“Let’s Get The Word Out”: Florida’s Governor Scott Takes Deep Dive Into Climate Change
My fellow Floridians, as you’ve all probably heard, a new National Climate Assessment report says that Florida is seriously threatened by rising sea levels, mass flooding, salt-contaminated water supplies and increasingly severe weather events — all supposedly caused by climate change.
Let me assure you there’s absolutely no reason for worry. I still don’t believe climate change is real, and you shouldn’t, either.
Don’t be impressed just because 240 “experts” contributed to this melodramatic report. The Tea Party has experts, too, and they assure me it’s all hogwash.
Even if the atmosphere is warming (and, whoa, I’m not saying it is!), I still haven’t seen a speck of solid evidence that it has anything to do with man spewing millions of tons of gaseous pollutants into the sky.
Is the planet a hotter place than it was 200 years ago? Yes, but only by a couple of degrees. Did most of the temperature rise occur since 1970? Yes, but don’t blame coal-burning plants or auto emissions.
Maybe the sun is getting closer to the Earth. Ever think of that? Or the Earth is moving closer to the sun? Let’s get some brainiacs to investigate that possibility!
As long as I’m the governor, Florida isn’t going to punish any industries by imposing so-called “clean air” regulations that limit carbon emissions.
In fact, soon after I took office we repealed the state’s Climate Protection Act and eliminated the Energy and Climate Commission that was created under my predecessor, the Obama-hugging turncoat Charlie Crist.
I also ordered the Department of Environmental Protection to halt all initiatives dealing with renewable energy and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, no one at DEP is even allowed to whisper the phrase “climate change” any more.
Yet the subject just won’t go away. That’s because the liberal media keep trying to scare everybody.
Say the polar ice caps really are melting, and sea levels really did rise 8 inches during the last 130 years. Who says there has to be a scientific explanation? Maybe God’s just messing around with us for a few centuries.
I myself own a big home in Naples right on the Gulf of Mexico, which is supposedly rising along with the oceans. Do I look scared? Do you see a moving van in my driveway?
Of course not (although I’m grateful to the Koch brothers for offering to let me stay with them in Wichita during the next hurricane).
And, please, enough griping already about Miami Beach going underwater! While I sympathize with all the homeowners and businesses along Alton Road that are being swamped by flooding at high tides, there’s not much I can do as governor except pretend it isn’t happening.
So let’s pull together to remind the rest of America, and the whole world, that most of Florida is still dry, and it will be for many, many real-estate cycles to come.
Newcomers who might be queasy about purchasing waterfront property in South Beach or Fort Lauderdale should instead consider some of our inland gems like Sebring (where the average elevation is 131 feet above sea level), Haines City (182 feet) or Eustis (67 feet).
Let’s get out the word that it could be hundreds of years before Ocala (104 feet) is submerged. So come on down now and get your homestead exemption before you need a snorkel to find your homestead.
If you really want to play it safe, try beautiful Britton Hill, the highest point in Florida at 345 feet above sea level. It is way up in Walton County near the Alabama border, but at least you’ll still be on the map if Key Biscayne turns into a coral reef.
To concerned residents of greater Miami, Tampa Bay and Apalachicola — three areas singled out by the federal report as imperiled by rising water — here’s what I would say:
Open a paddleboard shop, people. Or an airboat taxi service.
Why not turn a negative situation into a positive opportunity? One person’s sinkhole is another person’s cave-spelunking franchise.
Come on, Florida, let’s get to work.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, May 13, 2014
“Cashing In On Fear”: Agenda 21, The U.N. Conspiracy That Just Won’t Die
It’s been called “the most dangerous threat to American sovereignty”; “An anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture, and the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions,” that will bring “new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind,” and “abolish golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads,” in the name of creating a “one-world order.”
It’s been the subject of several forewarning books and DVDs; there are organizations dedicated to stopping it and politicians have been unseated for supporting it. Glenn Beck has spent a good portion of his career making people scared of it.
Not sure what it is? You’re not alone.
The Daily Beast got a sneak peek at a new report by Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights group, which deconstructs the mythology of Agenda 21 and the organizations, individuals, and even elected officials who’ve spent years promulgating the conspiracy theory surrounding it.
Before diving into the fiction that has inflated Agenda 21 to fear mongering status, we must first understand the facts. What, exactly, is Agenda 21?
While the name might sound a bit ominous, Agenda 21 is a voluntary action plan that offers suggestions for sustainable ways local, state and national governments can combat poverty and pollution and conserve natural resources in the 21st century. (That’s where the ’21’ comes from. Get it?) 178 governments—including the U.S. led by then-President George H.W. Bush—voted to adopt the program which is, again, not legally binding in any way, at the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro.
It wasn’t long after Agenda 21 was introduced that right wing opposition began to swirl. The SPLC points to Tom DeWeese as one of the first to pounce on the U.N. plan. In 1998 DeWeese founded the American Policy Center, a group based in Remington, Virginia that focuses on “environmental policy and its effect on private property rights” and “the United Nations and its effect on American national sovereignty.” The SPLC report quotes DeWeese as describing Agenda 21 as a “blueprint to turn your community into a little soviet,” promoted by non-governmental organizations that pressure governments to enforce it. According to DeWeese, “It all means locking away land, resources, higher prices, sacrifice and shortages and is based on the age old socialist scheme of redistribution of wealth.”
DeWeese has continued to deride the dangers of Agenda 21 well into the 21st Century, making appearances on Fox News and fitting in nicely with the Tea Party movement. The American Policy Center was just the first of many anti-Agenda 21 organizations to spring up in the past 15 or so years and the SPLC points out the 11 most pervasive.
To those who don’t closely follow the carryings on of fringe conspiracists, Glenn Beck might be the most recognizable face of the modern Anti-21 movement. Particularly during his reign at Fox News, Beck used his cable TV soapbox to scare his loyal viewers. “Those pushing…government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then just dismissing it as a joke,” the SPLC quotes Beck saying around 2011 while waving a copy of the 294-page Agenda 21 document on his show. “Once they put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it [sic], we will not be able to survive.”
Never one to miss an opportunity to cash on in people’s fears, Beck published a dystopian science fiction novel in 2012 called Agenda 21, about a version of America where mating partners are arranged, children are raised away from their parents in group homes, and the book’s heroine spends hours walking on a sort of treadmill that generates energy in an apartment in a planned community. In the book’s afterword, Beck warns, “[I]f the United Nations in partnership with radical environmental activists and naive local governments get their way, then the themes explored in this novel may start to look very familiar, very quickly.”
But while Glenn Beck can technically be dismissed as nothing more than a fringe figure, a conspiratorial talking head—no matter how large his audience may be—the elected officials who have taken a similarly strong stance against Agenda 21 cannot. In the report, the SPLC points out Newt Gingrich, who said he would “explicitly repudiate” the plan if elected president during his 2012 White House bid; Oklahoma Sen. Sally Kern and Arizona state Sen. Judy Burges who both introduced anti-Agenda 21 legislation that ultimately failed; and former Georgia Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers who “organized a four-hour, closed-door anti-Agenda briefing in October 2012” during which “attendees were told President Obama was using ‘mind control’ techniques to push land use planning, and that the U.N. planned to force Americans from suburbs into cities and also was implementing mandatory contraception to curb population growth.” U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has claimed that Agenda 21 sought to abolish “golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.”
And as recently as 2012, the SPLC writes, the Republican National Committee’s platform included the line, “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”
Several anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi groups have also jumped on the anti-Agenda 21 bandwagon, seizing the opportunity to blame the controversial document on none other than the Jews.
“Anti-Semitism is basically a conspiracy theory,” the American Jewish Committee’s Ken Stern told the SPLC. He explains how neo-Nazis have linked Agenda 21 to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a falsified document that is alleged to reveal a secret Jewish plot to take over the world. “It’s Jews conspiring to harm non-Jews, and that conspiracy explains a lot of what goes wrong with the world,” Stern said.
To be sure, not all of Agenda 21’s opponents are on the far right of the political spectrum. The group Democrats Against U.N. Agenda 21 hosted a conference on the plan in California in 2011. Its founder, “self-described lesbian feminist Rosa Koire,” wrote the book Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21, which claims the the plan will ultimately lead to the U.S.’s economic demise.
In fact, the anti-Semitic crowd’s interest in the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory sort of explains why it appeals to all of its followers, regardless of political leanings.
“Any time you get some sort of UN program that suggests any kind of change in the way people live, even if it seems outwardly benign and even voluntary, it’s going to be taken up by people with a conspiracist bent,” Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University political scientist and scholar of conspiracy theories, told the SPLC.
At this point in the explanation, it bears asking whether any of this matters. Is the federal government—or any state or local subsidiaries—even considering implementing any of the plan’s suggestions for sustainable development? The SPLC report states plainly: “For all the agitation, it’s not clear.” 98 percent of people who responded to a June 2012 poll by the American Planning Association said they didn’t know enough about Agenda 21 to support or oppose it. Six percent said they were against it, while nine percent stated that they were in favor.
The SPLC does note that some politicians, like Chattanooga, Tennessee Mayor Ron Littlefield, have denounced the anti-Agenda 21 conspiracists as modern-day Joseph McCarthy’s who will finally tire the public with their scare tactics. Still, they write, “an enormous number of politicians, commentators, activists, conspiracy theorists and others have swallowed the story of the anti-Agenda 21 zealots making any kind of rational discussion of the environment and related issues extremely difficult.”
“And that is the basic problem,” the report continues. “Dealing with the serious problems that confront our nation and our planet becomes incredibly difficult when the public discussion is poisoned with groundless conspiracy theories.”
By: Caitlin Dickson, The Daily Beast, April 13, 2014
“Meet The American Oligarchy”: “Americans For Self-Prosperity”, Grasping Barbarians Exercising Crude Political Power
Let’s put it this way: If the Koch Brothers were Russians, we’d call them oligarchs: grasping barbarians exercising crude political power.
But this is America, where tycoons can buy respectability by throwing money at their wives’ favorite ballet companies and museums. Also by funding “think tanks” staffed by “resident scholars” keen to enhance the boss’s fondest delusion: that great wealth invariably conveys great wisdom.
Hence “Americans for Prosperity,” the group funded by billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch that’s spending untold millions in 2014 on TV commercials attacking the Affordable Care Act as a government boondoggle that “just doesn’t work.”
The deeper strategy, AFP president Tim Philips told the New York Times, is to present the law as “a broader cautionary tale” crafted “to change the way voters think about the role of government for years to come.”
Or as the sloganeering sheep in Orwell’s Animal Farm might have put it, “Big government bad, big business good!”
Elsewhere, however, big business hasn’t been looking entirely benign of late. Consider three episodes currently in the news: General Motors, the Toyota Motor Corporation, and Duke Energy, the nation’s largest electrical utility.
As so often happens with corporate malfeasance, the details can be hard to believe. Documents turned over to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration by General Motors show that company engineers knew about problems with an ignition switch in Chevy Cobalts as long ago as 2001.
That it could be a fatal flaw wasn’t immediately recognized.
The problem appears to have been a defective part manufactured by a GM supplier. Sometimes triggered by a too-heavy keychain swinging from the ignition, it caused the engine to shut off while driving — resulting in immediate loss of power steering, power brakes, and the failure of the vehicle’s air bags to deploy.
By 2009, however engineers concluded that the faulty switch played a causal role in several fatal accidents — although some drivers had been drinking, texting or otherwise distracted — and that while Cobalts were going out of production, hundreds of thousands were still rolling.
Nevertheless, GM did nothing, while company lawyers fought off or stonewalled lawsuits alleging product liability.
Twenty-three fatal accidents and 26 deaths later, GM finally issued a recall notice for 1.6 million vehicles last month. The company’s recently-appointed CEO Mary Barra has been doing public penance and vowing to do everything possible to restore consumer confidence in the GM brand, which will definitely take some doing.
Published accounts of how separate divisions of GM’s giant bureaucracy communicate badly or not at all read like episodes of Catch-22. Customer complaints and warranty claims aren’t shared with safety engineers, who in turn have no communication with company lawyers. Meanwhile, nobody was talking to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that belatedly promises a criminal investigation.
Meanwhile, the auto industry press contrasts GM’s “unusually proactive and candid approach” to Toyota’s, which last week admitted criminal guilt and paid a $1.2 billion fine—the largest against an automaker in U.S. history.
Announcing a settlement, Attorney General Eric Holder said the company had “intentionally concealed information and misled the public” and shamefully showed “blatant disregard for systems and laws.”
At issue were faulty accelerator pedals which caused the cars to rocket out of control. Toyota has recalled as many as 10 million vehicles worldwide, and has been forced to pay tens of millions in fines and lawsuit settlements. Hundreds more civil lawsuits await litigation. What the settlement makes clear is that Toyota’s top management deliberately lied to government investigators both about the mechanical issue and their knowledge of it.
Which brings us to the Tea Party paradise of North Carolina and Duke Energy’s massive coal ash spill into the Dan River—spreading as many as 82,000 tons of toxic sludge along 70 miles of scenic river bottom. According to the Associated Press, “coal ash contains arsenic, lead, mercury and other heavy metals highly toxic to humans and wildlife.”
In addition to the “accidental” spill, caused by a collapsed corrugated pipe seemingly uninspected since 1986, environmental activists photographed Duke employees pumping an estimated was 61 million gallons of coal ash-contaminated water into the Cape Fear River further east.
The resulting uproar has persuaded GOP governor Pat McCrory, a 28-year Duke Energy employee (and recipient of some $1.1 million in Duke-sponsored campaign donations) to change his mind about burdensome federal regulation. His state’s toothless regulators will now “partner” with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to pursue joint enforcement against the utility.
Previously, McCrory had scorned the feds as an impediment to efficient business practices, and made a great show of turning down EPA grant money. Meanwhile, arguing strenuously against stricter regulation of coal ash has been an industry front group called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) largely financed by — you guessed it — those well-known philanthropists, David and Charles Koch.
Americans for Prosperity, indeed.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 26, 2014
“What Republicans Say Versus What Republicans Mean”: A Classic Exercise In Political Disguise And Deceit
Now that the State-of-the-Union cameras are off, House Republicans are eager to discard their frozen smiles and return to their jobs of undermining virtually every goal President Obama set out in his speech on Tuesday night. They made that clear in a letter that the top four House officials sent to the president today, which purports to seek agreement on four points in the speech. It actually does quite the opposite.
The letter is a classic exercise in political disguise and deceit. The real aim of House Republicans is to reduce or remove the influence of the federal government in the marketplace and in the lives of Americans. But that’s not a usable political motto, since most people — except for the most rigid Tea Partiers or libertarians —still expect Washington to work for their benefit. So to preserve the standing of the Republican Party, its leaders have to make it sound as if they share the public’s desire, while concealing their own.
The four leaders — Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the conference chairwoman — wrote that if Mr. Obama truly wants to have “a year of action,” as he said in his speech, he can work with them to enact four bills the House has already passed. They all sound lofty until you actually read them, which is the reason the president has no intention of signing any of them.
Skills training. The president wants more training to match up workers and students to the needs of employers, and called on Vice President Joe Biden to oversee reform of existing training programs. The House training bill, passed last March, would actually eliminate many of the best programs, particularly those that involve labor organizations, and would not replace them. Requirements to direct training to low-income workers– the people who need new skills the most — would be dropped. Instead, the bill would freeze funding for seven years and send much of the remaining federal training money to the states, which cannot be counted on to build reliable programs. The bill’s real intention is to cut spending and weaken labor.
Natural Gas. The president said he would help businesses build factories that use natural gas, which causes less pollution than coal or oil, while strengthening protection of air, water, and federal lands. The Republican letter says nothing about the environment, but does push a bill the House passed in November to automatically allow construction of gas pipelines if the federal government takes too long to issue permits. Almost all pipelines are approved or disapproved within a year, which is apparently too long for the House’s business supporters. The bill’s real intention is to remove federal oversight of the pipeline industry.
Workplace flexibility. The president called for better maternity and paternity leave policies, and an end to restrictions on personal time that he said belonged in a “Mad Men” episode. The Republican response is that businesses should be able to choose whether to give overtime or compensatory time to hourly employees. The House bill, passed in May, would remove the worker protection in place since 1938 that requires extra pay for overtime work. Employees would be able to request comp time, but employers wouldn’t have to give them time off when requested, and wouldn’t have to pay them for comp time that wasn’t used. The bill’s real intention is to give more power to employers and less to workers.
Medical research. Republicans slashed important research in the sequester — the National Institutes of Health has been cut by $4.2 billion since 2011 — and the president urged that the money should be restored. The letter points to a House bill passed last month that would give $126 million to the N.I.H. over ten years for pediatric research. But it would get that money by eliminating public funding for political conventions. The House is free to stop cutting research and put all the money it wants into the N.I.H. The bill’s real intention is to force the political parties to rely on corporations to pay for their conventions, giving businesses far more leverage.
The letter makes no mention of the other popular ideas that Republicans have no intention of approving, including raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance and making preschool universal. The party is on retreat today to come up with disguises for blocking those ideas, too.
By: David Firestone, The New York Times, January 30, 2014
“Republicans Lying To Themselves”: Washington Austerity At Its Most Self-Defeating
This morning, the Post has a nice report about methane leaks. A team of researchers toured DC and documented nearly 6,000 natural gas leaks in the city’s decrepit pipe system, including 12 spots where concentrations had built to potentially explosive levels.
What does this have to do with the current obsession with austerity in Washington? Quite a lot, it turns out.
You see, Republicans have been arguing that America needs savage fiscal austerity because we can’t afford to do otherwise. “Let’s be honest…we’re broke,” says John Boehner. This was and is preposterous then and now markets continue to snap up American debt, which is still at historically low interest rates. But this methane study shows the Republican budget-cutting fever at its worst and most self-contradictory. Not granting the money to repair this aging pipe system isn’t just dangerous, it costs us more money. Let me explain why.
The case is obvious when you think about it: shelling out for maintenance now is dramatically cheaper that it is to wait until after the system breaks (and blows the street apart, as the case may be). Put in beloved Republican household accounting terms: suppose a central support beam in your home has cracked, threatening the collapse of the roof. Does it make more sense to nip down to the bank for a quick loan to replace the beam now, or procrastinate and have to build a new house?
It’s even worse when we take the slack economy into account. Borrowing rates are super-low. Construction and raw material costs are cheaper than they will be later if and when the economy picks up. Every wasted day not investing in repairs and upgrades just means more expensive, catastrophic failures.
Make no mistake, this is a terrible problem. Aside from leaky methane in DC, there’s the fact that the average water pipe in this city was installed in 1935, leading to an average of about 450 water main breaks yearly. Here are sinkholes caused by blown water mains in Philly and New York City. Nationwide, for water systems alone there’s an unmet repair bill totaling in the hundreds of billions that is going up steadily, year after year, as our capital stock continues to decay.
What we should be doing is increasing federal infrastructure investments and increasing aid to states and cities, which would allow the country as a whole to start tackling its massive backlog of deferred maintenance needs. If we did this, we’d avoid the expensive emergency repairs that are now the norm for keeping American cities functioning.
That doesn’t even begin to address the need for new investments, like hugely expanded broadband networks, or new higher-speed rail lines, by the way.
In a way, this negligence on infrastructure is just dodgy accounting that would get you thrown out of any halfway decently-run business. A budget process that allows you to claim you’re “saving money” while your critical infrastructure is falling to pieces is just allowing you to lie to yourself.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 16, 2014
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