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Libertys Army

Stock investors see threats from all directions

Written By: TIM PARADIS

The threats seem to be coming from all directions.

Jittery stock traders react to each day’s news as if it could be the start of Financial Crisis 2.0. On Thursday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index suffered its biggest one-day drop in more than nine months because of worries about debt problems in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Concerns about China’s plans to limit economic growth and proposed regulatory bank changes from Washington also have pummeled the market.

The fears aren’t as intense as in 2008, when the S&P 500 fell 38.5 percent. But January was the worst month for the market since it began its recovery last March. And the S&P 500 has fallen 7.3 percent from the high of 1,150.23 it reached Jan. 19.

It’s not as if something devastating has happened, either in Europe, where economies have been struggling for some time, or in Washington. It was expected that the Obama administration would try to restrict big banks. What’s different now is that investors have much more to lose than they did a year ago, so they sell at the first whiff of a problem. Even with its recent losses, the S&P 500 is still up 58 percent since hitting bottom March 9.

Investors are linking financial problems in Europe with the U.S. economic recovery. Some worry that governments’ debt problems will spread in the same way that bad mortgages in the U.S. took down economies here and abroad in 2008.

“They are shell-shocked because they’ve seen a similar movie before and they didn’t like the ending,” said Anthony Chan, chief economist at J.P. Morgan Private Wealth Management. “They’re wondering whether this is the sequel or not.”

Chan said investors are probably overreacting to the problems in Europe. But, he said, they are more demanding about what they want to see from the world’s economies.

“The market is going not going to be allayed by signs of recovery, they’re going to be looking for signs of sustainability,” Chan said.

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Geithner Says U.S. Will ‘Never’ Lose Its Aaa Debt Rating

Written By: Rebecca Christie

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its Aaa debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast today whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

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Obama admits health care overhaul may die on Hill

Written By: ERICA WERNER

No, maybe he can’t. President Barack Obama, who insisted he would succeed where other presidents had failed to fix the nation’s health care system, now concedes the effort may die in Congress.

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Obama vows to beat ‘blizzard’ of opposition

President Barack Obama vowed Saturday to beat a “blizzard” of opposition and to salvage his crusade for change, leaving a snow-buried White House to rally Democrats spooked by looming November polls.

Obama motorcaded through deserted Washington streets during a historic winter storm to fire up a party rocked by panic and disaffection after the president’s reform drive hit a roadblock after just a year in power.

“(It’s) good to be among friends. So committed to the future of this party and this country … a blizzard … Snowmageddon here in DC!” Obama told Democratic National Committee members hunkered down in a Washington hotel.

Obama sharply warned that he would not give up on his effort to pass health care reform through Congress, even though the loss of the Democratic Senate supermajority leaves his wavering party few easy options to enact it.

“Just in case there’s any confusion out there, let me be clear. I am not going to walk away from health insurance reform,” Obama said, in one of his most feisty speeches since his 2008 election campaign.

“I’m not going to walk away from the American people. I’m not going to walk away on this challenge. I’m not going to walk away on any challenge.’

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The great global warming collapse

Written By: Margaret Wente

As the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri’s own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

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Olympic Organisers desperate for climate change

Winter Olympics chiefs will not sanction a desperate last-minute venue switch despite unseasonably warm temperatures continuing to curse Cypress Mountain, the host of the freestyle events at the Games which begin on Friday.

The host city enjoyed highs of 11 degrees again on Saturday while meteorological officials said that the warm weather, which has led to 300 dumper trucks and even helicopters being used to transport snow from higher elevations, will continue right up to the opening ceremony on February 12.

The imported snow has been piled high on wood and hay which have been laid to form the bumps which test the freestyle skiiers at Cypress Mountain.

“We are not relocating any events,” said Tim Gayda, the vice-president of organising committee VANOC, responding to the problems caused by the warmest January on record, a legacy of El Nino, a periodic warming feature over the Pacific Ocean

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Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level — 26 percent — to the area threatened by river flooding — 29 percent — Vallaart said.

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DHS: Dependence on Fossil Fuels & Climate Change Are ‘National Threats’

Written By: Vladimir

On February 1, Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security released a 108-page report to Congress, the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Report. Subtitled “A Strategic Framework for a Secure Homeland”, a quick glance at the report left me questioning whether the DHS is more serious about Homeland Security than they are about advancing Obama Administration policy goals.

The following item is in a bullet list of threats to America’s national interests (p. 7):

• Dependence on fossil fuels and the threat of global climate change that can open the United States to disruptions and manipulations in energy supplies and to changes in our natural environment on an unprecedented scale. Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of weather-related hazards, which could, in turn, result in social and political destabilization, international conflict, or mass migrations.

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India forms new climate change body

Written By: Dean Nelson

India has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

The Indian government’s move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

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UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

Written By: Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

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IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks

Written By: Marc Sheppard

Unquestionably the world’s final authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings and recommendations have formed the bedrock of literally every climate-related initiative worldwide for more than a decade. Likewise, virtually all such future endeavors — be they Kyoto II, domestic cap-and-tax, or EPA carbon regulation, would inexorably be built upon the credibility of the same U.N. panel’s “expert” counsel. But a glut of ongoing recent discoveries of systemic fraud has rocked that foundation, and the entire man-made global warming house of cards is now teetering on the verge of complete collapse.

Simply stated, we’ve been swindled. We’ve been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the naïvely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.

Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem — but rather, a solution.

For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the “last chance to save the planet” International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of “climate debt” reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.

The Perfect Problem to the Imperfect Solution

The U.N. signaled its intent to politicize science as far back as 1972 at its Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm, Sweden. There, an unlikely mélange of legitimate environmental activists, dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, and assorted anti-establishment ’60s leftovers were delighted to hear not only the usual complaints about “industrialized” environmental problems, but also a long list of international inequities. Among the many human responsibilities condemned were overpopulation, misuse of resources and technology, unbalanced development, and the worldwide dilemma of urbanization. And from that marriage of global, environmental, and social justice concerns was born the IPCC’s parent organization — the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) — and the fortune-cookie like prose of its socialist-environmentalist manifesto, the Stockholm Declaration.

It was seven years later that UNEP was handed the ideal villain to fuel its counterfeit crusade. That was the year (1979) in which NASA’s James Hansen’s team of climate modelers convinced a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel to report [PDF] that doubling atmospheric CO2 — which had risen from 280 ppmv in the pre-industrial 1800s to over 335 ppmv — would cause nearly 3°C of global warming. And although the figure was wildly speculative, many funding-minded scientists — including some previously predicting that aerosols and orbital shifts would lead to catastrophic global cooling — suddenly embraced greenhouse gas theory and the inevitability of global warming.

It was at that moment that it became clear that the long-held scientific position that the Earth’s ecosystem has always and will always maintain CO2 equilibrium could be easily swayed toward a more exploitable belief system. And the UNEP now had the perfect problem to its solution: anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

After all, both its abatement and adaptation require huge expansion of government controls and taxation. Furthermore, it makes industry and capitalism look bad while affording endless visuals of animals and third-world humans suffering at the hands of wealthy Westerners. And most importantly, by fomenting accusations that “rich” countries have effectively violated the human rights of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people by selfishly causing climate-based global suffering, it helps promote the promise of international wealth redistribution to help less fortunate nations adapt to its consequences.

Best of all, being driven by junk-science that easily metamorphoses as required, it appeared to be endlessly self-sustaining.

But it needed to be packaged for widespread consumption. And packaged it they surely have. Here’s an early classic.

The year was 1988, and Colorado Senator Tim Wirth had arranged for Hansen to testify on the subject before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to help sell the dire need to enact national environmental legislation. As Wirth has since admitted, he intentionally scheduled Hansen’s appearance on what was forecasted to be the hottest day of the hearings. And in a brilliantly underhanded marketing ploy, he and his cohorts actually snuck into the hearing room the night before and opened the windows, rendering the air conditioning all but useless.

Imagine the devious beauty of the scene that unfolded in front of the cameras the next day — a NASA scientist preaching fire and brimstone, warning of “unprecedented global warming” and a potential “runaway greenhouse effect,” all the while wiping the dripping sweat off his brow. No wonder the resultant NY Times headline screamed, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how climate hysteria and not one, but two of its shining stars were born. For coincidentally, that was the same year the IPCC was established by the U.N. Its mandate: to assess “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.”

How perfect: an organization formed not to prove or disprove AGW, but merely to assess its risks and recommend an appropriate response.

Now it was time to really get to work.

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House faces tough vote on $1.9 trillion more debt

Written By: ANDREW TAYLOR

Facing a politically excruciating vote, House Democratic leaders are counting on new budget deficit curbs to help smooth the way for a bill allowing the government to go $1.9 trillion deeper into debt over the next year – or about $6,000 more for every U.S. resident.

The debt measure set for a House vote Thursday would raise the cap on federal borrowing to $14.3 trillion. That’s enough to keep Congress from having to vote again before the November elections on an issue that is feeding a sense among voters that the government is spending too much and putting future generations under a mountain of debt to do it.

Already, the accumulated debt amounts to $40,000 per person. And the debt is increasingly held by foreign nations such as China.

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U.S. Debt to Hit Proposed Ceiling This Month

The US debt is on track to hit a congressionally proposed debt ceiling of 14.3 trillion dollars by the end of February, the Treasury said Wednesday, a day ahead of a key vote to raise it to that level.

“Based on current projections, Treasury expects to reach the debt ceiling as early as the end of February. However, the government’s cash flows are volatile, making it difficult to forecast a precise date,” the Treasury said in a statement.

The current limit on the public debt of the United States is 12.374 trillion dollars.

The US debt exceeded 12.349 trillion dollars on Monday, according to Treasury data.

The US House of Representatives will vote Thursday on whether to raise the US debt limit to a historic 14.3 trillion dollars, allowing the United States to borrow another 1.9 trillion dollars

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Deficit imperils United States’ top credit rating

Moody’s warns US of credit rating fears

Fannie, Freddie Kept Off Budget, Dividends Counted

Written By: Dawn Kopecki

President Barack Obama’s budget blueprint for the next fiscal year excludes the $6.3 trillion in liabilities of government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and delays for a second time a decision on restructuring the mortgage-finance companies that were seized 17 months ago.

The companies may need $54.4 billion more in U.S. Treasury Department preferred stock purchases to stay afloat in the current year that ends Sept. 30, and $23 billion more for the next fiscal year, according to calculations made from the Obama administration’s 2011 budget proposal to Congress today.

“The administration continues to monitor the situation of the GSEs closely and will continue to provide updates on considerations for longer-term reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as appropriate,” the Obama administration said.

White House budget director Peter Orszag delayed a decision on whether to bring the companies’ $1.6 trillion in corporate debt and $4.7 trillion mortgage obligations onto the federal budget. As the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Orszag criticized the Bush administration for keeping the 2008 rescue of the government-sponsored enterprises off budget.

At the time, Orszag said “the degree of federal control over Fannie and Freddie is so strong, we are incorporating them into the federal budget.”

“We continue to be on track to release a statement in the very near future” on the GSEs, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said in a conference call with reporters today.

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First-time jobless claims rise unexpectedly

Written By: Christopher S. Rugaber

New jobless claims rise unexpectedly to 480,000 as layoffs continue, jobs remain scarce

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Next in Line for a Bailout: Social Security

Written By: Allan Sloan

Don’t look now. But even as the bank bailout is winding down, another huge bailout is starting, this time for the Social Security system.

A report from the Congressional Budget Office shows that for the first time in 25 years, Social Security is taking in less in taxes than it is spending on benefits.

Instead of helping to finance the rest of the government, as it has done for decades, our nation’s biggest social program needs help from the Treasury to keep benefit checks from bouncing — in other words, a taxpayer bailout.

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Obama Budget Seeks $1.1 Trillion in Tax Hikes

President would increase taxes on some businesses and wealthy individuals by a total of about $1.4 trillion over the next decade, while cutting taxes for workers and other businesses by about $330 billion.

While President Barack Obama is proposing to cut some taxes for companies that hire workers, his budget would raise a host of other taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals.

The budget proposal released Monday would extend Obama’s signature Making Work Pay tax credit — $400 for individuals, $800 for a couple filing jointly — through 2011. But it would also impose nearly $1 trillion in higher taxes on couples making more than $250,000 and individuals making more than $200,000 by not renewing tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush. Obama would extend Bush-era tax cuts for families and individuals making less.

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Federal Government to Grow to 2.15 Million Employees in 2010

The Obama administration projects the number of employees on the government payroll will grow to 2.15 million this year, reportedly making it the largest federal workforce in modern history and fueling criticism over the size of government.

The Washington Times reported Wednesday that the bulk of the increase is on the civilian side, which is expected to grow by 153,000 workers in 2010.

The expansion means the workforce will top 2 million for the first time since President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” according to the newspaper.

The expansion comes even as Obama calls for cutting the deficit and imposing a three-year freeze on some non-security spending.

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President Obama: “Every Economist from the Left and Right” Says Stimulus Has Saved or Created At Least Two Million Jobs

Written By: Jake Tapper

President Obama veered off script – and away from the facts – when he spoke about the stimulus bill today in Nashua, NH.

“Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment,” the president said. “But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, 7 million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.”

Um, it’s not true that “every economist” has said the Recovery Act has saved or created two million jobs.

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