White House Rural Council: Attempt at Central Planning?

COMMENTARY

By Lynn Kocal, Prairie Advocate Webmaster

While the mainstream media has kept everyone busy with Weinergate and the debt ceiling, at least one important move by the White House has surreptitiously passed beneath the media’s gaze, Executive Order 13575—Establishment of the White House Rural Council on June 9, 2011.

Executive orders are generally used to carry out laws enacted by Congress or to more effectively run government within Constitutional constraints. These orders can be curbed by Congress enacting legislation or by not funding the agency that is directed to carry out the order. Presidents have declared war with Executive Orders and even when getting Congressional approval, have maintained that they didn’t need Congressional authority when they got it.

Remember this quote about small-town U.S.A. from President Obama while he was campaigning because it might tell us a good deal of what is behind this EO: “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” This smacks of the elitism so often seen in this administration, meaning we aren’t smart enough to understand what is best for us, but they are - as if they know what we are about when they have no idea what we believe or how we think.

What does EO 13575 mean to us? In section 1, the order declares that “These communities supply our food, fiber, and energy, safeguard our natural resources,” which, based on previous experience, means the Executive Branch through agencies filled with nonelected “officials,’ wants more control over rural communities, more centralization of power, i.e., central planning. This means we will have more intrusion into our daily lives, more money siphoned off to multi-national corporations and fewer family farms and enterprise. It is essentially a federal take-over of more state’s rights. It’s important for you to read the order in its entirety at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/DCPD-201100431/pdf/DCPD-201100431.pdf (get the quick link at www.pacc-news.com).

This Rural Council is headed by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsac with every cabinet head named to serve on it as well as other designees determined by the President or Secretary of Agriculture.

Get ready for more scientific elitism to hit our communities. We have already found out what the Department of Education has done to local control of our schools, to the detriment of our youth’s education (we are still told that throwing more money to education will solve the problems when it’s clear to anyone with a memory that our educational system is not working). Now we will have “scientists” in their ivory towers determining what regulations will most benefit them and their crony-corporate ties. More run-away spending that will never help anyone in our communities and will actually harm the little bit that rural communities have going for them.

Rural economies have already been decimated by U.S. policy that has insidiously eroded our economic well-being. Simply eliminating these disastrous barriers to U.S. prosperity would improve the economic outlook for our nation as a whole. Here’s a list of a few of them:

1. Capping CEO salaries to $1 million dollars unless the corporation earns higher profits, motivating corporations to move factories out of the country, which in turn, creates competition that small, often rural, U.S. companies can’t match in a global, interdependent marketplace.

2. Implementing global rather than regional dependency on food, energy, and most goods, furthering less local economic security and ability for self-sustaining local economies, and allowing multi-national corporations to control us regionally.

3. Over-regulation that makes U.S. manufacturers unable to compete with less regulated countries, giving multi-national corporations, like GE, the edge over U.S. based concerns.

4. Domestic military base closures that once drove many rural economies and instead building foreign bases, which moves dollars and jobs out of the U.S.

5. Belonging to the World Trade Organization that allows foreign goods to be sold in the U.S. with no tariffs, but allows other countries to impose tariffs on U.S. goods.

Will our Congress decide to not fund this insanity? Will our states’ legislators determine that the federal government is over-stepping states’ rights concerning private property and local, in-state trade?

With only 16% of the U.S. population living in rural communities, is there a chance that anyone will care if the food, fiber, energy, and natural resources are under the grip of some out-of-touch people in Washington D.C.? These un-elected bureaucrats have no real-world experience in rural affairs or business for that matter. Imagine Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner deciding what is best for you. It won’t be something to imagine in the not-too-distant future. We are about to find out if we don’t act soon.

Elected officials’ contact info, depending on your location: Congressman Don Manzullo at , Congressman Bobby Schilling at , Senator Dick Durbin at , Senator Mark Kirk at , State Rep. Jim Sacia at , State Rep. Jerry Mitchell at , State Sen. Tim Bivins at , and Sen. Mike Jacobs at .

Crime Against Nature

Pollution Changes Everything. Pollution knows no boundaries. Realistically, discharges, spills and accidents with manure and water, are a form of trespass. Humid air heavy with ammonia and hydrogen sulfide reduce the quality of life experienced through home ownership. An over abundance of these “nutrients” do not stop at the edge of a neighbor’s property. Pollution does not stop at a township, county or state line.

In Northwest Illinois, we are living on karst topography which allows liquids on the soil’s surface to travel rapidly through cracks and sinkholes. Our ground water, streams, rivers, and aquifers intermingle because of this karst geology.

Having permission to discharge, even with a permit, does not make this ok. It is the scale of industrial animal operations, the concentration of manure produced in one location that makes this a crime against nature. A permit to discharge is not about “if” it will discharge, but “when” it discharges.

We should not be expected to compromise our water or hold our breath to accommodate business decisions based on agribusiness over community.

Susan Turner

Warren, IL

Take the Initiative - TEACON

Midwest Tea Party Convention TEACON will be held in Schaumburg 9/30-10/1 at Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center and Hotel, 1551 N.Thoreau Dr. (http://www.560wind.com/pages/TeaCon_Home)

We need to defeat not one but two opponents in the 2012 Election: President Obama and the mainstream media. For far too long in this country progressives have been on offense and conservatives have been on defense. In 2012, the TEA party movement will be on offense and TEACON is just the beginning.

Andrew Breitbart has been at the forefront of taking on the media and challenging the left. But Andrew does not have to do it alone. He’ll show everyone how they can join the fight at TEACON. Andrew has been a supporter, defender and protector of the tea party movement since the beginning. We’re not going to excuse him while he saves the world - we’re going to join him in the fight.

You won’t be able to see Glenn Beck’s show on Fox (anymore), but you’ll be able to see him live and in person at TEACON. The venue and the setting will allow people to get more up close and personal with Glenn. Of course a lot will happen over the next three months. There will be Chicago connections to his new media empire, GBTV . . . stay tuned.

Beck, Breitbart, Dana Loesch and Steven Crowder will attract a lot of attention, but I’m most excited about the training and break-out sessions that will be held at TEACON. Everyone who attends TEACON will have an opportunity to learn more, do more and be more in 2012. TEACON is designed by grassroots tea party groups for grassroots tea party members. Every session is designed for regular people who want to make a difference in the 2012 election. They’re going to leave with the knowledge, tools and skills to do just that.

When I talk to people about our convention I usually get to the point where I say, “And, oh yeah, we’re going to have Presidential Candidates at the event and hold our own Straw Poll”. We just have that much packed into what will be an unforgettable weekend.

Last week the left gathered in Minneapolis for their annual NetRoots conference. They were dejected, depressed and disappointed in Hope and Change. The people who attend TEACON will leave more educated, engaged and energized. This is going to be fun.

Steve Stevlic

Organizer, Chicago Tax Day Tea Party

Director, Chicago Tea Party Patriots

Twitter @landofdafree

www.teapartychicago.org

Morrison City Council Notes

July 11, 2011 a city council meeting was held in Morrison. All seats were full and then some. Seven Aldermen (Rose absent) were present along with Mayor Drey and Administrator Wise.

The Morrison High School Softball team and coach were recognized with Certificates for their achievement of 1st place at the State Softball Tournament. They waited in the hall to get their awards because there was no seating for them.

Public comment from Harvey Zuidema was on the Post Auditor’s Adjustments. Where did the $100,000 come from for water and sewer? The Sport Complex was in the hole by $245,783 and somehow ended up with 17 cents to the good. So if anyone else has questions about the financial reports they are to address James Wise, Mayor Drey, Melanie Schroeder or Ernie Huling. Terry Wilkens stated there is no reason for the $100,000 to be transferred to water and sewer unless for partial repayment of loan.

Bills payable amounted to $89,601.20. We paid Chen Nelson Roberts LTD $1,408 for legal fees having to do with the GE settlement (this should be the last-last bill from them, maybe). Exelon was paid $569.54 for electricity at the Sport Complex (two weeks ago we paid $956.87 for electricity there). Baxter and Woodman, INC collected $12,198.75 for Well 3 abandon and Demo engineering/legal, Well 5-engineering/legal, tower-engineering/legal, engineering service, and Well 4-engineering/legal.

Removal of a parkway tree at 305 East North Street was approved with the property owners to pay for the removal and to donate $25.00 for a tree to be planted at the Sport Complex.

James Wise was asking for a line of credit of $500,000 for Water Rehab projects so we don’t deplete the water and sewer funds. The Water and Sewer Department has a balance of close to $600,000.

Resolution 11-05 was passed to approve the Antique Tractor Drive slated for Aug. 15, 2011 at 7:30 am. There should be close to 50 tractors participating. The City Police Department will assist with traffic safety.

Brian Melton has also asked to place “all-way stop signs” at the school crossing on Genesee and Academic Drive. This should improve traffic flow and safety at that crossing. These will be in place and enforced at all times.

Street lighting was discussed. James Wise is recommending approval to use the same utility brokerage as the Sport Complex and the water/sewer department. We might save about $300 a year. I asked if the council approved the other agreements.

The next Morrison City Council meeting is July 25, 2011 at City Hall. Come and get to know your Morrison neighbors and councilmen. “Pack the house”! Be sure to contact any council member if you have any concerns or compliments. Hope to see you there!

Quote of the week: Democracy is the art of thinking independently together. (Alexander Meiklejohn)

A Morrison Taxpayer,

Marti Wood

Social Insecurity

“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd . . .” President Obama has made a lot of speeches, and said a lot of words, but these eleven are a real game-changer.

Like the boy who famously declared “The emperor has no clothes,” the president just shattered the myth of a Social Security “lock box.” We’ve been told the Social Security Trust Fund has $2.6 trillion. If that were true, why would the debt limit of the United States prevent the issuing of Social Security checks? Wouldn’t we just go to the Trust Fund vault at Fort Knox, and withdraw enough cash to cover the checks? The truth is, the “lock box” doesn’t require a vault to hold the Trust Fund assets. An old shoebox will suffice, as it’s only content is a faded and yellowed IOU. All of the real money you and I paid into Social Security was spent long ago. The president has revealed the naked truth – 40% of each and every check written by the Federal government is borrowed money, and with no borrowing, either the government has to write fewer checks, or, they’ll bounce.

About now, Big Government advocates are screaming at their papers – “The IOU’s are all treasury bonds, AAA rated safe investments.” The truth is treasury bonds are debt obligations whose safety is solely dependent on the fortitude of Washington politicians to allocate revenue to repay them. I’m not seeing much fortitude lately - the House budget has been buried in the Senate basement, as even its modest cuts are just too much for the Senate leadership to bear, though they’re far too small to even begin repaying the Social Security debt. When we’re talking about debt obligations with little possibility of re-payment, do Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, and Chase Manhattan come to mind?

Finally, those who are planning on Social Security may want to consider this: The president has just unequivocally stated your retirement is entirely subject to the whims of Washington politicians, and has pretty clearly indicated where he stands. It’s a far more convincing argument for private retirement accounts than any previously presented.

Terry Smith

Lanark, IL

Leaving the Parenting to Parents

Calling all parents. Parental Rights, are they secure? As a parent don’t you think you can make the best choices for your child not anyone else? The right of parents to raise their children as they choose is so fundamental that our founding fathers saw no need to include it in the Constitution. However, this fundamental right seems to be eroding. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has a different idea on how you raise your children. It is a treaty which creates binding rules of law. A few things under this treaty are:

· The CRC would automatically override almost all American laws on children and families because of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in Article VI.

· Congress would have the power to directly legislate on all subjects necessary to comply with the treaty.

· A committee of 18 experts from other nations, sitting in Geneva, has the authority to issue official interpretations of the treaty which are entitled to binding weight in American courts and legislatures. This effectively transfers ultimate authority for all policies in this area to this foreign committee.

· Under international law, the treaty overrides even our Constitution.

· The best interest of the child principle would give the government the ability to override every decision made by every parent if a government worker disagreed with the parent’s decision.

· A child’s “right to be heard” would allow him (or her) to seek governmental review of every parental decision with which the child disagreed.

Would you like to see your parental rights taken away? There is help out there against this treaty. ParentalRights.org has some answers about this. Come to the next Sauk Valley Tea Party meeting Tuesday, July 26, at 6:30 p.m. in the Loveland Community Building in Dixon, Illinois to hear how we can protect our Parental Rights.

Susie Miller

Sauk Valley Tea Party

Shopping to Help Animals

Adrianne’s Angels - St. George Pet Rescue has opened an EBAY store with all proceeds to fund spay/neuter. In our first week we sold six items. We really like this idea of an ongoing fundraiser that will never need a rain date! Please help us by donating small easy to ship items that we can turn into neuter dollars. We realize in this economy it can be hard to write a check, but easier to part with something you no longer need.

To see our EBAY items go to our only official website www.stgeorgepetrescue.org and go to the bottom of our home page for a link to EBAY. If there is something you need us to pick up, call us at 815-244-PETS.

Please help us to fund this urgent need in our county.

Lorna May

Mt. Carroll

Guest Commentary

Americans Without Chests

By Dr. Marvin Folkertsma

As Americans prepared to mark the birth of their country with the usual outpouring of celebratory events, pundits on the political right were scratching their heads over President Obama’s most recent comment about America’s free-enterprise system.

This time, corporate jet owners got the hit, no fewer than six times during Obama’s late June press conference, apparently for taking advantage of Bush administration tax breaks at the cost of “your child’s safety.” Such financial obscenities were matched by continued tax breaks for “millionaires and billionaires,” whose wealth the political left covets and whose sheer selfishness, in their view, has driven a stake through the heart of the president’s vaunted recovery summer. All the while unemployment rates remain stubbornly high, large and small businesses refuse to take their plunge into the world created by Obamacus Economicus, Americans by large majorities believe the country is going “in the wrong direction,” and administration officials remain puzzled by it all. The question is how to explain all this.

Two observers, one a 19th-century Frenchmen and the other a 20th-century Englishmen, offered words of wisdom about the consequences of centralizing political control and, we shall argue, the moral relativism that accompanies such a development.

Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous warning in Democracy in America about the peculiar type of despotism to which democracies are especially vulnerable included comments about “an immense tutelary power” hovering over a mass of citizens, for whose happiness it “willingly labors, but it chooses to be a sole agent and the only arbiter,” leaving nothing for individual determination. “What remains,” de Tocqueville asked, “but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?” The result is a power that “prevents existence,” that “compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people,” to the point where they can no longer be considered human beings at all.

Or if they can, they have no chests. This designation was made famous by that bête noire of British moral relativists, C. S. Lewis, noted for his writings on Christian apologetics as well as his Narnia series and the space trilogy. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man consists of three lectures he gave during World War II and was not about politics per se, but rather about the perils of assuming that science can dismiss statements of moral sentiments as purely subjective reactions. He noted that dismissing value statements’ objective meaning has the effect of emasculating humanity; that is, ripping out the “spirited element” of personhood—one’s chest—which hosts “indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man.”

This moral position is behind the expression, for instance, of having the “guts” to do something, the temerity, the “animal spirits.” It is not intellect alone that drives a person, nor one’s visceral desires, but that middle portion, the indispensable “heart” of it all; that is, one’s chest. Tear out an individual’s chest and you have a wraith: a head with appetites but no heart, no drive, no will to act.

Now consider the political application of these views in light of the current administration’s centralizing proclivities over the past two-and-a-half years. In the context of nationalizing decision-making for automakers, student borrowers, energy producers, and a host of large financial concerns, the Obama administration has regularly demonized the private sector, associating it with the greed and selfishness of what C. S. Lewis referred to as undisciplined appetites. Even casual consumers of news hear regularly about some two trillion (or more) dollars in the hands of private enterprise “sitting on the sidelines,” waiting for profitable investment but whose owners are afraid that their wealth will be confiscated to some degree. In the meantime, a massive healthcare law has begun its regulatory march across America; the EPA scorns Congress’ constitutional responsibilities while considering the imposition of cap-and-trade by administrative fiat; the NLRB sues one of America’s largest and most successful businesses for violating centrally determined political objectives. And this is just the short list.

What is the possible, indeed, the likely consequence of all this, if the process continues unchecked?

De Tocqueville saw the political result clearly, and C. S. Lewis is even more instructive in moral terms. Centralization of political power produces a nation of sheep who eventually become incapable even of forming concepts about independence, freedom, individual initiative. And ripping the constitutional heart out of American government and the “spirited element” from its most vibrant, imaginative citizens leaves a mass of dispirited onlookers, too timid or terrified to form judgments and make decisions that drive economic and spiritual growth.

About all this, administration officials remain uncomprehending, puzzled by the lack of national recovery. They shouldn’t be. In C. S. Lewis’ words, “we remove the organ and demand the function … We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

This is the inevitable result of the country’s creeping centralization, of creating ever larger numbers of Americans without chests.

— Dr. Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The author of several books, his latest release is a high-energy novel titled “The Thirteenth Commandment.”

Capitol Report

By Jim Sacia, State Representative, 89th District

Seldom do I comment on federal issues. Unless you live under a rock, you are aware that an age old debate between Republicans and Democrats is ongoing at the “Puzzle Palace” (Washington, D.C.) about raising the National Debt Limit. Yes, I’m aware it’s been raised seventy times and I’ve come to hate the term “kicking the can down the road”.

Here’s the deal – we are told that Democrats want to raise taxes on those making at least $250,000. We are told Republicans are saying reduce entitlements. August 2nd is the day that a decision must be made or the government shuts down. We are also told that both sides are committed to finding resolution.

History teaches us a great deal. In 1993, under the Clinton Administration, we passed a luxury tax. If you bought a high dollar item – boat, Lincoln, motor home, jet, or anything determined to be a luxury – the tax was huge and those who could afford such luxuries immediately quit buying them. Numerous “blue collar” builders of boats, Lincolns, motor homes, and jets were laid off. After two years the tax was repealed because the unemployment being paid to those laid off workers far outweighed the taxes gained.

Hello! Do you see history repeating itself? People with money build businesses and hire good people to work there. My anger comes from a desire to start some type of class warfare between the perceived haves and the have-nots.

I begrudge no one who strives to build a better life by building a business or improving an existing one. How do you incentivize the barons of business to do that by taxing them at a higher rate? Let’s allow the free market to flourish by encouraging business growth and not punishing those who make it happen.

I realize there is a philosophical difference laid out here, but doesn’t it make sense to listen to the lesson so well taught by history?

Another federal issue that will affect every farmer in the near future is being proposed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). In a nutshell, if your tractor and wagon hauling grain is on a public highway the operator will need a CDL. Contact your federal legislators before August 1, 2011. They are Congressman Don Manzullo at , Senator Dick Durbin at , and Senator Mark Kirk at . More information is available from the Stephenson County Farm Bureau website which is www.stephensoncfb.org.

As always, you can reach me, Sally or Barb at or e-mail us at . You can also visit my website at www.jimsacia.com. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you.