Trickle Up Poverty (27 page)
Translation: global warming isn’t about to kill off the polar bears, your SUV emissions aren’t jeopardizing their habitat, nor should polar bears be put on an endangered species list, as some are attempting to do in Congress. Senator James Inhofe puts it this way:
The bottom line is that the attempt to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is not based on any evidence that the polar bear populations are declining or in trouble. It is based on computer climate models fraught with uncertainties…. And frankly, listing the polar bear isn’t about the bear either. It is about trying to bring about climate change regulations using the most powerful development-stopping law in the land, the Endangered Species Act. Polar bears are being used to achieve long sought left-wing environmental regulatory policies.62
If the aforementioned actor had done his homework rather than read a script about something he doesn’t understand, he might have learned the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that “the polar bear population is 20,000 to 25,000 bears, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, estimates were as low as 5,000-10,000 bears due to sport hunting, which has since been restricted.”63 In other words, five times the number of polar bears roams the planet today than fifty years ago.
As for those ice caps, political analyst, Jim McConalogue, of the European Foundation, put it this way: “Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. We are still not able to control the sun.”64
Hot Air and Scare From Hollywood Idiots
The global warming scam has all the ingredients for a blockbuster movie. Lies, deception, payoffs, backroom deals, falsification of data, record tampering, and a cast of buffoonish characters in empty suits pulling off the greatest scam of the century. Not surprisingly, Leonardo “DiCrapio,” a junior member of the scare-America crowd, figured he’d cash in on the global warming scarefest with a movie of his own, The 11th Hour.
You probably never heard of it because it tanked at the box office.
Fashioning himself an expert on the subject, yet denying the input from any trained scientist with a different opinion,65 DiCrapio speaks in solemn tones throughout the movie trying to sound authoritative. After all, he is convinced that global warming is “the number one environmental challenge.”66 But his narration sounds more like a junior high kid trying to muster the courage to ask a girl out on a date. Against the backdrop of earthquakes, hurricanes, and flooding, this neophyte says, “The evidence is now clear. Industrial civilization has caused irreparable damage. Our political and corporate leaders have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence.”67
Did you see what this Al Gore—wannabe just said?
Overwhelming scientific evidence?
What universe is DiCrapio living in?
I guess he didn’t bother consulting with John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, who amassed more than thirty thousand scientists—nine thousand with real PhD’s in science—who signed up on the side of debunking the myth of global warming.68 Coleman was one of the first in his field to challenge the “dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives” who “manipulated long term scientific data back in the late 1990’s to create an allusion [sic] of rapid global warming … Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement growing.”69
Coleman echoed something I’ve been saying for the last five years on radio when he said global warming “is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you ‘believe in.’ It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a nonevent, a manufactured crisis and a total scam.”70
Then again, DiCrapio would have difficulty entertaining such an opposing point of view. I’m sure listening to a meteorologist might be too much to ask of a kid who, by his own admission, “never went to college.”71 It’s clear that educating the public with actual scientific truth wasn’t his goal. When asked what he hoped the film would accomplish, DiCrapio said, “I want the public to be very scared by what they see. I want them to see a very bleak future. I want them to feel disillusioned halfway through and feel hopeless.”72
To what end is the purpose of such fear mongering?
He wants us to embrace “green technology” and engage in a “cultural transformation” to save the planet. Let’s be clear on this point. I don’t oppose the overall concept of being a good steward of the world in which we live. Whether you’re a liberal or conservative, each of us would do well to find ways to reduce pollution and produce energy-saving devices.
On that topic, I was collecting and studying plant life in the South Pacific (1969–1989) long before being an environmentalist was fashionable. I have two Masters degrees in anthropology and botany and I was a pioneer in the field of ethno-medicine upon which I formed the basis for my doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley. I’m a trained scientist. I understand ecology better than this actor knows the clasps of brassieres.
Where I disagree with Leonardo DiCrapio, Al Goreleoni, and the other soothsayers, is the use of trumped up science to scare people into emptying their pockets to support radical eco-terrorist issues and causes while worshiping at the altar of environmentalism. Make no mistake about it. Adherents to this fable, having tuned out all contrary scientific data, are zealots with a capital “Z” and will say or do anything—including the manipulation of data or the suppression of facts—to advance their cause.
Case in point.
About the time DiCrapio was promoting his film, singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow teamed up with another global warming alarmist, whose name doesn’t matter, to kick off a “Stop Global Warming College Tour.” Her goal? She hoped to enlist thousands of college sheeple to fight the perceived threat that global warming represents. Midway through the tour, Crow actually made this suggestion to combat global warming:
I have spent the better part of this tour trying to come up with easy ways for us all to become a part of the solution to global warming. Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are,
in my mind, worth investigating. One of my favorites is in the area of conserving trees, which we heavily rely on for oxygen.
I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don’t want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.73
While Crow actually graduated from college, unlike the aforementioned actor, one wonders how an educated person could come up with such a featherbrained idea. It was an absurd comment heard around the world. In the wake of her idiotic comments, she became the laughing stock of the nation virtually overnight. The public ridicule prompted Crow to claim, “it was a JOKE.”74
I don’t buy it.
This is a typical liberal trick. They tell us how we should live, they make foolhardy comments, and they offer harebrained solutions and the second someone calls them on it, they play the “it was a joke card.” Remember, Sheryl-use-one-square-Crow wasn’t doing a standup comedy routine at the time. She was in the middle of a “serious” effort to educate students about the catastrophic implications of global warming. It wasn’t the first time we heard her say something loony. It won’t be the last.
Which brings us to yet another Hollywood idiot, Danny Glover, who forgot he’s an actor, not a scientist. Let’s set aside the fact that a number of scientists are good actors. Glover, who has no training in science, is suddenly an expert on the topic. In the wake of the earthquake that hit Haiti, here’s what Glover said of the people in Haiti: “They are all in peril because of global warming.”
But wait, he envisions more damage on the horizon because of the failure of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen to throttle the threat of climate change:
I hope we seize this particular moment because the threat of what happened to Haiti is the threat that could happen anywhere
in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know. They’re all in peril because of global warming, they’re all in peril because of climate change … When we look back at what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m saying? But we have to act now.75
Not only are these actors ignoramuses, they’re outright hypocrites.
Two examples will suffice. Compare the global warming rhetoric of Barbara “Babs” Streisand with how this singing yenta lives. On her website Babs talks about making a difference to stop global warming “by making simple, conscious decisions” to “conserve energy and help protect the environment from further deterioration.” She then links to an article entitled, “Simple Things We Can All Do to Help Stop Global Warming.”76 Great. So what has this diva done to cut back on energy consumption?
Nothing.
Streisand and her husband live alone in a gated compound sporting five homes and a twelve-thousand-square-foot barn that’s larger than Al Gore’s mansion. Did I mention the barn is air-conditioned?77 And this yenta wants you to cut back on energy usage by switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs? Let’s set aside the fact that Babs once starred in a movie as a crazy person. I’m sure there was no typecasting involved. However, in real life, she must think we’re nuts to take her concern about global warming seriously.
She has zero credibility.
To stop global warming, maybe she could stop singing for starters.
Take John Travolta who owns five airplanes, two of which are parked in the front yard of his home in Florida—one of which is a Boeing 707 four-engine behemoth. He owns a Lear jet and his own private runway. I have no problem with that. If he wants to double his fleet, more power to him. And yet it smacks of hypocrisy when he, like Al Goreleoni, tells us how we should live to minimize the impact on the environment, while ignoring his own preaching. Regarding global warming, Travolta said, “It is a very valid issue. I’m wondering if we need to think about other planets and dome cities.”78 In other words, things are getting so bad here on earth, we might need to move to another planet.
I say, be my guest.
When it comes to the Hollywood idiots, it’s “Do as I say, not as I play.”
I understand how easy it is to be hoodwinked by Hollywood’s cheerleaders. On the surface, they sound convincing. Their “star power” makes them seem believable. It’s easy to forget that their lines have been scripted for them on the screen. In real life, they demonstrate a poverty of ideas, a poverty of values, and a poverty of integrity. If you allow their illogic to sell you on the global warming fiction, their poverty of the soul becomes yours.
Which brings me to a final story.
While working on this book, I took a break from the writing to attend to some other business. After driving across town, I parked my car in the underground garage of an older, towering building in San Francisco. I rang for the elevator and soon found myself standing next to three or four twenty-somethings. Each was neatly dressed, reasonably nice looking people. I punched the button for my floor, the doors closed, and up we went.
I couldn’t help but notice that every one of my fellow travelers held a handheld device, maybe eight inches from their faces. They were staring into their little screens as though they were their personal oracle. I thought, “This is amazing. These people are completely oblivious of their surroundings.”
They neither heard nor saw anybody else in the elevator.
Me? I’m looking around, thinking I might exchange a few words, you know, as people do to pass the time. Especially since this wasn’t one of those supersonic elevators like the kind you’d ride up in the Willis Tower in Chicago. Sometimes I believe I could actually climb up the stairs faster than this thing was moving … 5th floor … 8th floor … 12th floor … still, not a word. As the elevator ascended, I wondered whether these people would even recognize danger when it approached them.
They didn’t seem to know what world they were living in.
I’m sure the last thing on their mind would be who the president really is, his Marxist-Leninist roots, or the fact that Congress was considering saddling them with more taxes under the guise of preventing global warming, or how fragile life itself really is. I realized, watching them work their little wheels on their BlackBerry’s without looking up once, that an evil government could literally take away their freedom and they wouldn’t even know it.
That’s when a chilling thought struck me: Would they even care?
As long as they could surf the Internet with their phone, would it matter that they were losing their fundamental freedoms? What’s more, I wondered which would be worse—to know the truth but to ignore it? Or, to be oblivious to the truth, to be ignorant of the reality that the world is collapsing around them?
Thank God those aren’t the only two choices.
Thank God some of us are still alert.
Thank God there’s an awakening as the Tea Party movement demonstrates. The resistance to what this president is doing to foist trickle up poverty on the middle class via Climategate is growing.
I can only pray it’s not too late to stop Obama’s hate.
The Real Cost of Legalizing Illegals—It’s the Vote, Stupid!
President Obama, Broken Borders are not a laughing matter. No one in Arizona is laughing. Do your job and secure the border.
—Advertisement by Governor Jan Brewer1
In the 21st century, we are defined not by our borders but by our bonds.
—President Barack Obama2
Entering the United States illegally has been a crime since 1929, and federal law affirms that it is a crime to be in this country illegally. In 2006, the U.S. Senate passed legislation authorizing the construction of a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border by a vote of 80 to 19. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that she was freezing funding for the Secure Border Initiative Network, effectively abdicating the primary responsibility associated with her office: securing the borders of the United States.3
This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Let’s set aside the fact that Napolitano is completely incompetent and should be fired. In this case, she was just reflecting the agenda of her boss, President Obama, who wants to erase the borders. That’s not hyperbole, that’s what Obama said to Mexican President Calderon during a Mexi-fest in the White House. Obama said, “Your business speaks to the truth of our time, in North America and the world. In the 21st Century, we are defined not by our borders but by our bonds, so I say to you and to the Mexican people, let us stand together. Let’s face the future together. Let us work together.”4
While Napolitano and Obama were busy compromising and erasing our border, Arizona residents were increasingly besieged by illegals crossing their southern border. Mexicans smuggling drugs and illegal aliens into the country were becoming more desperate and violent. Phoenix had gotten the nickname “Kidnapping Capital of the USA,”5 and the tragic murder of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, known as a Good Samaritan for the help he frequently gave to illegal immigrants,6 finally brought the consequences of the growing lawlessness along the border to a head.
Tragically, after Robert Krentz was murdered, “deputies and U.S. Border Patrol agents tracked footprints from the crime scene nearly 20 miles to the Mexican line, border-policy critics concluded that the killer must be an illegal immigrant.”7 The very people he was helping appear to have been the ones who took his life. The state of Arizona, with the approval of 70 percent of its citizens, passed its own immigration enforcement law, essentially restating federal law but taking responsibility for protecting the border and monitoring the presence of illegal aliens in the state into their own hands.
The response from the left was immediate, loud, and violent.
The left has this habit of protesting common sense.
Those speaking out and demonstrating against the new law resorted to willful misrepresentations of its contents, insisting that it gave law enforcement officers the right to arbitrarily approach anyone they pleased and demand to see identification. On those grounds, the protesters called those who supported the new law racists. President Obama, as he had done on the occasion of Professor Gates’ arrest, reacted intemperately. Before the bill had even been signed into law and certainly without his having read or been briefed on so much as a single word in the law, the president called it “poorly conceived” and “not the right way to go.”8
In response to a question by Texas Republican Representative Ted Poe during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to admit that he had “not had a chance” to read the bill, despite the fact that he had called it unconstitutional and vowed to sic Justice Department attorneys on the legislation to prove it.9 Of course, the president and his leftist whiners also failed to mention that the House of Representatives had passed a bill that affirmed “the authority of state and local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws while in the course of their regular duties.”10
In fact, the law is very straightforward.
It clearly states that those involved in, or suspected of, committing a crime can be approached by law enforcement officers. If you’re suspected of having committed a crime, you’ll be asked for ID. If you can’t produce ID, you’ll be taken to jail. If it turns out you’re in the country illegally, you’ll be deported. What’s wrong with that? This procedure applies to both those in the country legally and those here illegally. For some reason, Obamanics can’t seem to understand that the law applies to Caucasians as well as Chicanos, Jews as well as Christians, those who have jobs and those who are unemployed. It discriminates against suspected criminals if it discriminates at all. In any case, those stopped under this law are entitled to due process. Further, citizens have recourse in that they can sue the state government if they feel the measures being taken aren’t aggressive enough.
The circumstances that made passage of Arizona’s new illegal immigration law necessary contrast with how we often view those in the country illegally. Many Americans have a benign picture of illegal aliens. They view illegals as peacefully doing housework, gardening, and pool maintenance for well-to-do Americans in states along the U.S.-Mexico border. The problem is, while that may be true on some levels, not all illegal immigrants come to the United States to work.
Some come here to sell black tar heroin, the latest “drug of choice” being marketed to middle-class American youth in cities around the United States. Police report a nationwide network of illegal aliens selling this new potent and deadly form of heroin from Mexico. Since 1998, deaths in Ohio from heroin overdoses have tripled. The LA Times reports these illegals “have focused on middle-and working-class whites,” 11 further burdening the middle class with a lethal addiction.
What’s more, not all illegals are actually doing productive work.
In fact, a significant percentage of them are not here to work.
They’re here to work the system.
They make up a “shadow economy” and they take advantage of valuable resources, including health care and financial aid, without contributing to the taxes that pay for them. In fact, even those who work cost taxpayers substantially more than a family of citizens. The Center for Immigration Studies reports, that “illegal households created a net fiscal deficit at the federal level of as much as $400 billion.”12 The middle class must pick up the tab.
Criminal aliens are increasingly becoming a burden on our Federal prison system as well, accounting for more that 29 percent of all prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities. The percentage of all federal prison inmates is even higher.13 The percentage of illegals in prison jumps dramatically when we focus on California: Investors Business Daily reported in 2005 that about half the prisoners in that state were illegals, adding to the financial burden average Americans are strapped with.
And despite the fact that illegal aliens take jobs from American citizens in an economy where the unemployment rate among citizens remains close to 10 percent and real unemployment is closer to 20 percent, Barack Obama is determined to create a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens rather than deport them so that Americans can do the jobs they’ve usurped.
La Raza and MEChA: The Subversive Base of a Chicano-Leftist Takeover
Illegal immigration, especially from Mexico and Central and South America is not a new phenomenon. In fact, as far back as the middle of the last century, Chicanos were assuming a racial and cultural identity within the United States that would become a movement which spread throughout the American southwest and California. In his 1960 novel, The Ferguson Affair, about southern California attorney William Gunnarson’s solving a complex series of murders, author Ross MacDonald makes one of the first mentions of the term la Raza as a description of how Hispanics refer to themselves. Gunnarson is being lectured about his implicit racism by Detective-Lieutenant Harvey Wills, who offers this:
You may not realize it, but you don’t like cops, and you don’t like Spanish people. If you want to practice law in this town,
do it effectively, you’re going to have to get to know la Raza, understand ‘em.
When Gunnarson asks, “What does la Raza mean?” Wills answers that the term is what “they call themselves….It’s a proud word, and they’re a proud people….They have a lot of ignorance, a lot of poverty, a lot of crime. But they make a contribution to this town.”
Things have changed significantly in the ensuing five decades. La Raza, which is Spanish for “the race,” is now an official organization, not just a nickname. The National Council for La Raza (NCLR) receives tens of millions of dollars in federal grants annually. La Raza is a subversive anti-American “Hispanic advocacy” group that is determined to, as its founding document, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, says, reverse the “brutal gringo invasion of our territories.”14 Its members have wormed their way into city, county, and state governments, and into schools throughout the southwestern U.S. and California, bringing with them a philosophy that promotes flouting the law in support of its goals.
The list of La Raza’s subversive goals is very long.
First, they favor the abolition of the border between the United States and Mexico as one of the steps to their reclaiming portions of the American southwest and California from Americans who allegedly “stole” the territory from its rightful Hispanic owners. NCLR and its sister group, MEChA (Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), have expressed the intention to “liberate” the mythical territory of Aztlán, which stretches from areas occupied by pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico up into the southwestern United States and California.
Illegal immigration is part of a strategy to enable La Raza to take back territory that it feels was “stolen” from it by the United States. Aztlán is seen as the “birthplace of the Aztecs,” and it includes California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and areas in Texas and Colorado. Abolishing the borders between the United States and Mexico to enable illegal immigration into the United States is one of the most effective strategies they propose to work toward that goal.15
Let’s not mince words.
The two groups hate the United States and all that it stands for.
Antonia Darder, who teaches “cultural studies” at Claremont Graduate University, recently received a standing ovation at an annual La Raza Youth Conference held at UCLA for the purpose of promoting Aztlán culture. She said, “Capitalism is the root of domination. Racism and sexism exist because capitalism requires it…. We’re here because U.S. foreign policy in Latin America has forced us here.”16
The “Mechista” philosophy holds that “Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture.” The philosophy supports “Chicano nationalism” in a characteristically totalitarian way, claiming that “we must be consistent in our thinking and our actions.” It makes it clear that MEChA members are “Chicanes and Chicanos of Aztlán reclaiming the land of our birth (Chicana/Chicano Nation).”17
Another of the critical goals of La Raza is the granting of amnesty for illegal aliens. Achieving this also means working against enforcement of laws to stop illegal immigration. Several groups, including the Red Diaper Doper Babies of the American Civil Liberties Union and La Raza, among others, have petitioned President Obama to drop Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) agreements, which authorize state, county, and city law enforcement personnel to arrest illegal immigrants.
The incompetent Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is said to be working on revising the agreements to focus on arresting only illegals who are fugitives from justice. As usual, the Obama administration simply ignores the fact that being in this country illegally is a crime in itself, and our Homeland Security Secretary actively works to bypass the enforcement of federal law, to the detriment of our national security, precisely what Napolitano is charged with protecting.18
One of the first things the new Congress did in its first session after the election of 2008 was to prepare the way for re-introducing comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Senate bill S 9, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is titled “Stronger Economy Borders Act of 2009.” The problem is that it’s precisely the opposite of what that title implies! Make no mistake about it. The liberals like to say one thing and do the exact opposite in order to mislead the sheeple. This bill includes language that encourages legitimizing illegal aliens in the service of improving the economy. It echoes the sentiments of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who has said, “Immigrants must be brought out of the shadows so they can fully contribute to our nation’s future economic and social well-being.”19
In addition, Barack Obama addressed a group from the National Council of La Raza in November, 2008, shortly after the election, promising amnesty to illegals. Among the things he said?
We need to offer those who are willing to make amends a pathway to citizenship. That way, we can reconcile our values as both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws…. We should require them to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship—behind those who came here legally. But we cannot—and should not—deport 12 million people.
Obama’s offering the same rhetoric that informed the ill-fated Teddy Kennedy—John McCain Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. That bill resurfaced in March, 2010, when Obama met with his staff in order to try to jam through a new version of immigration reform with the same provisions as Kennedy-McCain before mid-term elections.20
What’s being proposed here is nothing less than anti-American legislation that makes a mockery of the rule of law. It’s also an indication that Obama is nothing less than a brazen revolutionary who will stop at nothing to ramrod his subversive agenda down our throats. The will of the people be damned! The president is beholden to NCLR, MEChA, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
And by the way, if you think Barack Obama is about to support any legislation that makes learning English mandatory for Hispanics or anyone else for that matter, then you need to readjust your thinking. In fact, promoting Spanish-English bilingual education is another of La Raza’s foundation principles, despite the fact that bilingual education has done enormous harm to the prospects of Spanish-speaking children in California.