BREAKING WIND
Obama, Pickens Forming
A Green Fascist Alliance?
by Marcia Merry Baker
Senator Barack Obama and big-bucks Republican oilman T. Boone Pickens, met Aug. 17 in Reno, Nevada, on energy policy, to confer on an insane "renewables" program calling for a massive U.S. shift to wind-powered electricity, and public/private transmission line Boone-doggles.
Lyndon LaRouche warned that, in doing this, Obama has bought into a cross-party program reminiscent of the 1920s Hermann Göring "back-to-nature" greenie retreats of the Nazis. Pages of World War II U.S. intelligence documents give evidence of the Nazi festivities held with radical 'left' environmentalists. The Pickens Plan discussed with Obama involves austerity, public-private funding swindles, science-fraud, and other elements amounting to fascism in the name of "clean, green energy" and jobs.
On Aug. 15, T. "Blowhard" Pickens also met on wind power with putative Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, whom he says he supports for President, except on McCain's energy policy.
Obama is not unaware that Pickens was a $2 million moneybags for the "Swift Boat" slanders against 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry. Obama's energy stance is not inconsistent with the trend in his other policies, but by throwing in with Pickens, he is forming a fascist alliance, not a bipartisan collaboration.
When Obama was asked about why he met with the funder of the dirty Swift Boat attack on Kerry, he said only that Pickens "has a longer track record than that.... He is a legendary entrepreneur." Thus, Obama not only glossed over Pickens' hit-man role for Rove-Republican sleaze, but also the oilman's long career in service to London financial interests, to deregulate and destructure American industry and energy (see Pickens' profile, below).
In fact, the entire Democratic Party leadership is "breaking wind" over Pickens. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) personally bought shares in one of Pickens' key Texas energy companies in May 2007, at the time of the initial public offering of CLNE (Clean Energy Fuels Corporation, formerly known as Pickens Fuel). George Soros, the megaspeculator and megafunder of subversive election operations, is also a CLNE shareholder.
The Obama/Pickens meeting came on the eve of the Aug. 18-19 National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, promoted as a kind of Democratic counter to the imputed "dig and drill" energy policy of Congressional Republicans. It was co-sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and the University of Nevada.
Panel participants included officials from the AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the governors of Arizona, Colorado, and Utah; former President Bill Clinton; former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup, Inc.; and other political figures and experts.
'Rebuild America' with Green Fascism
Whatever the Democratic alternative viewpoint at the Summit might have been (at best, nuclear; at worst, misinformed green-ism), the occasion became a platform for outright evil. The opening windy keynote was given by Pickens, and the closing one, by New York Mayor Michael "Benito" Bloomberg, both advocates, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), for Mussolini corporatist-style infrastructure schemes, which the latter two call their "Building America's Future" campaign.
Pickens carried on about America's vast Western "Wind Corridor" energy potential, and Bloomberg gave a crazed rant for windmills on the New York City skyline and bridges. But their core subtext was that austerity and privatization must be imposed on the United States, without fail. This is also the hallmark of the "pro-infrastructure" ruse of Felix Rohatyn, the fascist banker cracking the whip in the Democratic Party.
Pickens released a statement Aug. 17, after his meeting with Obama, in which he used language lifted almost verbatim from the "Building America's Future" kickoff in January 2008, announced by Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger, which proclaimed support for public/private infrastructure, and "non-partisan" intervention into the election process.
Pickens said, "I enjoyed the opportunity to meet Senator Obama and discuss an issue that is America's top priority, which is ending our dependence on foreign oil.... I assured Obama that this is a non-partisan campaign.... We discussed my plan and the opportunities to create jobs, grow our economy and revitalize America's heartland by using private capital.... He was very engaged."
In a pre-Energy Summit conference call with Pickens, Senator Reid asked, "Who would have thought last year that me and T. Boone Pickens would be in the same [swift?] boat pulling the same oar, the same way."
Pickens Plan—Gorey Business
T. Boone Pickens has been promoting his multi-million dollar wind-power campaign since early Summer, through national TV ads, trips to Congress, and other high-profile interventions. He is calling for 20% of the U.S. electricity base to come from wind by 2018, with thousands of wind turbines installed along a north-south "wind corridor" across the Texas High Plains, running power through new privately owned transmission lines, subsidized by state and Federal funding (see www.pickensplan.com).
He asserts that the shift to wind power will free up natural gas, now used for electricity, to instead go for vehicular transportation, and thus, cut down on imports from "unfriendly foreign nations." One major absurdity of this fascistic scheme is that every megawatt of "wind power" has to be backed up by new or in-place electricity generation (fossil or nuclear), because wind is simply unreliable (see "Windmills for Suckers: Pickens' Genocidal Plan," EIR Aug. 22, 2008)
In West Texas, Pickens has begun his multibillion-dollar project for the biggest, baddest wind farm ever. The state is already tops in the amount of wind electricity generated—twice that of California.
Pickens intends to build his own private electric transmission line to the Dallas/Houston markets. This would use a private corridor, starting at Roberts County in the Panhandle, going eastward through 12 counties. Pickens has created this by cadging from the state legislature, powers of eminent domain and sweeping tax breaks and subsidies, based on his scheme to sell Ogallala Aquifer water to Dallas, piped along his corridor.
On July 17, the Texas Public Utility Commission approved $4.93 billion in aid for such transmission lines to route West Texas wind power to eastern markets.
Senator Reid plans to organize the same public/private benefits for wind and other renewables at the Federal level. His bill S. 2076, would designate National Renewable Energy Zones. Pickens also demands changes to the EPAct (Energy Policy Act) of 2005, to further interstate private control and rights of eminent domain for "preferred access rights to transmission capacity," as he told the Senate in testimony June 17 (Hearing by the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, To Examine the Challenges and Regional Solutions to Developing Transmission for Renewable Electricity Resources). In July, he again testified, this time, to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)
Waiting in line to get in on the Texas Pickens corridor, and other big-deal transmission projects for public-private profiteering (PPP), is none other than Babcock & Brown, the Australia-based outfit, in the same circles of modern-day Mussolini PPP operations as MacQuarie/Cintra, that specialize in privatized tollroads. A longtime Babcock & Brown executive, David Crane, is the top economics adviser to Governor Schwarzenegger for so-called green infrastructure.
California has a ballot initiative promoting the Mussolini green fascism. Proposition 10, titled the "Renewable Energy and Clean Alternative Fuel Act," would spend $5 billion in state bond money—$10 billion, including the interest owed—to promote natural gas as the clean energy fuel for buses and other vehicles. The direct backer and would-be beneficiary of Prop 10 is the Pickens company CLNE, the largest natural gas depot operator in the country, with Pelosi and Soros along for the ride. Of course, all the promise of investment is so much hot air, given the blowout of the California budget, not to mention the world financial system, but these maneuvers make the intent behind the schemes clear.
It's just the usual Gorey business. As Al Gore himself said on July 20, on Meet the Press, "I think it's really significant that one of the most successful oil industry figures is now investing a billion dollars of his own money in windmills.... Just this past week, we saw Texas approve massive new transmission lines to use wind power as a substitute for the old [sic] ways of producing electricity."
Bloomberg Aloft
It was Mayor "Mussolini" Bloomberg, however, who set records for high-flying in his wind power oration, which concluded the Las Vegas Clean Energy Summit. He called for private/government partnerships for windmills on his city's bridges and rooftops, and at offshore sites 15-25 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean (where less visible). He also called for solar power, and for tidal power projects on the Hudson and East Rivers.
On the same day, his City Hall formally requested that private companies submit wind power project ideas by Sept. 19. They are soliciting all kinds of designs, from small, egg-beater-type windmills for inner-city rooftops, to gigantic three-blade monsters. He said that 10% of the City's electricity can come from wind.
You could visualize Bloomberg's own helicopter-beanie whirling atop his head—and perhaps one on his buttocks, to take maximum advantage of wind power—as he outlined his policy, using stock terminology from his "Building America's Future" rant about how U.S. power infrastructure is decaying, and public/private ventures are the only recourse. Bloomberg stressed that he wants New York City agencies to reduce their power consumption 30% by 2017.
By the next day, New York newspapers and metro engineers were having a field day panning the mayor. A photo of the Statue of Liberty, with her torch replaced by a wind turbine, was featured in the New York Times, headlined, "Experts Are Doubtful About Bloomberg's Windmill Plan; Predictions of Huge Costs for Minuscule Amounts of Energy." They neglected to mention the superprofits outfits like Pickens' will get from taxpayer subsidies, while more and more people freeze in the dark.
