This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Economy

  • Another thing that’s the US’ fault

    According to the AP (via Fox news and the Washington Post) some Cuban Army soldiers tried to hijack a charter flight to the US last night. They were thwarted and a Cuban Army colonel was killed. All very sad and I sympathizes with all of the people involved. However, halfway down the story, I find that it’s the US’ fault;

    “The responsibility for these new crimes lies with the highest-ranking authorities of the United States, adding to the long list of terrorist acts that Cuba has been the victim of for nearly half a century,” it said.

    Havana says U.S. immigration policies giving most Cubans almost guaranteed residency encourages them to risk their lives to get to the United States, and says that American officials have long tolerated — even encouraged — violence against the communist-run country.

    So it’s the US’ fault that Cuba kills it’s own citizens because they want a life in the 21st Century?

    Cuba also blames the US for it’s economic woes because we stopped buying their sugar, their rum, their fruit and (sadly) their cigars. Well, I remember when Coca-cola was made with sugar and I miss it. I’ve smoked Cuban cigars with Cuban rum and it’s a delight – one of my greatest delights. I sorely wish that the US would start trading with Cuba once again. But to imply that Cuban Communism doesn’t work because the US capitalists won’t trade with it is just insane and hypocritical.

    The same goes for US immigration policy towards Cuban refugees. It’s the same policy that West Germany had for East Germans who escaped – would the Left complain about that policy?

    I guess it all boils down to the fact that if Cuba wasn’t a repressive dictatorship that kept it’s people in the 1950s living in tarpaper shacks on unpaved streets and if Cuba allowed US companies to reclaim their properties and their businesses and pay decent wages, maybe the people wouldn’t be trying to hijack planes and riding innertubes to Florida.

  • Me? I’ll vote for any Republican.

    I’ve heard, and read, so many Republicans complain about certain members of the Republican field of candidates and declare “I wouldn’t vote for that guy under any circumstances!” Well, I “feel” the same way sometimes. There are none of the top three or four that excite me to action. But the alternative is frightening.

    Reading the websites of the Democrat candidates is like looking through a tear in time and space.

    Apparently Barack Obama has been busy during his two years as a Senator;

    Reaching across the aisle, Obama has tackled problems such as preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and stopping the genocide in Darfur.

    I’m sure the folks in Darfur are grateful that Obama has stopped the genocide being inflicted on their population. I suppose they all live on peaceful cul de sacs now that the genocide has ended. And I suppose Obama personally went to Libya and disarmed Gaddafi – what a brave soul.

    As far on the war against terror goes, Obama, apparently had intelligence that no one in the federal government had;

    In 2002, then Illinois State Senator Obama said Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States and that invasion would lead to an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

    How did that youngster know about the status of Hussein’s weapons when the entire world thought he had weapons? And President Bush said the same thing about the length of time and the cost, didn’t he?

    Energy? Obama is a “leader”;

    Senator Obama has been a leader in the Senate in pushing for a comprehensive national energy policy and has introduced a number of bills to get us closer to the goal of energy independence.

    Does that mean that he’s for drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf or opening the reserves in Alaska? Of course not;

    By putting aside partisan battles, he has found common ground on CAFE, renewable fuels, and clean coal.

    Yep, that’s the ticket – half-assed, feel good, “progressive” non-solutions. A fine candidate , indeed.

    But, try to find out what Hillary Clinton’s issues are. You have to slog through through her biography to find…nothing;

    Hillary has not wavered in her work to expand quality affordable health care to more Americans…

    Her strong advocacy for children continues in the Senate…

    Hillary has been a powerful advocate for women in the Senate…

    Hillary is strongly committed to making sure that every American has the right to vote in fair, accessible, and credible elections….

    Nothing disagreeable there. So she’s a bland candidate with nothing to offer Americans except bland platitudes – and don’t forget to sign up to have a Hillary Party in your home or hand over some cash – these webs sites ain’t free ya know.

    And my personal favorite, John Edwards – I’d vote for him in a primary because he’s so fricken transparent in his hypocrisy.

    On his web site Edwards claims he wants to end our dependence on foreign oil – no, not by drilling our own oil, by;

    …investing in clean, renewable energies like wind, solar, and biofuels to create a new energy economy, developing a new generation of efficient cars and trucks, and putting new energy-saving technologies to work in buildings, transportation, and industry.

    Of course if we don’t drill our own oil, we’ll still be buying foreign oil for those “efficient cars and trucks”, won’t we? But not to worry, Edwards will be leading us to energy independence because his mega-mansion and his campaign are “energy neutral“. Apparently just by declaring that in public makes it so.

    But that ain’t all! Edwards is going to eliminate poverty;

    Every day, 37 million Americans wake in poverty.

    Yeah, they wake up about noon, roll over and turn on “The View” and grab the “Cheetos” bag next to the bed from the night before. Do any of these 37 million people have families that can start haranguing them about looking for work? Nope, but they’ve got John Edwards;

    We can reach that goal by creating and rewarding work, strengthening families, helping workers save and get ahead, transforming our schools, expanding access to college, breaking up areas of concentrated poverty, reaching overlooked rural areas, and expecting people to help themselves by working whenever they are able.

    It’s just that simple – just expect people to do better, and they will. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of this?

    And on the overarching issue of our time, our war against terrorism? Well, Edwards wants to restore our moral leadership in the world. How you ask? By surrendering and pulling our troops out of the war;

    …immediately withdrawing 40,000-50,000 troops from Iraq, with the complete withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq within 12-18 months — allowing the Iraqis to assume greater responsibility for rebuilding their own country. It also means working to restore our legitimacy by leading on the great challenges before us like the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the genocide in Darfur, extreme poverty, and living up to our ideals in the fight against terrorism.

    I guess Edwards didn’t hear that Obama already ended genocide in Darfur.

    I’ll grant that none of the Republicans look particularly vote-worthy, but compared to what’s on the other side, they look like gems to me. For the best liveblogging of the Republican debate last night, see Sister Toldjah, for the best wrap-up see Rick Moran at the Rightwing Nuthouse.

  • Chavez, oil, banks and Gore

    Within the last few hours, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s answer to the question never asked, announced that he was seizing operational control of the Orinoco Belt oil reserves. From Reuters;

    The importance of this is that we are taking back control of the Orinoco Belt which the president rightly calls the world’s biggest crude reserve,” said Marco Ojeda, an oil union leader before a planned rally to mark the transfer.

    The four projects are valued at more than $30 billion and can convert about 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy, tarry crude into valuable synthetic oil.

    This comes the day after Venezuela announced it was pulling out of the IMF and the World Bank. From the AP;

    President Hugo Chavez announced Monday he would formally pull Venezuela out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a largely symbolic move because the nation has already paid off its debts to the lending institutions.

    “We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone,” said the leftist leader, who has long railed against the Washington-based lending institutions.

    Well, that’s all jim dandy. But it all comes just a few days after Al Gore snubbed Columbian President Alvaro Uribe at a climate change conference in Miami. From Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anatasia O’Grady (may require subscription);

    Al Gore may not have known that he was taking the side of a former terrorist and ally of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez when he waded into Colombian politics 10 days ago. But that’s not much consolation to 45 million Colombians who watched their country’s already fragile international image suffer another unjust blow, this time at the hands of a former U.S. vice president.

    The event was a climate-change conference in Miami, where Mr. Gore and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe were set to share the stage. At the last minute, Mr. Gore notified the conference organizers that he refused to appear with Mr. Uribe because of “deeply troubling” allegations of human- rights violations swirling around the Colombian government.

    It is not clear whether the ex-veep knows that making unsubstantiated claims of human-rights violations has been a key guerrilla weapon for more than a decade, along with the more traditional practices of murdering, maiming and kidnapping civilians. Nor is it clear whether Mr. Gore knew that the recycled charges that caught his attention are being hyped by Colombian Sen. Gustavo Petro, a close friend of Mr. Chávez and former member of the pro-Cuban M-19 terrorist group. What we do know is that Mr. Gore’s line of reasoning — that Colombia is not good enough to rub shoulders with the righteous gringos — is also being peddled by some Democrats in Congress, the AFL-CIO and other forces of anti-globalization. The endgame is all about killing the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

    I find it difficult to believe that Al Gore didn’t know that he was interferring in one of the President’s most successful programs in bringing our hemisphere’s neighbors and allies closer and a real attempt at trying to stem the illegal immigration flow at it’s source.

    I’m also pretty certain that Chavez moved against the oil companies and the banks secure in the knowledge that he has the tacit support of Al Gore and the Leftists in this country. Afterall, as long as Chavez remains anti-Bush, he’s in good company with the Democrats, Iran and al Qaida.

    Gore’s refusal to meet with the leader of our closest Latin American ally in the war against terror, and one of our few allies that won’t kowtow to Chavez’s attempt to become the next Simon Bolivar was probably puposely orchestrated to embarrass Uribe and to punish him politically for standing with Bush, despite the benefit to his own countrymen and the region.

    Manbearpig is just a childish, immature halfwit.

    Thanks, again, Florida. 

  • Clinton economy overshadowed by the Bush economy

    Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner reports today that the White House says the economy over which this administration has presided is more robust than the Clinton era economy;

    The White House says the economic surge that began five and a half years ago on President Bush’s watch is more robust than the much-touted expansion during the Clinton administration.

    “This is a much stronger expansion in a lot of ways,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto told The Examiner. “It’s much deeper and more measured.”

    Fratto’s assertion was disputed by Gene Sperling, economic adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spoke to The Examiner in his capacity as former National Economic Adviser to President Bill Clinton.

    “That’s a rather absurd claim,” said Sperling, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. “In terms of job creation, in terms of wage growth, in terms of business investment, in terms of poverty, there’s absolutely no comparison.”

    Sperling is right – there is no comparison. The last half of the Clinton economic growth was built on pure speculation rather than based on sound economic indicators. Stock prices were 80 times earnings – meaning that dividends didn’t justify the stock prices. That’s called speculation. The Clinton Administration announced in 1997 that they had completely made the stock market safe for investors by ending negative business cycles. Just three years before we discovered how Enron had fooled investors into investing in their failing company for more than three years.

    In fact, Enron should have become the symbol of the Clinton Administration’s economic policy. Enron’s board and employees were complicit in building a cardboard facade around an empty building. I find it hard to feel sorry for Enron employees who lost their fortunes in company stock. There had to be rumors circulating among them about the fake trading floors, ther had to people who knew Enron was engaged in defrauding investors.

    At the very least, employees had to know that no one invests their entire lifesavings in one company. Irrational investments result from succumbing to greed. My wife works for Lockheed Martin, but we certainly don’t have all of her retirement in L-M stock. What goes up eventually comes down. You don’t win in the stock market by following the crowd – you have to be there when everyone gets there and then leave quickly. 

    By the same token, there had to be members of the Clinton Administration who knew they were defrauding the American people by trumpeting the ballooning US economy that was inevitably heading for a crash. Companies with no business plans were selling stock hand over fist, investors were borrowing on their houses to invest. And when it all began to collapse in March 2000 (oddly enough on the day that the Clinton Administration Justice Department filed charges against Microsoft), investors who had believed the bluster and chest pounding from the Clinton White House had to come up with cash to pay off their debts (in their refi’d homes and margin accounts), which meant selling depreciated stock, which in turn drove the market lower.

    So while the stock market spiraled south, companies who had pennies of earnings and had existed soley to sell their stock, shuttered their doors and layed off employees in droves. Who did the Clintons blame? Who else – Candidate Bush who had, supposedly, “talked the economy down”. In fact, there were employees working for companies that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. The Clintons thought that they could base an economy on their incessant yammering.

    But this economy is based on solid growth, no one has tried to talk this economy as hard as the Democrats (worst economy since Herbert Hoover?) and it remains unaffected. Investor confidence is moderate, employment is solid (although it must turn south sometime and probably this year), investors are investing in solid companies, not speculating – although Jim Cramer would like them to do otherwise. 401k and IRA money is still pouring into the market at a record pace with increased contribution limits (thanks to the Bush tax cuts).  

    Sperling has always been one of the “legacy builders” at the Clinton Administration, but no amount of blather can rewrite history.

  • Haliburton moving to Dubai

    From the Fox News article;

    “Halliburton is opening its corporate headquarters in Dubai while maintaining a corporate office in Houston,” spokeswoman Cathy Mann said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “The chairman, president and CEO will office from and be based in Dubai to run the company from the UAE.”

    Lesar, speaking at an energy conference in nearby Bahrain, said he will relocate to Dubai from Texas to oversee Halliburton’s intensified focus on business in the Mideast and energy-hungry Asia, home to some of the world’s most important oil and gas markets.

    “As the CEO, I’m responsible for the global business of Halliburton in both hemispheres and I will continue to spend quite a bit of time in an airplane as I remain attentive to our customers, shareholders and employees around the world,” Lesar said. “Yes, I will spend the majority of my time in Dubai.”

    So what’s the big deal? Who’s surprised? Haliburton is an oil services company – the US isn’t interested in drilling for our own oil over here, so why shouldn’t they move to Mid-East? If Congress would get off their dead asses and authorize the US to drill, pipe and refine our own oil again, I’m sure Haliburton will reconsider.

    As the Wall Street Journal says;

    Halliburton’s decision is another sign of shifting alignments in the global oil order. Houston remains the center of the global Western oil trade, yet Dubai has grown in recent years as a rival — a hub for trade, investment and oil-patch deals, especially for national oil firms expanding beyond their home turf.

    Why would a bookseller open a shop in a neighborhood of illiterates? 

  • Will all of you retired people please stay at home

    I work in an office that has been around for more than 70 years and many of the people that worked here when I started here had been around about half that time. Luckily, they’ve retired. Unluckily, they still come back and kibutz and advise us when their days aren’t as full as they’d like.

    You know what I mean right? After all, we have national examples. Jimmy Carter, for one. I just “googled” “Jimmy Carter criticizes” and got 325,000 results. I guess being the worst president in history isn’t enough for one lifetime.

    Another example is Alan Greenspan who sent world financial markets into a spin last week with his “recession is possible…” comment, can’t seem to shut up. 28 minutes ago, Bloomberg put up a story that reports Greenspan just said that there’s a 1/3 chance of recession this year (whatever the Hell that means) – and they called it “update 1”. Alan, go home and hug your wife and watch some Judge Judy. You have enough money, you don’t need the attention anymore so why do you want to pester us – and poor Ben Bernanke?

    And if that’s not enough, four has-been Senate majority leaders are forming a “bi-partisan” advisory group”.

    The Bipartisan Policy Center, to be announced at a news conference Tuesday, will be directed by former Sens. Howard Baker, R-Tenn.; George Mitchell, D-Maine; Bob Dole, R-Kan.; and Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

    “We’ve all been leaders and you know how difficult it is,” said Dole, who served as both majority and minority leader between 1985 and 1996. “We’re all partisan in a way,” Dole said in an interview Monday, adding they also hope to show that “compromise is not a bad word.”

    Mitchell, who led the Senate from 1989 to 1995, added, “If the four of us can reach consensus in some areas it might have a beneficial effect.”

    What, for Pete’s sake could this cabal of politicians who are no longer in office possibly offer the world besides worthless opions. If I’m subjected to Tom Dascle’s “I’m concerned…” one more time, I’ll have to track him down and put a boot in his behind. 

    You can bet that when I finally retire again, I’ll not pester any-damn-body with my opinions – well, except here, of course.

  • The minimum wage fallacy

    Nancy Pelosi has declared that she’ll raise the Federal “minimum wage” her first 100 hours in office as Speaker of the House. Sounds good doesn’t it? All of those hard-working people will be lifted out of poverty by increasing their $5.15/hour a buck. Of course, who are those people that’ll be lifted from the depths of despair with an extra $40  every week?

    According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, out of 75,609,000 workers in 2005, 1.8 million are working at or below the minimum wage. Of those, 1.003 million are between 16 and 24 years old – high school and college aged. adobe creative cloud . So there are less than 800,000 people over the age of 25 working at or below the minimum wage.

    What kind of work are these people doing? BLS says that the large majority of these people are working in “Food preparation and serving related occupations” at 1.13 million in 2005. That’s over half of all minimum wage earners and it includes waiters, cooks, dish washers, bag boys – well, you get the idea.

    Here in the DC area, most of the restaurants pay minimum wage to their wait staff, but those waiters take home a coupla hundred bucks in tips every week – which is their incentive pay. Their employers guarantee a minimum wage, but if the employee works extra hard, they get a fat tip – more than Democrats would get them with a minimum wage increase. Sounds capitalistic doesn’t it?

    So there’s no breakdown by age by occupation, so we can only speculate on how many of those 800k people over the age of 25 (1.16% of the entire work force) actually make minimum wage, but I tend to believe that its statistically insignificant.

    Democrats are only appealing to their base to assuage their guilt about the way they feel the rest of us are doing.

    There’s probably very few Americans who are looking for a new house and car because the Democrats are finally putting those items within reach with their promise of a minimum wage increase.

    And if you include the tax increase the Democrats want to hit us with, how much will minimum wage earners really get in the end? When George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001, minimum wage earners didn’t have to pay their 15% income tax bill any longer – that has the effect of giving them a $30.90/week raise – $.78/hour – the effect of raising the minimum wage to $5.93/hr. And it didn’t cost employers anything – that’s probably what pisses off Democrats more than anything.

    So how many minimum wage earners will be pouring out in the streets to vote for Democrats so they can get their big wage increase? How many are buying new suits in hopes of landing that fat $6/hour job? More than likely, there’s only some pimple-faced kid hoping to get his new PSP a few weeks earlier thanks to Nancy (drain the swamp) Pelosi.