Homeland Security Order: Retreat From Illegals and Drug Smugglers

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One of our responsibilities is to provide facts on issues that may negatively affect the safety of the Republic, in order that American Citizens will be provided with the truth on issues that the Obama administration and the left of center liberal media establishment, works at covering up many of those facts daily.  The below listed published article provides complete details on our summary of the new Rules Of Engagement issued to the US Border Patrol.

On the first day of his appointment, new Rules of Engagement were issued to the Border Patrol by Obama’s newly appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, who has no Law Enforcement experience and is the first African American to head DHS.   The new Rules Of Engagement, bars self-defense from rock-throwers, and match the recommendation of a report by an Illegal Immigration advocacy groups and the Mexican government. They want to reduce policing of illegal immigrants trying to illegally enter the United States at the Mexican border.  Obama agrees with the new Rules Of Engagement and desires for more lenient policing of illegal Immigrants violating Federal Law at the US/Mexican border.

The report by the Police Executive Research Forum was commissioned by DHS, it encourages lawlessness at the border by Illegal aliens, puts Border Patrolmen in much more danger, bars Border Patrolmen from standing in front of smugglers’ vehicles to prevent smugglers from entering the United States, and prevents Border Patrolmen from shooting at people who are attacking them with large rocks (those rock assaults have put Border Patrolmen in the hospital with critical head injuries).

Three U.S. Border Patrolmen were killed in recent years, including one who was shot during a clash with drug smugglers carrying AK-47 assault weapons provided to them by agents of the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious illegal drug running operation (the illegal Fast and Furious gun smuggling operation continues to be covered up by Holder). The Border Patrol has been attacked 6,000 times since 2007, and they have been “assaulted with very large rocks” 1,713 times since 2010, resulting in the serious injury of Border Patrolmen.

Despite the 7,713 attacks on Border Patrolmen, they have responded with deadly force only 43 times—-or 0.00056% of the time they were dangerously attacked.

Instead of tighten up policing rules to protect the lives of Border Patrolmen, Obama’s newly appointed Secretary of Homeland Security is doing exactly the opposite, he is putting them in more danger and telling them to run away, and seek shelter from attack,  if they are attacked by Illegal Immigrants.

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the new rules are being challenged by mid-level DHS officials and Veteran Border Patrolmen, who argued that the new rules barring self-defense from rock-throwers “could create a much more dangerous environment, especially for agents operating in rural or desolate areas, often alone, where concealment, cover and egress is not an option.”  But Johnston overrode the internal opposition by Veteran Border Patrolmen, and forced the implementation of the advocacy groups’ new Rules Of Engagement; Johnson demonstrated his incompetence on the first day on the job by putting Federal law Enforcement lives more in danger.

The new Rules Of Engagement will encourage drug cartels and human smuggling cartels in Mexico to get much more aggressive.  These unconscionable new Rules Of Engagement, should be grounds for Speaker Boehner to take action against DHS for  intentionally putting the lives of Federal Law Enforcement Officers in danger, and creating fear for the families of those dedicated Federal Law Enforcement Officers.

Obama is doing to Federal Law Enforcement Officers what he did to US Combat Forces in Afghanistan, forcing new and very dangerous Rules Of Engagement on them (those new and dangerous Rules Of Engagement in Afghanistan increased personnel Killed In Action by casualties by 458%).

If the Speaker of the House doesn’t take “immediate” and “firm” action to oppose these new and dangerous Rules Of Engagement for Border Patrolmen at the Mexican Border that are preventing them from defending themselves and telling them to “run”, like the speaker has failed for 17 months to establish a Select House Investigative Committee with subpoena authority on The Battle of Benghazi, there should be a change in leadership in the House.

RELATED COLUMN: DHS Orders Border Control, Retreat From Illegal Throwing Rocks and Drug Smugglers Vehicles

What do IRS Form 990s tell us? Public education is being wrested from the public!

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One of the panel discussions in which I participated at the first annual Network for Public Education (NPE) conference was on investigative journalism. I chose to use my twelve minutes to only touch the surface on using IRS 990s (the tax forms for nonprofit organizations) as a research tool.

In this post, I would like to continue my tutorial. The information I include here I learned by my own wits and through the suggestions of others. My purpose is to assist those who wish to utilize information from tax forms in order to support their arguments in fighting corporate reform.

This will be one dry read– but a useful read for those seeking to improve their knowledge of nonprofit tax form navigation.

The Nonprofit Tax Form Search Engine

First of all, let me introduce a wonderful search engine for locating those nonprofit 990s: citizenaudit.org

One can search any term, including organization names and even names of individuals. I suggest putting quotation marks around search terms so that the search results include the exact term.

Sometimes the search engine boots out “404-not found” or a page noting “0 results.” If I am sure the org or person exists, I refresh the search and often get a result.

The search results include both the 990s for the organization itself and also a list of other orgs that connect to the search term.

Keep in mind that the common name of an organization might not be the formal name used on the tax forms. For example, “American Federation of Teachers” (AFT) is actually “American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO Parent Organization” (Go here then here to see the AFT tax forms.) Also keep in mind that many nonprofits have other nonprofits associated with them. For example, the search results for the term “American Federation of Teachers” yields numerous tax forms for the local-level unions.

Search engine users should check to be sure that they are viewing forms for the intended organization. This is especially important for organizations with generic-sounding names, such as “Education Trust”.

(For an organization with such a generic name as Education Trust, I find it helpful to search for the CEO– in this case, “Kati Haycock”. Searching for the CEO yields a more precise search result.)

Finally, the listing of 990s for the organization is followed by a cross-referenced listing of other nonprofits whose 990s include the searched term. For example, a search of “Center for Union Facts” includes a cross-listing for the Gleason Family Foundation.

The cross-listings are helpful in identifying donors to the nonprofit of interest.

One can also use the search engine to investigate individuals’ involvements. For example, “Gideon Stein” is tied to Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academies and Green Dot charters (renamed Future Is Now). Another example is “Steve Barr”, who is connected to both Green Dot charters (renamed Future Is Now) and Parent Revolution (a spin-off from Barr’s Green Dot).

Navigating the 990

The 990 form was changed in 2008 (a different form is used for more recent returns). For my discussion, I will take my examples from more recent 990s.

Page One

The first page of the 990 includes the fiscal summary (Part I) and the signature block (Part II). The first info I note is the calendar or tax year of the return. For example, this 2011 Harlem Success Academy 5 form is actually for July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012. I also look at the organization status. Most are 501(c)3 nonprofits. (This info is printed near the top of the form, in small print.)

Click here for types of 501(c) nonprofits, and here for the difference between 501(c)3 and 501(c)4.

Next, I notice when the form was filed (bottom of first page, next to preparer signature). In this case, the 990 was filed 04-23-13.

I might need to know these dates to determine if I am reading the correct form for, say, receipt of a Gates grant, or to determine when a key individual joined or left the organization.

The first page also includes a brief mission statement of the organization.  (In this case, the reader is referred to Schedule O for continuation of the mission statement, which would not fit in the space provided. This is Eva Moskowitz’s school, and Eva usually has a lot to say.)

Other info on page one includes information on the current year and the prior year financial summary of the org. I can see how much the organization has gained or lost from one year to the next. I can see the org’s total assets (line 20) and whether the org is spending more than it is taking in (revenue less expenses– line 19).

It is possible for a multi-million-dollar organization to slowly be spending more than it is gaining in revenue (see AFT’s 2012 990 as an example). Thus, an organization might say that it can do without certain reform-connected donations; however, if the organization has been consistently outspending its revenue over the course of years, then in order to forego the questionable donations, the organization must compensate by either curbing its expenditures or otherwise raising its revenues.

In comparing organizations that share common board members, it is also useful to compare organization addresses. For example, the supposed “grass roots” Los Angeles Parent Revolution shared the same CEO and, initially, the same physical address as Green Dot charters.

Page Two

The second page (Part III: Statement of Program Service Accomplishments) has a more detailed mission statement (one can still need that Schedule O in order to elaborate– page 2 has a box to check if such is the case).

Page 2 includes information on the top three greatest expenses for the organization that tax year. (Grant money also needs to be identified here if such is part of a specific expense.) This information is important in determining the organization’s priorities. I find the descriptors on this page very helpful in determining an org’s prioritized actions (and, more important, the motives behind the actions).

From page 2 of the Harlem Success Academy 5 return, I learn that Moskowitz spent $2.8 million educating “approximately 241 students” (she reported using no earmarked grant money). That’s approximately $10,300 per student. PLUS she reported earning $3.65 million in revenue– thus exceeding her expenses by $850,000. (No other priority expenditures were noted on the page.)

In contrast, a review of page 2 of the 2012 990 for Education Trust shows me that Ed Trust did not earn revenue from its top three ventures– which underscores its dependence upon philanthropic cash as noted in this post.

Pages Three and Four

Pages 3 and 4 of the 990 are Part IV: the checklist for required schedules.  This section includes 38 “yes/no” questions about activities of the nonprofit. A “yes” response requires a detailed answer– a “schedule” must be completed.

Applicable schedules are in alphabetical order at the end of the 990.

If a “yes” is indicated yet the associated schedule is not part of the return, or if it is left blank, something is fishy.

Of particular interest is item 4, on lobbying (requiring Schedule C). The American Legislative Exchange Council, known for  neglecting to note its lobbying activities on this 2009 990 and some others, sometimes acknowledges its lobbying (as it did in on its 2012 990) but then notes that its lobbying cost nothing.

Fishy. ALEC is a corporation-legislator dating service.

Also of interest is item 23, a reference to a subsequent section on compensation from unrelated organizations (Part VII, question 5). An answer of “yes” requires completing Schedule J, which is the document that enabled me to know that Eva Moskowitz’s salary is partially funded by another nonprofit, MRM Foundation/Julia Greenblatt (recorded on the 2012 990 for her charter management organization, Success Academy Charter Schools, Inc).

Pages Five and Six

Of interest on page 5 (Part V: Statements Regarding Other IRS Filings and Tax Compliance): Item 2a indicates the number of employees; 4a is about “interest in or authority over a bank account in a foreign country” and could be useful for unmasking foreign-run charters. (The item requires naming the foreign country.)

Page 6 (Part VI: Governance, Management, and Disclosure): Item 1a is a count of the voting members of the governing body, including clarification on how many are “independent” (not compensated as an independent contractor, and more).

Item 2 concerns multiple family/business relationships; item 3, delegation of management duties to a management company. These items help determine conflicts of interest.

Item 8 asks whether meetings are documented. If an organization is engaging in questionable practices, including bypassing their own protocol, such info might come in handy if the organization denies having a record of a certain meeting. A discrepancy between the organization’s “nonexistent” documentation and its reporting on its 990 could be useful for enforcing records requests.

The second section f this part includes questions of enforcing conflict of interest policies (requiring explanation on Schedule O). I find that most 990s post some generic declaration in this section regardless of the activities in which they engage. A pat conflict of interest policy does not preclude information that flags conflicts of interest elsewhere on the 990.

Pages Seven and Eight

Page 7 is Part VII: Director, Employee, etc. Compensation. Here’s where one can find board members, officers, and employees; their hours, and compensation, if any.

Also included in Part VII (Section B) are the five highest-compensated “Independent Contractors.” For Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 5, for example, one learns that Moskowitz paid her management company $282,630 to “manage” this co-located school of 241 students.

Those listed as independent contractors must provide an address– which, for the self-employed, is often a residence. In the case of Los Angeles Parent Revolution CEO Ben Austin– who was also an independent contractor for Green Dot charters– his address was listed as Beverly Hills even as he portrayed himself as a grass-roots “Los Angeles Parent” in his astroturf Revolution (see Schedule A of this 2007-08 990 for Austin’s Beverly Hills address– note that this return follows an older format).

It is this Section B on the union-bashing Center for Union Facts (CUF) 2012 990 that one reads of CUF CEO’s Richard Berman paying his own company a disproportionate amount of money as a “contractor.”

Also, in this section are three questions regarding excessive or unrelated compensation requiring Schedule J (discussed above re: Moskowitz’s salary from MRM Foundation).

Pages Nine thru Twelve

On page 9, Part VIII: Statement of Revenue, one can see info on government grants and other gifts.  Page 10 includes Part IX, a complete breakdown of spending. I found this information particularly useful in my writing on Moskowitz. I could compare her spending breakdown to her assets as recorded on Part X: Balance Sheet, item 1o, land, buildings, and equipment, less depreciation (depreciation is a write-off). (Land, buildings, etc., is detailed on Schedule D, Part VI.)

The 990 has additional information, much more than I discuss in this post; however, what I have included is information I have found useful in exposing the extravagant and questionable spending of so-called reform-promoting nonprofits.

The 990 PF

Private foundations complete a 990 PF. The primary interest in 990 PF’s is likely the listing of the foundation’s contributions in the form of grants and loans. For example, the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) is known for its support of “choice” (charters and vouchers). This WFF 2011 990 includes the details of numerous loans made to charter schools (often in the form of an unsecured “revolving fund”).

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has extensive 990s that list all grants paid out in a given year. An example is this Gates 2012 990. It is worth noting that Gates grants are not always fully paid in the year in which they are issued. Thus, one can compare grant information from the Gates grants search engine to the disbursement information for a specific year as noted on Gates 990s to roughly determine grant payment installments.

Time for My Exit

If I include Walton and Gates in my 990 PF discussion, it is only fitting to include the last of the Big Three, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (here’s its 2012 990).

Let’s close this post with a bang.

From Broad (as in Broad Superintendents Academy), most of the larger, six- and seven-figure donations are for education privatization, not the least of which is $3.5 million to Students First, $2.3 million to KIPP charters, $1.5 million to Success Academy Charters, over $1 million dollars to the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), $775,000 to Green Dot charters, $600,000 to New Schools Venture Fund (whose CEO is now the proposed US Undersecretary of Education, Ted Mitchell); $345,000 to Parent Revolution, $334,000 to Rocketship charters; $300,000 to Teach for America (TFA), and $215,000 to Education Trust.

What can 990s tell us?

Public education is being wrested from the public. It is being handed over to those who wish to make major money by those who have major money.

Let’s continue to write about it, using evidence to support our work.

IRS 990s never looked so glamorous.

RELATED COLUMN: Common Core-frustrated teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’

Good Businesses Respond to Facts, Not Ads by Lawrence W. Reed

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“Move here, expand here, or start a new business here and pay no taxes for ten years!” So goes the slick, nationally-broadcast television ads on which the State of New York is spending a small fortune.

Sounds like an attractive offer but the devil is in two big details the ads omit: One, when the ten years are up, you’ll get socked with the highest tax burden among the 50 states; and Two, taxes are just one of many reasons New York is too costly and unattractive to many entrepreneurs. It’s also home to high rates of unionization and a hostile regulatory environment. In the most recent study of state-by-state economic freedom from the Mercatus Center, New York places dead last. Georgia ranked a very healthy #9.

This raises yet again a longstanding question about economic development: Which is better for business, a friendly overall environment with no special favors or an unfriendly environment offset by “incentives” for particular firms or certain activities? It ought to be a no-brainer but sadly, it isn’t. Count me in the first camp.

Imagine a bad restaurant with high prices, lousy service and an awful menu. What would you think if the owner decided that the solution to declining sales was not to fix anything but to go out in the street, cherry-pick passersby and offer them a discount? For every new customer he might get, who could blame any of the old ones who would resent the discrimination and leave in a huff? If the restaurant owner really wanted to put his business on a sound footing, he would cut his high prices, improve his lousy service and replace his awful menu—for everybody, not just a favored few.

Well, New York is a bad restaurant. Expensive television ads are the politicians’ cowardly way of saying they don’t want to make the tough decisions to actually fix their state’s problems. They either think business people are dumb enough to ignore the facts and be suckered by a TV spot, or they just don’t understand the most basic lesson of economic development: The really good entrepreneurs you should want are the ones attracted by economic freedom, not by short-term favors and empty political promises.

States can foster superior and sustainable growth if they spend less energy on a few trees and care instead for the forest as a whole. Subsidies, tax breaks and other targeted, discriminatory “incentives” are not good substitutes for fixing the fundamentals. They’re also unfair to those without the political pull to get them. The states that get it right don’t have to squander money on advertisements—whether true or deceptive—because any entrepreneur worth his salt will know where to go and what places to shun.

A version of this article appeared in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

20130918_larryreedauthorABOUT LAWRENCE W. REED

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Prior to becoming FEE’s president, he served for 20 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

Um, Scarcity? by Sandy Ikeda

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The new mayor of New York wants to make city streets safer. According to The New York Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping set of proposals aimed at improving street safety in New York City, pledging considerable police resources and even precious political capital in Albany to a most ambitious goal: eliminating traffic deaths.

Not just lowering traffic deaths, mind you. Eliminating them.

I posed the following question to my students: If His Honor did manage to eliminate all traffic deaths in the city, how might that policy actually raise the total number of deaths? The answer lies in understanding a very basic lesson in economics: Scarcity matters.

What Is Scarcity?

Scarcity is what gives something economic value. Scarcity results when our wants exceed available, want-satisfying resources. The air we breathe outside is ordinarily not scarce, while the air we need to breathe underwater usually is. Consequently, to those who want air to breathe, the value of outside air is low while the value of underwater air is high.

Although we are often tempted to ignore scarcity, it’s impossible to escape its consequences. For example, there are not enough hours in a day to consume as much leisure as I want and also to earn as much income as I want. But the more I work the less time is left for leisure, and vice versa. Scarcity entails trading off some ends for other ends.

Now, if I’m spending my own private resources to pursue ends of my choosing—to buy a shirt for myself or a gift for someone else—scarcity is hard to ignore. But it’s much easier to overlook if I’m spending someone else’s valuable resources—when someone else is footing the bill. And because modern governments sustain themselves precisely by spending other people’s resources (acquired through taxation or inflation), public officials are far more likely to ignore scarcity and its consequences than a private person is. They may not be aware of the costs of a choice, but those costs always fall on someone, somewhere.

I argued recently that you can almost define economics as “the science that explains why passing a law won’t get it done” because the unintended consequences of a government intervention tend to frustrate what its advocates want to achieve. In that essay I emphasized how an intervention generates unintended consequences because society is so complex. But often the problem is simply that public officials ignore the existence of scarcity. If they spend more of the government budget on traffic control, that means spending less on preventing violent crime, and they may not like the results.

Political Rhetoric or Social Science Fiction?

So when I read about de Blasio’s plan, it caught my eye. The article goes on to say:

The 42-page plan is rooted in a Swedish street safety approach known as Vision Zero, which treats all traffic deaths as inherently preventable. Perhaps the most significant changes involve the New York Police Department, whose officers will increase precinct-level enforcement of speeding.

I’ve developed a soft spot for Sweden lately because it has taken major steps at the macroeconomic level toward a freer economy.

We here in the United States should learn from these steps. So I visited the website of Vision Zero and found much to like in their approach, which tries to take into account the imperfection of human behavior. They claim that safety in Sweden has improved, presumably as a result of Vision Zero.

The trouble begins when you look closely at the underlying philosophy.

The first is the idea that “no loss of life is acceptable” if it’s caused by traffic. But why stop there? Why should traffic deaths be less acceptable than deaths by poisoning or by drowning or from the flu or from a myriad of other causes? The same arguments they make for eliminating traffic deaths could be made for those. But Vision Zero doesn’t make them, perhaps because if they did it might direct scarce resources away from their pet project, or because at some level they realize that it’s too costly to eliminate all accidental deaths.

Second, Vision Zero places the bulk of the responsibility for safety not on the imperfect driver or pedestrian but on the less imperfect “professionals” in charge. Aside from the uncomfortable paternalistic overtones of that attitude, as I explained in the column I reference earlier, making driver “safer” can cause more accidents. In order to minimize accidents, the driver and pedestrian must bear the costs of their actions, otherwise they have an incentive to act recklessly.

At any rate, in each of these cases the VZ folks can’t possibly mean what they are saying because it utterly ignores scarcity. The spokesperson says that people should be able to demand (and presumably get) freedom, mobility, and safety all at once. Since what Vision Zero is purportedly aiming for is perfect safety—which is what is supposed to make the approach novel—then he must also mean perfect freedom and perfect mobility as well. In world of scarcity, that’s fantasy, or to be more precise, it’s social science fiction.

Surely, it’s only political rhetoric. At least I hope so. But there’s another problem with Vision Zero.

Ought Implies Can

If drivers and pedestrians who put their lives at risk still make mistakes, why should we assume that traffic professionals who don’t have as much to lose won’t also make mistakes? They can’t possibly anticipate every contingency, nor would we want them to if the cost is going to be sky high. Everyone makes choices that might contribute to an accident.  But why can’t an accident, even a terrible one, simply be an accident? Why does it have to be somebody’s fault, every time? I think this is wrong-headed.

I’m not saying that lowering traffic deaths isn’t a good thing. But making it a moral problem, by placing the main responsibility for saving lives on experts, is confused. Morality is related to economy, of course, but probably not in the way its proponents think.

As my colleague Steve Horwitz put it, “Ought implies can.” Economic concepts such as scarcity help us get a handle on what’s possible, the set of feasible choices, from among which we can choose. The “eliminate deaths” approach ignores the feasible and goes right to what we would like to see. Sure, bringing the number of traffic deaths to zero would be great, if it could be done at a reasonable cost. But I can say with assurance that the cost would not be reasonable.

That’s because “pledging considerable police resources” to eliminate traffic deaths necessarily means drawing police and other resources (for narrowing streets or installing devices that will penalize taxis for speeding) away from other areas, such as monitoring thefts or preventing violent crime and so on. In that way, Vision Zero could wind up taking away more life than it saves. The total effect would be an empirical question.

The mayor points out that last year there were 176 pedestrian deaths in the city. That works out to about 2.2 deaths per 100,000 persons, which is significantly higher than the national average of 1.58 deaths. Now, New York City has an above-average number of pedestrians per 100,000 persons, which might explain much of the difference, but it might be a good thing anyway to try to lower that number to somewhere closer to the national average. And that’s where people get uncomfortable with economists because we’ll often talk about the “optimal” number of deaths in such a case.

But when we say something is optimal, we’re not trying to morally justify those deaths. We’re only trying to make it clearer what the realm of the possible is—what we can do. Can we do better with existing resources? Almost certainly; our knowledge is never perfect and there’s always room for improvement. Can we increase government resources by increasing taxation and through inflation? Yes, we can!

That won’t solve the fundamental problem though. Even with a bigger budget, scarcity and the hard choices it entails won’t go away. The sooner real-world governments and their supporters realize it the better.

ABOUT SANDY IKEDA

Sandy Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. He will be speaking at the FEE summer seminars “People Aren’t Pawns” and “Are Markets Just?“

What Freedom of the Press?

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In a February 10 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who occupies one of the Republican seats on the commission, broke the news that the Obama administration was planning to place inquisitors in the newsrooms of television and radio stations across the nation.

Titled the “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN, the FCC program proposed to send researchers into TV and radio newsrooms to interview reporters, editors, and station managers about how they decide which stories to cover… or not cover. As Pai described it, the stated purpose of the CIN was to “ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about ‘the process by which stories are selected,’ and how often stations cover ‘critical information needs,’ along with ‘perceived station bias’ and ‘perceived responsiveness to undeserved populations.’ ”

As a guideline for their research, the FCC planners selected eight major categories for their investigators to delve into:

  • Emergencies and risks – immediate and long term,
  • Health and welfare – local health information and group specific health information,
  • Education – the quality of local schools and choices available to parents,
  • Transportation – available alternatives, costs, and schedules,
  • Economic opportunities – job information, job training, and small business assistance,
  • The environment – air and water quality and access to recreation,
  • Civic information – the availability of civic institutions and opportunities to associate with others,
  • Political – information about candidates at all relevant levels of local governance, and relevant public policy initiatives affecting communities and neighborhoods.

In addition, the FCC identified two broad areas of critical information needs associated with each of these categories: 1) Those fundamental to individuals in everyday life, and 2) Those that affect larger groups and communities.

But this is all pretty boring stuff. If the FCC was interested in conducting a study on which topics and which stories were most likely to put TV viewers and radio listeners to sleep, it’s pretty clear they were really onto something. There have always been much more interesting stories to report.

Although everyone but the fascist thugs of the Obama administration and the brain-dead rank-and-file of the Democratic Party were immediately horrified at what the FCC proposed, for the first time in history conservatives and the lawyers of the American Civil Liberties Union threw their arms around each other. The thought of someone marching into the newsrooms of television and radio stations and demanding to know how they conducted their business was roundly denounced by conservatives and honest liberals alike.

Jay Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative public interest law firm, cautioned: “The federal government has no place attempting to control the media, using the unconstitutional actions of repressive regimes to squelch free speech.”

Without doubt, Sekulow had the Obama administration in mind when he cautioned us against “repressive regimes?”

Commentary magazine equated the proposed FCC study to the dangers of, say, a federal shield law. The principal danger of a shield law is that, in order to legislate protections for a specific group… i.e. the “press”… it is first necessary to define that group. Therefore, the government would be placed in the position of deciding who is a journalist and who is not. As Commentary suggests, “The government could easily play favorites and have yet another accreditation – not unlike an FCC license – to hold over the heads of the press.” Given the Obama administration’s unprecedented use of the IRS to thwart its political opponents, is there any doubt that a shield law in their hands would be a very dangerous thing?

Commentary concluded that it is such rules that the FCC’s CIN calls to mind. It opens the door to increased government scrutiny of the press, with an implicit threat to a broadcaster’s license. It does so under the guise of “public service,” “quality control,” “fairness,” and other terms that usually hint the government is up to no good. Left unchallenged, the CIN would support the premise that “news judgment is the FCC’s business.”

The FCC quickly issued a statement saying that Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler was in agreement that “survey questions in the study directed toward media outlet managers, news directors, and reporters overstepped the bounds of what is required.” An FCC spokesman added that “any suggestion that the FCC intends to regulate the speech of news media or plans to put monitors in America’s newsrooms is false.” 

However, what is most noticeable about all of the moral indignation directed at the FCC’s CIN program, whether from the left or from the right, is that it is all premised on the notion that we actually have a free press in the United States when, in fact, we do not. Few conservatives, the most “under-served population” of all, would deny that because of many decades of leftish propagandizing by the mainstream media, any opportunity to get inside the newsrooms at the major networks to expose them for the charlatans they are would be far too tempting to ignore.

For example, in 2004, CBS newsman Dan Rather created a national stir when he charged that George W. Bush had been AWOL during a part of his service in the Texas Air National Guard. Unfortunately for Rather, the documents used to support his charge turned out to be forgeries. The documents, which Rather claimed were memos from one of Bush’s senior officers, contained superscript characters which

were not available on typewriters at the time. In truth, the documents that Rather hoped would ruin Bush’s reelection chances were created on a modern computer using Microsoft Word software, and artificially aged to make them appear authentic.

Nevertheless, the networks and major print media devoted hundreds of hours of airtime and countless lines of newsprint to the bogus story. It would have been interesting to learn how the networks decided to spend that much time and effort on the phony Bush AWOL story.

Conversely, just three years later, when it became evident that Sen. Barack Obama would be a viable Democratic candidate for the presidency, legal scholars complained that, because Obama failed to meet the basic requirements to be a “natural born Citizen,” as required by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, he would be ineligible to serve. And although there was ample evidence to support the charge, the mainstream media all but ignored the story.

And when the Maricopa County, Arizona, Cold Case Posse, under the direction of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, provided irrefutable proof that the long form birth certificate uploaded to the White House website on April 27, 2011, was a poorly crafted forgery, that his draft registration card was a forged document, and that his Social Security number was stolen and would not pass a simple Social Security Administration E-verify test, the left-leaning newsmen of ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC looked the other way. They simply ignored the story.

It would be interesting to have editors, producers, and reporters at our major networks explain why a few days absence by George W. Bush from his Air National Guard duty station should be a major national news story, while the constitutional ineligibility and the forged documentation of the country’s first black president deserved nothing more than to be swept under the rug.

These are not isolated incidents; they happen every day of the week, on every conceivable kind of issue, foreign and domestic. The only constant is the fact that the reporting is almost always slanted in favor of liberal/socialist orthodoxy and against traditional conservative views.

Given that so much of the Obama administration invites favorable comparison to Hitler’s Third Reich, it was only to be expected that the FCC’s CIN study would quickly attract comparisons. Marilyn Assenheim, writing for the Patriot Update, suggests that, “What (Obama) is establishing is a redo of historical absolutism. The German National Socialist government could not have aspired to better.”

Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, reminds us that “Arbitrary power is ugly and vicious, regardless of what pious rhetoric goes with it. Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it or lose it.” “But,” he asks, “is our generation up to fighting for it?”

Humorist Frank J. Fleming has said: “I think Obama is learning. By the end of his presidency he’ll have gone from less than useless to achieving parity with uselessness… In America, we love rooting for the underdogs, so maybe a gigantic decline in our nation is just what we need to believe in ourselves again.”

Perhaps a close brush with fascist dictatorship will be enough to wake us all up to the realities of the terrible dangers that Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi represent.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is of Press Freedom Monument, Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines by Mark Gio Amoguis. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. The use of this image does not imply in anyway endorsement of the author or contents of this column.

RELATED COLUMN: Liberal Blogger & Journalist Shows How Most News Is Controlled For Political Purposes

IRS: Two Fifths Doesn’t Solve Anything

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Two very important things happened at yesterday’s short-lived House Oversight hearing investigating the IRS targeting of nonprofits.

First, IRS former senior manager Lois Lerner again invoked the 5th Amendment. In January, her attorney said she would testify if given immunity. That same attorney now states, Lerner cannot testify because she fears for her life.

Second, graphics were apparently displayed that showed previously disclosed communications of Ms. Lerner. However, when viewed in the context of testifying under oath, well, as Fox News Greta Van Susteren said in her Facebook Post, “THESE EMAILS ARE HORRIBLE! Lois Lerner is in a heap of trouble — and these emails (below) are really bad.”

Lois graphic

Just who is “everyone” and “they” and is this why Ms. Lerner is so afraid to tell the American people the truth?

More importantly, why isn’t the news media falling all over themselves to get answers to these and other important questions regarding this scandal – just as they did with the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals?

And why isn’t every member of Congress demanding the appointment of a special prosecutor just like they have done in the past?

And the most important question of all – who is standing up for and defending the taxpayers of America – the ultimate and perennial victims of the IRS?

The answer is simple – nobody.

Taxpayers, the very people who paid for Ms. Lerner’s salary, pension and most likely, her attorney; who pay the salaries, benefit plans and perks of the IRS employees who carried out this political weaponization; who underwrite the lavish lifestyles of Members of Congress appear to not be even an afterthought in this escalating political cat and mouse.

This can change. If Congress enacts the FairTax® Plan, the American people will have a tax code that is fair, simple and truly represents them – not a plan that is used by a Congress bent on partisan manipulation and retribution.

More importantly, with the FairTax, the IRS is gone – no more scapegoated federal employees to do partisan political bidding and no more cowering by taxpayers from enforcers who act like brown shirt thugs instead of public servants once sworn to uphold the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

No citizen – most certainly no American citizen – should ever feel the need to cower before their government or any of its representatives.  As John Adams said in 1776, “Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”

Perhaps that is why a majority of Americans want the FairTax passed, the IRS defunded and disbanded and the 16thAmendment repealed.

FL Common Core: A Schneider Debriefing on Weingarten

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On Sunday, March 2, 2014, I participated in a much-publicized Common Core (CCSS) panel with four other individuals as part of the Network for Public Education (NPE) first annual conference in Austin, Texas. (A 40-minute video of the CCSS panel can be found here; a five-minute video excerpt of my seven-minute opener can be found here.)

[youtube]http://youtu.be/4abuqu3tmeQ[/youtube]

One of the panel members was American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. Weingarten was the only panel member in favor of CCSS. The rest of us, including moderator Anthony Cody, were against CCSS.

In this post, I would like to reflect upon my involvement on the CCSS panel, especially in connection with Weingarten. Much of what I have written is not available on video because the events and/or reflections occurred outside of the CCSS panel itself. Some of what I have written involves responding to Weingarten’s words here since there was neither time nor opportunity to do so during the panel session.

My Position on Weingarten

First, a clear word on where I stand in regard to Weingarten. I think she chooses to be involved with the likes of Bill Gates and Eli Broad because she likes them. I believe that the money they bring is a reason, but a lesser reason, for her sustained relationship with them. These two men bring with them power, and connections, and influence. Weingarten likes to be “at the table,”– their table. And their table is one that promotes the privatization of public education.

I believe that Weingarten’s continued involvement with Gates and Broad and their extensive network of moneyed, powerful cronies is destroying the union. The destruction shows itself in every pro-privatizing decision that Weingarten makes– and such decisions appear to be countless. It seems that every time I dig deeper in researching a Weingarten decision, privatization is the winner.

I believe that Weingarten is at least partly motivated to continue her Gates/Broad relationships because she always has an eye to the “where next” of her own career. She became a teacher temporarily in order to become a teachers union president; she was willing to jump into Hillary Clinton’s open senate seat in 2008 after having just been elected AFT president, and she continues to seek the next avenue in her career rise. The result is that Weingarten is willing to sacrifice the health and security of the union for her own career aspirations.

It is always my hope that Weingarten will forsake her allegiance to her corporate reform connections and focus on the well being of the union. However, with each new decision she makes, what I must face is the reality that Weingarten must be pushed into a political corner in order to eke out a couple of drops of concession that are for teachers (and, by extension, for the union) and against her beloved corporate reform connections. This reluctance showed itself in the CCSS panel regarding discontinuing Gates money for the AFT Innovation Fund (more to come on this) and it show itself in Weingarten’s dealings with New Jersey in the week prior to the NPE conference. (See this link for Weingarten’s letter to NJ Governor Chris Christie accompanied by my “deeper dig.”)

I have heard the excuse that being AFT president is a “difficult” job, insinuating that Weingarten should be excused for her reckless and repeated union-damaging decisions. I do not excuse her. She sought the job of teachers union president; based upon AFT’s 2012 990, she makes almost eight times my salary (W-2 and/or 1099 MISC have her compensation at $454,416), and she was elected to serve public school teachers.

If elected to serve us, then let her be accountable to us.

Schneider Has a Weingarten Vendetta (??)

I have actually had the term vendetta used to describe my interactions with Weingarten. First of all, a vendetta involves seeking revenge for a single wrong, perceived or actual. I am not seeking revenge. What I am doing is exposing Weingarten’s continued pro-privatizing dealings as I learn of them in the course of my research.

Yes, I am angry at Weingarten’s wrecking of my union and my profession. However, I am not cruel in my dealings with her.

Pointed, yes; cruel, no.

It’s called accountability. Perhaps she will begin to think about how her corporate-reform-friendly bent will come back to haunt her in my posts and elsewhere. (The education blogger network has become a force in its own right, and the press should provide a healthy pressure on those whose decisions impact the masses.)

Allow me to present some behind-the-scenes dealings to underscore my balanced motivations in interacting with Randi Weingarten.

When  I agreed to participate on NPE’s CCSS panel, there was no mention of Weingarten as a panelist. So, I did not agree in an effort to have a “showdown” with Randi Weingarten. Anthony Cody invited me to participate because of my extensive writing on CCSS.

On December 30, 2013, I received an email from Cody telling me that Weingarten had accepted an invitation to appear as part of the NPE CCSS panel and that she did not yet know I also invited.

I phoned Cody to be sure that my appearance would be no surprise to Weingarten. I wanted her to experience no daytime-television-sensationalized shock at my being there. Cody assured me he had no such intention and that Weingarten would know that I was a panelist long before the event.

People with vendettas do not guard their opponents against shock.

On February 4, 2014, Cody asked my thoughts on the format for the CCSS panel. I asked him if Weingarten would be the only pro-CCSS panelist. He said yes; so, I proposed that she begin a structured seven-minute presentation time and be allowed three additional minutes at the end.

People with vendettas do not offer generous concessions.

One of my fellow bloggers told me that she assumed Weingarten demanded the extra time. Weingarten did not. I suggested we incorporate it since she was alone in her position; the remaining panel members agreed.

But there is another piece to this story. There was some email discussion over a conversational format for the panel. I did not believe this would work well with five people, and I noted as much. “Conversational hijacking” was too much of a possibility, and some panelists might be completely omitted from the discussion. However, my principal concern was for my own self control. I phoned Cody and told him as much: In an open format, I was much more likely to rip into Weingarten, and I did not want this panel to degenerate into the dregs of an ugly encounter. I asked Cody to “save me from myself” (my exact words). He assured me that he felt more comfortable with the structure originally proposed and to which Weingarten had initially agreed. (She later wanted the more open format.)

People with vendettas do not ask others to help them maintain control against potentially unruly, “vendetta-related” upset.

Prior to the NPE conference, I had not met Weingarten. I wanted to do so in a low-key manner. So, after serving a chauffeur on Saturday night (the first conference night and the night before the CCSS panel), I introduced myself to Weingarten, who was at the Mariott at a reception for NM Governor Howie Morales. The reception was ending– it was 10 p.m.– and I walked up to her, said my name, explained that I wanted to introduce myself before tomorrow, then excused myself and left. No fanfare. No showing off in front of a group of friends. Just a moment of ice breaking in an effort to make tomorrow’s introduction a smoother moment.

People with vendettas do not “break the ice” via low-key introductions.

So, yes, my intention was to confront Weingarten’ pro-CCSS position but to do so in a professional and controlled manner.

(An aside: Before I published my open exchange with Weingarten in November 2013, I not only informed her that I was writing an open letter to her; I sent the letter to her and gave her a full week to respond if she chose to prior to my posting the letter. Then I sent the finished post to her prior to publishing, including her response, and told her the exact time and locations of the posting. And let us not forget my December 2013 defense of AFT against the Center for Union Facts. No vendetta.)

Schneider Was Too Controlled (??)

Allow me to address the pendulum as it swings to the other side, namely, that I was too controlled. Some audience members expected me to rip into Weingarten. First of all, my intention was to destroy her logic for supporting CCSS– not her. I believe that this was accomplished not only by me but also by the other three anti-CCSS panel members.

There were some addiitonal Weingarten statements on which I would have liked to comment in real time. Nevertheless, time did not allow for all panelists to say all that they wanted during the panel. We had a schedule to keep.

That Sunday afternoon, I was able to elaborate on my position regarding the influence of philanthropy dependence  (the money as well as the power and connections) as such concerns Weingarten and others receiving philanthropic “assistance” to a packed room as part of the philanthropy panel discussion. Plus, I am writing my candid “debriefing” as part of this post.

Should Randi Weingarten and I ever engage in a one-to-one discussion of AFT involvements with those known to actively promote the corporate reform agenda, my discussion will be much more direct– never cruel– and likely without much raising of my voice– but like the skilled and precise slicing of a surgeon’s scalpel.

The Weingarten-BAT Incident

In this post, I wish to respond to Weingarten’s words during the CCSS panel. First, allow me to sidestep to her auditorium entrance.

Her privatizer-friendly positions make Weingarten a polarizing figure. And she is very much the politician, seeking to be regarded as a member of whatever group whose opinions she is trying to sway.

(In planning for the NPE conference, fellow blogger Jon Pelto created a group for conference panelists. A number of bloggers were on this list and were trying to arrange a bloggers meeting. At one point Weingarten entered the conversation and asked, “So am I a blogger? Or just a participant?” I wanted a clear boundary. I responded, “Randi, you are a participant.”)

On the morning of the NPE CCSS panel, Weingarten wore a BAT (Bad Ass Teachers) t-shirt.

Apparently Weingarten passed the BAT table and asked for a t-shirt. A BAT took her photo and created a meme. The entire event disturbed blogger Kris Nielsen, who responded on March 3 with this post. The next day, March 4, blogger Denisha Jones answered Nielsen. I particularly like what Jones notes here:

…Taking a picture of Randi Weingarten in a BAT t-shirt did not make BAT’s suddenly reverse their stance on CCSS. And let’s be clear, Randi Weingarten put on the BATs t-shirt. BAT’s did not put on a Randi Weingarten t-shirt and allow themselves to be photographed. [Emphasis added.]

The BATs did not endorse Weingarten. One simply gave her a t-shirt.

I am careful about my associations. My education reform writings have made me popular with a variety of groups, some of which I would not otherwise choose to ally. Anyone may choose to reblog my work. However, I am careful where I choose to become actively involved, be it webpage, or magazine, or blog, or speaking engagement.

And I never don a logo in order to mimic belonging.

Weingarten’s Opener (And My Written Commentary)

In her opening remarks, Weingarten equates “national standards” with CCSS.  She admits that she “believes in national standards.” However, the push for CCSS is that they are not “national”– they are “state-led.”

If the public were fine with “national” CCSS, there would be no push to “rebrand” in an effort to trick the public into believing the standards are unique to individual states.

In my opener, I state that “national standards” does not equal CCSS, and that “national standards” must be voluntary.

In her opener, Weingarten also acknowledges that AFT “was approached” to “review” CCSS.

Not “write.” Not “develop.” Only “review.”

Not to mention the passive voice, “was approached.” Top-down.

She adds, “There was a bunch of give and take, and they changed the standards in a lot of different ways.”

Note the top-down “they.” “They” have the power. “They” have the final word. And in the end, “they” decided to make CCSS rigid.

Weingarten admits that she believes CCSS is “inappropriate for K thru 2″ and that she knows this “because people have used them how inappropriate they are.”

No mention of the need to pilot before implementing. No mention of the damage to student, teachers and schools for forcing implementation of untested CCSS.

How about grades 3 thru 12?

Weingarten jumps to the “real problem is the testing, which comes from No Child Left Behind (NCLB).”

The real problem is that all of Race to the Top (RTTT) attempts to be a “standardized NCLB”– rigid standards so that curriculum and test makers can pattern their wares after the CCSS template. Testing is the offshoot of the CCSS hub.

Weingarten states that the “problem” is that “testing has conflated with everything else that happens in school.” She does not admit her contribution to the destruction brought about by testing dependence, not the least of which is her taking money from Gates for VAM and not declaring VAM problematic until the month following the expiration of the Gates grant. Neither does Weingarten acknowledge her contribution in tying Newark teachers into VAM (see Newark link above).

Weingarten maintains that it is the testing emphasis that makes “people feel like they have no voice whatsoever.”

It is not the testing alone. It is the entire spectrum of reforms intentionally and strategically pushed down the collective school and community throats by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the National Governors Association (NGA).

Weingarten focused her argument on “finding a way to break through on the fixation on testing and the fixation on test scores.”

The way to destroy the CCSS tests is to destroy CCSS. In my opener, I offered the advice for teachers to form committees and to start shuffling CCSS around. Doing so sabotages CCSS as a template for testing.

The through answer is to obliterate CCSS. No CCSS, no CCSS tests.

AFT and Gates Money

During Weingarten’s second time speaking (recorded at end of video), Weingarten attempted to defend AFT’s accepting Gates money by noting that it was one percent of the total AFT budget. (According to the AFT 2012 990, AFT spent $190 million from July 2011 to June 2012. About.com has AFT’s annual budget at “over $170 million.”) She offered the audience the concession that at the July convention,she would ask members to vote on a five-cent dues increase in order to continue the AFT Innovation Fund. She asked the audience if that would be okay. The audience applauded.

Weingarten implied that “so little” Gates money does not matter. However, it apparently does since not accepting “the next round” for the AFT Innovation Fund means a dues increase. The current Gates grant for the Innovation Fund and CCSS ($4.4 million) expires in May 2015.

Note: There was no mention of returning any Gates money. There was also no agreement to not accept Gates money in the future– just not for the Innovation Fund.

The Gates money matters to those who take it. However, the connection to Gates and the power that such connection brings matters to those benefiting from his circle of power more than does his money.

A five-cent annual annual dues increase for all 1.5 million AFT members yields $75,000 in additional revenue.

A two-dollar annual dues increase for all 1.5 million AFT members would yield an additional $3 million in AFT revenue.

I would like to challenge Weingarten to offer AFT members the total amount that AFT dues must rise in order for her to say no to all corporate-reform-associated philanthropic money given to AFT.

I would also like to challenge her to stop making contributions out of AFT money to those who openly advocate the corporate reform, corporation-benefiting, test-driven, teaching-profession-undermining agenda.

In Closing

At the close of the NPE CCSS panel, Weingarten spoke last. She reiterated that she likes CCSS and added that her reason was “personal” and connected to her time “as a teacher.”

Two points:

First, as the president of a national teachers union, the “bottom line” for continued support of CCSS cannot be “personal.” Weingarten is the leader of 1.5 million union members. Support for any program must put union membership ahead of personal preference.

Second, Weingarten concluded her time “as a teacher” in 1997. Thus, she has been away from the classroom for seventeen years. In a conversation over dinner, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis observed to me, “I have been away from the classroom for only three years, and I am out of touch with what is happening there now.”

I returned to the public school classroom in 2007 after teaching at the university level. My 2007 return is worlds away from what I know as a classroom teacher in 2014.

For me, CCSS is indeed “personal,” for it is very much associated with my daily classroom experience. But may I always offer a more detailed, factual, research-based reasoning for railing against corporate reform and its ardent supporters than to simply note, “It’s personal.”

RELATED COLUMN: Conspiracy Fact: Obama Budget to Cement Common Core

EPA Attacks World’s Largest Copper Mine

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I could write every day about some new obscene Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) effort to thwart energy the nation needs, forcing the shutdown more coal-fired plants and the mines that supply them. Goodbye thousands of jobs, goodbye electrical energy. The White House has delayed the construction of the Keystone Xl pipeline to transmit oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Do you wonder, still, why there are millions of Americans out of work or who have stopped looking because every effort to build the nation’s economy is attacked by some element of the Obama Administration.

We can now add another attack on natural resources because the EPA has announced its intention to restrict, if not prohibit, the development of Pebble Mine in Alaska. The mine could be one of the world’s largest sources of copper.

Beyond the economic benefits the mine would create, it would not only produce copper, but strategic metals like molybdenum and rhenium. Daniel McGroarty, the president of the American Resources Policy Network, noted in a July Wall Street Journal opinion that these two metals “are essential to countless American manufacturing, high-tech, and national security applications.”

Copper is one of the most important minerals used today because it is a good conductor of heat and electricity—second only to silver in electrical conductivity. It was discovered thousands of years ago in prehistoric times. Methods for refining copper from its ores were developed around 5,000 CE and, though too soft for many tools, when mixed with other metals, the resulting alloys were harder. The entire Bronze Age owes its name to the mixture of copper and tin. Brass is a mixture of copper and zinc.

McGroarty pointed out that “The irony here is that renewable-energy industries that environmentalists champion, like solar and wind, rely heavily on copper. More than three tons of it are needed for a single industrial wind turbine.” Solar panels depend on copper as well. And electric cables, usually made of copper, transmit the energy these two favored “renewable energy” sources. Together, though, they represent less than 3% of the electricity generated.

Expecting environmental groups to make any sense or even to tell the truth is a waste of time. The Pebble Mine is opposed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthworks, and Trout Unlimited. The EPA claims to have researched the environmental impact of the Alaskan mine and concluded that it poses a serious risk to the salmon fisheries and native tribes in the Bristol Bay area.

EPA research is so wretchedly flawed that the Agency is still insisting that carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for “global warming” even though the Earth entered a new cooling cycle around 1996. None of the children born since then have ever spent a day experiencing a warming cycle.

The EPA has been engaged in its own interpretation of the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts. The Supreme Court, which erroneously ruled that CO2 was a “pollutant” in April 2007—it is vital to all life on Earth, providing for the growth of all vegetation—has just heard oral arguments for a case that could further ruin the nation’s economy. Environmental groups and the Obama administration argued that the EPA has the authority to require that power plants and other industrial facilities must get permits to emit carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases even though they have no effect at all on the Earth’s climate.

I often wonder why most Americans are so clueless about global warming. AKA climate change, and the rape of the nation’s economy by the EPA.

So we can anticipate that, when the partnership of those seeking to open the Pebble Mine does apply for a permit, we already know that the EPA will reject it. Gina McCarthy, the current EPA administrator, has made that clear. You can be sure that the EPA’s “research” has predetermined that outcome.

That’s not science. That’s just more environmental lies.

Those lies are a large component of why the nation is enduring an economic stalemate that is beginning to look like the next Great Depression. Those lies will try to stop the Pebble Mine and shut down more coal-fired plants. Those lies are the reason why so many potential new industrial and business enterprises are not being created.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED STORY: Wyoming welder faces $75,000 a day in EPA fines for building pond on his property | Fox News

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is courtesy of Rob Lavinsky / iRocks.com. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Calling the Global Warming Charlatans “Nazis”

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On February 20th, the noted meteorologist, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, fed up with being called a “denier” of global warming, posted a commentary on his blog titled “Time to push back against the global warming Nazis.”

“When politicians and scientists started calling people like me ‘deniers’, they crossed the line. They are still doing it,” said Dr. Spencer. “They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all man made nor a serious problem with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.” The Holocaust happened, but global warming’s latest natural cycle ended about 17 years ago and, as a lot of people have noticed, it has been getting cold since then.

“Like the Nazis,” said Dr. Spencer, “they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause…” In the case of global warming, this huge hoax was put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The UN would like to be the world’s global government, but that’s not going to happen. In the meantime, the IPCC provided scientists that cooperated with lots of money for their alleged research, all of which “proved” that carbon dioxide was dramatically heating the Earth. Others like Al Gore made millions selling “carbon credits”. Along the way, both Gore and the IPCC received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Spencer received a Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. He was a Senior Scientists for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center where he and a colleague, Dr. John Christie, received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. He became a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001 and continues to advise NASA as a U.S. Science Team Leader. As he points out on his blog, his research has been supported by U.S. government agencies, so the usual claim by Greens that he is a paid stooge of Big Oil just doesn’t work in his case.

Dr. Spencer’s decision to call a Nazi a Nazi ignited a lot of discussion among the global warming hustlers and those whom they have been calling “deniers” for many years. I always found it particularly offensive, but I suspect those I called charlatans and hustlers felt the same way. The difference, however, is the connotation applied to the term, “denier.” Even today anti-Semites of various descriptions deny that six million Jews died in the death camps of Nazi Germany during World War Two along with millions Christians and Eastern Slavic Europeans

What makes this particularly offensive and horrid is the fact that those in the Nazi leadership under Adolf Hitler were all environmentalists, deeply committed to conservation and similar expressions that put the Earth above the value of human life.

This is all revealed in a book by R. Mark Musser, “Nazi Oaks”, now in its third printing. Musser was introduced to environmentalism at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, from which he graduated in 1989. In 1994 he received Master of Divinity and spent seven years as a missionary to Belarus and in the Ukraine.

Musser’s book is absolutely astonishing as he documents how “Green” the Nazis were from their earliest years until their defeat. It was Heinrich Himmler, the Reich Leader from 1929 to 1945, who was responsible for the “Final Solution”, the mass killing of Europe’s Jews. He led the Nazi party’s SS.

As Musser notes, “The Nazis were trying to eliminate both global capitalism and international communism in order to recover a reverence for nature lost in the modern cosmopolitan world.” The Nazis also held Judeo-Christian values in contempt.

“That this evolutionary Nazi nature religion was clothed in secular biology and colored by environmental policies and practices, is a historical truth that has been ignored and underreported for too long a time in all the discussions about the Holocaust,” writes Musser.

I am inclined to believe that it is no accident that the global warming charlatans began to use the term “deniers” to describe skeptics.

By 2011, a Gallup poll that surveyed people in 111 countries revealed that most of the human race did not see global warming as a serious threat. Still, worldwide 42% told Gallup that they thought global warming was either ‘somewhat serious’ or ‘very serious.’ That was down from 63% in polls taken in 2007 and 2008 in the U.S.

More than just a spat between scientists, in April 2012, the Congressional Research Service estimated that, since 2008, the federal government had spent nearly $70 billion on ‘climate change activities.’ That kind of money could build or repair a lot of bridges and roads. It could fund elements of our military. It could be spent on something other than a climate over which neither the government nor anyone in the world has any influence.

Bursting onto the national stage, Dr. Spencer’s decision to call the global warming scientists Nazis for their efforts to intimidate or smear the reputations of those whose research disputes their claims, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. a Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote on March 1 that “Surely some kind of ending is upon us. Last week climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming hypothesis.”

“In coming weeks,” wrote Jenkins, “a libel trial gets under way brought by Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the famed “hockey stick” graph (Editor’s note: an IPCC graph Mann created that asserted a sudden, major increase in heat has been widely debunked) against the National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making wisecracks about his climate work.”

Revelations of several thousand emails between IPCC scientists, one of whom was Mann, were christened “climategate” and demonstrated the efforts in which they engaged to suppress the publication of any papers that questioned global warming in scientific journals. As the climate turned cooler, they became increasingly alarmed.

What we are likely witnessing are the long death throes of the global warming hoax. Calling those scientists and others like myself “deniers” and other names simply reveals the desperation of those who are seeing a great source of money slip away under the spotlight of scientific truth, nor will they be able to impose their lies on the rest of us.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license. Attribution: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P049456 / CC-BY-SA

Going Outlaw – It’s not necessarily a bad thing!

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If a tyrannical government passes laws we cannot obey, we will be outlaws. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Y_DLqmnoYGA[/youtube]

Dirty Dozen Sexual Exploiters of 2014 list includes Eric Holder, Verizon, Google and American Library Association

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Morality In Media (MIM) has released its 2014 Dirty Dozen LIst: 12 Leading Contributors to Sexual Exploitation. The top purveyors of pornography in America are:

  1. Attorney General Eric Holder – Mr. Holder refuses to enforce existing federal obscenity laws against hard-core adult pornography, despite the fact that these laws have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and effectively enforced by previous attorneys general.
  2. Verizon – Verizon pushes porn into our homes now through hardcore pay-per-view movies on FIOS, smartphones and tablets and as an Internet Service Provider with insufficient filtering options.
  3. Sex Week – Yale and other colleges and universities repeatedly offer Sex Week on campus. Porn stars are routinely invited to lecture, and pornography that glamorizes “fantasy rape” is screened.
  4. Playstation – PlayStation’s live-streaming abilities are filling thousands of homes with live porn, and the PlayStation Store sells hundreds of pornographic and sexually violent games.
  5. Facebook – Facebook has become a top place to trade pornography, child pornography and for sexual exploitation. Facebook’s guidelines prohibit such behavior, but the company is doing little to enforce them.
  6. Barnes & Noble – This Fortune 500 Company is a major supplier of adult pornography and child erotica. They regularly put pornography near the children’s sections in their stores and provide free, unfiltered porn publications on their Nook e-reader.
  7. Hilton – This hotel chain, like Hyatt, Starwood and many other top hotel chains, provides hardcore pornography movie choices. Porn channels are often the first advertisement on their in-room TVs.
  8. American Library Association – The ALA encourages public libraries to keep their computers unfiltered and allow patrons, including children, to access pornography.
  9. Google – Google’s empire thrives on porn. Porn is easily available, even to children, through YouTube, GooglePlay, Google Images and Google Ads.
  10. Tumblr – This popular social media blogging site bombards users with porn. Users must only be 13, and the filters do not work.
  11. 50 Shades of Gray – This bestselling book series and upcoming movie are normalizing sexual violence, domination and torture of women. Oprah Winfrey Network, Broadway and other mainstream outlets have even promoted this abusive lifestyle.
  12. Cosmopolitan Magazine – The magazine is a full-on pornographic, “how-to” sex guide, encouraging women to accept the pornified culture around them. They specifically market this content to teen girls.

Read more.

ABOUT MORALITY IN MEDIA

Founded in 1962, Morality In Media (MIM) is the leading national organization opposing pornography and indecency through public education and the application of the law. MIM is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

Currently, Morality In Media directs the War on Illegal Pornography coalition, an effort with Congress to pressure the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce existing federal obscenity laws.

MIM also maintains a research website about the harms of pornography and regularly directs national awareness campaigns to help the public understand the consequences of pornography and find resources to aid in their struggles. To see MIM other current efforts, click here.

Congress: Going Around and Around Again

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Long before the digital age, Americans of all ages loved to listen to music on 78/45 and 33 rpm records. That is, until the record became scratched and the diamond needle stuck in the groove and all one heard were pops, cracks and the same sound over and over.

These long forgotten records came to mind earlier this week when the Ways and Means Committee Chairman, Dave Camp, released his 979-page tax reform plan. Reactions have been swift and ranged from warnings about mid-term election fallout to indignant outrage by a few K-Street lobbyists whose carve-outs didn’t make the cut.

Although well intentioned, this plan is nothing more than a simpler version of a corrupted income tax code that panders to special interests and enables the IRS to continue as a partisan weapon.

Or as Congressman Jim Bridenstine declared, “This is a noble objective, but the plan released Wednesday inappropriately preserves both the IRS and all the nefarious opportunities for politicians to again use the tax code to hand out cash, control markets, and manipulate human behavior”.

For nearly a year, Congressional investigators have been reporting findings and oversight committees holding investigations on the IRS targeting scandal. Congressman Camp was at the center of these oversight and investigatory activities including Lois Lerner repeatedly invoking the 5thAmendment prior to negotiating immunity in exchange for testimony.

Given this, how can any Member of Congress, advocate for tax legislation that continues an agency as abusive as the IRS? Rest assured, to support the continuation of the income tax is to support this continued abuse!

There is a solution and it awaits a promised vote by the Committee on Ways and Means. HR 25, “The FairTax Act of 2013” is a simple, fair and transparent tax replacement plan that disbands and defunds the IRS in its entirety. It is the only tax plan before Congress that accomplishes this and is ready to be immediately implemented.

The FairTax fully funds the federal government, including Social Security and Medicare, and will stimulate the economy while generating jobs – jobs the American people desperately want and need.

Our income tax code is beyond repair and should be thrown into the dust heap of failed legislative experiments. The American people have labored under a punitive income tax code for 100 years. They are tired, demoralized and desperately want elected representatives who have the courage to end partisan game playing while doing what’s right for taxpayers and the nation. They want the FairTax.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image This image was originally posted to piqs.de was uploaded to Commons using Flickr upload bot on 21:36, 19 July 2007 (UTC) by Bryan. The use of this image does not in any way imply the endorsement of this author or the Fair Tax.

RELATED COLUMN: Congress Recalling Former IRS Official Lois Lerner, Who Took the Fifth: ‘If We Have to Hold Her in Contempt, So Be It’

US Chamber and Alex Sink agree: We need more workers to clean hotel rooms and mow lawns

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It appears that Democrat Alex Sink, candidate FL 13th Congressional District, is accurately stating the US Chamber of Commerce’s position on immigration.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/_w4peAzj5hw[/youtube]

 

Now listen to the US Chamber interview with Republican Grover Norquist and others talking about immigration reform:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/ToGQXhyWHnY#aid=P9DJ4Mbv2Uw[/youtube]

 

According to the US Chamber immigration website, “Immigrants do not typically compete with Americans for jobs, and, in fact, create more jobs through entrepreneurship, economic activity, and tax revenues. Immigrants serve as a complement to U.S.-born workers and can help fill labor shortages across the skill spectrum and in key sectors.”

“Across the skill spectrum” is code for more low cost workers to pick oranges, clean hotel rooms and mow lawns.

Appearances by Grover Norquist, the President of Americans for Tax Reform, Frank Keating, the President & CEO of the American Bankers Association, Alberto R. Cardenas, the Chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the President of the American Action Forum explain why Immigration Reform is important to the Conservative cause in the United States.

EDITORS NOTE: Featured images is courtesy of MSNBC.

RELATED COLUMN: Ann Coulter – RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE TO $14 AN HOUR USING THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!

Ten Bills, Ten Solutions to save America

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Russ Vought, Political Director for Heritage Action for America, notes, “During the State of the Union address, President Obama called for 2014 to be a year of action. We agree, but Americans deserve action that will take the nation in the right direction. That’s why, with no clear goals or mandate from the Washington Establishment, we hosted the first Conservative Policy Summit.

On February 10th, Heritage Action brought together leaders to highlight conservative bills that would improve the lives of hardworking Americans. 10 speakers. 10 solutions.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/26d0H5Wl43M[/youtube]

Conservatives must lead through action. And we are. Heritage Action brought these leaders together on February 10th. The Conservative Policy Summit highlights the bills they have introduced, showing Americans a winning conservative reform agenda. Watch important discussion about our nation’s most pressing issues and learn about the conservative answers.

 

Privacy – Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ)
Social Welfare – Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) 
Health Care – Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) 
Health Care – Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN) 
Energy – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Housing – Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)
Transportation – Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA)
School Choice – Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC)
Higher Education – Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)
Religious Freedom – Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID)

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Claude Covo-Farchi. The use of this image does not in any way that suggests that Covo-Farchi endorses Heritage Action or the use of the work in this column. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

Actor Ashton Kutcher speaks out on Free Markets and “Heavy-Handed” Regulations

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Ashton Kutcher (L) greets 2nd Security Forces Squadron Airmen. The Airmen provided security support on the set of “The Guardian” while it filmed on base.

Ashton Kutcher is an entrepreneur and popular actor. He denounced heavy-handed regulation in a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/EoQo0HM9D3k[/youtube]

Scott Blakeman from The Foundry reports:

Kutcher is a managing partner of the investment fund A-Grade Investments. One company his fund has invested in is Uber, the app-based service that connects drivers with passengers. Uber is rapidly expanding to cities across the U.S. and is in over 24 countries worldwide. But Kutcher is experiencing firsthand some of the roadblocks many businesses have endured.

Kutcher noted that “old-school monopolies and incumbents and old-school governments” are interfering with the transportation market, picking the winners and losers, and barring innovation.

For instance, Kutcher mentioned that Uber isn’t allowed to operate in Miami “because of some dumb regulation that says it can’t exist there.”

Miami’s cab industry is heavily regulated, such that “local laws have protected taxi-medallion holders for so long that any attempt to tinker with the rules is met with stiff political resistance.”

Audrey Edmonson, a member on the Board of County Commissioners for Miami-Dade County, proposed legislation deregulating the county’s transportation market so Uber and other companies could compete with traditional transportation services. But Dennis Moss, a fellow board member who is also the chairman of Miami’s Transportation and Aviation Committee, helped craft the existing restrictive regulations and is opposed to letting Uber enter the Miami transportation market:

If you want to pay for a luxury ride, then you should basically have to pay for a luxury ride.… That way we make sure that cab companies can also continue to make a living.

Read more.