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  • Ruminations – 20sep2011

    George Rebane

    Mr Igor Birman, Esq is Congressman Tom McClintock’s chief-of-staff and one of the stars on Capitol Hill.  Igor is also our friend and we have spent many long hours discussing the whys and wheretos of the country’s current travails during his Nevada County visits.  Just recently Igor was honored at Hillsdale College by an invitation to speak to a Constitution Week gathering at that institution.  If you’re a subscriber to Hillsdale’s very popular Imprimis, then you know the rarefied company that Mr Birman has now joined.

    Igor’s speech recounts the highlights of his immigration to the United States from the USSR, and connects these to America’s founding principles that not only differentiated us from that longstanding tyranny, but remain as the fundamental bulwark of our freedoms.  The pdf of his speech is available here Download Birman@Hillsdale. 

    Maybe, just maybe, there is something I can agree with on truthout.com.  Its numero uno progressive maven, William Rivers Pitt, reprises a past welcome to the website’s monthly contributors, that reads in part – “I don’t know what brought you to Truthout – 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the WMD lies, the fake terror alerts, the exposure of Abu Ghraib and our profligate use of torture, the ongoing domestic surveillance, the elections, the financial crisis, the lies compounded by lies, or the fact that the “mainstream” media is so full of shit you can smell them around the corner – but here you are, and thank you for it.” (emphasis mine)  And here I thought I was the only one harboring that sentiment.

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  • The Real Green Jobs Scandal (updated 20sep2011)

    George Rebane

    This crap we’ve been hearing about a handful of solar tech companies, led by Solyndra, going bankrupt is small potatoes and the tip of the iceberg, the remainder of which Team Obama and the Dems hope that never sees the light of day.  For all intents and purposes, there are no successful and sustainable green tech companies that have gotten the long green from the feds.

    GreenKoolAid Last night we heard that the administration is touting that they have created 3,545 new green jobs from an expenditure of $38,600,000,000 (yep, that’s over 38 billion dollars).  That computes to spending $10,880,000 per job.  As I’ve pointed out, when other people’s money runs out, so will the jobs and the companies that are providing them.  Now that is some serious crony socialism that the nation’s progressives hope the common folk never understand.

    In the meantime we keep hearing of the newest tax’n spend posterchild lamenting that he’s not paying enough tax, and telling us all that the feds should raise taxes on those who invest and create new jobs.  The country’s response can be heard echoing daily across this great land, ‘Write a f@%king check Warren!!’

    [20sep2011 update]  Tonight we heard that Congress is starting hearings on Solyndra, having subpoenaed members of that bankrupt company’s executive team to testify this Friday.  They, of course, will all be taking the Fifth.  And after a ridiculously harrowing day on the Hill, they’ll probably gather to take another fifth.  Congress will get nothing out of these people, and they will even get less when they subpoena Administration types to answer questions as to why the half billion was lent to a company that even the guy running the corner newspaper stand knew was gonna go belly up.  The government folks will all use ‘executive privilege’ to zip their lips.

    But not to worry, it will all come out.  And the later they start singing, the worse it will be for the White House.  In the meantime, we taxpayers do have something to worry about – namely that there are billions more that must be quickly spent on other green tech companies just waiting out there with their little beaks open and ready for their stimulus hit.  Given the spate of bankruptcies, sanity would dictate that further such giveaways should be halted until we find out what in tarnation is going on at the Dept of Energy (a question that’s been hanging for the last thirty years).  But sanity turned up MIA years ago inside the Beltway.  The Senate is determined to sprinkle those additional billions on temporary green jobs, come hell or high water – nothing will stop those Dems playing to their far left base now that these people are ready to toss Obama under the bus.

    Now don’t put away your funny bone yet, there’s another joke from the yokels.  It turns out that the 1,000+ Solyndra ex-employees can receive government paid retraining while drawing unemployment according to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT).  This is kind of weird in itself, and doubly so when you consider that these former employees were already trained up in how to work a clean energy, green tech, environmentally supportive, ya-da ya-da company.  Hasn’t everyone – from President Obama, through California’s Moonbeam, down to Mary Nichols of CARB (remember AB32, it’s still here), and even the considerable chorus of local lefties – been telling everyone and their mother that green/clean tech is where all the new jobs are coming from?  So why do they need retraining on our nickel?

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  • Insurmountable Opportunities for All (updated)

    George Rebane

    What a happy kickoff for the new election season.  Both sides are convinced they have the best position going into 2012.  Our local lefties are especially happy with all the polling results and the ongoing politics here in the county and the state.

    All this is happening when Congress is graded at historical lows, and 72% – almost 3 out of 4 Americans – think the nation is headed in the wrong direction.  Yet both sides interpret that datum as a compelling reason to pursue their stated goals – liberals want more taxes, more spending, more borrowing, and more regulations; and conservatives want lower taxes, less spending, less borrowing, and fewer regulations.  Both are convinced the citizens are overwhelmingly on their side.

    Well, there is a little bit of grousing.  A lot of people are “surprised” that “nothing can be done” in Congress, and there seems to be little ‘progress’ for the casual observer to see.  But that is altogether not true when it comes to legislation.  There is nothing written in stone that says a legislature is only productive when it passes more and more laws.  American folk philosophers such as Mark Twain and Will Rogers have long warned us to hang on to our wallets when Congress is in session and mostly up to no good.

    Also, as Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project have taught in their dissertation on principled negotiation, there is always the possibility that a negotiated settlement is not attainable without one side or both abandoning their core principles and/or interests.  Since the country has now become historically polarized in the ideologies that seek to inform and guide its future, we should not be surprised that there is a notable pause in deciding how we want to go forward as a unit.  No obvious middle ground beckons.

    ShovelReady The President is in a quandary; he did what his progressive base wanted him to do.  The citizens are balking at both the existential results and those yet to come.  But his base wants him to double down and veer even more leftward, while accusing him of having “no backbone” for hesitating.  They don’t seem to understand that Obama has a few things to clear up first, like the crony socialism that brought us the Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and Spectrawatt Solar bankruptcies.  (The rest of our solar energy industry is on its collective butt wondering whether more fed subsidies might be coming, or to declare early bankruptcy and avoid the rush later.  This has to do with the future of American manufacturing, unions, regs, and workforce qualifications, which have been and will continue to be treated in other posts.)

    There is ample reason to for him to hesitate when more of his own party like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) are telling the Dynamic Dozen (aka super committee) to be “brave, bold, and big” in tackling issues like tax reform.  That Wyden and his ilk of Democrats are talking about reducing taxes makes Obama’s choice of directions a mite confusing.  Staring them in the face is a heap of historical data on the top of which is the fact that the country added 6.3M jobs in the aftermath of the Reagan tax cuts.  What’s a liberal to do?

    Well one thing they can do is just read the comment streams on RR where some very serious and strong arguments are advanced by local liberals who are convinced that tax cuts have nothing to do with job creation (and neither do regulation cutbacks).  Wyden et al should inform themselves of this Sierra foothill wisdom, gird their loins, and charge in there, locking arms with their hard left brethren.  This would make things a lot easier for President Barack Obama.

    [update]  From time to time the notion of American intellectualism comes to the fore in these pages.  I’m an avid reader of the contemporary progressive mind, and run into a gem now and then which really illuminates their leading lights (reverse metaphor intended).  A current offering in this category featured on truthout.com is an essay – Between Race and Reason: Anti-intellectualism in American Life – by Susan Searls Giroux of Stanford University.  Besides being a massive apologetic for Barack Obama as Thomas Jefferson incarnate, the missive does provide a good look at the tenor and capacity of an educated liberal’s view of today’s world.  It is a good thing to know.

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  • Government Training Programs – A History of Failure (updated 17sep2011)

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my radio commentary broadcast on 16 September 2011 over KVMR-FM.]

    President Obama’s latest economic stimulus program – the half trillion dollar Ameircan Jobs Act – also contains the next tranche of funding for the next government training program that supersedes his 2009 Green Summer Jobs Corps for youth.  The new program will be modeled after Georgia Work$ – that’s spelled with an ending dollar sign.  Well Georgia Work$ doesn’t actually work, but its dollar sign does indicate that it is just the latest of government training programs that have cost taxpayers a bundle, and to have failed utterly to do anything close to what they were set up to do.

    To understand this brand new jobs training programs, we have to go way back to 1962 when Congress gave us the Manpower Development and Training Act (or MDTA).  It was supposed to train workers who were losing jobs to advancing technology.  It quickly became a bureaucratic mess that performed so poorly, that the Dept of Labor had to fudge its performance statistics.  The GAO or Government Accounting Office blew the whistle on them two years later.  But true to bureaucratic and political inertia, the MDTA continued operating and wasting money for a total of eleven years before its plug was pulled.

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  • Plan B – Obama Overboard?

    George Rebane

    More and more progressive voices are beginning to sound discontented with their Chief Community Organizer.  It turns out that even they are beginning to look seriously for what the man’s long suit was – so far they haven’t found anything beyond having done well in his teleprompter training course.  So more and more Democrats are beginning consider Plan B.

    WPA Some are recommending that a credible and electable alternative liberal throw his (hers too) hat into the ring, because it would get Obama’s attention and possibly “tighten him up” a bit for the 2012 run.  Others are simply saying that this guy had his chance and blew it big time.

    Among these are worthies like Professors Ralph Shaffer and Norma Jeanne Strobel who write in today’s Union wondering ‘Who will face Obama in the primaries?’  Giving their arguments for why Obama should be replaced, they opt for Washington’s perennial progressive, fellow professor Robert Reich.

    Unfortunately, the authors themselves are avowed progressive academics (are there any other kinds?) and therefore have no idea what happened during the Depression.  They like Reich because, as President, they believe that the diminutive Democrat will immediately announce the restart of the Works Projects Administration – backbone of FDR’s New Deal.  The problem is that the WPA, along with the New Deal’s remaining alphabet soup job programs, didn’t work.

    RR readers are familiar with Sec Treasury Morgenthau’s 1939 testimony to Congress when national unemployment was as high as that which FDR had at the beginning of his tenure in the White House.  Morgenthau lamented that the administration had thrown everything that borrowed money could buy at the economy, and nothing had worked.  He was desperate for new ideas.  (Help came shortly thereafter when Hitler and Stalin suggested WW2.)

    The footnote to all this is that the left continues to tell the country that it is the conservatives who want to turn back the clock to a time when nothing worked.  But I agree, they should toss the CCO and give Robert or Hillary or …, and the country a chance.

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  • Ruminations – 14sep2011 (updated 16sep2011)

    President Obama's approval ratings are so low now, Kenyans are accusing him of being born in the United States." –Jay Leno

    George Rebane

    Republican Bob Turner wins over a century of Democrat incumbency in New York Nine.  It turned out to be issues instead of long time party loyalty, and Obama lost on the issues.  Oh yeah, the defeated Democratic candidate was State Assemblyman David Weprin, but everyone knew that he was just a sock puppet.  No doubt our liberal friends will claim ‘it don’t mean a thing’, and explain it all to us.

    One of my recent talks was to South County Rotary yesterday morning (hard to believe that those people intentionally start their meetings at 7am).  I talked about SESF’s TechTest merit scholarship program, and how it is all coming down to encouraging our kids to consider STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) majors, because almost all other majors are counting for fewer and fewer (non-government) jobs.  Giving the background data for this eye-opener did not start the day off with a happy dance for those Rotarians who did, however, show much interest in the state of our educational system.  Maybe some of them will even send a check.

    Speaking of STEM, Europe’s economic powerhouse Germany is in trouble – they are running out of engineers.  In the September IEEE Spectrum we read that the country has 76,400 vacant engineering jobs, and importing high tech talent is no longer working.  In a declining population – 1.38 births per mother (2.1 is steady state) – this shortage will not be made up soon if ever.  Math is the stumbling block to all STEM careers, and it seems that Germany’s young people are catching the American disease, no one wants to do numbers when there are easier ways to get a check – at least until the government runs out of other people’s money.  Liberal sustainability advocates are invited to stay tuned.

    And we keep running into this damned income inequality all over the place (see Gini Index).  Those uppity educated people go out there and start businesses and get outlandish raises for performance, and you know the drill.  The income curve just keeps getting skewed no matter how hard the socialists try to even things out.  Problem is that the bastards won’t stand still for higher taxes and then do all kinds of things to end run those hard working government planners and accountants.  These high earners have literally no sense of social justice at all – clearly stronger measures are needed.

    Oh yes, in the politically correct department we have the IEEE assuring us in an article on manufacturing robotics that they “won’t displace humans but rather work alongside them – and alongside one another.”  What the maven forgot to explain to us is who worked alongside the human manufacturing worker before the machine came along.  Machines replacing humans?  No, no, no, not in this Age of Jobs.

    It appears that the UN’s IPCC is beginning to crumble faster and faster.  It’s arguments for man-made global warming were bought and paid for by politicians who now see that they may not get a return on their investment (Al Gore call your office).  Add that to the growing spate of green technology company bankruptcies – yep, they ran out of other people’s money – and you have a real embarrassment on your hands.  We capitalists call it insufficient ROI.

    To really twist the tail on this anthropogenic global warming, new evidence is pouring in that extra-terrestrial phenomena like cosmic rays and solar winds have always and will continue to swamp the puny efforts of man to change earth’s climate – it does it all by itself, thank you very much.  Soon the Agenda 21 people will just have to fess up and say ‘this climate crap was all a ruse, we just want to create a global government for other reasons, so suck it up and play ball, or else.’  For more details on things to do with global warming and climate change, our own Russ Steele’s The Next Grand Minimum blog will keep you right up to date on the latest turns in this brouhaha.  Get ready for a bit of global cooling.

    [16sep2011 update]  Another scientist balks at the global warming bums rush that the politicos have ginned up for us.  Physicist and Nobelist Dr Ivar Glaever resigns over the American Physical Society's "incontrevertible evidence" claim for AGW.  As anyone trained in science knows, "incontrevertible evidence" is something that real science takes a dim view of.  Glaever joins a rapidly lengthening list of scientists who have changed their minds as new evidence against AGW pours in almost daily.  Anyone have any names of former skeptics who now want to join Team Gore and the Debate-Is-Over chorus?

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  • We Will Remember 11 September 2001

     

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  • Who can work, who may vote (Addended) (updated 12sep2011)

    George Rebane

    [This is the submitted version of my column that was scheduled to appear in the print and online editions of the 10sep11 Union.  It was rescheduled and has been printed in the 17sep11 print and online editions (here) due to the Union‘s focus on 9/11 commentaries.  This piece clearly would not have fit.]

    The election season is here, and the economy is in the tank.  America is at a gore point – we can take the left fork and double down on the great mistake of ’08, or we can believe that there is a future for us which rejects the global socialism in UN’s Agenda 21.  (Agenda 21? See Judi Caler’s excellent ‘The many tentacles of Agenda 21’ in the 3sep11 Union available online.)  But before next November our focus will be on jobs, and which way the electorate will swing and sway.

    Readers familiar with my arguments on our workforce and employability know that the recovery, when it comes, will be unique in American history.  Comparing all kinds of data and charts on past recessions and depressions shows that we have already tipped into an unknown world.  Technology and globalism is obsolescing tens of millions of our workers.  And today only 81% of America’s potential workers between 20 and 64 are even in the workforce.  From 1948 to 1980, this was 98%.  Since then it has been steadily dropping in all worker categories.

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  • Community Unity – Liberal Version (updated 10sep2011)

    George Rebane

    This Sunday, 11 September 2011, Nevada City hosts Constitution Day with a big parade and a day-long celebration of Americana in its streets, parks, and shops.  This has been a community tradition since 1967, drawing together local organizations, residents, and visitors who come from far and wide to witness a ‘home town classic’ celebrating our unique nationhood.  The day will have additional significance since it also marks the tenth anniversary of the attack on America by coordinated teams of Muslim terrorists.  (see Union article)

    However, on the same day there is scheduled an alternative venue in half-hour away Penn Valley for those folks who would rather gather in a more Americana-free celebration called ‘MannaFest’ that proclaims ‘Community Unity NOW’.  It is advertized “to change Fear into Love & Compassion” with opening prayer and “ceremonies performed by: Maidu Indian Tribe Sierra Center of the Spiritual Living”.

    This is the cynical progressive version of community unity that matches the sermons from the other side of their mouths decrying their role in fostering the Great Divide (search RR).

    (The discerning reader will note another example of how spirituality and the transcendence of Man is selectively accepted as long as it is laundered of Christian tinges.  At other times the secular humanist makes sport of belief systems that reach for something beyond oblivion to inform and comfort our existence.  It is indeed the brave new world of yesteryear to which they want us to return – ‘This time we’ll do it right’.  Where will they build the new walls to keep us all in?)

    [10sep2011 update]  Today’s Union in an article by Paul August reveals that the MannaFest ads for community unity were just a come-on for something much more political and serious.  What the gathering will really be is the “9/11 Worldwide Peace Festival” sponsored by the Peace Center of Nevada County.

    To me this is a most cynical turn of events.  Not that we can’t continue having leftwing celebrations for peace; but scheduling such on 11 September 2011, and naming the event after the most dastardly and deadly surprise attack on the United States by a culture that is in a self-declared war on the west – an attack that left the streets of Islam’s cities filled with millions of Muslims screaming with joy, and deliriously celebrating what their fanatical suicidal brethren had accomplished with four hijacked airliners.  That all seems to me to be more than over the top and of a piece with the proposal to build the carefully named Cordoba Islamic Community Center and Mosque at Ground Zero.

    One wonders the response in 1951 to the Japanese wanting to erect the Tora-Tora-Tora Shinto Temple and Community Center on Ford Island opposite the Arizona Memorial, and the attendance at local ‘December 7th Peace Festivals’.

    It looks like this Penn Valley event was always planned for an audience of more than just ‘aging hippies’ as some have advised.  We are a changed country indeed.

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  • Obama’s off and running (updated)

    George Rebane

    The President’s much trumpeted jobs plan speech came off tonight.  The man has found a new voice that I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot between now and November 2012 – it’s his Right Now! voice that has a new sense of urgency delivered in a brand new timbre.

    He laid out a lot of points to get us working fixing infrastructure, giving small businesses payroll tax breaks, and presenting his plan for paying for it all.  For those who didn’t watch the speech, I advise clearing your throat and blowing all the loose boogers out of your nose, else you’ll get it all over your shirt. 

    Without so much as a blink, Fearless said that the added $447B of this latest stimulus (not the word he used) will be paid for by adding it on to the current $1.2T of spending cuts that Congress doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of agreeing on.  You heard right, ‘Since they’re already working on a lot of spending cuts and new revenues, I’m just gonna add a bit to that pile.  And voila! it’s gonna be taken care of – what’s your next question?’

    In Democratic circles that’s known as a plan, and, you know, they’re right that the Repubs haven’t been able to offer an equivalent plan like that since he’s been president.  (Now go clean up your shirt.)

    President Obama also went down history lane and reminded us that the feds have always had a role in investing in and building critical national infrastructure, so this is nothing but just another march we should take right now! down that well-worn policy roadway.  Didn’t the federal government come up with and invest in the trans-national railroad and land-grant colleges?

    Well no.  The college idea came from a college and businesses, and the railroad idea came from greedy investors.  As for funding the whole thing, it didn’t cost the federal government one red cent because it gave away something that in those days it had more of than it knew what to do with – land, lots of land.

    So the colleges were built by funds obtained from the sale of government land grants, and the greedies started railroad companies that were granted lots of literally worthless land along their rights of way that subsequently became valuable when they finished putting in the tracks.  All both enterprises wanted, after the deals were struck, was for the feds to get out of the way.  But our Organizer in Chief spun it as if you didn’t know any history – you could just see ol’ Honest Abe shaking his worried head and writing those big stimulus checks out of the Treasury.

    There was more to the kick-off speech for the Obama 2012 campaign, but you get the drift.  OK, I’ll just share one more little awkward piece.  Obama challenged that ‘Some may think that all government needs to do is just lower taxes and reduce regulations to get the economy going, but …’.  The remainder of that little piece of Keynesian wisdom was drowned out by loud applause and cheering from the Republican side of the packed House chamber.

    SolyndraFBI [update]  Well, it turns out that bankrupt Solyndra will be creating some more green jobs after all (see picture).  Only these will be at the FBI, Dept of Justice, and diverse law firms in California.  But hey, it’s solar energy and the $527M loaned them by the government was commonly known as ‘the long green’.  And here I’ve been a Doubting Thomas about all this.  This is part and parcel of all the wonderful work that CARB implementing AB32 has done for California.

    Actually Russ Steele broke this latest scandal locally here.  The WSJ just published ‘FBI Raids Solar-Panel Maker’ which added to the report that Solyndra executives have been in the West Wing over the last year or so almost as many times as AFL-CIO’s Trumka.  And to add insult to injury, Solyndra’s CEO Harrison just two months ago assured Rep Henry Waxman (D, CA) that all was going well and the company was financially secure.  He couldn’t have BSed a nicer guy.

    If it wasn’t for our money going down the drain, it sure would be fun watching the socialists continue to circumvent the markets by stimulating this and stimulating that.  And as we’ll no doubt find out when the investigation broadens, President Obama’s prescient statement that Solyndra was a “testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.” will turn out true beyond his wildest expectations.  At least for getting stuck with the bill, we are all going to have an entertaining election season.

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