Earth Day and the Great "Sustainability" Lie

By Alan Caruba

Americans are paying the hangman for the rope.

It is estimated that since the origin of the global warming hoax in the late 1980s, Americans have seen $50 billion of their dollars thrown down the climate change rat hole.

In a January CNSnews commentary, Elizabeth Harrington noted that “A study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the United States (has been) funding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ authority on alleged man-made global warming, with $31.1 million since 2001, nearly half of the panel’s annual budget.”

“In a Nov. 17, 2011 report, ‘International Climate Change Assessments: Federal Agencies Should Improve Reporting and Oversight of U.S. Funding’, the GAO found that the State Department provided $19 million for administrative and other expenses, while the United States Global Change Research Program provided $12.1 million in technical support through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSP), averaging an annual $3.1 million to the IPCC over 10 years--$31.1 million so far.”

The forthcoming UN Rio+20 IPCC international conference in June will switch course from the discredited global warming hoax in favor if its fundamental agenda, the imposition of a global government that reflects the UN’s goal of a worldwide socialist economy. The sovereignty of individual nations will be subject to the dictates of a small group of UN bureaucrats.

The theme will be “sustainability.”

There is a reason that the upcoming Earth Day, April 22nd, falls on the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the former Soviet Union’s first dictator. Everything associated with the environmental movement has communism as its basis.

In February, KPMG, a Swiss entity and “a global network of professional firms providing audit, tax and advisory services” operating in 152 countries, held a conference that attracted “more than 600 top CEOs and senior business leaders from many of the world’s major corporations.” It was held in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nationals Environmental Programme. Among those attending were former President Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It issued a report, “Business Perspective on Sustainable Growth: Preparing for Rio+20 and offered recommendations “to scale-up investment in sustainable development, provide strong price signals on resource scarcity and environmental impacts” and “deliver new platforms for public-private collaboration at the international and national levels.”

In other words, the UN is laying the groundwork to ensure that its bogus sustainability agenda will offer enough inducements to the global business community to ensnare them in its control.

In an article by Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post, he characterized Rio+20 saying, “It’s as if the high priests of Occupy the Planet and the Green Apocalypse—having run their old socialist and environmental engines into the ground—have stumbled across a new set of rationalizations and slogans.”

As if the Obama administration hasn’t wasted billions on its green energy agenda, funding one failed renewable energy company after another, the White House Council on Environmental Quality announced in March that it will sponsor its third annual “GreenGov” Symposium September 24-26 in Washington, D.C.

“The Symposium will bring together leaders from government, the private sector, non-profits and academia to identify opportunities to create jobs, grow clean energy industries, and curb pollution by incorporating sustainable practices into the Federal Government’s operations.” If this wasn't so ludicrous, I'd laugh, but these are the lies the Obama administration wants you to believe.

And people wonder why President Obama killed the Keystone XL pipeline, imposed an illegal moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and his administration has issued fewer leases for the exploration and extraction of oil on federal lands than any other.

Throw in the Environmental Protection Agency’s war on the coal industry, and the Interior Department’s limits on access to federal land known to contain uranium deposits for the nuclear energy industry, and you begin to see how our own government is conspiring to leave the United States of America bereft of the energy reserves that we have in abundance!

The nation’s energy needs and its dollar are being weakened in order to eliminate it as the only real deterrent to the United Nation’s, Russia’s and China’s global ambitions.

The Earth has not warmed in fourteen years and it is not running out of energy reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas.

As the global warming hoax is shelved, the sustainability hoax is being rolled out and will be on full display June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro conference when the usual suspects and charlatans gather to plot the continuation of their socialist revolution.

There is not one single reason why the U.S. taxpayer should be contributing to this communist cabal and conference.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

President Liar, Year One 2008-2009

By Alan Caruba

After years of hearing liberals tell us that any criticism of President Obama is because he is Black, it seems to me they ought to admit that he got elected because he is Black. In the interest of accuracy, he is half-Black and half-White. I say this because the media has now begun calling the shooter of Trayvon Martin a “White-Hispanic.”

Beyond that, it was apparent to anyone watching and listening to Barack Obama that a moron was running for office; one willing to say anything for five minute’s advantage. He literally lied his way into the Oval Office.

One need only revisit Obama’s campaign and his first year in office to grasp how audacious his capacity for lying was and is.

In June 2008 he was boasting that he was “the only candidate who isn’t taking a dime from Washington lobbyists” at the same time his fundraising team included 38 members of law firms that had earned $138 million to lobby the federal government. He had 79 “bundlers”, five of them billionaires, who tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each.

On October 24, 2008, Charles Krauthammer wrote “First, I will have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.” Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, on October 31, 2008, wrote “If Barack Obama is not a Socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.” So, yes, we were warned and, yes, a majority of voters refused to acknowledge the obvious.

An editorial in the January 8, 2009 Daily Mail, a British daily, characterized Obama’s ascent to power as a “Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality” adding that it was a victory for Hollywood, for “a man who is no friend of freedom”, “a victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than family” and presciently, “a victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation.”

Following his election Obama was being either ignorant or deliberately lying when he told a November 2008 Governor’s Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles that “Few challenges facing America—and the world—are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Not one single word of this was true and, a year later in 2009, a cache of emails between so-called climate scientists revealed that global warming was a hoax based on phony computer models Moreover, a perfectly natural warming cycle had already ended in 1998!

Is there anyone who does not know that Obama’s stimulus plan turned out to be a massive and costly failure? The answer is yes and some of them will vote for Obama in November. Lenin called them "useful idiots."

By February 2009, Bradley R. Schiller, a professor of economics, writing in The Wall Street Journal wrote “President Barack Obama has turned fear-mongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package. This fear-mongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics.”

As voters ready themselves to vote in November, it would be wise to revisit the way Obama hid his true past from them in 2008 and since. His college records were sealed, his Indonesian adoption records were sealed, his passport file was sealed and, of course, his official birth records were sealed. He has since provided a birth certificate that an investigation by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently asserted was a complete forgery. His first executive order in office was to put these and other documents off limits to public examination.

As 2009 came to a close, virtually all of Obama’s initiatives were in shambles, not the least of which was his foreign policy and, in particular, his Middle East policy. He alienated Israel and the Arab League refused to provide any kind of peace gesture. Despite efforts to soften the public perception of Palestinians, they are still shelling Israel with rockets from Gaza.

By the time 2009 was history, Obama had given the Queen of England an iPod preloaded with 40 show tunes, bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, praised Marxists Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez, announced he would meet the Iranians with no pre-conditions, announced the termination of the U.S. space program the day after the North Koreans tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, wanted to try CIA agents on charges of torturing terrorists, wanted a civil trial for the mastermind of 9/11, and wanted to shut down Guantanamo. He put a card-carrying Communist and admitted tax cheats part of his administration, and that’s just the short list!

In lieu of the likelihood that Obamacare, to which he devoted his first year in office, will be struck down by the Supreme Court, his open microphone gaff in which he urged the Russians to wait until he is reelected so he can give them more U.S. missile technology secrets and reduce our nuclear arsenal, and countless other deceptions, Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, described  his tete-a-tete with Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev as “creepy.”

“What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith,” wrote Noonan.

As millions of Americans still struggle with unemployment, the rolls of Food Stamp recipients grow, the mortgage crisis continues, gas prices increase, and much of the world holds Obama in contempt, the lies just keep coming, the class and race warfare is being ramped up, and media chatteratti continue to talk up his chances of being reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Little Green Morons

By Alan Caruba

Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, holds degrees in economics and finance from West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Coming Clean—Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal”, published in 2008 by the Sierra Club.

Recently, Brune bragged that he and the board had turned “away millions of dollars”, noting that “It sounds crazy” and explaining why. In 2010 Brune learned that, “beginning in 2007 the Sierra Club had received more than $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries of Chesapeake Energy, one of the country’s largest natural gas companies.”

This may come as a surprise to many, but a lot of energy companies and manufacturers who use a lot of energy give a lot of money to the Sierra Club. If this “sounds crazy”, it is because, presumably the Sierra Club is in business to put them out of business. In fact, Chesapeake Energy’s donations were for the Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign, an energy competitor to Chesapeake.

The fact that the Club’s Executive Director could brag about turning away millions in donations suggests that he wasn’t paying attention in college while studying economics and finance---or that like so many environmentalists, he is a moron. Or just a hypocrite. Time magazine revealed the actual story in its February 2nd edition. The Sierra Club was shilling for Chesapeake Energy.

And, yes, the corporations that give millions to the Sierra Club or give in to its demands are morons, too. In his previous job at the Rainforest Action Network, for seven years Brune led assaults on Home Depot, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Kinko’s Boise and Lowe’s. To put it another way, to hell with corporate jobs, dividends to investors, and profits with which to grow. Saving the rainforest came first. Cutting down a tree does not mean another one will not grow in the same place.

And now, at the Sierra Club, apparently the new battle is against natural gas. Can it get any more stupid? Like millions of Americans, my home of more than sixty years was heated by gas and the kitchen stove used gas. It was cheaper and cleaner than coal. As this is being written vast new reserves of natural gas are being found all over the nation, but as far as the Sierra Club is concerned, drilling for it poses risks “to our air, water, climate, and people in their communities.” Short of putting your head in the oven and turning on the gas, there are no significant risks and haven’t been any in the sixty years or so that “fracking” has been used to access natural gas.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is set to become a net exporter of liquefied natural gas by 2016 according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. It expects a cumulative increase in U.S. natural gas production through 2036.

To suggest otherwise is a form of environmental dementia reflected in their fear and hatred of every form of energy, be it oil,  coal, natural gas, or nuclear. To quote Brune, if it “sounds crazy”, it probably is.

If you want to know what’s crazy, it’s the Ohio Environmental Council praising First Energy Corporation “for its plan to permanently close six coal-fired plants.” Yippee! Who needs plants that have the capacity to generate 2,700 megawatts of electricity—enough to power more than 600,000 homes? Who needs the jobs and revenue they also generate? And who needs the electricity? First Energy has read the writing on the wall that says the Environmental Protection Agency is determined to close down every coal-fired plant in America, even if they currently produce FIFTY PERCENT OF ALL THE ELECTRICITY!

Just how stupid, how moronic are environmentalists?

One way to answer is to look at the Obama administration’s track record when it comes to “green energy.”

Recently the President was seen leaving an event promoting clean energy in a motorcade of twenty-two (22) gas-guzzling vehicles. Well, do as Obama says, not as Obama does.

After three years of the most astonishingly stupid and wasteful green energy policies inflicted on Americans, it is hard keeping score of the various beneficiaries of government largess that are going bankrupt.

The most famous at this point is Solyndra that went belly up taking a half billion in loan guarantees—taxpayer funded—with it. Beacon Power, a green energy storage plant, filed for bankruptcy last fall took with it $43 million of more Department of Energy loan guarantees. Ener1, touted during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden—who inadvertently called it “Enron1”—filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The electric car battery maker had received a $118 million grant from the Obama administration.

Since then, Evergreen Energy, a manufacturer of batteries for electric cars and recipient of “stimulus” funds also filed for bankruptcy. Amonix, Inc., a manufacturer of solar panels that had received $5.9 million in “stimulus” was stimulated to cut two thirds of its workforce, some 200 employees, barely seven months after opening a factory in Nevada.

The Obama administration has been hot for electric cars and hybrids. They are costly and you would have to drive one for a decade or two to amortize the sticker price with fuel savings. They have proved to be a big money-loser for auto manufacturers. At this point, only about 3% of all the cars sold in America are electric or gas-electric hybrids.

There’s more, but I won’t bore you with the trail of bad government loan guarantees and grants, more wasted “stimulus” millions.

The lesson here is that any organization, government agency, or company claiming to be “green” is composed of morons, charlatans or a combination of both.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Destroying America by Denying Access to Energy

By Alan Caruba

It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.

Obama’s decision to reject a permit for Canada’s XL Keystone pipeline is just one example. It is a job-killer and a revenue-killer. There are thousands of pipelines serving America’s energy needs and the XL Keystone pipeline would ensure that Canada’s own vast energy reserves would flow to America. It is one of our key trade partners and Obama has slapped it in the face.

In early January, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, announced a new 20-year, million-acre ban on uranium mining for federal lands in Arizona, despite the fact that these lands hold the highest-grade of known uranium deposits in the United States. It is an outrage that a new GOP-Congress will have to overturn if the nation is to be assured of sufficient uranium to power its nuclear plants and for weapons development. If the ban remains, these uranium resources would be inaccessible until 2023!

Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that Salazar’s announcement “further compounds a man-made energy crisis that has been planned and executed in Washington, D.C.”

At the same time we are learning of enormous natural gas discoveries that can reduce our energy bills and turn sleeping little towns into boomtowns, environmental organizations have launched a vast propaganda campaign against “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for more than fifty years. Their claims about dangers to the nation’s supply of fresh water are baseless. Their claims that fracking has caused earthquakes in Ohio are absurd.

Need it be said that the Environmental Protection Agency has turned its eyes on fracking and is working on a report due later this year that will likely call for harsh crackdowns on its use and more regulations to throttle the expansion of natural gas extraction?

The EPA has just released a report of those power plants that top the list of its regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There is no basis in science to justify the reduction of CO2. Indeed, since it is a gas on which all vegetation depends, much as oxygen is vital to all animal life, reducing it would impair great crop yields and healthier forests.

These regulations are based on the global warming hoax that blamed CO2 for warming the earth. That is utterly false. The Earth is currently in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and the climate of the Earth is almost entirely based on the Sun—solar radiation—along with the actions of oceans, clouds, and even volcanic activity that spews tons of particulates into the atmosphere.

Coal-fired power plants account for fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Fifty percent! And yet the EPA is determined to shut down dozens of them providing that vital factor in the lives of all Americans and the economy, nor does this take into account the billions that energy producers have spent to upgrade their technology to reduce emissions.

The Obama administration fuel economy agenda, a call for 54.5 miles per gallon ignores simple physics. There is a finite amount of energy a gallon of gas can generate. If you dilute it with ethanol as is currently required, you get even less mileage. The administration is trying to circumvent Congress by issuing standards based on regulating “greenhouse gas emissions”, but there is no need for this. It is a false argument. The Center for Automotive Research says that the proposed new standards would cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase by more than $11,000.

Americans and the nation’s future are being victimized by Obama administration policies. The 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, was released on January 12th by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, measures the many factors that contribute to the economic health of a nation—things like property rights, regulatory efficiency, open markets, free trade and labor policies.

Economic freedom is declining worldwide as governments try to spend their way out of the global recession. The United States fell to 10th place. In 2009 it ranked 6th, in 2010 it was 8th, and in 2011, it was 9th.

We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Green Energy Fail

By Alan Caruba

Watching Secretary of Energy Steven Chu face nearly five hours of grilling by a congressional committee seeking answers to the multi-billion dollar loss taxpayers have taken after the department dispensed their money in pursuit of its Green energy program was a reminder that ideology is not a substitute for reality.

Dr. Chu received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his work at Bell Labs, shared with colleagues, on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. At the time he was appointed to head the Department of Energy, he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkley. He also had gained notice as an environmental enthusiast advocating a shift away from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas and oil—to combat “climate change.”

At one point Dr. Chu thought that painting roofs and other structures white would help reflect the sun’s radiation and save the nation and the world from global warming. Another nutty idea of his was a global “glucose economy” to create a “low-carbon economy” by shipping glucose from tropical plants would replace oil, the energy source that fuels transportation worldwide and serves a multitude of other uses.

Why any of this nonsense qualified him to be the chief administrator of the Department of Energy defies understanding. A footnote to this is the fact that the Department was the creation of the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter whose “windfall profits” legislation drove much of the oil industry out of America despite the fact that the U.S. sits atop some of the greatest deposits of oil in the world.

The loan guarantees of grants made by the Department of Energy are turning out to be a huge scandal for the Obama administration, rivaling the Department of Justice’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to the drug cartels of Mexico. When you toss in an unemployment rate that rivals that of the Great Depression, it is hard to understand why anyone would suggest that Obama will be reelected.

As reported in The Washington Post in September, “A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

This works out to $5,077.574 per job created.

We are now familiar with the Solyndra scandal, one of the companies that received loan guarantees despite grave misgivings of DOE staff members. It declared a very predictable bankruptcy as a manufacturer of solar panels. Its failure was blamed on competition from China, also a major producer of wind turbines.

Between solar and wind technology, the failure of these two Green energy producers touted by the Obama administration, is beginning to be noticed at the same time the Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on closing down coal-fired electrical power plants and the companies that mine coal.

Another DOE beneficiary was BrightSource, another solar firm which received a $1.4 billion bailout. It turns out that the DOE officials involved was Sanjay Wagle, formerly a principal in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s firm. In 2010, BrightSource whose largest shareholder was Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, had $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million.

Just how many billions the Obama administration’s Green energy program will have lost by the time they are eventually calculated will be testimony to the general failure of solar and wind power. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club is celebrating Obama’s decision to delay approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, estimated to generate 20,000 jobs.

The Department of the Interior has just delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio “for up to six months” and an industry group estimates that drilling in the Utica shale affected by the delay would produce 204,500 jobs by 2015.

In mid-November, Lisa Murkowski, a Senator from Alaska, wrote an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the Obama administration’s proposed expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico are its first concession since its moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. The administration still opposes offshore drilling on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Sen. Murkowski pointed out that “Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders,” noting that according to the Department of Interior, “our offshore areas hold more than 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Artic Oceans is projected to hold 20% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas.”

Why anyone thought Dr. Chu was qualified in any fashion to run the Department of Energy defies the imagination. Why anyone still believes that solar and wind energy can replace traditional proven sources of energy is testimony to environmental propaganda and myth-making.

Green energy is simply one more way the Obama administration has set about destroying America’s capacity to generate the energy needed for everything requiring electricity. It is one more way to impoverish the nation. And he is running for reelection in 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Iran's Nuclear Armageddon

By Alan Caruba

During the long years of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union faced off against each other, both having an arsenal of nuclear weapons. Only once, during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, did the prospect of a real threat to the homeland arise. After a U.S. naval blockade was imposed, the Russians took their missiles home.

The key factor was that the Russian leaders were not suicidal. They were not crazy. They fully understood what it would mean to actually use nuclear weapons or be on the receiving end of them.

The Iranian ayatollahs are a different case entirely. Over the years, they have voiced a rather nonchalant attitude toward being on the receiving end of nuclear weapons because they are a Shiite martyrdom cult. During its eight-year war with Iraq, initiated by Saddam Hussein, an estimated 500,000 Iranians died, including 100,000 children sent to clear mine fields by setting them off.

The failure to grasp the depth and insanity of the current leaders of Iran is pushing the world toward the first nuclear confrontation since A-bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War II in 1945.

Yoram Ettinger, a former Israel consul general in Houston, Texas, warns that “Iran’s geostrategic goals are energized by its current Islamic zeal, viewing jihad (holy war) as the permanent state of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, while peace and cease-fire accords are tenuous.”

So, when the Israelis shared intelligence with President Obama in mid-November that the Iranians “will already have five nuclear bombs or warheads” by late March 2012, it raised the stakes for President Obama and the nation.

We already know Obama wants a reduction in nuclear arms. He signed a treaty with the Russians to achieve this. He refused to permit missiles to be based in Poland, presumably for the same reason. The surface to air missiles, however, could have deterred any missiles headed toward Europe.

I have absolutely no confidence in Obama when it comes to the preemptive action that must be taken against Iran’s nuclear and military facilities in order to end a threat that even the President acknowledged in a recemt Hawaii press conference would be directed not just at Israel, but at the United States as well.

The stakes just don’t get any higher and this President has not demonstrated any backbone except to okay the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the man behind the attack on 9/11. That was a no-brainer.

I don’t know what military assets and options we have in the Persian Gulf, but if an attack to deter an Iranian nuclear threat is undertaken either by Israel or together, we will likely need a lot of them.

Military observers have concluded that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz that provides access to and from the Persian Gulf, thus putting enormous strain on the provision of Middle East oil that flows through the Straits on a daily basis, not just from Iran, but from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq. An estimated 40% of all seaborne oil passes through the Strait, the equivalent of 20% of the total amount of oil traded worldwide. If closed, it would drive the cost of oil to stratospheric heights.

The failure of the U.S. to develop its own extensive oil reserves will prove to be a massive strategic error. The delay of a proposed Canadian oil pipeline to deliver oil to the U.S. is just one small element of this failure.

In an August 6, 2009 Jerusalem Post article, Anne Bayefsky of EyeontheUN.org wrote, “The Iranians have already called Obama’s bluff. An Iranian newspaper referred to the American agenda on July 20 this way: ‘The Obama administration is prepared to accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran…they have no long-term plan for dealing with Iran. Their strategy consists of begging us to talk to them.”

Ultimately it will be Israel’s call if U.S. leaders fail to step up to the task and, in the judgment of the Iranians, the U.S. will not. The Israelis have no choice.

In February 2010 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, addressing a crowd celebrating the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran,said  “Iran is now a nuclear state.”

The world is rapidly running out of time to prevent an Iranian Armageddon.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

This Way to the Poorhouse

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Why the US Credit Rating Was Downgraded

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011.

Obama's War on Oil, Coal, and America

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

White House Official Spokesman

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an administration that is imploding.

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Greens Really Believe

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Sudden Surfeit of Bullies

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba

Fortune Tellers, Tarot Readers, and Me

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011