LoneStarTimes.com

There seems to be a distinct disconnect between the elite in the Democrat Party and reality. Despite overwhelming evidence for more than a century of history that socialism’s wealth redistribution schemes never work, they keep on hawking it. Bob Herbert attempts to tug at our heart strings with a touching story of an unemployed maid:

Martha Escobar is staring into the cold, dark, unforgiving eyes of destitution.

Ms. Escobar is one of 16 janitors who were laid off from their jobs at a luxury complex in Los Angeles that houses some of the wealthiest tenants imaginable. JPMorgan Asset Management, a unit of the vast JPMorgan Chase empire, manages an intricate investment web that owns the buildings. The layoffs were ordered by a maintenance contractor, ABM Industries.
…
They also did the mopping and scrubbing at 2000 Avenue of the Stars, which also is part of the complex and is home to an array of glittering businesses, including the Creative Artists Agency, an entertainment and sports powerhouse. The janitors were let go a few weeks ago, and, given the current job market, they have not been able to do much since then but suffer with anxiety.

You know the rant. Rich fat cats getting richer on the backs of the poor getting poorer. In the real world businesses look at a slowing economy and make adjustments. And yes, sometimes that means laying off workers. In Washington, our congressional leaders, the President, and tired Keynsian economists look at the same slowing economy and somehow decide that tax and spending increases will fix everything. But back to Ms. Escobar:

Ms. Escobar is 41 years old and has two daughters, 14 and 10. She told me, through an interpreter, that she had enough money to pay September’s rent but not October’s. She has no savings. School is about to start, but she has no idea how she will pay for her girls’ uniforms.

“I have not been able to find another job,” she said.

No mention of a Mr. Escobar being able to help with the rent and uniforms so I assume he’s not an active participant in the financial dealings of the Escobar family. Another possibility is that he is in the picture but is not mentioned as that would spoil the SEIU thugs’ publicity stunt.

It would also help Ms. Escobar immensely to learn English. That would undoubtedly give her many more employment choices and possibly give her a chance at a better paying job. But this is the Democrats’ America, where she’s a victim. No more melting pot. We’re all about balkanizing America nowadays.

What’s different about these layoffs is that the janitors are not going quietly. They have been vigorously protesting the callousness of their treatment — the way the rich people who employed them for the munificent sum of $13.50 an hour found it so easy to dump them on the scrap heap with the rest of America’s unemployed millions.

The janitors have marched and fasted outside the buildings they once cleaned. And Ms. Escobar and another laid-off janitor, Elba Polanco, were brought to New York City last week by the Service Employees International Union, which represents them, to bring their plight to the attention of Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. Mr. Dimon has made a fabulous living by, among other things, borrowing enormous sums of money to buy companies and then hurling people out of work.

In the real world of America’s increasingly two-tiered society, you have to laugh at the idea of these janitors trying to get the ear of Jamie Dimon, who counts his wealth by the hundreds of millions. He is royalty, and they are from the peasant class. Mr. Dimon’s universe is orders of magnitude different from the one that Martha Escobar is scrambling around in. He talks to the Geithners and Bernankes and Larry Summerses of the world. The paycheck Ms. Escobar used to get wouldn’t cover Jamie Dimon’s dinner tab.

It would be interesting to see how much the SEIU paid Escobar, et al, for their camera op in NYC. Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the former SEIU boss representing Escobar had his own media day:

A federal judge Thursday sentenced the former head of one of L.A.’s most powerful labor unions to prison for fraud.

As head of the Service Employees International Union Local 660, Alejandro Stephens once represented 50,000 L.A. County employees. He enjoyed a lot of political clout — until federal prosecutors charged him with fraud.

They say he bilked $52,000 from a union-backed nonprofit called the Voter Improvement Project by entering into bogus consulting agreements that included friends and family. He pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion.

If we are an “increasingly two-tiered society” it is because for decades the federal government has turned a blind eye to illegal immigration. They have refused to secure our borders. For the most part they have refused to prosecute employers for hiring illegal immigrants. Most of these illegal immigrants are coming from countries that were designed as two-tiered societies centuries ago. These countries export their poverty and we gladly accept it.

Accepting those with no hope in their homelands is nothing new for America. Our great country was built on such immigrants. The problem now is that we no longer require immigrants to become Americans – to embrace our American exceptionalism. As soon as they step foot on our soil we immediately dub them victims. This is a relatively new phenomenon, maybe 30 years old. I first came to Houston shortly after the area became home to a large number of Vietnamese “boat people”.  These folks were subjected to as much prejudice and hate as any immigrants. Around 1980 it was a common sight along Houston area freeways to see Vietnamese crews picking up trash. Within a couple of years you didn’t see them out there anymore. They purchased convenience stores in inner city neighborhoods. Next they purchased small restaurants. Those became larger and larger. These immigrants didn’t whine about picking up litter. They used the opportunity given them, even menial jobs, to improve their lot in life and, more importantly, educate their children. Have you ever seen a homeless Vietnamese person in Houston?

When did it become a crime to offer lower wages for certain jobs? I worked as a janitor as one of my three jobs for several years while attending a Community College in the late ’70s. Yeah it was a lot of work for little money but it got me through college. And it beat the heck out of my previous employment from age 12 to 18 – cropping tobacco, tossing hay bales, and lugging watermelons. These hard, low-paying jobs taught me a valuable lesson: the advantages of an education. When did America lose this?

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The Tres Amigas Superstation at Clovis, New Mexico

 
Kate Galbraith at the Texas Tribune reports on the Tres Amigas project here:

Texas has always operated its own energy grid, separate from the two other grids that span the rest of the nation. But a project quietly emerging in eastern New Mexico would curb that independence — and affect energy prices for Texas consumers in ways that remain much in dispute.

The $2 billion project could connect all three grids (eastern, western, and Texas) as soon as 2013. They would meet near Clovis, N.M., just west of the Texas border. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has given a preliminary go-ahead to the proposal, known as Tres Amigas, which doubles as the name of the company running it. The federal commission’s chairman has praised it as a “prime example of the creativity and pioneering thinking that our country needs.”

But serious questions remain over whether the project would benefit Texas residents and businesses — whether electricity prices would rise or fall and whether the connections would allow other states to siphon off too much of Texas’ wind power. Large industrial users of electricity in Texas have objected, arguing the move will drive up prices. Some consumer advocates beg to differ, agreeing with Tres Amigas officials that the state’s energy customers could benefit by making available electricity from around the nation. At issue is whether the importing of power, potentially at lower rates, would be offset by whatever Texas might lose when cheaper power flows out of the state to meet demand elsewhere.

I will here declare I am no friend or fan of wind power. 

 The proposed interconnection of the three main U.S. power grids, Tres Amigas, has their website here. 

The first time I approached Abilene on my way to Odessa and began to see the new enormous and starkly ugly windmills standing across the horizon, I was horrified at, pace Ted Kennedy, the visual intrusion.  It was as if nighmarish giant extraterrestrials had invaded and were marching across West Texas.

Texas Tech’s Michael Giberson, a widely read energy blogger at Knowledge Problem and the subject of previous posts on LST, is in favor of the Tres Amigas project. Despite my respect for Giberson, I disagree with his obvious enthusiasm for wind power and the surrender of Texas’ electrical power independence to what is essentially the wind power lobby in other states.

Giberson has produced this pro-Tres Amigas report, a 45 page PDF file, on the proposed superstation. Reading his data, it becomes very clear the impetus behind it is to take advantage of cheaper Texas power, and future wind power projects, and to create available access for private wind power investors throughout the Great Plains.

Peter Behr, ClimateWire writer for the New York Times, wrote this about the Tres Amigas  effort last December:

In one famous showdown, a Texas utility — Central and Southwest Corp. — did create a transmission link between its divisions in Texas and Oklahoma to preserve its status as an interstate electric power holding company. At night on May 4, 1976, a technician opened a switch at a CSW substation sending power surreptitiously from Vernon, Texas to Altus, Okla., according to Cudahy’s account of the “midnight connection.”

Since Texas’ other major utilities were linked to CSW, their power was also flowing in interstate commerce. Several hours later, Texas utilities were informed of these events, and two of the largest responded in outrage by severing their transmission ties to CSW, at some risk to the state’s entire grid.

The Tres Amigas petition to FERC says that because energy is converted from an AC wave to a DC electronic pulse and then back into an AC wave synchronized with the receiving grid, the electrons in Texas are not “free flowing” into New Mexico or Oklahoma, preserving Texas’ separation.

The project will also require the approval of state commissions in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, said Raskin, because transmission line owners will have to run new lines through these states to the Tres Amigas terminals to make connections to the three grids.

and this:

Both Texas and adjoining Eastern Interconnection states that form the Southwest Power Pool are embarked on unprecedented transmission construction projects to bring thousands of megawatts of new wind power to their customers — and in SPP’s case, to move wind power through its area to the Southeast. Tres Amigas will offer more outlets for these regions’ wind power, Harris says.

But it may also threaten the business plans of some wind power and transmission developers by creating competition that could lower prices and profits. An official of one Texas energy company, who did not speak for attribution, said, “We look at it and say, ‘Where’s the money to support this huge a project? Which group of customers are going to pay for it?’ You’re going to have winners and losers in the wind area. It’s not clear who wants this enough to pay for it.”

“This project links the wind-rich areas” in the Southwest, said another longtime energy expert in Texas. If New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas are all generating more wind power they can use at times, why would they want to buy more power from each other? the expert asked. “It’s a great technical idea. But in terms of markets, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Despite promoters’ claims Tres Amigas has broad popular support, it is clear there are serious misgivings on the part of many.  And ironically, the market forces in the future may unexpectedly render many wind power installations economically unsupportable despite the flood of tax dollars being poured into them.

For further commentary on the viability of a nascent industry, existing currently on the extreme largesse of the American taxpayer, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce wrote this last week for the Wall Street Journal:

The wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the claim that it will provide major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There’s just one problem: It’s not true. A slew of recent studies show that wind-generated electricity likely won’t result in any reduction in carbon emissions—or that they’ll be so small as to be almost meaningless.

This issue is especially important now that states are mandating that utilities produce arbitrary amounts of their electricity from renewable sources. By 2020, for example, California will require utilities to obtain 33% of their electricity from renewables. About 30 states, including Connecticut, Minnesota and Hawaii, are requiring major increases in the production of renewable electricity over the coming years.

Wind—not solar or geothermal sources—must provide most of this electricity. It’s the only renewable source that can rapidly scale up to meet the requirements of the mandates. This means billions more in taxpayer subsidies for the wind industry and higher electricity costs for consumers.

None of it will lead to major cuts in carbon emissions, for two reasons. First, wind blows only intermittently and variably. Second, wind-generated electricity largely displaces power produced by natural gas-fired generators, rather than that from plants burning more carbon-intensive coal.

Because wind blows intermittently, electric utilities must either keep their conventional power plants running all the time to make sure the lights don’t go dark, or continually ramp up and down the output from conventional coal- or gas-fired generators (called “cycling”). But coal-fired and gas-fired generators are designed to run continuously, and if they don’t, fuel consumption and emissions generally increase. A car analogy helps explain: An automobile that operates at a constant speed—say, 55 miles per hour—will have better fuel efficiency, and emit less pollution per mile traveled, than one that is stuck in stop-and-go traffic.

and highlighted these facts:

Meanwhile, the wind industry is pocketing subsidies that dwarf those garnered by the oil and gas sector. The federal government provides a production tax credit of $0.022 for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced by wind. That amounts to $6.44 per million BTU of energy produced. In 2008, however, the EIA reported subsidies to oil and gas totaled $1.9 billion per year, or about $0.03 per million BTU of energy produced. Wind subsidies are more than 200 times as great as those given to oil and gas on the basis of per-unit-of-energy produced.

Perhaps it comes down to what Kevin Forbes, the director of the Center for the Study of Energy and Environmental Stewardship at Catholic University, told me: “Wind energy gives people a nice warm fuzzy feeling that we’re taking action on climate change.” Yet when it comes to CO2 emissions, “the reality is that it’s not doing much of anything.”

Without the massive subsidies from an acquiescent public sold on the mystical powers of “green energy”, wind power would still be a twinkle in the eye of Boone Pickens, Americans would be less poor at the federal level and Tres Amigas would never have gotten off the ground.

Unless and until someone can offer better reasons, and reasons advantageous to all of Texas, I am against Tres Amigas…

…and all the ugly wind towers everywhere.

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Oh to be a kid again.

Oh look, there’s Texpat

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While the media generally goes into hysterics every time the Texas State Board of Education meets, with commentators hurling mockery, outrage and vitriol at the board members, there is a total lack of interest when other states’ boards of education meet for the same purpose. Yet Texas is not the only state that influences the content of American schooling: a few other states also determine textbook standards that end up being used in other parts of the country. California, in particular, is also an important textbook market for publishers. Yet mysteriously, one never hears of any controversy erupting when the California State Board of Education meets to decide the content of textbooks used throughout the state and in many other school districts around the country which shun the Texas-approved textbooks.

Why is that? Could it simply be that California-approved textbooks aren’t as politicized as those in Texas?

Quite the contrary. If anything, the textbooks approved by the California State Board of Education are even more politicized than Texas textbooks, and more ideologically biased. So: Why does the media ignore what happens in California textbooks? Because the state’s bias goes the other way. California-approved social studies textbooks are politically correct in the extreme, with multiculturalism and “social justice” as the defining characteristics. The pressure groups and board members setting policy for California’s (and hence a substantial portion of America’s) textbooks exceed their Texan counterparts in their extremism, but since California pushes the “correct” kind of extremism, you never hear about it.

And I’m not just talking about overt political bias, as exemplified by the previously-mentioned A People’s History of the United States and countless similar study materials with a blatant left-leaning slant. I’m talking about a subtler form of indoctrination.

and this:

             The Travesty of Psychological Modeling

The entire drive for enforced equal ethnic and gender representation in history books is based on a false premise. Probably without even realizing it, politically motivated educators are borrowing unproven theories from psychology and applying them en masse to schoolkids. Relying on notions of “psychological modeling,” the unspoken assumption behind much of modern education is that children are incapable of forging their own personalities or paths through life, but are strictly limited to imitating the role models they perceive while growing up. Thus, according to the theory, a girl who grows up in the 1950s and sees no images or discussions of female firefighters will reach adulthood convinced of the impossibility of ever becoming a firefighter; furthermore, she will never attempt to or even want to become a firefighter, thinking it beyond her reach. And so in the next generation there will be no female firefighters either, thus once again no one on whom a young potential female firefighter might model her aspirations, and the cycle will repeat forever. Similarly, the theory goes, if a child grows up in a gang-infested neighborhood, and the only adults he ever sees are gang members, then when that child grows up he will almost certainly become a gang member too, because that’s all he knows: the gang members become his role models. And then he becomes the role model for the next generation. The principle extends across the social landscape: Kids who grow up being abused by their parents will themselves become abusers. Kids who grow up in a milieu filled with academics and intellectuals will themselves tend to become intellectuals too. And so on.

In an attempt to upend the status quo of this multi-tiered self-perpetuating class system, educators have sought to break the cycle of negative role modeling in minority communities by using the school system as a tool to present alternate positive role models for the children to emulate. Sounds almost reasonable on the surface. But there’s a terrible, terrible price to pay for this psychological self-help gimmick: In order to create a satisfactory array of positive archetypes, educators have begun to twist historical reality to suit their requirements, and engage in egregious revisionism to artificially construct the needed pantheon of role models to match every imaginable ethnic and social sub-grouping.

The conservative blogger, Zombie, who lives in the colon of The Beast, Berkeley CA, has produced a five-part series on the making of textbooks for children in America posted at PajamasMedia.  He drew quite a bit of fire in his first segment in the comments and I cautioned him the story was more complicated than he seemed to iterate.  Zombie asked for patience and he has, indeed, written a very interesting and informative series including criticism of just about everyone.

Part I is here.

Part II is here.

Read the whole thing.

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