Monthly Archives: February 2013

We’re Capable of So Much More

Posted on by
Reply

In a related article, I described how even Progressive Europe recognizes the retreat of the US from the global stage and from our responsibilities as a major power.  Yet we have the economic and resource capacity to do so much better, as Spiegel International Online notices.  Fracking provides an example of both our capacity and of our willful impotence.

The United States is sitting on massive natural gas and oil reserves that have the potential to shift the geopolitical balance in its favor.  Worries are increasing in Russia and the Arab states of waning influence and falling market prices.

And

American drilling experts began using a method called “fracking,” with which oil and gas molecules can be extracted from dense shale rock formations.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the United States will replace Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas in only two years.  The Americans could also become the world’s top petroleum producers by 2017.

And

…the boom could generate 600,000 new jobs, and some experts even believe that up to 3 million new jobs could be created in the coming years.

And

…the United States will benefit the most from the development of shale gas and oil resources.  …the political threat potential of oil producers like Iran will decline. Optimists assume that, in about 15 years, the United States will no longer have to send any aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to guarantee that oil tankers can pass unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz….

However.  There’s always a however.

President Barack Obama’s EPA continues to manufacture “investigations” of ground water pollution from fracking where none exists—their Wyoming fiasco, for instance.  His EPA continues its war on oil, gas, and coal by instituting output regulations that Congress already had rejected.

Obama continues to slow-walk oil and gas drilling permits on Federal lands and at offshore sites.  He has moved to cancel unused oil leases, never caring that the lessees had been reluctant to act on their leases due to uncertainty over Obama’s handling of hydrocarbons generally.

Obama even is slow-walking approval (and that approval is not a foregone conclusion, even now) of the Keystone XL Pipeline project, now that all environmental objections have been cleared with Nebraska’s approval of an alternate route.  This pipeline doesn’t directly address the resource explosion that fracking provides, but it remains symptomatic of his administration’s disdain for practical energy self-sufficiency.

It’s very unclear whether we will be allowed to realize the fruits of this technology and to bring into use these vast energy resources.

Perfection

Posted on by
Reply

It can be costly, especially for those not directly involved.

The perfection here is in the attitude of President Barack Obama and his acolytes as demonstrated by their responses to criticism.  Obama is above reproach—perfect—and so dissent must be suppressed and inconvenient law ignored.

Some examples, indicating Obama’s straightforward belief that the only reason people don’t agree with him is because they’re easily manipulated:

Obama’s bellyache, “One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates.  If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it[.]”

(This is especially rich given the way the media have coddled Obama.)

Obama’s whine that House Speaker John Boehner wanted to reach a deal on recent fiscal issues but couldn’t in part because he was vulnerable to attack for compromising Republican principles and working with the president.

(Notice that: compromising principles is an ethical thing to do….)

There are others:

Juan Williams, on a recent Fox News Sunday episode, saying in all seriousness that Obama had to make the unconstitutional appointments because he couldn’t get his appointments into office any other way.

Because when the law is inconvenient, it’s OK to disregard it.  If you’re the President.  How very Nixonian of both Williams and Obama.

And there’s

Obama’s claim that the only reason folks disagree with his gun control attack on the 2nd Amendment is because they want TV ratings and to sell more guns and ammo.

He left out the bitter clingers.

And the Progressives’ race card:

Jimmy Carter said, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

And [emphasis added]

It is wrong to believe Barack Obama shouldn’t be president because he’s black.  That you have other reasons along with those–even ones that rank higher–doesn’t make it excusable.  Likely those other reasons are themselves tied to Obama being black.

Yet for all his perfection, Obama’s failures make a long list:

  • Obamacare and skyrocketing premiums and other costs
  • Dodd-Frank and its suppression of business effort with regulatory costs
  • EPA attempt to regulate water as a pollutant
  • Obama’s unconstitutional appointments to NLRB, CFPB
  • NLRB’s statement that they’ll ignore the court’s ruling, because they consider it wrong
  • failure to produce a budget
  • refusal to curb spending, debt build-up

Obama may eventually suffer the consequences of the failure of his perfection.  But he’s not the only one who will suffer: he’s inflicting those consequences on the entire nation, on all of us.

Paper Tiger

Posted on by
Reply

We’re in the middle of a war far more damaging, far more threatening to our survival as a free nation, than wars President Barack Obama is so proudly walking away from.  This is a cyberwar that the People’s Republic of China is waging against us, and we’re losing it.  Badly.

One set of incidents includes this:

[Wall Street] Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. said Thursday that the paper’s computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, apparently to monitor its China coverage.  New York Times Co disclosed Wednesday night that its flagship newspaper also had been the victim of cyberspying.

Every computer in the NYT was hacked, and every password of every journalist (among other things) was taken.  The reason was the two newspapers’ articles critical of PRC leadership.  And they did this with ease and with impunity.  The hacking went on for months and only recently was stopped, maybe.  And that’s just a couple of newspapers.

There are no consequences for the PRC or for individual hackers, because the US is utterly powerless to do anything.

President Barack Obama is talking and shaking his finger very firmly at the Chinese, however.

The Obama administration is considering more assertive action against Beijing to combat a persistent cyber-espionage campaign it believes Chinese hackers are waging against U.S. companies and government agencies.

And

…the administration is preparing a new National Intelligence Estimate that, when complete, is expected to detail the cyberthreat, particularly from China, as a growing economic problem.  One official said it also will cite more directly a role by the Chinese government in such espionage.

Yeah, that’ll show them.

Erstwhile Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview on her way out the door,

We have to begin making it clear to the Chinese—they’re not the only people hacking us or attempting to hack us—that the United States is going to have to take action to protect not only our government’s, but our private sector, from this kind of illegal intrusions.  There’s a lot that we are working on that will be deployed in the event that we don’t get some kind of international effort under way[.]

This war has been underway for a number of years, our vulnerability is uncorrected, and we’re “going to have to take action?”  We’re not already?  Clinton let the cat out of the bag on our capacity to protect ourselves later in that same interview:

Obviously this can become a very unwelcome and even dangerous tit-for-tat that could be a crescendo of consequences, here at home and around the world, that no one wants to see happen[.]

This administration is afraid to respond, because striking back might angrify those who are hurting us.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, exposes with his commentary another aspect of the problem:

In the next year there will be an effort to figure out a way to engage the Chinese more energetically.  The issue now is how do we get the Chinese to take this more seriously as a potentially major disruption to the relationship.

This flows, though, from a false premise: the Chinese don’t care about our relationship as much as we do, and they see the relationship materially differently from us.  We’re also too desperate to have a relationship with them.  Indeed, in an aptly titled editorial (“Barbarians at the Digital Gate”), the WSJ notes

…hacking—both for purposes of monitoring and to steal commercial intellectual property or government secrets—has become the Chinese way.

You can see from all the idle chit-chat—we’re still trying to talk to the PRC and still avoiding concrete action—that our government is too timid, too powerless, and too ignorant actually to do anything to protect our country.

A Blow for Responsibility

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal described one.

The court of the European Free Trade Association on Monday said Iceland didn’t breach European Economic Area directives on deposit guarantees by not compensating UK and Dutch depositors in Landsbanki’s online savings accounts, known as Icesave accounts.

The beef was this:

The EFTA Surveillance Authority, or ESA, which brought the case against Iceland, had claimed that Iceland should have made sure UK and Dutch savers who lost money on Icesave got repaid from deposit insurance.

UK and Dutch authorities compensated their own savers.

The EFTA ruled that EEA directives don’t

lay down an obligation on the State and its authorities to ensure compensation if a deposit guarantee scheme is unable to cope with its obligations in the event of a systemic crisis[.]

And that’s entirely appropriate.  A nation’s taxpayers should not be held liable for the failure of foreigners’ investment decisions, whether those failures stem from poor judgment, bad luck, or anything else.  A nation’s taxpayers should not be held liable for the failure of its own citizens’ investment decisions, come to that.

Investing is a risk, and it’s the degree of that risk that prices the return on the investment.  To destroy that pricing mechanism is both immoral and fiscally unsound.

Charles Duxbury and Charles Forelle do put up an interesting question in their article at the link above.

If deposit-guarantee programs don’t protect everyone, are they really effective?  That issue was raised by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, which joined the case against Iceland.  European deposit-guarantee programs, if they have any funds at all, hold a tiny fraction of the insured deposits in the system.

The interest, though, is in the lack of understanding of the nature of insurance and of the distinction between insurance and welfare that the existence of the question exposes.  Insurance is a risk-transfer for a fee proposition, and nothing else.  The insurer agrees to assume a part of the risk surrounding an event (a decision to place funds with an external agency, in this case), and in return for that assumption, the insured pays the insurer a fee commensurate with the risk being assumed: how much of the value is to be repaid in the event of a loss and the likelihood of that loss.  Of course, the fee to be paid varies with that risk.  Want more protection—want to be made completely whole in the event of a loss?  Pay a higher fee.

Welfare is the function of dinging taxpayers to make whole an individual who suffered a loss, regardless of the amount placed with an external agency (in this case) and regardless of the likelihood of any such loss.  Welfare in this sort of case is nothing more than a “I hurt, and you have money—pay me” government-enforced demand.

Some Remarks on Budget Negotiations

Posted on by
Reply

Can the Progressives in this Congress and White House really be this…lacking in understanding?

The White House had suggested GOP willingness to let sweeping defense cuts take effect was the culprit [for the fourth quarter economic contraction just reported].

However, House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) spokesman Brendan Buck had this:

These arbitrary, automatic cuts were a creation and demand of the White House in 2011.  Twice the House has passed legislation to replace them with common sense cuts and reforms.  If there was any uncertainty late last year about the sequester, it was because the Democratic-controlled Senate, per usual, never lifted a finger to pass a plan to replace it.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) chimed in:

…today’s disappointing GDP report [of fourth quarter 2012 contraction] is a direct result of the economic uncertainty created by House Republicans’ strategy of obstruction and manufactured crises.

An exploding deficit, a destructive debt, stagnant and too-high unemployment, and a failed recovery from the Panic of 2008 aren’t crises at all—these are normal.  Congressman Sam Graves (R, MO), Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, noted

Is this stunt in economic growth really a surprise?  Anti-growth policies and an anti-business White House produce just that—a lack of growth[.]

Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX), incoming Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee added

The bottom line is that America’s economy continues to struggle primarily due to President Obama’s penchant for political brinkmanship and the pervasive uncertainty caused by his focus on higher taxes, regulation and ObamaCare.

Unfortunately, yes.  And that’s to the severe detriment of our country.