Jimmy Carter Redux

By Alan Caruba

I actually remember watching and listening to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech given 32 years ago on July 15, 1979. It marked a distinct turning point for the president because it addressed the already large loss of confidence in his leadership and judgment. It confirmed most voters judgment.

The address to the nation has since been called his “crisis of confidence” speech. It was, like most of Carter’s policies, a massive failure, and I had the same feeling when I listened to President Obama’s recent speech to the joint session of Congress, an occasion usually reserved for the State of the Union or a declaration of war.

And yet, and yet, we are living with many of former President Carter’s policies that were so wrong then and are so wrong now. If you were around then, I recommend you read the speech and, if you were born since then, it will amaze you how many really bad ideas Carter put forth that you are still hearing today from President Obama.

Jimmy Carter, a largely unknown Democrat former Governor of Georgia was swept into office on a wave of revulsion against the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal. Had that not occurred it is likely he would not have had much of a chance despite his toothy smile and grab-bag of loony liberal ideas. Four years later, voters voted for a conservative former Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. They kept him around for a second term throughout the 1980s.

On that long ago evening Jimmy Carter thought the best way to address the nation’s mounting economic and energy problems was to blame the voters. It wasn’t his fault. It was ours.

But it was his fault.

As Seldon B. Graham, Jr., the author of “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”, an oil industry engineer and lawyer, put it, “Globalist Jimmy Carter harmed the USA with a domestic oil windfall profits tax (in 1980), causing a severe recession, (and) loss of half a million jobs…” The windfall profits tax caused US-based oil companies to look elsewhere for oil and to lay off petroleum industry workers here.

Carter, just as Obama, did not understand that profits are what all businesses require in order to expand and invest in their future. It is the same misguided thinking that has Obama saying that “loopholes” in the tax code that encourage oil exploration and extraction should be closed. They are not “loopholes.” They are the same kind of tax policies that are extended to countless businesses.

If we fast-forward to today, we would understand that oil companies annually pay more than $30 billion per year to federal, state, and local governments in order to produce energy in the U.S. Contrast this with the more than a half-billion dollars taxpayers lost when the Obama administration backed a loan to the now bankrupt “green” energy, solar panel firm, Solyndra.

The fact is that America is home to more than 160 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The US is the third largest producer of oil in the world. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal with several centuries’ worth to be mined. The amount of natural gas that can be accessed by fracking technology is incalculable. And the Obama administration can’t even make up its mind about a new oil pipeline from Canada, an economic partner from whom we import a considerable amount of oil already!

We should be energy independent, but Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Barack Obama in 2011 are still blathering away about solar energy. What did Carter want back then?

“I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of the nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan removed them. Obama has promised to do the same, but hasn’t.

Carter said, “when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.” We’re still waiting.

In a nation that was the world’s leader in the manufacture of automobiles, Carter proposed “an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems.” Obama talks about high speed trains that no one wants or needs in the era of airline travel. Created in 1970, Amtrak has never made a profit.

In 1979 Carter said, “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.”

A September 14th Rasmussen poll asking if the nation was going in the right or wrong direction yielded the following analysis: “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters say the country is heading down the wrong track, showing little change from last week. Since January 2009, voter pessimism had ranged from a low of 57% to a high of 80%. This time last year, 65% said the U.S. was heading down the wrong path.”

If Obama wasn’t a far-Left liberal, wasn’t getting some extraordinarily bad advice from those he brought into the White House, and wasn’t a raving egomaniac, he might pause and stop playing political games to blame Congress and Republicans for the present economic crisis. If in the name of “social justice” the federal government--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--wasn’t in the mortgage business, there would not have been a crisis.

The problem for the rest of us is that Obama’s crisis is our crisis too as jobs melt away and businesses large and small wait to see how much more damage his proposals will do to the nation's economy. His solution was to throw a trillion-dollar “stimulus” at the problem in 2009. He has just proposed a half-trillion dollar solution.

Except for the usual percentage of liberals who think Obama will “stop the rise of the seas”, the rest of the nation is left to wait for next year’s elections. That’s our “solution.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Jimmy Carter Redux

Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli

By Alan Caruba

One of the most famous lines from The Godfather was, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli” Permit me to update that to the Middle East. Forget the wars, buy the oil, and develop our own oil as fast as possible.

Middle Eastern and other oil produced worldwide is for sale to anyone who wants to purchase it. Putting our troops in harm’s way and spending trillions to do so is idiotic.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has been marked as always with all manner of killing. The latest have been bombings in Baghdad that killed more than sixty people, the continued slaughter of Syrians sick of the two-generation despotism of the Assad family, the lingering fighting in Libya, and our continuing losses in Afghanistan.

The U.S. stepped in when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 to grab its oil reserves. It went back in 2003 to get rid of Saddam and never left. After 9/11 in 2001 it carpet bombed Tora Bora in Afghanistan to kill al Qaeda members and then never left. What’s wrong with this policy? There is no oil in Afghanistan. Iraq’s oil will be subject to its internal conflict and Iran’s meddling for the foreseeable future.

The Middle Eastern and African oil cartel, OPEC controls 44% of the world’s crude oil production and 79% of the world’s crude oil reserves. Thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy, the U.S. is unable to access billions of barrels of oil in Alaska and the continental shelf on both coasts.

This policy applies as well to our coal and natural gas reserves despite the fact that the U.S. has century’s worth of coal and is discovering new reserves of natural gas every day.

We have been losing the capacity to refine oil. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2009 there are 148 operable refineries, down from 150 and only 137 refineries were actually operating, down from 141. Regulations have ensured that not one new refinery has been built in the U.S. for over three decades.

Whose oil do we buy? Canada provides the U.S. with two million barrels of the eleven million we use every day. If the Obama administration and environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth would get out of the way and let the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project be built, it would move oil from Canada’s Alberta province to existing pipelines and refineries for an additional 1.1 million barrels. We also purchase oil that originates in Mexico and even Venezuela.

There are about 40 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico offshore of U.S. States, to which you can add an estimated 14 billion barrels off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The Obama administration’s response to this has been to restrict access to it. After the BP Oil accident in the Gulf, the Obama administration’s moratorium destroyed an estimated 13,000 jobs as oil rigs left for other sites and the local economy took a huge hit.

The Obama administration keeps telling everyone that it is the big, evil oil companies that determine the cost of oil and the price of gasoline, but oil is a global commodity and big oil companies can only get the daily price of various grades of crude. The top three U.S. oil companies paid $42.8 billion in income taxes in 2010 and, it should be noted, provided 9.2 million jobs for Americans who also paid taxes.

While vilifying U.S. oil companies, the Obama administration neglects to mention that ExxonMobil’s pretax income in 2010 was $52 billion, from which it paid $21.6 billion in income taxes worldwide, leaving a net income of $30.5 billion. That’s a tax rate of 45%, fully 10% above the statutory corporate rate of 35%. The same tax costs apply to ConocoPhilips and Chevron.

The United States has vast oil, gas, coal, uranium, rare earth and other natural resources. The federal government has for decades placed every obstacle it can in the way of accessing them

Instead, the Obama administration keeps saying that “green jobs” would replace those in the energy sector, along with increased subsidizing of wind and solar energy, the source of barely 3% of all the energy we use daily.

Today, when one in ten Americans are out of work, just tapping the oil in the outer continental shelf between 3 and 200 miles off our coast, developing our domestic oil and natural gas reserves, has the potential to create 1.2 million jobs representing $70 billion in annual wages. And that does not include development of our massive coal reserves!

Worldwide, the U.S. is already in competition with China and India to purchase the oil needed to sustain our industries and transportation. This is the real world, not the fantasy conjured up by the federal government and environmental organizations doing everything possible to turn off the lights and leave our cars parked in the garages of America.

In September, after having driven the economy into the ditch, the President says that a new plan to get the economy going again will be unveiled. It’s a good guess that energy development, other than wind and solar, will not be part of that plan.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli

Fuel for thought

Imagine what you could do with an extra £500 a year, ok, it's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but it's an extra £40 a month or a tenner a week. A lot of people might not notice the difference, but to pensioners shivering in the depths of winter because they dare not put the heating on or people living at the edge of their budget month in month out it might just be enough to make keeping going a little easier.
Express.

EVERY family in the UK pays £500 a year too much in “ineffective and fiercely costly” green taxes, a new book claims today.
Let Them Eat Carbon says domestic green taxes – like fuel duty, the fossil-fuel levy and landfill tax – raise £39billion a year, £13billion more than can be justified.
Its author, , says: “The biggest threat to taxpayers is expensive new green taxes and subsidies.”
He cites Government figures which put the annual social cost of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions at £16.9billion which, together with the £9.2billion spent on roads, leaves a green tax surplus of around £13billion – or £500 for every family.
He adds: “Excessive green taxes make everything from driving to work to taking a well-earned holiday more expensive and make it a lot harder for manufacturers to compete.”

 It's not just the £500 a year for families heating bills, it's the cost of food and transportation, it's part of the subsidy we pay for useless windfarms and solar panels. It all adds up and it costs everyone who pays a fuel bill and every taxpayer in the UK at least £500 and probably a lot more so deep does this scam go. It's not just the UK government either, it goes all the way up to the EU and beyond to the U.N. and its International Panel for Climate Control a hubristic misnomer of a title if ever there was one.
We are being robbed by those who know it's a scam yet pretend that somehow or other we wont notice and will carry on shelling out year in year out whilst they chant the mantra of carbon capture/climate change whilst jetting off to conferences in exotic locations often enough at our expense too.
Sooner or later though we'll call a halt to it or they'll quietly let it drop in favour of a new scam. But what they don't realise is just how close they have pushed people to the edge now. 10 years ago we all had a bit more cash to spare, now more and more are living on the edge and making personal cuts to their budgets. The riots were a symptom of this in part with the looting and the sheer anger of ordinary people at the powers that be. The Romans used bread and circuses to keep the mob happy, that's in part of what the Olympics are supposed to be a part of, but it's a year away and things aren't getting better, plus the bread (cheap food and drink) isn't available either. One of the reasons the Communist block carried on so long is that they kept the price of bread down, people could always get cheap food, when they finally ran out of money that's when it collapsed. Our politicians and other powers are playing with fire, when people feel they no longer have control over their finances they'll look to someone who will promise they can take care of it.
Might not be today or tomorrow, but unless there is a change in policy to put money back in working peoples pockets it will come.

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Unleashing Americans

By Alan Caruba

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My father was a certified public accountant, as is my older brother. I not only lacked any arithmetical skills, I spent much of my early years ignoring the ups and downs of the economy, thinking that these matters were beyond my comprehension. What I failed to understand was that the economy was as much a creature of meddling politicians as economic theories.

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression and have now lived long enough to be caught in a new one. I know that economists and others say we are in a Recession, but it feels like a Depression to me and to the millions of other Americans who are out of work and being laid off weekly. It feels like one to those who suffered foreclosure on their homes. It feels like one every time we go to the supermarket and gasp in disbelief at the cost of groceries.

The unimaginable debt that Americans have incurred by borrowing far too much as a nation and as individuals with credit cards, and the ease with which one could borrow against home equity, has now forced us to deal with the reality of a financial crisis that began in late 2008 when the housing bubble burst.

Historically, it started far earlier when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, elements of the 1930s New Deal, were created to bring “social justice” to the housing market. By the time of the 2008 implosion, they owned more than half of all mortgages issued in the nation.

While the politicians seek to position themselves to blame the other party, the saving grace is that in 2010 voters returned power in the House to Republicans; doing so by electing a large number of “Tea Party” candidates pledged to reduce the debt and reverse what have been the disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Despite the breathless reporting of the 24/7 news channels, the parade of politicians on both sides explaining their positions, the real news is that Americans are finally engaged in a real debate over the debt and the nation’s future. In 2012 they will vote to change course and, just as European nations that also borrowed too much, they will have to accept austerity measures.

A lot of government programs and, indeed, whole agencies and departments should be ended.

It’s not the death of socialism in America, but it is the recognition that a government that seizes and redistributes the wealth of working Americans must be reversed, revised, and reduced in size and scope.

Too much taxation, too much regulation, too much borrowing, and too much wasteful spending is what the national debate is all about and it is a long overdue debate.

In the land of the brave and the home of the free, Americans want to be free to decide what kind of light bulbs they can purchase, what kind of cars they can drive, and end all the other restrictions that make doing business in America an expensive, unrealistic nightmare.

In a way, the infatuation with a completely unknown, untested, and inexperienced president has been a wake-up call. Barack Obama was packaged to be a celebrity, a “messiah”, when all he really was, was an ill-prepared, standard issue Marxist. He surrounded himself with economic advisors and unvetted “czars” who shared his belief that one last, big push could “transform” a nation that was more in need of a sensible budget than grandiose and failed socialist solutions.

The result was the appalling Obamacare law that attempted to seize twenty percent of the nation’s economy. The House has voted to repeal it. Twenty-six States have gone to court to have it nullified. A Republican president and Senate in 2012 will end it.

Obama and the “green economy” advocates around him have dumped billions into wind and solar energy companies that could not exist without government subsidies coupled with government mandates for their use. Combined, wind and solar provide less than three percent of the nation’s electricity and will never meet its needs.

The nation’s auto industry, once the envy of the world, is almost entirely controlled by the government that, even in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, was being told it must produce lighter, more dangerous automobiles to meet unrealistic demands that they provide more mileage per gallon. You cannot get more energy from a gallon of gasoline than you can from any other source of energy that is ruled by the laws of physics.

Openly scornful of fossil fuels, the Obama administration has rendered the nation more dependent on foreign oil and waged war on coal and now natural gas.

The Obama moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wreaked havoc on the oil industry, pursuing the same policies of earlier administrations that have thwarted exploration and extraction of the billions of barrels of U.S. oil that go untapped and unused. Oil rigs have been departing the Gulf to other nations, along with thousands of jobs and millions in the revenue they contributed to the economy. The vast resources of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge remain off-limits even though only the tiniest part of the refuge would be affected.

We suffered a socialist “stimulus” that stimulated nothing but an increased multi-trillion dollar debt.

I think America has turned an invisible corner and that as soon as we rid the nation of President Obama and his tax-and-spend Democrat supporters in Congress, the nation will begin to correct its borrow-and-borrow-some-more profligate ways. A smaller, less intrusive government may emerge in the years, the decades ahead.

The entrepreneurial energies of Americans will be unleashed if that occurs. The present Recession/Depression will join all the previous ones we have been through. We have all been chastened and we will conclude it wasn’t just Barack Obama’s policies, but decades of socialist policies dating back to the earliest days of the last century.

If that occurs, our children and grandchildren will have the excessive burden of debt lifted from them and American’s energy, innovation, and optimism will prevail.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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If Elected (A Fantasy)

By Alan Caruba

I suppose we all wonder what we would do if elected President of the United States. In the run-up to the 2012 elections we will first have the primaries in which the candidates seek the nomination of their party.

It will be easier on Democrats because no one expects Barack Hussein Obama to face any opposition. That’s good news for the Republicans because there hasn’t been a President this incompetent since Jimmy Carter and never one as malevolent.

The Republicans have a surfeit of rather good candidates from which to choose. I do not agree with everything each one says and I have some concerns about some of the positions some have already taken, but the only way to keep the nation from being deliberately destroyed by progressive policies and legislation will be to remove Democrats and RINOs from office.

Twenty-six States have joined in a court case against the implementation of Obamacare and the House of Representatives has voted to repeal it. It was, if you recall, the central focus of Obama’s first two years in office. During those two years unemployment increased and the value of the dollar declined. He didn’t take notice until it came time to run for the office again. Famously, he called them “bumps in the road.”

So, if elected, what would I do? Here’s my fantasy!

I would make shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency a priority. It is a rogue agency that appears to think it is not accountable to Congress or the American people. It is filled with fanatics who have no regard for real science. It is costing the nations jobs and thwarting our energy needs. If I was President there would be no further mention of “global warming” or “climate change.” The climate is always changing; it’s called “the seasons” or “warming and cooling cycles.” There will be no regulation of carbon dioxide. That’s a scam.

I would shut down the Department of Education next. This department has almost single-handedly destroyed education in the nation, depriving all those passing through the government schools of knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and how the nation is governed. It has foisted “fuzzy” math on them. Mostly, though, teachers have been told they are “agents of change” responsible to indoctrinate students with liberal views including the odd notion that they can choose their gender and should be taught homosexual practices.

I would begin to strengthen our defense capability because we are going to need a larger navy, an Air Force with newer fleets of aircraft, and other improvements in an age of digital warfare. At the same time, I would begin to draw down the large numbers of troops still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let them fight their own terrorists. If Iran continues to make threats, I would light up the skies over military and nuclear facilities in a fashion comparable to the elimination of Osama bin Laden. It would be quick and lethal.

I would install a missile shield in Poland as formerly promised, provide military assistance to Israel and make it known that a threat or an attack on Israel will be regarded as an attack on the U.S.A. We offer this protection to Taiwan, as well as Japan and South Korea.

I would restructure the Department of Homeland Security and put someone serious in charge. Currently it is just a monstrous bureaucracy. Those airport pat-downs would be among the first programs to go.

I will make it known to the Department of Energy that I want more energy, not less. Therefore I want to see permits being issued for exploration and extraction of oil, natural gas, and coal. I like coal-fired plants that generate electricity. I like nuclear power. I like pipelines to ensure we get what we need when we need it.

I would build a tall fence between the United States and Mexico. Even though we are economic partners in many ways, it has long been Mexico’s policy to send its people north so they can take jobs from Americans and send money back to Mexico. That has to stop along with the wholesale invasion of our nation. Illegal aliens would be told they have six months to either apply for naturalization or go home. No more free schooling, hospitals, and welfare.

I would withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations. I would tell the UN to find new headquarters elsewhere. As corrupt as it was under Kofi Annan, it is even worse under Ban Ki-moon, the latest Secretary General.

I would cut the individual and corporate tax rates so people have more of their own money to spend as they wish, save or invest. I would create a commission whose mission is to identify regulations that need to be ended. And, yes, I would restructure Social Security and Medicare so they don’t go broke.

All federal departments and agencies would see their budgets reduced and there would have to be a reduction in force across the boards. The government is simply too big and wastes money like a demented Willy Wonka candy factory. The savings would be plowed back into debt reduction. And, while I was at it, I would put the U.S. back on the gold standard. Right now our dollars are based on nothing but a promise.

I could go on, but I promise I will not take up golf, though I am likely to install a pool table in the West Wing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → If Elected (A Fantasy)

Connecting the Dots

By Alan Caruba

It has long been my habit to collect and update data on all manner of issues and topics. In this era of Google and Bing, that may seem outdated, but it has its uses and, anyway, habits are hard to break.

The result of this is a huge pile of print-outs of articles from a variety of sources I regard as reliable for their information and opinion. Backing up this stack is a small library of books, the result of fifty years of reviewing, on matters old and new. This affords me the opportunity to swiftly and easily write my commentaries.

I suspect the average person depends on a handful of information sources simply because they lack the luxury of time. As skepticism of the mainstream media has grown, it accounts for why a reliable 20%-25% of the population remains fixed in their liberal, generally mistaken, view of issues and events. They are the ones still tuning in Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News or who think that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show constitutes real news. Try as I may to point out that Stewart’s show is on the Comedy Channel, the numbskulls ignore it.

The reason Osama bin Laden “sleeps with the fishes” is that there are scores of intelligence analysts whose sole job is to connect the dots from a mountain of information that flows into the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and other government agencies charged with keeping us alive.

The decision to kill bin Laden was a political one, so the likelihood is that his command staff will be killed on a regular basis between now and the 2012 elections. You may recall that a drone tried to take out al Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen at the same time in a two-fer, but his days are numbered.

Suffice to say, the nation’s affairs and the world’s are incredibly complex, so data collection is an essential way to make any sense of it.

Let me, randomly, provide just a few pieces of information through which I daily sift to construct a view of the shifting landscape of events, personalities, and issues.

While we are constantly told of the Palestinian “refugees” Gerald A. Honigman, reflecting on the May 15 “Nakba” demonstrations against Israel, asked about the fate of “some twelve million native Egyptian Copts—the pre-Arab, non-Arab people of Eqypt whose men frequently get murdered, women raped, churches torched, (and who) live in a constant state of intimidation? When will over thirty million native, pre-Arab, non-Arab Kabyle, Amazigh, and other native, North African people—the ‘Berbers’—get to have their Nakba Day? Or the “35 million stateless people—the Kurds—get their own special day as well.”

The Institute for Energy Research, on May 12, commenting on the calls to take tax subsidies from U.S. oil companies, said, “If the senators proved anything today, it was how out of touch they are with basic economics. Oil companies pay over $30 billion per year to federal, state, and local governments in order to produce energy in the U.S.” Meanwhile, Obama administration illegal moratoriums “have already decreased oil production in the Gulf of Mexico by 360,000 barrels a day.” In a major flip-flop, the president has announced a lease program to open up oil drilling in places that were sacrosanct just days before.

As Congress and the White House squabble over lifting the debt ceiling limit, on April 22nd CNSnews reporrted that “Federal agencies reported improper payments estimated at $125.4 billion in fiscal year 2010, an increase of $16.2 billion from the $109.2 billion estimate in fiscal 2009, the Government Acountability Office said.” Fully 94% of those payments came from “social spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid.” Maybe making a decent effort to stop wasting money would be a good idea?

On April 18th, Investors Business Daily, reported that “The EPA admits to Congress that it does not take into account the impact of its regulations on employment, the economy or internatinal competitiveness. Neither, apparently, does the White House.” This is a key factor in the loss of manufacturing and other business enterprises, along with the jobs they represent.

On April 1, Stephen Moore, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said, “It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities, combined.”

An editorial in the April 28th Washington Times opined that “President Obama rails against Wall Street to score political points. But when the smoke clears from all the demogoguery, the financial regulations he is publishing will result in fewer loans, more costly credit and individuals facing more risk.”

If converting food crops to fuel seems like madness defined, Elizabeth Rosenthal, writing in the April 6th New York Tmes, reported that “Each year, an ever larger portion of the world’s crops—cassava and corn, sugar and palm oil—is being diverted for biofuels as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossel fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy to keep their cars and industries running.” Wasting food? That’s the stuff of revolution everywhere.

Just this quick sampling reveals the nation is being run in an astonishingly incompetent and stupid fashion. The government’s repeated use of lies and fear to influence public opinion is dangerous in so many ways. It is fundamentally unAmerican.

It took from the late 1980s to 2009 to put an end to the global warming hoax. One scientist called it thirty wasted, lost years.

The Islamic jihad has been in effect since 632 A.D.

Communism, imposed on Russia in 1917, destroyed generations in the former Soviet Union, in the Peoples Republic of China, and still stunts life for millions today.

Surrendering to malicious religions, economic and environmental theories or wild self-indulgence is bad for individuals, nations, and the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Connecting the Dots

Morons Who Hate Oil

By Alan Caruba

It may seem harsh to call people who actively spread lies about oil “morons”, but that assumes they do so out of ignorance as opposed to those who do so for some crazed “environmental” reason that is so out of touch with reality it invites scorn.

A case in point is a new book by Steve Hallett with John Wright, “Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future” ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Suffice to say that Hallett is an associate professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University while Wright is “a journalist specializing in energy and environmental issues” who is the Latin America news editor for Energy News Today. Wright’s previous book was “The Obama Haters.”

How does Hallet get from botany to a supposed expertise on oil, an energy source more associated with geology? As for Mr. Wright, there is a strong possibility that he is a liberal and an environmentalist, and therefore beyond all hope when it comes to things called FACTS.

The prologue of their book is nauseating in that it regurgitates every environmental lie including “global warming”, a hoax that was revealed in November 2009 to have been the invention of colluding “scientists” working for the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change. Suffice to say their leaked emails demonstrated their panic when the Earth, beginning in 1998, began to cool.

“We seem to have quite a few problems,” wrote the authors. “Global climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, collapsing fisheries, desertification, wealth inequity, species extinctions, freshwater shortages, hapless governments, deforestation, disease epidemics, and agricultural failures top the list.”

Okay, scratch “global climate change” because the climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth, moving between ice ages and warmer periods well known to climatologists and meteorologists. The rest is mostly bogus, but what caught my eye was “wealth inequity” which is not an “environmental” problem, but is the keystone of a document called The Communist Manifesto.

Here’s another gem from their book. “We don’t know exactly when our fossil fuels will run out, but we can predict it to within a few decades. By the end of this century, our oil and natural gas supplies will be virtually nonexistent, and limited coal supplies will be restricted to only a handful of countries.”

Whoa! Does anyone recall how the all those “experts” on global warming kept predicting it was coming in thirty years, fifty years, by the year 3,000? This is the same scam being perpetrated by these two morons. And who is to blame for this coming disaster? “We are to blame.” That’s right, the horrid human race is to blame for this, just as it is for everything else environmentalists want to ban.

There is no denying that we horrible human beings have been using oil now for a while now, primarily since around the 1850s, ever since we discovered its marvelous properties, the energy stored in its molecules, and its extraordinary ability to be part of more than 6,000 products.

A single 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline and the rest is used in the manufacture of motor oil, diesel fuel, floor wax, asphalt, transparent tape, deodorant, dyes, rubber cement, water pipes, aspirin, toothbrushes, heart valves, bandages, and the other 6,000 things we use in some fashion or other. Suffice to say that all plastic begins as oil.

Are we running out of oil? No. Let me repeat. No. There is no such thing as “peak oil” because every time someone has made the prediction that we are using up all the oil, we find some more. This not to say the Obama administration will let oil companies drill for it in America. Not only do we pay less for domestic oil as opposed to importing it, but we have so much domestic oil we wouldn’t have to import it.

There are, for example, 40 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and estimates of approximately 14 billion barrels off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. In the Bakken shale beneath North Dakota, in just the western third of the State it is estimated that there are more than 500 billion barrels that can be extracted.

According to the US Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior that regulates America’s on and off-shore oil reserves, they estimate that America holds more than 21 billion barrels of “proven” conventional oil reserves. Add to this the estimated 100 billion barrels of oil reserves in the postage stamp-sized proposed drilling area of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

According to the Congressional Research Service, America’s combined energy resources, oil, coal, and natural gas, are the largest on Earth!

It is insane that Americans will be paying $4, $5 or more for a gallon of gasoline and it is insane to believe environmentalists when they tell you the Earth is running out of oil “by the end of this century.”

It is a kindness to call environmentalists “morons.” They are deliberately lying to everyone, using a massive, international propaganda machine, because in the end they want what Karl Marx and Barack Obama want, a redistribution of your money to other people.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Morons Who Hate Oil

Against All Energy Anywhere

By Alan Caruba

One of the great afflictions of the environmentalists—Greens—everywhere is a profound lack of understanding of the role that energy plays in whether a nation prospers or just limps along, barely keeping the lights on.

A classic case is the communist paradise of North Korea that is almost completely dark at night while just across the 38th parallel, South Korea is ablaze with light, energy, and a thriving economy.

Dedicated Greens don’t really like any kind of energy whether it is nuclear, provided by burning coal, from natural gas, oil or from hydropower. They think that wind power is trouble-free and cost effective when it is neither. They feel the same way about solar power. Both are deemed acceptable because they don’t “emit” anything. This viewpoint is not merely naïve, it is profoundly stupid.

Before we go further, let’s examine the basic facts of U.S. power, give or take a percentage point or two, coal provides over 50% of electrical power. Nuclear provides around 20%, natural gas is just over 20%, hydroelectric is close to 7%, and so-called “renewables” like wind and solar are credited with about 3%. Petroleum generated electricity is 1% and “other sources”, whatever they may be, come in at around 0.3%.

These are figures from 2009 and, suffice to say, are subject to change, but not much.

Friends of the Earth, an international Green organization, (FOE) is no friend to humanity. Hardcore Greens think Earth’s problems would be solved if human beings were not part of its ecology.

Following the Japan earthquake, FOE sent an email to its members and fellow travelers saying, “We must learn from this disaster. Tell your members of Congress that nuclear power should not be part of our energy future.” Ironically, FOE is very unhappy with President Obama and his administration which has been very inclined toward nuclear energy.

The Sierra Club, another ultra-Green organization, put out a newsletter reminding its members that it is “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy” and has been “for more than three decades.” The same newsletter warned that “politicians who owe their primary allegiance to the fossil-fuel industry (coal, natural gas, and oil) are quick to promote domestic drilling and deregulation, as if that would make the gauge on the gas pump start to run backward.” In point of fact, it would. U.S. domestic oil is always cheaper than imported oil.

The Sierra Club just conjured up a petition “to tell the Obama administration to protect the Arctic Refuge” because “We cannot allow these oil companies to destroy the pristine wilderness of the Arctic Refuge.” Every time you hear the words “pristine wilderness” think of a place no human would ever want to live, let alone visit. And no one is really addressing the economic devastation the Obama administration has visited on the Gulf States because of its refusal to allow oil drilling to resume.

FOE recently was fulminating against the use of coal to light up the homes, businesses and streets of South Africa and was equally unhappy about the effort to install a pipeline from Canada to the U.S. to transmit oil derived from its tar sands. A lot of our “imported” oil comes from Canada. That’s because it has been government policy for decades to make it difficult, if not impossible, to drill, extract, and refine oil here in America.

The March 21-27 edition of Bloomberg Business Week has an article by Brendan Greeley that is a good analysis titled “Facing Up to Nuclear Risk.” When nuclear plants have been built as many safety factors as possible have been built into them, but it is impossible to calculate the impact of an earthquake. The U.S. has its own tectonic fault lines, all well known, but the fact remains nuclear plants have been built near or on them.

“David Okrent, who advised the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on reactor safety for 20 years, points out that reactors are designed for only a set of defined events. ‘The early nuclear reactors weren’t designed for tornadoes,’ he says, ‘until one came along in Arkansas, and then we thought, ‘we gotta design for tornadoes.’ It’s not easy to be all-knowing.”

Were it not for Green propaganda, the U.S. would not be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on idiotic wind and solar farms that are utterly dependent on government subsidies and mandates that require utilities to use the pitifully small amounts of electricity they produce.

The same can be said of the equally idiotic regulatory mandates for ethanol that drive up the cost of every gallon of gas pumped while, at the same time, reducing the mileage and damaging to your car’s engine. Even Al Gore thinks ethanol is a bad idea.

Ironically, more people have died from wind turbines than nuclear plants. In 2008, there were 41 recorded deaths. The carnage on birds and bats is rarely mentioned by the media. Despite all the blather about Three Mile Island not one person has died from radiation since nuclear plants were first introduced.

It is surely worth noting that coal-burning plants in a nation that is the Saudi Arabia of coal do not have meltdowns causing radiation that can make large areas uninhabitable. That “smoke” you see coming from the smokestacks of such plants is steam. Water vapor. Clouds are made of water vapor.

If we were really serious about safety and the provision of more electrical power, the U.S. would be building a hell of a lot more coal-burning plants right now and into the future.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Against All Energy Anywhere

Can't have it both ways

Guenther Oettinger, the EU's energy commissioner is somewhat of an idiot, a very dangerous type of idiot to be sure, but still an idiot. Currently he's blatting out soundbites about the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan...

Telegraph.

Europe contemplates 'nuclear free' world in wake of Japan disaster
All Europe's atomic power reactors will be subjected to natural disaster tests in the wake of a the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant. 

Tuesday's EU decision came after Germany moved to shut down seven aged atomic plants amid panic over the safety of nuclear power as the Japanese crisis worsened.

Guenther Oettinger, the EU's energy commissioner, warned that a third explosion and fire at the Fukushima plant on Tuesday heralded the world's worst nuclear disaster.

"There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen," he said.

Mr Oettinger said that "stress" testing was needed to ensure that Europe's 143 reactors could withstand earthquakes and other emergencies.

"We want the safety of all reactors to be reviewed in the light of events in Japan," he said. 

"It has to raise the question of whether we in Europe, in the foreseeable future, can secure our energy needs without nuclear power?" 

 Nuclear power is dangerous, no doubt about it, however it has to be pointed out that in Europe few if any of our nuclear plants are built on or near tectonic fault lines so there's not much chance of a tsunami belting up the English Channel to inundate Dungeness after a massive earthquake off the south coast of Devon. Nor I suspect will the French be amused by Oettinger's outburst either as 80% of their power generation is nuclear in origin and as the EU is run for the benefit of the French Oettinger is probably doing the verbal equivalent of pissing into the wind. I suspect Oettinger is from the old school Green movement in Germany, the ones who produced all those nuclear power nein danke stickers back in the heyday of the old Berlin Wall East West protests, plus Germans have always been a little ambivalent about nuclear power anyway. But what Oettinger seems to have forgotten is that the EU is hell bent on carbon free power generation and quite frankly as much as he'd love to have us believe it, wind and solar power just won't hack it, we can't even make them competitive without massive subsidies, government lies notwithstanding on the issue.

So like it or not, nuclear power is the only option for the EU that actually works and will deliver the power necessary to keep the howling savages at bay from stringing up EU energy commissioners.

Saying or suggesting anything else would be a lie and I suspect Oettinger knows this, but his distaste for nuclear power is well known and clearly colours his judgement. Looks like he couldn't resist the opportunity to put the boot in despite the likelihood of a similar disaster as happened to Japan ever happening in northern Europe.

More about → Can't have it both ways

Obama's Endless Energy Lies

By Alan Caruba

For anyone who follows energy issues, the President’s press conference on Friday was a breathtaking example of his ability and willingness to lie about America’s energy needs and reserves while obfuscating his administration’s relentless attacks on the nation’s coal and oil industries.

Even if we give Obama the benefit of the doubt by saying he is being “misinformed” by advisors, it does not alter the fact that he has, since the days of his campaign in 2008, made no secret of his intention to undermine America’s oil and coal industries while encouraging greater use of the two forms of energy, wind and solar power, that are of the least value in the real world. Neither would exist without massive tax incentives and subsidies or mandates that require their use.

Obama’s lies are so easily refuted one might think he would hesitate to tell them, but he is undeterred by the truth.

Claims that his administration is approving drilling permits were disputed by the Governor of Alaska, Sean Parnell, in a March 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial. “…Alaska and the Gulf states have been blocked from developing America’s oil by politically driven federal policy…In Alaska, an oil company can buy federal leases, spend over $3 billion in permitting and capital costs, apply for an air permit from the Environmental Protection Agency, and then wait for five years and still have no permit.”

Obama’s claim that his administration is looking at oil leases that have not been developed into drilling sites obscures the fact that, despite billions invested in them by companies prepared to explore and extract oil, his administration has pursued a policy of stalling such efforts.

His claim that America has only two percent of the proven oil reserves of the world’s oil is just a flat-out lie. The Congressional Research Service recently released a report asserting that the U.S. has at least 17 percent of the world’s oil. And that is just the amount known to exist domestically and offshore.

In a March 11th statement by Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that “The CRS found that there is likely to be a combined 164.1 billion barrels or 8.5 times as much as the president alleges.”

It is Obama whose policies are driving up the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. When one considers that U.S. oil is always cheaper per barrel than imported oil, Americans are being robbed, not by oil companies, but by White House restrictions on oil production.

This is a President who, in January 2008, campaigning for the office, told the San Francisco Chronicle that his cap-and-trade plan would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, told the Wall Street Journal that same year that “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boast the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” which was paying $10 a gallon!

The Obama energy plan is devoted to bankrupting Americans and bankrupting America.

As Nansen G. Saler, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact, Houston, asked in a March 9th Wall Street Journal commentary, “How do we go from where we are today—importing about 20% of our daily energy supply—to where we want to be in 2026, perhaps even (as) an energy exporter?”

Imagine that? The U.S. as an energy exporter? Imagine the thousands of jobs that represents? Imagine the revenue that represents to a nation in its present financial crisis? Imagine the savings at the pump?

In 1960, the writer Mary McCarthy was being interviewed by Dick Cavett and was asked which writers she thought were over-rated. She named three, one of whom was Lillian Hellman, a well known Communist sympathizer. McCarthy replied that “everything she writes is a lie, including the ‘and’ and ‘the.’ It sparked a great literary controversy, but I was reminded of it while listening to Obama.

This President, blathering about “energy efficiency”, electric cars, high speed trains, thousands of acres covered by wind turbines and solar farms, and all the other pipedreams that represent a Green agenda, is deliberately misleading Americans while his administration, instead of “winning the future”, is killing the future for America..

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Obama's Endless Energy Lies

This is what happens if you make the price too high.

It's something that is well understood by the public but seems to be a bit of a blindspot for those in authority whether in government or utility companies. If you price a commodity too high or even attempt to ban it, then people will find a way around it legally or illegally. Happens with drugs, happening with cigarettes and tobacco and happening with alcohol. There are really times I am blessed by living 45 miles from Dover, I can make massive savings by doing a booze cruise as and whenever I need too, others will use "a man in a van" to buy their cut price ciggies, it happens all over the place and the righteous have only themselves to blame for trying to socially engineer out of demand something that the people clearly are not prepared to do without.
Now it's starting to happen with electricity...

BBC.

Criminal gangs are targeting people with electricity pre-payment meters in a doorstep fraud with hotspots reported in Kent, London and the Midlands.

Crimestoppers has warned people to be alert to the doorstep fraud and offered a £10,000 reward for information.

The fraudsters sell illegal, cut-price electricity top-ups by pushing a cloned key into people's meters to add credit.

Data from six energy companies has shown more than 120,000 people have been affected across the UK.

More than 5,300 incidents have been reported in Kent this year. Birmingham saw 6,978 incidents.

Across the country, customers have given the criminal gangs more than £7m, figures from British Gas, EDF Energy, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power and SSE have shown.

Over the last 13 years ever since governments got heavily into the climate levy scam, electricity and gas prices have risen well above that of inflation and this affects those particularly at the bottom end of the financial scale who struggle from week to week juggling their budgets and making decisions as to heat the house, top up the car or have something other than beans on toast as their main meal for once. So if someone comes along and offers a £10 top up for £5 what do you think is going to happen? Pretty much the same as what happens when someone offers cheap ciggies, booze or a half inched pay as you go mobile top up. No, I'm not saying everyone will do this, but if the government and by proxy the utility companied continue to squeeze us all financially then sooner or later people will look for ways around it. It will be unregulated uncontrolled and at times illegal and yes people will get caught, it won't stop others from doing it though and new scams will develop as the people doing it get more sophisticated. I rather expect that when the companies try to foist smart meters on us all that someone somewhere will develop a hack so they can't be controlled from outside or at least appear as if they are working when they aren't.
There's probably some natural law or formula out there to describe the phenomena of diminishing returns for price increases, the laffer curve I know describes it. Private industry know it quite well and it affects their pricing policies, however when governments become involved then this goes out of the window as they just raise prices and duties to fill their coffers without regard to the consequences. One of the consequences is of course that people will look for an alternative, happens every time, without fail legally or illegally. Prohibition in the USA shows what happens when governments interfere too much in the market, criminals step in to fill the gap because the demand doesn't go away it just goes underground.

More about → This is what happens if you make the price too high.

Living on another planet to the rest of us

Yes it's stick the boot into arch ecoloon Chris Huhne.

Express.

LIB DEM CHRIS HUHNE’S PROMISE ON CHEAP ECO-FUELS

HEATING bills will go down once renewable energy is commercial, the Climate Change Secretary has promised.
Chris Huhne said yesterday that the UK needed to prepare for a low carbon future.
In a speech to CentreForum in London the Liberal Democrat admitted there would be costs to consumers at first, but that in the end renewable energy would prove cheaper.
Setting out his vision for a low-cost future, he said the UK needed a “portfolio” of options, adding: “No-one knows what the most successful low carbon technology will be in 30 years.”
The Green Deal, to be rolled out in 2012, will see homes fitted with energy-saving packages.
Householders will pay for the improvements through savings on their bills, Mr Huhne said.

 Unless there is a massive breakthrough in the efficiency of solar power or the wind starts blowing all the time and the bird choppers suddenly become maintenance free (ie unbreakable) then nothing of the sort in the wonderful world of Chris Huhne is going to happen, though admittedly I can't predict 30 years ahead, on the other hand neither can he. I can predict though that prices will go up and not come down without the sort of breakthroughs mentioned and that much of the price we pay for these "green initiatives" will be subsidies and will remain a drain on our energy bills via government taxation.
At the moment though the only thing making green energy even remotely competitive with conventional energy generation is a massive energy subsidy from the government currently at over £1 billion a year for windfarms alone, roughly £32.50 on everyones bills.
The only genuine low carbon energy generating option is nuclear power and it has been an utter joy to watch the green movement dump all its opposition to this viable energy source over the last few years compared to their attempts to close down nuclear plants in the 80's and 90's. Again though because of the safety implications involved in generating by nuclear power, a nuclear plant is a hell of a lot more expensive than a coal or gas powered plant. Perhaps the generating industry could look at clean burn technology in those areas, though it seems unlikely whilst the government pisses our taxes away subsidising wind farms and solar panels that are energy inefficient.
So, unlike Chris Huhne, I'm not prepared to believe that energy prices will come down until or unless the government drop their insistence on renewables as a workable form of energy generation, but that's because I live in the real world, not one inhabited by politicians, the gullible and environmental extremists.

More about → Living on another planet to the rest of us

The True State of the Economy

By Alan Caruba

The mainstream media will fall all over itself to put a good face on the President’s State of the Union speech. Time was when Presidents simply sent a written message to the Congress (Article II, Section 3) to be read in chambers, but we must now suffer through an hour and a half of madcap Democrat applause and frozen Republican silence.

Great television, it isn’t. The worst part, even before the speech, is that everyone knows it will be filled with boldfaced lies about “investments”, i.e., more spending, and other fictions. Thank goodness that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives (Article I, Section 7). Since Republicans now control the house those “investments” are not likely to be approved or authorized.

In recent days, AmericanThinker.com, has posted excellent articles that provide the cold hard numbers regarding the first two years of the Obama administration and past four years of Democrat rule. A sampling tells the truth.

The prices of selected commodities, all of which translate to what you pay at the gas pump or in the supermarket, have all risen in the past two years.

#Crude Oil, European Brent (barrel) was selling for $43.49 in January 2009. It now sells for $99.02, an increase of 127.7%

#Corn, No. 2 yellow was selling for $3.56 a bushel in January 2009. It now sells for $6.33, an increase of 60.5%. Corn is an important indicator because much of it, by government mandate, must be turned into a gasoline additive called ethanol. The result is that the cost of food is increased as corn which is widely used to feed livestock and in countless other ways in the food chain is diverted to make fuel.

#Sugar, cane, raw, world price per pound was $13.37 in January 2009. It now sells for $35.39, an increase of 164%,

# Unemployment, non-farm, overall was at 7.6% and is now at 9.4%, an increase of 23.7%. The number of unemployed in January 2009 was 11,616.000 and has since risen to 14,485,000, an increase of 24.7% despite the promise of “shovel ready” and “Green” jobs. The number of people on food stamps increased 35.1%. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits increased 22.2%

# The national debt in trillions was $10.627 in January 2009 and now stands at $14.052, an increase of 32.2%.

Do you see a pattern here?

By December 2010, more than fifty percent of Americans said they were worse off than they were two years earlier when President Obama took office. The Bloomberg National Poll showed that two-thirds of Americans believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

None of this is surprising, given that the nation is struggling to recover from the longest recession since the Great Depression. There is no indication that Obama can, will, or even wants to correct the current recession. Recessions are cyclical and most presidents have encountered one while in office.

No amount of speeches, State of the Union or otherwise, will improve the economy if the past policies of the Obama administration continue. The nation has suffered unemployment at more than 9% for the twentieth month in a row as of January. That is a post-World War II record!

The Obama administration has done nothing useful to turn the recession around. Instead it has wasted billions bailing out General Motors to save the auto union, followed by an idiotic “Cash for Clunkers” program. At the same time, it has insisted that GM turn out $41,000 electric cars while raising the mandate for ethanol levels in gasoline, thus reducing the mileage per gallon while increasing its cost to consumers.

The housing market, brought to its knees by two horrid government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is still in the basement. The government had to seize both of them and is billions in debt as a result. “Social justice” was the excuse given for the government’s intervention in the mortgage loan marketplace instead of leaving it to the normal prudence of lending institutions.

Instead of focusing on ways to encourage the growth of small businesses, the administration spent its time and energy on passing Obamacare, taking trillions out of Medicare while at the same time adding more people to its rolls. This is the Obama definition of “saving” Medicare. More than half of the States have joined a suit to abrogate Obamacare as unconstitutional.

Obama’s is an utterly failed administration. In an effort to be reelected, Obama will apply a Clintonian approach, appearing to move to the middle, be more fiscally prudent, et cetera, but this is one leopard that will not change his spots. He is a committed Marxist and one who gives every indication of deliberately crashing the economy. In that respect, he is succeeding.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The True State of the Economy

Never thought I'd see the day

It was always something that attracted the great green unwashed, various leftists and many others of the hard of thinking in society and that was nuclear power. New Labour actually came to power in 1997 with a promise to phase out nuclear power as part of its manifesto.

New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals but not of outdated ideology. ..... We see no economic case for the building of any new nuclear power stations.

All part of Blair's concessions to the left-wing suicidal tendency CND part of the party, a little sop to say we're still (sort of) Labour. Whilst other countries (namely France) moved on to third and fourth generation stations in an area we used to be world beaters at, the UK decided that we would be safe relying on others to provide the fuel for our stations as well as a very unhealthy reliance on mostly useless "Green" energy schemes that don't even come close to generating what is claimed they can never mind what the country needs.
So this little matter caused my eyebrows to raise...

BBC.

Hundreds of people have called on the coalition to reconsider a decision to rule out Dungeness as the site of a new nuclear power plant.

The previous government dismissed Dungeness as a location for one of 10 new nuclear power stations in 2009.

About 200 people gathered at the meeting in New Romney on Saturday, to pledge their support for a new plant.

Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe Damian Collins vowed to take the issue right to the heart of government.

He told the meeting he would take a petition signed by hundreds of residents supporting Dungeness to Downing Street on Tuesday.

Mr Collins said thousands of jobs in Kent and East Sussex were dependent on the power plant.

The meeting in New Romney was also attended by officials from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Dungeness was rejected as an option for a new nuclear power station primarily on environmental grounds.

It is in an area prone to flooding and the shingle beach which protects the current site from the sea often needs to be replenished.

Strangely enough if anyone 10 years ago had asked me where Dungeness was I'd have hazarded a guess at Scotland. As it is it seems so strange to have people clamouring to have a nuclear power station in their back yard. Yes the jobs are certainly welcome and yes it is essential on top of Labours attempts to strangle at birth any attempt to build any power station that actually worked, now currently carried on by that idiot Chris Huhne in the coagulation.
How things have changed in the last 14 years, any attempt to build a new generation of nuclear plants would have been the cause of marches up and down the country, public enquiries and various attempts at sabotage by enviroloonies. Now staring into the abyss of power brown outs in the next few years nuclear power is the only guaranteed power source that can produce the necessary giga-wattage reliably and of low carbon that the green movement can stomach.
Hypocrisy writ large, though still not the quickest and cheapest way to stop the blackouts, but as that would bring the enviroloons out of the woodwork (google Kingsnorth) it does give me a wry smile to see the damascene conversion of the Green movement and the idiot left.

More about → Never thought I'd see the day

Denying Americans Their Own Energy

By Alan Caruba

What kind of government deliberately denies its citizens access to the energy they need to live, to conduct business, to transport goods, to travel, and to just turn on the lights? Answer: The United States of America.

In a letter to members of the G-20, the finance ministers and central bankers of leading industrial nations, President Obama said, “We should make sustained effort to carry through with our groundbreaking Pittsburgh commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

The result of such action would give international energy companies in other nations a large competitive advantage while penalizing U.S. oil and natural gas companies.

As Dr. Richard Swier noted recently, “In the U.S., support for the oil and gas industry is largely about investment depreciation rules which are available to many industries.” Energy companies routinely put huge amounts of money at risk to explore, discover, and extract the so-called fossil fuels. Take away the subsidies and the cost of all energy use in the U.S. goes up.

Meanwhile, CNN Money reported on November 12 that “President Obama lifted his moratorium on deepwater oil drilling nearly a month ago, but the government still hasn’t issued any new permits in the Gulf of Mexico. And most analysts say permits will be slow in coming through 2011.” (emphasis added)

This is great news for Saudi Arabia and bad news for Americans who think we should be accessing our own vast oil reserves. This failure to revive the oil drilling industry in the Gulf comes at a time when the price of a barrel of oil is rising while leaving thousands of oil industry workers in the Gulf States out of work.

A day earlier in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal it was revealed that while “President Obama continues to advertise the $814 billion stimulus and its green energy subsidy programs in particular as unqualified successes” an eight-page memo from his chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, environment and energy “czar”, Carol Browner, and policy aide, Ron Klain reveals that a $6 billion Department of Energy guarantee of loans and other disbursements was being resisted by the House budget office (OMB) and Treasury had found severe problems with “the economy integrity of government support for renewables.” (emphasis added)

Renewables is a code word for wind and solar energy projects. Loan guarantees, block grants, and government mandates often benefit large administration supporters such as General Electric and other political donors engaged in such projects.

One such project in Oregon would tap taxpayers for $1.2 billion while GE and Caithness Energy LLC would only put in about 11% of the project cost. It is corporate welfare that leaves the public with one of the two worst ways of generating electricity, as opposed to coal-fired and nuclear plants. Even hydroelectric power (generated by dams) is more reliable and less costly.

Back in October, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved a 50-megawatt Silver State Solar Project for Clark County, Nevada and three large solar power projects in California, all to be sited on federal land. This is not exactly what conservationists had in mind when such land was set aside. It diverts and wastes billions.

While all this is going on, the Environmental Protection Agency is still demanding that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced, the best known of which is carbon dioxide. They are referred to as “heat-trapping” gas and identified as the source of “global warming.” Only there is NO global warming and hasn’t been for a decade as the Earth’s overall temperatures have slid into a perfectly natural cooling cycle.

Thanks to Climategate, we now know that “global warming” was a complete fiction put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The question no one at EPA wants to answer is this: if greenhouse gases trap heat, why don’t they do it in the winter? If they are so powerful that they can trap heat, how come it gets cold as winter arrives in either the northern or southern hemispheres? Carbon dioxide does not trap heat, but more CO2 would in fact increase crop yields and aid forest and jungle growth worldwide.

According to CNSnews.com, “Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the global mean temperature by only 0.006 to 0.0015 of a degree Celsius by the year 2100 according to the EPA’s analysis.” In plain terms, no reduction whatever and none needed!

Greenhouse gas restrictions are nothing less than a criminal act against the citizens of the United States. It is utterly baseless, a fraud no less than “global warming.”

There are many other examples of what the government, under the present and preceding administrations going back to Jimmy Carter’s, have been doing to choke off the acquisition of American’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil.

This isn’t a energy policy. It’s a suicide pact to drive up the cost of energy for all Americans, diminishing our competitiveness, and making our lives harsher.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Denying Americans Their Own Energy

In the Conservative Reading Room

By Alan Caruba

With Christmas around the corner, it’s probably a good idea to look at some books that conservatives would enjoy and from which they would benefit.

Decision Points by George W. Bush ($35.00, Crown) is, of course, receiving a great deal of attention as the former president gives interviews to promote it. Reportedly 4,000 people showed up at a book signing opportunity in Houston to purchase it (already heavily discounted at Amazon.com). The book is a useful insight to why W did what he did at the time he did it. What emerges is a man who is comfortable in his own skin and with his beliefs. As he says, he will be gone by the time history makes a judgment of his performance in office, but for now the book provides an understanding of what it means to live history and make history one day at a time. Intelligence analysis is not always correct. Threats to national security must be evaluated. War, says W, is always the last option on the table. The publisher has printed 1.5 million copies. It will likely be a bestseller.

Rules for Radical Conservatives by David Kahane ($25.00, Ballantine Books) is a stab at conservartive humor. Liberals assume that conservatives have no sense of humor, but that is not true. Anyone who has listened to Rush Limbaugh knows and enjoys the laughs he serves up along with pithy comment. Kahane has penned a wickedly funny expose of what actually goes on in liberal enclaves. Those who read the National Review are already familiar with him and know the name is a nom de plume. Trying to figure out who he really is has become a parlor game of sorts. His is the persona of an insufferable Hollywood liberal inadvertently spilling the beans on their intentions to “transform” the nation. This book arrives just in time to savor the retaking of the House by the Republican Party and glimpse some hope of doing the same in the Senate and White House in 2012. Until then, it will prove entertaining for the right-winger in your life.

Selling Out a Superpower: Where the US Economy Went Wrong and How We Can Turn It Around by Ronald R. Pollina ($26.00 Prometheus Books) Are you still wondering why America and its economy are in decline? Then this is the book you must read. Economics may make your eyes glaze over or even just sound boring, but this extraordinary book by a man who has worked for decades with companies seeking to relocate or find a State congenial to their growth will prove to be a shocking explanation of what is wrong with the economy. I guarantee you that it is not boring. For example, I bet you do not know that in 1968 there were 62 lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and that today there are 34,000! They outnumber member of Congress and their staffs by a margin of two to one. By 2008 they were spending approximately $8.2 million for influence every day. Few represent the majority of Americans in the middle class. And that is why the real median household income in America has stagnated for more than a decade. The farther the nation has drifted from the constraints of the Constitution, the greater the central government has grown, strangling the economy with massive regulation, rising levels of taxation, and literally driving companies and the jobs they provide offshore. No single book I have read this year comes close to explaining what has occurred and what must be done to avoid a bad, sad future for the current and next generation of Americans.

The Patriot’s Toolbox: Eighty Principles for Restoring our Freedom and Prosperity is a guide that can be had by going to http://www.teapartytoolbox.org/. Directed at members of the Tea Party, it has eight chapters, seven of them previously published by The Heartland Institute as booklets in a series called “Legislative Principles” and one written specifically for this book. I heartily recommend this guide that will bring the reader insight and information regarding areas of concern and action that include health care, energy and the environment, school reform, privatization, and much more. The Institute is a non-profit, free market advocate for reform. It has been a major factor in the demise of the global warming hoax, sponsoring a series of international conferences that brought together the world’s leading scientists and others to debunk this fraud. The book was distributed to 34,000 candidates for public office and nearly 20,000 civic and business leaders, Tea Party activists, and Heartland supporters. They book can be requested for free, but I would urge that you support the Institute with membership or a donation you can provide.

The Energy Imperative by Phil Rae and Leonard Kalfayan with Michael J. Economides ($34.99, ET Publishing, Houston, TV) should be mandatory reading for every college or university student because he reads very much like a textbook and, for that reason, I would recommend it to anyone who is confused by all the talk about “green energy”, “Big Oil”, “dirty coal”, the usual hogwash the environmental organizations and politicians put forth to hide the fact that the United States and all other nations are totally dependent on energy and that so-called fossil fuels are essential to their existence. They are “the master resource” and the nations that use the most energy are also the nations that enjoy the best economies. This book was written so that anyone can read and understand the fundamentals of energy and its use. I guarantee you will be the smartest person in the room when you read this book.

Energy and Climate Wars: How Naïve Politicians, Green Ideologues, and Media Elites are Undermining the Truth About Energy and Climate by Peter C. Glover and Michael J. Economides ($24.95, Continuum, New York and London) address the ideological social agenda that is being driven more by myth than facts. I count both authors as friends and am frankly in awe of their individual and combined knowledge and insight regarding an issue that will determine whether the U.S. continues to rank among the great powers of the world or not. Right now the Obama administration is doing everything it can to destroy the coal mining industry, has stealthily shut down exploration and drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and is spending billions of public dollars on the least effective forms of energy, solar and wind, despite the fact they represent about one percent of all the electricity the nation requires. Glover is a British writer and journalist specializing in political and energy analysis. Economides is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston. He is the editor of Energy Tribune and what he does not know on the topic is probably not worth knowing.

The False Promise of Green Energy by Andrew Morriss, William T. Bogart, Roger E. Meiners, and Andrew Dorchack ($24.95, Cato Institute) will not be available until February 2011, but it knocks the propaganda and lies about “green energy” into a cocked hat. Sold as better for the environment, less polluting, and a whole new arena of new jobs, these and other claims are examined while exposing a large, vocal alliance of special interests—corporations, politicians, and environmentalists—who expect to reap billions boosting it. One problem has emerged for these hucksters. The Chicago Climate Exchange, created to buy, sell and trade “carbon credits” just closed shop in the wake of “Climategate”, the news that the Earth is not warming and that the data about global warming was cooked up by a handful of rogue climate scientists working with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Naturally, the mainstream media that wrote many stories about its opening ignored reporting its demise. Green energy is part and parcel of the multitude of lies told about the environment to enrich those telling them.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → In the Conservative Reading Room

What is Wrong with Obama?

By Alan Caruba

“Why are they all so afraid to say it: There’s something seriously wrong with Barack Obama. And until the day he’s no longer in the White House, there will be something seriously wrong with America.”
-- Judi McLeod, Editor of CanadaFreePress.com.

Like a broken record, Obama is still talking about Washington’s lobbyists and “special interests.”

Obama is a president who looks and sounds “normal”, but whose behavior all points to a variety of pathologies, beginning with narcissism and proceeding through an obsessive attachment to a Marxist ideology, the centralizing of all power, that has been tried and has failed everywhere.

There is, too, the complete inability to accept responsibility for his saying instead that “It’s George Bush’s fault” to “I inherited a mess” to “the Republicans must compromise.”

Clearly, the midterm election results reflect a rejection of Obama’s legislative agenda that included Obamacare, Cap-and-Trade, massive bailouts, a wasteful stimulus bill, an anti-energy agenda, a refusal to recognize the threat of Islamo-fascism, rejection of traditional U.S. allies such as Great Britain and Israel, and too much more to enumerate.

What was initially described as a cool, detached, and intellectual approach to the office is now beginning to look like a pathological lack of concern for Americans and the nation’s future. What emerged during his post-election press conference was, on careful analysis, little more than the same canned responses and rhetoric that has been his hallmark before and since taking office.

There was his tendency to give lengthy, lecturing answers to questions, wrapping them in rhetorical gauze to disguise anything specific. What emerged from the tide of words were the same failed policies that have stripped Democrat control of the House and yielded only a slim margin in the Senate.

At what point can we expect him to stop lying about “energy independence” when no nation on earth is energy independent? When he launched a war on coal? When his administration has stymied virtually all exploration and drilling for oil? When the need for more nuclear power is clothed in talk of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” that pose no threat to the environment?

At what point will he stop talking about “electric cars” when they are too expensive and cannot provide the mileage Americans expect and need? When his administration keeps ratcheting up mileage requirements the render cars more dangerous to drive? Or ethanol standards that increase damage to auto and other types of engines?

At what point will he stop talking about “greenhouse gas emissions”, the alleged “cause” of “global warming” when there is no global warming and about carbon dioxide that plays no role in climate change?

At what point will he equate Obamacare and other policies with his acknowledgement that Americans feel government is becoming too intrusive in their lives?

At what point will he ever understand or acknowledge that it was his administration’s policies that increased the national debt?

His great regret, he said, was not communicating more effectively with Americans, but this president was on television all the time from “The View” to “The Jon Stewart Show”, or giving endless speeches.

Of the many Democrat office holders who were rejected by voters, he called them “terrific public servants” who “showed courage” as they threw away common sense, sound economics, and ignored the wishes of their constituents to support policies they clearly knew were widely and strongly opposed; members of Congress who repeatedly voted for legislation they had not read!

How many times were Americans expected to personally show up in Washington, D.C. to protest?

Obama compared himself to Reagan and Clinton who both encountered midterm losses in their party ranks, but Obama seemed oblivious to the fact that this particular election was historic in the proportion of the rejection involved. Not just Congress, but numerous Democratic governorships were lost as well by his party.

One would think that he might signal a move to the center, but Obama is so driven by his personal pathologies and Marxist ideology that he is incapable of doing this, even though he did give ground on the likelihood of extending the Bush tax cuts, a vote the formerly Democrat dominated Congress failed to take before leaving to campaign for reelection.

Obama is left now with the option to use executive orders to “transform” a nation that has rejected his agenda.

He is left now with the veto power to thwart legislative action to address the nation’s ailing economy.

He continues to be surrounded by a shadowy and largely unknown coterie of White House “czars” to carry out his policies.

Nothing Obama said during his press conference offers any comfort. Rather, a close examination suggests that there is “something seriously wrong” with the 44th President of the United States.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → What is Wrong with Obama?