Obama introduces new style of governance - Bizarre

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.

One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

Under the title "Dumb and dumber," a prof schools Hillary

Hillary Clinton, in a recent address at the Brookings Institution: "The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [the U.S. is] -- whether it's individual, corporate or whatever the taxation forms are...Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere, and guess what --- they're growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they're pulling people out of poverty."

Economics Prof. Ralph R. Reiland, in a piece titled Dumb and Dumber, responded in the American Spectator:

"In fact, Brazil doesn't have the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba wins that race to fully bloated statism and excessive confiscation of income and wealth. And guess what --- they're not growing like crazy and there's still a shortage of fish even though the country is surrounded by water.

Fishing isn't easy, explains Nick Miroff, a correspondent who covers Cuba for GlobalPost.com, when "Cuba's communist government is so paranoid about illegal departures to the United States that it strictly controls who can own or use boats."

Imagine a nice day on the water. You're nothing, a peon, and the government is everything. You're on a dinky raft held together by some inner tube strips from a '59 Chevy, trying to hook a fish for dinner when some gun-toting government enforcers pull up in a speed boat. "Hey, nutso," they holler (that's "estar mal de la azotea" in Spanish, i.e., "to be off one's nut"), "you a mental case, crazy enough to try to escape to the U.S. hell from the workers' paradise?"

Then the water cops confiscate your fishing rod and you feel lucky that you weren't dropped in a dungeon for 10 years for excessive individualism and trying to steal a sea trout from the people.

Hillary also got it wrong about Brazil growing fast by way of excessively squeezing the rich and by having the highest tax-to-GDP rate. The top marginal tax rate on income in Brazil is 27.5 percent, a substantially lower rate than the 35 percent (and soon to be 39.6 percent) top rate in the United States.

Similarly, the top corporate tax rate in Brazil is 34 percent, lower than the combined federal and state corporate tax of 39.1 percent in the United States, the second-highest rate in the industrialized world (only Japan's 39.5 percent combined rate is higher than the U.S. rate, but 24 states in the U.S. have a combined corporate tax rate higher than top-ranked Japan). 

In other words, if Hillary Clinton is saying that the U.S. should copy Brazil's tax structure in order to get the economy moving and stimulate job creation, that would mean a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate and a one-third cut in the top U.S. income tax rate, the opposite of her call for higher taxes on the rich.

More broadly, Mrs. Clinton is ignoring the volumes of evidence that show a negative correlation between tax hikes and economic growth.

Tammy Bruce: George Soros heavily invested in Brazil, stands to profit from BP oil spill and opposition to deep-water drilling

Perhaps this is why drilling in Alaska is off the table–it would actually keep America safe and strong and won’t make Obama Boss George Soros even richer than he is now.

Interestingly, it seems the more trouble we have, the better it is for Soros. Last year, Soros noted he was “having a very good crisis” having bet against the United States and profiting from her economic downturn.

Now we learn Soros is set to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Gulf oil catastrophe. With Obama’s ‘moratorium’ and the Obama Admin’s general hostility to drilling, it’s reported many oil companies have already looked into with Brazil regarding a move those shores. And what is Soros principally invested in right now? Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company.

Reuters is reporting that Brazil stands to benefit from the BP oil spill catastrophe as the US moratorium makes more rigs available for other countries.

Even as an ecological catastrophe makes the future of U.S. offshore drilling less certain, Brazil is plowing ahead with a $220 billion five-year plan to tap oil fields even deeper than BP’s ill-fated Gulf well, which is still leaking crude.

It’s estimated that thirty five rigs are now sitting idle in the Gulf of Mexico. Brazil is already getting inquiries from companies wanting to move their rigs there. Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras already produces about a fourth of the world’s deep water oil…

The shortage of rigs could help Brazil become a major oil exporter.

What an amazing stroke of good fortune for Obama’s boss, unrepentant Nazi collaborator, George Soros! Soros is also invested in offshore oil drilling in Brazil, assisted by the American taxpayers.

Soros Fund Management, LLC holds a stake in Petrobras of approximately $900 million as of December 31, 2009.

George Soros’ principal investments are in oil; one in particular is Petrobras, the Brazilian-owned company. This happens to be the largest investment in the Soros portfolio at the present time.

Soros also owns quite a lot of real estate in Brazil.

Whether by incompetence or design, the post-American president is enabling a post-American world

Iran is on the march, and we have Barack Obama to thank.

In Tehran, Iran, Brazil and Turkey signed a deal on Monday to swap nuclear fuel. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Brazil’s President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu raised their hands in triumph after signing the deal.

Ambassador John Bolton spells out the implications of the deal: “If this continues, it cuts the kneecaps off the administration’s sanctions effort. I think it’s a jujitsu move by the Iranians that undercuts the Obama policy.”

An unsigned editorial in the Wall Street Journal characterized the deal as “a political coup for Tehran and possibly delivers the coup de grace to the West’s half-hearted efforts to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.” The editorial adds: “Full credit for this debacle goes to the Obama Administration and its hapless diplomatic strategy.”

And that’s not all. A new Israeli report shows that Iran has formed an alliance with China and North Korea, focusing on the development of missiles and nuclear capabilities.

Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said last week that North Korea is sending WMD’s to Iran’s reliable Middle Eastern client state, Syria. And few weeks ago it was revealed that Iran is sending paramilitary troops to Venezuela. What for?

A nuclear-ready Iran is preparing for world war. Here, there, everywhere. And we have … impotent Obama.