NOW WE MUST STOP CARA IN THE SENATE! (land grab)

NOW WE MUST STOP CARA IN THE SENATE!

Urgent Action Required - Senate Energy Vote Wednesday, May 25th.

Make your Calls, send those faxes and e-mails now, today, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

The big battle in the Senate has arrived.

***Liberal Lamar Alexander (R-TN) will try to amend his giant land grab bill S 964 into the Energy Bill now under consideration in the Senate. They will be considering options for the OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) oil exploration and Lamar wants a big chuck of that money.

Votes began this week in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the giant Energy Bill now working its way through Congress. The mark up could take most of next week. These may be the most important days of the year.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will face an attempt by Lamar Alexander to sneak his new CARA-LWCF bill (S 964) into the Energy Bill Wednesday, May 25th.

* Action to Take *

-----1. Call, fax and e-mail your two Senators to urge them to oppose S 964, the new CARA - LWCF Land Grab bill. This is especially important if one or both of them are on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The number for any Senator at the Capitol Switchboard is (202) 224-3121.
http://capwiz.com/landsense/dbq/officials/

-----2. You need to call, fax and e-mail members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee every day between now and Wednesday (not Saturday and Sunday) next Wednesday to keep Senators from adding CARA-LWCF (S 964) to the Energy Bill. The Energy Committee is listed below. They must be deluged with calls, faxes and e-mails.

-----3. This is an urgent call to action.   Call and e-mail your friends, neighbors and business associates to urge them call your Senators.

Background:

Liberal Lamar Alexander is back.

His Billion Dollar Boondoggle is back in another form.

S 964 was recently introduced by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), David Vitter (R-LA) and Tim Johnson (D-SD). It's a smaller version of the giant Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA).

This bill, entitled Americans Outdoors Act (S.964), would allocate over $2 billion in outer-continental shelf revenues from 2006-2011 (Guaranteed off-budget trust fund) to buy more federal land.

This would provide the new CARA - LWCF (Land and Water Conservation Fund) with $450 million over 6 years. An additional $350 million would be spent on wildlife restoration, $125 million for the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery program, and $450 million to help with the impact on coastal areas that produce oil and gas.

The House Appropriations Committee didn't provide funding in the fiscal '06 bill for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) that would allocate money between the federal, state and tribal governments for land acquisition. In FY '05, $255 million was allocated to the LWCF.

You need to ask your Senators to oppose any attempt to make the LWCF (Land and Water Conservation Fund) into a trust fund. It must go through the normal appropriations process every year. It must compete with other important priorities like health care, military needs and much more. Under S 964 only Social Security would have a higher standing. We call the new bill CARA-LWCF.

CARA - LWCF on the Senate side is a smaller version of CARA and sets a precedent for setting up a real trust fund for land acquisition. If it passes it appears it will get $450 million for six years. Added to the other amounts, this bill looks like more than $2 billion.   Lamar Alexander continues his billion dollar boondoggle.

Senator Alexander introduced his bill last year that would have eventually lead to the enactment of CARA, a $3 billion per year guaranteed off-budget land acquisition trust fund. The new CARA-LWCF is really just the camels nose under the tent. Once they get a trust fund, it will get bigger and bigger every year. It must be stopped now.

Massive guaranteed land acquisition is the death knell for rural America.

Liberal Lamar is grabbing two billion dollars now, and he will go for more later.
Stop this land-grabbing raid on the public treasury before it starts!!

The green extremists will not stop until they have grabbed your land!

They are setting aside over $450 million per year - guaranteed every year!!!!! And it is land acquisition and also administrative costs when land sales are closed, so it finances their operations as well as grabbing land.

It is a guaranteed, permanent, annual pile of cash for the greens. This will permanently finance the environmental movement with $450 million every year to finance their operations and seize property.

However, there is good news and more bad news: Congratulations to you who worked so hard to keep CARA-LWCF out of the Budget bill.

Earlier this year, Liberal Lamar spelled out exactly what his latest CARA scheme will do. "This money would be used by states, cities and communities to create neighborhood parks, greenways, and land trusts," says Alexander. "This would help build state parks and greenways and land trusts, closer to where people live, near their homes."

Got that?! Lamar's land grabs will be coming closer to where you live -- near your homes. His envisioned massive new parks and greenways will be comprised of your private property.

Liberal Lamar is using parks and land acquisition to build power in the Senate.

An old saying could be applied to him about the use of parks as political trading stock, "If the only tool he had was a hammer, everything thing he saw would begin to look like a nail."

With Alexander's focus on land acquisition and parks, all your property begins to look like a park.

It is a new kind of park, what we call an "ego political park," having less to do with resource values and more about pure political power and doing the work of the giant multi-national green industrial complex special interest groups that support him.

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