American Thinker | by John Griffing | Dec. 8, 2009
Global warming as a science is defunct. Evidence of scientific dishonesty abounds, and the recent e-mail revelations may be the last nail in the coffin. When all is said and done, temperatures are falling.
But as a tool for watermelon Marxists — green on the outside and red on the inside — climate change orthodoxy represents an opportunity to achieve age-old dreams of communist wealth redistribution. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Cass Sunstein, Obama’s new regulatory czar and perhaps the most powerful bureaucrat in America:
It is even possible that desirable redistribution is more likely to occur through climate change policy than otherwise, or to be accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid.
He added:
We agree that if the United States does spend a great deal on emissions reductions as part of an international agreement, and if the agreement does give particular help to disadvantaged people, considerations of distributive justice support its action, even if better redistributive mechanisms are imaginable.
Furthermore, Sunstein thinks that “[i]f we care about social welfare, we should approve of a situation in which a wealthy nation is willing to engage in a degree of self-sacrifice when the world benefits more than that nation loses.”
Sunstein is not alone. Sacked environmental czar Van Jones talks of “eco-apartheid.” To a like-minded audience, Van Jones exclaimed, “Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth! No justice on stolen land…we owe them a debt.”
President Obama is presumably on board, having pledged to “bankrupt” the coal industry, among other telling remarks:
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
President Obama is also on record as favoring Supreme Court intervention to “spread the wealth”:
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted. …
There are several things wrong with this statement, but the most chilling expression of President Obama’s anti-American philosophy lies in his willingness to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. …” Somehow, President Obama thinks he is exempt from the oath of office he took to “protect and defend the Constitution.” Within such a paradigm, anything is permissible, including the complete destruction of American economic strength as part of an abstract notion of redistributive justice.
President Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade bill would reduce U.S. GDP by $9 trillion at a time of severe unemployment. Where is the indignation? Where are the calls for his impeachment?
The U.N. Climate Change Conference wants to go as far as orchestrating a “planned recession” in order to begin the process. Cass Sunstein agrees.
But who needs these people when the President of the United States is willing to destroy the American dream by his own hand? President Obama has pledged to sign the Copenhagen Treaty, the biggest transfer of American wealth and sovereignty in U.S. history.
Few have bothered to read the agreement, which like so many other damaging agreements is excessively verbose. It calls for climate reparations to third-world countries — what the treaty calls “adaptation debt.” This isn’t optional. Clause 33 on page 39 of the agreement says that “by 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least $67 billion] or [in the range of $70 billion to $140 billion per year].” And unlike previous climate agreements, Copenhagen empowers a new U.N. council to compel rich nations to comply with this theft of resources. The treaty states:
The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:
(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate. [Emphasis added.]
World government will be a reality if this agreement is ratified. Notice also the use of the words “financial mechanism.” The Copenhagen agreement, for the first time in the history of international legal precedent, proposes giving the U.N. authority to levy a global tax on rich nations to pay for “adaptation debt.” Page 135 of the agreement provides for “[a global] levy of 2 per cent on international financial market [monetary] transactions to Annex I Parties.” Annex I countries are the rich ones.
What is astonishing about this “climate” treaty is that so little of it actually addresses climate. Emissions pledges remain mere pledges. The real focus of the treaty is the transfer of wealth. The words “climate debt” are used throughout the agreement, giving pseudo-credibility to the premise of wealth redistribution. But just what is “climate debt”? The essence of the concept is that rich countries raped the earth by emitting carbon and simultaneously deprived poor countries of economic opportunity. It would be funny if it weren’t actually the position of the Copenhagen Conference.
When all is said and done, what happens if we succeed in destroying American wealth and creating a world government to coerce the shift? Wouldn’t world peace be a good thing? But the peace of submission is not a peace worth having, and the perceived economic benefits will be brief, owing to global economic dependence on American consumers.
Once America is gone, it will be gone forever. Nations will benefit most from the continuing existence of a strong America. Killing the golden goose will not bring balance to the universe. Plundering American wealth will provide only a temporary shot in the arm for poor nations — and then the drug will wear off, ushering in a new dark age on a global scale.
Right now, President Obama is the most powerful person in the most powerful country on earth. Obama may not have noticed, but we already have world government, and America is king.
Just like with the man who sells his soul for power, the Devil never delivers as promised. He’s the Devil. And paradoxically, for the world to destroy America, it needs America’s wealth and resources.
Whatever President Obama has been promised will evaporate the moment America loses the privilege of the last word. President Obama will be committing treason by signing this treaty, and he must be held accountable. The American Revolution was fought over this very issue: taxation without representation.
. . . more
“We agree that if the United States does spend a great deal on emissions reductions as part of an international agreement, and if the agreement does give particular help to disadvantaged people, considerations of distributive justice support its action, even if better redistributive mechanisms are imaginable.” Cass Sunstein
Marxists believe that when a sprinter loses a race it is the fault of the winner; the faster runner, but not due to any fault of the slower runner. Marxists must construct a dysfunctional race where the fastest runner is tripped up and the slower runner wins; and by Orwellian Newspeak this is called “equality” and “social justice.” Marxism means irrational and unnatural unequal rules with equal outcomes (never mind the far greater unequal status of the Marxist ruling class) instead of rational and natural equal rules with unequal outcomes. In economic terms Marxists believe that the non-disabled poor (the proletariat class) is economically disadvantaged because of the economic success of others (the middle class). In truth, people are poor either due to a personal lack of productivity or because they are trapped under the productivity-destroying despotic rule of Marxists (or Islamists). Karl Marx hated the ordinary hard-working, happiness-seeking middle class individual; and his economic system (Marxism) was designed not to bring up the poor, but to bring down the successful while elevating the elite class of Marxist rulers.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
[http://www.anu.edu.au]
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property”…meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell, 1984
“The usual understanding of “equality,” when applied to people, entails equality of rights and sometimes equality of opportunity. But what is meant in all these (Socialist) cases is the equalization of external conditions which do not touch the individuality of man. In socialist ideology, however, the understanding of equality is akin to that used in mathematics, i.e., this is in fact identity, the abolition of differences in behavior as well as in the inner world of the individuals constituting society. From this point of view, a puzzling and at first sight contradictory property of socialist doctrines becomes apparent. They proclaim the greatest possible equality, the destruction of hierarchy in society and at the same time a strict regimentation of all of life, which would be impossible without absolute control and an all-powerful bureaucracy which would engender an incomparably greater inequality.” Igor Shafarevich
[http://www.robertlstephens.com]
“The imperative of economic equality also generates a striking opposition between “social justice” and its liberal rival. The equality of the latter, we’ve noted, is the equality of all individuals in the eyes of the law — the protection of the political rights of each man, irrespective of “class.” However, this political equality, also noted, spawns the difference in “class” between Smith and Jones. All this echoes Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek’s observation that if “we treat them equally [politically], the result must be inequality in their actual [i.e., economic] position.” The irresistable conclusion is that “the only way to place them in an equal [economic] position would be to treat them differently [politically]” — precisely the conclusion that the advocates of “social justice” themselves have always reached…. Hayek had continued, “Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different, but in conflict with each other… The goal of complete economic equality logically enjoins the means of complete state control, yet this means has never practically achieved that end. Yes, Smith and Jones, once “socialized,” are equally poor and equally oppressed, but now above them looms an oligarchy of not-to-be-equalized equalizers. The inescapable rise of this “new class” — privileged economically as well as politically, never quite ready to “wither away” — forever destroys the possibility of a “classless” society. Here the lesson of socialism teaches what should have been learned from the lesson of pre-liberal despotism — that state coercion is a means to no end but its own. Far from expanding equality from the political to the economic realm, the pursuit of “social justice” serves only to contract it within both. There will never be any kind of equality — or real justice — as long as a socialist elite stands behind the trigger while the rest of us kneel before the barrel.” Barry Loberfeld
[http://www.discoverthenetworks.org]