Fake News Practiced by All the Media

Is a reduction of federal government spending for a few days by 13% really a government shutdown? Of course not, though that was all that happened the last time Congress did not agree on a new budget authorization in time.  Especially not when government spending is at least four times that of a legitimate government abiding by the principle that its proper function is only to protect every American individual's right to life, liberty, self-ownership, property, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of speech and press, the freedom of self-defense, the right to the ownership of one's own labor and the fruits it produces, the freedom to trade and to contract, and the pursuit of one's own happiness -- all while free from others, including the government, initiating the use of force against the individual.

Yet once again, such a trivial prospective reduction in government spending on the 100th day of the Trump administration is being called a government shutdown.  Fox News, CNN, ABC, and NBC are all guilty of this alarmist, Yellow journalism.  It is a lie that promotes interest in their broadcasts. They clearly believe they are promoting their own self-interest with a lie.  Americans should be angry about this misrepresentation of the facts by our Fake News media.

An Ignorant Petition to Further Impoverish the Poor

With the international conference on Man-Induced Global Warming coming up soon in Paris, there is a petition circulating to support government efforts to suppress the use of inexpensive and reliable fossil fuels.  Here is the petition with my comments in blue added to it:

World leaders are coming together this year for climate talks in Paris. Their decisions affect all of us.  Darned, pesky nuisances these interfering world leaders are.  With most of the nations of the world having weak economies and too little respect for individual rights, these leaders are looking for ways to divert our attention from the many ways they get in our way, by getting in our way in the name of a scare based on a failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.

Climate change is dramatically changing the world we love. It’s putting our homes, our land and our food at risk. For nearly a billion people in poverty, more extreme weather and more disasters mean more hunger.  Climate has always changed.  Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  But, the world climate has actually been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years and there is no evidence that that has yet changed.  Man minimizes the consequences of climate change by using such resources as fossil fuels to make his home comfortable, manufacture products, and travel about to do productive work and transport his production to markets where people live better because of those products.  These private sector activities help us all to cope with the ancient vagaries of weather and climate.

Make 2015 the year leaders put the world’s most vulnerable people first in the battle against climate change.  So let them have the least expensive energy for transportation, light, and heat.  They will only become more vulnerable with skyrocketing energy prices, such as those advocated by Obama, his chief science advisor Holdren, and his Secr. of Energy.

If governments and big businesses are serious about fighting poverty, we need heads of state to make decisions in Paris that show support for the people whose lives and livelihoods are most at risk. These leaders have the power to start taking bold action on emissions, and to start to fix the damage that’s already been done.  Only there is no evidence that any damage has been done.  Rising CO2 concentrations do seem to be making plants grow better, which is only bad to these people because they think there are too many people on Earth and some of these Progressive Elitists want to see many of the poor die, because they believe man is the enemy of nature.  Their war to save nature is their war against man.

Millions of people across the world are already doing incredible things to protect the world we love. The fight against climate change won’t end this year but together we can win some important battles.  People in the most advanced societies that use the most fossil fuels are the ones who do the most to protect the world we love.

Show our governments and big business that they’ve got to take urgent action to tackle climate change, and stand with those hit first and worst by extreme weather and disasters.  Yes, tell them to leave private companies alone, so they can concentration on delivering inexpensive energy which is available when people need it.

 Make 2015 the year leaders stand with those hardest hit by climate change.  Yes, convince these leaders to stop meddling with our energy.

World leaders are playing mercilessly on the ignorance of the people with their tireless media, education, and political campaigns to convince them that any weather change is a fundamental threat to their existence and well-being caused by those bad human beings.  What I see are bad politicians, bad educators, and misleading and wrongheaded media.

Walter Williams - Congress's Financial Mess

Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, has written another interesting commentary on the current financial crisis called Congress's Financial Mess. He notes that the new media have repeatedly insisted that the current financial crisis was caused by deregulation and free markets. He goes on to show that this is not at all the case.

Professor David Henderson, research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, studied how regulation has grown in general over the last few decades. He published his results in "Are We Ailing From Too Much Deregulation?" in Cato Policy Report (Nov/Dec 2008). He examined the Federal Register for its lists of new regulations.

• 1977-1980, Carter, annual average of 72,844 pages of new regulations
• 1981-1988, Reagan, annual average of 54,335 pages
• 1989-1992, Bush, annual average of 59,527 pages
• 1993-2000, Clinton, annual average of 71,590 pages
• 2001-2008, Bush, annual average of 75,526 pages

Employees in government regulatory agencies:

• 1980, 146,139 employees
• 2007, 238,351 employees, an increase of 63%

[How do you measure the efficiency of a regulatory agency employee? Is it by the number of new pages of regulations per employee? If so, in 1980 there were 0.50 pages of new regulations per employee and this had dropped by 2007 to about 0.32 pages per employee! Apparently, the more employees, the less efficient they become.]

Regulatory spending by the banking and finance industries:

• 1980, $725 million
• 2007, $2.07 billion, an increase of 286%
  

Under the recent George Bush, there was no hesitation at all in creating new regulations. In fact, the Bush administration specifically wanted to tighten down on risky mortgage and other loans by banks, but Congress would not allow it. The most outspoken critics of tighter credit controls in Congress were Democratic leaders and committee chairmen, including Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Harry Reid.

The Clinton administration made a concerted effort to force Fannie Mae to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income people in 1999. They used the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act to make the banks make high-risk loans they otherwise would not make. Banks not submitting were fined and their mergers and branch expansion plans were denied or held-up.

In 2008, about $5 trillion of mortgages outstanding were owned or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing, and the Veterans Administration. This was one-third of all such mortgages.

[Government also encouraged the inflation of home and property values with extremely low interest rates through inflation of the money supply by the Federal Reserve Board over the last several years.]

To make matters still worse for us taxpayers, Bush gave the auto industry a bailout of $17 billion in addition to about $700 billion in bailouts to banks and financial institutions. Now, the presidents of 36 state government universities are asking for a bailout. State governors and local governments are readying proposals for bailouts, with California $15 billion in the red, Florida $5 billion negative, and Michigan shutting down a prison to save money.

Williams notes that the news media is insulting our intelligence! Unfortunately, they appear to be right about the intelligence, or at least the attention span, of the average voter.