California Says NO To Solar Power

California is not going to build a thermal solar plant in the desert. It seems the "environmentalists" are against it. You know. The usual. It is unnatural.

A proposed solar energy project in the California desert that caused intense friction between environmentalists and the developers of renewable energy has been shelved.

BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project.

The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument.

The land was donated by Wildlands to the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, with assurances from President Bill Clinton himself, the group says, that it would be protected in perpetuity. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a Bush administration initiative, opened the land to the development of solar projects.

I think this is just another example of the Cloward-Piven strategy at work. Create a crisis and then put the government in charge of "fixing" the problem. You have to wonder why Californians are such suckers for this strategy, given that the State is bankrupt.

H/T Watts Up With That

Obama Was A Trainer For ACORN

Here is what ACORN had to say about Mr. Obama.

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends. And along about early March, we started to see that the African-American community had made its move: when Sen. Obama’s name was mentioned at our Southside Summit meeting with 700 people in attendance from three southside communities, the crowd went crazy. With about a week to go before the election, it was very clear how the African-American community would vote. But would they vote in high enough numbers?

It seemed to us that what Obama needed in the March primary was what we always work to deliver anyway: increased turnout in our ACORN communities. ACORN is active on the south and west sides of Chicago, in the south suburbs and on the east side of Springfield, the state capital. Most of the turf where we organize in is African American, with a growing Latino presence in Chicago’s Little Village and the suburbs.

And where did I get the hint to look for the Obama ACORN connection?

From this Glenn Beck video.

And what made me look into that? A story about the genesis of the current situation by Glenn Beck where Glenn discusses the Cloward Piven strategy. And of course you have heard of the Cloward-Piven strategy from my pre-election post Barney Frank Frankly Not Frank which discusses how the mortgage crisis got started.

You can actually learn something useful about Cloward and Piven from the wiki.

The Cloward-Piven strategy refers to a political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, then both sociologists and political activists at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in a 1966 article in The Nation. The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force U.S. politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation "establishing a guaranteed national income."

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition....

OK. How about some more of the picture?

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

Now who was it that said "never let a serious crisis go to waste"? Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff. And what does a Chief of Staff do? Well he helps to fill staff positions wih the appropriate people. People like Communist Van Jones, Obama's former Green Jobs Czar. Or how about radical John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar.

You know it looks like these folks have a plan for America. And I don't think I like the plan.

And to think it all started to come apart with an attempt to start a child prostitution ring that was aided by ACORN.

Members of a community organisation closely linked to US president Barack Obama have been secretly filmed advising a fake pimp and his prostitute on how to evade authorities.

The video is seen as a serious setback for Obama, who has previously worked for Acorn, America's largest community organisation representing minorities and the poor.

Acorn was also a major supporter of Obama's campaign to become president, even though it is a non-profit non-partisan government organisation that receives over $70 million in taxpayer money.

Conservative activist James O'Keefe, along with a bogus prostitute, filmed Acorn workers advising on tax advantages for underage prostitutes.

In the video, an Acorn worker is heard telling O'Keefe that "under sixteen, yeah, so you'll be eligible for a child tax credit".

The worker also tells O'Keefe on how not to get caught by police.

If you haven't seen the videos you can watch them here:

Acorn Videos. And more is to come says Andrew Breitbart at Hot Air.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Barney Frank Frankly Not Frank

The Boston Globe, normally a reliable liberal paper, says that Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank (D - Corruption) has a lot to do with the mortgage crisis. It opens with a quote from Cong. Frank

'The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it."

That's Barney Frank's story, and he's sticking to it. As the Massachusetts Democrat has explained it in recent days, the current financial crisis is the spawn of the free market run amok, with the political class guilty only of failing to rein the capitalists in. The Wall Street meltdown was caused by "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector," Frank said; the country is in dire straits today "thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best." And that philosophy goes "back to Ronald Reagan, when at his inauguration he said, 'Government is not the answer to our problems; government is the problem.' "

In fact, that isn't what Reagan said. His actual words were: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Were he president today, he would be saying much the same thing.

Because while the mortgage crisis convulsing Wall Street has its share of private-sector culprits they weren't the ones who "got us into this mess." Barney Frank's talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn't wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so - or else.

The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.

The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.

I go into more detail on all the components of the problem at ACORN Is Not About Nuts and at The Best Congress Fannie Could Buy.

However, I just came across an American Thinker article which asks the question: are the people behind this stupid? Or was it a plan?

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama's connections to his radical mentors -- Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama's radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama's life comprise a who's who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

So this is a long time coming.

The American Thinker article points out that the strategy behind it has a name. The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis. Lenin also had a name for it: Worse Is Better.

I think a deeper look into what the American thinker has to say is in order:

Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

You know that sounds a lot like the Alinsky Method - Rules For Radicals. The American Thinker article goes much deeper into Cloward-Piven with lots of links and how the players are connected (see the connection chart - it is a beaut). May I suggest that a thorough reading is in order?

H/T commenter Dan at Classical Values for the Boston Globe bit.

Cross Posted at Classical Values