Tag Archives: spending

Our Computers, Our National Security

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First it was Russia and the People’s Republic of China.  Now it’s…Iran?  How far behind are we falling in cyberspace, the core of a modern society?  Now we’re hearing from The Wall Street Journal that Iran has been conducting an active cyberwar against us for some months.  (Notice that: we didn’t hear about this war voluntarily from our government, but from a newspaper which had to tease it out of our government.)

Iranian hackers with government ties have mounted cyberattacks against American targets in recent months, escalating a low-grade cyberwar[.]

The Iranian effort culminated in a series of recent attacks against US banks as well as electronic assaults this year on energy companies in the Persian Gulf.  The attacks bore “signatures” that allowed US investigators to trace them to the Iranian government, [US government] officials said.

Here are some of the battles waged in this war since the start of the year:

  • January 2012: Potent but smaller-scale denial-of-service attacks against US banks
  • July 2012: Cyberattack at Saudi Arabian Oil Co. unleashes a virus called ‘Shamoon,’ destroying data on 30,000 computers
  • August 2012: Cyberattack at Rasgas, a Qatari natural gas company, disabled websites and email system
  • September 2012: A group called “Qassam Cyber Fighters” announced plans for cyberattacks on US banks.  Powerful denial of service strikes hit Bank of America Corp, JP Morgan Chase & Co., US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co
  • October 2012: The Qassam Cyber Fighters issued announcements, followed by cyber strikes, involving other US banks, slowing or interrupting consumer websites

A “senior defense official” said,

They have been going after everyone—financial services, Wall Street.  Is there a cyberwar going on?  It depends on how you define “war.”

How very Clintonesque of him.

My own speculation is that these relatively small attacks are just probes, both to test us and to test Iran’s developing cybersystems.

How well prepared are we to defeat a serious, concerted cyberattack, and how well prepared are we to go over to the offense and crush our attacker?  Apparently not very well.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said this:

An aggressor nation or extremist group could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals.
They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.
The most destructive scenarios involve cyber actors launching several attacks on our critical infrastructure at once, in combination with a physical attack on our country.  Attackers could also seek to disable or degrade critical military systems and communications networks.
The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be “cyber Pearl Harbor:” an attack that would cause physical destruction and loss of life, paralyze and shock the nation[.]

Panetta says the US is putting in place systems to defeat such cyberattacks, but I have to ask: how does that work in the face of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s trillion dollar cuts to our defense establishment from the combination of his spending cuts for Defense and his sequestration of further Defense funds scheduled for the turn of the year?

Lies of the Democrats, Part 2

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This is Part 2 of my series on the lies told by Democrats during the present administration’s term in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with the dishonesty while in office.

In this post, I’ll mention a few more economic lies.

The Democrats insist that their “Stimulus” spending and their diversion of part of the TARP funding “saved the American automobile manufacturing industry,” the latter itself of questionable legality, given the legislated purpose of the TARP funding.

This is nonsense.  In fact, only two car companies were at risk out of the seven major car companies that comprised, and still comprise, the American automobile manufacturing industry.  Those seven?  In no particular order, they are Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, Nissan, GM, and Chrysler.  But wait, you say, Ford, GM, and Chrysler are the only American car manufacturers; the other four are foreign—and two of those three were threatened with bankruptcy.  How is saving those two not saving the American automobile manufacturing industry?

The fact is, none of those seven car manufacturers manufacture anything in the US, including the American three.  All seven of those companies do have major plant complexes in the US whose function is to produce cars for sale in the US.  That production, though, is limited to final assembly.  Every plant, for every car manufacturer, imports all of their cars’ parts—chassis, body panels, engines, batteries, even tires and wheels—from other countries: Mexico, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, India, wherever the costs of parts production is lowest.  Thus, every automobile manufacturer in that American industry is on an even footing with every other auto manufacturer: they all do final assembly (and only final assembly), of imported parts, in the US, for sale to American customers.  Those seven, not only the American three, are the American automobile manufacturing industry.

Now, of those two car companies that were saved, what was the nature of the rescue?  Normal bankruptcy procedures were bypassed, and the Obama administration forced senior creditors to the back of the line—the funds went first to the auto manufacturing unions (vis., the United Auto Workers and the Canadian Auto Workers Unions), while those senior creditors wound up getting nothing.  This stood bankruptcy law and order of precedence for creditors on their collective head.

And the bailout of the two American car companies went so well that one of them—Chrysler—is now an Italian car company.

Blasts from the Past

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This is what FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wrote in his diary in the depths of the Great Depression after years of explosive spending, rapidly increasing debt, enormously high unemployment, rising taxes and tax rates, and drastic intrusion of government controls into our economy:

We have tried spending money.  We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.  I want to see this country prosper.  I want to see people get a job.  I want to see people get enough to eat.  We have never made good on our promises.  I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started.  And enormous debt to boot.

Although slow to (re)learn the lesson, Morgenthau wasn’t the first to articulate the failure of government spending to accomplish much of anything good.  Ludwig von Mises had some remarks on the matter, too.

When the government spends more, the public spends less.  Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand.  They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.

And

It is obviously futile to attempt to eliminate unemployment by embarking upon a program of public works that would otherwise not have been undertaken.  The necessary resources for such projects must be withdrawn by taxes or loans from the application they would otherwise have found.  Unemployment in one industry can, in this way, be mitigated only to the extent that it is increased in another.

And

Government spending cannot create additional jobs.  If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other.

And

A policy of deficit spending saps the very foundation of all interpersonal relations and contracts.  It frustrates all kinds of savings, social security benefits and pensions.

Now contrast that with what the present administration has done, and the wonderful effects that explosive spending, rapidly increasing debt, enormously high unemployment, the constant threat of rising taxes and tax rates, and drastic intrusion of government controls into our economy have had on our economy and on jobs for Americans.

Lies of my President, Part 3

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This is Part 3 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

Last February, Obama had this to say through his Chief of Staff and former Budget Director, Jack Lew.  The remarks first came in response to a question from Dick Gregory, of MSNBC’s Meet the Press, and then in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley.

Gregory: Here’s a stat that a lot of people may not know, but it’s pretty striking.  The number of days since Senate Democrats passed a budget is 1,019.  Can you just explain as a former budget director, how do you fund the government when there’s no budget?

Lew: Well, you know, one of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50 votes to pass something.  And there has been Republican opposition to anything that Senate Democrats have tried to do.

and

Crowley: I want to read for our viewers something that Sen Harry Reid, the Democrat Majority Leader in the US Senate, who said, “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year.  It’s done, we don’t need to do it.”

Lew: He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget.  But we also need to be honest.  You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support.

It stretches credulity far beyond the breaking point for Obama—or his ex-budget director—not to know that it takes 51 votes to pass a budget resolution; budget resolutions cannot be filibustered, the point of the 60-vote red herring.  This is a lie, pure and simple.

On the Keystone XL pipeline, there’s this bit of dishonesty.  Recall that Obama killed the pipeline that would have run from Canadian oil sands into central and Gulf-coastal US because he felt “rushed” by Republicans.  Last March, he staged a photo-op to take credit for “expediting” the permit process for a southern portion of Keystone XL, a part that runs in Oklahoma.  And a part that doesn’t need his, or State’s, approval since it doesn’t cross an international border.

And this one:

If you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.

Never mind that more and more companies are limiting the health insurance coverage they’re offering as insurance costs rise (wait—weren’t these supposed to come down?).  Never mind that as health insurance coverage alters, doctors are increasingly opting out of—or being driven from by the insurance companies—accepting patients with this or that insurance company’s policy.  And never mind that Sears and Darden Restaurants are moving to a plan where they don’t offer health insurance coverage at all.  Instead, they’ll give their employees a sum of money and allow them to shop for their own coverage via an online exchange.

And this: Senator Barack Obama spoke against recess appointments, including signing a letter to President Bush the Younger objecting to a recess appointment.  He also insisted that it’s “the wrong thing to do,” to appoint people who “couldn’t get through a Senate nomination.”

As president, though, Obama has made “recess appointments” while deliberately bypassing any opportunity for the Senate to weigh in: Donald Berwick to Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after leaving the position vacant for 15 months before nominating any one at all, just because he didn’t want to hassle with Republicans; Professor Elizabeth Warren to a created just-for-the-purpose “special assistant” position in his office in order to make her the functional head of the new CFPB, when it became clear that she had no hope of being confirmed; three people to the NLRB while the Senate was still in session.

Welfare, Work, and the Stimulus

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It turns out Obama’s HHS waiver of the work requirement for welfare (in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, signed into law by President Bill Clinton) wasn’t the first Obama waiver of the work requirement.  No, it’s just one more instance of the wealth redistribution in which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama believes so much.

The Congressional Research Service has a new report out, albeit one done at the behest of an Evil Republican, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (the report can be found here or here).  This report demonstrates that the Obama Stimulus Package, drafted up shortly after his inauguration in 2009 and passed just after that also waived the requirement for work in order to get welfare.

Typically the food stamp program requires that group [“able-bodied adults” between 18 and 49 years old who have no dependents] to work or participate in a training program at least 20 hours a week to continue receiving benefits after three months. The stimulus law, though, allowed states to suspend the rule from April 2009 to October 2010—and most states did.

The CRS study showed that in fiscal 2010, the last year for which data was available, the number of food-stamp recipients in that group was at nearly 3.9 million. That’s up from 1.9 million in 2008.

Though food-stamp enrollment was already rising at the time in part due to the recession, the study noted the number in this group “increased more rapidly than the overall caseload.”

Their percentage of that caseload grew from 6.9 percent in 2008 to 9.7 percent in 2010.

This was no effort to accommodate spiking unemployment, though.  Indeed, it never was intended to—unemployment would never rise above 8% and would fall back to 5.5% by the end of 2009 with the stimulus, Obama promised us.  The waiver was, nevertheless, extended beyond 2010.

The latest CRS report noted that while the stimulus law lifted the food stamp work requirement until late 2010, the law allowing extended unemployment benefits likewise allowed most states to waive those work requirements in 2011 and 2012.

Bread and circuses.