President Obama bypassed Congressional approval when, on July 19, 2010, he signed Executive Order 13547 – Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes .

On June 12, 2009 he established the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force and charged them with “developing recommendations to enhance our ability to maintain healthy, resilient, and sustainable ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes resources for the benefit of present and future generations.” This task force was comprised of 24 senior-level officials from executive departments, agencies, and offices across the Federal government and was led by the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

The task force finalized its report to the President on July 19, 2010. Executive Order 13547 adopted the recommendations of the task force and directed executive agencies to form the National Ocean Council, which will be comprised of the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) (Nancy Sutley) and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (Dr. John P. Holdren), as co-chairs of this Council. The Council also includes the Secretaries of State, Defense, the Interior, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the Administrator of the EPA, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere (Administrator of NOAA), the Administrator of NASA, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the National Science Foundation, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Advisor and the Assistants to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Domestic Policy, Energy and Climate Change, and Economic Policy; and basically anyone else the Co-Chairs of the Council may choose to designate.

In an article by Henry Lamb posted on World News Daily on July 31, 2010 entitled Obama’s Latest Assault on Liberty he states “President Obama’s Executive Order 13547, issued July 19, further extends federal power, embraces global governance, diminishes the rights and privileges of individuals and brings the United States into compliance with Agenda 21, Chapter 17.6, which says:

Each coastal State should consider establishing, or where necessary strengthening, appropriate coordinating mechanisms (such as a high-level policy planning body) for integrated management and sustainable development of coastal and marine areas. …”

This executive order also intends to pursue the United States’ accession to the Law of the Sea Convention, or Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).

(more…)

Amidst the requisite election-year class warfare being played across the country, one of the common arguments being made by the left and accepted begrudgingly by the right is that those who earn the most should pay their fair share.  While both sides might differ over the size of one’s “fair share,” nevertheless even the most sober conservatives will usually concede this point.  Yet when one looks at how wealth is created, especially in spite of an economy as increasingly shackled as ours, this proves to be a specious argument.

The “fair share” arguments insinuate that the businessman, the entrepreneur, the inventor greedily piles their money on the backs of the poor.  Even for those who don’t see the world this way, there is a pervasive feeling that because one lives comfortably, one should be forced to support others because one has had such good fortune.  While you or I may agree that there is great merit to being charitable, I think we can also agree at least in principle that it is immoral for us to force someone to be charitable — especially if that “charity” is a government-run one for a government-determined cause, which is to say that it bears little resemblance to a charity at all.

But more importantly, what is forgotten are all the benefits that accrue to society as a result of the efforts of the wealth producer.

For it is the producer who generates wealth by applying his skills, energies and ideas and taking risk, generation which requires the creation of jobs both within his firm and within the firms that make up the other cogs in the chain of production, the proper allocation of capital by investors to fund the idea and the provision of a product that society values.  For one to make a lot of money, all of these disparate parts must come together, leading not just to success for the the producer, but food, an education and healthcare for the family of the employee and all of the employees at the firms that helped in the production of the good, a return for investors that can be reinvested in other profitable ventures to grow the overall economic pie and over time better and cheaper goods for the consumers, those who solely determine which producers are rewarded with profits and which are penalized with losses.

(more…)

Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza recently published an insightful, much-discussed article in Forbes, “How Obama Thinks.”

Drawing upon Obama’s writings and history, D’Souza concludes that his policy agenda—so at odds with traditional American values and principles—is rooted chiefly in the anti-colonialist intellectual influence of his Kenyan-born father:

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. . . .

[T]o his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. . . . Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America . . . .

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” Obama Sr. . . saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa . . . . As he put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

Like father, like son, says D’Souza:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

(more…)

The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy and the misguided notion that a few trillion dollars of additional federal spending would return us to prosperity moved us in early 2009 to suggest an alternate approach.  We proposed in an essay published in The American, the on-line journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a fifty percent tax credit up to a fixed limit for every taxpayer who purchased any consumer goods anywhere in the United States.

Our theory was that a robust economic recovery would be fueled by increased retail purchases, and that every dollar of cost to the treasury represented a prior retail purchase within the American economy. This, by definition, would have produced an immediate increase in revenues to our struggling business and manufacturing sectors.  That essay and the positive feedback it engendered provided the impetus for the establishment of the Of Thee I Sing 1776 website, the goal of which has been to produce weekly, timely, and hopefully, thought provoking essays.

This week we return to the subject of economic stimulus as more and more politicians from both sides of the aisle and columnists from left to right have pronounced the stimulus a disappointment, at best, and a disaster at worst.  More likely, given the nation’s accumulated debt, the latter may be the more apt description.

So is there a Plan B, so to speak, in the works?  The answer so far, based on bills recently considered and rejected by members of both parties in Congress, is that Mr. Obama would prefer to double down on the discredited Keynesian approach which didn’t work during the great depression and which failed miserably through the recently “ended” (at least by common definition) great recession.  Tell the 9.5% of the workforce who are still unemployed that the recession is over.  Tell that to those who have watched the average time the unemployed are out-of-work grow from six weeks to 12 weeks, to 25 weeks to 35 weeks.

The number of unemployed is essentially the same percentage of people who were unemployed before the Administration and the huge Democratic majority in Congress, in the name of “job creation”, started shoveling our tax money out the door (or as some might say burning it in a bonfire).  And just why won’t President Obama, Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi wake up and smell the fire that continues to burn?  The answer can be found in two very telling and, now, very familiar utterances of the president and his senior staff in the early days of the new Administration.  The president said he wanted to “fundamentally change America” and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when economic disaster was around the corner, famously said, “Never waste a crisis.”

(more…)

Amidst polls showing flagging public support, the Obama Administration has decided to address the one poll, among all others, that will determine Obama’s political future: the unemployment rate.  As Scott Rasmussen points out, the unemployment rate has a lot to say in deciding a President’s popularity rating and election results – which is probably why Obama announced he would hold a jobs summit with small business representatives among others.

Speeches and photo-ops, however, won’t change the fact that Obama’s policies are anti-capitalist and therefore anti-job and anti-recovery.

It’s important to note that the secret to capitalism is not all that secret.  It’s right there in the name CAPITALism.   Our system relies on:

• Step 1.  The ability of some to aggregate enough capital, i.e. save money, so that they can . . .
• Step 2.   Invest in productive enterprises, i.e. start or grow businesses which  . . .
• Step 3.   Employ people – people who  . . .
• Step 4.   Have the ability to buy things, i.e. purchasing power (critical in a 70% consumer driven economy) – which in turn  . . .
• Step 5.  Creates profits for sellers and . . .
• Step 6.  Savings – and the cycle renews.

The Left’s political policies, however, are sworn enemies of that simple and effective economic process.

(more…)

It’s okay for the Chinese to lecture President Obama on free market capitalism because he clearly doesn’t understand even the most basic principles of capitalism  and needs all the help he can get.  What’s not okay is for the Chinese to lecture the American people.  Here’s what I think:

Americans understand that prosperity, true prosperity, is created by an economic system where strong dynamic firms with better ideas, management and motivated employees  are free to prosper and the weak are allowed to fail.  This kind of Darwinian economic system has allowed our country to prosper for over 200 years.

Americans also understand that the federal government doesn’t really create jobs that lead to economic growth because Americans know that any job the government creates  can only be paid for by increasing taxes or by borrowing money–probably from the Chinese.  Nor is there any need to remind Americans that small businesses are the engine that move our economy, and that small businesses create 3 out of every 4 jobs in this country.

On the other hand, there is an urgent need to help President Obama learn the basic principles of a free enterprise system and how jobs are actually created in a market economy, for he is plunging headlong in the opposite direction.

(more…)