard it. But I don’t think the Democrats are going to be able to accomplish nearly as much as they would like to.
But this should be an eye-opener to everybody about what the Democrats would actually do if they had 51 senators. Here’s what they would do if they had the Senate and the House and the presidency. They would destroy the country as we know it.
Cunningham: That is their fervent wish to destroy the Republic.
Carmichael: And Republicans do a terrible job. I have to say this. Republicans do a terrible job of understanding the nature of the opposition and how to respond to it because they will not respond in kind. And I will tell you something. An armed Army facing an unarmed Army. I will go with the armed Army all the time.
Cunningham: Every time.
Carmichael: They will win.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
