America Elected an Ignoramus

By Alan Caruba

I do not write unpleasant things about Barack Hussein Obama because he is a Democrat, a far-left liberal ideologue, a confirmed liar, or the sock-puppet of whatever cabal that chose him long ago to be the President. I write unpleasant things because he is all of these things, but also because he is the most stupid man to have ever held the office of President.

As far back as January 2, 2010 I wrote that Obama had “a make-believe life” because there was no proof that anything he claimed in his two memoirs, written by the age of 45, was true. His resume listed “community organizer”, an amorphous term that could mean anything, as his primary occupation. By October 2010 the Washington Times published a commentary of mine that said “millions of Americans are beginning to ask: Is President Obama just a moron?”

Even prior to his election, he had ensured that his entire paper trail of birth certificates, passports, college records, and other items most people can produce in under five minutes were “sealed” from public review, despite the fact that most modern presidents have had to submit their personal records, short of a colonoscopy exam, for examination. Among his first executive orders was one issued on January 21, 2009 to ensure none of these records saw the light of day.

When he finally produced a birth certificate, forensic analysts deemed it a forgery.

So, what really occurred on Election Day in 2008 was that a majority of voters, guided by an adoring mainstream press, elected an enigma. He rewarded their obsequiousness by being the first President since Grover Cleveland to not attend their annual Gridiron dinner.

Since then, anyone paying any attention has had to conclude that Americans elected an ignoramus, based solely on his own words and actions.

Here’s just a quick look at some of them.

Hans Bader, a scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, addressed recent examples of Obama’s ignorance when he mocked Republicans as members of the Flat Earth Society in Columbus’ day for their skepticism of his green energy policies, among which was a hearty endorsement of algae—pond scum, but Columbus’ contemporaries knew the Earth was round, but doubted he could reach Asia via the Atlantic Ocean. Bader noted that Obama “falsely attributed to Muslims the invention of printing and even falsely claimed that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States as a new nation.”

The problem for many Americans, mostly registered Democrats and self-identified liberals is that his gaffes are dismissed despite the evidence that his policies have proved to be huge failures. His “stimulus” program wasted billions without producing any jobs, shovel-ready or not. We still have an 8.2% unemployment rate.

The fate of Obamacare will be decided shortly by the Supreme Court after 26 States brought suit against it as unconstitutional, but Obama, who was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law, apparently has not read the document, claiming the judges are “unelected” (they are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) and therefore have no right to pass judgment despite Marbury v Madison that established the Court’s role of judicial oversight.

Obama’s disdain and contempt for just about everyone except Muslims is astonishing. He has insulted just about every element of American society and many world leaders. In ways large and small this has been a constant element of his presidency. After gratuitously insulting doctors, bankers, and the insurance industry, he pushed hard to provide the planner of 9/11 a civil trial without all the protections afforded by the Constitution—in New York City.

Between January and July 2009, Obama sent a bust of Winston Churchill back to the British embassy. He gave the Queen of England an iPod with 40 show tunes, photos of his inauguration, and two of his speeches. Former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was given a box set of 25 DVDs, all in a format that does not work in England. Later, eager to empty Guantanamo, he authorized the transfer of some detainees to a British protectorate, Bermuda, without consultation with the UK.

Obama’s contempt for Catholics has long been on display before the Obamacare demand that they jettison their consciences regarding the sanctity of human life. His nomination of Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic apostate, as Secretary of Health and Human Services earned her a warning from Bishop Joseph Naumann not to present herself for Holy Communion.

His antipathy for Israel and its Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu has been on display from the beginning of his term, at one point admonishing the Israelis for building new housing in their own capitol and at another suggesting they retreat to their 1967 borders, a suicidal notion that Israelis found appalling.

At one point he said, “One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify issues.” His campaign motto was “Yes we can.”

Early on, he sent Air Force One to do a low fly-by of New York City for a photo op, neglecting to tell anyone there and generating 9/11 flashbacks and panics. Then he embarked on a global trip that quickly was dubbed his “apology tour” for an America about which he could little good to cite. At one point, he actually bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. We do not dip our flag to any other and no U.S. President bows to any other state leader, let alone a monarch.

His ignorance has been on display for so long the public hardly takes notice. “I’ve now been in 57 states. I think one left to go,” he said during his 2008 campaign. He referred to “Austrian” as a language when no such language exists; Austrians speak German.

His ignorance of economics is legendary. He referred to a “profit and earnings ratio” when the correct term is price-to-earnings (P/E). He still thinks that, as long as the Federal Reserve can print money out of thin air, the nation can never go broke.

He actually believes the economy will improve if taxes are increased; something that has never before happened in the history of the nation.

Whole books can and will be written about Obama’s ignorance and failures of judgment that Americans will have to live with for a very long time, especially as future generations try to dig out from his tripling of the national debt, the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression, and a housing market that has yet to have rebounded.

Add in gas prices Americans have never seen since gasoline was invented to power our cars and you have a man who is not what he claims to be and is too stupid to be the President of the United States, let along serve as a White House tourist guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

System Failure on a Global Scale

By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The World is Having a Nervous Breakdown

By Alan Caruba

If one has been in the habit of reading history then the events of the past and of the present inform each other. For this reason, it occurred to me that the world is once again having a nervous breakdown.

It’s not just about money, though surely the nations of Europe along with the U.S. have spent themselves into the poorhouse in ways that defy the imagination. If it weren’t so serious, it would be comical to see the desperation that has led our Federal Reserve to print money backed by nothing and to watch the central bankers of Europe move gobs of euros around between the new mother church, Germany, and the banks of Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Italy so that they can pay their bills.

They’re all broke. We have individual States that have a higher GDP than Greece that have balanced their budgets. Those are usually the States whose constitutions require they balance their budget. The rest are run by governors torn between taking the federal largess intended to deprive them of more sovereignty and hoping that the next natural disaster hits the State above or below them instead.

Few arrive at a nervous breakdown overnight. It takes time and a variety of bad decisions or bad luck or both. After blaming George W. Bush and Republicans for his problems, Obama has taken to blaming bad luck. Does he even know that people have concluded the economy is now officially and completely his fault?

When he proposed Obamacare, a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. to tell them not to do it. He should have listened to them. Now we call them the Tea Party.

Obama cannot explain away having increased government spending by 50% between 2008 and 2010 while calling for higher taxes on everyone at the same time there are an estimated 14 million Americans out of work, stopped looking for work, or can’t get a job because Obamacare has so screwed up the near future that businesses are reluctant to hire anyone.

The 2008 financial crisis was 100% a government creation dating back to the establishment of Fannie Mae in 1938 to purchase mortgages from banks in order to encourage more lending, more home building, more home ownership. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ignored the timeless role of greed in banking.

Rule Number One: Almost everything the government touches, it ruins in some fashion. At the very least, it increases its cost of operation.

Rule Number Two: The government’s primary function is the defense of the nation against attack. As Ronald Reagan said, “Nobody ever started a war with us because we were too strong.”

Rule Number Three: Government exists due to its ability to tax and spend other people’s money. Spending always needs to be restrained.

Rule Number Four. Government will always produce more laws and regulations than are needed. It should be restrained. (See the U.S. Constitution).

Globally, we are just emerging from a bout of total insanity called “global warming.” This was a theory that said that something that represented 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere was trapping all the heat and would kill us unless massively reduced. That “something” is carbon dioxide, a gas on which—along with oxygen—all life depends. It is plant food; the less carbon dioxide, the less vegetation. Herbivores eat vegetation and carnivores eat herbivores. Humans, being omnivores, eat both.

The other craziness afflicting the planet is “radical” Islam. The truth is that it has been just plain old Islam for about 1400 years. There are a billion Muslims, most located in the Middle East, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Wherever they are, their non-Muslim neighbors cordially hate them because Islam teaches that all other religions are false and that those who believe them—infidels—can be killed for not being Muslims. The strange part of this is, depending on whether you’re a Shiite or Sunni, it is perfectly okay to kill other Muslims, too. Christianity went through this during the Reformation, 1517 to 1648.

When I was a child, the world went crazy and held a great big war. It involved Germany, Japan, and Italy as the “Axis” powers and just about everyone else did their best to destroy their military in every way possible. The Axis was defeated first and then, still holding out, the Empire of Japan had not one, but two, atomic bombs dropped on them before they quit.

World War Two was the direct result of Europe’s World War One. The surrender terms were so awful the Germans embraced a lunatic called Hitler and the Italians fell in love with Mussolini.

The Soviet Union came out of World War One when the Germans permitted Vladimir Lenin, a Communist, into Russia. He started a revolution and the Russians swapped a czar for a new dictator. Stalin took over from Lenin, but because communism has never worked anywhere it was tried, the Soviet Union eventually fell apart in 1991. Now a republic, the new dictator is named Vladimir Putin.

As the French say, “Plus les choses changent, ils plus elles restent les memes.” The more things change, they more they stay the same.

The world is having a nervous breakdown because institutions, religions, and political ideologies are having difficulty adjusting to the migration and growth of populations. Modern communications technologies are playing a role as well.

The chimera haunting everyone is the military capacity to inflict massive devastation and death has increased beyond the confidence of governments and people that it can be controlled without having to kill a lot of people, i.e., Iranians, in the process..

Capitalism, despite an abundance of communism still around, has triumphed, but like any system, has been subjected to a great deal of abuse, rocking the economies of the U.S., Europe, and making most other nations nervous, too.

And, finally, there are six-going-on-seven billion people on a planet that is probably not intended to have that many. It puts intense strain on everything from water to food to the sources of energy that fuel modern and developing nations.

So everyone’s on edge. Nations and continents are on edge. The world is having a nervous breakdown.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Is America Slip Sliding into Decline?

By Alan Caruba

“Slip sliding away, slip sliding away. You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away.” -- Simon and Garfunkel

The song keeps running through my mind as I watch America lose its former influence in world affairs as well as its economic power. Both are slip sliding away. In the wonderful world of punditry, a lot of us are trying to figure out where the nation is going and for now how events in the Middle East will play out.

As always, history provides a template by which to judge present times. A similar period occurred when the British Empire began its decline. At its peak it was so vast it was said “the sun never set” on it. By the 1920s, a quarter of the Earth’s land mass and its population composed the empire.

And then it all began slip sliding away.

Britain was among the winners of World War One. Its empire expanded into the Middle East to incorporate parts of the former Ottoman Empire. Britain, however, had lost the cream of an entire generation of its young men.

By the end of World War Two, England’s wealth and yet another generation had been severely diminished. Former colonies clamored for independence. The Empire shrank as independence was granted to India, Burma, and former African colonies.

.Other forces were at work to undermine the influence of both the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1950s, a military coup in Egypt stirred ideas of an Arab confederation of states. It ultimately failed, but it set in motion ideas of nationalism.

In 1945, Winston Churchill was unceremoniously replaced by Clement Atlee, a socialist and a leader of the Labor Party. For the next six years Labor nationalized the nation’s coal mines, civil aviation, cable and wireless services, gas, electricity, railways, road transport and steel. The National Health Service, comparable to Obamacare, was introduced. In short, the British destroyed what was left of their economy by embracing the worst system for creating wealth known to man.

While Great Britain and America recognized the Soviet Union as the great threat to freedom after World War Two, both nations continued to incorporate socialism into their governmental structures and systems. In the U.S. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would swallow up and redistribute vast portions of wealth until they represented half of all the spending at the federal level. As government grew, the growth of civil service unions drained the coffers of State treasuries.

The people of the Middle East, under the sway of various monarchies and despots, developed a deep resentment of the West in general, but initially for the British. Entire nations, new colonies, had been created in the Middle East to ensure access to its huge reserves of oil and natural gas.

America did not become an empire in the British sense of the word, but it did become the world’s policeman, its navy keeping sea lanes protected and open, engaging in a series of conflicts during and after the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our Navy that in 1998 fielded sixty ships now has only twenty actively at sea.

In the 1950s, the conflict in Korea ended in a stalemate. In the 1970s, Vietnam became the first major defeat the U.S. had experienced. Too many casualties, no end in sight, Congress finally pulled the plug. It altered the way other nations perceived the world’s only superpower. Military successes in Iraq have done little to improve our standing in the world as the war in Afghanistan drags on in a fashion reminiscent of Vietnam.

Responding to environmental claims, America began to restrict access and use of its vast national reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. Prosperous nations are those that use the most energy in many ways, but the U.S. not only stopped the building of new refineries, the development of new coal mines, and exploration of new oil fields, but also thwarted the growth of the nuclear power industry. By February 2011, parts of Texas were experiencing rolling blackouts.

In a thousand different ways, an ever growing matrix of obstacles and regulation encumbers American industry, agriculture, and the development of new business enterprises with high technology was an exception. Its hardware, however, is made in Asia, not America.

The American economy was being hollowed out from within and beyond its shores with a combination of illegal immigration and “out sourcing” of jobs in an effort to remain competitive.

Largely unnoticed until the 1979 Iranian revolution, an Islamic fervor was growing in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere among its 1.3 billion adherents.

It exploded in America on September 11, 2001 though the U.S. had sustained many earlier attacks on its embassies and on the USS Cole.

It is exploding in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain. If history is any guide, these rebellions will be put down with a brutality that is also endemic to the region. The notion that these nations should be ruled by Sharia law is appalling, opening the door to a barbaric, ancient system of law more suited to the 7th century than the 21st century.

America’s influence is slip sliding away because it is presently led by a weak and hostile President, increasingly believed to be either a Muslim or sympathetic to Islam; a Marxist, ruefully acknowledged to be a complete enigma with no available documentation regarding his past or legitimacy to hold the office.

It is also under an entirely new kind of warfare. Its financial structure has been attacked and the crisis of late 2008 gives evidence of that.

Weakness or the perception of weakness invites attack. America is a great, but wounded nation being led by a president who shrinks from its superpower responsibilities and wants to spend its way out of debt; an impossibility. He must be endured for two more years while the Republicans in Congress neuter his ability to do more damage.

When it repairs itself, renewing its fundamental values, restoring its Constitutional limits, America will still have to stand guard against the forces of darkness within and beyond its gates.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

World Economy in Trouble

Understanding Obamanomics

A Vital Difference Today Between China and America

By Alan Caruba

“The joke among China hands goes like this,” says Michael Economides. “If the Americans and the Chinese start talking about a major project today, in two years the Chinese will be done and the Americans will still be talking and applying for permits.”

Economides is an internationally recognized expert on energy. The Editor-in-Chief of Energy Tribune, he is the author of “From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia”, co-authored with Donna Marie D’Aleo, published in 2008. This year has seen the publication of a new book, written with Xina Xie, a Research Professor at the University of Wyoming, “Energy: China’s Choke Point.”

The joke, as his new book makes clear, is on us. After many disastrous decades under the leadership of Chairman Mae Zedong, China in effect retained communism as its government model, but threw it away as its economic model. In effect, it embraced capitalism and, in sharp contrast to America’s economy, its economy is growing at a rate of nine percent per year.

It is doing this by building new coal-fired plants for the generation of electricity and is doing so at breakneck speed. Every week to ten days, it opens a new plant. China ranks third in the world in recoverable coal reserves after the U.S. and Russia. Fully 79 percent of its electrical energy will come from coal.

By contrast, President Obama has declared war on coal as an energy source for America despite the fact that the U.S. is virtually the Saudi Arabia of coal in terms of its recoverable reserves. Writing in September on WorldNetDaily, Jerome Corsi noted that “President Obama declared war on oil and natural gas at the United Nations global warming summit, and he made the same pitch the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.” At the time, Obama said, “I will work with my colleagues at the G20 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so that we can better address our climate challenge.”

Only there is no climate challenge. Revelations beginning on November 20 have mushroomed into “Climategate”, as it became known that the data on which the claims about “global warming” is based were deliberately falsified by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and other IPCC contributors.

There is only one way to explain Obama’s war on U.S. energy and that is the intention to destroy the nation’s capacity to power any new economic development and growth. One of the two major legislative initiatives of his administration has been “Cap-and-Trade”, in essence a huge tax on all energy use. The other, of course, is Obamacare, a healthcare industry takeover opposed by the vast majority of Americans.

Economides new book provides an excellent synopsis of China’s history in the modern era and a chilling look at the way millions died as the result of Mao’s ignorance and inability to understand how to build an economy. His “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” rendered China without the intellectual community required to teach a generation of young Chinese and played havoc on its agricultural sector.

It was his successor, Deng Xiaoping, who is credited with rescuing the nation and setting it on its present path. It has made amazing strides, but to understand China one must always keep firmly fixed in mind that it is hope to a huge part of the Earth’s population.

The most recent figures for the Peoples Republic of China put it at 1,338,612,968 as 2010 begins. Though the Han represent 92% of the population, there are many other ethnic groups and the nation, for purposes of agricultural production, are sharply divided between urban Chinese and those in its rural areas who are discouraged from leaving for better jobs and opportunities in its cities.

China not only has to feed more than a billion of its people, it needs to catch up with and even exceed economic giants like America. That will be greatly facilitated by current U.S. policies that discourage use of our own vast coal reserves and discourages exploration and extraction of huge oil and natural reserves off the long coastal areas of our continental shelf.

While America is being starved for energy—no new oil refineries or nuclear facilities have been built in three decades—China’s economy requires it to double its oil imports by 2015 from its 2009 levels. And it has some twenty nuclear facilities under construction!

Ironically, as Economides notes, “Even if it is rarely uttered explicitly, the American dream has served as the blueprint for the emerging Chinese lifestyle. For the Chinese, America has been the country to emulate in many ways, from its can-do attitude to its educational institutions to the apparent ebullience of its people, and of course, the lifestyle.”

As the American economy stagnates, “In their lives and workplaces, the Chinese today are burdened with fewer regulations than are their Western counterparts, the latter having to cope with the suffocating political correctness or moralisms that have emerged in Western societies.”

Economides bluntly warns that “although the much more advanced United States can afford to talk liberal flimflam about alternative energy luxuries, and can even attempt societal economic hara-kiri, it is clearly not an option for galloping China.”

Unless America shakes off the “liberal flimflam” denying us significant growth in our oil, coal and natural gas industries; unless we avoid the hara-kiri of Obamacare and Cap-and-Trade; unless we reduce the tax burdens on corporations and wage-earners alike, the future will belong to China.

China Will Surprise Obama

By Alan Caruba

President Obama loves to travel. He cannot wait to descend the steps from Airforce One to the sounds of welcoming bands, honor guards, and awaiting dignitaries. On his whirlwind November 13-19 trip to Asia, however, he is likely to be sternly lectured behind closed doors from Tokyo to Beijing and Seoul. It will come as a surprise to him.

That’s because he will be around grownups who don’t much like the way the United States’ economy is being overseen and directed these days. All that splash and dash that keeps Americans thinking that everything will get better doesn’t work in Asia. Worse yet, Obama will arrive with very little to offer.

Already we have seen him in his usual holier-than-thou mode lecture the Chinese on their need to extend more freedom and be more tolerant; themes that must sound naïve to his hosts who must meet the challenge of providing a better life for more than a billion Chinese.

The most amazing aspect of the story of modern China is the way, following the demise of Chairman Mao, they threw communism overboard, except politically, in favor of capitalism.

In early 2009, observers wondered if the recession that hit the United States and rippled out around the world would also set back China. By October, however, they were marveling that its aggressive stimulus had led to a growth of its GDP by 9% by its third quarter. Meanwhile, other economies, including the U.S., saw their GDP fall.

The Chinese mix caution with risk well. As The Economist noted in October, “Until recently China’s recovery was driven largely by state spending, but thanks to a rebound in construction, private-sector investment rose by 30% in the year to August, double its growth rate in December.”

Unlike the U.S. stimulus that has barely had an impact on our economy, the Chinese stimulus was directed to new infrastructure, especially railways and roads, both of which are expected to improve future productivity, moving people and goods more swiftly around the huge expanse of that nation.

Noteworthy as well has been China’s forward thinking energy program, building coal-fired plants at a brisk pace to extend electricity and, with it the prosperity that comes from affordable energy. By contrast, Obama recently visited and lauded a $150 million Florida solar power array that will only produce electricity for an average of four hours daily.

Most of America’s “shovel ready” projects are still waiting for the first shovel while most of the stimulus money spent to date was a bailout of states to cover Medicare and other federal mandated costs.

My concern is that Obama is probably clueless regarding economic issues and realities. If it doesn’t involve unions, Obama isn’t much interested in the welfare of American industry. He has even less knowledge of agriculture.

When General Motors was bailed out before and after declaring bankruptcy, Obama made sure that it was the unions that were put in charge. Quietly, Chrysler recently announced it would not be manufacturing electric cars. The auto company that refused government assistance, Ford Motors, is thriving.

Someone has probably briefed Obama on the fact that China is both America’s key trading partner and rival. China has been paying a lot of attention to trade of late, signing what Business Week described as “a bewildering variety of free-trade pacts with neighbors.” It is even making nice with Taiwan while talks are underway to liberalize trade terms with South Korea and the Persian Gulf states.

While the U.S. trade deals cover lower tariffs they also tend to incorporate all manner of other objectives such as intellectual property rights, government procurement rules, and even labor and environmental codes. The Chinese focus on more narrow, achievable goals. As Business Week noted, “Most manufactured goods made in Southeast Asia will now enter China duty-free, but goods shipped from the U.S. will still face average duties of 9%.”

Many U.S. manufacturers will decide to set up shop in Southeast Asia in order to have better access to China. Increased exports to China cushioned Japan’s economy as its exports to the U.S. plunged.

So, what is the Obama administration doing to improve the situation at home? It has proposed a healthcare “reform” to take control of one-sixth of the nation’s economy. It has a “cap-and-trade” bill that will impose higher taxes on all energy use. The proposed cap-and-trade bill will make it nearly impossible to sell one’s home without pouring thousands into it in order to meet environmental and energy conservation standards.

The first job for all Americans these days is to survive the Obama administration long enough to rescue the nation from further losses at home and abroad.

Lots of Taxes, Lots of Spending

By Alan Caruba

We sometimes forget that the primary reason we live in the United States of America and not some British Commonwealth nation is that the people who fought our Revolution got fed up with all the taxes that King George and Parliament kept imposing on them. No taxation without representation was the rallying cry.

Now all we seem to have, whether at the federal, state or local level is endless taxation on virtually everything we purchase, use or own. In many cases those taxes have risen obscenely in recent days.

The new tax on tobacco products is, we’re told, intended for our own good, making them so expensive we will give up smoking. Other proposed taxes on “fast food” and even soda are passed off as being an incentive to eat in a more healthy fashion. Our personal health is our business, not the government’s and surely not an excuse to tax us!

There have always been “sin” taxes on things like tobacco and alcoholic beverages, but thanks to the profligate spending of all legislatures everywhere, these taxes are rising to obscene levels, unrelated to anything than a desperate effort to fill gaps in the budget.

Neither the states, nor the federal government seem to understand the need to STOP SPENDING. Every new “entitlement” program, like the proposed healthcare “reform” just imposes more and more taxation, and creates larger debt.

Here’s a list of just some of the taxes we pay:

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Excise Taxes
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline TaxGross Receipts Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges re IRS Penalties
Liquor Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property TaxService Charge Tax
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax
Sales Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

In my home state of New Jersey, the tax per gallon of wine and spirits increased 25% this month. That’s about $5.50 for liquor and 87.5 cents per gallon of wine. New Jerseyeans are famous for being among the most taxed citizens in the nation. No wonder some of us drink! We have exorbitantly high property taxes, along with income and sales taxes. Born and bred here, I remain mostly out of inertia and old age.

Now, in President Obama’s words, “we’re broke” and the answer he and Congress propose is to raise taxes while increasing the national debt by trillions so that your children’s children will be born having to pay it off.

The history of the Great Depression and sheer common sense argue against this.

At the same time, the federal government is taking ownership of a large piece of the automotive industry, owns a majority interest in a huge insurance company and is owed billions in TARP money by banks, investment houses, and AIG.

The Democrats want to take over healthcare in America.

The Democrats want to put a tax on all energy use.

The Democrats are even proposing to set how much executives can be paid.

There is a word for this. It’s communism.

There has long been talk of “a flat tax” and a “value-added tax.” The former is advocated by Steve Forbes and, if he’s for it, it is probably a good idea. The latter is favored by European nations and is a form of sales tax.

The great problem with all taxes is that, once imposed, they are rarely, if ever, repealed. The profligate spending by state and federal legislatures is the problem.

What is wrong with this picture? EVERYTHING!

Obama's Big Lie: "Green" Jobs

By Alan Caruba

If there is one thing Americans began to rapidly conclude following his inauguration in January, it is that President Barack Obama lies all the time and that those lies are often blatant.

In pursuit of the “Cap-and-Trade” act that is a huge tax on all energy use in America, Obama’s favorite mantra is that massive subsidies to wind and solar energy producers, as well as biofuel producers, will generate millions of new “green” jobs. Perhaps the worst part of this lie is that they will actually destroy jobs.

In the July edition of Energy Tribune, Michael Economides and Peter Glover co-authored “Green Jobs: Fast-Tracking Economic Suicide.” I know Economides and he is internationally recognized as one of the world’s authorities on energy issues.

“Creating ex nihilo—literally, out of nothing—used to be a theological concept, God’s prerogative. Today, it seems, President Obama and certain Western politicians claim to possess the ability to do it,” write the article’s authors. “Against all the laws of economics and the marketplace, President Obama and others believe they can create millions of ‘green’ jobs ex nihilo, literally out of thin air, via cap and trade.”

There are two driving forces behind Cap-and-Trade. One is the claim that “green” energy producers will generate new jobs if the government just provides a combination of legislative mandates for its use (wind and solar) and, two, that a massive new trading apparatus in “carbon credits” for the generation of “greenhouse gas emissions” will protect the Earth against “global warming.”

It is increasingly obvious to everyone that the Earth is cooling, breaking thousands of previous records for cool weather in cities around America and similar conditions worldwide. The tide, too, is turning against the “global warming” hoax that is failing in the face of the obvious cooling weather and climate.

Using “global warming” to justify any government mandates or to empower the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” is a lie. It is a very big lie. Carbon dioxide is vital to all life on Earth.

As the Energy Tribune authors point out, “To generate real industrial jobs, however, you need a basic commodity to trade, such as oil, gas or coal.” This is in marked contrast to wind and solar energy. “The trouble is that alternative energy technologies currently don’t work. That is to say, they remain inefficient, offering a very poor energy return on investment.”

“Cut off the flow of public subsidies and the alternative energy industrial revolution would grind to a halt tomorrow.”

In the real world, in 2008 the Marcellus gas industry in Pennsylvania generated $2.3 billion in total value added, more than 29,000 jobs, and $240 million in state and local taxes. If you extrapolate that to other sectors of the energy industry, you would be looking at thousands of real jobs, not lost jobs, but President Obama and his sycophants would rather you not know about that.

If you had a choice, would you prefer to see wind, solar and biofuel energy producers receive billions in taxpayer subsidies or would you prefer to see independent energy producers permitted to extract oil and natural gas or the coal industry have access to the U.S. reserves that would provide electricity for centuries to come?

This is not mere conjecture. The experience of European Union nations demonstrates that “for every green job created, a real job is destroyed elsewhere in the economy.” Carbon regimes drive manufacturing to nations that do not impose limits on coal, oil and natural gas.

For example, “Germany’s Angela Merkel is insisting on major exemptions for German heavy industry come December’s global climate summit in Copenhagen. Merkel’s government is also supporting the building of 26 new coal-fired power plants across Germany.” Compare that with one hundred such plants whose construction was thwarted in the United States by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth.

“In June, deputy head of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, Jaroslaw Gresik, estimated that the EU’s climate policy would cost 800,000 European jobs.” Widely circulated data from a study of the heavily subsidized wind and solar energy industry in Spain revealed that its alternative energy program destroyed nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in its economy or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every ‘green job’ created. Consumers there have seen their electricity rate increase by 31 percent.

Other independent studies reveal that Obama’s claim of five million new “green” jobs would cost an estimated $500 billion to create.

Wake up, America! The Big Lie about “Green jobs” is going to cost jobs. The Cap-and-Trade bill is a massive tax increase.

The summer recess is the time to contact your Senator and Representative and tell them you oppose Cap-and-Trade. If it is passed, it will undermine the economy, cost jobs, and leave the nation increasingly dependent on the import of energy resources while our own lay underground, unexplored, untapped, unused.

Borrowing, Spending and Regulating, Oh my!

By Alan Caruba

It sometimes seems to me that the Congress and the White House are determined to put an end to the nation through a combination of exorbitant borrowing and insane spending.

At the end of May, an article in USA Today reported that “The government took on $6.8 trillion in new obligations in 2008, pushing the total owed to a record $63.8 trillion.”

These trillions reflect various retirement benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the new prescription medicine benefits. Then there are programs to aid Americans who have lost jobs, are behind on their mortgage payments, or just want to buy a new car by declaring their old one a “clunker.” When you add in the so-called “stimulus” bill, the bailout of General Motors, and the TARP bailout to financial and insurance firms, it adds up.

Robert Samuelson, a syndicated columnist, asked in May “Just how much government debt does a president have to endorse before he’s labeled ‘irresponsible’?”

While facing $63.8 trillion in obligations, Samuelson noted that “From 2010 to 2019, Obama projects annual deficits totaling $7.1 trillion; that’s atop the $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009.” It doesn’t stop there, however, “Obama’s health plan might cost $1.2 trillion over a decade; he has budgeted only $635 billion.”

Did President Obama and every member of Congress flunk arithmetic in grade school? How can they possibly believe that the actions they have taken and presumably intend to take with regard to an insane healthcare reform and massive tax on all energy use add up to anything than the total financial failure of the United States?

It adds up, according to USA Today, to “an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year…” I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $55,000 to spare. The economy has pretty much wrecked any plans I made to earn enough to cover my present expenses.

According to the Investor’s Business Daily, “American families over the last year already lost 8% of their net worth—in part as a result of inept government meddling, past and present.”

The result will be “Near-record deficits increasing at record rates (that) will push the public debt of the U.S. beyond the economy’s plausible capacity to pay—70% of GDP (Gross Domestic Profit) by 2012, heading quickly to 82% of GDP in 2019 and on pace to be astronomically higher soon thereafter.”

As someone who thanks a merciful God for the ability to check my checking and savings accounts’ balances via the Internet, all these enormous numbers and percentages tend to make my head spin. I understand them in the abstract, but I can barely get a grip on them in terms of the vast amounts of money they represent.

There are, however, still other numbers that are strangling the nation’s capacity to somehow get out of this mess.

For several years, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has taken an annual look at the growth and the cost of federal regulations. He deserves to be beatified for this task. They are published in a report titled “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.” On June 3, the latest report made its debut. Here’s a snapshot of how a nation strangles to death on regulations:

Federal agencies issued 3,380 new rules in 2008. Federal regulations ate practically 10% of what the U.S. economy produced last year. At $1.172 trillion, the cost of regulation is nearly equal with $1.2 trillion in income taxes.

Regulatory costs are a huge hidden tax. The federal government spent $2.98 trillion in 2008 and businesses spent more than a third of that amount on regulatory costs.

Crews points out that, “Rolling back regulations would constitute the deregulatory stimulus that the U.S. economy needs.

We’re all on this roller coaster together and there can be no happy ending to the ride.

Obama has Lost his Mojo

By Alan Caruba

The hours and the days speed by. It is almost five months since President Obama was sworn in. A million people gathered in Washington on a bitterly cold day to hear him and to leave behind a mountain of trash.

Granted that in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, first the White House and then the Congress panicked in the face of what looked like a total Wall Street meltdown. A frantic effort was made to secure a blank check for billions to purchase the “toxic” paper, the bundled mortgages that turned out to have no identifiable assets.

Major banks, investment houses, and a huge, international insurance company tottered on the brink of failure. Some did. Some were merged.

Americans, even the most unsophisticated, understood that such an implosion threatened the financial bedrock of the nation, but first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration said that such steps must be taken. Congress went along because they had no choice.

They did have a choice; indeed, a range of choices.

The bailed out automobile companies could and should have been allowed to proceed toward bankruptcy, a procedure which would allow them to reorganize. That would have saved taxpayers $70 billion of their money. The bailout was unconstitutional.

The banking bailouts were unconstitutional too. Public funds, treasury funds, are never to be used to favor one private entity or enterprise over another.

While it is called the Federal Reserve Bank, it is an institution in effect separate from the government that grants it the right to print money, determine interest rates, and exercise oversight over the financial health of the nation. It operates on its own set of imperatives.

Any Economics 101 student would tell you that flooding the nation and the world with dollars backed up by nothing more than “full faith and credit” is reckless and foolish. It always leads to inflation and it undermines the borrowing power of the Treasury. Top lenders like China have made it clear they will no longer underwrite the huge entitlement programs and a spending frenzy that knows no end.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are known as “government entities”, but together they own some fifty percent of all the mortgage loans issued by banking and lending institutions. Their top officers earned millions, but they are the primary cause of the collapse of the housing/mortgage bubble. Why? Because the government required banks and lending institutions to literally make bad loans. It was the law.

So Americans, whether they voted for Barack Obama or not, have arrived at a point where the man whose entire campaign was based on the promise of “hope and change” find themselves rapidly running out of jobs, money, and hope.

As credit froze up, unemployment began to increase and it is getting worse. Despite what the White House says, there is no such thing as “jobs saved” and the only jobs government can generate are government jobs.

A bogus $700 billion “stimulus” bill, promising funding of “shovel ready projects” is moving along at the pace of all government programs, very slowly. It’s not easy to spend that kind of money. The rest of the bill is pure pork. Typically, some of the projects are obscenely stupid. It should more accurately be called the Democrat Reelection Bill.

While the price of a gallon of gas begins to increase along with the prices of food and other necessities, the Obama administration is trying to push through legislation that would tax “greenhouse gas” emissions in the name of a global warming that is not happening. In parts of the United States, there will literally be no summer because the Earth has been cooling for the past ten years. In the first week of June there were record low temperatures in eighteen States.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill moving through Congress will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans to astronomical levels. It would drive down and drive out manufacturing of every description. When Microsoft Corporation tells the White House it is prepared to move its corporate headquarters and other operations overseas, it is not kidding.

Now the Obama administration is trying to push through “healthcare reform” that is little more than socialized medicine, systems that have failed in Canada and England, forcing people to wait weeks and months for treatment. It would require everyone to purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so. Your personal medical records? Any government bureaucrat could look at them.

Many Democrats are making it known they will not vote for “Cap-and-Trade” and may not vote for the takeover of the best health system in the world.

I predict that neither of these programs will become law and, if they do, Obama will have used up every ounce of trust and good will that has been extended to him. I also predict he will not care because his purpose is to bankrupt the nation and to destroy a Constitution he deems to be filled with too many restrictions on the federal government.

I predict that Barack Obama is just over a year away from seeing the Republican Party regain control of Congress in the same way it did in 1994. The October 2010 midterm elections will leave Obama a lame duck and likely a one-term President.

We cannot know what events will occur to further erode Obama’s vaunted popularity, the product of a mainstream media that has thrown away all journalistic standards, but you can be sure they will happen. Like 9/11 they will be largely unexpected by the general public or like Hurricane Katrina they will be an act of Nature.

On July 4, 2009, there will be 1,145 “Tea Parties” held across the whole of the nation according to the American Family Association. TEA being “Taxed Enough Already.”

Barack Obama makes people nervous.

Popularity is a curious thing. It can disappear overnight.

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Government is Bad for Business

By Alan Caruba

Why would the leaders of U.S. auto companies, two of whom are facing bankruptcy, gather around the President as he signed legislation requiring higher mileage per gallon when surely each knew that there is a finite amount of energy to be secured from a single gallon of gasoline?

They knew, too, they would have to build smaller, lighter, deadlier cars for anyone driving or who is a passenger in them; if, indeed, anyone will want to buy them or will be able to afford to buy them because their cost will increase with this new useless, senseless government mandate.

To meet a 35.5-mile-per-gallon standard by 2016 they might as well make cars out of papier-mâché. The new standards are yet another environmental delusion that the laws of thermodynamics can be replaced by ideology. Approximately 40,000 Americans die on the highways every year. Watch that number increase as the new standards kick in.

You and every other American is being taken for a fool because those who conjure up the stupidity these standards represent know you were never taught enough in school to understand what a fraud is being perpetrated against you.

This is why they can get away with airy references to “green jobs”, “clean energy”, and the greatest absurdity, an “energy independent” America that currently is forced to import much of its energy because U.S.-based natural resources have been put off-limits by the U.S. government.

Over the course of my long career as a public relations counselor, one lesson in particular has been learned. In general, people who run businesses run scared. When under attack their first instinct is to lay low and their next instinct is make any changes foisted upon them, even if they are based on bad science or lack common sense.

There’s a reason why you see television ads talking about the need for “all forms” of energy. They are the way energy providers are attempting to stem the tide of anti-energy rhetoric pouring out of the White House and Congress, while educating the public to the reality of how and where the energy they use is actually produced.

No coal? Half the electricity we use is generated by coal. No oil? All the gasoline is refined from oil, along with all the plastics we use. No natural gas? It heats millions of homes. Nuclear? It is good for twenty percent of our electricity.

Usually businesses and agricultural interests band together in trade associations to fight against injurious legislation. Washington, D.C. is home to a legion of government relations executives and agencies whose job is to spot trouble early and to convince legislators to avoid signing onto bad legislation or to modify it before it becomes the law. Without them, Americans would be suffering even more due to the idiotic legislation that is generated daily in Congress.

While the natural conflict of competition is the air corporate executives breathe, any conflict involving the U.S. government is necessarily buffered by lawyers, government relations specialists, and public relations professionals whose job it is to present the side of the argument the mainstream media generally ignores or distorts.

Corporate executives are not cowards. They do battle every day to increase their company’s profit margin, to protect its reputation among investors and with financial institutions, and to fund research and innovation. They also work hard to hire the best people and to keep them motivated and happy. That’s what bonuses are about and countless other programs corporations provide their employees. It’s good for business!

Congress, whenever it wants to intimidate some element of the business community, will drag them to Washington and then grill them mercilessly for the purpose of making them look evil. It is always a charade. Behind closed doors these same politicians can be found imploring the same corporations to give them campaign money.

In these times corporations have much to fear. Americans have elected a President who regards business and industry as the exploitation of workers, forgetting that they benefit employees, vendors, investors, pension funds, healthcare programs, and of course consumers.

Obama distrusts hedge funds and others who have made loans to businesses. He feels empowered to order the resignation of executives, alter the composition of corporate boards, and abrogate fundamental contract law. This is a man who has never so much as run a local Dairy Queen franchise!

It is useful to remember that virtually all of the recessions and the Great Depression were brought about, not by corporations and small businesses, but by government interference, usually involving exports and imports, but also by giving support to unions that, as often as not, saddled businesses with demands that slowed production and drained profits needed for growth.
It was not the financial community that came up with the notion of giving sub-prime mortgage loans to people who would, under normal banking practices, not qualify. That was a government idea. The fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ended up owning half of all the mortgages was a government idea.

Bailouts to banks, insurance companies, and auto companies were government ideas, but not constitutional ones. So far, the evidence suggests they were bad ideas.

Capitalism is a high risk venture. That’s what it’s supposed to be. Most start-up companies fail fairly quickly, but some grow and prosper. They expand and hire more people.

By contrast, all of us would benefit from a smaller, less intrusive government.

When corporations must deal with the government they are understandable wary and sometimes even fearful. They have reason to be.

Our Nobel Prize Moron

By Alan Caruba

I know you’re thinking the title refers to Al Gore, but no, it belongs to Paul Krugman, an economist best known as a New York Times columnist, and winner in 2008 of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He is widely regarded as an expert in international economics and has very impressive curriculum vitae. By all the standards of our times, the man is a genius.

Anyone who has worked for an institution of higher learning as I once did soon loses his awe of PhDs. Their expertise is usually very narrow. The intellectual hot house which they share also includes immense pressure to demonstrate through research and publication that they are productive. There is a herd mentality and some vicious politics that goes on as well.

Krugman may know about economics, otherwise known as the “dismal science” because I suspect the capacity to be very wrong is equal to or greater than the chance of getting things right. Most certainly, his May 15 column, based on a trip to China demonstrated he knows nothing about meteorology, climatology, the science of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Nobel Prize winner demonstrated what a moron he is when he strayed into the usual discredited blather associated with “global warming.” He spouts the nonsense about greenhouse gas emissions like some Red Guard reading from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

“The scientific consensus on prospect for global warming,” wrote Klugman, “has become much more pessimistic over the last few years.” Firstly, the Greens have been predicting global warming since the 1980s, always concluding it was due to arrive ten, fifteen, twenty or fifty years from now. This is usually a good indicator of how flawed and false such predictions actually are.

Second, there is no such thing as a scientific “consensus” about global warming, unless you include the growing consensus that it is a huge scam designed to further a hidden agenda to destroy the economies of industrialized nations.

In March I attended the 2nd annual Climate Change Conference sponsored by The Heartland Institute. It was wall-to-wall seminars by climatologists and others demonstrating why carbon dioxide in particular plays no role whatever in determining the Earth’s climate trends and never did.

But for Klugman, like Al Gore, facts are of no value when writing about global warming. “Indeed, the latest projects from reputable climate scientists border on the apocalyptic. Why? Because the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions are rising is matching or exceeding the worst-case scenarios.”

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Since carbon dioxide, a gas as vital as oxygen to all life on earth, plays no role in climate change, this assertion is just a regurgitation of Al Gore’s boldfaced lies. As to worst-case scenarios, that is the stock-in-trade of the Greens who conjured up the global warming hoax. It is based entirely on flawed and deceptive computer models.

The Earth has been cooling for the past ten years and, given the low activity of the Sun, the primary determinant of the Earth’s climate and temperature, solar scientists and others are predicting we could be on the cusp of a new little ice age or worse---a full-scale ice age that will render civilization’s short rise moot as nations find themselves buried under miles of ice for the next 100,000 years until the next interglacial period. It is, quite simply, colder everywhere.

Krugman’s main criticism of China, where he had visited prior to writing his column, was that “In January, China announced that it plans to continue its reliance on coal as its main energy source and that to feed its economic growth it will increase coal production 30 percent by 2015.” Good for China! I wish that the United States would permit, nay encourage, coal-fired plants to provide the electricity we will need by 2015 and beyond.

The opposite, however, is happening in the United States which has elected a President who’s on record saying he’d prefer to “bankrupt” any company that dared to build a coal-fired plant. Meanwhile, coal is the source of just over 50 percent of all the electricity we currently use!

If the U.S. continues to refuse to permit more coal-fired plants and continues to delay the building of more nuclear plants, we will not have the energy the economy needs to grow and Americans will begin to experience blackouts and brownouts like the banana republic we shall surely become.

Krugman was annoyed that the Chinese, more than a billion of them, seem to believe they have as much right to a lifestyle similar to ours, most of which was built on the availability of cheap energy and remains dependent on its affordability. If Congress passes the insane “cap and trade” emissions legislation, it will crash the nation’s economy. And they know it!

“The burden should fall,” wrote Krugman, “on those foreign consumers instead, that shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a ‘carbon tariff’ that reflects the emissions associated with these goods’ production.” So, instead of benefiting from affordable Chinese exports, Americans should pay more for something—global warming—that is not happening and punish China and themselves in the process.

It just gets worse from that point on as Krugman writes that, “Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports.”

Great! That’s just what we need with China, a trade war!

If this is the best a Nobel Prize winning economist has to offer then the process of destroying our economy is already under way. Lesser mortals will instantly identify his remedies as idiotic.

On Not Understanding Capitalism or Liberalism

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago, Rasmussen Reports conducted a national telephone survey and asked “American adults” if they believe capitalism is “better” than socialism. I found it disturbing that only 53% responded that they did.

That is a very bare majority of Americans who think capitalism is a better economic system than one essentially controlled by unelected bureaucrats, no matter where it’s found.

Fully 20% thought socialism is better and 27% weren’t sure.

It turns out that age has a lot to do with your attitude about capitalism. Adults under 30 were evenly divided. “Thirty-somethings,” Rasmussen reported, “are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.”

Republicans by a margin of 11-to-1 favor capitalism. Democrats are more closely divided with just 39% favoring capitalism, while 30% favored socialism. Among those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% preferred capitalism while 21% favored socialism.

I have no proof of this, but I suspect that most Americans would have some measure of difficulty defining the differences between capitalism and socialism. One of my favorite definitions is by Winston Churchill who said that “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Back in the 1940s, Norman Thomas, a U.S. Socialist Party candidate for President, said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without ever knowing how it happened.”

If Thomas were alive today, he would no doubt take a great deal of pleasure in Social Security, Medicare, and other “entitlement” programs that constitute a third or more of the nation’s annual budget. They are not voluntary.

The problem all such programs are encountering is that they are going broke. As the demographics of the nation change, we are running out of a younger, working population for the support of older ones. Europe has long since arrived at this point.

The irony is, of course, that capitalism is the only system that has a built-in motivation (called risk) for people to start new businesses, employ others, and strive to grow and succeed. America is one long story of such entrepreneurship, of venture capital looking for the next new idea, new product, or new service.

Capitalism also caters to the most inherent attribute of humans; greed. What is always overlooked, however, is the way wealth, once acquired, finds expression in philanthropy. Countless worthy causes in the arts, health, scholarships, aid to the less fortunate, et cetera, flourish because of private giving. And there is much to be said for inheritance; the right to pass on one’s wealth and property to one’s family.

Thus socialism is counter-intuitive to how humans organize themselves, their lives, and their societies.

As former President Ronald Reagan put it, “The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.”

As we close in on April 15, the date your income tax payment is due, the power of governmental coercion becomes quite evident. It is also the day this year that nearly two thousand “Tea parties” will be held around the nation to protest the tripling of the nation’s deficit, the proposed increases in taxation, along with the wastefulness of so much of what passes for government spending.

The Unconstitutionality of “Bailouts”

There needs to be another item on the Tea Party agenda. It is the fact that the “bailout” monies disbursed to General Motors and to a variety of banking, investment, and the huge AIG insurance company are totally in violation of the U.S. Constitution that forbids government choosing what enterprises will be allowed to continue or fail.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano warns against this in his most recent book, “The Revenge of Dred Scott.”

“The Constitution does not repose in the Congress the power to bail out individuals or private industry; Bailouts violate the equal protection doctrine because the Congress can’t fairly pick and choose whom to bail out and who to let expire; they violate the General Welfare Clause because they benefit only a small group and not the general public; they violate the Due Process Clause because they interfere with contracts already entered into; and they turn the public treasury into a public trough.”

Now consider this: This year’s bailout, stimulus, and other spending binges have obligated future generations of Americans to $12.8 TRILLION in debt, according to a recent Bloomberg study. Meanwhile, Congress and the Obama administration are poised to impose a bogus “climate change” program that could cost $3 trillion and regulate every aspect of our lives.

America is at a critical turning point and it must, if it is to have any future whatever, turn away from this profligate and very liberal use of the public treasury, combined with the baseless “cap-and-trade” program of carbon credits that will cripple what economy is left.

Socialism aka liberalism, as it is currently being put into effect by the Congress and the White House, prevents the failures that are necessary for the correction of bad management and bad judgment.

Obama: Buyer's Remorse

By Alan Caruba

The Economist is a weekly magazine whose headquarters is London and which is widely respected for its global coverage of political, social and, of course, business news. It also has a relentlessly liberal outlook which is to be expected given Great Britain’s nanny state mentality.

Former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, a conservative and a contemporary of Ronald Reagan, pointed out that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

It took from January 17, 2009 to March 28, 2009 for The Economist to lose its virginity so far as Barack Obama was concerned. Like most of the media, the magazine greeted his succession to the office of President with a schoolgirl’s gushing enthusiasm.

“Renewing America” was the January cover story welcoming him to high office saying, “Mr. Obama carries with him the hopes of the planet.” Not just America. The planet!

How far left is The Economist? “In some ways,” it opined in January, “the times cry out for more active government: for stronger regulation of banks and near-banks, for much more short-term government spending to counteract the contraction elsewhere in the economy, and for the establishment of a basic health-care system for everyone.” This tends to overlook the obvious fact that this is a description of the conditions that led to the current financial meltdown.

The existing regulation of U.S. banks was not accompanied by anything faintly resembling actual scrutiny and oversight. It was the government that had created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up and “securitize” all those bad loans banks and mortgage companies were required by law to make.

The short-term spending in the billions that has been made is widely regarded as a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. And Britain’s health-care system is an appalling deathtrap for anyone in need of immediate care. It is one in which bureaucrats literally decide who shall die if they have the misfortune of having a particular form of cancer.

In January, The Economist noted that Obama had “put together a team which has impressed almost everyone with its caliber and centrism.” Oh yeah?

By late March, The Economist was echoing Hillary Clinton’s comment during the campaign that the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training. “It went to the heart of the nagging worry about the silver-tongued young senator from Illinois; that he lacked even the slightest executive experience, and that in his brief career he had never really stood up to powerful interests, whether in his home city of Chicago or in the wider world.”

One can only imagine how he shall be judged by the heads of state at the upcoming G-20 meeting in the UK. One suspects that, if there is any candor to be had, they will take him into some room far from public view and beat the living tar out of him. It is an understatement to say they are very unhappy with this young Marxist.

From its optimism in January to its pessimism of March, The Economist concluded that Obama “has a long way to travel if he is to serve his country—and the world—as he should.” The tone of the editorial was not a hopeful one.

Indeed, many in the media that could not wait for Obama to take office are now experiencing some severe buyer’s remorse. It is instructive to watch them inch their way out of the cheering section, but it is altogether too late.

Barack Hussein Obama is the President and only the return of Republican control of Congress will be able to put any brakes on his intention to bankrupt the nation and take the rest of the world with it.

Electing Dumb People to do Dumb Things is Dumb

By Alan Caruba

Just how close is the United States to being ruled by executive order? It’s a question worth asking given the flurry of executive orders issuing forth from the Oval Office.

It is perhaps a cliché, but it has long seemed to me that Republicans and, in particular, conservative Republicans, were the grownups while Democrats, liberal by definition, were the children; the ones that insist on instant gratification and for whom no lie is big enough to cover up their long history of failures.

Just over half of those who voted in the last election were so enthralled with the oratory of Barack H. Obama and the thrill of electing the first African-American President to office that they heard whatever they wanted to hear. I grant that the Republican candidate, John McCain, was no match for Obama. His voting record and general political views were so out-of-step with most Republicans that vast numbers of them stayed home rather than cast a vote for him.

The media played its role by elevating Obama to such heights he gained the mocking moniker of “the Messiah”. Time magazine put his face on the cover some thirteen times during 2008. An inauguration preview made it fourteen as 2009 began.

It helped, too, that the aptly named “Bush derangement syndrome” was in full throat to position George W. Bush (who could not run for a third time) as the cause of the economic bubble that burst toward the end of his second term.

When Bush first took office in 2001, he warned against “strong repercussions in financial markets”, but no one was listening. After 9/11 the nation’s entire attention was focused on the threat from al Qaeda and, thereafter, the war in Iraq. In 2003, when Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow, testified in Congress that something had to be done about the cascade of failed mortgage loans being purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Barney Frank (D-MA) who is now the chairman of House Financial Services Committee, dismissed his warnings saying there was no crisis.

Efforts by Republicans in 2005 and 2006 to staunch the bleeding at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government sponsored enterprises, were defeated and, on September 7, 2008, both were put into conservatorship, another word for bankruptcy.

Prior to and ever since the Crash of 1929, the Democrats have seen a recession or depression as an opportunity to build party power. The latest Obama executive order strengthens union power which has long been in decline and for very good reasons. One of those reasons explains why General Motors is soon to be in bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, we have a Democrat President and a Democrat controlled Congress. As much as I have urged anyone who will listen to email, call, and fax their Senator or Representative to tell them to vote against the so-called “Recovery Act”, it is likely just a waste of effort. They like their predecessors in the FDR years are hell-bent to repeat the same errors that prolonged and deepened the Great Depression.

The voters have elected dumb people who will do dumb things and there is no foreseeable end to the pain and misery that will follow in their wake.

The federal government, the cause of the present crisis, needs to recuse itself from further mindless borrowing and spending if there is any hope to avoid the train wreck, but, that said, we have the wrong people running the train.

The United States of America is in peril of becoming the biggest banana republic the world has ever seen.

Santa Obama

By Alan Caruba

January 20 may be a day that Barack Obama comes to rue. At that point all that change he’s been promising will begin to become visible.

Not everyone will like it.

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post reporter on the nation’s media, has noticed the complete abandonment of any reality by journalists in the print and broadcast media these days, asking, “Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed “Generation O”?

I am reminded of President-elect Obama’s campaign warning that, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and just expect that other countries are going to say okay…” Or maybe we wouldn’t have to worry so much about what other nations say as what our Congress will say.

Congress has already banned the future sale of incandescent light bulbs. Don’t like having a choice? Too bad. The list of environmentally incorrect things Congress may ban is endless.

Meanwhile, billions more of OUR MONEY may be tossed to the ailing Detroit auto industry even though polls suggest most Americans think that is a bad idea as opposed to they’re having to declare bankruptcy and restructure their way out of crushing union contracts.

Energy independence? You won’t get it if the ban on off-shore exploration and drilling is not lifted and the ban on drilling in ANWR remains intact. There are lots of other places in the nation that will be declared off limits to drilling and mining. Why is that you ask?

Sen. Harry Reid, Majority Leader, wants to pass an Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, a monstrous cornucopia of more than a hundred bills that would place new restrictions on energy exploration, home construction, and business activity. Reid (D-NV) is hoping to slip it through this week’s lame duck session of the Senate. Hopefully it will die in the House.

Millions of acres of land, both public and private, would be put off limits to any useful purpose through the creation of National Heritage Areas, new wilderness area designations, and the introduction of something ghastly called “view scapes” and “sound scapes” that would render vast areas restricted from any new roads, expansion of towns, farming, mining, drilling, and anything else that might contribute to the nation’s energy and economic needs.

This and other nasty pieces of legislation are going to come flying out of the Democrat-controlled Congress that, for the last two years of Bush’s administration, is notable for having done almost nothing. I suspect President Obama is going to find himself at odds with Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid, both of whom favor increasing taxes and festooning the nation with more bizarre environmental restrictions.

Meanwhile, the governors and mayors of states and cities that have been spending money and digging an ever-deeper hole with civil service pensions and other benefits are going to be trekking to Washington, DC, hats in hand, for a piece of the action.

President-elect Obama will discover there is less and less money to give away. The United States, if we had to pay off our present debts and entitlement program obligations, is essentially broke. So are the States and so are many of the cities.

It won’t be Santa Obama. It will be the Obama who has already told us to tighten our belts, lower the thermostats, drive and eat less.

Notice that I say “us”, not the federal government, the cause of all our current miseries.

What good are property rights if Congress can simply confiscate privately owned land by declaring it a "view scape"?

Do you seriously think Congress will rein in the $1 trillion regulatory death grip it has imposed?

Do you really think Congress will provide more access to our own oil, natural gas, and coal reserves? Wilderness protection is wonderful right up to the moment we discover we no longer have a timber industry and have to import it from other nations.

Can we expect Congress to reform U.S. agriculture policies left over from the Great Depression?

Do you think Congress will liberalize trade with other nations?

Would an Obama administration want to admit that global warming is not happening?

There are so many things that Santa Obama and the Congress will not do to energize the most productive people on Earth.

So, stock up on those incandescent light bulbs, canned foods, and, oh yes, ammunition.

Politics Versus Economics

By Alan Caruba

Congress reminds me a lot of the Wizard of Oz these days. They keep telling us to ignore the man behind the curtain, but they are the man behind the curtain.

We have now reached the point where we can hope that the children we elected to Congress will get passed finger-pointing and blaming each other for the mess we are in. For whatever reasons they individually had, the decision to defeat the “bailout” or “rescue” plan signaled that the gravity of the problem had finally begun to penetrate the minds of our nation’s legislators.

Wall Street predictably took a nosedive. A lot of what constitutes the buying and selling of stocks is purely emotional. In good times everyone wants to get into the market and at the first hint of trouble, everyone wants to get out. There are signs, though, that even Wall Street thinks Congress will step in soon and assume a big chunk of the bad debt.

Politics is fluid, but there are real laws of economics that are well known, if often ignored. Money has to flow. There has to be “liquidity” and a consumer society requires a measure of constant, prudent lending to grease the wheels.

Grownups get nervous when there is too much debt on the books. Children think that debt is an illusion. Whoever tells you that having a huge national debt and bad balance of payments is not a problem is blowing smoke up your skirt.

Whoever tells you that it's a good idea to lend money to people whose chances of paying it back are slim to none is lying. That is the cause of the current problem; a lot of bad debt and it can all be traced back to Democrat-inspired programs, loosely labeled “social justice”, to justify the odd notion that poor people should live like the Middle Class. If they weren’t poor, they would be Middle Class. They’re not.

Moreover, a lot of the Middle Class assumed too much personal debt. Too many offers in the mail for credit cards. Too many inducements to purchase homes at inflated prices. Too many advertisements for vacations that probably should be spent closer to home. When you add in the jolt of rising energy prices and rising taxes, you get the perfect storm.

Republicans, for all intents and purposes, went along. Republicans, in case you haven’t noticed, abandoned all caution and prudence once they took control of Congress in 1994, helped to run up a huge national deficit, expanded some entitlement programs, expanded the federal government, and generally acted like Democrats.

The result is the present crisis. It is a crisis of confidence. The extraordinary low ratings that reflect the public’s regard for Congress and the President are entirely justified. The difference is that a huge Internet-informed public now has the capacity to flood Congress with messages warning against further foolishness.

Fixated on little more than raising money to get reelected, Congress critters will listen when they have to. They have to listen now.

What Americans want is a plan that will address the mortgage loan debt problem by finding means to deal with the bad paper, holding it until the housing market regains its value, and doing so in a transparent, carefully monitored, and rational manner. That will require a revised bailout/rescue bill; possibly one that has an insurance element to it, rather than a massive buy-up. Sticking the taxpayers with the bill is a very bad idea.

The last people who should be in charge of resolving the mess are those running Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Those two agencies need to be put out of business.

Bad politics, pandering for votes among the poor and minorities while fostering class warfare, produced the present crisis of confidence in the banking and investment system. The financial system must be protected. This isn’t about “greed.” Banks were put at risk because Fannie Mae, a semi-governmental entity, required bad loans be made.

The federal government must get out of the mortgage business. The government must get out of the provision of health and medical care. The government must get out of the nation’s educational system. The government must stop distorting agricultural decisions about what to plant. The government has to end its war on the oil industry.

What has not helped is the palpable sense of panic one could read on the face and in the words of Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, who failed to articulate the problem in other than apocalyptic terms. What has not helped has been the President’s flaccid response that suggests just how tired he is at the end of eight turbulent years spent trying to mobilize the public to realize we are in a long-term life or death struggle with Islamic fascists.

Here are three cheers for John McCain’s effort to bring Republicans to a point where they can forge a reasonable compromise with the Democrats who created this problem.

The distance Barack Obama wants to put between himself and the problem is an indicator of how he would lead. Obama’s agenda of more government programs and more government spending is nothing less than suicidal.