Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

Pssst, You ARE a Customer of This Bank

Posted on by

“If the Desert Sunlight solar firm is the ‘beginnings of a renewable energy future,’ then the future doesn’t look bright for taxpayers, ratepayers and all Americans who think mega-corporations should make a living by selling their products, not by selling a bill of goods,” The Heritage Foundation’s Mitchell Tu and David Kreutzer wrote for The Daily Signal.

In addition to benefiting from the Department of Energy’s now-defunct 1705 loan program, two of the four firms involved also are significant beneficiaries of funding provided by the Export-Import Bank: General Electric and First Solar.

The Export-Import Bank provides taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees to foreign countries and companies for the purchase of U.S. goods. The bank’s charter is set to expire June 30, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are beginning to wade into the debate over whether it’s life should be extended.

Pulling back the curtain and going deeper…..

Communist Regime-financing Ex-Im Bank Fights for Survival

The U.S. taxpayer-backed Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), widely criticized for crony capitalism as well as for financing communist and socialist regimes with American money, is fighting for its very survival amid scandals as a growing coalition of lawmakers in Congress works to finally shut it down. From funneling billions in “loans” to state-owned banks in Russia and Communist China, to offering the corrupt Brazilian state-owned oil giant Petrobras $2 billion to “develop oil fields,” to hiring politically connected “green energy” cronies, the bank’s activities have come under increasing criticism on Capitol Hill. Now, with its charter set to expire this summer without congressional action, the Ex-Im Bank — originally created to subsidize U.S. exports to the mass-murdering regime ruling the Soviet Union — is sparring with the American people’s elected representatives over its fate.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, key figures in the establishment wing of the GOP, often dubbed “RINOs” for being alleged “Republicans In Name Only,” are pushing for the re-authorizing the Ex-Im Bank’s charter. Corporate welfare-loving Democrats, too, despite being in the minority in both chambers of Congress, are working to keep the controversial bank alive. Even the most extreme self-styled “progressives,” such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose specialty is attacking business and markets in the quest for ever bigger and more oppressive government, want to re-authorize Ex-Im. Meanwhile, Big Business lobbyists with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other special-interest outfits are right now twisting arms on Capitol Hill and plotting strategies to keep the taxpayer-backed Ex-Im cash flowing to their members.

Establishment Republicans anxious to please powerful special interests have proposed “reforming” the bank in an effort to make saving it more palatable to the public. Among them is Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), who introduced a bill with more than 50 GOP co-sponsors, so far, to “reform” the bank while re-authorizing its charter until 2019. Last week, a coalition of Big Government-loving Democrats led by ultra-leftist Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) tried to force the House Financial Services Committee to at least consider renewing Ex-Im’s charter, but conservatives on the panel voted down their amendment. Even Obama, who accurately described the bank as “little more than a fund for corporate welfare” while on the campaign trail in 2008, is now working hard to browbeat Congress into re-authorizing the Ex-Im Bank.

“Bipartisan support for corporate welfare and a corporatism state provides compelling evidence that in the end, it is money and power — not ideology — that drives the DC insider establishment,” wrote Tom Borelli, a senior fellow with the pro-market group FreedomWorks. “Instead of drawing a clear policy distinction over corporatism and making the Democrats own the label of ‘the party of big business and special interests,’ Republican backers of the Ex-Im Bank are blurring the lines between the parties and tarnishing the GOP’s brand.” He said that unless conservative activists express strong opposition to re-authorizing the crony-capitalist bank, conservative members of the House of Representatives would likely be “overwhelmed” by Democrats and “ideologically bankrupt Republicans.”

Supporters of the Ex-Im Bank point out that its taxpayer-backed loan programs are contingent on the foreign entities involved purchasing U.S.-sourced goods and services. As such, the controversial bank likes to argue that it helps “support American jobs” and promote exports. Numerous other national governments also have similar institutions that subsidize some companies or government-owned “enterprises,” so the Ex-Im claims that it, too, must subsidize certain U.S. firms and foreign entities. Another argument often cited by the Ex-Im Bank and its supporters — primarily Big Business — is that rather than costing taxpayers money, it sometimes earns some revenue for the Treasury. Even this may be misleading, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office forecasting that U.S. taxpayers will bear some $2 billion in Ex-Im losses over the next decade. Plus, there is always the prospect that enough bad loans from the bank could end up putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for many more billions of dollars.

The federal bank also harms a wide array of Americans, experts say. “Ex-Im places the 99.96 percent of U.S. small businesses that it doesn’t subsidize at a competitive disadvantage because the subsidies artificially lower costs for privileged competitors,” explained Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow with the market-oriented Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Sadly, the privileges Ex-Im extends to the few come at the expense of countless American firms and their workers. Unsubsidized firms may see reduced revenues — and their employees may see their hours cut, their salaries stagnate, or their jobs simply vanish because their employers cannot compete on the uneven playing field created by the federal government….It is time for Congress to start cleaning up its house and agree to end programs that need to go away. Enough with the pretense of reform.”

Critics have also rallied against the bank in recent years citing a wide array of other arguments. For one, and perhaps most importantly, there is no authority in the U.S. Constitution for the federal government to create a taxpayer-backed bank that picks winners and losers by loaning money to foreign governments, banks, and companies. Secondly, if participants in the free-market do not consider loans to be wise enough to put private funds behind them, critics of the Ex-Im Bank say the federal government has no business putting taxpayers’ money on the line instead. And while it may be true that some businesses and jobs benefit from Ex-Im schemes, many others suffer as a result. Countless examples have been cited by experts.

Even putting those problems aside, another major concern surrounding Ex-Im Bank is its long history of subsidizing ruthless communist regimes — a sordid pattern that continues to this day. In fact, the bank was originally established in 1934 specifically to finance exports to the Soviet Union. Why would a U.S. taxpayer-backed bank be needed to finance exports to Moscow’s regime? Because anyone with any sense in the private sector knew better than to trust the collection of gangsters, mass-murderers, megalomaniacs, and cut-throats in Moscow enslaving the Russian people while trying to mooch off of Americans to pay for it. Numerous other brutal regimes also received Ex-Im financing under a variety of pretexts.

Despite the growing uproar, the Ex-Im Bank’s financing for brutal regimes that analyst say represent major national security concerns to the United States continues unabated. Between 1997 and 2013, for example, the bank provided almost $2 billion in loans and long-term guarantees just to banks in Communist China and Russia, CNSNews.com reported, citing Ex-Im’s annual reports. Among the recipients: Bank of China, the Russian Agricultural Bank, China’s State Development Bank, Gazprombank, and many more. Of course, despite claims to be shifting toward what they call “state capitalism,” the banking “industries” in both Russia and Communist China remain entirely dominated and largely owned by the respective regimes.

“I don’t think Ex-Im subsidies to Chinese and Russian banks or State-Owned Enterprises constitute good uses of taxpayer resources,” Dan Ikenson, the director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, told CNSNews.com. “But, believe it or not, Ex-Im does partner with foreign export credit agencies to fund export sales and infrastructure projects even though the primary rationalization for having Ex-Im in the first place is to counteract the advantages provided to foreign businesses by those export credit agencies. It’s a complete sham.” In a report about Ex-Im’s victims, Ikenson also noted that the bank causes “substantial” “collateral damage” to many American companies.

More recently, the Ex-Im Bank offered $2 billion to Petrobras, an oil conglomerate owned primarily by the corruption-plagued, Marxist-Leninist-dominated Brazilian government, currently headed by former communist terrorist and close Castro ally Dilma Rousseff. A series of scandals in recent years surrounding the state-owned giant, which has also counted billionaire Obama ally George Soros among its investors, revealed that Petrobras was being used by Rousseff’s extremist “Workers’ Party” to bribe politicians and help finance more socialist scheming in Brazil and Latin America. Aside from the national security concerns, U.S. lawmakers lambasted Ex-Im for funding Brazilian government oil exploration even while the Obama administration was working to shut down as much American energy production as possible and destroy Petrobras’ U.S. competitors.

A growing chorus of critics from across the political spectrum is calling on Congress to finally let the Ex-Im Bank’s charter expire as a first step to reining in cronyism, corruption, market distortions, and the financing of hostile foreign governments with U.S. taxpayer money. However, despite the mass opposition, unless the American people speak out loudly and clearly against Ex-Im and corporate welfare, analysts say the alliance of politicians in the pockets of Big Business and Big Government may yet succeed in re-authorizing the taxpayer-backed boondoggle.

_______

Detail about this bank: The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) is the official export credit agency of the United States federal government.[1] It was established in 1934 by an executive order, and made an independent agency in the Executive branch by Congress in 1945, for the purposes of financing and insuring foreign purchases of United States goods for customers unable or unwilling to accept credit risk. The mission of the Bank is to create and sustain U.S. jobs by financing sales of U.S. exports to international buyers. The Bank is chartered as a government corporation by the Congress of the United States; it was last chartered for a three-year term in 2012 and extended in September 2014 through June 30th, 2015.[2] [3] Its Charter spells out the Bank’s authorities and limitations. Among them is the principle that Ex-Im Bank does not compete with private sector lenders, but rather provides financing for transactions that would otherwise not take place because commercial lenders are either unable or unwilling to accept the political or commercial risks inherent in the deal. Its current chairman and president is Fred P. Hochberg.

The ‘Unwelcome’ mat for Netanyahu

Posted on by

If you know anything about the Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, they are not only covert, clandestine but assertive in gathering intelligence for the full safety and security of Israel. Given this fact, you can rest assured that Israel is very current on the P5+1 negotiations with Iran on their nuclear program in addition to being current on the status of that weapons program.

The White House has become defiant with regard to Israel in recent years and it has hit a crescendo with the formal visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the joint Congress on March 3. So, this begs the question, does Netanyahu have the ‘goods’ and he will tell all while the White House has dispatched his staff and cabinet secretaries to be somewhere else?

WASHINGTON (AP) – In what is becoming an increasingly nasty grudge match, the White House is mulling ways to undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington and blunt his message that a potential nuclear deal with Iran is bad for Israel and the world.

There are limits. Administration officials have discarded the idea of President Barack Obama himself giving an Iran-related address to rebut the two speeches Netanyahu is to deliver during his early March visit. But other options remain on the table.

Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials.

The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel’s March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said.

Vice President Joe Biden will be away, his absence behind Netanyahu conspicuous in coverage of the speech to Congress. Other options were described by officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

Netanyahu’s plan for a March 3 address to a joint meeting of Congress has further strained already tense ties between the U.S. and Israel. Congressional Republicans orchestrated Netanyahu’s visit without consulting the White House or State Department, a move the Obama administration blasted as a break in diplomatic protocol. Some Democratic lawmakers say they will boycott the speech.

U.S. officials believe Netanyahu’s trip to Washington is aimed primarily at derailing a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama’s signature foreign policy objective. While Netanyahu has long been skeptical of the negotiations, his opposition has increased over what he sees as Obama’s willingness to make concessions that would leave Iran on the brink of being able to build a nuclear weapon. His opposition has intensified as negotiations go into overdrive with an end-of-March deadline for a framework deal.  “I think this is a bad agreement that is dangerous for the state of Israel, and not just for it,” Netanyahu said Thursday.

The difference of opinion over the deal has become unusually rancorous.

The White House and State Department have both publicly accused Israeli officials of leaking “cherry-picked” details of the negotiations to try to discredit the administration. And, in extraordinary admissions this week, the administration acknowledged that the U.S. is withholding sensitive details of the talks from Israel, its main Middle East ally, to prevent such leaks.

The rebukes have only emboldened the leader of Israel, whose country Iran has threatened to annihilate. He has a double-barrel attack on the Iran talks ready for when he arrives in Washington. Not only will he address Congress, he will also deliver similar remarks at the AIPAC conference, an event to which administrations past and present have traditionally sent top foreign policy officials.

But maybe not this year.

An AIPAC official said Friday that the group has not yet received any reply to its invitation for senior administration figures to attend the meeting that starts March 1. The official stressed that last-minute RSVPs are not unusual, but the White House has been signaling for some time that a Cabinet-level guest may not coming.

Instead, the administration is toying with the idea of sending newly installed Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken to speak to the conference, according to officials familiar with internal discussions on the matter. But it’s possible Treasury Secretary Jack Lew could attend.

Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, who have both previously addressed AIPAC, will be out of the country on foreign travel that appears to have been arranged to make them unavailable to speak. Biden will be visiting Uruguay and Guatemala on a trip that was announced after Netanyahu’s speech was scheduled, while the State Department announced abruptly this week that Kerry will be traveling to as-yet-determined destinations for the duration of the AIPAC conference.

Obama spoke to AIPAC in 2012, while he was in the midst of his re-election campaign.

*** But there is more that gives clues as to what Netanyahu may have in his brief case regarding the Iranian nuclear program. It comes down to two countries, Iran and North Korea.

Why The U.S. Can’t Trust Iran And Its Nuclear Plans
The White House thinks Iran’s compliance with the terms of the interim deal indicates that an agreement may still be reached. The only problem: Trusting Iran is the surest path to a bad deal.
The history of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs—so full of inconsistencies, prevarications, concealments and outright lies—makes it hard to escape the conclusion that Iran’s claim to be pursuing nuclear power for peaceful purposes is disingenuous. That is why only draconian restrictions—enforced through intrusive verification and unrestricted inspections over decades—can offer guarantees that Tehran will not try to cheat again.
Since the exposure of Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities at Arak and Natanz in 2002, Tehran’s nuclear program has remained opaque. At a minimum, those revelations show Iran had lied to the international community for more than a decade, as it was busy building those facilities. That concealment in itself should elicit considerable suspicion and warrant demands that Iran make a full disclosure of the history, nature and extent of its nuclear activities. Exposure of its undeclared facilities gave Tehran a chance to just do that—instead, it chose to defy the international community and pursue its nuclear goals.
The door has always been open for Iran to come clean
For the next three years, Iran played hide-and-seek with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Eventually, in September 2005, the IAEA declared that “Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement… constitute non-compliance”and deferred Tehran to the UN Security Council.
Since then, punishment for Iran’s non-compliance has been slow and incremental, always leaving the door open for it to come clean. After two UN sanctions resolutions (1737 and 1747) failed to move Tehran, an August 2007 IAEA-Iranian joint working plan offered Iran a path to address all of the IAEA outstanding concerns about their past activities.
Instead, Tehran stalled for another six years.
In September 2009, President Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown exposed another industrial-size clandestine facility: the Fordow uranium-enrichment plant. Unlike previous discoveries, which Iran had sought to explain away in the context of a civil nuclear program, Fordow was too large to be a research facility and too small for civil purposes. It was, on the other hand, ideal for military-grade enrichment, having been dug deep under a mountain and supervised by Iran’s military.
Iran again demurred and denied the obvious.
                             
Evidence of Iranian nuclear subterfuge
The mounting body of evidence of Iranian nuclear subterfuge led the IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano to lament in his February 2010 report Iran’s ongoing failure to address “concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
At that point, a country loath to incur international isolation and eager to maintain economic growth, might recalibrate its course. By then, Iran had twice been offered a list of economic, political and diplomatic incentives in exchange for transparency and verification. The 2006 and 2008 proposals, formulated by the six world powers negotiating with Iran on behalf of the international community, were incorporated in UN Security Council resolution 1929 in June 2010 as a sign that Tehran could choose tantalizing economic incentives over sanctions if it only would own up to its past nuclear activities.
Iran again chose sanctions.
Frustrated with nearly a decade of foot-dragging, the IAEA published an extensive and damning report detailing possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program in November 2011.  As in the past, Tehran dismissed the information as Western “fabrications.”
Since the November 2013 interim agreement, none of the above questions has been addressed, and access to scientists and suspicious sites is still being denied.
Iran’s stalling tactics continue
One thing has changed, though. Rather than recognizing that Iran’s stalling tactics continue; or seeing Iran’s nuclear opaqueness as the greatest obstacle to a good deal; or objecting to a deal that does not fully address Iran’s past nuclear and ballistic missile research, the Obama administration has agreed to defer those issues to the ongoing IAEA work that Iran has stymied for more than a decade.
In June 2003, in a rare moment of public frustration, then-IAEA director Mohammad ElBaradei opined that “Iran should not wait for us to ask questions and then respond; it should come forward with a complete and immediate declaration of all its nuclear activities. That would be the best way to resolve the issues within the next few weeks.”
Twelve years on, ElBaradei’s sound assessment still resonates. Unless the coming nuclear deal rests on an unambiguous accounting of Iran’s nuclear past and present, the country will have obtained what it always wanted: an end to the sanctions regime and an unobstructed path to nuclear weapons.

Community Organizing, Back to the Future

Posted on by

The White House just wrapped up a 3 day summit on violent extremism. The platform of the summit was ending the cycle of hate, in other words, it was a collaboration of anger management classes. Barack Obama told his audience that scaling back on the tensions was not meant for Islamists, but rather to every common citizen worldwide to be gentle going forward with Muslims.

The invitees were hand chosen and those not in attendance were also notable. Were leaders in the fields of intelligence, counter-terrorism, Christians or Jews invited? Well now so much. Imagine the Director of the FBI, James Comey who has open cases in 49 American states not attending.

When it comes to those that did attend standing for ‘human rights’, those representatives come from countries whose own human rights come into question.  “There is a very profound conceptual disagreement about whether the best way to counter violent extremism is through human rights and civil society or through an iron fist,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. The Obama administration wants “to project the human rights side, but you look at the people they’re working with and fighting alongside, and there’s a lot more to it than that.”

Elisa Massimino, president of the advocacy group Human Rights First, attended Thursday’s meeting and was struck by the juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality: “We’re sitting in that room with representatives of governments that are part of the problem,” she said. “If the president believes what he’s saying, then the actions that these governments are taking are undermining our supposedly shared agenda.”

From the outside, however, the summit appears hastily organized and fraught with gaps. As of Friday, neither the White House nor the State Department had announced the names of any attendees, an agenda or what specifically the summit is designed to achieve. The summit is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, Feb. 18, and Thursday, Feb. 19.

“It’s bizarre,” says Naureen Shah, a former legislative counsel with the ACLU who recently became the security and human rights director at Amnesty International. “On the one hand they’ve been touting this summit and trying to showcase the U.S. and global efforts to combat violent extremism. But on the other hand, they’re not providing any information about what’s going to happen.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment last week on whether Russia would be participating in the summit, saying she did not currently have the list of invitees. She anticipated that, in the days before the summit, “we’ll do a briefing on the plans for the summit, what we hope to accomplish, et cetera.”

The takeaway was Barack Obama’s edit to reach out to governance in Muslim countries and require them to be more sensitive to the plight of those in poverty that would build programs generating educational access and later jobs. This is where the ‘community organizing’ comes into play.

Michelle Malkin says it best, laying it out for required reading.

Instead of killing jihadists, keeping them off our soil, locking up their poisonous spiritual agitators, and shutting off their terror-funding pipelines, President Obama called on America and the world to “invest” in unnamed immigrant “communities” vulnerable to unnamed extremism. Some of the most generous welfare states on the planet have suffered horrific jihad attacks this year. Liberal Denmark’s soft-on-jihad rehab program has been a disaster. But that hasn’t stopped State Department spokes-babbler Marie Harf from mewling incessantly about “combating poverty” to combat ISIS. Vice President Joe Biden opened the convention of jihad-coddlers on Tuesday by emphasizing the need for “respect” (cha-ching) and “a sense of community.” White House senior aides spoke generically about terrorists of “all shapes and sizes,” as they studiously avoided the precise nature and identity of the perpetrators of evil that precipitated the meeting. Screw that. Muslim jihadists chopped off the heads of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya last weekend. Muslim jihadists launched deadly shooting sprees in Copenhagen at a cartoonists’ free-speech event and a synagogue. Muslim jihadists murdered Jews at a kosher deli in Paris and slaughtered the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo over their drawings. Muslim jihadists caged and burned alive Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Muslim jihadists threw gays off buildings in Iraq. Muslim jihadists beheaded journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, humanitarian workers Alan Henning and Peter Kassig, and Japanese nationals Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto Jogo. Muslim jihadists have kidnapped and slaughtered thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Nigeria. The solution, the Obama administration wants the 60 nations that sent representatives to D.C. to learn, is a super-sized community-organizing campaign. It’s Jobs for Jihad Delinquents! No, this is not a Saturday Night Live anniversary skit. Politically correct public officials from L.A., Boston, and Minnesota are holding seminars on their “outreach” efforts to disaffected yoots as shining counterterrorism models. In Minneapolis, where al-Shabaab recruiters have metastasized, the U.S. attorney has bought into Muslim grievance-mongers’ complaints that “immigrant youngsters remain marginalized, without access to adequate education, employment, and other opportunities.” Social-justice warriors are united: Less “marginalization.” More midnight basketball. What a bloody crock. States like Minnesota and Maine have bent over backward to resettle thousands upon thousands of Somali refugees — putting their demands for halal-food freebies, taxpayer-funded foot baths, and “cultural sensitivity” over the safety and well-being of native-born citizens and taxpayers struggling to make ends meet. While grandmothers and disabled soldiers and breastfeeding moms must submit to invasive TSA screening, Muslim leaders in Minneapolis have the feds groveling in apology over increased scrutiny of some Somalis. I mean, it’s not like dozens of young male members of their “community” are flying off to the Horn of Africa and the Middle East to take up arms for jihad after benefiting from America’s blind generosity. Oh, wait. They are. The persistent left-wing myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist is absolute madness. How many times do we have to remind the clueless kumbaya crowd that al-Qaida mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri had a medical degree, as did Hamas bigwig Abdel al-Rantisi and the seven upper-crust doctors who helped plan the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings? Or that al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis. Terror architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned a mechanical-engineering degree at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta majored in urban planning at a German technical university. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh attended the London School of Economics before abducting and murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl. And Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb (Colorado State Teachers College) had plenty of exposure to wealth and Western studies. The “root cause” of their evildoing is not a lack of employment, education, community centers, iftar dinners at the White House, or publicly funded “opportunities.” When will these fools in high office learn that you can’t bribe these adherents of Stone Age ideology to behave? They don’t want jobs. They want blood. Revenge. Islamist dominance. Ruthless extermination of Jews, gays, Coptic Christians, Christian aid workers, cartoonists, journalists, apostates, and infidels of all shapes and sizes. The M****m j*******s are not victims of Islamophobic intolerance and Western callousness. We are the victims of our own leaders’ bleeding-heart overindulgence and reckless refusal to deal with reality.

Winning the hearts and minds of jihad….riiiiight….. maybe including Obamacare, Obama phones, the SNAP cards and Section 8 housing will work too.

Ask the Clinton’s About These Foreigners Please

Posted on by

How about the HSBC bank that is embroiled in a major scandal? How long have the Clinton’s known the Brit Richard Caring? Have Hillary and Bill describe their relationship with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnet. Then of course there is Huma Abedin, the Dubai Foundation, Friends of Saudi Arabia, Hani Masri, Oman, Saban Family Foundation and the Soros Foundation, just handful of the Clinton’s foreign friendly network.

So, where does all this lead? Foreign friends, NGO’s, foundations and powerbrokers buy presidential candidates and Hillary is no exception. She using the same page out of the money playbook that Barack Obama used.

Foreign Government Gifts to Clinton Foundation on the Rise

Donations raise ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up expected 2016 bid

The Clinton Foundation has dropped its self-imposed ban on collecting funds from foreign governments and is winning contributions at an accelerating rate, raising ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up her expected bid for the presidency.

Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

In 2009, the Clinton Foundation stopped raising money from foreign governments after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. Former President Bill Clinton, who ran the foundation while his wife was at the State Department, agreed to the gift ban at the behest of the Obama administration, which worried about a secretary of state’s husband raising millions while she represented U.S. interests abroad.

The ban wasn’t absolute; some foreign government donations were permitted for ongoing programs approved by State Department ethics officials.

The donations come as Mrs. Clinton prepares for an expected run for the Democratic nomination for president, and they raise many of the same ethical quandaries. Since leaving the State Department in early 2013, Mrs. Clinton officially joined the foundation, which changed its name to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and has become a prodigious fundraiser as the foundation launched a $250 million endowment campaign, officials said.

A representative for Hillary Clinton referred all questions to the Clinton Foundation.

A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation said the charity has a need to raise money for its many projects, which aim to do such things as improve education, health care and the environment around the world. He also said that donors go through a vigorous vetting process.

One of the 2014 donations comes from a Canadian agency promoting the proposed Keystone pipeline, which is favored by Republicans and under review by the Obama administration. The Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development agency of Canada, a first-time donor, gave between $250,000 and $500,000. The donations, which are disclosed voluntarily by the foundation, are given only in ranges.

One of the agency’s priorities for 2014-2015 was to promote Keystone XL “as a stable and secure source of energy and energy technology,” according to the agency’s website. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department was involved in approving the U.S. government’s initial environmental-impact statement. Since leaving State, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly declined to comment on Keystone.

The Canadian donation originated from an agency office separate from the one that advocates for Keystone XL, a Foundation spokesman said.

While the Canadian donation didn’t appear in a Clinton Foundation online database of donors until recently, the donation of about $480,000 was announced in June in Cartagena, Colombia, where the program provides job training for youths.

Kirk Hanson, director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, said the Clintons should immediately reimpose the ban, for the same reasons it was in place while Mrs. Clinton led U.S. foreign policy.

“Now that she is gearing up to run for president, the same potential exists for foreign governments to curry favor with her as a potential president of the United States,” he said.

If she becomes president and deals with these nations, “she can’t recuse herself,” added James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. “Whether it influences her decision making is questionable, but it is a legitimate thing to focus on by her political opposition.”

The donations weren’t announced by the foundation and were discovered by The Wall Street Journal during a search of donations of more than $50,000 posted on the foundation’s online database. Exactly when the website was updated isn’t clear. The foundation typically updates its website with the previous year’s donations near the beginning of the year. All 2014 donations were noted with asterisks.

At least four foreign countries gave to the foundation in 2013—Norway, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands—a fact that has garnered little attention. The number of governments contributing in 2014 appears to have doubled from the previous year. Since its founding, the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments, according to a Journal tally.

United Arab Emirates, a first-time donor, gave between $1 million and $5 million in 2014, and the German government—which also hadn’t previously given—contributed between $100,000 and $250,000.

A previous donor, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has given between $10 million and $25 million since the foundation was created in 1999. Part of that came in 2014, although the database doesn’t specify how much.

The Australian government has given between $5 million and $10 million, at least part of which came in 2014. It also gave in 2013, when its donations fell in the same range.

Qatar’s government committee preparing for the 2022 soccer World Cup gave between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2014. Qatar’s government had previously donated between $1 million and $5 million.

Oman, which had made a donation previously, gave an undisclosed amount in 2014. Over time, Oman has given the foundation between $1 million and $5 million. Prior to last year, its donations fell in the same range.

The Clinton Foundation has set a goal of creating a $250 million endowment, an official said. One purpose was secure the future of the foundation’s programs without having to rely so much on the former president’s personal fundraising efforts, the official said.

The Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman donations went to the endowment drive.

White House Counterfeiting Immigration Documents

Posted on by

Why Obama’s Immigration Order Was Blocked

The injunction isn’t about prosecutorial discretion. It is about granting illegal aliens benefits not allowed by law.

The Obama administration argued that DAPA is a routine application of “prosecutorial discretion”—the authority of executive officials to set priorities for enforcement of the law and to refrain from enforcement in cases where the public interest is least urgent. The district court recognized, however, that prosecutorial discretion is limited to nonenforcement and doesn’t entitle the executive branch to grant affirmative benefits such as work permits and welfare without statutory authority and notice-and-comment rule-making.

As the court explained, “DHS has not instructed its officers to merely refrain from arresting, ordering the removal of, or prosecuting unlawfully-present aliens.” Instead the department “has enacted a wide-ranging program that awards legal presence, to individuals Congress has deemed deportable or removable, as well as the ability to obtain Social Security numbers, work authorization permits, and the ability to travel.”

Despite misleading claims by administration supporters that the order interferes with executive discretion to set enforcement priorities, the district court narrowly crafted its order not to touch on prosecutorial discretion. The administration remains free to decide which illegal aliens to deport and which to permit to remain in this country. The court order is explicitly confined to the grant of work authorization and affirmative benefits, which has never been part of prosecutorial discretion.

Ted Cruz: White House ‘Counterfeiting Immigration Documents’

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, believes that the Obama administration is “counterfeiting immigration documents” under the president’s immigration plan.

Speaking to Fox News following a federal judge’s decision to temporarily halt President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration, the potential Republican presidential contender said the commander in chief is ignoring federal law.

“One of the things it points out is the president has claimed, rather absurdly, that the basis of his authority is ‘prosecutorial discretion.’ That he’s simply choosing not to prosecute 4.5 million people here illegally,” Cruz told Fox News. “But what the district court concluded, quite rightly, is they’re doing far more than that. The administration is printing work authorizations. It is affirmatively acting in contravention of federal law. Basically, what its doing is counterfeiting immigration documents, because the work authorizations its printing are directly contrary to the text of federal law. It is dangerous when the president ignores federal law.”

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen’s decision late Monday puts on hold Obama’s orders that could spare from deportation as many as 5 million people who are in the U.S. illegally.

In a memorandum accompanying his order, Hanen said the lawsuit should go forward and that the states would “suffer irreparable harm in this case” without a preliminary injunction.

“The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle,” he wrote, adding that he agreed that legalizing the presence of millions of people is a “virtually irreversible” action.

Talking to reporters in the Oval Office, Obama said he disagreed with the ruling by Hanen that the administration had exceeded its authority. But he said that, for now, he must abide by it.

“We’re not going to disregard this federal court ruling,” Obama said, but he added that administration officials would continue to prepare to roll out the program. “I think the law is on our side and history is on our side,” he said.

Cruz called it a “major victory for the rule of law.”

“It’s interesting, (Obama) said the law is on his side. There’s at least one person who calls himself a legal scholar who disagrees, and his name is Barack Obama,” Cruz said. “Twenty-two times President Obama has admitted he doesn’t have the authority to issue unilateral amnesty. Twenty-two times he says the constitution doesn’t allow it. He said, ‘This is not a monarchy.’ That’s his quote. And then after the last election, he said never mind and issued it anyway.”

Obama’s directives would make more than 4 million immigrants in the United States illegally eligible for three-year deportation stays and work permits. Mostly those are people who have been in the country for more than five years and have children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Applications for the first phase were to begin Wednesday, when as many as 300,000 immigrants brought illegally to the country as children could begin applying for an expansion of Obama’s 2012 program aimed at the younger immigrants known as Dreamers.

Hanen’s ruling late Monday night, in a case brought by 26 states led by Texas, said that Obama and his Homeland Security Department lacked the authority to take the actions they did.

“No statute gives the DHS the discretion it is trying to exercise here,” wrote Hanen, and he issued a stay blocking the actions from taking effect. His order was not a big surprise from a Republican-appointed judge who has showed a hard line on border issues.

The Obama administration could seek a stay of his order in addition to appealing to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the Justice Department was deciding its next move.

He said, “I’ve always expected that this is a matter that will ultimately be decided by a higher court — if not the Supreme Court then a federal court of appeals.”