There’s an old saying that if you lie down with dogs be prepared to get up with fleas. Apparently if you lie down with environmentalists you should be prepared to get raided by the Feds.

That’s the lesson to be learned from the experience of Gibson Guitars, whose Tennessee-based operations were overrun by armed agents from the Fish and Wildlife Service this week. The agents were looking for wood used in the manufacturing of the company’s legendary six strings. They believe some of it comes from sources not considered environmentally correct.

Gibson’s CEO protested the raid loudly this week, and who can blame him? For years Gibson has worked hand in glove with far left environmental organizations in an effort to make sure their wood comes from “approved” sources. Gibson is a partner in Greenpeace’s “Music Wood” campaign. It was one of the first instrument makers to procure wood that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), another green group. Gibson’s president sat on the board of Rainforest Alliance.

What has all the consorting with environmentalists gotten Gibson? Government jackboots kicking down doors and bad-mouthing from environmentalists.

And is anyone surprised to find George Soros involved in this saga?

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I recently took a two-day trip down to Palm Springs to attend an event called “Uncloaking the Kochs” hosted by Common Cause. Accompanied by my dear friend, former assembly candidate Alvaro Day, I traveled as an independent investigative journalist, and not in any official capacity on behalf of Big Government or Breitbart.com (though I was pleasantly surprised to run into a familiar friend of mine on rollerblades jovially inviting everyone to Applebee’s).

Among Common Cause’s, well, common causes, are campaign finance reform, net neutrality, outlawing the filibuster, promoting cap and trade, and in this particular case, herding a mass of protesters outside a nearby hotel to yell at Charles and David Koch for being conservative and rich.

Unfortunately several “haves” have missed the memo that you’re not to be both rich and conservative at the same time, and that bankrolling your pet causes is an extra no-no if you’re conservative—thus exempting left-wing billionaire philanthropists George Soros (from whom Common Cause has received $2 million over the past eight years) Peter Lewis, John Doerr, Julian Robertson, Nicolas Berggruen, and many others from being yelled at too. (more…)

A series of videos have been racking up viewings on YouTube, thanks in part to public school teachers and university professors making them a part of curriculum, and indoctrinating our children with left-wing anti-capitalist propaganda.

Annie Leonard, an activist with Greenpeace, created “The Story of Stuff,” a web video disparaging America’s consumer society and attacking capitalism (or, as she calls it, “the current economic model.”)  It was funded by the mysterious Tides Foundation – the group that also funded ACORN before it became a liability to the left and rotted away.

There has been a successful effort to debunk Leonard’s indoctrination effort, which can be found at Glenn Beck’s site.

But Leonard’s own words show that this Story of Stuff project is simply a means to an end.  The end, of course, is to transform America’s economy away from capitalism and towards something that can only be described as socialism.

“I go around the country and I show the ‘Story of Stuff’ film and for those of you that have seen it you know it lays out a pretty broad, pretty systemic critique of the economy – of the current economic model,” Leonard said in a May 2010 speech in South Carolina. (emphasis added)

The problem is, Leonard, and many like her, don’t have the courage to simply say they want to ditch capitalism.  Instead, they use poll-tested phrases like “an economy that works for everyone.” Or, she objects to “trashing each other on the equity front,” and apparently believes “stuff” is distributed unevenly among human beings.  “We’re not sharing the stuff we use well enough,” she says.

What Annie Leonard – and many other with socialist beliefs – lack is the cajones to say what they would do about it.  Clearly their remedy is more government intervention in our lives.  More regulation, more taxes, more nudges to get us to act as they would see fit.

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In 1983, Ronald Reagan infuriated liberals worldwide by accurately labeling the Soviet Union as the evil empire. George W. Bush received a similar reaction following his “axis of evil” speech in which he used the politically incorrect term, evil, to describe the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Although most Americans found it refreshing to hear a politician speak so directly and honestly, the media and the rest of the liberal elites went berserk. Imagine that. It was not that the Kim Jong-il regime kept the people of North Korea in a state of poverty and near starvation that got liberals in a tizzy. Rather, it was that Bush had the audacity to use the word evil to describe it.

The nearly two years of corruption, plunder, and economic destruction—combined with the mockery of the American people and vilification of the private sector—has crystallized for many a realization of a home grown threat more destructive and imminently dangerous to America than any of the substantial external threats we faced over the last century. It’s a threat that has been building quietly for many years but has come to the fore since President Obama was elected. Have you wondered how the radical left managed to capture the reins of power and govern in direct opposition to the will of two thirds of the population?  The answer is the New Axis of Evil. It is the power base of the left (and the Democratic Party).

No doubt, the list can be debated and expanded, but here, at least is a starting point—the dirty dozen if you will, with a few prime examples included.

1. Old Media (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, NY Times)
2. Engorged Public Unions (SEIU, NEA, AFSCME)
3. Global Socialist Elites (Robert McChesney, Andy Stern, George Soros)
4. Liberal “Think” Tanks (Media Matters, Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress)
5. America Hating Academics (Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman )
6. Professional Victims Groups (La Raza, CAIR, NAACP, NOW)
7. Community Disorganizers & Activists (ACORN, Code Pink, ACLU)
8. Environmental Redistributionists (Greenpeace, EDF)
9. Social Justice Preachers (Jeremiah Wright, Reverend Jim Wallis)
10. Progressive Hollywood Elites (Oliver Stone, Sean Penn)
11. Bloated Federal Bureaucracy (DOE, DOA, TSA)
12. Public/Private Colluders (AARP, Government Motors, Goldman Sachs)

It almost goes without saying (but here I’ll say it anyway)—there are many good people scattered among these institutions.

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To the credit of the New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post — reliable outlets for promoting global warming alarmism, protecting those who craft it and marginalizing those who point out its weaknesses and excesses — they all ran stories in the past 48 hours addressing the documents somehow obtained from the computers of a UK university serving as the warming movement and industry’s Mother Ship. My great surprise is even greater because these outlets have demonstrated a pattern of only giving ink to embarrassing controversies after a week or so, once it appears that damage control is needed and the alarmists have gotten their story straight.

I documented this pattern in a book published one year ago this month, subtly titled “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” The title says it all, including all that surely seems to have been affirmed by the documents posted, by “anonymous” on a Russian server and otherwise covering his tracks.

Since this affirms, not “reveals”, the scandal that so many have been explaining is the global warming industry, it also raises the issue of how can each of these media outlets still miss the plot? Well, they are doing so in a fashion so uniform, and in the face of such outrageous exposition of the scandal that is unfolding, that I conclude it is nonetheless yet another exercise in damage-control.

The emails, let alone the data still being combed over by the pointy-heads, plainly affirm everything I wrote, in detail, about the scams being run by the booming industry of Big Academia and Big Science suckling at the teat of the “global warming” panic they are also fostering.

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I have had the pleasure of Greenpeace taking my trash every Sunday night after I put it out — the contents winding up in staged “stories” in outlets like Deutsche Welle, the Independent, El Pais and Old Red herself, the Guardian, whose reporters never even called before cobbling unrelated offal together to spin their yarn. Not content to address the issues when old fashioned (if lame) intimidation efforts were handy, the green machine have also labored over breathless press releases announcing with whom they’ve seen me dine, and plastered the walls and leafleted Kyoto negotiating conferences with my mug as a “climate criminal”. As I detailed in Red Hot Lies, that’s child’s play compared with the death threats and attempts on scientists’ lives when they dare push back against The New Red that is Big Green.

So naturally, when I see an email touting a “tribunal”, in Spanish though it may have been, I look closer. Courtesy of a translating software and a little cleanup work, here’s today’s missive from Friends of the Earth International. When reading it, recall how the International Criminal Court was hailed by academics and even our then-president as an environmental treaty. Recall how we are poised to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty which despite its name purports to regulate land-based sources such as transport and electricity generation, just like Kyoto except that it has its own court, one that has already shown its willingness to go rogue and set its jurisdiction ad hoc.

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Congress’s official investigation into the financial crisis, the so-called Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, will convene its first meeting today.  Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked chairman of the commission Phil Angelides, has deep ties to radical left-wing politics, including the Van Jones-connected Apollo Alliance, which he chairs, and ACORN, which is an Apollo member and endorsed and actively supported his gubernatorial campaign.  His selection proves the commission will be a politicized attempt to advance a left-wing agenda through a revisionist history of the financial crisis.  It also assures that ACORN and other community organizers who forced banks to make reckless loans in the name of affordable housing will be let off the hook.

Angelides’s San Francisco-based Apollo Alliance describes itself as a “coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution.”  Based on the radical past of some of its key figures, the use of the word revolution is appropriate.  Apollo was conceived of, and presently serves, as a clearing house to align the otherwise disparate interests of environmental groups, labor unions, social justice organizations, and rent-seeking corporations.

Disgraced former White House green jobs czar Van Jones was an Apollo board member, involved with the group from its founding, and was its model for a new type of leader.  Apollo board member John Podesta, who was chairman of Obama’s transition team, already brought Van Jones back to the Center for American Progress, Podesta’s influential think tank where Jones had previously been a senior fellow.  These are Angelides’s friends and ideological peers. (more…)