The Cynical Economist

I have been saying it for months. Yes we are in depression. Nothing has changed since 2008. It is even getting worst with the anticipated changes and implementing the socialist policies of the assholes in DC.

From CNBC by Jeff Cox

Positive gross domestic product readings and other mildly hopeful signs are masking an ugly truth: The US economy is in a 1930s-style Depression, Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg said Tuesday.

Writing in his daily briefing to investors, Rosenberg said the Great Depression also had its high points, with a series of positive GDP reports and sharp stock market gains.

But then as now, those signs of recovery were unsustainable and only provided a false sense of stability, said Rosenberg.

Rosenberg calls current economic conditions “a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” and notes that any good news both during the initial 1929-33 recession and the one that began in 2008 triggered “euphoric response.”

“Such is human nature and nobody can be blamed for trying to be optimistic; however, in the money management business, we have a fiduciary responsibility to be as realistic as possible about the outlook for the economy and the market at all times,” he said.

The 1929-33 recession saw six quarterly bounces in GDP with an average gain of 8 percent, sending the stock market to a 50 percent rally in early 1930 as investors thought the worst had passed.

“False premise,” Rosenberg said. “And guess what? We may well be reliving history here. If you’re keeping score, we have recorded four quarterly advances in real GDP, and the average is only 3%.”

Rosenberg’s warning comes as a slew of major analysts—Goldman Sachs andJPMorgan among them—have slashed GDP projections for 2010 to the 1.5 to 2 percent range.

Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans said in a speech Tuesday that the risk of a double-dip recession has escalated. He said government programs to help distressed homeowners have been ineffective and aren’t helping the pivotal housing sector recover.

The dour outlooks come on the same day that the National Association of Realtors said home sales reached a 15-year low in June, dousing hopes that the industry had reached a bottoming point.

Rosenberg points out that the “overall economic malaise” has come despite aggressive efforts by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy through rate cuts. The central bank itself has scaled back its economic projections, has held steady on its balance sheet, and could be announcing another round of quantitative easing measures at its Jackson Hole summit this week.

“How’s that for a reality check,” Rosenberg said. “It’s not too late, by the way, to shift course if you have stayed long this market.”

What has America become in just a few years…

First in Kansas they tax your driveways now in Philly the insane public servants want to tax your blogs.

Whats next? Pee tax?

You know after all they say – the money don’t smell…

From Philadelphia city paper…

For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.

“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.

It would be one thing if Bess’ website were, well, an actual business, or if the amount of money the city wanted didn’t outpace her earnings six-fold. Sure, the city has its rules; and yes, cash-strapped cities can’t very well ignore potential sources of income. But at the same time, there must be some room for discretion and common sense.

When Bess pressed her case to officials with the city’s now-closed tax amnesty program, she says, “I was told to hire an accountant.”

She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.

Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.

Barry’s music-oriented blog, Circle of Fits, is hosted on Blogspot; as of this writing, its home page has two ads on it, but because he gets only a fraction of the already low ad revenue — the rest goes to Blogspot — it’s far from lucrative.

“Personally, I don’t think Circle of Fits is a business,” says Barry. “It might be someday if I start selling coffee mugs, key chains or locks of my hair to my fans. I don’t think blogs should be taxed unless they are making an immense profit.”

The city disagrees. Even though small-time bloggers aren’t exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any “activity for profit,” says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies “whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year,” he adds.

So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there’s the potential for it to be lucrative — and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to Read the rest of this entry »

Gerald Celente said it best: “You cannot legislate intelligence!”

From Forbes
by Scot Redler

Things were sure different when I was growing up. My parents taught me the value of a strong work ethic because that was how you got ahead in life. I shoveled snow off neighborhood driveways starting at age 10, and by the time I hit 13 I was busing tables at a local restaurant where, at 16, I became a waiter. In high school I hit the books hard with dreams of going to college and becoming a doctor, lawyer or fortune 500 CEO. Sadly, our society has allowed itself to drift in an altogether different direction.

“Anyone who wants to work an interesting job, earn a generous salary, enjoy unbeatable, rock-solid job security and, most importantly, advance the public good in pivotal ways would probably favor the federal sector,” said Lily Whiteman, federal careers expert. This quote represents a troubling new reality in today’s American society: the public sector has become more attractive than the private sector. Today, government favoritism towards public workers has skewed the sense of values that is the American capitalist hallmark.

Ms. Whiteman continues on to say, “. . .government employees seem to work shorter hours, have more vacation time, access unbelievable healthcare, never worry about job security and even make more money than people slugging it out in the private sector.” Sounds like a dream job, right? Work less, don’t worry about losing your job over poor performance, get better benefits, and get paid more for doing a job that contributes very little to the nation’s output. So what, now, are parents supposed to tell their kids, “weasel your way into a government job and you will be set for life”? The reality of the situation is that the government always looks out for its own, even when the economy is spinning down the toilet.

The growth of public sector compensation and benefits in the context of a global recession is not only a travesty, it is a serious impediment to the future growth of our country. Why would a graduate from a top university pursue a job in the private sector (in which jobs are now even more scarce) when, after nine years of pay hikes and benefits in the context of a struggling economy, the compensation of federal civil servants is now, on average, twice that of private sector workers?

Recently, another $26 billion has been appropriated to the States, which, President claims, is about “saving the jobs of teachers and other essential professionals”. It wasn’t about saving jobs, it was about using tax payer money to pay off teacher union bosses, reward them for past political favors and to get the votes for the Democrats for the all-important November election. The additional funding is also to help bail out the bloated pension plans that guarantee a healthy yearly gain when the S&P is down over 10%-12% for the decade! Washington doesn’t seem to care about the busted 401k system of the private sector worker, they just want to shove their free-spending agenda down our throats while they raise taxes.

The United States right now needs to be moving in the opposite direction from the one we are currently heading in. We need the brightest college graduates innovating in the private sector, not working as overcompensated, underperforming federal workers. We need lower tax rates to stimulate private industry. We need to reorganize the flawed and broken pension system. We need to stop bailing out the unions in return for votes.

I’m just a technical analyst, but until we restore the core values that have driven this nation since its founding, our country will keep heading down this dangerous and self-destructive path. Until we correct these fundamental problems and get back on the road to growth, the stock market will not reward investors.

I hope, that Obama reads the news and will rethink his approach of  ”fixing” the USA economy his way…The Government cannot create jobs for everyone and pay us to do nothing. In Eastern Europe there were literally millions of people paid to do nothing, just so the party leaders can say that the socialism is the better system than is the capitalism.

Cuba eyes more self-employment, not market reforms
by Carlos Batista

With government plans afoot to reshape Cuba’s workforce by cutting the bloat out of some payrolls, President Raul Castro said he would allow more small private businesses.

The economy is 95 percent in state hands at the moment. Castro’smove is aimed at limiting the socioeconomic fallout from planned work force shifts that could target one million excess jobs.

The Council of Ministers “agreed to expand the range of self-employment jobs, and their use as another alternative for workers who lose their jobs,” Castro said as he gave a closing address at a biannual session of the National Assembly.

After the crash of the former Soviet bloc, Cuba’s cash-strapped government in the 1990s approved a wide range of self-employment. Positions such as beauticians, dog groomers, small restaurant owners and even cigarette lighter refillers were legalized as long as workers got licenses and paid taxes.

But social resentment spread when some workers, particularly in small private restaurants, achieved dramatic levels of success.

The government began increasing taxation and regulation, and decreasing license-granting, until the self-employed sector was largely rendered paralyzed, like most of the economy.

By 2009, there were just 148,000 people out of a work force of five million who were legally self-employed.

Cuba has no regular access to international funding; it depends heavily on the cut-rate oil it gets from Venezuela in order to keep its fragile economy afloat. Tourism earnings and remittances from emigres also are key pillars of the Cuban economy.

Inefficiency is rampant and wages are woefully low.

Cubans’ hopes had been running high that change was coming to allow some economic opening in the Americas’ only one-party communist regime.

But the Castro government flatly ruled out the possibility of a sweeping turn toward capitalism.

“One cannot speak of reforms,” said Economy Minister Marino Murillo.

“We are studying an updating of the Cuban economic model in which socialist economic priorities will be at the forefront, and not the market,” he stressed, in a message sure to disappoint many on the island desperately weary after years of hardship and almost no economic or political change.

If there was any welcome news for Cubans, many of whom were fearful that job shifts discussed in state media recently could leave them unemployed for the first time, Castro insisted no massive firings without reassignment of workers would take place.

“No one will be simply left out in the cold” on the employment front, Castro said.

Raul Castro, 79, said he would launch new wage and salary practices early next year. He did not give details.

Three months ago he gave a green light for a test-run privatization of barber and beauty shops.

Under the limited program, the state now rents out shops to workers who used to live mainly on tips and work at home on off hours. Now stylists are able to set their own prices, and are working at improving service. Stylists pay for a license, their rent, social security plus electric and water bills.

Legislative committees have been looking at whether privatization can be expanded in food businesses, long plagued by insufficient supply, high prices, and major problems in the distribution chain, from rampant theft to spoilage.

Castro took the reins from his ailing brother Fidel Castro four years ago, saying he wanted to boost production. But the Cuban government has not made bold policy shifts able to achieve the gains it wants.

So far the government has handed fallow land to Cubans willing to farm it, and has ended the equal scale for salaries for all workers across industries.

But workers still make an average of around 20 dollars a month.

And here is another article from July 18 that I was about to post with some comments, but due to lack of time I postponded it.Here it is few days later

Jobless in Cuba? Communism faces the unthinkable
By ANNE-MARIE GARCIA (AP) – Jul 18, 2010

HAVANA — At a state project to refurbish a decaying building in Old Havana, one worker paints a wall white while two others watch. A fourth sleeps in a wheelbarrow positioned in a sliver of shade nearby and two more smoke and chat on the curb.

President Raul Castro has startled the nation lately by saying about one in five Cuban workers may be redundant. At the work site on Obispo street, those numbers run in reverse.

It’s a common sight in communist Cuba. Here, nearly everyone works for the state and official unemployment is minuscule, but pay is so low that Cubans like to joke that “the state pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.”

It is funny, that in Eastern Europe we had the same exact joke

Now, facing a severe budget deficit, the government has hinted at restructuring or trimming its bloated work force. Such talk is causing tension, however, in a country where guaranteed employment was a building block of the 1959 revolution that swept Fidel Castro to power.

Details are sketchy on how and when such pruning would take place. Still, acknowledgment that cuts are needed has come from Raul Castro himself.

“We know that there are hundreds of thousands of unnecessary workers on the budget and labor books, and some analysts calculate that the excess of jobs has surpassed 1 million,” said Castro, who replaced his ailing brother Fidel as president nearly four years ago. Cuba’s work force totals 5.1 million, in a population of 11.2 million.

In his nationally televised speech in April, Castro also had harsh words for those who do little to deserve their salaries.

“Without people feeling the need to work to make a living, sheltered by state regulations that are excessively paternalistic and irrational, we will never stimulate a love for work,” he said.

Indeed, the process of labor reform may already have started, albeit slowly.

Workers in the tourism sector say some of their colleagues have been furloughed during the lean summer months, while others have been reassigned to jobs on state-run farms.

How about that – government bureaucrat assigning you a job. You do not like it? You better stay unemployed? They will throw you in jail and there you will work what they tell you, but without pay.

Or just to make an example for the others, who do not want to work, the party will make you an enemy of the state, a spy and capitalistic pig and execute you publicly.

Free market doesn’t work? The planed economy is better? I disagree.

“Since we are now in the low season, the hotel where I work has sent many workers home for two or three months,” said Orlando, a chef in Varadero, a sand-and-surf enclave east of Havana.

“It’s very hard because you’re left with no salary at all,” said Orlando, who like almost all state employees, didn’t want his full name used to prevent problems at work. He added, “I’m lucky since I’m still in my job.”

Veronica, a receptionist at another Varadero hotel, said she feared she may be sent home in August, when her resort will be only half-occupied.

“Sometimes they offer alternatives, to study in a particular course or another job,” she said, “but sometimes, when (workers) are sent into the agricultural sector for instance, they just quit.”

With the government giving no details of its thinking, rumors have spread that as many as a fourth of all government workers in some industries could lose their jobs or be moved to farming or construction. But Labor Minister Margarita Gonzalez has promised that “Cuba will not employ massive firings in a manner similar to neoliberal cutbacks,” using “neoliberal” as a description of free-market policies.

The government has moved to embrace some small free-market reforms. It handed some barbershops over to employees, allowing them to set their own prices but making them pay rent and buy their own supplies. Authorities have also approved more licenses for private taxis while getting tough on unlicensed ones.

The global financial crisis, and the $10 billion in damage inflicted by three hurricanes in 2008, have forced authorities to run a deficit of 5 percent of GDP, leaving them unable to pay back credits received from China and elsewhere.

Cuba slashed spending on importing food and other basics by 34 percent to $9.6 billion in 2009, from $12.7 billion the previous year. But so far, the moves have not been enough to rein in the deficit.

95% of the economy is in the states hands and yet they are importing food. Reason? – the government cannot produce anything efficiently. It employs paper pushers, while no one wants to go and sweat under the sun farming the land, because there is no incentive in doing that. The food prices in Cuba are fixed and it doesn’t matter the demand, the labor or other costs, as an independent farmer you cannot make a profit.  I even have doubts that farmers going to break even. Thats why the government is re-assigning workers as receptionists and sending them to the farms.That is how planed economy works…

Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuba economics expert and professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, said Cuban officials have spent months debating cuts in the labor force and economic reforms. He said they know what’s needed, but face “a problem of political viability.”

Various government perks like cars, gas, uniforms and office supplies have become incentives to bloat the payroll, since they are based on the size of a company’s work force.

But low pay means low productivity. On Obispo street, a state-run cafeteria sells heavily subsidized soft ice cream and pork sandwiches for the equivalent of a few American pennies — meaning wages and tips are so tiny that the staff is complete indifferent toward customers.

Very true. During the communist years everything sucked. Customers? What the hell the workers care? They were  getting paid the same no matter, if they get one person to visit the restaurant (or whatever business) or one hundred. Actually they had the incentive to have less customers, because they would work less and still get the same salary. Serving more customers means more work for the same money… Nobody wants that.

Another incentive to work less, cheat the customers or steal from the business – the costs of running the business was absorbed by the government. The inventories were being constantly stolen, left to rot, but no one cared…

What if someone complains? So what? If  they do not like our business,  let them visit the business that is few blocks away. It is also run by the government and no one there cares for them either.

Of course eventually someday the workers from the restaurant will buy a product made by the same those customers they treated poorly. The product will be with poor quality, will not work as intended and so on…But what does the worker at the manufacturing plant care? If you do not like their product… good luck finding a better one.

Three waiters sit at the counter cracking jokes. A fourth is the only one working, making coffee for three tables. Nearby, a cashier stares into space, a cook flirts with a scantily clad teen and a supervisor sits idly by.

The state employs 95 percent of the official work force. Unemployment last year was 1.7 percent and hasn’t risen above 3 percent in eight years — but that ignores thousands of Cubans who aren’t looking for jobs that pay monthly salaries worth only $20 a month on average.

Salvador Valdes Mesa, secretary-general of the nearly 3 million-strong Cuban Workers Confederation — the only Cuban labor union allowed — has instead written that “reorganization” will ensure redundant workers are reassigned rather than fired.

He said the government wants more jobs in construction and agriculture.

Still, 35-year-old computer engineer Norberto fears for his job. He thinks it’s unfair to keep workers under communist domination and yet call them unmotivated. “I didn’t graduate from college to now work as a day laborer or a peasant, he said.

If he loses his job and gets an offer to work abroad, he said, “my question is ‘Will the Cuban authorities put aside their paternalism and let me leave?’”

Also read this one – Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

There is something in the Earth atmosphere….Otherwise there is no way to explain all these people and events that are gone insane around the World in the last few years

From The Telegraph
By Martin Banks

European bureaucrats have set up a secretive fund of £400 million to pay for projects that include promoting a “smelly-foot” dance and producing postcards about the causes of “social exclusion”.

Researchers have unearthed a series of grants issued to schemes deemed “confidential” that have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Taxpayers’ money spent on the projects, many of which have been described as “crazy”, has increased since the onset of recession.

The schemes include £145,000 to print 736 postcards that “reflect the current problems in Europe that generate social exclusion” and £166,000 on a street circus project whose aim is to “strengthen international understanding”.

Producing the postcards in six EU countries cost nearly £200 per card.

According to a report by Open Europe, a UK-based think tank, the £400 million was allocated to projects originally deemed “confidential”. The projects have now been listed on the European Commission’s newly-created database of beneficiaries of EU funds.

Open Europe analysts said they had unearthed “some pretty outrageous stuff”.

Stephen Booth, of the think tank, said, “There are some crazy projects but also a lot of money going to projects considered ‘confidential’.

“The Commission’s website simply says that ‘in certain cases, some parts of the information displayed on a particular grant or contract may be masked, for example, for security reasons’.”

Between 2007 and 2009, the database shows the Commission awarded a total of 727 grants in which the beneficiary is marked as confidential, amounting to a total value of just over £400m.

Some recipients have been named including the London-based Flying Gorillas troupe, whose act includes the “brilliant smelly foot dance and the incredibly difficult iguana four-step”. It received £162,000. Another £124,000 went to London-based artists BodyDataSpace for a project on “evolving global, social and technological shifts”.

From Forbes
by Daniel Fisher

President Obama on Tuesday called for the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, calling it “a common sense bill.”

Allan Dinkoff with the employment law practice at Weil, Gotshal & Manges has a problem with that description. Some parts may be common sense, Dinkoff says, such as expanding the anti-retaliation provisions, developing training for girls and women to improve their negotiating skills and studying the reasons for persistent pay disparities in the workplace. ”But the core of the bill is anything but common sense,’ says Dinkoff, who was in charge of employment law at Merrill Lynch and general counsel of GAF before joining Weil in 2009. “The bill risks altering in very fundamental ways how corporate America compensates its employees without any real justification for imposing that burden,” he says.

Here’s Dinkoff’s analysis:

Under existing law, companies can respond to a new hire’s prior pay history or compensation demands.  For example, Fair Pay Shipping Co. decides it wants to hire shipping managers and pay them $30,000.  It offers employment to John and Sally.  Sally accepts the $30,000, but John demands $33,000, which the company agrees to pay.  Under the existing statute, probably no problem, because the law currently says that an employer is not liable if it paid John and Sally differently for “a reason other than sex.”  The same would be true if Fair Pay Shipping Co. decided to pay each new hire $1,000 more than they made in their previous employment, and John made more than Sally in their previous jobs.

The result would be very different under the Paycheck Fairness Act, which eliminates the “reason other than sex” defense and substitutes instead a requirement that the employer prove that its pay practices are divorced from any discrimination in its workplace or at the employee’s prior workplace, that the pay practice is job related, and that it is consistent with “business necessity.”

So, now employers must have one pay for a job, not only at the entry level, but throughout the organization.  For example, what if a year after Fair Pay Shipping Co. hires John and Sally, John comes in and asks for a raise, but Sally does not.  Under the existing law, Fair Pay Shipping is probably OK giving John a raise and not Sally.  Not so if the Paycheck Fairness Act passes.

Therefore, companies will have far less flexibility in addressing different salary histories for new hires, different salary demands from existing employees, the size of pay raises for people promoted into new roles, and so on.  The law would make these changes without real evidence that these steps will eliminate pay disparities between men and women or any thought on the impact of restricting a company’s ability to respond to the different needs and demands of its employees.

Not so common sense.

Well I do not want public employees access internet gaming sites or any porn sites, while they perform their duty, on the taxpayers pay, but still I will ask , what will fall in the category of controversial opinion?

Why not block all internet access except to the sites directly involved and needed to make the transportation secure?

From CBS NEWS
by Pia Malbran

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is blocking certain websites from the federal agency’s computers, including halting access by staffers to any Internet pages that contain a “controversial opinion,” according to an internal email obtained by CBS News.

The email was sent to all TSA employees from the Office of Information Technology on Friday afternoon.

It states that as of July 1, TSA employees will no longer be allowed to access five categories of websites that have been deemed “inappropriate for government access.”

The categories include:

. Chat/Messaging

• Controversial opinion

• Criminal activity

• Extreme violence (including cartoon violence) and gruesome content

• Gaming

The email does not specify how the TSA will determine if a website expresses a “controversial opinion.”

There is also no explanation as to why controversial opinions are being blocked, although the email stated that some of the restricted websites violate the Employee Responsibilities and Conduct policy.

The TSA did not return calls seeking comment by publication time.

From Times Online
by Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

A high-level British offer of help to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was rebuffed by America shortly after the accident, fuelling fresh fears of political tension between the two countries over the disaster.

A few days after the BP-leased rig sank on April 22, the Cabinet Office made a direct offer to the US State Department to airlift half of Britain’s 1,200-tonne stockpile of chemical dispersants, The Times has learnt.

At the time there was an urgent demand for fresh supplies. The offer to provide the chemicals, at the cost price of £3 million, was made through diplomatic channels and via the Civil Contingency Secretariat, the Government’s emergency planning unit.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which was also involved in drafting the plan, said that the US had chosen not to accept the offer. Officials said the US claimed that the chemicals held in Britain did not have the correct paperwork but the spokeswoman said: “We are not aware of any problems with licensing. I cannot say why they have not accepted the offer. That is a question for the US State Department.”

One person familiar with the discussions said that the US decision seemed odd, given the severity of the crisis and the fact that the offer had been made in good faith. The Times understands that the rejection of Britain’s offer came after the US had accepted similar offers from other countries, including Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, sent a large batch of the chemicals to the Gulf shortly after the accident.

News of the rejection of Britain’s offer of help comes amid rising criticism of BP and increasing anti-British rhetoric among some American politicians and media. One prominent US blogger on the spill, Roy Eisner, even proposed a nuclear attack on Britain.

Senior British and US officials were trying to play down fears yesterday of an anti-British backlash. Louis Susman, the US Ambassador to London, told the BBC that criticism of BP’s response to the oil spill was not a diplomatic issue. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said that relations between the US and Britain were excellent.

BP says that 4,500 tonnes of dispersants have been used so far, about 80 tonnes a day. Virtually all of these chemicals are now being produced in Texas by a company called Nalco, reducing the need for imports.

British stocks of dispersant are kept in 11 different locations around the UK and are overseen by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. A large part of the stockpile is stored at Coventry airport, where specially equipped DC6 aircraft are kept on standby for an oil spill in British waters. Additional supplies are held in Aberdeen and Southampton.

The US State Department did not return calls seeking comment.

From WND

China is applying pressure on the United States to lift export limits on technology with military uses, even as Beijing poses an increasing strategic challenge to the U.S., according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

The Obama administration, like the Clinton administration some years before, may go along with the further loosening of export controls, using the excuse of wanting to improve the trade gap between the two countries.

The result, however, will be to make it more difficult for the U.S. to remain ahead of China in the development of technologies that provide a militaryadvantage.

China already regards the U.S. as its greatest strategic challenge and has attempted to contain the U.S. and limit access to critical strategic resources, especially in Africa and Latin America.

During the Clinton administration, many of the political appointees who now are in the Obama administration were instrumental through a major relaxation of technology export controls in providing Beijing with better intercontinental ballistic missiles, encryption and high-end telecommunications.

The Chinese have the U.S. over the proverbial barrel due to the tremendous trade debt the U.S. has with Beijing and the U.S. debt load China is carrying. Chinese officials already have threatened to limit that support as a result of the recent approval of $6 billion in U.S. military weapons for Taiwan.

For the rest of this report, and other intelligence briefs, go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin

From American Thinker
By W. R. Wansley

Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour, in the wake of hurricane Katrina, often blunted attempts of the media to goad him into criticizing the rescue efforts of President George W. Bush by stating, “Louisiana has the same president as Mississippi has.” That is to say Bush’s supposed inaction in the New Orleans’ “come rescue me” fiasco was in sharp contrast to the boot-strap spirit of the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Now the Gulf oil spill has shed more light on the consequences of reliance on the federal government to a national disaster. In Katrina, a group of people relied on government to take them out. In the Gulf, a group of people have been trying to get in — to apply American ingenuity to clean up the oil spill or prevent it from reaching the shore. Both groups have been held up — by government.

In Katrina, many New Orleans people, after generations of government dependence, stayed behind, drained of initiative by their government’s seeming ability to come to their aid. Those who depended on themselves rather than government did leave while those who had faith in government had no initiative to control their own destiny.

In the Gulf oil spill, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has begged for approval to put up temporary sand bars as a barrier to the oil. The EPA, worse than saying no, delayed and studied and pondered and then said no. We have seen countless stories in the news of innovation and ingenuity by Americans attempting to bring proven applications, equipment and tactics to bear on the oil. Each attempt is met with the same federal dithering, inaction and impedance.

In Katrina, energy and effort that should have been put into getting people out was instead diverted into protest, complaint and blame. Government conditioned these people to expect that government would deliver them. Regardless, the would-be rescuers were thwarted in their efforts by an ineffective Democratic governor who put politics over rescue, and an inept Democratic mayor who was just plain in over his head.

In the Gulf oil spill, there are presently dozens of individuals and small companies that have the ability to solve the oil clean up problem. After they show their process to the media, the inevitable question is asked, “Have you shown this to BP or the EPA?” Their all too familiar and depressingly consistent reply is, “yes, and they are considering it” or “yes, and they said they would get back to us”. They have been “considering it” for over 50 days now.

In Katrina, the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast were hit by the brunt of the storm surge. Total devastation. This wasn’t just some flooding caused by the breach of a Democrat Parish maintained levy. The people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast are for the most part a mixture of industrious workers and former industrious workers called retirees. Their ability to make do and to utilize the outpouring of basic supplies of ice and water from individuals and corporations from upstate and around the country was a resounding success.

In the Gulf, one company has a fiber mat (Fibertect) that absorbs oil. Another company has a machine (the Voraxial Separator) that seperates oil from water. Several folks have demonstrated the incredible effectivness of plain ol’ hay to absorb its weight in oil. Then there are Peat moss mats and hair mats that do the same. Again, people standing by waiting for the go ahead. BP says they have to get cleared from the Obama Administration and the Administration saying they are talking to BP – nothing happens.

Another company has a proprietary “molecule mat”; another has a “hydrophobic sand” and many have their on concoction of natural oil-eating microbes. One Florida Company has a soap made of plant extracts another has a type of dry ice that sticks to the oil and lifts it off the then clean sand. One man has tons of an airplane dispensed natural earth material that is extremely lipophilic (oil loving) which traps, holds and sinks the oil to be destroyed by oil eating bacteria. His reply from the EPA: “it is against regulations to intentionally sink oil”.

One thing all these solutions have in common: they are private enterprise endeavors showing ingenuity from inventors and innovators who, yes, want to do good but you see they, gasp, may also want to make a buck in the process. Never mind that all these things were invented and developed long before the current crisis. One poor fellow — the one with the hay solution — actually was shown on the You Tube video wearing overhauls. While the man who came up with a floating hair mat after the Prince William Sound spill is from north Alabama. Now we really can’t have that sort of thing going on, now can we?

Milton Friedman once asked why people assume that political self-interest is somehow nobler than economic self-interest. “Just tell me, he said, where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?” Why, from a community organizer, of course. The private sector cleaning up the oil spill; private charities feeding people; Private gun owners protecting their family and property; now we really can’t have that sort of thing going on, now can we?

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