PrintDecember 18, 2009
Enviro-Marxists Discover the Real Scourge of the Planet: Human Beings
"Climate change," the scam formerly known as "global warming," has been exposed as the crypto-Marxist hoax many of us long suspected. In Copenhagen, at the ridiculous charade of a "summit" on the dangers of producing record carbon emissions, the lofty rhetoric about saving the planet and the long-suffering polar bears has been ripped down like a sheet covering an unfinished masterpiece. Underneath, the masterpiece turns out to be an ugly reality as old as human history: a good old fashioned shakedown, in which the greediest of the greedy assert the right to confiscate the fruits of other people's labor, alternately threatening, whining, wheedling, and guilting their marks into coming across with the cash in the interest of "economic justice" -- or in this case, "climate justice."
With all that has happened -- the East Anglia e-mails, which revealed that supposedly respectable scientists were falsifying data, repressing any inconvenient findings, and trying to intimidate respected journals into marginalizing anyone who disputed their theory; the revelation that Al Gore made up numbers out of whole cloth and used them to support his claims of harm to those aforementioned polar bears; and the degeneration of the Copenhagen summit into an unintentional laugh-riot -- you might think that proponents of the theory of anthropogenic climate change would be issuing apologies, returning the millions that they have earned from this racket, and moving on to more productive pursuits. There's as much a chance of that happening as the purveyors of "eat all you want" weight loss miracles, herbal baldness cures, and "male enhancement" pills admitting that their products are shams and returning the beaucoups of loot they have extracted from the gullible.
Of course, the insistence of those involved in the "Save the Planet" scam on its continuing existence, in which they are so invested both personally and financially, is not a surprise. In this case, though, for many of the grifters, the motive goes beyond the obvious one of short-term personal enrichment.
As well-detailed here in John Griffing's excellent piece, the environmental movement has always been less about Mother Earth and more about Papa Dollar -- as in income redistribution, or "reparations." Like all religious zealots, radical leftists are driven by a vision of how human beings should live, and that vision requires that evil Amerika pay up for all the crimes committed against the rest of the world, especially the black and brown people who suffered at the hands of white Europeans. Say what you want about Marxists, but they are very capable of taking the long view, and they don't give up easily.
Predictably, now that the "climate change" rationale has lost a bit of its marketing appeal, the enviro-left have returned to another page in their threadbare playbook, one first popularized nearly forty years ago: reducing the scourge of the planet, human beings.
Diane Francis writes in the Financial Post:
The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
What a great idea! Of course, there are a few details to work out that Ms. Francis doesn't address -- most specifically, how such a law would be implemented and enforced. I don't think she wants to mention those icky forced abortions that occur in China as late as the ninth month of pregnancy. Perhaps that's because just like Chinese officials, she would be shocked -- shocked! -- upon hearing about them.
I wish that I could tell you that Ms. Francis is some wacky Canadian outlier so we could all have a good laugh. Unfortunately, and sadly, some reading her piece did not react with laughter or outrage. They cheered this plan and embraced it. Among them was CNN's resident curmudgeon, Jack Cafferty, who has managed to approach his dotage without learning how to take the pins out of his shirts. On the December 11 edition of "The Situation Room," he noted that "[t]here's [sic] too many people," and "it doesn't matter whether the globe heats up or doesn't."
If you really want to lose sleep over the future of this country, read the responses to Mr. Cafferty's question.
I can point to two reasons why seemingly smart, well-informed people can calmly discuss this blatantly ridiculous, unconstitutional, and horrifying proposal. First, there is the gradual acceptance by society of the belief that depending of his mother's frame of mind, an unborn child is either an anticipated blessing or an ill-timed mistake to be dealt with -- that is, eliminated quickly and clinically and forgotten as if it never existed. This conceit eventually became enshrined in law through the tortured legal reasoning and overt judicial legislation that delivered Roe v. Wade.
Second, there is the equally insidious and stunning ignorance by what appears to be a disturbingly large percentage of Americans of a critical fact: that the U.S. Constitution protects individual liberty by limiting the power of the federal government. This fact has always irritated the "former constitutional law professor" (actually an adjunct lecturer) who currently occupies the Oval Office. I hope that an actual professor would have more respect for our precious founding document, although I concede that given the left-wing reeducation camps that call themselves universities today, that's not likely.
In fairness, pretend you are Barack Obama. I think you can see how you would resent that pesky Constitution as an irritating obstacle to your plans to take one person's stuff and give it to someone more deserving -- or to put it in his own words:
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, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
The Founders understood that a government that "must do" things for you eventually degenerates into a government that does things to you. Barack Obama and his merry band of Marxists know that as well. They just hope the rest of us won't figure it out any time soon.
No matter how we got here -- be it the culture of legalized abortion, liberal judicial activism, the dumbing down of the population by the public school system, or an increasing number of people looking to government to provide for their every need -- it is chilling to consider where we find ourselves: a place where a couple of commentators on an allegedly serious news program can casually contemplate whether the United States of America should adopt the infanticidal policies of a brutal, murderous dictatorship without the slightest mention of the restraints of our Constitution...and have viewers enthusiastically chime in about what a terrific idea it is.
People who thirty years ago warned of a slippery slope should have thought more in terms of a tiny step off a very steep cliff.
