Category Archives: U.S. Constitution

Obama’s Motivation for the Iran Nuclear Deal

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Obama’s Motivation for the Iran Nuclear Deal

This may be somewhat conspiratorial, so critiques and commentary is invited. The common question has been for several months, why is Barack Obama so pro-Iran in order to get a final deal signed with regard to their nuclear weapons program.

No one seems to be able to suggest a viable reason, personally I went so far as to track down and interview Ambassador Mark Wallace, CEO of United Against Nuclear Iran.

 

Still without any meaningful answer as to why, it was prudent to search far and wide for clues and suddenly a real story began to develop on its own.

 

 

Plans for an Iran strike by Israel has been on the table and in 2011, Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared the time would be delayed for a future time. In 2012, Israel was poised to attack Iran, and the Obama National Security Council ensured that operation was terminated.

 

In summary, the United States and Israel have cooperated for decades on defense, military aid, arms sales, joint exercises and intelligence. This stems from a 1981 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that established cooperation on national security of both countries. In 1983, both sides signed a Joint Political Military Group implementing the MOU and in 1984 those activities commenced. In 1987, the United States constructed facilities to stockpile advanced military gear and munitions. In 1996, Congress codified this standard that included defense contracts, weapons systems, interagency strategic cooperation, diplomatic and intelligence operations and ballistic missiles. Countless laws/acts have been passed and signed in the United States where the U.S. and Israel together preserve and enhance Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.

 

Barack Obama is bound by agreement, law and treaty history yet he takes this history and text to the line where his policy does not support or stand with Israel in fully defending Israel in military hostilities or engagements as noted in the most recent conflicts in Gaza. Having a JPOA, a nuclear agreement has for the most part thrown sand in the gears keeping his own anti-Israel cultural and lifelong behavior intact, all at the expense of stability in the Middle East. Barack Obama’s background demonstrates he would rather have a failed nuclear agreement that satisfies his Muslim doctrine against Jews and Israel than to militarily stand with Israel even as new alliances and relationships have been established, isolating the United States. The same theory here is also applied to the balance of the Middle East with emphasis on Iraq and Syria.

CBO revises US Treasury runs out of money Nov.~Dec.

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Okay in the massive field of candidates running for president, who is talking about running out of money?

CBO projects that if the debt limit is unchanged, the measures that the Treasury has been taking to avoid breaching that limit will be exhausted sometime between mid-November and early December, and the Treasury will then run out of cash.

Summary

The debt limit—commonly referred to as the debt ceiling—is the maximum amount of debt that the Department of the Treasury can issue to the public and to other federal agencies. That amount is set by law and has been increased over the years in order to finance the government’s operations. In March, the debt ceiling was reached, and the Secretary of the Treasury announced a “debt issuance suspension period.” During such a period, existing statutes allow the Treasury to take a number of “extraordinary measures” to borrow additional funds without breaching the debt ceiling. The Congressional Budget Office projects that if the debt limit remains unchanged, those measures will be exhausted and the Treasury will run out of cash between mid-November and early December. At such time, the government would be unable to fully pay its obligations, a development that would lead to delays of payments for government activities, a default on the government’s debt obligations, or both.

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates, this year’s deficit will be noticeably smaller than what the agency projected in March, and fiscal year 2015 will mark the sixth consecutive year in which the deficit has declined as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) since it peaked in 2009. Over the next 10 years, however, the budget outlook remains much the same as CBO described earlier this year: If current laws generally remain unchanged, within a few years the deficit will begin to rise again relative to GDP, and by 2025, debt held by the public will be higher relative to the size of the economy than it is now.

CBO’s economic forecast, which serves as the basis for its budget projections, anticipates that the economy will expand modestly this year, at a solid pace in calendar years 2016 and 2017, and at a more moderate pace in subsequent years. The pace of growth over the next few years is expected to reduce the quantity of underused resources, or “slack,” in the economy, lowering the unemployment rate and putting upward pressure on compensation as well as on inflation and interest rates.

The Budget Deficit for 2015 Will Be Smaller Than Last Year’s

At $426 billion, CBO estimates, the 2015 deficit will be $59 billion less than the deficit last year (which was $485 billion) and $60 billion less than CBO estimated in March (see table below). The expected shortfall for 2015 would constitute the smallest since 2007, and at 2.4 percent of gross domestic product, it would be below the average deficit (relative to the size of the economy) over the past 50 years. Debt held by the public will remain around 74 percent of GDP by the end of 2015, CBO estimates—slightly less than the ratio last year but higher than in any other year since 1950.

Outlays

Federal outlays are projected to rise by 5 percent this year, to $3.7 trillion, or 20.6 percent of GDP. That increase
is the net result of a nearly 10 percent jump in mandatory spending, offset by lower net interest payments and discretionary outlays.

CBO anticipates that mandatory outlays will be $199 billion higher in 2015 than they were last year. Federal spending for the major health care programs accounts
for a little more than half of that increase: Outlays for Medicare (net of premiums and other offsetting receipts), Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for health insurance purchased through exchanges and related spending are expected to be 
$110 billion (12 percent) higher this year than they were in 2014.

In addition, outlays related to the government’s transactions with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for higher education programs will be greater than the amounts recorded last year. Those increases will be partially offset by increased receipts from auctions of licenses to use the electromagnetic spectrum and by reduced spending for unemployment compensation.

Even though federal borrowing continues to rise, CBO expects that the government’s net interest costs will fall by nearly 5 percent this year—mainly because lower inflation this year has reduced the cost of the Treasury’s inflation-protected securities.

CBO anticipates that discretionary spending, which is controlled through annual appropriations, will be about 1 percent less in 2015 than it was in 2014. By the agency’s estimates, defense outlays will drop by more than 2 percent, whereas nondefense discretionary outlays will be only slightly below last year’s amount.

Revenues

Federal revenues are expected to climb by 8 percent in 2015, to $3.3 trillion, or 18.2 percent of GDP. Revenues from all major sources will rise, including individual income taxes (by 10 percent), corporate income taxes (by 8 percent), and payroll taxes (by 4 percent). Revenues from other sources are estimated to increase, on net, by 5 percent. The largest increase in that category derives from fees and fines, mostly as a result of provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Many more details here.

 

Sue Compete America, a Good Place to Start

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Imagine your own government working against it’s own citizens. Now as you read on, listen for what all politicians have to say on the matter of college educations, employment and then immigration.

Pursuit of Happiness for who exactly, worse U.S. students cannot even get a seat in a college class as foreign students have them.

Compete America posts their principles on their website. The page is titled “Compete America’s 2011 Principles for U.S. Job Creation, Innovation and Economic Growth Through Employment-based Visa Reform”, so admittedly this demonstrates the efforts against U.S. citizens. Want to know what companies participate and are members? Click here and you will see corporations you know well like Boeing, Microsoft, Coca~Cola, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

                                            

Okay now read on to learn how bad this is and what questions and actions we need to take.

NationalReview: American technology workers won a big victory in the federal courts this month. The D.C. District Court ruled that a STEM-related visa program created by the Department of Homeland Security was potentially damaging to the domestic labor market and also in violation of federal rule-making procedure. For the plaintiffs in the case, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, however, the fight against BigTech lobbyists and Homeland Security has only just begun. DHS’s so-called Optional Practical Training (OPT) program allows foreign nationals to live and work in the U.S. on a student visa even after graduation. In a rule promulgated by DHS in 2008, foreigners graduating in a STEM field at a U.S. school had these authorizations extended to nearly two and a half years after their graduation. U.S. employers love this because, on top of the longer work period, they have a greater chance to transition them into the H-1B program, a “professional specialty worker” visa that can last up to an additional six years. Also, employers receive a tax benefit for hiring OPT participants over Americans, as they do not have to pay Medicare and Social Security taxes for aliens on student visas.
Plaintiffs’ counsel, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (which I work for), argued in court that the OPT extension, created not by statute but entirely by DHS, was really just a way to circumvent the existing H-1B cap of 65,000 annual visa grants set down by Congress years before.
Helpfully for us, DHS had already admitted that this was the purpose for the extension. As it explained in the agency rule creating the extension, “the H-1B category is greatly oversubscribed,” which, as a result, has “adversely affected the ability of US employers to recruit and retain skilled workers.” With the H-1B cap having been held up by Congress over the last few years, DHS did the next best thing. As H-1B guru Norm Matloff describes in a blog post discussing our case, the agency simply went ahead and created “a de facto expansion of H-1B.”
Let me digress for a moment on the H-1B lottery and the “oversubscription” issue. Unlike other visas, the fees for H-1B applications are refundable; there is no penalty for oversubscribing. As a consequence, heavy H-1B users, such as the outsourcing firms that supply BigTech companies as well as BigTech companies themselves, always apply for more visas than they really want in order to get close to their target. David North at the Center for Immigration Studies explains the process here. So when you hear in the press and elsewhere that “petitions have outstripped slots yet again by two-to-one,” the numbers are merely a reflection of companies’ trying to game the lottery system.
As Matloff explains, OPT is “just as harmful as H-1B.” The two programs are now similar in size, and the benefits to BigTech are also similar. Like H-1B holders, OPTs are younger than most American technology workers, and therefore cheaper. Citing the “prevailing wage” rules that technically exist for H-1Bs, Matloff notes that “the legal wage floors for H-1Bs depend on experience” (the worker’s age, in other words), “so hiring young H-1Bs in lieu of older Americans is legal.” As he says with cases such as SoCal Edison and Disney, “age was the key factor underlying the wage savings accrued by hiring H-1Bs.” See this link for information on a similar suit against Google based on age discrimination (which the company has since settled).
In the case of OPTs, however, this “wage floor” isn’t even available; being recent graduates, they’re all young (and cheap). Further, OPT participants are even cheaper to employ because, as stated earlier, aliens on student visas are exempted from Social Security and Medicare.
Fundamentally, the OPT program, like H-1B, allows BigTech firms to flood the labor market, creating artificial competition and pressuring the standard of living we’ve earned through decades of hard-fought democratic and labor reforms. The cost savings, meanwhile, get siphoned up by private technology firms, many of which grew out of taxpayer-funded military programs. Thankfully, much of this wasn’t lost on the judge. DHS had asserted that our plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue because (a) they couldn’t prove an OPT participant actually took one of their jobs (an impossible and unfair demand) and, in the alternative, (b) the plaintiffs were currently employed and so couldn’t show any injury — all are employed, mostly in contract positions. The judge knocked down both arguments by pointing out that “an influx of OPT computer programmers would increase the labor supply, which is likely to depress plaintiff’s members’ wages and threaten their job security, even if they remain employed” (emphasis added).
More concrete evidence was also offered. Plaintiffs showed examples of job advertisements where only OPT participants were requested to apply. As Matloff likes to note, these companies are not just using H-1Bs and OPT participants to replace American workers, as in the SoCal Edison and Disney cases; they’re also hiring them instead of American workers. And many times, it isn’t “highly skilled” types that are being imported but simply “ordinary people, doing ordinary work.” The benefits of circumventing the H-1B program are apparently big. Arguing that DHS’s chosen 29-month extension period was an arbitrary and therefore invalid decision, plaintiffs showed the court that industry lobbyists CompeteAmerica, lobbyists from Microsoft and the Chamber of Commerce, and others had all been in contact with DHS requesting the same 29-month extension. And showing just how eager it was to comply, DHS implemented the rule without going through the statutorily mandated notice-and-comment period, a window of time in which the public can criticize agency action.
DHS tried to argue in court that skipping the process was necessitated by a looming “fiscal emergency” in the U.S. economy that could be ameliorated only by letting “tens of thousands of OPT workers” join the tech industry. Whose economic analysis did DHS cite to back this up? Studies from the technology industry itself. Ultimately, although the court knocked down the OPT extension on procedural grounds, the victory is only temporary. DHS can open up the rule to notice-and-comment and try again.
Further, the judge rejected our argument that the program violates the law on other, more substantive (and less procedural) grounds. According to congressionally made statute (Immigration and Naturalization Act § 1101(a)(15)(F)(i)), student visas cannot be allocated for working purposes and may be allocated only to “bona fide students . . . solely for the purpose of pursuing such a course of study . . . at an established . . . academic institution” (emphasis added). But again, OPT, entirely a DHS creation, purports to let student-visa holders join the workforce. By ignoring the stipulations of Congress, the program exceeds DHS’s statutory authority.
By giving DHS the authority to redefine what a “student” is, the court is allowing the agency to set the duration and conditions of a student’s stay, potentially letting them occupy the labor market for years upon years. Good for the foreign “student,” good for the trillion-dollar

tech industry, but bad for the American worker. — Ian Smith is an attorney who works for the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

Green, Green and Green Obama and Harry Reid

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If you think this whole ‘green thing’ is legit, you need to read on. It is a ploy to fill politicians pockets with money and power. Coming out of the White House, it affects all government agencies including the military, violators pay fines, adding to the Treasury revenue base.

Obama Pushes Billions in Green Executive Actions

TheBlaze: President Barack Obama’s package of executive actions includes $1 billion in new taxpayer subsidies to the green energy industry and homeowners, while also promoting existing $10 billion in loan programs.

“We are taking steps that allow more Americans to join this revolution with no money down,” Obama said at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas Monday. “You don’t have to share my passion for fighting climate change. A lot of Americans are going solar and becoming more energy efficient not because they’re tree huggers – although trees are important, I just want you to know – but because they are cost cutters. And I’m all for consumers saving money because that means they can spend it on other stuff. Solar isn’t just for the green crowd anymore. It’s for the green eyeshade crowd too.”

Under the initiative, the Obama administration will invite applications for more than $10 billion in existing loan projects available. The current loans are for the Distributed Energy Projects program and solicitations will open to more potential companies to vie for funding on alternative energy.

Further, the administration will make $1 billion in new loan guarantees for distribution of alternative energy such as solar and wind. These new loan guarantees will target industries such as rooftop solar, energy storage, smart grid technology, and methane capture for oil and gas wells, according to the White House.

The administration also announced $24 million for 11 projects to assist in developing solar technologies that double the amount of solar energy available. Three of the projects are in California, two are in Massachusetts, the others are in New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington state.

Alternative energy is moving closer to a day when it doesn’t need subsidies, but the country can’t wait for that, said Energy Secretary Earnest Moniz in a conference call with reporters Monday.

“We support extending a variety of tax credits that is very important for clean energy and a clean energy infrastructure,” Moniz said. “Cost reductions have been incredible. Without subsidies, I would still see solar power growing, but we don’t have a lot of time to get it right. We need to address climate change early.”

Many of the loans are for companies seeking to access financing for green energy projects, some of the loans will also come through the Property-Assessed Clean Energy financing program, or PACE.

The Obama administration is also crating a Defense Department Privatized Housing Challenge, which allows companies to commit to provide solar power to housing on over 40 military bases across the United States, with the stated goal of saving military families money on energy bills and making military communities more energy secure. The DOD and White House Council on Environmental Quality convened companies that own privatized housing units for military to share best practices. Four companies are committed to provide solar power at more than 40 military bases. The companies are Balfour Beatty, Corvias, Lincoln Military Housing and United Communities.

***

Green Businesses, Political Powerbrokers Mingle at Reid Cleantech Summit

Eighth annual Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas takes place as Nevada regulators hammer out crucial solar energy measure

LAS VEGAS—Green energy businesses gathered in Las Vegas on Monday for an annual conference hailing progress in the cleantech industry and encouraging further government incentives for the types of firms that paid thousands of dollars to sponsor the event.

For a minimum $4,000 payment, businesses and other groups got a spot in the exhibit hall of the eighth annual National Clean Energy Summit, cosponsored by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and the Center for American Progress.

“This prestigious event brings together the investors, industry executives, entrepreneurs, policymakers and advocates who are shaping the future of clean energy,” NCES’s website says.

The exhibitor fee gets businesses access to “senior industry executives, corporate sustainability teams, leaders from all levels of government, project developers, financiers, utilities, representatives from state and federal agencies and media from across the country,” in the words of a summit brochure.

The confluence of business and policy is characteristic of the event, which this year featured speeches and discussions from President Barack Obama, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, and CAP president Neera Tanden.

Reid himself is one of the event’s major draws. His office has bragged about its work in securing subsidies for donors to the Clean Energy Project, a group that serves as “the fiscal agent and the coordinating entity” of the summit, according to board member Sig Rogich.

The conference highlighted green-energy-friendly policies such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s new restrictions on coal-fired power plants, which are poised to remake the U.S. energy economy. Companies on the right side of that policy equation face a tremendous financial opportunity.

“It’s a big business opportunity,” in the words of Tom Steyer, whose group Advanced Energy Economy is a CEP donor. “It’s a chance to make a lot of money.”

Steyer also serves on the board of NCES sponsor the Center for American Progress, which has been accused of acting as a de facto lobbying arm of First Solar, another CEP donor whose chief executive spoke at Monday’s summit.

The timing of the event was auspicious. Taking place in Las Vegas while Nevada energy regulators hammer out crucial details of the state’s renewable energy incentive packages, attendees could witness and participate in discussions that might directly inform policymaking that would affect the bottom lines of the conference’s participants and financial supporters.

Just days before the event kicked off, utility NV Energy, a CEP donor and NCES exhibitor, announced that it had hit a statutory cap on incentives for its solar power customers. Its proposed rates in the absence of those incentives would seriously damage Nevada solar industry, its advocates say.

Those issues received significant play at the summit during an afternoon debate moderated by Rose McKinney-James, a former CEP board member and current Nevada lobbyist.

In the latter capacity, McKinney-James represents Valley Electric and Bombard Electric, both of which are also CEP donors and were featured in NCES’s exhibit hall. Both also have a stake in the outcome of the net metering debate.

When NV Energy reached its previous net metering cap in May, McKinney-James helped broker a deal between the utility and the Alliance for Solar Choice, a rooftop solar advocacy group.

To the extent that the policy goals of various conference sponsors were opposed on the net metering issue, Reid very clearly took a stand, criticizing NV Energy’s rate proposal.

“The world’s changed, and they should change with it,” he said at a press conference opening the event.

Reid expanded on that position in the summit’s opening remarks.

“I believe Nevada can meet this challenge and begin the process of transforming our grid to fully valuing clean energy technologies,” he said.

He offered Valley Electric as an alternative, the type of company cooperating with his policy preferences rather than impeding them.

In a sign that it was aware of the ongoing controversy—and where the event’s more powerful voices stood on the issue—NV Energy adorned its exhibitor booth with signs and literature extoling the company’s commitment to renewable energy in general, and rooftop solar in particular.

Oh Look, an Illegal Immigrant Summer Camp

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As written on this blog that we must watch Germany when it comes to protests over immigration, it appears that things are spooling that activism here in America is in our future.

Who would imagine summer camp involves teaching activism and we are to accept this as a good thing?

This summer camp just churned out 80 activists

LATimes: Growing up in wealthy Marin County, Yaqueline Rodas didn’t know many people like herself: a young immigrant from Guatemala in the country without legal status. She knew even fewer political activists.

So it was with amazement and a little anxiety that she found herself standing one morning in June in a circle with 82 strangers, each of whom had also been brought to the U.S. illegally as a child, and each of whom was now officially an activist-in-training.

It was the first day of Dream Summer, an annual program that brings young immigrants from across the country to Los Angeles for a 10-week crash course designed to produce the next generation of immigrant rights leaders.

As the students sipped coffee and exchanged shy introductions in a meeting room in the basement of a Koreatown church, Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, which organized the program, explained the objective.

“It is to build a powerful social justice movement that will transform this country,” Wong said. He cracked a smile: “No pressure.”

Dream Summer, which concluded its fifth year Thursday with a graduation ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, has already changed the immigrant rights movement. Its alumni include many leading “Dreamer” advocates, including several who led the push for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (DACA, as it is known, granted temporary deportation protection to more than half a million young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.)

The program includes two weeks of workshops in Los Angeles on topics as varied as public speaking, the immigrant detention system and the history of the NAACP. Participants also spend eight weeks in internships at social justice organizations around the country.

The idea is for them to learn what has worked for other social movements. But the program’s biggest value, those involved say, may be the connections forged by young immigrants from different regions with similar backgrounds, similar frustrations and similar dreams.

“Look around the room,” Wong urged the students that first day in June. “Now you’re a part of a whole network, a whole community.”

Rodas, who applied for the program on a whim after a classmate at UC Santa Barbara recommended it, said the summer had changed her sense of place in the world.

It helped her realize that there were others like her who had experienced discrimination, and who also were bothered by their parents’ struggle to find well-paying work. And it helped her find a purpose.

“Now I know I want to do something to help my community,” said Rodas, who spent the summer helping immigrants without legal status sign up for health insurance.

Chando Kem, 21, spent the first few days of the program commuting from his home in Long Beach. But soon he was spending nights on the floor of the hotel rooms of the out-of-town participants to maximize the time with his new colleagues.

During his internship, at the Filipino Migrant Center in Long Beach, Kem was asked to produce video testimonials featuring immigrants who had experienced wage theft. During the process, he realized that he should interview his own father for the film.

When his family arrived from Cambodia, when Kem was 7, his dad worked at a Chinese restaurant where he was underpaid and denied proper lunch breaks, Kem said. “Before I thought, ‘OK, this is the way things are,'” he said. “Now it’s like no, that’s wrong.”

The organizers of Dream Summer say it was born out of failure and frustration.

They started the program in 2011 after Congress failed to pass the federal Dream Act, which would have given people who came to the United States before the age of 16 a pathway to citizenship. Opponents said it would have rewarded immigrants who broke the law.

That year, several of the program’s young participants were placed with campaigns working on behalf of the California Dream Act. It passed later that year, allowing youth to apply for state financial aid at universities.

Other Dream Summer alumni would go on to lead efforts against Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for controversial policies targeting immigrants in the country illegally, and to take on Obama’s deportation record. One graduate, Lorella Praeli, is now Latino outreach director for Democratic hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The program is not only for new activists.

At 33, Paulo Jara-Riveros was one of the oldest participants this summer. Brought to the U.S. from Peru at age 15, he returned to Peru to pursue his studies in 2011.

Two years later, Jara-Riveros was a part of a major protest in which two dozen young people with long ties to the U.S. surrendered to federal authorities at the Texas-Mexico border to protest American immigration policies. Jara-Riveros, a transgender man who says he faced discrimination in Peru, has applied for asylum and is waiting for a ruling in his case.

This summer he worked for a health organization that serves transgender immigrants. The experience was emotionally trying, he said. His takeaway: Activists must also tend to their own needs.

“Sometimes when you’re working in activism you get caught up in the work and you forget to take care of yourselves,” he said.

For Miguel Bibanco, a 20-year-old from Fresno, the program was not just about changing immigration policy. It was also about modeling an ideal society. He pointed to workshops that highlighted the experiences of minorities within the immigrant community, including lesbians, gays and transgender people and immigrants from Asia.

“It’s not just Latinos,” Bibanco said. “If we want a society that is inclusive, we need to start by including them in the activism process.”

On Thursday, he and Rodas snacked on taquitos and quesadillas at the program’s graduation ceremony, held at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

As the participants posed for pictures with their diplomas, they heard from Los Angeles City Councilman Gil Cedillo, who wrote the California Dream Act while he was a state assemblyman.

Cedillo evoked the heated rhetoric nationally around immigration. This summer, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has ratcheted up his crusade against illegal immigration, calling this month for a revocation of the constitutional amendment that guarantees citizenship to those born in the U.S.

“We’re being vilified,” said Cedillo, who called this “one of the most critical times in our country.”

He told the participants in the program that they were model members of the community. They were “hopeful, not hateful,” he said, “optimistic, not pessimistic.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve shown up.”