The Green Movement - Eco Terror or Socialist Plot?

Out of all the nooks and crannies that socialists have infiltrated in our society, the environmental movement has proven the most productive. It has everything they need. Armies of passionate followers that can be easily swayed by tainted studies laced with falsified data as well as the urgency of crisis they need to force entire nations headlong into self-destructive legislation and international pacts under the guise of saving the planet Neither of which are acts that are designed to save the planet. It wasn’t always that way. Many environmental groups began life to protect endangered species, prevent deforestation and to insure our air and water were free of dangerous chemicals and poisons. It was only in the last 30 years that the “green” movement added political activism into their repertoire.

The groups that were formed around the environmental movement are now funded in large part by the same people and organizations that fund socialist efforts as well as the extreme left of the Democrat party and other progressive movements. One of the more notable “contributors’ is our old friend, George Soros. It seems that wherever there is a movement to defeat Capitalism in general and American Capitalism in particular, you always seem to find George and his check book. Another familiar donor to anti-American / anti-Capitalist environmental organizations is the Tides Foundation.

Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the recipients. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, "launder" the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a "paper trail." Such contributions are called "donor-advised," or donor-directed, funds.

In 1996 the Tides Foundation created, with a $9 million seed grant, a separate but closely related entity called the Tides Center, also headed by Drummond Pike. The Tides Center functions as a legal firewall insulating the Tides Foundation from potential lawsuits filed by people whose livelihoods or well-being may be harmed by Foundation-funded projects. (Such as farmers or loggers who are put out of business by Tides-backed environmentalist groups.) In theory the Foundation's activities are restricted to fundraising and grant-making, while the Center focuses on managing projects and organizations; in practice, however, both entities do essentially the same thing.

The Tides Center's Board Chairman is Wade Rathke. Wade is also a member of the Tides Foundation Board. If you recall, Wade Rathke was a protégé of the late George Wiley, founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and a devout follower of Cloward and Piven. Maya Wiley, daughter of George Wiley, currently sits on the Tides Center's Board of Directors. In addition to his work with the Tides center, Rathke also serves as President of the New Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is also the founder and chief organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Isn’t funny how the same names keep popping up when the discussion is radical socialism?

One particularly notable donor to the Tides entities is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Senator John Kerry. From 1994 to 2004, the Heinz Endowments, which Mrs. Kerry heads, gave the Tides Foundation and Center approximately $8.1 million in grants. Until February 2001, Mrs. Kerry also served as a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which also gave Tides numerous six-figure grants. I case you haven’t guessed; George Soros also infuses money into the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation funnels money into hundreds of projects for the radical left including several dozen for the stated purpose of environmental sustainability. All of this draws Senator Kerry’s involvement with environmental legislation into serious question. With that kind of money changing hands, there must be a trade off. Has Kerry been promised a “soft landing” when the eco-activists finish tearing our Constitution and economy to shreds? Will these deals leave the Heinz-Kerry fortune one of the fortunate “untouchables” in a post-America, Socialist elite club with George Soros, Maurice Strong and Al Gore?

Getting into the groups themselves, Greenpeace must top the list. Founded in 1970 as a loose assortment of Canadian anti-nuclear agitators, American expatriates, and underground journalists calling themselves the "Don't Make a Wave Committee", Greenpeace, is today, the most influential group of the environmental Left. Its stated mission is to "use non-violent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems, and force solutions for a green and peaceful future." After a schism in the late 1970s, the various organizations originally comprising Greenpeace have today united into 41 affiliates and two main branches, Greenpeace USA and the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International.

One of the founders of Greenpeace was Irving Stowe (1915-1974) who was also on the executive board of Canada’s New Democratic Party. The New Democratic Party are Democratic Socialists that advocate many radical ideals including the abolition of the Canadian Senate. While they have never attained power over the Canadian Federal Government, they have had sufficient success in several provinces to be able to exert considerable political pressure.

Another of Greenpeace’s founders, Patrick Moore, left Greenpeace in 1986 after what he saw was a shift to a radical political ideology. He said in a statement that “Greenpeace today is motivated by politics rather than science and that none of his "fellow directors had any formal science education". In the 2007 film “The Great Global Warming Swindle, Moore commented: "See, I don't even like to call it the environmental movement anymore, because really it is a political activist movement, and they have become hugely influential at a global level.”

A prime example of socialists that discovered the environmental movement as a vehicle for their agenda is the group “Socialist Action”. Socialist Action is a nation-wide group of revolutionary socialists. In their own words: “We fight for a society organized to satisfy human needs, rather than corporate greed. We seek to revitalize the anti-war, labor, student and other social movements, and to bring activists together from different backgrounds into a revolutionary party that can successfully challenge the wealthy elite. As socialists we seek to understand the theory of Marxism, but as an activist group, we also seek to put those ideas into practice. Join us in the struggle to make a better world!”

Christine Frank of Socialist Action says: “We need to build a powerful and uncompromising environmental movement led by working people in alliance with other oppressed groups in society. In addition, we must infuse this new movement with eco-socialist principles that go beyond the maintenance of capitalism and its suicidal and genocidal policies and advance toward a zero-waste, democratically planned socialist economy that is green and sustainable and puts planetary and human needs before profits.”

Elmar Altvater is another Marxist that discovered the environmental movement could be used to further socialist policies. Mr. Altvater gained fame as one of Germany's most important Marxist philosophers, who strongly influenced the political and economic theory of the 1968 generation of radicals and is a renowned critic of "political economy" and author of numerous writings on his desire for globalization and his disgust of the free market. He suggests that there is only one “realistic alternative to oil imperialism; a shift from dependence on renewable energy sources, on the radiation energy released by the sun (and its derivatives such as photovoltaic, water, wave and biotic energy etc.), or on volcanic and geothermal energy”. He argues that “A society based on renewable instead of fossil energy sources must develop adequate technologies and above all social forms beyond capitalism.”

The Bullitt Foundation was established in 1952 by Dorothy S. Bullitt, who also created the King Broadcasting Company in Seattle. Denis Hayes, who was the national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970, is currently the Foundation's President. Hayes is a strong supporter of leftist political candidates, groups, and causes.The Bullitt Foundation, whose stated mission is "to protect, restore, and maintain the natural physical environment of the Pacific Northwest for present and future generations", directs its grants almost exclusively to radical environmental organizations whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner explains, is "not clean air and clean water, rather . . . the demolition of technological/industrial civilization." This philosophy is certainly aimed at using the environmental movement to further the group’s advocacy of destroying capitalist industry in favor of the establishment of socialism in the western nations.

Take your pick. When you research environmental groups, 90% are considered political activists and obtain funding from the same “progressive” sources. All have left-wing policies and many believe that only socialism will give society the tools it needs to stave off environmental disaster. The fact is that the United States has meaningful tools in place to prevent the irresponsible release in pollutants coupled with crippling fines and criminal prosecution for violators. In a socialist society, these safeguards would disappear as productivity drops, industries are lost and revenues to fund enforcement and remediation dwindle.

You must remember that wherever environmentalists have won the day, economic disaster followed closely. The logging industry in the Pacific Northwest was decimated in the 1990’s by the environmental campaign to preserve the spotted owl. Even though logging was banned in vast areas of the Pacific Northwest because this was purported to be the spotted owls “critical habitat”, in February 2008, a federal judge reinforced a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision to designate 8,600,000 acres in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico as critical habitat for the owl as well. It just so happens that is prime cattle grazing area so is this just a move to cripple yet another U.S. industry to drive us deeper into financial crisis a la Cloward-Pivens?

Last summer, half a million acres of fertile California farmland in the San Joaquin Valley have turned to dust after the water used for irrigation was reduced by 90% to save the endangered “Delta Smelt”. The smelt was not being further endangered by falling water levels, but because they were being drawn into the pumps. All technical suggestions to alleviate that from happening were dismissed in favor of denying water to the farms. These are the same farms that provide 15% of all the produce consumed in the United States. These examples, as with so-called “global warming”, display that only one conclusion can be reached and that is, the “real inconvenient truth” is that this is not about the environment at all but about progressive socialism, political power and who will ultimately wield much of the power in the “New World Order".

Paul

Old Politicians Never Die, They Just Smell Like it.

Do you remember the good old days when ex-Presidents would build their libraries, make a few stops on a speaking tour and write their memoirs? Now it seems that not only ex-President’s like Jimmy Carter have no idea when to keep their mouths shut but even those that ran for President and lost just have to put their two cents in as well.

Actually, it has nothing to do with the current date because there are large gaps between the Presidents that left office determined to allow the next President to shape policy and the course of the nation as they see fit and then there are those that must emanate an irritating buzz from the sidelines just to remain in the fringe of the spotlight. In fact, it seems that the proclivity of pestilence seems to be a product of ideology with liberals displaying a general inability to afford any measure of courtesy to future administrations; the same courtesy that they would have demanded for themselves had they actually stayed in office.

Former Presidents understand the searing responsibility of holding the highest office in the land even though none of them knew the depth of that responsibility when they began their race to become President. As such, there has always been a certain amount of sympathy that is afforded the next President because of the demands associated with that job. Even George Washington commented to John Addams that he felt sorry for him as he took the oath of office as the nation’s second President. While some serving President’s have invited criticism by blaming every failure of their administration on the previous one, it is a very rare occasion when a former President responds in kind but it still happens.

What is different as of the late twentieth and continuing into the early twenty first century is that for the first time, the losers are twice as vocal as the former Presidents. Most Americans know that Truman ascended to the Presidency after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945 but how many know that Truman was FDR’s third Vice President. The first, John Garner, resigned at the beginning of FDR’s second term and the second, Henry Wallace, was too liberal even for Roosevelt. In fact, Wallace believed that the Russian Revolution was on par with the American Revolution and both represented equal and important parts of man’s march to freedom. Truman was selected as the Vice Presidential nominee for the 1944 election as Roosevelt’s health wavered and Wallace was believed to be too radical to chance his elevation to President should Roosevelt die in office.

How many know that Truman had no Vice President in his first term and that the Vice President in his second term, Alben Barkley, was not his running mate in the general election? Most know very little about former Vice Presidents that did not attain the Presidency and even less about those that lost elections for President or Vice President because there was still some measure of decorum back then. Now, the losers take the stage, still striving for the fame they feel they were cheated from attaining. Al Gore, unlike his predecessors, refused to call for unity behind the new President and instead, fanned the flames of the left’s outright hatred of George Bush after the election of 2000.

Gore used the notoriety he had gained from the attention surrounding the 2000 election re-count to push his radical (and wrong) agenda to foster awareness of the so-called threat of global warming. This thrust him into the limelight once again and like any other attention starved brat, only served to reinforce his ill behavior. As an irritant to Bush administration climate policy, Gore sought to inculcate the radical environmental movement and eventually, the youth of the western world with a religious fervor about coming disasters that will befall the planet because of global warming. Even now, as the IPCC and the CRU have been caught red-handed manipulating and even suppressing climate data to support their hokey theories; Gore persists, spewing out these outrageous claims while his so-called “irrefutable” evidence crumbles bit by corrupt bit. You know, you almost feel bad for him. He couldn’t handle losing the 2000 election without a tantrum and now, in the absence of real proof, he’s acting like the proverbial madman on the corner shouting “The end is near!” as people cross the street to avoid eye contact with him.

Of course Gore could have avoided this embarrassment if he weren’t so vain and simply accepted his defeat with dignity. In fact, he could probably have lived out the balance of his life as a respected political analyst much as Henry Kissinger has. Even Richard Nixon managed to redeem himself and in the later years of his life, had been in high demand by news programs that were analyzing the, then current, Clinton administration. Nixon became a serious voice in the political discussion again because he displayed the confidence of a serious man and not the dour attitude of a sore loser.

By now, we are all used to the nonsensical drivel that emanates from the mouth of former President, James Carter. Most of what Carter says only serves to remind us why his Presidency marked the low tide stain for the modern Democratic Party and more importantly, why his bid for reelection was rejected by the American people. The naiveté of his recent statements are perfectly consistent with the simplicity that he exhibited during his Presidency. Unlike Gore, Carter isn’t lashing out over sour grapes, he just doesn’t know any better. Truthfully, I had always held that I liked Jimmy Carter personally. I think he is one of the few Presidents that followed his heart. Hid did what he believed was right; however, his idea of right did not serve the nation well and as much as he is an honorable man, he did not possess the necessary qualities that a modern nation demands of a President.

Now we have John Kerry. Kerry is only one of a long list of Massachusetts politicians that is quite popular in the liberal rat’s nest of Massachusetts but has failed miserably on a national level. Kerry comes from a wealthy family (Forbes) and married into a wealthier one (Heinz). Like so many born to wealth, the political scene was alluring to Kerry as he drooled at the thought of testing out all of the Socialist theories he had learned in Yale. After all, the lives of the general population are only pawns for wealthy socialists to play with and if they are wrong and their policies ruin the nation, they still have their fortune to escape with. It is all an exercise in theory for them.

Kerry had served in the United States Navy during Viet Nam. Assigned to a swift boat in what veteran’s call “the brown water navy”, Kerry was reportedly injured in combat several times and was decorated for bravery. Kerry had requested early release in January of 1970, for the purpose of running for Congress that fall and was discharged in March of that year. Rather than running for Congress, Kerry decided to join the anti-war movement after his release from the Navy and had made a number of high profile appearances as a decorated war veteran opposed to the war. Of course Kerry had to go just a bit too far and while speaking out against the war ended up denigrating the President, the nation and even his fellow sailors in the process. This would prove to be a critical mistake later in life.

Kerry did run for Congress in 1972 but that bid would fail as Kerry's younger brother Cameron and campaign field director Thomas J. Vallely were found in the basement of the opposition’s campaign headquarters. Charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit grand larceny", the two fenced with the courts for a year with the case being eventually being dismissed a year later but not before Kerry lost the election.

After completing law school and embarking on a brief career in law, Kerry was eventually elected to the position of lieutenant governor of Massachusetts under Michael Dukakis in 1982 and then to the United States Senate in 1985. In 2004, Kerry decided to run for President. During his campaign, a group of swift boat veterans protested his candidacy and brought his service record and military honors under severe criticism citing inconsistencies in the recorded events. Statements Kerry made during earlier “anti-war” interviews resurfaced in which he admitted that he tried to avoid combat by asking for duty with the swift boats which up till then had been used only for coastal patrols. Of course his voting record as one of the most liberal progressives in Congress was too much for main street America and only served to seal his fate. His 2004 bid for the Presidency with running mate John Edwards, ended in a close but failing race with Bush beating Kerry by only 2% of the popular vote at a time when Bush was also wildly unpopular.

Now that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons and Obama is facing harsh criticisms from other world leaders for vacillating in the face of Iran’s refusal to obey international law, John Kerry is stepping to the foreground for his fifteen minutes of fame again. He is demanding more negotiations with Iran even though negotiations have only proven to allow Iran the time continue the development of nuclear arms without fear of reprisal. In fact, Kerry tried to arrange a visit to Tehran to speak with Iranian officials as if to say that he can do alone, what the current administration in its entirety could not. Apparently, Iran can spot an elitist publicity hound faster than the people of Massachusetts can and denied access to Mr. Kerry.

John Kerry should accept that outside of the “People’s Republic of Massachusetts”, no one really cares what he thinks. For that matter, we really don’t care what any of the political figures that Massachusetts has cursed the nation with has to say about much of anything. If things continue as they are, we are going to see a lot more liberals stamping their feet in the press and on the news shows after the 2010 election send many of them home so I guess we should thank Gore and Kerry for preparing us. It only goes to show that old politicians never die, they just smell like it.

Paul