Continuing Our Info Dump on Maurice Strong and Friends
WHO IS MAURICE STRONG?
The adventures of Maurice Strong & Co. illustrate the fact that nowadays you don’t have to be a household name to wield
global power.
By Ronald Bailey Published in The National Review September 1, 1997
Mr. Bailey is a freelance journalist and television producer in Washington, D.C. He is author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martin’s) and The True State of the Planet (Free Press).
“The survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man,” declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the “Custodian of the Planet.” He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations.
This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, of course. Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of “global governance” that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans’ lives. Maurice
Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the “indispensable man” at the center of this creeping UN power grab.
Not that Mr. Strong looks particularly indispensable. Indeed, he exudes a kind of negative charisma. He is a grey, short, soft-voiced man with a salt-and-pepper toothbrush mustache who wouldn’t rate a second glance if you passed him on the street. Yet his remarkable career has led him from boyhood poverty in Manitoba to the highest councils of international government.
Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute; Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board. As advisor to Kofi Annan, he is overseeing the new UN reforms.
Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development — the so-called Earth Summit — held in Rio de Janeiro, which gave a significant push to global economic and environmental regulation.
“He’s dangerous because he’s a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system],” comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. “I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left.”
“This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner,” says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. “If he is whispering in Kofi Annan’s ear this is no good at all.”
Strong attracts such mystified suspicion because he is difficult to pin down. He told Maclean’s in 1976 that he was “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” And his career combines oil deals with the likes of Adnan Khashoggi with links to the environmentalist Left. He is in fact one of a new political breed: the bi-sectoral entrepreneur who uses business success for leverage in politics, and vice versa.
Strong started in the oil business in the 1950s. He took over and turned around some small ailing energy companies in the 1960s, and he was president of a major holding company — the Power Corporation of Canada — by the age of 35. This was success by any standard. Yet on more than one occasion (including once in Who’s Who), Strong has been caught exaggerating. He claimed, for instance, to have forfeited a $200,000 salary when he left Power. The real figure, said a company officer, was $35,000. Why this myth-making? Well, a CEO is just a CEO — but a whiz-kid is a potential cabinet officer.
And it is in politics that Strong’s talents really shine. He is the Michelangelo of networking. He early made friends in high places in Canada’s Liberal Party — including Paul Martin Sr., Canada’s external-affairs minister in the Sixties — and kept them as business partners in oil and real-estate ventures. He cultivated bright well-connected young people — like Paul Martin Jr., Canada’s present finance minister and the smart money’s bet to succeed Jean Chretien as prime minister — and salted them throughout his various political and business networks to form a virtual private intelligence service. And he always seemed to know what the next political trend would be — foreign aid, Canadian economic nationalism, environmentalism.
In 1966, by now a Liberal favorite, Strong became head of the Canadian International Development Agency and thus was launched internationally. Impressed by his work at CIDA, UN Secretary General U Thant asked him to organize what became the first Earth Summit — the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The next year, Strong became first director of the new UN Environment Program, created as a result of Stockholm. And in 1975, he was invited back to Canada to run the semi-national Petro-Canada, created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC’s oil shocks.
Petro-Canada was a sop to Canada’s anti-American Left, then denouncing American ownership of the country’s oil companies. Strong talked a good economic-nationalist game — but he himself was a major reason why Canada’s oil companies were U.S.-owned. Ten years before, while at Power Corporation, he had enabled Shell to take over the only remaining all-Canadian oil company by throwing a controlling block of shares in its direction. As Maclean’s wrote, he now returned “amid fanfares” to rectify this.
After a couple of years, Strong left Petro-Canada for various business deals, including one with Adnan Khashoggi through which he ended up owning the 200,000-acre Baca ranch in Colorado, now a “New Age” center run by his wife, Hanne. (Among the seekers at Baca are Zen and Tibetan Buddhist monks, a breakaway order of Carmelite nuns, and followers of a Hindu guru called Babaji.) Not for long the joys of contemplation, however. In 1985, he was back as executive coordinator of the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, in charge of running the $3.5-billion famine-relief effort in Somalia and Ethiopia. And in 1989, he was appointed Secretary General of the Earth Summit — shortly thereafter flying down to Rio.
Strong’s flexibility, however, must not be mistaken for open-mindedness. His friends, his allies among Canadian Liberals, his networks in the UN and the Third World, even his long-term business partners (like the late Paul Nathanson, wartime treasurer of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Committee) all lean Left. He has said the Depression left him “frankly very radical.” And given his ability to get things done, the consistency of his support for a world managed by bureaucrats is alarming. As Elaine Dewar wrote in Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine:
It is instructive to read Strong’s 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned
urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Europe. IN the meantime, Strong continued the international networking on which his influence rests. He became a member of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). He found time to serve as president of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, on the executive committee of the Society for International Development, and as an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. Above all, he served on the Commission on Global Governance — which, as we shall see, plays a crucial part in the international power grab. Sometimes, indeed, it seems that Strong’s network of contacts must rival the Internet. To list a few:
— Vice President Al Gore. (Of course.)
— World Bank President James Wolfensohn, formerly on the Rockefeller Foundation Board and currently on the Population Council Board; he was Al Gore’s favored candidate for the World Bank position.
— James Gustave Speth, head of the Carter Administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, crafter of the doomladen Global 2000 report, member of the Clinton – Gore transition team; he now heads the UN Development Program.
— Shridath Ramphal, formerly Secretary General of the (British) Commonwealth, now Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.
— Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute — which works closely with the World Bank, the UN Environment Program, and the UN Development Program — and Co-Chairman of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.
— Ingvar Carlsson, former Swedish prime minister and Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.
But Strong is no snob; he even counts Republican Presidents among his friends. Elaine Dewar again:
Strong blurted out that he’d almost been shut out of the Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been overruled by the White House because George Bush knew him. He said that he’d donated some $100,000 to the Democrats and a slightly lesser amount to the Republicans in 1988. (The Republicans didn’t confirm.)
I had been absolutely astonished. I mean yes, he had done a great deal of business in the U.S., but how could he have managed such contributions?
Well, he’d had a green card. The governor of Colorado had suggested it to him. A lawyer in Denver had told him how.
But why? I’d asked.
“Because I wanted influence in the United States.”
So Strong gave political contributions (of dubious legality) to both parties; George Bush, now a friend, intervened to help him stay in charge of the Rio conference; he was thereby enabled to set a deep green agenda there; and Bush took a political hit in an election year. An instructive tale — if it is not part of Strong’s mythmaking. Most of Strong’s friends are more obviously compatible, which may explain why they tend to overlap in their institutional commitments. For example, James Wolfensohn (whom Strong had hired out of Harvard in the early Sixties to run an Australian subsidiary of one of his companies) appointed him as his senior advisor almost immediately upon being named chairman of the World Bank.
“I’d been involved in . . . Stockholm, which Maurice Strong arranged,” says Wolfensohn, who, more recently, has been credited with co-drafting (with Mikhail Gorbachev) the Earth Charter presented for consideration at the Rio + 5 meeting in Brazil earlier this year. As head of the Earth Council, Maurice Strong chaired that meeting.
It’s not a conspiracy, of course: just a group of like-minded people fighting to save the world from less prescient and more selfish forces — namely, market forces. And though the crises change — World War II in the Forties, fear of the atom bomb in the Fifties, the “energy crisis” in the Seventies — the Left’s remedy is always the same: a greater role for international agencies. Today an allegedly looming global environmental catastrophe is behind their efforts to increase the power of the UN. Strong has warned memorably: “If we don’t change, our species will not survive. . . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” Apocalypse soon — unless international bodies save us from ourselves.
LAST week, Secretary General Annan unveiled Maurice Strong’s plan for reorganizing the UN. To be sure, the notoriously corrupt and inefficient UN bureaucracy could do with some shaking up. Strong’s plan, however, mostly points in a different direction — one drawn from a document, Our Global Neighborhood, devised by the interestingly named Commission on Global Governance.
The CGG was established in 1992, after Rio, at the suggestion of Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and head of the Socialist International. Then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali endorsed it. The CGG naturally denies advocating the sort of thing that fuels militia nightmares. “We are not proposing movement toward a world government,” reassuringly write Co-Chairmen Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal, “. . . [but] this is not to say that the goal should be a world without systems or rules.” Quite so. As Hofstra University law professor Peter Spiro describes it: “The aim is not a superstate but rather the establishment of norm-creating multilateral regimes . . . This construct already constrains state action in the context of human rights and environmental protection and is on a springboard in other areas.”
The concept of global governance has been fermenting for some time. In 1991, the Club of Rome (of which Strong is, of course, a member) issued a report called The First Global Revolution, which asserted that current problems “are essentially global and cannot be solved through individual country initiatives [which] gives a greatly enhanced importance to the United Nations and other international systems.” Also in 1991 Strong claimed that the Earth Summit, of which he was Secretary General, would play an important role in “reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance.” In 1995, in Our Global Neighborhood, the CGG agreed: “It is our firm conclusion that the United Nations must continue to play a central role in global governance.”
Americans should be worried by the Commission’s recommendations: for instance, that some UN activities be funded through taxes on foreign-exchange transactions and multinational corporations. Economist James Tobin estimates that a 0.5 per cent tax on foreign-exchange transactions would raise $1.5 trillion annually — nearly equivalent to the U.S. federal budget. It also recommended that “user fees” might be imposed on companies operating in the “global commons.” Such fees might be collected on international airline tickets, ocean shipping, deep-sea fishing, activities in Antarctica, geostationary satellite orbits, and electromagnetic spectrum. But the big enchilada is carbon taxes, which would be levied on all fuels made from coal, oil, and natural gas.
“A carbon tax,” the report deadpans, “. . . would yield very large revenues indeed.” Given the UN’s record of empire-building and corruption, Cato’s Ted Carpenter warns: “One can only imagine the degree of mischief it could get into if it had independent sources of revenue.”
Especially significant for the U.S. was the CGG’s proposal for eventual elimination of the veto held by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Commission knew that the current permanent members of the Security Council, including the U.S., would not easily surrender their vetoes, and so it recommended a two-stage process.
In the first stage, five new permanent members (without a veto) would be added to the Security Council — probably Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, and Nigeria — along with three new slots for non-permanent members. But the real threat to U.S. interests is the second stage: “a full review of the membership of the Council . . . around 2005, when the veto can be phased out.” These plans are advancing. In March, the president of the UN General Assembly, Razali Ismail of Malayasia, unveiled his own formula for reforming the Security Council. It closely tracks the CGG’s proposals. In particular, Razali proposed “urg[ing] the original permanent members to limit use of the veto . . . and not toextend [it] to new permanent members.” He wanted to make the veto “progressively and politically untenable” and recommended that these arrangements be reviewed in ten years.
In July the State Department compromised — accepting five new Security Council members but remaining silent on the veto. It plainly hopes that the veto issue will go away if the U.S. concedes on enlarging the Council. Yet the CGG’s report makes clear that we are facing a rolling agenda to expand the power of UN bureaucrats. The veto issue may be postponed for ten years — but what then?
“This is an initiative that should be resisted by the United States with special vehemence,” says Ted Carpenter. For if the veto were eliminated, the United States would face the prospect of having other countries make key determinations that affect us without our consent.
THE Commission also wants to strengthen “global civil society,” which, it explains, “is best expressed in the global non-governmental movement.” Today, there are nearly 15,000 NGOs. More than 1,200 of them have consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (up from 41 in 1948). The CGG wants NGOs to be brought formally into the UN system (no wonder Kenneth Minogue calls this Acronymia). So it proposes that representatives of such organizations be accredited to the General Assembly as “Civil Society Organizations” and convened in an annual Forum of Civil Society.
But how would these representatives be selected? This June, the General Assembly held a session on environmental issues called Earth Summit +5. President Razali selected a number of representatives from the NGOs and the private sector for the exclusive privilege of speaking in the plenary sessions.
“I have gone to a lot of trouble with this, choosing the right NGOs,” he declared. So whom did he choose?
Among others: Thilo Bode, executive director of Greenpeace, to represent the scientific and technological community; Yolanda Kakabadse, the president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and “from the farmers, I have chosen an organic farmer, Denise O’Brien from the United States, who is a member of the Via Campesina.” In what sense are these people “representative”? Whom do they > represent? Were the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of Toshiba, and the president of the Farm Bureau all too busy to come talk to the General Assembly?
Another example of how this selection process operates was the “great civil society forum” convened at the behest of Strong’s Earth Council and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International this past March. Some five hundred delegates met, supposedly to assess the results of the Earth Summit, but in reality to condemn the “inaction” of signatory countries in implementing the Rio treaties. The delegates were selected through a process based on national councils for sustainable development, themselves set up pursuant to the Earth Summit. Membership in these councils means that an organization is already persuaded of the global environmental crisis. So you can bet that the process did not yield many delegates representing business or advocating limits on government power.
This kind of international gabfest is, of course, a sinister parody of democracy. “Very few of even the larger international NGOs are operationally democratic, in the sense that members elect officers or direct policy on particular issues,” notes Peter Spiro. “Arguably it is more often money than membership that determines influence, and money more often represents the support of centralized elites, such as major foundations, than of the grass roots.” (The CGG has benefited substantially from the largesse of the MacArthur, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations.)
Hilary French, Vice President of the alarmist Worldwatch Institute, justifies this revealingly as “a paradox of our time . . . that effective governance requires control being simultaneously passed down to local communities and up to international institutions.” Paradoxically or not, the voters hardly appear in this model of governance. It bypasses national governments and representative democracy in order to empower the sort of people who are willing to sit in committee meetings to the bitter end. Those who have better things to do — businessmen, workers, moms — would be the losers in the type of centralized decentralization envisioned by Worldwatch. The result would be decisions reached by self-selecting elites. In domestic politics, we have a name for such elite groups — special interests.
ANOTHER CGG recommendation is that the old UN Trusteeship Council “be given a new mandate over the global commons.” It defines the global commons to include the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and the related environmental systems that contribute to the support of human life. A new Trusteeship Council would oversee “the management of the commons, including development and use of their resources . . . [and] the administration of environmental treaties in such fields as climate change, biodiversity, outer space, and the Law of the Sea.”
It is hard to see what this expansive definition would exclude from the jurisdiction of the Trusteeship Council. Biodiversity encompasses all the plants and animals on the earth, including those that live in your backyard. Will UN troops swoop in to stop you from cutting down trees on your property? Doubtless not. But a recent case near Yellowstone National Park may be a foretaste of how international agencies can meddle in U.S. domestic affairs.
Yellowstone has been designated a “World Heritage Site.” These Sites are natural settings or cultural monuments recognized by the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as having “outstanding universal value.” Sites are designated under a Convention ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1973, and it is possible to place such sites on a “List of World Heritage Sites in Danger.”
In this case, a mining company wanted to construct a gold mine outside the boundaries of Yellowstone. The normal environmental review of the project’s impact was still proceeding under U.S. law. But a group of environmentalist NGOs opposed to the mine were not content to wait for that review to take its course. They asked that members of the World Heritage Committee come to Yellowstone to hold public hearings. George Frampton, the Clinton Administration’s Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, wrote to the WHC saying: “The Secretary [Bruce Babbitt] and the National Park Service have clearly expressed strong reservations with the New World Mine proposal.” Frampton added: “We believe that a potential danger to the values of the Park and surrounding waters and fisheries exists and that the committee should be informed that the property as inscribed on the . . . List is in danger.” Four officials of the WHC duly came to Yellowstone and held hearings. And at its December 1995 meeting in Berlin, the Committee obligingly voted to list Yellowstone as a “World Heritage Site in Danger.”
“It was, in my opinion, a blatantly political act,” declared Rep. Barbara Cubin (R., Wyo.) during congressional hearings about the listing. “It was done to draw attention, public reaction, public response, and public pressure to see that the mine wasn’t developed.” Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell political scientist, agrees that the international listing of such sites “provides an international forum through which to put pressure on U.S. policy.”
Would the mine really have endangered Yellowstone? We’ll never know. The environmental-impact statement was never issued, and, under pressure, the mining company accepted a $65-million federal buyout plus a trade for unspecified federal lands somewhere else. Thus, even with no enforcement power, this UN dependency was able to make land-use policy for the United States.
These events prompted Rep. Don Young (R., Alaska) to introduce the American Land Sovereignty Act. With 174 co-sponsors to date, the Act aims to “preserve sovereignty of the United States over public lands and . . . to preserve State sovereignty and private property rights in non-federal lands surrounding those public lands.” Congress would have to approve on a case-by-case basis land designations made pursuant to any international agreements.
But is U.S. sovereignty really in danger? In an interview, Strong dismissed Young’s anxieties. “I do not share his concern. It is no abdication of sovereignty to exercise it in company with others, and when you’re dealing with global issues that’s what you have to do.” He continues: “If you put yourself in a larger unit, of course, you get some advantages and you give up some of your freedom. And that’s what’s happening in Europe, that the states of Europe have decided that overall they’re better off to create a structure in which they give up some of their national rights and exercise them collectively through the Union.”
This example of the European Union, however, worries Ambassador Lichenstein. The EU’s bureaucracy in Brussels, he complains, “is responsible to no one. Governments get together — foreign ministers, finance ministers — they presumably hand down the guidelines, but don’t kid yourself, the bureaucrats are running things.”
The Yellowstone case is an example of how “feel-good” symbolism about the environment can be transformed into real constraints upon real people imposed outside the law, with no democratic oversight and no means of redress. Ironically, Strong himself had a run-in with Colorado environmentalists over local water rights. They did not have the wit to call in an international agency against the New Age rancher — or maybe they realized that Strong was one property owner whose rights the UN would respect.
AS troubling as the Yellowstone incident is, much greater potential for mischief lies in a new series of “framework treaties” designed to handle global environmental issues. Initially, the treaties called for voluntary actions by governments and set up a consultative process. But environmental activists like Hilary French know very well how this process works. “Even though it can look disappointing, the political will created [by these framework conventions] can lead to commitments of a more binding nature,” she said. This is already happening.
“Although its declaration of principles was transparently aspirational, the 1972 Stockholm world conference on the human environment is generally recognized as a turning point in international environmental-protection efforts,” wrote Peter Spiro. “From it emerged a standing institution (the UN Environment Program); weak but more focused ‘framework’ treaties followed, which in turn are being filled out by specific regulatory regimes. The 1985 Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer itself included no obligations, but the 1987 Montreal protocols and subsequent amendments set a full phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting substances by 1996.
The regime covers 132 signatories with a total population of 4.7 billion people. Between 1987 and 1991, global CFC consumption was in fact reduced by half. A similar filling-out process is likely to occur with the biodiversity and climate-change conventions signed at Rio.” The “conventions” that Spiro was talking about emerged from the Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong. They deal with two of the alleged global environmental crises — global warming and species extinction.
At the time of the Earth Summit, some scientists predicted on the basis of climate computer models that the earth’s average temperature would increase by 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century because of the “greenhouse effect.” These predictions are controversial among scientists. And as the computer models are refined, they show that the atmosphere will warm far less than originally predicted. Furthermore, more accurate satellite measurements show no increase in the average global temperature over the last two decades. Finally, an important study published in Nature concluded that even if the warming predictions are right, it could well be less costly to allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise for a decade or more because technological innovations and judicious capital investment will make it possible to reduce them far more cheaply at some point before they become a significant problem. In other words, we needn’t take drastic and costly action now.
The process forges ahead anyway. The Framework Convention on Global Climate Change signed by President George Bush at the Rio Earth Summit is already beginning to harden. Initially, countries were supposed voluntarily to reduce by the year 2000 the “greenhouse gases” to the level emitted in 1990. Then, a year ago, at a UN climate-change meeting in Geneva, the Clinton Administration offered to set legally binding limits on the greenhouse gases the United States can emit. In June of this year, at the UN’s Earth Summit +5 session, President Clinton reaffirmed this commitment. And mandatory limits on carbon emissions are to be finalized at a global meeting of Convention signatories in Kyoto this December.
Estimates of the costs to the United States of cutting emissions range from $90 billion to $400 billion annually in lost Gross Domestic Product and a loss of between 600,000 and 3.5 million jobs. Global costs would be proportionately higher. Yet while the U.S. may be committing itself to limits, 130 developing nations, including China and India, are excluded under the Framework Convention from having to reduce their emissions, which, on present trends, will outstrip those of the industrialized world early in the next century. If the U.S. and other industrial countries have to limit energy use while the Third World is exempt, many industries will simply decamp to where energy prices are significantly lower.
If they are permitted to do so. For, as Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) asked at a conference on “The Costs of Kyoto” held by the Competitive Enterprise Institute: “Who will administer a global climate treaty? . . . Will we have an international agency capable of inspecting, fining, and possibly shutting down American companies?” Sen. Hagel is not alone is his concern. In July the U.S. Senate passed 95 to 0 a resolution urging the Clinton Administration not to make binding concessions at the Kyoto conference.
But the climate-change treaty is not the only threat to U.S. interests. Though Mr. Bush refused to sign the Bio-diversity Convention at the Rio Earth Summit — chaired, remember, by GOP contributor Strong — that only delayed things. The Clinton Administration signed shortly after its inauguration. Since the treaty obliges signatories to protect plant and animal species through habitat preservation, its implementation could make the World Heritage Committee’s activities on U.S. land use seem penny-ante by comparison.
MEANWHILE, how much further down the path sketched out by the CGG will the UN reforms developed by Maurice Strong and announced by Kofi Annan last week take us? The most important initiative is the recommendation that the General Assembly organize a “Millennium Assembly” and a companion “People’s Assembly” in the year 2000. (The “People’s Assembly” mirrors the CGG’s “Civil Society Forum” idea — among other things, only accredited NGOs would be invited to advise the General Assembly.) But what would these grand new bodies actually do? The Millennium Assembly would invite “heads of Government . . . to articulate their vision of prospects and challenges for the new millennium and agree on a process for fundamental review of the role of the United Nations [emphasis added].” That last innocuous phrase is diplomatese for opening up the UN Charter for amendment. If that happens, so could anything — notably eliminating the veto in the Security Council.
The Millennium Assembly would also consider adopting Strong’s Earth Charter. For the most part the Charter reads like another feel-good document — its draft says that “we must reinvent industrial-technological civilization” and promises everybody a clean environment, equitable incomes, and an end to cruelty to animals — but we have seen how such vacuous symbolism can have real consequences down the line. Inevitably, the Charter advocates that “the nations of the world should adopt as a first step an international convention that provides an integrated legal framework for existing and future environmental and sustainable-development law and policy.” This is, of course, a charter for endless intervention in the internal affairs of independent states.
Which leaves external affairs. Hey presto! In line with the CGG’s plan, Annan/Strong urge that the UN Trusteeship Council “be reconstituted as the forum through which member states exercise their collective trusteeship for the integrity of the global environment and common areas such as the oceans, atmosphere, and outer space.” For the time being, however, Annan and Strong have avoided calling for global taxes or user fees to finance the UN. One spokesman said that the issue was simply “too hot to handle right now.” What they propose is a Revolving Credit Fund of $1 billion so that the UN will have a source of operating funds even if a major contributor (e.g., the U.S.) withholds contributions for a time. In short, the CGG’s blueprint for a more powerful UN closely resembles the movement to expand the requirements of the Framework Convention on Global Climate Change. While the process may be piecemeal, the goal is clear: a more powerful set of international institutions, increasingly emancipated from the control of the major powers, increasingly accountable not to representative democratic institutions but to unelected bureaucracies, and increasingly exercising authority over how people, companies, and governments run their affairs — not just Americans, but everyone. In short, Col. Qaddafi’s definition of his leftist Green Revolution: “Committees Everywhere.”
If so, the future looks good for Maurice Strong. One UN source suggested that, at the very least, he would like to be made Secretary General of the Millennium Assembly or the People’s Assembly. Others suspect that, even at age 68, Strong is angling to be the next UN Secretary General. Such eminence may help explain a puzzling incident in his early career. Having long had political ambitions, he decided to enter the Canadian Parliament. A candidate was evicted from a safe constituency by the Liberal leadership, and Strong moved in. Then, with only a month to go before the 1979 election, he suddenly pulled out of the race.
Strong’s business deals were especially complicated at the time — he was setting up a Swiss oil-and-gas exploration company with partners that included the Kuwaiti Finance Minister and the Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation — and that is the explanation usually given. But maybe he just decided that for a man who wants power, elections are an unnecessary obstacle.
The Maurice Strong- Rothschild Connection: Beyond the CO2 Scam and into Control of Land and Food
What follows is a summary of and a link to another alarming connection of Maurice’s Strong. Edmund de Rothschild, his involvement with the CO2 Scam and his grab for our money and our food.
From Euro-med.dk: Summary: After Edmund de Rothschild’s statement, without basis, at the 4th World Wilderness Congress in 1987, that CO2 is the cause of a non-existent global warming – and that combating it needs money (our money), he founded the World Conservation Bank for this reason. In 1991 its name was changed to The Global Environment Facility (GEF). The purpose of this facility is to lend money to the poorest countries, printed by the IMF out of thin air, and with the guarantee of our governments. The facility takes wilderness areas with mineral riches as security. The GEF money is then to flow back to our governments as reimbursement for paid loans. I.e. We give away our tax money. For what? When a country cannot repay loans to the GEF it must give up a piece of its territory to the Rothschild banks (GEF, IMF, World Bank) – up to 30% of the Earth are meant. If land cannot be offered as collateral the country must starve (Haiti, Argentina and others). Rothschild´s stroke of genius was that he had his GEF smuggled into the UN system at the Rio UN Summit in 1992 by his friend, Maurice Strong. So now high-ranking ministerial officials from 179 countries are in the the council of the bank – blessing Rothschild grabbing the world! This article brings interviews with a man who was a participant at the 4th World Wilderness Congress,a man who knows what happened there and knew Rothschild personally – as well as David Rockefeller, who tried to threaten him to silence about what he had learned at the Wilderness Congress. The GEF is to manage the money just promised to the developing countries in Copenhagen (100 billion dollars a year from 2020 – 30 bn over the next 3 years) with the help of the World Bank. However, Rothschild does not leave it there. He and his henchmen are now joining the race of certain governments (China, Saudi Arabia), to buy up large areas of farmland in developing countries, having the crops transported back to the home countries. This leaves the locals, already starving, with much less crops available – with food prices rising rapidly – which is exactly Rothschild’s expectation. This makes people flee from Africa to Europe. Food prices have doubled in the past year or so – so that many people in Haiti before the earthquake, could not even afford to buy mud pies with minimal nourishment. And so it goes on. This is the ultimate goal of Rothschild’s New World Order
“ How Edmund de Rothschild Managed to Let 179 Governments Pay Him for Grasping Up to 30% of the Earth ”
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Background on Goldman Sachs
Today and for several days now, Goldman Sachs has been in the headlines.
Therefore, I felt it important to flag previous columns I have done on them, including how they helped to write the upcoming Cap and Trade bill, a large percentage of which has to do with the nation’s economy and not carbon emissions. Yes, another swindle is in process- just another in a decades long manipulation.
From two postings, the later of which can be found at:
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/a-history-lesson-on-goldman-sachs-one-of-the-main-players-in-cap-and-trade-legislation/
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
The Bubble Machine (video) from Brasscheck TV and Matt Taibbi at Rollingstone
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/674.html
Watch all five short videos!
“The Financial Services Modernization Act.’
“The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”
Goldman Sachs wrote them…
Clinton teed them up and Bush & Co. knocked them down the fairway.
Now Goldman owns the new president too.
The bankrupting of America (and the world) on the behalf of a handful of New York investment bankers.
Kleptocracy – government of the thieves, by the thieves, for the thieves.
Now read the article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
So- first they took your 401K (internet bubble), then they took your house (real estate bubble) and assaulted your 401K again, raised the interest rates on your charge cards to 20%+. For those of us still hanging on – here comes Cap and Trade. Another bill engineered by Goldman Sachs, with a little help from their friends.
Earlier I gave you the facts behind the fallacious science being used to co-opt our government and doom our family budgets: http://wp.me/pxG9Z-ak
Let me push the envelope further by rerunning some background data. Goldman Sachs has an untold number of “operatives” in our government, put there by both Presidents Bush and Obama, as well as their predecessors. Goldman Sachs and GE (owners of the NBC family of networks), along with Al Gore’s company will be the benefactors financially of the Carbon Credit market. The government will benefit also by a vast increase in taxes paid by businesses and in turn consumers. Here we will highlight the history behind the government connection with Goldman Sachs. It’s important you know these facts and use them to inform your representatives in the House and Senate that you know the real deal and you do not approve. I will leave this up all weekend, as the video takes 20 minutes to go through. As well, there is an accompanying article from Matt Taibbi, who is the interviewee in these videos. This is WELL worth your twenty minute investment.
“The Financial Services Modernization Act.’ http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h1479/show
“The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”
Goldman Sachs wrote them…
Clinton teed them up and Bush & Co. knocked them down the fairway.
Now Goldman owns our president too.
The bankrupting of America (and the world) on the behalf of a handful of New York investment bankers.
Kleptocracy – government of the thieves, by the thieves, for the thieves.
Follow up regarding the Cap and Trade Bill, Goldman Sachs, and the fact Goldman Sachs was the number one private donor to President Obama’s campaign at just under one million dollars.
https://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/why-not-only-cap-and-trade-will-fail-but-the-leftist-green-agenda-will-too/
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Lord Monckton Strikes Again: Scientific Truth on Global Warming
Our friend, Lord Monckton spoke late last week at the Second International Climate Conference where he discussed Climategate and the key players involved in the scandal. Although receiving a whopping $21,000,000 in public funding, their findings were not developed around science, but rather the politics of the global warming agenda.
This 35 minute video is well worth your time. Even in the first ten minutes, Lord Monckton uses a Karl Rove / Ross Perot strategy of graphs and charts to clearly illustrate the ACTUAL data and how these scientists faked the results.
This is a must see not only for those who do not yet understand the truth on the green agenda, but should also be viewed by those who do. Lots of information here that is a must know for anyone living on the planet. Lord Monckton asks specifically to share this video with everyone.
Be sure to sign the petition Lord Monckton discusses. You will find the link to the petition beneath the video.
Visit Lord Christopher Monckton’s website
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )
Reality Check for Liberals
I just want you to stop and think.
If all this global warming – green agenda crap were true; if all of the people pushing this agenda really, sincerely, just wanted a healthy planet; if they actually took the time to read the so called “science” behind it, how could they actually be on the side of Cap-and-Trade or the Kyoto Treaty?
They couldn’t.
First of all, Cap-and-Trade, has nothing to do with saving the planet, and neither do Agenda 21,COP 15 or the Kyoto Agreement or whatever other name it’s wants to go by these days. It’s all about control. Not about a “green” planet – all about profit to a few at the expense of the many.
If the green movement wanted alternative energy, they would have embraced it. It’s already out there. They would have spent money to perfect it, instead they spend their money, and our tax money, to fight it in court.
If the green movement wanted to impact the health of the planet, they wouldn’t all fly around in private jets or ride around in stretch limo’s telling the rest of us we should walk or bike to work. Those like Al Gore and the other elitists pushing it wouldn’t have several mammoth and lavish homes spread throughout the world while pushing pack-and-stack on the rest of us. They wouldn’t be fighting local farmers and forcing us to import our food from foreign countries at great expense and great carbon outlay.
There are so many, many issues with the green movement in which their actions contradict their drivel. Yet, no one questions. Come on, really. Congress will investigate whether baseball players take steroids, but not whether the science behind a complete overhaul of the American way of life is legit?
Not only will government not investigate, they won’t allow challenges, not even from noted scientists.
If you are still in the camp of the green movement, and you believe it’s all about the betterment of the earth, please take some time to read through documents and videos, etc we have compiled on this site.
Start with the Maurice Strong files. Strong, Soros, Club of Rome, etc… if it’s all about the earth, why do you think the power players of global business and corruption are also the people pushing the agenda? Won’t you listen to their own words? I don’t ask you to believe me.
Are you aware of Agenda 21, which dictates the policies of the green movement, including depopulation of the earth (not population control – actual depopulation), loss of property rights for homeowners around the world, loss of sovereignty for all nations- ceding to a global government?
It’s one thing to have a liberal ideology, it’s another thing to simply drink the grape kool-aid. They’ve spiked your drink – now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to do the hard work, read the data, see the facts or just believe what they tell you? Is it Jonestown, Guyana all over again?
If you actually care about the planet, educate yourself on the real facts. Don’t allow them to think for you, think for yourself. If you want a better planet and want to solve actual issues, I think you’ll find many freinds on the right willing to join with you. That goes for so called “health care reform” too.
Do you think by supporting them you won’t have to yield to their policies, or do you just not know what their policies are?
If it’s about solving real problems, let’s do it. I’ll help you.
If it’s about you using phoney baloney to control me and my life, I will fight you til the day I die.
I’m not a scientist. But there is one scientific formula I know:
< Freedom = >Government Control = Profit-from-corruption²
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )The Gold at the End of Obama’s “Reign”bow
“Nobody likes paying taxes, particularly in times of economic stress,” Obama said. “But most Americans meet their responsibilities because they understand that it’s an obligation of citizenship, necessary to pay the costs of our common defense and our mutual well-being.”
- Lael Brainard, nominee for Treasury Undersecretary of International Affairs
- Capricia Marshall, Chief of protocol for the State Department
- Kathleen Sebelius, secretary, Health and Human Services
- Ron Kirk, Trade Representative: The former mayor of Dallas, Tex
- Caroline Atkinson, Treasury Undersecretary of International Affairs
- Tom Daschle, nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services
- Nancy Killefer, nominee, Administration’s Chief Performance Officer
- Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor’s husband
- Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, the man who oversees the IRS
1) On people making more than $250,000.
- $338 billion – Bush tax cuts expire
$179 billion – eliminate itemized deduction
$118 billion – capital gains tax hike - Total: $636,000,000,000 /10 years
2) On Businesses:
- $17 billion – Reinstate Superfund taxes
$24 billion – tax carried-interest as income
$5 billion – codify “economic substance doctrine”
$61 billion – repeal LIFO
$210 billion – international enforcement, reform deferral, other tax reform
$4 billion – information reporting for rental payments
$5.3 billion – excise tax on Gulf of Mexico oil and gas
$3.4 billion – repeal expensing of tangible drilling costs
$62 million – repeal deduction for tertiary injectants
$49 million – repeal passive loss exception for working interests in oil and natural gas properties
$13 billion – repeal manufacturing tax deduction for oil and natural gas companies
$1 billion – increase to 7 years geological and geophysical amortization period for independent producers
$882 million – eliminate advanced earned income tax credit - Total: $353,000,000,000 /10 years
Why I Call It the Breath Tax
Rudd had hoped to take his carbon emissions trade scheme to next week’s global talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders will discuss new targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions….
The rejection gives Rudd a legal trigger to call an election, that could come as early as March or April 2010, and to then ram his laws through a special joint sitting of both houses of parliament if he is returned to power.
“We will do all we can, and continue to do all we can to safeguard our children’s future. And we will not take a backward step,” Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told a hostile Senate at the end of a marathon week-long debate….
The Senate rejection throws the future of carbon trading in Australia into confusion, creating new uncertainty for business which had sought clarity from the political debate.
“From the point of view of a lot of businesses in Australia they’re now back in the dark. No-one knows what is coming next,” said Tim Hanlin, chief executive of the Australian Climate Exchange.
Unfortunately, the target for climate stabilization may be moving more quickly than progress on policy. Recent empirical evidence indicates climate change is taking place considerably faster than scientists had expected only a decade ago. Furthermore, paleoclimatic research indicates that earlier climate change episodes also took place rapidly. If rapid change is occurring, a considerably lower policy target than 450 ppm is justified. The 350 ppm CO2 goal is only starting to receive attention among policy makers or in the global political discussions over climate, although Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review, have recently endorsed the 350 ppm target. The chief climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, argues that a reduction from the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 385 ppm, to 350 ppm CO2 by 2100 will be essential to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change. The lag in the discussion is in part due to the lack of analyses in the economics literature of the costs and benefits of a 350 ppm CO2 stabilization trajectory. For this reason, Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3) initiated this study of the economics of the 350 ppm target.
Hansen and his co-authors describe a detailed scenario for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of
reaching 350 ppm CO2 by 2100:
• Coal burning is phased out or achieves 100 percent carbon capture by 2030.
• Oil and gas prices rise steadily as these finite resources approach exhaustion.
• A combination of ending deforestation and initiating large-scale reforestation causes significant
negative emissions (that is, a withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere).
What does it take to get to 350?
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The authors of the SEI proposal use less elegant language: “The GDRs’ burden-sharing system is progressive with respect to both responsibility and capacity.”
They reason that 15.6% of the world’s population are in countries in the “high income” bracket and should be responsible for 78.5% of GDR costs of emissions control. Countries in the “low income” bracket contain 36.7% of the world’s population and should be responsible for only 0.5% of the costs.
The United States, they calculate, should pay 34.3% of the global bill, more than four times the burden of any other country.
SEI estimates that American taxpayers would need to pay $2,697 in annual per capita costs to achieve GDR’s global goals.
This amount is in addition to what taxpayers would pay for a carbon tax or cap-and-trade costs to cut emissions. The SEI study does not hazard a guess as to how much it would cost developed countries like the U.S. to cut their own emissions. Nor does it compare the cost and effectiveness of various policy alternatives.
Even with respect to only the high-income nations, the average U.S. taxpayer is very heavily punished. The average burden among high-income nations is only $1,845 per taxpayer. Taxpayers in 47 nations have to pay, on average, less than $5 each. People in 17 nations wouldn’t owe a penny.
SEI’s headquarters is in faraway Stockholm, Sweden. But a U.S. headquarters office opened at the Tufts University campus in Somerville, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, in April 2006.
According to IRS records, the U.S. Center of the Stockholm Environment Institute reported revenue of $1,483,391, with U.S. government agency support of $929,786. The total amount of revenue available to SEI is unavailable because many SEI-US projects, such as the GDR framework proposal, are developed in conjunction with SEI in Sweden, which has disclosed its revenue sources but not their amounts.
According to its 2007 annual report, SEI support comes from universities, foundations, corporations, the Swedish, U.S. and other foreign governments, and various nongovernmental organizations
SEI also works closely with the Earth Island Institute, one of America’s most radical environmental groups. Earth Island’s “EcoEquity” project was co-founded by Tom Athanasiou, one of the authors of the GDR framework.
The Earth Island Institute, which has been featured in numerous Capital Research Center reports, was founded in 1982 by David Brower, an anti-technology extremist so radical he was once kicked out of the Sierra Club.
Earth Island regards itself as an “incubator” and “fiscal sponsor” for grassroots activist groups like Athanasiou’s EcoEquity project.
One of the announced purposes of EcoEquity is to “prepare the American people” for the demands that GDR will make of them.
Earth Island receives funding from the Surdna Foundation ($150,000 in 2006), George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($300,000 in 2006), Marisla Foundation ($40,000 in 2006), Tides Foundation (more than $420,000 since 1999), and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (more than $150,000 since 1999). (Read more about the Earth Island Institute in “Ted Turner: Down, But Not Out,” Foundation Watch, November 2004; “‘Energy Independence’: A Formula For Attacking Energy Production,” Organization Trends, January 2007; and “Eco-Terrorism,” Organization Trends, February 2007.
Just as in Australia, our government is trying to force this global warming hoax down our throats. In less than one week, our President will head to Copenhagen. Please make sure the White House knows how you feel on treaties and legislation that would lead to an eventual “Breath Tax”.
The Greatest Scam In The History of Earth
Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a “climate emergency.” As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the “trigger” placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee.
As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points out, the Kerry-Boxer bill requires the declaration of a “climate emergency” if the concentration of carbon dioxide and other declared greenhouse gases in the atmosphere exceeds 450 parts per million (ppm). It was at about 286 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and now sits at around 368 ppm.
That figure was picked out of a hat because the warm-mongers believe that’s the level at which the polar ice caps will disappear, boats can be moored on the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dead polar bears will wash up on the beaches of Malibu.
The Senate version includes a section that gives the president authority, under this declared “climate emergency,” to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions … to address shortfalls” in achieving greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions.
What the “appropriate actions” might be are not defined and presumably left up to the discretion of the White House. Could the burning of coal be suspended or recreational driving be banned? Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked the EPA for a definition and received no response.
Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Horner says “this agenda transparently is not about GHG concentrations, or the climate. It’s about what the provision would bring: almost limitless power over private economic activity and individual liberty for the activist president and, for the reluctant leader, litigious greens and courts” packed by liberal Democrat appointees.
“Environmental groups have been working to deny grazing rights to America’s ranchers for decades. They do so by claiming violations of environmental policy, suing federal environmental agencies and ultimately, tying up ranchers’ time and resources in costly, and often baseless, court battles,” said Jeff Faulkner, Western Legacy Alliance (WLA) member. “What makes this situation worse is the fact that these environmental groups such as Western Watersheds Project and the Center for Biological Diversity are shaking down federal government programs so they can access taxpayer dollars to fund their radical agendas.”
Two of the federal programs that are seemingly handing out millions, and possibly billions, to environmental groups are the EAJA and the Judgment Fund.
The EAJA was established approximately 30 years ago by Congress to ensure that individuals, small businesses and/or public interest groups with limited financial capacity could seek judicial redress from unreasonable government actions that threatened their rights, privileges or interests.
According the U.S. Department of the Treasury website, the Judgment Fund, which was created in the 1960’s, “…is available for most court judgments and Justice Department compromise settlements of actual or imminent lawsuits against the government. Congress has added a number of administrative claim awards (settlements by agencies at the administrative level, without a lawsuit). The Judgment Fund has no fiscal year limitations, and there is no need for Congress to appropriate funds to it annually or otherwise. Moreover, disbursements from it are not attributed to or accounted for by the agencies whose activities give rise to awards paid. Absent a specific statutory requirement, the agency responsible is not required to reimburse the Judgment Fund.”
Since 2003, the Judgment Fund has paid out $4.7 billion in judgments, including the reimbursement of attorney’s fees. It appears environmental groups have accessed millions of taxpayer dollars from this fund; however, the Web site reporting these payments does not indicate to whom the payments were made or for what purpose. Additional investigation reveals that the same environmental groups benefiting from EAJA payments are accessing the Judgment Fund to millions of dollars each year.
An article at Fox News about the open letter noted:
American taxpayers are being forced to fund thousands of lawsuits filed against the federal government by environmental organizations — with their lawyers clocking thousands of hours and charging fees of up to $650 an hour.
The U.S. government hands out millions of dollars each year to various environmental organizations to help protect fish, wildlife and other aspects of the environment. And every year, those same groups spend millions suing the government over everything from forest policy and carbon emissions to water quality and wolf habitats.
Who paid the attorneys fees? The American taxpayers did.
In the lucrative world of environmental law, the biggest defendant is the federal government, and taxpayers foot the bill. The nation’s ten largest environmental groups have sued the government more than 3,000 times in a nine-year period, according to legal fund the Western Legacy Alliance, an Idaho-based legal fund that defends ranchers and farmers.
Now, the growing number of cases is beginning to attract the attention of some lawmakers in Congress.
Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., has written to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation, pointing out that much of the money being paid comes out of the Equal Access to Justice Act fund, which Congress set up for the indigent and public interest groups to recover legal fees.
Right now, the government does not account for how much is paid out to whom or for what reason.
“These are taxpayer dollars that are being used by the federal government to compensate people who have sued the federal government. I believe that taxpayers have the right to know who those people are and how much they’ve been paid,” Lummis told Fox News.
They should not expect any help from the current Administration, however.
Bloomberg noted: Billionaire George Soros, looking to address the “political problem” of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy technology and donate $100 million to an environmental advisory group to aid policymakers. [He] announced the investment in Copenhagen on Oct. 10 at a meeting on climate change sponsored by Project Syndicate. The group is an international association made up of 430 newspapers from 150 countries.
…Soros’s announcement comes two months before 190 nations will gather in the Danish capital for a final round of negotiations on a new climate treaty that includes provisions to finance clean- energy projects in developing nations. Talks last week in Bangkok were marked by a dispute between richer and poorer nations over whether to renew or abandon the Kyoto Protocol, the only existing global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide, which is blamed for global warming.
Soros, 79, also will establish the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based organization to which he will donate $10 million a year for 10 years.
Extreme left journalist George Monbiot ignored all the facts I provided when he was pointing a finger at me. He’s ignoring them again, which forces him to assume the deniers are at fault. He wrote, “There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.”
The sphere is expanding for several reasons.
- All evidence rejects the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing warming or climate change.
- Facts are gradually getting to the public despite obstructionism by journalists like Monbiot.
- Temperature projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are consistently wrong.
- Record cold temperatures are occurring everywhere.
- Motives of those pushing the need for reduction in CO2 are being exposed.
- Economic costs of a completely unnecessary action are emerging.
Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, suffered a data breach in recent days when a hacker apparently broke into their system and made away with thousands of emails and documents. The stolen data was then posted to a Russian server and has quickly made the rounds among climate skeptics. The documents within the archive, if proven to be authentic, would at best be embarrassing for many prominent climate researchers and at worst, damning.
The electronic break in itself has been verified by the director of the research unit, Professor Phil Jones. He told Britain’s Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
The paper goes on to discuss, at length the individual emails, and if you have not yet seen them, I urge to to follow the link.
In Australia, where the story first broke, the Herald Sun noted:
…So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics.
This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.
Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:
Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.
Hackers have broken into the data base of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – one of the world’s leading alarmist centers – and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.
The ethics of this are dubious. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion – sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.
“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball. “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature. It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.
“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge. Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.”
While the mainstream media is bending into pretzels to keep the scandal under the rug, Climategate is already the biggest scientific scandal in history because of the global policy implications.
Free Market or Government Control – Which will you demand?
— Jimmy Carter, in his second major energy speech, on April 18, 1977.
Methane (natural gas), while frequently developed with petroleum, also occurs in association with coal. Coalbed methane accounts for about 7.5% of current US natural gas production. Until recently, methane was thought to be thermogenic: derived from long-buried carbonaceous materials subjected to intense heat and pressures over geologic time. Additional work then determined that some percentage of the methane was biogenic in origin: created by ancient microbes that metabolized other hydrocarbon sources to generate methane. Most of this was thought to have occurred millions of years ago, when the hydrocarbon deposits were less mature and closer to the surface of the earth….
Dirt-Powered Bacteria Batteries
Bacteria are one of the most abundant organisms on the planet and also one of the most studied. Today, scientists use bacteria for genetics research, antibiotics, and yes! Even biofuels. Recent technological advances have made a battery running on bacteria a reality. Known as microbial fuels cells or MFCs, batteries running on bacteria and other microbes have been keenly researched by scientist for decades.
Turning Wastewater into Ethanol
As the world continues to search for alternative fuels to fuel our cars and heat our homes, many different opportunities are being explored and there has finally been a significant breakthrough in turning wastewater into ethanol as an automobile fuel source. Qteros and Applied Clean Tech have teamed up to create a biofuel that will get us that much closer to having another true “green” energy source. Water treatment systems are expensive to run and have presented communities where they are located with some significant challenges. Most notably, what they can do with the sludge that is left over once the wastewater has been treated. Plant managers may no longer faced with the difficult task of figuring out this problem.
December 2009 could spell the end of US Sovereignty
Is this what President Obama Meant On Thursday?
Lord Christopher Moncton is an adversary of climate change legislation, pointing out the fallacious arguments in it’s favor. Most notably, he was an official political advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His full bio appears in the full length version of the video at bottom of column.
President George W. Bush did not submit the treaty for Senate ratification based on the exemption granted to China (now the world’s largest gross emitter of carbon dioxide, although emission is low per capita). Bush opposed the treaty because of the strain he believed the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasized the uncertainties which he believed were present in the scientific evidence. Furthermore, the U.S. was concerned with broader exemptions of the treaty. For example, the U.S. did not support the split between annex I countries and others. Bush said of the treaty:
This is a challenge that requires a 100% effort; ours, and the rest of the world’s. The world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is the People’s Republic of China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto … America’s unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change … Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
In June 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency released the “Climate Action Report 2002”. Some observers have interpreted this report as being supportive of the protocol, although the report itself does not explicitly endorse the protocol.[citation needed] At the G8 meeting in June 2005 administration officials expressed a desire for “practical commitments industrialized countries can meet without damaging their economies”. According to those same officials, the United States is on track to fulfill its pledge to reduce its carbon intensity 18% by 2012. The United States has signed the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a pact that allows those countries to set their goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions individually, but with no enforcement mechanism. Supporters of the pact see it as complementing the Kyoto Protocol while being more flexible.
Here is the official document: http://vienna.usembassy.gov/en/download/pdf/kyoto.pdf
The Administration’s position was not uniformly accepted in the U.S. For example, Paul Krugman noted that the target 18% reduction in carbon intensity is still actually an increase in overall emissions. The White House has also come under criticism for downplaying reports that link human activity and greenhouse gas emissions to climate change and that a White House official, former oil industry advocate and current Exxon Mobil officer, Philip Cooney, watered down descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists, charges the White House denies. Critics point to the Bush administration’s close ties to the oil and gas industries. In June 2005, State Department papers showed the administration thanking Exxon executives for the company’s “active involvement” in helping to determine climate change policy, including the U.S. stance on Kyoto. Input from the business lobby group Global Climate Coalition was also a factor.
In 2002, Congressional researchers who examined the legal status of the Protocol advised that signature of the UNFCCC imposes an obligation to refrain from undermining the Protocol’s object and purpose, and that while the President probably cannot implement the Protocol alone, Congress can create compatible laws on its own initiative.
Treaties http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Treaties.htm The Constitution gives the Senate the power to approve, by a two-thirds vote, treaties made by the executive branch.
President George W. Bush did not submit the treaty for Senate ratification based on the exemption granted to China (now the world’s largest gross emitter of carbon dioxide, although emission is low per capita). Bush opposed the treaty because of the strain he believed the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasized the uncertainties which he believed were present in the scientific evidence. Furthermore, the U.S. was concerned with broader exemptions of the treaty. For example, the U.S. did not support the split between annex I countries and others. Bush said of the treaty:
This is a challenge that requires a 100% effort; ours, and the rest of the world’s. The world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is the People’s Republic of China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto … America’s unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change … Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
In June 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency released the “Climate Action Report 2002”. Some observers have interpreted this report as being supportive of the protocol, although the report itself does not explicitly endorse the protocol.[citation needed] At the G8 meeting in June 2005 administration officials expressed a desire for “practical commitments industrialized countries can meet without damaging their economies”. According to those same officials, the United States is on track to fulfill its pledge to reduce its carbon intensity 18% by 2012. The United States has signed the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a pact that allows those countries to set their goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions individually, but with no enforcement mechanism. Supporters of the pact see it as complementing the Kyoto Protocol while being more flexible.
Here is the official document: http://vienna.usembassy.gov/en/download/pdf/kyoto.pdf
The Administration’s position was not uniformly accepted in the U.S. For example, Paul Krugman noted that the target 18% reduction in carbon intensity is still actually an increase in overall emissions. The White House has also come under criticism for downplaying reports that link human activity and greenhouse gas emissions to climate change and that a White House official, former oil industry advocate and current Exxon Mobil officer, Philip Cooney, watered down descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists, charges the White House denies. Critics point to the Bush administration’s close ties to the oil and gas industries. In June 2005, State Department papers showed the administration thanking Exxon executives for the company’s “active involvement” in helping to determine climate change policy, including the U.S. stance on Kyoto. Input from the business lobby group Global Climate Coalition was also a factor.
In 2002, Congressional researchers who examined the legal status of the Protocol advised that signature of the UNFCCC imposes an obligation to refrain from undermining the Protocol’s object and purpose, and that while the President probably cannot implement the Protocol alone, Congress can create compatible laws on its own initiative.
Article II, section 2, of the Constitution states that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” These few words are the cornerstone to a major part of our system of divided powers, checks and balances.
Executive Agreements
In addition to treaties, which may not enter into force and become binding on the United States without the advice and consent of the Senate, there are other types of international agreements concluded by the executive branch and not submitted to the Senate. These are classified in the United States as executive agreements, not as treaties, a distinction that has only domestic significance. International law regards each mode of international agreement as binding, whatever its designation under domestic law.
The difficulty in obtaining a two-thirds vote was one of the motivating forces behind the vast increase in executive agreements after World War II. In 1952, for instance, the United States signed 14 treaties and 291 executive agreements. This was a larger number of executive agreements than had been reached during the entire century of 1789 to 1889. Executive agreements continue to grow at a rapid rate. The United States is currently a party to nearly nine hundred treaties and more than five thousand executive agreements.
Status as Law
By virtue of the Constitution’s supremacy clause (Article VI, clause 2) a treaty that is concluded compatibly with applicable constitutional requirements may have status as the “supreme law of the land,” along with federal statutes and the Constitution itself. A treaty does not become effective as U.S. domestic law automatically, however, upon its entry into force on the international level. Instead, this occurs only where the instrument is “self-executing” and operates without any necessity for implementing legislation.
When the Constitution created an executive branch and a president of the United States, it gave him no unchecked or unconditional powers. The Constitution made treatymaking a concurrent power. The United States Senate has carefully guarded its share of this power for two hundred years.
The vast majority of treaties have been ratified by the Senate. Since 1789, only twenty-one treaties have been rejected by the full Senate.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO STOP THIS? PLEASE ACT NOW!
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt EMAIL YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES AS WELL AS LEADERSHIP TODAY – CALL THEM MONDAY – Here’s the directory
Amerikeith’s site has Congressional Twitter links posted if you would rather tweet them:http://amerikeith.wordpress.com/contact-congress/congress-on-twitter/
Bring this to the attention to your local media and national media outlets – TELL THEM YOU KNOW http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/media/
For Further Information:
Full Hour and a half speech by Lord Mockton at Free Market Institute This week
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0
Link to Free Market Institute website
Here is a previous column on the subject http://wp.me/pxG9Z-ak
At link above you will find the 225 page 2009 Minority Report “..Scientists Debunk Global Warming Crisis”
FoxieNews also disusses this on her site http://foxienews.com/blog/?p=145
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 12 so far )A History Lesson on Goldman Sachs – one of the main players in Cap and Trade Legislation
“The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”
Goldman Sachs wrote them…
Clinton teed them up and Bush & Co. knocked them down the fairway.
Now Goldman owns our president too.
The bankrupting of America (and the world) on the behalf of a handful of New York investment bankers.
Kleptocracy – government of the thieves, by the thieves, for the thieves.
So- first they took your 401K (internet bubble), then they took your house (real estate bubble) and assaulted your 401K again, raised the interest rates on your charge cards to 20%+. For those of us still hanging on – here comes Cap and Trade. Another bill engineered by Goldman Sachs, with a little help from their friends. The article above will give you the details.
Now read the article: http://tinyurl.com/lys3m3
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression
By American Solutions | 10/02/09
President Obama’s energy “czar” Carol Browner hinted today that the EPA might implement a cap and trade plan for carbon dioxide emissions even if that type of plan fails in the Senate
Browner said in an interview today, “We also have the reality of EPA, under current law, moving forward…to start the traditional regulatory clock,” another less-than-disguised attempt to threaten Congress into passing some form of carbon criminalization bill such as the Waxman-Markey bill or the Senate version of the energy tax. This also comes in the wake of EPA’s decision to forego what it knows is best (legislation) by issuing rules for regulating carbon dioxide
Even more interesting is that the energy czar is actually encouraging well-connected groups and businesses to engage in lobbying. Browner said the credible threat of EPA regulating carbon would “obviously encourage the business community to raise their voices in Congress” in support of the energy tax.
In other words, the government is moving full speed ahead with a plan, regardless of whether our own elected leaders support it. And in the process, they’re hoping that businesses will spend millions of dollars in lobbying to support a devastating measure like the Boxer-Kerry energy tax.
A One-Two Punch to the American People
FOCUS IS NOW ON HEALTH CARE REFORM LEGISLATION- BUT MANY OTHER PERILS ARE IN OUR IMMEDIATE FUTURE:
UN CLIMATE SCIENTISTS and other Government Scientists SPEAK OUT ON GLOBAL WARMING
“Controlling carbon is kind of a bureaucrat’s dream.
If you control carbon, you control life.”
– MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, UN IPCC lead author and reviewer.
Per Senator Inhofe’s website: The Senate climate debate has largely been in standby mode since June, but Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is ready to kick-start the process with the release next week of a draft bill. Sources off Capitol Hill say they expect Boxer to start legislative hearings during the week of Oct. 5, with a tentative markup penciled in for the week of Oct. 12. Of course, much depends on the fate of the Senate health care bill, just how quick U.S. EPA can turn around an economic analysis of Boxer’s legislation and whether the chairwoman wants to satisfy key moderates on her panel, which include Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.). Here is the House version that passed http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h2454/show
At link above you will find the 225 page 2009 Minority Report “..Scientists Debunk Global Warming Crisis”
One scientist, DR. JOHN T. EVERETT, UN IPCC lead author and reviewer, led work on five impact analyses for the IPCC including Fisheries, Polar Regions, Oceans and Coastal Zones. a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) senior manager, project manager for the UN Atlas of the Oceans, said “It is time for a reality check,” Warming is not a big deal and is not a bad thing, The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I would much rather have the present warm climate, and even further warming, than the next ice age that will bring temperatures much colder than even today. The NOAA PaleoClimate Program shows us that when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the earth was much warmer, the CO2 levels were 2 to 4 times higher, and coral reefs were much more expansive. The earth was so productive then that we are still using the oil, coal, and gas it generated. For most life in the oceans, warming means faster growth, reduced energy requirements to stay warm, lower winter mortalities, and wider ranges of distribution,” he explained. “No one knows whether the Earth is going to keep warming, or since reaching a peak in 1998, we are at the start of a cooling cycle that will last several decades or more.” The quotes from 700+ scientists go on from there. Proof there is no concensus at all.
Despite tax dollars being spent on a report, in which consensus is Global Warming Science is not based on science at all, but rather a ploy by the UN and governments worldwide to take control, many of your elected officials refuse to back down.
At http://www.petitionproject.org/
31,478 American scientists have signed a petition, including 9,029 with PhDs signed a petition. The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis.
Proved: There is No Climate Crisis -Written by Robert Ferguson (July 2008)
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html
Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered [http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/index.cfm] demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) stated way back in a 2003 press release : http://inhofe.senate.gov/pressreleases/climate.htm
- “Over the past 2 hours, I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation’s top climate scientists.
What have those scientists concluded? The Kyoto Protocol has no environmental benefits; natural variability, not fossil fuel emissions, is the overwhelming factor influencing climate change; satellite data, confirmed by NOAA balloon measurements, confirms that no meaningful warming has occurred over the last century; and climate models predicting dramatic temperature increases over the next 100 years are flawed and highly imperfect.
- Finally I will return to the words of Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, who compiled the Oregon Petition:
But if the relationship between public policy and science is distorted for political ends, the result is flawed policy that hurts the environment, the economy, and the people we serve.” …
- “Over the past 2 hours, I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation’s top climate scientists. Finally I will return to the words of Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, who compiled the Oregon Petition:
What have those scientists concluded? The Kyoto Protocol has no environmental benefits; natural variability, not fossil fuel emissions, is the overwhelming factor influencing climate change; satellite data, confirmed by NOAA balloon measurements, confirms that no meaningful warming has occurred over the last century; and climate models predicting dramatic temperature increases over the next 100 years are flawed and highly imperfect.
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
These are sobering words, which the extremists have chosen to ignore. So what could possibly be the motivation for global warming alarmism? Since I’ve become chairman of the EPW Committee, it’s become pretty clear: fundraising. Environmental extremists rake in million of dollars, not to solve environmental problems, but to fuel their ever-growing fundraising machines, part of which are financed by federal taxpayers.
So what have we learned from the scientists and economists I’ve talked about today?
The claim that global warming is caused by man-made emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science.
And yet, Democrats and those aligning themselves with the environmental justice crowd in Washington insist on getting Cap and Trade legislation passed. They must be stopped.
News for 09/16/2009- An Open Letter to the Good Democrats of America
Good Democrats of America,
Your party has been co-opted by special interests and in particular, a billionaire who cares nothing for your country, your principles, your opinions. You need to take back your party, or as this may be impossible at this late date, you may need to start a new party of your own, reflective of your principles. Time is of the essence. Allow me to first introduce you to the actual head of your party. This will be an ongoing series. You don’t have to believe what I am saying, but please take time to investigate for yourself. I am confident the real Democrats of America do not condone corruption, anti-constitutional activities and laws or socialism.
Meet George Soros http://www.soros.org/…
http://www.discoverth…
George Soros was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. His father, Teodoro Schwartz, was an Orthodox Jew who, in 1936, changed the family surname from Schwartz to Soros in order to enable his family to conceal its Jewish identity and thus to survive the Nazi Holocaust. In 1947 Soros’ family relocated from Hungary to England. Five years later, George graduated from the London School of Economics. He subsequently worked for a London stockbroker. In 1956 Soros, with meager personal assets, emigrated to the United States. To date, he has amassed a personal fortune exceeding $7 billion. In addition, his management company controls billions of dollars more in investor assets.
In 1979 Soros established the Open Society Institute (OSI), which serves as the flagship of a network of Soros foundations that donate tens of millions of dollars each year to a wide array of individuals and organizations that share the founder’s agendas. Those agendas can be summarized as follows:
*promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
*promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
*opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
*promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
*promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
*promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
defending the civil rights and liberties of suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
*financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
*advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
*opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
*promoting socialized medicine in the United States
*promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather … the demolition of technological/industrial civilization”
*bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
*promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
*promoting taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand
*advocating stricter gun-control measures
*advocating the legalization of marijuana
Moreover, there are numerous “secondary” or “indirect” affiliates of the Soros network. These include organizations which do not receive direct funding from Soros and OSI, but which are funded by one or more organizations that do. These secondary affiliates also include groups that work collaboratively or synergistically with Soros-funded entities. In 1996 Soros launched the Soros Documentary Fund with a mission to “spur awareness, action and social change.” Over the ensuing decade, this Fund would help finance the production of several hundred documentaries. In 2001, the Fund’s leadership was turned over to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute with a continuing mission: “to support the production of documentaries on social justice, human rights, civil liberties, and freedom of expression issues around the world.” According to journalist Rondi Adamson, most of the documentaries that that the Fund supports “are highly critical of some aspect of American life, capitalism or Western culture,” and generally share Soros’ worldview that “America is a troubling if not sinister influence in the world, that the War on Terror is a fraud and terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters, and that markets are fundamentally unjust.
According to Richard Poe, co-author (with David Horowitz) of the book The Shadow Party:
“The Shadow Party is the real power driving the Democrat machine. It is a network of radicals dedicated to transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive. The leader of these radicals is … George Soros. He has essentially privatized the Democratic Party, bringing it under his personal control. The Shadow Party is the instrument through which he exerts that control…. It works by siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that would have gone to the Democratic Party in normal times, and putting those contributions at the personal disposal of Mr. Soros. He then uses that money to buy influence and loyalty where he sees fit. In 2003, Soros set up a network of privately-owned groups which acts as a shadow or mirror image of the Party. It performs all the functions we would normally expect the real Democratic Party to perform, such as shaping the Party platform, fielding candidates, running campaigns, and so forth. However, it performs these functions under the private supervision of Mr. Soros and his associates. The Shadow Party derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money. By controlling the Democrat purse strings, the Shadow Party can make or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund him. During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for Democrat candidates, prompting one of its operatives, MoveOn PAC director Eli Pariser, to declare, ‘Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it.…'”
The Shadow Party
The so-called “Shadow Democratic Party,” or “Shadow Party,” is a nationwide network of more than five-dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats. Its activities include fundraising, get-out-the-vote drives, political advertising, opposition research, and media manipulation. The Shadow Party was conceived and organized principally by George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Harold McEwan Ickes — all identified with the Democratic Party left.
A political consultancy called the Thunder Road Group (TRG), located on the 7th Floor of the historic Motion Picture Association of America headquarters at 888 Sixteenth Street NW in Washington, DC, serves as the unofficial headquarters of the Shadow Party. Three other Shadow Party groups also lease space in the same building, including America Coming Together (ACT), America Votes, and the Partnership for America’s Families. The clustering of these groups in a building owned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is significant. The MPAA has long enjoyed a close relationship with the Democratic Party; many high-ranking Democrats have transitioned comfortably from government jobs into glamorous posts in the MPAA’s upper management.
As of August 2004, the husband-wife team of George Soros and Susan Soros had contributed $13,120,000 to Shadow Party groups and operations, second only to Soros’ longtime friend and collaborator, insurance mogul Peter B. Lewis ($14,175,000). The third leading donor was Jane Fonda ($13,085,750), followed by Hollywood producer Stephen Bing in fourth place ($9,869,014). Other major funders of the Shadow Party include the Tides Foundation and the Open Society Institute (both Soros funded entities).
SOROS Has Successfully “TARGETED” Other Countries for “Regime Change”
Asserting that America needed “a regime change” to oust Bush, Soros declared that derailing the President’s reelection bid in 2004 “is the central focus of my life … a matter of life and death.” “America under Bush,” he said, “is a danger to the world, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”
Soros had previously experienced considerable success in effecting “regime change” elsewhere in the world. For instance, he helped fund the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” that brought Vaclav Havel to power in the Czech Republic. And by his own admission, he helped engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Georgia, and Yugoslavia.
When Soros targets a country for “regime change,” he begins by creating a shadow government — a fully formed government-in-exile, ready to assume power when the opportunity arises. The Shadow Party he has built in America greatly resembles those he has created in other countries prior to instigating a coup.
Soros’ Vision is Reflected in Our Government Today:
In a November 2008 interview with Spiegel, Soros made some comments that accurately outlined precisely the course that President Obama’s administration would eventually pursue in 2009:
“I think we need a large stimulus package which will provide funds for state and local government to maintain their budgets — because they are not allowed by the constitution to run a deficit. For such a program to be successful, the federal government would need to provide hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, another infrastructure program is necessary. In total, the cost would be in the 300 to 600 billion dollar range [in addition to the $700 billion bailout which the government already had given to the financial industry]…. I think this is a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The U.S. needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. I would use the revenues from these auctions to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy. That would be yet another federal program that could help us to overcome the current stagnation.”
The interviewer then said: “Your proposal would be dismissed on Wall Street as ‘big government.’ Republicans might call it European-style ‘socialism.'” Soros replied:
“That is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society…. I think it is better to have a government that wants to provide good government than a government that doesn’t believe in government…. At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable. Once the economy begins to recover, you have to balance the budget. In 2010, the Bush tax cuts will expire and we should not extend them. But we will also need additional revenues.”
Soros Money Financed Communist Van Jones AIM Column By Cliff Kincaid
http://www.aim.org/ai…
When the list of donors to the Van Jones “Green for All” organization is examined, one name stands out-the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros. The Green for All 2008 annual report is also notable for the pictures of the powerful people who associated with Jones. They include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Al Gore. While the Open Society Institute was supporting Green for All in 2008, when Jones was running it, the Soros-funded organization was financially underwriting the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights when Jones was in charge of that group. The Open Society Institute gave the Ella Baker Center $151,800 in 2006 and $140,000 in 2007. Jones ran this group during the years 1996-2007. He then emerged as a senior fellow at the Soros-funded Center for American Progress. Other funders of the Green for All group included Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, the Rockefeller family, Men’s Warehouse, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the New World Foundation, the Schwab Charitable Fund, the Streisand Foundation, the Service Employees International Union, and the Tides Center and Foundation. The 990 IRS forms of the Open Society Institute also disclose $560,000 in 2007 and $455,000 in 2006 to the Equal Justice Society, whose president, Eva Paterson, emerged as the major apologist for Jones when he came under attack for his communist background and anti-American statements.
An Unconstitutional America – Part 2
http://jim_hayden1.tr…
…By its very nature government must have supreme power to rule and to govern. It is for this very reason why our Constitution was written in the way it was. We as individual citizens have the absolute power to decide for ourselves what is constitutional and what isn’t constitutional. We as individual citizens have the absolute power to force the government to prove in a court of law that its actions against us are within the strict limitations of the constitution. Finally we can cast our vote for individuals who will support and defend the Constitution and who will insure that our individual rights are fully protected.
In part 1 of this 2 part series on unconstitutional America, we look at several just passed, proposed or pending legislation:
S. 773 -Bill Allows for Government to Shut Down Internet In Time of Crisis (2009)
H.R.675 – To amend title 10, United States Code, to provide police officers, criminal investigators, and game law enforcement officers of the Department of Defense with authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms. (2009)
H.R. 645 – National Emergency Centers Establishment Act of 2009
HR:1388 – The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009
H.R. 45 – Blair Holt Firearms Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009
HR 3200 America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009
Today we will list more pending, proposed or recently Passed Unconstitutional Legislation:
H.R.2454 – American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009
Creates an unjust burden on citizens by raising utility rates by multiples and raising the price of literally every thing from food to medical services and goods to toys to cars to magazines from manufacturers and suppliers costs being passed along to consumers. This will, purposely, as President Obama said in his campaign, lower the standard of living for citizens in order to save energy. The thing is, this sweeping, unconstitutional, falacial legislation, which generates untold wealth for GE (NBC) and Goldman Sachs (leaders in the newly created “carbon credit” field) is based on make believe and does virtually NOTHING to help the environment.
S. 560 The Employee Free Choice Act of 2009
Is ANYTHING BUT! This bill would do away with secret ballots in the workplace for union voting. You have seen how the SEIU treats everyday citizens at Health Care Rallies, so it does not take a genius to foretell what will happen dare you vote against allowing the union to “THUGATE” your workplace. Unions used to be a good thing, but in recent history they are anything but. They are corruption filled entities hell bent on wealth for the higher ups and run just like the mob and the new national government administration. Since when is OK in America to NOT have a secret ballot? Since when in America is OK to allow intimidation in voting. Maybe this is why it was OK to have the Black Panther members intimidate voters in Philidelphia and why not much federal stink was made about ACORN co-opting our elections.
H.R. 2749 – America’s Food Safety Act of 2009.. which has already passed in the House of Representatives
Food Czar Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto exec, helped draft the Food Safety Bill. So much for the small farmer or maybe even the home gardener :
According to Gunny G Online: “This astounding control will include the elimination of organic farming by eliminating manure, mandating GMO animal feed, imposing animal drugs, and ordering applications of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers, thus, will be locked not only into the industrialization of once normal and organic farms but into the forced purchase of industry’s products.” HR 2749 creates severe criminal and civil penalties, including prison terms of up to 10 years and/or fines of up to $100,000 for each violation. Does it include judicial review, Congressional oversight, a defined and limited set of penalties and punishments for a defined set of “crimes”? Not even. The so called Food Safety Bill hands carte blanch enforcement to the whims of Obama’s Food Czar.
H.R.1 – American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (this became law)
The Stimulus Bill –
This is the economic stimulus package that was passed by Congress on Feb. 13, 2009 and signed into law by President Obama on Feb. 17. The final version is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $787 billion over the 2009-2019 period. To date, estimates are showing only 11% of the money has been spent to date.. they must mean long term stimulus. Our government is wasting the money they have taken from our pockets, to redistribute the wealth to things like ACORN, studies for things like the Marsh Mouse (Pelosi’s district), grants for stuff we neither want or need, other special interest funding, etc… Do you realize, this being only one of the “porkulus” bills passed this year, that if they would have just given the same amount of money back to the taxpayers, every man, woman and child in the country would have been given $2400.. for a family of four that’s almost ten grand! Now that, fellow citizens, would have stimulated the economy! But that would not meet the Washington agenda, would it?
This list continues, but I feel my point is well made. The government is hell bent on taking our money, our liberty, our freedom… and has insured on doing so to our great, great grandchildren by continuing the spending spree well beyond any means we have to pay back the debt. The “never let a good crisis go to waste philosphy” made famous by Rahm Emanuel and practiced by both the Bush and Obama Whitehouse, we are being forced into socialist policies that go against the very Constitution the people in Washington have sworn to uphold. We have more CZARs than Russia has had in it’s entire history- by more than double! Czars are merely away around you, your representatives and your constitution. IS THIS NOT TREASON? This is not politics as usual. This is PURPOSEFUL DEMISE OF AMERICA AS WE KNOW IT! Please, get involved. If you can attend the MARCH ON WASHINGTON on 09/12/09 – COME! There are buses leaving nearly all medium and larger towns throughout the country. It is your duty as an American to speak out against the assult to our freedom and founding documents. If you can not attend the rally in DC, there will rallies ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY THAT SAME DAY! Find one near you and just go. You do not need a sign unless you want one. You just need your body and your voice.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )News for 08/21/2009- Free Speech, Health Care Freedom Plan, Proof Obama Lies, GE Buys Influence
Here’s a Video YOU Just Have To See!
It’s pretty bad when Air America calls the President a liar. Here is what he said about big pharma in the campaign and what he DID last week. Amazing!
SUPPORT “WHOLE FOODS” STORES IF YOU LOVE FREE SPEECH from Fox News
http://www.foxnews.co…
18,000 people on Facebook are calling for a boycott of the nationwide grocery store chain Whole Foods. It has to do with the debate over health care. Now, apparently, the CEO of Whole Foods who says we do need health care reform is not as liberal as some of his progressive clientele. John Mackey, who is the CEO of Whole Food who has been running the company, started the company in Austin Texas, about 30 years. In an op-ed in the WSJ, he said here are eight ideas as a successful CEO that I have, including tort reform, allowing insurers cross state lines, self-directed ideas. And yet he is vilified by some of the more liberal followers out there of the president’s plan. The individuals who signed up to boycott are waging war against Whole Foods. They are calling him a right-wing zealot.
Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, in 2007,said he had enough money to live comfortably, cut his salary down to $1 a year, and donated all of the proceeds from his stock option to charity. This does not sound like a guy who wants to stick it to the poor when it comes to health care. He had a different idea, and that was what was in the “Wall Street Journal.” He is a self-described libertarian. And I do not know if that was angered some people. Not only was he taking $1, but he pushed this through, Greta, a $100,000 need-based fund for Whole Foods workers. Heretofore this has been considered a relatively progressive company. Now he comes out and says the government-run plan is not the way to go. And he is absolutely being slaughtered on the left side of the blogosphere. He employs thousands of people. So I propose a reverse boycott. Everyone go to Whole Foods.
If you would like to support Mr. Mackey, or free speech, sign up on the support Whole Foods Facebook page at http://www.facebook.c…
Jim DeMint’s Health Care Plan – This should be what we are discussing! Write your reps today!
All Americans should have a health insurance plan that they can afford, own, and keep – that government can never take over or take away. No American should be forced into a government-run system that limits their choices and rations their care.” – Sen. Jim DeMint
The Health Care Freedom Plan would allow every American access to health insurance and according to a study by the Heritage Foundation, would cover 22.4 million currently uninsured Americans within the five years.
Click here for the press release.
Click here for a one-page summary of the bill.
Click here for a letter of support from Americans for Tax Reform, “This will likely be the best free-market alternative to government health care offered this Congress, and I would encourage all senators to co-sponsor this excellent legislation.”
Click here to read Senator DeMint’s Op-Ed “Let’s Cut the Health Care Red Tape” from Forbes.com
The Health Care Freedom Plan:
Protects the right of Americans to keep their employer-based plan if they so choose.
Provides Americans without employer-based health insurance with vouchers of $2000 for individuals and $5000 for families to purchase health insurance.
Allows Americans with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to use their HSA funds to pay for insurance premiums, encouraging employers to contribute to their employees’ HSAs.
Creates a national market for health insurance by allowing individuals to purchase health insurance plans in any state.
Provides block grants to states to develop innovative models that ensure affordable health insurance coverage for Americans with pre-existing health conditions.
Reduces predatory and frivolous malpractice lawsuits against physicians and hospitals.
Assures that every health care consumer has access to price information prior to treatment so they can make informed decisio about their care.
Repeals financial bailouts (TARP) to fund health care vouchers.
Cap and Trade: Organized Crime’s Best Friend from Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms…
Fraud investigators arrested nine people on Wednesday over a suspected £38m carbon credit trading scam in one of the clearest signs yet of criminals targeting international schemes to combat climate change. More than 100 Revenue & Customs officers raided dozens of properties in the south of England over an alleged cross-border fraud to evade value added tax, just weeks after the Treasury imposed emergency rules in an effort to curb the problem. Trading in carbon credits – allowances for companies to produce greenhouse gases – has been dogged by problems, from legal but ethically dubious practices to alleged scams involving fictitious products. Anand Doobay, a partner at Peters & Peters, a City-based law firm specialising in financial crime, said the ethereal nature of the fast-expanding multi-billion dollar international market in carbon credits had made them an attractive target for graft: “There is an increasing amount of fraud connected with them as a commodity. It’s trading with something that’s intangible, and that isn’t regulated in the way some other commodities are.”
Forging a “New World Order” Under a One World Government by Global Research
http://www.globalrese…
This is a lengthy article that is intelligent and enlightening. Readers are encouraged to click on the link above. The article talks about global governance, how the powers that be have gotten us almost there.. a few more tweeks, already being discussed, and it’s goodbye to soveriegnty. Anyone that cares about the US as a country (or any other country for that matter), our consitution and our freedom should take a few moments to read this article.
GE seeks support for GE-minded politicians
http://canadafreepres…
GEPAC issued the following letter to GE employees soliciting contributions so that it can support politicians who make money for the company, including with respect to the Waxman-Markey climate bill, financial services reform and military spending.
…The intersection between GE’s interests and government action is clearer than ever. GEPAC is an important tool that enables GE employees to collectively help support candidates who share the values and goals of GE. While we must continue to engage elected officials to help them better understand our various businesses and how legislation affects our Company and our customers, we must also make sure that candidates who share GE’s values and goals get elected to office.
Health Care Reform That Actually Works from American Thinker
http://www.americanth…
“Where’s the Republican plan?” It’s one of the red herrings that apologists for Obamacare pull out of their bag of cliched talking points when pressed to justify Democrats’ attempt to grab control of 18% of the nation’s economy.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I turned in the President and Co to Flag@whitehosue.gov- You should too
Sincerely,
News for 07/12/2009-Mind Control, Stinky Steny, 1984 by 2020, Passport Points, Interesting Video
How Politicians and the Media Change Our Minds By Paul Murdock at Campaign For Liberty
http://www.campaignfo…
Unbeknownst to us, our lives are filled with messages that have a profound effect on our emotions, beliefs, values, and behaviors. These messages can be as obvious as a tornado siren in Kansas or as secretive and stealthy as the viruses and bacteria that invade your biological organs. What is guaranteed is that, for good or evil, the message never ends, and its impact is powerful! …Although most intelligent individuals recognize bias, the inundating messages unconsciously lead to helplessness, apathy, and eventually acquiescence. In other words, the totality of the messages eventually destroys most individual defenses! Even when we are aware! For example, if individuals are consistently faced with “supposed facts and experts” from the media, professors, politicians, and corporations, values, ideals, and behavior is subtly manipulated like a river that never ceases to erode its banks. It will eventually get deeper and wider. What then can be done to minimize the persuasiveness of those in control? In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” Social control is dependent on providing one point of view and limiting knowledge and contrary viewpoints. The U.S. constitution became great because it was “the single greatest effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen” (John Adams). It is vital to openly debate topics, engage in fruitful discussion, and play devil’s advocate. Practice responding to propaganda, thinking rationally about the issues, attempt to understand the full range of options, avoid being dependent on a single news source, monitor your emotions, and be prepared to challenge the “group.”
Many unanswered questions about Hoyer, $18 million Recovery.gov redesign award by Mark Tapscott at Washington Examiner http://tinyurl.com/nv…
One of the great things about journalism is that you never know where a story is going to lead. So it was earlier this week when I saw a notice that the federal government had awarded an $18 million, multi-year contract to redesign the Recovery.gov web site to Smartronix, an obscure Maryland firm. Recovery.gov is the federal government’s web site that is supposed to provide up-to-date data on how funds are being spent under the $787 billion economic stimulus bill that was approved by Congress in February. The site has been criticized by folks across the political spectrum for being full of praise for the Obama administration but lacking in timely data on recovery spending. The amount struck me as excessive, even for a government web site, the multi-year duration also seemed a bit odd, and a quick scan of the Smartronix web site disclosed that it was a defense firm that had received more than $260 million in federal contracts, but with no obvious claims to special experience or skills for web site design. So I queried my colleagues on the Examiner’s commentary staff. Within five minutes, David Freddoso emailed back the news that several Smartonix executives had made $19,000 in contributions to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer since 1999, and that it appeared those were their only contributions. Those (questions brought by author in full article) are extremely relevant questions since Lundberg’s statement makes clear that there is indeed a relationship between Hoyer and Smartronix. The nature of that relationship is of interest because there is no FEC record of political donations by the Smartronix executives to any other federal office holder, the $18 million award and the RFP that produced it are raising multiple eyebrows among knowledgeable web designers, Smartronix refuses to discuss the controversy and Lundberg refuses to clarify the nature of the relationship between her boss and Smartronix. Stay tuned.
Coming: A New Definition of “Road Tax”– By Henry Lamb for Canada Free Press
http://canadafreepres…
It’s coming. With a $16 million grant from the federal government, the University of Iowa is developing a Global Positioning Satellite system that can measure the mileage, apply a variable tax rate that will increase during rush hours, and in high-traffic areas, calculate the total, charge a designated account card, and shut down your automobile if unpaid when due. Some 2700 automobiles in five states will be used in the test. The new by-the-mile tax system will give government much more than a new tax collection mechanism; it will give government much greater control over everyone. The new GM, now owned by the government, can install this new system in all of its vehicles. All that’s needed is an instruction from the car-czar. Auto makers that have not yet been taken over by the government can be required to install the system quite easily, by regulation or legislation. With such a system in every vehicle, the government can have virtual control over the population. Purchase of a vehicle will give the government a database containing the name and residence location of every automobile owner. Since the system has the ability to record and track the geographic location of the vehicle at every moment of the day or night – only for the purpose of applying the correct tax rate, of course – government can know where your vehicle is at any moment. Frightened yet? This is not hocus-pocus conspiracy-theory nonsense. The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission has unanimously endorsed the scheme. A past president of the Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials says that several states have considered not waiting for the federal government, and implementing this system within their states. It is on the horizon, and currently targeted for implementation by 2020.
An Interesting Point on Obama’s Citizenship– From WeThePeople.org
http://wethepeople.or…
Here are some points not yet made in the elusive birth certificate issue.
A Video That Will Cause You To Question That The President Transends Race
http://www.youtube.co…
Ed note- this would be interesting if it just weren’t so darn sad.
News for 07/11/2009-Gore Says Cap & Trade Brings Global Governance
Al Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About ‘Global Governance’ by Marc Morano at Climate Depot
http://www.climatedep…
Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”
“I bring you good news from the U.S., “Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times. “Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth’s temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C. Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming. “But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.”
Warning: Cap and Trade Bubble Ahead By Stephen Lendman at Global Research
http://www.globalrese…
On May 15, Cap & Trade was introduced in the House purportedly “To create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy.” In fact, it’s to let corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel as well as create a new bubble through carbon trading derivatives speculation. It does nothing to address environmental issues, yet on June 26 the House narrowly passed (229 – 212) and sent it to the Senate to be debated and voted on.
On July 1, Catherine Austin Fitts’ Solari.com blog headlined “The Next Really Scary Bubble” in stating:
“If you think the housing and credit bubble diminished your financial security and your community, or the bailouts, or the rising gas prices did as well, hold on to your hat” for what’s coming. “Carbon trading is gearing up to make the housing and derivative bubbles look like target practice.”
She quoted Rep. Geoff Davis calling it “a scam,” Rep. Devin Nunes saying it’s a “massive transfer of wealth” from the public to polluters and Wall Street, Rep. James Sensenbrenner stating “Carbon markets can and will be manipulated using the same Wall Street sleights of hand that brought us the financial crisis,” and Dennis Kuchinich citing “The best description to date (to) be found in Matt Taibbi’s….’The Great American Bubble Machine: From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs (GS) has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they are about to do it again.’
Editors Note: This brings to mind an email I recently recieved from a friend of mine with some Real World Experience in Cap and Trade. The email follows:
Thought I’d take some time and share some real world experience I had with Cap and Trade when I worked at DTE Energy. Keep in mind, this is from real experience which did not involve me performing research on the rules and regulations set forth by the government. At one time, within the last 10 years or so, the government once again studied the affects coal burning plants have on our atmosphere. As a result, the EPA regulations were tightened. The utilities have a very strong PAC (political action committee) and lobbyist so before any laws could be passed, negotiations took place regarding the new EPA regulations. In a nutshell the main concern was the amount of money it would require to upgrade the plants so the new emission standards could be met. Both the government and the utilities acknowledged this was not a sound business decision, so a graduated timeline was constructed to meet the new standards. Part of the graduated timeline included giving each electric utility credits (tokens) which essentially pardoned them for not meeting the new standards. The thought was the utility can use the credits during the graduated timeline so no penalty fees would be issued by the government. This sounded practical from both parties and the law was set. The kicker was, as I was told by several DTE employess AND the CEO, the number of tokens issued to a utility was based on the total amount of electricity generated at each plant, not just coal burning plants. In DTE’s case, they were issued credits for the nuclear power plant in Monroe which already met the new standards. So what really occurred over the subsequent years? The credits were sold to other utilities that needed them to avoid any fines. As stated in one management meeting, DTE made huge sums of money as a result of selling the tokens. So, a natural thought on my behalf was the money that was made would be used to upgrade the coal burning plants to meet the new standards. Logical but not good business sense. This money was thrown into multiple budgets and used at will. To make matters worse, at least for me, I just read in the paper about a month ago that DTE was approaching the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) requesting a rate hike to consumers. The reason for the rate hike? DTE just spent millions of dollars upgrading only 1 stack at a coal burning plant in Monroe. The upgrade brought that stack up to 80% of the new emmission standards. When DTE approached the MPSC for the rate hike that will be applied now, they also informed the MPSC that next year they will complete the upgrades to the stack that was started this year and begin upgrading the second stack as well. And oh, by the way, that effort will require another rate hike next year. When DTE approached the MPSC for the rate hike that will be applied now, they also informed the MPSC that next year they will complete the upgrades to the stack that was started this year and begin upgrading the second stack as well. And oh, by the way, that effort will require another rate hike next year. So, does cap and trade work? Oh yeah, you can make a lot of money in that market then turn around and get rate hikes to pay for things.
Obama Missile Defense Plan Puts America at Risk by Baker Spring at Heritage Foundation
http://www.heritage.o…
On February 2, 2009, Iran successfully launched a satellite into orbit using a rocket with technology similar to that used in long-range ballistic missiles. On May 20, 2009, Iran test-fired a 1,200-mile solid-fueled ballistic missile. North Korea attempted to launch a satellite on April 6, 2009, which, while failing to place the satellite in orbit, delivered its payload some 2,390 miles away in the Pacific Ocean. This was followed by a North Korean explosive nuclear weapons test on May 25, 2009. The ballistic-missile threat to the U.S. and its friends and allies is growing. Under these circumstances, common sense would dictate that the Obama Administration support full funding for the U.S. missile defense program.
What does the Administration do? On April 6, 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that the Obama Administration’s fiscal year (FY) 2010 broader defense budget would reduce the ballistic-missile budget by $1.4 billion. …
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