Free Republic

Energy: The EPA’s proposal to increase the amount of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline is a trifecta of regulatory abuse. It will do nothing for the environment, it will do nothing for energy security, and it could wreck millions of car engines

Glenn Beck once again blasted critics of his full-throated defense of Facebook – this time by calling out Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report for being biased against Hillary Clinton. Beck has been attacking Facebook’s conservative critics ever since the damage control meeting he and 16 other conservatives had with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week following reports from several Facebook whistleblowers that the site’s news curators actively suppress conservative stories in their “trending” news section while simultaneously boosting the signal of leftwing causes like Black Lives Matter. Beck, who has become Zuckerberg’s staunchest defender on the right, took to...

n 2016, the frontline of the war against the legitimacy of the Jewish state isn’t Gaza or Israel’s northern border — or even the Golan Heights. It is the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to terminate the Jewish state by delegitimizing it in the world community. This ugly campaign plays out on our nation’s college campuses, including most recently at the University of California-Irvine, where campus police had to intervene to save (mostly) Jewish women from “activists” protesting a film about Israeli soldiers. BDS-ers, crafting their efforts as “pro-peace,” have had considerable success with mainline Protestant...

Hillary Clinton is urging the White House to reject Norwegian Air’s application to fly to the United States over questions about its labor practices, adding her voice to a growing chorus of criticism surrounding the low-cost air carrier. .... Norwegian Air has for years been seeking access to more airports in the U.S. and European Union, by establishing a subsidiary — Norwegian Air International — in Ireland, a member of the EU. The Department of Transportation (DOT) tentatively approved the application last month. But critics have slammed the company for attempting to skirt more stringent Norwegian labor and tax laws...

The SEC showed its true colors yet again at a panel at Stanford Law School at the end of March, although not as dramatically as last year. In last spring’s SEC panel at Stanford, the then head of examinations, Andrew Bowden, made such fawning remarks about private equity, including repeatedly saying he’d really like his son to work in the industry, that he resigned three weeks after we publicized the segment. Nevertheless, this conference was another demonstration of depth of regulatory capture at the agency. As before, the real action came in when the audience members asked questions. They were...

Venezuelans on Tuesday woke up to discover that the government-controlled price of corn flour -- used to make corn patty arepas, a staple of local cuisine -- has risen 900 percent. The socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro had kept the price of corn flour frozen for 15 months at 19 bolivares a kilogram (two pounds).

Who knew that the Trump campaign would be getting involved in higher education policy this year? Sam Clovis, a tenured economics professor and Trump campaign co-chair, recently noted that their objectives include getting the government out of student lending, requiring colleges to share in student loan risk, and discouraging borrowing by liberal arts majors. Clovis told Inside Ed that the mere mention of these policy proposals has sent some Washington graybeards into a swivet, and "he expects some higher education leaders to react the same way when Trump outlines these ideas during the fall campaign." Some of the ideas under...

Cuba announced Tuesday that it will legalize small and medium-sized private businesses, a move that could significantly expand the space allowed for private enterprise in one of the world’s last communist countries. Until now, the government has allowed private enterprise only by self-employed workers in several hundred established categories like restaurant owner or hairdresser. Many of those workers have become de-facto small business owners employing other Cubans. But there are widespread complaints about the difficulties of running a business in a system that does not officially recognize them. Low-level officials often engage in crackdowns on successful businesses for supposed violations...

As we keep saying, there really is no point in trying to make people richer by making them poorer – which is what Shinzo Abe and Haruhiko Kuroda have been trying to do for the past several years. Not surprisingly, they have so to speak only succeeded in achieving the second part of the equation: they have certainly managed to impoverish their fellow Japanese citizens. Just think about the relentless pressure on the yen in the years following Kuroda’s implementation of the “QQE” policy (colloquially known as “money printing”). Economic growth has gone precisely nowhere, which should be no surprise....

Now, back to the Deep State. Much of its growth is recorded in the pages of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). This tracks all the laws laid down by successive governments. A privilege, a special tax break, a rule, a prohibition, a piece of meat here, a piece of meat there… and soon the foxes are eating high on the hog. But what’s meat for the foxes is poison for the economy. snip The relentless growth of Leviathan: total pages in the Code of Federal Regulations, 1950-2013 (it has continued to grow since then…). No wonder the economy is...

Rothschild, a restructuring agent, is taking bids to liquidate geographic bundles of the developer’s assets. ___ Until this most recent news, many in the solar industry were holding out a thread of hope that bankrupt SunEdison could somehow recover and continue in a diminished but intact capacity. That does not appear to be the case. According to a report in SparkSpread, SunEdison’s restructuring agent, Rothschild, is "soliciting bids for the bankrupt company’s asset portfolio in what is expected to result in an outright liquidation of the developer." That's an approximately 4-gigawatt to 5-gigawatt collection of operating and development assets, according...

Nokia, once the undisputed king of the mobile phone industry, is to cut one thousand and thirty-two jobs in Finland, in a cost cutting exercise after its acquisition of Alcatel Lucent – the telecommunications network equipment maker, according to a statement issued on Friday. Finland’s largest company has in fact shed thousands of jobs in the European country over the past few years, as it’s once mighty phone business was overtaken and outshone by companies who capitalised on consumer demand for smartphones, leaving Nokia scrambling to catch up. Nokia started the cost-cutting program in April and is aiming to save...

Software giant IBM is initiating another round of job cuts the company announced in April, according to multiple media reports. The number of positions cut could top 14,000, Stanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi told The Wall Street Journal. The cuts come as the company recorded its 16th consecutive quarterly loss. Big Blue has struggled with its core software business in the face of increasing cloud computing, analysts said. A company executive told WRAL TechWire IBM is "aggressively transforming" to offer more cloud-based computing and could rehire just as many employees to assist in that effort as are being let go...

Yahoo said Chief Executive Marissa Mayer faced “specific security threats” in 2015 — and the company accordingly spent more than a half-million dollars on her personal security. Last year’s tab came to $544,061 — more than 20 times the $26,891 Yahoo had spent a year earlier on protecting Mayer and her immediate family, according to a Monday filing. “During 2015 Ms. Mayer faced specific security threats that we believed were credible,” Yahoo said in the filing. The company didn’t elaborate on the threats. By comparison, Facebook said last month it spent $6.5 million on bodyguards and other security for its...

Chinese banks sitting on $1.7 trillion debt time bomb by business reporter Stephen Letts Chinese banks are looking down the barrel of a staggering RMB 8 trillion - or $1.7 trillion - worth of losses according to the French investment bank Societe Generale. Put another way, 60 per cent of capital in China's banks is at risk as authorities start the delicate and dangerous process of reining in the debt-bloated and unprofitable state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. Disturbingly though, debt is not only not shrinking, it is accelerating, making the eventual reckoning far worse. China's overall non-financial debt grew by 15.2...

In the late 1800s, it took railroad companies six years to lay 1,907 miles of track for what was to become the Transcontinental Railroad (or as Barack Obama calls it, the Intercontinental Railroad). Building that railroad line required tunneling through mountains — at one foot a day — building bridges — including one that spanned 700 feet — and doing all the work almost entirely by hand. As best, it will now take seven years for California to lay 119 miles of track — on relatively flat ground in the middle of nowhere. That news came from a contract revision...

When the economy stumbles, can the Fed still catch its fall? A growing number of economists, market analysts and investors worry that the answer is no. The Federal Reserve’s radical approach to monetary policy since the financial crisis, they believe, has confounded its ability to do anything about a potential downturn — or an unexpected shock to the economy. Worse, others argue that by staying with a zero interest rate for so long, the Fed has put itself into a box... ...the dilemma. The post-financial crisis economic recovery still looks shaky. The Atlanta Fed’s widely followed GDPNow number, a timely...

Leading figures in the Vote Leave referendum campaign to take Britain out of the EU have links to a controversial climate-skeptic think tank and question the science behind global warming. The group’s three leaders, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and figurehead Lord Nigel Lawson, have cast doubt over man-made climate change, which is backed by most of the world’s credible experts.Lawson founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009 and is a noted climate skeptic. Both the foundation, which broke UK Charity Commission rules for anti-climate bias, and Vote Leave share rich donors. Gove — who tried to stop climate change...

Take a Walk Down the Atrocity Covered in Wallpaper "The simplest explanation is usually the correct one." ~ Occam’s razor "Why can’t you get things? It is very difficult to explain. I understand you are upset, but you can’t give the oligarchy the upper hand. It’s a matter of being united … another economy is an option, the community economy, the one stemming from small producers … do not give these racketeers (the entrepreneurs) resources. You have to wait in line with us as well, but at least in the end you don’t pay as much." The above message is...

The Department of Labor has awarded Utica, New York, $2 million to teach young refugees how to build drones as part of a summer jobs program. About 400 teenage refugee students living in the city will get part-time summer jobs through the program, as well as tutoring in English and Math. Those who demonstrate academic competence will then take part in a year-long drone building challenge during the school year, as the work and tutoring continues. The 14- and 15-year-old refugee students will learn how to design a drone and then construct their own model using the lab of the...