America’s Racist And Anti-Muslim Policies Alienate The Islamic World
Monday, October 3rd, 2011
Barack Obama was elected the President because many Americans realized that the racist and anti-Muslim policies of Bush have done tremendous harm to the American interests all over the world. Even though Obama made tall claims that he would change these policies, he failed to do so and the policies formulated under Bush have made a comeback. Now, Obama is openly following the anti-Muslim and racist policies of Bush.
By Dr. Sawraj Singh
President George Bush undid the policies of President Bill Clinton and incited racism and hatred for the Muslims. He brought back the painful memories of the crusades. Barack Obama was elected the President because many Americans realized that the racist and anti-Muslim policies of Bush have done tremendous harm to the American interests all over the world. Even though Obama made tall claims that he would change these policies, he failed to do so and the policies formulated under Bush have made a comeback. Now, Obama is openly following the anti-Muslim and racist policies of Bush.
It may sound paradoxical that a black is following racist policies. However, we must understand that in the final analysis, anti-Muslim policies are racist policies because Islam is mainly the religion of the third world and non-white people. It is not Christianity against Islam because the non-white Christians of Africa and Latin America do not hate the Muslims. The hatred for the Muslims is primarily confined to the white Christians of North America and Europe. Therefore, instead of a Christianity-Islam rivalry, it is a contradiction between the whites and the non-whites.
The same can be said of the Zionists’ hatred for the Muslims; they associate themselves with the white Christians. In the final analysis, Zionism is also another form of racism. The attack on Libya can also be called a racist attack, where the white Europeans and Americans have attacked an African country. The so-called rebels are traitors and mercenaries. Therefore, they are also acting as agents of the whites.
Once Obama has started following Bush’s anti-Muslim policies, he is facing a very stiff resistance. He ordered the attack on Osama Bin Laden, completely violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. When America is miserably losing the war in Afghanistan, it has started blaming Pakistan. However, it is not just Pakistan which is seeing a very strong anti-American feeling among the majority of its population, many other Islamic countries also are; including the staunchest American ally Saudi Arabia, which is going through the same feelings. America and Israel are facing the worst isolation among the Islamic countries which form a major block in the third world. America’s threat to use veto against a Security Council resolution in support of a Palestinian state has alienated almost all of the Islamic countries. All of these countries are tilting towards China in America vis-à-vis China equation.
America is trying to counter the loss of influence in the Islamic world by trying to incite Hindu fundamentalism in India. America has indirectly tried to promote Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, as the next Prime Minister of India. However, Modi has become a symbol of anti-Muslim fanaticism in India. America has also tried to stir up anti-China hysteria in India. However, many Indians are very suspicious of America’s ulterior motives and see the American moves as pushing India to a war with China and the Islamic countries. Such a war can escalate into a third world war and make India the arena for such a war. Many Indians can see through the American designs and want to save India from such a catastrophic war. They believe that secularism and non-alignment are the best policies for India.
Dr. Sawraj Singh, MD F.I.C.S. is the Chairman of the Washington State Network for Human Rights and Chairman of the Central Washington Coalition for Social Justice.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Overrated Rumors of Barack Obama’s political skill have been greatly exaggerated.
Oct 10, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 04 • By NOEMIE EMERY
For a success, Barack Obama is a very bad politician, the worst politician to win the presidency by an electoral landslide, to never lose a major election, or to rise to the presidency from a state legislature in little more than four years. He has gone from sterling campaigner to put-upon leader; from the new FDR to the next Jimmy Carter; from being the orator who could hold millions spellbound to the man who moves no one at all. The man who promised everything is delivering nothing. Journalists who wept when he won the election now grind their teeth in despair. Maureen Dowd admits he isn’t the one for whom even he had been waiting. The gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large or alarming, and inquiring minds want to know what went wrong.
Did the prince (assuming he was one) turn into a frog? Did he use all his luck up in winning his office? Did he, once in power, see his governing skills fade away? The answers to these things are no, yes, and no. The record suggests that he was never a prince (merely a fantasy); that his luck went away once his free ride had ended; and that he had few political, that is, governing, skills to begin with, a fact that is now more than clear. In three areas at least, he appears to be lacking. Let us walk back and see what they are.
Good politicians create coalitions and then tend them carefully, draw people in from the opposite party, and make their own party (like Reagan and Roosevelt) both bigger and different than it was before. Obama inherited a coalition by chance and dismantled it during his first years in office, having never understood what it was made of, how it developed, how fragile it was, and what it would take to maintain. This coalition had formed by itself shortly after the Lehman Brothers collapse tipped the financial world into chaos in September 2008, and the election, without his having even to wiggle his fingers, fell into his open and welcoming lap. Aside from taking the rap for what was a crisis cooked up by both parties, the GOP was hit by two other strokes of bad fortune: Its nominee, John McCain, was a war hero and foreign policy maven, whose financial credentials were minimal. And the widely despised TARP bailout measure could have been fashioned on purpose to split the Republican party, which took two weeks off from the campaign against Democrats to open fire within its own ranks, laying waste to the sense that the party could govern and sending swing voters fleeing in droves.
The numbers for those days tell the whole story: Before September 15, the McCain/Palin ticket was leading Obama and Biden by two to three points in most national polls; within days, it was trailing by five, and then six. Before September 15, states like Ohio and Florida had been trending in McCain’s direction; after it, they swung back to the Democrats’ side. Weeks later, Obama beat John McCain by a spread of 53-46 percent, the widest popular-vote margin for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Obama captured the classic swing states of Ohio and Florida, but he also carried states, regions, and voting groups Republicans had seen for decades as their property. He won the purple/red states of Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina; he did better with whites, and white males, than Al Gore or John Kerry; and he swept Hispanics, whose losses George W. Bush had kept to a minimum. He exploded the red and blue map of the previous decade and expanded the Democrats’ reach into unexplored country, painting large swaths of the continent blue.
Pundits predicted a decades-long liberal dominance. Newsweek proclaimed us all socialists. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who had predicted an Emerging Democratic Majority almost a decade before, said it had emerged, albeit belatedly, and would be around a long while. “This realignment is predicated on a change in political demography and geography,” Judis said. “Groups that had been disproportionately Republican have become disproportionately Democratic, and red states like Virginia have turned blue.”
Or had they? If Obama had been a good politician, he would have realized that he had been elected not by a broad and deep swath of newly minted liberal voters, but by a temporary alliance of faithful progressives (numerous, but not enough to win elections) and centrist swing voters scared out of their wits by the crash. Before the crash, as David Paul Kuhn wrote on RealClearPolitics later, McCain led Obama in the Gallup polls for nine days in succession; after, he never led again. Before, Obama cracked the 50 percent mark only once, and that was at the peak of his convention; after, he passed it 33 times. He won nine states Bush had carried four years earlier, but in six of these (including Ohio and Florida) McCain tied or led him before September 15. Why? Most of these states had large, wealthy suburbs around their big cities, where stockholders and homeowners saw huge paper losses. It was during this period that Democrats made their gains among whites, and white males.
At the same time as this massive swing towards the Democratic ticket, polls showed that the ideological split remained where it had been in the Clinton/Bush era: self-identified conservatives around 41 percent, moderates around 37 percent, liberals around 21 percent. Many people who voted for Obama were not in fact liberal, but centrist or center-right voters unnerved by the crash and the chaos in the Republican party, and drawn to Obama’s misleading aura of calm. This meant there was also a split in Obama’s electorate: The progressives liked his liberal ideas, the centrists his so-called “conservative” temperament; the progressives wanted transformation, the centrists stability; the progressives wanted the government grown, the centrists wanted the economy stabilized; the centrists were prepared for the small shift to the left that comes with the usual change from a center-right to a left-center government, the progressives were bent on sweeping and radical change.
An adept politician would have looked at the polls and realized he had a frail coalition that had to be nudged along carefully, knowing schism would destroy his majority. Obama’s mistake was to assume that the shock of the crash had turned the center hard left and to govern accordingly. “The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America’s last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan,” wrote Peter Beinart, reflecting the view of the press and the president. As it happened, “the coalition that carried Obama to victory” would shatter in less than nine months.
The coalition Obama never realized existed took its first hit in his first month, with his $800 billion stimulus package, which would fail to address the problem of job loss and fail in its long-run ambition to hold unemployment under 8 percent. It took its second hit just a month later, with a bailout for homeowners behind in their payments, prompting CNBC’s Rick Santelli to suggest dumping worthless derivatives into Lake Michigan, thus launching the Tea Party movement, which Obama and allies, with typical brilliance, dismissed.
The third hit, and the one that proved fatal, was the launching of national health care, a sacred cause to the left but to no one else in the country, a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the country’s economy, which would prove a mistake in its timing (FDR had waited two years to introduce Social Security), a mistake in its structure, and a mistake in the way it was framed. To keep his coalition intact, it should have been incremental, built out from the center, and addressed to the main concern of the public, which was affordability. Instead, the plan that emerged from Congress was comprehensive, built out from the left, geared to help the uninsured (one-sixth of the country) at the expense of everything else in the system, and based on the premise, which no one believed, that it could expand subsidized coverage to millions of people while at the same time keeping costs down.
This was not what the centrists had signed on for, and in the course of the summer, they started to flee. Obama’s numbers began drifting down from their astronomical highs to more human levels, and support for his bill into negative country. Democrats from purple and red states found themselves besieged by angry constituents, whose concerns Obama did nothing to appease or acknowledge. They then flung themselves into the arms of Republicans, who, dazed and despondent after Obama’s election, could scarcely believe their own luck.
In October, Democrats rammed the bill through the House, winning by 7 votes out of a 79-seat majority, with no Republicans voting in favor, and 34 Democrats voting against. In November came the off-year elections for governor, in New Jersey, a blue state which Obama had won a year earlier by a 15-point margin, and Virginia, a purple/red state which Obama had carried by 7. Obama wrapped his arms around Democrats Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine. Independents, who had rallied for him a year earlier, looked, and ran hard in the other direction. Deeds lost by 18 points to Bob McDonnell. Corzine lost to Chris Christie by 3.
In December, Democrats pushed the bill through the Senate, by means of hundreds of millions in bribes and kickbacks to wavering members of their own party. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “gift for the American people.” The people thought differently. In January, Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts, taking the seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy, and becoming the first member of his party to represent his state in that body in 30 years. The bill was thought dead, and most Democrats breathed sighs of relief and exhaustion. But their perils were not over yet.
Proving there was no pain he would not inflict on his party, Obama seized on a loophole to push it back through the House, a Pickett’s charge of a mission which would prove a death sentence for many congressional Democrats. “The legislation has become a disaster,” wrote Howard Fineman in what used to be Newsweek. “The leaders of Troy knew they were making a mistake when they wheeled that horse into their besieged city, but they did it anyway. We’ll see what happens this fall.”
Obamacare passed the Senate 60-39, and they saw. “The Democrats’ hope with health care was that ‘people will like it after we pass it.’ Well, they hate it,” wrote pollster Pat Caddell in September. Time magazine found “a sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal” among many voters. “In Nevada, a state Obama won with 55 percent, . . . only 29 percent of likely voters . . . think the president’s actions have helped the economy.” In Indiana, a state legislator said she was often approached by former Obama supporters who wanted to “vent” their frustrations: “Betrayed by the health care vote,” “He’s not what I voted for,” “What are they thinking when it comes to spending?” were the most common themes.
In one go, the 2010 midterms wiped out the combined Democratic gains in the House of the previous two “wave” elections, took from them 6 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships, along with control of state houses, in swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. An army of rising young GOP stars vowed to work for health care repeal in the House and the Senate; governors vowed to work for repeal and resist implementation; and state attorneys general wasted no time in filing suits in federal courts to have the law declared unconstitutional. The use of wedge issues is common in politics—issues carefully selected to unite one party while dividing the other—but it is rare to use them against one’s own party. It takes an unusual politician to achieve this objective. One who’s not very good at his craft.
Good politicians are in sync with their times, understand them, and deal with their challenges. But Obama is at odds, and often at war, with his own. In an age when debt is a problem, he is a big spender; when government has to cut back, he wants to expand both its expense and its reach. Nothing that happens appears to deter him, not the massive pushback from the American people in the 2009 and 2010 elections; not the crisis in Europe, kicked off by the collapse of Greece’s finances in April 2010, which caused an austerity panic all over Europe, and should have driven home the most cogent of lessons: that exactly as he was trying to turn his country into a social democracy like those of old Europe, which the American left had long admired, the European social democracies had been forced to admit that their model could not be sustained.
The result is that Obama is now an outlier among the world’s leaders: the one head of a first world industrial nation who is not calling for cutbacks and thrift. In Britain, David Cameron plans cuts of $130 billion; in France, Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age and has limited pensions. “We can’t finance our social model,” said the president of the European Council, facing the reality that longer life expectancy, a smaller work force, and regulations and policies that inhibit productivity have called a halt to an era of generous benefits. Obama alone is hopelessly enamored of the past.
Perhaps it was all those Photoshopped pictures of Obama as Franklin D. Roosevelt that made him seem caught in a time warp—in 1933, when FDR met the Great Depression with a massive expansion of government (which was at the time perhaps too small for its purpose), or in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson leveraged the death of John Kennedy to pass the civil rights bills (as JFK would have wanted) and the Great Society programs (about which Kennedy might well have had second thoughts). It was the overreach and subsequent failure of those Great Society programs that led to the backlash against the liberal project, and the skepticism about the expansion of government that persists to this day. A good politician would have understood this, and known that, while there was plenty of room for tinkering with the basic functions of government, there was no going back to those innocent days. This was not 1933, or 1964, for that matter, and Obama had no Dust Bowl or tragic, dead president to stir people’s hearts. What he had was an unpopular deficit he proceeded to triple. And then he wanted to spend even more.
Faced with a public revolt, he went on to ignore it. At the State of the Union in 2011, he spoke for 40 minutes before mentioning deficits, and then did so fleetingly. In February, he sent the Senate a budget so bad that the senators of both parties unanimously rejected it. In April, he made another speech on the budget in which he talked about spending additional millions on such boutique liberal projects as green jobs and light rail.
There is a great role for a liberal president—saving the safety net by making it viable—but it’s not a role he wants to play. Great presidents (Roosevelt and Reagan) transform their times; good presidents (Eisenhower and Kennedy) understand them almost without trying; bad presidents (Buchanan and Carter) are overwhelmed by them. Obama is the first who has tried to defy them. This cannot, and will not, end well.
Obama’s third flaw is his failure to sense the importance of moral legitimacy, to which his failure to understand coalitions is linked. Moral legitimacy is what presidents gain when they champion reforms with a broad base of support from the public. Moral legitimacy is what the Electoral College ensures when it operates so that presidents are elected not just by bloc votes in safe states, but by groups of states representing different collections of citizens, and from different parts of the whole. Moral legitimacy is what Barack Obama threw away after Scott Brown’s election, when he made the choice to pass his health care bill on votes bribed or wrested from members of Congress, with no support outside Congress at all.
“Great measures should not be passed on narrow majorities” is an unwritten precept all leaders should heed. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson spent months building broad coalitions before passing their bills on Social Security and civil rights. Lesser politicians have tried this, and sometimes been less than successful, but until Obama, no one imagined that a president should try to pass a huge, complex, costly bill that affected everyone in the country not only without enjoying broad support, but while facing an enraged, energized, and broad coalition against it. The reasons Democrats gave were all unconvincing, and they would all prove mistaken: They had to pass something “to prove they could govern.” They had to have something to take to the voters. No one would care how the bill passed, as long as it did pass. They would look weak if they dropped it. Obama would prove himself a strong leader, and his stock with the public would rise. Alas. How were they to know that “governing” didn’t mean stiffing the public; that they would be giving Republicans an issue to take to the voters; that it was their party that would be terribly weakened by passage; and that public esteem for Obama as leader would not only not rise, but would stall, and then slowly drift down?
“Health reform has been a political dud for the Dems,” Mike Allen wrote in Politico a week after passage. Gallup found that Obama’s standing “on four key personal qualities,” including strong leadership, slipped below a majority for the first time in his presidency. And as for people not caring about the mechanics of passage, it turned out people cared. A Gallup poll showed that all adults, Republicans, and—crucially—independent voters considered the passage of the bill an “abuse of power” by margins of 53-40, 86-11, and 53-36. As Pat Caddell would say later, “Because of the way it was passed, as a crime against democracy, the country has simply not accepted it.” The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto added, “There is no precedent for a massive, unpopular expansion of the welfare state that has support only within one party. It’s possible that Americans would grudgingly come to accept it. . . . It’s also possible that they would hate it even more. . . . Obama and Pelosi not only are trifling with their party’s short-term prospects, but are putting at risk its long term viability.”
And so they did. By passing this bill against the will of the public, they brought on themselves a “long, twilight struggle,” in which the people, using all the legal, political, and tactical tools at their disposal, are endeavoring to take it apart. The fragile economic recovery, which had struggled upwards for months, stopped in its tracks after Obamacare’s passage and has yet to revive. Blame was placed on the burden in new taxes and regulations the bill would impose on businesses, along with uncertainty as to the effect the bill would have and even whether it would survive. Together, the stalled economy and Obamacare itself have already caused catastrophic losses for Democrats, and may do the same in the 2012 elections, when the Supreme Court case on the law’s constitutionality is set to go off like a bomb midcampaign.
Other presidents have failed by doing too little or nothing; Obama is the first to do himself in through hyperactivity. For a success, he is surely a failed politician. But then, what made him a success?
Obama won a race like none other, run by a candidate such as no one had seen. When he was six years old, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner showed a darkly handsome Sidney Poitier wooing the white niece of Katharine Hepburn, telling her father he hoped a child of theirs could one day be president—or secretary of state, as a concession, if the White House proved too far a reach. By the time that this fictional child would have been old enough to be either, the country had seen two black secretaries of state in succession, both popular and both boomed for president, and was palpably eager to break the highest glass ceiling of all. Of all possible candidates for the historic breakthrough, none fit the role better than Obama, “clean” and “articulate” (in the words of Joe Biden), cerebral, with elite credentials from humble beginnings, the son of an African student and a white woman from Kansas, a man who had brothers and cousins in Kenya, but could travel to Ireland (as had John Kennedy) and knock back a beer in a pub there with friends of his kin. He spanned races and continents, high and low culture, the trivial along with the sublime. He did not, as he said, look like the men on Mount Rushmore, but he looked like something perhaps more resonant: If not film-star handsome like Reagan and Kennedy, he was to an extreme degree our first Model President, the image of the cool, slim, and young seen in catalogues, the ideal of the with-it and of the postracial, living the good life as embodied by the trendy and slender in every upscale venue in the land. He never actually posed for a magazine layout, but this hardly mattered: Every picture he took looked like an ad for something expensive, and the fashion world loved him en masse.
Vogue editor Anna Wintour held a fundraiser for him. Diane von Furstenberg designed a tote in his honor. Models endorsed him. Donatella Versace dedicated a collection to him at Fashion Week in Milan. This was one side of an aspirational appeal that had numerous facets, and in which politics barely figured. He was a brand, but his appeal had a mythic dimension: He was The One, the magical Son who could heal the Original Sin of the Founding, and make the dream of equality flesh. Shelby Steele said he “flatters” America. People too young to remember the civil rights movement could pull a lever for him and feel themselves one with the freedom riders, who had risked all and bled for the cause. He was a blank slate on which people wrote their ambitions and longings. Allusions to him reached dimensions best seen as surreal: He was Reagan and Roosevelt; Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, and Moses and Jesus, as well as a feature in Gentleman’s Quarterly. His record was thin—all he had done well was speak and write (about himself, as it happened)—but that hardly mattered in the light of emotional resonance. He was a moral ideal, a fashion accessory, a note of good will to the rest of the universe. What could go wrong?
What went wrong in the first place was that too much went right. He never was able to learn from adversity, as he never saw any. He never learned to build and maintain coalitions; they simply assembled around him. He never argued people around from different positions, he simply inspired them to vague aspirations. He never passed laws, much less tried to enforce them. His idea of leading was making a speech. Miraculous things seemed to happen around him: In his breakout run that made him a national figure, he faced opposition from candidates who were sidelined by scandals before he could face them. In the Democrats’ primaries, he emerged as the candidate from academia and of the liberal white upper classes, a tranche often doomed by its want of appeal to minorities. As a black academic, he won nonwhites over, and his coalition formed by itself. His governing theory was that he would make speeches and win people over; then Nancy Pelosi would twist arms, or break them. That worked for a while, until Pelosi lost power, and so did his speeches. As a result he now seems to have run out of options, and strategies. There was, it appears, no plan B.
But what would have happened if Obama had had one, and followed it, when Scott Brown won the special election, and push came up hard against shove? Suppose he had pulled back, designed a small health care plan aimed at cost control, and forged a coalition of sorts around that. Suppose he had made it so attractive that it served as a bridge between the two halves of his coalition. Suppose it had won over a few GOP members—Scott Brown among them—the same ones who supported a few of his initiatives that appealed to their voters a little later on that year. He’d have had a win, if a small one, and would have taken a step toward repairing the split among his voters.
But what he’d have won would have been as nothing compared with what he’d have contrived to avoid. Think of the burdens he would not be bearing at present if he had been clever enough to step back: no bad blood and no bloodbath within his own party, no Bart Stupak and Evan Bayh resignations and drama; no rancid Obamacare as a vast open sore on his party, no Supreme Court case waiting to come up midcampaign; no unified, furious Republican party, no enraged independents lining up behind it, no Nancy Pelosi striding across the Capitol grounds with a grin on her face and an oversized gavel, an image that will live in the annals of political idiocy, a symbol of everything about the bill and its passage that people have come to despise.
If you want an explanation for the wave that drowned the House Democrats in 2010, you can do no better than return to that moment. Any good politician would have acted then to forestall at all costs the charade Pelosi and the Black Caucus staged, linking arms to evoke the bridge scene at Selma, then accusing the Tea Party of hurling racist insults, which were never proven or verified, and now appear not to be true.
A good politician would have heeded the words of John Kennedy, another fairly good politician, who made a practice when winning of giving the other side something to go home with, and of never making an opponent so angry he would do anything to secure one’s defeat. If Obama had gone with a small bill after Scott Brown’s election, he would have drained some of the rage out of the Tea Party, weakened the link between the GOP and the independents, removed a focal point for the anger of much of the country, and stopped the momentum of the wave of resentment and fury that rolled on, gathering steam every moment, to shatter his party in 2010. He lacked the sense common to all good politicians—shared by Ike, Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and others—that tells you that if A does X, it will cause B to do Y, whereas if A had done Z, B would have acted quite differently. A politician cannot survive lacking this instinct. But Obama is not a good politician, merely a good candidate, with no talent for governing. Thanks to a remarkable convergence of historical events, he was able to rise without that talent. And now he is paying the price.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, and the author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
For a success, Barack Obama is a very bad politician, the worst politician to win the presidency by an electoral landslide, to never lose a major election, or to rise to the presidency from a state legislature in little more than four years. He has gone from sterling campaigner to put-upon leader; from the new FDR to the next Jimmy Carter; from being the orator who could hold millions spellbound to the man who moves no one at all. The man who promised everything is delivering nothing. Journalists who wept when he won the election now grind their teeth in despair. Maureen Dowd admits he isn’t the one for whom even he had been waiting. The gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large or alarming, and inquiring minds want to know what went wrong.
Did the prince (assuming he was one) turn into a frog? Did he use all his luck up in winning his office? Did he, once in power, see his governing skills fade away? The answers to these things are no, yes, and no. The record suggests that he was never a prince (merely a fantasy); that his luck went away once his free ride had ended; and that he had few political, that is, governing, skills to begin with, a fact that is now more than clear. In three areas at least, he appears to be lacking. Let us walk back and see what they are.
Good politicians create coalitions and then tend them carefully, draw people in from the opposite party, and make their own party (like Reagan and Roosevelt) both bigger and different than it was before. Obama inherited a coalition by chance and dismantled it during his first years in office, having never understood what it was made of, how it developed, how fragile it was, and what it would take to maintain. This coalition had formed by itself shortly after the Lehman Brothers collapse tipped the financial world into chaos in September 2008, and the election, without his having even to wiggle his fingers, fell into his open and welcoming lap. Aside from taking the rap for what was a crisis cooked up by both parties, the GOP was hit by two other strokes of bad fortune: Its nominee, John McCain, was a war hero and foreign policy maven, whose financial credentials were minimal. And the widely despised TARP bailout measure could have been fashioned on purpose to split the Republican party, which took two weeks off from the campaign against Democrats to open fire within its own ranks, laying waste to the sense that the party could govern and sending swing voters fleeing in droves.
The numbers for those days tell the whole story: Before September 15, the McCain/Palin ticket was leading Obama and Biden by two to three points in most national polls; within days, it was trailing by five, and then six. Before September 15, states like Ohio and Florida had been trending in McCain’s direction; after it, they swung back to the Democrats’ side. Weeks later, Obama beat John McCain by a spread of 53-46 percent, the widest popular-vote margin for a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Obama captured the classic swing states of Ohio and Florida, but he also carried states, regions, and voting groups Republicans had seen for decades as their property. He won the purple/red states of Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina; he did better with whites, and white males, than Al Gore or John Kerry; and he swept Hispanics, whose losses George W. Bush had kept to a minimum. He exploded the red and blue map of the previous decade and expanded the Democrats’ reach into unexplored country, painting large swaths of the continent blue.
Pundits predicted a decades-long liberal dominance. Newsweek proclaimed us all socialists. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who had predicted an Emerging Democratic Majority almost a decade before, said it had emerged, albeit belatedly, and would be around a long while. “This realignment is predicated on a change in political demography and geography,” Judis said. “Groups that had been disproportionately Republican have become disproportionately Democratic, and red states like Virginia have turned blue.”
Or had they? If Obama had been a good politician, he would have realized that he had been elected not by a broad and deep swath of newly minted liberal voters, but by a temporary alliance of faithful progressives (numerous, but not enough to win elections) and centrist swing voters scared out of their wits by the crash. Before the crash, as David Paul Kuhn wrote on RealClearPolitics later, McCain led Obama in the Gallup polls for nine days in succession; after, he never led again. Before, Obama cracked the 50 percent mark only once, and that was at the peak of his convention; after, he passed it 33 times. He won nine states Bush had carried four years earlier, but in six of these (including Ohio and Florida) McCain tied or led him before September 15. Why? Most of these states had large, wealthy suburbs around their big cities, where stockholders and homeowners saw huge paper losses. It was during this period that Democrats made their gains among whites, and white males.
At the same time as this massive swing towards the Democratic ticket, polls showed that the ideological split remained where it had been in the Clinton/Bush era: self-identified conservatives around 41 percent, moderates around 37 percent, liberals around 21 percent. Many people who voted for Obama were not in fact liberal, but centrist or center-right voters unnerved by the crash and the chaos in the Republican party, and drawn to Obama’s misleading aura of calm. This meant there was also a split in Obama’s electorate: The progressives liked his liberal ideas, the centrists his so-called “conservative” temperament; the progressives wanted transformation, the centrists stability; the progressives wanted the government grown, the centrists wanted the economy stabilized; the centrists were prepared for the small shift to the left that comes with the usual change from a center-right to a left-center government, the progressives were bent on sweeping and radical change.
An adept politician would have looked at the polls and realized he had a frail coalition that had to be nudged along carefully, knowing schism would destroy his majority. Obama’s mistake was to assume that the shock of the crash had turned the center hard left and to govern accordingly. “The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America’s last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan,” wrote Peter Beinart, reflecting the view of the press and the president. As it happened, “the coalition that carried Obama to victory” would shatter in less than nine months.
The coalition Obama never realized existed took its first hit in his first month, with his $800 billion stimulus package, which would fail to address the problem of job loss and fail in its long-run ambition to hold unemployment under 8 percent. It took its second hit just a month later, with a bailout for homeowners behind in their payments, prompting CNBC’s Rick Santelli to suggest dumping worthless derivatives into Lake Michigan, thus launching the Tea Party movement, which Obama and allies, with typical brilliance, dismissed.
The third hit, and the one that proved fatal, was the launching of national health care, a sacred cause to the left but to no one else in the country, a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the country’s economy, which would prove a mistake in its timing (FDR had waited two years to introduce Social Security), a mistake in its structure, and a mistake in the way it was framed. To keep his coalition intact, it should have been incremental, built out from the center, and addressed to the main concern of the public, which was affordability. Instead, the plan that emerged from Congress was comprehensive, built out from the left, geared to help the uninsured (one-sixth of the country) at the expense of everything else in the system, and based on the premise, which no one believed, that it could expand subsidized coverage to millions of people while at the same time keeping costs down.
This was not what the centrists had signed on for, and in the course of the summer, they started to flee. Obama’s numbers began drifting down from their astronomical highs to more human levels, and support for his bill into negative country. Democrats from purple and red states found themselves besieged by angry constituents, whose concerns Obama did nothing to appease or acknowledge. They then flung themselves into the arms of Republicans, who, dazed and despondent after Obama’s election, could scarcely believe their own luck.
In October, Democrats rammed the bill through the House, winning by 7 votes out of a 79-seat majority, with no Republicans voting in favor, and 34 Democrats voting against. In November came the off-year elections for governor, in New Jersey, a blue state which Obama had won a year earlier by a 15-point margin, and Virginia, a purple/red state which Obama had carried by 7. Obama wrapped his arms around Democrats Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine. Independents, who had rallied for him a year earlier, looked, and ran hard in the other direction. Deeds lost by 18 points to Bob McDonnell. Corzine lost to Chris Christie by 3.
In December, Democrats pushed the bill through the Senate, by means of hundreds of millions in bribes and kickbacks to wavering members of their own party. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “gift for the American people.” The people thought differently. In January, Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts, taking the seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy, and becoming the first member of his party to represent his state in that body in 30 years. The bill was thought dead, and most Democrats breathed sighs of relief and exhaustion. But their perils were not over yet.
Proving there was no pain he would not inflict on his party, Obama seized on a loophole to push it back through the House, a Pickett’s charge of a mission which would prove a death sentence for many congressional Democrats. “The legislation has become a disaster,” wrote Howard Fineman in what used to be Newsweek. “The leaders of Troy knew they were making a mistake when they wheeled that horse into their besieged city, but they did it anyway. We’ll see what happens this fall.”
Obamacare passed the Senate 60-39, and they saw. “The Democrats’ hope with health care was that ‘people will like it after we pass it.’ Well, they hate it,” wrote pollster Pat Caddell in September. Time magazine found “a sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal” among many voters. “In Nevada, a state Obama won with 55 percent, . . . only 29 percent of likely voters . . . think the president’s actions have helped the economy.” In Indiana, a state legislator said she was often approached by former Obama supporters who wanted to “vent” their frustrations: “Betrayed by the health care vote,” “He’s not what I voted for,” “What are they thinking when it comes to spending?” were the most common themes.
In one go, the 2010 midterms wiped out the combined Democratic gains in the House of the previous two “wave” elections, took from them 6 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships, along with control of state houses, in swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. An army of rising young GOP stars vowed to work for health care repeal in the House and the Senate; governors vowed to work for repeal and resist implementation; and state attorneys general wasted no time in filing suits in federal courts to have the law declared unconstitutional. The use of wedge issues is common in politics—issues carefully selected to unite one party while dividing the other—but it is rare to use them against one’s own party. It takes an unusual politician to achieve this objective. One who’s not very good at his craft.
Good politicians are in sync with their times, understand them, and deal with their challenges. But Obama is at odds, and often at war, with his own. In an age when debt is a problem, he is a big spender; when government has to cut back, he wants to expand both its expense and its reach. Nothing that happens appears to deter him, not the massive pushback from the American people in the 2009 and 2010 elections; not the crisis in Europe, kicked off by the collapse of Greece’s finances in April 2010, which caused an austerity panic all over Europe, and should have driven home the most cogent of lessons: that exactly as he was trying to turn his country into a social democracy like those of old Europe, which the American left had long admired, the European social democracies had been forced to admit that their model could not be sustained.
The result is that Obama is now an outlier among the world’s leaders: the one head of a first world industrial nation who is not calling for cutbacks and thrift. In Britain, David Cameron plans cuts of $130 billion; in France, Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age and has limited pensions. “We can’t finance our social model,” said the president of the European Council, facing the reality that longer life expectancy, a smaller work force, and regulations and policies that inhibit productivity have called a halt to an era of generous benefits. Obama alone is hopelessly enamored of the past.
Perhaps it was all those Photoshopped pictures of Obama as Franklin D. Roosevelt that made him seem caught in a time warp—in 1933, when FDR met the Great Depression with a massive expansion of government (which was at the time perhaps too small for its purpose), or in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson leveraged the death of John Kennedy to pass the civil rights bills (as JFK would have wanted) and the Great Society programs (about which Kennedy might well have had second thoughts). It was the overreach and subsequent failure of those Great Society programs that led to the backlash against the liberal project, and the skepticism about the expansion of government that persists to this day. A good politician would have understood this, and known that, while there was plenty of room for tinkering with the basic functions of government, there was no going back to those innocent days. This was not 1933, or 1964, for that matter, and Obama had no Dust Bowl or tragic, dead president to stir people’s hearts. What he had was an unpopular deficit he proceeded to triple. And then he wanted to spend even more.
Faced with a public revolt, he went on to ignore it. At the State of the Union in 2011, he spoke for 40 minutes before mentioning deficits, and then did so fleetingly. In February, he sent the Senate a budget so bad that the senators of both parties unanimously rejected it. In April, he made another speech on the budget in which he talked about spending additional millions on such boutique liberal projects as green jobs and light rail.
There is a great role for a liberal president—saving the safety net by making it viable—but it’s not a role he wants to play. Great presidents (Roosevelt and Reagan) transform their times; good presidents (Eisenhower and Kennedy) understand them almost without trying; bad presidents (Buchanan and Carter) are overwhelmed by them. Obama is the first who has tried to defy them. This cannot, and will not, end well.
Obama’s third flaw is his failure to sense the importance of moral legitimacy, to which his failure to understand coalitions is linked. Moral legitimacy is what presidents gain when they champion reforms with a broad base of support from the public. Moral legitimacy is what the Electoral College ensures when it operates so that presidents are elected not just by bloc votes in safe states, but by groups of states representing different collections of citizens, and from different parts of the whole. Moral legitimacy is what Barack Obama threw away after Scott Brown’s election, when he made the choice to pass his health care bill on votes bribed or wrested from members of Congress, with no support outside Congress at all.
“Great measures should not be passed on narrow majorities” is an unwritten precept all leaders should heed. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson spent months building broad coalitions before passing their bills on Social Security and civil rights. Lesser politicians have tried this, and sometimes been less than successful, but until Obama, no one imagined that a president should try to pass a huge, complex, costly bill that affected everyone in the country not only without enjoying broad support, but while facing an enraged, energized, and broad coalition against it. The reasons Democrats gave were all unconvincing, and they would all prove mistaken: They had to pass something “to prove they could govern.” They had to have something to take to the voters. No one would care how the bill passed, as long as it did pass. They would look weak if they dropped it. Obama would prove himself a strong leader, and his stock with the public would rise. Alas. How were they to know that “governing” didn’t mean stiffing the public; that they would be giving Republicans an issue to take to the voters; that it was their party that would be terribly weakened by passage; and that public esteem for Obama as leader would not only not rise, but would stall, and then slowly drift down?
“Health reform has been a political dud for the Dems,” Mike Allen wrote in Politico a week after passage. Gallup found that Obama’s standing “on four key personal qualities,” including strong leadership, slipped below a majority for the first time in his presidency. And as for people not caring about the mechanics of passage, it turned out people cared. A Gallup poll showed that all adults, Republicans, and—crucially—independent voters considered the passage of the bill an “abuse of power” by margins of 53-40, 86-11, and 53-36. As Pat Caddell would say later, “Because of the way it was passed, as a crime against democracy, the country has simply not accepted it.” The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto added, “There is no precedent for a massive, unpopular expansion of the welfare state that has support only within one party. It’s possible that Americans would grudgingly come to accept it. . . . It’s also possible that they would hate it even more. . . . Obama and Pelosi not only are trifling with their party’s short-term prospects, but are putting at risk its long term viability.”
And so they did. By passing this bill against the will of the public, they brought on themselves a “long, twilight struggle,” in which the people, using all the legal, political, and tactical tools at their disposal, are endeavoring to take it apart. The fragile economic recovery, which had struggled upwards for months, stopped in its tracks after Obamacare’s passage and has yet to revive. Blame was placed on the burden in new taxes and regulations the bill would impose on businesses, along with uncertainty as to the effect the bill would have and even whether it would survive. Together, the stalled economy and Obamacare itself have already caused catastrophic losses for Democrats, and may do the same in the 2012 elections, when the Supreme Court case on the law’s constitutionality is set to go off like a bomb midcampaign.
Other presidents have failed by doing too little or nothing; Obama is the first to do himself in through hyperactivity. For a success, he is surely a failed politician. But then, what made him a success?
Obama won a race like none other, run by a candidate such as no one had seen. When he was six years old, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner showed a darkly handsome Sidney Poitier wooing the white niece of Katharine Hepburn, telling her father he hoped a child of theirs could one day be president—or secretary of state, as a concession, if the White House proved too far a reach. By the time that this fictional child would have been old enough to be either, the country had seen two black secretaries of state in succession, both popular and both boomed for president, and was palpably eager to break the highest glass ceiling of all. Of all possible candidates for the historic breakthrough, none fit the role better than Obama, “clean” and “articulate” (in the words of Joe Biden), cerebral, with elite credentials from humble beginnings, the son of an African student and a white woman from Kansas, a man who had brothers and cousins in Kenya, but could travel to Ireland (as had John Kennedy) and knock back a beer in a pub there with friends of his kin. He spanned races and continents, high and low culture, the trivial along with the sublime. He did not, as he said, look like the men on Mount Rushmore, but he looked like something perhaps more resonant: If not film-star handsome like Reagan and Kennedy, he was to an extreme degree our first Model President, the image of the cool, slim, and young seen in catalogues, the ideal of the with-it and of the postracial, living the good life as embodied by the trendy and slender in every upscale venue in the land. He never actually posed for a magazine layout, but this hardly mattered: Every picture he took looked like an ad for something expensive, and the fashion world loved him en masse.
Vogue editor Anna Wintour held a fundraiser for him. Diane von Furstenberg designed a tote in his honor. Models endorsed him. Donatella Versace dedicated a collection to him at Fashion Week in Milan. This was one side of an aspirational appeal that had numerous facets, and in which politics barely figured. He was a brand, but his appeal had a mythic dimension: He was The One, the magical Son who could heal the Original Sin of the Founding, and make the dream of equality flesh. Shelby Steele said he “flatters” America. People too young to remember the civil rights movement could pull a lever for him and feel themselves one with the freedom riders, who had risked all and bled for the cause. He was a blank slate on which people wrote their ambitions and longings. Allusions to him reached dimensions best seen as surreal: He was Reagan and Roosevelt; Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, and Moses and Jesus, as well as a feature in Gentleman’s Quarterly. His record was thin—all he had done well was speak and write (about himself, as it happened)—but that hardly mattered in the light of emotional resonance. He was a moral ideal, a fashion accessory, a note of good will to the rest of the universe. What could go wrong?
What went wrong in the first place was that too much went right. He never was able to learn from adversity, as he never saw any. He never learned to build and maintain coalitions; they simply assembled around him. He never argued people around from different positions, he simply inspired them to vague aspirations. He never passed laws, much less tried to enforce them. His idea of leading was making a speech. Miraculous things seemed to happen around him: In his breakout run that made him a national figure, he faced opposition from candidates who were sidelined by scandals before he could face them. In the Democrats’ primaries, he emerged as the candidate from academia and of the liberal white upper classes, a tranche often doomed by its want of appeal to minorities. As a black academic, he won nonwhites over, and his coalition formed by itself. His governing theory was that he would make speeches and win people over; then Nancy Pelosi would twist arms, or break them. That worked for a while, until Pelosi lost power, and so did his speeches. As a result he now seems to have run out of options, and strategies. There was, it appears, no plan B.
But what would have happened if Obama had had one, and followed it, when Scott Brown won the special election, and push came up hard against shove? Suppose he had pulled back, designed a small health care plan aimed at cost control, and forged a coalition of sorts around that. Suppose he had made it so attractive that it served as a bridge between the two halves of his coalition. Suppose it had won over a few GOP members—Scott Brown among them—the same ones who supported a few of his initiatives that appealed to their voters a little later on that year. He’d have had a win, if a small one, and would have taken a step toward repairing the split among his voters.
But what he’d have won would have been as nothing compared with what he’d have contrived to avoid. Think of the burdens he would not be bearing at present if he had been clever enough to step back: no bad blood and no bloodbath within his own party, no Bart Stupak and Evan Bayh resignations and drama; no rancid Obamacare as a vast open sore on his party, no Supreme Court case waiting to come up midcampaign; no unified, furious Republican party, no enraged independents lining up behind it, no Nancy Pelosi striding across the Capitol grounds with a grin on her face and an oversized gavel, an image that will live in the annals of political idiocy, a symbol of everything about the bill and its passage that people have come to despise.
If you want an explanation for the wave that drowned the House Democrats in 2010, you can do no better than return to that moment. Any good politician would have acted then to forestall at all costs the charade Pelosi and the Black Caucus staged, linking arms to evoke the bridge scene at Selma, then accusing the Tea Party of hurling racist insults, which were never proven or verified, and now appear not to be true.
A good politician would have heeded the words of John Kennedy, another fairly good politician, who made a practice when winning of giving the other side something to go home with, and of never making an opponent so angry he would do anything to secure one’s defeat. If Obama had gone with a small bill after Scott Brown’s election, he would have drained some of the rage out of the Tea Party, weakened the link between the GOP and the independents, removed a focal point for the anger of much of the country, and stopped the momentum of the wave of resentment and fury that rolled on, gathering steam every moment, to shatter his party in 2010. He lacked the sense common to all good politicians—shared by Ike, Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and others—that tells you that if A does X, it will cause B to do Y, whereas if A had done Z, B would have acted quite differently. A politician cannot survive lacking this instinct. But Obama is not a good politician, merely a good candidate, with no talent for governing. Thanks to a remarkable convergence of historical events, he was able to rise without that talent. And now he is paying the price.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, and the author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
Green Energy Industry Staggers
October 1, 2011
As the Energy Department hustled to get another $4.7 billion in loan guarantees for green tech companies out the door before time ran out and the program ended last week, yet another solar panel manufacturer was wilting in the sun, and the green jobs scam was looking more threadbare than ever. Says the WSJ:
Solar-power equipment manufacturer Stirling Energy Systems Inc. has filed for bankruptcy, adding to a wave of troubles in the solar industry amid soft demand, falling prices and difficulty raising money. [… ] Both [of the company’s plants] were sited on public land in California and obtained fast-track construction permits from the Obama administration.
The filing is the latest in a string of U.S. solar company bankruptcies, as soft global demand for solar power, falling prices and a glut of solar panels from Asia have hammered manufacturers.
Surprise, surprise: the American “green energy” industry faces much the same problems as everyone else in this economy. Solar firms still have to compete with Chinese labor (and massive Chinese government subsidies further enhanced by cheap Chinese currency).
But there’s another factor behind the failure of so many Obama administration initiatives in this field. Because alternative energy generation is expensive and inefficient, it requires some combination of subsidies, high energy prices and forced purchases to make these investments pay off.
The Solyndra guarantee and related programs were all developed back in the heady early days of the Obama administrations when delusional greens thought their global agenda was on the verge of being realized. Cap and trade and other aggressive energy policies would artificially jack up energy prices in the US to the point where demand for solar and other alternative energy would grow. The global carbon treaty would provide a permanent source of demand for green energy.
The political assumptions underlying the green investment boomlet turned out to be false. There will be no global carbon regime for the foreseeable future; there will be no cap and trade and no aggressive federal programs to raise energy prices during the deepest recession since World War Two.
Perhaps even worse from the green point of view, a cascade of discoveries and technological advances has dramatically increased the supplies of oil and gas in the western hemisphere — including huge new domestic energy supplies in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and upstate New York. These discoveries are devastating to the politics of the environmental movement.
There will be the usual NIMBY-motivated opposition (some of it justified) to frakking and to oil and gas pipelines, but overall millions more Americans are going to be economically tied to domestic energy production and they will not want their congressional representatives voting against the industry on which their paychecks depend. Nor will they support presidential candidates who promise to eliminate their jobs. It will not just be the people who work in the extraction business who feel this way. Those who supply the industry, those who operate pipelines, those who sell goods and services to gas and oil workers: they will form a powerful phalanx of pro-oil and gas interests that will reach far beyond Texas.
At the same time, key environmental arguments will be seriously weakened. The western hemisphere looks set to become energy independent for the foreseeable future; the US is moving steadily away from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that makes many national security experts think green. Importing from Canada just isn’t the same kind of problem as importing from Iraq.
The question of supply and peak oil will also recede; with new technologies and new discoveries coming so quickly, fewer people will feel the need to make large financial sacrifices now in order to prevent huge oil shortage and massive price hikes in the near term.
Increasingly, the climate change argument will be the only argument left to support subsidies for alternative energy generation. That argument has not been enough to make far reaching legal changes in the past when national security and peak oil worries supported it; there is not much to suggest that the climate change forces can win the political battle standing alone.
The collapse of the green political structure (cap and trade plus global carbon treaty) and the transformation of the American fossil fuel supply have dramatically weakened the case for alternative energy. Investors take heed.
As the Energy Department hustled to get another $4.7 billion in loan guarantees for green tech companies out the door before time ran out and the program ended last week, yet another solar panel manufacturer was wilting in the sun, and the green jobs scam was looking more threadbare than ever. Says the WSJ:
Solar-power equipment manufacturer Stirling Energy Systems Inc. has filed for bankruptcy, adding to a wave of troubles in the solar industry amid soft demand, falling prices and difficulty raising money. [… ] Both [of the company’s plants] were sited on public land in California and obtained fast-track construction permits from the Obama administration.
The filing is the latest in a string of U.S. solar company bankruptcies, as soft global demand for solar power, falling prices and a glut of solar panels from Asia have hammered manufacturers.
Surprise, surprise: the American “green energy” industry faces much the same problems as everyone else in this economy. Solar firms still have to compete with Chinese labor (and massive Chinese government subsidies further enhanced by cheap Chinese currency).
But there’s another factor behind the failure of so many Obama administration initiatives in this field. Because alternative energy generation is expensive and inefficient, it requires some combination of subsidies, high energy prices and forced purchases to make these investments pay off.
The Solyndra guarantee and related programs were all developed back in the heady early days of the Obama administrations when delusional greens thought their global agenda was on the verge of being realized. Cap and trade and other aggressive energy policies would artificially jack up energy prices in the US to the point where demand for solar and other alternative energy would grow. The global carbon treaty would provide a permanent source of demand for green energy.
The political assumptions underlying the green investment boomlet turned out to be false. There will be no global carbon regime for the foreseeable future; there will be no cap and trade and no aggressive federal programs to raise energy prices during the deepest recession since World War Two.
Perhaps even worse from the green point of view, a cascade of discoveries and technological advances has dramatically increased the supplies of oil and gas in the western hemisphere — including huge new domestic energy supplies in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and upstate New York. These discoveries are devastating to the politics of the environmental movement.
There will be the usual NIMBY-motivated opposition (some of it justified) to frakking and to oil and gas pipelines, but overall millions more Americans are going to be economically tied to domestic energy production and they will not want their congressional representatives voting against the industry on which their paychecks depend. Nor will they support presidential candidates who promise to eliminate their jobs. It will not just be the people who work in the extraction business who feel this way. Those who supply the industry, those who operate pipelines, those who sell goods and services to gas and oil workers: they will form a powerful phalanx of pro-oil and gas interests that will reach far beyond Texas.
At the same time, key environmental arguments will be seriously weakened. The western hemisphere looks set to become energy independent for the foreseeable future; the US is moving steadily away from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that makes many national security experts think green. Importing from Canada just isn’t the same kind of problem as importing from Iraq.
The question of supply and peak oil will also recede; with new technologies and new discoveries coming so quickly, fewer people will feel the need to make large financial sacrifices now in order to prevent huge oil shortage and massive price hikes in the near term.
Increasingly, the climate change argument will be the only argument left to support subsidies for alternative energy generation. That argument has not been enough to make far reaching legal changes in the past when national security and peak oil worries supported it; there is not much to suggest that the climate change forces can win the political battle standing alone.
The collapse of the green political structure (cap and trade plus global carbon treaty) and the transformation of the American fossil fuel supply have dramatically weakened the case for alternative energy. Investors take heed.
Bringing Selfish Back
Katie Kieffer
When politicians, journalists and college professors use words like “share,” “fair” and “redistribution,” they are trying to make socialist ideas sound sexy. Socialism isn’t sexy; it’s suffocating.
Here’s what’s sexy: “Selfishly” working hard to secure your own financial independence and making free choices with regard to your career, romantic relationships, children and estate. Let’s bring selfish back, y’all!
The problem with words like “share” and “fair”–words five-year-olds use when they want to play with their big brother or sister’s toys–is that they’re innocuous. They are inappropriate for describing government policies that ultimately replace freedom with thralldom.
Liberals will tell me things like: “Socialism is not communism. Socialism merely levels the playing field; it prevents rich people from creating monopolies and controlling everyone else.” My response is: “Have you read The Communist Manifesto lately?”
Marx believed that socialism was the natural first step toward its full realization, namely communism. When and if liberals actually read Manifesto, they’ll notice that Marx lays out ten steps that are “generally applicable” to establishing communist socialism. At least six of these steps look quite similar to current and pending U.S. polices.
1. “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (we have this now and it will become even more progressive if the Buffett Tax is implemented).
2. “Abolition of all right of inheritance” (think excessive and duplicative estate and inheritance taxes).
3. “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” (think Frank Dodd and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s monopoly on guaranteeing mortgages).
4. “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” (think net neutrality regulations and the TSA).
5. “Establishment of industrial armies” (think labor unions).
6. “Free education for all children in public schools” (yep).
All I’m saying is that America succeeds when she plays to her proven strength, namely capitalism. Just as a football coach adjusts his game plan when his quarterback is repeatedly sacked, America should change things up when she begins following significant parts of Marx’s playbook.
My problem with socialism is that it takes the fun out of life. Many college professors won’t admit that by “sharing” all your private property with the state, you’d surrender your ability to freely choose. And when you can’t prefer one thing, person or activity to another, life becomes drudgery.
As socialism progresses it eliminates career preference. The state decides what career you will pursue from an early age. You pursue a role the state deems best, not the career you discover and prefer.
Socialism also nixes romantic preference. Radical socialists like Marx teach that capitalism leads to prostitution. Marx says capitalists instituted marriage to keep their capital within their own family by procreating and carrying on their family line. He thinks socialism removes the “claptrap” of love by freeing every woman from allegiance to one man and her biological children.
Marx also expunges parental preference. Manifesto directs parents to hand their children over to the state to be raised. This prevents capitalists from passing their capital along to their children and keeping their wealth within their family instead of sharing it with the nation.
I think we should be free to prefer and raise our own children. We should also be free to pass on the fruits of our labor to our own flesh and blood. There is nothing wrong with exclusive love. There is nothing wrong with inheriting your parents’ money.
Ayn Rand was a teenager in Soviet Russia. She wrote a short novel, Anthem, where she envisions what could happen to man when society fully embraces collectivism: Preference of any kind becomes evil.
Her nameless hero, “Equality 7-2521” relays how the law “says that men may not think of women, save at the Time of Mating. This is the time each spring when all the men older than twenty and all the women older than eighteen are sent for one night to the City Palace of Mating. And each of the men have one of the women assigned to them by the Council of Eugenics. Children are born each winter, but women never see their children and children never know their parents.”
Equality 7-2521 struggles because he prefers one woman (the Golden One). She also prefers him. They feel suffocated because they are unable to express their exclusive love within the socialist society.
I’d rather choose my own career than have the state decide how I can best serve the common good. I’d prefer to bequeath my estate to my family and my favorite charities than to the government. I’d prefer to love one person than to owe sexual allegiance to every man in the nation.
Bottom line, I cherish property rights and freedom; I am selfish.
When politicians, journalists and college professors use words like “share,” “fair” and “redistribution,” they are trying to make socialist ideas sound sexy. Socialism isn’t sexy; it’s suffocating.
Here’s what’s sexy: “Selfishly” working hard to secure your own financial independence and making free choices with regard to your career, romantic relationships, children and estate. Let’s bring selfish back, y’all!
The problem with words like “share” and “fair”–words five-year-olds use when they want to play with their big brother or sister’s toys–is that they’re innocuous. They are inappropriate for describing government policies that ultimately replace freedom with thralldom.
Liberals will tell me things like: “Socialism is not communism. Socialism merely levels the playing field; it prevents rich people from creating monopolies and controlling everyone else.” My response is: “Have you read The Communist Manifesto lately?”
Marx believed that socialism was the natural first step toward its full realization, namely communism. When and if liberals actually read Manifesto, they’ll notice that Marx lays out ten steps that are “generally applicable” to establishing communist socialism. At least six of these steps look quite similar to current and pending U.S. polices.
1. “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (we have this now and it will become even more progressive if the Buffett Tax is implemented).
2. “Abolition of all right of inheritance” (think excessive and duplicative estate and inheritance taxes).
3. “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” (think Frank Dodd and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s monopoly on guaranteeing mortgages).
4. “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” (think net neutrality regulations and the TSA).
5. “Establishment of industrial armies” (think labor unions).
6. “Free education for all children in public schools” (yep).
All I’m saying is that America succeeds when she plays to her proven strength, namely capitalism. Just as a football coach adjusts his game plan when his quarterback is repeatedly sacked, America should change things up when she begins following significant parts of Marx’s playbook.
My problem with socialism is that it takes the fun out of life. Many college professors won’t admit that by “sharing” all your private property with the state, you’d surrender your ability to freely choose. And when you can’t prefer one thing, person or activity to another, life becomes drudgery.
As socialism progresses it eliminates career preference. The state decides what career you will pursue from an early age. You pursue a role the state deems best, not the career you discover and prefer.
Socialism also nixes romantic preference. Radical socialists like Marx teach that capitalism leads to prostitution. Marx says capitalists instituted marriage to keep their capital within their own family by procreating and carrying on their family line. He thinks socialism removes the “claptrap” of love by freeing every woman from allegiance to one man and her biological children.
Marx also expunges parental preference. Manifesto directs parents to hand their children over to the state to be raised. This prevents capitalists from passing their capital along to their children and keeping their wealth within their family instead of sharing it with the nation.
I think we should be free to prefer and raise our own children. We should also be free to pass on the fruits of our labor to our own flesh and blood. There is nothing wrong with exclusive love. There is nothing wrong with inheriting your parents’ money.
Ayn Rand was a teenager in Soviet Russia. She wrote a short novel, Anthem, where she envisions what could happen to man when society fully embraces collectivism: Preference of any kind becomes evil.
Her nameless hero, “Equality 7-2521” relays how the law “says that men may not think of women, save at the Time of Mating. This is the time each spring when all the men older than twenty and all the women older than eighteen are sent for one night to the City Palace of Mating. And each of the men have one of the women assigned to them by the Council of Eugenics. Children are born each winter, but women never see their children and children never know their parents.”
Equality 7-2521 struggles because he prefers one woman (the Golden One). She also prefers him. They feel suffocated because they are unable to express their exclusive love within the socialist society.
I’d rather choose my own career than have the state decide how I can best serve the common good. I’d prefer to bequeath my estate to my family and my favorite charities than to the government. I’d prefer to love one person than to owe sexual allegiance to every man in the nation.
Bottom line, I cherish property rights and freedom; I am selfish.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School
OCTOBER 1, 2011
School districts hire special investigators to follow kids home in order to verify their true residences.
By MICHEAL FLAHERTY
In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.
An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher's license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.
These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can't afford private schooling, they can't access school vouchers, and they haven't won or haven't even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there's the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.
From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.
Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.
Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.
In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups' efforts in Connecticut to pass the "parent trigger" legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT's success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from "the table." AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.
Kevin Chavous, the board chairman for both the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Democrats for Education Reform, senses that these recent events herald a new age for fed-up parents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. before them, they understand "the fierce urgency of now" involving their children's education. Hence some parents' decisions to break the law—or practice civil disobedience.
This life-changing decision is portrayed in Betty Smith's 1943 novel, "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn," also adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. In the novel, Francie Nolan is the bright young daughter of Irish immigrants living in Brooklyn's Williamsburg immigrant ghetto in the early 20th century. An avid reader, Francie is crushed when she attends her local public school and discovers that opportunity is nonexistent for girls of her ilk.
So Francie and her father Johnny claim the address of a house next to a good public school. Francie enrolls at the school and her life is transformed. A teacher nurtures her love for writing, and she goes on to thrive at the school. Francie eventually becomes an accomplished writer who tells the story of her transformation through education.
The defining difference between the two schools, writes the novel's narrator, is parents: At the good school, "The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans."
Were Francie around today, she'd be sad but not surprised to see how little things have changed. Students are still poisoned by low expectations, their parents are still getting bulldozed. But Francie wouldn't yield to despair. She would remind this new generation of courageous parents of the Tree of Heaven, from which her story gets its title—"the one tree in Francie's yard that was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement." The tree, the narrator adds, "liked poor people."
The defenders of the status quo in our nation's public schools could learn a lot from that tree.
Mr. Flaherty is president and cofounder of Walden Media, which coproduced the 2010 documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'"
School districts hire special investigators to follow kids home in order to verify their true residences.
By MICHEAL FLAHERTY
In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.
An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher's license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.
These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can't afford private schooling, they can't access school vouchers, and they haven't won or haven't even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there's the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.
From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.
Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.
Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.
In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups' efforts in Connecticut to pass the "parent trigger" legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT's success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from "the table." AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.
Kevin Chavous, the board chairman for both the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Democrats for Education Reform, senses that these recent events herald a new age for fed-up parents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. before them, they understand "the fierce urgency of now" involving their children's education. Hence some parents' decisions to break the law—or practice civil disobedience.
This life-changing decision is portrayed in Betty Smith's 1943 novel, "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn," also adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. In the novel, Francie Nolan is the bright young daughter of Irish immigrants living in Brooklyn's Williamsburg immigrant ghetto in the early 20th century. An avid reader, Francie is crushed when she attends her local public school and discovers that opportunity is nonexistent for girls of her ilk.
So Francie and her father Johnny claim the address of a house next to a good public school. Francie enrolls at the school and her life is transformed. A teacher nurtures her love for writing, and she goes on to thrive at the school. Francie eventually becomes an accomplished writer who tells the story of her transformation through education.
The defining difference between the two schools, writes the novel's narrator, is parents: At the good school, "The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans."
Were Francie around today, she'd be sad but not surprised to see how little things have changed. Students are still poisoned by low expectations, their parents are still getting bulldozed. But Francie wouldn't yield to despair. She would remind this new generation of courageous parents of the Tree of Heaven, from which her story gets its title—"the one tree in Francie's yard that was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement." The tree, the narrator adds, "liked poor people."
The defenders of the status quo in our nation's public schools could learn a lot from that tree.
Mr. Flaherty is president and cofounder of Walden Media, which coproduced the 2010 documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'"
Buck-toothed Lesbian Blogger: It’s Really God’s Fault that Palin Hasn’t Decided
Gosh darn it! How long does it take for God to make up his mind whether he wants Sarah to run for President? He’s had plenty of time. Sarah has talked with him often, so he’s had ample opportunity to bring up the subject. What’s wrong with him? Is He scared or intimidated by her? Is he afraid that Todd and his buddies will beat him up?
From the minute the election of 2008 was over, God should have been considering all options. What was he thinking? Tim Pawlenty declared his intention to run in March 2011.That should have been a wake-up call to God, if he wanted Sarah to run. That should have jogged his memory. God knew during the summer that the Undefeated was defeated. Did he speak out then? No! God knew almost one year ago that America by Heart was disappointing. Duh!!! As early as January of this year, God knew that Sarah Palin’s Alaska would not be renewed. He knew then that her popularity was on the decline, but did we hear a peep out of him? He probably knows that her contract with Fox will not be renewed, so what will she do for money if she doesn’t run? That’s not like God to leave her hanging!
God must have set-up Sarah Palin for failure when he sent Glen Rice to Alaska.
When her bus was decorated to be a trademark infringement did God think that He was being subtle? When God inspired Sarah Palin to re-tell the story of Paul Revere’s historic ride, was he just having a difficult day? What was he thinking?
God must have known that to be seriously considered as a candidate for President of the U.S., that every candidate would be expected to demonstrate proficiency in the English language. It is a requirement, not optional. “Shacke-ly”, “refudiate,” “misunderestimate” and “squirmish” should have each been a red flag that Palin was not a person who would inspire confidence. The Lord said the “the meek shall inherit the earth,” but God knows the difference between “meek” and “ignorant.” Rabbi Akiba said God has a sense of humor, but “President Palin” isn’t funny. Surely God has told Sarah by now that she should not run, but Sarah must think he’ll change his mind. If God was an all-merciful God, he would have put Sarah and the entire country out of our misery long ago.
We have Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry who are all part of “God’s Chosen.” Maybe it’s not so special to be part of the “chosen” if this is the way God treats his favorites. Either God is deceiving us or he has spoken to Sarah Palin and told her she is not equipped to be the President. Either the Holy Spirit has lost his voice trying to send a message to Sarah, or the end is near.
Maybe the signs God has been sending have been messages to the rest of us. Maybe it was a sign from god when Governor Palin quit her job as Governor that she was irresponsible. Perhaps when Sarah said she had been a victim of “Blood Libel” it was a reminder from God that WE had been the victims of Sarah Palin. Maybe when she referred to our “North Korean Allies” it was God’s way of warning us that Sarah Palin was the enemy. When Sarah Palin declared that Ronald Reagan went to college in California, maybe it was God’s way of reminding us that Sarah should go back to school. When she said Trig was born in Anchorage, was it a reminder that God wanted Trig to return to his birth mother. When she wrote on her hand, could that have been a sign from God that we should write her off? When Glenn Beck was fired could that have been a sign that Palin is poison to anyone who associates with her? Palin said when she was tapped by John McCain that it was part of God’s plan. If it was God’s Plan, and McCain lost the election, then God must have been trying to send us a message that we each have to take responsibility for ensuring that our elected officials are the most educated, competent, and capable leaders in the country. Maybe God sent these signs and Sarah is not able to see them. It is our job to make sure that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents see the signs and vote accordingly.
From the minute the election of 2008 was over, God should have been considering all options. What was he thinking? Tim Pawlenty declared his intention to run in March 2011.That should have been a wake-up call to God, if he wanted Sarah to run. That should have jogged his memory. God knew during the summer that the Undefeated was defeated. Did he speak out then? No! God knew almost one year ago that America by Heart was disappointing. Duh!!! As early as January of this year, God knew that Sarah Palin’s Alaska would not be renewed. He knew then that her popularity was on the decline, but did we hear a peep out of him? He probably knows that her contract with Fox will not be renewed, so what will she do for money if she doesn’t run? That’s not like God to leave her hanging!
God must have set-up Sarah Palin for failure when he sent Glen Rice to Alaska.
When her bus was decorated to be a trademark infringement did God think that He was being subtle? When God inspired Sarah Palin to re-tell the story of Paul Revere’s historic ride, was he just having a difficult day? What was he thinking?
God must have known that to be seriously considered as a candidate for President of the U.S., that every candidate would be expected to demonstrate proficiency in the English language. It is a requirement, not optional. “Shacke-ly”, “refudiate,” “misunderestimate” and “squirmish” should have each been a red flag that Palin was not a person who would inspire confidence. The Lord said the “the meek shall inherit the earth,” but God knows the difference between “meek” and “ignorant.” Rabbi Akiba said God has a sense of humor, but “President Palin” isn’t funny. Surely God has told Sarah by now that she should not run, but Sarah must think he’ll change his mind. If God was an all-merciful God, he would have put Sarah and the entire country out of our misery long ago.
We have Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry who are all part of “God’s Chosen.” Maybe it’s not so special to be part of the “chosen” if this is the way God treats his favorites. Either God is deceiving us or he has spoken to Sarah Palin and told her she is not equipped to be the President. Either the Holy Spirit has lost his voice trying to send a message to Sarah, or the end is near.
Maybe the signs God has been sending have been messages to the rest of us. Maybe it was a sign from god when Governor Palin quit her job as Governor that she was irresponsible. Perhaps when Sarah said she had been a victim of “Blood Libel” it was a reminder from God that WE had been the victims of Sarah Palin. Maybe when she referred to our “North Korean Allies” it was God’s way of warning us that Sarah Palin was the enemy. When Sarah Palin declared that Ronald Reagan went to college in California, maybe it was God’s way of reminding us that Sarah should go back to school. When she said Trig was born in Anchorage, was it a reminder that God wanted Trig to return to his birth mother. When she wrote on her hand, could that have been a sign from God that we should write her off? When Glenn Beck was fired could that have been a sign that Palin is poison to anyone who associates with her? Palin said when she was tapped by John McCain that it was part of God’s plan. If it was God’s Plan, and McCain lost the election, then God must have been trying to send us a message that we each have to take responsibility for ensuring that our elected officials are the most educated, competent, and capable leaders in the country. Maybe God sent these signs and Sarah is not able to see them. It is our job to make sure that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents see the signs and vote accordingly.
Researchers Hack Voting Machine for $26
By Matt Liebowitz
Published September 30, 2011
TechMediaNetwork
Campaigning for the 2012 presidential race has already begun, but what the candidates don't know is that come election day, hackers could be the ones whose votes have the biggest impact.
Researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have developed a hack that, for about $26 and an 8th-grade science education, can remotely manipulate the electronic voting machines used by millions of voters all across the U.S.
The researchers, Salon reported, performed their proof-of-concept hack on a Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine, a type of touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting system that is widely used for government elections.
(Diebold's voting-machine business is now owned by the Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, whose e-voting machines are used in about 22 states.)
In a video, Roger Johnston and Jon Warner from Argonne National Laboratory's Vulnerability Assessment Team demonstrate three different ways an attacker could tamper with, and remotely take full control, of the e-voting machine simply by attaching what they call a piece of "alien electronics" into the machine's circuit board.
The electronic hacking tool consists of a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8. Together with the $15 remote control, which enabled the researchers to modify votes from up to a half-mile away, the whole hack runs about $26.
Two of the takeovers show the researchers controlling the buttons on the keypad despite what the "real" voter enters. But in what Warner called "probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering," the researchers were able to blank the e-voting machine's screen for a split-second after the "vote now" button was pressed. While the screen went dark, they remotely entered their own numbers into the DRE's keypad.
Johnston explained in the video: "When the voter hits the 'vote now' button to register his votes, we can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter will be unaware that this has happened."
Johnston and Warner say that the ease with which this type of remote hack could be deployed highlights the need for e-voting machines to be designed better, with not just cybersecurity, but physical security in mind.
"Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock," Johnston said. "You don't have to have state-of-the-art security, but you can do some things were it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in."
Copyright © 2011 TechMediaNetwork.com. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Published September 30, 2011
TechMediaNetwork
Campaigning for the 2012 presidential race has already begun, but what the candidates don't know is that come election day, hackers could be the ones whose votes have the biggest impact.
Researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have developed a hack that, for about $26 and an 8th-grade science education, can remotely manipulate the electronic voting machines used by millions of voters all across the U.S.
The researchers, Salon reported, performed their proof-of-concept hack on a Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine, a type of touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting system that is widely used for government elections.
(Diebold's voting-machine business is now owned by the Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, whose e-voting machines are used in about 22 states.)
In a video, Roger Johnston and Jon Warner from Argonne National Laboratory's Vulnerability Assessment Team demonstrate three different ways an attacker could tamper with, and remotely take full control, of the e-voting machine simply by attaching what they call a piece of "alien electronics" into the machine's circuit board.
The electronic hacking tool consists of a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8. Together with the $15 remote control, which enabled the researchers to modify votes from up to a half-mile away, the whole hack runs about $26.
Two of the takeovers show the researchers controlling the buttons on the keypad despite what the "real" voter enters. But in what Warner called "probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering," the researchers were able to blank the e-voting machine's screen for a split-second after the "vote now" button was pressed. While the screen went dark, they remotely entered their own numbers into the DRE's keypad.
Johnston explained in the video: "When the voter hits the 'vote now' button to register his votes, we can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter will be unaware that this has happened."
Johnston and Warner say that the ease with which this type of remote hack could be deployed highlights the need for e-voting machines to be designed better, with not just cybersecurity, but physical security in mind.
"Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock," Johnston said. "You don't have to have state-of-the-art security, but you can do some things were it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in."
Copyright © 2011 TechMediaNetwork.com. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Here's what's wrong with the economy... (And How To Fix It)
Henry Blodget
Oct. 1, 2011, 11:14 AM
The United States is in a very tough spot, economically and politically.
The 25-year debt-fueled boom of 1982-2007 has ended, and it has left the country with a stagnant economy, massive debts, high unemployment, huge wealth inequality, an enormous budget deficit, and a sense of entitlement engendered by a half-century of prosperity.
After decades of instant gratification, Americans have also come to believe that all problems can be solved instantly, if only the right leaders are put in charge and the right decisions are made. And so our government has devolved into a permanent election campaign, in which incumbents blame each other for the current mess, and challengers promise change.
The trouble is that our current problems cannot be solved with a simple fix. They also cannot be solved quickly. It took 25 years for us to get to this point, and it will likely take us at least a decade or two to work our way out of it, even if we make the right decisions.
So it is time that we began to face reality.
THE PROBLEM: TOO MUCH DEBT
The biggest debt binge in US history, by a mile.
Four years ago, when the debt-fueled boom ended and the economy plunged into recession, most economists and politicians misdiagnosed the problem.
They thought we were having just another post-War recession—a serious recession, yes, but a cyclical one, a recession that easy money, government stimulus, and a return of "confidence" could fix.
A handful of economists, meanwhile, argued that the recession was actually fundamentally different—a "balance sheet" recession resulting from a quarter-century-long debt-binge, one that would take a decade or more to fix.
In the past four years, it has become increasingly clear that the latter diagnosis was correct: The US economy is behaving exactly the way other economies have behaved after piling up mountains of debt and eventually going through a financial crisis. It is bumping along with disappointing growth, high unemployment, and, increasingly (and understandably) social unrest.
So how do you get out of a "balance sheet" recession triggered by too much debt?
You reduce the debt.
More specifically—and here's the critical point—you reduce the debt that is crippling the productive part of the economy. This is the part that creates most of the jobs, prosperity, and wealth. It is also the part that pays for the rest of the economy. That part is the private sector.
What debt is crippling the private sector?
Consumer debt. The household mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other obligations that is forcing consumers to save and pay down debts instead of spend. Consumers still account for about 70% of the spending in the US economy, and that spending is now constrained. (See chart below—click for larger).
(Consumer spending was also artificially boosted for 25 years by the debt binge, so there's no way we're going back to that era. And we shouldn't strive to).
Households are still in debt up to their eyeballs. Here's household debt as a percentage of GDP.
Image: Calculated Risk
How can consumers reduce their debts?
By doing what they are doing right now:
Spending less
Saving more
Paying down debt
Restructuring debt
Defaulting
Importantly, this process takes time. And unless you're willing to just tear up the laws and contracts that have formed the basis of the country's economy for the past two centuries, there's no way to just wave a magic wand and make the debts go away.
Also importantly, this healing process has nothing to do with "restoring confidence." Or "reducing regulation." Even if you could suddenly cast a spell and make all Americans (irrationally) exuberant again, you can't solve a debt problem with more debt. Specifically, you can't reduce the amount you owe by borrowing more.
So where does that leave the economy?
It leaves the private sector, the productive engine of the economy, nursing its way back to health.
And it leaves the public sector—the government—trying to minimize the pain while the private sector heals itself.
The government also has debt coming out of its eyeballs. Here's government debt as a percent of GDP.
Image: US Government Spending
Complicating the US's problem, of course, is that the public sector—the government—has also racked up humongous debts in the past quarter century. For now, those debts are still manageable: Our creditors are still willing to lend us as much as we want, on ever-easier terms. But, eventually, these debts will have to be addressed. Specifically, at some point, the government will have to cut back spending and reduce its debts, at least as a percentage of GDP. Or the entire government will go bust.
Those facts should be relatively uncontroversial. Where the disagreement comes is when and where the government should cut back—and how much.
One side argues that the government should cut back immediately and completely, forcing the country to "take its medicine" in one quick dose.
The other side argues that the government should continue spending to support the economy until the private sector is healthy enough to once again carry the torch.
The policies that arise from this argument affect the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, so it's not surprising that people feel strongly about them.
THE SOLUTIONS
So what's the best approach to solving our problem?
Here's where philosophical differences come into play. "Best" is, at least somewhat, in the eye of the beholder.
The two extreme solutions are these:
Do you want a violent, painful "adjustment" in which many million more Americans are thrown out of work and the incomes and spending of tens of millions of Americans are suddenly reduced, thus crushing American companies at the same time?
Job losses from the peak, by recession. Our current recession is the bottom red line. Click for larger.
Image: Calculated Risk
Then immediately cut government spending from ~20%+ of GDP to the 15% of GDP the government collected in taxes last year and hope (pray) that the resulting dislocation doesn't further wallop GDP (which history suggests it almost certainly will).
Do you want to pretend we don't have serious problems and just keep the government spending vastly more than it takes in every year until our government debt load finally becomes unmanageable and the currency collapses?
Then just keep doing what we've been doing for most of the past 30 years.
For obvious reasons, neither of those two approaches are appealing.
Fortunately, there's a third option, which lies somewhere in the middle.
This solution consists of two parts:
Acknowledging the problem (and the problems with either extreme approach)
Designing an approach that addresses these problems and helps us work our way out of our predicament with the least possible pain, dislocation, and disruption.
THE "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT" PHASE...
Acknowledge the real problem with the economy—that we're in a "balance sheet" recession
Acknowledge that, to fix the economy, consumers need to work off their debts
Acknowledge that trend-line government spending is already too high relative to both GDP and the taxes that the government collects
Acknowledge that, eventually, to fix the latter problem, government spending will have to drop and taxes will have to go up
Acknowledge that, raising taxes and/or cutting spending sharply right now will wallop the economy
Acknowledge that walloping the economy right now will make the problem worse, not better, at least over the short term (consumers will have less money to spend, so the economy will shrink, and tax collection will drop...and then this vicious cycle will repeat. See Greece.)
Acknowledge that making the problem worse right now will increase social frustration and unrest (See Occupy Wall Street). It also won't help the rich get richer.
Acknowledge that denying the problem and continuing runaway government spending indefinitely will eventually lead to a debt and currency crisis (see Argentina)
Acknowledge that, right now, the government can borrow as much money as it wants at historically low interest rates—rates that are getting lower all the time
Acknowledge that the only spending in the economy that the government can directly control is government spending
Acknowledge, therefore, that the "best approach" given our current reality involves two specific goals:
Minimizing short-term pain while giving consumers time to nurse themselves back to health
Getting the long-term deficit under control before the government implodes
THIS LEADS TO A SOLUTION THAT SEEMS THE MOST REASONABLE AND LEAST RISKY AND DISRUPTIVE GIVEN THE CURRENT REALITY...
The government should construct and pass a long-term budget plan that
Minimizes short-term pain, while
Getting the long-term deficit under control
This budget plan should be designed to benefit all Americans, not just special-interest groups or different classes or industries
This budget plan can theoretically include an increase in short-term spending designed to minimize the country's pain, as long as it also includes a decrease in long-term spending (again, right now, the world is willing to lend us as much money as we want)
One form of government spending that unequivocally benefits all Americans is infrastructure spending (when the projects are finished, America has the infrastructure)
Infrastructure spending would help America address another reality that has emerged in the past three decades—the reality that the infrastructure of many countries in Europe, Asia, and other regions has vaulted past that in the US and made the US look like a second-world country
Infrastructure spending would boost employment in one sector of the economy hammered by the recession—construction
Infrastructure spending would involve fewer of the conflicts and misaligned incentives that infuriate many Americans about "entitlement programs," extended unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, and other government expenditures that seem to encourage sloth and laziness and "socialism"
The 10-year government budget designed to get us out of our current predicament, therefore, should probably include a massive, multi-year infrastructure spending program.
There, I said it. I have now revealed that I find merit in an approach advocated by one side in the religious war (Keynesians). And this religious war is so emotional that I will immediately be flamed as an enemy of the state, despite also advocating the reduced-spending approach held by the other side (Austerians).
But so be it.
I think this is the most reasonable approach to solving our nation's problems. I'll explain more about why in the coming days.
Oct. 1, 2011, 11:14 AM
The United States is in a very tough spot, economically and politically.
The 25-year debt-fueled boom of 1982-2007 has ended, and it has left the country with a stagnant economy, massive debts, high unemployment, huge wealth inequality, an enormous budget deficit, and a sense of entitlement engendered by a half-century of prosperity.
After decades of instant gratification, Americans have also come to believe that all problems can be solved instantly, if only the right leaders are put in charge and the right decisions are made. And so our government has devolved into a permanent election campaign, in which incumbents blame each other for the current mess, and challengers promise change.
The trouble is that our current problems cannot be solved with a simple fix. They also cannot be solved quickly. It took 25 years for us to get to this point, and it will likely take us at least a decade or two to work our way out of it, even if we make the right decisions.
So it is time that we began to face reality.
THE PROBLEM: TOO MUCH DEBT
Four years ago, when the debt-fueled boom ended and the economy plunged into recession, most economists and politicians misdiagnosed the problem.
They thought we were having just another post-War recession—a serious recession, yes, but a cyclical one, a recession that easy money, government stimulus, and a return of "confidence" could fix.
A handful of economists, meanwhile, argued that the recession was actually fundamentally different—a "balance sheet" recession resulting from a quarter-century-long debt-binge, one that would take a decade or more to fix.
In the past four years, it has become increasingly clear that the latter diagnosis was correct: The US economy is behaving exactly the way other economies have behaved after piling up mountains of debt and eventually going through a financial crisis. It is bumping along with disappointing growth, high unemployment, and, increasingly (and understandably) social unrest.
So how do you get out of a "balance sheet" recession triggered by too much debt?
You reduce the debt.
More specifically—and here's the critical point—you reduce the debt that is crippling the productive part of the economy. This is the part that creates most of the jobs, prosperity, and wealth. It is also the part that pays for the rest of the economy. That part is the private sector.
What debt is crippling the private sector?
Consumer debt. The household mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other obligations that is forcing consumers to save and pay down debts instead of spend. Consumers still account for about 70% of the spending in the US economy, and that spending is now constrained. (See chart below—click for larger).
(Consumer spending was also artificially boosted for 25 years by the debt binge, so there's no way we're going back to that era. And we shouldn't strive to).
Image: Calculated Risk
How can consumers reduce their debts?
By doing what they are doing right now:
Spending less
Saving more
Paying down debt
Restructuring debt
Defaulting
Importantly, this process takes time. And unless you're willing to just tear up the laws and contracts that have formed the basis of the country's economy for the past two centuries, there's no way to just wave a magic wand and make the debts go away.
Also importantly, this healing process has nothing to do with "restoring confidence." Or "reducing regulation." Even if you could suddenly cast a spell and make all Americans (irrationally) exuberant again, you can't solve a debt problem with more debt. Specifically, you can't reduce the amount you owe by borrowing more.
So where does that leave the economy?
It leaves the private sector, the productive engine of the economy, nursing its way back to health.
And it leaves the public sector—the government—trying to minimize the pain while the private sector heals itself.
Image: US Government Spending
Complicating the US's problem, of course, is that the public sector—the government—has also racked up humongous debts in the past quarter century. For now, those debts are still manageable: Our creditors are still willing to lend us as much as we want, on ever-easier terms. But, eventually, these debts will have to be addressed. Specifically, at some point, the government will have to cut back spending and reduce its debts, at least as a percentage of GDP. Or the entire government will go bust.
Those facts should be relatively uncontroversial. Where the disagreement comes is when and where the government should cut back—and how much.
One side argues that the government should cut back immediately and completely, forcing the country to "take its medicine" in one quick dose.
The other side argues that the government should continue spending to support the economy until the private sector is healthy enough to once again carry the torch.
The policies that arise from this argument affect the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, so it's not surprising that people feel strongly about them.
THE SOLUTIONS
So what's the best approach to solving our problem?
Here's where philosophical differences come into play. "Best" is, at least somewhat, in the eye of the beholder.
The two extreme solutions are these:
Do you want a violent, painful "adjustment" in which many million more Americans are thrown out of work and the incomes and spending of tens of millions of Americans are suddenly reduced, thus crushing American companies at the same time?
Image: Calculated Risk
Then immediately cut government spending from ~20%+ of GDP to the 15% of GDP the government collected in taxes last year and hope (pray) that the resulting dislocation doesn't further wallop GDP (which history suggests it almost certainly will).
Do you want to pretend we don't have serious problems and just keep the government spending vastly more than it takes in every year until our government debt load finally becomes unmanageable and the currency collapses?
Then just keep doing what we've been doing for most of the past 30 years.
For obvious reasons, neither of those two approaches are appealing.
Fortunately, there's a third option, which lies somewhere in the middle.
This solution consists of two parts:
Acknowledging the problem (and the problems with either extreme approach)
Designing an approach that addresses these problems and helps us work our way out of our predicament with the least possible pain, dislocation, and disruption.
THE "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT" PHASE...
Acknowledge the real problem with the economy—that we're in a "balance sheet" recession
Acknowledge that, to fix the economy, consumers need to work off their debts
Acknowledge that trend-line government spending is already too high relative to both GDP and the taxes that the government collects
Acknowledge that, eventually, to fix the latter problem, government spending will have to drop and taxes will have to go up
Acknowledge that, raising taxes and/or cutting spending sharply right now will wallop the economy
Acknowledge that walloping the economy right now will make the problem worse, not better, at least over the short term (consumers will have less money to spend, so the economy will shrink, and tax collection will drop...and then this vicious cycle will repeat. See Greece.)
Acknowledge that making the problem worse right now will increase social frustration and unrest (See Occupy Wall Street). It also won't help the rich get richer.
Acknowledge that denying the problem and continuing runaway government spending indefinitely will eventually lead to a debt and currency crisis (see Argentina)
Acknowledge that, right now, the government can borrow as much money as it wants at historically low interest rates—rates that are getting lower all the time
Acknowledge that the only spending in the economy that the government can directly control is government spending
Acknowledge, therefore, that the "best approach" given our current reality involves two specific goals:
Minimizing short-term pain while giving consumers time to nurse themselves back to health
Getting the long-term deficit under control before the government implodes
THIS LEADS TO A SOLUTION THAT SEEMS THE MOST REASONABLE AND LEAST RISKY AND DISRUPTIVE GIVEN THE CURRENT REALITY...
The government should construct and pass a long-term budget plan that
Minimizes short-term pain, while
Getting the long-term deficit under control
This budget plan should be designed to benefit all Americans, not just special-interest groups or different classes or industries
This budget plan can theoretically include an increase in short-term spending designed to minimize the country's pain, as long as it also includes a decrease in long-term spending (again, right now, the world is willing to lend us as much money as we want)
One form of government spending that unequivocally benefits all Americans is infrastructure spending (when the projects are finished, America has the infrastructure)
Infrastructure spending would help America address another reality that has emerged in the past three decades—the reality that the infrastructure of many countries in Europe, Asia, and other regions has vaulted past that in the US and made the US look like a second-world country
Infrastructure spending would boost employment in one sector of the economy hammered by the recession—construction
Infrastructure spending would involve fewer of the conflicts and misaligned incentives that infuriate many Americans about "entitlement programs," extended unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, and other government expenditures that seem to encourage sloth and laziness and "socialism"
The 10-year government budget designed to get us out of our current predicament, therefore, should probably include a massive, multi-year infrastructure spending program.
There, I said it. I have now revealed that I find merit in an approach advocated by one side in the religious war (Keynesians). And this religious war is so emotional that I will immediately be flamed as an enemy of the state, despite also advocating the reduced-spending approach held by the other side (Austerians).
But so be it.
I think this is the most reasonable approach to solving our nation's problems. I'll explain more about why in the coming days.
Thinning Steel
Chimerica War Comment: Everyone knows the terrible consequences of this kind of thinned steel. The whole world witnessed the collapsed schools in the Sichuan earthquake yet this terrible lesson creates no new behaviours. Three years on, thinned steel is still rampant in China. To understand why this is happening one needs a good understanding of how business works in China. A good explanation of this can be found in the book, Poorly Made in China, by Paul Midler, Chinese companies competing in highly competitive markets put in quotes that have almost no hope of turning a profit, so they need to look elsewhere to recuperate revenues - like shaving off 1mm of steel. This kind of creep often remains unseen but has the habit of popping up with disastrous consequences.
With the Chinese military churning out large volumes of home made gear it is inconcievable that they too are not effected by this quality creep
As rumours emerge of illegal steel thinning in Zhengzhou, all goes quiet on the Chinese front...
One trillion. This is the number of American dollars allocated for infrastructure projects in China over the next five years. Zhengzhou. This is the location of the latest ‘stretching’ factory in China pulling steel reinforcement rods to illegal diameters and threatening the lives of countless citizens who will use the infrastructure projects constructed using these substandard materials.
This week a surprisingly small article in British newspaper The Times detailed the discovery of illicit practices at a Zhengzhou ‘stretching’ factory where steel reinforcement rods used in a number of construction projects had been pulled to a thickness below regulatory standards.
The reasons for this are simple - 10mm wide rods can be easily stretched to a thickness of 8.5mm, creating many additional metres of metal then sold on for profit - but the resolution is not. Despite countless assertions from experts that pulling these essential building components to inadequate diameters will weaken a structure and endanger the lives of its users, construction companies in China are still being found operating under such measures.
This is not a new phenomenon however. In September 2011 a number of construction firms in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province were ordered to stop using thin reinforcement rods which had been stretched below regulatory standards, with Liu Lin, Director of the Construction and Real Estate Management Department under the Xi’an Industry and Commercial Administration Bureau explaining: “By making the steel bar thin, both the processing plants and the construction firms decrease their cost, but these bars will do harm to the quality of the building projects.”
Similarly in June this year the construction of the Ninghang high-speed railway was rocked by claims that 2.2km of safety barriers had been wrongfully installed using steel rods pulled from 6.5mm to 5.8mm and 8mm to 6.9mm. The groups leading the scheme were fined 100,000 yuan and the contractor, Hongye Traffic Facility from Yiyang, allegedly blacklisted. Reporting on the case, local news site China.org.cn was told by an official that: “The railway’s construction slowed down recently and quality inspectors failed to launch intense inspections as usual, which caused the loophole.”
Despite the severity of this issue and the immense ramifications it poses to the safety of civilians, none of the engineers, construction firms or steel research institutes WAN appealed to for comment were happy to venture an official opinion, many keen to state that they had little or no knowledge of the matter at hand.
Thinning reinforcement rods is not illegal but when practiced to excess can lead to a reduction in the effectiveness of the metal. Fan Zhong from the China Architecture Design and Research Group clarifies: “Over-stretching the steel bars will cause them to become brittle and weak, and less resistant to earthquakes,” a point confirmed by Wu Chengcai, General Engineer at the Shaanxi Provincial Building Research Institute, who comments: “When a building suffers great external force such as an earthquake, the stronger, standard steel bars will ‘stretch’ as the building suffers the damage, thus slowing the process of its collapse for people to escape. However, the buildings with the substandard, thin steel bars will collapse very quickly.”
With a marked history of earthquakes across the nation, China has upped its building regulations in recent years and yet somehow the practice of illegal steel thinning has continued to thrive. The potential human cost of stretching reinforcement rods for backhand cash is inconceivable for the majority of people but this remains a very real threat as China presses forward with an unyielding construction schedule, leaving many questions
With the Chinese military churning out large volumes of home made gear it is inconcievable that they too are not effected by this quality creep
As rumours emerge of illegal steel thinning in Zhengzhou, all goes quiet on the Chinese front...
One trillion. This is the number of American dollars allocated for infrastructure projects in China over the next five years. Zhengzhou. This is the location of the latest ‘stretching’ factory in China pulling steel reinforcement rods to illegal diameters and threatening the lives of countless citizens who will use the infrastructure projects constructed using these substandard materials.
This week a surprisingly small article in British newspaper The Times detailed the discovery of illicit practices at a Zhengzhou ‘stretching’ factory where steel reinforcement rods used in a number of construction projects had been pulled to a thickness below regulatory standards.
The reasons for this are simple - 10mm wide rods can be easily stretched to a thickness of 8.5mm, creating many additional metres of metal then sold on for profit - but the resolution is not. Despite countless assertions from experts that pulling these essential building components to inadequate diameters will weaken a structure and endanger the lives of its users, construction companies in China are still being found operating under such measures.
This is not a new phenomenon however. In September 2011 a number of construction firms in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province were ordered to stop using thin reinforcement rods which had been stretched below regulatory standards, with Liu Lin, Director of the Construction and Real Estate Management Department under the Xi’an Industry and Commercial Administration Bureau explaining: “By making the steel bar thin, both the processing plants and the construction firms decrease their cost, but these bars will do harm to the quality of the building projects.”
Similarly in June this year the construction of the Ninghang high-speed railway was rocked by claims that 2.2km of safety barriers had been wrongfully installed using steel rods pulled from 6.5mm to 5.8mm and 8mm to 6.9mm. The groups leading the scheme were fined 100,000 yuan and the contractor, Hongye Traffic Facility from Yiyang, allegedly blacklisted. Reporting on the case, local news site China.org.cn was told by an official that: “The railway’s construction slowed down recently and quality inspectors failed to launch intense inspections as usual, which caused the loophole.”
Despite the severity of this issue and the immense ramifications it poses to the safety of civilians, none of the engineers, construction firms or steel research institutes WAN appealed to for comment were happy to venture an official opinion, many keen to state that they had little or no knowledge of the matter at hand.
Thinning reinforcement rods is not illegal but when practiced to excess can lead to a reduction in the effectiveness of the metal. Fan Zhong from the China Architecture Design and Research Group clarifies: “Over-stretching the steel bars will cause them to become brittle and weak, and less resistant to earthquakes,” a point confirmed by Wu Chengcai, General Engineer at the Shaanxi Provincial Building Research Institute, who comments: “When a building suffers great external force such as an earthquake, the stronger, standard steel bars will ‘stretch’ as the building suffers the damage, thus slowing the process of its collapse for people to escape. However, the buildings with the substandard, thin steel bars will collapse very quickly.”
With a marked history of earthquakes across the nation, China has upped its building regulations in recent years and yet somehow the practice of illegal steel thinning has continued to thrive. The potential human cost of stretching reinforcement rods for backhand cash is inconceivable for the majority of people but this remains a very real threat as China presses forward with an unyielding construction schedule, leaving many questions
Unlikely: Glenn Beck fan AND fan of OccupyWallstreet AND from Texas?
Friday, Sep 30, 2011 at 3:14 PM EDT
Glenn had quite an interesting caller on radio today. A long time fan who has listened to Glenn since 2002 called in to say he sympathized with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. And he’s from Texas of all places. Why did the caller sympathize with these left wing, anti-corporate, anti-cop crowd? Get the answer and the debate that followed on radio today in the clip above!
Get the full transcript of this interesting conversation below:
GLENN: We have a caller on the phone that – on our phone that listens to this show that says, You know what? I think the guys that occupy Wall Street, I think they make some sense. Wow. We talk to him, now.
(Music playing.)
GLENN: And he’s from Texas.
PAT: It’s not possible.
GLENN: Derrick? Derrick?
CALLER: Yeah, Glenn. Thanks for the big intro, man.
GLENN: You’re welcome. How are you?
CALLER: I’m good. I’ve been listening to your show since 2002.
GLENN: Okay.
CALLER: So, yeah, I’ve been listening a very long time. Always enjoyed it.
GLENN: And are you – and you are a born and bred Texan?
CALLER: I am, indeed. I’m probably more conservative than you are, believe it or not.
GLENN: And you’re in – and you’re in – you’re not in –
PAT: Austin.
GLENN: Austin?
CALLER: No.
PAT: Where do you live? Where in Texas?
CALLER: I’m actually about 80 miles east of Austin, in the own of Fredericksburg.
PAT: Uh-huh.
GLENN: Okay.
CALLER: Did I say east? I went west. Sorry.
GLENN: All right. Go ahead.
CALLER: Okay. Here’s my thinking on this. I think you’re kind of looping them all into one basket. I’ve been watching some news programs at night and I see some signs they’re holding up that make sense. There’s one in particular that caught my eye. It said student loan equals slavery, student loan debt equals slavery and that is a –
PAT: And that made sense to you?
GLENN: Hold on just a second. Let him speak. Go ahead, Derrick.
CALLER: Debt equals slavery. Look it up in the Bible.
PAT: Okay. Well –
GLENN: Hang on. Let the man speak, Pat.
PAT: He’s done speaking.
GLENN: No, he’s not. Go ahead. Go ahead.
CALLER: Here is the – I think the fundamental issue of this whole thing is that some of these banks that these guys are protesting on Wall Street are the same ones that received the TARP bailout.
GLENN: Yes.
CALLER: I think they are frustrated because they can’t find work, they’ve been saddled with this huge amount of debt that these banks have loaned them, obviously it takes two to tango, but at the same time, these banks did receive these huge bailouts. Some of the students definitely want a bailout for themselves, but, you know, we’re in a credit – we live in a credit-driven society and I don’t know when the transition took place. I stayed at a hotel with my wife in San Antonio about a year ago and in the lobby was this huge mural that was painted in the depression and the words written on that mural were: Thrift is the pathway to wealth.
Now, sometime between then and now we have gone to a credit-driven society. Now, who benefits on a credit-driven society?
GLENN: Well, I would say anybody who anyone who uses credit and makes the decision to use credit. I would say that.
CALLER: Okay. Well, can you actually get wealthy with credit?
GLENN: Well, you can, yeah. You can. Overwhelming debt, no. The scriptures would be right that overwhelming debt would make you a slave.
CALLER: Sure.
GLENN: But, no, you can – you can borrow money to be able to start your own business.
CALLER: (Inaudible) yourself.
GLENN: Yes, in a realistic sort of way. Credit is –
CALLER: Sure.
GLENN: Credit is not evil. I’m sure. I’m not going to go down the Sharia law with you. Credit is not evil. It is the love of money or the complete disregard for responsible debt and responsibility for that debt after you’ve taken it.
PAT: May I? May I ask a question?
GLENN: Yeah, you can ask a question. Hang on just a second. Derrick, let Pat speak.
PAT: And yes, it is, but slavery is not voluntary. So – so, when you volunteer for slavery, that’s a whole different kind of slavery. You’re not – nobody is forcing these people to get into debt. No one – no one, Derrick, is saddled with debt. A horse is saddled because a horse has no choice. Nobody asks the choice, Hey, could I put this on you? You get into the agreement with the bank yourself. Now, if you’re out of control and you get so much debt that you can’t live your life in a decent way, that is your responsibility.
GLENN: Now, let me go here on something on the bank bailout. You said these banks received TARP. No, sir.
CALLER: Sure.
GLENN: Some of them did. Many of them were forced by the government to take TARP, just as they were also – just as they were also forced to live within the parameters that the government said that you must give loans to these people who cannot afford it. The government –
CALLER: Sure
GLENN: — is the one that is really responsible for much of this and I’m sorry, as much as – I mean, I just said to my daughter just last weekend, we had quite a discussion. Impersonally paying for their college educations. I have no problem paying for college educations. However, I told them, You know, gang, we are spending a lot of money on your college education. What exactly do you think you’re going to get in return for that money and that college education? Now, I will tell you that my older kids are just about out of college now. So, it’s too late for them, but my younger kids, I’m sorry, I am not paying for a college education that is this much money. It’s insanity. We –
CALLER: Congratulations.
GLENN: Excuse me?
CALLER: I think that’s a great idea. Why has it gone up so high.
GLENN: You would have to ask not the banks that, sir. You would have to ask the universities that.
STU: That’s the point here.
GLENN: You notice that the ones that nobody’s protesting against are the universities.
STU: Yep. Who are the least – who is the least guilty person party here in this? The least guilty party is the bank. You have somebody who is asking for money and agreed to a contract to pay it back and is not able to do so.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: And you have a university that keeps jacking the price up over and over and over again way beyond inflation, way beyond even healthcare increase in cost and, yes, sir, the bank is on its –
CALLER: It’s because of government intervention.
GLENN: Yeah. So, why are they not – why are they, then, not at the White House and Congress? Why are they in front of the banks? If the banks –
CALLER: Well, they –
GLENN: Excuse me, sir. If the banks are forcing people and they are engaging in predatory loans where they are luring people in and saying, you’ve got – oh, don’t worry about it. Now, that’s exactly what the government says the banks did, but I’m sorry, sir, the banks did not do that. Barnie Frank, Chris Dodd, those in Congress and those in the White House past and present, are the ones that did that, not the banks. I am not sticking up for the banks. I don’t think the banks – I think a lot of these guys – I think a lot of these guys are criminal in their negligence on what they’re doing. I think when it comes to CEO’s, you can make a point, if they can’t understand it, how could anyone understand it? If they don’t know how to make it work, how could – how would they – why would they engage? It’s black magic. You want to talk to me about the banks in that way? We’ll do it. But don’t talk to me about the banks on student loans. You took out a loan. You owe that money. You took out a loan. You got an education. They never promised you a job. It was an education. Now, what are you going to do with that education? You’re now going to take that valuable education and say, I’m going to destroy everything with that education? You’re out of your mind. I’m going to make others pay for my education? I’m going to destroy the system that allowed this society to have those universities? No, sir. No, sir. That’s irresponsible and, quite honestly, check your Bible. I believe that is evil.
STU: Still on the Bible here. We’re still in Bible country.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: Glenn, the other thing is the universities could have never charged the prices they pay if it wasn’t for the government making it so they can get low interest loans and funneling our tax dollars to these universities.
GLENN: And telling the – the universities are the ones who are teaching our children that capitalism is bad. The university – excuse me. But where are all these economists in? All these people that put it all together, they’re all the big university think tanks. The universities are the root of the problem, not all of the universities, not all of the professors, not higher education, not books, not learning, not – not the book from Karl Marx, but the university system that has been set up. It is absolutely out of control.
You tell me how somebody’s going to pay off a loan of $70,000 every year, $70,000 a year for four, six years? That’s insane. And nobody questions that. No. Instead, we just give these universities more money. We just take our tax dollars and give them more. Nobody – not once have I heard anybody in government talk about – they’ll talk about healthcare. Oh, they’ll talk about healthcare. They’ll talk about how things are in education. Not enough people are getting an education. Do you know why they’re not? Because it’s $40,000 a year. That’s why. And now let me ask you, what exactly have they changed at these universities where they have to have a 500% increase in cost? Why? Cloward and Piven were teaching at universities. You want to – you really want to collapse the system? Do you know what you do? If you – think of this. If you’re a revolutionary and you know I’ve got to get the youth, I have to get the youth behind it and I also have to overwhelm the system and collapse the system, what do you do? You make sure that nobody gets any kind of outside learning. You make sure that there’s no apprenticeship programs. You make sure that everybody’s a dummy unless you went to college and a good college and an expensive college and then you – once you have that foundation laid, then you just keep increasing the cost, 100% this year, 100% next year, 100% the next year and the cost becomes so crippling but what you do is you keep those interest rates down, you keep everything and you spread it over so nobody really notices until it’s so far out of control that no one can afford it anymore, no one can afford it and it doesn’t make sense to have this higher education and then what do you do? Then you tell all of the students, don’t pay your student loans, don’t pay it. It’s the bank’s fault. That’s how you sew the seeds of revolution and I contend that that’s exactly what the revolutionaries, the Marxists, the hippies from the 1960′s, the Bill Ayers of our universities did knowingly. Why aren’t you marching against the universities? Why is it only the bank?
STU: That’s a great point. I mean, you know, over and over again this happens and the market would not support the cost of these colleges without the government intervention. So, you have both of them working together.
GLENN: And when did that happen? And would you look that up? When did the United States really get into financing universities and financing student loans? When did that happen? Look it up. I have no idea. There’s a question usually I don’t – it’s not smart to ask a question you don’t know the answer to, but I’ll bet you it was in the 1970′s
STU: The one thing we do know is it’s been increasing and increasing and increasing, again it’s the – it’s like the racist argument. It’s like you can’t be against giving more money to colleges because then you’re against children. And, Glenn, correct me if I’m wrong because you think about this stuff several steps out farther than I do, but it’s like is it – no offense to the caller who just called in and made that point, but aren’t the people who are at occupy Wall Street, the guy we talked about who identified himself as a Bolivian socialist, aren’t people like that depending on guys like that caller, the mainstream person who just says, well, that’s a pretty good point, we should go along with that?
GLENN: This is why I have worked tirelessly to tell you in advance, how many times, maybe you’ll remember it now, how many times have I said, and it will all make sense. It will all make sense. They’re going to scoop up so many people and they’ll do it – so many people, because, if – look. This is – we have been thought – thank you, Edward Bernays, we have been taught a certain way to think. We have been taught to be consumers. Sir, don’t talk to me about the banks. Talk to me about Edward Bernays. Talk to me about the propaganda system that the progressives built that took us from a country in their own words, a country of – that went and focused on its needs and, instead, turned into a country that focused on its wants. That’s our problem.
Here is – here is a group of people that have planned this and they are going to scoop up all of the people who want, want a way out. Do you know why we believed – well, everybody believed we can have everything, we can have everything. We wanted to believe that. We knew it was not true. Social Security, we know that’s not true, but we accept the lies, the blatant lies. Oh, well, this doesn’t really have any problem. We accept that. Why? Because if we don’t, it requires us to think and behave differently and we don’t want to. We like our life. We don’t want to. Read Harry Truman. Read what happened to Harry Truman in 1919 when he and his partner went broke. Why? Because the progressive government of Woodrow Wilson drove our economy into a Cliff. He went broke. He would – he refused, refused to go bankrupt. Instead, he worked it out with all of his creditors and he paid his last payment in 1939. It took him 20 years to pay off his debt. Don’t talk to me about these banks. You don’t owe them. You’re not a slave to the bank. There is such a thing called bankruptcy, but is there anything called personal responsibility? You made the choice to go to school and take the loan. They never promised you anything but an education. Now, you want to go to them and say, I think I got a crappy ass education, I’ll stand with you on that one, brother. They indoctrinated you. They’re indoctrinating our children now, but don’t tell me about a loan that you took out. I understand. And if you can’t honestly pay it, if you are behind the 8 ball, you do everything you can, you work at every job you can to pay it off, but if you cannot make that, there’s something called bankruptcy.
Now, a lot of people are now saying bankruptcy, that’s your first option. It is your last option if we are a people of merit. But not anymore, because we have been taught to blame someone else. No. No.
By the way, thank you, Stu. Federal cash to students for college expanded greatly in 1965 as part of The Great Society. What a surprise. Back in a minute.
Glenn had quite an interesting caller on radio today. A long time fan who has listened to Glenn since 2002 called in to say he sympathized with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. And he’s from Texas of all places. Why did the caller sympathize with these left wing, anti-corporate, anti-cop crowd? Get the answer and the debate that followed on radio today in the clip above!
Get the full transcript of this interesting conversation below:
GLENN: We have a caller on the phone that – on our phone that listens to this show that says, You know what? I think the guys that occupy Wall Street, I think they make some sense. Wow. We talk to him, now.
(Music playing.)
GLENN: And he’s from Texas.
PAT: It’s not possible.
GLENN: Derrick? Derrick?
CALLER: Yeah, Glenn. Thanks for the big intro, man.
GLENN: You’re welcome. How are you?
CALLER: I’m good. I’ve been listening to your show since 2002.
GLENN: Okay.
CALLER: So, yeah, I’ve been listening a very long time. Always enjoyed it.
GLENN: And are you – and you are a born and bred Texan?
CALLER: I am, indeed. I’m probably more conservative than you are, believe it or not.
GLENN: And you’re in – and you’re in – you’re not in –
PAT: Austin.
GLENN: Austin?
CALLER: No.
PAT: Where do you live? Where in Texas?
CALLER: I’m actually about 80 miles east of Austin, in the own of Fredericksburg.
PAT: Uh-huh.
GLENN: Okay.
CALLER: Did I say east? I went west. Sorry.
GLENN: All right. Go ahead.
CALLER: Okay. Here’s my thinking on this. I think you’re kind of looping them all into one basket. I’ve been watching some news programs at night and I see some signs they’re holding up that make sense. There’s one in particular that caught my eye. It said student loan equals slavery, student loan debt equals slavery and that is a –
PAT: And that made sense to you?
GLENN: Hold on just a second. Let him speak. Go ahead, Derrick.
CALLER: Debt equals slavery. Look it up in the Bible.
PAT: Okay. Well –
GLENN: Hang on. Let the man speak, Pat.
PAT: He’s done speaking.
GLENN: No, he’s not. Go ahead. Go ahead.
CALLER: Here is the – I think the fundamental issue of this whole thing is that some of these banks that these guys are protesting on Wall Street are the same ones that received the TARP bailout.
GLENN: Yes.
CALLER: I think they are frustrated because they can’t find work, they’ve been saddled with this huge amount of debt that these banks have loaned them, obviously it takes two to tango, but at the same time, these banks did receive these huge bailouts. Some of the students definitely want a bailout for themselves, but, you know, we’re in a credit – we live in a credit-driven society and I don’t know when the transition took place. I stayed at a hotel with my wife in San Antonio about a year ago and in the lobby was this huge mural that was painted in the depression and the words written on that mural were: Thrift is the pathway to wealth.
Now, sometime between then and now we have gone to a credit-driven society. Now, who benefits on a credit-driven society?
GLENN: Well, I would say anybody who anyone who uses credit and makes the decision to use credit. I would say that.
CALLER: Okay. Well, can you actually get wealthy with credit?
GLENN: Well, you can, yeah. You can. Overwhelming debt, no. The scriptures would be right that overwhelming debt would make you a slave.
CALLER: Sure.
GLENN: But, no, you can – you can borrow money to be able to start your own business.
CALLER: (Inaudible) yourself.
GLENN: Yes, in a realistic sort of way. Credit is –
CALLER: Sure.
GLENN: Credit is not evil. I’m sure. I’m not going to go down the Sharia law with you. Credit is not evil. It is the love of money or the complete disregard for responsible debt and responsibility for that debt after you’ve taken it.
PAT: May I? May I ask a question?
GLENN: Yeah, you can ask a question. Hang on just a second. Derrick, let Pat speak.
PAT: And yes, it is, but slavery is not voluntary. So – so, when you volunteer for slavery, that’s a whole different kind of slavery. You’re not – nobody is forcing these people to get into debt. No one – no one, Derrick, is saddled with debt. A horse is saddled because a horse has no choice. Nobody asks the choice, Hey, could I put this on you? You get into the agreement with the bank yourself. Now, if you’re out of control and you get so much debt that you can’t live your life in a decent way, that is your responsibility.
GLENN: Now, let me go here on something on the bank bailout. You said these banks received TARP. No, sir.
CALLER: Sure.
GLENN: Some of them did. Many of them were forced by the government to take TARP, just as they were also – just as they were also forced to live within the parameters that the government said that you must give loans to these people who cannot afford it. The government –
CALLER: Sure
GLENN: — is the one that is really responsible for much of this and I’m sorry, as much as – I mean, I just said to my daughter just last weekend, we had quite a discussion. Impersonally paying for their college educations. I have no problem paying for college educations. However, I told them, You know, gang, we are spending a lot of money on your college education. What exactly do you think you’re going to get in return for that money and that college education? Now, I will tell you that my older kids are just about out of college now. So, it’s too late for them, but my younger kids, I’m sorry, I am not paying for a college education that is this much money. It’s insanity. We –
CALLER: Congratulations.
GLENN: Excuse me?
CALLER: I think that’s a great idea. Why has it gone up so high.
GLENN: You would have to ask not the banks that, sir. You would have to ask the universities that.
STU: That’s the point here.
GLENN: You notice that the ones that nobody’s protesting against are the universities.
STU: Yep. Who are the least – who is the least guilty person party here in this? The least guilty party is the bank. You have somebody who is asking for money and agreed to a contract to pay it back and is not able to do so.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: And you have a university that keeps jacking the price up over and over and over again way beyond inflation, way beyond even healthcare increase in cost and, yes, sir, the bank is on its –
CALLER: It’s because of government intervention.
GLENN: Yeah. So, why are they not – why are they, then, not at the White House and Congress? Why are they in front of the banks? If the banks –
CALLER: Well, they –
GLENN: Excuse me, sir. If the banks are forcing people and they are engaging in predatory loans where they are luring people in and saying, you’ve got – oh, don’t worry about it. Now, that’s exactly what the government says the banks did, but I’m sorry, sir, the banks did not do that. Barnie Frank, Chris Dodd, those in Congress and those in the White House past and present, are the ones that did that, not the banks. I am not sticking up for the banks. I don’t think the banks – I think a lot of these guys – I think a lot of these guys are criminal in their negligence on what they’re doing. I think when it comes to CEO’s, you can make a point, if they can’t understand it, how could anyone understand it? If they don’t know how to make it work, how could – how would they – why would they engage? It’s black magic. You want to talk to me about the banks in that way? We’ll do it. But don’t talk to me about the banks on student loans. You took out a loan. You owe that money. You took out a loan. You got an education. They never promised you a job. It was an education. Now, what are you going to do with that education? You’re now going to take that valuable education and say, I’m going to destroy everything with that education? You’re out of your mind. I’m going to make others pay for my education? I’m going to destroy the system that allowed this society to have those universities? No, sir. No, sir. That’s irresponsible and, quite honestly, check your Bible. I believe that is evil.
STU: Still on the Bible here. We’re still in Bible country.
PAT: Yeah.
STU: Glenn, the other thing is the universities could have never charged the prices they pay if it wasn’t for the government making it so they can get low interest loans and funneling our tax dollars to these universities.
GLENN: And telling the – the universities are the ones who are teaching our children that capitalism is bad. The university – excuse me. But where are all these economists in? All these people that put it all together, they’re all the big university think tanks. The universities are the root of the problem, not all of the universities, not all of the professors, not higher education, not books, not learning, not – not the book from Karl Marx, but the university system that has been set up. It is absolutely out of control.
You tell me how somebody’s going to pay off a loan of $70,000 every year, $70,000 a year for four, six years? That’s insane. And nobody questions that. No. Instead, we just give these universities more money. We just take our tax dollars and give them more. Nobody – not once have I heard anybody in government talk about – they’ll talk about healthcare. Oh, they’ll talk about healthcare. They’ll talk about how things are in education. Not enough people are getting an education. Do you know why they’re not? Because it’s $40,000 a year. That’s why. And now let me ask you, what exactly have they changed at these universities where they have to have a 500% increase in cost? Why? Cloward and Piven were teaching at universities. You want to – you really want to collapse the system? Do you know what you do? If you – think of this. If you’re a revolutionary and you know I’ve got to get the youth, I have to get the youth behind it and I also have to overwhelm the system and collapse the system, what do you do? You make sure that nobody gets any kind of outside learning. You make sure that there’s no apprenticeship programs. You make sure that everybody’s a dummy unless you went to college and a good college and an expensive college and then you – once you have that foundation laid, then you just keep increasing the cost, 100% this year, 100% next year, 100% the next year and the cost becomes so crippling but what you do is you keep those interest rates down, you keep everything and you spread it over so nobody really notices until it’s so far out of control that no one can afford it anymore, no one can afford it and it doesn’t make sense to have this higher education and then what do you do? Then you tell all of the students, don’t pay your student loans, don’t pay it. It’s the bank’s fault. That’s how you sew the seeds of revolution and I contend that that’s exactly what the revolutionaries, the Marxists, the hippies from the 1960′s, the Bill Ayers of our universities did knowingly. Why aren’t you marching against the universities? Why is it only the bank?
STU: That’s a great point. I mean, you know, over and over again this happens and the market would not support the cost of these colleges without the government intervention. So, you have both of them working together.
GLENN: And when did that happen? And would you look that up? When did the United States really get into financing universities and financing student loans? When did that happen? Look it up. I have no idea. There’s a question usually I don’t – it’s not smart to ask a question you don’t know the answer to, but I’ll bet you it was in the 1970′s
STU: The one thing we do know is it’s been increasing and increasing and increasing, again it’s the – it’s like the racist argument. It’s like you can’t be against giving more money to colleges because then you’re against children. And, Glenn, correct me if I’m wrong because you think about this stuff several steps out farther than I do, but it’s like is it – no offense to the caller who just called in and made that point, but aren’t the people who are at occupy Wall Street, the guy we talked about who identified himself as a Bolivian socialist, aren’t people like that depending on guys like that caller, the mainstream person who just says, well, that’s a pretty good point, we should go along with that?
GLENN: This is why I have worked tirelessly to tell you in advance, how many times, maybe you’ll remember it now, how many times have I said, and it will all make sense. It will all make sense. They’re going to scoop up so many people and they’ll do it – so many people, because, if – look. This is – we have been thought – thank you, Edward Bernays, we have been taught a certain way to think. We have been taught to be consumers. Sir, don’t talk to me about the banks. Talk to me about Edward Bernays. Talk to me about the propaganda system that the progressives built that took us from a country in their own words, a country of – that went and focused on its needs and, instead, turned into a country that focused on its wants. That’s our problem.
Here is – here is a group of people that have planned this and they are going to scoop up all of the people who want, want a way out. Do you know why we believed – well, everybody believed we can have everything, we can have everything. We wanted to believe that. We knew it was not true. Social Security, we know that’s not true, but we accept the lies, the blatant lies. Oh, well, this doesn’t really have any problem. We accept that. Why? Because if we don’t, it requires us to think and behave differently and we don’t want to. We like our life. We don’t want to. Read Harry Truman. Read what happened to Harry Truman in 1919 when he and his partner went broke. Why? Because the progressive government of Woodrow Wilson drove our economy into a Cliff. He went broke. He would – he refused, refused to go bankrupt. Instead, he worked it out with all of his creditors and he paid his last payment in 1939. It took him 20 years to pay off his debt. Don’t talk to me about these banks. You don’t owe them. You’re not a slave to the bank. There is such a thing called bankruptcy, but is there anything called personal responsibility? You made the choice to go to school and take the loan. They never promised you anything but an education. Now, you want to go to them and say, I think I got a crappy ass education, I’ll stand with you on that one, brother. They indoctrinated you. They’re indoctrinating our children now, but don’t tell me about a loan that you took out. I understand. And if you can’t honestly pay it, if you are behind the 8 ball, you do everything you can, you work at every job you can to pay it off, but if you cannot make that, there’s something called bankruptcy.
Now, a lot of people are now saying bankruptcy, that’s your first option. It is your last option if we are a people of merit. But not anymore, because we have been taught to blame someone else. No. No.
By the way, thank you, Stu. Federal cash to students for college expanded greatly in 1965 as part of The Great Society. What a surprise. Back in a minute.
Perry open to sending US troops to Mexico
By STEVE PEOPLES - Associated Press | AP
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry said Saturday that he is open to sending American troops to Mexico to help battle drug cartels.
Perry, the Texas governor, likened the situation to Colombia, where the government accepted American military support in battling drug trafficking. Mexico's government, however, has been opposed to foreign forces in its territory.
Perry saids the current violence may require similar military action.
"It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and keep them off of our borders," he said.
Perry often has called for more National Guard troops to help protect the Mexican border and stem the flow of illegal immigration. But Saturday's comments go further. They indicate he's open to deepening America's military involvement across the border.
Perry's comments came at a Saturday afternoon reception at the home of New Hampshire Republican gubernatorial candidate Ovide Lamontagne.
A spokesman later clarified that Perry is open to all options to cooperate with Mexico.
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry said Saturday that he is open to sending American troops to Mexico to help battle drug cartels.
Perry, the Texas governor, likened the situation to Colombia, where the government accepted American military support in battling drug trafficking. Mexico's government, however, has been opposed to foreign forces in its territory.
Perry saids the current violence may require similar military action.
"It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and keep them off of our borders," he said.
Perry often has called for more National Guard troops to help protect the Mexican border and stem the flow of illegal immigration. But Saturday's comments go further. They indicate he's open to deepening America's military involvement across the border.
Perry's comments came at a Saturday afternoon reception at the home of New Hampshire Republican gubernatorial candidate Ovide Lamontagne.
A spokesman later clarified that Perry is open to all options to cooperate with Mexico.
American Jewish fools
Caroline Glick reports that American Jews cannot tell their friends from their enemies.
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 80% of American Jews have favorable views of American Muslims. Seventy percent believe that they are not supportive of al-Qaida. These data indicate that American Jews are second only to American Muslims in their support for Muslim Americans. Indeed 6% more American Jews than American Muslims believe that American Muslims face prejudice due to their religion.
American Jewish championing of American Muslims is disconcerting when compared with American Jewish treatment of the philo-Semitic Evangelical Christians. Matthew Knee discussed this issue in depth in a recent article published at the Legal Insurrection website.
In a 2003 Pew survey, 42% of American Jews expressed antagonism towards Evangelical Christians. In a 2004 American National Election Study, Jews on average rated Evangelical Christians at 30 out of 100 on a "feeling thermometer," where 1 was cold and 100 was hot.
A 2005 American Jewish Committee survey found that Jews assessed that following Muslims, Evangelical Christians have the highest propensity for being anti-Semites. And yet, in the same 2004 American National Election Survey, Evangelical Christians rated Jews an average of 82 on the 1- 100 feelings scale. Evangelical Christians rated Catholics at 80.
Consistent survey data show that levels of anti- Semitism among Evangelical Christians is either the same as or slightly lower than the national average. According to a 2007 ADL survey, the US average is 15%.
There is a clear disparity between survey data on anti-Semitism among various American ethnic groups and American Jews' assessment of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the same groups. The AJC survey found that American Jews believed that 29% of Evangelicals are largely anti- Semitic. They assessed that only 7% of Hispanics and 19% of African-Americans are anti-Semites.
As it works out, their perceptions are completely incorrect. According to the 2007 ADL survey, foreign born Hispanics, and African-Americans, harbor significantly stronger anti-Semitic views than the national average. Twenty-nine percent of foreign born Hispanics harbor very anti-Semitic views. Thirty-two percent of African-Americans harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.
Like Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and Muslims vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party. Evangelical Christians on the other hand, are reliably Republican. A 2009 survey on US anti- Semitism conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco found that Democrats are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Republicans.
The Gallup survey from last month showing American Jews' deep support for American Muslims is of particular interest because that support stands in stark contrast with survey data concerning American Jewish perception of Muslim American anti-Semitism.
Read the whole thing. The post by Matthew Knee of Legal Insurrection, which is cited by Caroline extensively, is here.
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 80% of American Jews have favorable views of American Muslims. Seventy percent believe that they are not supportive of al-Qaida. These data indicate that American Jews are second only to American Muslims in their support for Muslim Americans. Indeed 6% more American Jews than American Muslims believe that American Muslims face prejudice due to their religion.
American Jewish championing of American Muslims is disconcerting when compared with American Jewish treatment of the philo-Semitic Evangelical Christians. Matthew Knee discussed this issue in depth in a recent article published at the Legal Insurrection website.
In a 2003 Pew survey, 42% of American Jews expressed antagonism towards Evangelical Christians. In a 2004 American National Election Study, Jews on average rated Evangelical Christians at 30 out of 100 on a "feeling thermometer," where 1 was cold and 100 was hot.
A 2005 American Jewish Committee survey found that Jews assessed that following Muslims, Evangelical Christians have the highest propensity for being anti-Semites. And yet, in the same 2004 American National Election Survey, Evangelical Christians rated Jews an average of 82 on the 1- 100 feelings scale. Evangelical Christians rated Catholics at 80.
Consistent survey data show that levels of anti- Semitism among Evangelical Christians is either the same as or slightly lower than the national average. According to a 2007 ADL survey, the US average is 15%.
There is a clear disparity between survey data on anti-Semitism among various American ethnic groups and American Jews' assessment of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the same groups. The AJC survey found that American Jews believed that 29% of Evangelicals are largely anti- Semitic. They assessed that only 7% of Hispanics and 19% of African-Americans are anti-Semites.
As it works out, their perceptions are completely incorrect. According to the 2007 ADL survey, foreign born Hispanics, and African-Americans, harbor significantly stronger anti-Semitic views than the national average. Twenty-nine percent of foreign born Hispanics harbor very anti-Semitic views. Thirty-two percent of African-Americans harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.
Like Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and Muslims vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party. Evangelical Christians on the other hand, are reliably Republican. A 2009 survey on US anti- Semitism conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco found that Democrats are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Republicans.
The Gallup survey from last month showing American Jews' deep support for American Muslims is of particular interest because that support stands in stark contrast with survey data concerning American Jewish perception of Muslim American anti-Semitism.
Read the whole thing. The post by Matthew Knee of Legal Insurrection, which is cited by Caroline extensively, is here.
Obama proudly declares class warfare
10-02-2011 17:11
By Deroy Murdock
It's official: America is at class war, and President Barack Obama proudly leads the charge against this country's wealthy.
``If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber makes me a class warrior ― a warrior for the working class ― I will accept that," Obama shouted Tuesday at Denver's Abraham Lincoln High School. ``I will wear that charge as a badge of honor."
``Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires. A teacher or a nurse or a construction worker making $50,000 a year shouldn't pay higher tax rates than somebody making $50 million."
Obama's assault on the affluent rests upon a sky-high stack of lies. Obama is too well staffed and too well informed not to know otherwise. So, maddeningly, he straight-out lies to the American people.
For days before Obama opened his mouth in Denver, multiple news accounts and opinion pieces annihilated the casus belli of his War on the Wealthy. Nonetheless, Obama keeps spouting falsehoods, perhaps hoping that his smooth voice will hypnotize Americans into believing his words.
``Fact check: The wealthy already pay more taxes," read the headline above a September 20 Associated Press. ``President Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries," Stephen Ohlemacher wrote. ``The data say they already are."
Nationwide, Ohlemacher and others dismantled Obama's soak-the-rich thesis. The rich are soaked today.
In 2008, its latest data indicate, the Internal Revenue Service harvested $1.0315 trillion in income tax ― of which the top 10 percent of earners paid $721.4 billion. The top 5 percent shelled out another $605.7 billion, and the top 1 percent relinquished $392.15 billion. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent collectively paid just $27.9 billion. Thus, the top 1 percent of taxpayers furnished 14 times the income taxes that the bottom half of filers supplied.
In 2009, the IRS reports, those who made at least $1 million average 24.4 percent of adjusted gross income in federal income taxes. Those who scored $200,000 to $300,000 paid 17.5 percent. Between $100,000 and $125,000: 9.9 percent. From $50,000 to $60,000: 6.3 percent. Those who earned between $20,000 and $30,000 saw income taxes devour 2.5 percent of AGI.
Income, schmincome, Leftists chirp. What about payroll taxes that lower-income Americans pay? Counting other taxes still shows that higher earners pay more, Obama's dark fantasies notwithstanding.
The Tax Policy Center ― a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution ― reported August 24 that Americans who receive $1 million or more will average 29.1 percent of earnings in 2011 federal income, payroll, corporate, and death taxes. Those clearing between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent, while those from $40,000 to $50,000 will average 12.5 percent. Those federal taxes will extract 5.7 percent from earners between $20,000 and $30,000.
Dry? Yes. But these figures demonstrate that Americans who earn more money pay more federal tax. Those who see less pay less. If Obama finds this unfair, he should define fairness.
True, the IRS notes, 1,470 households produced at least $1 million but paid no federal income tax in 2009. Still, this is just 0.62 percent of the 236,883 returns that millionaires filed. This reinforces the bipartisan idea of closing loopholes and lowering tax rates ― but not Obama's crusade against ``millionaires and billionaires" and his American Jobs Act's tax hikes on people earning as little as $200,000.
When Obama accepted the 2008 Democratic nomination in Denver, he espoused national unity. The USA would ``come together as one American family," he declared. The nearby Continental Divide might become this republic's only rift, if Barack Obama secured the presidency.
How disappointing that the eloquent man who millions hoped would heal this land now actively pits Americans against each other ― not by race or creed, but by income. As London's arson-scorched victims of mob rule learned last August, there is nothing cute about class war.
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
By Deroy Murdock
It's official: America is at class war, and President Barack Obama proudly leads the charge against this country's wealthy.
``If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber makes me a class warrior ― a warrior for the working class ― I will accept that," Obama shouted Tuesday at Denver's Abraham Lincoln High School. ``I will wear that charge as a badge of honor."
``Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires. A teacher or a nurse or a construction worker making $50,000 a year shouldn't pay higher tax rates than somebody making $50 million."
Obama's assault on the affluent rests upon a sky-high stack of lies. Obama is too well staffed and too well informed not to know otherwise. So, maddeningly, he straight-out lies to the American people.
For days before Obama opened his mouth in Denver, multiple news accounts and opinion pieces annihilated the casus belli of his War on the Wealthy. Nonetheless, Obama keeps spouting falsehoods, perhaps hoping that his smooth voice will hypnotize Americans into believing his words.
``Fact check: The wealthy already pay more taxes," read the headline above a September 20 Associated Press. ``President Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries," Stephen Ohlemacher wrote. ``The data say they already are."
Nationwide, Ohlemacher and others dismantled Obama's soak-the-rich thesis. The rich are soaked today.
In 2008, its latest data indicate, the Internal Revenue Service harvested $1.0315 trillion in income tax ― of which the top 10 percent of earners paid $721.4 billion. The top 5 percent shelled out another $605.7 billion, and the top 1 percent relinquished $392.15 billion. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent collectively paid just $27.9 billion. Thus, the top 1 percent of taxpayers furnished 14 times the income taxes that the bottom half of filers supplied.
In 2009, the IRS reports, those who made at least $1 million average 24.4 percent of adjusted gross income in federal income taxes. Those who scored $200,000 to $300,000 paid 17.5 percent. Between $100,000 and $125,000: 9.9 percent. From $50,000 to $60,000: 6.3 percent. Those who earned between $20,000 and $30,000 saw income taxes devour 2.5 percent of AGI.
Income, schmincome, Leftists chirp. What about payroll taxes that lower-income Americans pay? Counting other taxes still shows that higher earners pay more, Obama's dark fantasies notwithstanding.
The Tax Policy Center ― a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution ― reported August 24 that Americans who receive $1 million or more will average 29.1 percent of earnings in 2011 federal income, payroll, corporate, and death taxes. Those clearing between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent, while those from $40,000 to $50,000 will average 12.5 percent. Those federal taxes will extract 5.7 percent from earners between $20,000 and $30,000.
Dry? Yes. But these figures demonstrate that Americans who earn more money pay more federal tax. Those who see less pay less. If Obama finds this unfair, he should define fairness.
True, the IRS notes, 1,470 households produced at least $1 million but paid no federal income tax in 2009. Still, this is just 0.62 percent of the 236,883 returns that millionaires filed. This reinforces the bipartisan idea of closing loopholes and lowering tax rates ― but not Obama's crusade against ``millionaires and billionaires" and his American Jobs Act's tax hikes on people earning as little as $200,000.
When Obama accepted the 2008 Democratic nomination in Denver, he espoused national unity. The USA would ``come together as one American family," he declared. The nearby Continental Divide might become this republic's only rift, if Barack Obama secured the presidency.
How disappointing that the eloquent man who millions hoped would heal this land now actively pits Americans against each other ― not by race or creed, but by income. As London's arson-scorched victims of mob rule learned last August, there is nothing cute about class war.
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
US Senate to take up China currency bill
Posted: 02 October 2011 0958 hrs
WASHINGTON: The US Senate this week takes up a bill to punish China for its alleged currency manipulation, a measure that has divided the Republican presidential field and put the White House in a bind.
The legislation -- backed by Democrats and Republicans in the polarized Congress, but opposed by Beijing and potent US business groups -- faces a key procedural vote set for 5:30 pm (2130 GMT) Monday.
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, a key author of the measure, predicted the bill would clear that hurdle easily on the road to an "overwhelming vote" to approve it and send it to the House of Representatives.
"The time for asking China nicely is over," he said Friday.
But the bill faces an uphill fight in the House, where Republican leaders have no plans to bring it up for a vote unless the issue flares up as a core dispute in the November 2012 presidential races, several aides said.
And while White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters last week that the administration was "reviewing" the legislation and would not yet take a formal position, Schumer and others have said President Barack Obama opposes it.
The White House and Republican House leaders are likely mindful of stiff opposition to the bill from the business community in the wake of a letter from 51 US industry groups warning it would spark a "counterproductive" trade war.
The measure builds on congressional anger at the refusal by Obama and his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, to formally designate China as a currency manipulator in annual reports.
It would make it harder to avoid such a diagnosis, while making it easier for US firms to seek retaliatory tariffs against Chinese imports if Beijing is found to keep its currency -- and thus its goods -- artificially cheap.
With the election season heating up, the bill's backers have tied it to the sour US economy and the high 9.1 percent unemployment rate and said that China's trade policy has cost millions of American jobs.
A recent study by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute found that the US trade deficit with China has eliminated or displaced nearly 2.8 million jobs since 2001.
But the legislation has split the top two Republican White House contenders, with Texas Governor Rick Perry opposing it and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney saying he would make China's currency an issue on his first day in office.
Romney has dubbed China an "economic threat" and vowed to designate Beijing a "currency manipulator," a step that can trigger retaliatory US sanctions under existing law.
But "this is a free trade issue and Governor Perry does not support this bill," said a spokesman for his campaign, Mark Miner.
House Democrats hope that anger at the sour economy and at what are seen as China's unfair trade practices will help them force a vote with a little-used parliamentary procedure.
But so far, 174 Democrats -- and not one Republican -- have signed a so-called "discharge petition" to do just that, leaving it well shy of the 218 signatures it needs, according to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office.
Last year, a similar bill cleared the House by a lopsided 348-79 margin, with 99 Republicans voting yes.
Beijing unsurprisingly opposes the measure: Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei last week urged US lawmakers to "reconsider their decision and refrain from pushing through the bill" and warned against "politicizing economic trade issues and resorting to trade protectionism."
Republican White House hopeful and former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman told Fox News Channel last week that he "would sign it simply because you need to keep pressure on China" but warned Beijing would retaliate.
"You take action against China, you can expect them to rebut that action with commensurate tariffs," he said. "During a recession, you don't want a trade war."
In late 2010, Obama himself said in the heartland state of Iowa that the yuan was "undervalued" and was "a contributing factor" to the yawning US trade deficit with China.
In May 2011, however, the US Treasury Department declined in a formal report to brand Beijing a currency manipulator, and congressional Democratic aides say Obama may get caught between opposing the bill out of worries it could spark a trade war and election-year pressure to look tough on China.
Beijing has a history of allowing the yuan to strengthen slightly when it expects to come under heightened pressure over the value of its currency.
- AFP/cc
WASHINGTON: The US Senate this week takes up a bill to punish China for its alleged currency manipulation, a measure that has divided the Republican presidential field and put the White House in a bind.
The legislation -- backed by Democrats and Republicans in the polarized Congress, but opposed by Beijing and potent US business groups -- faces a key procedural vote set for 5:30 pm (2130 GMT) Monday.
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, a key author of the measure, predicted the bill would clear that hurdle easily on the road to an "overwhelming vote" to approve it and send it to the House of Representatives.
"The time for asking China nicely is over," he said Friday.
But the bill faces an uphill fight in the House, where Republican leaders have no plans to bring it up for a vote unless the issue flares up as a core dispute in the November 2012 presidential races, several aides said.
And while White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters last week that the administration was "reviewing" the legislation and would not yet take a formal position, Schumer and others have said President Barack Obama opposes it.
The White House and Republican House leaders are likely mindful of stiff opposition to the bill from the business community in the wake of a letter from 51 US industry groups warning it would spark a "counterproductive" trade war.
The measure builds on congressional anger at the refusal by Obama and his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, to formally designate China as a currency manipulator in annual reports.
It would make it harder to avoid such a diagnosis, while making it easier for US firms to seek retaliatory tariffs against Chinese imports if Beijing is found to keep its currency -- and thus its goods -- artificially cheap.
With the election season heating up, the bill's backers have tied it to the sour US economy and the high 9.1 percent unemployment rate and said that China's trade policy has cost millions of American jobs.
A recent study by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute found that the US trade deficit with China has eliminated or displaced nearly 2.8 million jobs since 2001.
But the legislation has split the top two Republican White House contenders, with Texas Governor Rick Perry opposing it and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney saying he would make China's currency an issue on his first day in office.
Romney has dubbed China an "economic threat" and vowed to designate Beijing a "currency manipulator," a step that can trigger retaliatory US sanctions under existing law.
But "this is a free trade issue and Governor Perry does not support this bill," said a spokesman for his campaign, Mark Miner.
House Democrats hope that anger at the sour economy and at what are seen as China's unfair trade practices will help them force a vote with a little-used parliamentary procedure.
But so far, 174 Democrats -- and not one Republican -- have signed a so-called "discharge petition" to do just that, leaving it well shy of the 218 signatures it needs, according to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office.
Last year, a similar bill cleared the House by a lopsided 348-79 margin, with 99 Republicans voting yes.
Beijing unsurprisingly opposes the measure: Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei last week urged US lawmakers to "reconsider their decision and refrain from pushing through the bill" and warned against "politicizing economic trade issues and resorting to trade protectionism."
Republican White House hopeful and former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman told Fox News Channel last week that he "would sign it simply because you need to keep pressure on China" but warned Beijing would retaliate.
"You take action against China, you can expect them to rebut that action with commensurate tariffs," he said. "During a recession, you don't want a trade war."
In late 2010, Obama himself said in the heartland state of Iowa that the yuan was "undervalued" and was "a contributing factor" to the yawning US trade deficit with China.
In May 2011, however, the US Treasury Department declined in a formal report to brand Beijing a currency manipulator, and congressional Democratic aides say Obama may get caught between opposing the bill out of worries it could spark a trade war and election-year pressure to look tough on China.
Beijing has a history of allowing the yuan to strengthen slightly when it expects to come under heightened pressure over the value of its currency.
- AFP/cc
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