Henry Paulson's Newest Assault on America--The Global Carbon Tax

Former Treasury-Secretary Hank Paulson is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with America.  In 2006 he moved from his cushy Wall Street job at Goldman Sachs to his position as Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush and wondered aloud whether he could "make a difference."  Two years later, he presided over probably the most blatant example of crony capitalism in the history of our nation as he persuaded Congress to give billions in TARP funds to bail out Wall Street firms that had bet wrong in the financial sector.  The anger and frustration over the images of spoiled billionaires using the U.S. Treasury as their personal piggy banks was a huge part of the reason for Barack Obama's victory over John McCain in 2008.  Americans hoped that they had seen the last of the big government/big business partnership.  They were wrong.

Now Paulson is back with a new idea to annihilate the U.S. economy--a global carbon tax.  This is an old idea--it was part of the failed climate change bill that mercifully died in 2010 when conservative activists started the Tea Parties and ended the Pelosi Reign of Terror as Speaker of the House.  But Paulson is undeterred.  Under the guise of saving the planet, Paulson wants to tax us back into the Stone Ages, effectively completing his apparent mission as Secretary of the Treasury--to destroy the middle class and create a gulf so wide between the rich and poor that no one can cross it.

Paulson's latest scheme was outlined in an article he wrote Sunday for The New York Times.  He, along with Michael Bloomberg, the enemy of all freedom, and Tom Steyer, a liberal billionaire who has dedicated his time to lobbying against the Keystone Pipeline, are releasing their Risky Business Campaign  next Tuesday detailing ways that businesses can fight global warming and promoting the tax.

Al Gore proved that there are billions to be made in the "climate change" arena.  What many Americans have forgotten is that the Chicago Climate Exchange was ready to sell credits as part of the "cap and trade" piece of the 2010 Climate Change bill before public anger leading to the 2010 elections destroyed any hope for passage.  Now, apparently, Paulson and his buddies, emboldened by the Obama Administration's dedication to implementation of job-killing and economy-killing measures believe that they have a shot at passage of a tax that will allow them to exponentially grow their own personal fortunes on the backs of American taxpayers.  Sound familiar?

What is oddly ironic about this whole situation is that anyone, anywhere, would believe that Paulson would be the right spokesperson for anything.  His chief accomplishment in public life is presiding over the greatest economic crash since the 1920's--a fact that hardly inspires public trust.  And yet, Paulson points to his time as Treasury Secretary as his primary qualification for his new mission.  In his NY Times article, entitled, Lessons for Climate Change in the 2008 Recession, Paulson writes, "I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it’s fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes and problem-solving."  Right on, Hank--we saw how you solved the problems in 2008 by playing a substantial role in crashing the U.S. economy.  Really, I think you've done enough.

The arrogance of leftist elites is matched only by their unbridled contempt for everyone who is not them.  But even Bloomberg and Co. should know that Hank Paulson's name is MUD with most Americans.  Whatever he's selling this time, we don't want any.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

 

The Pied Piper of Washington D.C.

Last week I wrote about the problem of immigrant children flooding the U.S.-Mexican border and the case of one two year old child--Adrian--who was brought by a presumed smuggler to the U.S. before being identified and returned to his mother in Durango, Mexico.

In just a week the situation has worsened significantly.  To put what is happening in perspective for my readers, I moved out of the El Paso, Texas area May 1, 2014.  Today, June 17, 2014, illegal immigrants are swarming into the city at a rate we have never seen before.  My brother, Chris, who has been an operations manager with a local broadcast network affiliate for over twenty years and whose wife is the news director at the same station, sent me this email on Friday afternoon.  I am reprinting it with his permission: 

Are you keeping up with the news on these immigrants flooding into the country? It is crazy here in El Paso,  We have bus loads of thousands of women and children who are coming up from Central America because they have heard that Obama is going to give their children amnesty.  This is what they have actually told our news teams when we go interview them.

Finding them is no problem, we just go to the bus terminals and they are standing there waiting to go into the interior.

 

So the Border Patrol is picking them up all over the Southwest border, busing them to El Paso, where they are being directed to these local organizations who are supposed to care for immigrants.  The folks who are supposed to be helping them are interviewing them, getting the names of anyone in the country who knows them and can put them up.  When they make contact with a family member or friend somewhere in the US, they help the immigrants get bus tickets and arrange for them to be picked up by their families in New York, or Washington, or where ever.  Before the Border Patrol releases them, they are given a court date and told they need to show up for it and are put into the system to have their case reviewed, which we are told will take several years to get around to because of backlogs.  Of course, there is nothing to force these people to show up for any hearings and there are literally thousands of them streaming in daily.
 

It is the craziest thing I have seen.  [DC] has literally opened the borders and we are swimming in them in El Paso.  Buses coming in everyday.

Chris

And then yesterday I received this email: 

Everything is the same here in El Paso  We are getting overrun by illegals. Yesterday the Feds flew a plane load of them to the EP airport and let them loose.  Lovely.

Chris

I am also hearing stories that many of these "kids" are seventeen or eighteen years old and are filling up the city. Reportedly they're hanging out in bands in retail parking lots begging for money.  An influx of jobless, parentless youth with no skills and minimal, if any, education, cannot end well for El Paso or for the U.S. as they continue to spread through the nation.

Driving this flood of illegal child immigrants are policies like "The Dream Act" which promise to give amnesty to the children of immigrants.  Of course, that promise was originally supposedly predicated on the concept that these children were the unintended victims of their parents' illegal behavior--they had no say in being brought to a nation that became the only country they had ever called home and it was, therefore, inhumane to deport them.  Now, however, we are seeing a flood of underage minors actively engaging in illegal immigration because they perceive that they have a free ticket to the U.S.  The Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal spotlighted this issue today in an interview with a woman from Central America whose fifteen year old son chose to cross illegally into the U.S.  

Anybody left in the U.S. who has any illusions that policies that are fostering this influx of illegal immigration are humane needs to go back and read "The Pied Piper of Hamlin."  In the poem, the piper lures away the village children with promises of a lifetime of delicious food and fun only to take them into the heart of the mountain where they disappear and are never heard from again.  Likewise, the Obama Administration has become the Pied Piper of D.C., promising a glorious future it cannot possibly deliver.  At a time when our social service programs are financially strapped, over 100 million Americans are out of the workforce and a reported twenty percent of American households do not have one single family member who is working, the Obama Administration has led tens of thousands of young people to believe that they will find work and prosperity in this country.  In reality, with no education, poor English skills and limited opportunities, many will undoubtedly end up in crime or prostitution to survive. 
 

At its heart, the failure of the Obama Administration's immigration policies is the failure of all liberalism--which assumes that there will always be money and resources to pay for every program and to support every person.  It is the epic failure that stems from a government that refuses to follow the laws, that invites open immigration with no vision or plan for how to integrate the newcomers into our society.  It is the failure of a government that refuses to recognize that immigration should and must, like any other successful relationship, be mutually beneficial.  The immigrants must offer something to our society other than just their own needs.  Simply being young is not enough to make a person a desirable future citizen.

 

What is happening in El Paso and other border communities is a crisis and a tragedy.  But if we as a nation do not start dealing with this quickly it is a crisis that will not stay confined to the border.  Congress needs to take action immediately to do whatever it can to stop this flow of migrants before our whole nation begins to suffer from the overload and these children have to face a lifetime of bad consequences from having been lied to about life in the United States.

 

 

 

 

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Putting a Face on Immigration Issues in Light of Eric Cantor's Historic Loss

What a difference a day makes!  In a stunning turn of events last night, Eric Cantor lost his primary to relatively-unknown challenger David Brat.  The Huffington Post, which yesterday led its email headlines with a smug banner reading, "Tea Party Facing Heavy Losses on Primary Day"  today led with a story asking Who the Heck Defeated Eric Cantor?

While everyone on both the right and the left tried to catch our collective breaths, pundits were immediately talking about the impact that Cantor's defeat will have on the future of immigration reform.  Fox News' Megyn Kelly speculated that Obama will use that famous pen and phone to act unilaterally, which is pretty much his consistent fallback plan every time he encounters any resistance. 

I think we can expect to see some executive orders, but the simple truth is that for all of his political posturing, Obama does not have the authority to rewrite the law as much as he would like.  The other truth, as I wrote yesterday, is that any executive order is a whole lot easier to get rid of than a law duly passed through Congress. So if we are going to see some action on this issue, it is better to have it be executive action than some massive piece of legislation amounting to a de facto amnesty to try to repeal down the road.

Whenever we talk about illegal immigration, we invariably hear a lot about "the children".  Conservatives and liberals tend to disagree about what we should do with children of illegal immigration. Eric Cantor's pro-illegal immigration statements certainly contributed to his loss yesterday.  Particularly, his statement about the U.S. wanting "the kids" sparked an outrage when we posted it on Facebook.  Only very recently have we begun to understand that the policies and statements of the Obama Administration are actually contributing to the very problem of illegal immigrant children.  There is an influx of illegal immigration among minor children prompted by their parents who are listening to our politicians and inferring that their children will get citizenship if they can just land on our soil.  The problem is growing exponentially, as we demonstrated in a poster yesterday on The Liberty Project:     

Proponents of the Dream Act, and any number of other initiatives to automatically grant citizenship to minor illegal aliens pretend that these proposals are based in compassion, but the truth is that they are leading to abuse, exploitation and abandonment of children on a scale we have not previously experienced.  Today, I want to put a face on these numbers--the face of one two-year old abandoned in the desert near Sunland Park, New Mexico on the night of Saturday December 6, 2013.

Border Patrol underground motion sensors detected foot steps in the desert area during the night of Saturday, December 6.  Agents who responded began following two sets of footprints and discovered the two-year old boy and a man who claimed to be his uncle hiding behind some brush.  When agents asked the man for his citizenship, the man fled back across the border abandoning the little boy. KVIA-TV (the local ABC News Affiliate) covered the story:

Click here to access the KVIA Story

The little boy, who spoke only Spanish, identified himself as "Adrian".  Agents turned him over to the Las Cruces Police Department who then turned him over to child protective services.  

The case of "Adrian" was unusual even for our community because the child was so young. He was abandoned in a desert where temperatures are frequently below freezing at that time of year and lows in the low thirties are normal.  The stretch of desert between Anapra and Sunland Park, New Mexico, is a desolate area with relatively few inhabitants.  Packs of dogs and coyotes live in the desert along with poisonous snakes. The ways in which an unprotected toddler can die in such a place are almost too many to count. (Interestingly, in the KTSM story linked below, a resident of Anapra said that while she was very surprised to see a toddler abandoned there, she is accustomed to seeing children of six or seven years of age crossing the border alone.)

"Adrian" quickly became a top news story for the El Paso/Las Cruces/Juarez area as officials attempted to identify him and locate his family.  Due to intense coverage and photos that were circulated through official news outlets and social networking sites like Facebook, officials were able to locate his family within a few days.  Channel 9 News (the NBC affiliate) carried the story that through cooperation with the Mexican Consul, "Adrian"--whose name actually turned out to be Ruben, had been identified and would be reunited with his mother.  

Click here to access the KTSM Story  

Ruben's mother crossed the U.S-Mexico bridge to take her son back to Durango, Mexico.  She refused to answer any questions about how he arrived.  Authorities believe that the man who abandoned the child in the U.S. was a smuggler.  According to the reports, it is not unusual for smugglers to abandon children; it is also not unusual to hold them for ransom.  KVIA reporters were present for the reunion.

Click here to access the story of the reunion 

In many ways, "Adrian" was lucky.  Because he was so young, authorities made a concerted effort to track down his family and the amount of attention that the case received forced family members to come forward to claim him.

The story of "Adrian" is the natural outcome of the policies of an Administration that tells parents that their children can be used as human anchors to a land brimming with free social programs.  Far from compassionate, programs that encourage parents to abandon minor children and even infants to a foreign nation are in fact brutal and exploitative.  These government policies and programs are allowing parents to justify levels of abuse and neglect that would previously have been considered morally reprehensible.  

The next time you are discussing illegal immigration and someone tells you to "think of the children", show them a photo of "Adrian".  Then remind them that our government's misguided policies are not helping "the kids"; they are endangering their lives.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Is the Tea Party Really Dead?

Today on primary day, pundits across America are watching the races of Lindsey Graham and Eric Cantor, in particular, to diagnose the health and well-being of the Tea Party.  This morning The Huffington Post sent out an email announcing that the Tea Party was facing big losses today.  Such pundits are going to wait until the end of the day to see whether either Graham or Cantor is forced to a runoff to determine whether this modern American conservative movement is officially dead or just on life supports.  And many conservatives will buy into the gloom and declare that the movement has failed.

Years ago I read that the main difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals are willing to win incrementally.  No one has ever declared American liberalism to be dead, because it wasn't.  Even when Tip O'Neill remarked in dismay (and very correctly I might add) that Ronald Reagan had set the left's agenda back thirty years, he never ever doubted that the agenda would ultimately be fulfilled.  The left does not worry about losing today, because even if they lose today, they know they can keep pushing their agenda, reworking it, and reorganizing themselves until they finally do win.

The right, on the other hand, takes an "all or nothing" stance.  If we don't win everything we want today we declare ourselves the losers.  We need to take a page out of the other side's playbook and look at what we have accomplished.

The last five years gave us a GOP House, and could give us a GOP Senate this fall.  It is not a perfect House and it will not be a perfect Senate, but grassroots activism has pushed the GOP politicians to the right.  The last five years gave us Ted Cruz as the firebrand Senator from Texas and an activist Heritage Foundation that is now refuting big government and corporate lies.  The last five years have seen Barack Obama fall from grace as the perceived savior of the universe to poll ratings so low that a majority of Americans would not vote for a congressional candidate he endorsed.

Seventy percent of the new jobs created in this country are being created right here in the state of Texas--where conservatism is alive and well.  Texas is a living example that conservative, limited government brings prosperity and business growth.  We are a constant reminder that small government works.

The Texas GOP held their state convention last week and voted in a platform that was MORE conservative than the platform two years ago.  While many were dismayed and claimed that some of the principles--such as refusal to support drug legalization--are out of touch with modern society, the fact that such a platform could be approved in a state growing as rapidly as ours testifies to the truth that there are still many Americans who embrace conservative values.

What can we take away from all of this?  First of all, we need to remember that if we have not gotten everything we wanted, certainly neither has the left.  It is because there is no comprehensive climate change bill that Obama is trying to ram his climate change agenda down our throats via onerous EPA regulations.  The president is using his "pen and his phone" as fast as he can, but the simple truth is that executive orders and memorandums such as the one he signed today on student loan debt, are much easier to change than actual laws passed by Congress.  (In the case of today's memorandum, it will automatically expire at the end of his term).  In the end this is the difference between trying to actually repeal a massive law like Obamacare and simply electing a new president who will undo the executive orders.

Second, we need to remember our victories.  The runoff election between Chris McDaniel and Thad Cochran is a reminder that any candidate can be unseated; they just need the right opponent.  We need to keep working and pushing.  Two years ago it appeared that Lt. Governor David Dewhurst was a shoo-in to replace the very moderate old-guard Republican Kay Bailey Hutchinson, but then a bright young Senatorial candidate named Ted Cruz captured the spirit of conservatism and the rest was history.

Third, we need to stand strong and stand together.  In the same article celebrating the potential defeat of the Tea Party, The Huffington Post lamented that only 1 in 6 Americans is really interested in the 2014 Congressional elections and that the levels of interest are overwhelmingly higher with those who identify as "Tea Party" or "Republican" than those who identify as Democrats.  This means that when the dust clears and the GOP has its slate of candidates, the momentum is on our side--if we will get organized, get out and vote.  We don't have to win everything to win a lot.  2014 is ours to lose; let's not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.