As described by Steven J. Milloy:

The mainstream media has been noticeably silent on EPA plans for the country … a slew of new rules and regulations to go into effect after November 7th that Obama has ordered be kept under wraps until after the election. What this Administration doesn’t want American families to know is precisely what they need to know.

 The US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Staff recently released a report on the upcoming EPA rules and regulations that, it said, will “eliminate American jobs, drive up the price of gas at the pump even more, impose construction bans on local communities, and essentially shut down American oil, natural gas, and coal production. They don’t want this economic pain to hit American families just before the election because it would cost President Obama votes.”

 The Senate report, A Look Ahead to EPA Regulations for 2013, looked at 13 of these new regulations, noting that they will hit American families, the poor, and those on fixed incomes especially hard, as Americans struggle more than ever in this economy and have already seen their energy costs skyrocket over the past four years.

 The entire report is a must read, but here are a few examples of what is being planned for us:

 New greenhouse gas regulations will no longer just affect coal plants, but will regulate churches, schools, restaurants, hospitals and farms, putting an enormous burden on Americans. “President Obama himself warned [these] would be worse than global warming cap-and-trade legislation,” said the Senate report. The new regulations will cost more than $300 to $400 billion a year and significantly raise the price of gas at the pump and energy in homes.

 Farms, for example, will be required to comply with costly permit mandates and have to pay a “cow tax” on each animal and an annual fee on greenhouse gases emitted. EPA estimates that over 37,000 farms and ranches will be subject to greenhouse gas permits, at an average cost of $23,000 per permit each year, affecting over 90% of the livestock production in the country. “The EPA will proceed to issue regulations, industry by industry, until virtually every aspect of the American economy is constrained by strict regulatory requirements and high energy prices.”

 New ozone rules will cost $90 billion a year by EPA estimates, while other studies have projected costs upwards of a trillion dollars and destroy 7.4 million jobs, the report found. Large numbers of companies, by EPA’s own projections, will be unable to meet the stringent restrictions and are expected to close.

 Natural gas fracturing regulations will severely impact energy production, resulting in new permits and well workovers costing $1.499 Billion to $1.615 Billion a year. At least “14 Federal agencies are working to regulate hydraulic fracturing at the federal level, so that they can limit and eventually stop the practice altogether,” the report revealed.

 Clean Water Act new guidelines would allow EPA to expand federal control over virtually every body of water in the country, no matter how small, the report described.

 Final stormwater regulations proposed by the EPA would become “the most expensive rule in EPA history,” according to the Senate. It would establish for the first time, standards for post-construction runoff, mandate cities to change existing buildings, stormwater sewers and streets, “and mandate the use of ‘green infrastructure’ techniques (like ‘green roofs,’ rain gardens, permeable pavement) to replace conventional stormwater management practices.”

 New Gas regulations called Tier III, would lower the sulfur content in gasoline to from 30 to 10 parts per million at a cost of up to $10 billion initially and $2.4 billion each year. That would add another 9 cents per gallon in manufacturing costs, cost that will be passed on to consumers at the pump.

 Farm Dust Regulations being proposed are so tightened, they would be below the dust created during normal farming operations and be impossible for rural American farms to meet.

 The report goes on in more detail about the planned regulatory onslaught. It also describes the war on coal, which includes the EPA obstructing 190 coal mining permits, jeopardizing 18,000 jobs, and trying to stop permits that have already been granted. It describes the war on oil and natural gas, such as EPA alleging water contamination from fracturing, even when it was unable to find supportive evidence and quietly withdrew the scares after the damage had been done to companies and had frightened homeowners.

 You can read the entire Senate report here.

 See also:

Electricity supply endangered by EPA regulations

BREAKING: Court tosses EPA Cross-state air pollution rule

EPA versus Arizona on regional haze issue

EPA war on coal threatens Tucson water supply

EPA fuel standards costly and ineffective

EPA, ethanol, and catch 22

EPA Admits CO2 Regulation Ineffective

How Many Haz-Mat Suits Do You Need to Change a Lightbulb?

Obama’s new campaign slogan has a history

Obama’s previous campaign was about “Hope & Change.” But it seems that mere “Hope” was not enough when competent action was required. The “Change” part doesn’t seem to be working either.

According to Investor’s Business Daily the change so far is:

• Median incomes: These have fallen 7.3% since Obama took office, which translates into an average of $4,000. Since the so-called recovery started, median incomes continued to fall, dropping $2,544, or 4.8%.

 • Long-term unemployed: More than three years into Obama’s recovery, 811,000 more still fall into this category than when the recession ended.

 • Poverty: The poverty rate climbed to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% in 2009, and economists think it may have hit 15.7% last year, highest since the 1960s.

 • Food stamps: There are 11.8 million more people on food stamps since Obama’s recovery started.

 • Disability: More than 1 million workers have been added to Social Security’s disability program in the last three years.

 • Gas prices: A gallon of gas cost $1.89 when Obama was sworn in. By June 2009, the price was $2.70. Today, it’s $3.84.

 • Misery Index: When Obama took office, the combination of unemployment and inflation stood at 7.83. Today it’s 9.71.

 • Union membership: Even unions are worse off under Obama, with membership dropping half a million between 2009 and 2011.

 • Debt: Everyone is far worse off if you just look at the national debt. It has climbed more than $5 trillion under Obama, crossing $16 trillion for the first time on Tuesday and driving the U.S. credit rating down.

So the Obama campaign has come up with a new slogan:

The slogan “Forward” has been used before, probably just a coincidence:

Is this the “Forward” you want?

See also:

The Collectivist Mind

Reclaiming Americanism and the Constitution

Personal Responsibility and Independence

Freedom, Morality, and Ignorance

President Obama said in a recent speech, “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” “You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.”

With those phrases Obama dismisses hard work and individual ideas. He trashes achievement. He says nothing is possible without government assistance. Maybe Obama is too used to crony capitalism in his quest to transform America. It must take a heavily subsidized village.

The speech may come to be seen as a defining moment into Obama’s mentality and his campaign.

Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Senate against Scott Brown parrots Obama, ” “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate.”

Who does she think pays the bulk of the taxes to pay for the roads and schools?

Thomas Sowell notes, “There was a time, within living memory, when the achievements of others were not only admired but were often taken as an inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting to achieve on the same scale.”

Sowell also writes, “People who succeed — whether in business or anywhere else — are often said to be ‘privileged,’ even if they started out poor and worked their way up the hard way….Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality.”

Charles Krauthammer writes, “the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom….Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.”

Krauthammer continues, “Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.”

In the collectivist mind, citizens are treated as orphan children who must be guided and cared for; and only government can do that properly. Only the elites in government, the anointed ones, are smart enough and caring enough to do that “for the children.”

Above all citizens must be taught proper thinking and action; they must be controlled so they can enjoy the resulting collectivist utopias such as Cuba, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union.

　”I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”  -Thomas Jefferson

Obama’s words show that he does not understand America and what it is to be an American.

The Cato Institute has a report that bears on the matter of political philosophy: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

See also:

Reclaiming Americanism and the Constitution

Personal Responsibility and Independence

Freedom, Morality, and Ignorance

Property Rights and Freedom

Beware of Sustainable Development