Goldfinger’s Law: Obama Claims He’s Not Anti-Business, But His Policies Give Him Away
The Obama administration regularly protests that it is not anti-business, and of course we take them at their word. But what then to make of the administration’s actions through the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency?
Early in the administration, Carol Browner, the environmental “czar,” made it clear that the EPA intended to move ahead with identifying carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant under the federal Clear Air Act, which would then allow the EPA to issue regulations on CO2 emissions, requiring permits before new CO2 emitters could be licensed. Taken to their logical conclusion, these regulations could result in homeowners needing a federal permit to install a new fireplace or build an outdoor grill.
The release of the Climategate files last year, and the recent landslide in Congress, made a formal CO2 regulatory “cap and trade” program politically impossible, but that didn’t slow the EPA — even though the discredited IPCC report was explicitly used as justification for CO2 regulation. The EPA announced regulatory guidelines for greenhouse gases, as they prepare for the new permitting process that is supposed to take effect on January 2, 2011 — less than two months from today.
This new permitting process will affect most large industry in the U.S. Like every regulatory process, it imposes costs on the businesses that need the permits. What’s worse, however, is that the additional load on the EPA’s bureaucrats, along with the problems of turning the “guidance” into real regulatory decisions, will mean that the regulation process itself will slow to a crawl. Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, noted in a statement that:
Internal EPA sources have … conceded that it will be two years before EPA can start making permit determinations. In this period, the energy and manufacturing sectors will essentially be in a construction moratorium … .
Now add to that some of the regulatory actions that occurred following last summer’s Gulf oil-well blowout. The Department of the Interior issued a six-month moratorium on deep water drilling in the Gulf — which was promptly struck down by the courts. Unwilling to see a little thing like a court order get in their way, Interior promptly issued a new moratorium, based in part on a scientific review.
Except the scientists and engineers who had provided technical input on the report immediately protested that the conclusions issued in the report weren’t the conclusions they had drawn. The Department of the Interior had to back off and issue an apology.
That report is back in the news this week, as the inspectors general at the Department of the Interior issued their own report, finding that political considerations had led the Department of the Interior to overstate the science.
In the meantime, Interior has issued new regulations and a new permitting process for deep-water drilling in the Gulf; so far, it doesn’t appear that any new drilling has been approved under these regulations.
That hasn’t been the only impact on oil production. More traditional shallow water drilling has also been brought to a near-complete stop, not through an explicit change in policy, but simply by slowing the permitting process. The effect is that there has been a nearly complete moratorium on drilling — shallow water or deep — in the Gulf. Similar problems are slowing or stopping oil exploration in Alaska.
Of course, the effect on drilling companies has been dramatic. Many companies have simply moved their rigs away from the United States, looking for more congenial locations. The financial impact has been immense. This week, Seahawk Drilling, a smaller drilling company based in Houston, quoted their president and CEO, Randall Stilley:
Due to dramatic delays in the issuing of shallow water drilling permits in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico resulting from the Macondo well blowout, as well as the continued low prices for natural gas and the economic slowdown, Seahawk’s liquidity and operations have been adversely affected. As previously announced, we have engaged Simmons & Company International to explore strategic alternatives for the company in order to examine all possible options to best realize the potential of our assets and maximize value to our shareholders.
Translated from the special lingo of financial statements, that’s “the slow-down in drilling permits has so impaired our business that we’re looking to sell assets in order to survive.”
The Obama administration wants people to believe that they are not anti-business, but their environmental policies alone are wiping out small businesses, and promise to stall large projects waiting for regulatory approval, probably for years.
Ian Fleming, through his character Auric Goldfinger, proposed this law: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Maybe Barokeydoke is just blind queer for anAL GOREtentive
And when The One was campaigning for President (before he was elected, that is) his stated energy policy was;
1. “If anyone tries to operate a coal-fired powerplant, we will bankrupt them.” (Pretty clear, no ambiguity there.)
2. “We’ll look at nuclear power.” (Translates to “..,. But we won’t actually do anything about it”. Then he closed Yucca Flats with the help of Harry Reid. Also pretty unambiguous.)
3. “We want to get America off petroleum.” (Also pretty clear.)
The One believes in Holy Wind and Holy Sun, period. Or, better yet, no energy of any sort. His Utopian dream is a world in which no energy is necessary, because we are all living like peasants in the 4th century BC. Which probably explains his infatuation with Doric columns behind him when he speaks. Not to mention why he hired Steven Chu to run the Department of Energy.
The One’s attitude toward our civilization is rather like Goldfinger’s attitude toward 007 when he had him strapped down under the laser;
Bond; “Do you expect me to talk?”
Goldfinger; “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to DIE!”
clear ether
eon
What can I say? This was patently obvious to anyone paying attention before the election. It was no mystery! Unfortunately, countless numbers of Americans wanted to prove “I am not a racist.” Well-documented evidence was simply ignored. We are also suffering from the myth that the typical Ivy League graduate has a few working brain cells in their head. This is usually true only regarding those who earned hard science degrees. Most of the Ivy Leaguers are politically correct, utopian jerks. They are also inclined to embrace economic doctrines that flatter them. It is most pleasing to be told by the progeny of John Maynard Keynes and John Maynard Galbraith that you are intellectually brilliant, warm and wonderful—and should be running everything. These folks instinctively gravitate toward crony capitalism and soft totalitarianism.
We are in deep trouble. The “elites” chose Obama because he could manipulate guilt tripped whites into voting for him. They probably also thought he was a bit smarter than he actually is. It is now dawning on them—that Obama is really way over his head. He is not even close to being able to handle the responsibilities of the presidency.
David, I believe we have been chasing shadows
As you intimate, we are all missing the bigger picture. We keep frittering around the edges of it all and coming to wrong conclusions.
We are in an either/or situation.
Either Stanley Kurtz and David Horowitz are unserious nutjobs, tinfoil hat conspiracy wacko, Oliver Stone crazy…or we are swinging and missing at the wrong pitch. Two books, Radical-In-Chief and The Shadow Party respectively, outline a roadmap for what is taking place in this land of ours. And like the silly joke about the guy who dropped his car keys in the dark, but keeps looking under the streetlamp, because that’s where the light is, we are never going to get to the right answers until we start asking the right questions.
It has become more and more apparent that crisis socialism and the shadow party that is working the marionette strings behind it, have their game face on. We are still in the locker room putting on our socks.
1)They create a fiscal crisis, couch it in “protection of the little guy” terms, give it a soft sounding organizational name and then use it to tear down capitalism, utilizing the very tenets necessary to survive and thrive in a free market society. And no, it is not enough to say “Alinsky tactics” and believe that amounts to an understanding of the depth and breadth of this movement.
2) When the “capitalist” free market system gets pounded with its own rulebook, and can’t respond swiftly enough, they storm the gates with race hucksters, gender hucksters, ethnic hucksters. There is a whole cottage industry of hucksterism, that makes its money on doing two things. They make sure that their “little guy” feels like he is being put down…and they keep him down. This does not work without the anger of “victims”. Therefore, victims have to constantly be created, often out of whole cloth. More importantly, victims have to be kept down as victims. There is no anger when victimization is “cured”.
Like the primordial slime in Ghostbusters, crisis socialism feeds off negative energy. This, not any phony “compassion” is the real reason that racism will not be “cured” in this country. The crisis socialists need “racism” like Audrey II needs blood to grow and thrive. It does not matter one whit whether it exists or does not exist, they will pick someone or something, anyone or anything, Karl Rove or Fred Barnes, the Republican Party or the Tea Party, and call them racists. They will never let this wound heal because they need to keep it infected. They will pick at this scab until it bleeds.
3)When things get too hot in the kitchen for the crisis socialists, when the dunderheaded Republicans get too close, the crisis socialists will find a “wedge issue” and throw it into the mix. And, lo and behold…the dummies bite on it every time. Without exception.
The crisis socialists feed off the resulting anger, they whip up their “little guy” victims and say “See, THEY hate you!”. And off we go, down some stupid blind alley, on some stupid issue that doesn’t mean squat and deflects attention away from the wholesale invasion and further deterioration of free market society.
4)This crappy, bumbling, fumbling, rank amateur administration hasn’t passed a budget, knew for years that the current tax RATES (not “Bush tax cuts”, only an imbecile would use that term), were set to expire. That’s right, we have no budget and we have no answer for what our tax rates are going to be. How can any sound business forecast under those circumstances? They can’t. That’s the point.
It’s a crisis creation and it has the effect of destroying budget forecasting. Ask who Harry Boyte is. Or Heather Booth. Or Bob Creamer. Or what George Soros has done in five countries.
And yet, what is the one, single, solitary issue that Pelosi wants to raise in the lame duck session? Right, the DREAM Act. Wedge issue. Bite on that, America.
5)Unions, especially “government employee” unions…have become the Workers’ Party. There is no denying that, they are so tied to crisis socialism that it is impossible to tell where ACORN begins and the SEIU ends. They are the same plate of spaghetti.
Right now, union “benefits” along with the ACORN created mortgage meltdown, the trial lawyers frivolous attacks on healthcare and manufacturing, and the phony “green” industry have combined to make us incapable of competing in a global marketplace. They don’t “protect” nearly as much as they destroy. The “immigration” fiasco is the coup de grace. I put quotes in “immigration” because that is not what it is when people crash your borders and hide out in your country. It’s a home invasion, but we are too lazy to care about the meaning of words.
6) We are disrespected around the world and cannot get anything done. When your view of this land of ours is one requiring deep bows, abject apologies and genuflection to the rest of the world, when you run around treating this land as a doormat, you are hard pressed to complain when the rest of the world wipes their feet on you.
We are not simply devaluing our currency, we are devaluing our brand. “American” policy, goods, services, culture, ingenuity, and yes, exceptionalism, used to command respect and admiration. Even from those who envied us or wanted to take a shot at us. No longer. We have bowed and scraped our way to mediocrity in two short years. We say we are nothing special, no more so than the Brits or the Greeks or anyone else and then wonder why people treat us as nothing special.
We have single-handedly destroyed the Mideast peace process by insisting that Israel not build homes in its own capital. A foreign policy move so inane, clumsy and foolish, even the opposing side slapped its forehead and said, “Where do you want me to go from here?”
We are clumsy, fumbling, bumbling amateurs on a world stage, greeting each passing day with piled on humiliation after humiliation.
And Nancy Pelosi and her cadre of fellow travelers threw a party in their own honor. Heaven knows, we have so little left, they might as well congratulate themselves on a job well done.
And virtually every one of these above six items, destroying our nation from the inside, is pushed by the far left Democratic Party, hidden by the media in their pocket and run in the shadows by the former SDS, Weathermen, ACORN and SEIU thugs, sponsored by Soros and his ilk and we keep wondering about things like whether Obama is a centrist. We will be fed a consistent stream of lies and distortions via the secret society of Journolistas and in the NYTImes, informally known as the Daily Duranty.
If we are not serious enough to stop using their subliminal terms and phrases, if we are too lazy to care enough to understand the real issues and only want to scratch a millimeter beneath the surface, then we will get precisely what we have coming. A secret, shadow, distorted, hidden agenda government that has absolutely no interest in anything other than the implementation against our will of a socialist Utopian, “for our own good” brand of crammed down legislation and from the bench fiats.
California is the canary in the coal mine. Except the coal mine has been shuttered. California is dead, long live California. The unions and the crisis socialists own it, lock, stock and barrel. Ignore it at your peril.
Again, either Stanley Kurtz and David Horowitz are completely nuts or it high time we stop asking the wrong questions and stop settling for the inane answers we have been receiving.
cf, I agree with absolutely everything you wrote. I have not yet gotten Stanley Kurtz’s book but it is next on my list. I remember when he was investigating The One in Chicago before the election and the machine threw barricades in front of him every step of the way. I am a big admirer of his scholarship.
How is it possible that the House has not passed 1 single appropriations bill (13 are required) for fiscal 2011 that it is legally mandated to do and yet no dinosaur media outlet reports this brazen irresponsibility? Rather, they report what an historically successful Speaker Mdme Pelosi has been. It is the most cynical abrogation of responsibility I can recall and it was done entirely to shield the Dems from the political fallout of producing a budget with a massive deficit before the election that would have been used against them. (They probably saved themselves 15 or 20 house seats and couple of senate seats as a result.) Was there a single story about this cowardice before the election?
Preparing for the next election begins now and we need another wave to rid ourselves of the RINO go-along-to-get-along types as well as a majority of the remaining Dems up for re-election. This past election cycle has provided a blueprint for how an engaged electorate can substantially influence the makeup and therefore policy of our elected officials. It is our only hope, along with more illumination of the behind the scenes deeds and tactics of the corrupt shadow government which Mr Soros and his ilk have been financing the past couple of years.
It is most pleasing to be told by the progeny of John Maynard Keynes and John Maynard Galbraith…
One small nit, David. Galbraith’s middle name was Kenneth, not Maynard.
Well, you can believe that obama has manipulated and suckered the “elites” or you can believe that he is their creature. Or I guess if you are really brain dead, you can believe that he is just a normal politician.
The first is certainly possible. Nobody is easier to sell something to than a salesman. Nobody appreaciates a jock more than another jock.
But it seems more likely that Obama is a creature of our new international aristocracy, who recognized that multi-racial, multi-national, multi-religious, multi-sexual, multi-ethical, multi-ideological clay was pretty good clay to work with, particularly after pummeling the American public with multi-culturalism for decades. There is overwhelming evidence that the man has been aided and abetted at every stage of his fantasy ‘career’. If he conned the Ruling Class, in addition to conning the Oprah-ized public with the Ruling Class’s help, then he is a con of epic proportions.
The way I see it, he is a slightly above average slime-ball who has been molded at every stage by people a lot smarter than he is. Now that he has been lifted up to the most prestigous position in the world, he is convinced that he got there through his own genius. a) He is delusional, at best; and b) The people who put him there so as to elevate themselves are beginning to regret the Obamastein they created.
obama cannot stop lying. it is what defines him.
“Three times is enemy action.” You betcha.
Actions speak louder than words. Every day, Obama tells us what he purportedly thinks or feels, aka “his message.” Every day, he shows his true beliefs and intentions through his actions … or inactions. He’s declared war on the proud and the productive: innovators, business, conservatives and independents, proponents of small government, etc. As you so cogently point out, much of this war takes form as regulatory and bureaucratic guerilla action, behind the scenes, out of the limelight.
The energy industry is about more than business and consumption, it’s about independence, autonomy and the ability to defend ourselves in a volatile world. If BHO has his way, he will gut the energy industry, burden an already weak economy with high energy costs, and effectively cripple both businesses and individuals.
I can see a time in the not-so-distant future where the energy industry becomes the next government takeover target, “for the good of the country.” He is a very dangerous man.
Obama wants his electric cars, but never quite says how we’re going to get the energy to power all these electric cars. Oh, that’s right, he will destroy our domestic energy industry so that we’ll have to pay more for electricity. If he can’t get it through cap and trade in Congress, he’ll do it through the EPA. So folks, did you ever stop to think that if energy prices skyrocket, you may save a little money not having to buy gas for that electric car, but you’re electrical costs for powering that electric car will also skyrocket? Seems that, under Obama, the American consumer just can’t win.
Fuel prices dues to “real” inflation of the dollar, not to mention the upcoming inflation have already driven prices up to the $3.00 per gallon range, look for them to go past the $4.00 and above in the next six months.
Today November 13 2010 gas prices in Nashville and surrounding areas average $2.76
May 1 2011 gas prices in Nashville and surrounding areas $4.98
“I’m all about business, I place no limits on business as long as it fits within this box right here. It can’t be longer than this, or taller than this, or wider than this and it can’t make more money than this, or it falls into my “too big to fail” policy which commands government controls. It can’t ‘not’ be green and it can’t ‘not’ be union, it can’t ‘not’ be a democratic supporter as a collective, corporate officers can’t make over what ever my pay czar says they can make, the body of employees have to include a significant representation of every democratic demographic and they have to have a say in how much they make beyond what government demands and what benefits they get and in corporate policy. Beyond these few basic necessities business may do as they please.”
Obama and his looney left cohorts are anti-prosperity and the creative independance that makes is happen. In their view, we should all be perpetual minors dependant on the government to think for us and provide for us. I suspect that viewpoint is some kind of mental illness that belongs to control freaks.
Just because the looney left can not do without some nanny telling them what to do, does not mean the rest of us suffer from the same affliction.
Too bad they can’t grow up to the real world. They are a living nuisance.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
These words predate Ian Flemming’s books. Captain W.E. Johns, author of childrens’ books about the wartime pilot, Biggles, had Biggles use these words, that I thought were very good at the time, and never forgot.
They are indeed. The Biggles books have disappeared from general availability, by the way. I suspect they were to un-PC.
Yes, the whole oil saga leaves me wondering what the real agenda is.
I have it from sources I am inclined to believe, that just off the Alaskan coast, some already drilled and capped, is enough oil to keep the US going for 20 years, or more.
Apparently, Obama’s utopian bubble economics do not sell well on the world stage of G-20. He received a ‘no deal’ and a ‘no way’ in every direction from the nations of trillion dollar business. Will that pursuade him from diluting the currency markets?
This EPA business is illustrative of the greatest danger of the marxist administration. Sure, the Health Care Scam is the poster child of destruction with the stick-it-to-us a close second, but we can’t even begin to imagine the damage that has already been done in the bowels of the 4 trillion dollar bureaucracy, no matter what is to come over the next 2 years. These criminals have waited all of their lives for their chance to punish us and force us into serfdom, and haven’t by any means restricted themselves to legislation. And they won’t stop just because of a landslide of public outrage either. It means nothing to them. Nothing.
It will take a generation, at least, to get the country back to normal. The regulation infrasturcture has been contorted beyond imagination and there are hundreds of bombs waiting to explode in the country’s face over the next several decades.
The “malignant” part of malignant narcissist is there for a reason.
This is one of the reasons why it is essential in the next election that the tea party keep the heat on and more good conservative thinking reps and senators get elected along with an acceptable R president. On the list of things to get done should be legislative boundary setting of the EPA, scaling back the scope of Clean Air and Clean Water Acts to the originally intended boundaries and specifically excluding CO2 from regulation. Eliminate Environmental Impact Statements for projects smaller than X. I’d be happy to eliminate the EPA entirely but that may be a bridge too far politically. We need to accelerate the removal of the entrenched and malignant bureaucratic interests when the chance arises.
Two writers at the Washington Post have taken the position that if President Obama wants to be remembered as a great President he must limit himself to one term. The writers are Patrick H. Caddell, who was a pollster and senior adviser to President Carter and Douglas E. Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Clinton. According to the article,
I can’t offhand recall any previous instance when two former workers for a former Democratic Party President have taken such a public stance in a normally Democratic Party supporting major newspaper. I doubt that President Obama will take their advice and suspect that if it should be brought to his attention he will be outraged. His outrage may extend to former President Clinton, whose wife would probably like to replace him, and former President Carter who has of late been less than fully supportive – despite the glorious prospect of seizing “the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again,” which would certainly feed his hubris.
On another front, CBS has an interesting story on potty training an infant. The article provides no answers but says,
Moreover, Dr. Phil has taken a stand foursquare (more or less) against bullying.
CF. You are not wrong.
Garet Garrett, in his excellent if slightly obscure essay on the New Deal called The Revolution Was, demonstrates how the American public were tricked out of their wealth and thus power, back in the 1930s. And the same principles appear to be in use now.
Part of that trickery was pretending to be fighting the Depression ‘all the way’ while actually creating it, deliberately causing it.
He points out that every step taken, if viewed in terms of trying to solve the problem, might be seen as incompetence, or unfortunate accidents, or just inadequate attempts to solve a very bad problem.
But if one views the steps that were taken as moves to enslave the American population, then they made perfect sense.
His article is at: http://mises.org/daily/2726
And yes, those who would resist this slavery are to an extent, ineffectively flailing their arms in the air as they use the terminology and “narrative” established by the enemies of freedom as they try to deal with them.
Well, at least the Tea Partiers are getting it half right!
John B
Thank You for the reference/link to “The Revolution Was” it is a very good Read.
This is a great article. I have read Michael Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty and Craig R. Smith’s Crashing the Dollar which explain in great details Obama’s polices about business in general. Mr. Obama is anti business in general and never backed away from a tax hike he did not like. How can you trust a president like this when two of his biggest influences in his life were Frank Marshall Davis and Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s book Rules for Radical was dedicated to Lucifer himself. Obama is one man not to be trusted. I know him and his croonies want to destroy this country from the inside out. Obama did say he was a citizen of the world and not American Citizen. This statement alone explains who he really is. He is the Macbeth Shakesphere wrote about in this great book.
No. No. A thousand times, No. Barack, don’t you see, is our philosopher king…er…president.
When Obama leaves office he will have cost the country tens of millions of lifetimes of effort and have donated tens of millions more in the form of issuing bonds against the full faith and credit of the children of America.
Assuming that we can get the Chicago thugs out of Washington without an exchange of nuclear weapons the country will be stuck with twice the debt of all the wars in history and many times infrastructure the damage to the United States that bombing did to Germany and Japan in WWII. In addition we will be the Jews forced to live with the NAZIs still walking among us.
On the Pro side the next thirty years will be the most economically dynamic in history and maintaining the top down fascist New York media of the twentieth century is already impossible and will soon wither.
The Con side has the debt, the damage to infrastructure and business and the brain dead zombies still walking around who voted for these creatures and give money to Serra Club and Peta.
It is a good thing the world badly needs a hundred million extra women.
In addition we will be the Jews forced to live with the NAZIs still walking among us.
One big difference, though, and it makes all the difference. This time the Jews will be armed. The #1 unintended consequence of the Obama regime (even before the election) has been the re-arming of everyday Americans and re-discovery of the 2nd Amendment. As of June 2008 I’d never owned a single gun. Now I have two, and a CCW card to boot.
Another unintended consequence — though it actually started under Bush — has been the revival of state sovereignty and the doctrines of interposition and nullification. And that is where the ultimate solution to the EPA’s madness lies. State legislatures must do to the EPA what more than a dozen have already done to the ATF — enact laws effectively nullifying their asinine regulations. The tactic has already worked; Bush’s hideous “Real ID” Act, though still on the books, is dead in the water because fully half of the states have refused to go along with it.
This action by the EPA is nothing new. The EPA should have had its wings clipped decades ago but continues to wield an inordinate amount of power to create havoc and reverse the natural progression of industrial development and all of its proven benefits to social development. Yes, there have been abuses, some more egregious than others and, human nature being as imperfect as it is and will likely remain, these will no doubt continue and need resolution. The EPA, as it is presently structured, is one such abuse and urgently in need of resolution.
That this present situation exists at all is the result of legislative bodies of every political stripe being completely unable or unwilling to face what has become a hydra headed monster.
The environment is important and needs protection. We get it; got it a long time ago; no longer need sledge hammer blows to our knees as reminders that the natural world, the air we breathe, the waters everywhere and the food we eat are of paramount importance. But so is our economic survival and the survival of the only dominant world power determined to protect and defend all against the rogue nations and ideologies determined to conquer, subjugate, exploit, suppress and render defenseless all by any means necessary. The actions of the EPA indicate they are either ignorant, choose to ignore or willingly abet the efforts of the latter.
The EPA is an organization born in an era that spawned the irrational “hate America” crowd. It has acquired authority far in excess of that required in a free market, Capitalist economy and that’s what America is, what made America the economic juggernaut envied and hated around the world and what America needs to stop being so damned ashamed of. Much of that hate is born out of envy, some of it is probably justified, most of it is born out of state sponsored ignorance and fear; so, as always and forever, there is room for improvement but none of it is grounds for self loathing.
Congress needs to stop pandering to “special interests” and shirking its responsibilities and pass legislation rendering independent, unregulated, unchecked, economy strangling edicts and regulations to be illegal and without any authority without full Congressional review and concurrence.