private business

In case you missed it, The Federalist ran an article I authored last week, “Oklahoma Republicans Are Helping Green Energy Cronies Scam Taxpayers Out Of Billions“. Check it out. I know both the Federalist and I would love that – but so will you. You may not know exactly how much of your hard-earned dollars are being GIVEN to PRIVATE companies in Oklahoma – but then, maybe you do and you’re just glad that Governor Stitt and his hand-picked Commerce Department staff is making sure that your kids have somewhere to work in Oklahoma so they can stay here after graduating college.

But wait. Is that really a reason for Republicans who love to use the expression ‘free market’ in their campaign literature, to GIFT private companies tax dollars.

Last Friday (2.7.25), in a special ROPE Report podcast at 1pm, Oklahoma Representative Jay Steagall was with me to talk about the ‘free market’ and Oklahoma tax incentives. Below is a clip in which Rep. Steagall and I make sure that everyone watching understands the concept of FREE MARKET ECONOMICS. What is that exactly? Watch below and find out.

So, is it appropriate for the legislature to appropriate your tax dollars, give it to another business which has the ability to make dollars on their own in the free market and then tell you that they’re doing it to create jobs? NO NO NO NO NO. I think you might get the idea.

In fact, last week, I wrote another article – this time for just the website – titled, “Gov. Stitt’s Commerce Department Gives Multiple MILLIONS Of Taxpayer Dollars To Paycom And Love’s Through Quality Jobs Incentives“. I think this should be required reading for EVERY TAXPAYER IN OKLAHOMA – and not just because I wrote it – because every taxpayer should know that their taxdollars are going to prop up private companies that can pay for their own cost of doing business.

We get our property taken from us and sold at auction if we don’t pay our property taxes. If we don’t pay our income taxes, the government seizes our bank accounts, fines us, or throws us in jail until we do.

And yet, MULTI-BILLION dollar privately held companies can use our hard-earned dollars to make more money whether we like it or not.

And here’s more about the Canoo debacle that you might not know.

Wow! How do you like THEM apples? Not only did Canoo soak Oklahoma tax payers for tax dollars as incentives to help them start a business that WAS NEVER GOING TO GET OFF THE GROUND, employees that more than likely didn’t even live in Oklahoma and were hired just in time to get state and local (Oklahoma City) incentives, got paid Oklahoma unemployment. I’m imagining that Canoo never funded their portion of their employees unemployment, but I don’t know for a fact.

Rep. Steagall has a bill to reduce Income Tax this year on a trajectory to complete removal. Governor Stitt has also said that he wants to remove Income Tax. Yet here’s the headline screaming from an article in the Oklahoma Voice last week, “Oklahoma legislative leaders hesitant to cut income tax“. WHAT? WHAT? Our ‘legislative leaders’ are Republican. Whatever happened to the Republican concept of smaller government and minimal taxation as tenets of the Republican platform? What about the other tenet of the platform – FREE ENTERPRISE!??

Please, contact your Representative AND Senator. Tell them you expect them to lower the state Income Tax with a plan in place to phase it out – THIS SESSION. And you might mention that one of the things they could do to afford it, was to QUIT GIVING BILLIONAIRES AND PRIVATE GREEN ENERGY COMPANIES our tax dollars – FOR A START!

So, before I was an education activist – and now a liberty activist – I was a biologist.

I actually have a BS (yes, I’m full of that! LOLOL) in Biology and a Master’s in Biology, both. In fact, I had intended to go on to get a Doctorate and teach, but once I found out that – in my experience – college professors were a bunch of big jerks I decided that wasn’t for me. Instead, I taught college as a TA and then after graduation, high school, middle school, my own kids and homeschool COOP kids.

Thus, I’ve been able to be fairly knowledgeable about issues we’ve covered that include science topics, like the Climate Change scam and all its universe of associated garbage.

Recently, I found out that Oklahoma had the second largest carbon capture facility in the world and the largest in the United States. I also found, as I asked around, that no one in Osage County (where the facility is located) seemed to know anything about it. This forced me – and our new writer Shane Smith – to do some research on carbon capture policy and what we found is that there really isn’t any policy other than no policy for green businesses, which doesn’t protect Oklahoma citizens at all. If you haven’t read our blog on the topic, you really should.

Last Friday, NeeAnn Clinton of Enid, in Garfield County, was on our podcast to tell us about a lawsuit residents have had to file against their Metropolitan Planning Commission for not upholding zoning laws in the case of a proposed 5000 acre solar facility just north of the city.

Though we kept trying to talk about solar, I kept inserting information about carbon capture because there were so many overlapping issues – mainly the lack of regulation.

At one point in the conversation I brought up a bit of biology…have a listen.

The slides embedded in the video came from the NOAA fisheries website. Go figure. I had learned about phytoplankton and blue-green algae when I was a student in college. So what? Now we don’t know this anymore? We’ve dumbed down our students so far in biology that not only do they NOT know the Carbon Cycle, but they don’t know what green plants/organisms do at all?

The schematic below shows specifically how oceanic environments SEQUESTER CO2 all by themselves without any help from carbon capture facilities.

In addition, just think of this one thing. What does the second largest carbon capture facility in the world run on? Electricity. Where does electricity come from? In Oklahoma, coal-fired electrical plants. So. Make sense of that. You can’t. It’s stupid.

This writer says, in an article actually titled, “The Great Carbon Capture Scam“,

Running a carbon capture system is incredibly energy-intensive, essentially requiring building a new power plant to run the system. This obviously creates another new source of air and carbon pollution since the U.S. no longer builds nuclear plants and even when it did never built them that small. This extra energy use undermines the whole goal of capturing carbon in the first place. Indeed, while the U.S. emits roughly 5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, removing 1 billion tons of that through direct air capture would require nearly the entire electricity output of the nation, according to research published in Biophysical Economics and Sustainability.

In fact, the carbon capture scam is SO BAD that Rex Weyler of GREENPEACE FOR PETE SAKES, though he believes that Climate Change is a thing, and big oil is the devil, he does believe this:

The swindle appears simple: Pretend to help solve a problem, while making the problem worse, socialize the costs and liabilities, and privatize the profits. Clever.

Weyler’s article is really very good – lots of great information on all the failed CO2 capture attempts through today – but people won’t like it because it points to big oil as the generator of the scheme for regeneration of spent oil fields and our Governor won’t like it because it basically echoes what Michael says in the clip above – it’s all about the Benjamins. Period.

Oklahoma shouldn’t perpetuate scams on the back of their citizens and taxpayers, so you’d better let your legislator know you won’t put up with giving these private companies carte blanche to wreck your back yard and kill you with a CO2 pipe break and you’d better do it NOW!

ROPE Report

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Oklahoma Taxpayers Get Soaked By Canoo – And Other Taxpayer-Financed Violations Of The Free Market

How To Know Carbon Capture Is a Scam