Tag Archives: Al Gore

Unions, Buffett, Robber Barons and Cronies Now Have Our Oil, Oh My

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By John Ransom via Townhall Finance

 

President Barack Obama and Warren Buffett in t...

It’s already been widely reported that Warren Buffett, a major shareholder in Obama, Inc. will be one of the primary beneficiaries of the decision from the White House to kill the Keystone pipeline and the jobs it would create.

The administration now makes no attempt at all to disguise the fact that most decisions he makes are made in the best interest of Obama, Inc. shareholders.

Buffett’s railroad, the BNSF Railway- now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Obama, Inc.- in a remarkable coincidence, will instead, apparently and patriotically, transport Canadian oil to the US at only a slight premium to the oil companies than it would have cost to transport via the Keystone pipeline.

Ohmygosh. What a fortunate coincidence for all of us. Maybe now Buffett’s secretary will be able to afford the higher tax bracket her jerk-off boss puts her in and she won’t have to decide between her medication and cat food.

Obama has decided thusly to kill the pipeline even though: 1) Transport costs will be more expensive; and 2) The transport method will introduce more of the dreaded “carbon” into our atmosphere. Remember the thing that activists have been protesting against?

Net/net environmentalists have just made sure that more “carbon” will kill our planet even more quickly under their theory.

It’s a win-win-win. Obama and Buffett and Buffett’s secretary all benefit.

And really: Who else is there to be concerned about?

Seriously though: You just can’t find a group more gullible than environmental activists.

It used to be that starting a religious cult was a convenient way to control the gullible. But today’s sophisticated con artist would be well advised to invent a global crisis, you know, like Global Polar Bear Cannibalism.

Imagine spending six months working toward stopping Keystone because you believe with all your liberal bleeding heart that you’ll stop the dirty, planet-killing carbon, only to read today’s article from Bloomberg about the Buffett Express.

While Buffett apparently is a shareholder in Obama, Inc., enviros are only sharecroppers in the concern.

Because anytime you have a liberal policy that 1) is more expensive and 2) doesn’t even attempt to address the issue that liberal activists say they are protesting- you know, like too much “carbon” in our atmosphere- you know somewhere, somehow, someway that another, better-heeled liberal shareholder has just stuck it to the sharecroppers on Obama’s plantation. They tried it previously with Al Gore’s Climate Exchange. I’m still waiting for a thank you from environmentalists for stopping that scam.

I wrote previously about how Labors’ International Union of North America- another sharecropper on Fantasy Island- denounced president Obama’s decision to kill Keystone. But a handful of other unions will benefit greatly because their workers work for Obama shareholder Warren Buffett.

I know, I know: It surprised me too.

Here’s how the Transport Workers Union explained it:

Under President Jim Little, TWU has been a leader in advocating for major “New Deal” type investments in infrastructure modernization and repair, public transportation, energy conservation and climate protection as a means of putting people to work and laying the foundations of a more sustainable economic future for the United States. This is a transition that sound science and sound economics tell us we must make today, not in some far off future, in order to prevent irreversible harm to our planet’s climate, and to provide good jobs now for the millions of Americans who desperately need them. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would take us in the opposite direction, increasing our reliance on dirty bitumen sands oil and stalling critical efforts to create the jobs we need to transition to a more sustainable economy.

The pipeline appeared to be on a fast track to approval, but thanks to the efforts of TWU and a handful of other unions allied with millions of climate justice activists, in November the State Department delayed its decision on the project, and President Obama has said that if Republicans again try to force him to make a premature decision by tying the pipeline’s fate to another payroll tax cut extension early in 2012, he’ll kill the project for good.

So now we know where Obama draws the line: terrorist are OK; illegal immigrants; mob violence- good with all that. But force him to make up his mind? You’ve really crossed the line now buddy.

Thanks to goodness that Obama’s not thinking about the good of the country, but rather just the politics of the whole thing. Maybe we can get him to hold his breath too until the GOP backs down? Hey, it’s worth a shot. He’s done dumber things…this year.

No mention from the Transport Workers union in their communiqué that their workers will now transport the oil that would have gone via the pipeline. Also no mention that a million barrels of oil transported per day will produce for railroads about $3 billion in annual revenues for union workers who are in pay dispute with Buffett’s BNSF and other national carriers.

Ohmygosh. They forgot to tell us that part too.

Where will they get the money to raise union wages?

Ta Da! President Obama has now found the money to settle the dispute.

In October, Obama signed an executive order declaring an emergency and created a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to forestall a railroad strike.

I guess the PEB found a way out of the difficulty. It’s just a gut feeling I have, but perhaps there will be no strike now.

But the fun doesn’t stop there ladies and gentleman.

Just think of this: Warren Buffett and the railway workers now control a significant portion of your oil. Greaaaat. We thought we’d stop letting our enemies dictate to us once we used less Middle East, Iranian and Venezuelan oil.

Think again.

Get ready to pay and pay and pay….

The energy publication the Platts puts it this way:

John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil used trains to help solidify the power of his trust. (A paper written by two professors on the history of Standard Oil and rail put it this way: “The charge leveled most consistently against Standard Oil is that it secured unfair competitive advantages by negotiating advantageous rates with the railroads over which it shipped crude from the ‘Oil Regions’ of Pennsylvania and Ohio to its Cleveland refineries and sent kerosene and other refined petroleum products to markets on the East Coast.”)

But now the railroads will be able to switch roles with the Standard Oils of the world.

And all this time we thought Keystone was just a dispute about carbon, when in fact it was just a falling out amongst cronies. Some of them, it turns out, are shareholders and some of them, it turns out, are sharecroppers.

Well, either way, global warming, once again, just created a bumper crop of something for someone.

And that something stinks.

John Ransom

John Ransom is the Finance Editor for Townhall Finance. You can follow him on twitter @bamransom and on Facebook: bamransom.

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Obama’s Enviro-Racketeering

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By Rich Trzupek

As I have noted on more than one occasion, in recent years the United States EPA has been acting more and more like a revenue-generating arm of the government than an agency that’s actually interested in protecting human health and the environment. A recent story published in the New York Times amply illustrates the point: fuel suppliers are being fined for failing to add a “green fuel” – cellulosic ethanol – that doesn’t actually exist into their gasoline blends.

Cellulosic ethanol has long been a particularly prized panacea among environmental groups. As any moonshiner knows, conventional ethanol has long been produced by fermenting naturally grown sugars. These sugars are readily available and relatively easy to get at in corn for example, which is why ethanol production plants commonly use corn as their feedstock.  However, even Al Gore eventually realized that it was rather idiotic to take millions of acres of farmland out of food and feed production in order to “grow” a fuel that (in many gases) actually ends up on the deficit side of the energy ledger. Cellulosic ethanol theoretically addresses those concerns.

There are sugars theoretically available in cellulose, a naturally-occurring polymer found in all sorts of plant life. If you can figure out how to get at those sugars, then you can make ethanol out of things that don’t have a lot of intrinsic value and that don’t compete with food and feed crops, like tree trimmings and corn cobs. Unfortunately, getting at those particular sugars is (for a lot of reasons that would bore the heck out of the average reader) extremely difficult. Like the Chevy Volt, the concept of cellulosic ethanol is very attractive, but the reality is expensive and impractical.

Expense and practicality are hardly matters of concern to environmentalists though. Environmentalists prefer the pixie dust approach to dealing with energy policy: if they believe hard enough, their wishes will come true. They wanted cellulosic ethanol and once Democrats took control of Congress after the 2006 elections, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid duly granted their wish. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated the use of certain minimum quantities of cellulosic ethanol that started at 100 million gallons in 2009 and ends at 16 billion gallons is 2022. (Annual US gasoline sales are about 130 billion gallons, by way of comparison). In 2011, oil companies were mandated to sell at least 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol.

This was a problem for oil companies, because there are no plants currently producing cellulosic ethanol. And so, using her authority under the Clean Air Act, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson duly issued penalty demands of $6.8 million to oil companies for not using a non-existent fuel.  If the rallying cry in 1776 was “No Taxation Without Representation!”, perhaps the equivalent in 2011 ought to be “No Penalty Without Reality!”

Interestingly, the act that started this chain of ridiculousness included an alternative that allowed companies to actually pay a tax – in the form of “credits,” whose price the EPA would set – in lieu of actually buying cellulosic ethanol. In EPA-land, this would be an alternative form of compliance, even though it would do absolutely nothing to address the concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on foreign oil that the act supposedly solved. The “credit” scheme smells, in other words, like a back-door carbon tax cleverly disguised in a “green” bill that Democrats pushed through and the all-too-eager-too-please George W. Bush dutifully signed.

When oil companies didn’t bite at the credit deal, Jackson decided to get the cash anyway, in the form of the fines that the EPA is allowed to levy thanks to the power that Congress has given this out-of-control agency. Indeed, the fines could have been a lot larger, but when going after big companies that might fight back, the EPA has to balance what they figure they can get without a prolonged court battle versus the time and expense of going through such a judicial exercise. In the grand scheme of things, one expects that the oil companies will do the same math and decide it’s easier to pay the EPA than to pay yet another army of lawyers. If that sounds a lot like legal racketeering, it’s probably because it is.

Did the EPA have to demand penalties in this case? No. That was a choice and, given the extreme leftist ideology of this administration and its EPA chief and given Obama’s desperate need to generate revenue by any means possible, it’s sadly no surprise that Lisa Jackson did what she did. But it’s beyond reason that we ever got to this point in the first place. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 gave the EPA administrator the power to waive or change the requirements for cellulosic ethanol if supplies were not available or if the cost was too high. Jackson could have – and should have – waived the requirement, but she chose not to.

There are those who would counter the equity and reasonableness arguments presented above by saying that the EPA should be forcing technological advancements and that these kinds of penalties accomplish that end. To this I would respond: nice thought, but perhaps you should step over here into the real world for a moment.

First of all, oil companies are not going to be the ones to develop cheap means of producing cellulosic ethanol. Oil companies employ geologists and engineers; they know about refining and exploration. They don’t have the people or the expertise to explore complex bio-chemical processes. There are companies out there with that kind of expertise and the government is pumping hundreds of millions of our tax dollars into them in the effort to discover this latest version of the energy world’s Holy Grail. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 alone included $50 million in grant funding specifically targeted toward cellulosic ethanol research. Levying punitive fines on oil companies to penalize them for the failures of all that government-mandated and funded research makes no sense. But, the EPA and the Obama administration have long since abandoned common sense altogether.

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Hat tip Leslie Burt

Making Eco-village in Green Mansions

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By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

Loudon County, Virginia, is one of the richest counties in the nation. They are now at the forefront of implementing the environmentalist green agenda of living in an eco-village. The residents are “a typical middle class mix of mostly white-collar workers.” (Washington Post, December 31, 2011)

If we consider this group typical middle-class, we should consider the price of homes in this utopian “paradise.” The last home bought in this Shangri-La in September 2011, a foreclosed home, cost $359,000. Some sell between $895,000 and $1.7 million.

The roads are unpaved, the terrain is rough, and the non-existent lawns are typical of wilderness grasses. The inhabitants like to keep them this way in order to reduce their Al Gore-determined carbon footprint. The gravel roads and the untended surroundings are definitely intentional.

“The development attracts a self-selecting group of people who, to varying degrees, are in search of a more sustainable and locally-centered lifestyle.” This may sound admirable to some people, but it regurgitates the buzzwords and goals listed in the UN Agenda 21 for all nations who signed the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Treaty. I am not sure about you, but I like my roads paved.

Gravel is intended to reduce harmful runoff into the Potomac and to slow down auto traffic. Parking is delineated to lots around the commune, not in front of people’s homes.

According to the Washington Post, “although it’s become almost mainstream to be ‘green,’ residents of EcoVillage, founded in 1996, are on the cutting edge of the movement.”

I am unsure how mainstream United Nations dictates are in America or the push by leftist environmentalists to get their carbon footprint tax.  Most Americans do not desire to live such “locally centered lifestyles.” We love our cars, we love our roads, our cities, and we are not so much fond of village life, which most societies try to escape. We would like to be able to keep our mobility and freedom to go greater distances in search of the American dream. Trying to fashion 19th century lifestyles for the rest of us in the 21st century is not exactly the majority of Americans’ idea of progress.

Residents, in communist fashion, must abide by strict ecological standards for building, lighting, and landscaping. Perhaps they should include goats in their lawn management program. “Villagers” can only pick from six approved house plans and must build in clusters of one-third to three-quarter acre lots for a total of 14 houses. There are 14 more lots, nine of which are vacant and for sale at $80,000 a piece. How many middle-class Americans can afford to pay $80,000 for such a tiny piece of land?

“Villagers” planted 11,000 trees in order to replace flora with indigenous varieties. After all, according to National Geographic, any species of flora that are not local represents “biological imperialism.”

Planting trees is a laudable effort; it makes the area a “heaven for birds,” which prompted the Audubon Society to name the EcoVillage a Home Wildlife Sanctuary. “Eighty-five percent of its 90 acres are protected open space.” This brings me back to the United Nations Agenda 21 and the Biodiversity Plan which aim to make most land protected and unavailable to human use.

The founders of the village lived since 2001 in a “straw bale house with timber beams, encased in thick stucco walls.”  I remember living in my Grandma’s straw and mud house in the early sixties in communist Romania. It was a heaven for mice and rats who tunneled and made their homes inside the walls. We could hear busy rat stomping feet all night long.

A solar system on the roof of a typical EcoVillage home heats the house with a complicated system of pipes and switches and an electric backup, just in case the sun does not shine at all. Some homes have geothermal underground pipes and windows are strategically placed to capture more sun.

“Villagers” claim that their choices have not been about the money, implying that the costs were not effective. They are well-off people trying to escape “the traffic and congestion of Vienna,” an upscale town with homes in the millions of dollars.

Potluck suppers and tree planting parties are the life of the “village.” Adults and children are required to do monthly community service in the EcoVillage. It reminds me of our forced “volunteer” work we had to do in the communist dictatorship in Romania – 30 days in the fall, picking the crops, and 30 days in the spring, planting the crops. We were not given as much as water during the 10 hours of daily forced labor.

Americans care for their environment and have plans in place for tree planting in order to prevent deforestation. We do not wish to excessively pollute our environment and do our part to protect it. The capitalist free market does a good job of eliminating and weeding out companies who over pollute. The price system, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” intervenes magically.

EPA rules and regulations protect our soil, water, and air. We do not need to revert to medieval times of village living in order to protect the planet. The environmental promoters have planned huge economic gains from carbon footprint taxes.

Cap and trade has been defeated so far, yet the United Nations, supported by the Sierra Club and other NGOs, goes full-steam ahead to charge Al Gore’s carbon footprint taxes in total disregard of our laws and Congress.

The UN Climate Change Summit in Durban

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By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

The UN Climate Change Summit in Durban has outlined the mandate to “respect the rights of Mother Earth” by paying a “climate debt,” a slush fund to bankroll the activities of a one-world government. I bet you did not know that Mother Earth had rights.

Lord Christopher Monckton said that the treaty “calls for the west to achieve 50 percent CO2 emissions reduction within the next eight years, a feat that would completely bankrupt the global economy and spark a new great depression, as well as a more than 100 percent reduction by 2050, which presumably could only be accomplished by killing billions of humans to prevent them from exhaling carbon dioxide.”

Monckton writes, “So, no motor cars, no coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, no aircraft, no trains, back to the Stone Age, but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in your caves.”

The treaty calls for a two degree Celsius drop in global temperatures, which Monckton says, “would kill hundreds of millions and herald a new ice age.” So much reduction in CO2 concentration would “kill plant life and trees on the planet because they need levels of CO2 above 210 ppmv (parts per million by volume) to survive.”

International Climate Court of Justice

The plan calls to disband military forces as they contribute to climate change. The UN will become the world army and police of the globe. An “International Climate Court of Justice” will enforce the treaty. This will require paying a “climate debt” and reparations to third world nations if carbon cuts are not drastic. Developed nations are thus responsible and guilty for the weather patterns and they must be punished.

Monckton also writes that the money will be collected by UN bureaucrats and distributed according to their judgment. “The UN exists for only one purpose: to get more money. That and that alone, is the reason why it takes such an interest in climate change. The Convention’s all-powerful secretariat (one world government) has no plans for democratic elections.”

The UN has designed new slush funds to enrich its coffers, a tax on shipping and aviation fuel, a worldwide cap and trade, and a new “Green Climate Fund.”

Green Climate Fund

According to Venezuela’s envoy, Claudia Salerno, the Green Climate Fund is “designed to help poor nations tackle global warming and nudge them towards a new global effort to fight climate change.”

I have a huge problem with this statement for two reasons. First, global warming has been debunked as a scientific hoax, and secondly, it is arrogant for bureaucrats to claim that humans can manage the climate or fight changes in climate. Over the past century, only two inches in water level rise has been measured, so it is disingenuous to say that many areas would be underwater without such draconian measures undertaken at the helm of the United Nations.

The “legally-binding treaty” is likely to pass this time, says Lord Monckton. The discussion centered on major polluters like China and India. The U.S. wants all polluters to be held to the same legal standard on emission cuts, while China and India do not wish their fast growing economies to be encumbered by strict guidelines.

Eco-Lunatics and Eco-Fascists

Lord Monckton was not allowed at the conference initially, he had to “parachute in.” He represented the Committee for Constructive Tomorrow, which provides “real solutions to dealing with environmental problems that third world nations are experiencing rather than the Marxist party line of environmentalist eco-fascists who want to punish the West alone and its developed nations.”

According to Lord Monckton, the eco-lunatics sent in goons in certain regions of Uganda, killed off the population and then declared the areas “carbon safe zones.” “These people are certifiably insane and are waging a sustained, malevolent attack on the West like termite ants.” They are going to send in troops to shut down entire industries for non-compliance with their UN Treaty.

Lord Monckton suggested that people should read for themselves the document at climatedepot.com at the Committee for Constructive Tomorrow website and at cfact.org. More than 1,000 international scientists disagree over “man-made global warming” claims.

United Nations “scientists” warn that “time is running out to close the gap between current pledges on cutting greenhouse gases and avoiding a catastrophic rise in average global temperatures.”

UN released reports claim that “delays on a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will make it harder to keep the average temperature rise to within 2 Celsius over the next century.” This Chicken Little, the Sky is Falling warning is so ridiculous, pretending that the UN has the power to stop the eruption of a volcano, a hurricane, a tsunami, or control nature with its demanding third world dictatorships at the helm.

The treaty is based on deliberately erroneous “scientific data” provided by Al Gore and other environmentalist alarmists who claim, “A warming planet has already intensified droughts and floods, increased crop failures, and sea levels could rise to levels that would submerge several small island nations, who are holding out for more ambitious targets in emission cuts.”

The fact that solar flares have intensified, the fact that the data suggest, based on temperature readings in the last century, that we are in a global cooling period, are not variables in this international climate calamity travesty.

If you think that our federal government has not already bought into the climate change debacle, you would be wrong.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in October 2009 that it is “hard for federal, state, and local officials to predict the impact of climate change, and thus hard to justify the current costs of adaptation efforts for potentially less certain future benefits.”

Based on opinion surveys of 176 people, with only 61 percent returning the questionnaire, the following issues were identified in reference to a “federal climate service:”

  • Translating climate data such as temperatures and precipitation changes into information that officials would need to make decisions
  • The difficulty in justifying the current costs of adaptation with limited information about future benefits.

The October 2009 report on climate change adaptation recommended the “development of a strategic plan to guide the nation’s efforts to adapt to a changing climate, including the mechanisms to increase the capacity of federal, state, and local agencies to incorporate information about current and potential climate change impacts into government decision making.”

On November 16, 2011, GAO released a document, “Climate Change Adaptation,” during the testimony before the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and the U.S. Senate.

Based on global-scale models, and we know how reliably scientific those are, GAO suggested that data from such models must be downscaled to a geographic area relevant to decision makers.

GAO testified that “climate change is a complex, crosscutting issue that poses risks to many existing environmental and economic systems, including agriculture, infrastructure, ecosystems, and human health.”

The globe has gone through periods of mild to severe climate changes throughout history. Climate change is not something we suddenly discovered and it was never proven scientifically to be the result of human activity.

We do have ample evidence that the University of East Anglia had hidden or destroyed data that had proven the global warming hypothesis to be a hoax. Most recently, 5,000 more e-mails were released as evidence that data was tampered with by the academics pushing the Marxist environmental agenda.

“The data does not matter. We are not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models,” said Professor Chris Folland from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. Dr. David Frame, a climate modeler at Oxford University stated, “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.”

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world,” said Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment.

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy,” said Timothy Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation.

“A 2009 assessment by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) found that climate-related changes—such as rising temperatures and sea level—will combine with pollution, population growth, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone.” Thirteen U.S. federal agencies are subscribers to USGCRP.

“According to the National Academies, USGCRP, and others, greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue altering the climate system into the future, regardless of emissions control efforts. Therefore, adaptation —defined as adjustments to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climate change—is an important part of the response to climate change.”

As with UN Agenda 21, it seems that the fix is on Climate Change and no amount of dissension from the rest of the population or scientific clarity will dissuade the minority policy makers. One world environmental control by the United Nations through its Secretariat is a bad idea for the developed world; it is a bad idea for the United States, and a bad idea for the sovereignty of many developed nations. It is not just bad policy; it is extortion, plain and simple.

The Loons are Running the Asylum

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By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

We have always had crazy people, citizens lacking common sense, the misinformed, the ignorant, the purposeful deceptive, but we never used to put them in charge, until now.  We are turning into europameristan because we think, it is not happening yet in our own back yards, neighborhoods, or towns.

We shake our heads in disbelief, joke about it, talk about it, write about it, while we are losing ground every day to a minority fringe bent on destroying everything around us and installing their ideas of civilized society: anarchy, socialism, Marxism, fascism, and Islamism.

Small areas of the country that do not represent America elect politicians like Barbara Boxer who make damaging policy for the rest of the country. She said yesterday, “Climate deniers in this country are endangering humankind.” In reality, the global warming hoax group is purposefully trying to destroy our economy by imposing United Nations mandated taxes on the United States, taxes earmarked for third world dictatorships.

Boxer tried unsuccessfully to pass cap and trade last year after bullying Roy Spencer during his testimony on cap and trade. “She did not allow him to finish any sentence that she did not want to hear. She displayed no tact, class, or understanding of the scientific issues, making trite and embarrassing comments of a global warming cheerleader.”

We allow Occupiers to create chaos, filth, disease, and destruction in our cities in the name of democracy in action, freedom of speech, and political correctness. They want anarchy, chaos, drugs, unions, free trade, no borders, free food, free housing, free school, free cars, free gasoline, free day care, free clothes, free perennial vacations, and free health care, all paid for by the producing “evil capitalists.”

We allow mainstream media to guide and control everything in this country because they know best what is good for the rest of the United States: socialism and Marxism.

We permit the indoctrination of our children in schools into the leftist agenda of globalism, environmentalism, diversity, socialism, and communism.

We allow third world dictatorships at the United Nations to control our land, water, and energy use via UN Agenda 21 and carbon credit tax in the name of social justice necessitated by a faux man-made global warming.

The head master of a second grade school in the U.K. cuts off the heat to an entire primary school during the coldest day in December to assuage his environmental guilt over his carbon footprint. The temperatures dipped to 1 degree Celsius while students shivered and were unable to perform their tasks. Parents were furious that this man chose to “save the planet” at the expense of their children’s misery.

Al Gore, politicians, the rich Marxist advocates and communism-loving Hollywood fire up their jets or taxpayer provided jets to go on shopping sprees, vacations, and other leisurely activities with total disregard for pollution or their carbon footprint. Yet we are expected and forced to alter our life styles fundamentally in order to fit into their agenda of rolling back life to middle ages.

The globalists invented the measurement of carbon footprint and water footprint for the masses but the oligarchs in power are exempted from such life style changes. They can pollute away. Entire countries can stop their economic activities and it would barely nullify a few days of China’s polluting industries.

We allow the federal government to replace parents and parental responsibilities. Detroit schools want to remain open during the Christmas holidays with the stated purpose to offer three meals a day to students and food baskets to their families. We do have food stamp programs in place and food banks, we do not need to keep schools open at great taxpayer expense. It is absolute insanity!

We allow TSA to dehumanize and humiliate us at airports in the name of air travel safety, an idea developed by progressives to better control mass transit. If we refuse the highly intrusive scanners, total strangers who seem to enjoy their newfound power are eager to molest us during pat downs.

“Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation’s Armed Forces at home.”

We allow voter fraud, political corruption, and squandering of our Treasury in the name of fairness, equity, social justice, and re-distribution of wealth. We are shamed and bullied into believing that protesting the corruption makes us bigots and racists.

We bailed out European banks that made irresponsible loans to irresponsible countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal who spent lavishly on social programs while expecting the “dumb and ignorant” U.S. to be the military protector and policeman of the world.

Bernanke just acknowledged that the Fed “loaned” $7.7 trillion to banks in 2008. Congress had “no idea to whom these loans were made.” Bernanke claimed that he “saved the world from total catastrophe.”

We bailed out national and international banks that were “too big to fail” because they bundled bad loans with good ones on the forced direction of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, and Maxine Watters assured us that both institutions were solid. Acorn and the Democrats picketed the homes of bankers to shame them into giving out mortgages to those unqualified who could not pay back the loans. If bankers refused, they were “racists and bigots.”

We are bailing out EU countries now through the International Monetary Fund because this regime does not want socialism to fail before the 2012 elections. The beloved socialist pet of the Democrats and this administration is floundering once again.

We are allowing the destruction of the best healthcare in the world, making the U.S. into the socialist utopia in which thousands of people will die untreated because of rationing of care, disregard for human life, gross negligence, and government malpractice.

Only in an insane world would people believe that adding 30 million more patients to the health care pool would make medical care better.

Only in a utopian world makes sense to bankrupt a country in order to fund socialized health care that is a disaster anywhere else it has been tried or is currently used.

The sane majority is allowing the fringe minority to dictate how we live, eat, drink, travel, worship, and ultimately what and how we think.

Only a deliberately blind populace would commit cultural, religious, political, and economic suicide by allowing a Marxist minority to control 306 million people with political correctness and lawlessness.

The current regime has destroyed jobs, homes, investments, and health care, yet the President is still the only one who can save us? How many more radical activists can we afford to put on the judicial bench in the next four years? How many more progressives can we afford to put on the Supreme Court in the next presidential term?

Our President is criticizing the Internet as a job killer in banking and phone industries, trying to excoriate the economic sector for the lack of job creation under his watch. People understand that Congress and Obama’s policies have caused the severe economic downturn. There is no denying it. He should know that Internet activity accounts for 21 percent of GDP growth.

The class warfare intensifies with the tired rhetoric that the rich must pay their fair share in taxes. “T. Boone Pickens has paid $665 million in income taxes since age 70.”  Forty-seven percent of the population does not pay any federal taxes yet receive earned income tax credit. How much more something for nothing should they get?

If you do not own stock in a corporation, why do you care how much the stockholders decide to pay their “fat cats?” They are not responsible for your financial problems. You may have made poor choices in life. You may have chosen to drop out of school, or you may have chosen unwisely education in fields that are not employable. It is not the corporate world’s fault for your unlucky choices. Politicians are at fault because they made the laws, funded them, and accepted campaign contributions from corporations.

People are weary of the tired out excuse that Obama inherited everything from Bush. George Bush’s economic policies set a record of fifty plus months of job creation. Bush asked Congress 17 times, starting in 2001, to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because it was financially risky for the U.S. economy.

On January 3, 2007 the Democrats took over the Senate and Congress. On that day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,621.77, the GDP growth was at 3.5 percent, and the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee. Fifteen months later we had an economic meltdown in the Banking and Financial Services.

Democrats controlled the budget process for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and they still have not passed a budget. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Obama took office. In 2009 they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the budget.

“The deficit Democrats did inherit was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets, the lowest deficit in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending.” Since Obama was an Illinois Senator, he should say, “I inherited a deficit that I voted for and then I voted to expand that deficit four times since my inauguration, to the highest level in U.S. history.”

There is organized and well-planned chaos coming from all directions at unrelenting speed. I am not sure how much longer this country can survive at this rate of insanity. We have become a threadbare carpet held together by very thin strings, threatening to break at any moment if we do not handle it gently. The sane majority must prevail.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh is a freelance writer (Canada Free Press, Romanian Conservative), author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her book, “Echoes of Communism, is available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Short essays describe health care, education, poverty, religion, social engineering, and confiscation of property. Visit her website, ileanajohnson.com.