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Banned
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Originally Posted by dc_dux
From my perspective, dk, you seem to place the blame for the current ills of the country on socialist regulators and liberal activitist judges and host, you appear to blame it all on a secret cabal of the wealthy that control and manipulate most politicians.
You guys are taking about the same country, aren't you?
host...for every peace action scorecard and report on defense industry pacs, someone else can find conservative scorecards and reports on dem-friendly pacs. ...but I do agree we need comprehensive campaign financing and lobbying reform.
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No....not "secret"...they have a website....and on it, they feature nuts like this one:
Quote:
http://www.policycounsel.org/46101/48601.html
Fred L. Smith Jr.
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute
....Thus, there is now religious, conservative support for the policies of Al Gore. The Chattering Class by chattering long and loudly have begun to gain mainstream Republican support and adherents throughout the conservative ranks. Environmentalism poses a real and present danger to America’s future.
These policies would do great harm to humanity, for the only known way to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases is to drastically reduce fossil fuel consumption. Many nations have ratified Kyoto but the only nations that are meeting their reduction targets are those whose economies have collapsed. Kyoto-type policies would inflate the already high cost of gasoline, natural gas, and home heating oil in this country, placing even more hardship on poor households. Exporting such policies to China, India, and other developing countries, where emissions are growing most rapidly, would doom those nations to perpetual energy poverty.
This push to use our vulnerabilities to enlist evangelicals and other conservatives in a global environmental crusade will continue. Yet, the expanded use of concentrated energy has been (literally) the engine of growth for the past century. Energy lights, cools and warms our homes; allows us the freedom of mobility to move when conditions change, to unite our geographically dispersed familes; to lighten the burdens of the workplace. Former missionary and climate scientist John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, commenting on this statement, noted: “Access to inexpensive, efficient energy would enhance the lives of the Africans while at the same time enhance the environment.”
Yet, these evangelicals would “help” the poor by closing the doorway out of poverty. As conservatives, we must recognize that the path to a cleaner environment is to increase global prosperity, to gain the wealth and knowledge that allows better Creation Care, better stewardship.
The eco-evangelicals mean well but they are confused. They fail to understand both the biblical and the economic basis of sound policy. Let me now review these confusions:
The Eco-Pantheism Confusion:
Modern intellectuals heavily influence our environmental thinking. Having abandoned God, many seem eager to worship Gaia – the goddess of earth. Few join the Church of Wicca or dance around trees at midnight but they seem to have substituted for the Christian rule – The Earth is the Lords – a confused view that The Earth is the Lord!
This is foolish. If any credence is given to the concept of Gaia (our planet evolving toward some form of self-consciousness), then man is clearly its “soul” and its “brain cells.’ To reject this special responsibility is to abandon our unique ability to care for God’s creation.
The Christian tradition is clear: mankind was given both dominion and stewardship over the earth.
The dominion concept is clear (all quotations taken from the New Living Translation of the Bible):
Genesis 1:27-28 “So God created people in his own image…God blessed them and told them, multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it. Be masters over the fish and the birds and all the animals.”
And also:
Psalm 8:5-6 " For you made us only a little lower than God, and you crowned us with glory and honor. You put us in charge of everything you made."
But, equally clear, is the fact that we are made responsible for its care:
Genesis 2:15 "And the Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it."
But, Christianity denies deity to nature. The Bible warms against this explicitly:
Roman's 1:25 "Instead of believing what they knew was the truth about God, they deliberately chose to believe lies. So they worshiped the things God made but not the Creator himself.”
Again, conservatives recognize that the biblical statement that The earth is the Lord’s is very different from the environmental view that The Earth is the Lord.
Our challenge, as in the case of welfare, is to translate our moral obligations into meaningful effective acts. We can care – but we must also act wisely to ensure that our moral concerns have moral consequences. Simply passing a law will not suffice. The Bible is not “green” in the sense that our eco-evangelical friends would pretend.
The Eco-Socialist Error:
The old progressives favored economic and technological growth since they were confident the future belonged to them. Theirs was the heresy of arrogance – the Tower of Babel hubris – that would create Heaven on Earth. Our new “green” progressives hate progress – modernity in general – and fear that change means loss of power. Their policies alone can prevent Hell on earth. Thus, their endorsement of the Malthusian I=PAT equation.
The Greens not only reject the private property focus of the Bible, but also reject the Constitution with its focus on private property. The checks and balances of the Constitution, we’re told, make it too difficult for the EPA to achieve its noble missions. But this is exactly wrong. Nothing is more suitable to integrating environmental values, to reducing conflict, to advancing both liberty and environmental quality than our constitution of liberty.
The Constitution lays out that environment of liberty. One scholar defines it thusly:
“The environment for liberty is characterized b a social order where the individual is secure in his person and his property against invasion by other persons, including agents of the State, by an economic order of well-defined opportunities for a person to contract for goods and services and freely to transfer property to others; by a civic order providing a myriad of opportunities for voluntary cooperation on projects for social good; by a political order in which the power of the State is strictly limited, and where common law rules on trespass and tort govern, instead of bureaucratic regulations of productive activity, govern the problems caused by accidental injury to others.” Dennis: p. 64
Al Gore recently spoke to a conservative gathering in Washington. Gore spoke eloquently on his concerns for our planet, his belief that a “wrenching transformation of America is critical,” is deeply worried about the fragility of our natural environment. Yet, Gore seems totally unaware of the fragility of the environment for liberty and the harm his policies would create for those institutions.
Yet, as all conservatives know well, the environment for liberty is always fragile and made far more so by a government seeing its duty to protect us from everything. George Washington warned us that political power like fire was a dangerous servant. And the EPA has become a very dangerous “servant” indeed – seeking to manage our life styles, our backyards, our very bodies.
Eco-socialism is no more likely to advance environmental goals than socialism did economic goals. The road to serfdom can be paved with green as well as red bricks but it still leads to the same authoritarian end state.
But then what is the Conservative Alternative?
Conservative environmental policies should be based on the same principles that have done so much to advance economic progress. The elements can be found in those two great documents of civilization: the Bible and the Constitution. No text is better to kick off this discussion that the parable of the Good Shepherd (Gospel According to Saint John, Chapter 10, verses 11-14, King James Version):
I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.
But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.
The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd….
I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.
But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.
The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd….
The Christian tradition makes it clear that man is to meet his moral duties to care for God’s creation prudently. Our duty is not simply to “care” but to devise institutions that will empower and incentivize each of us to fulfill our moral stewardship obligations wisely. It is not enough to care, we must devise effective policies to ensure that our responsibility for this planet is effective.
A story from a friend and wife of one of my oldest friends who teaches in Northern Virginia made this clear to me. She was administering an achievement test to a young Johnny and asked, “Now, Johnny, why does oil float on water?” And without a pause, young Johnny responded: “Well, ma’am, I guess it’s because people don’t care anymore!”
The Johnny story says much about the greenwashing of America’s youth in our schools but also poses our challenge.
And, as the Good Shepherd parable shows, private property is the most important environmental policy in the world. We must find ways of clarifying that only the extension of the institutions of liberty to the environmental area is compatible with meeting our moral duties to ‘care.”
Most environmental problems reflect problems with resources that have been left unattended, watching over by “hirelings”, parts of the commons of the world, and, too often, suffering the tragedies of such collectively controlled resources.
The environmental establishment plays on our fears: desert tortoises are endangered in Nevada, human chromosome damage is found in citizens around Superfund sites, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio catches fire, tropical rainforests are disappearing, and (of course) global warming threatens the future of mankind. That such claims may be false, over-stated or causally linked to non-human causes is rarely considered. Bad things are happening – man must be the cause. And, as moral individuals, we do feel a responsibility to concern ourselves with these factors.
But, we remain too unaware of the history of private conservation, the real trends that saw the reduction of the horrendous pollution of waters and air of air in the much poorer cities of a century or so ago. And that is tragic, for as Roderick Nash noted: "To defend a tradition, you first have to identify it." Conservatives have done a very bad job of educating ourselves and our fellow Americans on the history of man’s relationship with nature. We’ve allowed the left to create a caricature where error was intent, where progress has been belittled, where creative experiments have been ignored.
After all, America depleted – for a while – our wildlife and our forests but we transformed that natural heritage into wealth and knowledge. We used our greater abilities to lighten our footprint on this planet, to become better stewards, and Bambi now nibbles the gardens around Washington and forests are expanding throughout America. Would we deny the Brazils and Indonesias of the world the freedom to take this same path toward a better world?
Unfortunately, there’s little literature – too little literature – describing how Americans far before the EPA or the DOI were even dreamed of were already reducing waste, protecting wildlife, buying and protecting national amenities. One scholar, Pierre Desroches, has documented the rapid reduction in emissions as entrepreneurs looked at the liquids, solids and gases flowing out of their plants in the 19th century and found ways to transform these waste streams into wealth. Industrial ecology was discovered by the market long before it was thought of by the environmentalists. The view that only the government cares about efficiency, about waste reduction, is a modern secular heresy
And technology did much to lighten our footprint on this earth. Consider the massive reduction in pollution as the automobile replaced the horse. After all, the horse relied on renewable energy, was “organic,” and bio-degradable. But, a horse produced 40 pounds a day of solid wastes, a gallon or so of liquid, and required many acres of farm land devoted to providing it grain. Moreover, although an abandoned car can be an eyesore, it is far less objectionable to the dead horse in the front yard.
Man is not the cancer of planet earth. We are not mere “stomachs” – consumers of scarce resources – rather we have hands and a brain and a soul and – given the institutions of liberty that America’s Constitution has granted us – we can and do make the world a better place. The creative linkage of man’s genius and energies via the institutions of liberty has steadily lightened man’s footprint on this planet.
There is much yet to do but we should not be unaware that we’ve done much that is right. Consider some of the proudest examples of private conservation -- Jefferson's Natural Bridge, Mount Vernon, British anglers successfully suing upstream polluters, big-game ranches in Texas where dozens of species endangered in their home nations now flourish (America has been a refuge for nature, not just people). People care about the environment but conservatives must demand that the institutions support that concern, empower the individual to protect his or her part of this Garden Earth. That institutional development has been blocked by years of neglect but where it has been allowed it has demonstrated the viability of private property based environmentalism. The challenge is to an imaginative policy of ecological privatization - extending the institutions of liberty to those resources left behind – integrating the economic and ecological worlds.
Civilization as the Slow Evolution of Conflict Resolving Institutions
Mankind’s long prehistory as hunter-gatherers – living in communal, egalitarian tribes suppressing all individual experimentation because of fear that freedom would be used irresponsibly. The gradual development of the institutions of liberty which allowed freedom to expand but ensured that this freedom would be used responsibly - the family, private property, fences, customs of honesty and tolerance (but not affirmation) of error, contracts, trade, the market, and the array of complex arrangements that make modernity possible – all are steps along this path. The result is that mankind today in America especially – is far more capable of acting as a creative and responsible steward of this Planet.
Yet, the Greens disparage these institutions. They would have us return to the Dancing with Wolves lives of the primitives (aka indigenous peoples) of the world. Yet, as anthropologists gradually grow away from their romantic idealization of these often brutal societies, it is becoming increasingly evident that our world is far more sustainable than was theirs, our world is for better prepared to evaluate and respond creatively to environmental concerns.
Environmentalists seem horrified by mankind’s increased knowledge and power. To them, man only harms our planet. Yet, the authors of the famous bird guides, Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher, in a book Wild America, speaking of America noted:
..”never have I seen such wonders or met landlords so worthy of their land. They have had, and still have, the power to ravage it; and instead have made it a garden.” (quoted in Dennis, p. 59, mss; from their book p. 418, Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, 1955)
Americans spend vast energies, time and resources to better this planet, to make the world more a garden, an ark. Indeed, that point is sometimes realized even by critics of America such as John Kenneth Galbraith. He once noted that in America our homes and yards are beautiful, while our government parks and roads are a mess. From that observation, as a liberal, he drew naturally the conclusion, that we should raise taxes on our homes and yards, to fund our starved public sector. Conservatives would draw another conclusion: Is it possible to make more of this planet someone’s “backyard”, someone’s garden, someone’s pet?
Consider that the world needs two critical underground liquid resources – one is rare and costly to acquire, one falls freely from the sky; one historically has become ever more abundant, one has become increasingly scare. And, of course, I refer to oil and water. The difference is that oil – because of America’s unique provision allowing private ownership of subsurface mineral rights - allows private management of the oil resource. Water, everywhere, is controlled politically. Couldn’t we consider w hether the techniques used for oil management might not be extended to groundwater? (Almost all the world’s potable water resides in aquifers.)
The resources that are at risk today, the resources that are of concern in the environmental debate are those that lack the constitutional protections that allow caring individuals to own and protect them. The environmental problem is not that there is too much private property, but rather that there is too little.
Pets, wildlife? Offshore oil fields, offshore shrimping or fishing areas?
Indeed, as we become a wealthier people, we also come to realize that this is our planet and we should be better stewards. Since my childhood, I’ve noted a general decline in litter, especially given the massive expansion of material use and travel. A friend notes that mountain climbers now use less intrusive pitons and other climbing equipment. Even stone colored chalk needed to improve holds has become the preferred climbing product. And all this has happened because a free people with greater wealth and knowledge, motivated to be sure by peer pressure, have lightened their footprints on the earth. That cultural shift has happened by word of mouth – not restrictive rules.
Conclusion:
Conservatives must reject, not compromise with, the eco-pagan and eco-socialist biases proffered by the environmental establishment. We should be Green - -But we need not, indeed must not, become Pagans or Reds. Rather, we should begin now to devote the time, energy and resources needed to bring conservative principles to the fore of this emerging policy area. Our goal should not be to accept any watered-down, Al Gore lite policies, nor to give credence to the pantheistic language of the more extreme wings of modern environmentalism but rather to infuse environmental policy with the wisdom and moral concepts that structure our economy.
The rule of law, private property, enforceable agreements (contracts) creates an environment within which trust arises and it is that mix of legal and moral disciplines that has held our economic problems in check. And those same institutions can and should be extended to those resources – wildlife, groundwater, western lands and Alaska, offshore areas, space – the areas and resources which have for too long been left under the stewardship of the “hireling” rather than good [private] shepherds.
We can no longer stay on the sidelines while the left seduces our youth and our co-conservatives to their side. This will take time, resources and energy. We are not bereft of individuals and ideas, our intellectual ammunition stockpile is meager but not non-existent. Becky Norton Dunlop, CEI, Steve Hayward from PRI, David Reidenour at the NCPPR, Cal Beisner at Knox ? and Ken Chilton at Westminister, and a handful of others. Gary Palmer of the Alabama Policy Institute, CEI and Jane Shaw in Montana produced one book on environmental education – Facts not Fears – and CEI has a number of books (look at our web site) but the field is wide open and all of you and your groups should engage it also.
We’re late to this game – as we were late to the welfare reform fights, But our ideas and our ideals are correct. And we have some interesting rallying cries. To paraphrase that famous populist candidate, William Jenning Bryan, we reject both eco-paganism and eco-socialism. We will not crucify mankind on a cross of green!
Alternatively – Conservatives should espouse property rights approaches proudly. We realize we need be neither red nor pagan to be green!
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...and apparently they're building an army....for example, founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince is described as a right-wing christian. Prince is known to be a member of the CNP...
and the article by Chris Hedges, at the bottom of this post, opens with this paragraph:
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The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. <b>A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.</b>
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...and since everything reported carries equal weighting, when it's viewed from the "middle" of the road, the reporting of a former NY Times M.E. bureau chief is higher in stature than this, which turned out to be grossly inaccurate, authored and distributed by the entire conservative "media collective":
Quote:
http://benofmesopotamia.blogspot.com...ry-visits.html
Monday, December 18, 2006
<b>Schaudenfraude (Or John Kerry Visits Iraq)</b>
After praising Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, Senator John Kerry came to Iraq this weekend.
......<b>Finally, the next morning, Senator Kerry ate chow at the Dining Facility.</b> Normally when a Senator/Representative visits, he is joined by a contingent of soldiers/Marines/airmen from his home state. <b>Despite the fact that the MP unit responsible for Green Zone security is an Army Reserve unit from Massachusetts, not a single soldier went to sit with him.</b> (By contrast, Bill O'Reilly, host of that terrible shoutfest on Fox, had over 400 soldiers waiting in line to meet him on Saturday).........
Ben
Ben of Mesopotamia is a Harvard PhD and Presidential speechwriter called back to Active Duty for Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is currently serving as a U.S. Army Captain in Iraq. All opinions expressed herein are the author's alone, and do not express or reflect the opinion of the United States Armed Forces or the Bush administration.
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<B>The "Story" above, made the rounds, Malkin...LGF, Powerline Blog, and they were all wrong....it was "made up", untrue, complete with a misrepresented photo:</B>
<center><img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5027/1939/1600/989798/Kerry2.jpg" HEIGHT=300 WIDTH=375></center>
Quote:
http://www.alternet.org/story/46211/
America's Holy Warriors
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted January 4, 2007.
[Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."]
....During the past two years I traveled across the country to research and write the book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." I repeatedly listened to radical preachers attack as corrupt and godless most American institutions, from federal agencies that provide housing and social welfare to public schools and the media. But there were two institutions that never came under attack -- the military and law enforcement. While these preachers had no interest in communicating with local leaders of other faiths, or those in the community who did not subscribe to their call for a radical Christian state, they assiduously courted and flattered the military and police. They held special services and appreciation days for all four branches of the armed services and for various law enforcement agencies. They encouraged their young men and women to enlist or to join the police or state troopers. They sought out sympathetic military and police officials to attend church events where these officials were lauded and feted for their Christian probity and patriotism. They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as "satanic." All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society.
One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.
And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. <b>Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution.</b> These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.
"Contracting out security to groups like Blackwater undermines our constitutional democracy," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "Their actions may not be subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employees -- including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights and unlike police officers or the military they have no system of accountability whether within their organization or outside it. These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights."
The politicization of the military, the fostering of the belief that violence must be used to further a peculiar ideology rather than defend a democracy, was on display recently when Air Force and Army generals and colonels, filmed in uniform at the Pentagon, appeared in a promotional video distributed by the Christian Embassy, a radical Washington-based organization dedicated to building a "Christian America."
The video [Watch it HERE], first written about by Jeff Sharlet in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine and filmed shortly after 9/11, has led the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to raise a legal protest against the Christian Embassy’s proselytizing within the Department of Defense. The video was hastily pulled from the Christian Embassy website and was removed from YouTube a few days ago under threats of copyright enforcement.
Dan Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans affairs, says in the video that his weekly prayer sessions are "more important than doing the job." Maj. Gen. Jack Catton says that his being an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a "wonderful opportunity" to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. "My first priority is my faith," he says. "I think it’s a huge impact. ... You have many men and women who are seeking God’s counsel and wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secretary of defense."
Col. Ralph Benson, a Pentagon chaplain, says in the video: "Christian Embassy is a blessing to the Washington area, a blessing to our capital; it’s a blessing to our country. They are interceding on behalf of people all over the United States, talking to ambassadors, talking to people in the Congress, in the Senate, talking to people in the Pentagon, and being able to share the message of Jesus Christ in a very, very important time in our world is winning a worldwide war on terrorism. What more do we need than Christian people leading us and guiding us, so, they’re needed in this hour."
The group has burrowed deep inside the Pentagon. It hosts weekly Bible sessions with senior officers, by its own count some 40 generals, and weekly prayer breakfasts each Wednesday from 7 to 7:50 a.m. in the executive dining room as well as numerous outreach events to, in the words of the organization, "share and sharpen one another in their quest to bridge the gap between faith and work."
If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or a series of environmental disasters, these paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could swiftly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to businesses and right-wing interests that often help bankroll the Christian right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on street corners in Baghdad and New Orleans could appear on streets across the U.S. Such a presence could paralyze us with fear, leaving us unable to question or protest the closed system and secrecy of an emergent totalitarian state and unable to voice dissent.
"The Bush administration has already come close to painting our current wars as wars against Islam -- many in the Christian right apparently have this belief," Ratner said. "If these wars, bad enough as imperial wars, are fought as religious wars, we are facing a very dark age that could go on for a hundred years and that will be very bloody."
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Last edited by host; 01-05-2007 at 05:21 PM..
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