Archive for August, 2011

Brett Noel

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Herman Cain

Imagine living in a neighborhood where most of your neighbors wish you would move away. Since you have a right to be there and it happens to be the home of many generations of your family, you refuse to be intimidated into leaving, even though you are violently attacked frequently, and sometimes family members are killed. Although painfully saddened, your resolve to remain there is not weakened.

That neighborhood is the dwelling place of Israel, a nation surrounded by many of its enemies.

Having spent last week in Israel talking and listening with many of Israel’s citizens, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, the leader of the opposition party in the Knesset, the mayor of Jerusalem, the mayor of the city of Ariel and the deputy prime minister, and touring the landscape of Israel, I now have a greater appreciation for the threats against Israel, its frustrations and its genuine desire for peace.

Threats against it from some of its neighboring nations and the Palestinians are very real. Those threats are not only from Iran wanting to wipe Israel off of the face of the earth, but also frequent terrorist attacks, most recently along its southern border.

After seeing first-hand the proximity of its enemy’s borders to communities within Israel, and the peaceful and positive developments in the city of Ariel, often referred to as the West Bank, it is easy to understand why the Israelis consider the idea of going back to the pre-1967 borders, as proposed by President Obama, to be unreasonable, impractical and, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, a non-starter.

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Dan Calabrese

A friend of mine – someone you would definitely peg to the left end of the spectrum – was lamenting the other day that college loan defaults look like the next big financial meltdown. Outstanding student loans now exceed $805 billion, and a disturbingly large percentage of graduates default on the loans, while many others struggle to pay them off, with payment schedules that stretch into their 30s.

So my friend looks at the difficulty college grads have repaying the loans and worries that because of this, they won’t buy homes, won’t buy cars, won’t buy lots of other stuff and won’t have enough money to pay into Social Security. And this, he fears, will hurt the economy because it really needs people to buy stuff.

That got me thinking, and something hit me. Conservatives are always lamenting the size, cost and scope of big government. Liberals rail against big business. But they’re both sort of right. It’s the bigness all around that leads to problems and puts way too much pressure on consumers to spend.

Big government not only supports a massive bureaucracy, but it also pays the medical bills of the poor and the elderly. It needs lots of money. Big business is asked to pay wages, pay taxes and pay the health insurance of all its employees, and that’s before it pays for operational costs like facilities, machinery, raw materials, marketing, etc. It needs lots of money too.

People who get sick need to patronize big health care, and that’s not just the hospitals and the physician groups. It also includes big health insurance, which doesn’t actually take care of anyone, but collects a lot of money from people and then turns around and writes checks on behalf of the some of those people, when it isn’t litigating with the help of big law firms, which need lots of money and depend on big jury settlements, which are paid for by big insurance companies.

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Brett Noel

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Herman Cain

Having served on the boards of directors of several major corporations over the last 20 years, I have had the responsibility of voting to hire a new CEO, and of voting to fire a current CEO, many times. In both instances, the decision was based on assessed potential and performance.

Directors hold CEOs responsible for results, and the prudent use of company resources such as cash, equity and human resources. Specific metrics are established for both annual and multi-year performance, which are evaluated in making the hire or fire decision.

If a CEO is underperforming and on the brink of being fired, then we look to see if he or she has identified the right problem, and has established a plan of action to get things back on track. If the plan is convincing and the performance metrics were missed by a reasonable amount, then he or she would be given a specific amount of time to get back on track.

The Board has to decide what’s convincing, what’s reasonable and how much time should be allowed for a course correction. Then it has to take action.

President Obama’s economic policies have failed to an unreasonable degree. He has no plan for a course correction. He has promised a plan for focusing on job creation since he has been in office. He has had over two and a half years to get it right, and now he wants a month to write another speech, following a three-day bus tour that produced nothing but a bunch of photo-ops. We are not convinced we will hear anything new. A board’s action would be unanimous:

Mr. President, you’re fired.

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Dan Calabrese

Obama Administration officials told the Washington Post the other day that Obama’s big jobs plan, to be announced in February, will include tax incentives to companies to hire workers, as well as federal funding for infrastructure projects.

These ideas will fail. Let me explain why.

Both of the activities Obama seeks to stimulate – private-sector hiring and public-sector infrastructure development – happen naturally on their own when need and market conditions dictate that they should. The fact that they are not happening now is evidence of something wrong with market conditions. One thing we certainly know is that problem in the market is not a lack of free money falling from the sky, or from Washington as the case may be, because that doesn’t happen when the market is in good shape either.

Obama does not understand why private-sector companies hire workers. In a series of speeches to business leaders, Obama lectured CEOs about the wrongness of sitting on cash reserves when people are out of work. Does Obama think companies hire people just because they have some money sitting around? Does he think they hire people as some sort of civic duty?

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Brett Noel

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Herman Cain

First, let’s clarify some of the media noise about my campaign and my intentions.

I am running for president, seeking the Republican nomination. I finished 5^th in the Iowa straw-poll last Saturday ahead of six other candidates. The candidates who finished ahead of me spent millions on TV and radio advertising, and we spent $0.

We have no debt beyond travel and other expenses, which we settle within 30 days after the end of the month. We are raising money at a rate ahead of expenses. We are running the campaign like a business. What a novel idea, and it’s working!

With a national name ID of just 46 percent, I have no intentions of dropping out of the race. All of those predictions of the demise of my campaign are all self folly.

Now, last week all media eyes were on Iowa with the latest presidential debate and the Iowa straw poll. Both events are barometers of knowledge of the issues and their respective solutions, presentation, communication skills and how well a candidate can get his supporters to turn out for events. But neither event is a predictor of who will ultimately win the Republican Party’s nomination.

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Dan Calabrese

I’m actually starting to wonder if the United States of America is going to survive.

I’m starting to wonder if a breakup like that which befell the Soviet Union in 1991 could ultimately prove to be our fate, and I’m not talking all that far down the road.

It’s not because of Standard and Poor’s downgrade. Anyone who seriously thinks the United States is a AAA credit risk has to be a heroin addict. I’m convinced the only reason the rating agencies have maintained the gold-plated-rating fantasy all these years was political pressure. S&P just became a little less willing to indulge the delusion.

The reason for my burgeoning fear is the way the political class reacted to the news. David Axelrod and John Kerry were telling everyone who would listen over the past weekend that this is the “tea party downgrade.” I guess that’s because tea party types precipitated the debt ceiling showdown in the first place by insisting that conditions be placed on letting the government borrow more money.

Republicans, of course, wanted to make sure everyone knew this was the Obama downgrade.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.