p15, v9.18 — Left / Right & Legals

Left / Right & Legals

Mountain Views News Saturday, May 2, 2015

MVNews this week: Page 15

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

Mountain Views-News Saturday, May 2, 2015

RON Paul

HOWARD Hays As I See It

Mountain
Views

News

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

CITY EDITOR

Dean Lee

EAST VALLEY EDITOR

Joan Schmidt

BUSINESS EDITOR

LaQuetta Shamblee

PRODUCTION

Richard Garcia

SALES

Patricia Colonello

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WEBMASTER

John Aveny

CONTRIBUTORS

CoCo Lasalle

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills

Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

Lori Koop

Rev. James Snyder

Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

THE REAL WAR ON THE

MIDDLE CLASS

One of the great ironies of American politics is that
most politicians who talk about helping the middle class
support policies that, by expanding the welfare-warfare
state, are harmful to middle-class Americans. Eliminating
the welfare-warfare state would benefit middle-class
Americans by freeing them from exorbitant federal taxes,
including the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax.

Politicians serious about helping middle-class Americans
should allow individuals to opt out of Social Security and
Medicare by not having to pay payroll taxes if they agree to
never accept federal retirement or health care benefits. Individuals are quite capable
of meeting their own unique retirement and health care needs if the government
stops forcing them into one-size-fits-all plans.

Middle-class families with college-age children would benefit if government got
out of the student loan business. Government involvement in higher education is
the main reason tuition is skyrocketing and so many Americans are graduating
with huge student loan debts. College graduates entering the job market would
certainly benefit if Congress stopped imposing destructive regulations and taxes
on the economy.

Politicians who support an interventionist foreign policy are obviously not
concerned with the harm inflicted on the middle-class populations of countries
targeted for regime change. These politicians also disregard the harm U.S. foreign
policy inflicts on Americans. Middle- and working-class Americans, and their
families, who join the military certainly suffer when they are maimed or killed
fighting in unjust and unconstitutional wars. Our interventionist foreign policy
also contributes to the high tax burden imposed on middle-class Americans.

Middle-class Americans also suffer from intrusions on their liberty and privacy,
such as not being able to board an airplane unless they submit to invasive and
humiliating searches. Even children and the physically disabled are not safe from
the Transposition Security Administration. These assaults are justified by the threat
of terrorism, a direct result of our interventionist foreign policy that fosters hatred
and resentment of Americans.

Some “military Keynesians” claim that middle-class workers benefit from jobs
in the military-industrial complex. Military Keynesians seem to think that the
resources spent on militarism would disappear if the Pentagon’s budget were cut.
The truth is, if we reduced spending on militarism, those currently employed by
the military-industrial complex would be able to find new jobs producing goods
desired by consumers. Even those currently employed as lobbyists for the military-
industrial complex may be able to find useful work.

Few things would benefit the middle class more than ending the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies erode middle-class families’ standards
of living while benefiting the financial and political elites. Middle-class Americans
may gain some temporary benefits from Federal Reserve created booms, but they
also suffer from the inevitable busts.

As I write this, the dollar still reigns as the world’s reserve currency. However, there
are signs that other economies are moving away from using the dollar as the reserve
currency, and this trend will accelerate as the Federal Reserve continues to pump
more fiat currency into the economy and as resentment toward our foreign policy
grows. Eventually, international investors will lose confidence in the U.S. economy,
the dollar will lose its reserve currency status, and the dollar bubble will burst.

These events will cause a major economic downturn that may even be worse than
the Great Depression. The main victims of this crisis will be average Americans.
The only way to avoid this calamity is for the American people to force Congress
to free them from the burdens of the warfare state, the welfare state, taxation, and
fiat currency.

——

Ron Paul is a former Congressman and Presidential candidate. He can be reached
at VoicesofLiberty.com.

“Thinking that building more reservoirs will get you out of a
drought is like assuming that opening more checking accounts
when you’ve lost your income will help you pay your bills,”

- Andrew Fahlund, deputy director of California Water
Foundation

International news over the past several days has been
focused on the tragedy in Nepal, with thousands of lives
lost. I heard a USC professor of Earth Sciences interviewed
on the subject, and what he said came off as a plug for “big
government”.

He said it’s inevitable we’ll experience something of a
similar magnitude (7.8) on the San Andreas Fault – maybe
not tomorrow, but most certainly within the next century.
He repeated a paraphrase of the NRA popular among those
in his field; “Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people”. A big difference
in our situations is that in Katmandu, for example, not more than a quarter of the
structures were built to code. He said it made him want to go out and “hug a building
inspector”.

The big news nationally came from Baltimore, another situation with cops allegedly
committing criminal acts themselves and a community fed up with their routinely
getting away with it. Covering these stories, there are always those compelled to point
out that victims of black-on-black crime far outnumber black victims of white cops.
For those thus implying that police be held to no higher standard than inner-city
gang-bangers, I think they owe an apology to the hundreds of thousands serving with
honor in law enforcement.

Locally, I was relieved to find no mention of me in the MVN’s “Sierra Madre Police
Blotter”. I was busted (or rather notified) twice. One notice caused me to re-set the
sprinkler when the spray heads were seen popping up on the wrong day. The other
resulted in half-a-Saturday spent fixing a leak in my outdoor plumbing. Aside from
this personal impact, the drought led me to find out about things I didn’t know much
about before. (Did you know it takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond?)

In hindsight, maybe we should have paid attention sooner. Back in 2004, another
Earth Sciences professor, Lisa Sloan of UC Santa Cruz along with a grad student
published a paper on the effects of melting Arctic ice caused by global warming. As the
ice melts, heat rises from the ocean causing vast high pressure zones. Another effect
of global warming is that it thickens the atmosphere – so these zones become all the
stronger, blocking jet streams and normal weather patterns.

As predicted by Prof. Sloan, the effect of this would be for expected Pacific winter
storms to be diverted from California up to British Columbia and Alaska, and all the
way over to the East Coast. Ten years later, it turns out she was right.

NASA-funded research out of Utah State University last year confirmed the
strengthening high pressure center off the west coast and the low pressure zone back
east, bringing increased warm temperatures and less rain to the west coast and more
frigid storms to the other side of the country. These zones will get stronger and the
weather more extreme as the atmosphere thickens because of global warming.

The warming has other effects. More rain falls in infrequent downpours, which
drain away faster. More rain and less snow in the mountains means less water from
melting snow in spring and summer. More heat means faster evaporation.

In his column last week, Greg Welborn cited presidential wannabe Carly Fiorina’s
claim that 70% of California’s rainwater is “flushed out to sea”. According to the
California Water Federation’s Andrew Fahlund (quoted above), the number is more
like 50%. That runoff not only protects vital ecosystems, but also keeps salt water
from the San Francisco Bay from heading upstream to the Delta, which would render
even less suitable for drinking and irrigation. Anyway, according to the Public Policy
Institute of California, “These waters are largely isolated from major agricultural and
urban areas and cannot be used for other purposes”.

The reservoirs Fiorina complains we didn’t build might have increased supplies
by 1%. John Lund, director of Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, estimates the most
ambitious projects under consideration might increase capacity by 5-15%. But the
bigger problem is that by the fourth year of a drought, most would be dried up, anyway.
Lund estimates that under current conditions, every million acre-feet of capacity
might capture only 50,000-150,000 acre-feet of water a year.

Other suggested options have included integrating surface and groundwater storage,
and updating our urban delivery systems – like that century-old pipe that burst in
Westwood last year, spilling about 20-million gallons. And then there’s agriculture,
which uses four times the water in our state as does urban areas. Adjustments won’t be
easy; the Central Valley has 1% of our nation’s landmass, but provides 25% of its food.

Politically, the problem has not been that environmentalists get in the way of
projects, but that nobody wants to pay for them. No doubt, ten years ago we should
have paid more attention to the likes of Prof. Sloan of UC Santa Cruz who warned that
global warming is real, as are its consequences. For now, blaming “liberals” and the
delta smelt isn’t going to help.

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LEGAL NOTICES

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT

File No. 2015-110202

The following person(s) is (are) doing business as: UNCHARTED
ANTIQUES 27 N. ALTADENA DR. PASADENA, CA. 91107.
Full name of registrant(s) is (are) JOHN RICHARD LECLERC 27
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commenced to transact business under the fictitious business name
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itself authorize the use in this state of a Fictitious Business Name in
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