← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Gabrielle
Thread ID: 19158 | Posts: 18 | Started: 2005-07-15
2005-07-15 18:04 | User Profile
Now you know why we are not drilling for own oil in Alaska!
From: 21st Century, Fall 1992 Who pulls the strings of environmental groups? The establishment figures who fund and control it -- from England's Prince Phillip and the Netherlands' Prince Bernhard, to U.S. corporate funders like Robert O. Anderson.
Who Owns the Environmentalist Movement?
Far from a grass roots movement, envronmentalism is a big business, funded and directed by the leading families of the U.S. and European establishments By Rogelio A. Maduro and Ralf Schauerhammer
This article is adapted from Chapter 10 of the Holes in the Ozone Scare: The Scientific Evidence That the Sky Isn't Falling, published in June 1992 by 21st Century and now in its second printing.
Twenty-five years ago, those who believed that Mother Nature comes first and humankind second were part of an insignificant fringe, considered radical by most Americans. These environmentalists were visible mostly at the level of the antinuclear street demonstration, where marijuana smoke wafted around "Back To Nature" posters on display. Today, however, what used to be extremist "environmentalist" ideology has become mainstream, permeating American institutions at every level, from corporate boardrooms to the Federal Reserve, the Congress, the White House, the churches, homes and schools.
Official lore from the environmental movement's publications asserts that the movement emerged from the grass roots. The truth, however, is that funding and policy lines comes from the most prestigious institutions of the Eastern Liberal Establishment, centered around the New York Council on Foreign Relations, and including the Trilateral commission, the Aspen Institute, and a host of private family foundations.
This network of foundations created environmentalism, moving it from a radical fringe movement into a mass movement to support the institutionalization of antiscience, no-growth policies at all levels of government and public life. As prescribed in the Council on Foreign Relations 1980s Project book series, environmentalism has been used against America's economy, against such targets as high-technology agriculture and the nuclear power industry. This movement is fundamentally a green pagan religion in its outlook. Unless defeated, it will destroy not only the economy, but also the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States, and has in fact come perilously close to accomplishing this objective already.
The vast wealth of the environmentalist groups may come as a shock to most readers who believe that these groups are made up of "public interest", "nonprofit" organizations that are making great sacrifices to save the Earth from a looming doomsday caused by man's activities. In fact, the environmental movement is one of the most powerful and lucrative businesses in the world today.
Funding from the Foundations
There are several thousand groups in the United States today involved in "saving the Earth". Although all share a common philosophy, these groups are of four general types: those concerned, respectively with environmental problems, population control, animal rights, and land trusts. Most of these groups are very secretive about their finances, but there is enough evidence on the public record to determine what they are up to.
Table 1 lists the annual revenues of a sampling of 30 environmental groups. These few groups alone had revenues of more than $1.17 billion in 1990. This list, it must be emphasized, by no means includes all of these envirobusinesses. It is estimated that there are more than 3,000 so-called nonprofit environmental groups in the United States today, and most of them take in more than a million dollars a year.
The Global Tomorrow Coalition, for example, is made up of 110 environmental and population-control groups, few of which have revenues less than $3 million per year and land holdings of more than 6 million acres worth billions of dollars, is just the best known of more than 900 land trusts now operating in the United States.
Table 2, lists the grants of 35 foundations to two heavily funded and powerful environmentalist groups -- the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council -- for the year 1988.
The data available from public sources show that the total revenues of the environmentalist movement are more than $8.5 billion per year. If the revenues of law firms involved in environmental litigation and of university environmental programs were added on, this figure would easily double to more than $16 billion a year. This point is emphasized in Table 3, which lists the top 15 environmental groups receiving grants for environmental lawsuits and protection and education programs.
To get an idea of how much money this is, the reader should consider that this income is larger than the Gross National Product (GNP) of 56 underdeveloped nations (Table 4). The 48 nations for which the latest GNP figures were available have a total population of more than 360 million human beings. Ethiopia, for example, with a population of 47.4 million human beings, many starving, has a GNP of only $5.7 billion per year. Somalia, with 5.9 million inhabitants, has a GNP that is lower than the revenues of those groups listed in Table 1. Not a single nation in Central America or the Caribbean has a GNP greater than the revenues of the U.S. environmental movement.
With these massive resources under its control, it is no surprise that the environmentalist movement has been able to set the national policy agenda. There is no trade association in the world with the financial resources and power to match the vast resources of the environmental lobby. In addition, it has the support of most of the news media. Opposing views and scientific refutations of environmental scares are most often simply blacked out.
Where do the environmental groups get their money? Dues from members represent an average of 50 percent of the income of most groups; most of the rest of the income comes from foundation grants, corporate contributions, and U.S. government funds. Almost every one of today's land-trust, environmental, animal-rights, and population-control groups was created with grants from one of the elite foundations, like the Ford foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. These "seed grants" enable the radical groups to become established and start their own fundraising operations. These grants are also a seal-of-approval for the other foundations.
The foundations also provide funding for special projects. For example, the Worldwatch Institute received $825,000 in foundation grants in 1988. Almost all of that money was earmarked specifically for the launching of a magazine, World Watch, which has become influential among policy-makers, promoting the group's antiscience and antipopulation views. The Worldwatch Institute's brochures report that it was created by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to "alert policy makers and the general public to emerging global trends in the availability and management of resources -- both human and natural".
Foundation grants in the range of $20 to $50 million for the environmental cause are no longer a novelty. In July 1990, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $50 million global environmental program. The specific purpose of the program is to create an elite group of individuals in each country whose role is to implement and enforce the international environmental treaties now being negotiated.
Kathleen Teltsch reported in the New York times (July 24, 1990):
"As an initial step, the five-year program will assist hundreds of young scientists and policy makers in developing countries to create a worldwide network of trained environmental leaders, who will meet regularly at workshops, sharing information and discussing strategy. **
"Through the international network, the foundation wants to encourage efforts to build environmental protection into governments' long-range economic planning. Other major elements would promote the drafting of international treaties to deal with forest, land, and water preservation, and hazardous waste disposal"
The foundations are run by America's top patrician families. These families channel billions of dollars into the organizations and causes they wish to support every year, and thereby exert enormous political clout. By deciding who and what gets funded, they determine the political issues up front in Washington, which are then voted on by Congress. It is all tax free, since the foundations are tax-exempt. The boards of directors of the large foundations are made up of some of the most powerful individuals in this country, and they always overlap with power brokers in government and industry.
One such individual was Thornton F. Bradshaw, who, until his recent death, was chairman and program director of the MacArthur foundation and a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Conservation Foundation. At the same time, Bradshaw was chairman of the RCA Corporation and a director of NBC, the Atlantic Richfield corp., Champion International, and first Boston, Inc. Bradshaw was also a member of the Malthusian Club of Rome and director of the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies, organizations that have played a critical role in spreading the "limits to growth" ideology of the environmental movement.
Another individual perhaps better known to readers is Henry A. Kissinger, former U.s. secretary of state and a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. For years Kissinger was the director of the fund's special Studies Project, which was in charge of special operations.
Corporate Contributions
Another huge source of contributions to the environmental movement is private corporations. Unlike tax-exempt foundations, however, corporations are not required by law to report what they do with their money, so it is difficult for an independent researcher to estimate the level of funding for the environmentalist movement from business and industry. There are watchdog groups, however, that have investigated these money flows and come up with startlingly large figures.
For example, the April 1991 newsletter of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., which monitors trends in corporate giving, scathingly denounces those corporations it has discovered financing the environmentalists. The newsletter states that oil companies "are heavy financial supporters of the very advocacy groups which oppose activities essential to their ability to meet consumer needs".
Further, it reports, "The Nature Conservancy's 1990 report reflects contributions of over $1,000,000 from Amoco, over $135,000 from Arco, over 4100,000 from BP Exploration and BP Oil, more than $3,200,000 (in real estate) from Chevron, over $10,000 from Conoco and Phillips Petroleum and over $260,000 from Exxon". **
From the scant information publicly available (largely annual reports from the major environmental groups), one can conservatively estimate that corporations contribute more than $200 million a year to the environmentalist movement.
This should come as no surprise. Over the past 20 years, giant corporations have discovered that by using environmental regulations they can bankrupt their competition, the small- and medium-sized firms that are the most active and technologically innovative part of the U.S. economy.
Compliance with environmental regulations is also big business. According to official figures from the federal government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it costs the U.S. economy $131 billion today to comply with environmental regulations. That figure will have risen to more than $300 billion a year by the year 2000. The expenditures are a net drain on the economy, but while the nation is bankrupted, someone is profiting from the services and equipment sold. A look at classified advertisements in the papers today reveals that companies involved in environmental compliance are growing fast. Many of these corporations are contributing to the environmental movement.
Funds from the U.S. Government
There is a third area of funding for the environmental movement: the U.S. government itself. As reported in detail by Peter Metzger, former science editor of the Rocky Mountain News, there are now thousands of professional environmentalists ensconced in the U.S. government. These environmentalists channel hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and favors to environmentalists and environmental groups under all kinds of guises. In a 1991 newspaper series, columnist Warren Brookes exposed how the federal Bureau of Land Management [BLM] used the Nature Conservancy as a land broker, giving the antigrowth organization handsome profits.
The EPA doles out huge amounts of money to environmental groups to conduct "studies" of the impact of global warming and ozone depletion. President Bush has made the Global Climate Change program a priority, so while the Space Station, vaccinations for children, and other crucial projects have been virtually eliminated from the budget, $1.3 billion is available for studies of how man is fouling the Earth. Similarly, scientists who challenge global warming and ozone depletion as hoaxes do not receive a penny in funding, while those who scream doomsday receive tens of millions in research grants from the "climate change" program.
How much funding do the environmentalists receive from the federal government? Officially, the U.S. government gives away more than $3 billion a year in grants to support environmental groups and projects. The actual total, however, is impossible to estimate. A top-ranking official of the department of Energy who spent two years attempting to cut off tens of millions of dollars in "pork barrel" grants going to environmentalist groups, discovered that for each grant she was eliminating, environmentalist moles in the department added several new ones. The official resigned in disgust.
The environmentalist capture of Washington, which was consolidated during the Carter administration, produced radical changes in the Washington, D.C. establishment. This process of subversion was described by [Peter] Metzger in a speech given in 1980, titled "Government-funded Activism: Hiding Behind the Public Interest."
"For the first time in history, a presidential administration is funding a political movement dedicated to destroying many of the institutions and principles of American society. Activist organizations, created, trained, and funded at taxpayers' expense, and claiming to represent the public interest, are attacking our economic system and advocating its replacement by a new form of government. Not only is this being done by means already adjudicated as being unconstitutional, but it is being done without the consent of Congress, the knowledge of the public, or the attention of the press.
It all began when President Carter hired individuals prominently identified with the protest or adversary cultureââ¬Â¦ the appointment [by the Carter administration] of several hundred leading activists to key regulatory and policy-making positions in Washington resulted in their use of the federal regulatory bureaucracy in order to achieve their personal and ideological goals.
Already accomplished is the virtual paralysis of new federal coal leasing, conventional electric generating plant licensing in many areas, federal minerals land leasing and water development, industrial exporting without complex environmental hearings, and the halting of new nuclear power plant constructionââ¬Â¦
The consequences of those sub-cabinet appointees having then made their own appointments, and those having then made theirs, so that now, there are thousands of [environmentalist] representatives in governmentââ¬Â¦"
According to Metzger, this new class,
"enshrined in the universities, the news media, and especially the federal bureaucracy, has become one of the most powerful of the special interests."
Read on: [url]http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/un/environment.htm[/url]
2005-07-15 18:08 | User Profile
Environmentalist Groups See Trouble Ahead By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
in L.A. Times, December 1, 2004
WASHINGTON. Environmentalists see some of their worst fears playing out as President Bush moves to cement a second-term agenda that includes getting more timber, oil and gas from public lands and relying on the market rather than regulation to curb pollution.
Bush's top energy priority -- opening an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling -- is shaping up as an early test of GOP gains in Congress.
"This is going to be a definitional battle, and we're ready," said Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters.
Though the election didn't emphasize such issues, administration officials believe the results validated their belief that many environmental decisions are better made by the marketplace, landowners and state and local governments.
James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the administration will continue a "partnership with the oil and gas sector" but also will work with conservation organizations -- as long as they are "willing to engage constructively on defining priorities and practices in domestic production."
Bush's environmental priority is to rewrite the Clean Air Act to set annual nationwide limits on three major air pollutants from power plants and to allow marketplace trading of pollution rights rather than regulation to meet those goals.
He does not plan to change his mind on his rejection of the Kyoto international climate treaty that would impose mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions. "Kyoto's unworkable," Connaughton said.
Because of an environmental group's lawsuit, the EPA is preparing to issue first-ever regulations to cut mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants and new standards for cutting soot in the air and reducing power plant pollution that drifts between states.
Mike Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, foresees more EPA water monitoring and preparations against chemical and biological attacks.
"I believe the mission that the president has given me in a second term, and the agenda and the philosophy that was validated by the election, was more progress, faster, being achieved in a way that will maintain economic competitiveness as a nation," he said.
Republicans in Congress plan to re-examine other landmark 1970s laws: the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, and the National Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources.
One area where environmentalists and the White House could find agreement is ocean issues. The administration is looking at setting catch quotas for individual fish species, new protections for fragile coral reefs and ecosystem-based management of rivers and streams, Connaughton said.
Some huge regional issues also will get attention. They include restoring the Florida Everglades, aiding the recovery of Pacific Northwest salmon, improving water quality in the Great Lakes and dealing with drought in the West and coastal erosion in Louisiana.
The administration put off until after the election a final decision on a plan to allow road building and logging on 58 million acres of remote forests where both are now banned.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton's agency is rewriting 162 plans for managing about one of every 10 acres in the United States. The decisions will affect whether wildlife protections or new oil and gas drilling projects are favored. Norton wants to give local governments more say.
Administration officials say they will more broadly apply the "healthy forests" law that Congress approved in his first term. It lets companies log large, commercially valuable trees in national forests in exchange for clearing smaller, more fire-prone trees and brush.
The administration wants forest managers to clear such trees and underbrush from up to 4 million acres at risk of fire, about 300,000 acres more than current efforts. It hopes to double that to 8 million acres within a decade, said Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs forest policy.
Environmentalists still view the courts as their last resort.
The day after the election, the staff of law firm Earthjustice "gathered to face the news that the most anti-environmental administration will be back for four more years," Buck Parker, the firm's executive director wrote supporters. But, he added, "We're more determined than ever to carry on.
[url]http://www.bcdems.net/?q=node/11[/url]
2005-07-15 18:10 | User Profile
Ford: Sugar Daddy of the Greens By John Perazzo FrontPageMagazine.com | January 19, 2004
We have all seen the photos of cute, fuzzy creatures and flower-speckled hills adorning the Websites and promotional literature of Americaââ¬â¢s leading environmentalist groups. These groups portray themselves as grassroots organizations of ordinary nature-lovers motivated purely by a desire to preserve, for the welfare of future generations, those pristine areas of our nationââ¬â¢s landscape not yet spoiled by the smoky breath of industrial pollution. But in truth, environmentalismââ¬â¢s major objective has little to do with clean air, pure water, or cuddly wildlife. Rather, it is a vast network of radical leftist organizations dedicated to nothing less than the overthrow of American capitalism, which they deem the source of all environmental ills.
Randall Hayes, president of the Rainforest Action Network, calls capitalism ââ¬Åan absurd economic system [that is] rapidly destroying nature.ââ¬Â Greenpeace International puts it this way: ââ¬ÅWhen the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we canââ¬â¢t eat money.ââ¬Â Far from being a grassroots movement, almost all of todayââ¬â¢s environmentalist groups were created with grants from one or more elite foundations, among the most prominent being the Ford Foundation, which regularly funds leftist political causes. ââ¬ÅSeed grantsââ¬Â from Ford and other foundations establish radical groups as new, independent entities that can thereafter commence their own fundraising operations under the pious banner of ââ¬Åenvironmentalism.ââ¬Â
The environmentalist establishment is comprised of thousands of groups ââ¬â some local, some national ââ¬â but virtually all well funded and able to pursue a multitude of often-obscure issues. Many people wonder, for instance, what motivates such groups to jump on the particular bandwagons they choose, such as a California group organized solely for the purpose of protecting an obscure species of flies. The answer is simple: these groups understand that the allegedly threatened welfare of such an insect could provide the pretext needed to someday derail the construction of a proposed factory, housing development, corporate office building, or road slated for a particular location. To set the stage for this scheme, a leftwing foundation such as the Ford Foundation makes a grant to establish a group purportedly dedicated to protecting the species in question, and a cause is thus created. The nominal beneficiaries take many forms: spotted owls, snail darters, band-winged grasshoppers, moss spiders, beach mice, gray bats, and flatwoods salamanders, to name just a few. The ââ¬Åendangered speciesââ¬Â list in the U.S. alone currently contains no fewer than 70 varieties of clams, 32 types of snails, 16 kinds of beetles, and 19 breeds of butterflies.
Contrary to the public image of an everymanââ¬â¢s movement, environmentalism is in fact big business, raking in more than $8.5 billion per year. If we factor in the revenues of law firms involved in environmental litigation, this figure nearly doubles. Environmentalist group income is larger than the Gross National Product (GNP) of about five-dozen nations worldwide. No trade association on earth possesses the financial resources and political influence of the environmental lobby. There are more than 3,000 so-called nonprofit environmental groups in the U.S. today, most of which take in over $1 million annually. In one recent year, Greenpeace International took in $35 million, the National Audubon Society $79 million, the National Wildlife Federation $102 million, the Sierra Club $74 million, the Nature Conservancy $972 million, and the World Wildlife Fund $118 million. In addition, each of these groups holds assets ranging from $16.3 million to $2.9 billion.
**Only a small portion of these immense revenues comes from the checkbooks of concerned individual donors. Much of the money comes from the groupsââ¬â¢ real estate holdings, product marketing, business deals, and huge stock portfolios. In other words, the very movement that condemns capitalism for allegedly ravaging the environment happily takes advantage of capitalism to rake in mounds of cash. Indeed, many environmentalist organizations buy stock in companies whose industries they consistently denounce as ââ¬Åharmfulââ¬Â to the environment: lumber companies, mining companies, and manufacturers of bulldozers and logging equipment such as Caterpillar and John Deere. Other environmentalist groups round out their portfolios with holdings in real estate, utilities, and government securities. The anti-capitalists further feed from capitalismââ¬â¢s trough by accepting at least another $200 million per year in corporate donations. **
Environmentalist groups also exploit their non-profit status and reputations as selfless wildlife protectors by buying and selling vast tracts of land. The Nature Conservancy (NC), for instance, buys real estate from landowners at a reduced cost and then sells it to the government for an inflated price. In one recent year, the NC bought and sold more than 73 million acres in this manner ââ¬â all in the name of ââ¬Åsaving the environment.ââ¬Â Notably, environmentalist groups use a hefty portion of such windfalls only to feather their own financial nests with such things as luxurious new offices, high-profile lobbyists, high-priced economists and attorneys, and millions of direct-mail pleas for still more money. Moreover, the bigwigs of the environmental game are careful to save themselves an ample piece of capitalismââ¬â¢s pie; environmental executives have average annual salaries in the $200,000 neighborhood.
The rest of environmentalismââ¬â¢s funding comes largely from prestigious foundations like the Ford Foundation. Each year, hundreds of foundations earmark thousands of grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars for environmentalist groups. Many of these foundations are part of an informal coalition called the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA), comprised of more than 250 private donors responsible for most of the money given to such groups. The EGA holds private annual retreats to plan strategies for achieving its desired programs and policy outcomes ââ¬â almost exclusively leftwing, anti-business, and anti-private property ownership. Occupying a prominent place at the EGA meetings is the Ford Foundation, which has a long history of donating enormous sums to environmentalist causes.
In 1969, for instance, a large Ford Foundation seed grant established the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a group that made its name in the early-1970s fight to ban DDT, the life-saving insecticide that was turning the tide on malaria. Among EDFââ¬â¢s other achievements was its role in drafting Californiaââ¬â¢s first sweeping environmental regulations in the form of Proposition 65, the ballot initiative that restricted the use of many chemicals in industry and agriculture and has cost the California economy billions of dollars. The Ford Foundation has funded EDF heavily over the years, its generosity highlighted by a $500,000 grant in 1988, a $400,000 grant in 1996, and a $150,000 grant in 1998. Today EDF has seven offices nationwide, more than 150,000 members, and an annual operating budget of $17 million.
A $400,000 Ford Foundation seed grant in 1970 also established the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a radical leftist group that serves as one of the environmentalist movementââ¬â¢s legal arms. The NRDC has filed dozens of lawsuits to block the construction of highways, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants, but is perhaps best known for being the source of an enormous and costly apple industry hoax about Alar in 1989. Another NRDC signature issue is its fight to shut down the timber industry. Depicting itself as a nonprofit entity dedicated to fighting the capitalistic greed that purportedly ravages the environment, the tax-exempt NRDC holds assets exceeding $71 million.
A very partial list of other Ford Foundation grants made in the past few years includes the following: $225,000 to the Wilderness Society, $200,000 to Friends of the Earth, $2 million to the Nature Conservancy, $48,000 to the World Resources Institute, $75,000 to the NRDC, $24,000 to the World Resources Institute, $250,000 to the Environmental Law Institute, $225,000 to the Environmental Working Group, $50,000 to the National Environmental Trust, and $300,000 to the National Wildlife Federation. According to the Capital Research Center (CRC), which was established in 1984 to study non-profit organizations, all of the aforementioned organizations are politically far-left. Other recent Ford grants include: $150,000 to the American Land Institute, $500,000 to the Rainforest Alliance, $96,000 to the Center for Marine Conservation, $32,000 to the Conservation Fund, $150,000 to American Rivers, $100,000 to Northwest Environment Watch, and $400,000 to the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development.
Four years ago, the Ford Foundation also gave $150,000 to the International Forum on Globalization (IFOG), a think-tank of some five-dozen anti-capitalist organizations with close ties to the Rainforest Action Network. IFOG founder and president Jerry Mander calls capitalism and economic globalization ââ¬Åthe greatest single contributor to the massive ecological crises of our time,ââ¬Â characterized by an ââ¬Åinherent emphasis on increased trade requir[ing] corresponding expansion of transportation infrastructures ââ¬â airports, seaports, roads, rail-lines, pipelines, dams, electric grids ââ¬â many of [which] are constructed in pristine landscapes, often on Indigenous peopleââ¬â¢s lands. Increased transport also uses drastically increased fossil fuels, adding to the problems of climate change, ozone depletion, and ocean, air, and soil pollution.ââ¬Â
That, in a nutshell, is the environmentalist view of capitalism. **Therefore, the next time you hear an environmentalist group depicting itself as a grassroots enterprise of average Americans who spontaneously banded together to save the environment, remember that its true agenda is political, not environmental. Moreover, it is most likely an enormously wealthy entity funded by some of the deepest pockets on earth, such as those of the Ford Foundation. **
[url]http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org/environmentalistswildlands/fordsugardaddy011904.htm[/url]
2005-07-15 18:13 | User Profile
'Us now, you're next,' say desperate farmers Massive 'Bucket Brigade' demonstration to protest court-ordered water shut-off KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. -- Outraged at the impending destruction of an entire rural community, thousands of protesters are expected today in this small rural town in south-central Oregon in an outpouring of support for the 1,400 farm families whose lives have been savaged by an unprecedented court-ordered cut-off of irrigation water from Upper Klamath Lake -- an order prompted by environmentalists' concerns over the survival of two species of sucker fish and a species of salmon.
They're here from all parts of the West, arriving by bus, car and plane, with hand-painted signs and banners waving, hoping to draw public awareness to the plight of the farmers. Politicians of various stripes are on the speakers list, which has expanded exponentially -- Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif. and U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., among them.
"We've got 20 or 30 politicians coming in," says Bob Gasser, one of the rally organizers. "It's just sort of grown."
The highlight of the event will be the noon-scheduled Bucket Brigade, when farmers and their sympathizers form a human chain to transport water, person-to-person, from Upper Klamath Lake to the main canal of the irrigation system in a symbolic act of solidarity. (To view map of Klamath Basin area, click here.)
"We have 50 buckets, one for every state in the union," says Gasser, owner of Basin Fertilizer and Chemicals in Merrill, Ore. Actually, he explains, the water will be taken from Lake Ewana, a small lake that's fed by a river from Upper Klamath Lake. "We'll dip out the water and hand the buckets down the line to the A Canal where they'll be emptied. We want to draw attention to what's happened here, to tell the American people that what happened to us can happen to them."
As the farmers see it, it's just a matter of time. Hence the rally's simple message: "Us now, you're next."
The hand-delivered water will be the only water the canal receives for many months, if ever. Normally at this time of year it would be near brimful, as would be the hundreds of miles of secondary canals. Farmers would be in the fields planting their crops under clear skies unclouded by dust. Storeowners would be selling supplies and equipment. Waterfowl would be nesting near the canals and in the two wildlife refuges in the area.
That's how it's been for nearly 100 years -- even when there's been a drought, as there is this year.
But last month, two federal judges, in a set of related rulings, delivered a double-whammy that stopped this scenario, at least through this year and perhaps longer.
Read on: [url]http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org/articles/Archives/archive1/worldnet050701.htm[/url]
2005-07-15 18:16 | User Profile
The Kyoto Protocol is a Complete Fraud by Glenn Woiceshyn (June 12, 1998)
Summary: This treaty, if ratified, means drastic cuts to our fossil fuel consumption and hence to our prosperity. It also means handing the United Nations power to control the industrial activities and economies of sovereign countries.
[[url]www.CapMag.com][/url] In primitive cultures, witch-doctors encouraged tribal chiefs to sacrifice people to mystical beliefs and deities. The Aztecs slaughtered thousands per year hoping to secure good weather from a mythical sun god. Power lusters throughout history have discovered mysticism to be an effective tool to sacrifice gullible people to their power lust.
The global warming scare is a case in point. More than 160 nations met last December in Kyoto, Japan and produced the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty designed to force "developed nations" to drastically cut carbon dioxide emissions, and to transfer wealth and technology to "undeveloped nations" -- a socialistic-dictatorial policy that allegedly will prevent cataclysmic weather caused by alleged manmade global warming.
This treaty, if ratified, means drastic cuts to our fossil fuel consumption and hence to our prosperity. It also means handing the United Nations power to control the industrial activities and economies of sovereign countries. Egged on by environmentalists, our political leaders said, in effect, that we must sacrifice our national sovereignty, economic freedom and prosperity to "save the planet." Now, politicians, environmentalists and (shamefully) even some business leaders are busy working out the details of this sacrifice.
But, as documented by renowned climate scientist Fred Singer, the Kyoto Protocol is based entirely on falsehood -- it is a total fraud.
Singer, who earned his doctorate at Princeton University, is president of The Science and Environmental Policy Project, a non-profit policy research group he founded in 1990. Singer is also Distinguished Research Professor at George Mason University and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. His previous positions are many but include, for example, chief scientist, U.S. Department of Transportation (1987-89), deputy assistant administrator for policy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970-71), and founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Science, University of Miami (1964-67).
T o convince countries to support the Protocol a counterfeit "scientific consensus" was concocted by UN bureaucrats. First came a 1995 UN scientific report which explicitly claimed no discernible manmade global warming. Then, a policymakers' summary was prepared from the report and stressed the opposite conclusion -- one based solely on computer models which don't match historical data and which incorporate assumptions that grossly exaggerate the warming effect of carbon dioxide. To eliminate the contradiction, the politically undesirable statements in the science report were quietly removed, yet the authors' names were retained.
Following this blatant act of politicizing science, more than 140 climate scientists (including several TV meteorologists) rebelled and signed the Leipzig Declaration, which states that "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide ... actual observations from weather satellites show no global warming whatsoever -- in direct contradiction to computer models."
As Dr. Singer point out, the oft-cited 0.5 degree (C) warming since 1850 mostly occurred prior to 1940, long before carbon dioxide emissions increased significantly, and most likely is the result of a natural recovery from a mini ice-age (1450-1850). Furthermore, contrary to widespread belief, meteorological data indicate that exceptionally violent and destructive hurricanes have become less frequent in the past 50 years. But, truth is subjective according to modern philosophy. What's true for environmentalists -- floods of "biblical proportions," apocalyptic storms, massive droughts, famine and pestilence -- is no less true than anyone else's claims. Subjectivism -- the notion that "it's true because I (or the majority) believe it or feel it" -- is the brand of mysticism currently ruling modern culture, including politics.
According to U.S. Vice-President and environmentalist Al Gore, "The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is ... spiritual." [Earth in the Balance, 1992, p. 12)
As with any form of mysticism, subjectivism undermines people's ability to think clearly, logically, objectively. It thereby sedates people into passively accepting the arbitrary, alarmist claims of pressure groups desperately seeking political power. According to one of Gore's advisors, Stanford "climate scientist" and environmentalist Stephen Schneider, "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." [Quoted in Jonathan Schell, "Our Fragile Earth," Discover, October 1989, p. 47.]
Such environmentalists are today's witch-doctors cashing in on widespread subjectivism to egg politicians into destroying our freedom -- all in the name of science.
Troubled by this blatant assault on objectivity in science, more than 17,000 basic and applied scientists have, to date, signed a petition against the Kyoto Protocol, spearheaded by Frederick Seitz, a former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. A scientific article accompanying this petition -- in addition to debunking the theory that rising carbon dioxide levels are causing global warming and catastrophic weather -- demonstrates that the extra man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere actually creates a greener planet, the alleged goal of environmentalists.
According to the article: "Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the CO2 increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."
So what explains the environmentalists zeal to push a socialistic Kyoto Protocol in the name of creating a greener planet? Decades ago, when it became apparent to people that Marxism -- a philosophy based on the mystical doctrine of dialectic materialism -- yielded poverty and murderous dictatorships, not prosperity as promised, many leftists switched to environmentalism. They retained their "love" of statism -- of sacrificing the individual to the state -- and their hatred for capitalism, and promised a "greener planet" instead. In essence, the reds merely painted themselves green.
After all, environmentalism is far more effective at destroying individual rights and thus capitalism because preservation of nature necessitates annulling property rights and blocking productive/industrial activities -- activities such as housing, petroleum production, mining, manufacturing, etc., which improve man's environment. This hands today's tribal chiefs (qua politicians) the omnipotent power to sacrifice people to the god of today's witch-doctors (qua environmentalists) -- pristine nature.
Thankfully, objectivity still exists in society, particularly among scientists, and the truth is now catching up with environmentalism as it did with Marxism. The sooner the better -- for the sake of reason, freedom and prosperity.
[url]http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?id=56[/url]
2005-07-15 18:20 | User Profile
THE SMART GROWTH FRAUD
By Michael S. Coffman July 15, 2003 NewsWithViews.com
For decades urban planners have adhered to the mantra that urban sprawl increases pollution and housing costs, more driving time to work and shopping, stress, and the escalating consumption of scarce farmland and open space. Urban planning to implement what Al Gore calls ââ¬Åsmart growthââ¬Â supposedly corrects these problems and creates more livable, inexpensive homes for all. Irrefutable evidence, however, shows that urban planning creates the very nightmares it is supposed to eliminate. In the process, it strips urbanites of one of their most fundamental civil liberties ââ¬â property rights.
Land-use control has been a goal of socialists for many decades. Laurence Rockefellerââ¬â¢s 1972 publication of The Use of Land: A Citizen's Policy Guide to Urban Growth was instrumental in attempting to enact land-use regulation in Congress several times in the early 1970s. Edited by William K. Reilly, who later served as EPA Administrator under George Bush senior, the report claimed that planning the wise use of land is the best tool to guide growth toward achieving economic equality and protecting environmental quality.
Following the failed attempt to employ the anti-property rights features of The Use of Land, the United Nations set the same agenda in the 1976 Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I) held in Vancouver. For instance, the Preamble of Agenda Item 10 of the Conference Report states: ââ¬ÅThe provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable....ââ¬Â (Italics added)
Smart growth advocates seek to preserve land in a natural or agricultural state by encouraging individuals to live in denser communities that take up smaller tracts of land per housing unit. Such communities also encourage residents to rely more on walking or public transit than on cars for mobility, and they more closely mix retail and other commercial facilities with residential units to foster easy access to jobs and shopping.
Land-use control can often become an obsession to planners for obvious reasons. In order to plan and control growth in their enlightened way, government bureaucrats and planning advocates must control property rights. Private property rights and smart growth are therefore mutually exclusive.
Such policies do not permit Americans the freedom to live where they choose. They must live inside urban growth boundaries. Developers must provide open space around new development. Americans may not live in greenbelt areas around urban centers. They may not live in designated viewsheds of scenic highways, or in the buffer zone of a Heritage River or a designated stream.
Read on: [url]http://www.newswithviews.com/Coffman/mike.htm[/url]
2005-07-15 18:40 | User Profile
A Tragedy of Environmentalism
By Joseph Kellard
January 23, 2003
Recently, a schoolgirl sent my newspaper a tragic letter. The tragedy, however, wasn't in the news she reported, but in her reaction to it.
The Bush administration opened for logging and development 300,000 acres of Alaska's Tongass Forest, home to thousands of species of animals, some of which are "endangered," read her letter of outrage. These human activities will kill many animals that are the "natural residents" of this land, she continued.
"[Human beings], simply because we are 'more advanced' than these animals," her most revealing passage read, "have no right to destroy and plunder this land, which we feel belongs to us, yet belongs to the animals. It is devastating to think of the destruction which will occur if we allow it, simply because we need oil and lumber."
This letter illustrates what occurs after children are taught certain issues and concepts when they are far too young to seriously understand them. The result is not education, but propagandizing for environmentalism, a thoroughly fraudulent, anti-man ideological movement.
Among the corrupt ideas most children like this schoolgirl have been taught, whether explicitly or implicitly, are that animals have rights to the land where they live, but man has no such right to use it for his self-interest (i.e., logging and development); that his activities "destroy" and "plunder"; and that he must sacrifice for nature and non-humans.
This last captures the essence of environmentalism, and her letter.
In reality, human beings are more advanced than animals because they alone possess abstract, conceptual thinking. Man has no animalistic survival instincts, and therefore must exercise his reason to live -- that is, to fell trees to build shelter and drill for oil to heat his home. His government, however, must uphold his rights, inherent in his reasoning nature, to think and act freely, not merely for his basic survival needs, but for his overall enjoyment of life. His freedom to these actions cannot rightfully be sacrificed for any reason, particularly for the non-human, which have no rights.
Thus, to write that man cannot reshape land where animals live "simply because" he needs oil and lumber, amounts to saying he cannot use that land "simply because" he needs to survive and be happy. Since environmentalism holds that man must be sacrifice to Mother Earth, and by extension that he is outside of nature, then, for example, beavers can fell trees and build dams because they are the "natural residents" of the land, but when man does so to build and heat his home he "destroys" and "plunders."
In one form or another, educators propagate these basic ideas to young people, from kindergartners to college students. These ideas give educators license to teach that if not for environmental regulations, corporations such as lumber and oil companies would rape all of Mother Earth's resources to quickly line their own pockets. Further, teachers champion "renewable" resources, allegedly to end US dependence on, first, foreign oil, and second oil altogether, for solar, wind, and other "earth-friendly" energies.
Their lessons, however, omit that it is largely due to environmentalist bans on man's use of vast stretches of land and sea that make the US, in part, dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Nor do they teach that green-approved energies are not viable alternatives to support our mass industrialized civilization. To sell them as such is a fraud. (Note that the more radical environmentalists decry even these energy sources.)
Educators shun books like "Facts Not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment," because they would have to teach these relevant facts: more wood is being grown in the US than is being cut, the number of acres planted with trees goes up nearly every year -- 80 percent of which are planted by private companies -- and cutting down old trees decreases the number of catastrophic wildfires (e.g., San Diego in 2003). Moreover, genetic engineering would produce superior species of trees with better quality and quantity of wood, and cloning would end all concerns about "endangered" species. But environmentalists violently oppose these technologies.
Instead, educators are telling children before they are old enough to spell "tree" or "animal" that these entities have "rights," a concept well beyond their intellectual development. From early on, children are told a host of environmentalism's half-truths, facts taken out of context, and outright lies, which paint man as a short-sighted, rapacious blight on the planet, and responsible for alleged catastrophic global warming, forest, animal and resource depletion, and many other non-factors.
Environmentalism puts up a façade of being for clean air and water for man's betterment, but clearly the movement is against his rational self-interest.
Tragically, this environmentalist propaganda passed off as education produces anxiety- and guilt-ridden children unable think objectively and independently to question this orthodoxy. Tragically, they will grow up not only educators themselves, teaching the same falsehoods to their students, but also politicians always eager to enforce more regulations that restrict man from using earth's resources for his survival and happiness.
[url]http://theai.net/tragedy.html[/url]
2005-07-15 18:48 | User Profile
Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide-Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot ... Rachel Carson. FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | July 31, 2003 | Lisa Makson
Posted on 07/31/2003 4:51:22 AM PDT by SJackson
A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women -- one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 --but there are no protestors clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel's Carson. Her1962 bestselling book Silent Spring detailed the alleged "dangers" of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria. Within ten years, the environmentalist movement had convinced the powers that be to outlaw DDT. Denied the use of this cheap, safe and effective pesticide, millions of people -- mostly poor Africans -- have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson's book. Her coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance.
"This is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro," said Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, Malaria Foundation International Chairman.
"[M]ost politicians today are more concerned about getting re-elected rather than doing what is right. [M]any of them have very poor scientific backgrounds and do not understand the impact of the policy decisions they are making . [and] are not able to teach their constituents that there will be severe consequences to their decisions," said former Surgeon General and retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dr. Harold M. Koenig.
"These poor public policies [i.e. prohibiting use of DDT] are being implemented because it is easier for politicians to go along with the noise coming from the hysterics rather than to learn the whole story and educate the general electorate that there are ways agents like DDT can be used safely," said Koenig, who is currently president of the Annapolis Center, a nonprofit educational organization that "promotes responsible environmental, health, and safety decision-making by applying a science foundation" to the public policy process.
Although DDT "provides the most effective, cheapest, and safest means of abating and eradicating" infectious diseases, all changed with the 1962 publication of Carson's tome Silent Spring. And just as the world's leading scientists predicted 30 years ago, Carson's crusade against DDT has caused the world's deadliest infectious diseases such as typhus and malaria, which "may have killed half of all the people that ever lived" according to the World Health Organization, to make a deadly comeback that will soon threaten the United States and Europe again.
"The resurgence of a disease that was almost eradicated 30 years ago is a case study in the danger of putting concern for nature above concern for people," said Nizam Ahmad, an analyst from Bangladesh that focuses on problems affecting developing countries.
"It's worse than it was 50 years ago," said University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill malaria expert Dr. Robert Desowitz said.
According to the WHO, "more people are now infected [with malaria] than at any point in history," with "up to half a billion cases [being reported] every year." The National Institute of Health reports that "infectious diseases remain the leading cause of death" in the world and is "the third leading cause of death in the United States." WHO estimates put the number of people in Africa dying from malaria annually is equal to the number of AIDS' deaths over the last 15 years combined!
"Carson and those who joined her in the crusade against DDT have contributed to millions of preventable deaths. Used responsibly, DDT can be quite safe for man and the environment," Koenig said, summing up what many infectious disease experts believe.
The discovery of DDT by scientist Paul Herman Muller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, was originally hailed as a major public health success because DDT kills mosquitoes, lice and fleas, which are carriers for more than 20 serious infectious diseases like the bubonic plague, typhus, yellow fever, encephalitis and malaria.
"To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable," a statement from the National Academy of Sciences said. Before DDT, infectious diseases spread like wildfire, leaving millions dead in their wake. During World War I, typhus epidemics killed 3 million Russians and millions elsewhere in European. But during World War II, before it was blacklisted by Carson and her crew, DDT saved millions of Allied troops from becoming ill and/or dying from infectious diseases such as malaria, typhus and the plague. Plus, DDT also saved the lives of recently liberated Nazi concentration camp survivors by killing off typhus-causing lice.
Other reasons for DDT being hailed as a modern day miracle are legion. For starters, it is extremely cheap to produce, costing $1.44 to spray one house for a whole year. Alternative pesticides being pushed by the U.N. and environmentalists are 10 to 20 times more expensive.
"DDT is the best insecticide we have today for controlling malaria," said malaria expert Dr. Donald Roberts of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. "DDT is long-acting, the alternatives are not. DDT is cheap, the alternatives are not. End of story."
Another reason DDT is such a blessing is that it enables developing countries to make significant economic progress, thanks to plunging infectious disease rates. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, "The unparalleled benefits stemming from [public health] programs [in developing countries] are due almost entirely to the use of DDT. DDT provides the only safe, economically feasible eradication measure available today [that helps to promote economic development."
The nation of India provides an illustrative example. Before the World Health Organization began its worldwide malaria eradication program in the 1940s, India had more than 100 million cases of malaria and 2.5 million deaths annually; produced less than 25 million tons of wheat per year; was host to widespread starvation; and spent 60 percent of its GDP on malaria control. But by the '60s, India's malaria cases dropped to fewer than 100,000 reported cases, with less than 1,000 deaths. Thanks to this stability, India produced more than 100 million tons of wheat annually.
But most importantly, DDT is also not hazardous to humans or the environment -- despite all the propaganda to the contrary. According to tests conducted by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Sabine Island Research Laboratory, "92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear" from the environment after 38 days. (See Environmental Protection Agency's DDT hearings transcript, page 3,726.) Plus, humans have nothing to worry about small exposures to DDT.
"DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the past 29 years of its existence]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign," said the WHO director in 1969. "Therefore WHO has no grounds to abandon this chemical which has saved millions of lives, the discontinuation of which would result in thousands of human deaths and millions of illnesses. It has served at least 2 billion people in the world without costing a single human life by poisoning from DDT. The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health."
The only reason millions of lives are being lost to infectious disease is because of Carson's crusade against DDT in her 1962 doomsday book "Silent Spring." Carson predicted that pesticides -- namely DDT -- would cause "practically 100 percent" of the human population would be wiped out from a cancer epidemic after one more generation. This would come about because a race of super-insects, impervious to pesticides, would come about threatening U.S. farms. Desperate farmers then would triple the amount of pesticides they were using so they could stop the super-bugs from destroying their crops. As a result, DDT would eventually work its way up the food chain, killing off first the bugs, then the worms, then the birds (hence her title), the fish and finally mankind.
Although this sounds pretty scary, all of this was mere speculation on Carson's part, based upon erroneous analysis of data (junk science). For example, Carson argued that the rise in cancer rates from 1940-1960 was proof that DDT was the cause because spraying began in 1940 and continued. However, if Carson would have looked at Center for Disease Control data from the 1900-1960, she would have noticed that her theory was way off the mark because cancer rates started to skyrocket in direct correlation to a surge of tobacco use.
"Sure more people are dying now of cancer than did in the past, because they are no longer dying of other causes at earlier ages, especially infectious diseases. The longer people live, the greater chances they have of dying of cancer," Koenig said. "We know of some things that have greater association with cancers. These include the use of tobacco in any form, excessive sun exposure, obesity, stress and lack of exercise. There are a few chemicals that are suspected to be carcinogenic. As far as I know there is no known association between DDT or any other insecticide and cancer. To categorize Carson's work as research is a big stretch. It was really just hysterical speculation."
Despite the constant banshee call of environmentalists that DDT causes cancer -- their main reason for justifying a worldwide DDT ban -- there is no scientific data to back that up.
"The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome [in humans]," said Dr. Amir Attaran, who is with Harvard University's Center for International Development and is a former WHO expert on malaria who used to support the environmentalists' call for using alternatives to DDT. Attaran changed sides on the DDT debate after he witnessed what happened when South Africa. After intense U.N. and environmentalist pressure, South Africa stopped using DDT and switched to the U.N. Environmental Program's alternative pesticides as a way to control malaria. But the mosquitoes quickly developed resistance to the new pesticides and malaria rates increased 1,000 percent. And despite UN threats to cut off funding for South Africa's public health programs, the nation started DDT again because its politicians could not stand idly by and allow millions of its citizens to become sickened and/or die from malaria. "They really tried to phase this stuff out, and had the budget to afford the alternatives," Attaran said. "[But if] South Africa can't get by without DDT, it's pretty much as if to say that nobody can."
In addition to Carson's unfounded cancer claims, Silent Spring is also chock full of other "untruthful and misleading" statements that have absolutely no grounding in scientific reality whatsoever, said San Jose State University entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards. Edwards is an environmentalist "with a desire to keep truth in science and environmentalism." He has even has a book published by the Sierra Club.
Edwards at first supported Carson but quickly changed his mind once he began checking her sources. What he discovered was not only did Carson rely upon "very unscientific sources," but she cited many of the same sources over and over again in order to make her book appear incontrovertible. Even more startling is that Edwards "found" many of Carson's statements based upon sound, scientific sources were actually -- his word -- "false."
"They did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides," Edwards said. "She was really playing loose with the facts, deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them, carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad. It slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans."
For example, Carson wrote that the Audubon Society's annual bird census from 1940-1961 showed widespread declines in the bird population so since this was the same time period that DDT spraying began, DDT was to blame. However, Edwards noted that the Audubon census figures actually show the inverse -- bird populations were increasing! In fact, some birds were benefiting so much from DDT, such as the blackbird and redwings, that they had become "pests."
"The phenomena of increasing bird populations during the DDT years may be due, in part, to (1) fewer blood-sucking insects and reduced spread of avian diseases (avian malaria, rickettsial-pox, avian bronchitis, Newcastle disease, encephalitis, etc); (2) more seed and fruits available for birds to eat after plant-eating insects were decimated [by DDT]; and (3) Ingestion of DDT triggers hepatic enzymes that detoxify carcinogens such as aflatoxin," stated a May 1967 Virginia Department of Agriculture Bulletin.
Yet, despite Carson's research inconsistencies and dearth of solid scientific evidence, DDT was eventually banned in the U.S. This is due to the work of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus, an attorney with ties to the Environmental Defense Fund. Ruckelshaus ordered a hearing on a possible ban of DDT after EDF, which was started and financed by Audubon, and Audubon launched a lawsuit against the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the newly created EPA because of DDT.
After seven months of hearings, which produced 9,362 pages of testimony by 125 witnesses, EPA Judge Edmund Sweeney ruled against EDF, Audubon and the Carson coterie, saying that according to the evidence, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man...is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man...[and the] use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife." But Ruckelshaus quickly overruled Sweeney and banned DDT on Jan. 1, 1972. His decision had nothing to do with science or concern for the American people -- Ruckelshaus never attended a day of the hearings and admitted that he never read the transcripts. Instead, it was due to Ruckelshaus' ties to EDF and environmentalists.
"The ultimate judgment [on DDT] remains political," Ruckelshaus wrote to American Farm Bureau Federation President Allan Grant on April 26, 1979. "Decisions by the government involving the use of toxic substances are political with a small 'p.' In the case of pesticides in our country, the power to make this judgment has been delegated to the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency."
Although the ban was appealed, Ruckelshaus' ban on DDT remained intact because Ruckelshaus stacked the deck in the environmentalists' favor -- he appointed himself as the appeal judge. After the appeal was foiled, Ruckelshaus began soliciting donations on behalf of EDF on his personal stationery, writing: "EDF's scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won." Scientists decried the decision.
"The news that the Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S.A. has now imposed almost a total ban on the use of DDT may be welcomed by partisans of the antipollution movement, but will cause concern to well-informed public health workers, since it increases the difficulty of controlling several tropical arthropod-borne diseases," said Dr. L. J. Bruce-Chwatt in the British medical journal, The Lancet. "The rich countries, preoccupied with their own environmental problems and degenerative illnesses related to affluence should be reminded of the fact that the old plagues have not been banished from the world and that any apparently beneficial move may have an unexpected rebound effect and jeopardize the health gains achieved elsewhere over the years."
Thirty years later, Ruckelshaus' legacy is alive and well. The Green lobby, lead by the WWF and Greenpeace, refuse to stop Carson's crusade against DDT until DDT is banned worldwide. They almost succeeded in 1999 when Germany, which held the European Union presidency, threw its weight behind the issue and began lobbying the UN Environmental Program. Although the resulting Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty never passed, in the meantime, environmentalists and UN politicians from the West are determined to do what they can to stop DDT use.
For example, Mexico, which was one of the few remaining producers of DDT in the world, was forced by the Clinton Administration to stop producing DDT if it wanted the North American Free Trade Agreement to pass. The U.S. State Department's Agency for International Development, under intense pressure from environmentalists, even changed its funding priorities in developing nations, noting that DDT funding would no longer be supported (but birth control would).
The reason for this shift away from DDT towards an emphasis on population control reveals the Malthusian philosophy behind the anti-DDT movement.
"[Any known alternative to DDT] only kills farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes. So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as any," said Dr. Charles Wurster, chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund's Scientific Advisory Council and a key promoter of the DDT ban.
Another anti-DDT Malthusian is Sierra Club director Michael McCloskey, who said that the "Sierra Club wants a ban on pesticides, even in countries where DDT has kept malaria under control...[because by] using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations."
This rationale of the anti-DDT crusaders is much like Carson's Silent Spring -- it is based on nothing more than a pack of unscientific hypothesizing. Much like Silent Spring, Thomas Robert Malthus' Principles of Population paints a horrific doomsday scenario: a worldwide "population explosion" will occur, but man's food production cannot keep pace, so millions will die from starvation. But just like Carson, Malthus only used data that supported his argument, citing birthrates from affluent areas where population was growing, while ignoring birthrates (and death rates) in all areas. And just as with Silent Spring,"environmentalists bandy about Malthus' notions even though he made these predictions before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread availability of contraception. It is interesting to note that despite the anti-DDT crowd's banshee-like cries of overpopulation, statistics -- yet again -- show that the opposite is true: deaths are outpacing births worldwide by a wide margin. So much so that many countries in Europe are trying to encourage their citizens to have more children. For example in Spain, which has the lowest birthrate of all European nations, the government is even awarding families in rural communities highly valuable Serrano pigs; in Valencia, women are given a "fertility" reward of $3,000 just for having a second child.
Today's anti-DDT crusaders' actions, which have caused the deaths of millions, are portrayed as compassionate. "Unquestionably [the DDT ban] places an unfair burden on poor countries," Koenig said. "In fact, this is just a modern day form of imperialism, the more developed and richer nations forcing the poor of the world to do their bidding just to survive."
It is impossible for developing countries to survive on their own without DDT because their populations, those who actually survive the deadly infectious diseases, never regain their full health.
"We have got to stop pressuring countries to stop using DDT," Roberts said. "It is immoral."
"Malaria perpetuates poverty by debilitating people. Unable to work, its victims cannot afford to feed themselves or their children. Sick and malnourished, they are prone to a vicious cycle of future infection and debilitation," said Dr. Roger Bate, author of When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story. "To break the cycle, to save lives, it is imperative that we have all the tools, including DDT, that work to help control malaria, protect health and ensure development."
Sujatin, a resident from the Irian Jaya province Indonesia, told Smithsonian Magazine what it is like to live with malaria. "My husband works as a logger in the jungles. He's gone for weeks at a time and he gets malaria. It is a terrible thing to have. Sweating. Very bad headaches. High, high fever. You vomit. You are so weak...when malaria comes every few days, you feel like you want to die," she said.
"Malaria keeps Africa down, and down is where the rest of the world wants us to be. If this was a disease of the West, it would be gone," Mamadou Kasse, medical editor of Senegal's largest newspaper, Le Soleil, told Atlantic Monthly's Ellen Ruppel Shell for her August 1997 article, "Resurgence of a Deadly Disease."
If Carson's crusaders are really concerned about saving lives and helping developing countries, then must allow DDT to be used without repercussions.
"Malaria kills a few million every year; each life lost is a potential Mandela, Shakespeare, or Edison, and nothing is less reversible than death, nor more tragic than the death of a child," Dr. Roger Bate said. "Hundreds of millions suffer chronic illness, which creates a painful economic burden and perpetuates poverty. This may not be the intention of those who are debating a DDT ban, but it surely will be the outcome."
If that is not enough to convince them, Carson's crusaders should realize that their actions against DDT might eventually boomerang.
"[B]anning DDT worldwide is beyond ignorance, it is just plain stupid," Koenig said. "[Although m]alaria still is prevalent in the countries in the equatorial regions . [it] is only a matter of time, a short time, before we see these diseases again in the regions between the tropics and the poles."
Until that time comes, the malaria plague seems to be off the public radar. However, let there be no mistake: Rachel Carson and the worldwide environmentalist movement are responsbile for perpetuating an ecological genocide that has claimed the lives of millions of young, poor, striving African men, women and children, killed by preventable diseases.
[url]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/955667/posts[/url]
2005-07-15 18:51 | User Profile
Major property rights rally cancelled in Florida -Unable to obtain required permits to protest
Henry Lamb October 3, 2002
Major property-rights rally cancelled in Florida Unable to obtain required permits to protest government land-grabs
While caravans of property-rights advocates rolled toward Florida from California and Ohio, rally organizers agonized over the decision to cancel the events planned to celebrate the caravanôs arrival in Naples, Fla., Oct. 17.
Two days of speeches, music and other festivities designed to call attention to the erosion of private-property rights were planned for Naples, which was to serve as a staging area for the caravan to then proceed across Alligator Alley to Dade County for a final day of activities.
The decision to cancel came late Monday night after a Dade County sponsoring organization discovered they could not secure the necessary permits in time to arrange for the event. Organizers in Collier County had come to the same conclusion earlier in the day.
Local organizations in South Florida have been working since mid-July to secure suitable locations and necessary permits. Obstacles of various sorts appeared at every step of the way.
Some of the organizers are pointing fingers of blame at local politicians, while local politicians are blaming the organizers. Bottom line is, the previously planned and much-touted events will not occur.
Collier Countyôs Property Rights Action Committee, however, is planning a get-together on private property of their members on Oct. 18 to welcome any of the caravan travelers who decide to continue the journey to south Florida. Local organizations in Dade County are trying to regroup and find some other way to prevent the flooding of their land and thousands of acres of private farmland.
The Sawgrass Rebellion was conceived as a rallying cry for people across the country who are experiencing the loss of private property and property rights to government programs that seek to expand wilderness, establish wildlife corridors, secure "open space," create urban-growth boundaries, scenic viewsheds and a host of other land-management programs.
The two primary programs that brought the Sawgrass Rebellion to Florida were the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and Collier Countyôs Comprehensive Plan Amendments.
The $7.8 billion Everglades Restoration Plan seeks to "restore" the Everglades. The plan, however, is also expected to drive hundreds of people from their homes and flood thousands of acres of prime farmland. Moreover, the Washington Post has reported that scientists and engineers have a low confidence level that the plan will achieve the anticipated results.
Amendments to the Collier County Comprehensive Plan, required by state law, present a different set of problems for landowners. The proposed amendments designate vast stretches of private property as "Natural Resource Protection Areas" in a county that already has 87 percent of its land in government ownership or is otherwise "protected."
Development in the protected areas is essentially prohibited. Landowners may "transfer" a development right to a buyer in a "receiving" area. This scheme arbitrarily assigns an artificial value to a development right that is determined by a buyer within the designated receiving area. But there are more so-called "development rights" available for sale than can be absorbed by the designated receiving area. So, what amounts to government manipulation of property values and the designation of a favored "receiving" area is fraught with the potential for political misadventures, say critics.
Not surprisingly, the owner of a significant portion of land in the "receiving" area is a strong supporter of the politicians who are advancing this plan. The "victims" ââ¬â those who live in the designated "protection" areas ââ¬â include landowners who have tried to organize the rallies in Collier County.
A legal challenge to the amendments, filed by a local landowners group ââ¬â one of the rally organizers ââ¬â asked the county to provide more than 30 specific documents, maps and scientific data required to justify the land use designations. The challengers claim scientific data they have accumulated indicates there are virtually no significant ecological or biological differences between the land designated for preservation and the land designated as the "receiving" area where development could occur ââ¬â with development rights purchased by a very limited number of buyers.
Politicians and environmentalists have clearly won this round, fought in the swamps of South Florida. The problem, though, has received considerable attention. People from South Carolina, New York, Montana, California and many other states are discovering that they are confronting precisely the same problems.
The Sawgrass Rebellion, if nothing else, has served to galvanize property-rights groups across the country. More than 700 such groups have lent support in one way or another, and will not fade into the woodwork just because the Florida rally has been cancelled, they say. In fact, property-rights leaders say they are digging in and preparing strategies to take the campaign to a higher level ââ¬â with or without a rally in Florida.
Editorôs note: The October 2002 edition of WNDôs monthly Whistleblower magazine ââ¬â titled "GREEN WITH ENVY: Exposing radical environmentalistsô assault on Western civilization" ââ¬â is a mind-boggling expose of the radical environmentalist movement. It documents how environmentalist-inspired laws outlawing asbestos caused the early collapse of the World Trade Center, killing thousands; how this yearôs ferocious western wildfires were largely the result of environmentalist policies; how environmentalist policy elitists want to lock up as much as one-half of the United States as "Wilderness," basically off-limits to humans; why the save-the-rainforest movement is a fraud; and much, much more.
[url]http://www.godlikeproductions.com/news/item.php?keyid=588&page=1&category=42&scategory=0[/url]
2005-07-15 18:57 | User Profile
Think Brad Pitt
Millions dying so fish may live Sydney Morning Herald ^ | June 19, 2005 | Miranda Devine
Posted on 06/18/2005 6:00:44 PM PDT by Piefloater
IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract fecal matter from the poor man's backside.
He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments. The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence inside seemed to be hell on earth.
I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often lethal, diseases they carry.
The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.
Last month at a health conference in Darwin, researchers warned of a regional epidemic of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. They also warned that malaria in the Asia-Pacific represented a major impediment to economic growth with about 1.4 million people in the region exposed each year. While Australia was declared malaria-free in 1981, the disease kills about one person a year and infects 800 to 1000.
But worldwide the mosquito death toll is staggering. The World Health Organisation says malaria kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people each year, most of them in Africa - mostly children and pregnant women - and causes brain damage to many more.
That is one dead child every 30 seconds. Only AIDS is a bigger killer of Africans.
All those deaths are the reason Rachel Carson's seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, about the evils of pesticides, was last week voted among the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Fifteen American scholars enlisted by conservative magazine Human Events awarded Carson the honour along with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Silent Spring, with its scary talk of cancer and dead fish and the mantra that man must not interfere with nature, launched the modern environmental movement. It also demonised DDT.
"We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides," wrote Carson, "but to find instead a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves."
Which is fine as long as it's not your child dying from a mozzie bite.
The US Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972, and the rest of the world followed suit. Tens of millions of people have died from malaria since. Almost overnight, what has been described as one of the greatest public health tools of the 20th century became one of its biggest bogymen.
It was only thanks to widespread spraying of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s that malaria was eliminated from all developed countries and controlled in tropical Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of Sciences declared that, in scarcely 20 years, DDT had prevented 500 million deaths. Advertisements of the time, which today seem preposterous, extolled it as a benefactor of all humanity, with slogans such as "DDT is good for me-e-e".
But malaria's mounting death toll in the decades since is finally prompting a rethink on DDT. In the footnotes of his best-selling anti-green novel State Of Fear, Michael Crichton asserted that the ban on the pesticide "has killed more people than Hitler".
An article in Britain's Spectator magazine last month went further, branding the DDT ban as the worst crime of the 20th century, and blaming environmentalist extremists for the deaths of about 50 million people.
Five years ago, South Africa began spraying small amounts of the dreaded pesticide on the inside walls of houses to arrest a malaria plague. Other parts of Africa are following, despite the reported disapproval of the UN, WHO and other agencies.
Another green-centric organisation, the European Union, even threatened Uganda this year with an export ban if it used DDT to restart a malaria control program.
But even environmentalists from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, while not admitting any guilt, are doing U-turns on their opposition to DDT, says The New York Times, and are beginning to weigh the benefits (live humans) against the risks (dead fish).
Perhaps the pendulum has swung from the knee-jerk eco-hysteria of Silent Spring to a more realistic approach to sparing human suffering.
[url]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1425875/posts[/url]
2005-07-15 18:58 | User Profile
How to Double Federal Money for Scientific Research in the U.S. by Dr. Bill Wattenburg
April 25, 1997
Someone has to say it: Stop massive scientific fraud in the name of environmental cleanup. With the 100 billion dollars saved, the federal budget for good scientific research can be doubled without increasing the national debt. Only new science will solve our major environmental problems. Medical science could be saving millions of lives many years soonerââ¬âif it had just ten percent of the money being wasted.
An army of environmental movement fraud artists, at least two-hundred thousand strong by minimal estimates, has become a cancer on the economy and health of this nation. This cancer is the Environmental Exploitation Lobby (the EELs) The EELs are the hundreds of thousands of untrained bureaucrats on the public payroll, manipulative lawyers, public relations experts, and high-paid ââ¬Åenvironmental cleanup specialistsââ¬Â who generate and/or feast off of meaningless environmental regulations and projects which require industry and government agencies alike to pay billions of dollars to them, the EELs. The EELs are the ones who benefited from the tens of billions wasted on stripping solid asbestos from our schools and public buildingsââ¬âa waste confirmed by none less than the EPA. They are the fear mongers who pocketed the twenty billion wasted on the nonexistent low frequency electromagnetic field threatââ¬âa scientific fraud recently confirmed by none less than the American Physical Society. Some other current multi-billion-dollar frauds are described below. The EELs are now wasting at least a hundred billion dollars each year of the limited public and private resources that should be going to quality research and development in all the sciences. In this era of limited government funding, scientists who do not speak up are sacrificing both the credibility and the future of science in this country. Those who may soon have no funds to support their work will have no one to blame but themselves. Scientific innovation, not massively misguided bureaucratic intervention at any cost, is the only solution to the most serious environmental problems. The professional scientific societies of America could reverse this double injustice to our nationââ¬â¢s future very quickly by organizing a conference to bring together leaders of Congress and private industry, government agencies funding most R&D, and university scientists. The purpose of this conference would be to organize unbiased scientific reviews and evaluations of the doubtful regulations and cleanup programs that are costing our nation the most. The potential reward for science that could be negotiated by our scientific societies should be that industry and victimized government agencies relieved from meaningless regulations will henceforth agree to contribute a reasonable percentage, say 25%, of savings to publicly funded scientific research. Industry and government could well afford to increase total public support for scientific research, no strings attached, by fifty percent within three yearsââ¬ânot just a little, but by fifty percent at least! The good scientists of this nation cannot continue to stand on the sidelines and tolerate this outrageous situation for fear of violating political correctness. Doubling the federal biomedical research budget, for instance, could save millions of lives and extend all of our lives within a few years. Compare this to the one-in-a-million person who is supposedly rescued by most of our bureaucratically inspired and misguided billion-dollar cleanup programs? A recent international conference (1) to find more support for biomedical research covered about every subjectââ¬âexcept a workable plan for significantly increasing funds for scientific research: This commiseration conference ignored a basic truth of our times: we are in an era of limited public funds to support all government activities. Money wasted by one government branch or bureaucracy is money denied all others. Private industry money wasted in the name of science is money that can never be paid to the government for its support of scientific research.
Scientific research dictates the future health of our economy and well as the health of our citizens. Millions of our citizens are dying early deaths, thanks to the EELs. The national tragedy can be measured by considering just the appalling consequences of too little funds for basic medical research alone. With the rapid advances in molecular and cellular biology, it is safe to predict that medical science will be able to find cures for cancers and other serious diseases that eventually kill us all. These advances surely will extend all our lives by five to ten years. So, for every year that these medical advances are delayed by lack of research funds, the equivalent of many millions of lives are lost in the U.S alone. This includes the members of Congress and their families whose lives will not be extended by the science that they should be supporting. Those who exploit the environmental movement to waste tens of billions that should be going to good medical science are directly responsible for denying millions of people many additional years of good life. The monumental absurdity is that the majority of environmental programs can not demonstrate that they are saving even a hundred lives, let alone the million equivalent every year that medical advances could rescue soon.
Superfundsââ¬âSuper Frauds The cruel fraud of the so-called superfund to clean up toxic sites around the country has been widely publicized. Eighty percent of the first twenty billion dollars spent went into the pockets of lawyers and bureaucrats who didnââ¬â¢t account for even a shovel full of dirt being cleaned upââ¬âbut they helped write the laws and make suckers out of members of Congress and the public, and shovel money into their pockets. Once the environmental lobby had convinced Congress to enact the superfund law and sidetrack billions of dollars that could be supporting other vital and productive programs such as scientific research, the technically incompetent members of the environmental lobby swiftly set about stuffing sixteen billion dollars into their own pockets. This exceeded the total budget for all publicly funded biomedical research in this country. However, no group of scientists stood up to protest while more money was being wasted in the name of environmental science than real scientists could ever hope to obtain. In fact, the superfund fraud is just the overflow of the cesspoolââ¬âa whiff in the wind compared to the real waste going on. Many have estimated that $60 to $100 billion dollars is wasted each year by U.S. industry in complying with meaningless regulations that have no scientific or cost effective basis whatsoever. These economy-killer regulations are devised by the EELs and put in force by incompetent bureaucrats who have to justify their existence. There is not a scientist reading this who is not aware of meaningless, paper-pushing regulations that even waste the meager funds available to university laboratories.
Read on: [url]http://www.pushback.com/Wattenburg/articles/sciencefunding.html[/url]
2005-07-15 19:00 | User Profile
The Australian government put the skids on Shell's bid for Woodside as being in the nations interest. Yet we have a company that is heavily involved in Oil and Coal trying to get it's hands on a third of the worlds supply's of uranium. Do we really want the oil companies to have a stranglehold on another possible energy source ? But Xstrata is just a miner right ? What do they have to do with oil ? A major shareholder in Xstrata is Glencore International who incidently....."Through these commodity departments we physically market Crude Oil and Oil Products such as Fuel Oil, Heating Oil, Gasoline, Naphtha, Jet Fuel and Liquefied Petroleum Gas, as well as Coal and Coke." [url]http://www.glencore.com/pages/group_structure_energy.htm[/url] An interesting history on Xstrata can be read here. [url]http://finance.news.com.au/story/0,10166,12063767-521,00.html[/url]
Good riddence you may say. A world without nuclear energy would be a godsend right ? I disagree....
"The purpose of the organized environmentalist movements was to be a cover for the oil company stoppage of the building of nuclear power plants. Thus, instead of branding the country which owned the nuclear fuel as "communist," since it was the US which owned most of the fuel, the uranium and plutonium fuel itself needed to be "branded" as the worst mass killer since Stalin, Hitler and Foo Manchu.
The new "phoney" environmentalists would point out Hiroshima, Nagasaki and even Chernobyl as proof of the dangers of nuclear energy. But if you explain that Chernobyl was never built to be a safe nuclear power plant, but was an old Soviet bomb factory for quickly converting raw uranium into plutonium for making nuclear bombs. And, if you further explain that it did produce electricity as a byproduct but it was not designed to be a safe power plant, the average environmentalist only stares blankly. And no nuclear reactors like Chernobyl, without any safety-sealed containment vessel, have been built for over 50 years. But that wasn't in any "environmentalist movement" handout literature they read.
Are nuclear reactors safe, clean and reliable? Go ask the US Navy. They have been running hundreds of nuclear reactors for over 40 years in their ships, submarines and aircraft carriers. Not one accident or radiation leak. When it comes time to change the used nuclear fuel, after the old fuel is removed and they wait two days for the short-term radiation components in the core container to fade away, the nuclear swabbies actually enter the reactor core, and do their regular maintenance work.
Often the Navy nuclear technicians sit for several days right on the reactor core with their tools and instruments during the maintenance procedure. The dosimeters they wear measure the amount of radiation they are getting. The dosimeters always show the total radiation they get while sitting in the reactor core during maintenance is much less radiation than the average web- surfer gets from sitting in front of a color VGA computer monitor while surfing the web for an hour. What? That wasn't in the "phoney environmentalist" handouts?
Most of the "environmentalist" movements are really being directed by the petroleum industry to shut down nuclear energy in order to keep the huge profits flowing into the oil companies, until the time comes when the energy companies can also take control of nuclear fuel.
Thus the "phoney environmentalists," who are still clamoring for the US to enact the Kyoto accords, are both in favor of the switchover to nuclear generated energy, and at the same time are opposed to building new nuclear plants in the US. I will leave it to the "environmentalists" to figure out the illogic of that position." [url]http://www.brojon.org/frontpage/bj050701-4.html[/url]
But what does an attack on environmentalists have to do with a mining company taking over Australia's Uranium ? It's all about control. The US lead oil leaders do not control the worlds supply of Uranium. Why do you think the US bans the recycling of Uranium products ? Because they do not have control over that "clean" energy source.
But soon they will. Not only has the US and it's oil leaders taken control of the majority of the worlds oil supplies now they are seeking to get a hold of the worlds uranium.
Our government is in so deep with the US and it's oil leaders they will not block the sale. Soon it will be game set and match.
[url]http://www.perthimc.asn.au/?action=newswire&parentview=8734[/url]
2005-07-15 21:32 | User Profile
Gabrielle,
You are right about the "Environmentalists" most of what they do has nothing to with "protecting" the earth. It is about getting Political power. They are Neo-marxists. That is why some call "Environmentalist" Watermelons; they are Green on the outside and Red on the inside!
2005-07-16 03:09 | User Profile
These groups engage in a sort of corporate extortion for a living.
A few years ago I was involved in a case where my firm's client - a food manufacturer - was basically shaken down by an upstart environmental group concerning alleged GMO (genetically modified organism) in their products. The people behind this group had contacts in the press, and a few cleverly worded statements caused our client a good deal of PR damage.
The one of the big names in the environmental "movement" offerred their "services" to help "set the record straight."
It was rather clearly a coordinated shakedown (although we couldn't prove it). And it worked. Our client became a corporate sponsor of the big environmental group, and got its name cleared in the press.
From my experience, that's how the thing works in practice. These groups are really businesses in their own right, with the profits coming out as managment salary and bonuses instead of dividends and interest payments.
They're parasites who look out for themselves. Their business is to provide PR cover for their big corporate sponsors.
Heck, just as one example, if groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club were really concerned about the environment and overpopulation, they'd be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Minutemen on the Arizona border. They'd be sponsoring VDARE. But clearly that's not what they're about. In fact, Sierra faced an insurgency by its grass roots members recently (covered by VDARE) on this very issue, and no suprises that the grass roots contingency was soundly defeated.
Money talks, bs walks.
2005-07-16 03:15 | User Profile
It is a shame that leftists have completely taken over the global environmental movement, because true conservationism is an extremely conservative ideal. There is certainly nothing conservative about rapacious consumer capitalism.
2005-07-17 12:26 | User Profile
Kill name, PETA asks Fishkill Animal rights group offers alternative By Anthony Farmer Poughkeepsie Journal
If Fishkill changes its name to a more animal-friendly moniker, will the striped bass swimming in the Hudson River have any idea?
PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, seems to think so.
The animal rights group based in Norfolk, Va., renewed its call, first made nearly a decade ago, for Fishkill to change its name. The group now wants the town and village to be known as FishingHurts.com, which just happens to be the Internet address for a PETA Web site dedicated to the group's "fish empathy project."
Fishkill officials weren't biting Wednesday.
The name Fishkill is actually derived from two Dutch words: Vis, for fish, and Kill, for stream or creek. PETA acknowledges the true meaning of the name, but said most who see Fishkill on a map wouldn't know that.
Implied definition
"When they think of Fishkill, they think of abusing fish and that's not the right message," said Karin Robertson, manager of PETA's fish empathy project. "By changing the name, Fishkill can send a positive message to people."
PETA argues studies show fish are smarter than most people think.
PETA also offered to donate $15,000 worth of a soy-based, faux-fish product for school students in the town if the name is changed.
But local Fishkillers said PETA's offer wasn't likely to catch on.
Resident Willa Skinner, the town historian, said the area has been known as Fishkill since it was first settled.
"I don't know what's the matter with these people," Skinner said. "I think they don't mind a lot of ridicule.
"What about the other kills, like Otterkill, Beaverkill, Catskill?" she wondered.
PETA said it would welcome any town with such a name to change it to something more animal-friendly.
Supervisor Joan Pagones said the name is part of the town's heritage and is not meant to demean any form of life. She noted the community even has a disaster plan that includes animals.
"We love animals, we love fish, we love dogs, we love cats," Pagones said. "We can't change our heritage."
Pagones said she is willing to sit down with the group. Instead of changing the town's name, she hoped any discussion would focus more on things like not using animals for testing commercial products, something she supports.
"I don't even have a fur coat," she added.
PETA has cast its net before seeking towns to change their names, but has come up empty.
Two years ago, PETA offered $15,000 worth of veggie patties for the community of Hamburg, near Buffalo, to change it's name to "Veggieburg." Hamburg leaders declined.
"We haven't been taken up on any of our offers yet," Robertson admitted.
[url]http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050714/NEWS01/507140349&SearchID=73214379568044[/url]
2005-07-18 14:32 | User Profile
A textbok case of Information Warfare. Using informatin for political advantage and power. Mao was only partly right about where political power emmanates from.
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]These groups engage in a sort of corporate extortion for a living.
A few years ago I was involved in a case where my firm's client - a food manufacturer - was basically shaken down by an upstart environmental group concerning alleged GMO (genetically modified organism) in their products. The people behind this group had contacts in the press, and a few cleverly worded statements caused our client a good deal of PR damage.
The one of the big names in the environmental "movement" offerred their "services" to help "set the record straight."
It was rather clearly a coordinated shakedown (although we couldn't prove it). And it worked. Our client became a corporate sponsor of the big environmental group, and got its name cleared in the press.
From my experience, that's how the thing works in practice. These groups are really businesses in their own right, with the profits coming out as managment salary and bonuses instead of dividends and interest payments.
They're parasites who look out for themselves. Their business is to provide PR cover for their big corporate sponsors.
Heck, just as one example, if groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club were really concerned about the environment and overpopulation, they'd be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Minutemen on the Arizona border. They'd be sponsoring VDARE. But clearly that's not what they're about. In fact, Sierra faced an insurgency by its grass roots members recently (covered by VDARE) on this very issue, and no suprises that the grass roots contingency was soundly defeated.
Money talks, bs walks.[/QUOTE]
2005-07-18 20:43 | User Profile
You see I have no problem with pro-Environmental legislation, I actually like it, but sometimes the left just proposes stupid stuff for sensational value. In terms of checks and balances on corporations so they don't put profit before saftey, I think that is a good thing. When it gets to the point where they are talking about drilling in the Artic, it won't really hurt anything, so I think the left just complains for the media attention to gain lemming votes.