Claude Cartaginese
Van Jones, one of President Barack Obama’s controversial czars, is out. Now, barely two days later, the radical views of another Obama nominee are coming to light. As reported Monday on Fox News by Brian Sullivan, host of Your World, Cass Sunstein, Obama’s choice to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is advocating a plan whereby Americans would automatically have their organs harvested after death. (Sunstein has already raised eyebrows with his extremist views on regulating human behavior and his belief that animals should be able to sue humans).
Under Sunstein’s latest proposal, you could become an organ donor and not even know it.
The way organ donation works today, doctors and hospitals can only harvest your organs when you (or a spouse or relative of yours after your death) issue specific authorization (such as checking the organ donor box on your driver’s license) allowing them to do so. Sunstein wants to make it an “opt-out decision,” whereby your organs would be taken after death whether it’s what you wanted or not, unless you specifically opt-out.
The idea of automatic organ harvesting was outlined last year in a book Sunstein co-authored with Richard H. Thaler entitled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Sunstein and Thaler argue that not enough people are donating organs because the decision to donate is left up to them.
That, they say, is why doctors and hospital officials would be better able to make the choice for you. Their doing so would spare you from having to make the decision and would not place your loved ones in the difficult position of trying to determine what your wishes would have been. From the book:
- “The major obstacle to increasing [organ] donations is the need to get the consent of surviving family members.”
- “Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate.”
- “The next of kin can be approached quite differently when the decedent’s silence is presumed to indicate a decision to donate rather than when it is presumed to indicate a decision not to donate. This shift may make it easier for the family to accept organ donation.”
This idea of a “mandated choice,†where the government will force you to make a decision or will decide for you about such an important issue, is something that would bring tears of admiration to the members of the National People’s Congress in Communist China.
Sunstein and Thaler admit that there will be opposition to this idea, but nothing insurmountable:
Another [problem] is that it is a hard sell politically. More than a few people object to the idea of ‘presuming’ anything when it comes to such a sensitive matter. For these reasons we think that the best choice architecture for organ donations is mandated choice.
The bottom line, then, is that under Sunstein’s plan, the government would have the last say in what should happen to your organs after you die, as you are deemed too stupid to be trusted to make the right decision:
The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all of the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made [for them] by someone else.
The president has asked us to judge him based upon whom he surrounds himself with.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The bottom line is we need the president of the United States of America to use his bully pulpit to talk to kids about the importance of education and to help inspire kids–Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers
It has come as quite a surprise to Randi Weingarten, the leftist National Education Association and teachers unions, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the White House that not all parents are willing to toe the Democratic Party line when it comes to President Barack Obama using his “bully pulpit†to speak to America’s children on Tuesday.
In fact, as Fox News reports, some parents and school districts are downright outraged. Many parents, already subject to the whims of leftist schoolteachers, administrators and unions do not want their children–a captive audience–to be forced to watch an 18 minute speech from a far-left president without the benefit of knowing its contents in advance.
Even worse, what has really raised the ire of parents is the distribution of so-called “teachers manuals†containing post-speech “lesson plans†to be assigned to students, an unprecedented exploitation of administrative authority reminiscent of techniques used in the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, where schoolchildren were/are required to write letters to “Dear Leader.â€
From the manual:
As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
What is the President trying to tell me?
What is the President asking me to do?
What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
Parts of this “manual†bordered on hero worship and were so partisan that the administration was forced to re-write entire passages, which Secretary Duncan explained away simply by characterizing the offending passages as just being “poorly written.â€
ARNE DUNCAN: We just clarified that to say write a letter about your own goals and what you’re going to do to achieve those goals. So again it’s really about personal responsibility and being accountable, setting real goals and having the work ethic to see them through.
Duncan and others not understanding the backlash is bad enough, but even worse is the admission that they don’t care about the dissenters or their opinions. Dissenters are being dismissed as being childish and silly:
ARNE DUNCAN: [the furor surrounding the speech is] just silly. They can go to school. They can not watch. It’s just, you know, going [to be] an 18-minute speech.
ARNE DUNCAN: I frankly don’t pay any attention to [the criticism].
Presidential Spokesman ROBERT GIBBS: I think we’ve reached a little bit of the silly season when the president of the United States can’t tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school.
And yet, this scheduled “mass counseling†type session scheduled by the president is not something we usually see in democratic societies.
As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education—it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality,” said Oklahoma Republican state Sen. Steve Russell. “This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”
Glenn Beck and others have suggested that parents keep their children home for the day in order to avoid any coercion.
This is not an unreasonable suggestion.
Parents should have the opportunity to watch the talk first, allowing them to make the determination as to whether it’s something they want their children to see or not.
And for those who don’t believe that students are coerced in school, put yourself in the place of this young supporter of John McCain being browbeaten by her Obama activist teacher:
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate as of July 2009 was 9.4%. Economists have calculated, however, that if you add those people who are underemployed or who have gotten so discouraged they have simply stopped looking for work (and thus are no longer counted by the government as unemployed), the real unemployment rate is closer to 16.3%.
While the economic meltdown has forced companies to furlough, cut salaries, lay off employees or shut down completely, one sector seems to be poised for a massive hiring spree: the government itself.
According to Amy Goodman and the Marxists over at Democracy Now!:
The federal government is poised for a large hiring spree over the next four years. The Partnership for Public Service (PPS) says federal agencies need to hire more than 270,000 so-called “mission critical†workers by 2012 to deal with a wave of expected retirements from baby-boom workers. Overall, the survey says the government will need to hire 600,000 new workers by the end of President [Barack] Obama’s term.
So the PPS, a statist organization that bills itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to revitalize our federal government by inspiring a new generation to serve and by transforming the way government works,†is proud to announce that the size of the government will swell by another 600,000 bureaucrats, which will increase the current workforce by nearly one-third!
Of those hires, 270,000 are deemed “mission critical†according to the PPS press release and include attorneys, paralegals, investigators, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, police officers, airport screeners, customs and border patrol agents, and intelligence agents. And what of the other 330,000? They will be hired simply to fulfill Obama’s goal of massively growing the size of government for its own sake.
The PPS has spearheaded the drive to recruit new employees for the government by sponsoring federal job fairs across the country. Since government jobs have traditionally been lower-paying than those in the private sector, the PPS has focused on trying to attract those workers who would never have considered working for any bureaucratic government agency. The government’s challenge, according to Max Stier, President and chief executive of PPS, is to “win the war for talent in order to win the multiple wars it’s fighting for the American people.â€
If you like big government now, and you think a large, Zimbabwe-style bureaucracy is a model we should follow, then you should love the next three-and-a-half years.
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Due to the recent death of Edward Kennedy, the Senate version of the Waxman-Markley climate change bill — named after its sponsors Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and officially known as H.R.2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 – is on hold. As a result, we’ll all have to suffer a bit longer with the effects of global warming until the bill is passed.
Don’t despair, however. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! network does have some good news to report about the government’s efforts at reversing global warming. According to Goodman, while the efforts of the Senate to pass a climate change bill may be stalled, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced plans to declare carbon dioxide (CO2) “a dangerous pollutant.â€
A dangerous pollutant? Isn’t CO2 a naturally occurring substance?
Well, yes. CO2 is a chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a carbon atom. Volcanoes, geothermal springs, mineral degradation and other natural phenomena all emit vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. The EPA’s demonization of CO2 is based on the (unproven) belief that CO2, along with six other gases, form a heat-trapping layer in the upper atmosphere. The end result of this trapped heat is a global rise in temperature over time (also unproven).
There is nothing the EPA can do about naturally occurring sources of CO2, but by golly, the EPA’s task is to protect the environment, and that’s what it’s going to do. What the EPA has decided, in essence, is to protect the environment from another source of CO2 emissions–you.
In addition to producing CO2 every time you breathe (which the EPA can’t regulate), you also release CO2 whenever you drive your car, cook on your grill, open a can of cola or make bread (which can be regulated). It’s a common by-product of many activities. So, is all of this CO2 really a bad thing? Actually, no.
In the first place, CO2 is required by plants for photosynthesis. Plants use this “dangerous†by-product of our respiration as the main component of their respiration. The plants then release oxygen (O2) as their by-product, which is our primary source of this life-sustaining element. We benefit them; they benefit us. Symbiosis, as the scientists say.
Secondly, environmentalists theorize that there is a potentially larger threat to the atmosphere, a substance that is not even on the EPA’s list of deadly heat trappers: water vapor. Water vapor attaches itself to free carbon particles in the atmosphere, forming “black carbon,†or soot. This black carbon is considered by environmentalists to be just as hazardous as CO2, but there’s a major difference between the two: CO2 has an atmospheric lifetime of up to 100 years, while black carbon’s is only a matter of days.
The EPA could, theoretically, achieve its aims faster by going after water vapor, effectuating a change in weeks rather than centuries, yet it has not declared water vapor to be (as of this writing), dangerous.
Finally, the EPA is forced to concede that an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels may actually do some good. From a Wall Street Journal report:
The EPA did acknowledge some positive impacts from higher CO2 concentrations.
One is faster-growing trees in tropical forests, which helps offset deforestation. Another is marshes that can more quickly grow above rising sea levels, providing an insurance policy of sorts for some low-lying areas against the potential ravages of rising sea levels resulting from warmer global temperatures.
When politics and science converge, a good thing becomes a bad thing becomes a good thing becomes a mess.
By the way, another substance classified by the EPA as dangerous is methane; don’t even think about breaking wind.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
It all started earlier this year, when the Director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, told a German Magazine during an interview:
I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word ‘terrorism,’ I referred to ‘man-caused’ disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.
Next, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined the fray. After some initial confusion caused by Napolitano’s interview, Clinton set the record straight by announcing that the administration of President Barack Obama would no longer be talking about a “War on Terrorâ€:
I haven’t gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It’s just not being used, the administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself.
Thus, in an effort to rhetorically distance itself from former President George Bush (who had coined the “global war on terror†phrase after the September 11th attacks), the Obama administration made it clear that the appellations “terrorism†and “war on terror†were officially dead. In their place were substituted weird Orwellian Newspeak-type terms such as “overseas contingency operation†and the afore-mentioned “man-caused disaster.â€Â Linking “Islam†and “terrorism†in the same sentence seemed to rise to the level of thought crime.
A funny thing happened, however. The terrorists never got the memo.
They just went on doing what terrorists do. So, while the Obama administration was focused on semantics, those bent on our destruction went right on building bombs and attacking innocents.
And now, according to a Fox News report, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, while assailing Bush during a news conference for having “under-resourced Afghanistan for the better part of a decade,†declared Afghanistan to be “the most important part of our war on terror.†Oops.
OK, he said it.
Can we now go back to speaking Standard English and fighting terrorism?
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The president’s approval ratings are going down. The economy is stagnant, and the president’s efforts at jump-starting it have met with little success. After rushing through a series of bailouts and company takeovers, the president’s Marxist advisors recommended a slew of vast, draconian “reform†policies. But the public has grown increasingly skeptical. Consumer confidence is at an all-time low.
The president’s detractors on the airwaves have become more numerous and more vocal than ever before. And it’s no longer just the conservatives. The mainstream media have also begun to criticize the president’s policies.
Something must be done, and quickly.
The president decides that the best course of action will be to silence the critics. A bill aimed at communications reform is introduced. A “fairness doctrine†is proposed, which will insure that “both sides on any given issue will be heard.â€
“It will strengthen democracy,†the president asserts.
By now, you may be wondering how far President Barack Obama and his advisors are going to take things. Put that thought aside for a moment, because we are talking about a different leftist president here: President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina.
As Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman reported yesterday, President Fernandez has sent a media reform bill to Congress, in an effort aimed at “reducing the control of a handful of companies that dominate broadcasting.†This bill, Goodman reports, “is based on a proposal written by a coalition of community media, human rights groups, unions and progressive academics.â€
As President Fernandez herself put it:
This bill looks to dedicate to all of our people the right, so that everyone can be heard, so that voices of every man and woman can be heard, whether we like what they have to say or not, whether they serve our interests or are against our interests. It is for all of us.
All Argentines have the right to expression and to cultural assets that can’t be monopolized by one sector or one company
Naturally, leftist groups and academics have welcomed the Argentine Government’s push to silence its critics:
“You can’t have a society held hostage by the opinions of four companies that own the media,†said one leftist academic professor.
Argentines have every reason to fear this bill. It is nothing but a power grab by an unpopular leftist president committed to staying in power.
A political adversary of Fernandez rightly called it “a desperate effort to win votes at any price.â€
Julio Barbaro, a former head of Argentina’s state broadcast regulator noted:
[This bill] was only agreed between people with the same point of view … they’re looking for war with this bill.
Mr. Barbaro only got it half-right. The war, in fact, has already begun.
The leftist cable programs have been, for some time now, completely fixated upon the idea of prosecuting members of the administration of former President George Bush–especially former Vice-President Dick Cheney–for their role in the enhanced interrogation techniques (or, “torture,†in the leftist lexicon) of captured Islamist terrorists. From far-left Rachel Maddow to ultra-left Amy Goodman and her Marxist Democracy Now! network, there has been a concerted effort to link Cheney’s name with the “torture†of prisoners’ accused of being al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers.
Goodman’s Democracy Now!, for example, reported last week that a recently released 2004 CIA report on prisoner interrogations, has given President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder enough reason to open an inquiry into “CIA torture.†Holder has now appointed a federal prosecutor to look into whether CIA interrogators and contractors should be charged for the alleged torture and abuse of foreign prisoners.
So what did the released memos show?
In the case of the CIA’s most high-profile prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)–the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States–the memos demonstrate that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked very well, thank you.
Mohammed, an uncooperative prisoner with a deep and avowed hatred of the United States who was trained to endure harsh interrogation techniques, went on to become the CIA’s “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda, only after he was subjected to these techniques.
After he was forced to endure waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation, Mohammed began to cooperate and apparently even enjoy revealing al-Qaeda’s secrets. A person familiar with the sessions told the Washington Post:
KSM seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of Al Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology and operatives. He’d even use a chalkboard at times.
And what was the end result of Mohammed’s post-waterboarding disclosures?
Officials were able, with information gleaned from those interrogations, to thwart al-Qaeda plans to strike at additional targets in the United States, Saudi Arabia and East Asia. In one instance, officials broke up a network of Pakistanis recruited “to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.” The CIA and law-enforcement officials were able to round up operatives both in the United States and abroad before they were able to strike, based solely upon the information gleaned from Mohammed after he was waterboarded.
Apparently, this wasn’t good enough.
Holder’s pending inquiry has made it quite clear that to the Obama administration, the successful thwarting of numerous terrorist attacks and the saving of countless American lives will be met not with praise and gratitude, but with scorn and the threat of prosecution! Efforts to demonize the Bush administration will thus continue unabated. As Cheney explains:
We had a track record of eight years defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda, the approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, ‘How did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?’
Instead they are out there threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions — threatening contrary to what the president originally said. They’re going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations.
This December, as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! tells us, a Climate Summit will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The purpose of this summit will be to renew the Kyoto Climate Treaty Against Global Warming (Kyoto Protocol), which went into effect in 2005 (the United States was not a signatory to that treaty). At the Copenhagen Summit, a group of African nations, led by Ethiopia, will make an extraordinary demand of the West.
The Africans, Goodman reports, are going to demand $67 billion per year from Western developed nations (read: “the United Statesâ€) as reparations for the “devastating effects of climate change on the African continent.â€
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi frames the situation as follows:
Africa is going to need development assistance perhaps more so than in the past given the more hostile global economic environment that appears to be emerged. The international community needs to take urgent steps to limit global warming to about 2 degrees Celsius, which is going to hit Africa first and hit it hard.
The most effective means of adapting to climate change is growth and transformation of Africa’s economy that needs funds from the international community.
What the international community can do is to either become a stumbling block or a helping hand in the struggle for African economic growth and transformation.
On August 31, African heads of state are going to meet in Tripoli, Libya in order to iron out the details of the “compensation” package. In attendance—and deciding the fate of the developed world—will be such bastions of liberty, freedom and fiscal responsibility as Ethiopia, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Libya, Uganda, and a host of others. Nearly all of these countries have already received billions of dollars in aid over the years, with little to show for it besides graft, corruption and the personal enrichment of their despots.
And the devil, as they say, is in the details. Democracy Now!’s annual reparations figure of $67 billion is probably the minimum for which the Africans will settle. As Dr. Abebe Hailegabriel, acting director of the African Union’s Rural Economy and Agriculture Department, put it:
Trillions of dollars might not be enough in compensation.
The Africans have begun to look at their environment in a new way. Instead of deserts, savannahs and plains, they’re seeing dollar signs. There is a word for what they have in mind for the December Summit: extortion. This sudden environmental awakening on their part is nothing but a ruse to extort billions of additional dollars from the West.
The United States never ratified the Kyoto Treaty Against Global Warming. It would be wise to stay away from its successor in Copenhagen as well.
Hassan Nemazee
Amy Goodman of the Marxist Democracy Now! network reported yesterday on the arrest of a “leading Democratic donor†named Hassan Nemazee.
Here is the story, in its entirety:
Back in the United States, a leading Democratic donor has been arrested and charged with seeking to defraud the financial giant Citibank. Hassan Nemazee is accused of submitting forged documents to secure a $74 million loan. Nemazee has given at least $150,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee since 2006 and supported several other leading Democratic politicians.
Not much to sink your teeth into there. Could it be that Goodman is downplaying this story? Who is Hassan Nemazee, anyway?
Nemazee, it turns out, is an Iranian-American real-estate developer and investor, and is currently Chairman and CEO of Nemazee Capital Corporation, a holdings company that invests in both public and private companies. After making millions of dollars in his dealings, he began to actively support the Democratic Party with large cash contributions. He was the principal fundraiser for John Kerry‘s 2004 presidential campaign, for which he raised more than $100,000. He gave more than $150,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 1990s, at least $60,000 to Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund, and $250,000 to Al Gore‘s presidential campaign in 2000.
So is he just a zealous Democratic Party supporter with deep pockets?
Not quite. This may be the part Goodman was reluctant to talk about. Nemazee, you see, has a dark secret: he’s a terrorist sympathizer.
Nemazee is a Board of Trustees member with the Asia Society, an organization sympathetic to the oppressive, terrorism-sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist regime of Iran. The Asia Society has gone on record as “recommending that the United States declare an end to President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and negotiate with Taliban members willing to separate from Al Qaeda.†He was a past board member of the American-Iranian Council, a U.S. lobbying group that has consistently supported lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran and accommodating the Tehran regime. He is also a founding board member of the Iranian American Political Action Committee [IAPAC], which seeks to create friendly and lucrative business relationships with the Iranian theocracy ruling that country.
Nemazee, whose bail has been set at $25 million (secured by his $20 million New York City Apartment), faces a maximum prison term of 30 years.
Now that the Democrats–who have been the major recipients of Nemazee’s largesse–are running the show, it should be interesting to watch this saga play out.
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Warning: This post contains a graphic depiction of the murder of two FBI agents.
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In the early summer of 1975, activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM), who had been staging a takeover of the Pine Ridge reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, noticed two vehicles pull into the compound. The cars belonged to FBI agents Jack R. Coler, 28, and Ronald A. Williams, 27, who had come to serve an arrest warrant on a Native American kidnapping suspect named Jimmy Eagle. Leonard Peltier and two AIM comrades involved in the Pine Ridge takeover thought the agents were coming after them and opened fire on the vehicles. The Indians fired 125 shots—114 of which came from an AR-15 assault rifle—at the agents in their cars.
They didn’t stand a chance. Coler, mortally wounded, passed out from loss of blood. Williams, also injured, threw down his gun, stripped off his shirt and waved it as a flag of surrender. He then applied his shirt as a tourniquet around his fellow agent’s shattered arm.
Peltier dispatched both of them, as they lay wounded, by shooting them in the head at point-blank range. Agent Williams, according to the pathology report, was killed with his hand held up to his face. The bullet went right through his hand into his head. He died, according to prosecutors, begging for his life.
A jury found Peltier guilty of murder after only six hours of deliberation. He was sentenced to life in prison. In a statement read before the Court, he defiantly declared:
“I’m not the guilty one here. White racist America is the criminal, for the destruction of our lands and our people.”
The American left soon rallied around Peltier. Such luminaries as Jesse Jackson, Ed Asner, Danny Glover, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, and Rep. John Conyers soon became involved in the “Free Peltier†movement.
Referring to himself as a “political prisoner,†Peltier went on to become a cause célèbre in the communist world as well. In the 1980s, for example, when dissident Russians began writing about gulags, forced exile, forced commitments to psychiatric hospitals and other abuses by Soviet authorities, the Soviets seized upon the Peltier “political prisoner” case as a shining example of American hypocrisy. Communist China’s government, as recently as 1998, voiced its support to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
And now, our favorite Marxists over at Democracy Now! are loath to report, Peltier, after 33 years in prison, has been denied parole. Not only that, we are told that his parole denial is the fault of none other than former President George W. Bush! Peltier’s lawyer, Eric Seitz, in an interview with host Amy Goodman, explains:
Well, what we learned was that the Parole Commission, which is a holdover group of people from the Bush administration and an agency of the Justice Department, is never going to parole Leonard Peltier. They adopted in full the position of the FBI that if you kill an FBI agent, you should spend the rest of your life in jail, even if there are serious questions about the conduct of the FBI itself and of the government in prosecuting him.
Peltier, reports Goodman with a heavy heart, will now be ineligible for another parole hearing until July 2024, when he will be 79. She neglects to tell us in that report, however, how old the two FBI agents would have been, had they not run into Peltier on that June day back in 1975.
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FBI Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams
According to reports from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama has generously agreed to lend $2 billion to the oil industry for the purpose of offshore drilling. Those of you who have been proponents of this for some time now are probably thinking that the president has finally come to his senses and has taken the first of many concrete steps required in order to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.
Not so fast.
Like everything else coming out of the Obama administration, there’s more to this than meets the eye. The government is not lending the money (your money, actually) so that our domestic oil industry can drill offshore and in oil-rich areas with proven reserves such as the Gulf of Mexico. Rather, the government is lending the money to Brazil, so that they can drill offshore and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The recipient of this great act of generosity is Brazil’s quasi-public national oil company, Petrobras, which will use the money for the exploration and drilling of 270 sites in the Gulf of Mexico and over 200 more off the coast of Brazil itself.
For those not knowing much about Petrobras, here are a few interesting facts:
• The Company has been run since 2005 by José Sergio Gabrielli, a firebrand socialist member of Brazil’s leftist Workers’ Party.
• Brazil’s socialist government holds 40% of Petrobras’ shares. The Communist Chinese–who have been guaranteed a supply of 200,000 barrels of oil a day for ten years by the Brazilians in exchange for a $10 billion loan from China’s government earlier this year–also own a significant stake in Petrobras.
• Petrobras’ largest individual shareholder, by far, is none other than leftist billionaire George Soros, whose hedge fund, by some remarkable coincidence, increased its holdings in Petrobras just prior to Obama’s loan announcement.
• Petrobras is currently under investigation by Brazil’s Congress amid allegations that it has padded contracts and paid off politicians.
So the Brazilians will soon be taking oil from the Gulf of Mexico, one of the richest oil fields in the world (and where, until recently, environmentalist protestations have thwarted any drilling attempts by our own government). And, it seems, they will have plenty of company. China, India, Norway, Spain and Russia, to name a few, have all signed agreements with countries bordering the Gulf, such as Cuba and the Bahamas, enabling them to initiate exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico as well.
Within the next two years, when rigs proudly displaying the flags of Brazil, China, Russia, Cuba and other countries are extracting oil right off our coast in order to fuel their economies, take note of the fact that the one flag you won’t be seeing is the Stars and Stripes. For that, you may have to visit a wind farm.
On December 21, 1988, Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, acting on instructions from Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadaffi, placed a bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103, destroying the plane in flight. The blast killed 270 people, including all 243 passengers (189 of whom were American), 16 crew members, and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.
After being sheltered for years by the Libyans, al-Megrahi was finally convicted of the crime in 2001 and sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving the equivalent of 11 days in prison for each victim, this mass murderer, now suffering from prostate cancer, was released by Scotland on “humanitarian” grounds. He arrived back in Libya, Amy Goodman reported on Democracy Now!, maintaining his innocence. In fact, Goodman’s report was a most sympathetic one, culminating in this self-serving statement from al-Megrahi, read by his attorney:
“I had most to gain and nothing to lose about the whole truth coming out, until my diagnosis of cancer. To those victims’ relatives who can bear to hear me say this, they continue to have my sincere sympathy for their unimaginable loss that they have suffered. To those who bear me ill will, the only thing I can say is that I do not return that to you.â€
Al-Megrahi’s release, done quietly and resulting in his immediate house arrest upon his arrival back in Libya, would have been insulting enough to the families of the victims. What followed, however, was a disgrace of truly unimaginable proportions.
Libya, with the world watching, welcomed al-Megrahi home as a conquering hero. People danced in the streets. Some threw flower petals as he stepped from the plane. Al-Megrahi’s release, occurring as it did during the Islamic “holy month” of Ramadan, has been perceived almost as a miracle by his well-wishers. “It’s a great day for us,” said a jubilant 24-year-old Abdel-Aal Mansour, one of the revelers. “He belongs here, at home.”
As a further slap to the international community, al-Megrahi will even be feted at next month’s celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the military coup that swept the Libyan dictator Quaddafi to power.
The Libyans, of course, in the midst of their jubilation, have given no thought to the relatives of the victims who died as a result of al-Megrahi’s state-sponsored terrorist act back in 1988. Those people are now forced to witness a state-sponsored celebratory spectacle. “You get that lump in your throat and you feel like you’re going to throw up,” said Norma Maslowski, a New Jersey native, whose 30-year-old daughter, Diane, died in the attack.
You do indeed.
