Federal “Race to the Top” grant competition enhances federalization of local schools

By Seth Richardson

The  U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” grant competition is another step in the not-so-stealthy program to take over public education and administer it at the federal level. Starting with Jimmy Carter, who birthed the bloated bureaucracy, big-government advocates have been relentlessly working towards full federal control of education, despite attempts to deconstruct the unconstitutional intrusion on state sovereignty and parent’s rights by Ronald Reagan and other liberty-minded fiscal conservatives over the years.

Crypto-Progressive George Bush the Younger, whose favorite political theorist was Progressive architect Woodrow Wilson and who never met a big-government bureaucracy he didn’t like, shoved the plan far down the slope with the No Child Left Behind Act, and Progressive/Liberal/Socialist (take your pick) President Barak Obama is continuing the slide towards full federal control of education.

As a part of the Obama administration’s inflationary American Reinvestment and Recovery Act fiat-money exercise in fiscal insanity, the DOE is dangling 4 billion dollars in front of state educators in an attempt to further enhance the framework of federal education control. The competitive grant program provides a long laundry list of requirements and criteria upon which a state application will be judged, and upon which awards, if any, will be based.

Among other attempts to commit states to centralized control, key to the effort is “standardization” of everything from teacher education to student testing and evaluation. One particularly troubling aspect is the criteria that encourages “a commitment to adopting a common set of high-quality standards, evidenced by … [a] State’s participation in a consortium of States that… [i]s working toward jointly developing and adopting a common set of K-12 standards… that are… internationally benchmarked… and [i]ncludes a significant number of States.”

Why we would want to benchmark our children’s education to international standards that consist mostly of Socialist propaganda is something we might want to discuss. Why we would want to jointly adopt common standards with other states is another question that leads inexorably to the conclusion that Obama’s One World Government may be preceded by his One Nation Government wherein state sovereignty ceases to exist.

But nobody can accuse Obama or his cohorts of being stupid. The forces of Progressivism, Liberalism, and Socialism have been working on this educational agenda for more than a hundred years now. Neo-Marxists and radical Liberals and Progressives, who infest the National Education Association and nearly every school district in the country understand that the route to collectivism and control lies in the minds of our children, and that control of their education by the State, by which I mean the Collectivist State, not the State of Colorado, is essential to indoctrinating and raising up generations of dependent-class Proletarians who are pliable and compliant with Socialist, Liberal and Progressive ideology.

And because states are loathe to give up any chance they have at recovering some of the wasted tax dollars they send to Washington, dangling money before educators is like tossing a bucket of swill into the feeding trough at a pig farm, and Colorado is no exception in the swinish rush to the federal trough. That’s unfortunate, because Colorado should take the lead in rejecting Congressional swill-pandering and standing firmly on the solid ground of state sovereignty.

There’s nothing wrong with improving education, but not every effort to improve education is worthy of consideration, particularly when the sub rosa agenda is a nefarious one that leads to the surrender of local control over our children’s education. Colorado must not participate in programs that enhance federalization of our education system and should flatly reject the offer to grunt and squeal at the federal trough. Instead, we must insist that the federal government respect the Constitution and Colorado’s sovereign right to educate her children as the People of Colorado see fit, not as the bureaucrats in Washington require.

Keep in mind that the purpose of the grant program is not only to bind states to educational “reform” through the “cooperative agreements” criteria, it’s to get states to do the scut-work of creating the framework that the Department of Education will eventually implement through regulation to imprison the states and their educational systems to federal servitude. By participating in this “race,” Colorado is facilitating the federal government in exceeding its constitutional limitations and authority, and is helping to forge the very fetters that will bind our children’s educational future to the visions of Progressivism, Liberalism, and Socialism that the Administration has in mind.

There’s a better idea though, one that’s been floated in Washington since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education; eliminate it as a flatly unconstitutional intrusion upon state sovereignty. An added benefit of eliminating the department is that tax money we send to Washington to fund it can remain in Colorado and be used to actually serve the educational needs of our children without having the federal government skim some off the top, give most of it away to other, more compliant states, and then send a pittance back to us. It’s our money, and we should keep it right here in Colorado.

CATO Institute scholars Veronique de Rugy and Marie Gryphon wrote in their 2004 paper “Elimination Lost: What happened to abolishing the Department of Education?”:

“As recently as 1996, the Republican party sought to abolish the Department of Education as an inappropriate intrusion into state, local and family affairs. The GOP platform that year was clear: “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.”

While the Republican congresses of the mid-1990s are most famous for their efforts to eliminate the department, their goal was not a new one. Conservatives had talked about eliminating the department since its creation by President Carter. President Reagan made a campaign pledge to eliminate it, and renewed his promise in his first State of the Union address in January 1982: “The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.”

It’s high time we demanded that our state legislators support such efforts, and it’s long past time to demand that our federal representatives get on with slaughtering this pig.

In a Denver Post article, Molson Coors chairman Pete Coors and Steve Shuck, chairman of The Shuck Corporation in Colorado Springs, write:

“Colorado is applying for millions in federal funds to be used to transform our state’s education system. Who can dispute the need to do so?”

However well intentioned the sentiment of improving education, what Mr. Coors and Mr. Shuck don’t appear to see the danger of allowing the federal government to take control of public education.

If Colorado’s education system is broken, then it’s up to Coloradoans to fix it, and we’re perfectly capable of doing so on our own. Debilitating dependency on federal largesse does not solve anything, certainly not Colorado’s educational problems. This grant program, even if Colorado competes successfully, will provide only $60 – 175 million in grants, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the more than $5 billion Colorado spends on public education every year. And it’s not about federal money that will improve education, it’s about committing the state to policies and programs that comply with federal educational goals, not necessarily the legitimate needs of the children of Colorado. And ultimately, our children will be paying for the grants the feds hand out, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Shall we sell our children’s minds and liberty, not to mention their economic future, down the river at such a cheap price?

Coors and Shuck go on to say:

“When the interests of our kids, families, communities and businesses are on the line, we must subordinate our personal, historical agendas to the securing of their futures. The interests of our kids must trump partisan politics.”

Indeed. Which is why Colorado must reject further pandering to Liberal/Progressive/Socialist political agendas and overweening federal interference in the education of our children and save them from proletarian dependence on the federal government for their educational needs.

Education is a local matter, let’s keep it that way.

© 2009 Altnews

A primer on Payments in Lieu of Taxes and why they exist — Part 1

By Seth Richardson

Payments in lieu of taxes (PILT), sometimes known as PILOT, is a concept for revenue sharing that originated between governmental entities and emerged decades ago as states began to understand that federal lands within their states were exempt from property taxation under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. In the beginning, states and local political subdivisions were often burdened with providing services such as law enforcement, roads, bridges and firefighting to federally-owned lands while at the same time being unable to collect tax revenues to pay for those services. This placed an undue burden on local taxpayers, often a crippling one, particularly in the western states where in some places, more than 85 percent of the land in some states, and many counties, is owned by the federal government. Indeed, nearly one-third of all of the land in the U.S. is owned by the federal government, with the vast majority in the western states.

This inequity was formally recognized by Congress in 1997 with the enactment of Public Law 97-258, when formal payments to state and local jurisdictions adversely affected by federal ownership of lands exempt from local taxation were authorized.

More recently, the concept of PILT has been expanded by state and local jurisdictions in an attempt to generate revenues from other tax-exempt entities and organizations, including public colleges and charitable institutions. The theory is that private non-taxable organizations such as charitable foundations that are tax-exempt under federal law, and property within one political subdivision (state, county, city) that is owned by another political subdivision and is therefore immune from taxation by the containing entity, still enjoy the benefits of services offered by the containing entity, but because no taxes are paid, it is felt by some that this is an unfair tax burden upon the taxpayers of the containing entity. An example is Washington, D.C., where half or more of the land is tax-exempt, but where city services such as law enforcement and firefighting, among others, must nonetheless be provided to all residents, even when they are on federal property.

There is nothing inherently wrong with payments in lieu of taxes, particularly between one government entity and another, since they are statutorily prohibited from taxing one another, because equity demands that local taxpayers should not have to shoulder the entire burden of providing basic services like sewers and water to tax-exempt governmental agencies from which local taxpayers receive no concomitant benefits.

But the PILT concept, like many good ideas, has metastasized into a cancer of ever-growing proportions as financially-strapped municipalities and politicians search for revenue sources to prop up dwindling sales tax revenues.

The best thing about a PILT is that it’s entirely voluntary, at least so far. This means that while some landowner otherwise exempt from taxation may agree to pay money to the local government to help defray the costs of providing public services, PILTs are not, so far, a tax-equivalent mandatory exaction.

This is not to say that cities, counties and states do not have considerable powers they can bring to bear on non-profits and other tax-exempt private organizations in order to “persuade” (read: coerce) them to agree to a PILT. Author Mark Murphy writing for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the nation’s largest public employee union, wrote:

“Local officials sometimes force the issue with nonprofits that have not contributed by halting or slowing building permits or zoning approvals, by proposing to levy some alternate tax on nonprofits or even by challenging the organization’s tax-exempt status. The result is usually a negotiated settlement that allows the jurisdiction to collect some revenue while at the same time letting the tax-exempt organization project a positive image in the community and avoid an alternative that could be worse. That was the case in Baltimore, Md., last year, where 16 of the city’s largest nonprofit organizations agreed to contribute $20 million to the city over 4 years, after the mayor dropped a proposed energy use tax on nonprofit organizations within the city. Several Pennsylvania cities and counties mounted legal challenges to local nonprofit organizations’ tax-exempt status in the early 1990s. Many of these attempts were successful in collecting PILOT payments even after they lost initial challenges in court.”

Murphy goes on to recommend ways that public employees can work to enhance government revenues (and thereby preserve public-sector jobs) through public employee activism to encourage (read: coerce) PILTs from local non-profit organizations.

The problem with PILTs in this context is that the reason that such organizations are tax exempt in the first place is that they generally offer services to the community that the government would otherwise have to pay for itself, so the taxes are foregone precisely because of the greater fiscal benefits that the community realizes by having non-profits serving the community.

The National Society of Fund Raising Executives (NSFRE) published a position paper on PILTs in 1997 saying:

“These actions are motivated by a thirst for property tax revenues with no regard to the fact that, for over 400 years, western societies have exempted not-for-profit organizations from taxation because of “community benefit.” Not only do those living in the communities served by not-for profit organizations benefit from their presence, the not-for-profits work to preserve America’s voluntary philanthropic tradition. Studies continually reaffirm the finding that not-for-profit organizations deliver programs more cost-effectively and with better quality than government efforts.

In 1994, 10 million people were employed in the not-for-profit sector with an annual payroll of $144 billion. This is 10.6 percent of the total workforce. In addition, volunteers provided the full-time employee equivalent of 5.46 million people. If the services provided by these volunteers alone were not available, the government would have to pay over $49 billion to provide the same level of service.”

On the other hand, some organizations voluntarily make PILTs as a goodwill gesture to the communities they serve. An example is Harvard University, which paid the city of Cambridge $1.6 million and paid Boston $40 million in 2001 for their tax-exempt campuses.

But the key here is voluntariness. So long as local tax-exempt organizations can afford to contribute towards the municipal services they receive, fine. But as the NSFRE points out, the very reason they are tax exempt in the first place is that they provide far more by way of benefits than they consume in public resources. Even the Congress and the Supreme Court recognize this beneficial relationship, as the NSFRE paper points out. The failure to recognize the benefits such non-profits offer by bureaucrats, politicians and public employee unions is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees.

There is little argument that PILTs between different political subdivisions to offset the impacts of services provided to non-taxable government entities are inherently unfair or unreasonable. However, the essential component of the entire PILT concept, at least as originally conceived, is that the tax-exempt status of one jurisdiction’s property causes an unfair economic drain on the taxpayers of the other jurisdiction without any realized benefits, which therefore ought result in some compensation for those costs.

When the taxpayers of Colorado Springs have to pay for public services rendered to El Paso County government, from which the city taxpayers receive little or no benefit, then a PILT from the County to the City is likely to be appropriate and reasonable.

But when it comes to PILT payments from one municipal department or enterprise to another, such as from the Colorado Springs Utilities Enterprise to the city’s General Fund, that’s something else entirely… it’s a TABOR-evading fraud on the taxpayers… as I will discuss in Part 2 of this examination of Colorado Springs payments in lieu of taxes, coming soon to this column.

Councilman Sean Paige salvos in the debate about the Templeton Gap floodway.

By Seth Richardson

“It’s better to be the burr under the saddle than the horse,” said the late but notable Boulder political gadfly Ricky Weiser on the many occasions she was asked why she preferred to attend virtually every meeting of the Boulder City Council and Boulder County Commissioners for something like 40 years as a citizen, rather than seeking election to public office.

Sage advice I think for our much respected and revered local gadfly and columnist-cum-Councilman Sean Paige, who seems to be in something of a snit over my column criticizing the Council’s position on the T-Gap floodway levee improvements.

I think he’s taking the criticism too personally, but for better or for worse, Paige has volunteered to govern and having done so, he’s also volunteered to suffer the saddle-galls that are part of the job.

Unlike most elected officials however, Paige has his own virtual printing press, Local Liberty Online, a sterling source for information on the outrages and abuses of government. Which makes his salvo at The Broadside somewhat puzzling, but an excellent excuse to further the debate.

To be fair, Paige is not responsible for the Stormwater Enterprise situation, it had its genesis long before he joined the council, and he’s been handed the short end of the stick by the voters. But it seems from his column that he’d rather blame Douglas Bruce for the woes of the Council than accept the fact that Douglas Bruce didn’t enact anything, the voters of Colorado Springs did.

In his Page by Paige column at Local Liberty Online, he takes me to task for my suggestion that a simple solution to the T-Gap floodway issue is to propose a Special Improvement District. He says,

“Why floodway residents would listen to what we “incompetents” on Council have to say about the need for a special district is a mystery. These folks voted in the majority to end the stormwater enterprise, and free themselves from the “rain tax,” only weeks ago. That they would turn around and support a mill-levy increase next year (a new “rain tax”), on advice from their allegedly-inept City Council, is doubtful. But maybe Seth can take on the task of selling the concept, in between blog posts. Why it’s Council’s job to promote the virtues of the district is unclear, since a majority on Council (including me) opposed Issue 300, anticipating that it would have nasty consequences. I’m not going to spend next year cleaning-up after Doug Bruce. I have my hands full now, trying to comply with his incomprehensible ballot language.”

First, let me say that my criticism of the Council is not directed at any particular individual, and certainly not at Paige, but rather at the institutionalized arrogance and corruption that’s been in place for some years now that led to the creation of the Stormwater Enterprise in the first place.

I was not in this neck of the woods when that happened, but I’ve seen it before and I recognize the symptoms of government corruption and arrogance when I see them, having come from Boulder County, where one perforce lives under the oppressive and disdainful arrogance of government bureaucrats and elected officials on a daily basis. It’s why I left and I don’t want to see it institutionalized here. And I’m gratified that someone like Douglas Bruce is willing to beard the lion in its den and work to shut such charades down. I’m also gratified that the citizens of Colorado Springs are not the deluded, dependency culture Liberals and Progressives that infest Boulder County like pine beetles ravaging the forest.

Coming from that environment, it was easy to see that the Stormwater Enterprise was set up as a way to weasel around the limitations of TABOR and give the Council the ability to raise funds without a vote of the people. The whole Stormwater Enterprise scheme was specifically concocted to end-run TABOR by redefining infrastructure improvements and maintenance that have customarily and historically been paid for by taxes as “services” paid for by mandatory fees instead, thus freeing the city from having to ask permission to soak the taxpayers for more money. This is not true of every city enterprise, but it’s certainly true of the Stormwater Enterprise, and the People decided that this charade could not be allowed to continue, so the People (not Doug Bruce) revoked that authority. That leaves Paige and his fellow Councilpersons with a conundrum and a mess to clean up, but that’s what they get paid the not-so-big bucks to do, and nobody’s chained them to the dais.

This is not to say that the money and infrastructure improvements for stormwater flow are not necessary, they certainly are in some cases, or that they not reasonable, because certainly the T-Gap project is completely reasonable. Moreover, with some $15 million in cash in the enterprise’s coffers, which will perforce revert to the city when the enterprise itself is dismantled, there will be at least some money available in the immediate future to continue necessary projects. Council will have to find a new funding source, of course, which will depend on the trust of the community to approve new taxes to fund the work.

The problem is one of credibility and accountability on the part of the Council. Their predecessors tried to concoct a scheme to frustrate TABOR, and the people of Colorado Springs called shenanigans on them and shut them down. That’s their sovereign right.

It’s certainly not fair to blame Paige for the problem, or for the fact that Issue 300 destroyed the Stormwater Enterprise much more suddenly than is prudent. In this I agree with him. Even I clearly understand that there are legitimate needs when it comes to stormwater improvements. But that’s how things stand, and griping about it profits no one.

But my criticism of the council stands as it regards the Templeton Gap Floodway project specifically, which is what I was writing about, not all of the rest of the now-defunct Stormwater Enterprise projects, which, as I have written previously, will need to be dealt with one way or another.

Now let me address some of the questions Sean raises in his column. To begin with, in my view, the best reason why the floodway residents would listen to a proposal for a special improvement district is because, as I pointed out, it’s going to cost residents, by the City’s own estimates, some $3,000,000 per year, every year, from now until their mortgages are paid off, to buy federal flood insurance if they don’t. On the other hand, if they do listen and approve the new mill levy, they pay much less overall, and they only have to pay for the improvements once.

Did I live in the area, I’d certainly vote for a ballot issue that promises to save me having to pay hundreds of dollars every year into the foreseeable future in exchange for paying a small mill levy over a fixed period to fix the levee. Any sensible person can analyze the costs and come up with a perfectly rational conclusion that ends in a voluntary mill-levy increase for the residents of the flood hazard area.

And to refute one of his other arguments, while he is correct that some stormwater projects must justifiably be paid for by all taxpayers, so a plan has to be worked out to pass a ballot issue to fund them, in the case of the T-Gap levee it’s only the residents of the high hazard flood areas that are affected by the FEMA flood insurance requirement, so it’s perfectly reasonable to cut this project out of the herd and fund it separately using a special improvement district. And it’s appropriate that it be done immediately because unlike a speculative 1 percent risk of a “100 year flood” in any given year that many projects are built to protect against, the residents in the area of the T-Gap levee have a 100 percent chance of being required to buy flood insurance if their mortgage is backed by the federal government, and when FEMA will drop the hammer on them is just a matter of time.

As for why the city should take on the task of convincing residents its in their best interests to do so, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s the Council’s job. I’m afraid that cleaning up after what a majority of the voting citizens of the city (not Doug Bruce) voted to do is exactly what the Council is obligated to do, whether they like it or not.

Plan A didn’t work out. That doesn’t mean that the Council can simply give up and walk away from the problems. It means that they must come up with Plan B, and try harder to convince the taxpayers that the problem is real and the need for more tax money is legitimate.

And for goodness sake, it’s time to start being open, honest and forthright about it, because Council credibility is on a par with that of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall  at the moment.

Paige concludes by writing:

“Unlike Richardson, I have a responsibility to consider this bigger picture when taking a position on the stormwater issue. It isn’t just a theoretical blogging exercise for me anymore. No one was as angry about the way the stormwater enterprise was created than I was. But that doesn’t justify shutting it down in a sloppy, wasteful, short-sighted way.”

Maybe not, Sean, but that’s what happened, and now it’s time to  work the problem, which is all I’m suggesting. You want a “holistic” solution to the various other stormwater and drainage problems, fine, work one out. I’ll be happy to offer suggestions. Just don’t try to evade TABOR with the new plan. Suck it up and ask permission, like Council was supposed to have done in the first place.

But there’s still no reason that the Templeton Gap levee can’t be fixed by getting the people who will be directly impacted economically to approve a mill-levy increase starting right now! Why wait? What’s the deadline for certifying the levee? Won’t working towards a Special Improvement District keep the feds happy for a while, as funding is being sought? Be creative and positive rather than dog-in-the-manger and negative.

What the taxpayers ordered the Council to dismantle was the Stormwater Enterprise and its autonomous authority to levy “fees,” they did not order the Council to abandon all necessary stormwater infrastructure projects.

Nor did they demand or require that payments already made to the enterprise be refunded.

Mr. Bruce seems to believe that the shut-down of the Stormwater Enterprise requires that the assets be sold and fees collected be refunded, but that requirement appears nowhere in the ordinance or the ballot issue.

Everything the Stormwater Enterprise acquired, purchased or collected in fees prior to the new ordinance was acquired lawfully and in accordance with the laws governing municipal enterprises, that much the courts have confirmed. It can’t collect any more fees, nor can it do “free” work on city-owned property, nor can it give “gifts” or payments to the city. But it can simply disappear, leaving the city in possession of the assets, which can be redirected to a new city  “Stormwater Division” that will carry on the necessary work, but with a taxpayer-approved funding mechanism in place of the fee-collection system.

All the People actually did in dissolving the Stormwater Enterprise was to revoke the autonomous fee-collection authority of the Enterprise itself and thereby implicitly require that the Council ask for the taxpayer’s permission to levy new taxes to pay for stormwater improvements. They didn’t say that they wouldn’t be willing to pay for the needed projects, or that they wanted refunds.

The People, I think, are not opposed to paying the necessary taxes to keep the city operating properly, they are just opposed to shenanigans, fear-mongering, lies and being treated like they are children by the people they elect to serve them.

© 2009 Altnews

Is anyone alive today going to see the end of the era of oil?

By Seth Richardson

One of the questions regarding the global warming debate routinely asks “how is fossil fuel use sustainable?” The answer is short and sweet: “It isn’t, in the long term.” But the long term is a very long time, meaning centuries and perhaps millennia. Nothing much is going to change in our lifetimes, that is an economic certainty.

Supply and demand is the ultimate arbiter of the value of any resource. When the supply runs out, demand will naturally shift to a different resource. When it comes to fossil fuels however, there is little evidence that the supply is going to run out any time soon. That fact alone will overcome any attempts to phase out fossil fuel use worldwide.

Keep in mind that every time someone predicts we have reached “peak oil,” some oil company finds yet another massive reserve of oil, usually on the narrowest of fringes of the 70 percent of the planet that has yet to be geophysically explored for oil and gas. As drilling technology improves, deeper and deeper coastal resources will be discovered and will become available for exploitation. Add to that the massive amount of natural gas that is as yet untapped, and the time-frame for running out of fossil fuels expands geometrically.

And then there’s sea-bed methane nodules. There’s enough methane slush on the sea floor to power our economy for hundreds upon hundreds of years. We have only to develop the technology to harvest it, which will occur if and when the cheaper drilled-oil and gas reserves become too expensive to exploit.

Physics is immutable, and there is no energy source that has the energy density, storability, and portability of fossil fuels. Not sunlight, not wind, not wave power, nothing. While nuclear energy exceeds the energy density of oil, it is not portable. Envirowhackos insist that not only are we running out of oil (which is not true) but that continuing to use oil is poisoning the planet and causing global warming that will kill us all, so we must immediately (and according to the pundits in Copenhagen that means by the end of next week) “fundamentally transform” how our society operates, if there is any hope of avoiding imminent catastrophe.

Please excuse me for a moment while I process a flashback to the 1970s, when the then-young broken-record sounding envirowhackos predicted that the planet, as of ten years ago, would be a Venus-like hell of boiling lead and corrosive atmosphere. Evidently something went wrong with those prognostications, just as the wheels are now coming off the current crop of environmental divinator’s prognostications.

The hysterical, overblown “greenhouse effect” rhetoric of the 1970s is now being dutifully recycled in an attempt to once again frighten the public into beggaring the economy in the name of environmental protection. Please excuse me again if I say “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” The lies perpetrated by the environmental leftists in the 1970s (some of whom now advise the President today) are precisely why I, and so many others, are not as credulous as we once were. “Earth Day” has come and gone as the public has become much more sophisticated and well-informed on the mendacious political and economic agendas of climate-alarmists.

The environwhackos are again trying to claim that we must, simply must fundamentally transform our society immediately, by force if necessary, to avoid yet another phantasmagorical threat to planetary survival. The problem is that their goals are as unachievable today as they were in the 1970s, even if the threat is real (which it’s not).

The very simple fact is that the entire planet’s economy and social structure is founded upon the use of oil and natural gas and it is simply not economically or socially possible to dispense with their use in any time frame less than a century, or perhaps two centuries. Nor is there any real need to rush into anything, since all the dire prognostications point to problems centuries in the future which may or more likely cannot be prevented by anything we do in the next 100 years.

The damage is done, claim some climatologists, who correctly point out that the CO2 in the atmosphere today will be there for hundreds of years, even if we end technology and all hold our breaths till we all drop dead tomorrow. So, if the damage is already in the pipeline, there’s no need to rush into anything or beggar our economy by imposing unrealistic, impossible-to-achieve, nation-destroying panic-based treaties or legislation, is there? We have plenty of time to calmly and carefully expand the science and have open public discussions that are based on science, truth, and reason, not hysterics, political manipulation and greed.

Literally all of our technological infrastructure is dependent upon fossil fuels, and will remain dependent on fossil fuels for the next couple of generations no matter what, because the investment in changing over to “renewable” energy sources, in realistic terms, requires it.

Attempting to legislate the planet away from fossil fuels can only and inevitably result in the brutal, deliberate torture and death of hundreds of millions of mostly poor people. Every time we increase the cost of energy, poor people suffer first and foremost. If there is any “social justice” to be had, the place to start is by keeping energy costs as low as humanly possible for as long as humanly possible, because every price increase first impacts the poor.

The economic facts are simple: We are not going off the fossil fuel standard any time soon. Not in our lifetimes and not in our children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes. There is simply too much infrastructure to change over and the costs are simply too great, both monetarily and socio-politically for any society to even credibly attempt to abandon fossil fuels. People are not going to tolerate being forced back into wattle-and-daub mud huts in order to pander to the eco-guilt of a few clinically deluded ignoramuses or the power-and-control pretensions of a few pathologically insane Liberal/Progressive megalomaniacs like Barak Obama and the extremely dangerous ideologues with whom he’s surrounded himself.

When the real effects of Cap and Trade begin to hit home with the middle-class and poor, the political pendulum will reverse course and crush without a shred of mercy those who are trying to kill the poor with kindness to the planet. And that’s a good thing. Those who deliberately devalue human life in order to achieve either political power or ecological rectitude need to be crushed utterly, because they are evil.

This does not mean that we should not continue the measured, prudent, gradual process of developing renewable sources of energy without undue expense or environmental impact (and yes, “green” power has environmental impacts), so that the need for fossil fuels will diminish naturally over time, a long, long time. It does mean that we, the People, cannot and will not allow politicians and those with vested economic interests in a “green economy” to either control us or deprive us, any of us, even the poorest of us, of the economic and social benefits of an advanced technological society. Let Al Gore wear a hair shirt and live in a cave whilst eating nuts and berries if he’s so environmentally conscious.

Changes in social habit patterns and development will continue to make inroads on the fossil fuel infrastructure, and common-sense market-based iterations such as more energy-efficient houses and businesses will make more and more economic sense as the technology to achieve real energy savings continues to advance, as it only can when the technological society in which such invention flourishes is allowed to operate free of unreasonable eco-guilt-based regulation. Eventually, as society evolves and infrastructure is replaced by more efficient, less-polluting, non-fossil-fuel technology, a better balance will be achieved.

But this is not the sort of societal change that can or should be mandated by government. All government mandates do is increase energy costs and negatively affect the very free-market economies that will eventually cause the change-over through market-based incentives.

Nor is it going to happen in a short time span. This is a generational problem that will require generations to change. Ignore the panicked cries of the eco-loons, the earth abides, and we will improvise, adapt and overcome any environmental changes that might occur in the meantime, because that is what human beings do.

© 2009 Altnews

Let’s try thinking out of the box to get the Templeton Gap floodway project done.

By Seth Richardson

A poverty of imagination, or deliberate dog-in-the-mangerism seems to be infecting city government, what with the failure of Issue 2a and 2b and the success of Issue 300.

The long-awaited demise of the Stormwater Enterprise has resulted in some blow-back regarding the Templeton Gap Floodway. The project to improve the levees to protect some 3000 properties was estimated to cost about $4.2 million, but with the dissolution of the Stormwater Enterprise, the improvements will likely not be made, according to Councilman Scott Hente, whose district includes the floodway. City spokesperson Mary Scott said, “It’s likely that project is not going to be done.”

If true, it’ll be because of ineptitude, incompetence and lack of imagination on the part of the city, not because the project has no other source of funding.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, as a part of its map modernization program, requires that all levees be certified, and analysis suggests that the T-Gap levee is too low to contain 100-year flood flows, so it must be raised in order to meet FEMA standards.

Nothing in federal law requires that the levee be improved, or that it exist at all. It was built in 1949, in response to several flooding incidents in the 1900s. The primary financial import of not certifying the levee is that homeowners in the area protected by the levee who have federally-backed mortgages (and nobody has said how many properties this includes) will be required to buy federal flood insurance. The City estimates that this might cost residents and business owners in the area as much as $3 million per year in insurance premiums.

This is a significant amount, but the question that’s been begged since the beginning of this project is why this is a city-wide problem and not a local issue? Why should all taxpayers in the city fund floodway improvements to benefit 3000 property owners merely so that they do not have to protect their own property by buying flood insurance?

Logically, this situation is ripe for a Templeton Gap Floodway Improvement District, which would extract taxes from those residents whose homes are threatened, rather than having everyone else pay for it.

Given the fact that the estimated cost of the improvements is only $4.5 million, and the estimated annual cost of flood insurance is $3 million, it’s clearly in the best interests of the residents of the area involved to vote to approve such a special taxing district to improve their levee. A mere two years of flood insurance premiums would more than cover the costs of the improvements. Spread that obligation out over say 20 years, and authorizing a tax in order to avoid much higher flood insurance costs makes perfect sense.

The City should immediately draft a ballot issue for the next election creating this new district and placing a mill-levy on the properties within it. But at the same time, it should engage in some serious advertising to the residents to demonstrate the economics of failing to pass the ballot issue. The benefit of this sort of a solution is that only the people who benefit from the improvements pay for the improvements, the money is dedicated to that specific project, and the consequences of not approving the ballot issue are a significantly larger economic burden on property owners on an ongoing basis, year after year.

Those facts would seem to indicate that such a ballot issue would be a slam-dunk for the City. So why hasn’t this been proposed already?

What seems to be happening is the typical “doom-and-gloom” tactics of saying “well, you nitwits trashed the Stormwater Enterprise, so we’re just not going to think out of the box and you are going to suffer the consequences of not letting us do it our way.”

The good news is that the residents of the affected area don’t have to wait for the city to do what the city is supposed to do, they can get together and draft a ballot issue themselves, and save themselves a lot of money in the future.

One has to wonder why a journalist and a bunch of ordinary citizens can come up with a viable idea to resolve the problem within a few minutes of discussion in the comments section of a news story, and yet our highly-paid City Manager cannot? It appears that the dogs in the manger are too busy snarling and snapping at the public to actually do their jobs.

© 2009 Altnews

When does a student cease to be a student and become a fully-vested adult?

By Seth Richardson

Unfortunately, Erica Corder has lost her appeal to the United States Supreme Court. But she didn’t lose her case on the merits, she lost as a result of legal technicalities and because her attorneys failed to make the right arguments.

To recap, Corder departed from her approved valedictory speech at her 2006 graduation ceremony at Lewis Palmer High School in Monument. Instead of the approved speech, she spoke about Jesus, which infuriated the school administrators. After the graduation ceremony was complete, Corder was escorted to the Vice-Principal’s office, where she was told she would not be receiving her diploma, and was required to meet with the Principal, Mark Brewer. She and her parents met with him on May 30, 2006, where Brewer told her that if she did not publicly apologize for her speech, she would not receive her diploma. Corder wrote an explanation, not an apology, but was forced by Brewer to add the sentence, “”I realize that, had I asked ahead of time, I would not have been allowed to say what I did.”

Corder sued the school district on a number of grounds, and lost at every level. But she shouldn’t have lost, and here’s why: At the time that Brewer coerced Corder into making an apology, Brewer had no legal authority to discipline Corder because she was no longer a student. Therefore, Brewer’s threat to withhold her diploma was an unlawful denial of Corder’s right to receive documentation of her successful (and exemplary) completion of the public school curriculum. Corder should have refused to make an apology and sued Brewer and the school district for refusing to issue her diploma. She didn’t, and that’s ultimately why she lost the case.

What happened is that Principal Brewer, pissed-off at the breach of trust and decorum, which is understandable, tried to engage in one last, desperate act of educational discipline against a former student. His dog-in-the-manger, authoritarian behavior has cost the taxpayers of the district many thousands of dollars in legal expenses, for no better reason than an institutional pique over a harmless act of defiance by a graduating valedictorian.

The attorneys for the district argued that Corder’s religious statements had the “imprimatur” of the school district merely because the graduation ceremony was orchestrated and supervised by the school, and the courts agreed that this justified the disciplinary action by Brewer. This is legalistic pettifoggery and rank idiocy, and the courts involved bought into it, no doubt to bolster the power of principals at the expense of the civil rights of students. The notion that a rational, reasonable adult attending a high school graduation would mistake the obviously personal religious statement Corder made as some sort of state-sponsored official proclamation is utterly asinine.

Here’s what Corder said:

“We are all capable of standing firm and expressing our own beliefs, which is why I need to tell you about someone who loves you more than you could ever imagine. He died for you on a cross over 2,000 years ago, yet was resurrected and is living today in heaven. His name is Jesus Christ. If you don’t already know Him personally I encourage you to find out more about the sacrifice He made for you so that you now have the opportunity to live in eternity with Him.”

Anybody think this represents official school policy?  Anyone? Me neither.

But all this is pretty much surplusage, because the case was actually dismissed on the grounds of “mootness” and because Corder failed to present a proper Due Process claim at trial. The District Court ruled that because Corder has graduated, the school district “can no longer impinge on Plaintiff’s freedom of speech and religion. Accordingly, Plaintiff’s claims for declaratory or injunctive relief based on such conduct are moot.”

As for Corder’s complaint that the school coerced and compelled her to issue an apology against her will, the District court said, “Since Plaintiff does not assert a due process claim, I see no constitutional implication from the school allegedly using the diploma as leverage for the apology.”

In other words, the District court was able to dodge the most important question, that of compelled speech, because Corder’s attorneys failed to properly raise the issue of due process.

But due process is precisely what this case is about.

This is a serious issue. School administrators across the country use this coercive tactic of threatening to withhold diplomas in order to punish misbehavior by graduating seniors and theoretically coerce good behavior at graduation. The core legal issue is whether school administrators have, or should have, any such after-the-fact legal authority over newly-minted adult high school graduates. The desire on the part of the school administration to hold a club over the heads of graduating students, as a means of preventing disruptive or inappropriate behavior is understandable, but the ends do not justify the means. Constitutional rights are more important than proper decorum at a graduation ceremony.

The root question is when does a student cease to be a student? When, exactly, did Corder become a “former student” and therefore an adult citizen fully vested with civil rights and no longer under the dominion, control or disciplinary authority of the school? This question is a critical one because it determines where the authority of the school to threaten to withhold a diploma ends, and where a high school graduate’s right to demand that a diploma she has earned through meeting the scholastic requirements be given her begins.

Federal District Court Judge Walker D. Miller completely ignored this critical aspect of the case, and wrote,

“As discussed, the school district was within its legal authority to exert editorial control over school-sponsored speech at the graduation and to insist on an apology and clarification for Plaintiff’s conduct in evading such efforts at control and thereby associating the school with a position other than neutrality on religion.”

The issue of “editorial control” aside, Miller builds his ruling on the legally unsubstantiated premise that the school had authority to “insist on an apology” from Corder. No, sorry, the school had no such authority because at the time that the school insisted on an apology, using an unlawful threat to withhold her diploma, Corder was absolutely not a student any longer, since the meeting took place days after the ceremony. Moreover, claims that the school might be held liable for sponsoring “religious speech” for Corder’s acts are legally invalid, since Colorado has a law that explicitly states that schools are not to be held liable for the exercises of free speech by students.

The sad fact is that the only hold that Brewer had over Corder was her diploma, and he was intent on humbling her for her temerity and defiance, so he abused his authority, and cost the taxpayers a bundle in the process.

Does the fact that the school has not yet handed her a piece of paper mean that she remains under the dominion and control of the school and has not graduated? If so, then what of the graduate who does not attend the ceremony whose diploma is mailed to him? Is he a student until the Post Office delivers his diploma? Could Brewer legally deny her a diploma forever if she had refused to accede to his coercion? I think not. It defies common sense and justice to even contemplate granting school principals such plenary authority to determine who may or may not receive a diploma.

I think that a high school student graduates and ceases to be a student upon the successful completion of the required curriculum and the end of the instructional period, not whenever the school principal decides to confer a diploma upon the student. A diploma is earned through scholastic achievement and may not be arbitrarily and capriciously withheld by a school administrator out of pique or anger over a bit of harmless defiance of custom.

Most certainly a school principal has absolutely no authority to coerce a free adult into making an apology once the authority to impose discipline upon a student has been rendered moot by her completion of the educational program and graduation. If Corder’s complaint is rendered moot by her graduation, as the court held, then Brewer’s authority to discipline her is likewise rendered moot.

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

© 2009 Altnews