Free Republic

Portland, OR: In a city where just about everything that can be done on a bicycle has been done, Portland still doesn't do bike sharing. Not yet anyway. After years of study, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has recommended using $4 million in startup funds -- half from a limited, flexible federal funding pot, half from private investors -- for an automated community bicycling program. The City Council is expected to vote Wednesday on the concept, which has proved wildly popular in other American cities and across Europe. "We essentially expect this to be used by everybody -- tourists, businesspeople,...

Just when you thought you might sleep better at night, with only worries about feeding your family, keeping your job and home in a terrible economy, the debt ceiling just raised to $2.8 trillion, the United Nation’s “Sustainability” Agenda 21 marches on with the help of a myriad of private and governmental organizations nationwide dedicated to the “fundamental change” of America as we know it. The HUD Secretary just announced on July 28, 2011 the availability of $95 million to support “sustainable local initiatives” through the fiscal year 2011 Regional Planning and Community Challenge Planning Grant Programs. It seems like...

Modern feminism erupted upon Western culture in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which smeared suburban households as “comfortable concentration camps.” Friedan was a communist who knew little of housework. Her husband even furnished a maid. Yet she charged that tending the hearth repressed homemakers who would find greater contentment in roles historically filled by men. Were feminists true to their purported ideals — penetrating previously masculine domains and liberating women from reliance on men — they would adore Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. As the world actually turns, conservative women find feminists their shrillest critics. But their achievements,...

Study after study has shown that children with married parents are better off, and our society has embraced the idea that children should be raised by married adults. The latest research digs deep into this long-held belief and reveals an interesting twist. A new British study finds that kids of married parents are more intellectually advanced than those born out of wedlock, but this has nothing to do with marriage. Rather it's a reflection of the types of people who tend to get married and those who don't, . . .

This year's college graduates have better career prospects than their peers did a year ago—as long as they're looking in the private sector. Employers plan to hire 19% more new graduates this year than in 2010, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That means students were more likely to have offers as they head toward graduation. Among college seniors who applied for positions, the survey said, 41% had an offer this year, up from 38% last year. (snip) ...some degrees are far more valuable than others. Computer science, accounting, economics and engineering majors were...

Imagine for a moment that every single person living in the city of San Jose, plus another 150,000 or so, just up and left. Vanished. Poof. Gone. Leaving their homes, business buildings and factories behind. That is, in effect, what has happened to the city of Detroit, according to 2010 U.S. Census data released this week. The city that boasted 1.8 million residents in 1950, and was the nation's economic engine for most of the 20th century, now is home to 714,000 people, a population loss of some 1.1 million — with a 25% drop in the last decade alone....

Environmentalists are backpedaling in their long march toward deindustrialization. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has offered to delay some of its plans to regulate so-called greenhouse gases. Republicans in Congress shouldn’t hesitate to press their advantage. The agency’s advance faltered last week with the announcement that it was willing to put off for three years new rules requiring biomass-fired boilers to obtain permits to emit carbon dioxide. This provides temporary financial relief to power plants that burn forest and agricultural products, wastewater treatment facilities, landfills and highly subsidized ethanol operations. Other restrictions announced Jan. 2 on coal-fired plants and oil...

Some time ago, there was a lengthy debate as to why anyone even cares about the manufacturing ISM number. After all America is now by and far a service economy. Obviously, that debate ended in a stalemate. Nonetheless, the sad truth is that with each passing year America is losing ever more of its once dominant industrial advantage, and with the chief export being "financial innovation", should the world experience another risk flare up it is very likely that the world will enforce an embargo on any future US "imports" and the country's current account deficit will drop to a...

An anonymous email making the cyberspace rounds is so upsetting that its author was correct to hide his name. The “Changes Are Coming” email details the demise of our post office, our newspapers, check writing systems, books and music as we know them along with the end of Cable TV and network systems as now constituted. But the harshest caveat bearing down on America is our demise due to deindustrialization. The email reports that “Tens of thousands of factories have left the U.S. in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost. . .the U.S....

The New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) adopted by a vote of four to three the most comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution reduction regulations in the nation. The rules, proposed by the New Mexico Environment Department, will reduce global warming pollutants through a regional cap on GHG emissions. “Addressing climate change immediately is the right thing to do—I am pleased that the EIB adopted the program I have worked so hard to develop,” Governor Bill Richardson said. “I call on the federal government to build on New Mexico’s program and the WCI to implement a national cap-and-trade system.” “I applaud...

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles, to televisions, to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II. But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of...

It's been a quarter-century since author John Naisbitt blithely described manufacturing as a "declining sport" that Americans could easily offshore to Asia. Since then obituaries for U.S. manufacturing, both mournful and enraged, have been written many times...Snip... Manufacturing's role in promoting job and income growth is often understated. Although overall industrial jobs have diminished by almost five million since the late 1970s, the loss has been concentrated largely in lower-skilled positions. The number of higher-skilled positions, with a median hourly wage of $24, jumped by more than 36% between 1983 and 2002 to nearly 4.5 million, according to a 2006...

The myth of Kyoto By Peter Worthington, For the Toronto Sun January 9, 2005 Throughout the Cold War, until the final collapse of the Soviet Empire, there were always people in the West -- usually well-educated -- who believed in the good intentions of communism. Universities were an incubator for Marxism and a benign view of Soviet altruism. When Sovietism became tainted after "aberrations" like crushing the Hungarian rebellion (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), admiration was shifted to China and the humanitarianism of Mao Tse-tung. Until he was also discredited. Such people tended to blame the West (i.e....

According to its proponents, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, will create a "free trade" area encompassing the entire hemisphere -- from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. According to President Bush, the FTAA, which is scheduled for completion next year, would "make our hemisphere the largest free-trade area in the world, encompassing 34 countries and 800 million people." The result would be new export markets for American goods and a corresponding increase in our national prosperity and the standard of living throughout the hemisphere. At least, that's the story. It's an attractive one, and to many a...

Our standard of living is being deliberately undermined to merge our nation into a centrally directed global economy.As part of his September 2001 visit to the U.S., Mexican president Vicente Fox accompanied President Bush to Toledo, Ohio, where they addressed a carefully selected crowd of 8,000 people. Toledo was chosen because of its large and growing Mexican immigrant population. This changing demographic in America’s heartland was presented as symbolic of the growing interdependence created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The New York Times described how both Presidents Fox and Bush "praised the contributions of Mexican immigrants and...

Volume 34, Number 21 Thursday, April 17, 2003 Study predicts Boeing downsizingGeographers say airplane manufacturer will exit from passenger jet manufacturing By ELLEN GOLDBAUMContributing Editor The red ink flowing from the airline industry in recent months has consistently grabbed headlines, but during the next decade the U.S. economy will be affected by an even more significant loss with the nation's eventual exit from the building of passenger aircraft, a market the U.S. has led for more than half a century, according to a research paper by two UB geographers.The paper, which was published last month in the journal Futures,...

When the dictator, Josef Stalin, first appeared at the brand-new United Nations accompanied by representatives of Soviet "labor unions," other delegates cried foul, asking, "How can there be labor unions in a government-run society?" Stalin explained, "Ah, but these are Non-Governmental Organizations," and the term "NGO" first came into the world's vocabulary. Nowadays, most of us are likely to think of NGOs as large-scale charitable organizations who work all over the world providing medical care in disaster situations, food to famine sufferers or advocacy for political prisoners. One of the main reasons we even recognize the names of the well-known...

Unless Congress regains a modicum of sanity, the United States of America is about to rejoin an organization dedicated to the destruction of the last vestiges of Judeo-Christian civilization. For reasons inexplicable to most sensible Americans, in September 2002, an otherwise sensible President George W. Bush told the United Nations that the U.S. will rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a wild-eyed bunch President Reagan abandoned in 1984, noting that it was utterly corrupt and the U.S. had no business being a member of such a group. Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of the insidious nature...

There has been no spring on the East Coast of the United States this year. Even into the early days of June, the weather has remained cold and damp. One is tempted to ask, "Where is the global warming that has been predicted?" but this cold spell in the US is offset by a heat spell in India that has killed dozens of people. Is global warming occurring there, but not here? Is global warming occurring at all? No. The entire global warming hoax is based on computer models and they are designed to produce the kind of data that...

SHOULD LENIN’S BIRTHDAY BE A HOLIDAY, alongside the national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the new California holiday honoring union boss Cesar Chavez? Why, you might ask, would Americans celebrate the birthday of this mass murderer Marxist, the founder of the is-it-dead-or-only-sleeping Soviet Union? But the sad fact is that our children in public schools and colleges probably are directed to celebrate Lenin’s April 22 birthday and his values, whether they know it or not. Schools and the media now call this date Earth Day, a date that oddly falls each year only a week before an...