Capitalizing On The Latest Crisis

Capitalizing On The Latest Crisis

Congress and the White House are using to Gulf oil spill to advance dubious energy agendas

By: Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr., Niger Innis and Reverend Samuel Rodriquez

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Business and capitalism are dirty words in many White House and progressive circles, except in two ways.

Business is good when it can be co-opted and manipulated by government to advance “progressive” energy, social or economic agendas. And capitalism is a virtue in the sense of capitalizing on every crisis to promote those agendas – through the guiding principle enshrined by leftists like Saul Alinsky and Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

Thus the tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been incompetently handled by a White House, EPA and Corps of Engineers unable even to make timely decisions about constructing sand berms to keep oil out of fragile estuaries. But the crisis is being exploited brilliantly to justify policy initiatives like cap-tax-and-trade, EPA’s “endangerment” decree, more bans on drilling, and mandatory fuel switching to higher priced options, most notably wind and solar power.

The economic facts of life simply don’t support this agenda.

Senator John Kerry asserts that China and India are spending billions to take our “clean energy” discoveries and technologies, make the wind turbines and solar panels in Asia, and sell them back to us. He is right about what’s happening, but completely wrong about why. The fault, dear Senator, is not in our stars (or in Asia), but in ourselves.

China and India pay their workers less than we do, especially in union shops so beloved by progressives. They use coal to generate cheap electricity to power their factories, while the White House, EPA and Congress strive to tax and regulate American coal-fired power plants into oblivion. China mines its abundant rare earth minerals (essential for wind turbine magnets and Prius batteries), whereas we have made hundreds of millions of acres of superb mineral prospects off limits.
China and India are creating tens of thousands of jobs, financed by American taxpayers and consumers, while we tax and over-regulate productive industries to pay for subsidies, tax breaks and payrolls for wind and solar companies that then must buy turbines and panels from China and India, because we cannot afford to make them here in the United States.

That’s why 240 gigantic wind turbines being installed in Texas created 2,800 jobs – but 2,400 of them were in China. The measly 400 we got were temp jobs: truckers to haul components from the West Coast to West Texas, plus installers, landscapers, lawyers and bureaucrats. This is indeed a great Green Jobs Program – for the Chinese!

Is this the economic transformation that Senator Kerry wants to bring about? So now we are going to be dependent on the Middle East for oil – and on China and India for “alternative,” “renewable” energy?

Equally puzzling, the wind energy industry is exempted from Migratory Bird and Endangered Species laws. Oil companies pay millions in fines, if a few hundred birds die in uncovered treatment ponds or are caught in the Gulf oil spill. And they should. But wind turbine operators get a free pass, even when their “Cuisinarts of the air” slice and dice thousands of eagles, hawks, falcons, geese, ducks and bats annually.

Installing hundreds of thousands of turbines, and millions of acres of solar panels – to replace oil, gas and coal facilities – would be an unprecedented disaster for habitats, wildlife and the environment.

Equally absurd, the 83% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions required by the House-passed climate bill and its Kerry-Lieberman Senate counterpart would send America’s CO2 emissions back to levels last seen in 1870, when population, energy use and technology changes are taken into account. The price impacts on energy use, jobs, working families, living standards, schools and hospitals would be disastrous.

Meanwhile, emissions from China, India and other emerging economic powerhouses would rapidly offset our nation’s painful reductions, and global atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise. America is not an island.
This is not sustainable development. It is the unsustainable devolution of our country. It is economically and environmentally ruinous. It is the Greecification of America.

The shift to the new Green Jobs Economy may sound good in the abstract. But a closer look at the current transformative plan reveals substantial complications.
It will not generate wealth and is not the product of wealth creation. It is a manifest wealth transfer, from productive and innovative segments of business and society to regulators, activists, companies and energy systems that could not survive without constant subsidies, tax breaks and environmental “get out of jail free” cards.

The Green Jobs Economy would have expensive, intermittent wind and solar replace reliable, affordable hydrocarbon-based electricity. On a large scale, that would severely impact working class families and small businesses. It would impose a punitive, regressive tax on our nation’s most economically vulnerable citizens. It would slow, if not obliterate, our nation’s chance for economic recovery and growth.

President Obama says he’s trying to figure out “whose ass to kick” over the Gulf oil spill and cleanup. He might want to start with his own regulators, advisors and congressional allies, who are leading him and our country over an energy and economic cliff.
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Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr. is founder and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition; Niger Innis is national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality; Reverend Samuel Rodriquez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. They are the co-chairs of the Affordable Power Alliance:

http://affordablepoweralliance.org/

Obama To Sue Over Arizona Immigration Law?

Obama To Sue Over Arizona Immigration Law?
Obama Regime Pushing States Toward The Unthinkable

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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The American left wing's sainted Secretary of State, Mrs. Bill Clinton, reportedly allowed, on Ecuadorian TV, as to how the Obama Regime intends to sue the state of Arizona over Arizona’s new immigration law. Even with the, oh, so “transparent” Obama Regime, the governor of Arizona had to learn this from a news report on TV! Is she angry? You bet your sweet bippy she is!

Look, the United States of America is, today, united in name only! If we have not as a nation divided into two camps, every bit as stark as the states just prior to the American War Between the States, then we are sure as heck approaching that condition.

The Confederate States seceded because they could not abide a growing central government dictating to sovereign states what they would and would not be allowed to do. They believed, so much, in the original constitution of the Founding Fathers that they copied it as the Constitution of the Confederacy. Google the Confederate Constitution and read it for yourselves. You will note a few changes, such as a single 6-year term for the President, but by and large, it is the original US Constitution.

We are living history today. We are watching our country break apart, a little at a time, and the root cause is the imposition of a central government, controlled by Socialist, Progressives, Marxists, Statists, Liberals, and even the odd Maoist thrown in, here and there, which is drunk on power and lusting for even more.

Americans are losing their hard won freedom little by little as the Obama Regime takes advantage of every crisis, real or imagined, or just plain manufactured to instill fear in Americans that their only salvation is in falling at the feet of Obama, and his minions, and worshiping by sacrificing their freedom and swearing fealty to the current socialist regime which is, every day it seems, simply assuming the powers of an American dictatorship.

I have news for the socialists in charge of our government. Their orgy of power will end, and end very soon, or they will have only a part of the existing states to run rampant over with their atrocious acts of barbarism and vandalism aimed at the few freedoms the American citizens have left.

As much as the federal government likes to believe, and delude others by insisting the states are not sovereign entities, they are WRONG!

Arizona, a former member of the Confederacy, WAS, and REMAINS, a sovereign state. The federal government CANNOT impose its will on the people of that state -- unless the Arizonans willingly accept it.

One of the extremely important facts about this country the democrats choose not to remember is that 11 states and parts of two other states are a part of the US ONLY BECAUSE THEY WERE FORCED, AT THE POINT OF A FEDERAL GOVERENMENT BAYONET, TO REJOIN THE UNION!

Revisionist history does not teach our students the horrible injustices done those former Confederate states after the war under the guise of “Reconstruction.”

If you want to know what an all powerful, vengeful, federal government can do to its own subjugated citizen, do a little research on the south for roughly seven to ten years after the war. You will be horrified.

I include these remarks about the so-called American Civil War and Reconstruction as a warning. Unless our government returns to governing as a constitutional republic, as much as I hate to consider it, Americans will be at each other’s throats.

History does repeat itself. The Obama Regime is making many of the same mistakes the Lincoln administration made. It is alienating its citizens.

The American people, as a whole, have a very long fuse, and we remind the federal government that at the end of that fuse lies an obstinate, stubborn, freedom loving people who have no intention of giving up their sacred freedom by lying down and rolling over for some would-be tin pot dictator and his flunkies in OUR nation’s capitol.

May God have mercy on America because there is a backlash, of biblical proportions, building today and it could explode at any moment.

J. D. Longstreet

Worst President, Ever! ... Alan Caruba

Worst President, EVER!

By Alan Caruba

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Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time. His constant use of TelePrompters became an instant joke, suggesting he could not say anything unless it was scripted. Indeed, listening to him try to speak without them is a painful process of a very slow selection of words and very long pauses in between.

After his first press conference he stopped holding them until 309 days later when he addressed the oil spill in the Gulf. It was such a lame performance that his advisors apparently thought a speech from the Oval Office, his first, would make up for that. It didn’t.

In this age of 24/7 news coverage, Barack Obama has managed to make himself ubiquitous to the point of complete inanity. So, I have a bit of advice for him: Shut up, Barack.

The seas have not ceased to rise because you were elected (as promised) and the Earth has not “healed itself.” Indeed, it is bleeding oil at a prodigious rate, confounding BP’s engineers, all graduates no doubt of the Acme School of Oil Drilling.

What have we learned about Barack Hussein Obama? If George W. Bush was considered an amiable dunce, Obama has demonstrated to everyone he is the worst kind of ideologue, totally tone deaf to the Voice of the People. When nearly a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. on September 12th last year to protest Obamacare, his communications advisor, David Axelrod dismissed them saying, “They’re wrong.”

Axelrod was on all the network and cable news shows the day following his Oval Office appearance defending a speech that essentially said we don’t know what we’re doing, but we blame BP. The good news is that the president has finally found someone else to blame other than George W. Bush for his own ineptitude and incompetence.

In case you haven’t noticed, Obama’s approval ratings in the polls are in the low 40s and heading south. There is a hard core of about 30% who support Obama no matter what he does or doesn’t do. In an article by the Editor-in-Chief of CNSnews, Terence P. Jeffrey, he noted that “The middle class is abandoning President Barack Obama, according to data released by the Gallup Poll. The only income bracket among which a majority still says they approve of the job he is doing as president are those earning $2,000 per month or less.”

Anyone still making a living comparable to achieving the American Dream has long since abandoned the great Community Organizer with the exception of union members. When you lose the middle class, you have lost the great engine of the American economy.

With the exception of the growing legion of government workers, the unions had been losing members for years. They were held in generally low esteem and their destruction of General Motors and Chrysler bears out their parasitic relationship with business and industry. Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s support from teacher’s unions suggests why our educational system has been in the toilet for decades.

Every time Obama opens his mouth, his approval falls. It began with his great Apology Tour to the Middle East at the beginning of his presidency, continued with his acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize for having done nothing notable, and plunged with his advocacy of the much-hated Obamacare shoved down the throats of all Americans.

In addition to advocating a Cap-and-Trade bill that is a huge tax on energy use, he is now babbling about a “clean energy future” that apparently involves paving over America with millions of acres of solar farms and coast-to-coast wind turbines.

Obama doesn’t like coal that provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use every day and, of course, oil that fuels our cars, trucks, tractors, et cetera.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Barack Hussein Obama is living proof of that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

From Sea to Shining “Si”

From Sea to Shining “Si”
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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I WISH I had said it, but I did not. I mean the catchy phrase in the title of this piece. I heard a comedian use it recently and I thought then that it captures the condition America finds itself in today will illegal aliens from Mexico flooding into our country from across an unsecured, wide-open border between Mexico and the US.

Honestly, I don’t think the US government actually knows how many illegals we have living in the US. They keep tossing out the number of 12 million, or so. Well, that was the number used many years ago. Common sense dictates that there is many more than 12 million illegal aliens in the US today – if -- that number was correct when it was first used years ago.

Now The Obama Regime wants Congress to pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. Yep! It’s the same song, third verse. When one translates the title of the bill into non-politically correct English one finds that it means AMNESTY!

Look, all Obama’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform will do is guarantee even more illegal aliens will come running across that border headed north into America. Why? Because they will have deduced that all they have to do is be INSIDE America when the NEXT AMNESTY is declared. And they are right!

America does not need a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. American simply needs to enforce its own immigration laws! As the state of Arizona is proving, enforcement of the law will lead to voluntary immigration southward -- back into Mexico and beyond.

The plain truth is – America’s borders will be secured the minute the US Government wants them secured and not before. That’s the problem. The government does not want the borders secured. In fact, just the opposite is true.

We have a government of Globalists, I am afraid. They are the folks who don’t believe in borders – at all. They are hard at work pushing world wide-open borders. See, they NEED open borders, or no borders at all, in order to realize their ultimate goal of global governance.

The end game is worldwide socialism. Marxists-Leninists have been preaching for years that America can be brought to heel and capitalism smothered to death through immigration. The idea is to flood capitalist/industrialized nations, such as the US, with low skilled, under educated, poverty strickened masses of immigrants, and use them as a tool to create civil unrest and eventually bring down capitalism and crush the constitutional republic of the US and replace it with socialism/communism.

Somehow, the Democratic Party in the US forged far ahead of the Globalists by installing a socialist government in America’s national legislature and in the office of the President.

Well, Americans have had a taste of socialism, thanks to the democrats, and, for the most part, they are sick of the incremental imposition of socialist slavery and want to be done with it by purging the Congress of as many Socialist/Globalists, Marxists, Maoists, Progressives, and as many pitiful guilt-ridden liberals as we possibly can in November.

Oh, and while we are at it, we need to search out those laboring, sub-rosa, for a North American Union and get rid of them as well.

J. D. Longstreet

Never Allow A Serious Crisis To Go To Waste

Never Allow A Serious Crisis To Go To Waste
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

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A think we can all agree that the “Gulf Gusher” crisis is serious. And I AM concerned. Certainly, I am concerned over the problems presented by the oil leak in the ocean, but, frankly, I am concerned more about what may be happening in Washington while America’s attention is focused on that crisis.

It was Obama’s Chief of Staff whom famously, or infamously, said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” THAT worries me because I have to wonder what the Obama Regime is using the Gulf Oil spill to camouflage.

If we know anything about this regime, it is that they will use the opportunity presented by the gushing oil to slip something through the Congress or, by executive order, slip something through one or more of the cabinet offices that they know the American people would raise holy heck about – if only they knew it was happening.

Its not that this approach to governing is new -- for it most certainly is not. Diversion is one of the oldest tools in the “politics toolbox.” However, in a representative republic it is not only distasteful, it is, well, not representative of the will of the people. It intentionally shuts the people out. It silences their voice. It brings to a screeching halt any input into the legislative process by the people. “Vox Populi” is censored – period!

I am more than a little concerned the Obama Regime will take advantage of the current crisis to make things happen in Washington that ordinarily would not happen.

As we have noted many times in the past, Obama promised to fundamentally change America -- and he is doing just that.

If you have paid attention to the Presidential polls you have seen that Obama’s approval ratings have dropped drastically in the past few months. That is indicative of the fact that more and more Americans are recognizing the humongous error the country made in electing a socialist to the Presidency.

Little by little Americans have come to realize the dangers Obama’s plans hold for the sustainability of a constitutional republic. Many of those who voted for Obama now realize they do NOT want the change he is bent on bringing to America. They have come to realize, also, the price to be paid for Obama’s America is a loss of freedom.

Conservatives all across the country are banding together to fight Obama’s plans for a socialist America in groups such as the Tea Party Movement. There are many other groups gearing up to fight the socialists, progressives, marxists, and liberals in the 6 months, or so, to the Mid-Term Election in November.

As we observe the ineptitude of a President, obviously “in over his head,” trying to manage the “Gulf Gusher” problem, it is clear that his regime is all but useless in an emergency situation. Many are wondering just how he would react in the aftermath of another terrorist attack when he appears so befuddled by a so-called environmental catastrophe. The answer, I am afraid, does not reinforce one’s faith in the continued viability of America as a single 50 state country.

Yes, it IS terrible to contemplate – but there it is.

J. D. Longstreet