Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, June 15, 2011


Now THIS is frigg'n rock and roll!

(Yeah... with a full frigg'n orchestra for back-up!)
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6 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://paul.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1876:the-keys-to-economic-growth&catid=62:texas-straight-talk&Itemid=69

* AS ALWAYS, YOU'LL LEARN A LOT BY LISTENING TO DR. RON PAUL (R-TX)

U.S. job growth in May was negligible... [T]he official unemployment figure - at least the figure the Labor Department admits to- rose to 9.1%.

[N]o amount of government spending or Federal Reserve quantitative easing can reduce unemployment, increase real productivity, or address our debt fiasco. U.S. jobs and productivity are dependent on the accumulation of private capital to finance existing businesses or fund new entrepreneurial activity. Private capital - whether accumulated by profitable U.S. businesses, invested by private equity and venture capital firms, or attracted from abroad - is the key to economic growth and new jobs.

But we cannot create jobs if we demonize profits, punish risk-taking capitalists, and stay hostile to foreign investment.

(*NOD*)

The steps to encouraging capital investment and creating new jobs in America are simple, though not easy:

First and foremost, we must create a sound U.S. currency backed by gold or some other commodity respected by the market. No nation in history with a rapidly depreciating currency has attracted private capital. Unless and until we prohibit the Treasury and Federal Reserve from essentially creating money and credit from thin air, we cannot restore the U.S. economy.

Second, we must create a favorable regulatory environment for U.S. business. This cannot be stressed enough. When businesses don’t know what’s coming next from the EPA, when ObamaCare spikes their healthcare costs, or when the Dodd-Frank bill adds almost unknowable regulatory compliance burdens, businesses simply will not expand and hire. It is time to start shrinking the federal register.

(*APPLAUSE*)

Third, we must stop spending trillions of dollars overseas on foreign wars. There is no point in debating a foreign policy we cannot afford. It no longer matters what neoconservatives want - our interventionist foreign policy is financed on credit, and our credit limit has been reached. Our economy would be infinitely better off if those trillions of dollars had never been removed from the private economy or added to our debt.

Finally, we must completely revamp the U.S. tax system and move to a territorial model that does not tax foreign source income. U.S. corporations are sitting on more than a trillion dollars in foreign earnings that cannot be repatriated to the U.S. because of taxes. We need to stop taxing unpatriated funds to bring those earnings home. Better yet, we need to abolish the income tax altogether.

* THE QUESTION OF COURSE... WHAT TO REPLACE IT WITH IF WE DO. FRANKLY, I'M WILLING TO ABIDE THE INCOME TAX - AS LONG AS IT'S REFORMED SO AS TO APPLY TO EVERYONE EQUALLY WITHIN REASONABLE BRACKETS.

The U.S. economy is in deep trouble. Congress needs to act immediately to restore the rule of law and create an environment that rewards, rather than punishes, the critical components of any healthy economy: capital accumulation and investment.

America has never enjoyed absolute free-market capitalism: creeping government intrusion and special interest political patronage have existed and increased since our founding. But America historically has permitted free markets to operate with less government interference than other nations, while showing greater respect for property rights and the rule of law. Less government, respect for private property, and a relatively stable legal environment allowed America to become the wealthiest nation on earth.

By contrast, the poorest nations almost always demonstrate hostility for free markets, private property, and the rule of law.

* AMERICA MUST RETURN TO OUR FOUNDING PRINCIPLES!

June 15, 2011 at 8:48 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56993.html

More than two years after Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.

* FOR EXAMPLE...

Telecom executive Donald H. Gips raised a big bundle of cash to help finance his friend Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.

Gips, a vice president of Colorado-based Level 3 Communications, delivered more than $500,000 in contributions for the Obama war chest, while two other company executives collected at least $150,000 more.

[I]n mid-2009, Obama named Gips ambassador to South Africa. Meanwhile, Level 3 Communications, in which Gips retained stock, received millions of dollars of government stimulus contracts for broadband projects in six states - though Gips said he had been “completely unaware” that the company had received the contracts.

(*GUFFAW*)

The iWatch News investigation found:

Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.

* CHANGE... HOPE AND CHANGE... CHANGE AND HOPE... DOLLARS AND JOBS... (*SMIRK*)

Some Obama bundlers have ties to companies that stand to gain financially from the president’s policy agenda, particularly in clean energy and telecommunications, and some already have done so. Level 3 Communications, for instance, snared $13.8 million in stimulus money.

* CHUMP CHANGE TO MR.... er... HOPE AND CHANGE.

The big bundlers had broad access to the White House for meetings with top administration officials and glitzy social events. In all, campaign bundlers and their family members account for more than 3,000 White House meetings and visits. Half of them raised $200,000 or more.

* OH... AND GET THIS FOLKS...!!! (READ ON...)

Public Citizen found in 2008 that President George W. Bush had appointed about 200 bundlers to administration posts over his eight years in office. That is roughly the same number Obama has appointed in a little more than two years, the iWatch News analysis showed.

* FOUR TIMES THE NUMBER OF BUNDLER APPOINTMENTS...!!! YEP... THAT'S "CHANGE" ALRIGHT!

June 15, 2011 at 9:26 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303848104576385620186823528.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

* FOLKS... YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS OP-ED IN ITS ENTIRETY. IF THE LINK DOESN'T WORK, GOOGLE "The Obama Hiatus" AND IT'LL POP UP.

The White House is more or less conceding that it doesn't have a chance of winning a second term unless his major policies go on hiatus.

This holiday from committing liberal history began in December with the White House-GOP deal that extended the Bush tax rates through the 2012 election and added a payroll tax cut on employees to 4.2% from 6.2%. These proposals came from the same Democrats who only months earlier had increased payroll taxes to finance their health-care bill and routinely claim that tax rates don't matter to the private economy.

Next came the much-ballyhooed White House scrub for "excessive" regulation, even as hundreds of new rules mandated by the legislation of the first two years continue to be written and to slow business investment. But at least the rule review persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to stop treating dairy farm milk spills as if they were Gulf oil leaks. That should help next year in Wisconsin.

Picking up the vacation pace, this week the EPA delayed by two months the carbon regulations that it wants to impose, even as it resists bipartisan attempts on Capitol Hill to kill them altogether. Next up may be a delay in pending regulations meant to harm coal-fired power, before opponents gather enough votes to kill them. The EPA has already yanked an entire rule that would have forced thousands of businesses to install new industrial boilers.

* IN OTHER WORDS, FOLKS, THE DEMS ARE PLAYING BAIT AND SWITCH - LAYING THE GROUND WORK TO CLAIM THEY'RE NOT ACTUALLY DOING ALL THE ECONOMICALLY DESTRUCTIVE THINGS THEY BELIEVE IN. YET... WHAT HAPPENS IF OBAMA IS RE-ELECTED? THEN ALL THESE BAD POLICIES COME BACK WITH A VENGENCE. IN OTHER WORDS, FOLKS, OBAMA'S "BACK-TRACKING" IS NOTHING MORE THAN A PRE-ELECTION "TRICK" TO TRY AND FOOL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AGAIN!

Also this week, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission voted - five to zero - to delay by six months the derivatives swap rules that were due this month under the Dodd-Frank financial re-regulation. The alphabet soup of financial regulators will eventually add tens of thousands of pages to the Federal Register, but for now they are conceding that the derivatives market isn't the calamity they claimed it was in the rush to pass the bill.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Then there's health care. Over the last year, the Health and Human Services Department has granted at least 1,372 temporary waivers to ObamaCare mandates...

(*ROLLING MY EYES*)

(If the law isn't enforced, maybe voters will forget it passed.)

(*SNORT*) (*CHUCKLE*)

(By the way, this waiver process isn't in the law's statutory language. HHS has simply created it via regulation.)

* FOLKS... YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP!

June 15, 2011 at 9:55 AM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304259304576373391101828876.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

In justifying U.S. involvement in Libya, the Obama administration cited the "responsibility to protect" citizens of other countries when their governments engage in widespread violence against them.

* BUT ONLY IN COUNTRIES THAT CAN'T FIGHT BACK - AND EVEN THEN, ONLY IN SUCH COUNTRIES AS... OH... SPELL THEIR COUNTRY'S NAME AS L*I*B*Y*A.

(*SMIRK*) (*SNICKER*)

But in the realm of cyberspace, the administration is ignoring its primary responsibility to protect its own citizens when they are targeted for harm by a foreign government.

* BTW... THE AUTHOR OF THIS PIECE - RICHARD CLARKE - WAS A NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICIAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE FOR THREE PRESIDENTS.

Senior U.S. officials know well that the government of China is systematically attacking the computer networks of the U.S. government and American corporations.

Beijing is successfully stealing research and development, software source code, manufacturing know-how and government plans.

* To be continued...

June 15, 2011 at 10:25 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)

Three years ago, the head of the British Security Service wrote to hundreds of corporate chief executive officers in the U.K. to advise them that their companies had in all probability been hacked by the government of China. Neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security has issued such a notice to U.S. executives, but most corporate leaders already know it.

* BUT COMMUNIST CHINA'S ACTIVITIES GO FAR BEYOND "CORPORATE ESPIONAGE"...

Gmail accounts of senior U.S. officials had been compromised from a server in China. The targeting of specific U.S. officials is not something that a mere hacker gang could do.

* OH... AND NEITHER IS THE U.S. CHINA'S ONLY TARGET...

The German government claims that the personal computer of Chancellor Angela Merkel was hacked by the Chinese government. Australia has also claimed that its prime minister was targeted by Chinese hackers.

In 2009, this newspaper reported that the control systems for the U.S. electric power grid had been hacked and secret openings created so that the attacker could get back in with ease. Far from denying the story, President Obama publicly stated that "cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid."

There is no money to steal on the electrical grid, nor is there any intelligence value that would justify cyber espionage: The only point to penetrating the grid's controls is to counter American military superiority by threatening to damage the underpinning of the U.S. economy. Chinese military strategists have written about how in this way a nation like China could gain an equal footing with the militarily superior United States.

(What would we do if we discovered that Chinese explosives had been laid throughout our national electrical system? The public would demand a government response. If, however, the explosive is a digital bomb that could do even more damage, our response is apparently muted - especially from our government.)

* FOLKS... CHINA IS NOT OUR FRIEND.

What does the administration know about the role of the Chinese government in cyberattacks on public and private computer networks in the United States?

If there is widespread Chinese hacking of sensitive U.S. networks and critical infrastructure, what has the administration said about it to the Chinese government?

* WHAT IS THIS "IF" NONSENSE?! THE ENTIRE PREMISE OF THE ARTICLE IS BASED ON THE FACT THAT THERE IS WIDESPREAD CHINESE GOVERNMENTAL HACKING OF SENSITIVE U.S. NETWORKS AND CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE!

Since defensive measures such as antivirus software and firewalls appear unable to stop the Chinese penetrations, does the administration have any plan to address these cyberattacks?

In private, U.S. officials admit that the government has no strategy to stop the Chinese cyberassault. Rather than defending American companies, the Pentagon seems focused on "active defense," by which it means offense. That cyber offense might be employed if China were ever to launch a massive cyberwar on the U.S. But in the daily guerrilla cyberwar with China, our government is engaged in defending only its own networks. It is failing in its responsibility to protect the rest of America from Chinese cyber attack.

June 15, 2011 at 10:26 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/801-economy/166599-pelosis-net-worth-rises-62-percent-

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saw her net worth rise 62% last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

Pelosi saw her wealth rise due to some stock gains and real estate investments made by her husband, Paul.

* NO CATTLE FUTURES PROFITS?

June 15, 2011 at 3:43 PM

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