Back to Basics

For the past few months, I’ve been spotlighting the Obama administration’s War on the West, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s War on Jobs,
and the White House land lock-up (Part 1, Part 2). Today’s column exposes the next Obama environmental power grab — into the sea.

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And now: The Stealth Obama Ocean Grab
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

It’s not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration’s neon green radicals are also training their sights on the deep blue seas. The president’s grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over “conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.”_

Democrats have tried and failed to pass “comprehensive” federal oceans management legislation five years in a row. The so-called “Oceans 21″ bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of “ecosystem management.” Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.

In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council” with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!

The panel will have the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with existing regional and local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.

No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green jobs czar/self-avowed communist Van Jones).

Also on the new ocean panel:

– Socialista and energy/climate change czar Carol Browner, last seen bullying auto company execs to “put nothing in writing, ever” and threatening to push massive cap-and-trade tax hikes during the upcoming congressional lame duck session.

– Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former high-ranking official at the left-wing Environmental Defense Fund, which has long championed drastic reductions of commercial fishing fleets and recreational fishing activity in favor of centralized control.

Speaker Mop & Glo made headlines for her call to investigate opponents of the Ground Zero mosque, but there was something else about her remarks that should have raised your hackles:

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said. “How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we’ve been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we go forward to an election about the future of our country and two of the first three questions are about a zoning issue in New York City.”

Pelosi was speaking at a ceremony celebrating the Treasure Island land deal:

The deal has been signed to transfer man-made Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay from the Navy to San Francisco.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus signed the transfer agreement on Tuesday. It includes a section of neighboring Yerba Buena Island.

Payments to the Navy could rise to $105 million, funded by private companies and revenue from developing the former Navy base into a model 21st century neighborhood.

Pelosi has used her power to push the crony-infested project for years. She pushed aggressively for legislative language that would have forced the military to fork over high-value property at no cost to local communities. And as the Washington Times recounted last fall, she presided over a “den of corruption” to secure the coveted property:

…Treasure Island is not a case of a small town that has relied on a local military base for its livelihood for decades. It is a land grab by politicians for well-connected developers. Tony Hall, the former executive director of the Treasure Island Development Authority, told us the city’s effort to develop the island is a “den of corruption.” Treasure Island Community Development, the prospective developer for Treasure Island, was granted a no-bid contract by the city.

At the core of Treasure Island Community Development are high-powered California Democratic lobbyist Darius Anderson and supermarket magnate Ronald W. Burkle. Both are well-known financial backers of San Francisco’s Democratic Mayor Gavin Newsom…

…A proposed Treasure Island development plan slates 90 percent of the developed acreage for residential use, 7 percent for commercial property and 3 percent for parking. An illustration shows about a dozen high-rise blocks of shoreline condominiums with stunning views of the city, plus 300 acres of park and recreation land. This would hardly be “affordable housing,” the $5 billion investment that Mrs. Pelosi claims would have to be recouped by the developer. The only long-term jobs created from this plan would be for maids and doormen for the high rollers privileged enough to live there.

The Navy merits praise for holding the line in defense of a market-based transfer of Treasure Island.

Waving goodbye to property rights…

My column today raises bright red flags about a little-noticed, radical green land grab program underway at the White House called the “Great Outdoors Initiative.” Keep in mind my previous coverage of Obama’s War on the West and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s job destruction. The War on the West is a war on property rights, a war on the economy, and a war on the American way of life.

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How Obama is locking up our land
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Have you heard of the “Great Outdoors Initiative”? Chances are, you haven’t. But across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life.

In April, President Obama issued a memorandum outlining his “21st century strategy for America’s great outdoors.” It was addressed to the Interior Secretary, the Agriculture Secretary, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. The memo calls on the officials to conduct “listening and learning sessions” with the public to “identify the places that mean the most to Americans, and leverage the support of the Federal Government” to “protect” outdoor spaces. Eighteen of 25 planned sessions have already been held. But there’s much more to the agenda than simply “reconnecting Americans to nature.”

The federal government, as the memo boasted, is the nation’s “largest land manager.” It already owns roughly one of every three acres in the United States. This is apparently not enough. At a “listening session” in New Hampshire last week, government bureaucrats trained their sights on millions of private forest land throughout the New England region. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack crusaded for “the need for additional attention to the Land and Water Conservation Fund — and the need to promptly support full funding of that fund.”

Property owners have every reason to be worried. The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is a pet project of green radicals, who want the decades-old government slush fund for buying up private lands to be freed from congressional appropriations oversight. It’s paid for primarily with receipts from the government’s offshore oil and gas leases. Both Senate and House Democrats have included $900 million in full LWCF funding, not subject to congressional approval, in their energy/BP oil spill legislative packages. The Democrats have also included a provision in these packages that would require the federal government to take over energy permitting in state waters, which provoked an outcry from Texas state officials, who sent a letter of protest to Capitol Hill last month:

“In light of federal failures, it is incomprehensible that the United States Congress is entertaining proposals that expand federal authority over oil and gas drilling in state water and lands long regulated by states… Given the track record, putting the federal government in charge of energy production on state land and waters not only breaks years of successful precedent and threatens the 10th Amendment to the United Sates Constitution, but it also undermines common sense and threatens the environmental and economy security of our state’s citizens.”

This power grab, masquerading as a feel-good, all-American recreation program, comes on top of a separate, property-usurping initiative exposed by GOP Rep.

There are ten planks in the Communist Manifesto and it will come as no surprise to anyone to discover that they are being implemented by the Obama administration in league with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The first plank called for the abolition of all private property ownership and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.

The Constitution regards the ownership of private property to be of such importance that the Bill of Rights’ Fifth Amendment includes an injunction against the taking of private property for public use without just compensation. The object was to keep as much private property as private as possible.

Some of the other Communist goals included a heavy progressive or graduated income tax and abolition of all rights of inheritance. If the Bush tax cuts are not extended, the “death tax” on estates will partially implement the inheritance goal and, of course, everyone currently anticipates that income tax rates will rise.

The federal government has long been involved in sequestering land from private ownership and in cases such as the establishment of National parks and forests it has proven to be a good idea, ensuring the protection of landmarks such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park.

Such efforts ensured that the U.S. still has 70% of the forest land that existed in 1600—737 million acres. Of these 33.5% are reserved from harvest by law or represent slow-growth areas unsuitable for timber production. The rest are timberlands that, for forest management purposes, are still harvested.

This has not stopped environmentalists, often called tree-huggers, from trying to stop any harvesting and the 1980s Spotted Owl hoax in the Northwest was so successful it closed down timber and sawmill operations, devastating an important industry. The claim was that the owls were endangered. Like most environmental claims it was false.

Most people will be surprised to learn that nearly 30% of the 2.63 million square miles of the United States is directly owned by the federal government.

This federal land is located primarily in the West. For example, 69.1% of Alaska is owned by the federal government and 84% of Nevada. More than half of both Utah and Idaho is owned by the federal government. Other western states such as Arizona, California, Wyoming, Oregon, New Mexico and Colorado have from 53.1% to 36.6% of their land allocated to the federal government.

If the States are sovereign republics in their own right, it begs the question why the federal government owns so much of the West, but the most pressing question today is why new legislation is making its way through the House and Senate to create a permanent trust fund for the purpose of acquiring still more federal land.

Snort. Robert Reich argues that the only way the American public can be kept informed about the BP oil spill is to have the transparency-challenged Obama administration take over the company — through a “temporary receivership.”

Banking. Auto manufacturing. Health care. Now oil. There’s no such thing as a “temporary” government power grab, let alone a “temporary receivership” in the hands of Team Obama control freaks:

It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public know what’s going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP’s strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the President is ultimately in charge.

You know who’s tickled pink (or rather, red) by Reich’s proposal?

Maxine “socialize Big Oil” Waters. Remember?

By JOHN SHADEGG AND PETER HOEKSTRA

We are nominating Sen. Baucus’ health care reform bill for the Pulitzer Prize — for fiction.

John Shadegg

Like works of great fiction writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story line of the Baucus bill is not what it seems and is in fact a clever subterfuge of what health care reform will mean for the American people.

Hiding behind this facade is another story about a massive power grab by the Washington political establishment.

The bill is loaded with fiction. To begin with, it purports to reduce the deficit. This is really an Enron-style scam with the bill’s massive new taxes starting on day one and its dramatic new health care expenditures, which will far exceed the tax revenues, beginning in year four.

Hence its favorable score: 10 years of revenue, seven of expenditures. In the private sector, people go to jail for this type of accounting; in the U.S. Senate, they trumpet it as good news.

The Baucus bill claims to treat all Americans equitably, yet four states receive Medicaid exemptions — the federal government will pick up the state’s share of Medicaid costs — for five years. That means taxpayers in 46 states will subsidize other states, including Nevada, so Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can bring home the bacon and get re-elected.

Sen. Chuck Schumer put in a little-noticed provision that exempts New Yorkers and taxpayers from some other states from the bill’s tax on gold-plated insurance plans. The result: The rest of the nation will subsidize the health care of New Yorkers and a few others.

If you’re lucky enough to live in one of the favored states, you win. If not, you lose. Guess how many of those states are blue and have Democratic senators up for re-election? Hardly seems fair, does it? Huge earmarks and health care favoritism for states served by powerful Washington elites.

There are other massive earmarks in this bill. Up to $10 billion will go to VEBA, such as the underfunded retirement health care package of United Auto Workers retirees. This may or may not be a good idea, but it clearly does not belong in this legislation.

The bill has huge, new mandated costs on the states for Medicaid, and there are many other costs omitted from the bill that will need to be paid for by taxpayers. The bill claims savings it says will be achieved by reducing reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals. This has never happened in the past and won’t now. It is pure fiction.

There’s more fiction in both the Senate and House versions. Despite Democrat claims to the contrary, both will cover illegal aliens and abortion, and virtually no Americans will be able to keep their existing plan. The legislation will cost billions more than estimated. The numbers and the promises just don’t work.

Most importantly, and this is what the legislation is really about, the Baucus bill will transfer power from the American people to Washington elites — a power grab far more massive than it appears. Just think about it, the fiction (yes, some would call it lies) you’re hearing about today is happening while people are watching.