Environmentalism: The "Greenist Insanity"

[PoliticalChic]

What makes adherents of the 'environmental' movement, the 'greens,' insane?


Well....if one can picture an adult- at least in terms of chronological age- advocating that society give up technological advances, the free market economy, private property, and that society should consider the views of stone age peoples as more advanced.....\
..that's pretty much text-book insane.



And how about that attachment of environmentalists to a childish view of ancient peoples, and a bigoted one of the white race?

(Of course, thanks to the Liberal worldview, it's open season on white folks and Christians.)



7. "The wisdom of the tribal peoples, and its favourable contrast with the cruel rapacity of the white man’s approach to the environment, has become one of the mantras of the Green movement. Primitive people, supposedly living in harmony with nature, have become, in Wallace Kaufman’s phrase: ‘the gold standard of the environmental movement. Against this standard it measures the values and achievements of our society’(Kaufman, W., "No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking,", p.57)
Whelan, Op.Cit., p.23



a. "The environmental holocaust will only be averted, according to this argument, when
we are humble enough to sit at the feet of tribal peoples and absorb their wisdom."
Ibid.

OMG.




8. "In the neo-religion of the Greens, the tribal man and woman are Adam and Eve, their home is the Garden of Eden, and their state that which can obtain before the serpent of greed makes people eat the apple of industrial development."
North, R.D., "Life on a Modern Planet: A Manifesto for Progress," p.198.



Insane?

 

[PoliticalChic]

9. Once one looks deeply into the 'thinking' of the insane greenists, and considers what they 'believe' to be the facts.....one wonders how they escape the asylums.


A. Take the book"The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy,"
by ultra greenist Kirkpatrick Sale....
From a review of the book: "Columbus as seed-bearer of a European civilization of conquest, violence, ecological plunder and intolerance."


Really?

It is no more than a screed blasting Western civilization, a fundamental theme in Greenist doctrine, and expounds on the wonders of the 'noble savage.'


Typical of the insanity of the Greens, Sales actually claims that primitive peoples lived free from disease.

This, page 160 of his book:

"...to an extraordinary extent, the Americas were free of any serious pathogens...the Indians enjoyed remarkably good health, free of both endemic and epidemic scourges. As [anthropologist] Henry Dobyns says...’People simply did not very often die from illnesses’ before the Europeans came."


Believable?




Can you take one more dose of this insanity?

b. "There is only one way to live in America, and there can be only one way, and that is as Americans - the original Americans - for that is what the earth of America demands. We have tried for five centuries to resist that simple truth. We resist it further only at risk of the imperilment - worse, the likely destruction - of the earth."
Sale, Op.Cit., p. 369

Live the way early tribes did?
This passes for cogent thought?



Rather than running around in a loincloth, these folks need their sleeves lengthened by a couple of feet so they can be tied in the back.

 

[mamooth]

You understand nobody actually reads your babble, right?

The exception is when you're getting upset at how FDR didn't ally with Hitler in WWII. Nazi sympathizing does draw people's attention.

 

[PoliticalChic]

You understand nobody actually reads your babble, right?

The exception is when you're getting upset at how FDR didn't ally with Hitler in WWII. Nazi sympathizing does draw people's attention.

1.First you dolts deny the truth of what I post.

2. When you realize that it is undeniable, the personal attacks begin

a. And, of course the lies, such as 'you're getting upset at how FDR didn't ally with Hitler...'

3.Then 'nobody actually reads your babble, right?'...and you write that after reading same.

Priceless!


My posts are well researched and documented...
If I were wrong, one of you imbeciles would be able to explain how so.....but you can't; I am, as usual.....correct.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Now I've laid out the case, complete with examples, of the magical thinking of environmentalists, the Greenists, and while there has been anger from the other side, there hasn't been any counter argument from their side.



Here is just one more way of spotlighting the insanity, the satire of Brother Theodore....


10. When considering the bizarre concepts on which environmentalism is based, the best critique of same came from comic-noire philosopher, Brother Theordore...


"...started developing the weird, philosophical, sick-funny monologues that would be his greatest legacy. Calling his act "stand-up tragedy," Theodore would, with dark glare and thick German accent, alternately rail at and flirt with audience. Nearly all the jokes had a dark or absurdist edge, and some of his favorite themes included completely giving up food and convincing humans to walk on all fours instead of two legs."
Stand-Up Tragedy Brother Theodore Gottlieb Dead at 94 - Playbill.com



Hardly any different from the insanity of Greenists who find salvation in the 'wisdom' of long-supplanted cultures, Theodore propounds the idea that man should devolve back to Quadrupedism, ambling around on all fours.....




Check out his performance here, and compare it to the serious insanity of the environmentalists....

 

[Old Rocks]

Hmmmmmmm.............. We have real problems concerning maintaining a livable environment and supplying all the power our society needs. Now we see a whacko on the far right, PoliticalShit, posting the meanderings of whackos on the far left. Really had enough of both, we need sane people addressing real problems, not nut jobs still hunting commies under their bed.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Hmmmmmmm.............. We have real problems concerning maintaining a livable environment and supplying all the power our society needs. Now we see a whacko on the far right, PoliticalShit, posting the meanderings of whackos on the far left. Really had enough of both, we need sane people addressing real problems, not nut jobs still hunting commies under their bed.

"posting the meanderings of whackos"

You seem not to have been able to cite any?

Is that an oversight on your part....or because you are too stupid?



We both know that everything I post is true and correct....and you prove that by both your vague 'is not, is not' posts, and by how easily I reduce you to vulgarity.

True?

 

[Old Rocks]

Now PolticalShit, you did not reduce me to vulgarity. I was already there long before I ever saw a post of yours. After all, I grew up around fundementalists and their mental contortions to avoid reality. Honest vugarity is far better than the lies and myths of far right wing fundementalists.

 

[dilloduck]

The OP is fringe whack job rant. The environmental movement is filled with people that were infants when the Soviet Union fell. That Delingpole can contrive parallels between environmentalism and communism is meaningless. Given the sort of free reign of imagination of which Delingpole has made use, we could come up with parallels between communism and any group of people you'd care to identify. The core principles of environmentalism involve the protection and preservation of the environment in its natural state. They are NOT the core principles of communism: common ownership of the means of production and the elimination of social classes.

That you could be convinced that they are, indicates a hostility towards environmentalism and a certain paranoia regarding communism on your part. Thus, I believe you must be a whack job.

Apparently you are of the belief that when the Soviet Union fell communist ideology disappeared from the face of the Earth. Educate yourself.

 

[Old Rocks]

The OP is fringe whack job rant. The environmental movement is filled with people that were infants when the Soviet Union fell. That Delingpole can contrive parallels between environmentalism and communism is meaningless. Given the sort of free reign of imagination of which Delingpole has made use, we could come up with parallels between communism and any group of people you'd care to identify. The core principles of environmentalism involve the protection and preservation of the environment in its natural state. They are NOT the core principles of communism: common ownership of the means of production and the elimination of social classes.

That you could be convinced that they are, indicates a hostility towards environmentalism and a certain paranoia regarding communism on your part. Thus, I believe you must be a whack job.

Apparently you are of the belief that when the Soviet Union fell communist ideology disappeared from the face of the Earth. Educate yourself.

It just as well have. Nobody gives it credance any more. Not even the 'Communist' nations.

 

[Bfgrn]

Why does Teddy Roosevelt and a present day environmentalist sound the same PC?

a. Teddy Roosevelt, icon of conservation, along with his ideological soul-mate, Gifford Pinchot, head of the Division of Forestry (later the Forest Service), strongly believed in the preservation of forest lands. Their view of conservation saw waste as the problem…..not people. “He was a progressive who strongly believed in the efficiency movement. The most economically efficient use of natural resources was his goal; waste was his great enemy.”


Present day environmentalist

I want to say this: There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.

The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.

What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. That's what we do with the Riverkeepers -- we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full-time, paid Riverkeeper -- each one agrees to sue polluters.

At Riverkeeper, we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists anymore. We're free marketers. We go out into the marketplace, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We're going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits, because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country. What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient, and the kind of corporate-crony capitalism which has been embraced by this White House, which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity, and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria.

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.

And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.

The Bush White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.

In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined; they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction.

The only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy. You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny, where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but, over the long term, the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number-one issue for all of us: to try to restore American democracy, because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Now PolticalShit, you did not reduce me to vulgarity. I was already there long before I ever saw a post of yours. After all, I grew up around fundementalists and their mental contortions to avoid reality. Honest vugarity is far better than the lies and myths of far right wing fundementalists.

The vulgarity began when it dawned on you that my posts are correct and true.

So...I have reduced you to same.


But...you certainly can try again.....is environmentalism merely an atavistic attempt to worship Gaia, curtail technology and industry, inflate the power of government?

Is it not based, as communism is, on ending private property?

How many examples of Greenists claiming that the noble savage should be our icon, and learning from same should be our goal?

See what I mean?

You are speechless.....and clueless.

And insane.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Why does Teddy Roosevelt and a present day environmentalist sound the same PC?

a. Teddy Roosevelt, icon of conservation, along with his ideological soul-mate, Gifford Pinchot, head of the Division of Forestry (later the Forest Service), strongly believed in the preservation of forest lands. Their view of conservation saw waste as the problem…..not people. “He was a progressive who strongly believed in the efficiency movement. The most economically efficient use of natural resources was his goal; waste was his great enemy.”


Present day environmentalist

I want to say this: There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.

The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.

What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. That's what we do with the Riverkeepers -- we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full-time, paid Riverkeeper -- each one agrees to sue polluters.

At Riverkeeper, we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists anymore. We're free marketers. We go out into the marketplace, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We're going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits, because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country. What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient, and the kind of corporate-crony capitalism which has been embraced by this White House, which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity, and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria.

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.

And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.

The Bush White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.

In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined; they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction.

The only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy. You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny, where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but, over the long term, the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number-one issue for all of us: to try to restore American democracy, because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.

You little stinker, you left out the part about profit.

b. TR and Pinchot did not intend to set aside forests for perpetual pristine preservation. Their conservation was anthropocentric, a very different concept from modern environmentalists. No, their aim was to set aside resources for future development, for profit, and for the benefit of the many: “The greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest time” (the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham).

That endorses capitalism...the very anathema to 'environmentalism.'

 

[CrusaderFrank]

The IPCC openly said that AGW is not about science, it's about Marxist redistribution

 

[Bfgrn]

Why does Teddy Roosevelt and a present day environmentalist sound the same PC?

a. Teddy Roosevelt, icon of conservation, along with his ideological soul-mate, Gifford Pinchot, head of the Division of Forestry (later the Forest Service), strongly believed in the preservation of forest lands. Their view of conservation saw waste as the problem…..not people. “He was a progressive who strongly believed in the efficiency movement. The most economically efficient use of natural resources was his goal; waste was his great enemy.”


Present day environmentalist

I want to say this: There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.

The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.

What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. That's what we do with the Riverkeepers -- we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full-time, paid Riverkeeper -- each one agrees to sue polluters.

At Riverkeeper, we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists anymore. We're free marketers. We go out into the marketplace, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We're going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits, because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country. What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism, which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient, and the kind of corporate-crony capitalism which has been embraced by this White House, which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity, and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria.

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks. They maximize wealth. They create jobs. I own a corporation. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our government. The reason for that is they don't have the same aspirations for America that you and I do. A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits, and the best way for it to get profits is to use our campaign-finance system -- which is just a system of legalized bribery -- to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.

And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're amoral, and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process. Let them do their thing, but they should not be participating in our political process, because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic. It's against the law in this country, because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins. That's the way the law works, and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process, and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process. This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders -- Republican and Democrat -- have been warning the American public against domination by corporate power.

The Bush White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately, but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid, the domination of our government by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions, would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth, who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, in his most famous speech, warned America against domination by the military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, he complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.

In order to do that, we need an informed public and an activist public. And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that puts all the values we care about in jeopardy, because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined; they go together. There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction.

The only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy. You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny, where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but, over the long term, the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number-one issue for all of us: to try to restore American democracy, because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.

You little stinker, you left out the part about profit.

b. TR and Pinchot did not intend to set aside forests for perpetual pristine preservation. Their conservation was anthropocentric, a very different concept from modern environmentalists. No, their aim was to set aside resources for future development, for profit, and for the benefit of the many: “The greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest time” (the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham).

That endorses capitalism...the very anathema to 'environmentalism.'

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke

Why am I not surprised PC?

Please tell us what part of RFK Jr's speech Teddy would disagree with...be specific...

 

[Moonglow]

Humans are not the top of the cosmic order but part of it, destroying nature for financial gain will eventually leave you with a planet unable to sustain any more profit, or the complex lives that will be destroyed.. We as humans have to follow the fine line as other species in regard to our natural resources. They must be managed and maintained for future humans..

 

[dilloduck]

You don't see any evidence of anyone provoking class struggles anywhere ?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

"Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated." – IPCC, 2010

 

[PoliticalChic]

Humans are not the top of the cosmic order but part of it, destroying nature for financial gain will eventually leave you with a planet unable to sustain any more profit, or the complex lives that will be destroyed.. We as humans have to follow the fine line as other species in regard to our natural resources. They must be managed and maintained for future humans..

1. "Humans are not the top of the cosmic order..."

Well....if one were to use you for judging same, I can certainly see why you would say that.



2. "We as humans have to follow the fine line as other species in regard to our natural resources."

Sort of like squirrels who bury nuts?
I can see you fit into that analogy.

 

[Moonglow]

Humans are not the top of the cosmic order but part of it, destroying nature for financial gain will eventually leave you with a planet unable to sustain any more profit, or the complex lives that will be destroyed.. We as humans have to follow the fine line as other species in regard to our natural resources. They must be managed and maintained for future humans..

1. "Humans are not the top of the cosmic order..."

Well....if one were to use you for judging same, I can certainly see why you would say that.



2. "We as humans have to follow the fine line as other species in regard to our natural resources."

Sort of like squirrels who bury nuts?
I can see you fit into that analogy.

Have you found a way to give that 5 year old his brain back?