Monday, November 7, 2011

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, November 7, 2011


Let's start off the week with a bit of Bennett... Tony, that is!

Folks... com'on... if today's newsbites theme song doesn't put a smile on your face... nothin' will!
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9 comments:

William R. Barker said...

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

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204002304576631192120542046.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

The Occupy Wall Street protesters aren't good at articulating what they want, but one of their demands is "end corporate welfare."

Well, welcome aboard!

Some of us have been fighting crony capitalism for decades...

(*RAISING MY HAND*) (*SHOUTING "ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!"*)

Corporate welfare is the offer of special favors - cash grants, loans, guarantees, bailouts and special tax breaks - to specific industries or firms.

* THINK G.E. AND ITS CEO JEFF IMMELT - aka: OBAMA'S "JOBS CZAR."

The government doesn't track the overall cost of these programs...

* IS ANYONE SURPRISED...???

(*SMIRK*)

...but in 2008 the Cato Institute made an attempt and came up with $92 billion for fiscal 2006, which is more than the U.S. government spends on homeland security.

(*HEADACHE*)

That annual cost may have doubled to $200 billion in this new era of industry bailouts and subsidies. According to the House Budget Committee, the 2009 stimulus bill alone contained more than $80 billion in "clean energy" subsidies, and tens of billions more went for the auto bailout and cash for clunkers, as well as aid for the mortgage industry through programs to refinance or buy up toxic loans.

This industrial policy model of government as a financial partner with business can sound appealing, but the government's record in picking winners and losers has been dreadful. Some of the most expensive flops include:

The Supersonic Transport plane of the mid-1970s...

Jimmy Carter's $2 billion Synthetic Fuels Corporation...

Amtrak, which hasn't turned a profit in four decades...

...and the most expensive public-private partnership debacle of all time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have lost $142 billion of taxpayer money.

* To be continued...

November 7, 2011 at 9:36 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

A few other illustrative industry handouts:

The ethanol subsidy, benefitting mostly corn farmers and corporate fuel blenders in the Midwest, costs about $6 billion a year through an array of tax subsidies, tariffs and mandates while making fuel and food more expensive.

The Federal Communications Commission recently approved spending up to $4.5 billion a year on a Universal Service Fund to bring broadband development to rural America. (Broadband service is already rapidly expanding - with some $65 billion in private capital - absent the subsidies, but Internet providers and telecom firms pressed for the program.) This is in addition to a $5 billion Broadband Technology Opportunities Program run by the Commerce Department.

The Department of Agriculture's Market Access Program helps advertise and promote the products of agribusinesses like the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council and Sunkist, the orange growers consortium that has received more than $800 million in the life of the program.

Crop price supports for wheat, corn, rice, sugar and soybean farmers are supposed to help struggling family farms, but at least half the subsidies go to large and wealthy farmers and corporations. (Restricting those funds to farmers with incomes below $250,000 would save $30 billion over the next decade.) Congress can't seem to wean the farm belt off these payments even though commodity prices and farm incomes are near an all-time high.

Some $8 billion has gone via Mr. Obama's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program to the likes of Nissan, Ford and Tesla Motors... Another $2.4 billion has been routed to manufacturers trying to build battery-operated electric cars. (As with the loan guarantees to Solyndra, if these companies succeed, the private investors get rich. If they fail, taxpayers lose.)

According to the Pew Research Center's "subsidy scope" data base, direct expenditures in the energy industry more than quadrupled in Mr. Obama's first year in office to $18 billion from less than $4 billion in 2008. (That doesn't include loan guarantees. ... The Solyndra loan constituted less than 2% of the $40 billion in outstanding loan guarantees to dozens of energy companies...)

Republicans, for their part, favor handouts to the nuclear industry. Over the years the feds have provided billions of dollars in loan guarantees and cut-rate insurance to nuclear plants, though even nuclear-utility executives say new plants may not make economic sense in a world of cheap and abundant natural gas. Last month House Speaker John Boehner backed a $2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee sought by USEC Inc. for a uranium-enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio.

The Export-Import Bank has a portfolio of $14.5 billion of outstanding loan guarantees to assist major U.S. exporters. More than 90% of the funds went to 10 corporations, including Boeing ($6.4 billion), General Electric ($1.043 billion) and Caterpillar ($424 million).

[T]he parade of subsidies gets longer each year, perhaps, as the old joke goes, because in Washington Republicans love corporations and Democrats love welfare.

(*GNASHING MY TEETH*)

With American federal debt headed toward the worst European levels, this is an issue that should unite the tea party, the Occupy Wall Street protesters and Congressional deficit-cutters.

November 7, 2011 at 9:37 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45153941/ns/us_news/t/obamas-rail-initiative-train-nowhere/#.TrhpynI1QfU

As part of the economic "stimulus" plan of 2009, Obama pushed through more than $8 billion in initial funding to extend high-speed intercity rail service to 10 major U.S. rail corridors by 2034.

* YEAH... 2034.

(*SMIRK*)

A quarter of that money - a little more than $2 billion - went to California, where voters in 2008 approved a plan to build a 220-mph line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The California High Speed Rail Authority promised voters that the line would open in 2020, at an overall price of about $33 billion.

Since then, not a single segment of track has been laid and not a single station has opened.

That 2020 ribbon-cutting? It's now projected to be no earlier than 2033 - at least 13 years late.

That $33 billion price tag? It's been recalculated at $98.5 billion - nearly three times the original estimate.

"Knowing what we know now, we think the time is now to pull the plug on this project," said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a conservative activist group.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said last week that Obama was still committed to the the plan...

* ANYONE SURPRISED? ANYONE...? ANYONE AT ALL...???

Carney said the White House was ready to "continue to work with lawmakers of both parties around the country, as well as local officials, who are interested in this kind of "investment," because it really is the kind of thing that will help create a better future for the individual states and the country."

* THESE PEOPLE ARE TOTALLY IRRESPONSIBLE! (I SUSPECT MAJOR LSD AND COCAINE ABUSE.)

Last week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott wasn't shy about saying "I told you so." Scott said he rejected a federal offer of $2.4 billion because he didn't want Florida to get stuck with a wildly inflated bill. Now, Californians are "on the hook for another 50-some billion dollars," Scott told reporters. "So I know all of you were very supportive of my decision on high-speed rail."

The U.S. had ambitious plans to connect the country with a network of high-speed trains when it inaugurated Amtrak's Acela Express service between Washington and New York in December 2000. Eleven years later, the Acela remains the nation's only high-speed line, and it's not really accurate to call it even that. The Acela is capable of running as fast as 165 mph, well above the government high-speed definition of 150 mph. But it averages only about 80 mph, because it has to share tracks with conventional trains and because some of those tracks are supported by infrastructure dating, in some stretches, back to 1935.

The concerns - the delays, the soaring costs or the disruption to local landowners - have not changed the mind of Gov. Brown (D), who has championed the initiative from the beginning. In a statement after the High Speed Rail Authority put out its gloomy new business plan, Brown reiterated his conviction that the rail line would "create hundreds of thousands of jobs, linking California's population centers and avoiding the huge problems of massive airport and highway expansion." Even with its alarming new numbers, the plan remains "solid," Brown said, and it "lays the foundation for a 21st century transportation system."

* SERIOUSLY, FOLKS... YOU KNOW OL' JERRY BROWN - GOV. MOONBEAM - WAS "DOING TABS" BACK IN THE 60's/70's.

November 7, 2011 at 6:44 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pension-pain/2011/11/03/gIQAlYWctM_story.html

Voters in deep-blue California, Illinois and New York once again picked Democratic governors to run some of the most populous - and financially troubled - states in the union [last year].

In Illinois, where state public-employee pension plans have a worst-in-the-nation $80 billion unfunded liability, Gov. Pat Quinn and the Democratic legislature raised the retirement age to 67...

(*SINCERE APPLAUSE*)

...and limited the maximum salary on which pensions can be based to $106,800.

* THEY WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO HAVE TIED THE CAP TO TWICE THE MEDIAN STATE INCOME.

But Illinois pension funds still rely on an unrealistic average 8.25% projected rate of return.

* AND THIS IS HOW GOVERNMENT LIES TO US... (*SHRUG*)... HOW POLITICIANS DELIBERATELY LIE TO US.

In New York and California, Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown, respectively, have proposed changes to their states’ benefit structures. Both courageously address real issues: They raise retirement ages; curtail the practice known as “spiking,” under which employees can base pensions on one unusually high annual salary; cap six-figure annual payouts; and, most significant, increase current employee pension contributions.

(*AGAIN...SINCERE APPLAUSE*)

And while Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Quinn have adhered to the union-blessed defined-benefit model, Mr. Brown, who unveiled his plan Oct. 27, offers an innovative, mandatory, hybrid benefit composed of a 401(k)-type plan, Social Security and a smaller guaranteed pension.

(*RISING TO MY FEET TO APPLAUD*)

But there’s a catch: Except for increased employee contributions, the reforms mainly apply to new hires, not to the existing state workforce.

(*SIGH*)

A similar assessment applies to the reforms adopted in another blue state that kept Democrats in power in 2010: Maryland. Gov. Martin O’Malley and the legislature imposed somewhat higher contributions on existing employees and trimmed benefits for new hires but left the plan’s defined-benefit structure in place.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Sooner or later, state and local governments must further rein in benefits for current employees - so that the cost of providing for public servants tomorrow does not make it impossible to provide actual public services today.

* REALITY'S A BITCH!

November 7, 2011 at 7:26 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/americas/united-states-drug-enforcement-agency-squads-extend-reach-of-drug-war.html?_r=1&ref=world

Late on a moonless night last March, a plane smuggling nearly half a ton of cocaine touched down at a remote airstrip in Honduras. A heavily armed ground crew was waiting for it - as were Honduran security forces. After a 20-minute firefight, a Honduran officer was wounded and two drug traffickers lay dead.

Several news outlets briefly reported the episode, mentioning that a Honduran official said the United States Drug Enforcement Administration had provided support.

[However,] none of the reports included a striking detail: that support consisted of an elite detachment of military-trained D.E.A. special agents who joined in the shootout, according to a person familiar with the episode.

* DID CONGRESS APPROVE THIS?

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations - including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize - that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

* AGAIN... DID CONGRESS APPROVE THIS? IS THERE A LAW ON THE BOOKS - A LAW AMERICAN CITIZENS CAN SEE AND REFER TO AND KNOW WHO VOTED FOR AND AGAINST IT - AUTHORIZING THE PRESIDENT TO USE WHAT AMOUNTS TO MILITARY FORCE IN OTHER COUNTRIES?

The program - called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team - was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.

* IF MEMORY SERVES, THE TALIBAN OUTLAWED THE DRUG TRADE WHEN THEY WERE IN POWER. (*SHRUG*)

Federal law prohibits the drug agency from directly carrying out arrests overseas...

* BUT APPARENTLY KILLING OVERSEAS DRUG DEALERS IS FINE AND DANDY. (*SNORT*)

* FOLKS... AGAIN... WE SEEM NO LONGER TO BE A NATION CONSTRAINED BY THE RULE OF LAW, BUT ONLY BY THE ABILITY OF A PRESIDENT - ANY PRESIDENT - TO DO WHAT HE WANTS WHEN HE WANTS AND UNLESS CONGRESS IMPEACHES HIM AND REMOVES HIM FROM OFFICE THERE'S NO OTHER MEANS OF CHECKING PRESIDENTIAL POWER.

November 7, 2011 at 10:30 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamescorum/100115822/general-fuller-was-fired-for-hinting-at-the-truth-karzai-is-thoroughly-unhinged-and-were-propping-him-up/

On Friday, on the orders of the U.S. government, Major General Peter Fuller, deputy commander of the NATO mission to train the Afghani forces, was removed from his post.

Fuller’s crime: telling the truth about a serious problem for NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In a press interview last week, Fuller responded to Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s recent statement that he would readily join with Pakistan in a war with the United States if he had to choose sides.

Finally, a US general responded with the mild comment that the political leaders in Kabul were “isolated from reality”. This was enough to end the career of a capable officer.

One of the key reasons for the American defeat in Vietnam 36 years ago was the unwillingness of officers on the ground to tell their superiors the truth for fear of losing their careers. In the end, a strategy built on a false foundation of optimistic reports simply collapsed.

If President Obama publicly punishes his officers for telling the truth, then they will either be silent or lie to him.

Apparently, the only lesson Obama learned from studying Vietnam is how to replicate the same failed policies.

November 7, 2011 at 10:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/kyrgyzstans-election-winner-says-us-air-base-poses-risk-must-shut-by-2014-after-lease-ends/2011/11/01/gIQApDEibM_story.html

Kyrgyzstan’s president-elect said on Tuesday Nov. 1, that the U.S. air base needs to close by 2014 because its presence on Kyrgyz soil puts this former Soviet nation at risk of retaliatory strikes from those in conflict with the United States.

* YET ANOTHER FOREIGN POLICY TRIUMPH FOR HILLARY! (NO...? THIS IS BAD...? OH... NEVERMIND...)

(*SNICKER*)

Almazbek Atambayev, who won over 60% of ballots in last Sunday’s vote, said Kyrgyzstan will honor a contract allowing the U.S. to lease the Manas base through mid-2014.

The United States has used Manas, located within the country’s main civilian airport, as a key logistical hub for operations in nearby Afghanistan since 2001. Manas remains the only U.S. military outpost in the volatile region after the U.S. was evicted in 2005 from a base in authoritarian Uzbekistan over Washington’s criticism of a brutal crackdown on protesters by Uzbek forces.

* OH, YEAH... BEFORE OBAMA THERE WAS BUSH... (*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Russia also has a military base in the Central Asian nation on China’s mountainous western fringes. Atambayev, whose recent overtures to Moscow indicate he will pursue an explicitly pro-Russian line, did not say anything about that base.

(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)

November 7, 2011 at 10:52 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4145266,00.html

* HERE'S THE HEADLINE...

Microphones accidently left on after G20 meeting pick up private conversation between US, French presidents.

* HERE'S THE STORY...

According to a Monday report in the French website Arret sur Images, French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly told US President Barack Obama that he could not "stand" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he thinks the Israeli premier "is a liar."

According to the report, Obama replied: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!"

* OH, YES... AND THESE TWO MORONS ARE RUNNING FRANCE AND AMERICA. GOD HELP THE WORLD!

* REPEAT AFTER ME, KIDS... "EVERY MIC IS A HOT MIC... EVERY MIC IS A HOT MIC... EVERY MIC IS A HOT MIC"

The surprising lack of coverage may be explained by a report alleging that reporters present at the event were requested to sign an agreement to keep mum on the subject of the embarrassing comments.

(*SMIRK*)

A member of the media confirmed Monday that "there were discussions between journalists and they agreed not to publish the comments due to the sensitivity of the issue."

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

He added that while it was annoying to have to refrain from publishing the information, the journalists are subject to precise rules of conduct.

* NOT AMERICAN JOURNALISTS. AT LEAST... NOT HISTORICALLY.

* REMEMBER WHEN THE AMERICAN MEDIA'S JOB WAS TO REPORT THE NEWS... NOT COVER IT UP?

(*SIGH*)

November 7, 2011 at 11:09 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/name-and-shame-obama-may-go-public-with-lawmakers-funding-requests-20111105

President Obama may be planning to use his executive authority to publicize special funding requests that lawmakers make for pet projects.

* GOOD FOR HIM! (FUNNY, THOUGH... SOMEHOW I DOUBT SENATOR OBAMA EVER PROPOSED SUCH A BILL WHEN HE WAS A SENATOR; NOR DID PRESIDENT OBAMA PROPOSE SUCH A BILL DURING THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF HIS TERM WHEN DEMOCRATS CONTROLLED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE. STILL... HYPOCRISY ASIDE... GOOD FOR HIM! BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!

A memo that the White House has floated on Capitol Hill would require executive branch agencies to make public any letter from a member of Congress seeking special consideration for any project or organization vying for government funding.

* GOOD! THEY SHOULD BE PUBLIC! WHY HASN'T OBAMA DONE IT ALREADY...?!?! I'M ALL FOR IT...!!!

A White House spokesman declined to comment, except to say he did not believe the document would be coming next week.

(*SMIRK*)

Such [action] by the White House could cause embarrassment for members [of Congress[ who say they do not request earmarks, but who have written to executive branch agencies seeking special consideration for funding in their districts.

* GOOD! LET'S SEE IF OBAMA HAS THE BALLS - AND CHARACTER - NECESSARY TO DO THE RIGHT THING! AGAIN... I HOPE HE DOES!

November 7, 2011 at 11:18 PM

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