Hatred of an American oil company
Corrupt NY officials aid and abet a corrupt prosecution in Ecuador
Chevron is not backing down to New York State officials who are pressuring the company to settle a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that involves plaintiffs from Ecuador who are suing over alleged environmental damages.
On Oct. 7, Chevron submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the office of New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in an effort to flush out and detail the assistance he and his predecessor Alan Hevesi furnished to the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the consultants.
The litigation began in New York back in 1993, but the case was moved to Ecuador a decade later. Although Chevron has never operated in Ecuador, it purchased Texaco Petroleum in 2001, which was the subject of the initial suit. Plaintiffs accused Texaco of dumping oil-drilling waste in unlined pits they claim later contaminated the forest and caused illness to the local population. In response, Chevron pointed out that Texaco remediated environmental impacts that resulted from its operations. Moreover, this remediation was certified by government agencies in Ecuador.
“All legitimate scientific evidence submitted during the litigation in Ecuador proves that TexPet’s remediation was effective and that the sites it remediated pose no unreasonable risks for human health or the environment,” Chevron officials have pointed out. Moreover, Ecuador’s state-owned company, Petroecuador, was actually the majority owner of the consortium that included Texaco and bears responsibility, with the government of Ecuador, for any environmental damage that has occurred in the region, Chevron has argued.
Nevertheless, in Feb., an Ecuadorian court in Lago Agrio issued an $18 billion judgment against Chevron. Since then the company has fought back vigorously. It claims the ruling is illegitimate and unenforceable because of documented evidence of fraud on the part of the plaintiffs, the Ecuadorian government and that country’s judiciary. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York concurred after hearing the evidence and issued a preliminary injunction that barred any attempt to enforce Ecuadorian judgment outside of that country.
Diapoli has leaned on Chevron to settle the suit claiming that it could impact the state pension fund’s $780 million investment in Chevron stock, according to a report in the New York Times. The plaintiffs working through their representatives have also cajoled DiNapoli into taking a public stand against Chevron, the report says.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo also interjected himself into the case while serving as state attorney general at the behest of an aide who was being paid $10,000 a month by a group that collaborated with the plaintiffs the New York Times reported.
Chevron has filed a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) suit that claims plaintiffs’ lawyers and consultants provided “clandestine assistance” to the Ecuadorian court in drafting the judgment against Chevron.
Chevron’s RICO suit alleges that the defendants and key co-conspirators have used the lawsuit to threaten the company, dupe U.S. government officials and harass Chevron employees. Those named in the suit include: New York City-based plaintiffs’ lawyer Steven Donziger; his Ecuadorian colleagues Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza; their front organizations, the Amazon Defense Front and Selva Viva; and Stratus Consulting, a Boulder, Colo.-based consulting firm.
Donziger, the New York attorney, has stepped down as the lead attorney and has declined to make any recent media comments. The plaintiffs have reacted to recent developments through Pablo Fajardo, an attorney in Ecuador.
Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, has issued a preliminary injunction order against RICO defendants. The order “enjoins and restrains” the defendants from receiving any benefits, directly or indirectly, until after a final determination is made about the RICO suit.
More HERE
*****************************
Ireland Versus Greece: A clear lesson for America
America's Celtic cousins have chosen the right path
Ireland’s refusal to bow to Eurozone pressure on tax hikes has resulted in slow but steady economic growth on the Emerald Isle — while Greece’s insistence on tax hikes in lieu of tougher “austerity” measures has crippled its economy and threatened to plunge the Eurozone (and the world) into another recession.
What lessons should U.S. policymakers take from these divergent paths? That’s easy — if economic recovery is truly your goal, cut government instead of raising taxes.
Last January, an EU report revealed the Greek deficit was 12.7 percent of GDP — more than three times its government’s previous estimate (and more than four times the amount permitted under EU rules). Three months later, that figure was adjusted upward to 13.6 percent of GDP.
Ireland’s situation wasn’t much better. From 2008-2010 government spending climbed from 42.8 percent to 67 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, Ireland’s debt quadrupled over roughly the same period to more than 100 percent of GDP as Dublin took a page out of Washington D.C.’s “too big to fail” playbook.
Having forced Greece into adopting a host of new tax increases, Eurozone nations eager to enhance their own competitiveness tried to force Ireland into raising its 12.5 percent corporate income tax rate to a level more in line with rates in France (33 percent) Germany (30 percent), Spain (30 percent) and Great Britain (28 percent). Irish leaders wisely rejected this demand, however, recognizing that such a tax hike would eliminate a key competitive advantage and hamstring their economic recovery.
They were correct.
“Ireland was Europe’s second fastest growing economy in the second quarter of this year, expanding at an annual rate of 2.3 percent,” bond analyst Michael Hasenstab wrote recently. “The recovery in GDP growth in turn helped Ireland to meet and exceed the deficit-reduction targets set by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.”
Hasenstab also noted that foreign direct investment climbed by 19 percent during the first six months of 2011 due to Ireland’s competitive tax climate and comparatively light regulations.
Meanwhile in Greece – which imposed higher corporate, value-added, fuel, luxury and property taxes – GDP is projected to slump by 5.5 percent this year, and another 2.5 percent next year. Meanwhile Greek debt – forecast to climb to €357 billion this year (or 162 percent of GDP) — will soar to 173 percent of GDP next year.
Clearly, Ireland will be in a much better position to weather the consequences of a possible Eurozone collapse than Greece — or for that matter Portugal, Spain or Italy.
And while European nations are doing everything within their power to plug a growing number of holes in the dam, it’s looking increasingly like “when” not “if” this collapse occurs.
Earlier this month Great Britain authorized another £75 billion worth of quantitative easing — in addition to the £200 it has previously approved. Meanwhile the European Central Bank announced it was authorizing another €40 billion in emergency loans on top of the €60 billion it already approved. A few weeks ago, Dexia — the Franco-Belgian bank that was bailed out in 2008 to the tune of €6.4 billion — received another bailout along with state guarantees of up to €90 billion to finance borrowing over the coming decade.
And of course there’s a second Greek bailout on the way that’s likely to top €110 billion.
In light of America’s deteriorating economic and financial position, when should our leaders press the panic button?
“For Greece, crisis came when its debt reached 137 percent of its economy,” U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint recently warned. “For Ireland, it was 74 percent. For Portugal, it was 82 percent. Every country and every crisis is unique, but with the United States debt-to-GDP ratio at 102 percent, there is no question we are already well within the debt ‘red zone.’”
What’s becoming abundantly clear, though, is that once that button is pressed — the key to surviving a debt crisis is cutting government, not the economy.
SOURCE
*****************************
Occupy Wall Street’s Anti-Semitic Slurs Ignored by the Left
The President and his buddies seem to be fans of the “Occupy” movement. Some even claim they created it. They neglect to mention that there is a great deal of hate and even violence in this group.
SOURCE
******************************
Equally Poorer
As President Obama continues to base his reelection hopes on resentment toward the "1 percent" who are supposedly not "paying their fair share," the latest evidence suggests that his attacks are still off-target.
According to data just released by the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans earned 16.9 percent of all adjusted gross income in the United States. While no doubt that's a lot of money, it actually represents a decline from 2008, when the rich earned 20 percent of all income. That's right; the rich are earning a smaller proportion of U.S. income.
In fact, there has been a 39 percent decline in the number of American millionaires since 2007. Among the so-called super rich, the decline has been even sharper. The number of Americans earning more than $10 million per year has fallen by 55 percent. Perhaps someone should tell the folks in Zuccotti Park: Inequality is actually declining.
Interestingly, the decline in earnings by the rich has corresponded with higher unemployment and rising poverty overall. We are all poorer, but at least we are more equally poor. Hooray.
Could it be that the rich might actually perform a valuable service in our economy by, say, creating jobs? After all, what does the president think that the rich do with their money: Bury it in their back yard? In reality, individuals either spend that money or they save and invest it. If they spend it, it helps provide jobs for the people who make and sell whatever it is they buy. If the money is instead saved and invested, it provides the capital that is needed to start businesses and hire workers. It is trite but true — not many Americans have been hired by a poor person.
As for their not paying their fair share, according to the Tax Foundation report, that top 1 percent of earners paid 36.7 percent of all income taxes, an amount that truly does seem disproportionate. The top one-tenth of 1 percent, the truly rich, earned nearly 8 percent of all income but paid a hefty 17 percent of all income taxes.
And while Warren Buffett may, as he claims, be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, he is clearly an exception. In fact, the effective tax rate paid by the rich has actually gone up in recent years, and now averages roughly 24 percent, compared with an average of 11 percent for all taxpayers. Moreover, as the Tax Foundation points out, the reason that Buffett and those like him pay low effective tax rates is that much of their income is derived from capital gains and dividends, but "income derived from these sources has already been taxed once by the corporate income tax, which is not included in the current study, meaning the average effective tax rate numbers can be somewhat misleading."
All of this may be one reason why, despite the protestations of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, support among Americans for redistribution of the wealth is actually declining. According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who believe that "government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor" has fallen dramatically, with barely a quarter of the population strongly supporting the proposition. And, the biggest decline for redistribution has actually occurred not among the rich but among the working class.
Perhaps the "99 percent" are not quite so seduced by class warfare as President Obama thinks. Or perhaps they understand that, as William J. H. Boetcker once said (in a quotation often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln), "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich."
SOURCE
************************
ELSEWHERE
The numbers refute Keynes, Obama, Krugman: "The actual numbers on consumer spending instantly refute the Keynesian economic proposals favored by President Obama and Paul Krugman. There is no lack of 'consumer demand.' Instead, consumer spending is at an all-time high. Why then do so many small business owners list 'poor sales' as their chief concern? Could it be because they need more sales in order to pay the increased burdens imposed upon them by The State?"
Censoring cash: "Some governments are weighing the outright elimination of cash. Last year, for example, Swedish officials debated going cashless. Cash still circulates, but the prominent Swedbank announced its intention to cease cash transactions in central Sweden with the exception of one Karlstad branch office."
Social cooperation doesn't mean government: "In recent months I’ve drawn attention to the emphasis that free-market liberals historically have placed on social cooperation. Contrary to the partly self-inflicted caricature of the libertarian as an atomistic, rugged, self-reliant individualist, the weightiest thinkers in this tradition have in fact stressed the indispensability of sociality to human well-being."
Occupy Wall Street demands life without hardship: "I watched cable news. The lead story was about Occupy Wall Street -- a group that seems to consist of mostly young, able-bodied, able-minded people with their well-honed sense of entitlement 'protesting' against a country that much of the world would lie, cheat, steal and kill to enter. They finally issued their list of 13 demands. These included, but were not limited to, a 'guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.' Such a life would provide the Occupy folks plenty of time to think up more demands -- while sitting around all day."
I ah tell ya, this shite will blow up on you: "The Iranian government is showing remarkable stupidity in their coverage of OWS. I know, I know, their 1% isn’t on friendly terms with our 1%, so they are happy to see our 99% pissing upward. But, honestly, have they given any thought to what your average Iranian might actually think when he sees coverage of people protesting in the streets? I don’t see how this will improve Yusuf Schmoiani’s opinion of his 1%."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Monday, October 31, 2011
Tony Blair -- the Leftist fool who trusted an Arab dictator
A secret cache of Colonel Gaddafi’s chemical weapons has been found in Libya, the country’s new rulers announced yesterday.
The deadly arsenal proves the tyrant had refused to give up his weapons of mass destruction – despite promising Tony Blair he would relinquish them in the infamous ‘Deal in the Desert’.
The National Transitional Council said the chemical warheads had been secured and would be made safe by experts. A spokesman said: ‘They are from the Gaddafi era and are under guard until they can be handed over.’
To this day, Mr Blair defends his decision to embrace Gaddafi by trumpeting the idea that he forced the dictator to give up his WMD programme.
His spokesman said earlier this week: ‘Mr Blair, in office, had been responsible for getting Gaddafi to give up his chemical and nuclear weapons programme and renounce terrorism.’
Gaddafi agreed to destroy most of his weapons of mass destruction in 2003 as part of moves to bring Libya, then a pariah state, in from the cold. The agreement was sealed in 2004 when Mr Blair shook hands with Gaddafi in a tent outside Tripoli.
The disarming process was being overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, but was never finished because of the outbreak of war.
It meant the dictator retained around ten tons of deadly mustard gas and other chemicals. Throughout the uprising, rebels feared vengeful Gaddafi – who warned they faced the ‘fires from Hell’ – would unleash WMD on his own people. In Misrata, panic gripped the population when forces loyal to Gaddafi were seen wearing gas masks.
Nato spy planes and satellites monitored suspected chemical weapons dumps at three separate locations, including the Rughawa site some 130 miles south of the tyrant’s birthplace Sirte.
More HERE
*************************
Never have so few been blamed for so much by so many
by Spengler
Here's your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies:
A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government's failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame?
The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that's not what you wrote, don't blame me if you can't get a job at the New York Times.
Rarely in the course of human events have so few been blamed for so much by so many. There are precedents, for example, when Adolf Hitler claimed that a Jewish "stab in the back" lost World War I for Germany. The notion that the problems of three hundred million Arabs revolve around the governance of a few million Palestinians has the same order of credibility.
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations always presumed that Israel's peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan would remain intact - that Egypt would interdict terrorists infiltrating Israel from the Sinai, stop weapons from reaching Hamas in Gaza, and otherwise fill its obligations. But Egypt is dissolving. The Egyptian army crossed a red line on October 9, according to Egyptian blogger Issander al-Armani. [1] Soldiers attacked Coptic demonstrators who were demanding protection from the army, The military not only shut down news coverage of the massacre, but used state television to call on Egyptian Muslims to "defend the army from the Copts".
On September 19, the Egyptian army showed that it could not protect Israel's embassy in Cairo; on October 9, it showed itself ready to murder members of the country's Christian minority. Egypt is dissolving because it can't feed itself, and it can't feed itself because it is going bankrupt. Former International Atomic Energy chief Mohamed ElBaradei, now a candidate for Egypt's presidency, warned last week that Egypt would run out of money within months, according to the English-language edition of Almasry Alroum:
ElBaradei, the undeserved winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize (he helped Iran cover its tracks en route to enriching uranium to near weapons grade), nonetheless is the closest thing to a responsible figure in Egyptian politics. His warning that Egypt is burning its cash reserves is accurate. On October 5, the Financial Times reported that Egypt's foreign exchange reserves had fallen from $35 billion in January to only $19.4 billion, [3] enough to cover less than five months' worth of imports.
The central bank had reported $25 billion of reserves in August, [4] so the monthly decline appears to be around $6 billion; it is hard to tell precisely because the Egyptian central bank publishes contradictory data about its reserve position. The earlier $25 billion figure might have counted loans expected from the Gulf states, but as the FT explains, "Only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far."
Almost 60% of Egyptians live in rural areas, yet the country imports half its caloric consumption and spends $5.5 billion a year in food subsidies. When it runs out of money, millions will starve. Many already are hungry. The state-controlled newspaper al-Dostour warned on October 9 that an "insane" increase in the price of food - up 80% so far this year - has left citizens "screaming". [5]
The newspaper added that the "current state of lawlessness has left merchants and businesses with no supervision", leading to hoarding, price-gouging and shortages. This was evident at the outset of the uprisings, [6] and a breakdown of the country's food distribution system was evident by May, as I wrote at the time. [7]
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces appears baffled. Its leader, Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, does not appear in public. Previously he ran Egypt's military industries. Prime Minister Essam Sharaf was briefly transportation minister, having taught highway engineering for most of his career.
He has spoken publicly about only one topic of political importance, namely the peace treaty with Israel, which he proposes to change, as he told Turkish television on October 8. [8] Egypt's leaders face a crisis brewing for two generations in which the Egyptian government kept half of its population illiterate and mired in rural poverty as an instrument of social control. As ElBaradei warns, they have no idea what they are doing.
Syria, meanwhile, is in civil war, which may turn into a proxy war between the Sunni powers and Iran. And Iraq's leader Nuri al-Maliki, the leader of the supposed Iraqi democracy we spent a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives to put in place, is backing the Bashar al-Assad regime in alliance with Iran. [9]
Turkey, the self-styled rising power in the region, is about to get its come-uppance in the form of a nasty economic downturn. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's belligerence has risen in inverse proportion to the market price of the Turkish lira:
I warned in August of the "instant obsolescence of the Turkish model" as the credit bubble engineered by the ruling party explodes. [10] Markets have already anticipated a sudden turnaround in the Turkish economy. The lira fell by a quarter between November 2010 and September 2011, making it the world’s worst-performing emerging market currency. The stock market has fallen in dollar terms by 40%, making Turkey the worst performer after Egypt among all the markets in the MSCI Tradable Index during 2011.
In short, there is not a patch of ground in Israel's proximity that is not roiling and boiling with political and economic turmoil. Echoing in the ears of Israel's leaders are the words of Isaiah (57:20-21), which Jews around the world read on October 8 on the Day of Atonement: "The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked."
Spengler's corollary states: Neither is there peace to the stupid. We have Nicholas Kristof writing in the October 6 New York Times: "Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy. Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future."
Kristof is talking about the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which was undeveloped land before 1967 and which every conceivable peace agreement would assign to Israel.
Nothing will appease the liberals, because if liberal social engineering can't fix the problems of the Middle East, the world will have no need of liberals. The New York Times will demand [14] that Israel concede and apologize, as surely as a gumball will roll out of the machine when I crank in a quarter. Existential need trumps rationality, most of all among the self-styled priesthood of rationality.
SOURCE
*************************
Losing the peace in Iraq?
BY NEW YEAR'S DAY, the US military presence in Iraq will be history. President Obama has made it official, announcing last week the fulfillment of his campaign pledge to end the Iraq war and bring the troops home. Senior American commanders in Iraq had recommended keeping up to 18,000 servicemen there, and even Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wanted around 4,000 to remain. But Obama, whose meteoric rise to power was fueled by opposition to the war, overruled them. "The rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year," he told reporters. "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over."
And what happens then? The president asserts that American soldiers will "cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success" and that the US withdrawal will "strengthen American leadership around the world." But that's only bluster. Obama has never shown much interest in the fate of Iraq after American forces leave. As a candidate for president he insisted that even preventing a potential genocide wasn't a good enough reason to keep US forces in Iraq, and long after it was clear that President Bush's "surge" had led to dramatic progress in the war, Obama continued to claim that it was making the situation worse.
In fairness, elections have consequences. Obama has never made a secret of his determination to pull American troops out of Iraq; certainly he has been more passionate on that subject than on the importance of securing Iraq's long-term viability as a stable, pro-American oasis in the Arab world. As a matter of short-term political calculus, presidents rarely go wrong when they "bring the boys home for Christmas." Indeed, a New York Times/CBS poll taken immediately after Obama's announcement found a significant upward bump in his approval rating on Iraq.
But what is good for the Obama re-election effort may be calamitous for Iraq and for US interests in the Middle East.
Retired Army General John Keane, an architect of the 2007 surge and former adviser to General David Petraeus when he served as US commander in Iraq, describes the year-end withdrawal deadline as "an absolute disaster." Iraq's fractious, fragile democracy is still little more than a multitude of factions capable of backsliding into violence without an American presence to keep the peace. Right next door is Iran, which already operates terror squads in the country and will now intensify its bid to dominate Iraq and use it as a base to spread Islamist theocracy to the Persian Gulf. And after such a hard-won victory over al-Qaeda in Iraq -- a victory that cost so much blood and treasure -- America's departure throws open the door to a return of the jihadists beginning in 2012.
"We won the war in Iraq," Keane told The Washington Times, "and we're now losing the peace."
A similar sense of foreboding comes from John Burns, the highly-regarded New York Times correspondent who spent more than five years covering Iraq. "I have very little confidence that the center can hold there without the tripwire that American troops represent," Burns said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. "When they're gone, I think all bets are off . . . . A lot of groups of ill intent have been waiting for the Americans to go."
Perhaps everything will turn out fine. Perhaps Iraq's constitutional system will prove more durable than Keane and Burns fear. Perhaps, as the president tells us, quitting Iraq will in some way actually "strengthen American leadership around the world."
That isn't, however, what history suggests. To this day, the United States maintains a substantial military presence in Italy (approximately 11,000 active-duty personnel), South Korea (28,500), Japan (40,000), and Germany (54,000). When US forces settle in for the long haul after fighting and winning bloody wars, the results have generally been decades of peace and progress. But when the United States bugs out -- as it did in Vietnam after 1972, or in Germany at the end of World War I -- the results have been disastrous, both for the nations we walked away from and for American influence worldwide.
In pulling the US military out of Iraq, the president is doing what he said he would do. If it all works out, he will be able to trumpet his success in safely bringing the troops back. But if he turns out to have squandered the peace after so many sacrificed so much to win the war, there won't be much doubt about who lost Iraq.
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
Hamas boosting anti-aircraft arsenal with looted Libyan missiles: "The improved quality of anti-aircraft missiles held by Hamas in Gaza is increasingly worrying the Israeli defense establishment. Hamas recently managed to smuggle relatively advanced Russian missiles, which were looted from Libyan military warehouses, into the Gaza Strip. Israel is worried about the presence of the missiles, both because they curb the air force's almost unlimited freedom of movement over Gaza today, and because of their possible use against civil aviation in Eilat. Shoulder-fired anti-aicraft missiles have been smuggled into Gaza in recent years at Iran's initiative. But the fall of Muammar Gadhafi's regime has enabled Hamas to bring in much higher quality missiles - and in much larger quantities."
Another A380 grounded: "China Southern Airlines first Airbus A380 remained grounded after a mechanical failure forced the cancellation of a flight on Saturday, less than two weeks after its maiden flight. "We are not sure when the A380 flights can be resumed at the moment," Zou Yingping, a press officer of the Guangzhou- based carrier, said by phone today. Zou said the problem was related to the super-jumbo's flap power and drive unit."
Robin Hood defamed again: "Once you boil away all of its high-sounding rationalizations, socialism is only a lame attempt to make stealing appear respectable. That's all it ever was, all it is now, and all it ever will be. ... Socialism pops up in some funny places. When the City Fathers -- Democrat or Republican -- steal your home or business to widen a road or build a park, or simply to give it to some other business that will probably pay higher taxes, that's socialism."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
A secret cache of Colonel Gaddafi’s chemical weapons has been found in Libya, the country’s new rulers announced yesterday.
The deadly arsenal proves the tyrant had refused to give up his weapons of mass destruction – despite promising Tony Blair he would relinquish them in the infamous ‘Deal in the Desert’.
The National Transitional Council said the chemical warheads had been secured and would be made safe by experts. A spokesman said: ‘They are from the Gaddafi era and are under guard until they can be handed over.’
To this day, Mr Blair defends his decision to embrace Gaddafi by trumpeting the idea that he forced the dictator to give up his WMD programme.
His spokesman said earlier this week: ‘Mr Blair, in office, had been responsible for getting Gaddafi to give up his chemical and nuclear weapons programme and renounce terrorism.’
Gaddafi agreed to destroy most of his weapons of mass destruction in 2003 as part of moves to bring Libya, then a pariah state, in from the cold. The agreement was sealed in 2004 when Mr Blair shook hands with Gaddafi in a tent outside Tripoli.
The disarming process was being overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, but was never finished because of the outbreak of war.
It meant the dictator retained around ten tons of deadly mustard gas and other chemicals. Throughout the uprising, rebels feared vengeful Gaddafi – who warned they faced the ‘fires from Hell’ – would unleash WMD on his own people. In Misrata, panic gripped the population when forces loyal to Gaddafi were seen wearing gas masks.
Nato spy planes and satellites monitored suspected chemical weapons dumps at three separate locations, including the Rughawa site some 130 miles south of the tyrant’s birthplace Sirte.
More HERE
*************************
Never have so few been blamed for so much by so many
by Spengler
Here's your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies:
A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government's failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame?
The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that's not what you wrote, don't blame me if you can't get a job at the New York Times.
Rarely in the course of human events have so few been blamed for so much by so many. There are precedents, for example, when Adolf Hitler claimed that a Jewish "stab in the back" lost World War I for Germany. The notion that the problems of three hundred million Arabs revolve around the governance of a few million Palestinians has the same order of credibility.
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations always presumed that Israel's peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan would remain intact - that Egypt would interdict terrorists infiltrating Israel from the Sinai, stop weapons from reaching Hamas in Gaza, and otherwise fill its obligations. But Egypt is dissolving. The Egyptian army crossed a red line on October 9, according to Egyptian blogger Issander al-Armani. [1] Soldiers attacked Coptic demonstrators who were demanding protection from the army, The military not only shut down news coverage of the massacre, but used state television to call on Egyptian Muslims to "defend the army from the Copts".
On September 19, the Egyptian army showed that it could not protect Israel's embassy in Cairo; on October 9, it showed itself ready to murder members of the country's Christian minority. Egypt is dissolving because it can't feed itself, and it can't feed itself because it is going bankrupt. Former International Atomic Energy chief Mohamed ElBaradei, now a candidate for Egypt's presidency, warned last week that Egypt would run out of money within months, according to the English-language edition of Almasry Alroum:
Egypt might face bankruptcy within six months, Egyptian reform advocate and presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei warned on Monday. During a meeting with labor leaders at the Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS) in Helwan, south of Cairo, ElBaradei attacked the "failing" policies of Egypt's ruling military council.He criticized the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) for what he called incompetence and lack of experience, saying that experienced government officials don't have enough power. Egypt is currently relying on its cash reserve with no gross domestic product, he said [2].
ElBaradei, the undeserved winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize (he helped Iran cover its tracks en route to enriching uranium to near weapons grade), nonetheless is the closest thing to a responsible figure in Egyptian politics. His warning that Egypt is burning its cash reserves is accurate. On October 5, the Financial Times reported that Egypt's foreign exchange reserves had fallen from $35 billion in January to only $19.4 billion, [3] enough to cover less than five months' worth of imports.
The central bank had reported $25 billion of reserves in August, [4] so the monthly decline appears to be around $6 billion; it is hard to tell precisely because the Egyptian central bank publishes contradictory data about its reserve position. The earlier $25 billion figure might have counted loans expected from the Gulf states, but as the FT explains, "Only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far."
Almost 60% of Egyptians live in rural areas, yet the country imports half its caloric consumption and spends $5.5 billion a year in food subsidies. When it runs out of money, millions will starve. Many already are hungry. The state-controlled newspaper al-Dostour warned on October 9 that an "insane" increase in the price of food - up 80% so far this year - has left citizens "screaming". [5]
The newspaper added that the "current state of lawlessness has left merchants and businesses with no supervision", leading to hoarding, price-gouging and shortages. This was evident at the outset of the uprisings, [6] and a breakdown of the country's food distribution system was evident by May, as I wrote at the time. [7]
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces appears baffled. Its leader, Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, does not appear in public. Previously he ran Egypt's military industries. Prime Minister Essam Sharaf was briefly transportation minister, having taught highway engineering for most of his career.
He has spoken publicly about only one topic of political importance, namely the peace treaty with Israel, which he proposes to change, as he told Turkish television on October 8. [8] Egypt's leaders face a crisis brewing for two generations in which the Egyptian government kept half of its population illiterate and mired in rural poverty as an instrument of social control. As ElBaradei warns, they have no idea what they are doing.
Syria, meanwhile, is in civil war, which may turn into a proxy war between the Sunni powers and Iran. And Iraq's leader Nuri al-Maliki, the leader of the supposed Iraqi democracy we spent a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives to put in place, is backing the Bashar al-Assad regime in alliance with Iran. [9]
Turkey, the self-styled rising power in the region, is about to get its come-uppance in the form of a nasty economic downturn. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's belligerence has risen in inverse proportion to the market price of the Turkish lira:
I warned in August of the "instant obsolescence of the Turkish model" as the credit bubble engineered by the ruling party explodes. [10] Markets have already anticipated a sudden turnaround in the Turkish economy. The lira fell by a quarter between November 2010 and September 2011, making it the world’s worst-performing emerging market currency. The stock market has fallen in dollar terms by 40%, making Turkey the worst performer after Egypt among all the markets in the MSCI Tradable Index during 2011.
In short, there is not a patch of ground in Israel's proximity that is not roiling and boiling with political and economic turmoil. Echoing in the ears of Israel's leaders are the words of Isaiah (57:20-21), which Jews around the world read on October 8 on the Day of Atonement: "The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked."
Spengler's corollary states: Neither is there peace to the stupid. We have Nicholas Kristof writing in the October 6 New York Times: "Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy. Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future."
Kristof is talking about the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which was undeveloped land before 1967 and which every conceivable peace agreement would assign to Israel.
Nothing will appease the liberals, because if liberal social engineering can't fix the problems of the Middle East, the world will have no need of liberals. The New York Times will demand [14] that Israel concede and apologize, as surely as a gumball will roll out of the machine when I crank in a quarter. Existential need trumps rationality, most of all among the self-styled priesthood of rationality.
SOURCE
*************************
Losing the peace in Iraq?
BY NEW YEAR'S DAY, the US military presence in Iraq will be history. President Obama has made it official, announcing last week the fulfillment of his campaign pledge to end the Iraq war and bring the troops home. Senior American commanders in Iraq had recommended keeping up to 18,000 servicemen there, and even Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wanted around 4,000 to remain. But Obama, whose meteoric rise to power was fueled by opposition to the war, overruled them. "The rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year," he told reporters. "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over."
And what happens then? The president asserts that American soldiers will "cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success" and that the US withdrawal will "strengthen American leadership around the world." But that's only bluster. Obama has never shown much interest in the fate of Iraq after American forces leave. As a candidate for president he insisted that even preventing a potential genocide wasn't a good enough reason to keep US forces in Iraq, and long after it was clear that President Bush's "surge" had led to dramatic progress in the war, Obama continued to claim that it was making the situation worse.
In fairness, elections have consequences. Obama has never made a secret of his determination to pull American troops out of Iraq; certainly he has been more passionate on that subject than on the importance of securing Iraq's long-term viability as a stable, pro-American oasis in the Arab world. As a matter of short-term political calculus, presidents rarely go wrong when they "bring the boys home for Christmas." Indeed, a New York Times/CBS poll taken immediately after Obama's announcement found a significant upward bump in his approval rating on Iraq.
But what is good for the Obama re-election effort may be calamitous for Iraq and for US interests in the Middle East.
Retired Army General John Keane, an architect of the 2007 surge and former adviser to General David Petraeus when he served as US commander in Iraq, describes the year-end withdrawal deadline as "an absolute disaster." Iraq's fractious, fragile democracy is still little more than a multitude of factions capable of backsliding into violence without an American presence to keep the peace. Right next door is Iran, which already operates terror squads in the country and will now intensify its bid to dominate Iraq and use it as a base to spread Islamist theocracy to the Persian Gulf. And after such a hard-won victory over al-Qaeda in Iraq -- a victory that cost so much blood and treasure -- America's departure throws open the door to a return of the jihadists beginning in 2012.
"We won the war in Iraq," Keane told The Washington Times, "and we're now losing the peace."
A similar sense of foreboding comes from John Burns, the highly-regarded New York Times correspondent who spent more than five years covering Iraq. "I have very little confidence that the center can hold there without the tripwire that American troops represent," Burns said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. "When they're gone, I think all bets are off . . . . A lot of groups of ill intent have been waiting for the Americans to go."
Perhaps everything will turn out fine. Perhaps Iraq's constitutional system will prove more durable than Keane and Burns fear. Perhaps, as the president tells us, quitting Iraq will in some way actually "strengthen American leadership around the world."
That isn't, however, what history suggests. To this day, the United States maintains a substantial military presence in Italy (approximately 11,000 active-duty personnel), South Korea (28,500), Japan (40,000), and Germany (54,000). When US forces settle in for the long haul after fighting and winning bloody wars, the results have generally been decades of peace and progress. But when the United States bugs out -- as it did in Vietnam after 1972, or in Germany at the end of World War I -- the results have been disastrous, both for the nations we walked away from and for American influence worldwide.
In pulling the US military out of Iraq, the president is doing what he said he would do. If it all works out, he will be able to trumpet his success in safely bringing the troops back. But if he turns out to have squandered the peace after so many sacrificed so much to win the war, there won't be much doubt about who lost Iraq.
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
Hamas boosting anti-aircraft arsenal with looted Libyan missiles: "The improved quality of anti-aircraft missiles held by Hamas in Gaza is increasingly worrying the Israeli defense establishment. Hamas recently managed to smuggle relatively advanced Russian missiles, which were looted from Libyan military warehouses, into the Gaza Strip. Israel is worried about the presence of the missiles, both because they curb the air force's almost unlimited freedom of movement over Gaza today, and because of their possible use against civil aviation in Eilat. Shoulder-fired anti-aicraft missiles have been smuggled into Gaza in recent years at Iran's initiative. But the fall of Muammar Gadhafi's regime has enabled Hamas to bring in much higher quality missiles - and in much larger quantities."
Another A380 grounded: "China Southern Airlines first Airbus A380 remained grounded after a mechanical failure forced the cancellation of a flight on Saturday, less than two weeks after its maiden flight. "We are not sure when the A380 flights can be resumed at the moment," Zou Yingping, a press officer of the Guangzhou- based carrier, said by phone today. Zou said the problem was related to the super-jumbo's flap power and drive unit."
Robin Hood defamed again: "Once you boil away all of its high-sounding rationalizations, socialism is only a lame attempt to make stealing appear respectable. That's all it ever was, all it is now, and all it ever will be. ... Socialism pops up in some funny places. When the City Fathers -- Democrat or Republican -- steal your home or business to widen a road or build a park, or simply to give it to some other business that will probably pay higher taxes, that's socialism."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Government, not capitalism, should take blame
By Adam Creighton, commenting from Australia
As the public squares of Western capitals fill with angry crowds – self-appointed representatives of the ‘the 99%’ – it is easy to poke fun.
Railing against greed and inequality is akin to complaining about human nature. And far from being 21st century sans-culottes, these are mostly avec-ipods: relatively well-off, educated, and accessorised with the clothes and gadgets of the corporate culture they damn.
But their inchoate chants give vent to an increasingly widespread disgust with the economic status quo. Across the OECD the global financial crisis has thrown 15 million people out of work. Massive bank bailouts have triggered public debt crises in the United States and Europe that presage penal inflation and tax hikes.
In Britain, whose public debt has surged £1 trillion, GDP per person is now 13% lower than its pre-crisis trajectory. Ordinary taxpayers and voters are bearing these colossal costs, while those that abetted the crisis – bank staff, economic bureaucrats and politicians – remain and even prosper.
If this is not galling enough, the steady drip of obscene ‘bonuses’ and gargantuan pay cheques in the wider corporate world is Chinese water torture for disillusioned taxpayers and shareholders.
The public is not angry about inequality per se; they are concerned by an economic system that appears to be allocating rewards arbitrarily and unfairly.
They are rightly gobsmacked that the system’s shortcomings, starkly revealed, are being papered over, even exacerbated.
It is a public relations disaster for the intellectual ‘Right’ that vast swathes of voters worldwide are blaming capitalism for this offensive economic bog, and calling for greater government intervention.
It is not surprising, though. The International Monetary Fund, self-anointed ringmaster of ‘free markets’, repeatedly endorsed our economic system before 2008.
That people blame capitalism will be an economic disaster too, laying the groundwork for yet further shifts away from the ideals of a free society.
Indeed, the ‘occupying’ protestors should be agitating for more capitalism and less government.
Capitalism rewards talent and effort, and leaves the biggest rewards for those that risk their own money and time to produce goods or services that consumers can voluntarily buy – think Henry Ford or Lang Hancock or the late Steve Jobs.
Capitalism is not about giant corporations being able to dump their losses on taxpayers. It is not about allowing senior employees to feast with impunity on the profits of capital supplied by others simply because they can. Nor is it about armies of bureaucrats, corporate welfare, implicit guarantees for banks, or welfare states so pervasive and meddling they have sucked the appetite for individual responsibility out of their citizens.
Government has systematically shielded the biggest companies and their staff from the bracing but vivifying winds of ‘creative destruction’, what Joseph Schumpeter considered the hallmark of genuine capitalism.
Through direct spending and subtle regulations western governments have permeated almost every facet of the economy. In banking, governments and economic bureaucrats have acted as Dr Frankenstein, unwittingly facilitating monstrous growth in banks’ size, short-term profits and risk-taking with their implicit guarantees and feckless ‘Basel’ regulations.
Finally, despite patchy evidence, most economists agitate for Keynesian pump priming and artificially low interests rates to resuscitate economic growth. Yet their underlying models are often no less naive than the Leontief input-output tables that tried to animate the Soviet Union.
In short, Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek would recoil at the economic status quo. If genuine liberals want to maintain credibility, they need to distance themselves from corporatist and managerial rent-seeking as much as they do from the labour and bureaucratic kind.
Arguing for a greater role for owners of capital in our economy – shareholders – is one important way to encourage enduring support for capitalism. Adam Smith railed against the avarice and waste of the managers of the British East India Company. Indeed, economists have long recognised the gross inefficiencies that can arise when the link between ownership and control is severed, whether in government or private enterprise.
Limited liability companies are a gift and construction of the state. They came about to promote risky ventures whose success could bring wide benefits but the costs of whose failure would be borne by the owners. They have been a boon for western civilisation, but they require managers to exercise prudence and restraint, especially in the banking sector where limited liability for owners and no liability for bankers can and do have harmful social outcomes.
Even if the distribution of incomes and wealth is of no concern, how it comes to manifest itself is. If the current trend continues, whereby ever greater rent-seeking, bureaucratic and corporate parasitism contributes to ever greater disparities of wealth, our western democracies leave ourselves open to extreme elements that could remove the freedoms and liberties we still have.
As the Remuneration Tribunal is about to recommend massive pay increases for politicians and senior bureaucrats – justified by ‘market rates’ – consider whether corporate largesse is contributing to a creeping venalisation of the public service too, which will only erode further public support for our economic system.
SOURCE
*****************************
Abortion coverup and Kathleen Sebelius
If a private health insurer had engaged in the kind of criminal obstruction that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been tied to in her home state of Kansas, it would be a federal case. Instead, it's a non-story in the Washington press. Nothing to see here. Move along.
On Monday, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. World Magazine, a Christian news publication, reported on new bombshell court filings showing that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces." World Magazine reported: "The health department failed to disclose that fact for six years, until it was forced to do so in the current felony case over whether it manufactured client records."
The records are at the heart of the fraud case against Planned Parenthood. Kansas health bureaucrats now shrug that the destruction of these key documents -- which they sheepishly admitted had "certain idiosyncrasies" -- was "routine." Who oversaw the agency accused of destroying the evidence six years ago? Sebelius.
As governor of Kansas, Sebelius fought transparency motions in the proceedings tooth and nail for years. Prosecutors allege a long-running heinous cover-up to manufacture false records of patients who had late-term abortions -- and to whitewash Planned Parenthood's systemic failures to report child rape.
Former GOP state Attorney General Phill Kline's investigation turned up massive discrepancies in reported child rape statistics compared to Planned Parenthood and the late late-term abortionist George Tiller's bogus claims. Planned Parenthood of Overland Park and Tiller together performed abortions on 166 girls aged 14 and under and only reported one each to authorities. So, 164 cases of underage rape or statutory rape went unreported and were not investigated by authorities.
Where is Joe Biden to decry actual rape atrocities and Nancy Pelosi to decry dire hazards to women's health when we need them?
A Kansas district judge found probable cause of criminality in the abortion providers' records; another district judge found probable cause to believe Planned Parenthood committed 107 criminal acts. Sebelius' response? A bloody ideological soul mate of Tiller's, she launched a vengeful witch-hunt against Kline. The state ethics board accused him of lying. The left-wing state Supreme Court Sebelius appointed stymied Kline's subpoenas and appeals.
Kline was cleared of all ethics violations. In fact, for 20 full months, the state's disciplinary board for lawyers suppressed an internal investigative report concluding there was zero probable cause to justify the ethics complaints.
Where there's obstructionist smoke, there's corruption fire. Under Sebelius' watch as governor, an inspector general also reported that her appointed health policy board had "applied pressure to alter an audit report, restricted access to legal advice and threatened to fire her for meeting independently with legislators," according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Entirely fitting, of course. The war on whistleblowers and inspectors general has been a hallmark of the current White House. And the radically pro-abortion rights Sebelius has ruled ruthlessly from her Beltway perch: policing citizen critics of Obamacare through a taxpayer-funded Internet snitch brigade; threatening private companies and insurers who have increased rates to cope with Obamacare coverage mandates; lashing out at newspapers who dare report on the costly consequences of the federal law.
As she bullies private companies to meet discriminatory and arbitrary disclosure demands, Sebelius has yet to be held accountable for overseeing state government agencies that conspired to hide the deadly truth about the Big Government/Big Abortion alliance from taxpayers. Like her boss in Washington, Sebelius' political playbook has a single page: Destroy the messenger.
SOURCE
**************************
Occupied with jobs, jobs, jobs
Has the country gone mad? No need to answer; the question is rhetorical. (In other words, I know the answer, too.) According to the Bureau of Labor, 14 million Americans together make up our dismal national unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. That figure doesn’t include the 9.3 million who have uncomfortably settled into part-time work, or the million additional folks who have become discouraged and stopped looking for work altogether.
This is a depression. No doubt, some agency of government spares no expense cataloguing the psychiatric records needed to substantiate that diagnosis.
President Obama campaigns across the country for his jobs bill — or to get re-elected next year on the slogan, “Republicans are even worse than me.” Only one effort stands any chance of success.
This jobs bill is predicated on two central ideas: (a) drop-shipping crates of cash to state and local governments, tallying each tiny statistically detectable response to stimulus as credit to Mr. Obama’s heroism, audacity, and sagacity, and (b) when people decide whether or not to vote for him next year, he’d prefer they be employed (if they’re not too discouraged) or, at the very least, to blame Republicans.
Thankfully, the Obama Jobs Bill is fully paid for. How? By raising taxes in the future on rich people who can afford it and don’t pay their fair share.
So, what does that tax share look like now? America’s top ten percent of income earners pay 73 percent of all income taxes collected. The bottom 47 percent of Americans certainly pay plenty in many another tax, but pay nothing in federal income taxes . . . in many cases receiving money from Uncle Sam over and above what they’ve paid in.
Fairness has a whole new meaning.
A proposal by U.S. Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., makes more sense than Obama’s bill — if the goal is to make sure everyone has a job. It makes no sense at all, but Jackson’s idea is for the federal government to simply hire every unemployed American at roughly $40,000 a year.
That’s more than 15 million people.
But that’s not the half of it. Think of all the millions making less than $40K who will quit their jobs to take the sinecure with the salary bump.
Hmmm. Why didn’t we think of that?
But count on congressional Republicans to stand in the way of Obama and the Democrats. Not out of a principled belief in free markets and antagonism to government taking money from one person to give to another, mind you. Something else will be at play, here.
With all the jaw-boning over jobs, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson’s proud declaration that as governor he never created a single job is the only statement with any merit — proving he understands the difference between politically-created, walking-around-money jobs and productive private sector positions financed through profits earned.
Funny, unemployed Americans don’t want jobs badly enough to travel to Alabama to pick the crops not now being harvested by illegal immigrant labor. Obama’s administration doesn’t want Boeing to open up a plant in South Carolina. Even in my neck of the woods, in Arlington County, Virginia, the county board moved unanimously to prevent a Wal-Mart, Target or other big box store from opening for business.
The message is: We want jobs, but only the jobs we want. We want high-paying jobs, with lots of perks and lavish health benefits and a pension paying more in retirement than one makes while working.
These days you won’t find many of those jobs . . . outside of government.
Maybe the government will start growing money trees.
SOURCE
**************************
Barack Obama and the infantilization of America
By JAMES TARANTO
Here's ABC News, reporting on the speech the president gave in Fog City: "At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America."
Oh no! Horror of horrors! Obama is the only thing standing between us and having to rely on ourselves! And do you know what they call people who rely on themselves?
Oddly, the White House website doesn't have the text of this speech, but here's a passage from ABC: "The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don't work even harder than we did in 2008, then we're going to have a government that tells the American people, 'you are on your own. If you get sick, you're on your own. If you can't afford college, you're on your own. If you don't like that some corporation is polluting your air or the air that your child breathes, then you're on your own.' That's not the America I believe in. It's not the America you believe in."
Obama explicitly rejects the American ethos of self-reliance. He sees dependence on government not as an evil, if sometimes a necessary one, but as a goal to be pursued. It reminded us of Peggy Noonan's observation last week that there's something not fully adult about the president himself: "Sorry to do archetypes, but a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. What America has right now is a bright, lost older brother. It misses Dad."
Perhaps Obama is eager to infantilize Americans precisely because he is not a fatherly figure--a man of unquestioned wisdom and maturity. A strong father continues to command his children's respect even as they too reach adulthood. As Mark Twain observed, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." The "bright, lost older brother," by contrast, can command the respect only of young children.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
By Adam Creighton, commenting from Australia
As the public squares of Western capitals fill with angry crowds – self-appointed representatives of the ‘the 99%’ – it is easy to poke fun.
Railing against greed and inequality is akin to complaining about human nature. And far from being 21st century sans-culottes, these are mostly avec-ipods: relatively well-off, educated, and accessorised with the clothes and gadgets of the corporate culture they damn.
But their inchoate chants give vent to an increasingly widespread disgust with the economic status quo. Across the OECD the global financial crisis has thrown 15 million people out of work. Massive bank bailouts have triggered public debt crises in the United States and Europe that presage penal inflation and tax hikes.
In Britain, whose public debt has surged £1 trillion, GDP per person is now 13% lower than its pre-crisis trajectory. Ordinary taxpayers and voters are bearing these colossal costs, while those that abetted the crisis – bank staff, economic bureaucrats and politicians – remain and even prosper.
If this is not galling enough, the steady drip of obscene ‘bonuses’ and gargantuan pay cheques in the wider corporate world is Chinese water torture for disillusioned taxpayers and shareholders.
The public is not angry about inequality per se; they are concerned by an economic system that appears to be allocating rewards arbitrarily and unfairly.
They are rightly gobsmacked that the system’s shortcomings, starkly revealed, are being papered over, even exacerbated.
It is a public relations disaster for the intellectual ‘Right’ that vast swathes of voters worldwide are blaming capitalism for this offensive economic bog, and calling for greater government intervention.
It is not surprising, though. The International Monetary Fund, self-anointed ringmaster of ‘free markets’, repeatedly endorsed our economic system before 2008.
That people blame capitalism will be an economic disaster too, laying the groundwork for yet further shifts away from the ideals of a free society.
Indeed, the ‘occupying’ protestors should be agitating for more capitalism and less government.
Capitalism rewards talent and effort, and leaves the biggest rewards for those that risk their own money and time to produce goods or services that consumers can voluntarily buy – think Henry Ford or Lang Hancock or the late Steve Jobs.
Capitalism is not about giant corporations being able to dump their losses on taxpayers. It is not about allowing senior employees to feast with impunity on the profits of capital supplied by others simply because they can. Nor is it about armies of bureaucrats, corporate welfare, implicit guarantees for banks, or welfare states so pervasive and meddling they have sucked the appetite for individual responsibility out of their citizens.
Government has systematically shielded the biggest companies and their staff from the bracing but vivifying winds of ‘creative destruction’, what Joseph Schumpeter considered the hallmark of genuine capitalism.
Through direct spending and subtle regulations western governments have permeated almost every facet of the economy. In banking, governments and economic bureaucrats have acted as Dr Frankenstein, unwittingly facilitating monstrous growth in banks’ size, short-term profits and risk-taking with their implicit guarantees and feckless ‘Basel’ regulations.
Finally, despite patchy evidence, most economists agitate for Keynesian pump priming and artificially low interests rates to resuscitate economic growth. Yet their underlying models are often no less naive than the Leontief input-output tables that tried to animate the Soviet Union.
In short, Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek would recoil at the economic status quo. If genuine liberals want to maintain credibility, they need to distance themselves from corporatist and managerial rent-seeking as much as they do from the labour and bureaucratic kind.
Arguing for a greater role for owners of capital in our economy – shareholders – is one important way to encourage enduring support for capitalism. Adam Smith railed against the avarice and waste of the managers of the British East India Company. Indeed, economists have long recognised the gross inefficiencies that can arise when the link between ownership and control is severed, whether in government or private enterprise.
Limited liability companies are a gift and construction of the state. They came about to promote risky ventures whose success could bring wide benefits but the costs of whose failure would be borne by the owners. They have been a boon for western civilisation, but they require managers to exercise prudence and restraint, especially in the banking sector where limited liability for owners and no liability for bankers can and do have harmful social outcomes.
Even if the distribution of incomes and wealth is of no concern, how it comes to manifest itself is. If the current trend continues, whereby ever greater rent-seeking, bureaucratic and corporate parasitism contributes to ever greater disparities of wealth, our western democracies leave ourselves open to extreme elements that could remove the freedoms and liberties we still have.
As the Remuneration Tribunal is about to recommend massive pay increases for politicians and senior bureaucrats – justified by ‘market rates’ – consider whether corporate largesse is contributing to a creeping venalisation of the public service too, which will only erode further public support for our economic system.
SOURCE
*****************************
Abortion coverup and Kathleen Sebelius
If a private health insurer had engaged in the kind of criminal obstruction that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been tied to in her home state of Kansas, it would be a federal case. Instead, it's a non-story in the Washington press. Nothing to see here. Move along.
On Monday, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. World Magazine, a Christian news publication, reported on new bombshell court filings showing that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces." World Magazine reported: "The health department failed to disclose that fact for six years, until it was forced to do so in the current felony case over whether it manufactured client records."
The records are at the heart of the fraud case against Planned Parenthood. Kansas health bureaucrats now shrug that the destruction of these key documents -- which they sheepishly admitted had "certain idiosyncrasies" -- was "routine." Who oversaw the agency accused of destroying the evidence six years ago? Sebelius.
As governor of Kansas, Sebelius fought transparency motions in the proceedings tooth and nail for years. Prosecutors allege a long-running heinous cover-up to manufacture false records of patients who had late-term abortions -- and to whitewash Planned Parenthood's systemic failures to report child rape.
Former GOP state Attorney General Phill Kline's investigation turned up massive discrepancies in reported child rape statistics compared to Planned Parenthood and the late late-term abortionist George Tiller's bogus claims. Planned Parenthood of Overland Park and Tiller together performed abortions on 166 girls aged 14 and under and only reported one each to authorities. So, 164 cases of underage rape or statutory rape went unreported and were not investigated by authorities.
Where is Joe Biden to decry actual rape atrocities and Nancy Pelosi to decry dire hazards to women's health when we need them?
A Kansas district judge found probable cause of criminality in the abortion providers' records; another district judge found probable cause to believe Planned Parenthood committed 107 criminal acts. Sebelius' response? A bloody ideological soul mate of Tiller's, she launched a vengeful witch-hunt against Kline. The state ethics board accused him of lying. The left-wing state Supreme Court Sebelius appointed stymied Kline's subpoenas and appeals.
Kline was cleared of all ethics violations. In fact, for 20 full months, the state's disciplinary board for lawyers suppressed an internal investigative report concluding there was zero probable cause to justify the ethics complaints.
Where there's obstructionist smoke, there's corruption fire. Under Sebelius' watch as governor, an inspector general also reported that her appointed health policy board had "applied pressure to alter an audit report, restricted access to legal advice and threatened to fire her for meeting independently with legislators," according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Entirely fitting, of course. The war on whistleblowers and inspectors general has been a hallmark of the current White House. And the radically pro-abortion rights Sebelius has ruled ruthlessly from her Beltway perch: policing citizen critics of Obamacare through a taxpayer-funded Internet snitch brigade; threatening private companies and insurers who have increased rates to cope with Obamacare coverage mandates; lashing out at newspapers who dare report on the costly consequences of the federal law.
As she bullies private companies to meet discriminatory and arbitrary disclosure demands, Sebelius has yet to be held accountable for overseeing state government agencies that conspired to hide the deadly truth about the Big Government/Big Abortion alliance from taxpayers. Like her boss in Washington, Sebelius' political playbook has a single page: Destroy the messenger.
SOURCE
**************************
Occupied with jobs, jobs, jobs
Has the country gone mad? No need to answer; the question is rhetorical. (In other words, I know the answer, too.) According to the Bureau of Labor, 14 million Americans together make up our dismal national unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. That figure doesn’t include the 9.3 million who have uncomfortably settled into part-time work, or the million additional folks who have become discouraged and stopped looking for work altogether.
This is a depression. No doubt, some agency of government spares no expense cataloguing the psychiatric records needed to substantiate that diagnosis.
President Obama campaigns across the country for his jobs bill — or to get re-elected next year on the slogan, “Republicans are even worse than me.” Only one effort stands any chance of success.
This jobs bill is predicated on two central ideas: (a) drop-shipping crates of cash to state and local governments, tallying each tiny statistically detectable response to stimulus as credit to Mr. Obama’s heroism, audacity, and sagacity, and (b) when people decide whether or not to vote for him next year, he’d prefer they be employed (if they’re not too discouraged) or, at the very least, to blame Republicans.
Thankfully, the Obama Jobs Bill is fully paid for. How? By raising taxes in the future on rich people who can afford it and don’t pay their fair share.
So, what does that tax share look like now? America’s top ten percent of income earners pay 73 percent of all income taxes collected. The bottom 47 percent of Americans certainly pay plenty in many another tax, but pay nothing in federal income taxes . . . in many cases receiving money from Uncle Sam over and above what they’ve paid in.
Fairness has a whole new meaning.
A proposal by U.S. Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., makes more sense than Obama’s bill — if the goal is to make sure everyone has a job. It makes no sense at all, but Jackson’s idea is for the federal government to simply hire every unemployed American at roughly $40,000 a year.
That’s more than 15 million people.
But that’s not the half of it. Think of all the millions making less than $40K who will quit their jobs to take the sinecure with the salary bump.
Hmmm. Why didn’t we think of that?
But count on congressional Republicans to stand in the way of Obama and the Democrats. Not out of a principled belief in free markets and antagonism to government taking money from one person to give to another, mind you. Something else will be at play, here.
With all the jaw-boning over jobs, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson’s proud declaration that as governor he never created a single job is the only statement with any merit — proving he understands the difference between politically-created, walking-around-money jobs and productive private sector positions financed through profits earned.
Funny, unemployed Americans don’t want jobs badly enough to travel to Alabama to pick the crops not now being harvested by illegal immigrant labor. Obama’s administration doesn’t want Boeing to open up a plant in South Carolina. Even in my neck of the woods, in Arlington County, Virginia, the county board moved unanimously to prevent a Wal-Mart, Target or other big box store from opening for business.
The message is: We want jobs, but only the jobs we want. We want high-paying jobs, with lots of perks and lavish health benefits and a pension paying more in retirement than one makes while working.
These days you won’t find many of those jobs . . . outside of government.
Maybe the government will start growing money trees.
SOURCE
**************************
Barack Obama and the infantilization of America
By JAMES TARANTO
Here's ABC News, reporting on the speech the president gave in Fog City: "At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America."
Oh no! Horror of horrors! Obama is the only thing standing between us and having to rely on ourselves! And do you know what they call people who rely on themselves?
Oddly, the White House website doesn't have the text of this speech, but here's a passage from ABC: "The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don't work even harder than we did in 2008, then we're going to have a government that tells the American people, 'you are on your own. If you get sick, you're on your own. If you can't afford college, you're on your own. If you don't like that some corporation is polluting your air or the air that your child breathes, then you're on your own.' That's not the America I believe in. It's not the America you believe in."
Obama explicitly rejects the American ethos of self-reliance. He sees dependence on government not as an evil, if sometimes a necessary one, but as a goal to be pursued. It reminded us of Peggy Noonan's observation last week that there's something not fully adult about the president himself: "Sorry to do archetypes, but a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. What America has right now is a bright, lost older brother. It misses Dad."
Perhaps Obama is eager to infantilize Americans precisely because he is not a fatherly figure--a man of unquestioned wisdom and maturity. A strong father continues to command his children's respect even as they too reach adulthood. As Mark Twain observed, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." The "bright, lost older brother," by contrast, can command the respect only of young children.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Finding Believers in Liberty in the Strangest Places
The image of the military as bloodthirsty authoritarians is just vicious Leftist propaganda
Most Americans believe in liberty. Even Washington can’t stamp out the commitment to individualism and independence that burns within most people.
On my latest trip to Afghanistan I spent a lot of time with military personnel, NCO and officer alike. Some on the Left believe that the military is filled with authoritarian automatons. Nothing could be further from the truth. Members of the military are just like the rest of us—indeed, every day they see and suffer through the failings of the U.S. government’s biggest and most expensive bureaucracy.
And they think for themselves. One young enlisted driver declared himself in favor of drug legalization. Having seen the problems created by attempting to stamp out opium production and distribution in Afghanistan, he realized the best response was to take the profit out of the drug trade, and the only way to do that was to stop treating drug use as a crime.
As far as I could tell, he wasn’t a member of the Libertarian Party, devotee of Ayn Rand, or even member of the Campaign for Liberty. He simply made the logical connection between drug prohibition and drug crime. In Afghanistan, opium production funds the Taliban insurgency and government officials alike. Here, as in several Latin American nations, Washington’s “war on drugs” has had catastrophic geopolitical consequences.
At another base I met a retired military man now serving as a civilian consultant helping to train Afghans. The problem, he declared, was their lack of understanding of the importance of liberty. Afghans are fiercely independent, but the allies were supporting creation of a centralized state in Kabul. He hoped American think tanks and organizations friendly to the ideals of liberty could help promote the principles of freedom here. He quoted Charles Murray’s In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. I don’t remember ever meeting anyone in Washington who quoted Murray’s elegant defense of a free society!
A Marine Corps captain sidled up to me at another stop and said when he heard that I worked at the Cato Institute he wanted to meet me. He was no enthusiast for big, expansive government and saw the consequences of such policies on the ground. Serving in a combat command hundreds of miles from Kabul and thousands of miles from the U.S., he declared that he was a fan of Rep. Ron Paul.
So much for the Neocons’ claim that critics of the warfare state are anti-military and anti-military personnel.
None of this surprised me. My father was career Air Force, so I grew up on military bases around the world. Many other family members and friends serve in or were in the military. Through my policy work I meet a lot of the upper ranks, while excursions like my trip to Afghanistan bring me into contact with members of the enlisted force, the backbone of the U.S. military. I’ve found service personnel to be a uniformly impressive lot, independent thinkers with no illusions about the efficiency of their own institution or the judgment of the politicians who send them off to war.
The fact that members of the military need little prodding to support political freedom should remind us to promote the principles of liberty to everyone everywhere. No one is beyond liberty’s reach. Often those in the most flawed government institutions have the best understanding of the benefits of freedom and failures of bureaucracy. And despite its best efforts, the government has never been able to destroy people’s innate desire for liberty.
Equally important, we should remember that the principles of limited government, including a restrained, defensive foreign policy, are for everyone, including those serving in government bureaucracies. Most people join the military to defend their nation, not to fight unnecessary wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. However, that doesn’t stop politicians from sending personnel into harm’s way for no good reason. Limiting government intervention would benefit all of us, from Americans at home who pay the bills to military personnel abroad who do the fighting (and dying).
Indeed, the latter is one of the main arguments for international restraint. There are a lot of ivory tower hawks in Washington, warrior wannabes prepared to fight to the last volunteer in an attempt to transform the rest of the world. A policy of empire inevitably treats military personnel as dispensable, a replaceable means to one or another glorious end.
Afghanistan is a good example of the sheer madness of American foreign policy. There was a strong argument for targeting al-Qaeda and ousting the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11. There is a plausible argument today for trying to tailor a speedy withdrawal to maximize the chance, however small, that a liberal, democratic system might evolve in Afghanistan.
But what conceivable argument was there for ever moving from immediate retaliation to long-term nation-building?
In a decade of fighting nearly 2000 Americans and 1000 coalition personnel have died. Thousands more have been wounded, many severely. The U.S. has spent more than $464 billion on the Afghan war. Vast bases have risen out of nothing in nowhere to be filled with runways, offices, fences, barracks, supplies, chow halls, vehicles, guns, and people. Operations consume oceans of fuel and break down equipment. Money flows to train and equip the Afghan security forces. And Americans will continue to pay for the war for decades to come, caring for service personnel who have suffered debilitating injuries.
Not just the fighting is costly. Since counter-insurgency operations are based on winning support from the population, the U.S. government is dedicated to utterly transforming an impoverished rural and tribal society. The Pentagon, not to mention civilian “aid” agencies, is supporting better governance, freer elections, and expanded education of girls; underwriting construction of additional schools, hospitals, roads, electricity projects, paying to train police and “build capacity” in the Afghan government, and even helping to expand cell phone coverage and internet access. Worthy endeavors all, but matters for America’s Department of Defense?
Indeed, “Transition” is all the rage. Allied troops are supposed to come out by 2014, but the respective governments insist that the “international community” must remain involved for as long as necessary. That means more equipment, training, advice, mentoring, and money, lots of money. At least until Afghanistan is able to pay the costs, which essentially means the U.S. and Europeans will be writing checks forever.
This from heavily indebted states running deficits today and facing huge financial challenges tomorrow.
Even if a competent, honest, effective government ultimately arises in Kabul, which today looks to be the stuff of fantasy, Afghanistan should be America’s last nation-building venture. Afghans have faced far more than their share of tragedy after more than three decades at war, but there is little reason to believe that the coalition can deliver permanent peace, prosperity, and modernity no matter how much it spends. America does not have the resources to engage in social engineering in the many other poor, war-torn nations around the globe. It isn’t in the interest of Americans generally. It certainly isn’t in the interest of members of the military.
Liberty is the most important political end. There are other, higher human ends. But liberty allows us to pursue our ultimate purpose. No matter who or where we are.
SOURCE
*****************************
More Leftist disconnection from reality
Biden's audience whooped and applauded last week in Flint when he said that without Obama's jobs bill, police will be "outgunned and outmanned." (Wild applause!)
I suppose liberals would claim they were applauding because they believe Obama's jobs bill will prevent these murders. Which reminds me: Republicans believe the death penalty prevents murders! Which belief bears more relationship to reality?
In a case I have previously mentioned, Kenneth McDuff was released from death row soon after the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972 and went on to murder more than a dozen people.
William Jordan and Anthony Prevatte were sentenced to death in 1974 for abducting a teacher, murdering him and stealing his car. They came under suspicion when they were caught throwing the murder weapon from the stolen vehicle in a high-speed car chase with the cops and because they were in possession of the dead man's wallet, briefcase and watch.
The Georgia Supreme Court overturned their capital sentences in an opinion by Robert H. Hall, who was appointed by Gov. Jimmy Carter.
Hall said that the death sentences had to be set aside on the idiotic grounds that the jurors had overheard the prosecutor say that the judge and state supreme court would have the opportunity to review a death sentence, which might have caused them to take their sentencing role less seriously.
(If the facts had been the reverse, the court would have overturned the death sentences on the grounds that the jurors did not take their sentencing decision seriously, under the misapprehension that no judge or court would second-guess them.)
Prevatte was later released from "life in prison" and proceeded to murder his girlfriend. Jordan escaped and has never been found.
As president, Carter appointed Hall to a federal district court.
Darryl Kemp was sentenced to death in California in 1960 for the rape and murder of Marjorie Hipperson and also convicted for raping two other women. But he sat on death row long enough -- 12 years -- for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional. He was paroled five years later and, within four months, had raped and murdered Armida Wiltsey, a 40-year-old wife and mother.
Kemp wasn't caught at the time, so he spent the next quarter-century raping (and probably murdering) a string of women. In 2002, his DNA was matched to blood found on the fingernails of Wiltsey's dead body. Although Kemp was serving a "life sentence" for rape in a Texas prison, he was months away from being paroled when he was brought back to California for the murder of Wiltsey.
His attorney argued that he was too old for the death penalty. He lost that argument, and in 2009, Kemp was again given a capital sentence. He now sits on death row, perhaps long enough for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional again, so he can be released to commit more rapes and murders.
Dozens and dozens of prisoners released from death row have gone on to murder again. No one knows exactly how many, but it's a lot more than the number of innocent men who have been executed in America, which, at least since 1950, is zero.
What is liberals' evidence that there will be more rapes and murders if Obama's jobs bill doesn't pass? Biden claims that, without it, there won't be enough cops to interrupt a woman being raped in her own home -- which would be an amazing bit of police work/psychic talent, if it had ever happened. (That's why Americans like guns, liberals.)
Obama's jobs bill tackles the problem of rape and murder by giving the states $30 billion ... for public school teachers.
Only $5 billion is even allotted to the police, but all we keep hearing about are the rapes and murders that Democrats are suddenly against (as long as being "against" rape and murder means funding public school teachers and not imprisoning or executing rapists and murderers).
Finally, did Flint use any money from Obama's last trillion-dollar stimulus bill to hire more police in order to prevent rape and murder? No, Flint spent its $2.2 million from the first stimulus bill on buying two electric buses.
Even if what Flint really needed was buses and not cops, for $2.2 million, the city could have bought seven brand-new diesel buses and had $100,000 left over for streetlights.
Rather than reducing the rate of rape and murder, blowing money on "green" buses is likely to increase crime, since people will be forced to spend a lot more time waiting at bus stops for those two buses.
It's going to be a long wait: The "green" buses were never delivered because the company went out of business -- despite a $1.6 million loan from the American taxpayer.
But if I were a liberal, I wouldn't acknowledge these facts, or any facts. I would close my eyes, cover my ears, demand that MSNBC fire Pat Buchanan and the FCC pull the plug on Fox, and pretend to believe that taxpayer-funded "green" projects and an ever-increasing supply of public school teachers were the only things that separated us from Armageddon.
SOURCE
***************************
Pay no attention to the inflation behind the curtain
According to legend, in Czarist Russia, Grigory Potemkin constructed fake villages to make Catherine the Great believe that the countryside was tranquil and prosperous, when in fact it was chaotic and stricken with poverty.
Such it is with government economic statistics, as evidenced by the latest release of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) showing a 2.5 percent increase for the third quarter of 2011. “U.S. Economic Growth Accelerates,” blared one media headline. “Economy expands 2.5 percent in the third quarter,” heralded another.
But below the headlines, one finds the spin. The Bureau of Economic Analysis claimed the increase “primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures”.
To be certain, consumption increased by $127.4 billion out of the $185 billion increase, a peak behind the numbers finds that only $10.1 billion was for durable goods. $28.9 billion was for non-durable goods: $8.1 billion was increased gas and energy consumption, $9.6 billion for food and beverages, and $3.1 billion for clothing.
The lack of increased good purchases is also indicated by the $24.3 billion shrinking trade deficit. While exports increased $31.6 billion, imports only increased by $7.3 billion. Slower imports indicates slowing consumer spending on actual goods, not accelerating.
Another portion of the increase was $88.4 billion for services. But, again, the increases come in necessities: $25.2 billion for housing and utilities, $31.2 billion for health care, $11.5 billion for food services and accommodations, and $6.7 billion for financial services and insurance.
With existing home sales taking a plunge and prices flat to falling, the increase for “housing and utilities” can largely be attributed to the increased cost of utilities. The same can be said for the $8.1 billion increase for gas and energy, and the overall $21 billion increase for food and food services. In short, prices are increasing.
Other data bears this out. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is up 3.9 percent at an annualized rate overall for all items, including food by 4.7 percent and energy by 19.3 percent. If one takes out food and energy, the CPI is only growing annualized by 2 percent.
As for producer prices, those have been way up, too, growing at an annualized rate of 6.9 percent in September — it was 7 percent and 6.5 percent in July and August, respectively. All of which accounts for the $46.1 billion increase for equipment purchases.
Meanwhile, when government reports “core” inflation, they leave out food and energy price increases, and as a result, when it reports GDP it leaves those numbers in. This results in prices appearing to be relatively “stable” while the economy is “growing,” when in fact, prices are fluctuating and growth is slowing.
That is the real story behind the numbers that will go underreported in the mainstream media. This is not growth accelerating at all. It’s inflation.
America’s equivalent of the Potemkin Village was L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” tale criticizing monetary policy, in which famously the “Wizard” urges Dorothy and her friends to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
True to form, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is probably hoping nobody peaks behind the GDP press release curtain.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
The image of the military as bloodthirsty authoritarians is just vicious Leftist propaganda
Most Americans believe in liberty. Even Washington can’t stamp out the commitment to individualism and independence that burns within most people.
On my latest trip to Afghanistan I spent a lot of time with military personnel, NCO and officer alike. Some on the Left believe that the military is filled with authoritarian automatons. Nothing could be further from the truth. Members of the military are just like the rest of us—indeed, every day they see and suffer through the failings of the U.S. government’s biggest and most expensive bureaucracy.
And they think for themselves. One young enlisted driver declared himself in favor of drug legalization. Having seen the problems created by attempting to stamp out opium production and distribution in Afghanistan, he realized the best response was to take the profit out of the drug trade, and the only way to do that was to stop treating drug use as a crime.
As far as I could tell, he wasn’t a member of the Libertarian Party, devotee of Ayn Rand, or even member of the Campaign for Liberty. He simply made the logical connection between drug prohibition and drug crime. In Afghanistan, opium production funds the Taliban insurgency and government officials alike. Here, as in several Latin American nations, Washington’s “war on drugs” has had catastrophic geopolitical consequences.
At another base I met a retired military man now serving as a civilian consultant helping to train Afghans. The problem, he declared, was their lack of understanding of the importance of liberty. Afghans are fiercely independent, but the allies were supporting creation of a centralized state in Kabul. He hoped American think tanks and organizations friendly to the ideals of liberty could help promote the principles of freedom here. He quoted Charles Murray’s In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. I don’t remember ever meeting anyone in Washington who quoted Murray’s elegant defense of a free society!
A Marine Corps captain sidled up to me at another stop and said when he heard that I worked at the Cato Institute he wanted to meet me. He was no enthusiast for big, expansive government and saw the consequences of such policies on the ground. Serving in a combat command hundreds of miles from Kabul and thousands of miles from the U.S., he declared that he was a fan of Rep. Ron Paul.
So much for the Neocons’ claim that critics of the warfare state are anti-military and anti-military personnel.
None of this surprised me. My father was career Air Force, so I grew up on military bases around the world. Many other family members and friends serve in or were in the military. Through my policy work I meet a lot of the upper ranks, while excursions like my trip to Afghanistan bring me into contact with members of the enlisted force, the backbone of the U.S. military. I’ve found service personnel to be a uniformly impressive lot, independent thinkers with no illusions about the efficiency of their own institution or the judgment of the politicians who send them off to war.
The fact that members of the military need little prodding to support political freedom should remind us to promote the principles of liberty to everyone everywhere. No one is beyond liberty’s reach. Often those in the most flawed government institutions have the best understanding of the benefits of freedom and failures of bureaucracy. And despite its best efforts, the government has never been able to destroy people’s innate desire for liberty.
Equally important, we should remember that the principles of limited government, including a restrained, defensive foreign policy, are for everyone, including those serving in government bureaucracies. Most people join the military to defend their nation, not to fight unnecessary wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. However, that doesn’t stop politicians from sending personnel into harm’s way for no good reason. Limiting government intervention would benefit all of us, from Americans at home who pay the bills to military personnel abroad who do the fighting (and dying).
Indeed, the latter is one of the main arguments for international restraint. There are a lot of ivory tower hawks in Washington, warrior wannabes prepared to fight to the last volunteer in an attempt to transform the rest of the world. A policy of empire inevitably treats military personnel as dispensable, a replaceable means to one or another glorious end.
Afghanistan is a good example of the sheer madness of American foreign policy. There was a strong argument for targeting al-Qaeda and ousting the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11. There is a plausible argument today for trying to tailor a speedy withdrawal to maximize the chance, however small, that a liberal, democratic system might evolve in Afghanistan.
But what conceivable argument was there for ever moving from immediate retaliation to long-term nation-building?
In a decade of fighting nearly 2000 Americans and 1000 coalition personnel have died. Thousands more have been wounded, many severely. The U.S. has spent more than $464 billion on the Afghan war. Vast bases have risen out of nothing in nowhere to be filled with runways, offices, fences, barracks, supplies, chow halls, vehicles, guns, and people. Operations consume oceans of fuel and break down equipment. Money flows to train and equip the Afghan security forces. And Americans will continue to pay for the war for decades to come, caring for service personnel who have suffered debilitating injuries.
Not just the fighting is costly. Since counter-insurgency operations are based on winning support from the population, the U.S. government is dedicated to utterly transforming an impoverished rural and tribal society. The Pentagon, not to mention civilian “aid” agencies, is supporting better governance, freer elections, and expanded education of girls; underwriting construction of additional schools, hospitals, roads, electricity projects, paying to train police and “build capacity” in the Afghan government, and even helping to expand cell phone coverage and internet access. Worthy endeavors all, but matters for America’s Department of Defense?
Indeed, “Transition” is all the rage. Allied troops are supposed to come out by 2014, but the respective governments insist that the “international community” must remain involved for as long as necessary. That means more equipment, training, advice, mentoring, and money, lots of money. At least until Afghanistan is able to pay the costs, which essentially means the U.S. and Europeans will be writing checks forever.
This from heavily indebted states running deficits today and facing huge financial challenges tomorrow.
Even if a competent, honest, effective government ultimately arises in Kabul, which today looks to be the stuff of fantasy, Afghanistan should be America’s last nation-building venture. Afghans have faced far more than their share of tragedy after more than three decades at war, but there is little reason to believe that the coalition can deliver permanent peace, prosperity, and modernity no matter how much it spends. America does not have the resources to engage in social engineering in the many other poor, war-torn nations around the globe. It isn’t in the interest of Americans generally. It certainly isn’t in the interest of members of the military.
Liberty is the most important political end. There are other, higher human ends. But liberty allows us to pursue our ultimate purpose. No matter who or where we are.
SOURCE
*****************************
More Leftist disconnection from reality
Biden's audience whooped and applauded last week in Flint when he said that without Obama's jobs bill, police will be "outgunned and outmanned." (Wild applause!)
I suppose liberals would claim they were applauding because they believe Obama's jobs bill will prevent these murders. Which reminds me: Republicans believe the death penalty prevents murders! Which belief bears more relationship to reality?
In a case I have previously mentioned, Kenneth McDuff was released from death row soon after the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972 and went on to murder more than a dozen people.
William Jordan and Anthony Prevatte were sentenced to death in 1974 for abducting a teacher, murdering him and stealing his car. They came under suspicion when they were caught throwing the murder weapon from the stolen vehicle in a high-speed car chase with the cops and because they were in possession of the dead man's wallet, briefcase and watch.
The Georgia Supreme Court overturned their capital sentences in an opinion by Robert H. Hall, who was appointed by Gov. Jimmy Carter.
Hall said that the death sentences had to be set aside on the idiotic grounds that the jurors had overheard the prosecutor say that the judge and state supreme court would have the opportunity to review a death sentence, which might have caused them to take their sentencing role less seriously.
(If the facts had been the reverse, the court would have overturned the death sentences on the grounds that the jurors did not take their sentencing decision seriously, under the misapprehension that no judge or court would second-guess them.)
Prevatte was later released from "life in prison" and proceeded to murder his girlfriend. Jordan escaped and has never been found.
As president, Carter appointed Hall to a federal district court.
Darryl Kemp was sentenced to death in California in 1960 for the rape and murder of Marjorie Hipperson and also convicted for raping two other women. But he sat on death row long enough -- 12 years -- for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional. He was paroled five years later and, within four months, had raped and murdered Armida Wiltsey, a 40-year-old wife and mother.
Kemp wasn't caught at the time, so he spent the next quarter-century raping (and probably murdering) a string of women. In 2002, his DNA was matched to blood found on the fingernails of Wiltsey's dead body. Although Kemp was serving a "life sentence" for rape in a Texas prison, he was months away from being paroled when he was brought back to California for the murder of Wiltsey.
His attorney argued that he was too old for the death penalty. He lost that argument, and in 2009, Kemp was again given a capital sentence. He now sits on death row, perhaps long enough for the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional again, so he can be released to commit more rapes and murders.
Dozens and dozens of prisoners released from death row have gone on to murder again. No one knows exactly how many, but it's a lot more than the number of innocent men who have been executed in America, which, at least since 1950, is zero.
What is liberals' evidence that there will be more rapes and murders if Obama's jobs bill doesn't pass? Biden claims that, without it, there won't be enough cops to interrupt a woman being raped in her own home -- which would be an amazing bit of police work/psychic talent, if it had ever happened. (That's why Americans like guns, liberals.)
Obama's jobs bill tackles the problem of rape and murder by giving the states $30 billion ... for public school teachers.
Only $5 billion is even allotted to the police, but all we keep hearing about are the rapes and murders that Democrats are suddenly against (as long as being "against" rape and murder means funding public school teachers and not imprisoning or executing rapists and murderers).
Finally, did Flint use any money from Obama's last trillion-dollar stimulus bill to hire more police in order to prevent rape and murder? No, Flint spent its $2.2 million from the first stimulus bill on buying two electric buses.
Even if what Flint really needed was buses and not cops, for $2.2 million, the city could have bought seven brand-new diesel buses and had $100,000 left over for streetlights.
Rather than reducing the rate of rape and murder, blowing money on "green" buses is likely to increase crime, since people will be forced to spend a lot more time waiting at bus stops for those two buses.
It's going to be a long wait: The "green" buses were never delivered because the company went out of business -- despite a $1.6 million loan from the American taxpayer.
But if I were a liberal, I wouldn't acknowledge these facts, or any facts. I would close my eyes, cover my ears, demand that MSNBC fire Pat Buchanan and the FCC pull the plug on Fox, and pretend to believe that taxpayer-funded "green" projects and an ever-increasing supply of public school teachers were the only things that separated us from Armageddon.
SOURCE
***************************
Pay no attention to the inflation behind the curtain
According to legend, in Czarist Russia, Grigory Potemkin constructed fake villages to make Catherine the Great believe that the countryside was tranquil and prosperous, when in fact it was chaotic and stricken with poverty.
Such it is with government economic statistics, as evidenced by the latest release of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) showing a 2.5 percent increase for the third quarter of 2011. “U.S. Economic Growth Accelerates,” blared one media headline. “Economy expands 2.5 percent in the third quarter,” heralded another.
But below the headlines, one finds the spin. The Bureau of Economic Analysis claimed the increase “primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures”.
To be certain, consumption increased by $127.4 billion out of the $185 billion increase, a peak behind the numbers finds that only $10.1 billion was for durable goods. $28.9 billion was for non-durable goods: $8.1 billion was increased gas and energy consumption, $9.6 billion for food and beverages, and $3.1 billion for clothing.
The lack of increased good purchases is also indicated by the $24.3 billion shrinking trade deficit. While exports increased $31.6 billion, imports only increased by $7.3 billion. Slower imports indicates slowing consumer spending on actual goods, not accelerating.
Another portion of the increase was $88.4 billion for services. But, again, the increases come in necessities: $25.2 billion for housing and utilities, $31.2 billion for health care, $11.5 billion for food services and accommodations, and $6.7 billion for financial services and insurance.
With existing home sales taking a plunge and prices flat to falling, the increase for “housing and utilities” can largely be attributed to the increased cost of utilities. The same can be said for the $8.1 billion increase for gas and energy, and the overall $21 billion increase for food and food services. In short, prices are increasing.
Other data bears this out. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is up 3.9 percent at an annualized rate overall for all items, including food by 4.7 percent and energy by 19.3 percent. If one takes out food and energy, the CPI is only growing annualized by 2 percent.
As for producer prices, those have been way up, too, growing at an annualized rate of 6.9 percent in September — it was 7 percent and 6.5 percent in July and August, respectively. All of which accounts for the $46.1 billion increase for equipment purchases.
Meanwhile, when government reports “core” inflation, they leave out food and energy price increases, and as a result, when it reports GDP it leaves those numbers in. This results in prices appearing to be relatively “stable” while the economy is “growing,” when in fact, prices are fluctuating and growth is slowing.
That is the real story behind the numbers that will go underreported in the mainstream media. This is not growth accelerating at all. It’s inflation.
America’s equivalent of the Potemkin Village was L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” tale criticizing monetary policy, in which famously the “Wizard” urges Dorothy and her friends to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
True to form, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is probably hoping nobody peaks behind the GDP press release curtain.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Friday, October 28, 2011
Conservatives ARE more squeamish than liberals: Study finds right-wingers are more easily disgusted
This is a good confirmation of Haidt's research about the greater moral complexity of conservatives and shows why Leftists are unmoved by such things as abortion and Communist mass-murder. They really are emotionally deficient. Like psychopaths, their only real emotion is hate
How easy do you find it to look at revolting images such as a man eating worms? If the answer is 'difficult', it might offer an insight into your politics.
Scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln showed 50 volunteers a series of 38 disgusting images - including one of a man eating worms (the actual image is pictured, right).
Others included an incredibly emaciated body, a bloody wound and an open sore with maggots in it, as well as human excrement floating in a toilet.
The researchers then measured the electrical 'disgust' response in the skin of their 50 volunteers. When people are disgusted, their reaction causes a measurable change in the electrical conductivity in their skin. It's a 'disgust' response that cannot lie.
They found, as they had predicted, that people who expressed strong conservative political views had a far stronger disgust response. People who were repulsed by the images were particularly likely to disapprove of gay marriage.
The researchers accept that people of all political hues are unlikely to accept their ideas - people like to imagine their political views are rational, rather than physical.
But they pointed out that it's far more likely that the disgust response could influence a person's politics than the other way round.
The researchers wrote, 'Individuals with marked involuntary responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images.'
Sex-related issues appeared to be most strongly influenced by the 'disgust' response - a primitive instinct designed to protect people from disease.
The researchers suggest that basic, physical responses might be closely tied to our politics. Interestingly, that suggests that politics could be influenced far more strongly by genetic factors than previously believed. [That is already well-confirmed]
'Mounting evidence points to the relevance of subconscious factors in political decision-making situations,' wrote the researchers.
SOURCE
In the evolutionary scheme of things, disgust about homosexuality and incest obviously has survival value as both are detrimental to reproduction. As Haidt has shown, conservatives have the full set of emotional responses; Leftists do not
**********************
Romney's brainless threat to China
Jeff Jacoby points out that China benefits all Americans, but particularly the poor. He might also have added that it is utter lunacy to deliberately attack such a large and important country as China
IN HIS 2010 BOOK No Apology, Mitt Romney has a lot to say about China, much of it unfavorable. He writes of Beijing's "brutal repression and incarceration of dissidents." He decries the brazenness of Chinese enterprise, with its "rampant theft of intellectual property from Western businesses." He warns that China's "aggressive pursuit" of cyber-warfare capabilities has made it "the most active cyber-combatant in the world." He details the ominous Chinese military buildup in combat aircraft, submarines, and ballistic missiles. He laments the communist government's willingness to shield the odious regimes in Iran and Sudan from international sanction.
Nevertheless, Romney's criticism of China has its limits. Nowhere in his book does he characterize China as a hostile trade foe, or condemn its currency policies as "cheating," or call for the imposition of protectionist tariffs.
Yet on the presidential campaign trail these days, the former Massachusetts governor routinely slams the Chinese government, vowing that on "Day One" as president he'll designate China a "currency manipulator" and impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. "We've allowed China to just walk all over us," Romney fumed during an interview with Sean Hannity the other day. He dismisses concerns about starting a trade war with America's largest foreign creditor. The only "alternative to confronting China," he wrote this month, "is allowing the Chinese to take by trade surrender what we fear to lose in a trade war."
Whipping up resentment against foreign trading partners is a time-honored way for candidates of both parties to score cheap political points. Romney's China-bashing today is reminiscent of the Japan-bashing that candidates like Pat Buchanan and Dick Gephardt sought to ride to the White House a generation ago. What makes this candidate's protectionist rabble-rousing so disappointing is that he knows perfectly well how superficial and spurious it is.
The vehement line of attack Romney keeps up against China today is absent from the manifesto he published last year. In No Apology, Romney emphasized protectionism's self-destructiveness. "US companies faced with … less costly products from overseas have to make one of two choices," he wrote. One is to improve their own technology and productivity; the other is to "argue for protection, hold on as long as possible, and slowly watch their market share wane." Far from endorsing vigorous presidential action against foreign competitors, he faulted George W. Bush and Barack Obama for yielding to protectionist special pleading. The Obama administration's punitive tariffs on Chinese tires may have been "good politics," Romney declared, "but it is decidedly bad for the nation and our workers. Protectionism stifles productivity."
It may be true, as Romney and others claim, that China artificially undervalues its currency, thereby making Chinese goods less expensive to import than they otherwise would be. It's easy to understand why some manufacturers might not happy about that, but for US consumers generally China's policy is a blessing. "By keeping the value of its currency low, Beijing enables Americans to stretch our dollars farther," economist Donald Boudreaux remarks. "This results in significant improvements in living standards" -- especially for poor and working-class Americans. Does Romney really think that's a bad thing?
And does he really believe it's in the US interest to hold the threat of new tariffs over the heads of Chinese manufacturers? Romney's "Day One" threat to slap higher duties on Chinese imports is just another way of saying that if China doesn't force Americans to pay more for made-in-China products, Washington will. Tariffs are taxes, and they will do more than hurt millions of American shoppers for no good reason. They will also penalize innumerable businesses that rely on imported goods and materials, and the myriad of employees, managers, and shareholders whose economic welfare is linked to those businesses' success.
As it happens, the value of China's currency has appreciated by around 30 percent in recent years and is likely to keep climbing. But from an American perspective, it shouldn't matter whether imports from China cost less because Beijing manipulates the yuan, because Chinese manufacturers have access to abundant raw materials, or because of a new technology that turbocharges Chinese productivity. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is the same: lower prices for US consumers. And lower prices aren't something from which Americans need to be rescued by politicians.
"When I see an American company challenged by a foreign competitor," Romney wrote in his book, "I don't look for protectionist policies as an answer to the company's problems." If only that Romney were the one running for president.
SOURCE
*******************************
Obama Rules, Budget Woes Spur Medicaid Benefit Cuts
A medical student checks on a patient in the hallway of the emergency room at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Washington state changed its... View Enlarged Image
Critics who worried ObamaCare would lead to rationing may be seeing their fears realized sooner than they expected. Recently, Washington state changed its Medicaid program so that recipients may only go to the emergency room three times per year for "nonemergency" conditions.
The initiative is expected to save about $72 million over two years. Yet the conditions that are considered nonemergent under the program include chest pains, asthma and abdominal pains.
"Many of the people who exceed the three-visit limit are people with chronic conditions or generalized complaints who are going much more often to the emergency room and are clearly aware that it is not an emergency," said Jim Stevenson, communications director for the Health Care Authority, which oversees Medicaid in Washington. "The hope is to move them into primary care."
State Medicaid recipients can still go to the ER after three visits, but could be charged if it's nonemergent.
Dr. Nathan Schlicher, spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, worries that "patients who have hit the three-visit limit could be discouraged from going to the emergency room when they have something serious. We're talking about some pretty serious medical conditions."
ACEP has filed a lawsuit to block the three-visit limit.
But the simple fact is that Medicaid is an ever-growing share of state budgets. With budgets strained, governments have sought ways to reduce expenses.
Earlier this year, Washington reduced the rates that Medicaid pays to providers. Thirteen other states have also cut rates: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia.
California cut rates 10%, but that's been suspended pending a legal challenge. The Golden State also limited Medicaid recipients to seven doctors visits per year.
Late last year Arizona stopped letting Medicaid pay for certain transplant surgeries.
Expect more rationing to sicker patients because doing so poses few risks to politicians, one analyst suggests.
"When health care systems are politically controlled, politicians direct resources away from the seriously ill who need expensive advanced medical care, to the healthy voter," said Linda Gorman, a senior fellow at the conservative Independence Institute. "Relatively few voters need advanced care, so catering to the healthy makes political sense."
Since 2009, states have faced new rules that prevent them from reducing their Medicaid eligibility standards. The 2009 stimulus provided short-term cash to shore up Medicaid, but states had to agree to never cut their eligibility levels or risk losing the federal funding. And when ObamaCare fully kicks in, states will have to expand Medicaid to 133% of the federal poverty level.
Also, the congressional deficit "supercommittee" may be looking at ways to cut Medicaid.
So states can't lower eligibility rates and many have cut already-low Medicaid reimbursements. As a result, they increasingly are turning to slashing benefits.
Washington state says it doesn't want Medicaid patients to feel they can't get emergency care.
"If Medicaid clients feel they are having an emergency, they should go to the ER," said Stevenson, adding, "If a patient has a nonemergent condition but the ER physician feels there was a strong reason for it to be an exception to the rule, there is a process in place so it can be challenged."
Schlicher replied, "There is very limited criterion under which physicians can do that. There is no check box that says, 'I think this was this was a reasonable emergency.'"
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
The euthanasia of the saver: "Given that the Fed’s official policy is to drive all interest rates to near zero, one may conclude that the Fed seeks to impoverish the widows, orphans, retired people, and all other financially untutored people who rely on interest earnings to support themselves in their old age or adversity. Can a crueller official policy be imagined, short of grinding up these unfortunate souls to make pet food or fertilizer?"
The TSA’s gingerbread man: "Yet now the agency’s adding software to protect privacy it swears didn’t need protecting. The software supposedly substitutes a generic figure that resembles a genderless gingerbread-man for the picture of our naked bodies the scanners produced -- pictures the TSA’s 'area director' in Denver, Colorado, admitted 'were graphic, no doubt about it.' Mr. Gingerbread appears on the monitor as a stand-in for all passengers, or so claims the TSA, which lies about everything, all the time; yellow boxes highlight any contraband. If you leave your cell-phone in your hip pocket, Mr. G blushes yellow there."
It’s 100% certain that OWS don’t represent 99%: "The claim ‘we are the 99%’ really represents the renunciation of politics and an embrace of cheap moralising. And what is even more disturbing than the protesters’ claim to represent 99% of people is the credibility given to it by the media."
The real Solyndra scandal: "The unfolding collapse of solar cell maker Solyndra surely reflects poorly on the Obama administration and its drive to build a 'green economy.' That said, many media reports have made both too much and too little of Solyndra. The real scandal is the general propensity of politicians to hand out subsidies to favored interests. Any honest look at the facts reveals plenty of political blame to go around."
Ten years of trading liberty for security: "Today the Patriot Act is hardly controversial. In an era of detentions without trial, assassinations of American citizens without due process, enhanced interrogation techniques, perpetual and expanding wars, unchecked executive surveillance, and federal officials groping and irradiating passengers by the many thousands every day, it even seems a bit quaint, perhaps, to reflect on the Patriot Act, many of whose worst provisions have now become sewn into the unquestioned tapestry of American governance." (10/26/11)
Student loans: "If we were searching for cosmic justice, who should suffer? I guess a lot of people are saying that the students who took out loans should not suffer. For now, let's assume that this is correct. Should the lenders suffer? It's popular to hate banks, but it's hard to see what they did wrong here."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
This is a good confirmation of Haidt's research about the greater moral complexity of conservatives and shows why Leftists are unmoved by such things as abortion and Communist mass-murder. They really are emotionally deficient. Like psychopaths, their only real emotion is hate
How easy do you find it to look at revolting images such as a man eating worms? If the answer is 'difficult', it might offer an insight into your politics.
Scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln showed 50 volunteers a series of 38 disgusting images - including one of a man eating worms (the actual image is pictured, right).
Others included an incredibly emaciated body, a bloody wound and an open sore with maggots in it, as well as human excrement floating in a toilet.
The researchers then measured the electrical 'disgust' response in the skin of their 50 volunteers. When people are disgusted, their reaction causes a measurable change in the electrical conductivity in their skin. It's a 'disgust' response that cannot lie.
They found, as they had predicted, that people who expressed strong conservative political views had a far stronger disgust response. People who were repulsed by the images were particularly likely to disapprove of gay marriage.
The researchers accept that people of all political hues are unlikely to accept their ideas - people like to imagine their political views are rational, rather than physical.
But they pointed out that it's far more likely that the disgust response could influence a person's politics than the other way round.
The researchers wrote, 'Individuals with marked involuntary responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images.'
Sex-related issues appeared to be most strongly influenced by the 'disgust' response - a primitive instinct designed to protect people from disease.
The researchers suggest that basic, physical responses might be closely tied to our politics. Interestingly, that suggests that politics could be influenced far more strongly by genetic factors than previously believed. [That is already well-confirmed]
'Mounting evidence points to the relevance of subconscious factors in political decision-making situations,' wrote the researchers.
SOURCE
In the evolutionary scheme of things, disgust about homosexuality and incest obviously has survival value as both are detrimental to reproduction. As Haidt has shown, conservatives have the full set of emotional responses; Leftists do not
**********************
Romney's brainless threat to China
Jeff Jacoby points out that China benefits all Americans, but particularly the poor. He might also have added that it is utter lunacy to deliberately attack such a large and important country as China
IN HIS 2010 BOOK No Apology, Mitt Romney has a lot to say about China, much of it unfavorable. He writes of Beijing's "brutal repression and incarceration of dissidents." He decries the brazenness of Chinese enterprise, with its "rampant theft of intellectual property from Western businesses." He warns that China's "aggressive pursuit" of cyber-warfare capabilities has made it "the most active cyber-combatant in the world." He details the ominous Chinese military buildup in combat aircraft, submarines, and ballistic missiles. He laments the communist government's willingness to shield the odious regimes in Iran and Sudan from international sanction.
Nevertheless, Romney's criticism of China has its limits. Nowhere in his book does he characterize China as a hostile trade foe, or condemn its currency policies as "cheating," or call for the imposition of protectionist tariffs.
Yet on the presidential campaign trail these days, the former Massachusetts governor routinely slams the Chinese government, vowing that on "Day One" as president he'll designate China a "currency manipulator" and impose tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. "We've allowed China to just walk all over us," Romney fumed during an interview with Sean Hannity the other day. He dismisses concerns about starting a trade war with America's largest foreign creditor. The only "alternative to confronting China," he wrote this month, "is allowing the Chinese to take by trade surrender what we fear to lose in a trade war."
Whipping up resentment against foreign trading partners is a time-honored way for candidates of both parties to score cheap political points. Romney's China-bashing today is reminiscent of the Japan-bashing that candidates like Pat Buchanan and Dick Gephardt sought to ride to the White House a generation ago. What makes this candidate's protectionist rabble-rousing so disappointing is that he knows perfectly well how superficial and spurious it is.
The vehement line of attack Romney keeps up against China today is absent from the manifesto he published last year. In No Apology, Romney emphasized protectionism's self-destructiveness. "US companies faced with … less costly products from overseas have to make one of two choices," he wrote. One is to improve their own technology and productivity; the other is to "argue for protection, hold on as long as possible, and slowly watch their market share wane." Far from endorsing vigorous presidential action against foreign competitors, he faulted George W. Bush and Barack Obama for yielding to protectionist special pleading. The Obama administration's punitive tariffs on Chinese tires may have been "good politics," Romney declared, "but it is decidedly bad for the nation and our workers. Protectionism stifles productivity."
It may be true, as Romney and others claim, that China artificially undervalues its currency, thereby making Chinese goods less expensive to import than they otherwise would be. It's easy to understand why some manufacturers might not happy about that, but for US consumers generally China's policy is a blessing. "By keeping the value of its currency low, Beijing enables Americans to stretch our dollars farther," economist Donald Boudreaux remarks. "This results in significant improvements in living standards" -- especially for poor and working-class Americans. Does Romney really think that's a bad thing?
And does he really believe it's in the US interest to hold the threat of new tariffs over the heads of Chinese manufacturers? Romney's "Day One" threat to slap higher duties on Chinese imports is just another way of saying that if China doesn't force Americans to pay more for made-in-China products, Washington will. Tariffs are taxes, and they will do more than hurt millions of American shoppers for no good reason. They will also penalize innumerable businesses that rely on imported goods and materials, and the myriad of employees, managers, and shareholders whose economic welfare is linked to those businesses' success.
As it happens, the value of China's currency has appreciated by around 30 percent in recent years and is likely to keep climbing. But from an American perspective, it shouldn't matter whether imports from China cost less because Beijing manipulates the yuan, because Chinese manufacturers have access to abundant raw materials, or because of a new technology that turbocharges Chinese productivity. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is the same: lower prices for US consumers. And lower prices aren't something from which Americans need to be rescued by politicians.
"When I see an American company challenged by a foreign competitor," Romney wrote in his book, "I don't look for protectionist policies as an answer to the company's problems." If only that Romney were the one running for president.
SOURCE
*******************************
Obama Rules, Budget Woes Spur Medicaid Benefit Cuts
A medical student checks on a patient in the hallway of the emergency room at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Washington state changed its... View Enlarged Image
Critics who worried ObamaCare would lead to rationing may be seeing their fears realized sooner than they expected. Recently, Washington state changed its Medicaid program so that recipients may only go to the emergency room three times per year for "nonemergency" conditions.
The initiative is expected to save about $72 million over two years. Yet the conditions that are considered nonemergent under the program include chest pains, asthma and abdominal pains.
"Many of the people who exceed the three-visit limit are people with chronic conditions or generalized complaints who are going much more often to the emergency room and are clearly aware that it is not an emergency," said Jim Stevenson, communications director for the Health Care Authority, which oversees Medicaid in Washington. "The hope is to move them into primary care."
State Medicaid recipients can still go to the ER after three visits, but could be charged if it's nonemergent.
Dr. Nathan Schlicher, spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, worries that "patients who have hit the three-visit limit could be discouraged from going to the emergency room when they have something serious. We're talking about some pretty serious medical conditions."
ACEP has filed a lawsuit to block the three-visit limit.
But the simple fact is that Medicaid is an ever-growing share of state budgets. With budgets strained, governments have sought ways to reduce expenses.
Earlier this year, Washington reduced the rates that Medicaid pays to providers. Thirteen other states have also cut rates: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia.
California cut rates 10%, but that's been suspended pending a legal challenge. The Golden State also limited Medicaid recipients to seven doctors visits per year.
Late last year Arizona stopped letting Medicaid pay for certain transplant surgeries.
Expect more rationing to sicker patients because doing so poses few risks to politicians, one analyst suggests.
"When health care systems are politically controlled, politicians direct resources away from the seriously ill who need expensive advanced medical care, to the healthy voter," said Linda Gorman, a senior fellow at the conservative Independence Institute. "Relatively few voters need advanced care, so catering to the healthy makes political sense."
Since 2009, states have faced new rules that prevent them from reducing their Medicaid eligibility standards. The 2009 stimulus provided short-term cash to shore up Medicaid, but states had to agree to never cut their eligibility levels or risk losing the federal funding. And when ObamaCare fully kicks in, states will have to expand Medicaid to 133% of the federal poverty level.
Also, the congressional deficit "supercommittee" may be looking at ways to cut Medicaid.
So states can't lower eligibility rates and many have cut already-low Medicaid reimbursements. As a result, they increasingly are turning to slashing benefits.
Washington state says it doesn't want Medicaid patients to feel they can't get emergency care.
"If Medicaid clients feel they are having an emergency, they should go to the ER," said Stevenson, adding, "If a patient has a nonemergent condition but the ER physician feels there was a strong reason for it to be an exception to the rule, there is a process in place so it can be challenged."
Schlicher replied, "There is very limited criterion under which physicians can do that. There is no check box that says, 'I think this was this was a reasonable emergency.'"
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
The euthanasia of the saver: "Given that the Fed’s official policy is to drive all interest rates to near zero, one may conclude that the Fed seeks to impoverish the widows, orphans, retired people, and all other financially untutored people who rely on interest earnings to support themselves in their old age or adversity. Can a crueller official policy be imagined, short of grinding up these unfortunate souls to make pet food or fertilizer?"
The TSA’s gingerbread man: "Yet now the agency’s adding software to protect privacy it swears didn’t need protecting. The software supposedly substitutes a generic figure that resembles a genderless gingerbread-man for the picture of our naked bodies the scanners produced -- pictures the TSA’s 'area director' in Denver, Colorado, admitted 'were graphic, no doubt about it.' Mr. Gingerbread appears on the monitor as a stand-in for all passengers, or so claims the TSA, which lies about everything, all the time; yellow boxes highlight any contraband. If you leave your cell-phone in your hip pocket, Mr. G blushes yellow there."
It’s 100% certain that OWS don’t represent 99%: "The claim ‘we are the 99%’ really represents the renunciation of politics and an embrace of cheap moralising. And what is even more disturbing than the protesters’ claim to represent 99% of people is the credibility given to it by the media."
The real Solyndra scandal: "The unfolding collapse of solar cell maker Solyndra surely reflects poorly on the Obama administration and its drive to build a 'green economy.' That said, many media reports have made both too much and too little of Solyndra. The real scandal is the general propensity of politicians to hand out subsidies to favored interests. Any honest look at the facts reveals plenty of political blame to go around."
Ten years of trading liberty for security: "Today the Patriot Act is hardly controversial. In an era of detentions without trial, assassinations of American citizens without due process, enhanced interrogation techniques, perpetual and expanding wars, unchecked executive surveillance, and federal officials groping and irradiating passengers by the many thousands every day, it even seems a bit quaint, perhaps, to reflect on the Patriot Act, many of whose worst provisions have now become sewn into the unquestioned tapestry of American governance." (10/26/11)
Student loans: "If we were searching for cosmic justice, who should suffer? I guess a lot of people are saying that the students who took out loans should not suffer. For now, let's assume that this is correct. Should the lenders suffer? It's popular to hate banks, but it's hard to see what they did wrong here."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Obama uses executive powers to get past Congress
For President Obama, it was something akin to a public policy hat trick. "We can't wait for Congress to do its job. So where they won't act, I will," President Obama told students at the University of Colorado-Denver.
During a three-day Western trip that ended Wednesday, Obama announced initiatives that could help 1.6 million college students repay their federal loans, 1 million homeowners meet their mortgage payments, and 8,000 veterans find jobs.
The Democratic president did this with nary a negotiation with congressional Republicans. Like many of his predecessors in the White House, he got past Congress the old-fashioned way: He spurned it.
"We can't wait for Congress to do its job. So where they won't act, I will," Obama told students at the University of Colorado-Denver. "We're going to look every single day to figure out what we can do without Congress."
On all three initiatives, Obama used his executive authority rather than seeking legislation. That limited the scope of his actions, but it enabled him to blow by his Republican critics.
"It's the executive branch flexing its muscles," presidential historian and author Douglas Brinkley says. "President Obama's showing, 'I've still got a lot of cards up my sleeve.'"
The cards aren't exactly aces, however. Unlike acts of Congress, executive actions cannot appropriate money. And they can be wiped off the books by courts, Congress or the next president.
Thus it was that on the day after Obama was inaugurated, he revoked one of George W. Bush's executive orders limiting access to presidential records.
On the very next day, Obama signed an executive order calling for the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility in Cuba to be closed within a year. It remains open today.
Harry Truman's federal seizure of steel mills was invalidated by the Supreme Court. George H.W. Bush's establishment of a limited fetal tissue bank was blocked by Congress. Bill Clinton's five-year ban on senior staff lobbying former colleagues was lifted eight years later — by Clinton.
"Even presidents sometimes reverse themselves," says Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University. "Generally speaking, it's more symbolic than substantive."
Not in all cases. Executive orders have been used to make major policies since George Washington's first order in 1789. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt protected 130 million acres of land and created five national parks. Franklin Roosevelt established internment camps during World War II. Gerald Ford used a presidential proclamation to pardon Richard Nixon in 1974.
They're also used in situations such as the one Obama faces today, with a contrarian Congress blocking legislation. Truman foresaw that trouble for his Republican successor, Dwight Eisenhower, who was coming to the Oval Office after having served as a five-star Army general. "He'll sit here, and he'll say, 'Do this! Do that!' And nothing will happen," Truman said.
Clinton used the tactic in 1998 during the Whitewater scandal, which was crippling his chances of moving legislation through a Republican Congress. His emphasis on executive orders led White House aide Paul Begala to quip in The New York Times: "Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool."
Obama's latest strategy serves as a way to take what limited actions he can while putting pressure on Congress to go further and pass pieces of his $447 billion jobs bill. Senate Republicans have blocked such action, and the House won't consider it.
"Rarely have we had a greater temptation or need or desire to do this," says congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, pointing to Republicans' efforts to stop Obama's agenda.
"It shows a strong, vigorous president," says David Abshire, a former counselor to Ronald Reagan who heads the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. "From a leadership point of view, it's a win-win."
Others see the move toward executive orders as blatantly political. "If they are valuable and they are legal, why didn't he do this two years ago?" says Todd Gaziano, director of legal and judicial studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The White House says there's more to come. "This president is not going to sit around," says communications director Dan Pfeiffer. "You're going to see the administration pick up the pace."
Obama has used executive orders to set ethics rules, clarify labor laws, promote diversity in the workplace and discourage texting while driving. He's also frozen foreign assets invested in the U.S. from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia and Syria.
This week's actions came in areas controlled largely by Congress, such as housing and education. As a result, their impact will be more limited. The veterans employment initiative, for instance, amounts largely to challenging community health centers to hire them.
"You can cajole, you can encourage, you can do anything you want," Light says. "You can encourage the Washington Redskins to win, but that ain't going to do it."
SOURCE
*********************************
Obama's Great Depression
The president is following in Herbert Hoover's footsteps
Last week the White House picked a Virginia fire station as the venue for the president's principal campaign stop—er, legislative sales pitch. The choice was apt. At roughly the same time the president was lamenting how "cities and states like Michigan and New Jersey . . . have had to lay off big chunks of their forces," Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, "It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers."
Oh. Guess you can go home now, Wall Street occupiers! All those unemployment reports? False alarms.
To be fair to Reid—which may be more than he deserves—he was defending the part of the American Jobs Act that would appropriate $35 billion for state and local government hiring. That might help offset the savage cuts of the past year, except for one thing: The cuts have not been that savage. From September of last year to this past month, state and local payrolls have shrunk by 260,000 positions out of more than 20 million. That comes to roughly 1 percent of the work force.
The situation looks much worse for the private sector. It has added jobs at an anemic rate in the past few months, but it still has far to go before it claws its way back to the employment peak of November 2007. At that time total non-government employment stood at 124 million. It's now 109 million. Barack Obama has joined George W. Bush in a dubious category. They are the only two presidents besides Herbert Hoover to see the number of job-holding Americans decline on their watch.
The parallels with Hoover don't end there. It's commonly believed Hoover took a hands-off approach to the country's economic distress, and that his administration's tight-fisted refusal to spend prolonged the misery. But Hoover was about as stingy with a government dollar as "Jersey Shore" is with hairspray.
Hoover increased federal spending by more than 50 percent, signed the biggest peacetime tax increase to that point, lavished money on public works, and signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariff. FDR slammed Hoover's "reckless and extravagant" spending and accused him of wanting to "center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, denounced Hoover for "leading the country down the path of socialism."
Hoover's massive government interventionism did not end the Great Depression. George W. Bush's rapid spending increases did not forestall the current malaise. And the massive government outlays of the past three years—federal spending has increased 30 percent; despite layoffs, state and local spending has grown, not shrunk—have not cured the country's economic ills, either. Yet the answer, say countless voices in the prestige press, is to stop Washington's ruinous "austerity" and start spending.
How many moons orbit the planet they're living on? If a $900 billion spending hike is austerity, what in the world does extravagance look like?
Actually, it looks something like the $440,000 Washington spent on a museum for antique bikes. Or the half-million-dollar federal outlay for beautifying decorative rocks. Those are some of the things Sen. John McCain recently urged Congress to stop using tax dollars for—along with the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky and a giant coffee pot in Pennsylvania—on the theory that maybe the money could be used better elsewhere. The Senate didn't buy it, and last Wednesday his colleagues shot down his proposal 59-39.
This kind of thinking shows why the congressional super-committee has deadlocked. The super-committee is supposed to hash out a deal by Thanksgiving to reduce the deficit. According to the narrative in the prestige press, blame for the impasse falls on the GOP's tax intransigence. Democrats won't agree to spending cuts until Republicans agree to revenue hikes, goes the story, and Republicans are fanatical. But that narrative—like Hoover's austerity and the austerity of this summer's recent budget deal—is a myth. Given the recent spending explosion, blaming the GOP for not meeting Democrats halfway is like blaming the victim of a mugging who hands over 95 dollars and then refuses to go halfsies on the last five bucks. Man, what kind of selfish jerk isn't willing to meet his opponent halfway?
As even The New York Times conceded a couple of months ago, "There is something you should know about the deal to cut federal spending that President Obama signed into law on Tuesday: It does not actually reduce federal spending. By the end of the 10-year deal, the federal debt would be much larger than it is today. Indeed, both the government and its debts will continue to grow faster than the American economy."
That story also noted, "The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal debt is likely to exceed 100 percent of the nation's annual economic output by 2021." Well. According to the latest figures, U.S. debt is on track to exceed GDP by Halloween—this Halloween.
Herbert Hoover would be proud.
SOURCE
***************************
Secret ballot elections? Not if the NLRB has its way
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) finds itself in the news again as a federal court ruled that its lawsuit against the states of Arizona and South Dakota can move ahead.
The heinous crime committed by these states (along with South Carolina and Utah, which are not being sued) that drew the ire of the NLRB? The people of these states had the audacity to overwhelmingly vote in favor of state constitutional amendments last November that ensures workers secret ballot union elections.
That’s right; our federal government is suing states because they want to protect their citizen’s right to one of the most fundamental of all American principles — the ability to keep their vote secret.
In the what’s-up-is-down world of the Obama Administration, protecting the secret ballot election when deciding whether workers want to unionize brings the hammer of an NLRB lawsuit down upon you.
After all, their Big Labor political allies just spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeking to convince Congress to allow them to shelve secret ballot elections all together, so after failing that, it is only logical that the Obama NLRB would sue states that protected them.
Now, Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC) has stepped into the fray introducing legislation that would specifically allow states to protect their resident’s secret-ballot rights. The Duncan bill already has 38 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives is designed to protect workers right to choose whether to join a union or not.
More HERE
*****************************
ELSEWHERE
More fool them: Banks lose 50% of what they lent to the Greeks: "Eurozone leaders have sealed a three-part deal, which they hope will convince markets they have an effective response to the growing economic crisis. In the early hours of this morning, officials in Brussels said an accord had been reached with banks on a 50 per cent write-off of Greek debt, and they had also approved a complex mechanism for 'leveraging' an existing bailout fund to boost its firepower. It means that, coupled with an earlier decision to recapitalise vulnerable banks, the summit has delivered on the package it promised.
DC: “Lemonistas” charges dropped: "Three people arrested in August for selling lemonade on U.S. Capitol grounds were set free after the charges were dropped Monday in D.C. Superior Court. Blogger Meg McLain, one of the women arrested at the Aug. 20 lemonade stand, along with New Hampshire activists Will Duffield and Katherine Dill, said they were facing up to a year in jail when the judge told the group the case was dismissed."
Krugman’s space aliens won’t create jobs, repealing health control law will: "What do you think will help decrease unemployment and underemployment? What role do you think the government can, or should, play in encouraging job growth? Space aliens attack! Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman says we need scientists to 'fake an alien threat.' 'A massive buildup to counter' the threat, real or not, would end the economic slump 'in eighteen months,' he said. Dr. Krugman unwittingly shows how loony Keynesian economic 'stimulus' schemes are."
US government getting snoopier and snoopier, says Google: "Government authorities in the United States showed an increased interest in Google account holders in the first half of 2011, according to a report released Tuesday by the search giant. The report showed that 5,950 requests for information were made by U.S. government authorities during the first six months of this year, compared to 4,601 requests during the last six months of last year -- an increase of 29 percent."
Report: DoJ could ignore FOIA requests: "A longtime internal policy that allowed Justice Department officials to deny the existence of sensitive information could become the law of the land -- in effect a license to lie -- if a newly proposed rule becomes federal regulation in the coming weeks. The proposed rule directs federal law enforcement agencies, after personnel have determined that documents are too delicate to be released, to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests 'as if the excluded records did not exist.' Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, says the move appears to be in direct conflict with the administration's promise to be more open"
Why I decided to publish directly through Amazon: "Amazon’s print-on-demand service (through subsidiary CreateSpace) assures that supply always meets demand by eliminating the guesswork inherent in legacy publishing and thus the risks associated with printing thousands of copies of something that might not sell and could be left to rot away in a warehouse. Amazon brings to market good books that might otherwise be left to rot away on a hard drive because the market for them was considered too small (or nonexistent) or they were considered too risky. By doing so, Amazon encourages writers to write what they want to write, not what the publishers think they can sell to the most people"
Stopping the HHS database!: "Another ObamaCare abomination has recently come into light. I know, I know, you're as surprised as I was. This time, it's a rule that allows Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services to create a national database by forcing insurance companies to turn over YOUR private health records. ... This breach of doctor-patient confidentiality puts your information at risk."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
For President Obama, it was something akin to a public policy hat trick. "We can't wait for Congress to do its job. So where they won't act, I will," President Obama told students at the University of Colorado-Denver.
During a three-day Western trip that ended Wednesday, Obama announced initiatives that could help 1.6 million college students repay their federal loans, 1 million homeowners meet their mortgage payments, and 8,000 veterans find jobs.
The Democratic president did this with nary a negotiation with congressional Republicans. Like many of his predecessors in the White House, he got past Congress the old-fashioned way: He spurned it.
"We can't wait for Congress to do its job. So where they won't act, I will," Obama told students at the University of Colorado-Denver. "We're going to look every single day to figure out what we can do without Congress."
On all three initiatives, Obama used his executive authority rather than seeking legislation. That limited the scope of his actions, but it enabled him to blow by his Republican critics.
"It's the executive branch flexing its muscles," presidential historian and author Douglas Brinkley says. "President Obama's showing, 'I've still got a lot of cards up my sleeve.'"
The cards aren't exactly aces, however. Unlike acts of Congress, executive actions cannot appropriate money. And they can be wiped off the books by courts, Congress or the next president.
Thus it was that on the day after Obama was inaugurated, he revoked one of George W. Bush's executive orders limiting access to presidential records.
On the very next day, Obama signed an executive order calling for the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility in Cuba to be closed within a year. It remains open today.
Harry Truman's federal seizure of steel mills was invalidated by the Supreme Court. George H.W. Bush's establishment of a limited fetal tissue bank was blocked by Congress. Bill Clinton's five-year ban on senior staff lobbying former colleagues was lifted eight years later — by Clinton.
"Even presidents sometimes reverse themselves," says Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University. "Generally speaking, it's more symbolic than substantive."
Not in all cases. Executive orders have been used to make major policies since George Washington's first order in 1789. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt protected 130 million acres of land and created five national parks. Franklin Roosevelt established internment camps during World War II. Gerald Ford used a presidential proclamation to pardon Richard Nixon in 1974.
They're also used in situations such as the one Obama faces today, with a contrarian Congress blocking legislation. Truman foresaw that trouble for his Republican successor, Dwight Eisenhower, who was coming to the Oval Office after having served as a five-star Army general. "He'll sit here, and he'll say, 'Do this! Do that!' And nothing will happen," Truman said.
Clinton used the tactic in 1998 during the Whitewater scandal, which was crippling his chances of moving legislation through a Republican Congress. His emphasis on executive orders led White House aide Paul Begala to quip in The New York Times: "Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool."
Obama's latest strategy serves as a way to take what limited actions he can while putting pressure on Congress to go further and pass pieces of his $447 billion jobs bill. Senate Republicans have blocked such action, and the House won't consider it.
"Rarely have we had a greater temptation or need or desire to do this," says congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, pointing to Republicans' efforts to stop Obama's agenda.
"It shows a strong, vigorous president," says David Abshire, a former counselor to Ronald Reagan who heads the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. "From a leadership point of view, it's a win-win."
Others see the move toward executive orders as blatantly political. "If they are valuable and they are legal, why didn't he do this two years ago?" says Todd Gaziano, director of legal and judicial studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The White House says there's more to come. "This president is not going to sit around," says communications director Dan Pfeiffer. "You're going to see the administration pick up the pace."
Obama has used executive orders to set ethics rules, clarify labor laws, promote diversity in the workplace and discourage texting while driving. He's also frozen foreign assets invested in the U.S. from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia and Syria.
This week's actions came in areas controlled largely by Congress, such as housing and education. As a result, their impact will be more limited. The veterans employment initiative, for instance, amounts largely to challenging community health centers to hire them.
"You can cajole, you can encourage, you can do anything you want," Light says. "You can encourage the Washington Redskins to win, but that ain't going to do it."
SOURCE
*********************************
Obama's Great Depression
The president is following in Herbert Hoover's footsteps
Last week the White House picked a Virginia fire station as the venue for the president's principal campaign stop—er, legislative sales pitch. The choice was apt. At roughly the same time the president was lamenting how "cities and states like Michigan and New Jersey . . . have had to lay off big chunks of their forces," Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, "It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers."
Oh. Guess you can go home now, Wall Street occupiers! All those unemployment reports? False alarms.
To be fair to Reid—which may be more than he deserves—he was defending the part of the American Jobs Act that would appropriate $35 billion for state and local government hiring. That might help offset the savage cuts of the past year, except for one thing: The cuts have not been that savage. From September of last year to this past month, state and local payrolls have shrunk by 260,000 positions out of more than 20 million. That comes to roughly 1 percent of the work force.
The situation looks much worse for the private sector. It has added jobs at an anemic rate in the past few months, but it still has far to go before it claws its way back to the employment peak of November 2007. At that time total non-government employment stood at 124 million. It's now 109 million. Barack Obama has joined George W. Bush in a dubious category. They are the only two presidents besides Herbert Hoover to see the number of job-holding Americans decline on their watch.
The parallels with Hoover don't end there. It's commonly believed Hoover took a hands-off approach to the country's economic distress, and that his administration's tight-fisted refusal to spend prolonged the misery. But Hoover was about as stingy with a government dollar as "Jersey Shore" is with hairspray.
Hoover increased federal spending by more than 50 percent, signed the biggest peacetime tax increase to that point, lavished money on public works, and signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariff. FDR slammed Hoover's "reckless and extravagant" spending and accused him of wanting to "center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, denounced Hoover for "leading the country down the path of socialism."
Hoover's massive government interventionism did not end the Great Depression. George W. Bush's rapid spending increases did not forestall the current malaise. And the massive government outlays of the past three years—federal spending has increased 30 percent; despite layoffs, state and local spending has grown, not shrunk—have not cured the country's economic ills, either. Yet the answer, say countless voices in the prestige press, is to stop Washington's ruinous "austerity" and start spending.
How many moons orbit the planet they're living on? If a $900 billion spending hike is austerity, what in the world does extravagance look like?
Actually, it looks something like the $440,000 Washington spent on a museum for antique bikes. Or the half-million-dollar federal outlay for beautifying decorative rocks. Those are some of the things Sen. John McCain recently urged Congress to stop using tax dollars for—along with the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky and a giant coffee pot in Pennsylvania—on the theory that maybe the money could be used better elsewhere. The Senate didn't buy it, and last Wednesday his colleagues shot down his proposal 59-39.
This kind of thinking shows why the congressional super-committee has deadlocked. The super-committee is supposed to hash out a deal by Thanksgiving to reduce the deficit. According to the narrative in the prestige press, blame for the impasse falls on the GOP's tax intransigence. Democrats won't agree to spending cuts until Republicans agree to revenue hikes, goes the story, and Republicans are fanatical. But that narrative—like Hoover's austerity and the austerity of this summer's recent budget deal—is a myth. Given the recent spending explosion, blaming the GOP for not meeting Democrats halfway is like blaming the victim of a mugging who hands over 95 dollars and then refuses to go halfsies on the last five bucks. Man, what kind of selfish jerk isn't willing to meet his opponent halfway?
As even The New York Times conceded a couple of months ago, "There is something you should know about the deal to cut federal spending that President Obama signed into law on Tuesday: It does not actually reduce federal spending. By the end of the 10-year deal, the federal debt would be much larger than it is today. Indeed, both the government and its debts will continue to grow faster than the American economy."
That story also noted, "The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal debt is likely to exceed 100 percent of the nation's annual economic output by 2021." Well. According to the latest figures, U.S. debt is on track to exceed GDP by Halloween—this Halloween.
Herbert Hoover would be proud.
SOURCE
***************************
Secret ballot elections? Not if the NLRB has its way
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) finds itself in the news again as a federal court ruled that its lawsuit against the states of Arizona and South Dakota can move ahead.
The heinous crime committed by these states (along with South Carolina and Utah, which are not being sued) that drew the ire of the NLRB? The people of these states had the audacity to overwhelmingly vote in favor of state constitutional amendments last November that ensures workers secret ballot union elections.
That’s right; our federal government is suing states because they want to protect their citizen’s right to one of the most fundamental of all American principles — the ability to keep their vote secret.
In the what’s-up-is-down world of the Obama Administration, protecting the secret ballot election when deciding whether workers want to unionize brings the hammer of an NLRB lawsuit down upon you.
After all, their Big Labor political allies just spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeking to convince Congress to allow them to shelve secret ballot elections all together, so after failing that, it is only logical that the Obama NLRB would sue states that protected them.
Now, Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC) has stepped into the fray introducing legislation that would specifically allow states to protect their resident’s secret-ballot rights. The Duncan bill already has 38 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives is designed to protect workers right to choose whether to join a union or not.
More HERE
*****************************
ELSEWHERE
More fool them: Banks lose 50% of what they lent to the Greeks: "Eurozone leaders have sealed a three-part deal, which they hope will convince markets they have an effective response to the growing economic crisis. In the early hours of this morning, officials in Brussels said an accord had been reached with banks on a 50 per cent write-off of Greek debt, and they had also approved a complex mechanism for 'leveraging' an existing bailout fund to boost its firepower. It means that, coupled with an earlier decision to recapitalise vulnerable banks, the summit has delivered on the package it promised.
DC: “Lemonistas” charges dropped: "Three people arrested in August for selling lemonade on U.S. Capitol grounds were set free after the charges were dropped Monday in D.C. Superior Court. Blogger Meg McLain, one of the women arrested at the Aug. 20 lemonade stand, along with New Hampshire activists Will Duffield and Katherine Dill, said they were facing up to a year in jail when the judge told the group the case was dismissed."
Krugman’s space aliens won’t create jobs, repealing health control law will: "What do you think will help decrease unemployment and underemployment? What role do you think the government can, or should, play in encouraging job growth? Space aliens attack! Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman says we need scientists to 'fake an alien threat.' 'A massive buildup to counter' the threat, real or not, would end the economic slump 'in eighteen months,' he said. Dr. Krugman unwittingly shows how loony Keynesian economic 'stimulus' schemes are."
US government getting snoopier and snoopier, says Google: "Government authorities in the United States showed an increased interest in Google account holders in the first half of 2011, according to a report released Tuesday by the search giant. The report showed that 5,950 requests for information were made by U.S. government authorities during the first six months of this year, compared to 4,601 requests during the last six months of last year -- an increase of 29 percent."
Report: DoJ could ignore FOIA requests: "A longtime internal policy that allowed Justice Department officials to deny the existence of sensitive information could become the law of the land -- in effect a license to lie -- if a newly proposed rule becomes federal regulation in the coming weeks. The proposed rule directs federal law enforcement agencies, after personnel have determined that documents are too delicate to be released, to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests 'as if the excluded records did not exist.' Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, says the move appears to be in direct conflict with the administration's promise to be more open"
Why I decided to publish directly through Amazon: "Amazon’s print-on-demand service (through subsidiary CreateSpace) assures that supply always meets demand by eliminating the guesswork inherent in legacy publishing and thus the risks associated with printing thousands of copies of something that might not sell and could be left to rot away in a warehouse. Amazon brings to market good books that might otherwise be left to rot away on a hard drive because the market for them was considered too small (or nonexistent) or they were considered too risky. By doing so, Amazon encourages writers to write what they want to write, not what the publishers think they can sell to the most people"
Stopping the HHS database!: "Another ObamaCare abomination has recently come into light. I know, I know, you're as surprised as I was. This time, it's a rule that allows Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services to create a national database by forcing insurance companies to turn over YOUR private health records. ... This breach of doctor-patient confidentiality puts your information at risk."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
