This Way to the Poorhouse

By Alan Caruba

On Tuesday, September 13, Reuters news service reported “Number of poor hit record 46 million in 2010.” Another new record set by the Obama administration and a President who has been out campaigning to “Pass this jobs bill now.”

“The number of poor Americans in 2010,” Reuters reported, “was the largest in the 52 years the Census Bureau has been publishing poverty estimates.” Obama has the great misfortune of presiding over a government, some of whose agencies report just how bad a job he’s doing. Last month, we were informed that zero new jobs were created in August.

On the same day of the Reuters article, Douglas W. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was on Capitol Hill, advising the new deficit super-committee to whom Congress has punted the job of reducing the obscene amount of money the federal government wastes every day.

If they don’t come up with a plan, cuts kick in automatically. This basically means that they have to decide what agencies and departments get protected. Otherwise the federal government gets a one-size-fits-all budget cut. That is as dumb a way to run the nation as one can imagine.

There was some fairly desultory media coverage of Elmendorf’s presentation. For most reporters it was just more of the same, but for the rest of us, it was a reasoned description of the utter disaster that faces the nation if a truly massive effort isn’t undertaken to slash government spending.

Aside from spending, there’s the problem of all those old codgers like me. “If current policies are continued in coming years,” Elmendorf said, “the aging of the population and the rising cost of health care will boost federal spending, as a share of the economy, well above the amount of revenues that the federal government has collected in the past.”

Social Security and Medicare have to be significantly reformed. They are bankrupting the nation because, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

Reform, however, of any part of the federal budget is complicated by “the weakness of the economy and the large numbers of unemployed workers, empty houses, and underused factories and offices.”

Or to put it another way, we’re broke. We are seriously broke. We are $14.3 trillion broke in terms of the national debt. That’s about the same amount of the entire gross domestic product for a year.

We are not only broke, Elmendorf told the committee, “the economic growth for the remainder of this year and next is likely to be weaker than the agency anticipated—with growth in the vicinity of 1 ½ percent this year and around 2 ½ percent next year.” We need at least 3 percent to just break even.

Since both the Democrats and Republicans got us into this jam, it is highly doubtful the super-committee will do anything but dawdle long enough to let the automatic cuts kick in.

Meanwhile, the rest of the federal government is hemorrhaging money.

As this is being written, I received a news release from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that it has awarded “nearly $100 million to promote jobs, self-sufficiency, independent living for HUD-assisted housing developments.”

Then the U.S. Treasury informed me that “two additional New Jersey community banks receive $22 million to help small businesses access capital, create new jobs.”

And something called the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Advisory Committee is set to “present eleven recommendations to promote U.S. exports of renewable and efficiency technologies to federal officials.”

Folks at the Department of Commerce will be told that green energy and clean energy is the wave of the future. Did anyone tell them that Solyndra, the solar panel company that received a U.S. government loan of more than $500 million just filed for bankruptcy? Or that General Electric builds its wind turbines in China? Or that it shut down the last factory in America that manufactured incandescent light bulbs?

A week ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a ten-point plan to create jobs that has nothing to do with shoveling gobs of taxpayer money out the door to banks, housing developments, or wasting time discussing renewable energy.

Among its recommendations were the repeal of the financial “reform” laws, Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. Bank of America isn’t planning to cut 30,000 jobs because it has too little regulation, but too much bad regulation.

CEI urged that proposed or recently finalized federal environmental regulations that will force the closing of power plants and energy-intensive industrial plants be put on hold. The Institute urged the federal government to expedite environmental permitting of natural resource projects (coal, oil, natural gas) projects on federal, state and private lands. Ending taxpayer subsidies for wasteful, inefficient “green” jobs was yet another recommendation.

It’s not that CEI and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among other think tanks and trade associations haven’t been telling the Obama administration what needs to be done to energize the economy. It’s more like the administration either isn’t listening or doesn’t care or intends to deliberately put America further into bankruptcy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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"Grand Theft Auto" - How Auto Dealers Fought Back and Won

By Alan Caruba

We are all aware that one of the bail-outs that occurred on Obama’s watch was the takeover of two of the three major auto manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler companies. As both faced bankruptcy, the Obama administration stepped in to become the owner of these companies.

Among the first to discover the arrogance and ignorance of those selected to direct its Automotive Task Force were hundreds of dealerships for both companies. On May 14, 2009, Alan Spitzer was among them. He was informed that his company, begun by his grandfather, expanded by his father, and one he expected to hand on to his own children had been arbitrarily disenfranchised by Chrysler.

The worst aspect of this was that, while franchises are protected by state law, federal law trumps this long established business relationship. Chrysler had been instructed to divest itself of a quarter of its dealer network and General Motors was as well. Some 2,000 dealerships were affected by the regimes demands.

As Spitzer and his daughter, Alison, spell out in their new book, “Grand Theft Auto: How Entrepreneurs Fought for the American Dream” (http://www.newyearpublishing.com/), “Dealers are completely independent business people, not owned by the auto manufacturers as many believe. Dealers are the manufacturer’s only customers. They are the face of their brands. Without them there are no sales.”

One might have thought that the last thing to do would be to decimate a quarter of General Motors and Chrysler’s vast network of dealers, but that is exactly what the Obama task force did “as a condition for securing the federal funding they needed to stay afloat.” While “saving” the companies essentially was a sop to the auto unions, the task force cut loose the dealers who were the lifeblood of the companies, plunging many of them into economic destruction along with their thousands of employees.

Worse yet, “hundreds of franchises were stolen from their rightful owners and re-assigned or ‘gifted’ to other dealers.” Additionally, anyone who owned GM’s and Chrysler’s securities were informed that neither company would honor them under their new management, defrauding them of their investment. Both companies were required to add union representatives to their board of directors.

They had to have been extraordinarily stupid to do this, but the task force did not include a single person with any experience in the auto industry. If they had they would have known that “States earn about 20 percent of their sales tax revenue from auto dealers.” What’s more, “dealerships comprise as much as 7-8 percent of all retail employment.”

Critical to this extraordinarily thuggish decision was the fact that the dealerships did not cost the auto manufacturers one dime. They were given less than a month to close their doors. Contrary to the belief that the decision of who would be closed was not based on their political affiliations. Indeed, there appeared to be no rational reason for who was chosen for destruction.

The takeover was an example of a gangster government intervening in the private sector; making sure to not “let a crisis” go to waste as it pursued its socialist agenda.

For Alan Spitzer, it was apparent that “the only avenue for justice would be for Congress to enact another federal law that, presumably, would leapfrog the bankruptcy statues and overturn the terminations. In my view, these actions represented a threat, not just to the nation’s 18,000 car dealers, but to our entire franchise system that is so fundamental to the way business is conducted in America.”

The most astonishing aspect to Spitzer’s story is that he literally created a grassroots movement to overturn the government’s illegal and outrageous terminations and that he got a bill passed through a bitterly partisan House and Senate!

The grassroots effort “was directly responsible for saving hundreds of dealerships and tens of thousands of jobs,” said Spitzer. In the end, after Obama signed the legislation that was part of a larger bill, Spitzer actually got to meet the President who still did not give any evidence of understanding what his administration had attempted to do.

The GM and Chrysler takeover was just one more example of how ruthless, ignorant, and incompetent the Obama regime has proven to be with its reckless spending and idiotic “cash for clunkers” programs that achieved nothing more than to get the nation’s historic AAA credit rating reduced and lines around employment fairs that stretch to the horizon.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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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

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Why the US Credit Rating Was Downgraded

By Alan Caruba

To begin with, the debt ceiling was lifted in part to hold onto our historic AAA rating of U.S. securities, but that didn’t work. On August 5th, Standard & Poor’s, one of three major rating agencies, downgraded the U.S. to AA+, the first such downgrade in the history of the nation. The liberal media immediately attacked Standard & Poor’s, but odds are they will be joined soon enough by Moody’s and Fitch.

As the air is filled with charges and countercharges as to who is to blame for the downgrade, and blaming George W. Bush has become a joke (yes, he does share some of the blame), the numbers tell the story. As the Washington Times recently noted, “In 2008, the federal budget deficit was around 3 percent of gross domestic product. In 2011, it’s around 11 percent.”

“Total federal debt was $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008 and is currently $14.6 trillion. Debt as a percentage of GDP was a painful 69 percent at the end of the Bush years, but Mr. Obama is pushing it over 100 percent, another disgraceful historic milestone.”

In the week leading up to the last-minute agreement to lift the debt ceiling the Tea Party movement’s members were being called “terrorists”, a notion so idiotic that it defies belief. As the debt ceiling debate wound down, that was all one heard from Democrat politicians and their mainstream media toadies. It is a measure of their desperation.

Neither the President, nor the leadership of the Democratic Party apparently got the message of the 2010 elections that took away the control of the House and gave it to Republicans and new Tea Party caucus members. The initial Democrat response was to call them “extremists” for wanting to get spending under control, but mostly to repeal Obamacare.

The House, in fact, did vote to repeal Obamacare. The Tea Party movement began with its opposition to that legislative monstrosity. On March 9, 2010, Americans filled the streets of Washington, DC, right up to the stairs of the U.S. Capitol Building. David Axelrod, then a White House consigliore to President Obama, dismissed them saying, “They are wrong.”

They were not wrong then and, in many respects, they are not wrong now. They are, however, impatient. That is historically American because we have always been a people in a hurry. The Tea Party movement rose out of widespread opposition to Obamacare.

At some point the nation has to begin the long hard process of reversing a decades-long spending binge by both the government and individual Americans, many of whom turned their homes into ATMs or purchased homes they could not afford.

The housing bubble burst in September 2008 at the end of President Bush’s second term. It’s worth remembering that, when Bush came into office President Clinton had bequeathed him a budget surplus.

Bush expanded Medicare with a prescription benefit. When 9/11 occurred on his watch, it drained a trillion dollars out of the economy. He responded with a war in Afghanistan and then added a war in Iraq for good measure. They seemed like a good idea at the time, less so now. The Bush tax cuts reduced government revenues and were very popular, but bills must be paid. Massive borrowing ensued.

When the financial crisis hit, President Bush was at the tail end of a long period of U.S. history dating back to the 1930s Great Depression that made it inevitable. Social Security and Medicare/Medicare have become unsustainable. In effect, the housing bubble was just the trigger that revealed a far larger problem. The New Deal of the 1930s, Medicare in the 1960s, and LBJ’s “War on Poverty” were all part of the problem Americans must address today.

It is historic fact that Republicans have presided over a debtor nation for a long time, dating back to the days of Richard M. Nixon. Indeed, a decade ago, it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who had a surplus when he left office. Previously, Ronald Reagan had run deficits for his eight years and had increased the budget by 69%. He was followed by Bush41 and Bush43 who also ran deficits. I am not assigning “blame”; just stating facts, because facts are important.

An excellent new book, “Lost Decades” by Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden has just been published and anyone who truly wants to understand how Democrats and Republicans alike have dug the nation into a deep financial hole should read it.

As the authors note, “Events of the weeks during and after the passage of TARP revealed a chilling fact that the American financial system was effectively bankrupt.”

TARP, an emergency legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis, was designed initially to purchase the “toxic assets” that had been sold throughout the financial system, mostly banks, hedge funds and insurance companies—all rated AAA by Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard & Poor’s…yes, that Standard & Poor’s!

Also revealed has been the fact that the American economy is central to the stability of foreign economies as well. Many other nations had also been engaged in spending too much and were caught up in the housing bubble, ours and their own. England was one. Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece, and others tottered as billions in alleged value, bundled from countless mortgages and sold as securities, disappeared.

At the urging of two government sponsored entitles (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, subprime loans were encouraged. They were then “bundled” them and sold as securities. When the housing bubble burst, no one knew who owned what. The assets were often no longer specifically connected to the owners of homes who discovered that their mortgages now exceeded the value of their homes.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own nearly half of all the mortgage loans issued by banks and mortgage firms nationwide. The government was on the hook for billions and stepped in to seize both GSEs. They need to be wound down and eliminated, returning to a time when banks and mortgage firms can rationally make prudent loans. The federal government should not have been in the housing mortgage business and now we know why.

When investment banks like Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the huge insurance company, AIG, faced a similar fate, the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, stepped in to stabilize the U.S. financial system with loans constituting billions of public funds.

In sum, they had no choice. They had facilitated the problem, but a nation without a functioning banking system is nothing but some borders on a map.

It’s worth pausing to recall that President Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury was Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs. He was succeeded by Lawrence Summers, a Rubin protégé and later an Obama economic advisor. Bush’s later Secretary of the Treasury, as noted, was Hank Paulson and his chief of staff was Joshua Bolton, another Goldman alumnus. It’s a very small cliché of men deciding first how Wall Street will benefit and then how, as the expression goes, “to kick the can down the road.”

As noted in the "Lost Decades", “The government depended on access to domestic and international finance to underwrite its own borrowing as deficits grew; the private sector’s vibrancy similarly depended on a continued flow of funds from and through the world’s financial institutions.”

So long as the bubble existed, the politicians found no reason to rein in government spending and to compound the mess its vaunted regulatory apparatus had failed its responsibilities as well. These bubbles and recessions are not exclusively American. Previously, Japan lost a decade as well and other nations, several in South America, experienced even worst financial debacles.

So the debt ceiling vote just put off the problem while the politicians hope and pray that the economy will revive. They are unlikely to do what is necessary to cut the size of the federal government, its spending, and remove the weight of suffocating job-killing regulation. Whole government agencies need to be eliminated.

The Tea Party movement, made up of middle class, sensible, God-fearing and Constitution-loving Americans is all that stands between us and the politicians. The Tea Party needs to be focused. It needs to be patient. We know the current bunch of politicians must be replaced.

As for the theatrics of the debt ceiling debate and vote, we elected these politicians and their predecessors. The deficits they gave us are collectively our deficits, our debts.

In 2012, hopefully we can begin to say goodbye Barack Obama, goodbye Harry Reid, goodbye Nancy Pelosi, goodbye Barney Frank, goodbye Dick Durbin. And thank you, Tea Party Americans.

© Alan Caruba, 2011.

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Obama's War on Oil, Coal, and America

By Alan Caruba

If there is a single reason for defeating Barack Obama’s bid for reelection, it would be his energy policies, all of which have been aimed at denying Americans access to their domestic oil as well as our huge reserves of coal.

Both energy sources would generate thousands of jobs at a time when unemployment figures rival those of the Great Depression. At the same time, domestic oil production would reduce our obscene dependency on foreign oil while coal production would ensure that we can all enjoy the most affordable electricity insofar as coal is responsible for just over half of all electricity generated.

Fortunately for Americans, Exxon has not abandoned the search for new sources of domestic oil, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars this requires. In early June it announced large discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico, the first in decades. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the company “unveiled three discoveries that are likely to turn it into one of the biggest producers of oil and gas in the region.”

On the same day, Seldon B. Graham, Jr., an oil engineer and attorney, had a letter in The Wall Street Journal in which he noted that “the actual price of U.S. oil is cheaper than the actual price of foreign oil” advising readers that the “the oil price” cited in the media is actually a reflection of Wall Street speculators making bets on the future, not the market price.

“U.S. consumers,” said Graham “could save some $17.7 billion annually at the current price difference if U.S. oil replaced foreign oil.”

At the same time Exxon was announcing its discoveries, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was holding a particularly acrimonious meeting involving the members of the cartel. The meeting reportedly “broke up in disarray with no decision on raising production—despite widespread fears that higher crude prices were endangering the world economy.”

The so-called Arab Spring involving turmoil in nations from Tunisia to Yemen, along with the fighting going on in Libya, an oil-producing nation, has sharpened the divisions within OPEC, but the greatest of these is between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran has played a role in the turmoil, backing the Syrian regime and warning Saudi Arabia against further support of Bahrain. Apocalyptic fears are being generated as Iran closes in on having its own nuclear weapons.

What, then, has been the Obama administration’s response to this? While slowly beginning to provide new permits for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, having declared a moratorium after the BP accident (and thus destroying countless jobs in the Gulf States region), it is now threatening a new way to shut down oil exploration and production in one of the most oil-rich areas of the nation, the Permian Basin of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced it intends to declare the dunes sagebrush lizard an “endangered species” because it believes that oil production is destroying parts of the lizard’s home. Ignoring the nation’s financial crisis, its high rate of unemployment, and the rising cost of gasoline at the pump, the USFWS thinks that it is more important to protect “a unique sand dune ecosystem” for a LIZARD.

“This is the most prolific oil-production region in onshore America,” said Ben Sheppard, president of the Permian Basic Petroleum Association. That, of course, is why the Obama administration wants to attack it in the same way it has been attacking any off-shore production off the coast of Alaska and, of course, in ANWR, the site of billions of untapped barrels of oil.

At the same time Investors Business Daily took note of the Environmental Protection Agency’s drive to impose new regulations on utilities that use coal. “The rules make sense only if you want less energy, higher prices, and fewer jobs.”

“We’re being systematically starved of energy,” said IBD, “and our economy is suffering. Just don’t ask the White House to help.” It estimated that the new EPA rules would cost electric utilities $184 billion by 2030 and kill 1.4 million jobs. They would, of course, increase the cost of electricity to everyone.

Like everything else the EPA proposes, it is based on totally bogus estimates of air pollution in addition to the scientifically-debased assertion that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to save the Earth from global warming. Meanwhile, the UN Kyoto Protocol intended to reduce CO2 emissions is soon to end as most of the original nations signing onto it have abandoned it.

America has arrived at a moment in time when the enemy is now the administration in control of its ability to provide the power it needs to dig out of the current financial crisis. If a foreign government was imposing these restrictions we would go to war against it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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White House Official Spokesman

By Alan Caruba

I really miss Tony Snow who served as George W. Bush’s White House press secretary until cancer took him from us too soon. Snow was a journalist with an impressive resume, but beyond that, he had a charm that made him the master of that ugly little pit of hell where White House correspondents gather to report on its events.

I was no fan of Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s first press secretary. I used to call him Glib Gibbs and often wondered if some of the correspondents had secret voodoo dolls with his image. It wouldn’t have surprised me. For all that, he was good at his job which was to protect Obama from the growing perception that he was an idiot who hated America.

I was not surprised when Gibbs decided to move on. Being press secretary is a killer job and he had served in that capacity all through Obama’s campaign and into the White House for most of the first two years there.

Why anyone thought Jay Carney, a former Time Magazine Washington bureau chief, could ever take over is beyond me. I am confident in saying he was probably never picked to play on anyone’s team during his school days. He looks like he has a permanent weggie,. He is beyond being a nerd. He is a caricature of one. Nervous, twitchy, and in way over his head.

In a very real way, Carney reflects the incompetence that can no longer be hidden from the American public (and all others). It’s a national embarrassment to watch Attorney General Eric Holder’s glassy-eyed ignorance, real or feigned, of any question members of a congressional committee might ask.

Then there’s Homeland Security's Janet Napolitano who apparently has no idea where Mexico is located. As for any useful anti-terrorism action, it was airline passengers who subdued the last two terrorists who tried to blow up a plane and passengers who fought the terrorists in one of the 9/11 planes.

The Obama administration has alienated States that have gone to the courts to put an end to Obamacare, that have sought the right to enforce immigration laws the federal government will not, and are demanding that drilling moratoriums and other restrictions be lifted.

The skyrocketing national debt will be an issue that the administration cannot paper over with calls for higher taxes and measures that sound increasingly bizarre to ordinary Americans—the latest being to tax people based on how many miles they drive their cars anywhere, such as to work, if they have a job in this economy.

And it’s not just the press secretary who looks and sounds foolish much of the time. Following the triumphant announcement that Osama bin Laden had been found and killed, the next few days were a cornucopia of conflicting statements leaking from the White House and other government spokespersons regarding the specifics of the event.

The decision to not release the photo of a dead bin Laden only managed to ignite the febrile imagination of every conspiracy enthusiast from Cleveland to Karachi.

Anybody remember who was tapped to replace Tony Snow? It was Dana Perino, a blond with movie star good looks, a sweet demeanor, smart as they come, and solid as a rock behind the podium. She is now one of Fox News Channel’s great assets.

My guess is that Carney’s replacement is already being interviewed as this is being written.

If it was my job to pick a new press secretary I would want someone with journalism credentials, but I would want him to be a snappy dresser with a dazzling smile and nerves of steel. If he had also been a professional magician, that would clinch it for me because the next press secretary will spend 95% of his time distracting the press corps by pulling rabbits out of hat.

This is an administration that is imploding.

Everything that can go wrong in the year and a half remaining until Obama is replaced will go wrong. It will be the Gulf oil spill in spades. It will be the million-person crowd that turned out to oppose Obamacare before it was passed. It will be a growling, menacing Tea Party 2.0.

It could also be a series of terror attacks in retaliation for killing bin Laden and, with a 100,000 troops already in the Middle East just who would we attack—other than Iran—that we haven’t already?

There is weakness, vacillation, at the core of the Obama administration and our enemies know it. They will not likely wait around for a new president before striking.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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What Greens Really Believe

By Alan Caruba

Earth Day was established in 1970 and millions of Americans and others around the world have been steadily brainwashed to embrace the impression that environmentalism is about protecting the Earth, but when Greens talk among themselves, it is a very different story and a frightening one at that.

The massive propaganda program that supports the Green agenda is impressive in its scope. Its locus is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was revealed in 2009 to be a complete hoax based on the manipulation of computer models to predict a warming due to excess carbon dioxide. There never was any threat from CO2. It is a gas that is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. It represents a very minor, even miniscule, part of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Nothing, however, deters the Green agenda and, since the first Earth Day, it has penetrated the nation’s schools and, of course, its politics, deliberately deterring and thwarting access to the nation’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas; the greatest such reserves in the world! It is a drag on business development. It is the ultimate nanny state seeking to alter people's lifestyles through coercion, legislation, and persuasion.

What most people are unaware of is the fascistic hatred of mankind that underlies the philosophic basis of environmentalism.

Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept, was quoted by William Tuck in “Progress and Privilege”, 1982, as saying “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals, but absolutely limited by the state.” Lamont Cole, an ecologist, has said, “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."

Stewart Brand, writing in the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote, “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!”

I doubt most people are wishing for a disaster and, when they occur such as the earthquakes in Haiti and in Japan, the first instinct of decent people worldwide is to mobilize to help those affected. This is a very human reaction, but it is not a Green one.

Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, characterized capitalism, saying “Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”

It is no coincidence that Earth Day is also the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, the founder of the former Soviet Union and devotee of Karl Marx, the creator of Communism. The Communist revolution worldwide led to the murder of an estimated one hundred million throughout the last century.

At the heart of environmentalism, aside from its wish for far fewer humans, is a hatred of capitalism. The failures of communism and socialism everywhere attest to the way state control of all aspects of life is ignored by Greens.

David Foreman, founder of Earth First!, said, “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, hold dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wildness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settle land.”

Thus, agriculture, the key to civilization, is decried as harming the Earth and all manner of business and industrial enterprises, dependent on the provision of energy, is regarded as evil.

Major environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to name just two, oppose the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to provide energy.

So much of what environmentalism preaches and claims in its propaganda is utterly false, but telling lies is part and parcel of the Green message.

Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. Senator (D-CO) said, “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Virtually everything being advocated by the Obama administration represents this willingness to take action and tell lies about the nation’s need for energy, with the exception of the worst ways of producing it, wind, solar, and biofuels. Even before gasoline prices climbed to new highs, negatively affecting all aspects of life in America, Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, was advocating higher prices.

The few quotes cited here do not begin to illuminate the horrors that environmentalism would visit on mankind or the nihilistic view it holds, but they represent a far greater body of Green writings and statements over the years that indicate the extent of the threat it poses to humanity.

A deluge of environmental propaganda will precede Earth Day, April 22, 2011. It should be seen as a warning to all who believe in the Creator and all who wish to advance a world at peace, one in which humanity benefits from trade, prosperity, and modern technology worldwide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → What Greens Really Believe

A Sudden Surfeit of Bullies

By Alan Caruba

Have you noticed how the subject of “school bullies” or “bullying” is suddenly in the news? These things don’t happen spontaneously.

For most of my life I have earned my living in public relations and one learns a few things about the way the public is herded toward certain assumptions and actions when enough money and effort is made to influence their judgment.

In early March, in concert with the White House, the National Education Association, a union, not a benevolent “association” of teachers, released “a new survey on bullying” that found, not surprisingly, that teachers “and education support professions” were in desperate need of “additional training on when and how to intervene in bullying situations.”

If the raucous crowds of teachers and other public sector union members who gathered in Wisconsin’s state house and outside of New Jersey’s in Trenton are any indication, the NEA knows a lot about bullying and hardly needs any instruction on how to deal with it.

“Our members,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, “know that bullying is a significant problem” and, naturally, they need “more training” to deal with it. These are people who presumably passed through four years of college education in order to become teachers and, if the NEA is to be believed, they simply did not receive enough training to deal with school bullies.

This is so absurd one hardly knows how to address it. The NEA produced statistics that “82 percent of school employees report they have witnessed bullying two or more times in the last month.” This does not strike me as an epidemic of bullying.

“98 percent believe it is their job to intervene when they see bullying happening in their school.” Well, duh! What are they being paid for?

Unless I am just too old or too terribly out of touch, bullying has been going on since the days of the one-room schoolhouse. The delicate psyches of school children, whether they are the bullies or the bullied, manage to survive. At one time or another, the masses of children condemned to government schools have all had to deal with this.

Why is this bullying issue being ginned up? In an age of the Internet with its FaceBook, MySpace, and YouTube ability to turn any bullying incident into a worldwide event, we are simply more aware of them. We are aware, too, that some few children whose parents were unaware or inattentive commit suicide.

Many children are the typical targets of bullies, male and female, because they are having gender identification problems, are fat, are white, are black, are not on any sports teams, are serious students getting good grades, or are simply available to be bullied. Surely every school has its cliché of bullies.

Blogger Hans Bader recently took note of the fact that the Obama administration sent a letter to school officials “that undermines both free speech and due process.” Bader noted that “a political appointee in the Education Department sent a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to the nation’s school boards claiming that many forms of homophobia and bullying violate federal laws against sexual harassment and discrimination, but those laws only ban discrimination based on sex or race—not bullying in general.”

“The letter from the Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights, Russlyn Ali, defined ‘harassment’ so broadly,” noted Bader, “as to reach both speech protected by the First Amendment, and conduct the Supreme Court says does not legally qualify as harassment.”

Why is the White House and the Department of Education reaching all the way down into your local school is push for greater acceptance of homosexuality in particular and government intervention in general for an element of school life as old as education in America?

Is there any parent or citizen that is not aware of how poor the quality of education is in America these days? Is there anyone who has passed through grades K-thru-12 who doesn’t understand that bullying has always been a problem; that teachers and school administrators routinely intervene to deal with individual cases? That no “additional training” is required for this?

In a new book coming in May, “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse”, author Annette Fuentes makes a case for the way too many schools treat students as potential jailbirds, requiring them to pass through metal detectors, and be subject to intrusive searchers, or suspended for alleged infractions of idiotic “zero tolerance” policies.

Following the Columbine High School tragedy, Fuentes noted that the “public’s perception of school violence and youth behavior was seriously out of whack with reality,” adding that “Failing schools breed failing students and place them at risk of falling into the juvenile justice system, especially as policing and the practices of that system increasingly make their way into the schoolhouse.”

How crazy is it when a five-year-old is arrested for bringing a butter knife to school or a teenage girl is suspended for bringing Midol for her menstrual cramps? Why are six-year-old strip-searched in a classroom when a few dollars goes missing from the teacher’s desk? These incidents are too often a part of school life for today’s students trying to learn anything in a hostile environment.

“Hysteria, not clear-eyed analysis, has colored the public’s understanding and, regrettably, tainted media coverage of school violence,” writes Fuentes. “The climate of fear has created ripe conditions for imposing unprecedented restrictions on young people’s rights, dignity, and educational freedoms.”

So, it follows naturally that the NEA and the White House are busy of late creating a campaign that will underwrite the wasting of millions on “additional training” to deal with an overheated and deliberate campaign to make Americans think that schools are rife with bullying when it is nothing more than one of the most common problems when masses of young people are “educated” in schools that more closely resemble minimum security prisons than places of learning.

© Alan Caruba

More about → A Sudden Surfeit of Bullies

Fortune Tellers, Tarot Readers, and Me

By Alan Caruba

On the day Mubarak stepped down as Egypt’s president and the crowds in Tahrir Square were going bananas over the news, I paused to post a comment on my blog saying that Egyptians, ten years or less into the future, might look back at his thirty years of dictatorship as “the good old days.”

This rather casual approach to what is, in Vice President Biden’s words, is a “big f-ing deal”, so far as Egypt and the Middle East is concerned, gave me cause to reflect on how difficult it is to make any predictions about the future except in the most general way. Even then, the prospect for being wrong is constant.

When one looks back in history, the temptation is to say things like “Of course America was going to win World War Two”. That's pure 20-20 hindsight. America was very late to the party; the war in Europe had begun in 1939 and we didn’t get in until December 1941 when we were attacked  by Japan. Americans were hugely opposed to getting into another European conflict, nor eager to take on one in Asia. After Pearl Harbor, however, we could not wait to get into the field and kick some butt. Sort of like after 9/11, eh?

It is unlikely that those Iranian students back in 1979 had any idea that the Ayatollah Khomeini would return from his exile in France a month after it started and impose one of the cruelest regime imaginable. The Shah, of course, was no choir boy, but he did try to modernize Iran, not drag it back to the seventh century. Despite pronouncements by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, most Iranians have a great affection for America.

I doubt any one of the victorious parties who signed the Treaty of Versailles after World War One had any idea they were handing an unknown malcontent called Adolph Hitler the red meat he needed to (1) build the National Socialist party in Germany into one that (2) won a democratic election, (3) catapulted him into the Chancellor’s job, and imposed a totalitarian regime that (4) jailed all of its opponents and (5) enjoyed a lot of support among the common folk.

The same treaty divided up the Middle East when British and French diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, took out a map, used colored crayons to create new nations, partition others, and set in motion everything we have been living with ever since 1919. Back then, President Woodrow Wilson wanted to create an international organization, the League of Nations, to ensure no new wars would occur. He was, of course, a liberal. By the 1930s Hitler and Japanese Emperor Hirohito had other plans.

A liberal like Wilson, Roosevelt set about to create the United Nations after World War Two and now we have a huge, corrupt, totally ineffective organization that hasn’t stopped a single war since it came into being in 1945. It was and is an exercise in futility and pure evil. Its interim first Secretary General was Alger Hiss, a Soviet spy who, like many others, held high level State Department posts in the FDR and Truman administrations.

Which, for no particular reason, brings me to the Central Intelligence Agency that I seriously doubt could predict tomorrow’s weather. Reportedly, the news of Mubarak’s decision to step down came to the current CIA Director, Leon Panetta, from CNN. This is on a par with the former CIA chief, George J. Tenet’s pronouncement to then-President George W. Bush that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Few were found after the invasion.

We keep being told that we only hear of the CIA’s failures and never of its successes. I am old enough to recall they were taken completely by surprise when both Pakistan and India achieved nuclear weapon parity. I can even recall the debacle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a happy surprise. In fact, I keep searching my memory for any reports of its successes. But of course they are a SECRET.

I would love to sit in on one of those daily CIA briefings for the President. I suspect I might find myself laughing out loud much of the time. Some of our spies gave their lives to protect us, but as patriotic they and the folks over at the National Security Agency are, predicting crises and events is not their forte, probably because they are unpredictable in any but the most general terms.

For example, largely unreported is the news that, since 2006, Pakistan has increased its nuclear arsenal to more than a hundred atomic bombs. It is one of the most unstable governments in the Middle East. The U.S. has given Pakistan billions despite the fact that a large portion of the country is controlled by the Taliban, it is generally anti-American, and it is bankrupt. More jihadists come out of Pakistan then anywhere else.

The Obama administration has banned the use of terms such as “jihad”, “Islamic terrorism”, and “radical Islam” in U.S. documents. This is a self-inflicted, ideological blindness on a galactic scale.

So it is left to imbeciles in the news media to tell us what is happening, why it is happening, and what is likely to happen.

That’s how we ended up with Walter Cronkite reporting from Saigon that Tet was a huge defeat for the American forces when it was, in fact, a huge victory or Dan Rather’s utterly false report about George W. Bush’s National Guard history. We end up with a rabid anti-Semite like Helen Thomas reporting from the White House since shortly after the Lincoln assassination (okay, she’s not that old).

Since the late 1980s, this mush-for-brains crowd has been telling us that global warming was real and we had to all switch to riding bicycles, driving electric cars, and whizzing around at a huge 60-miles-per-hour in so-called “high-speed” trains instead of taking a plane. When people start getting their genitals fondled by TSA agents in order to get on Amtrak, all travel in America will revert to automobiles and horses.

All of which leads me to believe that those in the White House, in the past and the present, have no more grasp of events than your dentist.

When I make a prediction—and it is very rare—it is almost always based on history and, in case you haven’t noticed, history is speeding up thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

I suspect ideology, uninformed speculation, ignorance and fear are the basis for most “strategery”. You will understand then why I lean toward the Latin admonition, “Si vi pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, prepare for war.

Ronald Reagan reminded us, "Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong"

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Fortune Tellers, Tarot Readers, and Me

Israel Holds Its Breath

By Alan Caruba

After more than three thousand years of varying calamities, Jews have perfected survival against the odds. There is a joke they tell about “Jewish Zen”:

“Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.”

Right now, Israel and those who support the Jewish State are holding their breath, watching events in Egypt. What is happening is not inconsequential, given that Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 after a series of wars in which it had been soundly defeated.

When the flamboyant Gamal Abed Al Nasser died, Anwar al-Sadat became Egypt’s president and, together with Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, they turned a corner toward peace. The treaty was greeted with angry demonstrations throughout the Arab world. Sadat, the peacemaker, was assassinated by Muslim zealots.

At that point Hosni Mubarak became Egypt’s president and he has held the position for three decades as the head of what is essentially a one party system. There have been a half dozen assassination attempts on his life. He is 83 years old. Like most Arab nations and other third world nations, he ran an authoritarian regime.

The peace deal included the return of the Sinai desert to Egypt by Israel. Under former Prime Minister Arial Sharon, Israelis who had lived in the Gaza strip were forced to leave and it was turned over to the Palestine Authority in a “land-for-peace” swap. The peaceloving Palestinians turned Gaza into a launch site for thousands of rockets into Israel.

Today, Egypt shares a border with Gaza which features an unknown number of tunnels used to smuggle in weapons and goods. Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist Palestinian organization that drove the PA out at gunpoint.

So the fate of Egypt is of importance to Israel. To Israel’s north, another terrorist group, Hezbollah, has taken over the government of Lebanon without firing a shot. Christians, Druze and Marists, along with others in Lebanon have once again lost control over their nation, formerly peacefully governed by a constitutional coalition of Christians and Muslims.

None of this bodes well for Israel as it looks around at Middle Eastern and northern African nations in which governments are being overthrown for being noxious oppressors.

Of great importance to Israel at this time is the question of what action the United States will or will not take regarding the current turmoil. Since the Egyptian uprising appears to be a genuine people’s rebellion, the question is who ends up with the reins of power there? My bet is on the military.

Meanwhile, however, yet another United Nations resolution aimed at Israel like a guided missile is making its way through the Security Council and, at this point, only the U.S. can shoot it down with a veto.

The UN resolution declares that any construction in the West Bank by Israel is illegal, even if it is in its capitol, Jerusalem.

No American administration has been able to broker peace between Israel and the so-called Palestinians, the oldest existing group of “refugees” in the world.

Following the end of a failed war against the then new state of Israel, the Arab population that fled became the sole object and purpose of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). No other refugee group in the world enjoys this status.

There is a Palestinian problem because there is a United Nations problem.

The United Nations is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of its Middle Eastern and Islamic members.

What was to be a UN emergency response in May 1950, UNWRA has cost American taxpayers billions since then. Today, UNRWA continues to operate in both the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank and the Hamas-ruled Gaza, taken from the PA in June 2007. As noted in a recent article by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, in 2007 UNRWA employed more than 29,000, all but 200 of whom were Palestinians. Its “facilities and personnel have been tied to numerous terrorist attacks on Israel.”

Sixty years of stalled and failed peace talks, as well as terror campaigns against Israel, have deligitimized Palestinian claims.

Following Israel’s operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to stop Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket attacks, the Obama administration promised $400 million for Gaza and $600 million for the West Bank.

Though not confirmed, the rumor-mill in Washington is saying that the Obama administration will not veto the latest in an endless succession of anti-Israel resolutions.

If true, President Obama would become the first U.S. President to not defend Israel’s sovereignty.

If true, it would signal to the entire Middle East and the world that America is abandoning the only true democracy in the region and its longtime ally.

The United Nations was founded in 1945 after World War Two. It has since become a cesspool of corruption and an international cancer determined to become a one-world government. The time is long overdue for the U.S. to stop funding it and, indeed, to withdraw from it.

If Obama does not veto the Security Council resolution, the U.S. will pay for that decision for decades to come. Israel will be in ever more certain peril.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Israel Holds Its Breath

The Horrid Ms. Browner

By Alan Caruba

The announced departure of Carol Browner as President Obama’s climate “czar” is very good news for America, given her long record of contempt for the truth regarding “global warming” and a range of other Environmental Protection Agency initiatives when she served as former President Clinton’s director of the EPA.

The decision to leave could have been motivated to put some distance between herself and the White House to afford the President some political cover.

Whatever reason will be put forth for her leaving, the real reason is her justified concern that she will be summoned before a congressional committee to explain why, for example, she deliberately misled Americans during the BP oil spill, going on national television to say that most of the oil was gone. She cited a White House commission created to investigate the spill, implying that the scientist’s report had confirmed the need for a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf when, in fact, they had not supported it.

Browner has been a dedicated socialist, serving as a Commissioner of the Socialist International, an umbrella group for 170 “social democratic, socialist, and labor parties” in 55 nations. According to its “organizing document”, the SI cites capitalism as the cause of “devastating crisis”, “mass unemployment”, “imperialist expansion” and “colonial exploitation” worldwide. This is straight out of the Communist Manifesto.

When her role with SI was revealed, its website scrubbed her photo and evidence of her commission membership. No doubt several of Obama’s “czars” have shared similar views of capitalism. One, Van Jones, was forced to resign as the "Green Jobs Czar" when it was revealed he was a communist.

Obama’s election was, in effect, a socialist takeover of the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Browner’s dedication to the Big Lie of “global warming” goes back to her days when she served as then-Senator Al Gore’s legislative director from 1988 to 1988. Browner’s devotion to environmentalism resulted in her being named Florida’s Secretary of Environmental Regulation from 1991 to 1993. After the 1992 presidential election, she served as a transition director for Vice President-elect Gore.

Global warming is the assertion that the Earth is rapidly warming as the result of the buildup of “greenhouse gases”, most particularly carbon dioxide.

The “theory” is now totally discredited, but continues as justification for a variety of policies such as the administration’s emphasis on wind and solar energy, attacks on the coal and oil industries, and efforts that would drive up the cost of electricity to business, industry, and all consumers.

Browner is on record saying that global warming is “the greatest challenge ever faced” despite revelations in 2009 that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had rigged the computer model's global temperature records to advance the fraud.

Global warming is the basis for the Cap-and-Trade legislation that was stalled in the Senate during the first half of Obama’s term. Since then, the EPA under Lisa Jackson, a Browner acolyte, has asserted that it intends to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The EPA has no such authority under the Clean Air Act. Such regulations would have a devastating affect on the nation’s economy.

In December 1992, President-elect Bill Clinton named Browner as his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency and she was confirmed by the Senate on January 21, 1993. She would become the longest-serving EPA director.

Despite a J.D. degree from the University of Florida College of Law in 1979, Browner has frequently shown a contempt for the law. In 1995, she used her position at the EPA to lobby more than a hundred grassroots environmental groups to oppose the Republican-led Congress’s regulatory initiatives to curb the EPA. In doing so, she violated the Anti-Lobbying Act. The Browner-led EPA was strongly rebuked by a bipartisan subcommittee of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

On her last day as EPA Director, Browner ordered a computer technician to delete all her computer files despite a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve those files. It was later learned that three other high-ranking EPA officials had also violated the judge’s order. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held the EPA in contempt of Congress in 2001.

During secret negotiations with auto industry executives on behalf of the Obama administration, Browner directed them “to put nothing in writing” as she orchestrated an agreement to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards. Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions.

In these and countless other unknown ways, Carol Browner has used the reins of power as EPA Director and later as President Obama’s climate advisor to assert EPA and government control over every aspect of the lives of Americans, limiting their choices, and in the process harming the nation’s economy.

Until the nation is released from the grip of such environmental/socialist zealots, its future remains in jeopardy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Horrid Ms. Browner

Want to know why oil will hit $100 a barrel?

Sorry, America, but the Obama administration (and earlier ones as well) won't allow exploration and drilling for oil anywhere on the map that's red. It is not issuing permits for deepwater drilling where it's green. And China is busy buying oil for its growing economy while ours stagnates for lack of oil industry jobs and all the others dependent upon it. This is not rocket science. It's your government's energy policies.

-- Alan Caruba

More about → Want to know why oil will hit $100 a barrel?

Oil Drilling Moratorium is an Act of Treason

By Alan Caruba

If you had any doubt that Barack Obama’s agenda is to destroy the United States of America, but still want more proof, I offer you the announcement that his administration will not provide any offshore oil leases in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, or Atlantic coasts...for at least seven years!

In October, a study by the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University concluded that the reduction of shallow water oil drilling permits that followed the BP oil spill would put as many as 40,000 jobs at risk and cost the region $4.3 billion in lost wages and revenues.

At the same time, a consortium of foreign oil companies led by the Spanish firm, Repsol, working with India’s state-run Oil & Natural Gas Company and Norway’s StatoilHydro are exploring for oil off the coast of Cuba where drilling in its waters will proceed even while American and other oil companies will be denied access to vast reserves off the coasts of all of the Gulf States.

From Alaska to Florida, offshore of California or any of the East Coast States, Obama is destroying America’s energy future in the same fashion his administration has done everything in its power to shut down the nation’s coal mining industry.

Here are the statistics that demonstrate how dependent we are on fossil fuels: In total they provide 84.9% of the energy Americans use. Of that, coal provides 22.4% and oil represents 39.2%, while natural gas accounts for 23.2%. Other energy sources include nuclear power at 8.3%, hydroelectric at 2.4% and the least efficient and dependable, wind at 0.3% and solar at 0.08%. (Data source: the Institute for Energy Research)

In March, Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, said, “President Obama has made his intentions to bankrupt the coal industry clear. EPA’s actions this week demonstrate that he will wage a war against the energy source that generates half of America’s electricity and is our nation’s most abundant, reliable, and affordable energy sources.”

Gov. Manchin said that estimates were that the administration’s actions would affect 65,000 members of the Appalachian workforce who would lose some of the highest-paying jobs available in the region. At least $12 billion in lost economic development was forecast.

Nor is the Obama attack on the nation’s energy supply restricted to coal and oil.

In October, the Obama administration demanded $880 million in exchange for a $7.5 billion loan guarantee necessary to the construction of a Maryland nuclear facility. The plant would have generated thousands of jobs as well as needed megawatts of electricity for that State’s residents. The project was cancelled.

State by State as America ceases to mine its own coal and loses access its own oil reserves, the prices of energy which will have to be imported will rise while thousands of jobs related to these industries disappear, wrecking the economies of entire communities and delaying the recovery of energy-rich States.

These are acts of treason against the nation, if not in the narrow legalistic definition, but in the larger context of the harm being done to a nation for which affordable, abundant energy has been at the core of its economy and well-being.

The moratorium is the equivalent of an act of war on the ability of Americans to have the energy they need to recover from the present economy, to provide the jobs necessary to that recovery, and to fuel everything from the utilities that generate electricity and the nation’s fleet of trucks that transport the vast bulk of all goods.

This agenda of economic destruction has been carried out since Obama took office in 2009. It is the reason Obamacare was inflicted on the nation, asserting control over one sixth of the nation’s economy. It is the reason the government took over General Motors and Chrysler. It is the reason Obama failed to come back from South Korea with a trade treaty and has stalled others in the pipeline.

In countless ways, the engine of the federal government is being used to betray and impoverish Americans.

Cry treason! For that is what it is.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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The Kindergarten Congress

By Alan Caruba

The Founders in their genius created a Constitution that was intended to slow down the process of legislation precisely because they wanted the new nation to avoid being destroyed by the passions and trends of the day.

So what do we have today, a month away from the largest transfer of power in Congress since 1946?

We have a Senate being asked to vote on whether, not when, to extend the tax rates that have been in existence for the past nine years.

We have no indication of a resolution to continue funding the operation of government.

We have extraneous issues such as whether Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be imposed on a military, a large portion of which do not want to have openly gay members in their midst.

We have seen a vote allegedly on food safety that will destroy yet another segment of the economy, the small, usually family-owned farm.

The majority leader of the Senate wants a “Dream Act” amnesty program that would fund the college education of the children of illegal immigrants. And while this is being contemplated, since January 2000 census data shows that 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, have arrived in the nation. In 2008 and 2009, 2.4 million new immigrants settled in the United States at the same time that 8.2 million jobs were lost.

Across our southern border Mexico is in a state of anarchy that threatens States from Texas to California, but the present administration is suing Arizona for taking action to respond to the threat.

We have seen the White House push for approval of a critical nuclear weapons treaty that clearly needs to be subjected to further thought before we allow the Russians to decide how many such weapons we can have.

We have an Environmental Protection Agency threatening to ignore Congress and initiate an authority it does not have, the imposition of regulatory control over carbon dioxide emissions. This would give it control over all energy use and thus control over our lives and the future of our economy.

The present Congress, until December 31, is filled with defeated Representatives and Senators, or those about to retire. It should be enacting only such legislation as will maintain the government until a newly-elected Congress takes office in 2011.

And we have a President who sat down this week with the present and future leaders of Congress for two hours in the White House and resolved absolutely NOTHING.

If we replaced the Democrats in Congress with randomly selected kindergarten children, we could do no worse than the ones who forced so-called Medicare reform, Obamacare, on a majority of Americans who expressed their opposition in “town hall” meetings and mass marches.

We have a government-owned automobile company producing obscenely priced electric cars that can barely travel beyond forty miles despite a massive infrastructure that will ensure that gasoline powered automobiles can transport Americans anywhere they want to go.

We have a Congress and administration that, in two years, inflated the nation’s debt beyond that of every previous combined Congress in the nation’s history.

Beyond our borders there are U.S. carrier groups in the Yellow Sea of China and the Gulf of Persia because we have never resolved to take action against a criminal cartel called North Korea and we lack the will to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities even though the entire Middle East would support the action.

Meanwhile, millions of homes in America are over-valued, forcing foreclosures when a rational reevaluation is called for. We have an official 9.6 unemployment rate that is in reality close to twenty million unemployed. Two million of them will lose unemployment compensation that has been provided for two years with which to find employment.

There cannot, however, be renewed employment until the income tax issue is resolved by the simple action of extending present rates.

We have a government that told us that the last Recession ended in 2009! By any rational definition, the U.S. is in a Depression.

Billions squandered. Trillions borrowed. It is a national death spiral that must be set right, but which is imperiled by a succession of potential presidential vetoes.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → The Kindergarten Congress

Joe Biden is No Laughing Matter

By Alan Caruba

“The first two vice presidents were elected president outright, and twelve more veeps would end up, by hook or by crook, in the White House, running things. The vice presidency has supplied a third of our presidents. For that reason alone, it’s worth losing sleep over.”

That’s what Jeremy Lott wrote in his entertaining history of the nation’s vice presidents titled “The Warm Bucket Brigade.”

If you want to consider just how close we came to having a lunatic and charlatan of the first order, keep in mind that Al Gore was Bill Clinton’s vice president for two terms and was thankfully defeated when he ran for the office.

Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice president, is frequently described as Darth Vader, but for Bush’s two terms, the former Secretary of Defense with a deep portfolio of elected and appointed positions can be credited with understanding the dangers in the real world and advising the president well following 9/11.

This brings us to Joe Biden, a longtime Senator from Delaware whose judgment is questionable at best, laughable at worst. And he is the proverbial one heartbeat away from the job of president.

The last time when had a vice president who was held out as a laughing stock was Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush’s choice, but Bush remained loyal to him despite calls that he be dropped in both 1998 and 1992. Quayle was hardly the fool the media painted him but his gaffes didn’t help his place in history.

This brings us Joe Biden who is rapidly becoming a major embarrassment to President Obama and the rest of the nation.

Famous for talking at length while saying almost nothing useful, Biden’s gaffes are now a matter of record. His “This is a big fu*king deal” during the Obamacare signing ceremony on March 23 is now seen in the light of how this atrocious piece of legislation has literally screwed the entire nation.

During the over-hyped swine flu outbreak, Biden warned Americans to stay out of “confined places” such as airplanes, suggesting that taking the subway was a good alternative.

Nor could he remember the 800-number for the website that people could visit to track stimulus spending. He might well regret ever remembering it insofar as the latest news that millions were sent to dead people and convicted felons in prison. Beyond that, the stimulus bill has laid a big fat egg.

It was Biden who was touting a “Recovery Summer” that never occurred as unemployment rolls remained high around the nation.

To his credit, he accidentally spoke the truth when he told a gathering of the House Democratic caucus in February 2009, “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30% chance we’re going to get it wrong.” Turns out the odds were a lot higher.

His political judgment has made some Democrats wince. “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me.” Her qualifications included having been First Lady by virtue of being married to Bill, followed by a carpet-bagging election as a Senator from New York. Odds are she will jump off the good ship Obama well before his disastrous first and last term is over.

Reelected robotically by the good citizens of Delaware, Biden would likely have remained in the Senate presiding over its foreign affairs committee, but for reasons known only to Obama, he was raised to a position characterized by one of FDR’s many vice presidents, John Nance Garner, as “the worst damn fool mistake I ever made”, declaring the job not worth “a pitcher of warm piss.”

In his book Lott concludes that, “If we wanted to create an office to trade prestige for ambition—a drunk tank for the power mad—we’d probably concoct something like the modern vice presidency.”

If, by chance, Biden should ascend to the presidency to replace Obama, it is doubtful anyone will find much to laugh about.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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