First of all, I am not a Constitutional lawyer, but his resume says Barack Obama is one, so he should know better (or maybe he does!). Second, I am wondering just how many Obama constitutional violations are “too many”—until the perpetrator of them must pay for his misdeeds, and the wrongs be righted. Perhaps, as I have heard, “what goes around, comes around,” and Obama (and his accomplices) will actually get their just rewards. Of course, since they are occupants of the mystical kingdom of Washington, DC and our Federal Government branch of that kingdom, perhaps they will just retire to become lobbyists, highly paid speakers or private equity/hedge fund partners, any of which will provide them an income for a life of comfort, in spite of their guilt and misdeeds.
The entire list the Obama Administration’s Constitutional misdeeds and apparent outright violations are too long to even list here. I’m not even sure I can recall them all, and it seems the list grows almost daily. Of course the latest one is to step beyond the law once again, and modify his signature legislative achievement—The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). He freely tweaks the law over and over, until he either gets part of it to work as intended—or better yet—he hangs the blame for the failure on someone else and moves on.
Many of the suspected, alleged or actual constitutional violations have been (or are being) tested and litigated in the courts, and some have already been found to be illegal—yet they continue unaltered under the president’s auspices (The NLRB “non-recess” recess appointments to name just one). This particular one has caused companies that were mistreated under it a large amount of time, money and anguish due to rulings by NLRB commission members who themselves were illegitimate. And it’s not even over yet. Ask Boeing how much this one cost its company.
Others of the president’s constitution violations are cloaked in that murkiest of areas: “executive privilege.” Let’s see if we can remember just a few. How about the DREAM act, which magically made a large number of youthful but illegal immigrants into legal ones, and bestowed on them the benefits befitting a citizen. Why not? Obama’s clear hope is that the longer these violations go without resolution via litigation in the courts, the more likely they become accepted as de-facto valid and legal.
Then there were his late, possibly illegal and certainly superficial staff replacements at places like the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Committee) where years of investment in Yucca Mountain (in Harry Reid’s own Nevada) are being rendered useless and wasted, while temporary nuclear waste storage around the country remains just that—temporary, neither very secure, nor very safe. But at least Obama and his NRC appointees fixed it so nothing would make it out to the Senate leader’s backyard.
Perhaps there was nothing illegal about the IRS suddenly deciding to selectively target the most troublesome Obama political opponents during the run up to his reelection. And maybe he had no knowledge of it, or involvement in it. That’s what his “im-plausible deniability” would have us believe. Funny how this, like so many Obama misdeeds falls under, “I must not have been paying attention to that when it happened, I can’t vet everything” excuse.
That excuse also worked well for the inexplicable Benghazi incident in which an ambassador and three other Americans were killed, and yet somehow, mysteriously, no help for them was forthcoming, from the Obama White House or the Clinton State Department, or anywhere. After all, as Hillary said, “what does it matter now?” (They are still dead, right?)
Some others actions are cleverly contrived to be less clear presidential Constitutional violations; those may be just executive power plays, in which the Obama Cabinet members simply make new laws, bypassing Congress entirely (EPA, HHS, etc.). Most of these will be litigated, eventually, but by then, Barack Obama will have “run out the clock” on one or more of the aging Supreme Court Justices, so he can appoint another of his old cronies (like his past appointments).
Or better yet, Barack Obama will be out of office and on the “rubber chicken circuit” speaking for a quarter million dollars and up per appearance. Even after the courts weigh in on the many Obama constitutional violations, the people affected by them will have suffered enormously, spending huge sums to fight these through the courts, against the deepest pockets in DC, the US government’s?
Meanwhile, the president continues to modify and make law around Congress, now on his latest and biggest foul-up: Obamacare. Maybe all he is doing is his rightful administrative work. That would be refreshing, since he seems to have been out of the loop, or clueless, or simply uninformed about nearly every other crisis. They say this happens often to protect or insulate the president by providing him with “plausible deniability.” There is no doubt that one has been worn out during Obama’s 5 years in office. In his case the more accurate description would be “im-plausible” deniability.
Maybe someday the Obama constitutional violations and this president who ignores the law, will actually be found guilty, and the violations reversed , but by then it will be too late, the de-facto damage will have been done. What a shame; what an embarrassment; what a farce. Next up: His immigration reform plans. Watch for this one in “coming attractions.”
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FROM MY BRENNER BRIEF POST LAST WEEK
Energy Policy—What energy policy?
The strategic plan for the US Department of Energy reads like a vague, self-serving paean to the president’s delusions about energy. There is no coherent US energy policy except for President Obama’s “pipe-dreams” and baseless promises of millions of jobs chasing imaginary renewable energy “rainbows.” Read all the way to the end of this post to see what the government’s “Strategic Plan for 2012 said. That part is a must-read.
Barack Obama would rather penalize (or ignore) clean coal projects and stall or downplay the other dominant fossil fuels, like oil and gas—upon which America relies for energy n ow and for the next decade or two. He would rather dump billons of taxpayers’ money into speculative “investments,” (his term, not mine) but with no returns (except losses), using largely borrowed money, chasing noble-sounding but very long-term, problematic or even unproven renewable energy sources. Even the derogatory term “crony capitalism” isn’t a valid excuse for this misappropriation of taxpayers’ funds.
I am all for getting as much as we can out of renewable energy resources, but at what cost to the country, its people and its future? Remember solar energy’s potential winners (think Solyndra, et. al.) and wind-power’s ideal mechanics (windmill farms dotting the landscape and/or opposed by everyone within sight off Cape Cod), and of course we should use those God-given available energy sources: geothermal, hydroelectric, and tidal.
I am also in favor finding the next new global energy source, but many countries think they have found it already. Why ignore safe new nuclear technology, while others like China and France go full speed ahead, while we are busy chasing wind farms and rainbows? Why impede new exploration while hoping some new solar technology will actually become economically viable in a few years without massive subsidies?
However, none of these renewable sources, except for solar (for which the technology may evolve “someday”) have the potential to make up the substantial/dominant sources of energy to power America, and then at higher than competitive prices—except in selected areas where the natural topography and/or geography on coastlines, provide ideal settings. Worse yet, virtually all of the places where renewable energy can be feasibly generated fairly economically are far distant from population/industrial centers where the energy is needed/used, thus putting additional strain on an aging and dangerously fragile energy grid: solar in Western deserts; wind in wide open great plains or off our coasts; hydro where there are raging rivers with expensive dams in place to harness them, and so forth
Meanwhile current energy policy virtually ignores obvious large-scale solutions: completing the Keystone pipeline, expanding off-shore drilling, selective drilling in ANWR (Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve) finding and exploiting vast deposits of shale oil, applying fracking technology to capitalize on previously unreachable oil and gas deposits, and on, and on. These energy solutions alone could create easily North American and US energy independence from Middle-Eastern, Soviet bloc, and other “unfriendly” sources of oil even within a decade.
Better yet, the USA might actually enjoy a global energy cost advantage in its manufacturing industries, and be able to repatriate good earning jobs. No doubt these avenues of energy development will create many jobs in their own right. The combination of these strategies will reduce revenue to America’s enemies and antagonists, and help America’s strategic international position and its economy.
Instead, here is the opening from the 2012 Strategic Plan for the US Department of Energy
The mission of the Department of Energy is to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.
Goal 1: Catalyze the timely, material, and efficient transformation of the nation’s energy system and secure U.S. leadership in clean energy technologies.
Goal 2: Maintain a vibrant U.S. effort in science and engineering as a cornerstone of our economic prosperity with clear leadership in strategic areas.
Goal 3: Enhance nuclear security through defense, nonproliferation, and environmental efforts.
Goal 4: Establish an operational and adaptable framework that combines the best wisdom of all Department stakeholders to maximize mission success.
And this is the Mission Statement for the US DOE.
1. Our mission is vital and urgent.
2. Science and technology lie at the heart of our mission.
3. We will treat our people as our greatest asset.
4. We will pursue our mission in a manner that is safe, secure, legally and ethically sound, and fiscally responsible.
5. We will manage risk in fulfilling our mission.
6. We will apply validated standards and rigorous peer review.
7. We will succeed only through teamwork and continuous improvement.
Isn’t that a nice page of words? This is not a joke. This page was taken directly from the US Department of Energy’s 2012 Strategic Plan upon which it planned spend about $30 billion!
(That is $30,000,000,000 of our money—at least one-fourth of which would need to be borrowed from somewhere.)
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2011_DOE_Strategic_Plan_.pdf
Nowhere in here does it say they will do anything particularly productive about improving the strategic energy position of the USA …or what …or how. Little actionable statements of that sort are even included.
When I was running major, publicly owned companies, if an executive of mine wrote such a mealy-mouthed and vague page of platitudes, to ask for a huge budget, I would fire that person, and all those who were parties to such useless nonsense.
Of course it all reads well and sound noble and high-minded. Clearly this was written to please someone, and my assumption is to please “the boss”—Barack Obama—whose entire career, especially as president of the USA has been devoted to high-sounding, soaring rhetorical speeches in which he has promised everything and after which he has delivered nothing.
No wonder his approval rating is plummeting. It should continue to do so as more of his incompetence and irresponsibility is exposed.
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Forecasts Don’t Have to Be an Exercise in Futility
Posted on October 28, 2013This month, we present the insights of guest blogger John Mariotti. John is the president and chief executive officer The Enterprise Group, a coalition of time-shared executive advisors, as well as a director on several corporate boards. He formerly served as president of Rubbermaid Products Group and Huffy International.
Forecasting is at once among a company’s most critical activities and also one of its biggest supply chain challenges. The ability to predict, as accurately as possible, what customers will buy and when they will buy it is among the main drivers of profitability. Missing the mark by too much will either result in excess inventory (and margin erosion) or insufficient inventory (and lost sales).
Yet anyone who has tried to predict the future knows how difficult it can be to find that balance.
Quite simply, forecasts often are wrong because they’re estimates of the future, and nobody knows what the future holds. Just ask your local weather forecaster who, despite having all the latest technologies, still can’t say with certainty whether or not it will rain on your golf game tomorrow.
Companies struggle with the same issue, but for an additional reason: the fear of being wrong. And that’s exactly the wrong mentality to have because it effectively paralyzes an organization into inaction, which in many cases is even worse than having an inaccurate forecast.
Instead, companies should strive to be wrong in an informed direction. By that I mean be able to confidently lean one way or another, based on your best available information. If you combine the insights of people who are most knowledgeable about the marketplace with the most robust data about current conditions and the recent past, you’ll be able to dramatically decrease your odds of being wrong in your forecast. The key is to approach the forecast from a triangulation perspective: Identify the extremes of a situation—the low and high endpoints—and, by using the data and market insights available, begin to move away from the extremes until you reach a range of acceptable uncertainty. Then select the midpoint of that range as your forecast, recognizing that that’s probably as close to accurate as you can get at that moment in time given the information you have on hand.
This method, while overly simplistic as described, is accurate surprisingly often because at least half of what a company needs to know about demand can be predicted with rather high accuracy and half of the ones that remain can be predicted with enough accuracy that you won’t be subjected to a panic fire drill if things don’t go as precisely as planned. For instance, a company can get a good sense of demand by simply talking to its customers. The timing of planned promotions and price events, or even competitive situations that might affect demand, are also generally well known by the sales team. That’s why it’s so important for the sales, marketing, production planning, and supply chain teams to meet periodically and discuss these issues openly. In so doing, they can collectively lean to favor one direction or another.
The same is true of forecasting a company’s “response-ability”—in other words, if a significant change in demand is forecast, how able the supply chain is to react. Several important questions are involved in forecasting response-ability: How much capacity does your next-level supplier have? How fast can the supplier ramp up? Will it have the raw materials on hand? If it doesn’t, how fast can it get them? What regularly occurring events—such as holidays and planned shutdowns—might affect suppliers’ ability to meet a sudden surge in demand?
These are all questions that can be answered without having to guess at the future at all. They’re all questions about tangible, physical, operational situations, the answers to which a company’s purchasing department should have for each piece of the network they manage. While you can’t predict demand with certainty—nor can you predict a storm in the ocean, a snowstorm in the Rockies, or an airline malfunction in Asia that will delay your shipment—you can know if the supply chain has enough, too much, or too little in it. You can forecast how you can respond, how quickly, and with what. And that intelligence will allow you to lean one way or the other.
Once you’ve created your forecasts, though, you can’t ignore it. Rather, you need to continually monitor the marketplace and refine your forecast accordingly. Just like campaign teams on election night monitor early returns for signs they need to alter their last-minute get-out-the vote activities, a company should keep track of what’s going into and coming out of the channel and how those actions align with the assumptions underpinning the initial forecast. For instance, if point-of-sale data indicates the channel is filling up, orders will begin to decline. If data show the opposite, orders likely will pick up. Importantly, a company needs to make sure it understands, as much as possible, the drivers of channel activity to minimize the chance of being misled by isolated or one-time behaviors that aren’t representative of a channel-wide trend that could dramatically affect overall demand (and, thus, would require a significant rethinking of the original forecast).
Of course, all of what I just stated is exponentially more difficult for companies that have tens of thousands of products and customers spread all over the world. And that’s why technology is critical to accurate forecasting. Today’s forecasting tools make the complex calculations that enable a company to triangulate across all their products, customers, suppliers, and geographies. But technology on its own won’t solve everything. Rather, it needs to play a supporting role to people who collaborate across the supply chain to exchange the information that is critical to making forecasts as accurate as they can be. The simple truth is, the more people collaborate and share information, and work toward a common goal, the more effective the supply chain will be.
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