CA Union Shuts Down America's Largest Ports
California may find itself in a disastrous fiscal situation, but that won’t stop California’s newly-empowered unions from flexing their muscle. In the aftermath of the failure of Proposition 32, which would have prevented public sector unions from funding politicians, the unions are celebrating their confirmed power by striking. The latest strikes started today with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63, which shut down the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the busiest ports in the United States.
Even though November traffic remains slow at the ports, that doesn’t mean the economic effect will be mitigated. These ports handle approximately 40% of America’s imports.
Shockingly, the strike doesn’t include dockworkers – it’s just the clerical staff at the union, which has now set up picket lines at the terminals at the Port of Los Angeles. The 50,000-member union supports the strikers; 10,000 dockworkers did refuse to cross the picket lines.
While the unions are shutting down America’s port traffic, they refuse to speak to the media. According to theLos Angeles Times, “The union fell back on a statement released Tuesday evening and had no further comment Wednesday.”
There were no specific demands by the union; their only statement decried “corporate greed and outsourcing.” No wonder so many companies are outsourcing, when unions shut down their ports of entry. The 14 employers negotiating with the unions contend they haven’t outsourced any jobs, and had even proposed “absolute job security” and both wage and pension increases in a rotten economy.
The last lockout of this sort took place in 2002. It cost the economy some $15 billion.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/29/CA-unions-shut-down-nation-largest-ports
Solar firm that got $26M in Miss. loans is closing
Mississippi taxpayers may have only an empty Senatobia building and some solar panel equipment to show for nearly $26 million in loans provided to Twin Creeks Technologies.The California-based solar technology firm is liquidating, and a company that bought Twin Creeks' assets does not intend to take over its agreement with Mississippi. The contract called for Twin Creeks to invest at least $132 million and create at least 500 jobs.
The Mississippi Development Authority's Kathy Gelston says officials are negotiating for Twin Creeks to repay aid above the value of the building and equipment.
Lenders sold Twin Creeks' technology for $10 million to GT Advanced Technologies of Nashua, N.H., in mid-November. Gelston says Twin Creeks received about $3 million from the sale, but says there are creditors beyond Mississippi.
http://www.wlox.com/story/20220865/solar-firm-that-got-26m-in-miss-loans-is-closing
Gitmo North returns: Obama’s shady prison deal
by Michelle Malkin
If you thought President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder hadgiven up on closing Guantanamo Bay and bringing jihadists to American soil, think again. Two troubling developments on the Gitmo front should have every American on edge.
The first White House maneuver took place in October, while much of the public and the media were preoccupied with election news. On Oct. 2, Obama’s cash-strapped Illinois pals announced that the federal governmentbought out the Thomson Correctional Center in western Illinois for $165 million. According to Watchdog.Org, a recent appraisal put the value of the facility at$220 million.
Democratic Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin led the lobbying campaign for the deal, along with Illinois Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn, who is overseeing an overall $43 billion state budget deficit and scraping for every available penny. The Thomson campus has been an empty Taj Mahal for more than a decade because profligate state officials had no money for operations. Economic development gurus (using the same phony math of federal stimulus peddlers) claim the newly federalized project will bring in $1 billion.
Sen. Durbin told a local Illinois paper that “the decision to move ahead came directly from President Barack Obama” and that he had secured the green light during a discussion on Air Force One earlier in the spring. But this gift to Obama’s Illinois homeboys wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill campaign favor.
Obama’s unilateral and unprecedented decision steamrolled over bipartisan congressional opposition to the purchase. That opposition dates back to 2009, when the White House firstfloated the idea of using Thomson to house jihadi enemy combatants detained in Cuba. As you may recall, the scheme caused a national uproar. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department’s budget, blocked the administration from using unspent DOJ funds for the deal. With bipartisan support, Congress passed a law barring the transfer of Gitmo detainees to Thomson or any other civilian prison.
The message was clear: Taxpayers don’t want manipulative Gitmo detainees or their three-ring circuses of transnationalist sympathizers and left-wing lawyers on American soil. Period.
But when this imperial presidency can’t get its way in the court of public opinion, it simply circumvents the deliberative process. As Rep. Wolf noted: The shady deal “directly violates the clear objection of the House Appropriations Committee and goes against the bipartisan objections of members in the House and Senate, who have noted that approving this request would allow Thomson to take precedence over previously funded prisons in Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia and New Hampshire.”
Obama and his Illinois gang insist that Thomson will not become Gitmo North. But denial is more than a river in the Muslim Brotherhood’s homeland.
The 9/11 Families for a Safe and Secure America, which spearheaded the movement against shipping jihadi detainees to the mainland, exposed the fine print of the Obama DOJ’s deal with the state of Illinois. The purpose of the Thomson facility acquisition, according to the DOJ notice filed in the D.C. courts, included this clause:
“… as well as to provide humane and secure confinement of individuals held under authority of any Act of Congress, and such other persons as in the opinion of the Attorney General of the United States are proper subjects for confinement in such institutions.”
Guess whom that covers? Yup: Gitmo detainees, who are being held under the congressional act known as the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2001.
Now, bear all this is mind as you consider the second and more recent Gitmo gambit. On Wednesday, in response to a whistleblowing report from Fox News homeland security reporter Catherine Herridge, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) released a General Accounting Office report exploring the feasibility of transferring the Gitmo gang to civilian prisons.
Lo and behold, Feinstein concluded, the report “demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantanamo without imperiling our national security.”
The “political will” does not exist now nor has it ever. But thanks to Obama’s sneaky, back-door misappropriation of government funds to buy Thomson, the feds have exactly what they need to fulfill the progressive-in-chief’s Gitmo closure promise: a shiny, turn-key palace in crony land tailor-made for union workers, lawyers, and terror plotters to call their new home.
When the War on Terror meets the Chicago Way, we all pay.
http://michellemalkin.com/2012/11/30/gitmo-north-returns-obamas-shady-prison-deal/
Obama's opening "fiscal cliff" bid seeks debt limit hike, stimulus
House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.
The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements,to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.
He did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports, but did not specify an amount or any details. And senior Republican aides familiar with the offer saidthose initial spending cuts might well be outnumbered by upfront spending increases, including at least $50 billion in infrastructure spending, mortgage relief, an extension of unemployment insurance and a deferral of automatic cuts to physician reimbursements under Medicare…
[T]he details show how far the president is ready to push House Republicans. The upfront tax increases in the proposal go beyond what Senate Democrats were able to pass earlier this year. Tax rates would go up for higher-income earners, as in the Senate bill, but Mr. Obama wants their dividends to be taxed as ordinary income,something the Senate did not approve. He also wants the estate tax to be levied at 45 percent on inheritances over $3.5 million,a step several Democratic senators balked at. The Senate bill made no changes to the estate tax, which currently taxes inheritances over $5 million at 35 percent.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/30/us-usa-fiscal-offer-idUSBRE8AT02C20121130
Krauthammer On Fiscal Cliff Negotiations: "Republicans Ought To Simply Walk Away"
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It's not just a bad deal, this is really an insulting deal. What Geithner offered, what you showed on the screen, Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox, and he lost the Civil War. The Democrats won by 3% of the vote and they did not hold the House, Republicans won the house. So this is not exactly unconditional surrender, but that is what the administration is asking of the Republicans.
This idea -- there are not only no cuts in this, there's an increase in spending with a new stimulus. I mean, this is almost unheard of. What do they expect? They obviously expect the Republicans will cave on everything. I think the Republicans ought to simply walk away. The president is the president. He's the leader. They are demanding that the Republicans explain all the cuts that they want to make.
We had that movie a year-and-a-half ago where Paul Ryan presented a budget, a serious real budget with real cuts. Obama was supposed to gave speech where he would respond with a counter offer. And what did he do? He gave a speech where he had Ryan sitting in the front row. He called the Ryan proposal un-American, insulted him, offered nothing, and ran on Mediscare in the next 18 months.
And they expect the Republicans are going to do this again? The Republicans are going to walk on this. And I think they have leverage. Yes, for Congressional Democrats it will help them in the future if Republicans absorb the blame because we will have a recession. But Obama is not running again unlike the Congressional Democrats. He's going to have a recession, 9% unemployment, 2 million more unemployed, and a second term that's going to be a ruin. That is not a good proposition if you are Barack Obama.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/11/29/krauthammer_on_fiscal_cliff_negotiations_republicans
No Time to Give Up in the Fiscal Fight
By Mark Davis
If I keep reading the advice of those who are saying we should give Barack Obama what he wants, let him take the American economy into the quicksand and make him own it, I am going to be tempted to agree.
So I’m going to stop reading such things.
With respect to those who offer that strategy, it is flawed on multiple levels. It may not work, it would confuse people about what conservatism is and what it does, and it would slam the brakes on our most valuable passion right now-- the desire to save what we can of America during this perilous second Obama term.
So, if you are in the mood, this is a call to battle.
The Obama win and the GOP Senate failures were like a tranquilizer dart to the neck, draining the will of millions of conservatives, and plenty of Republicans in Congress.
But we are starting to slowly awaken, and if we play our cards right, we can stand on core values and still look at ourselves in the mirror, win or lose.
I understand the appeal of an argument that says, “Okay, Mr. President. You won. You want this ship? Steer it into the rocks and we’ll be there to fix it afterward. Maybe then people will hear what we have to say.”
Except maybe they will, maybe they won’t. The notion of the public flocking to Republicans for rescue is a hard sell. Didn’t we kind of think they would do it this year?
Americans generally believe spending is out of control. We did not like the stimulus. We still don’t like Obamacare. November 6 was the perfect opportunity to turn to Republicans for relief from all three headaches.
It didn’t happen.
So now we think we’ll enjoy a popularity burst for throwing up our hands when the going gets tough?
And here’s the tricky thing: what if we let the Obama agenda roll and the expected disasters do not exactly happen?
Make no mistake, I know this second term is the worst news our economy could get. We should not be surprised to see America swirl even more deeply into the fiscal toilet.
But what if our system displays its occasional pesky resilience, and unemployment stays right where it is, or maybe only a tick or two worse? What if the stock market goes up another 3000 points by the 2014 elections? Markets rebounded strongly in 2009 and 2010 even as the fangs of Obama’s policies sank in.
Welcome to the worst conservative nightmare-- an American economy spunky enough to strain against the shackles of Obama, managing a glimmer of health just barely sufficient to fend off the stain of failure we would need for this grand experiment in surrender to succeed.
So as attractive as it sounds to abandon the post-election battlefield so that Obama can “own” the result, the risks are unacceptable.
That would seem highly unlikely. Still high on the adrenaline buzz of an election that seemed to smile on their big-government aspirations, Democrats are not in the mood to make deals.
Fine. Then let them be judged by that.
I know the media will paint any dark result as the fault of Republicans. Let them. It is time to stop worrying what the media say or how young and non-white voters might recoil at first.
We must do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. Only then can we go to those
voters we so deeply want to attract and say that we did it for them. They may not have appreciated it, but when we refused to let spending get even more obscene, we said no, and we did it for all Americans.
When we say no to further milking of top earners, we do it not to protect the Bentleys in their garages, but to protect the jobs they create with the money we let them keep.
Republicans lost in 2012 because we did a poor job of teaching voters why we are right. We are up against growing generations of people who are not learning life lessons from intact families instilling virtues of work and self-reliance. They are learning from government schools, liberal colleges and a twisted popular culture.
We will not deserve their attention if we have to explain how we gave up the fight in 2012 because the fight got hard. We will not deserve their respect if we fold our arms in a petulant tantrum and dare the Democrats to ruin the country so we can score an I told you so.
With Democrat heels dug in, the only common ground will be found when Republicans cave on core principles.
So let’s refuse to do that. This is not the last so-called fiscal cliff we will face. The second Obama term will feature deadline after deadline and crisis after crisis, all accompanied by Democrats and the media condemning us for our our refusal to give in to ideas that will only worsen the economy.
The first step toward earning public trust is to lead by example, even when the march is hard. It does not get much harder than right now. But wherever events lead, I want a Republican party that faces voters in 2014 toughened by fighting the good fight, proud of the stands we took, unwilling to buckle for political expediency but always ready to work with anyone who wants to work with us.
http://townhall.com/columnists/markdavis/2012/11/30/no_time_to_give_up_in_the_fiscal_fight
More Evidence the Government is Running a Giant Ponzi Scheme
The U.S. birth rate just hit a new low which has liberal media outlets likeNPR pointing out that Medicare and Social Security are in trouble as a result. Why? Because the program isn't being paid for with money former workers put into the system, that's already been spent by the government, but by young people currently working.
The U.S. birth rate hit an all-time low last year, according to a report from the Pew Research Center — just 63 births per 1000 women of childbearing age.
This is a problem. Not just because there is less chubby-cuteness in the country. But also, as I reported earlier this month, fewer babies now means fewer working-age people a couple decades from now. And that means fewer workers helping to pay for programs like Medicare and Social Security that support the elderly.
This is the government's definition of aPonzi Scheme:
What is a Ponzi scheme?
A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns with little or no risk. In many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors and to use for personal expenses, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity.
Why do Ponzi schemes collapse?
With little or no legitimate earnings, the schemes require a consistent flow of money from new investors to continue. Ponzi schemes tend to collapse when it becomes difficult to recruit new investors or when a large number of investors ask to cash out.
Naturally because new workers (declining in number) are paying for the benefits of retirees, the system is going to collapse. The original intentions of Social Security and Medicare were to take money out of people's paychecks and "save" it for them until retirement. Today that isn't the case and younger generations are shouldering the burden of the government's poor decisions and actions to spend Social Security and Medicare money on other things.
Do You Secretly Hate The Rich?
We’re all just wasting our time until we finally work up the “politically incorrect” courage to say that economic bigotry isn’t something we should tolerate from anyone, whether they’re conservative, liberal, libertarian, or anything else. Economic bigotry is so common, it’s seeped into the rhetoric
even of the capitalists who supposedly embrace every economic “class”.
So what is an “economic bigot”? Anyone who thinks it’s fine to steal from the rich but not the middle class. Anyone who thinks the rich should pay a higher rate of taxes than anyone else. Anyone who thinks that “middle class” is somehow a better background than “rich parents”.
Screw that. It’s disgusting, it’s weird, and it’s based on the new infatuation of people to obsess over bending over backwards so the most radical leftists will possibly be more “open” our view. It’s so common and “normal” now that it’s getting difficult for us to even see it happen. Look at any “fire them up” speech, and you’ll see the “middle class” glorified and the “upper class” ignored — at best.
It’s fine that the rich get richer with capitalism. That’s awesome. It’s wonderful. It’s also good because other people also are better off. Everyone sees their incomes go up. Everyone. Because remember, whatever is good for the middle class is going to be good for the poor and the rich as well. And that’s GOOD. Being in one income group doesn’t mean you have extra rights. It doesn’t mean you’re more important. That’s absurd.
That’s why we shouldn’t focus only on rhetoric of “well, we need more middle class jobs!” It’s not necessary and it creates invisible “class warfare” narratives in the minds of the listener.
So here’s to capitalism, to EVERYONE it helps, which includes the people with the huge houses, the expensive private schools, the private jets, and the luxurious lifestyles we’re trained to hate — because they have identical natural rights as anyone else.
By playing along with the Marxist word games, we’re just selling the socialists the rope they plan on hanging us with.
So next time someone says something negative about someone because their parents were successful, or they have millions of dollars they can spend on anything they want, or they have a car that is as expensive as some houses, just look them in the eye and say, “I know, isn’t that great? It should be more common.”
Down with every ounce of Marxism, whether in policy or rhetoric. If we don’t stop caving to every new angle of the left, we’re just wasting our time.
http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/hate-the-rich/
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