Obama’s False Flag Operation

“I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.” - Noam Chomsky

False flag operations are covert operations designed to deceive people in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name comes from the old naval strategy of flying false colors from their masts, instead of their own. Obviously there are two main goals when using this strategy; the first is to initially deceive the designated target into leaving it open to a surprise attack or the other is to carry out your assault and set it up so a third party is blamed for your actions. This is the goal of the progressives who push for ideas like Cap N Trade and a number of other economic interventions into the private sector.

In January 2008 candidate Barrack Obama was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board and was asked about his Cap N Trade proposal. Obama responded, "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers." Cap N Trade on its surface is a plan to get businesses and consumers to use less energy by regulating carbon dioxide use. Each business would be allowed to use a given amount of CO2 before you’d need to purchase carbon credits from businesses which wouldn’t use all of their allotted credits. Europe has a number of similar proposals to limit CO2 emissions, which have made their energy prices skyrocket. The average unemployment levels in Europe are levels that Americans don’t have any tolerance for; the best example of which is that Germany is at an 8 year low for unemployment currently, which is 7.3%. That’s great news for them, they’ll need such a bustling economy (you know things are bad when a 7.3% unemployment rate is considered an economic upturn) to help pay their $8.71 per gallon gas prices. After Europe implemented a carbon trading system, despite the dramatic increase in energy prices, the over half of the EU 12 (the 12 biggest European Union countries) has seen their emissions increase by 10%-20%, while suffering tough economic times as more money must be diverted from hiring/purchasing to go towards energy prices.

Another downside of Cap N Trade is its projected effect on global temperatures. Without getting into the long debate about global warming and climate change as a whole, where climatologists constantly find out they know much less than they thought they did… Cap N Trade will reduce global temperatures by .007 degrees Celsius by 2050. So a bill that’d kill an estimated 2,000,000,000 jobs in the middle of a prolonged recession and will make the cost of living skyrocket and the quality of life diminish will result in almost no temperature change in 39 years. Needless to say, Cap N Trade is a merit-less proposal. Why do the democrats want it then? Well, the admission that global warming isn’t the crisis they said it was for the past 20 years would be admitting they’ve already driven up prices on most commodities with regulations for no reason. They’ve convinced a large portion of the American public that global warming is serious business, enough so that the environmentalist lobby is a sizable portion of the democrat base. Much more nefariously though, the major driving force behind the Cap N Trade proposal is the trillions of dollars that is at stake for the special interests and corporations who have bet their money on it.

Enron, the energy giant that famously collapsed a decade ago due to the executives cooking the books, was perhaps the biggest pusher of the legislation. BP, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, General Electric and just about any oil and energy companies out there are pushing it. General Electric, who it was revealed, didn’t pay any taxes on their billions of profits last year, has a great steak in this operation; they even have several networks to push their agenda on both via entertainment (NBC programming and its channels such as USA and Bravo) and news channels (MSNBC and CNBC). GE’s business network, CNBC estimated in 2009 that Carbon Trading could be a $15 Trillion industry in the US. The vehicle to create this Carbon Trading market, needed for the implementation of Cap N Trade, is the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The CCX was founded initially by grants allocated to them by the Chicago based Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001; a time in which Barrack Obama served on the Board of Directors. Also on the board serving with then community organizer Obama, is Obama's White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarret. Many of the major investors in the CCX include the usual suspects of people finding ways to screw the American public, such as: Goldman Sachs (and Goldman Sachs' executives individually) and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management (GIM). Speaking of people notorious for doing their best to crush American hopes and dreams, Forbes Magazine points out, “The actual operating system for CCX trading was provided by deposed former Fannie Mae head Franklin Raines, who had purchased the technology rights. Raines had become an expert in bundling bad subprime mortgages, and the technology was ideal for bundling worthless air credits.” Raines is best known for doing a wonderful job of sinking the American housing market by purchasing so many subprime mortgages and fighting off George W Bush’s attempts to audit Fannie Mae. Raines also did the American people a favor by taking $90,000,000 as an early retirement bonus.

Cap N Trade was voted on in the House of Representatives on June 26, 2009 and passed by a vote of 219-212. 8 Republicans broke rank and supported the bill while 44 Democrats joined the Republican minority and voted against. Luckily, the bill died in the senate. In late November of 2010, the CCX announced that it was laying off half its employees and closing its operations as a Carbon emissions trading exchange. The reasoning behind this was the massive Republican victory in the November elections, which essentially killed Cap N Trade for the foreseeable future. However, in politics, just like in life, just when you think you’re safe and in the clear, there tends to be more than just one way to dick you over.

In the Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007) the supreme court ruled 5-4 (with Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito dissenting) that the EPA had the responsibility to determine whether or not the Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere represented a threat and to act if necessary under the Clean Air Act (1963, 1970, 1990). In this textbook example of judicial activism, the court ruled that the agency has the ability to create laws and regulations, bypassing the Congress and White House altogether. The equivalent to this would be a customs agent deciding the United States’ trade policy and tariff rate for different imports. Perhaps even more accurate in this scenario would be if the particular custom agent had stock in US automakers. He’d probably decide that a 3000% tariff on imported Toyotas, Hondas, and other foreign makes seems reasonable.

Predictably in 2009 the EPA declared Carbon Dioxide and several other gases to be “pollutants that endanger public health and welfare", which set into motion a process that opened the door for regulation of gases for the first time in United States history. As the New York Times’ John Broder wrote in 2009, “Mr. Obama and [EPA director] Ms. Jackson have said they much prefer that Congress address global warming rather than have the E.P.A. tackle it through administrative action that could be subject to lawsuits.” In other words, they’d prefer to pass Cap N Trade… but if that fails, they’ll use the administrative action route, bypassing the Constitutional authority of the legislative branch. This is worrisome for a number of reasons. Not just because it’ll kill jobs, damage the very unstable economy and lower the standard of living that Americans have grown used to, but because there is no recourse for the American people. If your congressman votes to pass Cap N Trade, you can vote him out of office in the next election; such unprecedented action from federal agencies cannot be stopped easily. Essentially, using this course of action, the only branch that matters is the president, as he appoints agency heads. To recap, the judicial branch, the branch that “determines whether or not laws are Constitutional”, gave an agency new powers not delegated to it. That sounds like the job of the legislative branch, a branch which such action invalidates.

On April 7, 2011 the House of Representatives fought back, voting 255-172 to prevent the EPA from having the ability to regulate emissions, with 19 Democrats voting in favor of the law and no Republicans opposing it. However, the bill is expected to die in the democrat controlled senate. If in the unlikely event it makes it to a floor debate, even with a number of vulnerable senate democrats up for re-election in 2012, it’s unlikely the bill will make it past a filibuster. As the Wall Street Journal writes, “"This not about climate change," Rep. Brian Bilbray (R., Calif.) said during debate on the bill Wednesday, adding that EPA's greenhouse-gas regulations would not have a significant impact on global warming. "This is about proposed regulation from a bureaucracy in a field of law that was never meant to address this issue at all."“ Indeed, if you want to regulate Carbon emissions, let’s have that debate, but don’t backdoor it in using secretive and unconstitutional means.

One of the worst parts of the regulatory process in general, not just in situations with such shady ways of going about it, is that when prices are raised to pay for the cost of their required actions, the public usually has no clue as to why the price has increased. People usually chalk up increases in prices to causes like greed, increased costs of business, a scarcity of the product, lack of competition, or increased taxes. It’s true that all of those are all factors which could raise prices, however regulation is hardly ever considered. This is somewhat surprising because of the tens of thousands of pages that get passed yearly in new laws and regulations. 

Another factor that allows regulations to escape the ire of the American public is that in addition to not knowing the specifics of regulatory bills, the economic impact of the regulations is often felt years after their institution. An example of this would be the Community Reinvestment Act originally passed by President Jimmy Carter, the poster boy for useless short-sighted ne'er do wells. Under President Clinton, the Community Reinvestment Act was essentially put on steroids. The Community Reinvestment Act’s noble purpose was to help poor and minority communities by helping them own homes. But as Forbes Magazine puts it,“The CRA forces banks to make loans in poor communities, loans that banks may otherwise reject as financially unsound. Under the CRA, banks must convince a set of bureaucracies that they are not engaging in discrimination, a charge that the act encourages any CRA-recognized community group to bring forward. Otherwise, any merger or expansion the banks attempt will likely be denied. But what counts as discrimination? According to one enforcement agency, ‘discrimination exists when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants." Note that these 'arbitrary or outdated criteria’ include most of the essentials of responsible lending: income level, income verification, credit history and savings history--the very factors lenders are now being criticized for ignoring.”

Does that problem sound familiar? Yes, that’s right, a bill passed in 1977 and pumped up throughout the 90s, greatly contributed to the housing market's boom and subsequent bust which was the main contributor of the  economic crash of 2008. Actions have consequences, regardless of their intention, and that consequence sometimes has to build up for years to occur. In this case, banks were told by the government to give risky loans to low income people. Because these loans were very risky, the interest rate on these loans was high. Poor people kept defaulting on these loans, causing high foreclosures. The banks began to collapse, people stopped buying houses, credit was frozen, and more and more people couldn’t afford to purchase as many goods and services which caused unemployment/closures/bankruptcies... And there you have it, the 2008  economic collapse started with good intentions.

Another issue with bills like the CRA and other such regulatory bills is that, generally, at the very least, the legislation is hundreds of pages long; and the content doesn’t make for exciting reads. The news generally won’t give it much attention as it: is boring, doesn’t make for a sexy sensational story, and may appear to be of little consequence.

Going back to the title of this entry, it is quite common for people, businesses, and institutions that have very little or nothing to do with a problem, to get blamed for a problem. In 2010, SCE&G (SC Electric and Gas) wanted to raise its rates. People were understandably outraged, as we are in an economic recession, and an increase in bills is good way to cause hate and discontent. However, it’s unlikely that SCE&G really wanted to deal with thousands of angry customers calling them complaining and it’s also unlikely they wanted people’s power to be cut off. Likely the rate increase came from something not obvious to the common person, be it inflation, increased taxes, or regulations. It’s highly doubtful that they wanted to increase their profit margin at this time. Right now, for example gas prices are on the rise. A number of people want to blame the Satan-worshiping oil executives for this problem. What those people don't understand is that oil companies, as well as most companies in general have a set profit margin. For US oil companies the rate is an average of around 7%. What is also lost on those who blame oil companies for increasing prices is hidden factors contribute to the price much more than profits. An example being that OPEC sets the standard as to how much gas is produced daily, and supply and demand makes up for the reason for pricing. Another lesser considered statistic is that gas taxes, which both the federal and state governments tax, can make up 25%-33% of the price.

The moral of the story is, don’t always look for the simplest explanation. The oil companies are a frequent straw man for democrats to attack, which works to demonize them in the public’s perception. This makes the republicans and anyone not totally opposed to the oil companies, instantly, pawns of the oil industry. The great irony behind this is that Obama received more money from BP than any other candidate in history. However, that fact doesn’t matter, because it actually requires research and insight that the general public isn’t willing to search for. What matters is that he gave BP hell from his bully pulpit so people think that he is taking them on. Tactics such as his causes innocent people to get blamed and demagouged. In the world of politics, only a small portion of what actually goes on is known by the public. It’s important to remember this and always watch “both hands”, the hand politicians want you to watch usually is a pleasant distraction from what the other hand is doing.