Glenn Jacobs: Cap and Trade Equals Fraud and Tax

H.R. 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 will result in a totalitarian centralization of the American economy in the administrative agencies of the federal government, especially the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This 1,300 page horror is a prime example of congressional modus operandi — no one in Congress actually had the opportunity to read the bill which was, incidentally, being amended as it was debated on the floor. As H.R. 2454 shows, this axiom still holds true: the more benign the title of a congressional bill, the more draconian its contents. After all, who could be against clean energy or security? The real goal of H.R. 2454 has nothing to do with either of these; it is a power grab, pure and simple.

While we have all heard much about the tax implications of H.R. 2454 and that every American family could see a $3,000 a year increase in their energy costs, H.R. 2454 does much more than that. H.R. 2454 is a fascistic fait accompli, giving the government expansive powers to regulate, subsidize, and tax more sectors of the economy. The bill authorizes more federal government control over the electrical grid, state and local building codes, lighting and appliances, industry, the financial markets, and, perhaps most ominously of all, the health care system. In addition, it includes wealth redistribution measures and would allow increases in foreign aid.

Part of the rhetoric surrounding H.R. 2454 is that it will help break America’s dependency on foreign oil by encouraging development of renewable energy sources. Most likely, the opposite will happen as oil companies “cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports.”

Ironically, cap and trade — the cornerstone of H.R. 2454 — does not protect the environment! Even Greenpeace opposed H.R. 2454, recognizing that it “chooses politics over science.” While I would argue that the science to which Greenpeace refers is dubious at best, there is no question that H.R. 2454 has put politics above all else.

In a cap and trade system, the government deems a certain level of pollution acceptable as long as the polluter pays a tax. That’s like saying that it’s acceptable for someone to throw trash on your lawn so long as he has bought a government permit. Even worse, he can throw even more trash on your lawn if he buys additional permits from someone who refrains from throwing trash on your lawn. In effect, cap and trade legalizes pollution.

Advocates of cap and trade have used tortured logic to portray it as a market based system. James Boyce, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, claims that “this is the biggest creation and allocation of property rights since the Homestead Act.” This statement is false on its face and falls into the realm of fantasy.

Unlike the Homestead Act which dealt with property that actually existed in the real world, the property rights to which Boyce refers have been created exclusively through government edit. There is no such thing as a “carbon credit” except on a bureaucrat’s spreadsheet. Boyce’s statement turns the concept of property rights — the basis of a free society — on its head. The “right” to pollute is not a form of property, it is a government granted privilege.

No one has a “right” to have clean air and water provided for them at someone else’s expense. But no one should have the “right” to pollute air or water that he does not own. Far from creating a new form of property rights, cap and trade undermines the property rights that we own in our own bodies by granting polluters the legal privilege of polluting resources that they do not own and that we put into our bodies, i.e. air and water.

Litigation (in the cases where harm has come to individuals) and a strict respect for property rights offer much more effective ways of dealing with pollution than regulation does.

True environmentalists — those of us who are concerned about things such as clean air and water — should oppose schemes like H.R. 2454. H.R. 2454 is not designed to clean up the environment. It is designed to generate more revenue for the government and to give the government more power over the economy, our lives, and our freedom. And it does so at the expense of the environment.

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FEMA, Israeli Defense Forces Home Front Command Partner for Martial Law

A press release buried on the FEMA website, dated June 30, 2009, announces a meeting between FEMA administrator Craig Fugate and Maj. Gen. Yair Golan of the Israeli Defense Forces Home Front Command. “I look forward to working with my Israeli counterpart as co-chair of an emergency management work group to improve emergency management practices in both countries,” said Fugate. “These partnerships are critical in ensuring that we are incorporating best practices and also working towards greater public preparedness.”

The Israeli National Emergency Management Authority and FEMA partnership was established under “an emergency management work stream workgroup established under a 2007 Memorandum of Understanding with DHS,” according to the press release. FEMA representatives attended the national preparedness exercise Turning Point 3 in Israel on June 1, 2009, and Israel sent observers to the TOPOFF 4 national exercise in the United States, as well as personnel to participate in FEMA emergency management training.

TOPOFF, or Top Officials, is billed as “the nation’s premier terrorism preparedness exercise” by the Department of Homeland Security. “Thousands of federal, state, territorial, and local officials engage in various activities as part of a robust, full-scale simulated response to a multi-faceted threat,” the DHS website explains.

Later this month, FEMA will hold National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09). “NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery,” according to the FEMA site.

Turning Point 3 is a “war simulation” conducted by Israel’s IDF and Home Front Command. “The five-day drill, to be coordinated by the Defense Ministry together with the Home Front Command, is intended to test Israel’s preparedness at all levels, from the government down to the citizen in the street. It is also meant to check the coordination between local authorities and the various military and other organizations involved,” Arutz Sheva notes.

As we noted in April in regard to NLE 09, these coordinated exercises are inappropriate, considering the fact there has not been a terrorist attack on the United States since September 11, 2001.

The DHS and FBI have shifted from so-called Islamic terrorism — well documented as a manufactured threat — to “homegrown” terrorism. In recent months, the DHS has characterized patriot groups, pro-life and anti-illegal immigration activists as “rightwing extremists” threatening the homeland. In the wake of several violent incidents attributed to “white supremacists,” the corporate media has stepped up its mantra that patriot groups and extremist “lone wolves” are a threat.

Although not specifically mentioned in the FEMA factsheet, NLE 09 will also include exercises designed to round-up and intern suspected terrorists. Under REX 84 and other operations, FEMA, in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies, trained to detain large numbers of American citizens.

Israel has plenty of “best practices” experience in rounding-up “terrorists” in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. As noted by human rights groups, Palestinian detainees are held, often for indefinite periods, on secret charges at locations that are rarely disclosed to their families. Most of the Palestinian detainees have never been charged, never been tried, and never have seen a lawyer, according to Mitchell Kaidy, writing for WRMEA. In the 1980s, the Israeli Landau Commission discovered that Israeli security police tortured prisoners not only to extract information but to extract confessions.

Israel is now sharing this experience with their American partners under the guise of “emergency management.”

In addition to “exercising” mass detainments, NLE 09 will concentrate on preparing various governmental bodies and organizations for a “Code Red” alert, in other words full martial law. In 2003, then DHS secretary Tom Ridge told CBS News: “If we simply go to red… it basically shuts down the country,” meaning that civilian government bodies would be closed down and taken over by an Emergency Administration. The Israeli Defense Forces Home Front Command is designed for the same purpose.

“In turn, code red alert would trigger the ‘civilian’ Homeland Emergency response system, including the DHS’ Ready.Gov instructions, the Big Brother Citizen Corps, not to mention the USAonWatch and the Department of Justice Neighborhood Watch Program which have a new post 9/11 mandate to ‘identify and report suspicious activity in neighborhoods’ across America,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2005.

Since 2005 and the election of Barack Obama, the government has made strides in creating a Big Brother Citizen Corps. In addition to passing the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education (GIVE) Act — the foundation for Obama’s “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded” as the U.S. military — Democrats are pushing H.R. 675, a bill that would amend title 10 of the United States Code and extend to civilian employees of the Department of Defense the authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms.

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Fox News : The Only Thing That Can Save America Now Is For Al Qaeda To Nuke Our Cities

This Is Insane. Pure Treason. But understandable.

When tragedy and disaster strikes, people run to their TVs. Fox News pulled more than 10 million viewers on 9/11 and for a week or two after. They nearly hit those same ratings highs when Rupert Murdoch’s droogs fermented from fantasy into reality an unprovoked War On Iraq.

Imagine how many people would watch Fox News if American cities started getting blown apart by “major weapons”?

It’d be the mecca of ratings.

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Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists”

A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”. Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police states like China and Burma.

In a speech to the National Press Club, Hartigan savagely dismissed blogs as, “Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”

“Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights,” barked Hartigan.

“In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart.”

“Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”

Hartigan doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to suit the demands of their corporate owners. This is the very reason why blogs and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the mainstream media’s audience share, because people are sick of being treated like idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.

Indeed, Hartigan’s boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words, Murdoch’s many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the manufactured case for invasion. Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the corporate media’s “loss of power” to alternative media and Internet blogs, seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.

When the people know that the corporate media is deliberately lying to them about Niger yellowcake and weapons of mass destruction, they are going to seek alternative avenues of information. The fact that the corporate media habitually lies is a manifestly provable reality, not a “myth” as Hartigan ludicrously claims.

In addition, while mainstream media routinely uses anonymous sources and little more than bluster and hot air to back up their stories, blogs provide links to almost every claim they make so readers can research the source evidence for themselves. This is the opposite from Hartigan’s claim that blogs make “radical sweeping statements without evidence.” Indeed, this phrase perfectly characterizes tactics employed by the mass media on a daily basis.

The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power to blogs and alternative media, which is why people like Hartigan are so angry and also why the establishment is aggressively moving to phase out the old Internet altogether and replace it with “Internet 2,” a highly regulated and controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.

As blogger Darryl Mason writes today, “John Hartigan is full of shit. Bloggers have gone to jail for their work, and to protect their sources, in North Korea, Iran, Egypt, the list of countries persecuting bloggers grows longer by the week. And the CEO of Australia’s biggest news corporation doesn’t know this?”

The jailing of bloggers for speaking too much truth is obviously not the kind of news that John Hartigan, a Rupert Murdoch CEO, is interested in. How could he not know about those jailing and prosecutions.

Remember those words. “Political extremism”.

You will hear that call more and more as the major news corporations scale up their war against independent media, and bloggers.

The source of the establishment’s move to claim that bloggers and alternative media outlets are “extremists” or at worst “terrorists,” as we first reported in September 2006, was a White House strategy document that the government had been following since 9/11.

In a September 5, 2006 speech President George W. Bush referred to the document as “an unclassified version of the strategy we’ve been pursuing since September the 11th, 2001,” that takes into account, “the changing nature of this enemy.”

The strategy paper on how to ‘win the war on terror’ cites “conspiracies” as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to “address” and “diminish” the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.

This notion then reappeared in a March 2009 Homeland Security document entitled “Domestic Extremism Lexicon,” in which the “alternative media” is listed alongside other radical extremist groups with the implication that people who disagree with the mass media’s version of events are potential domestic terrorists.

According to World Net Daily, the DHS document was almost immediately rescinded, but the groups listed alongside Neo-Nazis, Aryan prison gangs and black power extremists again prove that the federal government is targeting American citizens who are merely knowledgeable about their rights and up on current issues as potential domestic terrorists to be treated as a “threat” to law enforcement.

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The Alex Jones Show - L I V E - June 30th With Spencer Pratt & Heidi Montag

Alex welcomes reality MTV stars Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag to discuss their awakening to the New World Order. Alex talks with Timothy F. Ball, a retired university professor and global warming skeptic. He heads the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and is the former head of Friends of Science, a non-profit organization of those who are skeptical of human-caused global warming. GCN host and WRH editor Mike Rivero updates Israel’s kidnapping of former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

MEDIUM QUALITY FREE MP3 FILE: http://rss.nfowars.net/20090630_Tue_Alex.mp3

See also: MTV Star Heidi Montag: Over My Dead Body Would I Take A Microchip

RED ALERT: The Total Takeover Of America Enters Its Final Phase

Full frontal assault on every aspect of freedom kicks into high gear as the elite twist the knife into the rotting carcass of the United States

The wholesale looting of America and the transfer of wealth and power over to a private banking elite who are setting up a world government, along with the complete obliteration of any remaining freedom to protest, resist, or even speak out against this agenda, is now entering its final phase as numerous different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place and portray a clear picture of tyranny.

We are about to sound the death knell for the United States if every one of the following attacks on our liberty, free speech, sovereignty, and right to not be ruled over by an unelected banking dictatorship is not fiercely opposed and crushed.

RED ALERT 1

The passage of the “Climate Bill” by the House and its likely approval by the Senate represents the entrée for the complete and total subjugation of any freedoms we had left and the beginning of nightmare regulation and suffocating control over every aspect of our personal lives by millions of green stasi tasked with enforcing impossible to attain goals of 80% carbon dioxide reduction - all based on the manufactured threat of global warming.

This bill will also sink the economy and create a new great depression, effectively obliterating America’s first world status. It represents a transfer of power and wealth from both the U.S. government and the American taxpayer over to the system of world government and global regulation now being erected by means of the climate change hoax.

This is far worse than just a “new tax” as Republicans are complaining - this is the total takeover of the American economy by private banking interests through the carbon trading system.

As we have attempted to warn, the major beneficiaries of the climate bill will be the elitists who own the carbon trading systems that will be used to handle the ‘cap and trade’ program, namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering.

We must rally now to lobby members of Congress who voted for the legislation and demand they change their vote before July 2nd. Failing that, we must demand that the Senate does not rubber stamp this nightmare legislation. Failing that, we must support and organize to craft more legislation based on the example of Arizona, who recently passed state Senate legislation refusing to comply with insane climate laws coming from the federal level.

RED ALERT 2

The seemingly endless economic “bailouts” represent the wholesale looting of the American taxpayer and the grand theft of trillions of dollars by private banking interests who refuse to even disclose where the money went.

Not satisfied with stealing tens of trillions, under the Obama administration’s new regulatory reform plan, the Federal Reserve is now trying to enrich itself with dictator powers that will give it complete control over the U.S. economy, handing them the authority to “regulate” and shut down any company whose activity it believes could threaten the economy and the markets.

We must rally now and lobby more members of Congress to support Ron Paul’s H.R. 1207 bill to audit the Federal Reserve and highlight the fact that Bernanke is spewing financial terrorism when he threatens an economic collapse should the Fed be opened up to scrutiny.

RED ALERT 3

Federal hate crimes legislation, which in reality would criminalize “thought crimes,” has cleared the House and now faces the Senate as S.909, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act (officially, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act).

S.909 is a direct violation of the First Amendment. It allows the federal government to prosecute people involved in “hate speech” transmitted over television, radio, and the internet. The House version of the bill states:

“Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce [radio, TV, internet] any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both. (HR 1966, SEC 3, Sec. 881a)”

In other words, if a talk show host engages in “hostile” speech against a person or persons of the above mentioned federally protected group that talk show host will face federal prosecution and the prospect of a two year prison term.

The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act would similarly criminalize free speech on the Internet if it can be deemed in any way to have been “harmful” to an individual. This represents the end of political blogging and free speech on the world wide web.

If both bills are not opposed and thrown out then the First Amendment will become nothing more than a relic of a bygone age.

RED ALERT 4

The Senate bill S.787, otherwise known as the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA), would replace language in the regulatory act currently using “navigable waters” with “waters of the United States.”

What this means is that “the government would essentially be able to regulate everything from standing water in floodplains to creeks that run behind business and residences,” according to an Environmental Leader report.

This represents a complete takeover of private land and waterways by the federal government, a total assault on private property rights and a complete federalization of America’s land and water.

“In a letter to Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer and ranking member James Inhofe, the American Farm Bureau Federation said that the proposed law would “extend to all water — anywhere from farm ponds, to storm water retention basins, to roadside ditches, to desert washes, to streets and gutters, even to a puddle of rainwater,” stated the letter. “For the first time in the 36-year history of the act, activities that have no impact on actual rivers and lakes would be subject to full federal regulation.”

If this bill becomes law, it will empower the federal government to seize private property on a whim, using similar powers that Communist China employed during Chairman Mao’s “great leap forward,” where landowners had their property violently confiscated and stolen by the government.

If this bill passes the Senate, private property rights in the United States are effectively null and void and the federal government would legally have the power to bulldoze families from their homes as routinely happens in Communist China.

RED ALERT 5

Amongst the myriad of assaults on the Second Amendment rights of American citizens undertaken by the Obama administration during the course of its first year in office, the one that stands out as the most alarming is the attempt to ban people who appear on the terrorist watch list from buying guns.

But isn’t stopping terrorists from buying guns surely a sensible measure to take? The problem is that the terrorist watch list, sometimes called the no fly list, is not a list of likely terrorists, it is a sprawling database of of innocent people that contains the names of over one million Americans. This is a rise of 32% since 2007 alone.

Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes, reverends, the former assistant attorney general, toddlers and children, the ACLU administrator, people with difficult names and all American names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become caught in the vast tentacle of this list, documents the ACLU.

Moreover, once a person is included on the terrorist watch list it is virtually impossible to get off it.

The terrorist watch list is an ever-expanding tool with which to deny Americans basic rights as well as to strip them completely of the Fourth Amendment.

Now it is being used to prevent law-abiding citizens from purchasing firearms. Legislation sponsored by the The Government Accountability Office seeks to “close the gap” and prevent victims of the terrorist watch list from being able to purchase firearms.

This represents a new end run around the Second Amendment and a concerted effort on behalf of the federal government to classify millions of innocent Americans as potential terrorists, thus stripping them of their Constitutional right to own firearms.

RED ALERT 6

Our right to protest against any of the egregious assaults on the Constitution that are listed above is itself being removed by new law enforcement and Pentagon training manuals and guidelines that define protesting as domestic terrorism.

Current Department of Defense anti-terrorism training course material states that the exercise of First Amendment rights in the U.S. constitutes terrorist activity.

Over the last few years we have documented countless examples of security assessment reports from the likes of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as police training manuals, which state that anti-war protesters, gun owners, veterans, Ron Paul supporters and those who merely cite the Constitution should be equated with extremists and domestic terrorists.

The fact that the government is now treating people who merely criticize its conduct as domestic terrorists is the clearest signal possible that the United States has entered a period in history similar to Germany in the early 1930’s and that it can only be a matter of time before the right “emergency” provides the justification for dissidents to be targeted for round-ups and mass imprisonment.

No one can claim now that this is merely a paranoid delusion - the government itself is training its law enforcement and military arms that protesters and people who use their First Amendment rights are domestic terrorists. The last time this happened was under King George shortly before the American Revolution.

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT

If we don’t stand up in unison and exercise our right to protest and free speech now more than ever before, while pointing out that the real terrorists are those who would seek to destroy the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, then we may find ourselves doing our protesting behind the barbed wires and the concrete blocks of an internment camp.

The hour is late, the clock stands at one minute to midnight, and the federal government, through all the examples documented above, is on the verge of implementing nothing less than a total environmental, financial and societal dictatorship and killing what once was the United States of America.

Almost identical programs of total enslavement are also being pushed through in almost every other major western country at the same time.

If we don’t stop obsessing about the minutia of life and actually concentrate on the imminent destruction of the very principles of our livelihoods, the bedrock freedoms that allow us to operate in relative comfort on a daily basis and be reasonably secure in our own homes, being able to pay our bills, put food on the table, earn money, and air our grievances when government threatens to impinge on those basic freedoms, then there will be nothing left but a rotten hollow carcass and a memory of what America once strived to be - land of the free, home of the brave - not land of the thief, home of the slave.

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S 787 Near Complete Takeover of Private Land by out of control Government

IT IS TIME TO REALLY, REALLY PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT DISREGARD CONGRESS HAS FOR OUR PROPERTY RIGHTS AND LET THEM KNOW WHAT WE THINK!

You need to read this! This will be a near complete takeover of private land in the US by our out of control Government.

If you think food is high now or energy, just wait this this kicks in… We are getting change alright!

- Bob Parker
I’LL KEEP MY GUNS, FREEDOM, & MONEY…
YOU CAN KEEP THE “CHANGE!”

Message from R.J. Smith regarding:

S.787 Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA)

Hope many of you had a chance to watch democracy in action. In a mere one hour and seventeen minutes the EPW sailed through the CWRA S.787 (actually a slightly modified alternative amendment worked out yesterday by Baucus-Klobuchar-Boxer.) The Baucus “compromise” was largely window dressing, maintaining the existing CWA exemptions for some agricultural activities in the new CWRA. This was to lure farmers into supporting the CWRA. At best it might have gained them one farm organization.

S. 787 as amended passed and was reported favorably to the Senate. The vote was 12-7 on straight party lines.

Senators Inhofe, Vitter and Barrasso were heroic in their efforts to defend private property rights and states’ water rights and prevent most of the American land and water from effectively being Federalized/nationalized.

Inhofe made an excellent opening statement and subsequent comments. Said the bill was not fixable, but that there was no way to stop it in committee. He vowed a very robust effort to defeat it on the floor. Said it is a dagger aimed right at the heart of rural America.

Vitter noted this bill is a radical change in the CWA moving from regulation of navigable waters to regulation of all waters of the US. He submitted two amendments.

One to allow the president to override the CWRA in the case of natural disasters such as hurricanes, so that recovery efforts would not be delayed or halted. Boxer said public health would be compromised if exemptions were provided. Carper said Vitter’s amendment would undermine the intent of the bill.

Boxer and Carper argued they weren’t expanding any government authority — simply returning to the authority of the CWA prior to the SWANCC and Rapanos decisions, i.e., restoring the authority of the CWA. (Boxer repeated that theme over and over.)

Vitter responded that it restores nothing that was ever in the CWA — instead it returns to the vastly expansive definition of navigable which federal bureaucrats had achieved in order to usurp powers not grated to the Federal government (such as the migratory bird rule, the “glancing goose test”), which was why the Supreme Court had to step in and point out that navigable meant navigable.

It was defeated on a voice vote.

Vitter offered another amendment to include language that the use of mosquito control pesticides would never be required to obtain permits under the CWRA. Worried about this preventing control of diseases such as West Nile. Said FIFRA already adequately regulates their use. There have been movements to require such permits and there are currently cases in court. Boxer responded that Obama has issued a two-year stay or moratorium on such regulations — so nothing to worry about. Vitter insisted that it was necessary to resolve the uncertainty and a temporary stay was insufficient.

Defeated on a voice vote and a roll call vote.

Barrasso then offered a series of amendments, basically aimed at restricting the vast new “wetlands” listed as waters of the US.

First was to prohibit the Federal government from taking all streams and intermittent streams within a state. Said there was no authority for the US to seize jurisdiction over state streams. “No one in WDC has the right to seize and control our streams.” And they were already adequately protected under state laws. And that streams that only flowed when storm water runoff filled them would be placed under control of Washington. Defeated on voice vote.

Next amendment to prevent Federal government from taking all mudflats in the 50 states. Boxer objected to saying the environmentalists were special interest groups, they were just trying to protect our beautiful places. Defeated on voice vote and on a roll call vote by 13-6. I believe it was Voinovich who crossed. (It was difficult to hear the clerk announce the roll call vote and the votes themselves.)

Next amendment to prevent US takeover of all prairie potholes in the states, with vast numbers being on private farmland and ranchland. Voice vote sounded close so Boxer asked for a roll call vote. 13-6 against.

Next Barrasso amendment to prohibit Federal takeover of all wet meadows. Defeated on voice vote.

Next amendment to prevent EPA takeover of all natural ponds. It nationalizes all natural ponds on private lands. Defeated by voice vote.

Boxer asked Barrasso if he had any more amendments. He responded yes. She replied “Boy you are a glutton for punishment.” (So much for respect for property rights and the Fifth Amendment.)

Next amendment. To protect and exempt agriculture under the CWRA. Boxer said this would create an enormous loophole for pollution by famers. Defeated on voice vote.

Next amendment prohibits controls on animal farming: cattle, sheep, goats, fish, crawfish, etc. Defeated on voice vote.

Last Barrasso amendment required that specific language be inserted in the bill to clearly exempt ground water from the regulatory authority of the CWRA. Said while the findings suggest that ground water is not included, that was insufficient. Need unambiguous language. Boxer replied that doing so would weaken the bill! Defeated on voice vote and then on a roll call vote. Inhofe then asked that his name also be attached to all of the amendments.

Then Boxer called for the vote on S.787 as amended and it very quickly passed 12-7.

Now we wait to see what happens in the Senate and what Rep. Oberstar does in the House.

Senator Inhofe said in committee that there is no chance of the CWRA passing on the Senate floor. And in a post-mark-up press release reiterated that “The CWRA faces certain demise if it ever reaches the Senate floor.”

Also Senator Crapo placed a hold on the bill.

Let’s hope that Senator Inhofe’s optimism is well founded.

Meanwhile it is important that anyone who has examples of CWA horror stories of landowners — or any projects — tied up in years of costly red tape and permits, staggering court costs, and fines or imprisonment for carrying out legitimate activities on private land — please submit them to us. Especially if you have documentation such as newspaper stories.

The supporters of the CWRA are arguing that it is simply an attempt to return to the innocuous CWA pre-SWANCC, when the law did nothing but make our waters safe for drinking, swimming and fishing.

We need additional stories similar to those of the imprisonment of Ocie Mills and his son in FL for 21 months; John Pozsgai in PA for 18 months as part of a three-year sentence; Bill Ellen in MD for 6 months; etc., to demonstrate the vast overreach of the CWA and precisely why the Supreme Court had to step in.

And that returning to those unlimited powers — and in fact giving the Feds ever broader authority to regulate anything and everything would be a disaster.

Remember the case of the Gaston Roberge and his wife in Maine. They had owned a 2.8 acre commercial lot in the town of Old Orchard Beach for 20 years. Purchased originally to pay for their retirement.

In the mid-1970s they had allowed the town to deposit excavated dirt from a sewer line project on one half acre. When they attempted to sell the lot in 1986 the Corps told them it was a wetlands and they had violated the CWA by illegally dumping fill on it and were order to remove it.

They spent 8 years fighting through the green tape and with mounting frustration and costs finally went to court. In the discovery process they located an internal Corps memo recommending “Roberge would be a good one to squash and set an example” — in order to create a climate of fear among landowners and developers. Subsequently the Corps dropped the charges and paid some compensation to Roberge — but nowhere near enough to make him whole.

That attitude of the Federal bureaucrats of squashing people to set an example demonstrates the CWA had long ago been converted from water protection to an exercise in naked political power.

If you have such horror stories please send them to rsmith@nationalcenter.org. Or mail them c/o NCPPR, Capitol Court, N.E., Suite 200, Washington, D.C 20002.

And for information on the CWRA, many documents and papers and links to other sites visit the National Center’s CWRA webpage: http://www.nationalcenter.org/CWRA.html.

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Pro Establishment Buchanan: Climate Bill Is Transfer Of Wealth To World Government

Former presidential advisor slams fearmongering that led to passage of nightmare legislation

During an appearance on MSNBC, political commentator Pat Buchanan correctly defined the “Climate Bill” for what it really is, not just a new tax on the American people, but a complete transfer of power and wealth to a global government that is using the manufactured fear of global warming to grease the skids for total domination.

Referring to the passage of the climate bill and global warming in general, Buchanan said that the legislation was passed through the use of fear and that, “More and more scientists are coming forward to say this is a hoax and a scam which is designed to transfer wealth and power from the private sector to the government sector and from the government of the United States to a world government. Which is what we’re going to get in Copenhagen when we get this Kyoto two agreement.”

Buchanan labeled the legislation a “tax bill” that would raise the prices of utilities for every American, hammer the middle class and working class, “for a danger that we don’t even know is really there”.

The former senior advisor to three U.S. presidents accused the Obama administration of hyping the apocalyptic myth that the oceans will rise and that cities will be underwater in order to ram through the legislation.

Establishment left-wing blogs like Crooks and Liars and Media Matters are carrying the video of Buchanan’s remarks with little or no accompanying commentary, as if Buchanan’s comments alone are enough to discredit his position.

Those who act as shills for the climate change hoax may believe that anyone who dares challenge the authodoxy of the church of global warming is automatically a heretic and that no evidence whatsoever needs to even be presented to counter their sacrilege, but here in the real world we prefer to stick to the facts.

Empirical satellite data shows that mean global temperatures are the same that they were 30 years ago and that global sea ice is also at similar levels. Following a spike in global temperatures at the end of the last century that coincided with the sun undergoing its most active period in recent times, the planet has now cooled to 1979 levels. At the end of summer last year, despite hysterical predictions that the North Pole would be free of ice for the first time in history, Arctic sea ice had actually expanded by 30 per cent, an area the size of Germany.

Coinciding with expanding ice sheets, there has been no rise in sea levels for the past three years. Tropical storms and extreme weather events attributed to global warming like hurricanes and typhoons are at a record low.

The United Nations’s IPCC, the heavily politicized organization that is often erroneously cited as an independent scientific body by climate change promoters, was last year caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception.

“This was startling,” reported the London Telegraph. “Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.”

It soon came to light that the data produced by NASA to make the claim, and in particular temperature records covering large areas of Russia, was merely carried over from the previous month. NASA had used temperature records from the naturally hotter month of September and claimed they represented temperature figures for October.

As David Deming points out in his excellent article today, temperature data collected by weather stations is being artificially impacted by measuring systems placed nearby to sources of heat. This is why claims that global temperatures are still rising are completely contradicted by real world evidence of falling temperatures and what some scientists are warning is the beginning of a new ice age.

“Why do people think the planet is warming?,” writes Deming. “One reason is that the temperature data from weather stations appear to be hopelessly contaminated by urban heat effects. A survey of the 1221 temperature stations in the US by meteorologist Anthony Watts and his colleagues is now more than 80 percent complete. The magnitude of putative global warming over the last 150 years is about 0.7 °C. But only 9 percent of meteorological stations in the US are likely to have temperature errors lower than 1 °C. More than two-thirds of temperature sensors used to estimate global warming are located near artificial heating sources such as air conditioning vents, asphalt paving, or buildings. These sources are likely to introduce artifacts greater than 2 °C into the temperature record.”

“Every year in the US, more than forty thousand people are killed in traffic accidents. But not one single person has ever been killed by global warming. The number of species that have gone extinct from global warming is exactly zero. Both the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets are stable. The polar bear population is increasing. There has been no increase in infectious disease that can be attributed to climate change. We are not currently experiencing more floods, droughts, or forest fires,” he concludes.

As we have attempted to warn, the major beneficiaries of the climate bill will be the elitists who own the carbon trading systems that will be used to handle the ‘cap and trade’ program, namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering.

Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

While Maurice Strong, who is regularly credited as founding father of the modern environmental movement, serves on the board of directors of CCX. Strong was a leading initiate of the Earth Summit in the early 90s, where the theory of global warming caused by CO2 generated by human activity was most notably advanced.

Watch the clip of Buchanan’s comments below.

Bernanke Threatens America With Economic Collapse If Fed Audited

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke unleashed an alarming veiled threat of financial terrorism when he was questioned by Rep. Duncan on Thursday about his response to the fact that a majority of Congress co-sponsoring Ron Paul’s H.R. 1207 bill to audit the Federal Reserve.

Bernanke clearly regarded the bill’s intent as hostile to the institution he represents:

“My concern about the legislation is that if the GAO is auditing not only the operational aspects of the programs and the details of the programs but making judgments about our policy decisions would effectively be a takeover of policy by the Congress and a repudiation of the Federal Reserve would be highly destructive to the stability of the financial system, the Dollar and our national economic situation.”

The brunt of Bernanke’s statement is as crystal clear as a threat from a common street thug– back off from the Fed, or the economy gets it.

The chairman clearly implies that any attempt to restore monetary powers constitutionally granted to the Congress would be seen as a “takeover” and that the defensive and “repudiated” Fed would respond destructively.

Of course Congress’ constitutional power over money is enumerated in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution:

The Congress shall have power… To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

Bernanke’s open use of financial terrorism in the face of Congress’ blatant Constitutional authority is absurd and dispicable.

Greenspan, Bernanke and other Fed-related cronies have already bad-mouthed the Dollar and signaled it’s decline as the world’s currency. So what else is new?

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Feds To Get Power To Target Websites Making “False Claims”

New FTC guidelines would allow government to scrutinize content of websites, “patrol what bloggers say and do”

The Federal Reserve refuses to disclose where trillions of dollars in bailout money went and yet the FTC is more concerned about snooping into the financial affairs of bloggers who make a few bucks off affiliate relationships, according to new guidelines set to be introduced later this year that would give the government a foot in the door to regulate and shut down blogs for making “false claims”.

“New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest,” states an Associated Press report.

Furious that struggling families are supplementing their income by having housewives write blogs about cooking, or individuals posting political opinions and funding their operation by carrying affiliate links to Amazon books, the new FTC regulations would ensure that “Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews,” according to the report.

The proviso that “any type of blog could be scrutinized” frames this assault on free speech in a wider context that just individuals making claims about products advertised on their websites.

The proposed guidelines (PDF) state that “deceptive speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” and that “The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that the government can restrict, or even ban, such speech.” Of course, the issue of whether such speech is deceptive will be decided by the government itself.

The definition of “false claims” is so loose that it could hand the feds the power to shut down any website on a whim based on the flimsiest of pretexts. The AP report notes that the new guidelines would create a system to “patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online”.

As the Cryptogon website points out, in reality this has little to do with the FTC’s concern for fair business practices and everything to do with the government getting a foot in the door for their overarching agenda to regulate and control blogs and free speech on the Internet.

“What has happened is that bloggers have blown the support columns out from underneath traditional media and the people who run the show don’t like that.”

“The fact that some of us are able to survive by maintaining blogs must have come as an incredible shock to fat bastards in boardrooms across the land. That we are not “regulated” is unthinkable in the Soviet hive mind that governs the political economy of the United States.”

This is all about creating a chilling atmosphere and preventing people from creating their own websites by establishing a mountain of red tape and bureaucracy around the currently simple process of writing and maintaining a blog.

The ultimate endgame is to mimic the Chinese Internet system of total government regulation and censorship via the implementation of a registration process whereby every blogger will be assigned a number and given permission to blog by the government. If the blogger expresses an opinion deemed unsavory by the authorities then their registration credentials will be terminated and their ability to login to their own blog will be removed.

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