November 25, 2009

ACORNing the Climate Change Movement

By Mark J. Fitzgibbons

The climate change movement may have been caught in its first ACORN moment, with the publication of e-mails suggesting global warming data has been manipulated or suppressed.

The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit's (CRU) e-mail system was hacked, and it now appears that fraud as a political strategy may not be limited to ACORN's community organizing. Rest assured that as with ACORN, it won't be the political or big media establishments who capture the next big evidentiary breakthroughs in "Climategate."

Global warmists apparently don't find destroying evidence offensive to their "science." Similarly, ACORN doesn't seem fettered by ethics. Not even a week apart from the breaking news of Climategate, BigGovernment.com reported that the San Diego ACORN office was caught on film literally dumping documents even though it is facing investigation.

On this document-dumping, BigGovernment.com reports,

ACORN's political agenda is also exposed, with thousands upon thousands of documents revealing the depth of the political machine that is ACORN, and its disturbing ties to not only public employee labor unions but some of the most radical leftist organizations.

Either California's attorney general didn't demand that ACORN preserve all documents for the investigation so that ACORN could not use the excuse of its document retention and destruction policies to destroy evidence, or ACORN ignored that demand.

Now with calls for investigations into Climategate, will investigators neglect taking steps to prevent the destruction of evidence? One cannot understate the scope of the fraud if data were manipulated or suppressed for financial and market gains or other nefarious reasons (not that suppression of data by members of the scientific community wouldn't be nefarious on its face).

Besides their apparent shared willingness to tamper with evidence, the climate change movement and ACORN have another common link: their foundations in Marxism.

ACORN, from founder Wade Rathke to others, has employed the techniques and visions of Marxist Saul Alinsky.

The green movement, which found its ultimate vessel in climate change, is also steeped in Marxist foundations. The Green Horizon Foundation's reading list, for example, is filled with Marxist authors, including Marx himself.

French author André Gorz, who's featured on that list, published Ecology as Politics in 1975. In it, Gorz does not mask the anti-capitalist, Marxist agenda of the green movement. He writes, "This is why the ecological struggle is, in its present form, an indispensable dimension of the struggle against capitalism."

It's very important to understand this: for the greens, there is no distinction between their movement and the anti-free-market movement.

Ecology as Politics gets even more interesting. Here are selected quotes:

All production is destruction.

The earth is not naturally hospitable to humankind.

The struggle for different technologies is essential for a different society.

If the manipulation or suppression of climate data were based on greed and financial gain as many suspect, that's bad enough. But if such lies were made in pursuit of a political and ideological agenda, what should we believe of that agenda? Yes, it is corrupt, and it is willing to accept corruption of even scientific data -- that which is presumed by most people to be purer than politics -- as a means to its ends.

The Marxists in the green movement seem to justify their corruption based on a belief in the moral superiority of their agendas. Quoting Rene Dumont's L'Utopie ou la morte (Utopia or Else), Gorz writes about "murderers who take protein from the mouths of poor children," lambastes "neoliberal economists" who don't go as far as his Marxism, and praises the "Chinese socialist civilization."

This is quite similar to the situation with ACORN, where proponents of ACORN's mission obviously believe that corruption is justifiable. Both ACORN and the climate change movement have used political affiliations to advance their agendas.

Just as we're learning about the infiltration of ACORN's brand of corruption in the world of elected officials and even law enforcement officials like attorneys general, the financial and political stakes in the climate change movement almost assure us of scandals yet to be discovered.

Let's see where the evidentiary trail leads, but as the old saying goes, follow the money. One more tip: Observe which government officials are slow to investigate, or who investigate the watchdogs instead.

Andrew Breitbart, get the cameras rolling for Climategate.