Energy and Fair Trade - The Path to Recovery

I read an article in Newsweek the other day. The guy writing the article had a pretty good grasp of how currency works, and went into great detail about various currency wars over the past 50 years. His premise was that in hard economic times, most nations maneuver to weaken their currency to expand exports, and the United States is no exception. But as I have written several times over the past weeks, China has raised currency manipulation to an art form. That being said, in this cycle the United States has been successful in weakening its currency vis-a-vis the Euro and Yen.

The flip side of the equation is that as the dollar weakens, imports into the United States become more expensive. So…if China lets its currency rise, imported goods from China become more expensive, and goods exported from the United States to China become cheaper. The unintended consequence is that imported oil becomes much more expensive. Given the regulatory, environmental, and redistribution policies of Barack “no growth” Obama, that becomes problematic. Ex.: the oil drilling embargo in the Gulf of Mexico (lifted just this past week due to massive political pressure). We are between the rock and the hard place. Money flows out of the United States either to China with a strong dollar, or to OPEC with a weak dollar.

Any economic recovery has to be two pronged. 1) China has to let its currency float and rise; and 2) We have to increase domestic energy production to stave off the effects of increased imported oil prices. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Two simple things to restore our nation’s economic prowess!! But it won’t happen, not under this ideologically pure President.

In fairness to Barack, he has addressed the trade imbalance with China more than his predecessors. Unfortunately, that’s not saying much. The United States has to be much more aggressive, but our leaders spew fear that the Chinese will stop buying our bonds. Bunk!!! The Chinese will make a lot of noise. And even if they act, more likely than not it would be an anemic reaction! And even if it was a strong reaction, I have read numerous articles saying that it would not be the financial Armageddon that the many people say it will be. The estimates I have read say it would only affect a small percentage of the debt.

As for the energy, Obama’s green policy is purely ideological, based on global warming. That is a problem. His policy is not one of expanding energy supplies, it is based on restricting your access to any kind of energy at all. An energy policy based on environment purity, and one based on economic growth are two different animals. He is foisting his environmental religion on us in the form of green energy jobs. Spain did the same thing. Any energy jobs produced pale in comparison to more traditional energy jobs lost. Just ask the thousands upon thousands of unemployed oil platform workers in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.

So…this is what we are facing. Currency and energy are the paths to economic recovery; and how to do it is not complicated. The main problem is finding a political leader that can articulate it, and use common sense action to get the desired result. If you know somebody like that…please let me know.

Meanie Bodinie

My lovely wife Ginger, while discussing a family matter, said to me that she was tired of being a Meanie-Bodinie. This morning I read an article by Robert Reich in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled GOP’s Tough Love Cruel to Millions of Americans. A similar topic was the subject of a sermon about benevolence in church…we were told we are not doing enough. Couple that with one Democratic politician who said the Republican solution to health care reform is death….WOW!

I was aghast. I must be a Meanie-Bodinie. But you know what? I didn’t know that being for smaller government, less taxes, and more individual freedom and choice made me a Meanie-Bodinie. I thought it made me a compassionate conservative. Find me a priest. I need to go to confession.

It all depends on how one views issues of poverty. For example, I think that Second Harvest Food Bank is a worthy endeavor, and I do what I can to support it. On the other hand, when I hear comments from various people that the organization is successful because it is now serving 10,000 families, or 15% more families than last year…that’s not success! That is failure. It is failure on the part of our society and economic system to provide people a means to make a living. If the goal of charitable success is more parties served, the nation is doomed to failure.

Money doesn’t grow on trees. It comes from people working, people making things of value. Government produces nothing. It recycles…taking money from one place and putting it in another. To do that, it must pay bureaucrats to handle the shifting of money. More often than not, bureaucrats aren’t very efficient at their job. It is just the nature of the beast. One never handles other people’s money as carefully as one handles one’s own, be it a government endeavor or not. The bureaucrat takes a cut of every dollar that passes though him. He is a middleman. That middleman has no incentive to make sure the money is spent the way it was intended. His function is to disburse the money…nothing else. And his self interest is served by having more and more money to disburse, not resolving any issues.

As Margaret Thatcher once said…the trouble with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. No matter how noble the cause or how well intentioned the government program, sooner or later it will run out of money. Right now, in the United States, we are out of money.

So how are the poor best served? I subscribe to the belief that a rising tide raises all ships. If the economy improves, all citizens will benefit. If a healthy base is rebuilt from the shambles of the financial meltdown…all citizens will benefit. If small business is able to regenerate itself, all citizens will benefit. But in order for that to happen, the government needs to get out of the way, and yes, some folks will have to feel some pain as things move forward. There is no free lunch. Sooner or later, we are going to have to take the medicine, and a spoonful of Obama sugar won’t help.

Mr. Reich, one of President Obama’s closest advisors testified in Congress we don’t need any more, white, blue collar construction jobs. Unfortunately, Mr. Reich, that’s EXACTLY what we need. It is those white, blue collar construction jobs that pay taxes.

Condemning folks to a lifetime of government assistance and dependency is the worst kind of cruelty. That is a new form of slavery that knows no color..only hardship and dependency. Obama commented this past week it took a long time to free the slaves in this country. Yes, Mr. President, you are right. But how do we free the people stuck in poverty…1/10th of the United States population on food stamps. Who is the real Meanie-Bodinie?

Five Free Things to Improve Our Schools

Waiting for Superman is the new documentary about the failure of American public schools. Once the envy of the world, the American education system has declined to an embarrassing ranking of 26th. The documentary examines many things, but from what I have read places the blame mostly on teacher unions. I disagree. They are part of the problem, but down on the list. More money isn't the answer either. We have continually thrown money at the problem with per pupil spending rising exponentially, while test scores plummet. The answer is someplace else.

Here are five things that would improve learning in the schools, and none of them cost a dime.

1) BAN CELL PHONES IN THE CLASSROOM. How did we survive without them for all those years? Parental pressure keeps schools from requiring cell phones to be checked at the door. But simply banning their use in the classroom doesn't work. Teachers spend a good part of their teaching time looking under desks and behind books as students continue to text away rather than pay attention to the teacher, not to mention the teacher's time in enforcing the rules.

2) UNIFORMS. Leave the butt cracks and bouncing boobs for the malt shop. Schools with uniforms routinely outperform schools without uniforms. Today's students can't respect education if they can't respect themselves enough to leave the gangsta rap droopy drawers in the drawer back home. And just so you know, "dress codes" work for about the first three days of school.

3) HIRE TEACHERS, NOT COACHES. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the beginning of the slide in American education occurred about the same time as men moved into the primary education field in a big way. School hiring should be based on what teachers can teach and how well they can teach it...not what they can coach. How many social studies teachers have been hired because they can coach wrestling? Coaching staff should be handled independently of the teaching staff.

4) END MAINSTREAMING. Another example where courts have interfered in the education process. While some challenged students actually benefit from mainstreaming, many of them do not. The purpose is to make the parents feel better. Teachers are using an inordinate amount of time at the expense of the other students taking care of mainstream issues. All students should be placed in a learning environment best suited to individual needs within reason. Challenged students should be placed where they can actually learn something, no matter how disconcerting it is to Mom and Dad.

5) LIMIT ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF. Bureaucracies beget more bureaucracy. Schools are no exceptions. Lately there has been a piling on. Administrative personnel tend to get bigger raises at the expense of teaching staff....over and over and over again. No teacher should be laid off in order to provide an administrator with a 5-10% raise, not in this day and age. The cost of administrative staffs should be limited to a certain percentage of a school system's budget, and no raises should be given to these folks at all if teachers are being laid off.

Add increased discipline to the mix; allow teachers to once again flunk students; prohibit administrators from unilaterally changing grades; expel students who either physically or verbally abuse teachers….you will see the school systems shape up real fast.

But you and I know none of the above will ever happen. Meanwhile, let's just blame the teachers.

Where Do You Go To Get Your Reputation Back?

Wikipedia defines Yellow Journalism as follows:

“Yellow journalism or the yellow press is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension "Yellow Journalism" is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion .”

The latest local political scandal involving the Cafaro family and certain public officials has once again garnered yellow journalistic headlines in the local paper. What are these folks doing?

My position is clear. No matter how inflammatory the indictment or bill of particulars, these are allegations, not statements of fact. Just because somebody said it happened doesn't make it so. The Vindicator knows that. Buzz words like conspiracy and bribery and perjury make for great headlines and may even sell a paper or two. But at the end of the day, this is a criminal proceeding in which both sides of the issue will be heard by a jury. Until that time, all of the parties are presumed to innocent until proven guilty. That isn’t a platitude. It is the bulwark of our criminal justice system. The Vindicator should tone it down a bit, especially under these circumstances.

Nobody wants corrupt public officials. But there is something more going on here. This isn’t open the fee drawer in a judge’s desk or look the other way while the mobsters are blowing up another car or taking bribes to allow trafficking in drugs. This looks more like politics bleeding into the criminal justice system. “We don't want Cafaro controlling Mahoning County” is not a legal argument. It’s a political argument.

Criminalization of political behavior is a dangerous game. Remember Scooter Libby? The government went on a multi-year witch hunt to find out who leaked that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. Turns out the special prosecutor knew the answer almost from the beginning. Instead of stopping the investigation, the special prosecutor wasted millions upon millions of the taxpayers’ money harassing Bush appointees for political purposes; convicting Scooter Libby for perjury in an irrelevant interview a year after the Special Prosecutor should have ceased the investigation. Is that kind of justice you want?

Or Blago up in Illinois. Now there was an open and shut case. Dude, he walked!!! So much for all of the hype! It was political behavior. It might be unseemly and dirty, but the Feds couldn’t get the jury to agree it was illegal.

I don’t know how this is going to turn out. Almost all of these folks had stellar reputations in the community prior to these alleged "crimes." It may be everything the prosecution says it is, or it may turn out to be a political vendetta. I have read a portion of the indictments and the pleadings. In my opinion, this is much ado about nothing. Lot's of smoke, but not much fire. I might be proven wrong; but what if I’m right?

If it turns out these folks are innocent, where do they go to get their reputations back?

Where Have All The Homeless Gone?

Where have all the homeless gone? Remember during the Bush years the continual cacophony of homeless noise on CNN and the rest of the “mainstream” media? The unemployment was at 4.5%, but the media talked about “jobless prosperity” and how many homeless there were in the country. Story after story of people looking for shelter told us the Bush and the Republicans were deaf to the cries of the poor and needy.

Of course, those stories only surfaced during the administrations of Bush the elder and the Bush the younger. There were no homeless under Bill Clinton, and there are definitely no homeless under Barack Obama. It’s a miracle.

The truth is far more disturbing. Poverty in the United States is on the rise. The poverty rate is currently 15%, up from 13.5% last year. That means 1 in 7 Americans are living in poverty, and experts claim that, truth be told, it is actually approaching 1 in 6.

Approximately 3.5 million Americans will be homeless at least sometime during this year, if not more. Approximately 1.6 million of these folks will be housed in a public shelter. On any given day, there are approximately 650,000 American living in a temporary shelter. The rest will end up in a car or on the street, or take refuge in the home of a relative. The chronically homeless number about 110,000 and is on the rise.

A little under ½ of the homeless suffer from a disability, from mental disease to HIV. Each night there are approximately 107,000 veterans using a public shelter. Of families located in shelters, 240,000 are single mothers. Other categories include those suffering from domestic violence, and young adults barely 18 years of age bounced out of the foster care system (Statistics taken from Poverty.org / Who Is Homeless in America by Josie Raymond /July 6, 2010).

Yet to watch the evening news, you would think that they have simply been absorbed in the aura of Obama’s wonderfulness. They don’t exist unless they are reported by the media, and the media has chosen not to report them.

In my research for this article, what surprised me was the coldness of the statistics that were being reported by various government agencies. Rather than examining the causes of homelessness, the numbers were couched in terms of 6000 people being served. The measure of success at the various agencies was not geared in developing policies to end homelessness, but rather to signing people up for government programs.

Here is the bad news. The government can try, but it will NEVER “program” folks out of poverty. There isn’t enough money in the world to do that. Best case scenario, any government program will be temporary (as it should be). Worst case scenario, those signing up for the program instead sign up for a life style of continual poverty and hopelessness. When success is measured in “numbers served” rather than numbers moved off the roles to successful lives, those in the system become just that…a number served. No help. No improvement. No success. Just a number to justify more money to the agency!

Obama has made homelessness a priority, whatever that means. But the increasing poverty numbers and homeless don’t do anything to help his presidency. He prefers to keep them hid. What he has proposed is an expansion of the Bush homeless policy. Bush concentrated on housing for the chronically homeless and veterans. Obama is keeping the Bush strategy intact and expanding on it with the goal to “end homelessness by 2020.”

Good luck with that, because the Washington Post reported that while the Obama proposals are strong on platitudes, they are short on funding. There is a reason for that…like I said…there is not enough money in the world to take care of the problem.

In the meantime, if you see a homeless story on TV news show, let me know. I bet the next time you see a homeless story on any network other than Fox, there will be a Republican president. They will just kind of pop up from nowhere.

In Afghanistan, What Does Win Mean?

I am very uncomfortable about the Afghan war. In this political season when domestic issues are at the helm of the debate, Afghanistan is looming in the background. If the mainstream press catches on to what is going on over there, I predict it will move to the forefront of the political debate in the next presidential election.

More than 575 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since Barack Obama was sworn in as President. 323 of those casualties occurred this year alone. The total number of American/British/Australian casualty’s exceeds 2200 since the beginning of the war. The death trend lines are on the way up.

President Obama said that Iraq was the wrong war. The right war was in Afghanistan. He has a point. Afghanistan was the launching point for the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda in collaboration with the Taliban Afghan government. We should retaliate against the country that invaded us…and that would be Afghanistan. The first American military charge of the 21st Century was a cavalry charge in the Northern provinces.

But beyond the logic of attaching those who attacked you…what does one do with Afghanistan? It is one of the poorest nations in the world. Its chief export is opium. It has a medieval religion…even the moderates are archaic! It does have substantial natural resource deposits, but they are located in difficult places to mine.

To quote the Looks Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag from the Vietnam protest days: “Well, it’s one, two three, what are we fightin’ for?” I wish the government would explain what the ultimate goal is in Afghanistan. How does one define “win” in Afghanistan?

We have routed the Taliban from Kabul, the capital. The balance of the country is nominally under control of the national government, but in reality is under the control of a bunch of tribes and warlords. These guys are friendly to whomever pays them the most, or the party who scares them the most.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are scattered in the mountains, some of which are in Afghanistan, and others in Pakistan in a wasteland region out of control of the Pakistani government. This is guerilla warfare being fought by zealots funded by Iran. How does an occupying force “win” such a war? I don’t think it can be won in the traditional sense. Even a nation building approach is questionable as the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt.

President Bush was faced with three rogue nations after 9/11: Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Bush and Obama have at least achieved a degree of victory in Iraq. Iran seems to be off the table when it comes to military action. And in Afghanistan, we appear to be gearing up for a war of attrition against an enemy that cannot be defined or segregated into any specific boundary or territory. That is scary. Afghanistan is not called the graveyard of empires for nothing. Its most recent casualty was the Soviet Union, which bankrupted itself into oblivion.

Add to the mix Obama’s extreme left wing ideological bent…I think he owes the American public a concise and pithy explanation of American goals in this war. If it were George Bush sitting in the White House, I guarantee you would see body counts on the nightly news…night after night after night.

So Mr. Obama, what does “win” mean in Afghanistan?

A Broken Moral Compass

I had lunch with a friend of mine last week. He is a banker, and talked about how folks are walking away from their mortgages. They are walking away not because they have lost their jobs, or are having financial problems, but simply because their homes are “underwater.” That means the house is worth less than they paid for it, and most likely less than the mortgage.

Folks like this have a choice. They can do the right thing: keep paying their mortgage knowing they owe the money; that the value of the house will most likely return in better times; and it is the moral thing to do. Or they can do the wrong thing: walk away and stick the bank with the note and the property. Too many folks are choosing the latter instead of the former.

My friend said that years ago that wouldn’t have happened. People had respect for themselves and other people. People had honor, and did the right thing. “We have lost our moral compass,” he said. His statement gave me a moment of clarity. I think that sums up the problems of today in about a pithy a statement as one can make.

Whether it is the government or unions or big business or education or anything else, America has adopted a mentality of everyman for himself. I watched a movie the other night entitled “The Smartest Men in the Room.” It was the story of Enron. Talk about the lack of a moral compass. It should be required viewing for every business student. The scam these guys pulled off was breathtaking in its magnitude, and was void of any morality.

My wife was in Penney’s on Saturday and it was packed with teenagers being followed by herds of children. One of the clerks told here these young women were single mothers who were given a $175.00 JCP gift card for each one of their illegitimate kids. The program was part of Obama’s stimulus money, implemented through the county. The story was buried in the Vindicator under a headline relating to demolition contracts. 3400 single mothers participated. Given most of these folks have more than one illegitimate child, you can guess that it cost the taxpayer close to $100,000.00 in Mahoning County alone.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for these folks, but the spectacle was obscene. In light of all the sex education programs in the school and the accessibility of contraception, there is no reason for illegitimate children in this day and age other than the mothers may want them, or they have zero sense of responsibility at all. The “nobody is going to tell me what to do” entitlement mentality has to be learned. There are two ways to prevent an unwanted pregnancy: 1) use birth control, or 2) don’t have sex. Both are easy and cheap. But the moral compulsion, the moral compass, isn’t there to point in the right direction.

The lack of a moral compass is rooted in two things.

1) The elimination and degradation of religion in our society. In order to establish morality, there has to be some mechanism that establishes right and wrong. Historically, that has been in religion. It’s no coincidence that the basic moral fabric of the United States rooted in the Ten Commandments has frayed as the Ten Commandments have been moved from our public institutions. Right or wrong has to be the starting point…and the shades of gray should be the exception instead of the rule; be it stealing or sex.

2) Secular relativism has become the norm. Beginning in the 1960’s, the do it if it feels good philosophy took root and flowered in our schools, universities, and the media. It’s all about what makes me happy. I am entitled to be happy. There are no rules, just self satisfaction and feeling good. But to have aspirations and goals, one has to know the rules. Today, there are no rules. Look around. What do you see? Anger is growing in our society. People are becoming more antagonistic by the day as decency and common courtesy have given way to individual and selfish needs and desires. Walk away from the mortgage. Scam those stockholders. Have more babies out of wedlock. People are even losing the ability to talk to one another. It’s all shades of gray.

Nothing will get better in this country until boundaries of behavior are re-established based on higher moral principles other worship of the government. Until that time, we are in for a bumpy ride.