GM’s CEO prodded out by White House, offers company more money for greater control

GM’s CEO forced out by White House

At the urging of the White House, which is preparing to announce additional plans to rescue U.S. automakers, General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner is resigning.

3.30.09 / Peter Whoriskey / Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Rick Wagoner, General Motors’ chairman and chief executive, is resigning at the request of the White House, clearing the way for the Obama administration to offer the company more federal aid.

President Barack Obama is expected to announce a plan Monday to prop up General Motors and Chrysler, offering them more money if the companies agree to shrink and refocus their businesses. Wagoner’s resignation was one of the White House’s conditions for more federal aid.

”He agreed and will do that,” a senior administration official said Sunday evening.

It was not clear who would replace Wagoner; Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson would appear to be the most likely candidate, The Detroit Free Press reported Sunday. GM declined to comment.

The White House’s insistence that Wagoner step down represents an extraordinary intervention of the federal government into the management of a private company. It also reflects that the president and his auto task force have taken a skeptical view of the companies’ plans to restructure, which were submitted last month.

Before the federal government extends more financial aid to automakers, the industry must offer a plan that makes it ”much more lean, mean and competitive than it currently is,” Obama said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation.

In February, GM and Chrysler, which had received $17.4 billion in loans in December, requested up to $21.6 billion in additional federal assistance. Both companies have submitted business plans to the government that promise to shrink their workforces and product lines in response to the vast falloff of U.S. auto sales.

Wagoner’s resignation does not mean he will leave the company immediately. He will continue to draw his $1 a year annual salary, because if he leaves the company he is entitled to a multimillion-dollar pension that the government does not want to pay, a source familiar with the matter said.

Marc Cannon, senior vice president with AutoNation, the country’s largest GM dealership, said the move demonstrates there is a path to a viable GM, albeit one with new management.

”What it clearly says to us is the administration believes that General Motors will come out of this stronger, but they needed to make changes moving forward,” Cannon said.

A GM spokesman declined to comment.

Wagoner, a graduate of Harvard Business School, came to GM as its chief financial officer in 1992, when he was 38, and he became chairman in 2000.

His critics say that under his watch, GM focused too much on trucks and sport-utility vehicles even as foreign rivals introduced smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. The company eventually pushed its plug-in Chevrolet Volt, but that was after gas prices skyrocketed.

Between 2005 and last year, Wagoner oversaw more than $73 billion in losses. In 1994, when he took charge of North America, GM held 33.2 percent of the American car market. Last month, GM held only 18.8 percent of American auto sales, according to Motorintelligence.com.

His defenders, however, have noted that during Wagoner’s reign GM has led the industry in renegotiating key contracts with the United Auto Workers.

But then came the economic downturn and a 40 percent plunge in U.S. auto sales.

”He was restructuring the company and he got caught by the economy,” said Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of Edmunds.com, a consumer automotive website.

Ultimately, however, what led to Wagoner’s ouster may be that his proposal to restructure GM did not pass muster with the Obama administration.

On Face the Nation, Obama said GM and Chrysler had not yet met the conditions of their existing loans, and sacrifices would be necessary for them to become viable businesses.

“That’s going to mean a set of sacrifices from all parties involved — management, labor, shareholders, creditors, suppliers, dealers.”

Obama, Maurice Strong, Al Gore key players cashing in on Chicago Climate Exchange

Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–the rest of the story

3.25.09 / Judi McLeod / Canadian Free Press

Good news to know that the truth will always out–even when you’re Barack Obama.

“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes.  In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit.  Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States.  That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower.  The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI).  MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.  Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR.  “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale.  The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996.  But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding.  When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value.  On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.  By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors.  Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder.  The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.

If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.

It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs.  Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives.  John is the brother of William Ayers.

What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.

Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.

But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.

The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.

Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”.  He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!

Geithner turnaround on IMF global currency shocks currency markets

Geithner about-turn on dollar status shocks currency markets

Sterling jumped more than a cent against a sharply falling dollar on Wednesday, with the greenback winded after US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he was “quite open” to China’s suggestion of moving toward SDR-linked currency system, Reuters reported.

3.25.09 / UK Telegraph

By 1408 GMT, the pound had jumped to a session high of $1.4725.

However, the dollar soon pared losses after the Treasury Secretary added that the dollar was likely to remain the world’s reserve currency for a long time.

“The market is purely reacting to the Geithner comments and it’s taken out a whole load of stops [in euro/dollar and cable],” a London-based trader said. “With a comment like that people just cut all their positions.”

Initially, investors viewed the comment as an about-turn because on Tuesday Mr Geithner had firmly dismissed suggestions that the global economy move away from using the dollar as the main reserve currency.

In a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill, US Republican Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, asked Mr Geithner: “Would you categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar and going to a global currency as suggested this morning by China and also by Russia, Mr Secretary?”

Mr Geithner replied, “I would, yes.”

Chinese central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan on Monday urged an overhaul of the global monetary system to allow for wider use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) created by the International Monetary Fund as an international reserve asset in 1965.

Mr Zhou’s comments followed remarks by Russia last week which said it would put forward a proposal at a meeting of the Group of 20 in London on April 2 for the creation of a new global reserve currency.

Chinese military capabilities shifting balance of power in Asia, says US Defense Department

China’s Arms Technologies Changing Balance in Asia (Update1)

3.26.09 / Tony Capaccio & Michael Forsythe / Bloomberg

March 26 (Bloomberg) — China is altering the balance of power in Asia by continuing to develop “disruptive” military capabilities, including cyber and anti-satellite technologies, the U.S. Defense Department said in a report to Congress.

“China’s ability to sustain military power at a distance remains limited, but its armed forces continue to develop and field disruptive military technologies” such as missiles that would hinder adversaries from entering a battle zone, the Defense Department said in the annual report, released yesterday.

The term disruptive technology describes products or processes that marginalize older technologies. In the military, cyber warfare can disable computer-based weapons systems. In 2007, China destroyed one of its weather satellites in space with a kinetic weapon, leading lawmakers to question the safety of U.S. surveillance and communications satellites. China is also developing anti-satellite lasers and has the ability to jam some satellite transmissions, the report said.

The report “provides a very professional, factual description of what we see with the Chinese military,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters. “It provides some new details, some additional specificity, but there are no new major strategic insights or capabilities revealed,” he said.

The report said China’s lack of transparency in detailing its military spending and capabilities “poses risks to stability by creating uncertainty and increasing the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation.”

Defense Spending

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang called the report a “gross intervention in China’s international affairs.”

The report “continues the play up the fallacy of the China threat,” Qin said at a press briefing in Beijing. He urged the U.S. to “stop making groundless accusations against China so as not to further damage the two countries’ military relations.”

China’s defense spending has increased by more than 16 percent a year for the past decade, according to Chinese government figures. The Pentagon report puts China’s defense spending at the second-highest in the world after the U.S., with total spending at between $105 billion and $150 billion in 2008. The U.S. military’s budget in 2008, not including supplemental spending for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was $488 billion.

China’s government said earlier this month that its military spending will rise to 480.6 billion yuan ($70.4 billion) this year, up 14.9 percent from 2008. The Pentagon report said the Chinese budget “does not include major categories of expenditure.”

Military Exercises

China’s military is increasingly taking part in military exercises with other countries, the report said. This year three Chinese navy ships participated in anti-piracy patrols off Somalia.

Earlier this month five Chinese vessels confronted a U.S. surveillance ship in the South China Sea.

Li Zhaoxing, the spokesman for China’s legislature and a former foreign minister, said March 4 that “China’s defense spending is relatively low in the world.”

“China’s limited military power will be used solely to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Li said.

The Pentagon report said China is continuing to pursue military capabilities aimed at deterring Taiwan from declaring formal independence from the mainland. China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province. The U.S. is required by law to sell the island weapons for its defense.

Warming relations

In the past year, China and Taiwan ended a six-decade ban on direct shipping, air and postal links following the election of Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, who abandoned his predecessor’s pro-independence stance.

“This modernization and the threat to Taiwan continue despite significant reduction in cross-Strait tension over the last year since Taiwan elected a new president,” the Pentagon report said.

“Tensions are reduced but they have not vanished,” Admiral Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee March 24. Talks between the countries are “richer today and more productive” than before the election of Ma, he said.

The report says that Taiwan no longer enjoys air superiority over the waters separating the mainland and the island, reversing a conclusion the Pentagon first voiced in 2002.

“Since 2000, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait has continued to shift in Beijing’s favor, marked by the sustained deployment of advanced military equipment to the regions opposite Taiwan,” the report said.

“In 2002, the department assessed that Taiwan ‘has enjoyed dominance of the airspace over the Taiwan Straits for many years.’ This conclusion no longer holds true,” the report said.

In particular, China has increased its force of mobile short-range missiles based in garrisons opposite Taiwan to as many as 1,150 in September from up to 790 in late 2005, the report said.

Kremlin’s senior economic advisor favors partial return to the gold standard

Russia backs return to Gold Standard to solve financial crisis

3.30.09 / Ambrose Evans-Pritchard / UK Telegraph

Arkady Dvorkevich, the Kremlin’s chief economic adviser, said Russia would favour the inclusion of gold bullion in the basket-weighting of a new world currency based on Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Chinese and Russian leaders both plan to open debate on an SDR-based reserve currency as an alternative to the US dollar at the G20 summit in London this week, although the world may not yet be ready for such a radical proposal.

Mr Dvorkevich said it was “logical” that the new currency should include the rouble and the yuan, adding that “we could also think about more effective use of gold in this system”.

The Gold Standard was the anchor of world finance in the 19th Century but began breaking down during the First World War as governments engaged in unprecedented spending. It collapsed in the 1930s when the British Empire, the US, and France all abandoned their parities.

It was revived as part of fixed dollar system until US inflation caused by the Vietnam War and “Great Society” social spending forced President Richard Nixon to close the gold window in 1971.

The world’s fiat paper currencies have lacked any external anchor ever since. It is widely argued that the financial excesses and extreme debt leverage of the last quarter century would have been impossible – or less likely – under the discipline of gold.

Russia is a major gold producer with large untapped reserves of ore so it has a clear interest in promoting the idea. The Kremlin has already instructed the central bank of gradually raise the gold share of foreign reserves to 10pc.

China’s government has floated a variant of this idea, suggesting a currency based on 30 commodities along the lines of the “Bancor” proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1944.

Turkish media implicates Israel in plot to assassinate their Prime Minister

Israel planned to kill Erdogan: Report

3.29.09 / Press TV

Turkish media sources detail information implicating the Israeli Mossad in a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

An e-mail found on a personal computer belonging to one of the members of the underground Ergenekon organization exposed Mossad’s role in the failed assassination efforts against Erdogan, Turkish media outlets reported on Friday.

The organization has been accused of orchestrating a coup plot against the current Turkish administration.

The indictment list tabled by the Turkish prosecution against the organization says that an Israeli journalist had sent the e-mail to a number of Ergenekon figures to inform them of Israeli readiness to assassinate the Turkish premier.

According to sources in the Turkish press, the e-mail promised support for Mr. Dugo — whose identity has not been revealed — against Erdogan after coordination with Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

The e-mail explained that the Mossad would wait for a green light from Mr. Dugo to carry on with the assassination plans.

Turkish sources have claimed Mr. Dugo to be Turkish Labor Party head Dugo Prinitchek — who is suspected of leading the secret organization.

The news of an alleged Israeli role in the plot comes after a report last month suggested that Tel Aviv sought to stage regime change in Turkey in response to Ankara’s condemnation of Israeli crimes in the Gaza Strip.

Tensions between Israel and Turkey emerged in late January, when Erdogan stormed out of a Davos forum after a heated debate with Israeli President Shimon Peres on the military aggression brought upon Gaza.

The Turkish prime minister walked out of the debate — attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other panel members –, while complaining that his comments on the conflict were cut short by the Washington Post’s moderator David Ignatius.

Erdogan had told Peres at the Forum, “When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill.”

The criticism was leveled at the Israeli killing of over 1,350 Gazans amid a crippling 20-month blockade on the densely-populated Palestinian sliver.

“I know very well how you hit and killed children on beaches,” he lashed out.

Government panel advocates depression tests for all teens

Panel: All teens should be tested for depression

2 million in U.S. are affected but most are undiagnosed, task force says

3.30.09 / AP

CHICAGO – An influential government-appointed medical panel is urging doctors to routinely screen all American teens for depression — a bold step that acknowledges that nearly 2 million teens are affected by this debilitating condition.

Most are undiagnosed and untreated, said the panel, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which sets guidelines for doctors on a host of health issues.

The task force recommendations appear in April’s issue of the journal Pediatrics. And they go farther than the American Academy of Pediatrics’ own guidance for teen depression screening.

An estimated 6 percent of U.S. teenagers are clinically depressed. Evidence shows that detailed but simple questionnaires can accurately diagnose depression in primary-care settings such as a pediatrician’s office.

The task force said that when followed by treatment, including psychotherapy, screening can help improve symptoms and help kids cope. Because depression can lead to persistent sadness, social isolation, school problems and even suicide, screening to treat it early is crucial, the panel said.

The task force is an independent panel of experts convened by the federal government to establish guidelines for treatment in primary-care. Its new guidance goes beyond the pediatrics academy, which advises pediatricians to ask teen patients questions about depression. Other doctor groups advise screening only high-risk youngsters.

Because depression is so common, “you will miss a lot if you only screen high-risk groups,” said Dr. Ned Calonge, task force chairman and chief medical officer for Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment.

Screening advised even for kids without symptoms
The group recommends research-tested screening tests even for kids without symptoms. It cited two questionnaires that focus on depression tip-offs, such as mood, anxiety, appetite and substance abuse.

Calonge stressed that the panel does not want its advice to lead to drug treatment alone, particularly antidepressants that have been linked with increased risks for suicidal thoughts. Routine depression testing should only occur if psychotherapy is also readily available, the panel said. Calonge said screening once yearly likely would be enough.

The recommendations come at a pivotal time for treatment of depression and other mental health problems in children.

Recently passed federal mental health equity legislation mandates equal coverage for mental and physical ailments in insurance plans offering both. The law is expected to prompt many more adults and children to seek mental health care.

Yet at the same time psychiatrists specializing in treating children and teens are scarce. A separate report, also released Monday in the Pediatrics journal, says primary care doctors including pediatricians and family physicians will need to get more involved in mental health care.

That report is from the pediatrics academy and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The groups say pediatricians should routinely consult with child psychiatrists, including working in the same office when possible. And it says insurers should compensate pediatricians for any mental health services they provide.

Pediatricians can play major role
Dr. Alan Axelson, a Pittsburgh psychiatrist who co-authored the second report, praised the task force recommendations and said pediatricians can play a key role.

Because children’s families often get to know their pediatricians, having those doctors offer mental health screening can help make it seem less stigmatizing, Axelson said.

Most pediatricians aren’t trained to do psychotherapy, but they can prescribe depression medication and monitor patients they’ve referred to others for therapy, he said.

Dr. Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said his group strongly supports both Pediatrics reports.

While primary care doctors have full plates just dealing with physical ailments, many recognize the importance of providing mental health services — and many already do, Epperly said.

It isn’t always as time-consuming as it might seem; some screening questionnaires can be filled out by patients in the waiting room, Epperly said. Doctors can easily spot any red flags.

New US Senate push for ousting Cuba travel ban and trade embargo

A push for easing limits on Cuba

Senate measure would eliminate travel ban; embargo under reexamination

3.30.09 / Shailagh Murray & Karen DeYoung / Washington Post

WASHINGTON – Roughly a year after Fidel Castro stepped aside and handed much of the responsibility for leading Cuba to his brother Raul, there is new momentum in Washington for eliminating the ban on most U.S. travel to the island nation and for reexamining the severe limitations on U.S.-Cuban economic exchanges.

At a Capitol Hill news conference scheduled for tomorrow, a wide array of senators and interest groups — including Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.); Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.); Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and Human Rights Watch — will rally around a potentially historic bill to lift the travel ban.

President Obama called repeatedly during the campaign last year for a “new strategy” toward Cuba, and this month he lifted severe Bush-era restrictions on travel and remittances to the island by Cuban Americans with relatives there, after the 2009 spending measure banned using taxpayer money to enforce them. The Treasury Department also said it would ease licensing requirements for trade-related travel by U.S. citizens.

Although the decision is not yet final, Obama is expected to further loosen remaining travel restrictions for all Americans by the time he goes to the April 17-19 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, senior administration officials said. Such restrictions were first imposed in 1961 and have been progressively tightened since then. Removing all sanctions requires congressional action, but one senior official said that Treasury has wide leeway to ease the licensing requirements that limit travel.

A bipartisan majority in Congress, including farm-state Republicans looking for new agricultural markets, has long advocated lifting the sanctions to some degree. Provisions to ease the restrictions on travel and agricultural sales were repeatedly attached to legislation passed during the Bush administration, only to be abandoned in closed-door reconciliation conferences as the threat of a presidential veto loomed.

The new bill was first proposed two years ago, dying in committee, but this time it has gained 18 co-sponsors, including eight Democratic committee chairmen. Meanwhile, new legislation was offered in the House last week to further loosen trade restrictions for agricultural products.

Cuban American vote
The handful of Cuban Americans in Congress, most of them Republicans, have long been in the vanguard that advocated stricter restrictions and opposed a new outreach toward Cuba. But none has been more stalwart than Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).

The son of Cuban immigrants, Menendez has risked the goodwill of the White House and his standing within the party to press the continuation of sanctions and travel restrictions against Havana’s totalitarian regime. He riled many of his colleagues this month by blocking two of Obama’s science nominees and by holding up the 2009 spending measure to protest the Cuba provisions it included.

The bill to be unveiled tomorrow in the Senate goes well beyond the measure Menendez just protested by removing legal barriers to all travel to Cuba, as opposed to just family-related visits.

Lugar released a report in late February that calls for a dramatic overhaul of U.S.-Cuba policy. “Economic sanctions are a legitimate tool of U.S. foreign policy and they have sometimes achieved their aims, as in the case of apartheid in South Africa,” he wrote in a letter accompanying the report. “After 47 years, however, the unilateral embargo on Cuba has failed to achieve its stated purpose of ‘bringing democracy to the Cuban people,’ while it may have been used as a foil by the regime to demand further sacrifices from Cuba’s impoverished population.”

Defiant, public opposition
In a lengthy speech from the Senate floor this month, Menendez shot back at Lugar: “Over the years, millions of Europeans, Canadians, Mexicans, South and Central Americans, among others, have visited Cuba, invested in Cuba, spent billions of dollars, signed trade agreements and engaged politically. And what has been the result of all of that money and all of that engagement? The regime has not opened up; on the contrary, it has used resources to become more oppressive.”

Fellow Democrats were surprised by the force of his defiant, public opposition to a provision that enjoys broad support in the party. Menendez also serves as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a coveted leadership post that demands a degree of party loyalty.

Some liberal donors protested doing business with a man they thought was taking an outdated stance, and some of Menendez’s fellow senators questioned whether they had picked the wrong person for the DSCC job. Dodd, for instance, is a top GOP target in 2010. He has called U.S.-Cuba policy “an abject failure.” Some Democrats have wondered privately how hard Menendez would work to defend his colleague.

“Anyone who knows me knows my views are both heartfelt and principled,” Menendez responded. “It should be of no surprise to anyone that I have used political capital in my many years in the House and the Senate on this issue.”

Fighting for a ‘failed strategy’
Menendez said he would continue to use every available tool to preserve U.S. sanctions until political conditions change in Cuba, although he attributed much of his earlier ire to the fact that the provision had been inserted with no notice into an unrelated bill.

“If you want to change Cuba policy, fine, let’s duke it out,” Menendez said. “Let’s duke it out on the floor and let’s have our debate and let’s have our amendments. Let’s know who’s for democracy and human rights and who wants to sell their stuff no matter how many people are in prison. That’s fine. At least it will be an honest discussion.”

Menendez and other proponents of the current restrictions warn that free-flowing trade and tourism would only enrich the Castro regime and defuse tensions within the Cuban population — friction that is key, they argue, to fostering political change.

Dorgan, who is the lead author of the unrestricted travel measure, said Menendez and a small, bipartisan group of House hard-liners are fighting a losing battle. “It’s sort of all over but the shouting, whether our country should maintain this embargo,” Dorgan said.

Menendez “has a right to take a position and assert it very strongly,” Dorgan said. But, he added, “it’s pretty clear to everybody that this is a failed strategy and has been a failed strategy for a long time.”

White House stresses ‘transition’
Although Obama last year proposed a new direction with Cuba, he has yet to indicate he favors lifting all economic sanctions. In remarks before the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami last May, he asserted, “It’s time for more than tough talk that never yields results. It’s time for a new strategy. There are no better ambassadors for freedom than Cuban Americans. That’s why I will immediately allow unlimited family travel and remittances to the island.”

But on a separate CANF questionnaire, Obama wrote that, while U.S.-Cuba policy “has failed,” he would “maintain the embargo as an inducement for democratic change on the Island.”

At a warm-up summit to this week’s meeting of the Group of 20 major industrialized nations, Vice President Biden said in Chile this weekend that the United States had no plans to scrap the Cuban trade embargo. He said that the Obama administration thinks “Cuban people should determine their own fate and they should be able to live in freedom.” But he added that a “transition” was needed in U.S.-Cuba relations.

Menendez said he was open to a debate on Cuba, provided his colleagues refrain from sneaking language into unrelated bills. “A full and open discussion of the real situation in Cuba is timely,” he said on the Senate floor this month. “We should gather evidence, bring a wide range of voices to the table and make careful and thoughtful considerations of their implications.”

Mandatory service proviso found attatched to new Senate bill

Mandatory Service Bill Lives On

3.29.09 / Infowars

It seemed like a victory, of sorts. Last week the Senate approved a bill to radically expand the AmeriCorps program. The bill initially contained language that proposed a study for mandatory service for all young people in the United States, but this language was removed as the bill moved through the Senate and did not appear in the final version.

	Democrat Jim McDermott has sponsored the new mandatory service bill.

Well, it’s baaaaaaack. The language was stripped from one bill, but it suddenly appeared in another. It is now contained in HR 1444, due to crawl across the House floor this week. HR 1444 is sponsored by Rep. Jim McDermott, a Washington state Democrat, and is assigned to the House Committee on Labor and Education.

The bill, under Section 4 (b)6, states:

Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.

How “mandatory service,” i.e. servitude, strengthens the “social fabric of the Nation” is not explained.

HR 1444, like its earlier parent 1388, includes the prospect of a “public service academy, a four-year institution that offers a federally funded undergraduate education with a focus on training future public sector leaders” and reaches all the way down to primary school, requiring a review of “the means to develop awareness of national service and volunteer opportunities at a young age by creating, expanding and promoting service options for primary and secondary school students and by raising awareness of existing incentives.”

That is, “existing incentives” as determined by the government.

In addition to Obama’s election campaign pledge to create a 250,000 strong national security force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has authored a book (The Plan: Big Ideas for America) that calls for three months of compulsory civil service for all Americans aged 18 to 25.

So it looks like the goblin of compulsory national service has not gone away, it has simply morphed into another bill, soon to be considered by the House.

One thing is for certain: the federal government considers you and your children little more than ciphers to be press ganged into mandatory “service” to a government addicted to wars waged in the name of international bankers.

CFR report: Geoengineer the earth to stop global warming

They put forward a solution of putting black soot on ice to stop global warming, but this is the same thing that was being put forth in the 70s to stop global cooling.So which is it?

The Geoengineering Option
A Last Resort Against Global Warming?

From CFR.org

Authors:

David G. Victor, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Science and Technology M. Granger Morgan, Head, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University Jay Apt, Distinguished Service Professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Executive Director, Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, Carnegie Mellon University John D. Steinbruner, Director, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland Katharine Ricke

March/April 2009
Foreign Affairs

As climate change accelerates, policymakers may have to consider “geoengineering” as an emergency strategy to cool the planet. Engineering the climate strikes most as a bad idea, but it is time to start taking it seriously.