“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” – Rahm Emanuel
(Rules for Radicals #8)
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Obama announced on Wednesday that the U.S. will curb its oil imports by a third within the next ten years. Before you get overly excited and think that he plans to replace the 1.6 billion barrels of oil (33% of the 5 billion barrels of crude and refined petroleum products we import) per year by allowing accessing our own vast resources of oil, natural gas, and coal; or facilitating building new nuclear power facilities, think of whom we are talking about.
The thesis that Obama is a collectivist ideologue has been proven by many who have painstakingly analyzed his past associations, words, and actions – with ample audio and video evidence as well as by his own words from his books - despite continued denials and ridicule by the left. As such, Obama and his entourage have adopted Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ (the ‘play book’ that is the radical left’s version of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’) as their bible, and likes of Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven (parents of the infamous strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis) as their role model.
This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with over a century old history of collectivism in its various forms known as Marxism/Communism/Socialism.
A Brief History:
Since the modern era beginnings of collectivism in the late 19th century, elitist classes of academics, social engineers, and politicians have seen it as their sole purpose to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (as in Marxism/Communism) or, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving what they view as the highest social progress by means of combining crony capitalism with state planning (as in Fabian Socialism).
However, by late 1980s, Marxism and Communism had on the most part been relegated to the dustbin of history everywhere other than the left’s favorite regimes in a handful of countries like Cuba.
Socialism itself took body blows as China, just by removing many of its collectivist policies and adopting (mostly) free market ones instead, attained unparalleled success; the U.S. attained a quarter century of virtually continuous economic/wealth expansion under Reaganomics; and European social democracies later proved the unsustainability of welfare states (PIIGS).
As early as the 1970s, it was already becoming clear that a new strategy was needed on the path to Marxist utopia. The replacement was a benign sounding but insidious new vehicle: environmentalism (later evolving in to today’s arguably more devious green movement involving shady characters like billionaire Maurice Strong). The deviousness, and the genius of this new movement whose fathers included James Lovelock and (the more radical) Dave Foreman is because it is conducted in the name of mother earth – and the way the issue has been framed by the left, who among us can truly defend polluting and making earth unsustainable for the future generations?!
Basis for General Strategy:
Collectivism (as in progressive policies) kills the human spirit as we have witnessed not only in society after society from the demise of the Roman Empire to today’s Marxist/Socialist basket cases, but in our inner cities where misery (as measured by poverty, crime, single parenthood, etc.) has reigned supreme for better part of the last half a century despite comparatively substantial enrichment of the rest of the society.
Many progressives that I know would disagree but I am yet to hear a compelling argument that inner cities are not the definitive proof that progressive policies are miserable failures after decades of so-called war on poverty.
Basic human nature craves freedom and liberty regardless of any other factor. In contrast, collectivism requires relinquishment of one’s private property (physical or intangible) to varying extent. As private property rights and our god given right to liberty are inextricably tied to each other, this means that unbridled liberty and collectivism are naturally inconsistent, thus the age old dilemma of collectivists: How to voluntarily lead masses to collectivism?
Luckily enough for the collectivists, human nature also longs for security. For every individual who is willing to take a chance on life, there are many more who, given the opportunity, would not mind giving up a piece of their liberty in exchange for some security. The collectivists figured out rightly that the delicate balance between the needs for liberty and security could be tipped in their favor if the society was made to incrementally depend on the central government by spreading poverty (which naturally leads to dependence on the government) through vehicles like government provided healthcare, overly generous welfare policies, and strict controls on energy among other means. With higher and higher cost of government, taxes could be raised to prohibitive levels for wealth accumulation provided that a critical mass of dependency class was reached. Such policy initiatives would be made palatable to the public by cloaking them under the guise of compassion for the less fortunate as well as the planet that we inhabit.
There is, after all, truth to the saying "green is the new red" not only in Germany but in most western societies where the green movement has been hijacked by the radical left. To political revolutionaries like Van Jones or the president himself (not to be confused with ‘active’ revolutionaries like Che), the process of social change has long been primarily a triangle of cooperation between institutions. Picture an equilateral triangle: at the top is government including leftist politicians who make laws and regulations that advance their cause and judges who thwart challenges to these laws. The remaining two corners are occupied by the academia that brainwash the youth with bias towards collectivism as portrayed by left’s ideas of social and environmental justice, and the mass media that selectively controls the flow of information and propagandizes the leftist cause. The goal is total control of the minds and pocket books of the public so that they go along with laws and regulations implemented by benevolent progressive politicians like sheep being led to the slaughterhouse.
With this in mind, now we can start to make sense of the Obama energy policy, or lack thereof.
Green Agenda as Agent of Change:
Environmentalism and energy policies go hand in hand since, as I pointed out earlier, the latter impacts the environment since all processes have byproducts – in the case of energy production and use: pollution.
To committed leftist ideologues, green energy policy is a vital tool for social change as they have witnessed in Europe. There’s no greater social power than the power to ration – an insidious form of leverage over the public. And, other than rationing food (and healthcare), there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the enabler of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society like ours.
Since production and usage of energy means inevitable pollution - one that has been greatly exaggerated by the left - it was a no brainer to use environmentalism as the latest vehicle in effectuating collectivist goals as the pioneers of modern radicalism (left would like to call neo-liberalism) like Alinsky prescribed. In radicalism of all types, ends always justify the means – especially if the means can be used to reward your cronies, strengthening alliances.
Green agenda as a tool for gradual transformation to dependence on central government is designed to impoverish people through policies that would render energy prohibitively expensive to use. With accompanying wealth destruction, human nature would take care of the rest – trading more and more of their liberties for more security in a vicious cycle until any semblance of free markets would disappear.
Obama said numerous times that under his scheme, "energy prices will necessarily have to skyrocket", and that we have to adjust our way of life to reflect the new reality. He and his energy secretary, Dr. Chu (I know, it does sound like an evil doctor from a James Bond movie) made it clear that the aim is to have energy prices be on par with Europe. As far as gas is concerned, that is darn near $10 per gallon, folks! And that does not even begin to address energy rationing.
As further evidence of collusion between the green movement and the government, the EPA and the Administration in general have gone beyond all limits to restrict drilling for oil - on land or off shore - including falsifying reports and ignoring a federal judge who ruled against the moratorium placed on off-shore drilling under false pretenses. At the risk of appearing to digress, the main stream media who still claims objectivity, has not widely reported this scandal (or any other from Pigford to D.O.J. Black Panther case to .... (fill in your favorite scandal du jour)) and American public in general is in the dark as to all the shenanigans going on with this Administration. This is exactly the role media is supposed to play in the radical playbook as I explained earlier.
Gulf of Mexico is not the only place that Obama Administration has shut down either. Interior Secretary Salazar started his cabinet job by closing off oil shale development in the Rocky Mountain region. Obama's campaign promise of opening up drilling off the Atlantic Coast was also reversed - ask the governor of Virginia. Alaskan reserves in ANWR and in the Barents Sea are still off limits, tied up in politics and environmental permitting. Instead, we have seen the Administration dump more regulations and taxes on our domestic oil and gas industry, thus cutting jobs (over 19,000 in the Gulf region alone), raising energy costs, and sending more cash overseas to unfriendly governments.
Obama and his merry gang's plan is obviously to exploit the current crisis by pushing ahead with their green energy agenda - similar to the one that has failed, at times miserably, in Spain, U.K., Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Bio fuels (read: ethanol) have proven to be a disaster - both financially due to the cost of government subsidies and increased food prices - while other alternative sources of renewable energy such as wind have only enriched the cronies of the government while providing less than 1% of our energy production at unreasonably high costs. The story of Jeffrey Immelt and his company, General Electric, speak volumes to the incestuous relationship between the government and the crony capitalists that have infiltrated it through and through. Mr Immelt, to this day, inexplicably serves as the chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness for the President despite his company having made $14 billion in profits ($9 billion from overseas operations which have not been impatriated) and paid a grand total of $0 in taxes to the federal government. In fact, G.E. has created more jobs overseas with their overseas profits during this recession than in the U.S. Also, G.E. stands to benefit to the tune of several billion more from digitizing medical records and their wind turbine business. That is the pay-off for turning over two major networks (NBC and MSNBC) to the service of candidate Obama during the 2008 elections. And, oh yes, one more thing: Mr. Immelt professes to be a Republican.
Again, in the name of fairness, establishment Republicans are just as guilty in this game of cronyism as are Democrats. In Washington, money knows no political distinctions.
On the academic front, did you ever wonder why concepts like man made global warming and observation of Earth Day became substitutes for civics and U.S. history in many public school systems? It is no wonder when you consider that public schools are essentially run by extreme left wing labor unions. They are essentially the factories for tomorrow’s radicals.
The cabal of hard leftists in media, academia, and politics (Marxists masquerading as Democrats and crony capitalists) have been hard at work putting lipstick on the pig called environmentalism for public consumption. Their goal, however, is no different than Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Fidel.
We unfortunately have the leading promoters of this new religion dictating American policy for the time being.
"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism." You have got to admire his perceptiveness while lamenting why most Republicans in the U.S. Congress, as the opposition, are not half the visionary that he is.
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Afterword:
If Marxism, Communism, or even benign sounding socialism is so great in their view, why do American progressives avoid the label like a plague? Are they less gutsy or intellectually honest than their European counterparts? Or simply less principled? Just asking.
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