It's the Economy, Stupid! ... Alan Caruba

It's the Economy, Stupid!

By Alan Caruba

It is interesting to see how intently foreigners are watching the run-up to the 2012 national elections, particularly as regards whether President Obama could be reelected. Hardly a day goes by that I do not receive inquiries from places like South Africa, Israel, or England. Some offer comments on my Facebook page, but the concern is the same, can Obama be defeated?

To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That will be the deciding factor as Democrats , Republicans, and independents go to the polls in November. The news for Obama is bad. Unfortunately, the news for millions of out-of-work Americans it is even worse.

On February 28, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and a coalition of business groups were in the D.C. Court of Appeals to argue their challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules regarding greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that there is no correlation between such gases—mainly carbon dioxide—and a non-existent global warming probably won’t even be discussed. A spokesperson for the NFIB said, “For the small business community, the constant churn of costly and carelessly promulgated regulations has become too great a burden to bear.” Guess who all those small business owners will be voting against in November?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) keeps doing something that is unexpected from most government agencies; it keeps telling the truth. In mid-February it issued a report which said that, after three years of Obamanomics, the nation has seen the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Trust a Democrat President to repeat all the errors of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who prolonged the Depression for ten years while he held office.

The “official” unemployment rate has hovered around or exceeded 8 percent and this is expected to continue through 2014. The CBO noted that the level of long-term unemployment—those looking for work for more than six months—is over 40 percent! That is the highest since 1948 when the data was first collected.

Hans Bader, Counsel for Special Projects with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently noted that “The official unemployment rate is going down, but that’s partly because many long-term unemployed people went into Social Security Disability, citing ailments such as depression. Now they have a monthly government check, they are never, ever going back to work, and they are no longer treated by the government as unemployed.” This is governmental slight-of-hand to lower the rate of unemployment while contributing to it.

Writing in OpenMarket.org in February, Bader noted that a good part of the unemployment problem in the nation is a severe shortage of skilled factory workers. “In recent years, government officials have depicted white-collar jobs for college graduates as the way to go,” said Bader who noted that, while seeking to increase spending on colleges, the administration has been “slashing spending on more useful vocational education that could lead to work in manufacturing.”

An indication of how poorly the government solution to the need for skilled manufacturing employees has been is the fact that the private sector has stepped up to solve the problem. The National Association of Manufacturers has endorsed a National Manufacturers Skills Certification System to fill the gap. In partnership with community colleges and trade schools, the program offers “a relatively inexpensive path to meeting the human capital demands of U.S. advanced manufacturers.”

It has not gone unnoticed that Obama’s stimulus billions did not produce any “shovel ready” jobs and wasted public funds on a range of “green” industries, many of whom, like Solyndra, have gone belly up. Overall, the “green” industries involving solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars have proven to be sinkholes of money that generate few jobs compared to the rest of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

Finally, after three years of the most anti-energy administration since Jimmy Carter, the rising price of gas is going to have a devastating affect for Democrats and Obama on public perceptions on Election Day.

To those foreign correspondents asking whether Obama will be reelected, I keep saying that the present economy with its slow “recovery” and the high rate of unemployed, combined with the government’s crushing load of irrelevant and odious regulations, is as good an indicator as any regarding the outcome of the November general elections.

If foreigners are as much concerned with U.S. elections as Americans, all the debates, daily silliness of political news coverage, and largely irrelevant social issues suggest that November will represent, like the 2010 elections, a massive voter movement away from “hope and change” to a Republican candidate that offers an alternative economic policy to four more years of the disaster called Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

What Debt? Obama's Insane Spending Binge! ... Alan Caruba

What Debt? Obama's Insane Spending Binge!

By Alan Caruba

There’s a reason that President Obama wants to increase taxes. His administration cannot spend your money fast enough.

A visit on Tuesday morning to the websites of various federal departments reveals that this administration can find an excuse to spend millions on anything. Here’s a quick tour.

In the wake of the Solyndra scandal in which taxpayers were, in the words of Investor Business Daily, “put on the hook for at least the first $75 million if the company should default and with “a minimum of five green firms going bankrupt” the U.S. Department of Energy, on September 13, announced a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to Mojave Solar LLC for the development of the Mojave Solar Project.

On the same day, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a $32.5 million grant “to finalize expansion plan of Boston’s South Station” for the purpose of expanding and enhancing the historic station on the grounds that it estimates a “50 percent increase in high-speed intercity passenger rail travel in the coming years.” And we all know how accurate estimates are, eh?

Three days later, the DOT provided $22 million to the Maryland Department of Transportation for a study of replacement options for the Susquehanna River Bridge on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C. Why not spend the money on actually replacing the bridge? On September 19, DOT awarded $25 million to the city of Charlotte, N.C. for a streetcar line “to improve access to jobs, housing, and schools.” Why money from other States should gift Charlotte with a streetcar line when the nation has a $14 trillion debt might have something to do with the fact that the Democratic Party National Convention will be held there in 2012.

In the midst of a recession that officially does not exist, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD), on September 15, announced $93 million in grants to 39 local projects “to conduct a wide range of activities intended to protect children and families from potentially dangerous lead-based paint and other home health and safety hazards.” HUD estimates there are “nearly 7,000 high-risk homes” because “providing healthy and safe homes for families and children is a priority.” Keep in mind that lead-based paint was banned for residential use in 1978, more than three decades ago.

On September 15, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced awards totaling $10 million “to aid 129 organizations across the country that would like to become community health centers. The funds came from the Affordable Care Act, but at the same time Obamacare cuts billions from Medicare, reducing payments to hospitals and to individual physicians providing care to America’s growing population of the elderly. Go figure.

At the Department of Commerce, on August 30, they were celebrating a $2.9 million

On September 14, the Department of Agriculture announced that taxpayers are now on the hook for loans to 27 rural electric cooperative utilities. DOA made $603 million in loans to help electric utilities "upgrade, expand, maintain and replace rural America’s electric infrastructure."

This is the same administration whose Environmental Protection Agency is waging war on coal-fired utilities and mining (coal provides 50% of all electricity in America). On September 16, USDA announced funding for more than 500 projects to boost renewable energy production (wind and solar) despite the fact that this represents just over 2% of all the electricity produced and companies producing solar panels are declaring bankruptcy on a weekly basis these days.

Secretary Tom Vilsack also noted that USDA Rural Development “is providing $35 million

Not to be outdone, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced in late August that it was making more than $53 million in grants to 17 states “to support conservation planning and acquisition of vital habitat for threatened and endangered fish, wildlife, and plants.” The Endangered Species Act has been one of the greatest failures in U.S. history and responsible for thwarting billions in development. This money is intended to remove yet more landmass from development, all in the name of obscure species and plants.

On September 14 the Department of Justice announced grants totaling $118.4 million to “enhance public safety in Indian Country.” The money went to tribal governments. Apparently the Apaches are on the warpath again. Over the last two years, DOJ spent $121 million on conferences.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the money flowing from the Departments of Defense, Education, Veteran Affairs, and Homeland Security. It is in fact just a quick overview of the funding the Obama administration is spending while 14 million Americans are trying to find a job and others struggle to pay their mortgage or put their children through college.

It is a look at a government grown so large and so profligate that its credit rating was recently reduced and our President is on the campaign trail telling Americans they must pay more taxes despite the fact that 40% pay no taxes and “millionaires and billionaires” pay 70% of taxes collected. It’s the same government that wants to impose a 1% tax on all

Tea Party, anyone?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

History is No Help to the Federal Reserve ... Alan Caruba

History is No Help to the Federal Reserve

By Alan Caruba

Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, gave a press conference on Wednesday and, try as I did, I fell asleep almost immediately. For those suffering from insomnia, I would recommend you “take two Bernanke’s and call me in the morning.”

At the time of his appointment Bernanke was widely known as an expert on the history of the Great Depression. It was commonly thought that he would avoid putting the nation through a similar experience, but a long, deep recession has put that in doubt.

In “New Deal or Raw Deal”, historian Burton Folsom, Jr., identified three major causes of the Great Depression, beginning with a Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on imported goods that was signed in June 1930 by Herbert Hoover. It was the highest tariff on imported goods in U.S. history. Other nations retaliated. “Our exports, therefore, dropped from $7 billion in 1929 to $2.5 billion by 1932.” The result was that “By July the stock market had lost one-third of its value in ten months”, a second major cause of the Depression whose beginning is generally dated to the Wall Street crash of October 1929.

The other cause was due to the fact that, in the three years leading up to the bill, “the national debt balloon(ed) from $1.3 billion to $24 billion.” Our current national debt is equal to our entire Gross Domestic Product, the value of all of the nation’s goods and services.

Folsom identified the third leading cause as “the poor performance of the Federal Reserve. “In practice, the Fed had raised interest rates four times, from 3.5 percent to 6 percent, during 1928 and 1929. That made it harder for businessmen to borrow money to invest, which hindered economic growth.”

Under former Chairman Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, the Fed has kept the interest rates it charges banks to nearly zero. Bernanke is no doubt aware that the Fed’s failure to lend money to cash-hungry banks led to the collapse of hundreds during the Great Depression.

Fast-forward to present times and we see that the Fed has literally flooded the economy with cash, essentially by simply printing money out of thin air. All of it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the government.

On April 25, The Wall Street Journal headlined an article, “Fed Searches for Next Step” noting that it “is likely to begin closing a wide-open credit spigot this week—but faces a major decision: when to start draining the excess credit out of the economy by raising interest rates.”

Whether the economy was infused with great gobs of cash or whether that liquidity is slowed, the Fed—then and now—is caught in a vice because history demonstrates that neither action had the desired purpose. If this was a game of Monopoly, the players could put the board away in its box, but neither history nor current trends point to anything other than a severe depression.

The rating service, Standard & Poors, recently issued a warning that the U.S. debt was slipping into a “negative” situation and this has been followed with a prediction by the International Monetary Fund that the U.S. economy will be overtaken by China in just five years. S&P is famous for its failure to spot bad guys like Enron, to whom it gave high ratings right up to the day it collapsed, nor should we believe the IMF propaganda which suspiciously tries to panic Americans.

The Fed was created by a small group of bankers and came into being in 1913. In good times and bad it has functioned in concert with international banks to control the volatility of the financial marketplace and sustain the viability of the individual nations they represent. The Fed functions largely in secret. The oversight that Congress is supposed to exercise is much the same of its regulatory agencies that have rarely seen trouble brewing, nor been able to do much about it except to clean up the mess with taxpayer’s funds.

The problem in the 1930s and now is the national debt, the result of insane, profligate spending. Those in the White House and the Democratic Party are opposing any rational steps to reduce it.

Instead, it enacted Obamacare, legislation that will further crash the economies of individual States. Some twenty-eight States are already on record opposing it. An effort to have it declared unconstitutional was greeted by the Supreme Court with a refusal to expedite the case just before the judges began a three month vacation.

An April 27, 2010 Cato Institute briefing paper by Arnold King presciently noted that “Recently, the Federal Reserve has significantly altered the procedures and goal that it had followed for decades. It has more than doubled its balance sheet, paid interest to banks on reserves held as deposits with the Fed, made decisions about which institutions to prop up and which should be allowed to fail, invested in assets that expose taxpayers to large losses, and raised questions about how it will avoid inflation despite an unprecedented increase in the monetary base.”

The Cato paper was titled “The Case for Auditing the Fed is Obvious.” The fate of the nation is held in the hands of the Federal Reserve. It performed poorly in the late 1920s and 30s, and confidence in its ability to extricate the nation from its enormous debt may well be misplaced.

A combination of unsustainable entitlement programs, too much spending, and the collapse of the housing market that resulted from Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s belief that housing prices would never fall has brought us to this point in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The response by the government, however, was to buy the bank’s bad debts and engage in multi-billion dollar “stimulus programs” which we were told would create employment and put the economy on track to recovery. It has not happened.

Instead, taxpayers have had the nation’s future put in jeopardy into the next and further generations, some of whom are as yet unborn.

Despite the Fed’s printing presses, the U.S. dollar is in decline at the same time that the price of gasoline, food, and everything else is rising.

The 2010 elections that put Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, the branch of government that initiates spending bills, has resulted in partisan warfare on Capitol Hill as the GOP weighs what steps it can take. Ambivalence about raising the debt ceiling reflects GOP concerns regarding the 2012 national elections and their fear that they, not the Democrats that regained control of Congress in 2006 will be blamed for the current crisis.

Suffice to say that both political parties deserve blame for years spent initiating excessive spending and ignoring the warning signs.

Meanwhile President Obama has declared his candidacy airily demanding that taxes be raised on “the rich” at a time when raising taxes is the worst possible choice to make as the economy struggles to recover. For the passed two years, the Obama administration has engaged in every effort to undermine and destroy the economy.

John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and the nation’s second President, warned “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

2012 looms as an election year in which Americans will decide whether to change course or, indeed, commit suicide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Impatient Americans ... Alan Caruba

Impatient Americans
By Alan Caruba

Americans are an impatient people. There’s a reason why every manner of labor-saving device was invented here and why we are in love with every kind of device that lets us instantly communicate with one another.

In an earlier era, it might have taken longer for a majority of Americans to realize just how awful President Obama’s legislative and other policy initiatives were for the nation, but a plethora of punditry on countless Internet websites and blogs alerted them even while the mainstream media was trying to deceive them as they had with their support for candidate Obama.

As an aside, media prognosticators are predicting that daily newspapers are essentially all dinosaurs and many, if not most, will be gone in a decade or so. The general rule is that new technology, the Internet, drives out old technology, dead-tree newspapers.

The other factor is that most daily newspapers with their liberal outlook have simply been abandoned by subscribers who have tired of seeking real news amidst the propaganda. Prediction: none of the news weeklies will be around in five years or less. When even the National Enquirer and Star Magazine are filling for bankruptcy protection, you know the times they are changing. Survivors, however, may be the nation’s many weekly newspapers because, like politics, all news is local.

Impatience with a Congress that was so clearly out of touch with most constituents has resulted in a historic turnover of power to the Republican Party and it is a far more humble party than its heyday during George W. Bush’s two terms, the latter of which saw Americans return Democrats to power.

Americans had already grown weary of the war in Iraq that had begun in 2003 and had little enthusiasm for the nation’s military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001. Throughout history, great empires have fallen because they got over-extended in such conflicts.

Making matters worse for any administration is the growing perception that the Middle East is psychotic; a place where reason takes a backseat to a seventh century religion that dominates its politics and social life. Watching Muslims blow up mosques filled with other Muslims is sufficient to convince many Americans that no amount of military power or billions in foreign aid will change anything.

Only one nation in the Middle East poses any kind of military threat and that is Iran. The minute it actually acquires nuclear weapons will be the hour in which Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and various Gulf States sit down at the table with Israel to discuss and plan ridding itself of this threat. The Iranian leadership—not its people—are certifiably crazy.

Americans will be looking to a Republican controlled House to rid the nation of Obamacare and begin to address over-spending, joblessness, and other issues, but the next two years will be spent in triage, trying to stop the bleeding until the patient can make it to the operating room and that will require the election of a new president and a Republican Senate.

So Americans are going to have to strive to be patient while the many Republican governors redistrict their states to aid a victory in 2012. They will have to content themselves with legislative maneuvers to defund Obamacare or remove many of its more noxious mandates. Also on the To-Do list will be to put the Environmental Protection Agency in manacles before it utterly destroys the economy with crazed greenhouse gas emissions regulations.

There is little that can be done to turn around the decades-old disastrous energy policies that have stalled the construction of the many new coal-fired and nuclear plants needed to provide the electricity that is the very breath of life to the nation. The Obama administration will also continue to thwart any oil exploration and drilling, and how much of a priority this will be in the new Congress is unknown.

Meanwhile the White House has announced that, upon his return from India, President Obama will sit down with the Republican leadership of the House along with their Democrat counterparts including the noxious Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It is likely to be little more than a photo-op because this president is deaf to partisanship or the reversal of his plans to destroy the nation.

This means that that a less frightening two years is ahead with the hope of real change in 2012. The economy is barely improving and is likely to remain stagnant, even with the extension of the Bush tax cuts. A Mount Everest of federal regulations will have to be eliminated to get the economy moving again.

And then there are the unknown and unpredictable “events” that will occur. 9/11 was one such event in 2001.

On September 18, 2008, there was a little reported electronic run on U.S. banks that withdrew $550 billion before the Federal Reserve stepped in to stop it. It blew away the charade of the nation’s housing market that involved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Privatizing both should be a GOP priority. Americans have yet to have been told who withdrew those billions.

Other events over which there is no control such as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes could play a role. We’ve seen how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico undermined confidence in the Obama administration.Two years isn’t really that long a time, but a lot can happen and it will call for patience and perseverance.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

People Have Noticed ... Alan Caruba

People Have Noticed

By Alan Caruba

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"Apres moi le deluge”, “After me, the flood” and though attributed to the French King Louis XV, historians believe it was actually said by Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour. The last members of the monarchy spent France into the poorhouse until they had their heads separated from their bodies via the guillotine.

People have noticed the same eerie disconnect from the suffering of the populace as Barack and Michelle Obama party on. There has been a succession of vacations topped off by Michelle in Spain on the U.S. dime. Keeping track of the vacations, about seventeen this year, has become a media pastime.

Twenty months into his first and last term, President Obama, has wasted a trillion dollars we didn’t have on a stimulus package that was little more than a wish list of pet projects for Democrat congressmen and bailouts of the teacher’s unions whose members would otherwise have to join the long lines at the unemployment office.

People noticed.

Obama has had notably little success in foreign affairs, failing to draw the line with the Russians on issues of defensive missiles in Europe, managing to insult the British in a dozen ways, and being mocked by the Iranian leaders as they get ready to fire up a nuclear reactor.

People noticed.

When he finally decided what to do in Afghanistan, he made the announcement at West Point, including a date when the new infusion of troops would leave. The cadets slept through the speech and the Taliban circled their calendar for 2011.

People noticed.

Barely in office a day, he was all for closing down Guantanamo until he learned there was no place for the detainees. The states did not want them in their prisons and foreign nations did not want them for any reason. When his Attorney General wanted to try the mastermind of 9/11 in New York City the outcry was deafening.

People noticed.

Many of those he wanted to appoint to his administration turned out to be tax cheats or had to withdraw due to charges of unethical behavior or corruption. Despite a pledge to drive out the lobbyists, a number of appointees were lobbyists. A whole slew of “czars” turned out to include a number of loonies who were either outright communists or who believed weird science theories.

People noticed.

Despite widespread, vocal opposition, Obamacare was forced upon an unwilling America and now we are learning it will increase costs and deny care, just as we knew it would.

People noticed.

Bush had his Katrina, but Obama had the Gulf of Mexico oil leak. His administration mismanaged it beyond belief and then he arbitrarily shut down oil production from other rigs, adding more people to the unemployment lines.

People noticed.

Obama used the occasion of a Ramadan dinner at the White House to wade into the controversy regarding a plan to build a mosque within two blocks of where 3,000 Americans died from an Islamic terrorist attack. Then he had to back off what he said.

People noticed.

Obama appointed two women to the Supreme Court, both of whom think the Constitution was written on silly putty. One had never been a judge.

People noticed.

Muslim murder at Fort Hood, a failed Christmas bomber on a commercial jet, and another failed bomber in Times Square. The response to all three incidents was slow and very, very politically correct, tip-toeing around using the word “Muslim.”

People noticed.

Rather than take dramatic action to stem the flood of illegal aliens along the southern border, the Obama administration brought a suit against Arizona at the same time twenty other states are writing and passing similar legislation to enforce immigration laws. Then they threatened Sheriff Joe Arpaio with a legal suit charging that he was anti-Hispanic!

People noticed.

Along the way the Tea Party movement occurred and Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. Harry Reid became even creepier than anyone could imagine. The voters elected Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, and a Republican Senator to fill Teddy Kennedy’s vacant seat.

People noticed.

On November 2nd, the voters will go to the polls for a midterm election and the odds are that many Democrats will just stay home while the independents and Republicans will turn out in huge numbers.

The power in Congress will shift, perhaps dramatically, because people noticed.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Obama, The Nation Killer ... Alan Caruba

Obama, The Nation Killer

By Alan Caruba

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The unemployment rate keeps climbing and the polling results for the President and Congress keep falling. Conservatives are well aware that the Obama administration has relentlessly pursued legislation harmful to the economy, but just how bad it is and how bad it will become in 2011 may not have sunk in fully for the public in general.

Nothing among Obama’s legislative agenda and executive orders has done anything other than push the nation more and more toward bankruptcy. Perhaps the oddest aspect has been the action of the Federal Reserve which is, in theory, an independent entity. Suffice to say, it is pursuing policies that reflect the same disastrous actions that prolonged the 1930s Great Depression. Not surprisingly, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has pronounced the outlook “unusually uncertain.”

The worst is yet to come because the end of the Bush tax cuts on December 31, 2010 will generate major increases in taxation that will affect all but the appalling 40% who pay no taxes at all. This isn’t redistribution of wealth. It is a penalty levied on investors, entrepreneurs, and those who still have jobs.

One of those policies, the president’s shut-down of drilling in the Gulf, twice rejected by the courts, will add thousands more to the ranks of the unemployed without any justification.

When the tax cut deadline comes at midnight on December 31, the “death tax” on estates will return, increasing 55% on estates of $1 million or more, but it won’t just be “the rich” who are affected. As reported in Investor’s Business Daily, “The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50%, to 15% from 10%.” These brackets will increase 25% to 39.6% for others.

The marriage penalty returns and the capital gains tax “will jump 33%” and “the tax on dividends will go all the way from 15% to 39.6%--a 164% increase.” Wall Street will hit a wall of resistance from investors. A spending-crazed Congress will have $115 billion more to waste and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it will reach $2.6 trillion by 2020, a mere decade from now. These funds are theoretically going to be allocated toward paying for the vastly expanded Obamacare “reform” of the already insolvent Medicare program. A booklet by Michael D. Tanner, “Bad Medicine”, published by the libertarian Cato Institute, points how the fallacy—the lie—that an expanded Medicare will protect those now without such protection against rising healthcare costs. The truth is that by 2019 an estimated 21 million Americans will still be uninsured.

Obamacare will cost far more than advertised; more than $2.7 trillion over ten years of full implementation and will add $352 billion to the national debt over that period. Insurance costs will skyrocket for younger, healthier workers. Furthermore, Obamacare “will increase taxes by more than $669 billion between now and 2019, and the burdens it places on business will significantly reduce economic growth and employment.”

A July 23 Rasmussen poll revealed that 75% of likely voters say free markets are better than government management of the economy. “Americans overwhelmingly believe that more competition and less regulation are better for the economy than more regulation and less competition.”

Wayne Crews, the vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, describes what is necessary for economic recovery, citing “massive spending cuts, deregulation, privatization, tax-cutting, avoiding of monetary inflation, and elimination of government-granted monopolies and favors.” The Obama administration and Democrat-controlled Congress will not engage in any of these well known remedies. What is occurring is a deliberate policy to destroy the nation’s economy and with it the nation. The trade deficits the nation has run, importing more than we export, will ensure we do not dig ourselves out of the hole for years to come.

Writing recently in the Globe and Mail, a London newspaper, Neil Reynolds warned that “Democracies produced Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, fulfilling the expectation of Socrates and Machiavelli that democracies end in tyranny. Now democracies are fulfilling the complementary expectation of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman that democracies end in bankruptcy.”

All hail, Obama! The Nation Killer!

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Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.© Alan Caruba, 2010

A few questions for President Obama ... by Paul Driessen

A few questions for President Obama
How exactly does the President plan to create his new Green Jobs Economy?
BY: Paul Driessen
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America needs decisive leaders who understand what government can (and cannot) do to stop the Gulf gusher, clean up the mess, and get business, jobs and prosperity back on track. Instead, President Obama sounds like an anti-business Community Organizer in Chief – pointing fingers, making baseless claims about ending our “addiction to oil,” and leaving no crisis unexploited to promote job-killing cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy agendas. His June 15 “vision” raised more questions than it answered.

1) The President said he can no longer support new drilling unless industry can prove it will be “absolutely safe.” This avoidable environmental disaster happened because BP, its contractors and MMS regulators did not follow procedures or respond properly to tests and warning signs, indicating critical trouble was brewing downhole. But if “absolute safety” is to decide activities and technologies, America will come to a standstill in the absence of impossible-to-obtain proof that nothing will ever go wrong, no one will ever screw up, and no technology will ever malfunction.

Oil tankers sometimes run aground, unleashing their black cargo on our shores. Will oil imports now be banned, as well? Over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents last year. Will highways and city streets be closed to vehicles? Airports, trains and subways? Wind turbines kill 3,000 eagles and other raptors every year, plus 100,000 to 300,000 other birds and bats. Will they be shut down until that carnage ends?

2) President Obama demanded that BP “set aside “whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed” by the spill. With thousands of environmental activists, regulators, congressmen and trial lawyers on Team Obama, one can only imagine what creative damages and costs might be concocted, to convert the initial $20-billion BP fund into a bottomless money pit, and what “standards” might guide bird death valuations, for example.

ExxonMobil paid $600,000 when 85 birds died in uncovered waste facilities. PacifiCorp paid was fined $1.4 million after 230 eagles were killed by its power lines over a two-year period. Will those fines set the standard for Gulf oil spill bird deaths? Or will the standard be the zero, zip, nada fines assessed to date on wind turbine operators for their ongoing slaughter? Will BP be required to compensate oil field workers who lose their jobs because Team Obama imposed an arbitrary drilling moratorium, instead of ensuring improved oversight of drilling, blowout prevention and well completion activities?

3) The President said China is creating “clean energy” jobs “that should be right here in America,” while we send “nearly $1 billion of our wealth every day to foreign countries for their oil.” We will “embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny,” he declared, because “the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”

America is not running out of oil. It is running out of places the government allows us to drill. China is creating renewable energy jobs, because it mines the lanthanides, lithium and other minerals that are essential for wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid cars, while we lock up our prospects; burns coal to generate cheap electricity to run its factories, while the White House, Congress and EPA try to drive US coal-based power to extinction; and pays its factory workers a fraction of what American workers receive.

Companies have been drilling in deep waters, because most onshore and shallow water areas are off limits. Will we now open the ANWR, Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, Rockies and near-shore OCS to drilling – where access and development are easier, and accidents (that we hope, and industry must ensure, never happen again) can be fixed and cleaned up far more easily than in mile-deep waters?

Will President Obama lift his OCS moratorium (which even his independent safety experts opposed), before it further devastates the battered Gulf economy, rigs head overseas, and thousands of experienced workers permanently leave the industry for other lines of work?

To advance the President’s “national mission” and generate 20% or more of our electricity with wind and solar, will our legislators, regulators and litigators continue to ignore the environmental review, endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that govern fossil fuel and nuclear power – so that we can rapidly blanket millions of acres of onshore and offshore America with wind turbines and solar panels, to replace coal-fired power plants, regardless of the environmental costs?

Rather than dozens of “ugly” offshore oil and gas platforms, often dozens of miles from our coasts – will America now enjoy seeing thousands of “beautiful” offshore wind turbines, towering above our beaches and creating obstacle courses for submarines, merchant ships laden with bunker fuel, and more tankers filled with crude oil and far more toxic refined product?

Will the President and Congress now open some of the hundreds of millions of acres they have made off limits to exploration and mining for the minerals needed to manufacture “green” technologies here in America? Or will we henceforth be dependent on foreign countries and dictators for both our “dirty” oil and the raw materials and finished components needed to build a new “clean energy” economy?

4) Under a cap-tax-and-trade regime, the price of hydrocarbon energy will “necessarily skyrocket,” to “encourage” companies and families to use less fossil fuel energy, and “persuade” them to switch to wind and solar. How will that affect turbine and panel manufacturing costs and subsidies, and the downstream costs of renewable energy and everything Americans make, grow, drive, ship, eat, drink and do?

How will US wind and solar factories compete with Chinese and Indian facilities, if the American plants are compelled to pay two, three, five times as much for electricity, under cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy mandates? How will they compete if they must also pay subsidies, union wages and gold-plated health and pension plans, if government grants are also tied to compulsory unionization, and if non-union shops and right-to-work states are excluded from the bidding and subsidy process?

How will regulators and “clean energy” companies deal with the nasty pollutants generated in the process of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of acres of solar panels? How will they handle highly toxic silicon tetrachloride, the powerful greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride and other chemicals used or generated in making solar panels, fiberglass and other components?

Even “little” 1.5 megawatt wind turbines require 700 tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass, copper and rare earth (lanthanide) minerals. Add in the transmission lines and backup gas-fired generators, and we’re talking some serious land use, raw material, pollution, bird kill and economic issues. How do our legislators, regulators, litigators and environmental activists plan to address these issues?

Will solar and wind companies operate under free market principles, to compete and possibly fail against other energy firms? Or will they be kept in business via huge subsidies under government systems that extract countless billions from families and less favored companies, borrow it from our children, and redistribute that wealth to “clean energy” companies? How long will this Grecian Formula be sustainable?

Spain lost 2.2 traditional jobs for every wind power job its massive subsidies created. President Obama has said we can create 5 million green jobs. How does he plan to compensate 11 million workers who will lose their traditional jobs under the Spanish Scenario? With more stimulus money and red ink?

Every seven million gallons of corn-based ethanol requires billions in subsidies, cropland equivalent to Indiana, millions of gallons of water and millions of tons of fertilizer, to make fuel that costs more but gets a third less mileage than gasoline. Can someone explain how this is eco-friendly and sustainable?

When this house of cards inevitably collapses, as it has in Spain, will its congressional and administration creators be held responsible and accountable, under the same standards they are applying to BP?

Just asking. (Not that I expect President Obama, Senator Kerry or Speaker Pelosi to have any answers – or even deign to respond to any American citizen who might ask such impertinent questions.)

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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death.

The Decline and Fall of Everybody ... Alan Caruba

The Decline and Fall of Everybody
By Alan Caruba
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I have a friend of over twenty-five years who I watched build a single idea for a business into one that, at one time, was taking in a million dollars a year. Then the Internet came along, followed by the 2008 financial crisis.

After a reasonable period of agonizing, my friend sat down and put the numbers on the page. They added up to firing all his employees and not renewing the lease on the office in which he’d been since the mid-1980s. Tech savvy, his business has gone “virtual.” As he put it, “I will make sales from my cell phone.”

Now take my friend, the classic entrepreneur and small business owner, and multiply him by thousands across the fruited plains and purple mountains majesty. Not only has the economy crashed, thanks to the latest “bubble” of bad housing mortgages, but it happened just in time to ensure that Barack Obama who never owned a business, met a payroll, or worried about selling anything other than himself was elected president.

Next on the list of burst bubbles will be all the “green” technology and “clean energy” companies into which the government has been pumping billions in subsidies for wind and solar power, grants for research on biofuels, electric cars, and all the other “green” projects the public continues to be told represent a bright new world.

Why would anyone think that a “community organizer”, academic, and briefly a working lawyer, could know or even be brought up to speed fast enough to know what to avoid and what needs to be done to put people back to work or help small to medium businesses? The answer is he couldn’t and he wouldn’t and he didn’t.

Obama’s most basic instincts are a liberal distrust of “big business”, “Wall Street”, and anyone else involved in shaping and making the economy. This is particularly true since his political rise has been fueled by millions from unions. He is their man. They own him. He is beholden to a number of other special interests, but that is where his heart is. That is where he looked for and received campaign funds, campaign manpower, and votes.

Once in office, he set about reversing the slow and well-deserved decline of unions that, while having a long-ago past history of correcting working conditions, are now totally parasitic no matter whether it is the auto or any other industry, or whether it is in the public service sector where they toil as government workers, teachers, and others whose work rules, health benefits, and pensions have contributed to the insolvency of most states and cities.

They and the nation’s other blood-suckers, the lawyers, are Obama’s chosen constituency and everybody else can just plain go to hell or shut up and take a government-issued check for a return on taxes you may not have paid (40% do not pay taxes these days), your food stamps debit card, or any of the other government handouts that keep people docile and unproductive. Don’t worry, when your unemployment benefits run out, Congress will just extend them.

The problem is that Congress and the nation are just flat broke. At some point all the borrowing will stop because those doing the lending will decide they are not seeing any real return on their investments in U.S. Treasury notes.

The problem is that one of the wonders of globalization is that when one country goes belly up, it affects all the rest. Sooner or later the whole global network of central banks is likely to run out of money with which to bail out one another. Then what?

My friend will run his business as best he can in an economy where his customer base has increasingly reached the same point that whole nations will. They will have to decide where to spend what little money they have.

This is going to become an increasingly difficult decision when Obama and the Congress raise taxes at the worst possible time, thus sucking anywhere from 40% to 60% or more out of the pockets of the middle class, the entrepreneurs, the managers, the professionals. If they own homes as many do, they will cease to have any equity and prove hard to sell.

So it will be the decline and fall of everybody other than the millionaires who can afford the lawyers and accountants to show them how to pay less taxes than a chimney sweep or bus driver.

My friend is sounding a lot more relaxed these days. He is no longer responsible for all the costs involved with hiring, paying, or firing anyone. He no longer has to meet the rent on his office. Even so, he has discovered a whole new layer of reporting to the IRS regarding his venders and must in turn provide data to those who continue to use his services. American businesses, large, medium and small are strangling on government regulation and taxation.

There is a ripple effect here. It begins with the laid-off former employees who cannot find new jobs. It includes the owner of the office building who has space he cannot rent to a new business enterprise. It includes a copier machine lease allowed to lapse. As he put it, he can walk down the block from where he lives and use printing and delivery services. For list maintenance and other IT services, there’s always the vendor in Bangalore, India.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Guests of Vlad the Impaler ... Alan Caruba

Dear reader:

This is the kind of writing that makes Alan Caruba stand out from the multitude of Conservative commentators in the press and on the Internet today. Alan Caruba is extremely insightful. He probes deeper than most. Plus, his wit is as sharp as a double-edged sword.

Alan’s abilities as a wordsmith are unsurpassed. Once you read his article below, I’ll bet you will agree with me – and -- be ready to add a few superlatives, describing Mr. Caruba’s writings, yourself.

Alan has studied Mr. Obama and his administration and, with the accuracy of a laser, is able to cut through the layers upon layers of propaganda to offer his readers an analysis of the Obama Administration unmatched anywhere else on the web.

We are proud to offer the piece below to our readers, especially during this time of tribulation in America.

Please scroll down and read Mr. Caruba’s comments below.

Thanks.

J. D. Longstreet

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Guests of Vlad the Impaler
By Alan Caruba
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Lately I have been reading and hearing a lot of psychoanalysis of Barack Hussein Obama and it reflects a growing need by pundits and regular folks to figure him out.

The reason is obvious. We are all now the guests of Vlad the Impaler, version 2.0.

As several million unemployed already know, he doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about what it’s like to not have a salary, not have health care coverage, and not be able to make the mortgage or car payment.

Having been abandoned by his birth father, his step-father, and finally by his mother, Barack figured out how to bottle up all that anger, put on a happy face, and pay back America for failing him.

Obama has lived a virtually invisible life whereby no one who ever attended college with him recalls him. He taught at the University of Chicago and not one student has ever come forward to acknowledge having been in one of his classes. Among the friends he did choose, all shared a common theme of hatred for America. If there is a paper trail, it has been carefully sequestered, out of reach, sealed.

Less than a year and a half into his first and, hopefully, last term, all the polls including those of the mainstream media show that people don’t merely “disapprove” of his performance in office, they are seriously worried whether he should even be in office.

If you don’t like America, Barack Hussein Obama knows exactly how you feel and why.

All this was on display throughout the campaign, up to and including delusions of grandeur and omnipotence that in any other setting would have instantly identified him as a mental case. “Yes, we can” shouted the crowd.

What they got, however, was the biggest collection of left-wing nut-jobs one could gather in one spot; most of them designated “czars” and exempt from any investigation by Congress.

Communists, dedicated socialists, weird “scientists” who think reducing the population is the only way to save the Earth; others who think we should abandon all the traditional and known energy sources that keep the lights on and the cars rolling in favor of windmills, solar panels; and bicycles. You know, crazy people!

We got a kind of machine politics that hasn’t been seen in Washington, D.C. since the early days and years of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration when the Great Depression so frightened people they were willing to watch the federal government expand in ways that were never intended. From time to time, the Supreme Court would staunch the flood of horrid legislation. FDR’s answer was to try to “pack” the court by expanding it.

Today, we have witnessed a Democrat-controlled Congress that just passed a huge “reform” of the nation’s healthcare industries, effectively destroying the relative handful of insurance companies that provided coverage.

With healthcare now under government control and virtually every other commercial and financial activity to suffer the same fate, it is only time before everyone will be issued an ID card to control everything one does.

Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to literally own an automobile manufacturer destroyed by its own unions? An insurance company that was so big it was not allowed to fail despite billions in bad transactions? Why, in fact, is the federal government in the business of buying and selling housing mortgages?

For most of the beginning of his first year in office, Obama was everywhere on television, granting interviews to reporters who listened in amazement at his detachment from the reality of the economy. “Are you punch drunk?” asked Steve Kroft of Sixty Minutes. Bret Beir of Fox News fought to keep him focused on the questions being asked.

People swiftly noticed he could not speak extemporaneously. Without the Tele-Prompters, he lost the aura of being all knowing and all seeing. It became a joke. A response to a simple question about taxes recently elicited a rambling 17-minute “answer” that made everyone listening wonder why he could not deliver a simple answer.

And then there are the critical, unanswered questions that will not go away.

Where was he born? Hawaii? Okay, but his father was a British subject, a citizen of Kenya, so rule out his eligibility to be president. Why won’t he produce a real birth certificate? Why are his university records unavailable? What nation’s passport did he travel on when he visited, of all places, Pakistan? Questions, questions, questions.

There is the growing fear that he is not eligible to hold the office, but he has already named one Supreme Court judge and will soon appoint another. He is issuing executive orders. He is signing laws.

In my life, I saw Richard M. Nixon driven from office for official misconduct resulting from the Watergate scandal. I saw Bill Clinton survive impeachment despite having broken several laws that would have put most people in jail.

It is hard to get rid of a really bad president. It may prove harder to get rid of an imposter, a provocateur, a revenge-filled destroyer of the economy and the nation.

I saw this all before he won the office, wrote about it then and wrote about it since. If I did, others did. Indeed, some wrote entire books about it.

So why has no court in America demanded that Barack Hussein Obama produce a birth certificate or any other proof of eligibility?
If a cover-up got Nixon booted and both a real estate deal and a sexual dalliance with a White House intern merited a special prosecutor for Clinton, when doesn’t this question rise to a point of critical concern for the nation?

Alan Caruba

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

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© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Bill Comes Due for Socialism ... by Alan Caruba

The Bill Comes Due for Socialism
By Alan Caruba

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"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister

It began as a beautiful cruise to a land of “hope and change”, but it has become a nightmare in which the ship of state is being deliberately steered toward a whirlpool of debt from which, if Obama is successful, the nation cannot escape.

One of the primary reasons the U.S. economy has grown over the years has been the confidence in its innovation and productivity. It has generated investment from around the world from those who wanted to profit from our success story. There was a time when U.S. securities were the safest in the world, but that is no longer the case.

On December 24, 2009, the U.S. Senate voted to raise the ceiling of the government debt to $12.4 trillion, described by an Associated Press reporter as “a massive increase over the current limit and a political problem that President Barack Obama has promised to address next year.”

On January 20, 2010, barely a month later, Senate Democrats “proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion.”

This is the reason, by virtue of the Massachusetts special election; the United States has dodged the bullet of a “reformed” healthcare system which would have slashed a half trillion dollars from Medicare coffers while adding millions more people to its rolls.

It would have turned the health insurance industry into a public utility. They would have ceased to be private enterprises of competing companies. It would have driven physicians out of practice. It would have bankrupted the nation and reduced a widely acknowledged excellent health system to that of a third world nation.

The proposed “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on all energy use—the lifeblood of any economy, must be defeated. This will come most likely from a lack of votes as Senate Democrats are finally scared enough of the electorate to act with some degree of rationality.

In a recent commentary, Jerome R. Corsi, the author of “America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving the Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty”, wrote “With the recession and the huge stimulus package added to the beginning of the baby boomers retiring, United States debt is already at 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the Obama administration plans as they currently stand.”

In other words, the U.S. government is committed through various “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other expenditures, to spend more than it takes in via taxes. The other major expense is for defense. These three factors represent half of the annual U.S. budget.

The situation is so grave that, on January 18, The Washington Times editorialized that “Obama is killing the economy.”

The bill has finally come due for decades of socialism that began in the 1930s.

“The 2009 budget deficit tripled over 2008. The deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) went from 3.1 percent in 2008 to 9.9 percent in 2009. The deficit for the first month of fiscal year 2010 was $176 billion, which was greater than the $161 billion deficit for the entire 2007 fiscal year.”

At present rates, the public debt of the United States will reach 85 percent of GDP by 2018, just eight years from now, and 100 percent by 2022. It would be 200 percent by 2038 unless some brakes on spending are not applied before the ship of state gets sucked down beneath an ocean of debt.

What does President Obama propose? He wants to apply an unconstitutional special tax on banks! And not all banks, but just those banks on “Wall Street” whom he blames for the current recession.

His most recent proposal to regulate the banking system drove down the Dow Jones Average signaling further fears of his intention to micro-manage the economy. It is a recipe for disaster and shares of the big Wall Street banks in particular fell. He is deliberately attacking the great engine of the nation’s economy.

Wall Street is not the problem. The government is the problem.

Obama made no mention of the real culprits for the housing market meltdown, the reckless spending of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act that underwrote a program that put $12 trillion of mortgage loans, half of all such loans, in the hands of the federal government!

As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, “President Obama’s proposal (would) bring back 1930s-like separation of commercial and investment banks, dubbed Glass-Steagall II or Glass-Steagall 2.0, (and) would do little to prevent the problem of financial institutions being too big to fail. What it would do is hurt economic recovery, reduce types of financing available to businesses big and small, and give European and Asian financial services firm a huge competitive advantage over their U.S. counterparts.”

The billions still unspent in the so-called “Stimulus” bill should be returned to the Treasury. Plans to expand Medicare and Medicaid need to be scrapped. Taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, must be avoided if for no other reason that CO2 has nothing to do with a non-existent global warming.

The capacity of the United States to recover calls for an end or at least a cap on the mindless spending of taxpayer millions on the pet projects and crony deals of Representatives and Senators.

It calls for an end to the restrictions on the exploration for and extraction of the nation’s vast coal, oil and natural gas reserves, including in ANWR and aggressively in the offshore continental shelf.

It calls for an end to huge multi-million dollar subsidies for “renewable energy” schemes such as solar and wind power.

It calls for an end to the ethanol mandates that dilute the mileage of every gallon of gasoline and actually increase CO2 emissions!

It calls for an end to congressional mandates on the auto industry that have, in part, driven two of its largest manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler, into bankruptcy. The U.S. must divest its ownership in both companies.

It calls for reining in the rogue government agency, the Environment Protection Agency that is attempting to unilaterally impose control of CO2 emissions and has long engaged in practices that impede economic growth for business, industry, and the nation’s agricultural sector.

There are many reasonable and rational steps that can and should be taken, but it seems clear that the President, with the support of a Democrat controlled Congress, has no intention of taking any of these steps and, indeed, is intent on bankrupting the U.S. government and its people.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.