Monday, October 31, 2011

Equally Poorer

From CATO Institute

by Michael D. Tanner

This article appeared on National Review (Online)< on October 26, 2011.

As President Obama continues to base his reelection hopes on resentment toward the "1 percent" who are supposedly not "paying their fair share," the latest evidence suggests that his attacks are still off-target.

According to data just released by the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans earned 16.9 percent of all adjusted gross income in the United States. While no doubt that's a lot of money, it actually represents a decline from 2008, when the rich earned 20 percent of all income. That's right; the rich are earning a smaller proportion of U.S. income.

In fact, there has been a 39 percent decline in the number of American millionaires since 2007. Among the so-called super rich, the decline has been even sharper. The number of Americans earning more than $10 million per year has fallen by 55 percent. Perhaps someone should tell the folks in Zuccotti Park: Inequality is actually declining.

Interestingly, the decline in earnings by the rich has corresponded with higher unemployment and rising poverty overall. We are all poorer, but at least we are more equally poor. Hooray.

Could it be that the rich might actually perform a valuable service in our economy by, say, creating jobs? After all, what does the president think that the rich do with their money: Bury it in their back yard? In reality, individuals either spend that money or they save and invest it. If they spend it, it helps provide jobs for the people who make and sell whatever it is they buy. If the money is instead saved and invested, it provides the capital that is needed to start businesses and hire workers. It is trite but true — not many Americans have been hired by a poor person.

As for their not paying their fair share, according to the Tax Foundation report, that top 1 percent of earners paid 36.7 percent of all income taxes, an amount that truly does seem disproportionate. The top one-tenth of 1 percent, the truly rich, earned nearly 8 percent of all income but paid a hefty 17 percent of all income taxes.

And while Warren Buffett may, as he claims, be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, he is clearly an exception. In fact, the effective tax rate paid by the rich has actually gone up in recent years, and now averages roughly 24 percent, compared with an average of 11 percent for all taxpayers. Moreover, as the Tax Foundation points out, the reason that Buffett and those like him pay low effective tax rates is that much of their income is derived from capital gains and dividends, but "income derived from these sources has already been taxed once by the corporate income tax, which is not included in the current study, meaning the average effective tax rate numbers can be somewhat misleading."

All of this may be one reason why, despite the protestations of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, support among Americans for redistribution of the wealth is actually declining. According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who believe that "government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor" has fallen dramatically, with barely a quarter of the population strongly supporting the proposition. And, the biggest decline for redistribution has actually occurred not among the rich but among the working class.

Perhaps the "99 percent" are not quite so seduced by class warfare as President Obama thinks. Or perhaps they understand that, as William J. H. Boetcker once said (in a quotation often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln), "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich."

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

CBN: Arab Spring feeding push for Islamic Caliphate?

You will not read this in the MSM. I don’t even think you’ll read this on Fox News. But CBN lays out what many of us already know, that the Muslim world is working hard toward an Islamic Caliphate. And they’ve been doing it since 1928:

INSTANBUL, Turkey — Tunisia’s leading Islamist party recently captured most of the votes in the country’s first open election in decades.

For many, the move was another sign that Islam, not democracy, would continue to dominate the Middle East.

Some feel Muslim groups in the region are working harder than ever to re-establish an Islamic caliphate, or Islamic state.

When Muhammed died 14 centuries ago, the Muslim world needed someone to take the prophet’s place.

“The caliphate was the leadership of Islam after the death of Muhammad the prophet of Islam,” explained Islamic expert Moshe Sharon.

The last caliphate was located in Istanbul, Turkey. For 400 years, Istanbul and the Topkapi Palace was the political center of the Muslim world.

From there, the Turkish sultans ruled the Ottoman Empire as caliphs from 1517 until the empire fell after World War I.

But in 1924, the Turkish leader Attaturk abolished the caliphate. Since then, many Muslims have dreamed of its return.

“The major aim of the caliphate is to rule the world and this can be done under the leadership of one caliph and he himself only can declare a holy war, a jihad,” Sharon explained.

Some believe a restored caliphate will precede the Islamic messiah. While they may disagree on tactics, many modern Islamic groups share the goal of restoring the caliphate.

They include the Taliban, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the granddaddy of them all, the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The Muslim Brotherhood was set up in 1928, four years after the disbanding of the Muslim caliphate by Ataturk,” said Kenneth Timmerman, president of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. “And their specific mission was to restore the caliphate just four years later.”

“They’ve been pursuing that mission ever since,” he continued. “Their goal remains to set up one world Islamic government.”

The Brotherhood now has a foothold in Egypt where after the fall of the Mubarak government, it became the country’s most organized political party.

“What the Muslim Brotherhood would like to see is a strong, powerful Islamic government armed with nuclear weapons,” Timmerman added.

“Whether those are supplied by Pakistan or Iran doesn’t matter, and they would be gradually eliminating Christian and Jewish influence, Christian and Jewish governments,” he said.

Another potential power player who wants to restore the caliphate is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“I think Erdogan clearly sees himself as the founder of the new caliphate, the world Islamic government with Turkey at its center,” Timmerman said.

“I think this is what’s behind him offering to send the Turkish navy, for example, to protect a quote ‘peace flotilla’ that would come to Gaza,” he said.

“I’m sure that in his heart that [Erdogan] is dreaming about the re-establishment of the caliphate,” Sharon added. “He behaves like it. He can easily push this area into a great war.”

Because of the threat of war and rise of Islam, many feel the so-called “Arab spring” is a misnomer.

“I wouldn’t call it an Arab Spring,” Sharon said. “It’s far from being an Arab Spring. It’s the same kind of winter.”

Obama’s student loan plan isn’t so new

I can’t help but feel that President Obama’s new student loan proposal could take its title from William Shakespeare’s comedy “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Technically, on paper, the “Pay as You Earn” plan that the president began trumpeting Wednesday is new because it’s a new regulatory action taken by the Department of Education. But that action is just fast-tracking an improvement to a benefit already mandated by Congress in an existing program.

“It brings more relief on student loans to more borrowers than the current law would allow,” said Sara Gast, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education.

The president’s announcement gives a boost to the current Income Based Repayment program, or IBR. That program allows borrowers with federal student loans — a key piece of information that is being left out of many reports — to have their monthly payments set to a reasonable amount based on their income and family size. Monthly payments can be capped at 15 percent of borrowers’ discretionary income. After 25 years of qualifying payments, the remaining debt, including interest, is forgiven.

Starting in 2014 and later, the cap is lowered to 10 percent and debt forgiven after 20 years. But under Obama’s plan, borrowers who took out student loans in 2008 and later — and who take out a new loan in 2012 — can get the lower cap and the loan forgiveness starting next year, Gast said.

Let me put it another way so you are clear on who will benefit from this change. The president’s plan does not affect borrowers who took on loans before 2008 and who do not take out a new loan next year. So, if you are already in repayment and are not planning to take out new student loans, this plan does not affect you.

The changes could help borrowers who in 2012 and later consolidate loans from the government’s direct loan program and the nixed Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. Overall, this measure would provide an estimated 1.6 million borrowers with more manageable monthly payments, the administration said.

By the way, if your loans are in default, you can’t take advantage of IBR based on the current program or the president’s plan.

Got overwhelming private student loans? No soup for you!

That’s my sarcastic way of saying parents and students with oppressively high private student loans won’t see any relief.

New or not, Obama’s plan will bring much needed publicity to a program that borrowers who struggle with high payments should take advantage of. More than 36 million Americans have federal student loan debt, but fewer than 450,000 of them participate in income-based repayment, the administration said.

In the long term, however, reducing the need to borrow for higher education would help students and their families the most. Even with the relief from IBR, borrowers can be strapped with student loans for as long as two decades.

According to Federal Student Aid, an office of the U.S. Department of Education, these federal student loans are eligible to be repaid under an IBR plan: All Stafford, PLUS and consolidation loans made under either the Direct Loan or FFEL Program are eligible. The loans can be new or old and can cover any type of education (undergraduate, graduate, professional, job training).

Loans that are not eligible to be repaid under IBR: those currently in default, parent PLUS Loans (PLUS Loans that were made to parent borrowers) and consolidation loans that repaid parent PLUS Loans.

Why we must lose the darn 1 percent

Last Updated: 10:55 PM, October 25, 2011

Posted: 10:55 PM, October 25, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street crowd has correctly identified two distinct groups in this country: the wealthiest 1 percent and the other 99 percent, who suffer from the 1 percent’s vast wealth: The wealthiest 1 percent not only have more money than us, they have much, much more money. That’s just wrong.

It’s easy to see how the wealthiest 1 percent are devastating our country. Let’s say you took part in a raffle and won a prize of $500. Happy at your good fortune, you’d start thinking of all the neat things you could buy with $500.

But say the person next to you won $1 million. Then, suddenly, your $500 would seem like nothing in comparison, and all your ideas of what to do with that $500 would seem pathetic compared to what you could do if only you had the other person’s $1 million.

One truth would ring constantly in your mind: “That’s not fair!”

That’s what the wealthiest 1 percent do to us a nation: It’s just impossible to appreciate our affluence while other people are allowed to have so much more than us.

Sure, we could instead compare ourselves to the poor in other nations who live on a dollar a day or the poor throughout history who lacked all the freedoms, opportunity and technology we have -- but it’s too depressing to think about those people. Instead, we just need to do something about the wealthiest 1 percent.

Some might say one person’s income doesn’t affect another’s, and people should only worry about improving their own finances, but this is ignorant of how math works: None of us can get ahead while the 1 percent are around.

Let’s say you had two apples and another person -- let’s call him “Rich” -- also had two apples. If you then got one more apple and Rich got 80 more apples, would you now have more apples? No, you’d have fewer apples -- fewer than that other guy who has an unfair number of apples!

See, the wealthiest 1 percent prevent us from getting ahead because any time we improve our incomes, we spend more on businesses and services, and guess who that helps? The 1 percent. Getting ahead just isn’t worth the knowledge that the rich are getting richer.

There’s no point in working hard to try to become one of the 1 percent ourselves, because what’s the chance of that happening? One in 100? Who would play a lottery with odds that bad?

No, instead of working hard, the 99 percent can only sit and protest on Wall Street until the wealthiest 1 percent are torn down.

Here’s the thing: They’re the 1 percent, but we’re the 99 percent. Their wealth may be much more than ours, but 99 is a much bigger number than one. So we should just gang up and take their money.

When one person takes the property of another, that’s tyranny, but when lots of people get together and do it, that’s democracy. So we should legislate that the 1 percent no longer get to keep that vast wealth and must instead distribute it among the rest of us. (I should get the largest portion because it was my idea.)

After we’ve taken care of their wealth, to keep the nation happy and prosperous we should pass a law making it illegal for there to be a wealthiest 1 percent -- this country should just be the normal 99 percent.

Sure, that isn’t mathematically possible, but government shouldn’t be about what’s possible; it should be about what’s fair.

Frank J. Fleming’s e-book, “Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything,” will be released by HarperCollins on Nov. 15.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Top 0.1 Percent Pays More Income Tax than Bottom 80 Percent

9:27 AM, Sep 21, 2011 • By JEFFREY H. ANDERSON

In his recently released deficit plan, President Obama lays out the “Buffett Rule” (named, of course, for Warren Buffett, the famous investor and supporter of Obama). The rule, as Obama defines it, is “that people making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay.”
Buffett and Obama

Obama’s clear inference, of course, is that this otherwise happens routinely; that the rich are shirking their citizenly duties while the middle class pays. Is this inference true? Or is it simply a political fiction, a straw man from which Obama hopes to make hay in 2012?

The Tax Policy Center (TPC), a center-left joint-creation of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, publishes federal tax statistics by income group (see, here, here, here, and here). The essential funding source (at least from individuals) for most of the general functions of government — defense, roads, national parks, federal law enforcement, etc. — is the income tax. It is almost entirely through the income tax that individual citizens contribute financially to the day-to-day functions of their government.

In 2010, according to the TPC, Americans in the lowest quintile of income-earners — the bottom 20 percent — paid minus-3.8 percent of the total federal income tax burden. In other words, they got more back, in income tax credits and the like, than they paid in. Similarly, those in the second quintile paid minus-4.3 percent of the total federal income tax burden — so they, too, weren’t paying into the income tax till but rather were taking out.

Those in the middle quintile — pretty much the center of the middle class (this quintile had an average income of $44,000) — paid 3.9 percent of the total federal income tax burden (about $1 of every $25 dollars in income taxes paid nationwide). And those in the fourth quintile — whose income ranged from $58,000 to $102,000 — paid 15.1 percent of the total federal income tax burden.

So, all told, the 80 percent of Americans whose income placed them in one of these first four quintiles of income-earners combined to pay 10.9 percent of the total federal income tax burden. Put otherwise, this 80 percent of the citizenry paid about $1 out of every $9 that was paid in federal income taxes nationwide.

Meanwhile, Americans in the highest 0.1 percent of all income-earners — these are the very rich, with incomes of at least $1.974 million — paid 16.4 percent of the total federal tax burden. Essentially, one out of every $6 paid in federal income tax was paid by this 0.1 percent of the citizenry.

In other words, the top 0.1 percent paid more toward the workings of government than the bottom 80 percent did. That’s despite the fact that the bottom 80 percent collectively made more than six times as much money as the top 0.1 percent did.

On average, a given member of the top 0.1 percent paid $1.1 million in annual federal income tax — $1,147,616, to be more exact. That’s more than 1,000 times what the average person in the middle quintile paid ($1,017). Yes, the very rich made a lot more money — but not anywhere near 1,000 times as much. In fact, only 12 percent of this gap in income-tax payments is attributable to the gap in income between the two groups. The rest resulted from the very rich paying a much higher percentage of their income — more than 8 times as high — in income tax.

Now, I don’t know how much Warren Buffett pays his secretary, or how much either of them really pays in income taxes. But when 0.1 percent of the population is collectively paying more in income taxes than 80 percent of the population is collectively paying, it’s clear that there’s not a whole lot of need for the “Buffett Rule.”

Again, the stats I’ve quoted — all of which are from the TPC — are for income tax. What if we were to include all federal taxes — including payroll taxes, which people pay and then (to a greater or lesser degree) get back in direct payments for themselves in the form of Social Security or Medicare? What if we were also to include employers’ share of these payroll taxes, crediting employees as if they had made these payments themselves (like the TPC does)?

Factoring in payroll taxes in this manner, those in the top 0.1 percent no longer paid more in taxes than the bottom 80 percent did last year (although they did pay more than the bottom 40 percent did — four times as much, in fact). But they still paid much higher rates. The average total federal tax rate for those in the top 0.1 percent was 30.7 percent. (That’s before factoring in any state or local taxes.) In comparison, the average total federal tax rate for those in the middle quintile was 12.8 percent. The average rate for those in the fourth quintile was 16.8 percent. And the average rate for those between the 95th and 99th percentile (those making between $204,000 and $509,000) was 23.4 percent. So even if Buffett’s secretary makes a cool half-million annually, he or she still likely pays a much lower total tax rate than the average person in the top 0.1 percent.

Certain prominent Obama supporters (Buffett, General Electric) do seem to be particularly good at avoiding paying taxes, but that doesn’t mean they’re the norm. The facts are clear: Our very richest citizens collectively pay for more of the day-to-day operations of our government than 80 percent of our citizens collectively do. The rich would already seem to be paying — as Obama likes to say — “their fair share.”

The ‘Hunger’ Hoax

Thomas Sowell
The ‘Hunger’ Hoax
It’s part of the larger poverty hoax.

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 by declaring, “One in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press, and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients from one income level to another.



That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Sen. John Edwards was running for vice president. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.

Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue from, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.

The political Left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the “hunger in America” hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.

Burgers, pizzas, and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of September 25 by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is “to get people to see cooking as a joy.” For this, he says, “we need action both cultural and political.” In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!

Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don’t find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don’t always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.

An arrogant elite’s condescension toward the people — treating them as children who have to be jollied along — is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening society.

Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.

We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and either cars or trucks.

Why are such people called “poor”? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.

Those who believe in an expansive, nanny-state government need a large number of people in “poverty” to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.

Politicians, welfare-state bureaucrats, and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The New Face of Environmentalism

Van Jones renounced his rowdy black nationalism on the way toward becoming an influential leader of the new progressive politics.
By Eliza Strickland

On the opening afternoon of last month's Bioneers Conference -- the massive gathering of environmental activists held annually in San Rafael -- shiny hybrid cars parked in spaces "reserved for clean-air vehicles." Conferencegoers polished off kale salads and raw cucumber soup while a three-piece band picked out bluegrass tunes in the sunshine. Several thousand righteous souls had trekked here to the Marin Center in search of ideas and enlightenment. But the 2:45 p.m. panel on "social entrepreneurs" was failing to inspire.

The first speaker, a ponytailed environmental philanthropist, subjected his audience to a dry academic talk about the people he calls social entrepreneurs: ambitious visionaries who take risks and seize opportunities. He portrayed such activists as special people, implying that the rest of society should basically get out of their way. Some audience members seemed more interested in getting out of his way, and quietly slipped out of the auditorium in search of more fiery oratory.

The second speaker, a community organizer who works in Mexican border towns and embodied many of the traits her predecessor had catalogued, repeatedly left the room in silence while she struggled to get her PowerPoint presentation working. "I had hoped to show you ..." she said, her voice trailing off. "You're not going to get a visual, I guess."

By the time the final speaker addressed the crowd, people shuffled restlessly in their seats as a lone infant wailed. Van Jones, a tall, dark-skinned man wearing a "Kanye was right" T-shirt under his black blazer, seemed to have little in common with his audience of predominately white hippies. Feeling the energy in the room ebbing straight from the stage, he later said, Jones decided to throw out the talk he had planned to deliver about the work of his human-rights organization, the Ella Baker Center. Instead, he asked the name of the squalling baby. "Tavio," the mother replied.

"Tavio is a social entrepreneur," Jones said. "Tavio is changing the rules -- see? Speak when you want to speak."

The crowd laughed, and Tavio's parents smiled beatifically.

Then Jones alluded to what he had heard from some of the other speakers that day. "They're calling out for us to be brave again," he said. "To break out of patterns, start breaking some rules, try some new stuff." He explicitly challenged the ponytailed speaker's notion that social entrepreneurs such as he are isolated heroes. Jones said he personally would be "babbling on a street corner" somewhere if not for the support of his colleagues. He instead insisted that each member of the audience had the potential to light a fire that could change the world.

Jones quickly involved others in his presentation by lobbing questions back at his audience; each raised hand signaled another person won over. "Is there anyone here who has a recurring dream that there's something you're supposed to be doing?" he asked. "You look at your journal and the same idea keeps coming back? Is there anyone here who ever swallowed hard and took a stand for something that you knew was unpopular? Has anybody in this room ever really, really screwed something up, and then tried again? Well, I would say if you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a social entrepreneur."

The activists hung on Jones' words, captivated by the potential that he described within each of them. He finished with an exhortation worthy of a revival: "Our species is struggling to live through you, through that dream, through that journal entry that keeps recurring," he said, his voice quivering with passion. "I beg you, I beg you, embrace that rule-breaking, life-affirming, risk-taking you that the world needs so desperately right now."

He bowed his head, and was greeted with whistles, hoots, and applause. Half the audience leapt to its feet. If it hadn't been a crowd of sedate white liberals, someone might have shouted "Hallelujah." A woman turned to her companion and asked, "Where did this guy come from again?"

Jones came from rural Tennessee, by way of Yale Law School. The self-described former "rowdy black nationalist" is best known as founder of the Ella Baker Center, an Oakland-based nonprofit group with roots firmly grounded in criminal-justice issues that affect low-income people of color. In 1995, he started Bay Area PoliceWatch, a program that assists victims of alleged police brutality. He made his mark as an activist by brashly saying things no other civil-rights leaders would say, such as "Willie Brown's Police Commission is killing black people." The center's second program, Books Not Bars, runs a campaign to radically transform California's youth prisons into rehabilitation centers. As the group gained visibility and a reputation for in-your-face tactics, its annual budget snowballed to $1.4 million, and its staff increased to 22.

But Jones' personal life has been punctuated with a series of epiphanies, each of which has expanded the focus of his work. In college, he embraced the fight for racial justice. Then he moved to the Bay Area and embraced the struggle for class justice. When he gained interest in environmentalism, he started searching for a way to pull together all three quests in the service of a better future. Now that he believes he has found that unified field theory -- one suffused with his rediscovered spirituality -- he's out to sell it to the progressive world.

"There is a green wave coming, with renewable energy, organic agriculture, cleaner production," he said in an interview. "Our question is, will the green wave lift all boats? That's the moral challenge to the people who are the architects of this new, ecologically sound economy. Will we have eco-equity, or will we have eco-apartheid? Right now we have eco-apartheid. Look at Marin; they've got solar this, and bio this, and organic the other, and fifteen minutes away by car, you're in Oakland with cancer clusters, asthma, and pollution."

Jones started his first environmental program, Reclaim the Future, only six months ago. Notably, it wastes little time critiquing the negative aspects of society, but rather accentuates the positive. As such, it exemplifies the new concept of environmentalism's so-called third wave -- a movement refocused on neither conservation nor regulation, but investment. Jones envisions West Oakland and other depressed neighborhoods as healthy, thriving hubs of clean commerce. He hopes to "build a pipeline from the prison economy to the green economy" by training prisoners reentering society to help build a solar-powered, energy-efficient future. He believes the flourishing of "green-collar jobs" can give gainful employment to those who most need it, and give struggling cities an economic boost into the 21st century.

But since the Ella Baker Center itself will neither start green businesses nor run job training programs, what precisely does Jones do?

As the staff runs the day-to-day operations of the center's three programs, Jones' job is to raise money, manage personnel, and propagate the group's ideas beyond the office walls. "Van's role and [the center's] role is really to evangelize, to spread the word of this vision," said Juliet Ellis, a member of the Ella Baker Center's board and the executive director of the nonprofit Urban Habitat.

Jones spreads his gospel at every conference, speech, and awards ceremony that finds its way onto his busy schedule, and he has found receptive ears from coast to coast. His rise to prominence has a lot to do with timing. As environmentalists and progressives grope to rebuild their respective movements after years of disarray, Jones is often pointed to as an avatar of Environmentalism 3.0. Lefties have come to one conclusion since the debilitating defeats of 2000 and 2004: that they need to present a positive vision Americans can latch onto and vote for.

"The country is waiting for a movement that inspires people, that doesn't just critique," Jones said. "That's my gut instinct. And when it's resonant, when it's right, people feel how they fit into it. We want a green economy that's strong enough to lift people out of poverty."

It took a personal crisis for Jones to conclude that complaint-based politics can get you only so far. Since 2000, when he watched a budding political movement destroyed by infighting, he has tried to be a voice for solidarity while showing other activists that "there's a path out of this self-marginalizing place without compromising your constituency." But while his vision brings many submovements together under one tent, some of the people who helped Jones devise that vision aren't invited to the revival.

It's been a little more than a year since two of Jones' fellow travelers dropped a bomb on the environmental movement in the form of a paper provocatively titled "The Death of Environmentalism." The paper played an important role in the debate that followed the re-election of President Bush. Shaken progressives had to admit that their best electoral efforts had failed, and began to cast about for the reason. There was "The Death of Environmentalism" with its bold declarations: Environmentalism had defined itself as a special interest, its message was too negative, and it presented narrow technical solutions instead of an inspiring vision tied to values voters hold dear.

Commentators quickly pointed out that all these criticisms could just as easily be leveled at other segments of the left. What was the movement besides a collection of special-interest campaigns? Just like that, the paper became a mirror reflecting back the fears of a disenfranchised movement.

Predictably, there was an angry backlash, which the authors chalk up to the movement's reluctance to admit its failures. "There's a lot of fear," said Michael Shellenberger, one of the paper's authors, in an interview. "We have to come to grips with the fact that our current strategies not only aren't helping, but might even be counterproductive." While Shellenberger said he and coauthor Ted Nordhaus didn't set out to write a generational statement, they may have done so inadvertently. "The responses have been disproportionately positive from young people," he said, "and disproportionately negative from the older generation that's more invested in older ways of doing things."

Although the paper was primarily an assault upon the strategies of the left, Shellenberger and Nordhaus praised a few people and projects. One was Van Jones, whom the authors called an "up-and-coming civil-rights leader," extolling his vision of a broad alliance between environmentalists, labor unions, civil-rights groups, and businesses. His focus on investment, they said, pointed the way to the environmental movement's future.

The glowing words were no coincidence. Jones and the authors met in 2005 and became close allies who brainstormed ideas for the new shape of the environmental movement. Although Jones says the Ella Baker Center's environmental program isn't based on the ideas in "The Death of Environmentalism," it benefited from conversations he had with Shellenberger. The two worked together on the Apollo Alliance, a national environmental organization that promotes many of the ideas associated with environmentalism's third wave. It was Shellenberger who convinced alliance leaders to include Jones on the national board.

Yet last spring, Jones spoke out against "The Death of Environmentalism" at a panel discussion about the progressive movement's future, where he shared the stage with luminaries of the activist left. "I love the authors, I love the analysis," he said. "It breaks my heart the way that it was brought forward." He thereafter repeated his criticisms in stronger terms, and now calls the paper an "immoral attack."

Jones said his quarrel lay not with the authors' ideas but their tactics. Their critique of the status quo was an assault on national environmental organizations, which leaders such as Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope greeted with anger. "It was a smart document, but it was not wise," Jones said. "You don't ambush allies. You don't shame elders."

Although he concedes the need for discussion and argument within any movement, Jones said the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" conducted the debate with insufficient respect. "I'm interested in managing conflict with an eye toward maximizing unity," he said. "There's a tradition of very nasty polemics on the left. I've seen it split coalitions, movements, parties. This is my concern: it's easy to start a fight, it's hard to finish a fight."

But from the perspective of Shellenberger and Nordhaus, Jones has merely adopted the same tack as most of the progressive left. He has embraced their paper's feel-good ideas, but renounced the dialogue and arguments that helped get to that point. "There's this culture within the progressive community that everybody has to hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya' before you can introduce a new idea or piece of legislation," Shellenberger said. "People say, 'Oh, you can't criticize your friends.' It's strange that liberals who believe in being small-D democrats think ideas should be talked about behind closed doors and then get so angry about a paper that calls for open debate. It's a symptom of how uncomfortable people are with asking the hard questions about what kind of future they want. ... A whole series of fights need to happen on the left before we can become unified."

The authors complain that Jones didn't begin critiquing their paper until he was surrounded by its detractors at the Apollo Alliance, a group whose strong ties to the Sierra Club guaranteed that it would take a stance against the two upstarts. Shellenberger said he saw Jones twice in the immediate aftermath of the shakeup. The first time, shortly after the paper was distributed, he said, "Van congratulated us; he praised the essay. He was very positive to us, privately." The next time, at a meeting of the California Apollo Alliance, Shellenberger remembers Jones saying, "Wow, a lot of people are really angry about this," before repeating his praise of the paper. But in the months after Jones joined the board, Shellenberger said, he began to criticize the paper and its authors. "I think he was worried about politics," the author said.

The Ella Baker Center distanced itself from the rabble-rousers, both figuratively and literally. The controversy erupted just as the center was moving across the bay to bigger digs in Oakland. Shellenberger and Nordhaus were left behind. "There was just too much fire around those guys, and we didn't want to get burned," explained Joshua Abraham, director of the center's environmental program.

Jones' emphasis on solidarity only increased his cachet among environmental leaders. But Nordhaus believes Jones is taking the easy route by avoiding confrontations with the progressive movement's old guard. It may allow him to be a more popular leader in the short term, Nordhaus said, but ultimately prevent the movement from undergoing the self-scrutiny it needs to regain a place in the national debate.

"Van will have a very successful and prominent career as a spokesman of the left," Nordhaus said. "He's a handsome, charismatic, intelligent man who can speak with passion. But Van will have to decide at the end of the day whether he's willing to put all that at risk to take the leap to 21st-century politics that can really go somewhere. In that, he's a fascinating, transitional, and ambiguous figure. Is he going to be part of the vanguard or part of the reaction?"

Jones has taken a keen interest in the vanguard from almost the moment he and his twin sister were born in 1968. "We were in utero while King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, MLK was assassinated, the Democratic convention was bloody," he said. "And I was born nine months into that. For some reason I was always intensely aware that there had been all this hope right before I was born, and then all these problems."

As a tyke, he carefully cut out articles about John and Bobby Kennedy and pinned them to a corkboard in his room in the specially delineated "Kennedy Section." After that came the Star Wars action figures: Luke Skywalker was JFK, Han Solo was RFK, and Lando Calrissian was MLK.

Although his parents, both teachers, grappled with the desegregation of the school system, the civil-rights movement wasn't a dominant force in his young life. Racism troubled him little in the mixed neighborhood he grew up in. The white and black kids exchanged insults, but it felt no different than the other trash talk boys slung around.

Jones first began his long process of reinvention when he attended the University of Tennessee in Martin. Unhappy with his given name, Anthony, he made a list of possible replacements -- Jet, Rush, Van. "I was, like, 'The coolest people in the world have monosyllabic names,'" he said, citing Prince and Sting. He laughs about his reasoning now, as well as his motive for entering campus politics. He just wanted to impress his girlfriend, who was smart, beautiful, and planned to be a doctor. Her parents were both professors, and Jones worried that she was out of his league. "I really wanted her parents to like me, and think that I was worthy," he said. "So I said, 'Well, I'm just going to take over this goddamn campus.'"

He ran for dorm vice president, and then for student council. Meanwhile, inspired by the crusading editor of his hometown newspaper, he worked toward a career in journalism by starting an underground newspaper. He later followed his mentor to Shreveport, Louisiana, for a summer job as a cub reporter, where he got his first jolt of radical outrage.

A rap concert was coming to town, featuring provocative acts such as NWA. The sleepy city of Shreveport panicked. "They acted like there was going to be a black riot as a result of it," Jones said with disgust. On the night of the concert, police helicopters hovered overhead and highway patrol cars lined the streets, but the audience was peaceful, he recalled. He felt vindicated, until the next morning when he saw the front page of his own newspaper. "There was a picture of a black kid on the ground with a cop on top of him with a gun out, looking over his shoulder," Jones said. "And the headline was, 'Rap concert peaceful, but ...'" Underneath the photo was a map of the city, with every stolen car and noise violation from the day before marked with the icon of an explosion. Jones went in to the editor's office yelling, and didn't stop until the paper printed his response to its coverage.

But that wasn't enough to assuage his anger. Convinced that American society needed a wake-up call on race, Jones abandoned his plan to become a journalist, concluding that he would rather make news than report it. "If I'd been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect," he said. "But as it was, I went on to an Ivy League law school."

He arrived at Yale Law School wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther bookbag, an angry black separatist among a sea of clean-cut students dreaming of Supreme Court clerkships. "I wasn't ready for Yale, and they weren't ready for me," Jones said. He never fell in love with the law, and at one point contemplated dropping out of school. But he realized that a law degree gave him the credibility to speak out about the criminal justice system, so he persevered.

Jones first moved to the Bay Area in the spring of 1992, when the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights hired a batch of law students to act as legal observers during the trial of Rodney King's assailants. Eva Paterson, who was then the committee's executive director, remembers getting a cover letter that stood out from the rest: "It was this piece of stationery that had little faces across the top, a stencil of little guys with dreads. We said, 'Oh, yeah, we're hiring him.'"

Paterson got to know Jones over the coming months, and enjoyed having the young radical in her office. "He was a kid then, really," she said. "He was brilliant, pretty feisty, pretty in your face, but that's how you are when you're young. Just a force of nature."

When the verdicts came down -- not guilty for three of the officers involved, and deadlocked on the fourth -- Paterson's office, like the city, reacted with disbelief. Paterson said she felt like picking up her office chair and hurling it out the window. The staff hit the streets to monitor the demonstrations that erupted in San Francisco. One week later, while Jones was observing the first large rally since the lifting of the city's state of emergency, he got swept up in mass arrests. It was a turning point in his life.

Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, "I met all these young radical people of color -- I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."

In 1994, the young activists formed a socialist collective, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia. They protested police brutality and got arrested for crashing through police barricades. In 1996, Jones decided to launch his own operation, which he named the Ella Baker Center after an unsung hero of the civil-rights movement. Jones wedged a desk and a chair inside a large closet in the back of Paterson's office. He brought in his home computer and ran cables through the rafters to get the operation humming.

"Eva was really my saving grace," said Jones. "She understood that I was a little rowdy and difficult to deal with, but she tried to find a way for me to fit into her system. She finally figured out that wasn't going to work, and then she went way beyond the call of duty helping me start my own thing."

Paterson was surprised by the number of tattooed individuals suddenly passing through her office, but she didn't interfere. "He didn't need a lot of coaching; he just needed a place where he could have a desk and a phone, and a little infrastructure support," she said. She did give him one piece of advice. "I think I counseled him to be diplomatic," Paterson said. "I tried to convince him that you could be passionate, but you didn't have to talk about your opponent's mother. That you could be very, very committed and say what you had to say so that people listened."

The lesson lay waiting in Jones' brain for years, until he was ready to receive it.

Jones began transforming his politics and work in the aftermath of a crisis that coincided with the primary election in March 2000. He was campaigning hard against California Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that increased the penalties for a variety of violent crimes and required more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults. Several activist groups united to organize young people into sit-downs, rallies, and protests. But Jones said the coalition ultimately imploded "in the nastiest way you can ever imagine."

The activists who worked on Prop. 21 had lofty ambitions -- they hoped to create a youth movement as powerful as the antiwar coalition of the 1960s. With a hip-hop soundtrack, they aimed to enlist a generation clad in puffy jackets and baggy pants in the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Yet despite early successes such as rallies covered by MTV and support from rap icons like Mos Def and MC Hammer, the movement fell apart in the glare of the limelight. The groups fought over grant money and over who deserved credit for various successes. When the voters went ahead and approved the proposition anyway, Jones took a big step back.

"I saw our little movement destroyed over a lot of shit-talking and bullshit," he said. "It just seemed like an ongoing train crash that was calling itself a political movement. It was much more destructive internally than anyone was talking about, and much less impactful externally than anyone was willing to admit."

Jones' fixation on solidarity dates from this experience. He took an objective look at the movement's effectiveness and decided that the changes he was seeking were actually getting farther away. Not only did the left need to be more unified, he decided, it might also benefit from a fundamental shift in tactics. "I realized that there are a lot of people who are capitalists -- shudder, shudder -- who are really committed to fairly significant change in the economy, and were having bigger impacts than me and a lot of my friends with our protest signs," he said.

First, he discarded the hostility and antagonism with which he had previously greeted the world, which he said was part of the ego-driven romance of being seen as a revolutionary. "Before, we would fight anybody, any time," he said. "No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward. ... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."

His new philosophy emphasizes effectiveness, which he believes is inextricably tied to unity. He still considers himself a revolutionary, just a more effective one, who has realized that the progressive left's insistence on remaining a counterculture destroys its potential as a political movement. "One of my big heroes is Malcolm X, not because I agree with Malcolm, but because he wasn't afraid to change in public," he said.

Devising a new strategy for the left went hand-in-hand with finding a new approach in his personal life and relationships. Jones said he arrived at that by harking back to his roots. Although he had spent many childhood summers in "sweaty black churches," and in college had discovered the black liberation theology that reinterprets the Christ story as an anticolonial struggle, he had pulled away from spirituality during his communist days. During his 2000 crisis, he looked for answers in Buddhism, the philosophy known as deep ecology, and at open-minded institutions such as the East Bay Church of Religious Science.

The last step was learning to ignore critics from within the movement who didn't appreciate his new philosophy and allies. "I'm confused half the time about what I'm doing, but none of the things that leftists use to discipline each other into marginality have any power over me anymore," he said. "It's like, 'Oh, you're working with white people.' Or 'Who are you accountable to?' A lot of the things that we say to each other to keep anybody from getting too uppity, too effective, I just don't listen to anymore. I care about the progressive movements as they are, but I mainly care about all of our movements becoming a lot bigger and a lot stronger."

Jones has since become known as a guy who actually can get things done, a guy whom the mayor will take meetings with. For instance, last June he worked with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on the UN World Environment Day conference about green cities. Some environmental groups boycotted the event, which was heavily underwritten by Pacific Gas & Electric, a perennial environmental nemesis. Jones sidestepped this controversy while pursuing his own goal, the inclusion of a series of events highlighting the environmental issues faced by the poor and people of color.

His efforts led to six days of conversations between environmentalists and crusaders for racial justice. Juliet Ellis, of the Ella Baker Center board, said it was a necessary step for groups that have shied away from collaborating in the past. "We're still not at a place where social justice and mainstream environmental groups believe they're fighting for the same things," she said. "As far as bridging those divides, Van definitely has the skill sets and the experience and the personality to play a role in that."

But Jones also attracted a number of critics. During the conference, many environmental-justice groups were irritated by what they saw as Jones' attempt to appoint himself the leader of a movement in which he'd never before played a role. They also thought his silence on the sponsorship of PG&E compromised his integrity, given that the company's Hunters Point Power Plant is a primary target of Bay Area environmental-justice advocates.

In the aftermath of the event, seven of these groups wrote a letter to Jones expressing their concerns about the perceived glory-hogging of the Ella Baker Center team. Henry Clark, the longtime executive director of the West County Toxics Coalition, and one of the signers, complained that Jones excluded the true leaders of the Bay Area movement. "They jumped out front to put themselves in the lead, to make contact with these funders, in more of an opportunistic way," he said.

"There was concern among many, many environmental-justice organizations who have been working on these issues for years," added Bradley Angel, executive director of the group Greenaction. "But I know we all have the same goals. I'm looking forward to those goals being addressed, since we're all working together."

On the fourth day of the conference, some of the environmental-justice groups that Jones left out organized their own event, a rally across from City Hall protesting the conference's involvement with PG&E. Angel said it was a coming together, "to confront the powers that be, and to show that we will not compromise with those who violate the principles of environmental justice."

"City hall is listening!" a speaker shouted to the crowd. But, in fact, it was Saturday, and the halls of power were empty.

Jones has long displayed a knack for absorbing the ideas of others and then broadcasting them in a way that turns theorizing into movement-building. In the best scenarios, this leads to the harmonious amplification of the message.

In September, he cohosted the Brower Youth Awards for environmental activism with Julia Butterfly Hill, the protester who drew attention to vanishing old-growth forests by living in the canopy of a redwood for two years. Jones and Hill have been close friends since they met at a conference in 2002. Their alliance embodies the sense of unity desired by many environmental and racial-justice activists.

They met at a pivotal time in both of their lives. Hill said she was reaching out to the racial-justice community, trying to make the connection between "humanoid and planetary rights." Meanwhile, Jones was going through a similar process in the opposite direction. He calls Hill "the Mahatmama," in homage to her earth-mother vibe, and credits her with helping him connect to the environmental movement. "Before I met her, I already had the idea in my head, 'Green Jobs, Not Jails,'" he said. "But the whole idea for a green-collar solution for urban America was something that Julia was really helpful in developing."

Around that same time, the Apollo Alliance was launched in Washington, DC, with a catchy slogan: good jobs, clean energy. Modeled after President Kennedy's famous challenge to America to put a man on the Moon, the alliance is an effort to inspire the country into a frenzy of environmentally friendly inventiveness. But Jones approached the Apollo organizers because he believed that their original formulation of environmentalists plus labor unions wasn't ambitious enough. "I wanted to enrich their framework, which I thought started out with too little racial-justice understanding," he said. He was already working on the Ella Baker Center's own environmental program, but saw the Apollo Alliance as a useful partner, with a national platform. "I was met with absolutely open arms," he said.

The Ella Baker Center was one of the first groups to act upon the ideas espoused by the Apollo Alliance. Jones is talking to organizers about starting a branch of the alliance in West Oakland. He said he believes the down-and-out neighborhood could be a model of urban sustainability through investment, technology, and job creation. Concrete plans for Oakland include a job-training program at a biodiesel company that is starting up a production and wholesale facility this January, and the construction of the "green-designed" Red Star Housing project on the former site of a polluting yeast factory. Developers have promised to include a job-training component to teach environmentally friendly construction techniques to prisoners reentering society.

"We're really curious; we're all watching to see where it goes," said Peter Teague of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which is funding the center's environmental work. "It's moved from that giddy, imagining stage to trying to make something happen on the ground, which is a lot tougher. But I think Van is making a huge contribution in just showing us what's possible."

But while Jones continues to advance the ideas he developed along with the Apollo Alliance, the organization's cofounders Shellenberger and Nordhaus were both forced to remove themselves from the national board because of the controversy they stirred up. "When Ted and I put out 'Death of Environmentalism,' we had people coming up to us and saying, 'You're finished in this business,'" Shellenberger said. "Basically, 'You will never work in this town again.' I was telling my wife that we might have to move to Humboldt County and take up organic farming. We knew it was a risk, but we felt like we had a moral imperative to say it. We felt like we could see what was making the environmental movement ineffectual, and we had to speak out. ... If the movement were really strong and robust, people wouldn't have felt the need to go out and destroy us."

Nordhaus agrees that the progressive left is doing its best to avoid looking at the fault lines exposed by the paper. "It is really through debate that a political ideology gets built, not by trying to paper over conflicts," he said. "The irony is how little taste there has been on the left for continuing the discourse that 'Death of Environmentalism' started. The impulse is to say, 'Yeah, we read that, and there were a lot of things I disagreed with, but there were some good ideas, and we're all doing it! It was that easy!' It's indicative of everything that's still wrong with the left."

Jones, with his message of effectiveness through solidarity, has come to embody the reaction against the two heretics, even as he embodies the approach they recommended. "It's not that we've had a lack of debates and controversy, that hasn't been the problem," he said. "Do we really want to do this with this much divisiveness? Isn't there another way we could make the same points?"

He described the Shellenberger and Nordhaus method as "diesel," and said it's characterized by outrage, sharp critique, and the desire to come up with the best ideas. He said his own approach is more "solar-powered," and is distinguished by compassion. "People need to have their higher selves reflected back at them, the part of them that's already aspiring to greatness and deep service," he said.

Jones regrets having ever spoken up about Shellenberger and Nordhaus' work, particularly since his comments have embroiled him in exactly the kind of dispute that he thinks fractures the left. "I don't think people want to read an article where we say mean things about each other," he said. "I think it depresses people." Jones added that his own personal goal is to be "a voice calling for unity and respect," and said he hopes to work with the two authors again in the future.

But in the short term, expect to see Jones more often on the national stage. And expect Shellenberger and Nordhaus' book, now scheduled for publication in fall 2006, to be greeted with a new round of dismissal and outrage. The two authors have a knack for getting people to think, but only the least defensive activists seem ready to receive their message. Meanwhile, Jones' warm-as-sunshine style is winning him far more friends. The progressive movement probably needs all three men: the two apostates nailing their criticisms to the door to the church, and the preacher inside the tent. Hallelujah.

Friday, October 14, 2011

America's Worst Wind-Energy Project

Wind-energy proponents admit they need lots of spin to overwhelm the truly informed.

The more people know about the wind-energy business, the less they like it. And when it comes to lousy wind deals, General Electric’s Shepherds Flat project in northern Oregon is a real stinker.

I’ll come back to the GE project momentarily. Before getting to that, please ponder that first sentence. It sounds like a claim made by an anti-renewable-energy campaigner. It’s not. Instead, that rather astounding admission was made by a communications strategist during a March 23 webinar sponsored by the American Council on Renewable Energy called “Speaking Out on Renewable Energy: Communications Strategies for the Renewable Energy Industry.”


During the webinar, Justin Rolfe-Redding, a doctoral student from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, discussed ways for wind-energy proponents to get their message out to the public. Rolfe-Redding said that polling data showed that “after reading arguments for and against wind, wind lost support.” He went on to say that concerns about wind energy’s cost and its effect on property values “crowded out climate change” among those surveyed.

The most astounding thing to come out of Rolfe-Redding’s mouth — and yes, I heard him say it myself — was this: “The things people are educated about are a real deficit for us.” After the briefings on the pros and cons of wind, said Rolfe-Redding, “enthusiasm decreased for wind. That’s a troubling finding.” The solution to these problems, said Rolfe-Redding, was to “weaken counterarguments” against wind as much as possible. He suggested using “inoculation theory” by telling people that “wind is a clean source, it provides jobs” and adding that “it’s an investment in the future.” He also said that proponents should weaken objections by “saying prices are coming down every day.”

It’s remarkable to see how similar the arguments being put forward by wind-energy proponents are to those that the Obama administration is using to justify its support of Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar company that got a $529 million loan guarantee from the federal government. But in some ways, the government support for the Shepherds Flat deal is worse than what happened with Solyndra.

The majority of the funding for the $1.9 billion, 845-megawatt Shepherds Flat wind project in Oregon is coming courtesy of federal taxpayers. And that largesse will provide a windfall for General Electric and its partners on the deal who include Google, Sumitomo, and Caithness Energy. Not only is the Energy Department giving GE and its partners a $1.06 billion loan guarantee, but as soon as GE’s 338 turbines start turning at Shepherds Flat, the Treasury Department will send the project developers a cash grant of $490 million.

The deal was so lucrative for the project developers that last October, some of Obama’s top advisers, including energy-policy czar Carol Browner and economic adviser Larry Summers, wrote a memo saying that the project’s backers had “little skin in the game” while the government would be providing “a significant subsidy (65+ percent).” The memo goes on to say that, while the project backers would only provide equity equal to about 11 percent of the total cost of the wind project, they would receive an “estimated return on equity of 30 percent.”

The memo continues, explaining that the carbon dioxide reductions associated with the project “would have to be valued at nearly $130 per ton for CO2 for the climate benefits to equal the subsidies.” The memo continues, saying that that per-ton cost is “more than 6 times the primary estimate used by the government in evaluating rules.”

The Obama administration’s loan guarantee for the now-bankrupt Solyndra has garnered lots of attention, but the Shepherds Flat deal is an even better example of corporate welfare. Several questions are immediately obvious:

First: Why, as Browner and Summers asked, is the federal government providing loan guarantees and subsidies for an energy project that could easily be financed by GE, which has a market capitalization of about $170 billion?

Second: Why is the Obama administration providing subsidies to GE, which paid little or no federal income taxes last year even though it generated some $5.1 billion in profits from its U.S. operations?

Third: How is it that GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, can be the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while his company is paying little or no federal income taxes? That question is particularly germane as the president never seems to tire of bashing the oil and gas industry for what he claims are the industry’s excessive tax breaks.

Over the past year, according to Yahoo! Finance, the average electric utility’s return on equity has been 7.1 percent. Thus, taxpayer money is helping GE and its partners earn more than four times the average return on equity in the electricity business.

A few months ago, I ran into Jim Rogers, the CEO of Duke Energy. I asked him why Duke — which has about 14,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation capacity — was investing in wind9energy projects. The answer, said Rogers forthrightly, was simple: The subsidies available for wind projects allow Duke to earn returns on equity of 17 to 22 percent.

In other words, for all of the bragging by the wind-industry proponents about the rapid growth in wind-generation capacity, the main reason that capacity is growing is that companies such as GE and Duke are able to goose their profits by putting up turbines so they can collect subsidies from taxpayers.

There are other reasons to dislike the Shepherds Flat project: It’s being built in Oregon to supply electricity to customers in Southern California. That’s nothing new. According to the Energy Information Administration, “California imports more electricity from other states than any other state.” Heaven forbid that consumers in the Golden State would have to actually live near a power plant, refinery, or any other industrial facility. And by building the wind project in Oregon, electricity consumers in California are only adding to the electricity congestion problems that have been plaguing the region served by the Bonneville Power Authority. Earlier this year, the BPA was forced to curtail electricity generated by wind projects in the area because a near-record spring runoff had dramatically increased the amount of power generated by the BPA’s dams. In other words, Shepherds Flat is adding yet more wind turbines to a region that has been overwhelmed this year by excess electrical generation capacity from renewables. And that region will now have to spending huge sums of money building new transmission capacity to export its excess electricity.

Finally, there’s the question of the jobs being created by the new wind project. In 2009, when GE and Caithness announced the Shepherds Flat deal, CNN Money reported that the project would create 35 permanent jobs. And in an April 2011 press release issued by GE on the Shepherds Flat project, one of GE’s partners in the deal said they were pleased to be bringing “green energy jobs to our economy.”

How much will those “green energy” jobs cost? Well, if we ignore the value of the federal loan guarantee and only focus on the $490 million cash grant that will be given to GE and its partners when Shepherds Flat gets finished, the cost of those “green energy” jobs will be about $16.3 million each.

As Rolfe-Redding said, the more people know about the wind business, the less they like it.

— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, was recently issued in paperback.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Clear case of economic terrorism

UPDATED – Beck: “Clear case of economic terrorism”

See the full video and read analysis from The Blaze here. Business Insider has posted a full transcript and their analysis here.

On radio this morning, Glenn broke a story that he called a “clear case of economic terrorism”. In shocking audio Glenn received over the weekend, former SEIU leader Steven Lerner lays out a plan to attack JP Morgan Chase.

“Yesterday afternoon in my office, Scott Baker came in from The Blaze and he said here is the tape I said I want the unedited tape. He said it’s 25 minutes. This is the unedited tape. We listened to it,” Glenn described.

“I called in all of the producers. I called in all the heads of my company, and we sat in a room and we listened to Americans describe how they were going to take down a major U.S. bank in May and how they were going to collapse the stock market and bring on a second economic collapse, how this could not appear to be coordinated and could not appear to be coordinated or union‑backed, how the unions were dead and the only way to really restart the unions is to collapse the system.”

“When you hear this tape, you will recognize some of the things that we have been warning about. You will recognize what I believe the Pentagon was warning people about.”

Stu gave the context on who exactly Steven Lerner is, “The entire time [Glenn was] speaking about SEIU, this guy, by his own description, was the director of SEIU’s banking and finance campaign. He’s not just some guy in some little group. He is a big figure in SEIU until very recently and the entire time you were talking about SEIU, this is the guy heading up the banking.”

You can listen to the full audio below (story continues after the clip):

“So you know, this tape is now being delivered to the bank in question, J.P. Morgan Chase. It is also being delivered to the justice department and this is the clearest case of economic terrorism I think I have seen,” Glenn said.

Why would this group pick JP Morgan Chase as their primary target? Glenn’s believes that it’s because they are one of the strongest banks out there. “Because if they can bring down J.P. Morgan Chase, that’s the strongest of the bunch. If they can bring down J.P. Morgan Chase, who can’t they bring down?”

Lerner also said that leftist leaders must convince their followers that the country is not broke, but that the wealth is all in the hands of the rich.

Glenn said, “You must alert all of your friends. Whenever you hear someone say there’s plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands or it’s just in the hands of these greedy bankers, you know they’re part of this strategy. Have you heard anyone say we have plenty of money? Think to the discussions that you heard in the last four weeks in Wisconsin.”

Glenn explained that the only way for this plan and ones like it to be stopped is for listeners, readers, and viewers to spread the evidence to their friends and family members. “I’d rather be laughed at, called a conspiracy freak, et cetera, et cetera and save the country. The way the country is saved is not by us, but by you. You must spread this information and know that people are trying to play you.”

“You can call it a conspiracy theory, but the language that he uses is already being used by labor leaders and those who are whipping people up into a frenzy in Wisconsin and wait until you see how they are going to use the state and county and local labor unions to do exactly what they did to the housing market. It’s the same tactic, gang. The same tactic. And it ends with the destruction of the economic system of the United States of America. They are bringing it on through chaos and bringing down of Wall Street and the stock market.”

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Proposed List Of Demands For Occupy Wall St Movement!

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.

Lloyd J Hart 508-687-9153

Newly Released Documents Prove: Holder Lied, and Hundreds Died via Fast and Furious

Posted by AWR Hawkins

Just the facts:

On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and the House Oversight Committee for questioning on Fast and Furious.

During questioning, Issa asked: “When did you first know about the program…called ‘Fast and Furious?”

Holder responded: “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks”

As I’ve written elsewhere, at the very moment Holder gave this answer, it was a safe bet he was being less than completely honest with the Congressional committee. But now the evidence, having become insurmountable in just the past 48 hours, makes it crystal clear that Holder lied to Issa and the House Oversight Committee.

Proof:

Reports CBS NEWS: “[Holder] was sent briefings back as far as 2010.” Briefings on Fast and Furious that is, beginning at least as early as July 2010. (In other words, Holder began receiving briefings on Fast and Furious “ten months before his May 3rd Congressional testimony.”)

And on October 18, 2010, documents show that Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer sent communiqués to Holder warning that indictments for Fast and Furious could come soon.

In response to this growing mound of evidence against him, Holder is now saying he “misunderstood that question from Congress [on May 3rd], that he did know about Fast and Furious, just not the details”

This is the same tired defense others under Holder have been making – that they knew about Fast and Furious but not about “the details,” i.e. about the guns being walked into Mexico. However, this just won’t fly. It’s an insult to common sense and runs counter to the facts available to the public at large.

For example, documents show that on October 22, 2010 a Deputy Attorney General sent Holder a memo in which he basically said he didn’t expect much trouble to arise if knowledge of gun walking became public, because it was already an excepted fact that U.S. guns were being used by Mexican gangs in Mexico.

The Deputy Attorney General’s exact words to Holder: “It’s not going to be a big surprise that a bunch of U.S. guns are being used in [Mexico], so I’m not sure how much grief we get for guns walking.”

The bottom line: Holder knew about Fast and Furious at least as early as July 2010, but on May 3rd he told the Congressional committee he had only known about it for a “few weeks.” This means he mislead Congress, a crime made even more egregious by the fact that he had received regular updates on Fast and Furious from July 2010 through May 2011.

Also, Holder has maintained he had no knowledge of guns walking into Mexico via Fast and Furious, but the October 22, 2010 memo proves he not only knew, but was told not to worry about it because no one would be surprised at U.S. guns in Mexico.

What is House Speaker John Boehner doing today? If it’s anything other than initiating impeachment proceedings against Holder, then he’s wasting our time.

Article II of the Constitution gives Congress the power to impeach “the president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United States.” And it’s time to use that power.

Holder lied, and hundreds died via Fast and Furious.

House Republicans Request Special Counsel to Probe Holder on 'Fast and Furious'


EXCLUSIVE: House Republicans are calling for a special counsel to determine whether Attorney General Eric Holder misled Congress during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Operation Fast and Furious, Fox News has learned.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, was sending a letter to President Obama on Tuesday arguing that Holder cannot investigate himself, and requesting the president instruct the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel.

The question is whether Holder knowingly made false statements of fact under oath during a Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3. At the time, Holder indicated he was not familiar with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program known as Fast and Furious until about April 2011.

"I'm not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks," Holder testified.

The Department of Justice defended Holder in a statement Tuesday.

“The Attorney General’s testimony to both the House and the Senate was consistent and truthful," it read. "He said in both March and May of this year that he became aware of the questionable tactics employed in the Fast and Furious Operation in early 2011 when ATF agents first raised them publicly, and at the time, he asked the Inspector General’s office to investigate the matter."

However, newly discovered memos suggest otherwise. For instance, one memo dated July 2010 shows Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Center, told Holder that straw buyers in the Fast and Furious operation "are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to the Mexican drug trafficking cartels."

Other documents also indicate that Holder began receiving weekly briefings on the program from the National Drug Intelligence Center "beginning, at the latest, on July 5, 2010," Smith wrote.

"These updates mentioned, not only the name of the operation, but also specific details about guns being trafficked to Mexico," Smith wrote in the letter to Obama.

"Allegations that senior Justice Department officials may have intentionally misled members of Congress are extremely troubling and must be addressed by an independent and objective special counsel. I urge you to appoint a special counsel who will investigate these allegations as soon as possible," Smith wrote.

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers, D-Mich., said he had not been informed of the reqeest before it was sent to the president.

This is the third time in two years the Judiciary Committee chairman has called for a special counsel. In October 2009, Smith asks for a special counsel to investigate the now defunct community organizing group ACORN. In July 2010, Smith asked the Obama administration for a special counsel to investigate voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

In response to the release of the memos, a Justice Department official said that the attorney general "has consistently said he became aware of the questionable tactics in early 2011 when ATF agents first raised them publicly, and then promptly asked the (inspector general) to investigate the matter."

The official added that in March 2011, Holder testified to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee of that development, and regularly receives hundreds of pages, none of which contained information on potential problems with Fast and Furious.

"The weekly reports (100 + pages) are provided to the office of the AG and (deputy attorney general) each week from approximately 24 offices and components. These are routine reports that provide general overviews and status updates on issues, policies, cases and investigations from offices and components across the country. None of these reports referenced the controversial tactics of that allowed guns to cross the border," the official said.

"(House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell) Issa of all people, should be familiar with the difference between knowing about an investigation and being aware of questionable tactics employed in that investigation since documents provided to his committee show he was given a briefing that included the fast and furious operation in 2010 – a year before the controversy emerged," the official continued.

Issa, R-Calif., told Fox News on Tuesday that Holder saying he didn't understand the question rather than he didn't know of the program is not a successful defense to perjury.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, added that months before Holder testified -- on Jan. 31 -- he came to Grassley's office, where Grassley gave him a letter detailing the investigation of Fast and Furious.

"If he read my letter, he knew on January 31," Grassley told Fox News. "He probably actually knew about it way back in the middle of last year or earlier.

Grassley said since he's not a lawyer he's not going to make a judgment on whether Holder committed perjury.

"But I can tell you this. They're doing everything they can, in a fast and furious way, to cover up all the evidence or stonewalling us. But here's the issue, if he didn't perjure himself and didn't know about it, the best way that they can help us, Congressman Issa and me, is to just issue all the documents that we ask for and those documents will prove one way or the other right or wrong."

Smith said he was not suggesting that Holder committed perjury, per se.

"I am suggesting there is a conflict between what the attorney general told us and what these documents that were just released show us. ... We need to find out what's behind that ... and give the attorney general the opportunity to tell the truth," Smith told Fox News.

Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this report.