Phil Kerpen

Googling Obama’s Reelection

November 21, 2012 By Phil Kerpen Leave a Comment

President Obama’s reelection was a triumph of Big Data, technological innovation, and precision targeting over the usual gravity of an incumbent president with a record of economic failure. This was facilitated by largest data trove in the world, Google, lending talent, expertise, and quite possibly data to the cause. Now, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is being rumored as a potential Commerce Secretary or even Treasury Secretary — the top economic policy position — in Obama’s second term. That’s probably far-fetched, but the close relationship between the administration and Google deserves scrutiny.

Obama reportedly met Google CEO Eric Schmidt for the first time in a 2007 campaign event at Google’s headquarters. That was the event where Obama famously said: “I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality.” It was music to Schmidt’s ears because net neutrality regulations were the company’s top rent-seeking priority: a legal guarantee they could continue to consume a massive portion of consumer broadband capacity without being asked to pay for it.

The idea of regulating the Internet was basically dead on arrival in Congress, but Obama’s close friend Julius Genachowski jammed it through on dubious legal grounds on a 3-to-2 party-line vote at the Federal Communications Commission. The order is likely to be struck down in court next year.

Google’s top lobbyist, Andrew McLoughlin, was installed as the top tech policy staffer in the White House, where he proceeded to breach ethics rules by maintaining regular contact with his former Google colleagues and conducting his official business from a Gmail account. Ironically, his misconduct came to light because of one of Google’s many privacy failures, a bug that accidentally revealed private information on Google Buzz.

Schmidt also reportedly pressed the Obama campaign, through economic adviser Jason Furman, to make a major push into green jobs, a sidelight business of Google’s. We know how poorly that turned out, with new bankruptcies and scandals breaking every week or so.

There are other reasons to be wary of Google, which has largely built its business by expropriating other people’s property, monetizing it, and then settling if caught.

It was that way from the beginning, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers” — but then proceeded to pilfer patented search ad technology from GoTo. They eventually settled for over $300 million with Yahoo, which had acquired GoTo’s intellectual property.

It was that way when Google tried to scan millions of books without permission from authors and later tried to legitimize this grab after-the-fact by inking a licensing deal with publishers that would automatically sweep in authors. That deal was struck down in court.

It was that way when Google got caught red-handed facilitating the sale on counterfeit pharmaceuticals, not only facilitating the theft of intellectual property but also directly endangering safety by bringing potentially dangerous fake drugs into the country. Google forked over $500 million to the Department of Justice to settle the charges.

Yet the Obama administration embraced Google wholeheartedly, conducting the president’s first video address on YouTube, doing Google+ chats, and tailoring procurement requests towards Google’s cloud-based products.

Unsurprisingly, when the Obama team set out to take on the Herculean task of using data and technology to overcome the president’s economic record, they went to Google. According to BusinessWeek, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina looked to Schmidt as a mentor. Messina explained: “For three hours we sat in a conference room, and he just gave me advice about all the mistakes he’d made, about purchasing supply chains, about HR, about the blocking and tackling of growing fast and making sure you have organizational objectives.”

Schmidt’s role went beyond advice. He acted as a facilitator, connecting Messina with the top talent that became the campaign’s vaunted data team, and led a team of top Silicon valley executives who advised Messina on setting up the campaign’s data infrastructure. On election night, Schmidt was seen smiling in the room with Obama’s data team.

Now Schmidt, the CEO of a company with a record of ruthlessly expropriating what it wants, is in a position to be rewarded even more in Obama’s second term.

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Filed Under: Floyd Reports

Gas Prices Are Up Because Of Obama’s Offshore Ban

October 19, 2012 By Phil Kerpen 2 Comments

In the Hofstra presidential debate, President Obama said: “when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse.” Wrong. Prices collapsed because we signaled to the world that we were finally moving forward with developing America’s massive offshore oil and gas resources — and they shot back up when Obama reimposed the offshore ban.

Obama’s ridiculous story that the doubling of gasoline prices under his watch is a result of economic recovery doesn’t fit the facts. According the National Bureau of Economic Research, responsible for officially designating when recessions start, the recession began in December of 2007. The average price for a gallon of gasoline that month, according the Energy Information Administration, was $3.02. The price rose for the next seven months with the country in recession. The price peaked in July of 2008 at $4.06 a gallon, more than half a year into recession, exacerbating economic pain and spurring the national protest movement that gave us “Drill Here, Drill Now” and “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

That July 2008 peak coincided with a critical policy change. On July 14, 2008, President Bush lifted the executive branch moratorium on offshore drilling that his father had put in place. That indicated a consolidation of support for offshore drilling that stalled the run-up in prices at the pump. In the next two months, the average price dropped more than thirty cents to $3.70.

Grassroots activists pressed even harder, demanding that Congress lift the remaining barrier to offshore drilling, the appropriations rider that had been in place since 1981. The pressure on Obama was so intense that he even reversed his opposition, claiming on August 1, 2008, that he would support offshore drilling under some circumstances.

Meanwhile, activists ratcheted up pressure on Congress and the White House, urging Congress to let the ban expire. Facing organized opposition in Congress, a Bush veto threat, and overwhelming public opinion in favor of drilling, Nancy Pelosi caved. After 27 years, the ban on offshore drilling was officially lifted on October 1, 2008.

With the moratorium lifted, markets anticipated future production of the estimated 19.1 billion barrels of oil (equal to 30 years of imports from Saudi Arabia) in the Outer Continental Shelf. Market psychology abruptly reversed, and the price at the pump dropped sharply.

It reached a low of $1.79 in January 2009, the month of Obama’s inauguration. That’s no coincidence.

The first order of business for Ken Salazar, Obama’s new secretary of the Interior, was to stop the pending opening of the former moratorium waters — supposedly temporarily. That announcement was made on February 10, 2009. By April, prices were back over two dollars. By June, when the recession officially ended, the price was $2.63 — up more than 80 cents from when Obama took office while the economy was still in recession.

Prices spiked up again starting in May of 2010, which is when Obama and Salazar imposed an illegal moratorium (literally; Salazar was held in contempt of court because the moratorium was based on a politically corrupted report) in the Gulf of Mexico as an overreaction to the BP spill.

By December of 2010, Obama had fully and permanently reimposed the old moratorium that Bush and Congress had lifted in 2008. So now we’re back where we were in summer of 2008, with prices around four dollars and vast offshore American energy resources locked up by politicians. The facts are clear — the pain at the pump is not, as Obama suggested, a result of a supposedly strong economy. It is a result of his own disastrous policy.

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Filed Under: Floyd Reports Tagged With: Gas Prices, Nancy Pelosi

Che And The EPA

September 15, 2012 By Phil Kerpen Leave a Comment

On September 13, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent an internal email to its staff under the subject line “Hispanic Heritage Month.” The email, obtained by The Weekly Standard magazine, featured a picture of infamous communist butcher Che Guevara with the slogan “hasta la victoria siempre,” or “on to victory, always.”

Che has long been a hero of communists and other radicals for his brutal tactics, and the iconic photo of Che taken by Alberto Korda has shown up in inappropriate places before. But it is especially chilling to see Che’s image being used by a government agency that has pursued an astonishingly aggressive anti-growth and anti-property rights agenda.

The seeming ubiquity of Che’s image should not desensitize us to the depravity of the man. Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained the depths of Che’s evil a few years ago in the New Republic. He noted that Che wrote in “Message to the Tricontinental” in April 1967: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”

In January 1957, Che murdered Eutimio Guerra, writing his diary: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain…. His belongings were now mine.”

Most infamously, Fidel Castro put Che in charge of La CabaÃ±a prison, where he summarily executed hundreds of men — over 500 according to U.S. State Department cables. According to Llosa, jazz musician Paquito D’Rivera wrote a letter criticizing the approving use of Che’s visage. D’Rivera wrote that one of Che’s prisoners “was my cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there precisely for being a Christian. He recounts to me with infinite bitterness how he could hear from his cell in the early hours of dawn the executions, without trial or process of law, of the many who died shouting, ‘Long live Christ the King!’”

The EPA email said, apparently unaware of the irony: “Religion plays a significant role in the daily life of Hispanics with more than 90% of the population being Roman Catholic. Churches and spiritual activities influence family activities and families unite together to involve in prayers and sermons.”

So what could the EPA have meant by using a picture of the murderous Che with the slogan “on to victory, always”?

The EPA agenda is not literally murderous, but it is devastating to our economy. The agency’s regulations are crushing the coal industry and driving up the price of electricity. The agency’s corrupt shakedown of the auto industry will dramatically increase the price of all but the very smallest and lightest vehicles — putting them out of reach for the Americans who need them most.

The EPA’s infamous abuses of the Clean Water Act led to a recent unanimous Supreme Court case in Sackett, with even the Court’s liberals agreeing that the agency has no right to prohibit an Idaho couple from building a home on their property without even a right to appeal.

Former EPA administrator Al Armendariz resigned in disgraced after video surfaced of him explaining his philosophy of harassing oil and gas companies: “It’s kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean: they’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they’d run into, and they’d crucify them and then, you know, that town was really easy to manage over the next few years.”

No wonder these guys idolize Che Guevara.

Fortunately, the U.S. House will soon vote on and pass H.R. 3409, which would block the most extreme elements of the EPA’s anti-growth agenda. But when the Senate refuses to act, the American people need to elect a Senate that will. And the American people need to elect a president who won’t hire bureaucrats who idolize Che Guevara.

Photo credit: BvdL (Creative Commons)

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Filed Under: Floyd Reports Tagged With: EPA, Supreme Court

Pipeline: Death By A Thousand Studies

June 22, 2012 By Phil Kerpen Leave a Comment

There has never been a more “shovel ready” project in history than the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been exhaustively engineered, studied, reviewed, and re-reviewed as Obama tries to kill the project without admitting that’s what he’s doing. At stake are about 20,000 immediate jobs, a secure supply of North American oil, billions in private investment, and the global efficiency benefits of connecting a major crude source to the world’s most efficient refining center. The latest news is that rather than simply say “yes,” Obama is conducting yet another open-ended study.

The original permit application for the project was submitted in 2008. The State Department exhaustively reviewed every aspect of the proposal.

The State Department issued three different press releases in the spring of 2011 — in March, April, and June — that included this sentence: “The U.S. Department of State expects to make a decision on whether to grant or deny the permit before the end of 2011.”

The president’s jobs council touted the economic benefits of pipelines in its official report, saying: “Policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects are necessary.”

But what if such timely development comes into conflict with ideologically motivated, powerful environmental special interests? We now know where Obama comes down.

The environmental protest crowd decided to make this into a litmus test political issue, instead of the no-brainer source of jobs and affordable energy that it really is. Their professed concern is that developing energy from increasingly-important unconventional sources, like the Alberta oil sands, will increase global warming.

Even if they’re right, they’re wrong to oppose the pipeline. If the Canadians can’t build a pipeline to U.S. refineries, they’ve already announced they’ll build a pipeline to export terminals on the west coast of Canada instead, from which it will go to dirtier and less efficient Asian refineries. A lose-lose for the economy and the environment.

The State Department’s exhaustive review process ended last summer, and they recommended approval. All that remained was the usually perfunctory approval of the president. But Obama ignored all the reviews, the evidence, and the recommendations of his own jobs council to side with the protest crowd. He said he would wait until after his re-election to decide whether to approve it.

Congress forced his hand in a bipartisan bill passed around Christmas. It required Obama to decide to either approve or reject the pipeline within 60 days. He rejected it.

The pipeline company resubmitted the application.

Now the State Department is conducting yet another review. A new public comment period has been opened through the end of July, and the State Department will then review those comments. Who knows how long that will take? This is despite the fact that the review issued last August, all but approving the project, was labeled “final.”

Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota- a state that needs the pipeline to efficiently bring some of the oil from its miraculous energy boom to market-observed: “In essence, they’re saying, ‘OK, now we’re going to start all over again.’”

With unemployment rates and gas prices still painfully high, the thousands of workers hoping for jobs building the pipeline and the millions of Americans who will benefit from the oil that will flow through it can’t afford to wait. Obama needs to stop playing the endless-study game and approve the Keystone XL pipeline now.

Mr. Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at phil@americancommitment.org.

This column has been edited by the author. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.

Photo credit: terrellaftermath

Filed Under: Floyd Reports Tagged With: Gas Prices, Global Warming, Unemployment

Obama Should Blame Himself, Not The SCOTUS

May 25, 2012 By Phil Kerpen 3 Comments

Sometime in the next month, the United States Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obama’s individual mandate, the provision forcing everyone in the United States to buy health insurance. Based on how badly this provision was defeated in the oral arguments, it will likely be struck down as unconstitutional. If the law’s most popular provision, the ban on excluding pre-existing conditions, is also struck down, Obama has nobody to blame but himself.

Obama campaigned against the individual mandate. In fact, it’s the issue he won the nomination on. Obama said four years ago: “The main difference between my plan and Senator Clinton’s plan is that she’d require the government to force you to buy health insurance.” He even ran attack ads bashing Clinton on the issue.

Once Obama was in the White House, though, his tune changed. The mandate became the centerpiece of a corrupt deal that Obama cut with the insurance industry. They agreed to accept the ban on excluding pre-existing conditions and several other expensive, onerous regulations in exchange for a mandate forcing everyone to buy their product, and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to further sweeten the pot.

Ron Suskind, who was granted insider access to the White House, explained that Obama made the deal even though “Obama, never much for the mandate, was concerned about legal challenges.”

He should have been more than concerned. He should have upheld his sworn oath to the Constitution and said no to any deal that relied on an unconstitutional mandate.

The oral arguments before the Supreme Court showed this wasn’t a close call. Even liberal commentators acknowledged it was a blowout. Jeffrey Toobin of CNN said it “was a train wreck for the Obama administration,” and Andy Serwer of far-left Mother Jones magazine added “Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. should be grateful to the Supreme Court for refusing to allow cameras in the courtroom, because his defense of Obamacare on Tuesday may go down as one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the court.”

It wasn’t Verrilli’s fault. Obama was making him defend the indefensible. A federal government with the power to order citizens to purchase politically-favored goods and services is a government of unlimited, unchecked powers—a government the Constitution exists to prevent.

If the ban on pre-existing conditions falls with the mandate, as is likely, that will also be Obama’s fault. The administration’s brief to the Supreme Court argued that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta “was incorrect” to let the pre-existing ban stay in effect. Without the mandate, the Obama administration argued, the pre-existing ban has to go.

Unfortunately, they are right. There is no way to solve the pre-existing condition problem through economically destructive regulations — even if you try to pay-off the insurance companies with an unconstitutional mandate. Without the mandate, as Obama acknowledged, the pre-existing ban would put most insurance companies out of business.

If the Court, as expected, rejects Obama’s unconstitutional mandate and the pre-existing condition ban he tied to it, he’ll have nobody to blame but himself. His whole corrupt approach was a dead-end, and he knew it.

Mr. Kerpen is the president of American Commitment and the author of “Democracy Denied.” Kerpen can be reached at phil@americancommitment.org.

Photo credit: terrellaftermath

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Filed Under: Floyd Reports Tagged With: Obamacare, Supreme Court

Googling Obama’s Reelection

Gas Prices Are Up Because Of Obama’s Offshore Ban

Che And The EPA

Pipeline: Death By A Thousand Studies

Obama Should Blame Himself, Not The SCOTUS

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