Posts by AlanCaruba:
Obama’s War on U.S. Energy
January 19th, 2014
By Alan Caruba.
There is no reason for the U.S. to be in such a slow recovery from the financial crisis of 2008. If President Obama would get out of the way, our national debt could be dramatically reduced and hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created in the nation’s energy sector, leading to the expansion of its manufacturing sector and still more jobs.
As Daniel Simmons, the Director of Regulatory and State Affairs for the Institute of Energy Research told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Healthcare and Entitlements in February 2013:
“The federal estate contains vast energy resources, but the federal government allows energy production on a very small percentage of taxpayer-owned federal lands. The Interior Department has leased just two percent (2%) of federal offshore areas and less than six percent (6%) of federal onshore lands for oil and gas development.”
“These technically recoverable resources total 1,194 billion barrels of oil and 2,150 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that is owned by the federal taxpayer…the value of the estimated oil resources is $119.4 trillion and the value of the estimated natural gas resources is $8.6 trillion for a grand total of $128 trillion.”
As 2014 began, Mark D. Green, editor and lead contributor to Energy Tomorrow, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, noted that “Oil and natural gas are the energies of our lives.” They heat and cool our homes and apartment dwellings. They fuel our vehicles and aircraft. They are components of products we use every day. “Every day 143 U.S. refineries convert an average of 15 million barrels of crude oil for these uses and more.”
Green also noted the important role the energy industries play in our economy, citing the “5.6 percent (5.6%) of total U.S. employment. “With the right policies in place—pro-development policies that increase access to domestic reserves—the industry could add another 1.4 million jobs by 2030.”
Jobs for younger workers would increase because 50 percent (50%) of the oil and natural gas industry’s skilled workers could be retiring within a decade. Pro-development policies would fuel a renaissance in manufacturing as lower energy prices would reduce out-sourcing and attract manufacturers to build and expand facilities in the U.S.
One factor stands in the way of this brighter economic future and that is President Obama and those who direct the work of the Environmental Protection Agency—an enemy of the coal industry—and the Department of the Interior which has slowed the provision of leases to energy companies to expand the discovery and extraction of energy resources.
Instead, Obama has delayed the construction of Canada’s Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would generate jobs to build it and jobs resulting from it. Green says that “As unimaginable as it might have been just five years ago, the right policy decisions could see the U.S. meet 100 percent (100%) of its liquid fuel needs domestically or from Canada by 2014.”
Energy industries already send $85 million a day to the U.S. Treasury in income taxes, royalty payments, and other fees. Obama, though, wants to raise the nation’s borrowing limits after having added six trillion dollars in debt in his first term.
It was Obama who wasted a trillion dollars on a failed “stimulus”, discovering belatedly that there were few “shovel-ready” jobs while at the same time wasting billions in loans to wind and solar companies that went into bankruptcy shortly after receiving them.
As Simmons points out, “In 2011, wind power produced 1.2 percent (1.2%) of the energy used in the United States, solar power produce 0.1 percent (0.1%) and hydroelectric power contributed 3.3 percent (3.3%) of the total energy used. Solar and wind energy is unpredictable and require back-up from traditional electrical energy plants. “Today, there are 104 nuclear reactors in the United States and construction began for all of these reactors prior to 1974.”
Thanks to the EPA 153 coal-fired plants have been shut down!
What the public is not told is that the coal-fueled electric sector has invested $110 billion in a variety of clean coal technologies that reduced emissions by 90% and intends, over the next decade, to spend $100 billion more. Even so, the EPA continues to issue rules—New Source Performance Standard—that make operating coal-fired plants too costly to operate.
The Obama administration’s justification for its policies is the bogus claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for “global warming” or “climate change” when it plays NO role whatever regarding the Earth’s climate.
The same lies the Obama and Democrats in Congress, as well as the Health and Human Services department told Americans about the Affordable Health Act are reflected in their lies about the nation’s energy sector.
Obama has been waging a war on America’s energy needs and the benefits that would result from its expansion.
Until Obama leaves office and voters remove the opponents of the nation’s energy sector, the enormous benefits to Americans in jobs and debt reduction will not occur.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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Harry Reid is Killing the Senate
January 15th, 2014By Alan Caruba.
In his 2005 book, “The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate”, Lewis L. Gould began by noting that the Senate was intended “to provide a legislative check against the potential tyranny of unrestrained majority rule.”
“The Framers of the Constitution envisioned a Senate that would function as a wide and judicious check on both executive power and the House of Representatives. They did not imagine a body that would act as a rubber stamp for an incumbent president. Nor would they have been pleased to see the Senate so focused on allocating federal appropriations to contributors and constituents.”
By 2005, Gould had concluded that “the Senate had become more often an impediment to democratic government rather than a place to express sober second thought on national priorities.”
Nearly a decade ago, he concluded that “A profound sense of crisis now surrounds the Senate and its members. Critics allege that it is an undemocratic place where the national interest received only fitful attention.”
On January 8th I happened to watch CSPAN as the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, addressed the problems that were worse than even when Gould was writing about the Senate. The subject of his address to fellow Senators was “Restoring the Senate” and it received little or no media coverage.
Rule changes instituted by Majority Leader, Harry Reid, had turned the Democrat-controlled Senate into the rubber stamp the Framers had feared. It was Reid and then-Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who had pushed the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—through both houses in 2009; a 2,000-plus-page bill that was famously voted upon by Senators who had not even had time to read it, let along take the time to debate it. By 2010, voters returned control of the House to the Republican Party.
Obamacare had given rise to the Tea Party movement and the growing numbers of independent voters in the 2014 midterms will likely return power in the Senate along with voters unhappy with Obamacare and the President’s preference to rule by executive orders to bypass Congress. These days, in addition to Obamacare, the Tea Party movement is devoted to ensuring that the Constitution is not ignored.
McConnell, addressing the members of the Senate, said, “even if you’re completely at peace about what happened in November, even if you think it was perfectly fine to violate the all-important rule that says changing the rules requires the assent of two-thirds of Senators duly-elected and sworn, none of us should be happy about the trajectory the Senate was on even before that day or the condition we find it in 225 years after it was created.”
Kimberley A. Strassel, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, was much freer to address the problem. In a Jan 14 column, she wrote “The popular judgment that Washington’s dysfunction is the result of ‘partisanship’ misses the crucial point. Washington is currently gridlocked because of the particular partisanship of one man: Senate Majority leader Harry Read. And Republicans are warming to the power of making that case to voters.”
Noting that the 113th Congress is often called the least productive in history, Strassel pointed out that “The Republican House in fact passed more than 200 bills in 2013. Some were minor, and others drew only GOP votes” but “the laws all went to die in Mr. Reid’s Senate graveyard.”
“Mr. Reid took over the Senate in early 2007 and it functioned just fine in the last two years of the Bush administration. It didn’t suddenly break overnight. What did happen is the Senate Democrat’s filibuster-proof majority in the first years of the Obama administration—when Mr. Reid got a taste for unfettered power—and then the GOP takeover of the House in 2011.”
“That is when the Senate broke, as it was the point at which Mr. Reid chose to subvert its entire glorious history to two of his own partisan aims. Protecting his majority and acting as gatekeeper for the White House. Determined to protect his vulnerable members from tough votes, the major leader has unilaterally killed the right to offer amendments…Determined to shield the administration from legislation the president opposes, Mr. Reid has unilaterally killed committee work, since it might produce bipartisan bills.”
“Here’s how the Senate ‘works’ these days,” wrote Strassel, “Mr. Reid writes the legislation himself, thereby shutting Republicans out of the committee drafting. Then he outlaws amendments.”
“It isn’t that the Senate can’t work, it’s that Sen. Reid won’t let it.”
In addition to a President who is seen by more and more Americans as a liar and an incompetent, they are often unaware of the critical role that Harry Reid has played in thwarting the normal process of the Senate to debate—and amend—legislation. While Obamacare is the President’s legacy legislation, it was created in the Senate, a body which does not have the Constitutional right to initiate legislation that imposes taxes, an authority granted only to the House. And the Supreme Court ruled that it was a “tax” and permitted its implementation!
In his address to the Senate, McConnell said of Obamacare, “The chaos this law has visited on our country isn’t just deeply tragic, it was entirely predictable…the Senate exists to prevent that.”
Harry Reid is killing the Senate and only American voters can save it by replacing the Democratic Party majority there.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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America’s Unemployment Sinkhole
January 12th, 2014By Alan Caruba.
A President who thinks that extending unemployment compensation “creates jobs” is so out of touch with reality that it should come as no surprise that Obama has the worst record of unemployment rates since the days of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The latest employment figures for December showed that the economy only added 74,000 non-farm jobs, the fewest in three years! The government claims that the unemployment rate dropped 0.3%—the first time in 60 months that it dropped below 7%. And the official rate is bogus. The government only counts people as unemployed only if they are actively looking for work.
As of October 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that “The U.S. now has 90.6 million ‘non-institutionalized’ men and women over the age of 16 not working—an all-time high. That’s 10 million above the 80.5 million when President Obama took office. With total unemployment at 144.3 million, for every three Americans over the age of 16 earning a paycheck there are two who aren’t even looking for a job. That’s an ugly portent for American prosperity.”
In a September 2013 edition of Investor’s Business Daily, Betsey McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “Beating Obama-Care”, wrote that “After 4-1/2 years of the Obama presidency, an unprecedented number of Americans have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, low-wage earners are suffering most and the U.S. is fast becoming a nation of part-time workers.”
You can thank Obamacare for the rise in part-time workers as it increased the cost of hiring full-time workers and many businesses have reduced the hours of workers to avoid incurring it. Obamacare is a job killer. From Jan 1 through July 31, 2013, 77% of jobs created were part-time. Fewer than one out of four people got hired for full-time jobs. This is the opposite of a normal economy.
The official Labor Department figure of seven percent (7%) unemployment is a fiction as it does not include the millions who have given up looking for work. Mort Zuckerman, the chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, writing in a July 2013 edition of The Wall Street Journal, said “The unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.”
McCaughey noted that since 2008 Congress has extended jobless benefits from a maximum of 26 weeks to as many as 99 weeks every year, but failed to do so for 2014. While benefits ended for more than 1.9 million unemployed, the President and Congress went on vacation.
Now the most important piece of legislation according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a three-month extension of benefits. In an election year, this is likely to be extended repeatedly as Republicans are being described as heartless and indifferent, but the facts reveal a President who has been responsible for the millions of unemployed.
According to Paul Harrington, the director of Drexel University’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy, “Back in 2007, 7% unemployment would seem disastrously high, but now it’s more like a humble brag.” For those that are working, the “fiscal cliff” agreement with Congress included an increase of the Social Security payroll tax that raised it from 4.2% to 6.2% which translates for a worker earning $30,000 a year to a loss of $50 a week less in take-home pay.
The percentage of Americans who have a job or are seeking one plunged to a 34-year-low in the spring of 2013 to 63%. Little wonder that a record number of Americans households saw their real income drop by $2,627 and the number of people in poverty increased by approximately 6,667,000 according to the Census Bureau.
A record 46,496,000 are now poor by government standards. This represents an increase of 16.73% from 2008 to 2012.
Obama’s policies have created a nation of millions on some form of government dole. By June 2013, a record 23,116,928 American households were enrolled in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—AKA food stamps—according to data released by the Department of Agriculture. That outnumbers the population of the entire Northeastern United States or those living in the entire Western U.S.
By December 2013, the total number of people now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,988,269, up from the previous record of 10,982,920 set in November, according to the Social Security Administration. The average monthly benefit was $1,146.43, an increase from the previous December. CNSNews.com reported that the number of Americans getting disability benefits exceeded the entire population of Greece. The number has increased every month for 202 straight months.
The poverty level has broken a 50-year record.
The poverty rate has stood at 15% for three consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s, famed for LBJ’s “war on poverty.” More than $20 trillion has been spent on poverty since then. Today the government spends nearly $1 trillion annually on 80 federal means-tested programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services for the poor and low-income Americans.
The poverty level is defined by the government as an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four. The poverty is directly attributable in part to Obama’s failed efforts to improve the nation’s economy.
To put it in other terms, the U.S. spent $3.7 trillion on welfare over the past five years that Obama has been in office.
New research from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee, reported in October 2013, noted that “The enormous sum spent on means-tested assistance is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects.
It isn’t even the entire amount because states contribute more than $200 billion each year, primarily in the form of low-income health care. And, of course, Obamacare has already produced an increase of those enrolling in Medicaid.
The statistics all add up to a nation in which Americans are worse off since the election and reelection of President Obama and we have another three years in which to endure his historic failure to turn around the economy. What can we expect from a President who thinks that unemployment compensation “creates jobs”?
The government does not “create jobs”; the private sector does that and, under Obama, it has been under attack with a vast increase in government regulations and policies that produce unemployment.
Is there “income inequality” in America? Yes, there always has been, but what Obama does not talk about is the “income mobility” that permits low income Americans to secure employment and higher wages when the economy is improving. It is another Big Lie from a President who is wedded to Marxist “solutions” that have never worked.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
Kerry’s Looney Diplomatic Agenda
January 7th, 2014By Alan Caruba.
As far as Secretary of State John Kerry is concerned, the greatest threat to the Earth is “climate change.” That is his view as well of the Obama administration that, according to a CNS News article, wasted $7.45 billion taxpayer dollars over the last three years “to help developing countries cope with climate change in fiscal years 2010 through 2012, according to a federal government report submitted to the United Nations.” In Kerry’s words, climate change is “a truly life-and-death challenge.”
Since the first humans stood upright and began to walk, they have never played any role in climate change, a natural aspect of the Earth that is cyclical, moving between periods of warmth and cooling. We are currently in a 17-year-long cooling cycle which forced the army of environmental liars who claimed that “global warming” was the greatest threat to change its name to “climate change.”
Another name change caused a lot of problems as well.
Since Israel declared its independence and sovereignty in 1948, it has fought a succession of wars against its Arab “neighbors” and been subjected to the claim that former occupants were “Palestinians” despite the fact that there never was and still is not a nation called Palestine. Arabs that chose to remain became citizens of Israel.
It was the Roman Emperor Hadrian who tried to change the name of Israel to Palestine. The name reappeared following World War One when the Treaty of Versailles used it to designate a swath of land south of Syria as a British mandate. In 1948, when the British left, Israel was born again after 2,000 years.
Israel joined the United Nations on May 11, 1949. Resisting the existence of Israel became an Arab cause. These days Israel maintains diplomatic relations with more than 150 nations.
Successive American administrations sought to provide an agreement between those claiming to represent Palestinians and the nation of Israel. All such efforts have all failed. At present the Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah on the West Bank, is the focus of such efforts. Hamas, a proxy of Iran, controls Gaza, a territory abandoned by Israel in the hope that “land for peace” would succeed. It did not and Gaza is little more than a staging ground for ceaseless rocket attacks.
When Secretary Kerry arrived in Israel on January 3 to meet with PA president Mahmoud Abbas, the streets of Ramallah filled with several hundred protesters chanting “Kerry, you coward, there is no place for you in Palestine!” Abbas has never expressed any opinion other than a hope for the destruction of Israel. He replaced Yasser Arafat who waged an “intifada” against Israel as the self-appointed head of the Palestinians.
Kerry is so obsessed with getting a peace accord that he has spent five months trying to negotiate it with no progress. He has made ten trips to Israel and its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has had to pretend, like all the former prime ministers, that an agreement is possible. After the 1967 war, Egypt decided to sign a peace treaty that secured the return of the Sinai Peninsula. These days the Egyptian military it is fighting jihadists located there.
The Palestinians are losing ground. Abbas’ refusal to come to any agreement with Israel has resulted in the announcement by the European Union to discontinue its $1 billion annual contribution to the Palestinian Authority if a peace accord is not signed within a year. The US-EU aid packages total $1.5 billion and account for nearly all of the PA’s regular revenue. Jordan has already made it clear it does not Palestinians providing “security” on its West Bank border with Israel.
Yoram Ettinger, a columnist for Israel Hayom, recently wrote that “Kerry is preoccupied with pressuring Israel, notwithstanding the transformation of the Arab Spring delusion into a reality of an Arab Tsunami, highlighting the 1,400-year-old intra-Muslim and intra-Arab uncertainty, unpredictability, instability, fragmentation, violent intolerance and absence of Arab democracy and civil liberties.”
Kerry wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders, reflecting Obama’s goal. That is an idiotic demand that ignores Israel’s need for security or the provision of housing for its growing population. Obama has criticized the building of such housing in Jerusalem and the West Bank, but few give much thought to the absurdity and arrogance of this. Imagine if Obama expressed a similar criticism of new housing in Canada or Mexico?
The only overt ally the United States has in the Middle East is Israel, but you would not know that from Kerry’s efforts and Obama’s barely hidden enmity. Like the effort to strike a deal with Iran to stop enriching uranium to build nuclear weapons, both are oblivious to the reality of events in the Middle East, all of which reflect a region in turmoil. Having withdrawn our troops from Iraq and preparing to leave Afghanistan, Obama’s foreign policy only portends further turmoil.
The Obama administration would rather fight “climate change” than deal with the harsh realities of the real world.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
The United Nations Cesspool
January 4th, 2014
By Alan Caruba.
I don’t write much about the United Nations because it is everything that it is not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be devoted to human rights and other noble and global aspirations. Instead it is a cesspool in which the worst of its member nations are sponsors of terror and other sins against mankind.
An article on Fox News reminded me of just how horrible, for the most part, the United Nations is despite its occasional usefulness. Anne Bayefsky writes extensively on the subject of human rights. She is a professor at York University, Toronto, Canada and an adjunct professor at Touro College in New York. She has been honored for her work and I rank her as one of the most impressive and important women on the international scene today. Her article took a look back at 2013 and what to expect in 2014.
Lacking any leadership from the United States, a role it has played in international affairs since the end of World War Two, the world is spiraling toward the prospect of a Middle East cataclysm between its secular, moderate population and the insanity of Islamic fascism. As Bayefsky noted, “The U.N. Security Council adopted four legally-binding sanction resolutions on Iran in 2006. American diplomacy managed to extract even Russian and Chinese support for international laws that state ‘Iran shall without further delay…suspend all enrichment related activities.’”
“And yet in 2013 President Obama decided to destroy that hard-won consensus, trash those legal obligations, and authorize Iran to continue enrichment activities.” The U.S. agreement was joined by six world powers, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, five of whom, other than Germany, are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Have they concluded that Iran cannot be stopped? Or should be allowed to join the nuclear club?
Iran has never ceased from regarding itself as at war with the U.S. and Israel. It has never ceased to threaten the existence of Israel. With nuclear arms and long-range missiles, it could destroy or inflict unimaginable damage to the nations who signed onto the deal.
This readiness to ignore the obvious can be seen as well in the composition of the U.N. Human Rights Council. In November, it elected China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba as members. “Half the members of the Council are not even democracies”, noted Bayefsky, “and Islamic states hold the balance of power by controlling the African and Asian blocs.”
“In 2013, the Council criticized Israel more than any other state, almost twice as much as Syria and six times as much as Iran.” That is the very definition of evil and insanity combined. After three years, 130,000 Syrians have been killed in its war and millions have fled to adjacent nations, often having to live in rudimentary camps. It is led by a dictator, Bashar Assad.
U.N. Watch, an independent group, noted that in 2013 the General Assembly “adopted 21 condemnatory resolutions against Israel, compared to 4 on the rest of the world combined.” The U.N. Special Committee on Decolonization, charged with opposing the subjugation of peoples, “elected the murderous Syrian regime to a senior post.”
“The U.N. Conference on Disarmament in May 2013 made Iran its president.”
U.N. Watch noted that “UNESCO, which condemned no other country but Israel, and which was silent as Hamas bulldozed a world heritage site to make a terrorist training came, allowed Syria to sit as a judge on UNESCO’s human rights committee.”
These kinds of decisions and actions are part of a long litany of the United Nations’ behavior that renders its charter a meaningless piece of paper. Recall that the U.N.’s creation began in the United States as World War Two was coming to an end. The secretary general of the conference that organized the U.N. was Alger Hiss, a Russian spy who held high posts in the FDR and Truman administrations.
The United Nations is so entrenched in global diplomatic affairs that its vile actions cannot be lightly dismissed, especially in light of the way it is used by the major powers.
Nothing good can come of this and 2014 may provide testimony to that prediction.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
Obama’s 2014 Big Lie: Income Inequality
January 1st, 2014
By Alan Caruba.
As the liberal disaster called Obamacare unfolds, President Barack Obama is already embarked on his next Big Lie: income inequality.
It’s useful to visit some of the planks of Karl Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto. They included abolition of private property—the keystone of capitalism—and the application of all rents of land to a public purpose. Marx advocated a heavy progressive or graduated income tax whereas a fair tax that treats all Americans fairly by taxing what you spend instead of what you earn. The current tax code is more than 73,000 pages! Marx wanted to eliminate all rights of inheritance and centralize credit by means of a national bank.
What Obama is talking about is socialism/communism when he claims that income inequality must be altered by more government intrusion into our lives and his claims are false. He said that “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” is “the defining challenge of our time”
His objective is to further divide Americans by promising what government cannot and should not deliver. This is now the Democratic Party theme leading up to the midterm elections in November. He is right about one thing, only economic growth can provide the opportunity for Americans to increase their personal incomes, provide a choice of investments, and save more for the future. In his first five years in office, economic growth has been historically slow.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion commentary by Robert A. Grady he cites a 2011 study by Lee Ohanian and Kip Hagopian, “The Mismeasure of Inequality”, that concluded that “inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009.” According to studies by the U.S. Treasury, the capitalist system in America, providing mobility (up or down), found that “considerable income mobility” in the decades 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, found that approximately half of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher quintile by 2005. They were decades, the 1980s and 1990s, in which the vast majority of Americans gained higher incomes.
In the past four and a half years since the recession officially ended, poor people and the middle class were hurt the most and opportunity slowed. Under Obama millions of Americans are out of work and dependent on government programs such as food stamps and unemployment compensation. The later ended for many on December 31. The inequality that Obama cites is the direct result of the failure of his economic programs as well as a dramatic surge in federal regulations that harm economic growth.
The Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—is discouraging full-time employment. According to Gallup’s payroll-to-population ratio, the proportion of the American population working full-time, has dropped almost two percentage points in the last year to 43.8%. Wall Street Journal columnist noted that Obama spent 2013 fund-raising for the Democratic Party “making 30 separate visits to wealthy donors” at “more than twice the rate of the President’s two-term predecessors. On the day following the September 11, 2012 attack that killed an American ambassador and three others in Benghazi, Obama flew to Las Vegas on a fund-raising trip.
In the year ahead you will hear him cite figures based on 1979 income rates to justify his call for more opportunity, but in 1979 the mean (average) household income of the bottom 20% of wage earners was $4,000. By 2012, it was $11.499, an increase of 186%. For the middle class, the increase was 211%. Despite the 2008 financial crisis, it still rose.
Did the rich get richer? Yes. But the rich earn their money from inheritance, from business development (jobs) and investment. Under communism there is no inheritance; the state gets it all. And the state owns the factories and instruments of production, as well as collectivizing agriculture. It maintains a “progressive” or graduated income tax.
Does the political theme of income inequality work? Bill de Blasio, New York’s new mayor, ran on an income inequality platform and will be sworn in by former President Bill Clinton who will be accompanied by his wife, Hillary.
Income inequality will be the theme of Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union speech, but like everything else he says it will be a Big Lie.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
Looking Into My 2014 Crystal Ball
December 28th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
Pundits are expected to make predictions for the year ahead and far be it for me to avoid what, generally speaking, depends on who is making them. Major trends are already in place and easy to predict as they proceed, but it is always unknown events that upend predictions. Mother Nature and perpetrators of evil can always be counted upon to provide them.
Since the Earth has been in a seventeen-year cooling cycle, I can safely predict there will be no “global warming” in 2014 and, given the other science-based factors, the likelihood is that 2014 will experience more colder weather and may even be an earlier predictor of a mini-ice age much the same as the one that occurred from 1300 to 1850.
As mentioned, it is the unpredictable events that will affect 2014. The good news is that the U.S. has seen far fewer hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires in recent years. The global cooling trend, however, is likely to cause more and larger blizzards.
“Climate change”? This is now the basis of all the lies we shall hear from the President to justify his five-year delay of the Keystone oil pipeline, his continued war on coal—affordable electricity—and other Environmental Protection Agency efforts to control our lives while denying the creation of the thousands of jobs the pipeline and other energy-related development would provide. Environmentalism is the enemy of the technologies that have transformed and enhanced our lives.
The November mid-term elections hold the promise of ridding Congress of some of the Democrats who unanimously voted for Obamacare in 2009. It will also replace those Republicans-in-name-only, RINOs, who have joined Democrats in voting for legislation that advanced the socialism that is strangling the nation by expanding the federal government. The ranks of “independent” voters will increase.
The erosion of the Democratic Party base will continue as Obamacare afflicts millions of Americans who will lose their healthcare insurance plans, be deprived of using their personal physician, and see their costs increase as the insurance industry is destroyed. It is the essence of communism, providing the government with control over one’s life and, in too many cases, causing many to die for the lack of plans they previously had or the costs of those they are required to purchase. Those leaving the party will include women and the younger generation leaving college to discover there aren’t any jobs to help them cope with the debt they incurred to attend. Hispanics, too, show signs of leaving.
It is hard to predict what will occur within the Republican Party whose leadership has engaged in denunciations of the Tea Party movement. However, when the Tea Party movement elects more committed conservative GOP candidates, it will save the nation and the party. Suffice to say that Obamacare will be the gift that keeps on giving in 2014.
Obama’s failed foreign policy will ensure that former allies will cease to trust the U.S. to support their need to deal with the rising threat of Islamic jihad in the Middle East and Africa. Obama has lost Egypt and Saudi Arabia as long-time allies. Israel is in a particularly perilous situation and the outcome of the Syrian civil war does not bode well for it or its neighbor Jordan.
Iran will be the greatest threat of war since the 1930s. And, yes, the U.S.-led “deal” will fail.
Polls reveal a growing unhappiness with the U.S. Congress. The President’s performance ratings have been falling and will continue to do so in 2014. The problem is the growth of socialism that began during and in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The pension debt and other benefits resulting from government worker unions has forced Detroit into bankruptcy and other American cities will follow. By executive order the President just raised government salaries by 1%. Can he do that? Not really. Only the House can authorize such expenditures.
The mainstream media will continue to lose its credibility as the Internet affords Americans alternative means of finding out what is really occurring as opposed to the deceptive and manipulative efforts of the Obama administration. Having raised voter’s expectations of Obama, his fall will be dramatic in 2014. The mainstream media is largely composed of liberals who are the result of the transformation of education into socialist indoctrination that began in the 1960s. By contrast, conservative print and broadcast media will thrive. Fox News has more viewers than the networks and CNN, combined.
Events such as the current attack on Southern Sudan, and the on-going slaughter in Syria will continue. Christians throughout the Middle East and Africa will find themselves under continued attack. Muslim-on-Muslim violence will continue. Islam is devoted to its “holy” war, including its own schism.
In America, privacy, an essential element of the Constitution, will continue to be diminished if Congress does not address the vast collection of information of all of our communications. Read the Fourth Amendment. It says in part that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”
We may see more states enact laws to defy Obamacare. South Carolina is currently the only one. The Tenth Amendment says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Read the Constitution, you will not find the words “health” in it, nor “education”, nor ‘environment.” The federal government should get out of these aspects of our lives.
My most positive prediction is that historians will look back at 2014 as the year in which Americans woke to the threat of socialism-communism and, like the Tea Party movement, began to fight back.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Supreme Court is Undermining Science and Society
December 23rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
The Supreme Court has taken up another case based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign of lies that carbon dioxide is the cause of “climate change” and claims about the quality of air in the United States. The Court is composed of lawyers, not scientists.
At this point in the present era, the Court has made rulings that run contrary to the original, clear intent of the U.S. Constitution and has wrought havoc on our society.
In 1973 it ruled that the killing of unborn babies was protected and millions since then have been deliberately killed. It extended protection to sodomy and same-sex marriage. It is destroying the fabric of our society that has served Americans well for more than two hundred years.
It ruled that the Affordable Health Care Act was a “tax”, enabling the Obamacare to be unleashed with the subsequent loss of health care plans by millions of Americans, often the loss of their personal physician, and the requirement that deeply-held religious opposition to contraception and abortion be negated by a law that requires their beliefs be overruled and denied.
In 2007, I wrote a commentary that was published in The Washington Times. I criticized a Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a “pollutant”, opening the door to the EPA’s rapacious intent to control all aspects of our lives based on this lie that is used to justify its war on coal-fired plants that provide nearly half of all the electrical energy we use daily. “CO2 is not a pollutant,” I wrote, “It exists in the Earth’s atmosphere and every blade of grass and every tree depends on it.” It plays no role whatever in the Earth’s climate.
The Clean Air Act and revisions passed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s. The original regulation of air pollution was a good idea, as were the laws affecting clean water, but the EPA has since used pollution to impose a vast matrix of regulations that do not reflect the fact that the nation’s air and water is now as clean as it ever can be.
Carbon monoxide emissions have fallen from 197 million tons to 89 million tons. Nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons. Sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 3l million tons to 15 million tons. Lead emissions fell by more than 98%. Particulate emissions (soot) fell by 80%. The air in the U.S. is considerably cleaner, but the EPA’s assertions continue to be made to expand its regulatory power and to attack the sovereignty of the states.
A case that was recently argued before the Court is another EPA effort to rewrite the Clean Air Act, asserting that it be given authority to regulate the flow of alleged “pollution” between “upwind” states and those who receive particulates and gases under its control. Some 27 states are considered “upwind” and those states along with all others have their own air control laws. In states that are more heavily industrialized and which have a large number of coal-fired plants on which the EPA wants to impose expensive standards that have no basis in fact.
A coalition led by Texas of more than a dozen other states brought a case, Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation, opposing the EPA’s regulatory re-write of the Clean Air Act. In August 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the EPA which appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Wall Street Journal noted that “The D.C. Circuit only rarely overturns EPA rules, which shows how out of bounds the cross-state regulation is. The Supreme Court should overturn it for violating the federalist intentions of Congress, but there is also the added judicial incentive to show this increasingly rogue agency that it can’t rewrite the law as it pleases.”
The U.S. has been harmed by the many laws whose justification is based on the totally unscientific hoax regarding CO2. During the 101st and 111th Congresses, there were 692 laws introduced containing the term “greenhouse gas” when, in fact, CO2 is NOT such a gas, playing no role whatever in trapping warmth to affect the weather and/or climate of the Earth.
Stringent domestic laws and regulations, moreover, do not take into consideration the role of many other nations whose emissions are far greater than those produced here. However, reducing their emissions will have no effect on the Earth’s climate. The Earth is in what will likely be a lengthy cycle of cooling based on reduced solar radiation. It recently snowed in Egypt and in Israel where snow has long been a rarity.
The Obama administration’s “war on coal” has used the EPA to inflict an attack on the nation’s capacity to provide energy and the EPA has not ceased from using every ruling it has imposed to degrade the nation’s ability to maintain and expand the industrial base it needs to provide for economic growth, an increase in jobs, and the sovereign right of states to determine their own response to the need for clean air. The U.S. is a republic composed of separate republics.
At this point, control of the nation’s air and water quality should be returned in full to the states and the EPA should be eliminated as the threat to the nation it has become. The Supreme Court has played a role in this threat, ruling without any attention to real science, traditional values, and the clear intent of the Constitution.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Power-Mad EPA
December 16th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
Barely a week goes by these days without hearing of some new demand by the Environmental Protection Agency that borders on the insane.
Increasingly, EPA regulations are being challenged and now reach the Supreme Court for a final judgment. This marks the failure of Congress to exercise any real oversight and control of an agency that everyone agrees is now totally out of control.
Recently the EPA ruled that New York City had to replace 1,300 fire hydrants because of their lead content. The ruling was based on the Drinking Water Act passed by Congress in 2011. As Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) pointed out while lambasting the agency, “I don’t know a single New Yorker who goes out to their fire hydrants every morning, turns it on, and brushes their teeth using the water from these hydrants. It makes no sense whatsoever.” Reportedly, the Senate is poised to consider legislation exempting fire hydrants if the EPA does not revise its ruling.
The EPA is not about making sense. It is about over-interpreting laws passed by Congress in ways that now continuing lead to the Supreme Court. The Court is composed of lawyers, not scientists. In an earlier case, they ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “pollutant” when it is the one gas that all vegetation requires. Without it, nothing grows and all life on Earth dies.
A federal appeals court recently heard a case about the EPA’s interpretation of the 2012 Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, yet another effort in the “war on coal” that would shut down more coal-fired plants that provide the bulk of the electricity the nation requires.
The EPA is asserting that the rule would annually prevent 11,000 premature deaths, nearly 5,000 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks. Moreover it asserts that it would help avoid more than 540,000 missed work days, and protect babies and children. These statistics were just plucked from thin air and are typical of the way the EPA operates to justify its rulings.
What makes this case, brought by EarthJustice–formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund–of interest is the way the NAACP, along with 17 other organizations, came to the defense of the ruling. Are you surprised that the NAACP has a director of Environmental and Climate Justice? Apparently civil rights for Afro-Americans now embraces the absurd claims about climate change, formerly known as global warming. “Civil rights are about equal access to protections afforded by law,” said Jacqui Patterson, the NAACP director. “These standards provide essential safeguards for communities who are now suffering from decades of toxic exposure.” If these essential safeguards are in place, on what basis does she make such a claim?
The EarthJustice attorney, Jim Pew, claims the case is about protecting “hundreds of thousands of babies each year from development disorders, and spare communities of 130,000 asthma attacks each year. If, in a lawsuit, you find yourself arguing against the lives of babies, children with asthma, and people suffering from your toxic dumping, then you are on the wrong side of both the lawsuit and history..”
Here, again, the claims about health-related harm are absurd. Who believes that asthma or development disorders are related to mercury? Who believes that communities served by coal-fired power plants are subject to major health hazards?
The claims about mercury are baseless, in a 2011 commentary published in The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Willie Soon, a geoscientist at Harvard and expert on mercury and public health issues was joined by Paul Driesson, a senior policy advisor for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), is reputing the claims about mercury that have been part of the environmental lies put forth for years.
“There is no factual basis for these assertions. To build its case against mercury, the EPA systematically ignored evidence and clinical studies that contradict its regulatory agenda, which is the punish hydrocarbon use.”
“Mercury has always existed naturally in the Earth’s environment…Mercury is found in air, water, rocks, soil and tries, which absorb it from the environment. This is why our bodies evolved with proteins and antioxidants that help protect us from this and other potential contaminants.”
Soon and Driessen do not deny that coal-burning power plants emit an estimated 41-to-48 tons of mercury per year, “but U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons, Chinese power plants eject 400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers, and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.”
“Since our power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other 99.5% in our atmosphere.”
Such FACTS mean nothing to the EPA. The air and the water of the United States is remarkably clean, but to justify its existence and expand its power, the EPA continues to impose idiotic and unscientific rules about fire hydrants and power plants.
The threat is the EPA, not mercury.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The financial Collapse of America
December 15th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
“The United States is in very deep trouble. First, the concept of repaying $16.7 trillion in debt is not even a remote possibility over the next 100 years, even if the government had small surpluses. Then, because the country is running such large deficits, the national debt is increasing and getting worse…much worse. In addition, the government is approximately $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities that have to be resolved.”
“Pray that the market for the national debt remains open so that the United States can keep borrowing to repay the money is previously borrowed and then will have to re-borrow to repay the money it just borrowed. There is no chance the market will not change its demeanor over the next 100 years.”
That’s Murray Holland’s conclusion in his book, “A Nation in the Red: The Government Debt Crisis and What We Can Do About it” ($28.00, McGraw Hill). As a longtime book reviewer, I have read a growing stack of books warning about a financial collapse, but Holland’s book is not only based in the actual debt, but is written in a manner that even a person who has no knowledge of this issue can understand.
The “market” Holland refers to is the market for America’s treasury notes and bonds, issued to cover our on-going budget and the interest needed to pay prior borrowing. In sum, the nation is spending more and borrowing more than it can afford. It has been doing this for a long time and the warning signs are places like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and other European nations that, following World War Two, embraced socialism. America did so even earlier during The Great Depression and the decades since the 1930s.
Holland calls it a Debt Trap and conservatives know instinctively that the U.S. government is too large and too based in socialism to survive. “There are over 500 agencies and departments on the list and it does not even include all the agencies and departments created in the states under grant programs from the federal government.” One can find the list at http://www.usa.gov/directory/federal/index.shtml.
“The list of social programs is long,” writes Holland, “but the four major categories driving America into the Debt Trap are income security (Social Security, welfare, and other related programs), healthcare (Medicaid, Obamacare, and Medicare), education, and housing,” noting that “These programs did not exist until after the Great Depression.” They came about as the result of a Keynesian view that government spending would lift the economy out of its doldrums, but government spending does nothing to improve the economy. It sucks money out of the economy and, more specifically, out of the pockets of individual citizens and the business community.
Americans born during and after the Great Depression have had eighty years living in a nation whose economic system is capitalism, but whose governance is socialism. Despite nearly fifty years of a Cold War with the former Soviet Union (1945-1991), Americans have been blissfully ignored its intention of the communist intention to destroy capitalism and have accepted a vast matrix of social programs that now represent $70 trillion in unfunded financial liabilities. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their plan “to overwhelm America with debt, welfare, and entitlements—in other words, to bankrupt America has continued unabated.
“This will cause the collapse of America and the government could then turn to pure socialism,” says Holland, noting that “Their scheme has been so well researched it has its own name: the Cloward-Piven strategy,”
It’s worth noting that, in addition to the socialist nations of the European Union, communism is still alive and well in Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba to name just a few nations. And yet, even Russia and China have adopted some capitalistic measures, while ensuring strong, totalitarian central governments.
The level of danger has increased exponentially with the election and reelection of President Barack Obama whose namesake legislation, Obamacare, is already having a catastrophic effect on the economy while putting all Americans at risk for the loss of healthcare from individual physicians and hospitals. The legislation was passed by a party-line vote by Democrats and opposed by every Republican in Congress. Obama spent the years since signing it lying about it. That’s what Communists do.
It is what the vast bulk of the nation’s print and broadcast media is doing are doing as well. They are little more than echo chambers for the torrent of lies that Obama administration is telling Americans about the economy.
“During the first few years of the Great Depression, almost 2,300 banks were closed, manufacturing fell 46 percent, and wholesale prices fell 32 percent. Today, the United States has a reported unemployment rate of around 8 percent. During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate hit 25 percent.” With ninety million Americans unemployed, the figures cited by the federal government are a fiction.
The only thing that can save America is an increase in our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), selling more goods and services, enabling an increase in employment, coupled with a vast reduction in the enormous governmental regulation of business which thwarts this. The vast taxation of Americans needs to be reduced in order to permit them to retain and spend their earnings, make investments, start new businesses. The annual GDP is now less than what the nation earns.
The “redistribution of wealth” is a totally communist concept and it is the intent of the Obama administration.
The future of the nation depends on the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections and control of Congress by as many conservative candidates and office-holders is essential. The RINOs, Republicans in name only, must be replaced.
In the meantime, I recommend you purchase and read “A Nation in the Red.”
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama’s Moment of Truth—About His Lies
December 10th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
I think the bulk of the U.S. population, particularly likely voters in 2014, have reached the point where they no longer believe anything President Obama says.
It coincides with what may be the lowest level of confidence in the U.S. Congress. Its Democratic members all voted for Obamacare without reading it and the harm it is doing to millions of Americans, along with its total lack of constitutional legitimacy, will likely see those running for election and reelection in the 2014 midterms defeated.
As the first year of Obama’s second term is completed in January, the nation is at a point that I don’t think has existed since the days leading up to the Civil War in 1861. It took until 1865 to conclude that split and a hundred more years to make right the many wrongs that led up to it.
In my life, more than seven and a half decades, I cannot recall a President who has generated such a deep sense of distrust. I say “distrust” because that differs from just disagreeing with a particular President’s policies. I say “distrust” in the context of what people believe no matter their political affiliation.
What we all know now is that President Obama cannot be trusted when he speaks about anything whether it is his signature legislation, the Affordable Health Care Act, or his rejection of decades of U.S. policy toward Iran that began in 1979 when they seized our diplomats in 1979. In the United Nations and in Congress, sanctions were applied that were, until his recent announcement, working effectively to influence its determination to make its own nuclear weapons. All that effort has been undermined by a process conducted in total secrecy because Obama knew it would be rejected. It should be noted that this occurred when Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.
Obama is the fulfillment of a long effort by the former Soviet Union, begun in the 1920s, to transform our society from one whose values and policies led the world in the effort to oppose communism even as it and European allies embraced socialist programs that are now threatening theirs and our economic stability. “Social justice” is the term adopted and exercised through “political correctness”, a philosophy that paints the U.S. as a heartless, rapacious, racist, capitalist nation more to be hated than admired.
Political correctness played a major role in the election of a virtually unknown first term Senator from Illinois because Americans wanted to demonstrate to the world that a black man could be elected President.
The failure of the Republican Party to strongly advocate the traditions and patriotic beliefs of Americans led to his reelection. The other factor was the adoption of the Alinski-inspired methods of character assassination and the distortions of our history that is heard and read daily in the mainstream press and taught in our nation’s schools from kindergarten to college.
America has fallen prey to the infiltration and takeover of our education system that is filled with lessons and books that distort our history, denigrate our Founders, and teach disrespect for our Constitution, if it is taught at all. Our culture has been degraded by a Hollywood that turns out films depicting capitalism as corrupt and fills our lives with cultural messages that degrade our society.
From the earliest days of his first term, Obama has publicly attacked America in ways no previous President ever did.
In April 2006, in a speech delivered in Strasbourg, France, Obama said, “America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive (towards Europe)” when, in fact, America had twice come to the aid of Europe, first in World War One, and saving it from the worst totalitarian threat in World War Two. The graves of U.S. soldiers are found in cemeteries throughout Europe and it was the expenditure of trillions during and after WWII that attest to our long-term policies, not of conquest, but of liberation.
At home, Obama has striven to fulfill the “politically correct” policies of dividing the nation ethnically, emphasizing the national and religious differences that have existed in a culture of tolerance that earlier accepted waves of immigration of those who were eager to assimilate and become “Americans” as opposed to those who arrive, now often illegally, and demand the rights of native-born and nationalized Americans.
Obama has by-passed the limits the Constitution imposes on the executive branch with little or no opposition in a Senate controlled by the Democrats. The effort by the Republican controlled House led to the government shutdown and is now used against it despite the refusal of the President to negotiate and avoid it.
Even among “low information voters” the accumulated awareness of the many Obama administrations scandals is beginning to exercise some influence. From Fast and Furious to the Benghazi lies, even those who pay little attention to the government are growing aware of the massive waste of money the stimulus represented and the increase of U.S. debt, the failure to pass a budget for five years that the Constitution requires, suspicious huge purchases of ammunition by Homeland Security, and, of course, Obamacare. They may not understand what these scandals mean, but they sense something is very wrong with America.
A President who is widely perceived as a liar has lost the most important factor that all Presidents require to function, his credibility.
What is needed now more than ever before is a Congress that vigorously opposes his actions and the months between now and the midterm elections will be critical for Republicans and independents to assert the role of this branch. The attack on a long established voting rule in the Senate has made this more difficult.
It can only be hoped that enough Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and independents will wake from their stupor and demand action.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama’s Deliberate Destruction of the Economy
December 3rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” ~ Cicero 55 BC
What was true for Rome is true for America. President Obama may know little about history and less about economics, but he is relentlessly destroying America and has been since he first took office in 2009.
In September, the Gallup polling organization, reported that “Americans’ trust in ‘the American people’ to make judgments about political issues facing the country has declined each year since 2009 and, at 61%, is down nearly 20 percentage points from its recent peak in 2005. Still, that exceeds the 46% of Americans who trust the ‘men and women…who either hold or are running for public office,’ which is one point above the historical low from 2011.”
“The results are based on Gallup’s annual Governance survey, conducted Sept 5-8. The same poll found that American’s trust in the federal government to handle domestic and international problems, their trust in the news media, and their trust in the three branches of the federal government, and in state and local governments are all at or near historical lows.”
In the end, the primary currency of government is the trust people put in its ability to respond to the problems they encounter in their daily lives.
As of October, more than ninety million Americans were out of work. The data the federal government publishes is not trustworthy. It is manipulated for political gain. By October, even the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to admit that 90.6 million Americans over the age of 16 were not in the labor force–an all-time high.
Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, noted that “After four and a half years of the Obama presidency, an unprecedented number of Americans have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, low-wage earners are suffering most and the U.S. is fast becoming a nation of part-time workers.”
An October CNS News article reported that “Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau. They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.” The figures worked out to about 1.7 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every one person working full-time year round.
In September, CNS News reported that “A record 23,116,928 American households were enrolled in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—AKA food stamps—during the month of June, according to data released this month by the Department of Agriculture. That outnumbers the 20,618,000 households that the Census Bureau estimated were in the entire Northeastern United States as of the second quarter of 2013.”
Also in September, CNS News reported that “During the four years that marked President Barack Obama’s first term in office, the real median income of American households dropped by $2,627 and the number of people in poverty increased by approximately 6,667,000, according to data released by the Census Bureau. The record total of approximately 46,496,000 people in the United States who are now in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, is more than twice the population of Syria,” a nation that has lost 100,000 people in its civil war.
“In 2008,” the CNS News report noted, “the year Obama was elected, people in poverty represented 13.2 percent of the national population. In 2012, they represented 15.0 percent of the population.” And, in 2012, Americans either went to the polls or stayed home sufficiently to reelect Obama. Obama supporters in effect voted to continue the nation’s poverty rates.
In late January, the Federal Reserve released data that revealed that its holdings of U.S. government debt had increased to an all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000 as of the close of day. The Fed’s holdings of U.S. government debt had increased by 257 percent since President Obama was first inaugurated in 2009. It is the single largest hold of U.S. government debt. China is the largest foreign holder of this debt.
“The misery is not going to end soon,” wrote Mort Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of the U.S. News and World Report, in a July Wall Street Journal commentary, noting that the economy represents “the weakest gross domestic product (GDP) growth since World War II. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP in four consecutive years.”
Over the past five years, the U.S. spent $3.7 trillion on welfare. That includes approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs. That figure is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time.
You don’t have to be an economist to see that Obama embarked on a deliberate program to impoverish as many Americans as possible since taking office in 2009. If this is not a cause for impeachment than nothing is, but he will not be impeached. Instead, he will continue to attack all aspects of the economy. Obamacare is the ultimate example of this.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
From Prohibition to Obamacare
December 2nd, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and many other works of literature.
It is one of the great mysteries that, for progressives, also called liberals, the past provides no lessons, no warnings that would prevent them from repeating their errors. Progressives are always focused on a magical future in which there will be no wars, no hunger, no poverty. Their belief in the redistribution of wealth—communism—is, in Winston Churchill’s words, “the equal sharing of misery.”
Obamacare is a perfect example of the progressive inability to accept that socialism and/or communism simply does not work. It depends on coercion and in the case of communism it left hundreds of millions dead in its wake over the course of the last century. Obamacare depends on (1) the belief that human nature will change—which it will not—and (2) the lies to implement it.
The news is filled with the failure of the government, despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, to provide a working website. Even assuming that the technical problems are solved, the failure of Obamacare is built-in because Americans have always enjoyed a culture of independence, despite the creep of government programs that occurred over the last half century.
The trust in the federal government, of Congress, is at an all-time low.
Social Security is insolvent or soon will be. Medicare was rendered even more insolvent when billions were transferred to Obamacare. Medicaid will bankrupt states as thousands more sign up for this program of minimal medical service.
As I listened to and read about the Obamacare roll-out, I was reminded of an earlier program that was adopted, Prohibition. It involved a nationwide ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. It was the law of the land from 1920 until 1933. When it went into effect it was hailed as a victory for public morals and health. By the time it was repealed with the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, Americans had seen the growth of organized crime, the corruption that permitted ordinary citizens to ignore it, and the loss of the taxes to fund other aspects of governance.
Wikipedia notes that “By 1925, in New York City alone, there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs” where liquor was sold. Prohibition proved nearly impossible to implement and enforce.”
Barack Obama represents the high-water mark of progressives to impose communism on America. A totalitarian form of government, we have witnessed how his administration has turned the Internal Revenue Service into a political instrument to suppress its opponents and has expanded the National Security Agency into a means to spy on all Americans, accessing every piece of communication between them. Obamacare enables the government to know every bit of information about individual’s health records.
It is, as C.S. Lewis said, “tyranny exercised for the good of its victims.” Even so, the progressives ignore the failure of communism in the former Soviet Union and the decision of China to move to a capitalist economy while endeavoring to retain a single party government that is encountering increasing protests and resistance from its population.
Obamacare is being imposed at the same time that socialist healthcare programs are in retreat in Europe. In Britain, the government led by Prime Minister David Cameron has introduced a bill seeking to partially privatize the National Health Service (NHS) in an effort to avoid the Greek-style financial meltdown that threatens the European Union member states. Cameron’s argument for the bill is that there is too much bureaucracy in the NHS system and that it interferes will patient care. NHS is based on the rationing of medical care as opposed to the free market system where costs are determined by supply.
As reported in a recent article by Arnold Ahlert on Front Page Magazine.com, “Last November, such rationing reached a scandalous level. A study by the Co-operation and Competition Panel revealed that Primary Care Trust heads were imposing arbitrary spending caps, denying patients procedures such as hip replacements and cataract removals—and that waiting times for services were seen” to be deliberately extended ‘so patients would go private or die before they were seen,’ to slash costs.”
Obamacare, as has been widely reported, has increased the costs of healthcare insurance, particularly for the young on whom the system relies to pay for the costs of caring for the elderly. It has led to the cancellation of millions of healthcare insurance plans and millions more will lose their plans.
In a November 30 Washington Times article by Jennifer Oliver O’Connell, it is reported that the inherent unconstitutionality of Obamacare will bring about its end. Cases making their way through the judicial system such as Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp v. Sebelius, Indiana v. IRS, Pruitt v. Sebelius, “may be the final nails in the coffin of Obamacare.” The first two cases cited will likely be heard in March with a final ruling in the summer of 2014. There are others such as Halbig v. Sebelius, King v. Sebelius, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, as well as the HHS employer mandate and origination clause challenges are among the many cases challenging the basis of Obamacare.
Finally, in the November 2014 midterm elections, political pundits are virtually unanimous in the prediction that Democrats will be driven from their control of the Senate and Republicans will increase their control of the House.
Obamacare is the ultimate expression of the progressive and/or liberal approach to government and it is, just as was the case of Prohibition, the increasing resistance of the American public and will be, at some point, repealed.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Prospect of World War Three
November 26th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
Let me begin by saying that the deal the U.S. struck with Iran on November 24 is so criminally stupid that mobs with torches and pitchforks should be surrounding the White House and Department of State demanding that the President and Secretary of State resign.
How many times does the United States have to make really bad deals with really bad nations? And then call it progress!
In 1994, former President Clinton announced that a deal with North Korea had agreed to “freeze the major elements of its nuclear program.” A new round of talks was scheduled—in Geneva—to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Virtually the same language was used by President Obama in his late evening announcement of a fundamentally useless, but extremely dangerous agreement with Iran.
Worse than accepting Iran’s deception, it is as if Obama knew nothing of the North Korean deal that subsequently resulted in its development of a nuclear weapon despite some costly bribery exacted for promises it never intended to keep. The worst part of this is Obama’s deception of Congress and the American people. Efforts to grant Iran the status of a new nuclear power had been secretly going on for a year behind the back of Congress.
On hearing of the deal, Rep. Mike Rogers said “That’s the one thing the whole world was trying to stop them from doing,” referring to the permission granted to continue enriching uranium. “We made this mistake in Pakistan. We made this mistake in North Korea. History is a great judge here and great teacher. Why would you make the same mistake to a nation that will proliferate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East if they are successful at getting a nuclear weapon?”
It is important to keep in mind that not just the U.S. is a signatory to this agreement, but also the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia and China. It was facilitated by the European Union. The lessons of history were totally ignored. The sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Iran were ignored.
For years many have taken comfort in the knowledge that, in the past, Israel destroyed the nuclear reactors that were being built in Iraq and more recently in Syria. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was assumed to have the support of U.S. military power in the event that Iran would retaliate either directly or through its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
It is clear now that Obama has abandoned Israel as well as Saudi Arabia which also regards Iran as its enemy. Obama has embraced America’s enemy since the Islamic revolution in 1979. He has not brought us closer to peace. He has brought the world closer to World War Three.
I am not a military strategist, but one need not be to understand Israel’s peril or the limits on its ability to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, many of which are underground or heavily defended.
Here are some comparisons:
Iran has a population of 78,868,711. Israel has a population of 7,765,700.
Of these, those fit for military service are 39,556,497 in Iran and 2,511,190 in Israel.
Comparing active military personnel, Iran has 545,000 and Israel has 187,000.
Iran has 650,000 in military reserves. Israel has 565,000.
Iran’s annual defense budget (in USD) is $10,687,000,000 and Israel’s is $15,209,000,000.
The comparison of their military capabilities is equally daunting. A sobering analysis is offered on the website of the Jewish Virtual Library.
Even if Israel were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, it would also have to fend off massive rocket attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas.
What defies Obama’s reasoning is Iran’s long history of attacks on the West. It has specialized in taking hostages, initially in Lebanon from 1984 through 1992. It seized the American embassy in 1979 and held American diplomats for 444 days. It holds an American cleric as this is being written.
In 2011, the U.S. discovered that Iran had conceived and funded a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. in Washington, D.C. At the time, the State Department said that the thwarted plot “underscored anew Iran’s interest in using international terrorism—including the United States—to further its foreign policy goals.”
Obama’s ability to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its intent to become a Middle East hegemon through diplomacy does not exist.
A race to acquire nuclear arms has begun in the region where Israel and Pakistan already have them, as does India and China. Saudi Arabia has announced its intent to secure nuclear weapons.
One can only conclude that this interim agreement is a repeat of the appeasement that occurred in Munich when European nations sought a similar agreement with the Nazi regime. The lessons of history are unforgiving.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
China! China! China!
November 24th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
“Doom is one of the oldest stories of mankind,” says Josef Joffe in his excellent new book, “The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophesies.”
As long as I can remember I have read and heard that America is in decline beginning when Sputnik was launched in the 1950s. We were all told that the Soviet Union was to be the next great superpower. It collapsed in 1991. The Federation that replaced it was the shrunken loss of many of its former captive satellite states. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, we were told a resurgent Europe would overtake the U.S. and in the 1980s that Japan would become an economic superpower.
Now we are being told that the future belongs to China and the emerging economies there and in India. Joffe, a Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, publisher-editor of Die Ziet, and frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Affairs, has gathered together the facts of America’s economic ups and downs to present a realistic and optimistic view of the future.
The news is filled with reports on China’s 18th Central Committee’s Third Plenum, citing promises of expanded property rights, transparent market regulation, and prices set by the market. The Wall Street Journal, however, noted that “China’s new leaders are tightening political repression”, the mark of every Communist state. There was also news of China’s loosening of its “one-child” policy that restricted couples from adding too much to its population of 1.3 billion.
Joffe demonstrates why China has many problems that will keep it from overtaking America’s economic dynamism and before you fall the latest version of America’s decline, you should definitely read his book. He asks, “Who would actually want to live in a world dominated by China, India, Japan, Russia, or even Europe, which for all its enormous appeal, cannot take care of its own backyard? Not even those who have been trading in glee and gloom decade after decade would prefer…to take over as housekeeper of the world.”
As for China, Joffe notes that it “has the largest population on earth, half of which is still living in the countryside.” Half the population “remains poised to go urban and sell its labor at low wages”, but he also points out that, in terms of its demographics, “China is getting older and America is getting younger.” Its fertility rate has dropped and “Aging is not good for growth and so China will inevitably slow down, with rapid aging adding pressure to all the other growth brakes embedded in an economy that remains resolutely statist.”
And that is China’s problem. While introducing reforms, China is still a nation where the state owns and operates much of its economy. This is an object lesson and warning to Americans who are now rising up to demand that Obamacare, the takeover of one sixth of the U.S. economy, be repealed. Governments cannot and should not run various elements of a nation’s economy because decisions are based in politics, not the marketplace.
“China’s working-age population will reach its peak at the end of this decade and decades before the People’s Republic is supposed to overtake the United States.” Meanwhile, thanks to our fertility rates and immigration, the U.S. will have a population of younger workers. It has not escaped the attention of observers that, by 2025, China would account for less than a fifth of the world’s population, but almost a fourth of the world’s senior citizens.”
“A burgeoning army of pensioners and infirm will eat up investment funds as a fire will consume oxygen,” says Joffe. Aging populations worldwide, including our own, put enormous strains on growth and, as we have seen here, social programs such as Social Security and Medicare are threatened with insolvency unless reformed. Nothing scares the political class more as the aging citizens who represent a major voting bloc.
“Economic growth could soar or falter tomorrow, but populations change slowly because they are rooted in long-term trends and culture,’ says Joffe.
Joffe also cited China’s educational system that places its emphasis on learning the answers to tests as opposed to the ability to think creatively and question government dictates. This reflects in part our own educational system that has been tending toward “teaching to the test” and a national curriculum such as is being imposed in the current “Common Core” program that the Obama administration has introduced.
“In a one-party state that is China, the government is the ultimate guardian over what students and scholars may read, say, and even write, in schools for the elite.”
Education is the basis of “human capital” because an educated population is a major contributor to economic growth. “One quick, but effective, way is to look at education expenditures as a share of GDP, where the United States beats China and India hands down.” They spend around 3.5 percent while the U.S. spends 7 percent. And this on a population one-quarter the size of China’s and one-third the size of India’s, and with a GDP that dwarf the economies of China and India by factors of 2.5 and 10, respectfully.
Militarily China may pose a problem for Asian nations; it is unlikely to pose a threat to the United States whose military power, though being reduced by expenditures and other factors, is still the greatest in the world.
“In his Rise and Decline of Nations, Mancur Olson argues that closed societies freeze up-victims of rent-seeking elites who capture political power to cement economic privilege and stifle the competition that fuels rejuvenation.”
America’s problem is not so much China as it our out-of-control spending and the dangerous increase in our indebtedness. Until this is gotten under control we will be borrowing too much and, China, that purchases much of our debt will do its best to compete economically with a system that does little for its own and which depends on our financial stability.
All of this argues for an America, for all its current problems from an administration trying to “transform” America into a Communist worker’s paradise, that will replace the backward steps that have been taken and make the changes necessary to remain the world’s only true superpower.
That is the payoff of capitalism and freedom.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
John Kerry: A World Class Doofus
November 19th, 2013
By Alan Caruba.
Recently, in the wake of another diplomatic disaster for the Obama regime, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “We are not blind and I don’t think we’re stupid.” He and the President may not think they’re stupid, but the leaders of nations around the world most certainly do.
In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary by Brett Stephens, titled the “Axis of Fantasy vs. Axis of Reality”, he cited the French rejection of the negotiations with the Iranians, saying “the French also understand that the sole reason Iran has a nuclear program is to build a nuclear weapon…This now puts the French at the head of a de facto Axis of Reality, the other prominent members of which are Saudi Arabia and Israel. In this Axis, strategy is not a game of World of Witchcraft conducted via avatars in a virtual reality.”
Stephens said of Kerry’s remark on Meet the Press, “When you’ve reached the ‘don’t call me stupid’ stage of diplomacy, it means the rest of the world has your number.”
The Secretary of State carries out the President’s foreign policies, but when both are ideologically blind to reality and both harbor a deep disdain for an American history of global leadership since the end of World War Two, they are going to initiate and stumble around in ways that convince other nations to seek leadership elsewhere or to pursue they own interests without looking to the U.S. for support.
John Kerry has one of the worst records imaginable to be our Secretary of State. I have always regarded him as a moron with strong anti-American beliefs. I shudder to think he was the Democratic Party’s candidate for President in 2004, losing to George W. Bush who thankfully had previously defeated Al Gore. Two worse candidates for the presidency are hard to imagine.
Kerry first came to my attention and that of most Americans when he testified on April 22, 1971 before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, claiming that American veterans of the Vietnam War had committed war crimes that were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels.” Kerry had, at that point, become a spokesman and organizer for the group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Towards that end, he was working closely with people, many of whom could only be described as revolutionary Communists.
A lot of my generation opposed the Vietnam War in the belief it was the wrong war in the wrong place, mostly the result of Lyndon Johnson’s bad judgment. It would cost our nation more than 50,000 lives of those who were sent into that grinder. We did not see it as an excuse to lie about their participation, comparing them to barbarian hordes. Kerry said at the time, “We cannot fight Communism all over the world and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.” The U.S., however, did not stop resisting Communism and, in 1991, the Soviet Union would collapse as just one result of the resolve.
Like most liberals, Kerry has a long record of embracing the worst dictators of the modern era. As early as May 1970 Kerry met with North Vietnamese/Viet Cong delegations at the Paris Peace talks to discuss various proposals, an action even Kerry acknowledged was “on the borderline of private individuals negotiating, etc.” It was, in fact, conduct prohibited by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Now, as Secretary of State he gets to negotiate for the U.S.; most recently with the Iranians.
In a commentary, “Kerry: Stay Home”, Prof. Israel Hayom, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and a fellow at the Middle East Forum, wrote “the prism of the Obama administration on the Middle East and global affairs is fundamentally flawed. An American policy that supports the Muslim Brotherhood, estranges its traditional Arab allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, allows Iran to get closer to the bomb, sees in Turkey’s Erdogan a great friend of the West, and insists that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be ended in nine months is dangerous and does more damage than good. Similar complaints about poor U.S. political judgment are abundantly voiced by America’s friends in Asian and Eastern European capitols.”
“It is the enemies of the U.S. who rejoice in President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and who relish in America’s perceived decline in world affairs.”
A recent example of the fumbling that passes for foreign policy by the President and the Secretary of State was seen in Obama’s threat to attack Syria in the wake of its use of poison gas. It is useful to know that Kerry had met with Syria’s dictator, Bashar Assad, on more than one occasion and, as a Senator, had worked to undermine the Bush administration’s efforts to isolate Assad.
In February 2009, days after Obama’s inauguration, Kerry was sent to Syria to establish a new relationship. He would make five trips there between 2009 and 2011. After a passionate speech on August 30 advocating the President’s proposed military action against Syria, Obama decided to seek congressional approval before taking any action. Kerry looked every bit the fool he was and is. As it turned out, it was the Russians that saved their bacon, stepping in to expedite the destruction of the Syrian poison gas arsenal.
Suffice to say, Kerry and Obama are wrong on virtually every aspect of foreign relations currently confronting the nation. One cannot finish this brief review, however, without noting Kerry’s view that “climate change” is “as dangerous as any of the sort of real crises that we talk about.” He has been a longtime advocate of “cap-and-trade” programs to reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions. There is no “global warming” and the Earth has been a cooling cycle since around 1998.
This capacity to ignore the facts, whether it is about the idiotic belief that humans can or should do anything about the climate or that the Iranians will say anything to continue their pursuit of nuclear weapons that makes Kerry a very dangerous, world class doofus in charge of implementing Obama’s equally foolish foreign policies.
Smarter men than the obsequious John Kerry have abandoned their allies and even started wars. He is in a position to do a great deal of harm, not just to the U.S., but worldwide.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Environmental Enemies of Energy
October 29th, 2013By Alan Caruba.
While Americans grapple with the Obamacare debacle and 90 million are officially unemployed according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is another threat to our future as environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth continue their assault on the provision of electrical energy, the lifeblood of the nation’s economy and our ability to function at home and on the job.
Recently, Sierra Club members were told that they, “supporters, partners, and allies have worked tirelessly to retire 150 coal-fired power plants since January 2010—a significant number in the campaign to move the country beyond dirty and outdated fossil fuels.”
Coal, oil and natural gas are labeled “dirty” for propaganda purposes, but what the Sierra Club and others do not tell you and will never tell you is that they account for most of the electricity generated in America, along with nuclear and hydropower. Wind and solar power provide approximately 3% of the electricity and require government subsidies and mandates to exist. Their required use drives up the cost of electricity to consumers.
Among the many ongoing lawsuits that the Sierra Club is pursuing is one against Navajo coal mining, the Keystone XL pipeline, one seeking penalties for “ongoing violations” at Montana’s Colstrip power plant. They filed a suit against the power rate increase for Mississippi’s Kemper County coal plant.
In early October, The Wall Street Journal published an article, “Mississippi Plant Shows the Cost of ‘Clean Coal’.” It is testimony to the nonsense about “clean coal.” The plant, the reporters note, was meant to demonstrate that Mississippi Power Company’s Kemper County plant was “meant to showcase technology for generating clean energy from low-quality coal” but it “ranks as one of the most expensive U.S. fossil fuel projects ever—at $4.7 billion and rising.”
“Mississippi Power’s 186,000 customers, who live in one of the poorest region of the country, are reeling from double-digit rate increases,” adding that “the plant hasn’t generated a single kilowatt for customers…”
Seven power plants in Pennsylvania are under attack by the Sierra Club and EarthJustice which have filed a federal lawsuit. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has exposed this common practice by environmental groups to “sue and settle.”
“It works like this. Environmental and consumer advocacy groups file a lawsuit claiming that the federal government has failed to meet a deadline or has not satisfied some regulatory requirement. The agency can then either choose to defend itself against the lawsuit or settle it. Often times, it settles by putting in place a ‘court-ordered’ regulation desired by the advocacy group, thus circumventing the proper rulemaking channels and basic transparency and accountability standards.”
High on the list of government agencies that engage in this is the Environmental Protection Agency, but others include Transportation, Agriculture, and Defense, along with the Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers. One recent victory touted by Friends of the Earth is an EPA air pollution regulation is one that affects ships navigating along the coasts of the United States and Canada, out to 200 nautical miles, to “significantly reduce their emissions.”
Like the touted benefits of wind and solar power, “clean coal” is another environmental myth that is costing billions. Recently, the Global Warming Foundation reported that “The world invested almost a billion dollars a day in limiting global warming last year, but the total figure–$359 billion—was slightly down on last year, and barely half the $700 billion per year that the World Economic Forum has said is needed to tackle climate change.” The report cited was generated by the Climate Policy Initiative.
The problem with this is that there is NO global warming. The Earth is in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and has been for 15 to 16 years at this point. The notion of spending any money on “climate change” is insanity. The climate is largely determined by the Sun and other natural factors over which mankind has no control. The claim that carbon dioxide is a contributing factor to climate has been decisively debunked despite the years of lies emanating from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Indeed, during the current cooling cycle, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen!
For all their caterwauling about fossil fuels, environmental groups have resisted the expansion of the use of nuclear power that emits no so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions. The Friends of the Earth recently declared that “The quickest way to end our costly fossil fuel dependency is through energy efficiency and renewable power, not new (nuclear) reactors that will suck up precious investment and take years to complete.”
The Obama administration’s record of bad loans to companies providing renewable power—wind and solar—is testimony to the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars. In September, the Department of Energy made $66 million in green-energy subsidies to 33 companies, half of it to companies by a single venture capital firm with close ties to the White House.
The continued loss of coal-fired plants has reduced their provision of electricity from over 50% to around 47%. The resistance to the construction of nuclear facilities slows the replacement of their loss, but plants utilizing natural gas have benefitted greatly from the discovery of billions of cubic feet through the use of hydraulic fracking technology holds the promise of maintaining the nation’s needs. Need it be said that “fracking” has become a target of environmental organizations?
Environmental organizations are the enemies of energy in America and worldwide. Without its provision third world nations cannot develop and the ability to provide the energy America needs is put in jeopardy.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Obama’s Legacy is Failure
October 23rd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
No need to wait around three years and beyond to know what Barack Obama’s “legacy” will be. It will be failure. Few, if any, presidents have demonstrated his level of incompetence and ineptitude.
Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, is called President Obama’s legacy legislation, the one for which he will be remembered, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt is remembered for Social Security or Harry Truman is remembered for Medicare. Obama is likely to regret his legacy, though you can be sure that while he lives he will blame its failure on everyone but himself.
Obamacare, enacted in his first term, will be emblematic of the eight years in which every policy Obama initiated swiftly became a failure. Does anyone recall his “stimulus” with “shovel ready jobs” that did not materialize? Or “Cash for Clunkers”? How many millions were loaned to “green energy” companies that rapidly went bankrupt? Not everything failed. His “war on coal” has been a success if you measure success in the number of plants generating electricity shut down and workers laid off. And, of course, there is the doubling of the national debt. It’s a long list.
The legislative history of Obamacare begins when it was passed by the House on November 7, 2009 and by the Senate just before midnight on Christmas Eve, 2009. Both houses of Congress had Democratic Party majorities, but it required a lot of arm-twisting and political bribery to enact the bill. President Obama signed it into law on March 21, 2010. It is doubtful that most members of Congress actually read the bill before voting to pass it.
By 2010, the midterm elections gave power to Republicans in the House and narrowed the margin in the Senate. Significantly, the Senate refused to consider any of the legislation the House sent over to end the government shutdown.
Virtually everything the President said about Obamacare before and since its passage has been a lie. In many ways Obamacare is a mirror image of his character or lack of it. Passed off as a moral responsibility to provide health insurance coverage to those who could not afford it, Obamacare is filled with hidden taxes. When you tax something, you tend to get less of it. It is blatantly unconstitutional in its implementation of fines for failing to sign up.
To date, Obamacare’s initial impact has been to turn fulltime jobs into part-time jobs. It has doubled and tripled insurance premiums. It has caused a reduction in physicians as many elect to retire or close their private practices due to its low levels of compensation. Many will not accept patients on Medicare or Medicaid.
Indeed, to implement Obamacare, $500 billion was taken from Medicare with an additional $818 billion to be taken from Medicare Part A in 2014-2023. For the senior citizens who were depending on Medicare to help cover expenses, the likelihood is that they will receive reduced services and a poorer quality of care, if they even find care.
The nationalization of 16% of the nation’s economy has been a socialist dream that has been around since the 1980s. It has arrived and, like socialism everywhere, it is a failure.
Another Obama legacy is his failure to get the economy on track since the 2008 financial crisis. It was a crisis caused by the interference in the housing market that has been around since the creation of two government “entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who not only purchased billions in mortgage loans, but demanded that loans be made to those who lacked the capacity to repay them. They then bundled the loans as “assets” and sold them to Wall Street. Though Wall Street is blamed for the crisis, the government seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both are back in business. This is a formula for future crises.
According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 90 million Americans are not working.
As Terence P. Jeffery of CNS News recently noted, “In January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 80,507,000 Americans not in the labor force. Thus, the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 10,102,000 during Obama’s presidency.”
A recent report from a coalition of businesses, advocacy groups, policy experts, and nonprofit organizations concluded that 49 states have seen an increase in the number of families living in poverty and 45 states have seen household median incomes fall in the last year.
Led by Opportunity Nation, a think tank that focuses on the young, the report concludes that almost 15% of those aged 16 to 24 no longer attend school or have a job. This is a vast aimless and frequently hopeless cohort of the population. It does not bode well for the future in terms of skills that will not be taught and will not be utilized.
And yet this is a President who, in the wake of the failure of the Obamacare website, said, “Thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak.” He is lying.
Like the fable of the little boy who cried wolf too often, millions of Americans no longer believe anything Obama says these days. Even for his supporters, the evidence is so great as to be unavoidable.
It is increasingly likely that the 2014 midterm elections will resemble the 1994 election that returned Republicans to control of Congress after some four decades by the Democratic Party.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Predicting America’s Future
October 22nd, 2013By Alan Caruba.
One of the great parlor games of pundits, politicians, journalists, and just about everyone else is predicting the future.
There’s a wonderful book, “The Experts Speak”, that is filled, page after page, with predictions and pronouncements by people of presumed wisdom and knowledge, all of which turned out to be often hilariously wrong. In 1913, regarding Einstein’s theory of relativity, Ernst Mach, a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, said, “I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.” To err is human.
I prefer optimists to pessimists and the co-authors of “America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century—why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come”, James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus, are optimists.
In his foreword to the book, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, better known as the “Instapundit”, cites the late economist, Herbert Stein, who said “Something that can’t go on forever, won’t”, noting that “The American 2.0 approach, which delivered stability and prosperity to many for decades, is now more problem than solution, as banks fail, bureaucrats flounder, and the economy fails to deliver the jobs—or the tax revenues—need to keep the whole enterprise going.” Reynolds, however, agrees that “The Jeffersonian individualism that was embodied in in America 1.0 never really went away.” And that’s the good news.
Bennett and Lotus begin by saying, “We are optimistic about the long-term prospects for American freedom and prosperity. You should be, too.” They do not believe the nation is “on an inevitable road to tyranny and poverty. Predictions of the end of America are deeply mistaken,” but they do say that “The current politico-economic regime is falling apart.”
I think most people will agree with that as a deeply divided America struggles to deal with slow economic growth, a Marxist President, and the final gasp of a government that has expanded to a point of demonstrating the wisdom of the Constitution’s limits on its size and role. The Tea Party movement and the founding principles of the Republican Party are all about those limitations.
As Obamacare fails dramatically, Americans across the political spectrum will want to return to a more manageable, less intrusive government. They did that when they elected Ronald Reagan. America needs a leader to emerge who will bring the two factions together and, if history is a guide, they will find one. It will not be easy because two generations have passed through the liberal indoctrination of its schools and because the nation’s media, composed of those graduates, is dominated by liberals.
Another factor is demography, the study of populations. Americans are living longer and the effects of that are undermining the future of progressive programs such as Social Security and Medicare. At some point they will have to be reformed, along with the rising costs of medical care.
Americans, since the early years of the last century have gone back and forth between progressive programs and a yearning for less control from centralized government. The income tax, the government’s “safety net” introduced following the Great Depression, the growth and decline of unions, and even Prohibition demonstrate this ambivalence. Obamacare is likely to be repealed just as Prohibition was.
America 1.0 stretched from the century the preceded the Revolution and extended to the Civil War. It was a largely agrarian society of farmers with the emphasis on individual responsibility. It was, as well, a society based on the nuclear family, a structure that remains today, though is under attack by liberals. America 2.0 saw the rise of industrialization and, following World War Two, the nation as a superpower in the world.
America 2.0 is crumbling, say the authors, and that “we are in the midst of slow but wrenching transition to an emerging America 3.0.” It will be “an even bigger transition, from industrial to an individualized-and-networked economy that we are undergoing now.”
One of the elements of the transition that the authors recommend is the abolishment of the federal income tax and replacing it with a national consumption tax, saying that “The required disclosure of personal economic information required in filing tax forms constitutes perhaps the largest single invasion of civil liberties in America, violating the spirit of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against search and seizure of personal information without a judicial warrant.”
Here again, putting the Internal Revenue in change of enforcing Obamacare will likely trigger a backlash against it, the income tax system, and generate a return to the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution.
Then, too, the world is also changing as Islamism seeks to drag its population back to a dark age of feudalism and slavery. The wave of terrorism is generating a backlash, even in nations where Islam is the dominant faith. America, in the process, has learned it cannot export its unique democratic system and engage in “nation building.” The original faith in the United Nations to deter wars has faded and the growth of various regional organizations will likely replace it.
The co-authors of “America 3.0” say “We can sketch only the bare outlines of what an America 3.0 defense and foreign policy might be like in reality. But those policies must be consistent with what can actually be achieved by American power, with a renewed focus on securing the global commons for trade, maintaining our alliances, and defending the American free and prosperous way of life.”
We are living in times of both rapid and slow change, and America has the mechanism—the Constitution—to make the changes needed to adjust and the strength to protect itself from enemies, domestic and foreign, in a global economy. It won’t be easy and it will not be fast enough for most, but America will remain a dominant agent for change.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
The Press Endures Obama’s Unrequited Love
October 20th, 2013By Alan Caruba
Some years ago Bernard Goldberg wrote a book, “A Slobbering Love Affair With Obama”, about the way the press treated his 2008-9 campaign and election as President. The mainstream press continues to protect Obama, often rather blatantly. The curious thing about this is that it is not reciprocated. More and more, the press acts and sounds like an abused wife.
A case in point is the way the networks—ABC, NBC and CBS—covered the government shutdown. A new report from the Media Research Center analyzed the coverage, finding 41 stories that blamed the Republican Party and zero—none—that blamed the Democrats. There were 17 stories that blamed both sides. Recall, please, the shutdown continued because the President refused to negotiate and the Democrat-controlled Senate refused to vote on any bills sent over from the House.
A recent, glaring example of how some of today’s journalists have debased their profession was the decision by Paul Thornton, editor of The Los Angeles Times letter’s section, to openly refuse to publish any letters from skeptics about the global warming hoax that blames “climate change” on human activity, not the Sun, oceans, and other natural factors.
The cover of the September/October edition of The Quill, the membership magazine of the 8.000-member Society of Professional Journalists, featured an article by Kara Hackett, “There Goes the Sun”, referring to the metaphorical sunlight that is supposed to shine on government activities. The subtitle said, “President Obama has had successes and failures in changing the way Washington works. When it comes to his transparency promises, there’s not much to cheer. His 2008 campaign talked the talk, but nine months into his second term, where’s the walk?”
Journalists pride themselves for being on the cutting edge of events and trends, but they have been slow to realize or to admit that they have been instrumental in electing a pathological liar to the highest office in the land. “Now, after a turbulent start to Obama’s second term in office, his administration’s 2009 promise to be ‘the most open and transparent in history’ is another liability,” lamented Hackett.
Another liability…like an Obamacare from which Congress is exempt, the Benghazi attack last year, the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, the revelations about the National Security Agency, and the fact that the IRS no longer can be trusted with your private and personal information? And that’s the short list.
The Quill devoted six pages to Hackett’s article as she carefully detailed the many measures that seemed to offer a new era in openness. Many reporters chafed at difficulties they encountered during George W. Bush’s two terms, but the hostility to Bush43 was no secret. All administrations are reluctant to share information that might not make them look good. This is a description of the adversarial relationship that has existed since the days of George Washington.
The complaints are old and common, so Obama’s 2009 instruction to agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” when responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries was music to their ears. In December 2009, the White House issued an Open Government Directive, “ordering agencies to publish at least three high-value data sets on Data.gov and create an open government Web page to update citizens about its progress.”
Like the proverbial frog in a pot of water being slowly brought to a boil, it took reporters a while to get beyond the glow emanating from the administration’s directives to the reality of dealing with government agencies and departments.
New York Times reporter, Sarah Cohen, is quoted as saying that the “information agencies provide is often an extension of their public relations arms to help them enlist support rather than to help the public understand what is really going on.” Well, duh!
What was going on was a variety of government policies that turned out to be duds. A case in point was the billions in loans to “clean energy” companies that frequently declared bankruptcy before the first term ended.
More blatant was the way the administration twisted arms and offered bribes to some members of Congress to get the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) enacted. Not one Republican voted for it, so they needed every Democrat vote.
Virtually every promise Obama made about the bill has turned out to be a lie.
Within the press community, groups devoted to more open government began to take notice, from the Open the Government Coalition to the National Freedom of Information Coalition, Investigative Reporters and Editors, to the Project on Government Oversight.
The Obama administration became obsessed with secrecy to identify and prosecute “whistleblowers.” Hackett noted that “The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act of 1917 seven times, more than all previous presidents combined, to prosecute federal employees who expose government waste, fraud and abuse”, adding “These are the same employees the president once pledged to support.”
Even after signing the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act in November 2012, the administrative created a loophole big enough to drive a tank through. Hackett interviewed Jesselyn Radack, the national security and human rights director for the Government Accountability Project who noted that “whistleblowers who go through the internal channels to report wrongdoing used to suffer workplace reprisals. But now, under Obama, they’re facing the rest of their lives in prison.”
When the Justice Department subpoenaed 21 Associated Press phone lines and accused Fox reporter, James Rosen, of being a possible “co-conspirator” in a leak investigation, it was impossible for the press to ignore the thuggish efforts of the administration to shut down any “leaks” in a way that put a big chill on relations between contacts within the administration and reporters.
A recent report by The Committee to Protect Journalists on “The Obama Administration and the Press Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America” spelled out the assault on U.S. and foreign journalists, saying that “the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press.”
What this means is that the Obama administration has a lot to hide and the front line of defense against its machinations, the press, continues to protect it despite having become a target for oppression. You’re next.
Editor’s Note: I have been a member of SPJ since 1979.
© Alan Caruba, 2013