Is non-principle of “sustainability” about to collapse under the weight of its own mushy contradictions? News this week from the seemingly unrelated areas of biofuels and health policy provide some hope.
Sustainability has been smuggled into the policy lexicon as an Orwellian dumber-down of debate. Who would promote unsustainability? It has become the weasel word and policy tic of our time. Corporate chieftains, politicians, consultants and public intellectuals all bow the knee before this founding concept of environmental Newspeak.
Its origins as a subversive political principle lay in the United Nations’ Brundtland report, which coined “sustainable development” as a counterattack against the resurgent forces of free-market capitalism in the late 1980s. Designed to induce a warm fuzzy feeling of stewardship of the planet, the poor and the future, its true meaning was hinted at by the fact that it was hatched by a bunch of self-confessed socialists, led by Gro Harlem Brundtland and Canada’s own Maurice Strong.
Sustainability was the new “S” word, behind which lurked all the power lust and exploitation of economic ignorance that had given the old “S” word its power. Before, that is, the old “S” word had collapsed in a heap.
It was inevitable, however, that, just as the old socialism imploded because it simply didn’t work (except for its rulers and their hangers on) so the new socialism would also grind to a halt.
Although sustainability initiatives are piled on to the policy temple daily, mighty intellectual cracks are becoming ever more apparent. Perhaps the most obvious current example is the global biofuels fiasco. Government subsidies doled out in the name of concern for future generations have wound up exacerbating food supply problems and sending prices soaring; thus severely damaging those underrepresented poor people who happen to live on the earth right now.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (a former dyed-in-the-wool “old” radical socialist who believed that governments could run everything) this week wrote a letter to the chairman of the Group of Eight noting that: “We need urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable.” The President of the European Commission, Jose Barroso, responded: “We are for sustainable fuels.”
So let’s see now, a sustainable government initiative has led to an unsustainable result. Sounds like we need a little more clear thinking here. Or perhaps just thinking.
Another, even more bizarre, indication of utter confusion about the concept of sustainability came this week when British Columbia declared that it was going to add sustainability as the sixth “pillar” of its medicare programme (the other five crumbling struts being universality, portability, accessibility, comprehensiveness and public administration). Insofar as this announcement means anything, howeverbeyond that variation of policy Tourette syndrome that requires the “S” word to be attached to any and every initiativeit seems to mean more reliance on markets, the very evil from which sustainability is meant to deliver us!
This refreshing possibility (and an inevitable one, since medicare in its present form is, well, unsustainable) was confirmed by the agitated reaction of the NDP and other leftist groups such as Canadian Doctors for Medicare.
NDP health critic Judy Wasylycia-Leis declared, “I think this is really the agenda of the privatizers of medicare,” before retreating into the Alice in Wonderland world of sustainablespeak. Sustainable health care, she said, is apparently a “goal” of governments, but “it is not a fundamental principle of medicare and I think what the B.C. government is doing is dangerous and very, very troubling from the point of view of preserving a system that is one of the best in the world.”
We have to agree that the Canadian system beats the only other two regimes where private health care is criminalized: Cuba and North Korea.
Sustainability’s psychological roots lay in the counterintuitiveness of market economics and the urge to exploit that ignorance in pursuit of political power. There are undoubtedly “externalities” in industrial activity. That is why we have environmental laws, which have traditionally erred on the side of excessive cost. However, the new form of socialism claims that marketsthat is, peopleare so feckless of environmental costs that not merely laws are needed but a comprehensive reordering of prices by bureaucratic fiat, so that consumer/sheep might be led towards the heaven on earth that the old “S” word failed to deliver.
The old interventionism was all about government ownership and central planning. The new interventionism is all about carbon taxes and or cap-and-trade to set the “right” prices so that we might regulate not just the world economy but the weather too! Why do so few people recognize that this is not just utterly ridiculous but profoundly dangerous to our freedom and our future?
The alleged severity of the problem (which is grossly exaggerated because it provides a new rationale for an old and ineradicable urge) in no way validates the application of methods that have always and everywhere failed in the past. Instead, that problem is either simply assumed away, or treated as an issue of insufficient “will” or “commitment.”
As Mark Jaccard, one of the leading proponents of draconian carbon-restriction policies to save the world, put it in an article in yesterday’s Vancouver Sun, “Political trust is crucial if humanity is to avert a climate catastrophe.” So forget history.
But then that’s what you have to do if, like Mr. Jaccard, you are fatally conceited enough to really think you can engineer a “sustainable global energy system.”
Maurice Strong:
Rep. Kanjorski: $550 Billion Disappeared in “Electronic Run On the Banks”(11am,09/15(8?)/08)
Live Leak ^ | 02/07/09 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1234032281
Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 1:54:52 AM by TigerLikesRooster
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2182163/posts
Rep. Kanjorski: $550 Billion Disappeared in “Electronic Run On the Banks”
At 2 minutes, 20 seconds into this C-Span video clip, Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania explains how the Federal Reserve told Congress members about a “tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars.”
According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occured over the period of an hour or two.
83 posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 12:43:50 PM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2182367/posts?page=83#83
More ammo here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2182432/posts?page=4#4
Rep. Kanjorski: $550 Billion Disappeared in “Electronic Run On the Banks”
BoingBoing.net ^ | February 9, 2009 | unknown http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/09/rep-kanjorski-550-bi.html
Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 12:43:07 PM by an amused spectator
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2182432/posts
122 posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 1:07:08 PM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2091792/posts
George Soros, Maurice Strong and company redefine the Middleclass (Must read)
Canada Free Press ^ | September 26, 2008 | Judi McLeod
Posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 10:41:02 AM by maggief
Who is attacking the U.S.? The big casualty in this 21st century U.S. civil war is the Middle Class George Soros, Maurice Strong and company redefine the Middleclass
George Soros, Al Gore, Warren Buffet, Maurice StrongThe Democrat-loving mainstream media is missing the boat on Warren Buffet’s take of America’s economic meltdown as …”a sort of economic Pearl Harbor we’re going through.”
That being the case, then surely the first question should be: “Who is attacking the U.S.?”
The billionaire’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. at the same time he’s touting the Treasury’s $700 billion bank rescue plan, should be the tipoff.
With so many banksters and fraudsters openly treating the U.S. treasury as their private piggybank, one ponders what‘s really going on.
Is wholesale market manipulation the new al Qaeda?
(snip)
So how does UN Poster Boy Maurice Strong intend to harness America’s middleclass?
This is what Strong told a reporter back in 1990, when he was describing what he called a fantasy scenario for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerlandwhere 1,000 diplomats, CEOs and politicians gather annually “to address global issues”.
What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?…
In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?
“This group of world leaders forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse,” Strong told the reporter in painting his so-called fantasy scenario.
“It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodities and stock markets. They’ve engineered, using their access to stock markets and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world’s stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can’t close…
(snip)
48 posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 12:19:49 PM by maggief
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2182367/posts?page=48#48