My Beauty Best Teacher

Here are some more thoughts on the auto loan bailout, going a little bit further than my last foray into this subject did.

My students keep asking me where I stand on the auto loan situation, and it's a tough position to put me in- I don't want to bias their thoughts, and it's not really about me in my classroom, it's about critical thinking and thought. When pressed though, I tell them that I don't think that the auto companies should get a bailout.

First, I also don't think that the banks should have bailed out either, and by bailing them out, Congress created this whole auto loan mess themselves. Second, the reason I'm not in favor of the bailout is out of principle- it is not fair and morally right that some companies are allowed to go bankrupt by the government, and others are saved with loans. Why one company and not another? The only arguments I ever hear in favor of the auto loan is the the auto companies affect a lot of people- that's true, but if you gave out loans of $1 million to 25,000 small companies (total of $25 billion, same as auto companies), that would probably affect a lot of people too.

And also, why now? Why let past companies fail, and then come in and rescue one now? Were the other companies in the past less deserving- were their works less important than the workers now? My grandpa worked for a steel company, and the US government let it go under- why didn't it rescue that company and provide money for my grandpa's pension and healthcare? Why rescue GM now- because it has better lawyers and lobbyists? That's not how America works- that is how corrupt regimes work.

One more thought on the auto bailout- and that's the role politics play in this whole process. The media is making the Republicans out to be the bad guys for stopping the auto loan. Here is a connection that I just made though- the states that are hurt the most by the auto companies going under are Midwestern states where Democrats are thriving, and the main people hurt by the auto companies going under are Democrats as well, specifically the labor unions who donated $2 million to Democrats last election and only $12K to Republicans. Maybe the chickens are coming home to roost after all. For more on this line of thinking, read Daniel Howes good article today in the Detroit News.

Via Reason:

...The Treasury Department yesterday revised its loss estimate for the Government Motors bailout from $14.33 billion to $23.6 billion, thanks to the company’s sinking stock price. GM’s Sept. 30 closing price, on which the new estimate is based, was $20.18, about $13 less than its December IPO price and $35 less than what is needed for taxpayers to break even.

The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct “investment” in GM. But that’s not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam’s special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn’t have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off.

This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That’s even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May....

...GM’s new competitors are not Toyota and Honda that share its cost structure but Hyndai and Kia that have a far leaner one. These companies concentrate on the small car market and don’t offer a full product line so GM and Ford’s most profitable vehicles—those evil, gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas emitting SUV’s and pickup trucks—are somewhat insulated from the downward price pressure. But the greens and Obama administration want GM to reorient its product mix away from big cars and toward money-losing hybrids and electrics, something that could well put GM back in a hole.

But that’s part of the administration’s long-term strategy for ruining GM....

...But the Ostrich-in-Chief Barack Obama, who had assured taxpayers that their GM "investment" would cost them "not a dime," is drawing the opposite lesson, obviously. He has been trumpeting the success of the bailout—repeatedly....

Read the whole article here- it is very good, and echo's a lot of my earlier comments and thoughts about the whole 'bailout.' From the beginning, I was critical of the bailout. In my post More Thoughts on the Auto Loan Bailout written on December 12, 2008, I wrote:

I don't think that the banks should have bailed out either (auto company), and by bailing them out, Congress created this whole auto loan mess themselves. Second, the reason I'm not in favor of the bailout is out of principle- it is not fair and morally right that some companies are allowed to go bankrupt by the government, and others are saved with loans. Why one company and not another? The only arguments I ever hear in favor of the auto loan is the the auto companies affect a lot of people- that's true, but if you gave out loans of $1 million to 25,000 small companies (total of $25 billion, same as auto companies), that would probably affect a lot of people too.

And also, why now? Why let past companies fail, and then come in and rescue one now? Were the other companies in the past less deserving- were their works less important than the workers now? My grandpa worked for a steel company, and the US government let it go under- why didn't it rescue that company and provide money for my grandpa's pension and healthcare? Why rescue GM now- because it has better lawyers and lobbyists? That's not how America works- that is how corrupt regimes work.

The simple fact of the matter is that under President Barack Obama and the new Democratic Party of Pelosi and Reid, government policy is now to direct money borrowed from China to favored groups in American society, such as auto workers and those who work for 'environmentally friendly' companies like Solyndra and SunPower. Government leaders take a cut of this money to make themselves more and more wealthy-see Frank, Dodd, Obama, Pelosi, Gore, Clinton, etc for a range of Democratic Congressman who have made themselves rich redirecting taxpayer funds. And thus America becomes just like every other corrupt oligarchy in the world, and our life, liberties, and property is less protected.

The only way to stop this is to throw the bums out next election. That means Obama has to go, and Democrats and Republicans who have supported his agenda also have to go- that's pretty much every Democrat and a good number of Republicans too. The most tea-party or conservative candidate who can win the general election must be nominated and we must act to get them elected, or America will continue to slide into the kind of tyranny that is evident when looking back at the sad and unprincipled chapter of the auto loan bailout.

For more information on this subject, check out Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road to Bankruptcy and Bailout-and Beyond or Bail Out or What Would the Founders Say?: A Patriot's Answers to America's Most Pressing Problems or How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today's Economy.

The best way for a company today to secure billions in loans is to donate money to Democrats, who will then steer taxpayer money to these companies so that they can then donate thousands of dollars to Democrats. At least that is the lesson that SunPower Corporation demonstrates.

I first heard about SunPower on Sean Hannity's show, where he was talking about how SunPower is going to be twice the scandal that Solyndra is. SunPower is a company with headquarters in California that builds solar panels and employees over 1500 people. For the last several years, it has been unprofitable and bleeding cash and is now heavily in debt, with a business model that most analysts believe is unsuccessful. But yet the United States Department of Energy gave a last-minute loan to this company for $1.2 billion on the hope that it will suddenly become profitable and also because this loan will help SunPower to create jobs (at a cost of $80/million per job). Here is more information on SunPower, via Human Events:

How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project.

The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain....

....According to the SunPower PAC filings for its activities in the 2010 midterm election campaign cycle, it donated more than $36,000. Of the $15,650 donated to House and Senate candidates, $14,650 went to Democrats, with these top recipients: $4,000 to Sen. Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), $3,000 to Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D.-Ariz.) and $2,900 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.)...

Most of the attention on SunPower centers on Democratic California Congressman George Miller, who has been a big proponent of SunPower, probably because it has a major manufacturing facility in Miller's district and his son happens to work for the company as a lobbyist- in fact, Congressman Miller has supported the very loans that pay his sons $178K/year salary!

But in reality, the story is not simply one of a Democratic Congressman who steers massive loans to a company his son works for- in reality, the story is that SunPower is yet another example of the sort of crony capitalism that the new Democratic Party and Barack Obama support.

A quick look on OpenSecrets.org demonstrates how the corrupt system of government that Democrats run actually works. Opensecrets tracks how much money donors give to political candidates. To reward all of my loyal readers, I went ahead and did some research for you on OpenSecrets to find out just how politically connected SunPower was so that we can speculate using real numbers on how much of a role their political donations might have played in securing taxpayer-backed loans for their unprofitable business.

Using OpenSecrets,org, I searched the 2008, 2010, and 2012 cycles, and then under 'occupation' type I wrote in 'sunpower', and was happy to see 156 entries for people who work at SunPower. These entries indicate employees of SunPower who gave money in these campaign cycles. I sorted all of the 156 entries into six columns to help me to better understand the data.

The first column that I created was of the total amount of money that employees of SolarPower gave to Republicans. This amount came to $250, given to the Republican National Committee.

The second column was the total amount of money that employees of SolarPower gave to Democrats from 2008-2012. This amount comes to $82,700, most of it going to President Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign or the Democratic National Commitee.

The third column that I created represented money given to liberal/Democrat interest groups that primarily donate money to Democrats- this amounted to $15,750.

The fourth column showed that the amount of money given to conservative/GOP interest groups was $500.

Employees of SunPower also gave $83,006 to a political action committee that was set up called SunPower PAC, which in turn has donated heavily to Democrats (SunPower PAC has given $16.7K to Democrats vs $6K to GOP).

Employees of SunPower also gave $45,700 to a political action committee called Solar Energy Industries Association, which has also given more heavily to Democrats (2006-2012, $105.9K to Democrats vs $54K to the GOP).

The data is pretty clear- donating money to Democrats, in particular to Barack Obama, assures your company will receive massive loans regardless if your company is profitable or a good investment.

Under this Democratic administration, supported by these Democrats in Congress, the way to wealth, loans, high pay, and job security is to donate money to the Democratic party and then have them use the power of government to grant you these things. If the GOP were to do these things, it would be wrong too, but the reality of the situation is that it is not a GOP administration overseen and supported by a GOP Congress acting in such a corrupt manner, it is a Democrat with oversight and support from Democrats. 'Hypothetical Corrupt Republican' isn't on the ballot in 2012- Barack Obama is, and it really doesn't matter who the Republicans nominate, because they haven't demonstrated this level of corruption yet, whereas Barack Obama has. Voters need to vote out these Democrats who have used campaign donations and family connections to corrupt the usual decision-making process for granting government loans and turned our once great nation of the free and the brave into the home of the corrupt and bought-off.

For those who are new to my blog, I've written about this topic before- see my posts State Capitalism, Crony Capitalism, Corrupt Capitalism, Syndicaliam, Corporatism... Obamaism or The Third Way: Obama and Fascism.

UPDATE: The Detroit News today ran another editorial about Solyndra, in it pointing out that

...in October last year, Solyndra donated $7,500 to the California Democratic Party and that company employees had kicked in $20,000 to Democratic candidates. They also contributed to the Republicans. But the Times said records show about 72 percent of the company's political contributions went to the Democrats and only 27 percent to Republicans. Contributing to Solyndra's failure were allegations that once it received the government-backed loans, it spent funds willy-nilly, including on a new $700 million plant deemed unnecessary by some company insiders....

That's how it works boys and girls- donate money to Democrats, get massive loans, pay yourself big salaries and live life large, and then get out before it all goes under, leaving taxpayers holding the bill. That's what you get when you vote Democrat (and sometimes for squishy GOPers too).

Over the weekend there was a good article in the Detroit News by Daniel Howes- check it out here. This article talks about many of the same things I wrote about in my post here, but I want to come back to them again, because this battle about giving a loan to auto companies is not so much about the loan as it is about political power in our country- it is a battle about political parties, unions, businesses, and the future role of government in the economy.

Picking up with that thought, here is what Howes wrote:

There's an internecine fight between opposing wings of the Democratic Party. On one side stand more liberal coastal lawmakers with close ties to a well-heeled environmental lobby, a documented antipathy for the Detroit auto industry and even less understanding of it. On the other are more conservative Rust Belt Democrats allied with the traditional constituencies of Big Labor, Detroit's Big Three automakers and middle class voters who, as President Clinton often put it, work hard and play by the rules.

The smart, if predictable, money is on the coastal-environmental wing because that's where the leadership, the political power, the media influence and the stated predilections of the president-elect reside. The winner would be able to dictate the terms for an industry bailout and, further down the road, a new environmental regime.

To emphasize- The battle is about letting environmental fascists control our country or not. State ownership driven by a watermelon agenda- communist policies disguised as environmentally friendly- this is a critical political battle within the Democratic Party. Howes continues:

There's the building clash between two of the biggest egos in the House. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, is campaigning to oust Rep. John Dingell, D-Dearborn, from his chairmanship of the powerful Energy and Commerce committee, a move that would dramatically tilt policy making toward environmental interest groups determined to reshape the auto industry by legislative fiat -- not the pull of the market or the prodding of energy prices.

Dingell, a practiced infighter who came to Congress when Eisenhower was president, is calling in political chits to defeat Waxman's bid. But the implication for Detroit is clear: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Californian to Waxman, wants congressional oversight of the auto industry to shift from parochial concerns to a national priority she can try to control and the Big Three cannot.

Look at the language that Howes uses- groups want to control businesses in our country by fiat, and Pelosi wants to center political power in her person. This is scary stuff- control of the market by individuals is something that is less socialist and more communist in nature! Pelosi wants to control auto companies- on so many levels, that is wrong. That is not the job of government for a reason- as far as I know, she has never run an auto company before, so has no idea on how to. And it is not good for a free country to have public officials running private companies. Howes continues:

Detroit's most potent bargaining chips this week are the millions of American jobs it supports, not insignificant as the nation slides deeper into recession, job losses mount and the Democrats cement their control of Washington.

Since when are people 'bargaining chips' for political parties and factions within the government? If our Founding Fathers were to see what had become of our great nation of free people they would be sick- groups 'cementing their control', other groups fighting for government handouts, jobs and people used, all while our country slides into a government-induced recession. It is a sad day in America.

Mired in grinding poverty and social destitution, Africa cries for help. A cacophonous galaxy of rock stars, anti-poverty activists, and heads of state are calling on the G-8 countries to cancel Africa’s $350 billion crippling foreign debt and double aid to the continent. British Prime Minister Tony Blair will make aid to Africa the centerpiece in Britain's presidency of the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland in July. Live 8 is planned for July 2. After meeting with President Bush on June 10, modalities are being worked out to cancel at least $34 billion in debt of 27 of the world’s poorest nations, mostly African. Will this African Marshall Aid Plan work?

Africa’s plight follows a ten-year attention deficit cycle. Every decade or so, mega-plans are drawn up and rock concerts held to whip up international rescue mission for Africa. Acrimonious wrangling over financing modalities ensues. Years slip by, then a decade later, another grand Africa initiative is unveiled. Back in 1985, there was Live Aid and a “Special Session on Africa” held by the United Nations to boost aid to Africa. Then in March 1996, the U.N. launched a $25 billion Special Initiative for Africa. In September 2005, the plight of Africa will again take center-stage at a U.N. conference with clockwork precision. Expect another major initiative for Africa in 2015.

Helping Africa of course is noble but has now become a theater of the absurd – the blind leading the clueless. A recent IMF study estimated that Africans in the diaspora remit $32 billion annually back to Africa, with the main destinations being Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. About $7 billion is sent to southern Africa (Ghana News Agency, Accra, May 31, 2005). The amount Africans abroad remit back exceeds the $25 billion Tony Blair seeks to raise.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo says corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion (£95 billion) from their people since independence. The World Bank estimates that 40 per cent of wealth created in Africa is invested outside the continent. Even the African Union, in a stunning report last August, claimed that Africa loses an estimated $148 billion annually to corruption – or 25 percent of the continent's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Rather than plug the huge hemorrhage, African leaders prefer to badger the West for more money. And the West, blinded by its own racial over-sensitivity and guilt over the iniquities of the slave trade and colonialism, obliges. This is the real tragedy of Africa.

Between 1960 and 1997, the West pumped more than $450 billion in foreign aid – the equivalent of four Marshall Aid Plans – into Africa with nothing to show for it. Contrary to popular misconception, foreign aid is not free but a soft loan. Outright debt relief and massive inflow of aid without any conditionalities, safeguards or monitoring mechanisms is absurd. It is akin to writing off the credit card debt of a drunken sailor and allowing him to keep the same credit cards. No African government has been called upon to give a full public accounting of who took what loan and for what purpose since many of Africa’s foreign loans taken in the past were misused and squandered. No government official has been held accountable; instead, irresponsible past borrowing behavior is being rewarded.

More distressing, much of the new aid money will flow directly into an African government budget – a huge black maze of vanishing tax receipts, extra-budgetary expenditure items, perks and off-budget “presidential privy accounts,” redolent with graft, patronage and waste. Over the past few decades, African budgets have careened out of control. State bureaucracies have swollen, packed with political supporters. Back in 1996, 20 percent of Ghana's public sector workforce was declared redundant by the Secretary of Finance and Guinea’s 50,000 civil servants were consuming 51 percent of the nation's wealth. In Kenya, civil service salaries take up half the budget; in Uganda, it is 40 percent. Zimbabwe has 54 ministers; Uganda with a population of 35 million has 70, while Ghana, with a population of 22 million, has 88 ministers and deputy ministers. With bloated bureaucracies, soaring expenditures and narrow tax bases, budget deficits have soared.

They are covered with World Bank loans and foreign aid (Ghana’s budget is 50 percent aid-financed and Uganda’s is 60 percent). If the aid is insufficient, the rest of the budget shortfall is financed by printing money. Even when is aid available for “budgetary support”, there is no guarantee that it will be used productively to generate a return to repay the soft loan. It could well be “consumed” when it pays for the salaries of civil servants. Writing off Uganda’s debt does not eliminate the aid dependency. In fact, when the World Bank canceled $650 million of Uganda’s debt in 1999, the first item President Yoweri Museveni purchased was a new presidential jet!


British Prime Minister thinks he can cajole or browbeat African leaders into curbing corruption and ensuring that resources released by debt relief are put to some good use – such as increased spending on education and health care. But the push for good governance and reform must come from within – from African civil society groups, organizations and the people. However, in country after country, chastened by diabolical restrictions, these groups have no freedom or political space to operate.

Carlos Cardoso, an investigative journalist, was murdered in November 2000 for uncovering a bank scandal in which about $14 million was looted from Mozambique's largest bank, BCM, on the eve of its privatization. The official in charge of banking supervision, Antonio Siba Siba, was also murdered while investigating the banking scandals. Such was also the fate of Norbert Zongo, a popular journalist in Burkina Faso, who was gunned down on Dec 13, 1998, while investigating official corruption. In September 2001, President Isaias Afwerki closed down all the independent media and arrested its staff, quashing calls for democratic reforms. In all, the government shut down eight private newspapers and arrested its journalists, picking them up in their newsrooms and homes and from the streets. They were held in a central jail until April, 2002, when they threatened to begin a hunger strike to protest their detention. They were then transferred to an undisclosed location.

In neighboring Ethiopia, President Meles Zenawi, a member of Tony Blair’s Africa Commission, just held fraudulent elections. Anticipating public outrage, he banned street demonstrations for one month and assumed full control of the country’s security forces. When the opposition rallied to protest the results dribbling in, the police opened fire, killing 26; opposition leaders have been placed under house arrest. Witness the election machinations in Egypt.

The paucity of good leadership has left a garish stain on the continent. Worse, the caliber of leadership has distressingly deteriorated over the decades to execrable depths. The likes of Charles Taylor of Liberia and Sani Abacha of Nigeria even make Mobutu Sese Seko of formerly Zaire look like a saint. In an unusual editorial, The Independent newspaper in Ghana wrote: "Most of the leaders in Africa are power-loving politicians, who in uniform or out of uniform, represent no good for the welfare of our people. These are harsh words to use on men and women who may mean well but lack the necessary vision and direction to uplift the status of their people (The Independent, Ghana, July 20, 2000; p.2).

The crisis in leadership remains a major obstacle to poverty reduction and has many manifestations. It is characterized, among others, by the following dispositions and failings: The "Big Man" syndrome, subordination of national interests to personal aggrandizement, super-inflated egos, misplaced priorities, poor judgment, reluctance to take responsibility for personal failures, and total lack of vision and understanding of even such basic and elementary concepts as "democracy," "fairness," "rule of law," "accountability," and "freedom" -- among other deficiencies. In some instances, the leadership is given to vituperative utterances, outright buffoonery, stubborn refusal to learn from past mistakes, and complete absence of cognitive pragmatism.

Believing that their countries belong to them and only them only, they cling to power at all costs. Their promises are worth less than Al Cappone’s. They stipulate constitutional term limits and then break them: Angola, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, and Uganda. African leaders themselves drew up a New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001, in which they inserted a Peer Review Mechanism (PRM), by which they were to evaluate the performance of fellow African leaders in terms of democratic governance. What happened? To be fair, they acted in reversing the “military coup” in Togo in February but went on vacation when elections were stolen in Zimbabwe and Togo.

Ask them to cut bloated state bureaucracies or government spending and they will set up a “Ministry of Less Government Spending.” Then there is the “Ministry of Good Governance” (Tanzania). They set up “Anti-Corruption Commissions” with no teeth and then sack the Commissioner if he gets too close to the fat cats (Kenya) or issue a Government White Paper to exonerate corrupt ministers (Ghana in 1996). To be sure, multi-party elections have been held in recent years in many African countries but the electoral process was so contumaciously manipulated to return incumbents to power. Four such “coconut elections” have so far been held this year: Zimbabwe, Togo, Congo (Brazzaville), and Ethiopia.

Ask them to place more reliance on the private sector and they will create a Ministry of Private Enterprise (Ghana). Ask them to privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises and they will sell them off at fire-sale prices to their cronies (Uganda). Or ask them to move a foot and they will demand foreign aid in order to do so. In 2003, some 30,000 ghost names were discovered on the payroll of the Ministry of Education, costing the government $1.2 million a month in salaries heisted by living workers. When Ghana demanded foreign aid to purge the payroll of these ghost names, Japan coughed up $5 million.

The reform process has stalled through vexatious chicanery, willful deception, and vaunted acrobatics. Only 16 out of the 54 African countries are democratic, fewer than 8 are “economic success stories,” only 8 have a free and independent media.

No amount of debt relief and increased aid will help Africa until Africa cleans up its own house. But the leadership is not interested in reform. Thus, without new leadership and genuine reform, debt relief and increased aid would compound Africa’s problems and more African countries will implode. The continent is stuck in a veritable conundrum. What can Western donors do?

Smart aid would do one of two things. One, bypass the vampire state and target the people, who produce Africa’s real wealth. An African economy consists of three sectors: the traditional, informal, and the modern sector. The people who produce Africa’s real wealth – cash crops, diamonds, gold and other minerals – live in the traditional and informal sectors. Meaningful development and poverty reduction cannot occur by ignoring these two sectors. But in the 1960s and 1970s, much Western development aid was channeled into the modern sector or the urban area, the abode of the parasitic elite minority. Industrialization was the rage and the two other sectors – especially agriculture – were neglected. Huge foreign loans were contracted to set up a dizzying array of state enterprises, which became towering edifices of gross inefficiency, waste and graft. Economic crises emerged in the 1980s and billions in foreign aid money were spent in an attempt to reform the dysfunctional modern sector. Between 1981 and 1994, for example, the World Bank spent more than $25 billion in Structural Adjustment loans to reform Africa’s dilapidated statist economic system. Only 6 out of the 29 “adjusting” African countries were adjudged to be “economic success stories” in 1994. Even then, the success list was phantasmagoric. Ghana, declared a “success story” in 1994, is now on HIPC life-support system.

At some point, even the most recklessly optimistic donor must come to terms with the law of diminishing returns: That pouring in more money to reform the modern sector is futile. Greater returns can be achieved elsewhere – by focusing on the traditional and informal sectors.

Second, smart aid would empower the African people (African civil society groups) to monitor how the aid money is being spent and to instigate reform from within. Empowerment requires arming the African people with information, the freedom and the institutional means to unchain themselves from the vicious grip of poverty and oppression.

Africa already has its own Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights (the 1981 Banjul Charter), which recognizes the right to liberty and to the security of his person (Article 6); to receive information, to express and disseminate his opinions (Article 9); to free association (Article 10); to assemble freely with others (Article 11); and to participate freely in the government of his country, either directly or through freely chosen representatives in accordance with the provisions of the law (Article 13). Though the Charter enjoins African states to recognize these rights, few do so. When President Thabo Mbeki called on June 3, President Bush should have handed him a signed copy of this Charter to be delivered to President Robert Mugabe of ‘Zimbabwe.

The institutional tools Africans need are an independent central bank (to assure monetary stability and stanch capital flight), an independent judiciary (for the rule of law), a free and independent media (to ensure free flow of information), an independent Electoral Commission, an efficient and professional civil service, and a neutral and professional armed and security forces.

Recent events in Ukraine (November), Ghana (December), Zimbabwe (March), Lebanon (April), and Togo (April) unerringly underscore the critical importance of these institutions. Without them, President Bush’s plan to spread democracy may stall. Democracies are not built in a vacuum but in a “political space” in which the people can air their opinion, petition their government without being fired on by security forces and can choose who should rule them in elections that are rigged by electoral commissions packed with government goons.

On May 13, thousands of Egyptian judges, frustrated by government control over the judiciary, agitated for full independence from the executive in their oversight of the electoral process. “The institutions are presenting Mr. Mubarak with an unexpected challenge from within, one that will be difficult to dismiss. The fact is, major changes in this country are going to come out of those institutions, not from the streets," said Abdel Monem Said, director of the Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo.

In the past 24 years, Egypt has received more than $55 billion in U.S. aid in direct government-to-government transfers. Smart aid would assist civil society in instigating institutional reform. Since this approach carries some risks, the same objective can be achieved by funneling aid through diaspora Africans and their organizations, as was the case with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War.

Africa’s long term growth prospects do not lie in rock concerts and increased dependency on Western aid but on the ability of the African people or civil society groups to instigate reform from within. Assistance to such groups – both at home and abroad – constitutes much smarter aid to Africa than all the LIVE AID concerts Bob Geldof can organize.
______________

The writer, a native of Ghana, is a Distinguished Economist at American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation. His new book is Africa Unchained (Palgrave/MacMillan). This article is culled from his May 10 testimony before the Standing Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate of Canada.

The President of the United States fills a lot of important roles in our political system- Commander-in-Chief, Chief Executive, Chief Legislator, Chief Jurist, Chief of State, Chief Diplomat, Head of Political Party, Popular Leader, etc- and to the list of these roles we now apparently must add 'Investor-in-Chief.'

Head of executive branches, whether at the state level as Governors or at the national level with our President, increasingly believe that it is part of their job description to take the money that taxpayers send to them to perform important government functions and instead gamble that money away on risky investments- the more risky and uncertain the investment, the more it seems that these executives are likely to dump precious taxpayer money into them.

Here in Michigan, we had a Governor that won a second term of office believing that she was a good Governor because she dumped taxpayer money into 'green energy' and 'cool cities' and the movie industry; upon further review and looked at with a true eye for costs and investment gains, these investments all turned out to range from bad to poor to horrible. Taxpayer money was distributed in a corrupt manner based more on political favors and little to no lasting gains came from these investments, certainly not enough to justify calling these schemes 'investment' in the private marketplace.

At the national level, Barack Obama believes that one of his major roles as President is to direct investments for the future, in spite of his lack of experience, training, or record of success in investing. No one would ever hire him to direct their personal investments, and yet as President he is doing just this with our public money at a time when public money is in short supply and needed ever more vitally. And the process that these investments are awarded are corrupt, filled with political considerations and backroom deals that would put any private businessman in prison for their actions.

The Washington Post writes about this role of the President in its article Barack Obama, investor-in-chief. From the article:

Would you buy a used car from Barack Obama? Or would you want him managing your 401(k) investment retirement plan at work? The president, of course, isn’t in that business specifically, but in a larger sense he’s been investing our money, picking the businesses he thinks will fuel economic expansion, new jobs and the technology of the future, and rebuild the nation’s fraying infrastructure.

All it takes is money - ours - he says, and he’s been spending it as fast as he can in a failed attempt to get the economy growing again. The economic policy term for this is “central planning,” wherein the government tries to pick the winners and losers and dumps hundreds of billions of dollars into various business sectors in the belief that it will pay off in the long run.

The government isn’t very good at this business, as we’ve seen in the disastrously ineffective $825 billion spending stimulus plan that President Obama and the Democrats shoved through Congress in 2009. Much of that money went into the budgets of countless federal departments, agencies and other programs that spent it. Still more went to states, counties, cities and towns for infrastructure programs or to keep public workers employed. A lot of the money was given to businesses that Mr. Obama thinks will be good for the environment, though his investment decisions didn’t always work out the way he hoped.

Consider the White House-backed solar energy firm Solyndra Inc., which declared bankruptcy this week after pocketing a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. Critics called the deal a “stimulus black hole.”

When Mr. Obama visited the Solyndra factory in May 2010, he called the company a success story that was “leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”

He was quite proud of his investment, boasting at the time, “Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot,” but now here was this shiny, new factory that “is the result of those loans” backed by his administration.
It was later learned that the White House fast-tracked Solyndra’s loan application, rushing Mr. Obama’s pet project through without a lot of serious checking. Federal investigators said that the administration had bypassed procedures to safeguard the taxpayers’ investment.

Mr. Obama is big on the solar-panel industry and under his policies, the government has dumped a lot of our money into it in the past three years. But it turns out that the U.S. industry has not turned out to be the bonanza that he sold to the country. Prices for solar panels have fallen because of strong competition from China, making the fledgling industry precarious at best without heavy federal subsidies.

Evergreen Solar Inc. filed for bankruptcy last month after being forced to close its plant in Massachusetts that was built with state and local government subsidies.

Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat, says the loan guarantee program “has not worked as well as we had hoped.” Sounds like a Wall Street investment banker defending a fat bundle of subprime real estate securities that went bad.

The solar-panel industry is not the only “investment” Mr. Obama has sunk a lot of our money into. While the plants build with his loans make for great campaign photo ops, the costly reality is that government is trying to pick the winners and losers in our economy instead of the private sector.

But Mr. Obama thinks he’s good at this investment business and now he is trying to convince us to buy into to a new federal “infrastructure bank” that will make off-budget grants and loans to rebuild “roads, bridges and ports and broadband lines and smart grids” with $30 billion of our money.

The bank would put “all those [unemployed] construction workers” back to work, he said. And it would provide Mr. Obama with lots of photo ops at jobsites, saying “look what I’ve done for you.”

If this sounds familiar, it was sold to us in the guise of the 2009 job stimulus bill that was supposed to put the construction industry back to work. Some short-term jobs were created but when the building projects were completed, the jobs ended. The construction industry today is in a recession.

Making Mr. Obama the investor-in-chief, deciding how and where the nation’s capital resources should be spent, hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. Ask Japan, which has gone on a public-works spending binge though its economy has been in a slump for two decades.

Better to shift federal public-works spending decisions to the states, along with the gas tax money for highways, and let them - not remote federal bureaucrats - set their own priorities. Broaden the tax base by eliminating dozens of loopholes, then cut business and individual tax rates, and slash the capital gains tax to unlock needed, job-creating investment capital.

Let the marketplace make the investment decisions that have made America the largest and most successful economy in the world. Mr. Obama has got better things to do with his time, like trying to figure out why his job approval polls have fallen to 39 percent.

Today's Detroit News carried a good article by Daniel Howes on the loans for the auto companies, and focused on what I think is the larger implication for the industry and the nature of government in our country. Here are some highlights:

This is what you get, Detroit, when the government becomes your lender of last resort -- a business plan designed to score political points, which means no bonuses for the top execs and no corporate aircraft (leased or owned) for as long as Detroit's beleaguered automakers owe the public money, which could be three years but probably more.

Also required is compliance with federal and state fuel efficiency requirements to develop alternative technology vehicles, no dividends for shareholders, restructured balance sheets, and no legal challenges to strict state greenhouse gas emissions rules. And, my personal favorite, agreement to assess the viability of converting SUV plants to the production of buses and rail cars for use by public transit agencies.

No wonder Ford Motor Co. doesn't want any part of the $15 billion morass taking shape in Washington. It gives new meaning to the term "loan shark," however predictable it all is, considering the political agendas inside Congress and, second, the abject financial weakness of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.

I'm not sure which is worse: A federal government presumptuous enough to think it can transform one of the country's most complex industries in a little more than three months. Or one readily prepared to use its emergency financial power to shape an industry and steer it toward political ends that may or may not reflect market demand.

Each step in this process feels more strange than the last -- a first round of congressional hearings that gave new meaning to the term "clueless Detroit," a second round long on detail and even longer on groveling, stunning ignorance in Washington of an industry that accounts for millions of jobs, an uninterested White House and, now, a bailout bill that reads as if is was drafted by Greenpeace and Soviet central planning.

The congressional committees that wrote a $700 billion financial bailout package, lent $150 billion to AIG and pumped $20 billion into Citigroup demand detailed plans from the automakers and four days of hearings for what's shaping up to be $15 billion in loans.

Or the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd, D-Conn., suggests Sunday that GM Chairman Rick Wagoner should "go" and make way for new leadership because the current one led GM off a cliff.

This from the senator who blocked reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac three years ago, was their top recipient of campaign cash, pocketed more than $300,000 in contributions from PACs and executives tied to Citigroup and then spearheaded the legislative effort to craft the financial rescue package.

Yet in the world where Detroit's future lies, such irony doesn't matter. Perception, politics and calculated remarks masquerading as offhanded ones do.

There are some really good points in here. My person favorite piece of analysis was on how the loan bill that Congress is writing looks more like it was produced by a combination of Greenpeace and the Soviet Union. There is actually a lot in there. Think about what Congress is bribing companies to do with taxpayer money- submit the the watermellons of state control. Our government is using our money to put in place a regulatory structure that would make the Nazi's or Soviet's envious, and what is even more sad is that citizens are clammoring for it to be done. When Congress passes this deal with the devil bill, everyone will clap, and the Republicans and people who voted no will look like the bad guys. Bizarro world strikes again!

The only thing that provides me any comfort is that I am not the only one totally pissed off by this whole process. Over at this blog, the blogger is so upset he has basically shut down posting in the face of this relentless environmental-fascist legislation. Is anyone else out there as pissed as me? Email me and let me know that I'm not alone!

As our nation descends into third-world dictatorships, I am increasingly finding myself unfamiliar with the overlords who control my behavior and distribute gifts and favors. I mean, I know who is elected into office, and I understand the bureaucracy and how that works. But who the heck is Ed Montgomery, what role does he play in our political system, and how does he get to be the one making major decisions and giving away money?

As reported by the Detroit News:

President Barack Obama's auto industry recovery czar, at the start of a two-day trip to a state ravaged by the auto industry downturn, unveiled Thursday an expanded business loan program he said will aid hundreds of auto dealers, repair shops and auto suppliers in Michigan.

Ed Montgomery also announced $10.3 million will be sent to the state for the redevelopment of aging manufacturing sites.

Earlier in the day, Montgomery toured Cascade Engineering, an auto parts supplier and wind turbine maker in the Grand Rapids area that has laid off 300 workers in the past four months. He announced that the Small Business Administration will expand a loan program to aid businesses like Cascade.

Montgomery also announced $10.3 million in new funding for cleanup and reuse of old industrial sites. He said it's the largest amount for brownfields redevelopment available to any state.

The money will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and will help communities to clean up sites known as brownfields, which may be contaminated by chemicals or pollutants.

I'm going to need to become more familiar with how things work in third world countries- how to curry favor with royal envoys, how to avoid being intimidated and bullied, and how to bow low to our new overlords, who tour around our country giving gifts to favored people.

Chamberlain S. Peterside contends that a pervasive evolving ownership culture is critical to unlocking Africa's potential "...As African countries continue to transform, a key element of their reform agenda should be to legitimize property rights and entrench ownership across the broad spectrum of society. So far the reverse is the case. Unbalanced income distribution has bred severe inequality and abject poverty in Africa...With a potential reserve of wealth hidden in real estate holdings in Africa, unless the laws are updated and home-ownership expanded through broad-based long-term loan programs, it is unlikely that you could nurture a robust middle class or make a serious dent in the living standard of the masses. Effective measures should include standardizing loan underwriting, packaging secondary market instruments and enhancing credit quality through government guarantees..."

Donklephant wrote recently that "Obama’s Nuclear Energy Ambitions Are Spot On". Donklephant is buying into the hopeandchange rhetoric that has come to characterize the Obama Presidency.

The news that prompts this comment is the news that President Barack Obama next week will announce a loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the United States in almost three decades. Let's repeat that- the President of the United States, who has no personal experience in loans, investments, or running energy companies, is going to be using your taxpayer money to give to a politically connected company in Georgia in order to build two new nuclear reactors. This loan guarantee is fully intended to be a bribe in order to get Republicans to sign on to a larger cap-and-tax plan that will destroy America. The government will afterwards continue to play a large role in this nuclear reactor, as it will have been paid for by state money.

Building nuclear reactors is fine, and needed, and welcome. But Obama's ambitions are not 'spot on'- we don't need more government-financed business interests, given away to politically connected people, run by the government, for the purposes of scoring political points. This isn't freaking Russia, this is America, and Obama's ambitions fit better there then they do here.

In America, the way the government supports nuclear energy is by getting out of the freaking way. It repeals all of its stifling regulations. It gets rid of its stinking taxes and fees. It puts in place proper private property rights and then protects them. In America, the way the government supports nuclear energy is by getting out of the way and letting the American people unleash their full intelligence, insight, creativity, and hard work on this issue.

I've already talked about Obama's policies with regards to nuclear energy in my post "Yucca Mountain":

The shutting down of the Yucca Mountain project (by Obama, in defiance of what Congress ordered) will cost jobs (already thousands are being laid off in Nevada because of this policy decision), will cost energy companies money (they paid billions of their own money for this project and now will have to pay billions more for unsafe temporary storage of spent nuclear waste), and will lead to lower investment in clean and safe nuclear energy (because there is no place to store the waste).

Obama's ambitions, like everything else he does, fit better in Russia than they do here. They are not 'spot on.'

If you believe that drilling for oil is bad and destructive to the environment but yet you need oil to continue to survive as a society, than the best way to do it is in the most nondestructive manner using the safest methods in the most green friendly nation in the world. To ban drilling in your safe, clean, and green nation and then turn around and support drilling in less safe, clean, and green nations is to work to damage the environment more and to cause more global warming (if you believe it), while demonstrating that you are a hypocrite.

Yet that is exactly what the Obama administration is doing- banning and hindering the more safe and more environmentally-friendly drilling methods that the United States can be engaged in while on the other hand supporting less safe and less environmentally-friendly drilling methods in other nations. The Obama administration is quickly owning the word hypocrisy, and will soon redefine it from "a state of incongruence between one's professed beliefs and feelings and one's actual beliefs and feelings" to "acting like Barack Obama and his Democratic allies."

From memeorandum, U.S. Gov't Agency Plans $2.84 Billion Loan for Oil Refinery—In Colombia:

The U.S. Export-Import Bank, an independent agency of the federal government, is now planning a $2.84-billion loan for a massive project to expand and upgrade an oil refinery--in Cartagena, Colombia. The money would go to Reficar, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ecopetrol, the Colombian national oil company.

“This is part of a $5.18 billion refinery and upgrade project in Cartagena, Colombia supplying petroleum products to the domestic and export markets,” the Export-Import Bank said in a statement.

The U.S. government-controlled bank says the $2.84-billion in financing it plans to undertake will be the second largest project it has ever done. The largest was $3 billion in financing for a liquid natural gas project in Papua New Guinea....

....Also according to NPRA, the last time a new oil refinery was built in the United States was 1993, when a small facility was built in Valdez, Alaska. The last time a new large oil refinery was built in the United States was 1976, says NPRA....

The current chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States is Fred P. Hochberg, who was appointed Democratic President Barack Obama in January 2009 and confirmed by the Democratic Senate in May 2009. He was major fundraiser and bundler for Barack Obama's Presidential campaign in 2008 and was member of the Obama transition team. He is a Democrat, appointed by a Democrat, confirmed by Democrats, who supports the Democratic policy of no drilling in America but supporting drilling in other nations. He is currently an unregistered Hypocrite.

To see my other posts on hypocrisy, check out BREAKING: Barack Obama Time Travels from January to Scold Barack Obama of February of his Lack of Civility in Wisconsin Budget Battle or Rand Paul to Obama Officials: You are pro-choice on abortion but not on toilets and lightbulbs?

The Direct Expatriate Nationals Investment (DENI) initiative aims to securitize diasporan cash remittances. In a presentation at the Ministerial Conference of the Least Developed Countries on Migrant Remittances Fred Kwoba the author of DENI asserted that:

"...Back in 1990 when international community first recognized this phenomenon of remittances, they frowned on it and dismissed it as inconsequential in the development of Africa. But Africans in the Diaspora never lost faith in the remittance lifeline. We kept sending money home even if there was a civil war or no government as Somalia and even if there in no bank, we still send money home. Such is our determination to send money home. Why? Because we have a moral responsibility and duty to support our people. And now the international community has finally come round not only to recognize this phenomenon but to fully embrace it as critical in the survival of our communities...We have developed a program called DENI that was designed to bring Africans together to pool their resources for large-scale investments in their home country. This will be done country-by-country, meaning Beninese will have their own DENI Program for Benin, Ghanaians will have their own DENI Program for Ghana, Malians will have their own DENI Program for Mali, Nigerians will have their own DENI Program for Nigeria and so on down the line until we get to Zimbabweans with their own DENI Program for Zimbabwe...DENI says we take a country (such as any that I’ve mentioned above) and target (say) 100,000 nationals (both at home and abroad) and encourage them to invest $1000 a piece in this initiative for their country. That would immediately raise $100,000,000 in cash for the government – cash on the table that is not a loan and is not a grant. No strings attached. No conditionalities. DENI is designed to be totally owned by the Government and its people. For a government that has received a debt forgiveness of (say) $500,000,000, DENI suggests that that amount of forgiveness be passed on to the people through this ingenuous conversion for purposes of poverty reduction. The government gets $100mn in cash from its nationals upfront that is not a loan and is not a grant..."

The Media Development Loan Fund:

In many transitional countries, independent news organizations are starved of affordable finance; credit usually comes at the price of compromising editorial independence. MDLF financing is often the only way a media company can access capital while preserving its autonomy. MDLF provides resources that empower its clients to make the most of their dedication to objectivity and accuracy, building solid businesses around the core values of independent journalism

From Foreign Policy Magazine comes this article "The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009". It has pictures and in depth analysis, but here is a handy summary of the top five stories for you:

1. The Northeast Passage Opens for Business. Good (lower cost of transporting goods around the world) or bad (an omen of the mystical cult of Global Warming), this does raise the importance of the Arctic Ocean, which is now accessible to exploration and development. This may be the cause of rising tensions between Russia and the US.
2. Iraq's New Flashpoint. Iraq's Arab and Kurdish populations are at odds with one another in the Nineveh region, not because of oil, but because of a large Kurdish population in this area, which is outside of the autonomous Kurdish region. Neither side has turned to violence- yet.
3. A Hotline for China and India. You only put in a hotline between world leaders when you are afraid that miscommunication may result and someone may make an unwise decision to nuke the other. The key to this conflict is the Himalayan region of Tawang, which is in India but China claims was part of Tibet (which is now part of China). The area has been increasingly militarized, and the Indian military documented 270 border violations and almost 2,300 cases of "aggressive border patrolling" by the Chinese in 2008.
4. A New Housing Bubble? More than any other factor, ill-advised speculation on U.S. real estate set off the global financial crisis. But even after millions of foreclosures and secondary effects ripped through economies around the world, a new housing bubble is forming again, for the same reasons the first did- Democratic pressure on banks to give everyone a home loan, Democratic pressure on banks to be nice about credit scores, Democratic 'stimulus' money for home sales, and Democratic pressure on banks to keep interest rates low and print money. Be prepared for Democratic policies such as these destroying the world's economies again sometime soon.
5. The ‘Civilian Surge' Fizzles. A major part of the strategy in dealing with terrorism and failed states was a surge in civilian personal from the State Department and USAID, but it turns out, those agencies have failed to deliver, and now the military is trying to meet that commitment too.

Eric Osiakwan's AfricaCan lauds the alternative financing mechanism proposed for Kenya's National Fiber Network,commenting on a Balancing Act report that states:

The Kenya Government will have a 40 per cent holding in the project, Etisalat 20% and the remaining 40% will go to investors in the East African region. The Government has said it will organise an IPO on the Kenyan Stock Exchange. Several Kenyan companies have expressed interest and one said that the Government had told them it would “guarantee their loan”.

He says:

Thank God the Kenyans are experimenting with this approach where government owns part, private sector owns part, educational institutions should also own part, CSO owns part through IPO on the stock market.
The Kenyan government can actually raise the 40% from government bonds . I am not an expert on the stock market discipline of shares or bonds but this is where the financial experts need to come out with innovative solutions that can help raise much of this money locally - it is possible.

• Lessons learned from the 2010 Edublog Awards | Kirsten Winkler

  So, one can win an edublog award with 100 something votes? Goodness sakes? Are that few people voting or are there just too many categories and too many nominees in each? I don't know.
  
  I responded to Kristen's reflection that social media is overrated with this comment.
  
  "It is also a matter of taking the time to self promote! I know for me, in the past, I've sent out tons of emails and messages on facebook - asking people to vote. We sent messages through our Nings and through every vehicle we could. This year with a looming book deadline, I had to ask myself if it was something I had time to do. I didn't. In retrospect, maybe I should have but really - if that is what it takes to win an award. I don't know - I guess the crunchies are important and that works the same way although I'm so tired of hootsuite reminding me to vote in that doggone award!
  So, I would say it is a function of PERSONAL connections and also a PERSONAL desire and willingness to put oneself out there and say "Hey I want to win, please vote for me." It is tough - when you do that you get a backlash but when you win an award - you win and no one really asks how you got it. So, I guess it is just what we have to live with for now.
  Thank you for some great reflections and for putting yourself out there. Good luck and congratulations."
  
  That pretty much sums up my thoughts this year.  We didn't put out these awards through our very active flat classroom groups or anything. December was just too stressful to run a campaign.  This, however, is just the nature of the beast - like it or not social media, voting, type campaigns and awards are the nature of "the beast ' and we have to make time to run the campaigns if we want to thrive in the space.

  tags: education edublog

• One Tweet CAN Change the World - The Tempered Radical

  Wonderful Blog post that you should share from the Tempered Radical, Bill Ferriter. It is about how one tweet from Karl Fisch to work with Kiva to help loan money to those who can create a business in another part of the world led his class to create a Kiva Club and how that one tweet went on to change the world.
  
  I would add this -- one tweet cannot change the world but it can be the spark to ignite an inferno of positive change! Great post.

  tags: education learning

• Google Cr-48 Chrome laptop preview (update: in-depth impressions!) -- Engadget

  Listened on Saturday morning to This week in Tech talk about the new Google Chrome laptop. Some things they said:
  
  1) Difficult to get to the local hard drive -- just supposed to be a temporary "shelf" - this from one who was taking screeenshots.
  2) Another had problem using it with his mifi card.
  3) A third didn't like the absence of some buttons.
  
  It is supposed to be a cloud device and has apps on it. Mixed reviews from the panelists. Doubt I'll get to test it, but it will be interesting to see what happens with the device. The question I have in rural america is that if this device can only be used in the cloud - what happens when you have a clear sky? (No internet) and NO ACCESS?
  
  Bandwidth snobbery is easy for people who live in areas with consistent cell coverage and wifi everywhere but that isn't the reality of most of us in the real world.

  tags: education learning

• ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (SimpleK12 Style) – SimpleK12

  Funny take on this poem technology style.

  tags: education learning Christmas

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Micheal Barone, writing for the Washington Examiner, from his article The Unhappy Warrior, best sums up President Barack Obama's much touted speech on jobs yesterday:

Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be). He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.” Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.

Obama assured us that this would all be paid for. But as far as I could gather, he punted that part of it to the supercommittee of 12 members set up under the debt ceiling bill. He now blithely charges it with coming up with more than its current goal of $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Oh, and he’s going to announce “a more ambitious deficit plan” that will “stabilize our debt in the long run”--11 days from now.

In the meantime, he called for higher taxes on “a few of the most affluent citizens”—as if this could pay for all the spending he’s been backing...

...Straw men took a terrible beating from the president. He assailed “tax loopholes” for oil companies, the chief one of which is that they are treated like other companies classified as manufacturers. The administration proposal is that the five largest oil companies shouldn’t be, because—well, because we want to get our hands on more of their money. Today’s Republicans, he gave us to understand, want to “eliminate most government regulations” and “wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades.” And, he suggested, they would never have created public health schools or the G.I. Bill or research universities.

When Barack Obama says, “This isn’t political grandstanding,” you have a pretty good clue that that is exactly what it is. Lest anyone doubt that, consider this from the third-to-last paragraph. “You should pass it. And I intend to take that message to every corner of the country.”

In other words, this was a campaign speech...

When I asked my students what they thought of Obama's speech, they said it sounded good but that they wanted to see the details and felt that the price tag for this sort of 'jobs bill' was going to be way too high for our nation to afford. The students also thought that this sort of stuff has already been tried and did nothing to help and only added more debt to our nation- you see, young people frequently are concerned with the amount of debt that older people are dumping on them to live their wonderful lifestyles of leisure and retirement. Hearing comments like these give me hope for our future; on the other hand, my students are being trained to think and reason and look at things critically and are less apt to fall for the straw man and false choice rhetoric that has come to characterize the President's speeches.

Pointing out media bias is like finding half-truths and partial-truths in an Obama speech, but even still, I think the media needs to be called out when they are covering up or hiding information for a purpose. Today, Hassan Nemazee was indicted for defrauding Bank of America, HSBC and Citigroup out of more than $US290 million in loan proceeds, US prosecutors said.

According to the AP, Nemazee is "a wealthy fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top Democrats". But according to News Digital Media, Nemazee is "a fund-raiser for Barack Obama" and in the last Presidential election supported Hillary Clinton's opponent, Barack Obama, by being listed as one of the top "bundlers" of contributions to Mr Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org.

So, the President's top fundraiser is going to jail for fraud and his top organizing group ACORN should be sending many more to jail for intending to support an underage prostitution ring. The Presidnet's former friend Bill Ayers has been hidden away, and the President's former pastor has been thrown under the bus. Last election, I wondered how America could have elected Obama- increasingly the evidence is that he was elected using fraud, deception, and help from questionable friends.

I wonder though, why Larry Neumeister writing for the AP choose to not mention that Nemazee was a top fundraiser to President Obama, and instead wrote that he was a top fundraiser for Obama's main opponent, Hillary Clinton. It is shockingly easy to research Nemazee and find out who he donated money to, and yet, AP reporter Neumeister got it wrong- not because he didn't do his research, but because he wanted you the reader to arrive at a conclusion that he wanted you to arrive at.

Corruption and fraud was committed by a Democrat and the chief beneficiary was the President of the United States- and it wasn't a small sum either. To me, that is a story that shouldn't be reported wrongly and buried deep in the newspaper.

UPDATE: Out of curiosity, I decided to search "Bush fundraiser Fraud" in yahoo. After looking through the first several pages of results, I saw nothing about Bush or McCain fundraisers being accused of fraud and yet see many stories about Obama or Clinton fundraisers being accused of fraud. It is almost as if the Democrats, who were yelling loudly about the culture of corruption and buying of votes, were in fact the corrupt ones who were buying votes.

Don't forget about former top Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu, who pleaded guilty in federal court to charges he cheated investors out of at least $20 million in a massive Ponzi scheme, benefiting primarily Hillary Clinton. In fact, for some reason this story seemed bigger than the one I am writing about today, when somebody committed 10 times more fraud and was successful in helping elect President Obama. The media buried one story and promoted another.

UPDATE II: Some reader reminded me about another top Democratic fundraiser who supported Obama with money and votes- Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer who helped launch Barack Obama's political career. He is also in jail right now for fraud. The evidence is starting to pile up.

UPDATE III: Not sure if anyone wants to do anything about this- if you do let me know- but Michigan Senator Carl Levin accepted campaign contributions from Nemazee. This contributions were probably fraudulent, and Levin should return or renounce this money. To contact him, click here.

StockMarketNigeria writes about the benefits of Railway Transportation:

The first phase of the Lagos-Kano railway line project is to cost $8.3 billion, of which $2 billion of the amount has already been obtained as a soft loan from the Chinese government. The numerous benefits of the project as announced by the president includes:

· Utilization of local raw materials as much as possible,

·Increase in traffic of goods and passengers around Nigeria,

· Retaining the top rating of important commercial cities like Lagos, Aba and Kano as key commodity-trading points in West Africa,

· And, reduction of road accidents in Nigeria

via GlobalVoices