Latest Developments - By  Tom DeWeese

First, let me thank all of the freedom activists who taking up the fight against Agenda 21. You are having an incredible impact. And as a result, things are heating up in the battle to enforce Agenda 21.

It appears that many of our recent victories to stop it have prompted Sustainablists to step up and rush new policies into place. Here are just some of the latest details:

First, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is forcing what he calls “Plan Maryland” through Executive Action rather than through the state Legislature. That means no votes from representatives of the people. Plan Maryland will lock away 400,000 acres of Maryland land – blocking any development over the next 20 years. The scheme shifts control of land use from local government to dictates by unelected state bureaucrats.

Worse, O’Malley’s plan will punish any county that doesn’t comply by withholding state funding. It will also triple sewer “flush” taxes on property tax bills — a tax on toilet flushes. Moreover, he wants to ban most septic tanks – a move that will destroy the ability to live in rural areas. Agenda 21 is on the move in Maryland.

Second, in Knoxville, TN a plan is being considered to charge a fee to property owners for rainwater runoff – meaning you pay a tax when it rains. This scheme has been enforced in Houston, TX where the city annually scoops up more than $400,000. The excuse is that rain water runoff from private property pollutes streams. Rain is natural and this is nothing more than another environmental con to grab more of your hard earned money.

They call it a fee rather than a tax in order to snare non-profit entities like schools and churches. Some churches in South Carolina pay an annual rain runoff fee of as much as $2,600. This too is Agenda 21 on the attack.

Third, there is a new kind of corporation being developed through Public Private Partnerships –it’s called “benefit” corporations. Imagine a legislated brotherhood of business where favored businesses get to go to the front of the line for permits, licenses and opportunities merely because they agree to advance the principles of Sustainable Development and Agenda 21.

Six states already have Benefit Corporation legislation: Hawaii, Virginia, Maryland, Vermont and New Jersey, and New York. And more are in the process of making it part of their states corporate legal system, including California, Colorado, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. This policy will destroy free enterprise and guarantee that we can’t stop Agenda 21.

There has been some good news in recent days in our battle to stop Agenda 21. We can now add the following communities to the growing list that have ended their contracts with ICLEI (the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives- the main group forcing Agenda 21 in many cities in America).  Clallam County, Washington, Abington, VA, Carver MA, Pinellas County, Florida, Garland, TX, and Sarasota County, Florida. Each of these communities has taken action to stop Agenda 21. And there are many more in the process of ending their membership in ICLEI and starting down the road against Agenda 21/Sustainablist policies.

The American Policy Center is on the front lines, spreading the message of the dangers of Agenda 21. I am on a seemingly non-stop speaking tour, informing citizens and elected officials of the dangers of these policies. Together we can win this battle to restore America’s Republic.

Today, the government is still wasting taxpayer money on the regulation of milk prices—70-some years and counting. The Federal Milk Marketing Order system (FMMO) was created during the Depression era to dictate price floors for dairy products, with the aim of ensuring that farmers stayed in business and that American families subsequently had local access to affordable milk. While this sounds like a good idea (don’t they all), the problems it was originally created to combat no longer exist in today’s world of high-tech refrigerators and modern transportation. Instead we’re left with a veritable labyrinth of government red tape, just for milk.

By Alan Caruba

Watching Secretary of Energy Steven Chu face nearly five hours of grilling by a congressional committee seeking answers to the multi-billion dollar loss taxpayers have taken after the department dispensed their money in pursuit of its Green energy program was a reminder that ideology is not a substitute for reality.

Dr. Chu received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his work at Bell Labs, shared with colleagues, on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. At the time he was appointed to head the Department of Energy, he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkley. He also had gained notice as an environmental enthusiast advocating a shift away from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas and oil—to combat “climate change.”

At one point Dr. Chu thought that painting roofs and other structures white would help reflect the sun’s radiation and save the nation and the world from global warming. Another nutty idea of his was a global “glucose economy” to create a “low-carbon economy” by shipping glucose from tropical plants would replace oil, the energy source that fuels transportation worldwide and serves a multitude of other uses.

The loan guarantees of grants made by the Department of Energy are turning out to be a huge scandal for the Obama administration, rivaling the Department of Justice’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to the drug cartels of Mexico. When you toss in an unemployment rate that rivals that of the Great Depression, it is hard to understand why anyone would suggest that Obama will be reelected.

As reported in The Washington Post in September, “A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

This works out to $5,077.574 per job created.

We are now familiar with the Solyndra scandal, one of the companies that received loan guarantees despite grave misgivings of DOE staff members. It declared a very predictable bankruptcy as a manufacturer of solar panels. Its failure was blamed on competition from China, also a major producer of wind turbines.

Between solar and wind technology, the failure of these two Green energy producers touted by the Obama administration, is beginning to be noticed at the same time the Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on closing down coal-fired electrical power plants and the companies that mine coal.

Another DOE beneficiary was BrightSource, another solar firm which received a $1.4 billion bailout. It turns out that the DOE officials involved was Sanjay Wagle, formerly a principal in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s firm. In 2010, BrightSource whose largest shareholder was Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, had $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million.

Just how many billions the Obama administration’s Green energy program will have lost by the time they are eventually calculated will be testimony to the general failure of solar and wind power. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club is celebrating Obama’s decision to delay approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, estimated to generate 20,000 jobs.

The Department of the Interior has just delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio “for up to six months” and an industry group estimates that drilling in the Utica shale affected by the delay would produce 204,500 jobs by 2015.

In mid-November, Lisa Murkowski, a Senator from Alaska, wrote an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the Obama administration’s proposed expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico are its first concession since its moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. The administration still opposes offshore drilling on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Sen. Murkowski pointed out that “Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders,” noting that according to the Department of Interior, “our offshore areas hold more than 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Artic Oceans is projected to hold 20% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas.”

Why anyone thought Dr. Chu was qualified in any fashion to run the Department of Energy defies the imagination. Why anyone still believes that solar and wind energy can replace traditional proven sources of energy is testimony to environmental propaganda and myth-making.

Green energy is simply one more way the Obama administration has set about destroying America’s capacity to generate the energy needed for everything requiring electricity. It is one more way to impoverish the nation. And he is running for reelection in 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.
Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.
The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.
My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.
In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t too near,
But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn’t quite know, Then the
sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.
My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
And I crept to the door just to see who was near.
Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.

A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
Standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked without fear,
‘Come in this moment, it’s freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!’

For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts..
To the window that danced with a warm fire’s light
Then he sighed and he said ‘Its really all right,
I’m out here by choice. I’m here every night.’ ‘It’s my duty to stand at the front of the line,
That separates you from the darkest of times.
No one had to ask or beg or implore me,
I’m proud to stand here like my fathers before me.
My Gramps died at ‘ Pearl on a day in December,’
Then he sighed, ‘That’s a Christmas ‘Gram always remembers.’
My dad stood his watch in the jungles of ‘ Nam ‘,
And now it is my turn and so, here I am.
I’ve not seen my own son in more than a while,
But my wife sends me pictures, he’s sure got her smile.

Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red, white, and blue… an American flag.
I can live through the cold and the being alone,
Away from my family, my house and my home.
I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.
I can carry the weight of killing another,
Or lay down my life with my sister and brother..
Who stand at the front against any and a ll,
To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall.’

‘So go back inside,’ he said, ‘harbor no fright,
Your family is waiting and I’ll be all right.’
‘But isn’t there something I can do, at the least,
‘Give you money,’ I asked, ‘or prepare you a feast?
It seems all too little for all that you’ve done,
For being away from your wife and your son.’
Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
‘Just tell us you love us, and never forget.
To fight for our rights back at home while we’re gone,
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.
For when we come home, either standing or dead,
To know you remember we fought and we bled.
Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us.’

PLEASE, Would you do me the kind favor of sending this to as many people as you can? Christmas will be coming soon and some credit is due to our U.S.service men and women for our being able to celebrate these festivities.  Let’s try in this small way to pay a tiny bit of what we owe. Make people stop and think of our heroes, living and dead, who sacrificed themselves for us.

LCDR Jeff Giles, SC, USN
30th Naval Construction Regiment
OIC, Logistics Cell One
Al Taqqadum, Iraq.