Oil Spills & Solar Panels

The recent disastrous oil spill in the gulf is a reminder of the dangers of fossil fuel dependency and is doing exactly what it was supposed to; giving a kick start to the controversial Cap and Trade legislation. But the debate over clean energy has been going on as long as I have been alive. In my day, solar panels were the "green solution" to clean energy. Harnessing the power of the sun to heat and cool homes was very popular in the 70's. The technology has been around for a lot longer than you may think, its history spans from 7th Century BC to today. Due to the crude oil trade embargo of the 70's, homes were built with solar panels. These energy saving panels, didn't however make the huge monopolistic energy companies any money.

Lets take a realistic look at what happened to this green energy. The laws of supply and demand usually spur innovation and production. Even beanie babies can attest to that. So why would something that saves consumers money and is in demand go away? The moment a consumer sees a reduced heating bill, why would they ever have a home without solar panels? Yet you only occasionally see homes still fitted with them. Did consumers change their minds about saving money? Installation of solar panels in homes by a retailer can cost upwards of $20,000 dollars and that savings is seen after many years. But consumers have the ability to build their own for hundreds of dollars. This tells us that solar panels were over priced right out of the market. If a consumer can build something for a couple hundred dollars that would cost $20,000 retail, something isn't quite right.

And lets look further to another green mainstay, wind power. Wind turbines and wind technology is another green solution that has been around for as long as humans, and can be seen as early as 5,000 B.C. , yet the technology has only been popping up in last 20 years. All this cheap energy and why does it cost so much for every day consumers to utilize it?

If products are not available or affordable to consumers they will not be used. In the case of wind turbines, most cities tie up wind technology in zoning legislation. Yet wind technology could easily allow us to tell energy companies to pound salt.

Energy companies have a monopoly on American energy and are big enough and rich enough to pay off elected officials to ensure we have no choices in the marketplace. Contrary to our supposed Capitalistic society. The Cap & Trade legislation, according to Obama, is to allow these monopolies to retrofit their operations to green energy and that they will pass that cost on to consumers. But why would we give these corrupt dinosaurs first access to green energy? They have had the opportunity to retool for decades. They've enjoyed no competition and the ability to set their price with no intervention from government. They've made literally billions of dollars off the American people. If they, at this point have not seen the good sense to "Go Green" The Federal government should be telling them: too bad- so sad, you missed the boat.

Let that green opportunity go to new businesses that can offer consumers affordable solutions in the marketplace. Let these greedy energy giants die on the vine. This legislation is so misplaced. A move toward renewable energy does not require an enormous tax scheme. The American people are not responsible for big energy's costs for what they should have done years ago. Here's a clue; use the money you already made in profit to retrofit your operations. If the government offered business loans for new green energy companies and rewarded businesses for offering affordable green solutions, it would actually create jobs, ease our dependence on fossil fuels and move us in the direction of economic recovery. Instead the government wants to hand over this great opportunity to the tired old corrupt status qou monopolies so they can make even more money off of us while they get with the program.

If Obama truly cared about consumers, the environment and green energy he would not be touching Cap & Trade with a ten foot pole. Instead he clearly identifies who he's in bed with. The demand is great for green solutions. Consumers would be eating up affordable solar panels and affordable wind turbines if our government would just stop getting in the way. Ask yourself why we can't do this on our own? Ask yourself why there are no companies out there that can offer us green solutions so we can tell our utility providers to get lost? Why have no companies seen this opportunity to produce solar panels and wind turbines and been flooding the market with products?

It reminds of a story. Stanley Meyer invented something called a water fuel cell. It would allow consumers to fill up their cars using a common garden hose. Stanley died suddenly in March of 1998, but not before the Pentagon seized the technology. Of Course Meyer was portrayed as a fraud in the media and the technology died with him. What is the incentive to create low cost energy when after hundreds of years all we still do is hold on to fossil fuels. The mystery is why. But in all actuality the why is money. Energy companies run the show and they want a piece of this "green" pie and our government is handing that giant slice on a silver platter. It is in our hands, we have to put in end to the rapping of America.

PBS

I watched a PBS special about a couple who had an autistic child, they were modern hippie parents not to be confused with hippies of the 60's and 70's. The modern day hippies have taken a big giant dose of the Kool-aid. The hippies of the 60's didn't trust the government, were against war and were for personal freedom mainly in the venue of personal recreational drug use. The new hippies of today buy everything their government tells them including global warming and liberalism to an extreme. Little do they know that Autism is linked mainly to government forced vaccinations, and forced medicated fluoride in the water. The hippies of the past would never have accepted these developments but would have been hosting love ins and protests against government control. The current hippies or liberals haven't a clue because in stark contrast they believe EVERYTHING their government tells them. Watching it told me how incredibly powerful propaganda is in modern age society. Hitler after all, was voted in by 95% of the population due to a very effective propaganda campaign which tells us evil only has to utilize tried and true methods of control to disable a nation of thinkers to be drones. The liberals or hippies of our society use to question everything, now they back everything the government tells them too in the name of liberalism or Socialism. They have no idea their beliefs are powered by beliefs that will eventually prove to be the biggest anti-American sentiment America has ever known. Freedom is something the hippies of days gone by understood, those liberals we see now are just pawns in a critical intellectual battle. Hippies can choose to think or buy in, buying in means the end of freedom as we know it. We all pray, thinking becomes the norm again!

good stuff

Audit The Fed Bill Gutted!

By Bob Ivry | Bloomberg

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been “gutted” while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House.

The bill, with 308 co-sponsors, has been stripped of provisions that would remove Fed exemptions from audits of transactions with foreign central banks, monetary policy deliberations, transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee and communications between the Board, the reserve banks and staff, Paul said today.

“There’s nothing left, it’s been gutted,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is not a partisan issue. People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that.”

The Fed, led by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, has come under greater congressional scrutiny while attempting to end the financial crisis by bailing out financial firms and more than doubling its balance sheet to $2.16 trillion in the past year. The central bank is also buying $1.25 trillion of securities tied to home loans.

Paul, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said Mel Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, has eliminated “just about everything” while preparing the legislation for formal consideration. Watt is chairman of the panel’s domestic monetary policy and technology subcommittee.

Keith Kelly, a spokesman for Watt, declined to comment and said Watt wasn’t immediately available for an interview. Watt’s district includes Charlotte, headquarters of Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. lender.

Original Language

Paul said he intends to introduce an amendment to the bill when it comes to the House floor for a vote restoring the legislation’s original language.

Continue

Excerpted from pp. 44-46 of The Great Derangement

[W]hen you’re looking at the process by which any bill gets passed into law, on the House side at least there are only a few people who really matter. Those people are the majority leader, the chairman of the relevant “committee of jurisdiction” (i.e. Energy and Commerce for the oil industry, Financial Services for Wall Street firms, etc.), the chairman of the Rules Committee, the chairs of the House-Senate conference committee, the House Speaker and perhaps a few other members of the conference committee.

These people are important because this small group can essentially ram a bill into law all by themselves. If you control all of these seats, you control every space on the congressional Monopoly board within which the bill can be written or altered unilaterally.

There are four main way stations on the road to a bill’s passage. There’s the committee of jurisdiction, where the bill, after being introduced, goes through what is called a markup process. In a markup, the committee decides what goes in the bill and what does not. The markup process is supervised by the committee chairman. Theoretically the markup process is put to a general vote by the committee, but in this Congress the reality is that the chairman puts in what he wants and chucks what he doesn’t want out the window.

He then sends the bill to the Rules Committee, where other House members from outside the committee – usually freaked-out minority members desperate to stop this or that criminally insane provision cleverly hidden in the committee version – have a chance to submit amendments to the bill. The Rules chairman tries not to laugh, somberly nukes every meaningful amendment request with a pained, regretful expression, and then takes the bill behind closed doors, where it can be rewritten (usually in the middle of the night) to include all the shit the House leadership knew was way to evil to survive public discussion in the original committee of jurisdiction.

Rules then puts the finishing touches on the bill’s language and sends it to the floor the very next morning. The version that leaves the rules committee is now called not a bill, but a rule. The Rules Committee is supposed to give House members three days to read the rule before it goes to a vote, but the three-day period can be waived in case of emergency. The “emergency” has been in place for five consecutive years now; virtually every bill that has passed through the house in the Bush era has been voted on just hours after emerging from the hairy womb of the Rules Committee.

After the House passes the rule, which of course no one voting on it has read, the world then waits for the Senate to pass its own hideous version of the legislation. But alas, the bill cannot be sent to the president until the differences between the House and Senate versions – consisting generally of differing sets of campaign donor hand-jobs hidden in the two bills – can be ironed out. This ironing out is done in the conference committee.

The mechanism of conference committee is a special voodoo all unto itself, a monstrously complex bureaucratic maze whose diabolical scheme is known to a select few congressional practitioners. But for the moment, only two facts are important.

The first is that the bill can again be completely rewritten here, rewritten from top to bottom, rewritten even so that it has a completely opposite meaning from the bills that passed the two houses – in a word, re written in such a fashion as to render the whole process up to now meaningless.

The second is that a majority vote of conference committee members, called “conferees,” is not even required for passage. Again, the conference committee chairs are the key players here. Whatever the top dogs from the House and the Senate want generally occurs. They redo the bill according to whatever swinish commercial dynamic happens to govern this back-room deal (for the conference hearings are almost always conducted out of the public eye), then send the final version for a vote, again giving the members just a few hours’ notice before they make an essentially blind decision on the by-now completely revised legislation.

Somewhere along the line, campaign donors apparently figured out that by a careful stewarding of their contributions, they could – instead of spending gargantuan sums to buy the wide majority of House and Senate members necessary for an open vote on the floor – instead target those members who could simply rewrite the important parts of the bill in secret.

Funny Dogs!

Big Bird helping to promote the Birth Certificate issue

Mom, says Ron Paul the only Congressman representing the people in Washington