The California IOU Manifesto

 

Water For Fighting Political Action Committee [WFFPAC]

News Release and Interview

Tyranny now rules California. It does so because we Californians have ceded our own power and authority to an “expert” class of elected officials and jurists who, despite the People attempting to enforce term limitations on our defacto despots, have nonetheless selected for themselves life-long office and perpetual placement in seats of power. In doing so, they have turned our natural and God-given rights into tradable commodities necessary to complete their transactions of state and governance. 

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” -C.S. Lewis

Many such examples can be found in the current water crises in the Klamath Basin and the Central Valley of California. The Central Valley farmers had recent limitations on obtaining as little as 0-15% of prior water allocation placed on them. When President Obama was in the hunt needing votes for the recent passage of nationalized healthcare, this allotment was increased to 40%, and suddenly two holdout Congressional votes were easy game for the President. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had proposed and promised a convoluted $11 billion dollar water project meant for repairing much of the Sacramento Delta and address some of the Central Valley water issues. With great fanfare, the Governor and California State Legislature placed their pork-laden bond issue on the November, 2010 ballot. But the political needs of the lame-duck Governor and the Legislators have again changed. While the needs of suffering communities in the Central Valley have only greatened, the Governor and the State Legislature is in the process of aggressively removing said relief from the ballot and choose to deny the People a say on the issue. You see, the profit from trafficking in human rights of those in the Central Valley and elsewhere would be much better spent on another day. Until then, those rights have been pulled from the Auction of Political Capital until a higher reserve can be met. 

This, unfortunately, is the current rule of law and governance in California. It need not stay so. Within our own state history, we can point to the tale of our founding and how the Bear Flag Revolters retook California when their rights had been usurped.  In a time and circumstances much more like our own, Howard Jarvis led Californians to pass Proposition 13 and therefore remanding the Golden State back to the People.  And now it is in your time for your heart and your hands to decide the California your children shall inherit. What legacy is fitting for them and how much should it cost you? 

By now you are aware of the Water For Fighting PAC and our attempt to qualify a California wide ballot initiative that is an assault on all our inept leadership.  With your help and those of hundreds of volunteers, we have begun collecting signatures. Despite this furious effort, we currently lag in our count in the time necessary to complete the 800,000 needed by October 10^th, 2010. In order to mount the type of California wide media campaign necessary to accomplish this, we are making an innovative fundraising appeal to our supporters so that we may accelerate our hiring of professional circulators. 

Water IOU

Power IOU

                                   

In the next month, instead of paying either your power or water bill, we are asking you to send that authority an IOU for that month’s payment. We have prepared attractive documents to complete for this purpose. As you will note, our IOUs bear a striking image of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the official who has led a government so enamored with using this type of monetary device.  We even suggest making additional copies for sharing with friends and scrapbooking for posterity.  We understand that many of our supporters are suffering financially, but certainly 8.3% of what each of us pays for water or power in one year is mightily worth: 

• Lifelong relief from taxes on homes, fuel, CO2, and water
• Creating millions of jobs and attaining full employment in two years
• Re-establishing California as the premier economy in the United States

 

We know we are asking the People of California to do a difficult thing in trying times. All the same, we know those who have examined our ballot initiative will recognize that Californians have so much to obtain from utilizing this simple IOU and finding a way to make their payments at a later occasion. Please share this manifesto with your family, friends, and colleagues! 

Signed, 

Oscar A. Braun and J. F. Shaughnessy

 

Contributuoin Link

Download, Circulate, and Sign

So These Two Businessmen Walk Into a Bar…

 

Bad Medicine: California Says "Line 'em Up!"

How would you finish this joke, especially if you were a businessman considering a store, service, plant operation, or other venture in California? We think many business people would just assume quickly pound down their poison of choice at the formerly sunny California Bar and Cafe and then beat-feet the heck out of our state. Especially in lieu of the strange medicine that is  AB32 and the efforts to delay it. Exactly what benefits does this delay strategy bring our state?  Let’s think about this double-shot of trouble for a moment:

• I want to invest my personal money, my own life’s blood in California
• Or else I’m a CEO and now my responsibilities to my shareholders have never been under greater scrutiny
• Thankfully, they have postponed a bizarre carbon trading program until the economy gets better
• Ho hum. So now I won’t have to worry about these costs until later, right?

 Just a minute, who is getting fooled here? I’m supposed to be happy to delay paying these incredible expenses, to take it in the pants just a little further down the road? Instead, I think I’ll take the road of least resistance and get outta here! Texas, here I come! But even our usually stalwart and reliable friends at the Howard Jarvis organization seem to have lost their way and now ready to grab on to this bad bottle of bender. For a more sober and (hic!) sedate discussion, let us join the Wall Street Journal for an editorial regarding just AB32 already in progress (5 April 2010):

 

Another California Dream

A La La Land climate law ignores economic reality.

California originates many ideas that roll across the country, for better or, lately, for worse. Now it has a global-warming law with no real name, just this: AB32. Last month, the California Air Resource Board (CARB) proclaimed in a report that AB32 would grow 10,000 jobs. This was widely cheered as good news. That’s true only if you also repeal basic market economics and the state’s current business indicators.

AB32 creates a statewide cap-and-trade program and imposes numerous command-and-control mandates that CARB calls “complementary measures” on businesses, such as low-carbon fuel standards and a goal of achieving 33% energy from renewable sources by 2020. Companies say compliance costs will force them to cut jobs and raise prices.

To meet renewable energy goals, the Southern California Public Power Authority has warned of a 30% rate hike. L.A.’s Department of Water and Power has told businesses to expect a 21% hike this year, though the city council recently nixed a three-month 5.7% rate increase. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa inveighed to the L.A. Times that the city council must raise rates because “the state is breathing down our necks . . . where we could be looking at fines of $300 million [in 2012] and $600 million on top of that.” CARB’s report pays lip service to these early red flags and claims the law will neither hurt taxpayers nor the economy. Of course not.

Their reasoning? Forcing businesses to comply with the complementary measures will make businesses more energy efficient, and this in turn will save businesses money on emissions allowances under cap and trade. CARB is essentially saying that forcing businesses to comply with one set of regulations will reduce the costs of having to comply with other, more onerous regulations. The good news is, you’re not dead.

CARB’s report concludes that if the “complementary measures” aren’t carried out, household income per capita will fall by 0.6% (with residential electric and gas prices increasing by 13% and 49%, respectively). But successful implementation would increase income by 0.1%.

A study by the Charles River Associates, performed at CARB’s invitation, reached the opposite conclusion. The Charles River analysts say the complementary measures would reduce income by 0.9% or $414 per year. Using a variety of scenarios, Charles River calculated the program would cost between $28 billion and $97 billion over the next decade.

Though the two studies relied largely on the same assumptions and data, they differed in one major respect. The CARB report says market failures “have prevented the penetration of energy-efficient devices among some customers,” though remarkably they “assume that this efficiency potential exists without being specific as to what market failures are being corrected by the policy intervention.” That is, CARB assumes market failures exist, but it won’t specify them or how its policies will correct them.

This assumption that businesses are behaving irrationally when they fail to invest in energy-efficient technologies undergirds their conclusion that forcing businesses to adopt green technologies will reduce costs.

But if these technologies were really going to save businesses money, why would they be so reluctant to adopt them? The Economic Impacts Subcommittee of the Economic and Allocation Advisory Committee that was appointed by CARB Chairman Mary Nichols and charged with reviewing the report concludes that “many of the technologies that would be adopted under AB32 are either yet to be developed or currently prohibitively expensive.” So how does CARB manage to make cost predictions about technologies that don’t even exist?  With a lot of uncertainty.

The Economics Impact Subcommittee notes that the report is full of “uncertainties relating to the supply costs of alternative fuels and the costs of energy-efficient improvements” and “behavioral responses to energy price changes” as well as “assumptions about ‘technology cost curves.'” Is there anything in the CARB report that isn’t uncertain?

Perhaps most uncertain of all is the projected 10,000 new green jobs, which presumably will be spurred by increased demand for renewable energy and green technology. But while CARB indicates the state will lose jobs in mining, utilities, construction, manufacturing, trade and transportation due to cost increases, it underestimates these job losses by failing to take into account businesses leaving for other states or countries.

The Economics Impact Subcommittee notes “there is reason to believe [the economic impacts of leakage] might be quite substantial” since “many of the measures and sectors from which large [greenhouse gas] reductions are drawn in the study are also the ones most vulnerable to leakage and/or reshuffling.” These job losses are more than likely to eclipse the paltry 10,000 new green jobs the report forecasts.

While almost all of AB32’s benefits are speculative and uncertain, its costs are hitting businesses and residents now. This is one more blow to jobs and growth that California doesn’t need.

Oooohhhhhhh. I’ve had too much. I said I wanted it sober and sedate, but the socialists have hammered us and drunk us under the table again. For the love of God, please send your hangover remedies to me below.

Joseph F. Shaughnessy
Communications Director
Water For Fighting PAC
http://www.waterforfighting.org
jfshaughnessy@comcast.net
Phone:  408-461-1211

Be sure to read other WFF PAC articles at: https://waterforfightingpac.wordpress.com/

Our Ship of Failed State

Is California Too Big To Fail?

Dear Friends, 

The State of California is too big to fail.  

Do these words cause concern? They very well should. The State of California is in a financial crisis and about to become a burden….Your burden. The elected leadership in California would just assume pass on our bills to all of you, whether you live in California or not. The current administration in Washington believes they have a strong constituency here and must bail us out with your money. How does that thought grab you? 

Most of you know that trends beginning in California quickly find their way across the nation. And we’re not speaking just about pop music, videos, and movies.  We’re speaking about political trends, both good and ill, that have become part of our culture.  The New Left and its counterculture began here before flourishing and spreading across the nation. On the other hand, the Golden State vision of Pat Brown, Reaganism, and the legal legacy of Proposition 13 brought some of the California Dream to all Americans. 

Liberty thinking Americans, whether in California or not, can help choose the next new trend. And you can help California in a way more honorable than bailing us out with your children’s money. Do this by supporting an effort meant to similarly reset the financial and political parameters brought about by Proposition 13. It is called the Water For Fighting (WFF) California Ballot Initiative.  Whether you are a Californian or live elsewhere and just want California to stay out of your pocket, here is what you must do: 

• Visit our website
• Download, circulate, and sign our ballot proposal
• Join the California Tea Party Posse
• Share knowledge of this ballot proposal with both your friends and enemies

We have started a fire that is spreading through the fields and valleys of California. We want people from all the states to come take a turn and squeeze the bellows stoking this flame. Save us and save yourselves by making this letter viral. Praying for our success is highly encouraged. 

Signed, 

Joseph F. Shaughnessy
Communications Director
Water For Fighting PAC
jfshaughnessy@comcast.net
http://www.WaterForFighting.org
Be sure to read other WFF PAC articles at: https://waterforfightingpac.wordpress.com/

Whither California as the Central Valley Withers?

This article appears in the Malcolm Media periodical Vegetables West. a leading agricultural publication in their May, 2010 issue.

All of the Central Valley is wondering just when-the-hell they might get some city folk to come to their side in this despicable man-made dustbowl they have endured for so many months.  I’m pleased to tell you that some of the crazed environmentalists that helped create and push our Central Valley brethren into this situation are about to foster millions of allies for you in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

I’m with the California Watershed Posse and I’m here to help. We have been around for about 15 years and engaged with organizations such as the Sierra Club, Bureau of Reclamation, and the California Coastal  

Desiccated Central Valley Orchard

Commission in disputes regarding air, water, habitat for humanity, marine ecosystems, energy resources and securing other exclusive unalienable Rights for Californians. Most recently, the Restore Hetch Hetchy organization and their Progressive allies have decided that the San Francisco Bay area no longer needs that reservoir which supplies the drinking water for 2.5 million water user accounts. Instead, they believe that we should compete downstream on the Tuolumne River for water rights that already belong to Modesto and Turlock. Every couple of years they rattle sabers and threaten to put the demolition of the O’Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy up for vote in San Francisco. As part of an earlier court agreement with San Francisco, they’ve even kept elected representatives from that city and county muzzled and “neutral,” unable to comment and otherwise act in their own best interests in this regard, while your state and federal taxes paid for their independent studies for destruction of that incredible project.

 This is one such year they are threatening a ballot initiative and we have determined to call their bluff by authoring an initiative of our own. While we’re at it, we also want to fix what ails you. Our organization determined that the causes we fight for can no longer be addressed effectively on a regional basis. On the San Francisco Peninsula, the latest insult is the California Coastal Commission denying all new and replacement wells in its jurisdiction.  Farmers, ranchers, arborists, and residential homeowners are all included. The same battles that we fight in our area are similarly fought by others throughout the state. Consider our brothers and sisters in the Klamath Basin who have suffered at the hands of their government for years. You know your own troubles. And so it goes statewide. 

For this reason, we bring to California the availability of a plebiscite state ballot initiative with input from across the nation that could be described as Proposition 13 on steroids. We want California to re-exert her 10th Amendment Rights and tell the Feds to go to hell!   

• No more revolving dustbowls approved with the stroke of some bureaucrat’s pen and thus destroying  a whole region
• No confusion which species has legal standing regarding protection by our Constitution and Founding Documents
• Recognition that man is not an invasive species

 This is the strong medicine for California; the Water For Fighting (WFF) California Ballot Initiative is just 191 words:  

 

(a) The State of California shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of the People’s exclusive unalienable Right to Life; or abridging the freedom of the People’s exclusive unalienable Right to Life, Production, Use and Consumption of air, CO2, water, habitat for humanity, and energy generating natural resources.

(b) The State of California shall not levy any taxes, fees, assessments or fines on the Production, Use or Consumption by the People of air, CO2, water, habitat for humanity, and energy generating natural resources.

(c) The State of California, upon approval by the electorate, shall repeal the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA),  the 1976 California Coastal Act  (Prop. 20), California Endangered Species Act (CESA) and the 2006 US California Global Warming Act (AB32), and expunge all references and all citations from the repealed laws found within the California Public Resource Code and Health and Safety Code.

(d) The People of California shall have the exclusive unalienable Right to nullify ALL Federal powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the State of California respectively, or to the People.

The laws and acts repealed above are currently used to bludgeon us until we succumb and either short sell or abandon our properties, destroying our communities and culture in the process. We say enough. Here is what you must do:  

• Go to our website and sign our virtual petition
• Tell your friends throughout the nation about this petition and initiative so they might effect change here and also save themselves the fate of California
• Inform your Congressman you want his or her endorsement of WFF
• Tell the Governor and your State Assemblyman you want the WFF plebiscite initiative placed on this November’s ballot to be voted on by the People of California

Signed,  

Joseph F. Shaughnessy
Communications Director
Water For Fighting PAC
http://waterforfighting.org
jfshaughnessy@comcast.net 
Phone:  408-461-1211

Be sure to read other WFF PAC articles at: https://waterforfightingpac.wordpress.com/