Senator Ted Cruz says his first bill will seek to repeal 'every syllable of every word' of ObamaCare

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1/3/13, "Cruz Sworn In As Texas’ First Hispanic US Senator, Will Introduce Bill To Repeal ‘Obamacare’," houston.cbslocal.com

"Tea party darling Ted Cruz has been sworn in as U.S. senator and says his first order of business will be introducing a bill he knows will never pass.

Cruz is a Cuban-American and former state solicitor general. On Thursday, he became the first Hispanic to represent Texas in the Senate.

He has pledged that his first bill would seek to repeal “every syllable of every word” of the Obama administration’s health care reform law.

Now in office, Cruz said he will keep that promise, even though he knows Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama will ensure his bill won’t become law.

Fueled by grassroots support, Cruz could become a rising star among Capitol Hill conservatives following the retirement of tea party leader U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina....

The former Texas Solicitor General will sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee." via Drudge

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1/3/13, Ted Cruz sworn in to US Senate by Joe Biden, getty

‘Fiscal cliff’ deal gives $11.2 billion in breaks to multinational banks-AP

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Included in Dec. 2012 “fiscal cliff” deal:

1/3/13, “New tax law packed with breaks for businesses,“ AP via Seattle Times

“An exemption that allows banks, insurance companies and other financial firms to shield foreign profits from being taxed by the U.S. The tax break is

important to major multinational banks and financial firms. Cost: $11.2 billion….

A tax credit for the production of wind, solar and other renewable energy. Cost: $12.2 billion.”…


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Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband Dick Blum was part owner of Al Gore’s Current TV now sold to Al Jazeera

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1/3/13, “Current TV Said to Fetch $500 Million From Al Jazeera,” Bloomberg

“Current TV’s investors included funds controlled by Los Angeles billionaire Ron Burkle and San Francisco money manager Richard Blum, according to a 2008 Securities and Exchange Commission filing when the company unsuccessfully sought to sell stock to the public. Blum is married to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from San Francisco.”...(item near end of article) via Michael Savage


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22,000 additional jobless claims filed in last 2 weeks of 2012-Reuters

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Jobless claims for prior week (12/23/12) were ‘revised up 12,000′ from initial report. Add that to 10,000 new claims filed week ending 12/29 and you have 22,000 new claims. The 12,000 revision number in Reuters original Jan. 3 report has been removed from many later versions. I was lucky to find one source (Chicago Tribune) that hadn’t yet altered the text to favor Obama.

1/3/13, “Instant View: Private sector added 215,000 jobs in December,” Reuters, via Chicago Tribune

“The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose last week, (w/e 12/29) but the data continues to be too distorted by the holidays to offer a clear read of labor market conditions.
 
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 372,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

The prior week’s figure was revised to show 12,000 more applications than previously reported.
 
Claims data reported for the week ended December 22 had been
artificially depressed by the holidays,
which resulted in data for 19 states being estimated.”…via Free Republic


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ADP: Dec. 2012 Manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs

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Ed. note: On ‘private sector’ jobs added, article doesn’t say how many were part time or temporary. Unless that data is included the number doesn’t mean much:

6/02/12, “America’s Transition To A Part-Time Worker Society Accelerates As Part-Time Jobs Hit Record,” Zero Hedge


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Both Standard & Poors and Moody's warn US knowing ceiling up in 2 months and Obama has already said he won't negotiate. Report, he's authorized to spend whatever he wants per 14th amend. Sec. 4

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Obama fails to pass a budget since April 2009 but the media will not allow Obama to be blamed. On 1/1/13, Obama scolded: "“Let me repeat, you can’t not pay bills that we have already incurred,” he said."...1/1/13, "Obama: No more debt ceiling," Human Events, Neil McCabe. May 2011, Obama budget failed in Senate 97-0.

1/3/12, "Fiscal cliff: US urged to tackle budget deficit," BBC

"US politicians have been urged to do more to sort out the budget by the two largest credit rating agencies.

The warning comes despite the US narrowly agreeing a deal to stave off the US "fiscal cliff" of spending cuts and tax rises worth $600bn (£370bn).

Rating agency Moody's said lawmakers would need to take additional steps to lower the ballooning budget deficit.

Rival agency Standard and Poor's added: "Washington's governance and policymaking had become less stable."

The deficit has topped $1tn in each of the past four years. Moody's said that if it failed to cut the deficit, the government's top credit rating could be at risk.

The fiscal cliff measures - $536bn of tax rises and $109bn of spending cuts - had been due to come into effect at midnight on Monday, but Congress agreed a deal to avoid the worst of the measures late on Tuesday....

The deal postponed the hardest decisions that Republican and Democratic politicians must agree on - spending cuts and dealing with the statutory limit on how much the government can borrow, the so-called debt ceiling.

The total amount of debt that the government can borrow is currently set at $16.4tn and the government is set to run out of money in the next two months if this limit is not raised by Congress.

During the last stalemate over the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, S&P downgraded the country's top-notch AAA credit rating to AA+ for the first time.

S&P said on Wednesday that governance and policymaking in the US had become, "less stable, less effective and less predictable. We believe that this characterisation still holds."

A bipartisan commission was set up in 2010 to look at lowering the deficit. Following the deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, the chairman of that commission, Erskine Bowles, said: "They didn't do any of the tough stuff. We've taken two steps now, but those two steps combined aren't enough to put our fiscal house in order."

Moody's has a negative outlook on US government debt, a warning of a possible downgrade.

In September, it said that it would upgrade its outlook if politicians could agree on policies that "produce a stabilisation and then downward trend in the ratio of federal debt to GDP over the medium term"."...

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Obama budget defeated 97-0 in the Senate, May 2011:

5/30/11, "Washington is Broken, and Needs Leadership. Where is President Obama?" Senator Ron Johnson, RedState.com

"Last week, President Obama’s FY 2012 Budget was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 0-97. Let me repeat that, ZERO to 97. The President’s budget that was unveiled as THE solution to our long-term fiscal problems did not receive a single vote in the United States Senate.

This is a stunning indictment of the President’s lack of leadership and seriousness. I don’t know how many thousands of man-hours that over four inch thick, 2400-page budget document took to create, but it was a total waste of time and resources. That is a very sad fact. Instead of acknowledging this failure, the Administration and members of the President’s party have been viciously demagoguing the only other budget plans offered, and engaging in  

a concerted effort to scare the American public 

and financial markets over the debt ceiling limit."...

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 4/30/12, "Obama, Democrats not serious about passing budget," Sen. Ron Johnson, CNN

"On Sunday, April 29, it will be exactly three years since the U.S. Senate passed a budget.

If you own or work for a small business that has a loan from a bank, I'm quite sure your business has a budget -- and a rather detailed budget at that. Every year around tax time, many American families sit down to fill out tax forms, estimate their income, and set spending priorities for the upcoming year. It's the responsible thing to do.

And yet, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appears to believe it is not necessary for the Senate to fulfill its legal responsibility by debating and passing a budget to account for $3.8 trillion in federal spending next fiscal year, $15.6 trillion of debt and, according to figures produced by the Senate Budget Committee Republican staff, more than $65 trillion in additional unfunded liabilities."...

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Company overseeing multi-billion dollar California climate auctions is a Delaware corp., Western Climate Initiative, Inc. principal place of business listed as 2 Wall St., NYC. CPA in Colorado

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10/23/12, “Cap and Trade manipulation leads to WCI Inc.,” CalWatchdog.com, Warren Duffy

“California will become the second largest carbon trading market in the world, just behind the European Union, whose Cap and Trade program began in 2005.  Although there is much to be learned from the EU experiment, those in charge of California’s agenda cannot be bothered with such nonsense.  After all, this is not just America, but California.  Any American knows that, “As goes California, so goes the nation.”

In Brown’s budget for fiscal year 2012-13, which began on July 1, there is a line item for the upcoming auction listing income of $1 billion. Being a rather complex operation, the auction requires expert and diligent oversight to avoid anyone “gaming” the system.  Not only will the state’s business community participate, but

• commodity speculators will be anxiously joining in the trading as well.

So who, exactly, will oversee this complicated auction that is now three weeks away?

• Western Climate Initiative Inc.

On November 28, 2011, WCI was established as a not-for-profit corporation in the state of Delaware, as Katy Grimes was the first to report here on CalWatchDog.com.
 
James Goldstene, the CEO of CARB, is also listed as the Chairman of the Board of WCI Inc. In other words, the head of the auction oversight group is also the CEO of the organization he is overseeing.  According to a document filed with the California Secretary of State’s office on December 23, 2011, WCI’s principal place of business is listed as  

2 Wall Street, New York City, N.Y.

On September 25, 2012, papers were filed with the California Secretary of State listing the address of WCI as 980 Ninth Street, Suite 1600, Sacramento, Calif.  However, that address is listed as  

a branch office of a statewide personal injury law firm.  

The person verifying the Statement of Information is listed as 
Patrick Cummins,

who was recently hired as the interim executive director of WCI.  Since 2000, Cummins has served as the project manager for the Western Governors Association in Denver, Colo.

Filing papers

As required, the state filing papers also included WCI’s IRS Form 990 for the year ending December 31, 2011.  It was signed by CARB CEO and WCI Chairman Goldstene, showing a post office box in Sacramento as WCI’s address.  The CPA who prepared the 19-page set of documents is in Lafayette, Colo.  So we have a

• Colorado CPA filing tax documents for a
• California oversight group that is
• incorporated in Delaware, but has a
• Wall Street business address for some documents and a
• Sacramento address for others.

The Western Regional Climate Action Initiative began on February 26, 2007  under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He called upon four governors from the states of Washington, Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico to form an organization and sign a document with the lofty goals of solving the “effects of a hotter, drier climate including prolonged droughts, excessive heat waves, reduced snow packs, increased snowmelts, decreased spring runoff, altered precipitation patterns, more severe forest and rangeland fires,

• widespread forest diseases and other serious impacts.”

From these humble beginnings, the California Legislature adopted Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which was signed into law by Schwarzenegger.  The unelected CARB bureaucracy then was authorized to oversee the program of reducing carbon emissions in the state to

• 1990 levels by the year 2020.

Cap and Trade program
The bill also provided for a statewide Cap and Trade program. CARB eventually entered into an agreement with WCI Inc to oversee this commodity trading program.

As “climate alarmism” grew to an international movement in the first decade of the new millennium, WCI expanded quickly and at its peak included seven western states by adding Montana and Utah to its original member states and four Canadian provinces.  Mexico, several Pacific islands and California Indian Tribes were considering joining the group. But when the global economy collapsed in 2008, one by one every WCI partner dropped out of the agreement except for

• California and the Canadian province of Quebec.

From all of this, we have the state of California now launching an expensive campaign of carbon credit auctions to supposedly alter the impact of greenhouse gases (GHG’s) on the planet’s environment, with only one partner in North America, Quebec. WCI announced that

• Patrick Cummins of Quebec would be its interim executive director.

The board of directors of WCI now includes twice as many Canadian representatives as Californians. The vice chairman of WCI is Robert-Noel de Tilly, the senior policy adviser in the Climate Change Office of the Quebec Ministry of Environment. And the WCI treasurer is Jean-Yves Benoit, an economist in the same office.

Tim Lesiuk, the secretary of WCI, is also the executive director of business development and chief negotiator for the Climate Action Secretariat of British Columbia. And another director, James Mack, is the head of the British Columbia Climate Action Secretariat.  The only other Californian on the WCI board of six members is Matt Rodriguez, the secretary for the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Bureaucrats

None of the resumes of the WCI board members lists any background or oversight with the kind of commodity trading the California Cap and Trade carbon auction promises to introduce. 

•  All board members are environmental bureaucrats.

The WCI board held an organizational meeting January 12, 2012 at the Sheraton Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The minutes of the meeting report that Michael Gibbs, an employee of the California Environmental Protection Agency, told the attendees the WCI Financial Committee is “establishing bank accounts, support for transactions in two currencies, (and) prudent management in conformance

• with an adopted investment policy.”

“Adopted investment policy”?  

Is that why WCI located its office on Wall Street?  Is WCI planning to invest in carbon credits, and can it do that as a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization under the IRS code?  Investments of any kind would appear to stray far afield of the original goals of the Western Climate group in 2007

• to simply coordinate efforts to
• “solve effects of a hotter, drier climate including prolonged droughts, excessive heat waves, reduced snow packs.”

The lingering question remains for so many: What exactly is the role of this newly incorporated Delaware corporation in the overall scheme of California’s Cap and Trade carbon credit auction program?  WCI reportedly was tasked with developing “a multi sector, market based” Cap and Trade program in September 2008 and July 2010. Which brings up more questions.
Can an international corporation create a complicated state environmental program

• without any input from the California Legislature?

Can CARB honcho Mary Nichols outsource the design, implementation and oversight of this expensive program with the only partner being in Canada? And can she enter into a treaty with that foreign country

• receiving no approval through the legislative process
• of California’s state elected officials?

Rather than this being accepted as California business as usual, these questions and many others need answers.  Californians deserved answers long before any auction could be held.  The reason for the auction is to “cap” the emissions of oil refineries (think higher prices at the pump to pay for the scheme), power plants (think higher utility bills), diesel truck operators (think higher costs for all consumer goods) and 400 other separate California business categories.

No other state in America is participating with California in this Cap and Trade scheme. No one in California will escape the heavy costs

• this catastrophic scam will bring our state.”

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11/23/11, “Europe’s $287 billion carbon ‘waste’: UBS report,“ The Australian, by Sid Maher

“SWISS banking giant UBS says the European Union’s emissions trading scheme has cost the continent’s consumers $287 billion for “almost zero impact” on cutting carbon emissions.“…EU CO2 trading provided “windfall profits” to participants paid for by “electricity customers.”“


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Al Gore sells his tv station to fossil fuel sheikdom of Qatar, makes $100 million dirty oil profit, was “eager” to close deal before Jan. 1 to avoid paying “fair share” of higher taxes on his $100 million profit

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1/2/13, “Al Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where Gore Failed,” NY Times, Stelter,

“Al Jazeera on Wednesday announced a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore, a former vice president, and his business partners seven years ago. Al Jazeera plans to shut Current and start an English-language channel, which will be available in more than 40 million homes, with newscasts emanating from both New York and Doha, Qatar.
 
For Al Jazeera, which is financed by the government of Qatar, the acquisition is a coming of age moment….
 
Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.”…via Tom Nelson

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Qatar offshore oil field



Below, Qatar oil field at sunset



 

 Above, “The asphalt ends, reducing the pressure in the tires.” 
 
Modern buildings in  Qatar


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Moody's warns US rating at risk, Cliff deal no fix for US debt ratios, says without further deficit reduction US rating could be cut

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1/2/13, "Moody's Anticipates Further US Fiscal Action Following "Fiscal Cliff" Deal", Moody's.com

"Moody's Investors Service said that the fiscal package passed by both houses of Congress yesterday is a further step in clarifying the medium-term deficit and debt trajectory of the federal government. It does not, however, provide a basis for a meaningful improvement in the government's debt ratios over the medium term. The rating agency expects that further fiscal measures are likely to be taken in coming months that would result in lower future budget deficits, which are necessary if the negative outlook on the government's bond rating is to be returned to stable. 

On the other hand, lack of further deficit reduction measures could affect the rating negatively. Notably, yesterday's package does not address the federal government's statutory debt limit,  

which was reached on December 31. 

The need to raise the debt limit may affect the outcome of future budget negotiations.

Although the fiscal package raises some revenue through higher tax rates on individuals earning more than $400,000 ($450,000 for joint filers) and through some other smaller measures, the estimated amount of increased revenue over the next decade is far outweighed by the amount of revenue foregone through the extension of lower tax rates for those with incomes below $400,000, the indexation of the alternative minimum tax, and other measures.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net increase in budget deficits from the fiscal package when compared to its baseline scenario (which assumes taxes on all income levels would increase) is about $4 trillion over the coming decade, excluding higher interest costs on the resultant higher debt. Based on that estimate, a preliminary calculation by Moody's shows that the ratio of government debt to GDP would peak at about 80% in 2014 and then remain in the upper 70 percent range for the remaining years of the coming decade. 

Stabilization at this level would leave the government less able to deal with future pressures from entitlement spending or from unforeseen shocks. Thus, further measures that bring about a downward debt trajectory over the medium term are likely to be needed to support the Aaa rating."...via Zero Hedge



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