Barry's UN Connection

Domestically, Barack O-buma is a progressive supporter of the mommy state.  Internationally, he plans to place the US into a global arena in which we have co-equal influence in world affairs with such nations as Bolivia, Estonia, and Burma.  In order to reduce us to this level, we will bear the economic burden of saving the world’s population from itself by authorizing the United Nations to tax our resources to the extent that our friends in Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba and other economic powerhouses deem is our rightful share.

This article by Cliff Kincaid in Accuracy in Media exposes O-buma’s support for what the president calls small global taxes.  This plan to help the world hijack the US will affect the stocks, mutual funds, and pensions of ordinary Americans.  Such are the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and by 2015, the US will be required to pay $845 billion into this world welfare fund.  We cannot pay our bills; annually we borrow over a trillion dollars to make payments to redundant bureaucrats.  Now, the boy genius wants to borrow another trillion dollars a year for welfare payments to foreigners.

Remember this from the White House’s unelected and non-vetted Science Czar: Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential.

According to the head Theftocrat, we have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals.  O-buma lies to obfuscate his intended theft.  Claiming that stealing nearly a trillion dollars a year from taxpayers represents small global taxes is the rough equivalent of claiming that Osama bin Laden had slight philosophical differences with US policies.  This tax, like almost all others, will increase annually as soon as the UN gets it in place.  That the president can lie so blatantly without arousing the ire of the national media is possible because graduates from progressive journalism colleges staff most major media outlets.

As Chuck Rogér points out in The New Media Journal, their leftist model of education is toxic for America.

Progressives view morality and knowledge as ‘constructs’ and social and economic power as commodities to be transferred from ‘oppressor’ to ‘oppressed.'  Progressives routinely label minorities as oppressed, and anything that benefits minorities as moral; hence, left-wing propaganda, lies, and disinformation are integral parts of their communication strategies.

The nation’s educrats embrace the precepts of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's cultural Marxism.  Members of the political class [have] glommed onto the resulting "social justice," affirmative action, "diversity," multiculturalism, political correctness, and other malignancies spawned by cultural Marxism.

Part of the education collective’s system of lies is their use of The Story of Stuff video to discredit capitalism.  What they do not tell the children they indoctrinate is that fleecing successful capitalists is how the US pays for social spending.  They are desperately hiding the fact that they steal the products of others’ labor to purchase the votes of their permanent entitlement constituencies.  That education apparatchiks use this video to brainwash trusting, unsuspecting children into accepting progressives' failed experiments reveals the depths of their depravity.

Michael Kleen’s article "You Call It Education, They Call It 'Demoralization'" reveals that the purpose of the Marxists’ dialogue is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

These education propagandists are using deconstructionists’ theories to disassemble traditional Western culture and replace it with collectivist ideals that are unilaterally beneficial to progressives.  To them, there is no truth; however, unquestioningly adopting whatever they espouse is mandatory for students.  Children are conditioned to believe that truth is relative to individual or tribal experience.  Their so-called social justice education deemphasizes knowledge retention and the development of traditionally productive skills.

These traitors are attacking vulnerable children to insure that, as a nation, we continue fail intellectually, ethically, and ideologically.

May your gods be with you.

   

Vote Early; Vote Often

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has signed a bill into law that requires voters to produce photo identification in order to participate in the election process.  ACORN, professional victim groups, illegal aliens, government unions, and the rest of the Theftocrats' permanent entitlement constituencies are beside themselves.  They are convinced that it is their birthright to steal elections.  How dare the rest of us demand honesty of them!

Making sure we have legislation that protects the integrity for an open, fair and honest election in every single case is important, said Walker.  The chronically bereaved responded by chanting, Recall Walker!  Wisconsin is now the 11th state to have approved requiring some form of photo ID at the polls.

Open, fair, and honest runs counter to the dictates of progressives' amorality.  They believe that they should be exempt from enduring any unwanted consequences that might result from their actions because lying, cheating, and stealing are essential to achieving their holy goals.

The Wall Street Journal's John Fund has these observations.  Coercion and chicanery are made much easier by the excessive use of absentee ballots.  Most of the elections thrown out by courts—Miami, Florida's mayoral election in 1998, the East Chicago, Indiana's mayor's race in 2005—involved fraudulent absentee votes.  Three decades ago, absentee and early ballots were only 5% of all votes cast nationwide.  In 2008, they exceeded 25%.

In the 2004 presidential election, Milwaukee election officials reported that some 5,000 more ballots were credited than were recorded as having been cast.  Additionally, more than 1300 votes cast by people who registered to vote on the day of the election--this invitation to fraud should be eliminated--were declared invalid.  The Milwaukee Police Department, a government union operation, had a plan for the 2008 national election.  The police department's Special Investigative Unit was ordered by superiors not to send anyone to polling places on Election Day.  What a shock.

Election laws should be clear, simple, applied equally, and balance ease of voting with the need for ballot integrity.  A unanimous Supreme Court warned about the danger of loose election laws when it vacated a Ninth Circuit opinion, which had enjoined the use of Arizona's new voter ID law on the grounds it would disenfranchise voters.

The court made the obvious point that "disenfranchisement" is a two-way street.  Fraud, it noted in Gonzales v. Arizona (2006), "drives honest citizens out of the democratic process. . . . [V]oters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised."

For Corruptocrats, election theft is merely part of their overall plan for the theft-welfare state.  They invented the mommy state to reflect their belief that they have discovered the way, the truth, and the light.  These delusions drive them to force everyone to live as they dictate; these dictates are unilaterally beneficial to themselves.  Theirs is not a society of taboos, boundaries that we are forbidden to cross.  Their utopia is one of enforced totems, or mandatory kow towing to the omniscient, omnipresent, and oppressive state deity.

May your gods be with you.

O-buma Wants $8 a Gallon Gas Prices

O-buma and company are simultaneously committing so many grievous economic errors that it cannot be mere coincidence.  Percipient thinkers recognize that unlikely coincidences are so rare that they seem to require careful planning.  Based upon these understandings, it is easy to conclude that the mess left after more than two years of The One’s mismanagement is no accident.

In this article, Jim Johnston points out that we should have used our Strategic Oil Reserve, as was done after Katrina, to increase the supply of oil and moderate its price after recent price shocks.  However, the O-bumites would rather we twist in the wind because we are an arrogant nation.  Government likes discretion in energy policy in order to obtain political advantage. 

The chart below of the last year's OVX (oil price volatility index) shows there were two occasions when the index exceeded 40.  One was a result of the BP oil spill in April 2010.  The other episode coincided with the 2011 revolutions in Middle Eastern oil-producing states.  In this pair of cases the volatilities rose because of unexpected increases in oil prices.  The jump in volatilities would have been a signal to release from the SPR.  That is what a private owner of stored oil would have done.

There is a frequently ignored connection between the Fed's increasing the money supply and increases in oil prices.  When inflation is anticipated, as it is now, one of the defenses is to switch out of dollars and into commodities.  This pushes nominal oil prices higher.  Thus the Fed is contributing to the high oil prices about which President Obama is complaining.  As with oil, Washington is ignoring several market indicators of future inflation.  Commodities such as gold, silver, and copper are all near historic high levels.  Foreign exchange futures are also higher, as are interest rate futures.

In another article, Chuck Roger exposes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing as folly.  QE derives from the Keynesian economic hypothesis that government spending helps end recessions.  But reality refuses to comply with theory...the $800 billion stimulus passed by Democrats and signed by Obama in 2009 will generate a paltry 5 percent boost in Gross Domestic Product.  Furthermore, each government dollar injected between 1947 and 2007, via deficit spending, stimulated only forty-six cents of additional GDP.  Negative returns and higher debt make for crummy investment karma.

The Fed Chief is inclined to give in to the insanity reflex: expecting repeatedly-failed tactics to succeed.  Bernanke's strategy will ram into reality.  His tactics will create conditions like those which caused the Great Recession in the first place.  Worse still, to compound the conditions that existed when the subprime mortgage gravy train derailed, today we have $2.35 trillion from QE1 and QE2 ready to flood the economy.

In “Four More Dollars?” author Pete du Pont asserts that America's energy policy is as bad as our fiscal policy.  The federal government is focused on producing not more energy but less of it, on making costs higher rather than lower, and on expanding regulation.

As for oil production, our government is limiting it, and over the years domestic drilling has been declining. In 1970 the U.S. produced 3.5 billion barrels; by 2010 that figure was down to two billion. The federal government has prohibited oil and natural gas drilling on 83% of federally owned land and increased the importation of foreign oil. In 1970 only 500 million barrels were imported; last year it was 3.3 billion barrels. That means that in 1970 U.S. oil production was 88% of consumption, and today it is only 37%.

[C]onsider the statement of Energy Secretary Steven Chu in The Wall Street Journal: "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the prices of gasoline to the levels in Europe."  The current gasoline price is about $8.50 a gallon in England and $8.80 in France and Germany.  Increasing the price of gasoline increases the costs of all essential commodities, driving more and more people to turn to the Corruptocrats’ theft-welfare state.  Who could possibly benefit from that?

May your gods be with you.

Landless in America

Totalitarian states keep the governed politically impotent by preventing them from owning land.  Landowners use and dispose of land as they choose and hold it free from liens or encumbrances.  Government reserves these rights for itself.  Unelected bureaucrats determine how we use land, regulate its disposal, and keep perpetual tax liens against it. 
 

Individuals cannot not own land outright; instead, government confers legal privileges to citizens concerning it, and the state can rescind those privileges arbitrarily.  Fourth Amendment guaranties are being eroded daily.  This article reveals one frightening instance.

Just last week, however, in a move that would have made King George III proud, the Indiana Supreme Court cavalierly decided that police can enter a person’s home for any reason – or no reason, or an unlawful reason — and the homeowner forced to stand aside and let them do their deeds.  Unless overturned by the federal courts or the state legislature, Indiana residents will be deprived of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” enjoyed to at least some degree by people in other states and under federal law.  The specific issue at hand is whether or not you can resist someone – anyone, including a police officer – attempting to illegally enter your home.

The American Thinker’s Daren Bakst offers thoughts on how the state gutted the Fifth Amendment in order to steal property rights from individuals and redistribute them to others.

Six years ago, the United States Supreme Court effectively gutted property rights protections in the Fifth Amendment.  A pending bill in the United States House could help to address some of the damage caused by the Court.  In Kelo v. City of New London, the Court held that the government can seize private property from one private citizen and transfer the property to another private citizen for economic development.  If a home would generate more tax revenue as a mall, then the government can seize the home.  The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution states "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."  This language is supposed to limit the government's power to take private property except for a "public use."

At Global Research, Paul C. Wright describes what the current administration is doing to the public; they are incrementally remanding the Constitution.

The pretext for the destruction of Americans’ civil liberties is the “global war on terror,” which – according to all three branches of government – requires that Americans surrender their liberties for security and protection from foreign and domestic threats…local law enforcement agencies are increasingly becoming a tool of state authority and state security.  Without a reversal of this trend, law enforcement will soon exist primarily to protect the interests of government.
 
Government should protect the little guy from the rich and powerful, especially when the rich and powerful is the government.  The Institute for Justice cites a case in which they prevented Donald Trump and the state of New Jersey from confiscating an elderly widow’s home.

Vera Coking, from Atlantic City, knows firsthand the power of unaccountable government agencies. [They] sought to take her property and transfer it—at a bargain-basement price—to another private individual: Donald Trump. Trump convinced the State agency to use its “eminent domain” power to take Vera’s home so he could construct a limousine parking lot for his customers...unfortunately, cases in which government agencies act not as protectors of constitutionally guaranteed rights, but instead as agents for powerful, private interests, have become all too common. 

'Individual freedom finds tangible expression in property rights.' This statement, penned by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, recognizes how central property rights are to a free society.

The people are no longer the government because the government is no longer accountable to the people.

May your gods be with you.

The O-buma Legacy: WWWIII

Barack O-buma plans to throw open the gates and bow down, as he has done previously to various foreign leaders, to kow tow and drive Israel from within the walls of our village and into the clutches of terrorists.  The O-bumites are now in league with mass murderers.  Their brethren are infamous.  The following is from Wikipedia. 

• 1983-bombed the US Embassy in Lebanon, killing 17
• 1983-bombed a US Marine barracks, killing 241
• 1984 - Twenty-two people were killed (two of them American) and seventy were wounded when a van loaded with four hundred pounds of explosives exploded in front of the U.S. Embassy annex in Awkar, Lebanon. Islamic Jihad (code name of Hezbollah) claimed responsibility for the bombing in a call to the media.
• 1985 - TWA Flight 847 hijacked, U.S. Navy diver is killed by Hezbollah.
•  1985 - Achille Lauro hijacking, wheel-chair bound American killed by Palestinian militants.
• 1988 - Pan Am Flight 103, outbound from London for New York with 259 people aboard, was destroyed by a bomb on December 21, 1988 while over Lockerbie, Scotland. All aboard the aircraft were killed as were eleven persons on the ground.
• 1993 - World Trade Center bombing, February 26: 6 killed, 1,042 injured.
• 1993 - Attack at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia, January 25: 2 killed, 3 injured.
• 1995 - Killing of two US Diplomats in Pakistan, March 8.
• Khobar Towers bombing: 19 American servicemen killed.
• 1998 - US embassy bombings: U.S. Kenya Embassy blown up, 214 killed (including 12 Americans); U.S. Tanzania Embassy blown up, 11 killed.
• 2000 - USS Cole attacked, 17 U.S. Navy sailors killed, 39 sailors injured.
• 2001 - September 11, 2001 attacks, 2,997 killed;  

The traitors in the O-buma White House want to create a post-Israel scenario that will force the US to choose between engaging in a protracted, unwinnable Mideast war or surrendering without firing a shot and vacating the region altogether.  Either way, this is the next big step in the progressives' planned downward gyre for America.

The Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft reports in his article "Rewarding Evil" that the Palestinian Hamas and Fatah terrorist factions signed a truce on Wednesday May 4, 2011. Neither of the terror factions recognize Israel and neither terror organization has plans to reject terrorist activities against the Jewish people.

In recognition of this terrorist truce, Barack Obama yesterday gave the Palestinian people Old Jerusalem. Old Jerusalem contains the most sacred holy sites of Christianity.  Arrogant, considering that they are not his to give away in the first place.  Further, all of the Christian and Jewish holy sites will now be under Hamas control thanks to Barack Obama.

Charles Krauthammer's article "The News in Obama's Speech" reveals that O-buma attended Jimmy Carter's school of weaseling and waffling.  He has come full circle from condemning the philosophies and policies of former president George W. Bush to adopting them.  'It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.'

With this Barack Obama openly, unreservedly and without a trace of irony or self-reflection adopts the Bush Doctrine, which made the spread of democracy the key U.S. objective in the Middle East.

'Too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills.'

Note how even Obama’s rationale matches Bush’s. Bush argued that because the roots of 9/11 were to be found in the deflected anger of repressed Middle Eastern peoples, our response would require a democratic transformation of the region.

'We have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals.'

A fine critique of exactly the kind of “realism” the Obama administration prided itself for having practiced in its first two years.  How far did this concession to Bush go? Note Obama’s example of the democratization we’re aiming for. He actually said:

'In Iraq, we see the promise of a multiethnic, multisectarian democracy. There, the Iraqi people have rejected the perils of political violence for a democratic process . . . Iraq is poised to play a key role in the region.'

Hail the Bush-Obama doctrine.

O-buma and company are dismantling the republic from within and without.  They realize that backing Israel into a corner will produce one certain result: it will trigger WWIII.  They remember Hafez Assad lobbing artillery shells into downtown Tel Aviv from the Golan Heights.  They are also perceptive enough to realize that when it happens again, the Israelis will go nuclear.

May your gods be with you.

Funding and Expanding Poverty

"Help the poor," has been Theftocrat boilerplate since Lyndon Johnson's creation of the Great Welfare Society.  Let us be clear.  What they mean by help is welfare.  Welfare is the collection of resources that agents of the state take from people who earned them in order to give them to people who have not.  Recipients are overwhelming providers.
 

Questions come to mind upon hearing this help-the-poor mantra.  Who will be providing the help?  What form will this help for the poor take?  What is this help expected to accomplish?
 

The answer to the first question is that it will come from private sector workers.  Not people in government service, they are paid from the earnings of those outside of government.  The people who earn money in legitimate private enterprise are the workers, from Wall Street executives to Wal-Mart greeters.  Yes, that is correct.  Poor working families are helping to shoulder the burden of non-working poor families.
 

Among the provided forms of assistance, housing might be the most significant because it provides a place to prepare food, sleep, collect mail, send children to school, and store essential belongings.  So why then is the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development doing such a poor job of providing housing to its clients?
 

The Washington Post reports in their article "A Trail of Stalled or Abandoned HUD Projects" that the federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.
 

Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found.  Some have languished for a decade or longer even as much of the country struggles with record-high foreclosures and a dramatic loss of affordable housing.
 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects.
 

The result is a trail of failed developments in every corner of the country.  Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected.  Houses that were supposed to be renovated are boarded up and crumbling, eyesores in decaying neighborhoods.
 

Two and one-half years in office is enough time to recognize the trends of this administration; we have inept and corrupt departments of Interior and State.  The president's foreign policy has been naive, gullible, and self-destructive for America.  Domestic policy has been the same failed Theftocrat experiment: it is the usual grand pontification, hand-over-fist grabbing of others' resources, and the same programs alleged to end poverty that actually perpetuate and increase it.
 

The Post's exposé reveals that HUD's housing for the poor program has been, largely, a boondoggle.
 

• Local housing agencies have doled out millions to troubled developers, including novice builders, fledgling nonprofits and groups accused of fraud or delivering shoddy work.
• Checks were cut even when projects were still on the drawing boards, without land, financing or permits to move forward. In at least 55 cases, developers drew HUD money but left behind only barren lots.
• Overall, nearly one in seven projects shows signs of significant delay.  Time and again, housing agencies failed to cancel bad deals or alert HUD when projects foundered.
• HUD has known about the problems for years but still imposes few requirements on local housing agencies and relies on a data system that makes it difficult to determine which developments are stalled.
• Even when HUD learns of a botched deal, federal law does not give the agency the authority to demand repayment. HUD can ask local authorities to voluntarily repay, but the agency was unable to say how much money has been returned.
 

The D.C. region has a particularly troubled track record.  In Prince George’s County, the nonprofit Kairos Development Corp., received $750,000 in 2005 to build dozens of homes.  Six years later, Kairos has not built a single house.

The only realistic expectation here is to realize that the past is a clear indication of the future.  Housing subsidy recipients tend to remain recipients.  The federal housing morass is a fly trap that brings clients in and keeps them there.  Unfortunately, taxpayers, including some working poor, are on the hook for this scheme. 
 

Federal housing projects tend to be bastions of political support for the Corruptocrats' theft-welfare vote buying apparatus.  Perhaps taxpayers should applaud such blithering incompetence.  Better yet, we should simply de-fund HUD altogether and take with it Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae.  The $50 billion per year cost should be refunded to the 50 states so that they could make their own housing decisions based upon the wishes of their respective electorates.
 

This would eliminate some of the wealth redistribution from historically red states to blue states, and voters would have a more direct voice concerning how their dollars are spent.
 

May your gods be with you.          

Ineptitude or Treason, Perhaps a bit of Both?

Perhaps the place to begin is with the boy genius's assessment of matters in Egypt.  His blundering has severely alienated our most reliable Mideastern Arab ally Saudi Arabia.  The following is from a report by Tom Brokaw.  Brokaw's sentiments seem to align a bit to the left of center; still, he had the integrity to broadcast an honest and accurate report concerning the ineptitude of a president whom he has supported.

After remarking on the difficulty of establishing democracy in the Middle East, Brokaw said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates “will face some tough questions in this region about the American intentions going on now with all this new turmoil, especially in an area where the United States has such big stakes politically and economically.”

“And a lot of those questions presumably will come from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,” reported Brokaw on the Nightly News. “I was told on the way in here that the Saudis are so unhappy with the Obama administration for the way it pushed out President Mubarak of Egypt that it sent high level emissaries to China and Russia to tell those two countries that Saudi Arabia now is prepared to do more business with them.”

It’s almost as if Mr. Obama is trying to lose all our country’s allies in the Middle East.   (emphasis added)  Almost indeed!  We will be in deep kimchee if we lose access to Saudi oil.  The One is a national embarrassment who brings to mind memories of Jimmy Carter's lusting in his heart for the Polish people.

O-buma's foreign policy weakens us diplomatically, militarily, and strategically; his domestic policy weakens us economically and balkanizes us politically.  He has made our porous border with Mexico exponentially worse and derides border security advocates.  However, only days before this tacky sarcasm, The Investigative Project on Terrorism had reported (April 29, 2011) about the sentencing of a Somali terrorist who had been smuggling his fellow Jihadists into the US for some time.

Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane pleaded guilty in November to two counts of making false statements on his 2008 asylum application. On the application, Dhakane failed to report his connections to two terrorist organizations and that he ran a smuggling operation out of a hotel in Brazil which brought members of one of those terrorist groups into the U.S.
 
Mark Wagoner, an FBI special agent assigned to the San Antonio Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), told the court Thursday that Dhakane provided the names of seven of his smuggling clients linked to the Somali-based terrorist organizations Al-Ittihad Al-Islami (AIAI), Council of Islamic Courts (CIC), and al-Shabaab.

While these individuals have been named, Dhakane was also involved in smuggling hundreds of individuals into the United States working for another well-known smuggler based out of São Paulo...the total number of people affiliated with terrorist groups whom Dhakane smuggled into the country isn't known.

Smooth move, O-buma.  Rather than a moat with alligators, perhaps we would be better served by stocking the Rio Grande with crocodiles.  Nonetheless, it is not immediately clear whether this sort of buffoonery is merely a smoke screen that hides treasonous motivation.  In another treacherous act, Barack, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi ran up another one trillion dollars in debt, and the results of this squandering have proved detrimental. 

This article is titled "A Verdict on Obama's 'Stimulus' Plan."  Its synopsis of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's dubious accomplishments is distressing.  Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that "spending equals stimulus," he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.  The chart below shows that the taxpayers bought half a million bureaucrats and lost one million private sector jobs by borrowing another trillion dollars.

Was this mere incompetence or was it an intentional act to facilitate national bankruptcy? 

"Jobs must be our number one focus," this was from Obama's first State of the Union address, and what a fine job he's done of it too.  Perhaps if he would stop hindering the oil companies, they could create over a million new jobs and generate over $194 billion in revenue for the government, increase petroleum supplies, and the price of gasoline could fall.  That is, it could be done if the left-wingers who have been controlling this president allow us to get out of the green oxcart that we are riding into ruin and allow capitalism's hot rod engine to resume pulling our economic train.

May your gods be with you. 

No Escaping Economic Consequences

The principles that govern economics apply to virtually every aspect of human life.  The immutable laws of supply and demand determine costs, even when it is inexpedient for Congress and occupants of the White House.  In unfettered markets when supply exceeds demand, prices fall, and vice versa.  When government agents arbitrarily assign price supports to commodities, purchasers consume less of that product and alternative choices become more attractive.  Minimum wage laws force employers to hire fewer workers and eliminate badly needed entry level jobs for people who are trying to enter the workforce.

General Motors executives found that it was economically unfeasible to pay United Auto Workers $80 an hour in wages and benefits to paint vehicles; they invested in plant infrastructure and acquired robots to paint for them.  The robots produced a superior quality product, did not need sick days, had no childcare emergencies, and required no expensive pensions or Cadillac health plans for retirees.

When the quality of General Motors' products declined and became less desirable than those of other motor vehicle manufacturers, the buying public voted with their feet and dollars and GM's house of cards crashed.  The legacy of paying $80 an hour while Saturn was paying $35 an hour for the same labor is that GM would not even exist if the current administration had not confiscated the company from its owners, given it to the UAW, and foisted the burden of subsidizing that economically non-viable entity onto taxpayers.  It is distressing that so few people realize that many in this country cannot afford new GM cars because they only earn a fraction of the compensation packages paid to UAW employees.  The relatively poor are subsidizing the well-off.

O-buma and company are attempting a similar end run and are maneuvering to confiscate Boeing from its owners.  They realize that it is simply beyond their ken to operate a business for profit.  Therefore, they are desperate to have competent capitalists succeed in business so that they can take the financial products of that labor and use it to purchase votes from their permanent entitlement constituencies.  The standard method for Theftocrats to acquire  businesses or industries is through oppressive regulation that prevents companies from pursuing strategies that improve their competitiveness.  The other favorite tactic is confiscatory taxation that leaves owners unable to invest in infrastructure needed to stay abreast in their areas of expertise. 

Those who operate such enterprises are denied vital business strategies and have their profits robbed from them while still bearing the burden of making a living.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, it is the same old serpent; you work, and I'll eat.  In his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Boeing Company President and CEO Jim McNerney offers his side of the story. 

Deep into the recent recession, Boeing decided to invest more than $1 billion in a new factory in South Carolina. Surging global demand for our innovative, new 787 Dreamliner exceeded what we could build on one production line and we needed to open another.

This was good news for Boeing and for the economy. The new jetliner assembly plant would be the first one built in the U.S. in 40 years. It would create new American jobs at a time when most employers are hunkered down. It would expand the domestic footprint of the nation's leading exporter and make it more competitive against emerging plane makers from China, Russia and elsewhere. And it would bring hope to a state burdened by double-digit unemployment—with the construction phase alone estimated to create more than 9,000 total jobs. 

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) believes it was a mistake and that our actions were unlawful. It claims we improperly transferred existing work, and that our decision reflected "animus" and constituted "retaliation" against union-represented employees in Washington state. Its remedy: Reverse course, Boeing, and build the assembly line where we tell you to build it.

This, despite the fact that the plant has already been built, 1000 workers have been hired and are being trained, and production is scheduled to begin in July.

Important to our case is the basic fact that no existing work is being transferred to South Carolina, and not a single union member in Washington has been adversely affected by this decision. In fact, we've since added more than 2,000 union jobs there, and the hiring continues. The 787 production line in Everett has a planned capacity of seven airplanes per month. The line in Charleston will build three additional airplanes to reach our 10-per-month capacity plan. Production of the new U.S. Air Force aerial refueling tanker will sustain and grow union jobs in Everett, too.       

This is a blatant power play by people who are paid much more than they can command on the open market.  They hope to use government thugs to do their stealing for them and take Boeing away from its owners.

In his article in The Daily Caller, Matthew Boyle points out that the NLRB, at the behest of Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, has taken unprecedented legal action against The Boeing Company to prevent it from expanding productions into South Carolina, a state that assures workers the freedom not to join a union as a condition of employment.  If the NLRB prevails, it will only encourage companies to make their investments in foreign nations, moving jobs and economic growth overseas.

The NLRB and the machinists' union claim that collective bargaining and the Wagner Act doesn’t set up a system of collective bargaining.  It sets up a guaranteed outcome...labor unions can’t possibly succeed unless [the public subsidizes] their success.

The New York Times reports that Boeing said it would 'vigorously contest' the labor board’s complaint.  This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent, said J. Michael Luttig, a Boeing executive vice president and its general counsel.  Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region.

Little wonder that companies are reluctant to hire and expand and are outsourcing jobs to locations that offer more favorable economic climates.  The US has the highest corporate tax rates on the planet; we are the only nation to tax domestic corporations on the profits of their foreign holdings.  Could progressives actually fail to recognize that they are preventing job growth and economic recovery?  Perhaps it is simply that they find it more expedient to increase the size of the theft-welfare mommy state.

May your gods be with you.

In Bed with the O-bumites? You Bet!

The Washington Post's reputation as an H. L. Mencken-type champion of the little guy, the poor, and the oppressed has taken a bit of a drubbing lately.  It has come to light that the Post owns Kaplan University.  Kaplan is a for profit university that has been accused by members from both aisles of Congress of exploiting economically disadvantaged students by saddling them school loans that they cannot repay in return for promises of non-existent jobs.

Kaplan is also a very profitable jewel in the Gray Lady's financial crown.  Post Chairman Donald Graham has had little to say in defense of Kaplan's actions.  However, Alan Carnuba's article "The Screwed Generation" reveals that the O-bumites' hopey-changey thing has been more like the green weenie for recent and soon to be college graduates.

Carnuba says that [t]oday’s college graduates are thoroughly screwed. According to Matthew Segal, the president of a non-profit membership organization called Our Time, “With 85% of college graduates moving back home and an average debt of $22,900 per student, thousands are staring at a bleak economic future.” 

Aren’t these the eager, besotted youngsters who, at age 18, voted for Barack Hussein Obama as if he were the Second Coming? In the words of Herman Cain, a GOP presidential contender, how did that work out?

Post Chairman Graham, a former police officer, was also questioned by one of his shareholders as to his opinion of Barack O-buma inviting a rapper to the White House to chant a tribute to a cop killer (the Post ran an article defending this act).  Graham plead the fifth and refused to comment.  This silence seems to be Graham's tacit approval of O-buma, the rapper, the cop killer, and Kaplan's apparent shafting of the poor.

The Post story about the rapper said, “Critics were swift to pinpoint lyrics that support such controversial figures as Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader who was convicted in 1977 of killing a New Jersey state trooper.  On the other side, [the rapper] Common’s defenders asserted that such songs are civic-minded protests of corrupt law enforcement and unjust legal proceedings.

Asked to explain this printed defense of a tribute to a cop-killer, Graham again declined to get involved. “We are obviously not going to comment on any given news story in today’s paper…”  What a shock.

Graham also clammed up and refused to say which members of the U.S. Senate and House he had personally lobbied in order to forestall federal regulations affecting Kaplan, a Post subsidiary and for-profit education business that had been contributing operating funds to the money- and circulation-losing Post newspaper. Kaplan has been under fire, even from the Obama Administration and liberal Democrats, for allegedly conning students into taking out federal loans for a worthless education or non-existent jobs. These federal payments had made Kaplan into a very profitable business.

Graham [also] claimed ignorance about a Daily Caller report by Matthew Boyle that The Washington Post Company has received Obamacare Early Retiree Reinsurance Program funding of $573,217 in taxpayer subsidies. The money was said to be for health benefits for early retirees from the company. Hal S. Jones, senior vice president for finance and chief financial officer of The Washington Post Company, said he was aware of the report but couldn’t supply any details.

Taxpayers' subsidies for the complicit and compliant lapdog media spell the end of the fourth estate's pretense of independent journalism and the First Amendment as well.  This is but another of the federal government's Tony Soprano-type subsidies; the reason for them is to take control of the businesses.  The Post has traveled too far down the slippery slope of government subsidy and control to return to respectability.  It is now a self-censoring eunuch spewing Theftocrat propaganda on behalf of the progressives.

May your gods be with you. 

It's the Treachery, Stupid

Whenever gasoline prices spike, some of the dullards on the Theftocrat side of the Congressional aisle start to yammer about raising taxes on oil companies or confiscating what they call excessive profits.  Economic illiteracy of this sort by public officials should be considered prima facie evidence justifying immediate removal from office.  The National Review Online article "The Oil Drill" makes the following points.

Three Senate Democrats angry about the high price of gasoline propose to raise taxes on the firms that produce it. No, it does not make any sense to us, either. For Democrats, expensive gas is just the price of scoring a moral victory over Big Oil, and American consumers will be expected to pay any price and bear any burden that Harry Reid & Co. inflict upon them.

The “Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act” is a [M]inotaur’s labyrinth of economic illiteracy, with Democratic senators Robert Menendez (N.J.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) lurking at the center of it. This A-team of financial sophisticates has taken a hard look at rising gasoline prices and concluded that the most reasonable course of action is to increase the cost of producing oil by “closing tax loopholes” for the five biggest oil companies.

The Democrats would rather use the tax code as an enemies list, and they’re already fighting about what to do with the money they foresee expropriating from oil producers and, indirectly, from gasoline consumers. Some want to use the funds to pretend to reduce the deficit. Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), getting in touch with his inner Barack Obama, has his eyes on the money, too, with big plans to use it to subsidize politically favored automobile manufacturers and enterprises engaged in the alternative-fuels business — as though one ethanol boondoggle and one GM bailout were not enough of a national embarrassment.

Consumer gasoline prices are highly responsive to oil producers’ costs. In a meaningful sense, oil companies are not so much taxpayers as tax-collectors. Singling oil companies out for tax-code punishment may give Democrats a political tingle, but it’s drivers and consumers (How do you think your groceries get to the store?) who will pay the freight. 

This is simply more of the O-bumites' LEAHP program, or Less Energy At Higher Prices.  They have illegally maintained a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and halted Shell Oil's exploration off the coast of Alaska.  Further compounding our energy problems is Hillary Clinton's blocking of a pipeline from Canada to Texas that would bring 900,000 barrels of oil a day to Gulf Coast refineries.

Now, the boy genius in the White House is simpering about increasing US oil production.  The business of this administration is propaganda and disinformation.  Its corporate logo should be Hypocrisy 'r Us.

May your gods be with you.