Archive for the ‘Buy American’ Category

Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year.

That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown.

Congressional Republicans dropped almost all of the policy restrictions they tried to attach to the bill, but won inclusion of the light bulb provision, which prevents the Obama administration from carrying through a 2007 law that would have set energy efficiency standards that effectively made the traditional light bulb obsolete.

Stopping the bulb ban was a chief GOP priority coming into this year, with all of the candidates seeking to become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee saying they would push through a repeal. That bill cleared the House but Democrats blocked its consideration in theSenate.

House Republicans then insisted on adding a provision into the year-end spending bill, and it was one of the last major sticking-points in the negotiations.

The spending bill doesn’t actually amend the 2007 law, but does prohibit the administration from spending any money to carry out the light bulb standards — which amounts to at least a temporary reprieve.

The spending bill is full of similar provisions that are included year after year to restrict what administrations can do.

At $915 billion in discretionary spending, the bill amounts to $750.6 million per page, and funds the vast majority of government operations, from defense to homeland security to federal parks. Since it is a must-pass bill, it also becomes a major battleground for policy fights such as the light bulbs.

Among the other policy riders attached to the bill is a requirement that all new federal employees be run through E-Verify, the voluntary government system for checking to see if employees are authorized to work in the U.S.; restrictions on the administration transferring suspected terrorist detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the U.S.; and a ban on the District of Columbia using government money to pay for abortions.

The GOP tried but failed to attach restrictions on the Obama administration’s nuclear waste policy, its international family planning policy and major restrictions on the president’s environmental agenda. Mr. Obama and Democrats also forced Republicans to remove provisions that would have prevented him from requiring government contractors to disclose their political contributions — though they cannot be required to disclose them as part of an application for a loan or grant.

“These contentious policy riders had no place in our annual appropriations bills, and it was encouraging that we were able to remove nearly all of them from the final version of this bill,” said Rep. Norm Dicks, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

FROM AN SR-71 PILOT…….

SR-71 Blackbird

In April 1986, following an attack on American
soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan
ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi’s
terrorist camps in Libya ..
My duty was to fly over Libya , and take photographs recording the damage our F-111′s
had inflicted.
Qaddafi had established a ‘line of death,’
a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra ,
swearing to shoot down any intruder, that crossed
the boundary.

I was piloting the SR-71 spy plane, the world’s fastest jet, accompanied by a Marine Major (Walt), the aircraft’s reconnaissance systems officer (RSO).
We had crossed into Libya , and were approaching our final turn over the bleak desert landscape, when Walt informed me, that he was receiving missile
launch signals.
I quickly increased our speed, calculating the time it would take for the weapons, most likely SA-2 and SA-4 surface-to-air missiles, capable of Mach 5 – to reach our altitude.
I estimated, that we could beat the rocket-powered missiles to the turn, and stayed our course, betting our lives on the plane’s performance.
On the morning of April 15, I rocketed past the line at 2,125 mph.
After several agonizingly long seconds, we made
the turn and blasted toward the Mediterranean …’You might want to pull it back,’ Walt suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles
full forward.The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds, well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly.
I pulled the throttles to idle, just south of Sicily but we still overran the refueling tanker, awaiting us over Gibraltar …

Scores of significant aircraft have been produced,
in the 100 years of flight, following the achievements
of the Wright brothers, which we celebrate in December.Aircraft such as the Boeing 707, the F-86 Sabre Jet, and the P-51 Mustang, are among the important machines, that have flown our skies.
But the SR-71, also known as the Blackbird, stands alone as a significant contributor to Cold War victory, and as the fastest plane ever, and only 93 Air Force pilots, ever steered the ‘sled,’ as we called our aircraft.
The SR-71, was the brainchild of Kelly Johnson,
the famed Lockheed designer, who created the P-38, the F-104 Starfighter, and the U-2. After the Soviets shot down Gary Powers U-2 in 1960,
Johnson began to develop an aircraft, that would fly three miles higher, and five times faster, than the spy plane, and still be capable of photographing your license plate.
However, flying at 2,000 mph would create intense heat on the aircraft’s skin. Lockheed engineers used a titanium alloy, to construct more than 90 percent of the SR-71, creating special tools, and manufacturing procedures to hand-build each of the 40 planes. Special heat-resistant fuel, oil, and hydraulic fluids, that would function at 85,000 feet, and higher, also had to be developed.
In 1962, the first Blackbird successfully flew, and
in 1966, the same year I graduated from high school,the Air Force began flying operational SR-71 missions.I came to the program in 1983, with a sterling record and a recommendation from my commander, completing the weeklong interview, and meeting Walt, my partner for the next four years. He would ride four feet behind me, working all the cameras, radios, and electronic jamming equipment.I joked, that if we were ever captured, he was the spy,and I was just the driver. He told me to keep the pointy end forward.We trained for a year, flying out of Beale AFB in California , Kadena Airbase in Okinawa , and RAF Mildenhall in England ..
On a typical training mission, we would take off near Sacramento, refuel over Nevada, accelerate into Montana, obtain a high Mach speed over Colorado , turn right over New Mexico, speed across the Los Angeles Basin, run upthe West Coast, turn right at Seattle , then return to Beale.Total flight time:- Two Hours and Forty Minutes.One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic, of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. ‘Ninety knots,’ ATC replied.A Bonanza soon made the same request.’One-twenty on the ground,’ was the reply.To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio, with aground speed check.I knew exactly what he was doing.Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit,but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley,know what real speed was, ‘Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,’ ATC responded.The situation was too ripe.I heard the click of Walt’s mike button in the rear seat.In his most innocent voice, Walt startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet clearly above controlled airspace.In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied ‘Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.’We did not hear another transmission on that frequency, all the way to the coast.

The Blackbird always showed us something new,each aircraft possessing its own unique personality.In time, we realized we were flying a national treasure..When we taxied out of our revetments for take-off,people took notice.Traffic congregated near the airfield fences, because everyone wanted to see, and hear the mighty SR-71.You could not be a part of this program, and not come to love the airplane.Slowly, she revealed her secrets to us, as we earned her trust..One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet, if the cockpit lighting were dark.While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know, and somehow punish me.But my desire to see the sky, overruled my caution,I dimmed the lighting again.To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window..As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky.Where dark spaces in the sky, had usually existed, there were now dense clusters, of sparkling stars.Shooting Stars, flashed across the canvas every few seconds.It was like a fireworks display with no sound.I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments,and reluctantly,
I brought my attention back inside.To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off,I could see every gauge, lit by starlight.In the plane’s mirrors, I could see the eerie shine of my gold spacesuit, incandescently illuminated, in a celestial glow.I stole one last glance out the window. Despite our speed, we seemed still before the heavens, humbled in the radiance of a much greater power.For those few moments, I felt a part of something far more significant, than anything we were doing in the plane..The sharp sound of Walt’s voice on the radio, brought me back to the tasks at hand, as I prepared for our descent.
San Diego Aerospace Museum
The SR-71 was an expensive aircraft to operate.The most significant cost was tanker support, and in 1990, confronted with budget cutbacks, the Air
Force retired the SR-71.The SR-71 served six presidents, protecting America for a quarter of a century.Unbeknownst to most of the country, the plane flew over North Vietnam , Red China , North Korea , the Middle East, South Africa , Cuba , Nicaragua , Iran , Libya ,and the Falkland Islands .On a weekly basis, the SR-71, kept watch over every Soviet Nuclear Submarine, and Mobile Missile Site, and all of their troop movements.It was a key factor in winning the Cold War.I am proud to say, I flew about 500 hours in this aircraft.I knew her well.She gave way to no plane, proudly dragging herSonic Boom through enemy backyards, with great impunity..She defeated every missile, outran every MiG, and always brought us home.In the first 100 years of manned flight, no aircraft was more remarkable.The Blackbird had outrun nearly 4,000 missiles,not once taking a scratch from enemy fire.On her final flight, the Blackbird, destined for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum ,sped from Los Angeles to Washingtonin 64 Minutes, averaging 2,145 mph, and setting four speed records.

BYE BYE SR-71 BLACKBIRD

Yesterday, I wondered how Nancy Pelosi and her husband were able to participate in Visa’s IPO in March 2008. It is very difficult for an individual investor to participate in IPOs, especially those which are heavily ‘oversubscribed’ as Visa’s was. It was the hottest IPO of the year, drawing what one analyst described as “extreme demand.” So, this tidbit from Newsweek’s story on Visa’s campaign to curry favor with Pelosi caught my attention:
Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call from his personal broker—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.
Wait, what? He was called and ‘invited’ to purchase shares in the IPO? Seriously? Let’s isolate one particular sentence from this graph:
The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals.
Specially selected individuals? Selected by whom? And, for what reasons, specifically?
If you are John Bresnahan at Politico, this will all seem like a fortuitous coincidence. The Pelosis obviously have lots of money to invest and their broker may have been one of the few people empowered to select who was lucky enough to buy into the hottest IPO of the year. Although, individual investors with access to IPOs tend to be far more active and wealthy investors than the Pelosis, a ‘reporter’ at Politico could view it all as perfectly normal. But, let’s look at the larger context here.
As Newsweek notes, Visa was very worried about Democrat proposals to regulate interchange, or “swipe” fees. Late in 2007, they organized a campaign to “court” then-Speaker Pelosi to plead their case and block new legislation regulating their business. One of their lobbying firms even hired a former top Pelosi staffer, Dean Aguillen, and the company, its executives and lobbyists began donating to her campaign.
Dean Aguillen was prohibited from lobbying his former boss for one year, but, according to Newsweek he provided key strategic advice to Visa:
By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.
In other words, the former Pelosi staffer was helping Visa figure out a way to win her support on their top legislative priority.
In Spring 2008, Rep. John Conyers introduces the very legislation that Visa feared most and just a handful of days later, Paul Pelosi is invited to buy shares in Visa’s IPO. Again, really? Who made that decision? Was it Dean Aguillen, perhaps?
If that decision was in any way related to Nancy Pelosi’s position as Speaker, she may run afoul of House ethics rules. As even Politico notes:
Under House rules, lawmakers are prohibited from using their official position “for personal gain.” This ban includes instances when a lawmaker uses “his political influence, the influence of his position … to make pecuniary gains” or take any official action that affects their own personal finances, the House Ethics Manual states.
Being part of Visa’s IPO, where the stock price rose 50% in two days, would generate a heck of a lot of “personal gain.” Was the invitation in any way tied to her position as Speaker? As Politico noted this morning, Nancy Pelosi really does have a ‘golden touch.’
By Mike Flynn

Should public school officials have the right to prevent students from wearing pro-American garb on Cinco de Mayo?

This question has been at the heart of a California court battle between the Morgan Hill Unified School District and students who were told by a principal and assistant principal that they could not wear American flag t-shirts on the Mexican holiday back in 2010.

Following the incident, a lawsuit against the district was launched by the students and their families. This week, the case came to a close, with a federal judge ruling against the students — a blow that is likely to infuriate some free speech advocates.….Read More

By David S. Addington, Heritage Foundation November 8, 2011 at 6:15 pm

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.

There are reports that estimate 11,000 workers lost wages and $4 million dollars in revenue went down the tubes due to the Occupy Oakland shutdown on Wednesday.

While Oakland’s Port may be considered the fifth largest in the U.S., that doesn’t mean business is thriving there, workers are happy and fat cat managers are walking around counting wads of money– not by a long shot.

In fact, the Occupiers really just shut down an embattled, faltering commercial hub that is a source of badly needed jobs in financially embattled Oakland.

Originally, Oakland was called the “Athens of the Pacific” as a complement. Sadly, the name has never been more apt than today, as both cities struggle with nanny-state rioters and impotent leadership.

Despite all that, in a statement released on its website the day before the shutdown, the Port expressed sympathy and even some solidarity with the protestors who planned to shut them down. This was perhaps in part to garner some goodwill from the gathering protest hordes and avoid violence.

More importantly, though, the Port laid out some basic facts that have gone essentially unreported in the media, and should make those who support Occupy take a long, hard look at the long-term goals of the “99%” movement.

According to its website, the Port of Oakland’s current situation is as follows:

We have over $1.4 billion in debt and annual debt service payments of over $100 million a year for the foreseeable future, constraining the jobs we can create and investments we can make.
Economic conditions at the Port have forced us to reduce our workforce by 40% over the last seven years.
Air passenger volume is down over 30% since 2008.
We are operating at just over 50% capacity at our seaport, while there is increasing competition from alternative shipping gateways around the country and the world.
So the Port of Oakland is already down on the ground, and the Occupiers decided to kick it anyway.
The Occupiers forced lost wages and productivity for a day in order to make it clear to the country that they are willing to halt stage even more damaging “general strikes” across the country.

Occupy is becoming more about blackmail than protest.

Even the Port organizers, sympathetic to Occupiers the way a hostage must be to his hostage-taker, expressed some concern about the impact on the community. Port management told reporters yesterday that:

“Any additional missed shifts represent economic hardship for maritime workers, truckers, and their families, as well as lost jobs and lost tax revenue for our region.”
It’s a good thing that the protestors stopped, but just in case the Occupiers weren’t aware of what their “general strike” would really mean for the Oakland community, or any other for that matter, the Port management also said that:

“Continued disruptions will begin to lead to re-routing of cargo and permanent loss of jobs, a situation that would only exacerbate the on-going economic challenges of our region.”
No kidding.

The Port has apparently resumed normal business as of yesterday. But there is clearly a trend with the Occupiers here. The businesses hurt by the Occupy movement, including the jobs and wages lost directly due to the protests, are overwhelmingly working and middle class. And nobody in Occupy seems to care.

As for the Port of Oakland, it seems very plausible that workers would have been better served receiving a day’s pay than being forced to stay home or walk in circles with a placard.

Over the course of one week, Occupy Oakland showed the world that they are willing to take money out of the hands of Port workers by day, and cause riots and destruction in their city at night.

This all forces us to ask the question: How does any of the mayhem in Oakland teach the “Banksters” on Wall Street a lesson in economics or social justice?.

BuckSexton

By Charles Pope, The Oregonian

WASHINGTON — At least $7 million in federal stimulus money intended to provide jobs to unemployed Oregonians instead paid wages to 254 foreign workers, federal investigators have concluded.

The money was for forest clean-up jobs in central Oregon where thousands of experienced workers were idle. When the contracts were announced in 2009, Oregon had the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation at 11.1 percent, with rates in the state’s rural forest counties nearly 15 percent and higher.

Even so, the contractors told federal regulators they could not find enough local workers for the jobs.

That came as a surprise to local officials, who said they often got hundreds of responses to every job opening.

“This is a timber area and we hadn’t been cutting trees for years,” said state Sen. Chris Telfer, R-Bend. “It really ticked off a lot of people here.”

In a report on the investigation this week, the Department of Labor’s Inspector General found that contractors who brought in foreign workers violated no laws or regulations, but used legal loopholes to hire foreign workers.

While legal, the hiring practices appear to violate the spirit and purpose of the $840 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus, which was designed to create jobs that would jumpstart the country out of recession.

“The goal of the stimulus bill was to put Americans back to work, not foreign nationals,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., who asked for the investigation in September 2010.

“It is obscene that U.S. companies were rewarded for abusing our American workers and immigration laws to undercut competition and squeeze more profits out of contracts,” DeFazio said. “Oregonians have been logging for over a century, our workforce is one of the best in the world, and these contracts should have been awarded to companies that hire Oregon loggers.”

The federal investigation looked at 14 contracts to clear federal forests in central Oregon. The contracts were controlled by four Oregon companies: Medford Cutting Edge Forestry, Summitt Forestry, Ponderosa Reforestations, and G.E. Forestry. All hired foreign workers, according to the report, though they didn’t all handle hiring in the same way.

The contractors applied for H-2B visas allowing them to hire workers for seasonal jobs, according to the report. In order to get clearance, contractors must prove the jobs can’t be filled with local residents and that pay won’t dilute local prevailing wages.

But there is a loophole. Under federal rules, notice of the job openings must be made where the job “originates.” And while the bulk of the work took place in Oregon, smaller jobs originated in other states.

According to reports by The Bend Bulletin, which revealed the foreign hires in a series of stories last year that triggered DeFazio’s call for an investigation, contractors advertised the jobs in tiny newspapers in California and Washington state for several days.

“Employers were not required to recruit U.S. workers in Oregon, and we were provided no evidence that they did,” federal investigators said. “Workers in Oregon were likely unaware that these job opportunities were available.”

In fact, although 146 U.S. workers were contacted for possible employment, investigators found that none was hired.

Contractors used another regulation to dampen response from Oregon residents, the report said. The visa regulations allowed the contractors to do all their hiring four months before work started. That made unemployed workers who needed jobs immediately reluctant to commit to temporary jobs four months later.

Despite the barriers, 29 U.S. workers learned of the jobs and asked about employment. The report did not say if they were from Oregon.

“We verified with the employers that none of these workers actually began employment with them,” the report says.

The reason?

“We spoke with two workers who reported that the employer used discouraging language, such as references to age and inquiries about speaking another language, which are not valid conditions of employment,” the report says.

The report does not address the nationality of the workers who were hired.

As required, the employers also notified state workforce agencies of the openings. But just as with obscure newspaper ads, the state postings were far-afield, with the notices sent to Arizona, California, Idaho, Washington and Wyoming.

The Labor Department did not respond to a request for comment, but agency officials have announced plans to revise regulations dealing with H-2B visas.

Congress is likely to act, too. Aides to DeFazio said he is closely monitoring the Labor Department’s proposals for fixing the problems and is not ruling out other action. And in the Senate, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden said he is watching as well.

“Right now there are 14 million job seekers in the U.S. and three million job openings.” Wyden said. “Given those numbers, there is absolutely no reason why hard-working Oregonians should be passed over en masse for Oregon jobs in favor of foreign workers.”

– Charles Pope

Drilling Down on the Family Farm

A CLOUD of dust and sand and diesel exhaust, thick as a desert windstorm, snaked up into the sky and blotted out the midsummer Pennsylvania moon. The scene was backlighted by 100 high-powered lights glaring from the top of a 70-foot-tall, hundred-yard-square acropolis of broken stone carved into our hillside.

Standing there, in what used to be my family’s pasture, I was surprised by my own feelings as I watched a small army of workers rev up the machines that would crack open the Marcellus Shale deep below my land, the same rich cache of gas that New York now seems poised to exploit.

I thought I was prepared for it. I had seen this operation before, on other people’s land. I had even been mildly impressed by the military precision of it all, by the way the roughnecks moved wordlessly among the massive water tanks arrayed around a drill pad the size of a high school football stadium, while others monitored the gargantuan pump itself, a 40-foot-long battleship of a machine that would blast a toxic cocktail of water and up to a dozen chemicals a mile and a half deep into the earth at more than 9,400 pounds of pressure per square inch to shatter the rock and release the gas trapped inside it.

But now that it was happening on our 100 acres, I could understand in a much more visceral way why the word to describe this process — fracking — stirs such fear. I could even feel the stirring of that fear myself.

It hadn’t been an easy decision to let the drillers onto our land four years ago. Not for me, not for my family, not for our neighbors, most of them former dairy farmers who had, over the years, been slowly strangled, driven out of business in part by spiraling energy prices. To us, the land was more than a spot on a driller’s map. It was home. The sum of who we are.

My parents bought the place 40 years ago. It started out as a weekend retreat but quickly became an obsession. We’d usually spend three or four nights a week there, trying to indulge my father’s dream of becoming a gentleman farmer and my mother’s dream of becoming a character in one of the frontier romance novels — buckskin bodice rippers, she called them — that she adored. My mother succeeded in achieving her dream. The same could not be said of my father. For a few years, he tried to press me into service in a never very successful attempt to raise beef cattle. We had about 40 head. My heart wasn’t in it.

Ultimately, my father quit trying. When I turned 18, I shook the dust of that place off my boots, headed off to college for a while, failed at that, and then failed at a series of jobs and marriages until I drifted into journalism and never figured out how to drift back out of it. But the place was always with me. It defined me. I went back every chance I got. My sister was married there. So was I, the third time at least. My father died there. I had always imagined it the way I remembered it. But it wasn’t that way anymore.

The working dairy farms that used to surround us had failed, most of them choked to death by a complex system that held the price of milk in check while energy prices, which drove up the cost of everything on those farms, spiraled upward. Those who could leave did, selling off their land, often in small chunks to people from New York or New Jersey who imported with them a fantasy of country living. Little by little, the country I had known, that whole way of life, was vanishing. It was, as one of my neighbors put it, “the end of country.”

And now, the drillers were coming.

The way I saw it then, the way I still see it, is that there was a sense of inevitability to it all. It wasn’t just about the money. Though some of us, like my own family, were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for our mineral rights, others, like my neighbor across the road, who signed before the full potential of the Marcellus was understood, got a pittance, just enough to pay their property taxes. It was about something more important. The way we saw it, maybe the gas in the Marcellus could buy us one more chance. Sure, it could also very well turn out that those long strands of $10 words in the contracts the companies offered would be a noose, binding us to an industry that would poison the last valuable possession we had. But they could also be a lifeline.

Tapping the more than 400-trillion-cubic-foot reserve of gas in the Marcellus could allow a farmer to keep his land and keep it intact. He might lose a few acres, maybe 5 or 10 if the drillers decided to put a rig on his land to suck out the gas from below his farm and the others they had leased for a mile around. He might lose none, if the drillers decided that all they really needed from him was the gas underground. He could keep farming if wanted to. And if he didn’t, well at least this was a chance to keep one more generation on the land, and in the process buy all of us a little time to figure out how to cut through the ropes that bind our fortunes to the political intrigues of a half-dozen oil-rich countries on the other side of the planet and the speculative games of oil traders in New York.

We were not entirely ignorant of the risks. We understood that what was coming to our little corner of Pennsylvania, and all over the state, was an enormous industrial operation.

It takes as many as 400 truck trips to complete a single well, and that’s not even counting the fuel-guzzling equipment needed to alter the ancient land to carve out the three- to five-acre drill pad itself. Once that’s done, the diesel drill rigs arrive, towering diamond-tipped syringes that work round the clock, often for two weeks at a stretch, to bore down 7,500 feet or so into the Marcellus before making a 90-degree turn to bore another mile and a half laterally. It’s a dirty, noisy, energy-intensive process, and despite the industry’s boast that natural gas burns 30 percent cleaner than oil, in the Marcellus the hunt for it is still fueled almost entirely by diesel.

And that’s not the only resource that’s consumed. It takes millions of gallons of water to break up the shale, and at least 30 percent remains underground forever. The rest of it, along with the slightly radioactive, highly saline and heavy-metal-laden water that has existed alongside the shale for 400 million years, flows up to the surface over the lifetime of the well.

IT’S a perilous process. There is the risk of surface spills — of the fracking fluid or flowback water, or even of diesel, whether held on the site to fuel the process or dumped when a driver fails to navigate the hazards on back roads never meant to handle this kind of traffic. Groundwater has also been fouled by drifting methane that migrated because the drillers, by dint of ignorance or carelessness or just plain bad luck, failed to properly isolate those deposits with cement.

This will never be a perfectly safe operation. No industrial process ever is. There will always be risks of accidents, mechanical failures, human error. That’s every bit as inevitable as the development of the Marcellus itself. There will never be enough regulators to police all the trucks and tanks and rigs that will cover the Marcellus from New York State to the Kentucky state line in the next few decades. In the end, the responsibility for monitoring this, for holding the industry to its promises and responsible for its failures, will fall where it has always fallen — on the shoulders of the people on the ground, the people whose lives will be most directly affected.

Standing there in what used to be our pasture on that light summer night, watching as the machinery of progress blasted the rock a mile beneath my feet, I realized that was what scared me the most. Not that this was inevitable, but that its impact depended so much on me, on whether I had the character to come out from behind the convenient shield of “are you for it or against it” ideology and find the strength, the will and the means to do what I can to make sure this is done in the best way possible.

I still don’t really know the answer.

Manufacturing in America peaked in 1979 when 19.5 million Americans actually produced durable goods.  In the last 30 years our manufacturing sector has declined by 40% losing almost 8 million jobs.  Nearly 6 million jobs have been lost since 2000 and since the Great Recession began we have lost an average 89,000 manufacturing jobs every month for the last two years.  Due to this dramatic constriction America has fallen below 12 million workers employed in manufacturing for the first time since 1946 and is now below levels not seen since 1941.  This dismal record portrays the stunning decline of America as a manufacturing superpower.  And while a rise in productivity has helped America maintain a prominent position in the world this has not resulted in manufacturing continuing to be an avenue for upward mobility for Americans.

So how do we re-industrialize America?  How do we get back all the jobs that have been exported in the last 30 years?  What will be the consequences of taking the bold steps necessary to make America once again the engine that drives the world’s economy?  What will be the result of failing to do so?

To set this discussion into its proper context first we must look at how America grew from a rustic agricultural nation on the edge of Western civilization into the greatest industrial superpower ever known.

In the interest of full disclosure I must confess that I am a life-long capitalist.  I believe that capitalism is the only economic system ever devised by man that requires free choice as a necessary requirement.  Every other system is either more or less a command economy.  The defense and restoration of America’s capitalist economy is today a hallmark of the conservative movement.  Many study the works of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek.  Those of us who want to see economic opportunity unshackled espouse the principles of both the Chicago and the Austrian Schools of economics as opposed to the theories of the Frankfurt School which have moved America in the direction of a centrally planned economy. 

Flying in the face of this conventional wisdom for the purposes of this discussion we must ask the question, was it capitalism that provided the environment which set America on the road to material riches and industrial power?  Culture to humans is like water to a fish.  It is everywhere.  It provides the medium through which we move.  However, since it is ever present it is not something we constantly notice or concentrate on.  Most of those who read these words were raised in a time or by people who taught American History as a positive, ever improving saga.  We were taught that America never started a war and never lost one.  We were taught that rugged individualism carved out an empire from a raw wilderness.  We were taught that capitalism paved and paid the way. 

At the hazard of being branded an apostate to conservatism I must continue to ask the question, was capitalism the catalyst for America’s industrial power or do we labor under the after-glow of a time when American History was taught in such a way as to magnify present circumstances by projecting them into the past?  Are we looking to a myth of free enterprise to recreate what it didn’t create in the first place?

Was it capitalism that fostered the founding of the colonies which became the seedbed of the United States?

Mercantilism was the economic system that proceeded capitalism in western civilization.  This was a system of economic nationalism which sought to build a strong country by maintaining a favorable balance of trade and by being self-sufficient.  This was one of the primary reasons why the sea-going European powers sought to establish colonies.  They wanted to secure sources of raw materials for their developing industrial sectors and to control external markets allowing them to produce and sell products all within their domestic economy, keeping all the gold at home.

The term mercantilism was coined by Adam Smith the philosophical father of capitalism, but it was not capitalism.  Inherently Mercantilism necessitated a centrally planned and controlled economy.  What benefitted the nation was permitted and encouraged.  What didn’t was prohibited and discouraged.  It was under this system that the English colonies were founded.  The first viable English colony in the New World, Virginia was founded by the Virginia Company a joint stock company which was given a charter by James I.  This charter, like subsequent charters given to the Massachusetts Bay Company and proprietary charters given to individuals such as William Penn and the Lords Baltimore gave these companies and individuals monopolies within specific geographic areas.  Government imposed and enforced monopolies are a restraint of trade and by nature incompatible with a free capitalist system. 

The colonies founded upon this restraint of trade followed suit giving monopolies to companies and individuals to do everything from making iron to importing. Government planning and control of the economy did not stop there.  The colonial governments also granted subsidies, bounties, land grants, loans and money prizes to encourage the birth and prosperity of the industries and services desired.  Through these actions the precursors of modern America were doing what is today reviled as inherently un-American, picking winners and losers.

If we fast forward to the founding of the United States do we find the unbridled free enterprise seen today to be the natural state of the Republic? 

In 1791 Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton issued his third path-breaking report to Congress the Report on Manufactures.  Of all his reports this one is considered the most innovative.  It provided a stark revelation of Hamilton’s and his Federalist compatriots’ vision for America and its economy.  So did this report outline an economy based upon capitalism and free enterprise?  No it did not.  This report envisions an America “independent of foreign nations for military and other essential supplies” this is the heart of a mercantilist program.  Hamilton proposed subsidies to encourage industry.  Some of the mercantilist policies advocated by Hamilton encouraged the central government:

• To constitute a fund for paying the bounties.
• To constitute a fund for a board to promote arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.  Hamilton wanted the fund to:

1. to defray the expenses of the emigration of artists, and manufacturers in particular branches of extraordinary.
2. to induce the prosecution and introduction of useful discoveries, inventions, and improvements, by proportionate rewards.
3. to encourage by premiums, both honorable and lucrative, the exertions of individuals and of classes.

The historical evidence of America’s reliance upon protectionist and economic interventionist policies as tools in the building of our greatness can be found everywhere.  The central government built, licensed, and encouraged roads and canals to foster interstate trade by providing monopolies, subsidies and grants.  It fought wars to safeguard sea lanes and to expand territory and markets.  And it birthed, regulated and controlled the financial industry from its very inception.

The incontrovertible evidence points to the fact that America was founded, launched, and nurtured as the successor to and the continuation of mercantilist not capitalist policies.

If these were the policies of economic nationalism which helped foster America’s rise to industrial greatness wouldn’t it seem appropriate for these policies to be the ones that would help it rise again?  There is only one national figure who has consistently urged a return to economic nationalism, Patrick Buchanan.  He has pointed out for years that our rush to embrace so-called free trade has put American workers at a decided disadvantage.  The dissolution of tariff protection forced our workers to compete against people who will work for a small percentage of what Americans can afford to work for in societies with little or no regulation.

How do we get back all the jobs that have been exported in the last 30 years? 

If we want to re-industrialize America we have to protect our markets and support our industry otherwise we will soon sink to a supplier of raw materials and a market to China and the other rapidly rising industrial powers of Asia. 

What will be the consequences of taking the bold steps necessary to make America once again the engine that drives the world’s economy? 

Such a policy calculated to re-build our industry and re-capture our domestic markets from China, Japan, and the four tigers of Asia will carry as many risks as it does benefits.  Just as any predator will react to resistance on the part of its prey so to if we enact tariffs on Chinese goods it may well ignite a trade war.  Then again anything worth having is worth fighting for.  If we want to once again rise to the top of the industrial world to once again have a favorable balance of trade we need to look to what is best for America not what is best for the U. N. or what is best for the globalization lobby. 

What will be the result of failing to rebuild our industrial sector?

Some may deride this proposed return to mercantilist policies as isolationism.  However, just as a nation without borders will soon cease to be a nation any nation that fails to protect and encourage its industry will find itself an agricultural and raw material colony in all but name for those nations which do.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College.  He is the author of the History of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2011 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com  Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens

THIS MUST BE PART OF OBAMA’S GREEN JOBS PROGRAM

By MIKE O’BRIEN

Is Obama abandoning his bid for a second term in the White House and is giving Colonel Sanders a run for his money by opening a chain of fried chicken joints?

Now that’s change you can’t really believe in.

But in Beijing, China, a restaurant is actually calling itself OFC with a logo that looks alarmingly like the President dressed in the colonel’s clothes.
The catchphrase underneath, apparently says ‘We’re so cool, aren’t we?’

The Obama Fried Chicken could be a response to the U.S. filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization about Chinese tariffs on American chicken exports.

According to the New York Times, the tariffs affect an industry that employs about 300,000 people and range from 50 to 100 per cent, which means some Chinese importers paid as much as twice the price for American chicken.

Maybe the Chinese have something of an Obama-chicken obsession.

Earlier this year in Hong Kong, an Obama lookalike was employed to advertize KFC.

The restaurant’s sign was first spotted by TheShanghaiist.com and picked up by msnbc.com.

There are, of course, New York versions that caused quite a stir.

There is one in Harlem and one in Brooklyn.

Some people have complained the name plays into old racial stereotypes.

Controversial: The Obama Fried Chicken joint in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn has been accused of racial stereotyping

Selling point: Obama’s name also made it way on to the awning of this fast food joint in Harlem, New York

WE KNEW THAT HE HAD THIS PLANNED AFTER HE GETS DEFEATED IN THE NEXT ELECTION.

Donald Trump has said he decided not to run for president in 2012, but the billionaire businessman could still be playing a key behind-the-scenes role in the Republican White House race.
Word is that Trump has spoken on the phone several times with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the new front-runner for the GOP nomination. Sources say Perry called the billionaire and offered high praise for Trump’s business acumen.
We hear that Trump likes Perry and the two will likely meet face to face sometime in September.
Trump has become his own “Iowa” — a must-do stopping point for all GOP candidates.
He met with former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who has yet to announce if she will seek the presidency next year. The two had a 15-minute get-together at Trump’s Manhattan penthouse on May 31.
Afterward Palin told reporters she and Trump share “our love for this country, a desire to see our economy put back on the right track,” and Trump said “I’d love her to run” for president.
Trump met earlier with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee before Huckabee decided not to run for president, and the two had a “very honest and open conversation about the process of running,” Huckabee said.
Then on July 28, Huckabee said in an email he thought the time may be ripe for Trump to re-enter the presidential race.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is also in the mix, said to be meeting with Trump in early September.
And Trump recently praised another GOP presidential candidate, Ron Paul, saying in a tweet: “Ron Paul is right that we are wasting trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Trump has said he would not run for president as a third-party candidate. But Patrick Caddell, a respected political pollster and strategist, co-wrote an op-ed piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal predicting that a third-party candidate will enter the presidential race.
The article cited a poll showing that 57 percent of voters now say there is a need for a third party, and stated that voters are seeking a leader offering “a new direction and a proven record of getting things done.”
Our sources say Caddell and Trump have been huddling at posh Trump Tower offices in New York.

Gun analysts treat motor vehicle deaths and gun deaths as events having the same properties of risk by directly comparing them with respect to rates per 100,000 of the population of the United States. Motor vehicles and guns, however, constitute dissimilar mechanisms, imposing different degrees of risk on the user. Taking account of the risk factor shows that guns are far more dangerous to gun-handlers or companions of gun handlers than motor vehicles are to occupants.
Accurate calculation of highway accident rates requires computation of the 200,000,000 licensed drivers, plus an estimated 100,000,000 passengers, who, combined, drive an average of 9,000 miles a year, creating a domain of risk of 2,700,000,000,000 miles. There were 42,031 highway deaths in 2009. Dividing 42,031 by the number of 100,000s (27,000) in the population of risk yields a rate of .000156 per 100,000 of those at risk, 98,077 times less than the 15.3. trumpeted iin gun media.
Now let’s determine the accidental death rate from guns. Multiplying the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate of 49,000,000 private households with guns by 2.7, the average number of people in a household, yields a population at risk of 132,300,000. The estimated number of accidental gun deaths is 642 (in 2006). We can now calculate the true accidental gun death rate per 100,000 at risk by dividing 642 by 1323 (the number of hundred thousands in the population of risk). The result is 0.49. The ratio of gun to highway deaths, considering the risk factor, is 3,141 to 1, not the .26 to 15.3 proclaimed by the pro-gun group. In short people in the orbit of guns have a significantly greater risk of accidental death than motor vehicle travelers.
For the complete text see my website, gungimmickry.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/business/vocational-schools-face-deep-cuts-in-federal-funding.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/07/09/business/100000000937574/hands-on-learning.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

At Guilford community college, Valan Ellerbee, in foreground, and Joe James work on manual mills.

From new roads to wise leadership,

sound financials and five-year plans,

Beijing has the winning approach.

The Wall Street Journal  July 9, 2011



Go to www.americanworking.com



A fifteen year old Amish boy and his father were in a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and then slide back together again.

The boy asked, ‘What is this Father?’
The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, ‘Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life, I don’t know what it is.’

While the boy and his father were watching with amazement, a fat old lady in a wheel chair moved up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened, and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched the small numbers above the walls light up sequentially.

They continued to watch until it reached the last number. and then the numbers began to light in the reverse order. Finally the walls opened again and a gorgeous 24-year-old blond stepped out
The father, not taking his eyes off the young woman, said quietly to his son…..
‘Go get your Mother’

Americans are at a crossroads.  Decisions must be made.

We, as a nation, need to decide, are we representative of the rugged individualism and independence or do we, as a whole, roll over and say “somebody needs to care for me, because I cant do it myself.”

We, as a nation, need to decide whether we will continue to be the policeman of the world, or do we say, “we cant do this anymore, sorry, folks, have at it amongst yourselves.” “Create what you like, regardless of what that might be.”

We, as a nation, need to decide if we want to have employment and self-determination or do we just want to go on the government dole.

We, as a nation, need to decide that being “An American” is a good thing and instills pride at the thought, a unique and successful experiment in a Republican form of government, or do we say, we are just another “member nation” of the World.

We, as a nation, need to decide if we wish to be more energy independent or do we rely on the rest of the world and their whims and simply buy energy.

We, as a nation, need to decide if we are a sovereign nation, with laws and rules created for our citizens or do we accept another’s rules and laws.

We, as a nation, need to decide who our allies are and build those ties to unbreakable, or do we simply keep sending funds, which we do not have, to anybody, regardless of their opinions of America.

We, as a nation, need to decide if we have the requisite fortitude to carry on as America, or do we say that we are too wishy-washy to make up our own minds about anything and the rest of the world needs to tell us how we think.

We, as a nation, need to decide, that as a mixture of all nationalities, our allegiance is to America alone, or are we just a landmass that hosts expatriates from all other nations of the world, with loyalty to their origins.

The time has come, no longer can we bury our heads in the sand.  We must decide.  As has been said MANY times before, “if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.”

We, as a nation, need to decide, Are we, or are we not, PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN.