Jerome R. Corsi's Blog, page 311
January 20, 2013
China poised to play debt card – for U.S. land
EDITOR’S NOTE: Barack Obama’s involvement in the DeMar Second Amendment case was previously reported in Chapter 7 of Jerome R. Corsi’s “America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty.”
NEW YORK – Could real estate on American soil owned by China be set up as “development zones” in which the communist nation could establish Chinese-owned businesses and bring in its citizens to the U.S. to work?
That’s part of an evolving proposal Beijing has been developing quietly since 2009 to convert more than $1 trillion of U.S debt it owns into equity.
Under the plan, China would own U.S. businesses, U.S. infrastructure and U.S. high-value land, all with a U.S. government guarantee against loss.
Yu Qiao, a professor of economics in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsighua University in Beijing, proposed in 2009 a plan for the U.S. government to guarantee foreign investments in the United States.
WND has reliable information that the Bank of China, China’s central bank, has continued to advance the plan to convert China’s holdings of U.S. debt into equity owned by China in the U.S.
The Obama administration, under the plan, would grant a financial guarantee as an inducement for China to convert U.S. debt into Chinese direct equity investment. China would take ownership of successful U.S. corporations, potentially profitable infrastructure projects and high-value U.S. real estate.
The plan would be designed to induce China to resume lending to the U.S. on a nearly zero-interest basis.
However, converting Chinese debt to equity investments in the United States could easily add another $1 trillion to outstanding Obama administration guarantees issued in the current economic crisis.
As of November 2012, China owned $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, according to U.S. Department of Treasury and Federal Reserve Board calculations published Jan. 16.
Concerned about the unrestrained growth in U.S. debt under the Obama administration, China has reduced by 97 percent its holdings in short-term U.S. Treasury bills. China’s holding of $573.7 billion in August 2008, prior to the massive bank bailouts and stimulus programs triggered by the collapse in the U.S. mortgage market, dwindled to $5.96 billion by March 2011.
Treasury bills are short-term debt that matures in one year or less, sold to finance U.S. debt. Holdings of Treasury bills are included in the $1.17 trillion of total Treasury securities owned by China as of November 2012.
In addition to a national debt in excess of $16 trillion, the U.S. government in 2010 faced over $70 trillion in unfunded obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits scheduled to be paid retiring baby boomer retirees in the coming decades, with unfunded obligations showing no sign of being reduced with Congress at a deadlock over reducing federal government spending.
Yu Qiao observed that if the U.S. dollar collapsed under the weight of proposed Obama administration trillion-dollar budget deficits into the foreseeable future, holders of U.S. debt would face substantial losses that the Financial Times estimated “would devastate Asians’ hard-earned wealth and terminate economic globalization.”
“The basic idea is to turn Asian savings, China’s in particular, into real business interests rather than let them be used to support U.S. over-consumption,” Yu Qiao wrote, reflecting themes commonly suggested by Chinese government officials. “While fixed-income securities are vulnerable to any fall in the value of the dollar, equity claims on sound corporations and infrastructure projects are at less risk from a currency default,” he continued.
The problem is that, in a struggling U.S. economy, China does not want to trade its investment in U.S. Treasury debt securities, with their inherent risk of dollar devaluation, for equally risky investments in U.S. corporations and infrastructure projects.
“But Asians do not want to bear the risk of this investment because of market turbulence and a lack of knowledge of cultural, legal and regulatory issues in U.S. businesses,” he stressed. “However if a guarantee scheme were created, Asian savers could be willing to invest directly in capital-hungry U.S. industries.”
Yu Qiao’s plan included four components:
China would negotiate with the U.S. government to create a “crisis relief facility,” or CRF. The CRF “would be used alongside U.S. federal efforts to stabilize the banking system and to invest in capital-intensive infrastructure projects such as high-speed railroad from Boston to Washington, D.C.
China would pool a portion of its holdings of Treasury bonds under the CFR umbrella to convert sovereign debt into equity. Any CFR funds that were designated for investment in U.S. corporations would still be owned and managed by U.S. equity holders, with the Asians holding minority equity shares “that would, like preferred stock, be convertible.”
The U.S. government would act as a guarantor, “providing a sovereign guarantee scheme to assure the investment principal of the CRF against possible default of targeted companies or projects”.
The Federal Reserve would set up a special account to supply the liquidity the CRF would require to swap sovereign debt into industrial investment in the United States.
“The CRF would lessen Asians’ concern about implicit default of sovereign debts caused by a collapsing dollar,” Yu Qiao concluded. “It would cost little and help the U.S. by channeling funds to business investment.”
January 14, 2013
Here's the real unemployment rate
NEW YORK – The real unemployment rate for December 2012 is closer to 23 percent, not the 7.8 percent reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to economist John Williams.
Williams, author of the Shadow Government Statistics website, argues that the federal government manipulates the reporting of key economic data for political purposes, using methodologies that tend to mask bad news.
In the BLS news release Jan. 4, the unemployment rate for December 2012 was reported to have remained unchanged at 7.8 percent.
Williams recreates a ShadowStats Alternative unemployment rate reflecting methodology that includes the “long-term discouraged workers” that the Bureau of Labor Statistics removed in 1994 under the Clinton administration.
The BLS publishes six levels of unemployment, but only the headline U3 unemployment rate gets the press. The headline number does not count “discouraged” unemployed workers who have not looked for work in the past four weeks because they believe no jobs are available.
Williams has demonstrated that it takes an expert to truly decipher BLS unemployment statistics. For instance, in Table A-15, titled “Alternative measures of labor underutilization,” the BLS reports what is known as “U6 unemployment.”
The U6 unemployment rate is the BLS’s broadest measure. It includes those marginally attached to the labor force and the “under-employed,” those who have accepted part-time jobs when they are really looking for full-time employment. Also included are short-term discouraged workers, those who have not looked for work in the last year because there are no jobs to be had.
Since 1994, however, the long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year, have been excluded from all government data.
While the BLS was reporting seasonally adjusted headline unemployment in December 2012 was only 7.8 percent, it was also reporting the broader U6 seasonally adjusted unemployment in December 2012 was 14.4 percent.
In his subscription newsletter, Williams contended the “headline changes” reported by BLS for the December 2012 unemployment rate of 7.8 percent “lack statistical significance.”
“To the extent that there is any significance in the monthly reporting,” he said, “it is that the economy is not in recovery, and that unemployment has made a new high, at a level that rivals any other downturn of the post-Great Depression era.”
The only measure BLS reports to the public as the official monthly unemployment rate is the headline, seasonally adjusted U3 number.
Williams calculates his “ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment Rate” by adding to the BLS U6 numbers the long-term discouraged workers, those workers who have not looked for work in more than a year but still consider themselves to be unemployed.
Williams believes that his ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment measure most closely mirrors common experience.
“If you were to survey everyone in the country as to whether they were employed or unemployed, without qualification as to when they last looked for a job, the resulting unemployment rate would be close to the ShadowStats estimate,” Williams explained to WND.
The headline BLS unemployment rate has stayed relatively low, because it excludes all discouraged workers, Williams argues.
As the unemployed first become discouraged and then disappear into the long-term discouraged category, they also vanish from inclusion in the headline labor force numbers. Those workers still are there, however, ready to take a job if one becomes available. They are unemployed and consider themselves to be unemployed, but the government’s popularly followed unemployment reporting ignores them completely.
Here is a more complete unemployment table that includes the seasonally adjusted unemployment percentages for U3 unemployment, as well as the same for U6 unemployment, followed by the ShadowStats Alternative Unemployment rate for both December 2011 and December 2012:
Increasingly, critics like Williams believe the seasonally adjusted U3 numbers reported by the BLS as the official monthly unemployment rate do not give a reliable picture of the true magnitude of unemployment in the United States.
The definitions used by the BLS exclude from the calculation of the monthly U3 unemployment rate anyone who has not looked for work at any time during the past four weeks. Those workers are considered to be “discouraged” and “not in the labor force.”
In the U6 calculations, the discouraged workers are only those who have actively looked for work in the past year.
The BLS definitions don’t consider those who would look for work if there were a reasonable chance they could find employment.
January 11, 2013
Obama's anti-gun bias traces back decades
EDITOR’S NOTE: Barack Obama’s involvement in the DeMar Second Amendment case previously was reported in Chapter 9 of Jerome R. Corsi’s “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.”
NEW YORK – Despite campaign statements calculated to make Barack Obama sound sympathetic to the Constitution’s Second Amendment, his history reveals another attitude.
Critics of Obama say he simply hates guns.
Obama’s long-term antipathy to the Second Amendment is evidenced by a case that came up when Obama was an Illinois state senator and Obama worked to prosecute criminally a man who stopped a home-invasion burglary that happened while his children were asleep in their beds.
But he used an improperly registered handgun.
The home invasion case
The case involved Hale DeMar, a 52-year-old Wilmette resident who was arrested and charged with misdemeanor violations for shooting a burglar who broke into his home not once, but twice. DeMar shot the invader in the shoulder and leg.
DeMar was well-known in Chicago as the owner the Oak Tree Restaurant on the Magnificant Mile along Michigan Avenue, and legally had purchased the gun in the 1980s from Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale.
On Dec. 28, 2003, DeMar woke up in the middle of the night to find his home had been invaded by a criminal who stole various household items including a television, a ring of keys and DeMar’s BMW SUV.
The next night the thief returned and used DeMar’s keys to get back into the house. This time, the thief set off the alarm system, automatically notifying the security company.
Concerned his children were in danger, DeMar got his handgun from the safe where he kept it and shot the thief, who then fled the house by crashing through the front window to escape.
The burglar, a 31-year-old with a criminal record, then drove DeMar’s SUV to the hospital, where he was arrested.
Arrested for self-defense
On Jan. 8, 2004, Wilmette Police Chief George Carpenter arrested DeMar for violating the town’s handgun ban, which took effect in 1989.
“Wilmette homes are much safer without a handgun,” Carpenter told the Chicago Sun-Times, defending his decision to enforce the North Shore suburb’s local ordinance.
Additionally, Carpenter charged DeMar with failing to renew his Illinois firearm owner’s identification card, which had expired in 1988. DeMar faced some hefty fines and possibly even some jail time under the violations.
A few days later, appearing before the Wilmette Village Board to defend why he arrested DeMar under the town’s handgun ban, Carpenter explained, “Handguns create a hazard in the home.”
Against a background of booing from local residents attending the packed village board meeting, Carpenter argued his case. “My experience is that handguns are more likely to be used or threatened to be used in quarrel or domestic situations or in suicide attempts,” he explained.
Town residents testifying disagreed, describing gun ownership as “a God-given right” and “the most sacred civil right.” According to a Chicago Sun-Times reporter present at the hearing, at one point a man in the audience stood up and yelled, “Give me liberty or give me death!” echoing Patrick Henry’s famous line.
“Until you are shocked by a piercing alarm in the middle of the night and met in your kitchen by a masked invader as your children shudder in their beds, until you confront that very real nightmare, please don’t suggest that some village trustee knows better,” De Mar said in his own self-defense.
“If my actions have spared only one family from the distress and trauma that this habitual criminal has caused hundreds of others, then I have served my civic duty and taken one evil creature off our streets, something that our impotent criminal justice system had failed to do, despite some thirty odd arrests, plea bargains and suspended sentences.”
In February 2004, Cook County prosecutors dropped all charges against DeMar, thinking better about facing the public outcry that had developed throughout the state over the case.
Obama pursues case
But that wasn’t the end, and soon Obama was in action.
In March 2004, the Illinois Senate passed Senate Bill 2165, a law introduced in response to DeMar’s case, with provisions designed to assert a right of citizens to protect themselves against home invasions, such that self-defense requirements would be viewed to take precedence over local ordinances against handgun possession.
The measure passed the Illinois Senate by a vote of 38-20.
Obama was one of the 20 state senators voting against the measure.
After passing the Illinois House by an overwhelming majority of 86-25, the measure went to the desk of the now-imprisoned Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who vetoed it.
On Nov. 9, 2004, the Illinois Senate voted 40-18 to override Blagojevich’s veto.
Again, Obama acted against the bill, voting with the 18 that wanted to sustain the governor’s veto.
On Nov. 17, 2004, the Illinois House voted overwhelmingly, 85-30, to override the governor’s veto and Senate Bill 2165 became law.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the override vote in the Illinois legislature demonstrated that, “Legislatures are responding – albeit with very small steps in Illinois – to constituents who demand that their right of self-defense be held sacrosanct.”
Obama was one of the few state senators who did not get the point.
The Joyce Foundation
Kenneth Vogel, writing in Politico.com, pointed out that before Obama became a national political figure, he sat on the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation that gave out at least nine grants totaling $2.7 million to groups advocating gun-control measures.
Among the Joyce Foundation grants approved while Obama was on the board was $20,000 in funding to a group called the Violence Policy Center that used the money to publish a book entitled “Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.”
Josh Sugarmann, the director of the Violence Policy Center and the author of the book, wrote in the book’s introduction, “A single consumer product holds our nation hostage: the handgun.”
For his eight years with the Joyce Foundation, Obama was paid more than $70,000 in director’s fees, according to Vogel’s article in Politico.com.
January 9, 2013
Brennan: Don't use 'jihad' to describe terrorists
NEW YORK – While concern has mounted that former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of defense should be blocked because of past expressed hostility for Israel, little attention has been given to CIA-nominee John Brennan’s view of Islam.
In a speech delivered Aug. 9, 2009, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies that is archived on the White House website, Brennan said using “a legitimate term, ‘jihad’ – meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal” – to describe terrorists “risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”
As WND reported, Brennan advised in the speech that U.S. foreign policy should encourage greater assimilation of the Hezbollah terrorist organization into the Lebanese government.
In a July 2008 article in The Annals, a publication of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Brennan argued it “would not be foolhardy, however, for the United States to tolerate, and even to encourage, greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system, a process that is subject to Iranian influence.”
Brennan argued Hezbollah “is already represented in the Lebanese parliament, and its members have previously served in the Lebanese cabinet, reflections of Hezbollah’s interest in shaping Lebanon’s political future from within government institutions.”
“This involvement is a far cry from Hezbollah’s genesis as solely a terrorist organization dedicated to murder, kidnapping and violence,” he said.
At the August 2009 press conference for the CSIS, Brennan declared: “Hezbollah started out as purely a terrorist organization back in the early ‘80s and has evolved significantly over time. And now it has members of parliament, in the cabinet; there are lawyers, doctors, others who are part of the Hezbollah organization.”
Middle Eastern terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah frequently maintain civilian units of doctors and lawyers to emphasize their outreach with local politicians and to increase their political acceptance in the international arena.
Conceivably, the Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, better known by the Turkish acronym IHH, would fit into Brennan’s definition of the charitable side of organizations such as Hezbollah. However, IHH’s ties to al-Qaida have been amply documented by experts such as former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who led the French judiciary’s counter-terrorism unit for nearly two decades before retiring in 1977.
Despite this history, IHH is not included on the State Department’s current list of 45 groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations, which names both Hezbollah and Hamas.
In a speech to New York University law school students posted on YouTube by the White House, Brennan included a lengthy statement in Arabic that he did not translate for his English-speaking audience.
Noting he was an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo in the 1970s, Brennan proceeded to use only the Arabic name, “Al Quds,” when referring to Jerusalem, commenting that during his 25-years in government he spent considerable time in the Middle East, as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.
“In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina,” he said. “I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims of making that pilgrimage.”
WND previously reported Brennan participated in a meeting with Muslim law students facilitated by the Islamic Society of North America, a group designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case in which the founders of the Holy Land Foundation of Texas were given life sentences “for funneling $12 million” to Hamas, the group currently in political control of the Gaza.
WND further reported that at the meeting with Muslim law students at New York University, Brennan declared himself a “citizen of the world,” who believed the U.S. government should never engage in “profiling” in pursuit of national security.
January 8, 2013
Did CIA pick sanitize Obama's passport records?
EDITOR’S NOTE: John Brennan’s involvement in the breach of Obama’s passport records was previously reported in the introduction to Jerome R. Corsi’s “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible To Be President.”
NEW YORK – John Brennan, the Obama counter-terrorism adviser nominated this week to head the CIA, played a controversial role in what many suspect was an effort to sanitize Obama’s passport records.
On March 21, 2008, amid Obama’s first presidential campaign, two unnamed contract employees for the State Department were fired and a third was disciplined for breaching the passport file of Democratic presidential candidate and then-Sen. Barack Obama.
Breaking the story, the Washington Times on March 20, 2008, noted that all three had used their authorized computer network access to look up and read Obama’s records within the State Department consular affairs section that “possesses and stores passport information.”
Contacted by the newspaper, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack attributed the violations to non-political motivations, stressing that the three individuals involved “did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.”
“As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity,” McCormack told the Washington Times.
The spokesman did not disclose exactly how the State Department came to that conclusion.
By the next day, the story had changed.
The New York Times reported March 21, 2008, that the security breach had involved unauthorized searches of the passport records not just of Sen. Obama but also of then-presidential contenders Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
Again, the New York Times attributed the breaches to “garden-variety snooping by idle employees” that was “not politically motivated.”
Like the Washington Times, the New York Times gave no explanation to back up its assertion that the breaches were attributable to non-political malfeasance.
Still, the New York Times report indicated then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had spent Friday morning calling all three presidential candidates and that she had told Obama that she was sorry for the violation.
“I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice said.
The newspaper quoted Obama as saying he appreciated the apology but that he expected the passport situation “to be investigated diligently and openly.”
According to the New York Times report, Obama’s tone of concern was obvious.
“One of the things that the American people count on in their interactions with any level of government is that if they have to disclose personal information, that is going to stay personal and stay private,” Obama told reporters. “And when you have not just one, but a series of attempts to tap into people’s personal records, that’s a problem, not just for me, but for how our government is functioning.”
The New York Times noted that the files examined likely contained sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, addresses and dates of birth, as well as passport applications and other biographical information that would pertain to U.S. citizenship. Only at the end of the article did the New York Times note that State Department spokesman McCormack had emphasized the most egregious violation appeared to have been made against Obama.
Obama was the only one of the three presidential candidates involved who had his passport file breached on three separate occasions. The first occurred Jan. 9, 2008, followed by separate violations Feb. 21 and March 14, 2008. Moreover, all three of the offending employees had breached Obama’s files, while each of the passport files of McCain and Clinton had been breached only once.
The Brennan connection
The New York Times noted the two offending State Department contract employees who were fired had worked for Stanley Inc., a company based in Arlington, Va., while the reprimanded worker continued to be employed by the Analysis Corporation of McLean, Va.
The newspaper gave no background on either corporation, other than to note that Stanley Inc. did “computer work for the government.”
At that time, Stanley Inc. was a 3,500-person technology firm that had just won a $570-million contract to provide computer-related passport services to the State Department.
Analysis Corporation was headed by Brennan, a former CIA agent who was then serving as an adviser on intelligence and foreign policy to Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign.
After Obama’s inauguration, Brennan joined the White House as assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counter-terrorism.
By March 22, 2008, the Washington Times reported that the State Department investigation had focused on the contract worker for the Analysis Corporation, because he was the only one of the three involved in breaching the passport records of both Obama and McCain, the two presidential candidates whose eligibility as “natural born” citizens under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution were in question.
Keeping with the theme that the motive for the passport breach was attributable to mischief, the three State Department contract employees received relatively light penalties for their offenses – two were fired and one was reprimanded.
Although at the time the State Department promised a full-scale investigation, the public was kept in the dark.
In July 2008, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a 104-page investigative report on the passport breach incidents, stamped “Sensitive But Unclassified.” The report was so heavily redacted, it was virtually useless to the public. Scores of passages were blacked out entirely, including one sequence of 29 consecutive pages that were each obliterated by a solid black box that made it impossible even to determine paragraph structures.
Investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman said a well-placed but unnamed source told him that the real point of the passport breach incidents was to cauterize the Obama file, removing from it any information that could prove damaging to his eligibility to be president.
According to the theory, the breaches of McCain’s and Clinton’s files were done for misdirection purposes, to create confusion and to suggest the motives of the perpetrators were attributable entirely to innocent curiosity.
Another thief enters the case
Within a few days, a new witness surfaced unexpectedly, providing evidence that breaching passport files was an offense being perpetrated by State Department officials on a massive and everyday basis.
The case centered on Leiutenant Quarles Harris Jr., age 24. Harris, who spelled his named differently than the officer rank, was a petty drug dealer and identity-theft criminal who never served in the military or in any police or fire department.
On March 25, 2008, at approximately 9:30 p.m., Officer William A. Smith Jr. of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s Narcotics Special Investigation Division stopped an oncoming vehicle that had tinted windows he believed were in violation of the D.C. Tinted Window Act of 1994.
After stopping the vehicle, Smith found the driver, Harris, and his female passenger had been smoking marijuana. Harris had stuffed in his jacket pocket a large clear zip-lock bag containing 13 smaller clear zip-lock bags, each filled with marijuana.
The affidavit of criminal complaint filed by Smith with the U.S. District Court specified that in the search of the vehicle, the officers found 19 different credit cards with names different from Harris and his female passenger. Also discovered were eight State Department passport applications, also in names different from Harris and his female passenger.
The officers further discovered four of the names on the passport applications matched the names on the credit cards. A check with American Express while Harris was still on the scene of the traffic stop indicated that some of the American Express cards in his possession, but not in his name, had recently been used and that American Express had placed a “fraud alert” on the cards.
Smith brought Harris to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Sixth District, where agents of the U.S. Secret Service, the State Department and the U.S. Postal Service questioned him. Harris’ involvement in passport application theft clearly made him no ordinary petty criminal.
According to the criminal complaint filed by Smith, Harris admitted under questioning that he obtained the passport information from an unnamed co-conspirator working at the State Department. The complaint said the passport applications were used to obtain credit cards in the names of the passport applicants.
Another unnamed co-conspirator working at the U.S. Postal Service intercepted the issued credit cards before they were delivered to the residences of the persons named on the cards.
What was clear from Harris’ statements was that breaching passport records at the State Department had developed into major criminal activity conducted on a continuing basis by State Department employees with access to the State Department’s Passport Information Electronic Records System, commonly known by the acronym PIERS.
What also was clear was that Harris had information related to the State Department employees who had breached Obama’s passport records and that he was cooperating with government officials.
Despite the objection of the prosecutors, the judge at his arraignment released Harris the next day on personal recognizance. He was ordered to return to court for a hearing in June 2008.
Key witness murdered
However, Harris did not live to attend the court hearing.
On April 18, 2008, he was found murdered in Washington, D.C., by a single bullet to the head in what appeared to be a drive-by shooting.
The Washington Times reported April 19, 2008, that a “key witness in a federal probe into passport information stolen from the State Department was fatally shot in front of a District church” at close range, around 11 p.m., in the 2800 block of 12th Street NE, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
Harris, who the Washington Times described as “cooperating with federal investigators,” was found slumped dead at the steering wheel of his car in front of the Judah House Praise Baptist Church in the northeast section of D.C., according to Commander Michael Anzallo, the head of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Division.
A police officer patrolling the neighborhood at the time of Harris’ death heard gunshots and ran to the scene, only to find Harris dead inside his car. The Metropolitan Police admitted a “shot spotter” device had been used to locate Harris in the shooting, although police officials declined to say whether his death was a direct result of his cooperation with federal investigators.
There is no evidence that today links Harris’ crimes or murder with the breach of Obama’s passport records by State Department contract employees.
At first glance, Harris could be dismissed as a foot-soldier selling marijuana and peddling credit cards fraudulently obtained via passport-related identity theft.
Yet there is more to the story than petty criminal activity. Obviously, Harris got himself in way over his head when he decided to work with the State Department officials accessing PIERS to obtain passport records without authorization.
Equally obvious was that by being willing to cooperate with police, Harris risked becoming a threat to his accomplices and co-conspirators within the State Department.
ABC news affiliate WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., reported Cleopatria Harris, the mother of Leiutenant Quarles Harris, believed her son was murdered to keep him from cooperating with the federal investigation into the passport-record breach. She told the TV station her son was in court three days before his murder.
“He felt like he was going to do jail time. He was willing to do jail time,” she said, indicating that she believed news reports that her son had been arrested and was cooperating with the police were the reason he was killed. “Yes I do. think it had a hell of a lot to do with it. [The story] made my son appear to be a snitch.”
Similarly, the Washington Post reported Cleopatria Harris was “absolutely sure” her son was killed because of his involvement in the passport-credit card scam.
Harris’ mother refused to believe her son’s murder was an act of violence unrelated to the passport scheme. Instead, she contended he was killed because he was an important witness regarding a State Department breach of passport records.
To date, the D.C. Metropolitan Police have no suspects in the still unsolved murder of Leiutenant Quarles Harris Jr. Nor has the State Department ever revealed publicly what was discovered in the breach of Obama’s passport records. The three individuals involved in the breach have never come forward in public to tell what they found.
Obama discloses trip to Pakistan
But this is not the end of the story.
Two weeks after the report that Obama’s passport records had been breached, candidate Obama made the surprising disclosure at a private fundraiser April 7, 2008, that he had traveled to Pakistan during his college years.
Jake Tapper, then senior White House correspondent for ABC News, commented that Obama’s disclosure that he had taken a college trip to Pakistan was “news to most of us.” Tapper said “it was odd we hadn’t heard about it before, given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign.”
Tapper reported that, according to the Obama campaign, Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, the year he transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University, and that he had visited his mother and sister Maya in Indonesia on the same trip.
Why was Obama disclosing now, for the first time, that he had traveled to Pakistan with his roommates from Occidental College?
Did Obama use an Indonesian passport to travel to Indonesia and Pakistan in 1981, and was he concerned the breach of his passport records might end up disclosing such information, if true?
The attempt to preempt such a disclosure might explain the timing of Obama’s decision to suddenly reveal, at least to the friends assembled for the fundraiser, the previously undisclosed trip to Indonesia and Pakistan.
“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college,” Obama is heard saying on the poor-quality audiotape that survives from the San Francisco fundraiser. “I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
January 5, 2013
Here come the geeks: How Obama won
A consensus is developing in the post-mortem analyses of the 2012 presidential election that technology, combined increasingly with behavioral science understanding of voting behavior, were decisive advantages that led Team Obama to victory.
As a result, the prognosis for all future elections is relatively simple: Here come the geeks!
“Smoke filled rooms” that in bygone days were the domain of ward bosses are about to be replaced with “computer caves” where the denizens are increasingly likely to be academics more comfortable with a computer keyboard who have never actually had an in-person conversation with a voter.
The emerging conclusion is that Obama beat Romney the minute the Chicago-based bosses who managed his campaign, including Jim Messina and David Plouffe, applied ward politics to the Internet age.
In a three-part series published by Technology Review in December, Sarah Issenberg, the author of the groundbreaking book “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” concluded Obama’s data techniques will rule future elections.
“What [the Obama campaign analytics] gave us was the ability to run a national presidential campaign the way you’d do a local ward campaign,” Simas told Issenberg. “You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another, and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what they’re discussing at the coffee shop.”
The Romney campaign placed emphasis on traditional techniques of presidential campaigning – messaging and mass media advertising, focusing largely on television.
By contrast, the Obama campaign focused on Internet profiling of voters to develop voter contact information that micromanaged campaign messaging to fit the voter profile, while concentrating on fund-raising and “ground-game” efforts to get out the vote, known in professional political circles by the acronym GOTV.
Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal, writing in the Atlantic 10 days after the election noted that on Oct. 21, the Obama campaign shock-tested Narwhal, the code name for the Obama campaign data platform, putting the technology through what geeks call “live action role playing,” or “LARPing,” to determine how the computer system would perform under every possible disaster situation.
Narwhal predictably crashed, providing Obama computer experts with the information the campaign’s tech team needed to build redundant systems and put fixes in place so the computer system worked under the stress of Election Day – when thousands of volunteers in the field would need to use it.
The Romney campaign had never bothered to beta-test its get-out-the-vote computer system, code-named “Orca.” Predictably, Orca crashed on Election Day, leaving thousands of Romney volunteers standing around unable to tell headquarters in Boston who had voted and to get instructions about which voters still needed to be brought to the polls.
A 93-page analysis, “Inside the Cave: An In-Depth Look at the Digital, Technology, and Analytic Operations of Obama for America,” produced by Engage, a Republican Party-oriented competitor in the field of technology-based political marketing, makes clear how computer technology, behavioral science analysis of voters and Internet sophistication gave Team Obama a decisive edge.
As detailed in the Engage report, the Obama campaign had 1,979 employees registered on Linkedin.com, 4.4 million donors and a list of 16 million email addresses, compared to the Romney campaign’s 369 employees registered on Linkedin.com, 1.1 million donors and 2 to 3 million email addresses.
Moreover, “Inside the Cave” makes clear the Obama team used experimental trials to test every aspect of the campaign before it was put to use, including testing multiple alternative designs of email fundraising campaigns before any fundraising emails were sent to see which version was likely to produce the most dollar returns in campaign contributions.
Patrick Ruffini, president of Engage, did not return multiple WND phone calls and emails asking for an interview about his firm billed as “a full-service interactive agency with a track record of winning the toughest battles in politics and public policy,” including holding “senior new media” roles with the Republican National Committee.
In employing experimental methodology, the Obama tech team took a page from the playbook of two Yale University political science professors, Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, who broke new ground introducing rigorous scientific research methodology into the study of what motivates voters, a central GOTV question.
In their path-finding book “Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout,” now in its second edition, Green and Gerber come to startling conclusions, including the admonition that telephone calling by phone banks has a minimal effect on motivating voters to vote, especially compared with in-person techniques that emphasize pounding the pavement with precinct workers assigned to knock on doors and interview voters.
The Obama campaign took Green and Gerber one step further, making sure its Internet messages were tailored to match voter interests using the same methodologies Green and Gerber have identified to ensure canvassing a precinct are armed with messages likely to be received favorably.
“Experts, be they consultants, seasoned campaigners or purveyors of GOTV technology, rarely measure effectiveness,” wrote Green and Gerber, communicating a message Messina and Plouffe took to heart.
That the Democratic Party is leaps and bounds ahead of the Republican Party in applying voter technologies is clear, in part by the reluctance of Republican-oriented consultants to go on the record.
Another group that refused to respond to WND requests for an interview was St. Paul, Minnesota-based FLS Connect, a firm contracted by the Romney campaign that advertises its expertise in “cutting edge technologies” applied to fundraising, voter and constituent contact, and data management tools.
Writing for RedState.com, Ben Howe lists FLS Connect as one of the consultants who “used the Romney campaign as a money making scheme, forcing employees to spin false data as truth in order to paint a rosy picture of a successful campaign as a form of job security.”
Tech editor Josh Peterson, writing for the Daily Caller, quoted Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign’s digital director, as rejecting the notion that Republican-contract social media companies, including FLS Connect, should not be castigated with a broad brush as having run a “consultant con job.”
Peterson noted that Moffat resisted answering the question when the Daily Caller pressed to know what consultant firm was responsible for developing Project Orca.
January 2, 2013
National debt doubles under Bernanke
Source: ZeroHedge.com, Dec. 16, 2012
NEW YORK – Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is known among some economists as “Helicopter Ben,” for his tendency to hover over developing financial crises only long enough to hurl seemingly endless dollars down on the problem.
With the Congressional Budget Office projecting the fiscal cliff legislation that passed Congress over the New Years Day holiday will add $4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, the Obama administration appears determined to address the crisis by pressing for yet more federal government spending.
The administration evidently believes Keynesian deficit spending will eventually create jobs, without igniting hyperinflation, regardless how high the national debt accumulates.
In December, Bernanke reached a new milestone, doubling the magnitude of U.S. debt since the day he became Federal Reserve Chairman in 2006, as graphically illustrated in a chart published by Zero Hedge.
The chart shows U.S. national debt totaling $8.183 trillion on Feb. 1, 2006, rose to $16.366 trillion on Dec. 12, 2012.
On Dec. 12, 2012, the Federal Reserve officially announced the launch of Quantitative Easing 4, known among economists as “QE4.” It amounts to a fourth annual round in which the Federal Reserve will buy U.S. debt, including both U.S. Treasuries and Mortgage Backed Securities Bonds commonly issued by investment firms and commercial banks.
The Fed announced it would enter 2013 with a plan to purchase $45 billion a month of U.S. Treasury securities and $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities, with combined purchases totaling $85 billion a month. It’s part of a continuing Fed plan to depress long-term interest rates and encourage, borrowing, spending and investing, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
With the December 2012 announcement, the Fed set specific targets, announcing an intention to keep short-term interest rates near zero into 2015, or until unemployment falls to 6.5 percent or lower, and as long as inflation forecasts remain near the Fed’s 3 percent target.
The Fed announced it will fund QE4 purchases by adding reserves to the banking system, a move the Wall Street Journal interpreted as “printing money to buy more bonds.”
“The key point here is that the Fed is now actively running both monetary and fiscal policy because it will now be in the business of funding nearly 100 percent of all the new government deficit spending in 2013,” concluded Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity. “And it is pumping a bit more than $1 trillion of hot, thin-air money into the economy as it does so.”
With QE4, the Fed appears on track to increase its balance sheet by another $3 trillion to $4 trillion, assuming QE4 will be extended again into 2014. That means the national debt by the 2014 mid-term elections would reach or exceed the $20 trillion mark.
With the U.S. gross national product for 2012 estimated at approximately $15.1 trillion, the nation’s national debt now exceeds 100 percent of GDP, a benchmark traditionally trained economists assume is a tipping point that could lead to hyperinflation if not reversed.
Money supply contracting again
Despite the Federal Reserve’s determination to print money at a rate unprecedented in U.S. financial history, the money supply has begun to contract again after a brief respite of growth in 2011.
Economics reporter Ambrose Evans-Prichard issued a warning last May in the London Telegraph that M3, the broadest measure of the money supply, has been contracting at an accelerating rate in the U.S. and European Union that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933. The supply is contracting despite near zero interest rates and a continuing QE program under which the Federal Reserve has been purchasing U.S. Treasury debt to fund Obama administration annual federal budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion during each year of his first term in office.
“It’s frightening,” Tim Congdon of International Monetary Research told Evans-Prichard. “The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the U.S. is not recovering.”
John Williams of ShadowStatistics.com commented in his subscriber-only newsletter June 1, 2012, that M3 growth picked up in 2011, peaking at 4.1 percent in January 2012. The rise reflected an annual growth that began in February 2011, only to slow down as 2012 progressed, to what Williams then projected would be a revised 2.5 percent growth.
Williams said in his Dec. 27, 2012, newsletter that the Federal Reserve is engaging in “a monetary-policy cave-in” that is “aimed at providing whatever liquidity would be needed to keep the system from collapsing.”
Williams has predicted that the U.S. is on track to experience hyperinflation by the end of 2014, assuming the Federal Reserve continues to buy U.S. debt in the magnitude projected by QE4.
December 29, 2012
Guess what 'fossil' fuels don't come from
NEW YORK – Astronomers are providing new evidence hydrocarbons are not a biological product but instead are created by inorganic chemical processes that occur on a continuing basis.
Scientists working at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, using the 30-meter telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy, have discovered a vast cloud of hydrocarbons within the Horse Head Nebula galaxy in the Orion constellation, according to reports published in The Daily Galaxy and in the oil industry publication Rigzone.
“We observed the operation of a natural refinery of gigantic size,” astronomer Jerome Pety told The Daily Galaxy.
Astronomer Viviana Guzman explained to both publications that the nebula contains 200 times more hydrocarbons than the total amount of water on Earth.
In 1951, Russian scientist and professor Nikolai Kudryavtsev articulated what today has become known as the Russian-Ukranian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins.
Essentially, the theory rejects the contention that oil was formed from the remains of ancient plant and animal life that died millions of years ago.
Thomas Gold was a professor of astronomy who taught at Cornell University and died in 2004, at 84 years old. In 1998, when he was 78, he published a controversial book , “The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels.”
As an astronomer, Gold was well aware that hydrocarbons are abundant in the universe. Since the early part of the 20th century, spectrographs that analyze wavelengths have permitted astronomers to determine with certainty that carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, right after hydrogen, helium and oxygen.
Furthermore, Gold wrote, among planetary bodies, “carbon is found mostly in compounds with hydrogen – hydrocarbons – which, at different temperatures and pressures, may be gaseous, liquid, or solid.”
“Astronomical techniques have thus produced clear and indisputable evidence that hydrocarbons are major constituents of bodies great and small within our solar system (and beyond),” he said.
In other words, hydrocarbons are not “organic chemicals” resulting from life processes on earth, as is commonly assumed by proponents of the fossil fuel theory.
Rather, Gold argued, hydrogen is a fundamental element readily available in the universe that combines with carbon to form hydrocarbons, whether life is present or not.
What astronomers have known about the abundance of hydrocarbons in the universe, however, has not passed on to geologists. In contrast, geologists think of hydrocarbons as forming only through the activity of life – either in building life through photosynthesis or when forms of life die.
Abiotic oil found on Titan
NASA scientists, in conjunction with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, have determined from a Cassini-Huygens probe that landed in 2005 on Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, that Titan contains abundant methane.
“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geological processes on Titan, perhaps venting from a supply in the interior that could have been trapped there as the moon formed,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told reporters Nov. 30, 2005.
The Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer, or GCMS, an instrument that identifies different atmospheric constituents by their mass, provided measurements demonstrating the methane on Titan is composed of Carbon-13, the isotope of carbon associated with inorganic or abiotic origins, whereas living organisms are typically associated with Carbon-12.
Each Carbon-13 atom has an extra neutron in its nucleus, making Carbon-13 atoms slightly heavier than Carbon-12 atoms, permitting the GCMS to distinguish between methane isotopes with Carbon-12 and methane with Carbon-13 atoms.
Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to a team of Johns Hopkins scientists reporting in February 2008 on their new findings from data collected from Cassini-Huygens probe radar data.
“Several hundred lakes or seas have been discovered, of which dozens are estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than the entire known oil and gas reserves on Earth,” wrote lead scientist Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., in the Jan. 29, 2008, issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.
Lorenz also reported dark dunes running along the equator cover 20 percent of Titan’s surface, comprising a volume of hydrocarbon material several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.
“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material – it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” Lorenz wrote.
It's back: Texas in 'Super Highway' deal with Spain
NEW YORK – Believe it or not, the Trans-Texas Corridor is back.
Very quietly, Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Department of Transportation, or TxDOT, signed in October a comprehensive development agreement to construct a toll-road redevelopment of Interstate 35 north of downtown Fort Worth.
TxDOT signed the 50-year deal with NTE Mobility Partners Segments 3 LLC, a U.S.-based wholly-owned subsidiary of Cintra, the Spanish-owned construction company. TxDOT picked Cintra in 2005 to build what some critics called the “NAFTA Super Highway.”
Chris Lippincot, the former TxDOT information officer who is currently acting as the new public relations man for Cintra in the United States, also announced TxDOT signed a contract in September with Cintra to build a privatized State Highway 130 toll road in San Antonio.
Perry may never have abandoned his original idea to build what during the presidential administration of George W. Bush was known as the Trans-Texas Corridor project, a 4,000-mile network of privately built and operated toll roads to crisscross the state, with Spanish development company Cintra scheduled to earn the tolls under 50-year leases.
In 2009, Perry scrapped the TTC plan after a series of combative town hall meetings throughout the state showed TxDOT it faced massive taxpayer resistance.
But now, the plan apparently is being implemented in small chunks, without the fanfare of divulging a statewide blueprint Perry and TxDOT may still have tucked away in their back pockets.
Was TTC ever really dead?
Operating below the radar of public opinion, Texas currently has $20 billion in roadwork underway through public-private partnerships, according to Ted Houghton, TxDOT chairman, the Texas Tribune reported earlier this month.
Despite Perry’s pledge in 2009 to end the Trans-Texas Corridor project with Cintra, TxDOT has kept the public-private partnership toll road concept alive by proposing smaller projects for the approval of the Texas state legislature.
Nicholas Rubio, the president of Cintra’s U.S. arm in Austin, told the Texas Tribune that Cintra currently has contracts for three road projects in Texas, consisting of approximately $5 billion in private investment against about $1 billion in public subsidies.
“You have to recognize, in general, that policymakers in Texas have been ahead of the curve,” Rubio told the Tribune. “The states that have been developing P3s (public-private partnerships) are Texas, Florida, Virginia, and that’s about it.”
In October, Perry and Rafael del Pino, chairman of Ferrovial, Cintra’s parent company in Spain, attended the grand launch of a 41-mile stretch of State Highway 130 P3 project between Austin and Sequin.
Texas owns the land on which the SH 130 P3 project is built, but a private consortium owned and operated by Cintra is scheduled to build the toll road. It’s to be operated under a 50-year lease, with Cintra taking the lion’s share of the tolls collected over the next 50 years to recover construction costs and to make a profit.
To make the SH 130 toll road palatable to Texas drivers, the speed limit will be set to 85 miles per hour, the fastest posted limit in the United States.
A look-back to the Bush era
Quietly but systematically, the Bush administration in conjunction with Perry in Texas advanced the plan to build a huge highway, four football fields wide, through the heart of Texas, parallel to Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, to the Texas border with Oklahoma.
The Trans-Texas Corridor moved ahead to begin construction following the re-election of Perry in November 2006.
Plans to build TTC-35 were fully disclosed on KeepTexasMoving.org, a now defunct official TxDOT website.
On March 11, 2005, a “Comprehensive Development Agreement” was signed by TxDOT to build the “TTC-35 High Priority Corridor” parallel to Interstate 35.
The contracting party was a limited partnership formed between Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A., a publically-listed company headquartered in Spain, majority controlled by the Madrid-based Groupo Ferrovial, and a San Antonio-based construction company, Zachry Construction Corporation.
The Cintra deal meant that once the TTC was completed, anyone who wanted to drive on it would have to pay an investment consortium in Spain for the privilege of driving in Texas.
Although somewhat incomprehensible to most U.S. citizens, these public-private partnerships involve selling off key U.S. infrastructure projects to foreign entities.
Granted, the “ownership” rights of projects like TTC-35 would have remained with the state of Texas, yet selling off the leasing rights amounts in the thinking of most U.S. citizens to selling off the highway to foreign interests for the term of the lease.
Under the terms of the TTC agreements with TxDOT, Cintra would have had the rights to operate TTC-35 for 50 years and to collect all tolls on the road in that period of time.
The Comprehensive Development Agreement called for Cintra-Zachry to provide private investment of $6 billion “to fully design, construct and operate a four-lane, 316-mile toll road between Dallas and San Antonio for up to 50 years as the initial segment of TTC-35.
For this, Cintra-Zachry paid the state of Texas $1.2 billion for the long-term right to build and operate the initial segment as a toll facility.
In April 2006, TxDOT released a 4,000-page Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, for what was described as the “Trans-Texas Corridor-25 Oklahoma to Mexico/Gulf Coast Element.”
The April 2006 EIS made clear that Cintra-Zachry planned to build a 1,200-foot-wide (approximately four football fields wide) complex with 10 lanes of highway – five lanes in each direction, north and south.Three lanes in each direction would be reserved for passenger vehicles and two separate lanes reserved for trucks.
The EIS design included six rail lines running parallel to the highway, with separate rail lines in each direction for high-speed rail, commuter rail and freight rail.
Finally, the design called for a 200-foot wide utility corridor that would include pipelines for oil, natural gas, water, telecommunications and data, as well as electricity towers.
According to the TxDOT Trans-Texas Corridor Plan adopted in June 2002, TxDOT ultimately would build some 4,000 miles of highway-railway-utility super-corridors throughout Texas over the next 50 years, using some 584,000 acres of what is now Texas farm and ranchland, at an estimated cost of $184 billion.
The TTC plan left little doubt TTC toll-road super-corridors were designed to facilitate international trade, primarily speeding trucks and trains carrying “inter-modal” containers from Mexican ports to destinations in the heartland of the U.S.
The full TTC build-out was designed to move goods through Texas rapidly, bypassing the major cities.
December 27, 2012
Norquist: Obama's return just 'political theater'
NEW YORK – Obama’s decision to cut short his Hawaii vacation and fly back to Washington was all about political theater, not a legitimate desire to negotiate and compromise with Republicans in Congress, charged anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.
“This is all about blaming people,” he said in an exclusive interview with WND at the end of a wild Thursday on Wall Street and in Washington.
Norquist insisted the president isn’t negotiating.
“He flies back from Hawaii, but there is no new White House proposal on the table,” he said. “This is all about Obama wanting the optics to be, ‘Oh, aren’t I hard at work.’ But if there were any new proposal coming forth from the White House, we would have heard about the details by now.”
Norquist argued Boehner had to call everyone in his Republican caucus back to Washington or else the Democrats in Congress would accuse the GOP of not trying.
“Obama wants to go over the fiscal cliff at this point, so for the next four years he can explain the failure of the economy caused by his taxes, his spending, and his regulations is the fault of the Republicans going over the cliff for 10 days or two weeks,” Norquist said. “Obama can’t keep blaming Bush for the next four years. That gets tiresome.”
In a wild day on Wall Street Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 13,000, losing 148 points at the day’s low, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid castigated House Speaker John Boehner as operating the House as a “dictatorship of the speaker.” Reid indicated a fiscal cliff deal before the Dec. 31 deadline was unlikely.
Use the “No More Red Ink” campaign to let Congress know what you think about extravagant spending.
On Thursday afternoon, after President Obama’s airplane landed at a suburban Maryland Air Force Base, word circulated in Washington that President Obama had reached out to Senate GOP leadership with a new proposal, although specifics on a new proposal were not readily available.
At approximately 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, an hour before the stock market closed, House Whip Eric Cantor announced House Speaker Boehner had called the House back to session this Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m., suggesting the House would stay in session through New Years Eve and New Years Day, if necessary.
With Boehner’s announcement, the DJIA bounced back, with stocks rallying to end the roller-coaster day at 13,096.31, down 18.28.
Still, Norquist could not see that anything had fundamentally changed in the fiscal cliff debate in Congress.
“There’s nothing here that jumps out and says something is happening,” he said.
“This is all about Obama protecting the Senate. It’s an effort to keep the heat on Boehner while keeping the Senate from having to cast a vote on tax or spending issues,” said Norquist. “Half of the Democrats up in the Senate could easily lose in 2014 if they voted for a liberal alternative to the Ryan plan.”
Norquist argued that with the stock market move today, Wall Street sent a message to Washington that the business community and investors are concerned about how much damage to the economy eliminating the Bush tax cuts across the board would do.
“The Democratic Senate leadership keeps saying we’re not doing entitlement reform, we’re not doing Medicare reform, we’re not doing Medicaid reform, we’re not going to lower marginal tax rates. But it’s not everyone in the Democratic Senate that wants to stake out a hard-left position; it’s the leadership, not those Democrat senators up for re-election in 2014.”
Norquist told WND the GOP and the Democrats in Congress appear to be still at loggerheads, with the GOP caucus indicating by rejecting the Boehner “Plan B” compromise that it is unwilling to increase marginal tax rates, even for the highest income earners, and the White House continuing to refuse to negotiate seriously any meaningful spending cuts.
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