Orwell’s Perfect Specimen: Cass Sunstein
There has been a lot of discussion in recent months regarding the policies and direction the Obama administration is taking. Speculation and quite honestly, good deductive reasoning would lead one to conclude that Cass Sunstein is behind the push for net neutrality and other freedom quelching procedures. A move that Obama is following given his recent speech about the Internet and the “distractions” and “misinformation” it causes.
Cass Sunstein has been a part of both the legal world and academia since he graduated from Harvard Law in 1978. He gave a lecture in 2007 called “He said that, she did what?” a piece where we glean a little more about his own political philosophy. This lecture was in line with his book “On Rumors” and “Going to Extremes.” On Rumors discusses the harm that spreading rumors via the internet, media, or other forms of communication, can cause. In his book he suggests regulation for these sources of information so the truth is known and rumors aren’t spread. This view is controversial, and rightly so, because it is in direct violation of the first amendment. Most political philosophy, for example, is based upon personal beliefs and opinion and not on fact, like mathematics, so how can a regulatory agency enforce certain opinions or belief systems?
Opening his lecture, Sunstein declared that one of his goals was “to drive a wedge between the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ and ‘Truth.’” Identifying truth specifically with factual accuracy, he outlined three mechanisms by which false rumors gain traction in that marketplace and become widely held beliefs.[…]
Focusing on false rumor propagation, Sunstein voiced two concerns unaddressed by these explanations. First, people tend to be unaware of the bias of the groups in which they are participants. Second, individuals discount the importance of ideologically minded people to willfully mislead. As he explained, “It’s underestimated the extent to which, with respect to certain rumors, there’s a self-interested or ideologically-motivated mover who is starting the information [process].”
Connecting these behavioral observations to issues of freedom of speech, Sunstein discussed certain Supreme Court decisions. Using the example of a case centered on a newspaper’s publication of the name of a rape victim, he noted the Court’s reliance on the argument that, if a fact is already in the public domain, then wide publication of that fact should always be protected. But this sort of publication can cause irreparable damage, he said, which might prompt a more nuanced application of law.
Raising a more recent phenomenon—YouTube—Sunstein warned of the dangers of turning every citizen into “their own Truman Show,” in which the minutiae of everyday life is broadcast to the world. “A life is not an incident or an event, but a series of them,” he explained, a fact which is lost when incidents are broadcast over the Internet or other media, without context. “Sometimes the isolated segment or event will have a kind of defining character, in a way that will be extremely destructive, not only to the individual involved, but also to people trying to make rational judgments about the relevant person.”
The freakiest part of his lecture wasn’t deciding truth from fiction from an already biased source such as himself, but what he said about the freedom of press: (Watch the webcast.)
Sunstein quoted Felix Frankfurter as saying, “Freedom of the press is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of achieving a free society.” After offering some examples in which uninhibited press freedom leads to the destruction of other freedoms, he proposed a reconsideration of the idea of the ‘chilling effect’”:
“Many First Amendment questions in this domain are resolved by reference to the ‘chilling effect’ concern. Indeed, it has become quite clear that references to the ‘chilling effect’ have had a very serious ‘chilling effect’ on engagement with the constitutional question …The question shouldn’t be whether there’s a chilling effect and how to avoid it, but how to achieve the optimal chilling effect.”
“Zero chilling effect, in light of the mechanisms just described, would be profoundly destructive to a host of relevant variables.”
One can only assume that a chilling effect in essence is the regulation of freedom. Chilling something usually slows it down. If I chill a gas does it not start to become a liquid and equally a liquid becomes a solid? I think it’s time to start saying “Hands off my youtube.”
Sunstein’s other book is “Going to Extremes” in which he believes that people become more and more polarized when they associate with like-minded people on a continuous basis like the internet, social networks, specific organizations and of course talk radio. I find it interesting that talk radio was mentioned specifically. I must also believe that he probably thinks there is no perfect time like the present to enforce his social and philosophical experiments on the masses when organizations and powerful grassroots movements like the Tea Party are shaping the political landscape.
It was Cass Sunstein, now a Harvard constitutional law professor, who first alerted a broad public to the kind of polarization that has preoccupied us most in recent years. Society, with the help of the Web, was sorting people by ideology in a way that eroded fellow-feeling and fostered mindless partisanship. Almost a decade ago, his Republic.com lamented that while daily newspapers confront people with all kinds of material they didn’t ask for, the Web allows them to dodge what they disagree with. This was an alarming refutation of our smug claims about the Internet. In theory, the Internet opens people up to new ways of looking at things. In practice, it lets people wall themselves off in informational micro-environments of their own design. It makes them not more cosmopolitan but more parochial.
Now Sunstein has written Going to Extremes, a short book about the nature and roots of extremism. It is meant to unsettle us in the way his earlier work did. He finds that sitting people down to deliberate does not necessarily lead them to compromise or to converge on their mean opinion. They tend to radicalize in the direction of whatever bias they had to begin with. Teams of doctors, deciding collectively, are more likely to support the “extreme” strategy of heroic efforts to save terminally ill patents than the average individual doctor among them. Juries tend to vote, after discussion, for much more “extreme” monetary awards than the average individual juror among them would. Talking things over isn’t necessarily wrong. But it doesn’t lead reliably to moderation, either.
An additional source can be found at the Harvard Law Record:
Sunstein stated that extremism in multiple domains (labor unions, corporations, environmental protection, gay rights, and more) “is a product of a distinctive kind of crippled epistemology resulting from group polarization.” In other words, individuals tend to come to more extreme views if they deliberate a given issue with like-minded people.
From Sunstein’s essay: “Delibrative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes” [can’t you just hear Billy Joel singing as you read this?]
Polarization is also likely to be produced by magazines with identifiable political convictions, such as the American Prospect, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and the National Review; by Pat Robertson and his special television programs devoted to his preferred causes; and by talk radio hosts with distinctive positions that are generally shared by their audiences. Because the results of group polarization cannot be evaluated in the abstract, nothing need be dishonorable in these efforts.
What can be said, in the abstract, is that attempts to ensure discussion among people with similar predispositions may succeed in increasing the confidence of individual participants and also in moving them toward more extreme positions. Thus would-be social reformers do well to create forums, whether in person, over the air, in cyberspace, or in print, in which people with similar inclinations frequently speak with one another and can develop a clear sense of shared identity.
[…]
An understanding of group polarization raises more general issues about communications policy. Under the “fairness doctrine,” now largely abandoned, broadcasters were required to devote time to public issues and to allow an opportunity for opposing views to speak. The second prong of the doctrine was designed to ensure that listeners would not be exposed to any single view. When the FCC abandoned the fairness doctrine, it did so, on the ground that this second prong often led broadcasters to avoid controversial issues entirely, and to present views in a way that suggested a bland uniformity. Subsequent research has suggested that the elimination of the fairness doctrine has indeed produced a flowering of controversial substantive programming, frequently with an extreme view of one kind or another; consider talk radio. Typically this is regarded as a story of wonderfully successful deregulation. But from the standpoint of group polarization, things are more complicated. The growth of issues-oriented programming with a strong, often extreme view may create group polarization, and all too many people might be exposed to louder echoes of their own voices, resulting in social fragmentation, enmity, and misunderstanding. Perhaps it is better for people to hear fewer controversial views than for them to hear a single such view stated over and over again.
It is not clear what can be done about this situation. But it certainly makes sense to consider communications initiatives that would ensure that people are exposed to a range of reasonable views, not simply one. This was the original inspiration for the fairness doctrine, and there is reason to encourage media outlets to implement the same goal today. Thus Habermas’s suggestion: (Harbermas’ tenets are described as Marxist in nature)
The diffusion of information and points of view . . . is not the only thing that matters in public processes of communication, nor is it the most important. . . . [T]he rules of a shared practice of communication are of greater significance for structuring public opinion. Agreement on issues and contributions develops only as the result of more or less exhaustive controversy in which proposals, information, and reasons can be more or less rationally dealt with.
Perhaps a code of fair programming could promote voluntary self-regulation in this direction. With respect to the Internet, Andrew Shapiro has suggested public subsidy of a civic icon that would promote exposure to substantive discussions from a variety of viewpoints. An appreciation of group polarization suggests the need for creative approaches designed to ensure that people do not simply read their “Daily Me.”
[…]
The answer is that we often do know enough to see which views count as reasonable, without knowing which view counts as right, and this point is sufficient to allow people to construct deliberative processes that should correct for the most serious problems potentially created by group polarization. What is necessary is not to allow every view to be heard, but to ensure that no single view is so widely heard, and reinforced, that people are unable to engage in critical evaluation of the reasonable competitors.
When did it become the government or even one czar’s job to assess and regulate whether people decide to congregate with like-minds or with differing views? Is that not the freedom of choice we were given as a people when this country was founded? This is what is most disconcerting, although an intention may be good (and I still do not believe that is the case), ultimately all human beings have a bias. As a member and friend to an ideological Democrat, it can only be assumed that the regulatory czar, himself, is biased (especially when he was also a contributing editor to The New Republic). Ultimately, whatever party is in power would lean towards their ideological principles, especially if it came to enforcing a policy like net neutrality.
I will again draw the point that the tea parties are a huge contingent and based upon the writing of Sunstein and his views on “extremism” and “group-think,” or as he likes to call it, “polarization,” the tea party movement is a prime target of his regulatory experimentation. Sunstein would love nothing more than to decide which voices and views should be heard. A regulatory agency or an individual would decide which opinions are reasonable – with a liberal deciding those things, the tea party would never have a voice.
The exact arguments that Sunstein makes in the second paragraph of Sunstein’s preface to Republic.com 2.0 ‘Revenge of the Blogs,’ is that staying in like-minded circles is like 1984, when it reality, having some bureaucrat legislate what is extreme, enforcing multiple viewpoints, or deciding what is a rumor is more Orwellian than free. Extremism can be both good and bad, but it is within the individual to decide what they will do with it. Human nature can, and never should be legislated. It is something the founders knew, but it is something that progressives seem to cannot grasp.
So wouldn’t it make sense that the FCC is going to find a backdoor way to “nudge” this policy into place? Sunstein is also associated with FreePress.net, the Soros-funded group that advocates for, what they consider media diversity, localism, ownership caps and other regulations that restrict free speech. FreePress.net is pushing for Net Nuetrality and in 1995 published Sunstein’s work, “Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech.” A snippet:
Sunstein writes that an overhaul or requalification of the existing judicial, academic, and social interpretations of the First Amendment would lead to a greater understanding of the actual intent of the framers. He argues from a Madisonian standpoint that the First Amendment is above all designed to promote self-government, and that current free speech law compromises the intent of Madison and other founders.
The FCC:
This week, the FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, from many and various sources intends to change the classification of the Internet from Title I, which is an information utility, to Title II telecommunication’s utility. The new reclassification will allow the Title II regulatory authority to enforce Net Neutrality. At this time is doesn’t quite make a whole, more like a half change. The agency will not be enforcing the regulations to the fullest of extent, against broadband providers, immediately, though, it seems odd that the push would be to re-title, in order to enforce at some future point. Oddly enough, by this reclassification, the FCC is going against the last 10 years of its own legal rulings.
In order to sidestep the recent court’s rulings against the FCC’s authority to enforce Net Neutrality, and to be able to watchdog the internet, broadband usage, etc. the FCC is doing this unprecedented move. This will allow more ability for them to regulate what occurs on the Internet. Since the court’s decision on Net Neutrality and it’s stance that the FCC had no right or authority to enforce Net Neutrality, it is almost expected that this will open the door to further litigation by those affected by this decision that the FCC has chosen to make.
For your viewing pleasure I have included a fun little diddy from the movie “The Best Little Whore House in Texas” – “I like to do a little sidestep”
Wouldn’t it also make sense that Elena Kagan, a fellow colleague and an admirer of Cass Sunstein would follow in these same philosophies that academia so loves to experiment with? Kagan wants to suspend Miranda Rights for American citizens, wants to control gun rights, and give more power to the executive branch when it comes to REGULATION: PERFECT for both Obama and Sunstein, who see the Supreme Court as too right-wing, and find their rulings to be more ‘fundamentalist’ than ‘minimalist’ as Sunstein writes in his book “Radicals in Robes.” Sunstein also believes, and I would assume his former boss Kagan does as well, that the Regulatory State needs to be reconsidered in his Harvard Law Review article in 1989 “Interpreting Statutes in The Regulatory State,” and his 1993 book, After the Rights Revolution:
In this provocative and lively book, Sunstein argues that the Reagan adminstration’s vigorous attack on government regulation was misplaced, contending that government regulation is superior to the behavior of private markets…Sunstein thus offers a spirited defense of the ‘rights revolution’ embodied in the new social and economic regulation–from clean air and water to antidiscrimination rules–that have swept government since the New Deal, and especially since the 1960s…The result is a careful, prescriptive study positioned among theorists’ visions of justice, laywers’ concepts of due process, and politicians’ imperatives for effective policy. (American Library Association )
Over the past decade Cass Sunstein has emerged as one of the country’s most prolific and provocative legal scholars. After the Rights Revolution is a rich discussion of how the courts have handled–and should handle–the plethora of regulatory statutes enacted since 1932. It deserves to be read widely by students of politics.
Liberals really have issues when it comes to the imperfections that human nature gives us. Rather than seeing the beauty in the imperfections, they want to eradicate them so society becomes as homogenous and equal as possible. Take for example Sunstein’s view on American Exceptionalism and its false notion in regards to the Constitution:
The third explanation Sunstein rejects is a cultural one that he refers to as the story of “American exceptionalism.” This explanation proposes that America’s culture is hostile to the idea of positive rights because of America’s unique history, which has never included any significant experiment with socialism. Sunstein rejects the cultural argument because he believes that “it is utterly implausible to suggest that something in the [nation's] culture foreordains our practices, present and future.” Additionally, Sunstein points out that although the political left in America is relatively conservative in comparison to almost all other developed countries, America is not without its own social welfare tradition. He cites Roosevelt’s New Deal, the movement for female equality, and the recent movement for recognition of gay and lesbian rights as examples of the flexibility of American culture, and, therefore, the falsity of the cultural argument.
Come to think of it, that certainly sounds similar to what Elena Kagan recently said regarding socialism.
I would consider the Internet, blogs, talk radio all innovative examples of American Exceptionalism, where people have aspired to and become successful bloggers, online investigative journalists, talk radio hosts or large Internet companies. Content will not always be fair and equal, to the chagrin of Sunstein, because we have the freedom of speech and of press. Sunstein and his ilk, however, would prefer that equality is forced upon his “subjects.” Would the forcing of equality actually become an oxymoron? How can one enforce equality but then make it appear that freedom of choice, which gives us the most equality, is being adhered to?
Sunstein would also prefer that average citizens don’t do their homework on elected officials, lest it ruins a liberal’s reputation or give us information to work from in order to investigate. Most truths start out as conspiracies. They only become fact when they are proven. That means it’s time to sign off before Sunstein scrubs my post, which would probably be deemed a conspiracy theory – something he abhors.
Kagan’s Moment in the SUNstein
As Alanis Morisett would say, “Isn’t ironic doncha think?” that every ideological liberal in Chicago is intertwined in some shape or form? Well, Elena Kagan is no different. I think we need to come up with a new 6 degrees of separation game; Kevin Bacon is getting old anyhow.
Since Sunstein may be the driving force behind many of Obama’s decisions, I could only note his views on the Supreme Court within his own essay, “The Myth of the Balanced Court,” where he contends that the so-called liberals that exist on today’s Supreme Court are not really liberal but moderate, and those who are considered to the right, are radically to the right. In Sunstein’s mind, although past liberal justices may not have acted appropriately when interpreting the constitution or legislation, they were at least liberal. Sunstein wants more liberal judges on courts to combat what he sees as a far right tendency when interpreting law. I personally feel his views are radically skewed to the left mainly due to the fact that legal circles have embraced liberalism so fully, moderate looks conservative and liberal looks moderate, and so on.
Here’s what he thinks about Constitutionalists or those he derogatorily refers to as ‘Fundamentalists’ or ‘Originalists’:
Fundamentalist constitutional theory is based on the idea that the proper approach to constitutional law is discerning and applying the intent behind the Constitution when it was ratified in 1789, the intent behind the Bill of Rights when it was ratified in 1791 or when the Fourteenth Amendment (through which much of the Bill of Rights has been applied to the states) was adopted in 1868. This approach is most often advocated by conservatives. In particular, Sunstein associates it with a movement known as the Constitution in Exile. Proponents of that view contend that decisions dating from the 1930s have erased the original intent behind the Constitution and that it’s true meaning needs to be restored.
Sunstein views the constitution as nonexistent prior to 1925 since it would leave out minorities, women and homosexuals. He states that there is no way that a female, a homosexual or a person of color could associate or understand a 200 year old document and relate it back to the ratifier’s intent. [I take offense to that narrow-mindedness].
If one intellectual admits that they are upset that positive rights were never included in the Constitution, but that only intellectuals considered positive rights a hobby/pastime to debate and ponder, why should we not believe that one of Sunstein’s colleagues and a pure intellectual with no working experience would not feel the same? The constitution as it stands is not good enough for intellectuals, in fact it is just a major hindrance.
The explanation for America’s rejection of constitution protection for positive rights that Sunstein accepts is what he refers to as the “legal realist” argument. Sunstein posits that America’s current non-recognition of positive constitutional rights results from an unfortunate twist of fate in the 1968 presidential election. According to Sunstein’s view, had Hubert Humphrey, rather than Richard Nixon, won the 1968 election, America would have a catalog of judicially created, positive constitutional rights today. However, Nixon won the election, and he was able to use his presidential appointment power to reshape the Supreme Court and, according to Sunstein, effectively eliminate any chance of the recognition of positive constitutional rights in the near future.
Sunstein supports this thesis by noting that through its so-called “new property” cases of the late 1960s, the Supreme Court came very close to interpreting some positive rights into the Constitution. The term “new property” originated in an influential law review article by the same name written by Charles Reich. Reich defines the “new property” as the “the jobs we hold, plus benefits, credentials, licenses, public welfare and all of the other kinds of valuables that come from large organizations and government” that provide the economic security that is necessary for the exercise of liberty. Reich argues that these entitlements served the same role as land and more traditional personal property- securing the liberty of the individual-and therefore should receive a similar level of protection. Sunstein sees the post-New Deal period and the “new property” movement as evidence that Americans are not as opposed to the idea of positive rights as many have assumed. The implication of Sunstein’s legal realist explanation is that “[w]ith modest shifts in the future, parts of the second bill of rights could well be included in our constitutional understandings, and certainly in the nation’s constitutive commitments.”
Cass Sunstein believes his nudge principle applies not only in regulatory affairs, but also in law. He feels that a court could gradually become liberal by nudging decisions leftwards every so often.
Elena Kagan, may not have specifically written in terms of nudging or minimalism as Cass Sunstein describes in his book “Radicals in Robes,” but she holds the same type of liberal ideals as Sunstein and Obama. Sunstein wrote in an article on The New Republic, of which he co-edits, that Obama is a visionary minimalist.
Barack Obama is widely regarded as a visionary because of his emphasis on “change” and his soaring rhetoric, but he also has strong minimalist tendencies. In his victory speech in Iowa, Obama went out of his way to say that it is time for a president who will “listen to” those who disagree, and also “learn from” them. In The Audacity of Hope, he asks for a politics that accepts “the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point.” In a crucial passage, he refers to “the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager’s abortion.” In this way, he suggests that across one of the nation’s least tractable divides, Americans have far more in common than we tend to think.
Like all minimalists, Obama believes that real change usually requires consensus, learning, and accommodation–a belief directly reflected in many of his policies.
I don’t believe for a second what Cass Sunstein mentions above, but I do believe that what is happening behind the scenes is the gradual transformation of the United States into the “Utopia” that is envisioned by liberals. The Saul Alinsky tactics, conform to become “The Man” and enact change, and tear down traditional institutions is reminiscent of Gramsci Marxism which proposes the same route for transformation.
Elena Kagan believes in more executive powers in the government. She prefers that the executive branch regulate more than the legislative. This view would fit perfectly with both Obama and Sunstein, who believe in legislating morals, ethics, and human nature. They think that perfection (in their minds) can be regulated and the government can oversee it. Elena Kagan would fit perfectly into this mold and she would be incredibly malleable seeing as how she has had no prior judicial experience.
Both Kagan and Sunstein also lament the fact that more liberalism doesn’t exist or that socialism has failed to be implemented.
“In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness,” wrote Kagan, Obama’s solicitor general.
“Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?” she asked.
“Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered.
“The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America,” she wrote. “Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.”
Kagan brought Sunstein over to Harvard Law from Chicago in 2007 and in so doing had the following to say about him:
Introducing Sunstein before the talk, Dean Elena Kagan ’86 described him as “the world’s pre-eminent legal scholar,” one who “challenges our assumptions and changes the way we think about legal issues.” Suggesting that Frankfurter was a forebearer of what she called “Sunsteinian Minimalism,” Kagan noted that the Justice, who was sometimes accused of being too leftist, brought to the Supreme Court a strong belief in judicial restraint. “He believed more in the institutions of democracy than in the courts,” said Kagan. “He also insisted … on respect for Federalism, for the decisions of state governments.”
“Cass Sunstein is the preeminent legal scholar of our time, the most wide-ranging, the most prolific, the most cited, and the most influential,” Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School, said in a statement released yesterday.
“His work in any one of the fields he pursues – administrative law and policy, constitutional law and theory, behavioral economics and law, environmental law, to name a nonexhaustive few – would put him in the very front ranks of legal scholars,” Kagan said.
It would appear as if somebody had an idol, and how else would one better flatter their idol by exemplifying him?
America doesn’t need political ideologues on the Supreme Court, but rather those who interpret the law and are independent thinkers that have the experience and knowledge to back it up–Just being a legal wonk, a dean, connected to Democrats, Larry Summers, and Goldman Sachs isn’t enough.
The Godfather of Climate Change-Maurice Strong
After much talk about Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, CCX, GIM and other miscreants of the corporate and political world, it’s interesting that the name of Maurice Strong hasn’t surfaced.
In order to understand his role in Crime Inc., maybe this movie clip will put it into perspective:
Maurice Strong is a huge United Nations guy who is a big advocate of the dreaded One World Order conspiracy but, more accurately, is pushing hard along with Al Gore for global environmental regulations which, of course, means cap and trade.
Many believe that Strong is behind the United Nations’ current reputation, which carries with it numerous scandals such as Oil for Food, funneling money to North Korea, shady dealings with Tongsun Park and Kofi Annan, procurement fraud, and rape cover-ups.
Report from 2007 [Strong just turned 81]:
Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
But his green credentials scarcely begin to do justice to Strong’s complicated back-room career. He has spent decades migrating through a long list of high-level U.N. posts, standing behind the shoulder of every U.N. secretary-general since U Thant. Without ever holding elected office, he has had a hand in some of the world’s most important bureaucratic appointments, both at the U.N. and at the World Bank. A Canadian wheeler-dealer with an apple face and pencil mustache, Strong has parlayed his personal enthusiasms and connections into a variety of huge U.N. projects, while punctuating his public service with private business deals.
It would seem as though Maurice Strong and George Soros could be twins separated at birth. Neither are American citizens by birth but have a strong hand in the current conduct of liberal politics in the United States. He is also another one of those shadow financiers who is connected to everyone and no one.
If you look up Maurice Strong at muckety.com you will find nothing, however, he has his tentacles in practically everyone at the United Nations, the CCX, the ECX, environmental companies, institutions and grassroots organizations, as well as other shady characters.
After Maurice Strong scurried away during the Annan, Ghali, Park and Oil for Food scandals, he wound up in China, where he currently resides and has even teamed up with Soros to build the “every-man’s” car; the Chery. Strong, surprisingly, is a partner and good friend to the lovely and ever so talented Mr. Gorbachev.
Maurice Strong’s sister was once a translator for Anita Dunne’s idol, Chairman Mao, and Strong has advised not only the Rockefeller and Rothschild Trusts, which are connected to everything political, but also the World Bank, another partner in the great circle of malfeasance; the CCX.
Maurice Strong has been tracked heavily by the Canadian Free Press, a conservative Canadian publication that doesn’t receive enough credit, in my opinion.
Strong, the silent partner [at CCX], is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower.
The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” traveled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
The Investigative “experts” in the MSM, appeared to have missed the connection between MMTI, the DOE, and Strong.
Upon tracking down several organizations of interest that are mentioned in connection with Maurice Strong, I find that muckety.com does not bring up results, or somebody doesn’t want them to bring up results. Those organizations are the Earth Council Alliance, the University for Peace, or UPEACE, a private entity that Strong used to funnel money to the United Nations, and Oil for Food.
However, the organizations I could find were the United Nations Foundation [a creation of Ted Turner’s] and the Global Environmental Facility, which was the catalyst for the Kyoto Protocol, Agenda 21 and the Rio Conference.
Muckety only connects the GEF to Mohamed El-Ashry, who is associated with Resources for the Future. Resources for the Future has trustees and chairmen like Lawrence Linden and Deutch, who are both partners respectively at Goldman Sachs and Citibank, mega-banks that are involved with the CCX and GIM.
CCX owes its existence in part to the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago-based liberal foundation that provided $347,000 in grant support in 2000 for a preliminary study to test the viability of a market in carbon credits. On the CCX board of directors is the ubiquitous Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and diplomat who, since the 1970s, has helped create an international policy agenda for the environmentalist movement. Strong has described himself as “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.” His former job titles include “senior advisor” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “senior advisor” to World Bank President James Wolfensohn and board member of the United Nations Foundation, a creation of Ted Turner. The [then] 78-year-old Strong is very close to Gore.
CCX has about 80 members that are self-confessed emitters of greenhouse gases. They have voluntarily committed themselves to reduce their emissions by the year 2010 to a level 6% below their emissions in 2000. CCX members include Ford Motor Company, Amtrak, DuPont, Dow Corning, American Electric Power, International Paper, Motorola, Waste Management and a smattering of other companies, along with the states of Illinois and New Mexico, seven cities and a number of universities. Presumably the members “purchase” carbon offsets on the CCX trading exchange. This means they make contributions to or investments in groups or firms that provide forms of “alternative,” “renewable” and “clean” energy.
More about Strong may be understood in this 1972 BBC interview:
Strong in his statement at the opening session of the Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) stated: “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.”
Strong stated: “”The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
The European Union was an experiment, whereby every country lost more of its sovereignty every year, and fortunately, we are seeing the results of that experiment unfold today. The euro is on the brink of collapse because every European country is intertwined in a convoluted web of enablement, debt, and socialism.
So, as much as liberals and progressives decry the wrongs of Capitalism, they really are still involved in the practice, however, rather than being proponents of pure Capitalism as Adam Smith had intended, they want to apply a new form of ‘Selective Capitalism’ that circulates wealth among the already wealthy and the Elite.
It seems to me that half of these wealthy elites are selfish hogs, who are happy that they were able to use the Capitalist system to earn their money, but now that they are content with their piece of the pie, they would prefer to keep it to themselves and shut the doors off to any type of upward mobility for the rest of us, the way real Capitalism should work.
As much as people cringe at the mention of Marxism, because let’s face it, it’s scary to admit it may be true, the same basic philosophy applies. The elite class rules while the middle class is destroyed and the rest remain poor.
Obama’s Team is So Transparent, They’re Opaque; Release of Mid-Year Budget Review Delayed
The release of the mid-year budget review from the White House has been delayed. It really comes as no surprise anymore that the Obama team meant “transparency for thee but not for me.”
As a democrat, it’s ok to harp about Republicans, scream, and whine when you feel as though they aren’t being transparent enough. Then campaign on empty slogans of hope and change, but once in office do nothing of the sort. As they say to the victor goes the spoils and in this scenario, the spoils include hypocrisy and a lack of information disseminated to the American public. Read more
Why I’m a 27 Year Old Conservative
I grew up in the liberally elite state of Connecticut, inundated with yacht clubs, country clubs, and various people suffering from the chronic condition of cranial rectal disorder. Connecticut was a cross between the cinematic masterpieces of Pretty in Pink, Mean Girls, and the Stepford wives. I never lived on the right side of the tracks, like Molly Ringwald, was never popular, nor did I want to conform to the rest of the “wives” living in the neighborhood. I was dead set to go against the grain, remaining true to my morals and beliefs. Growing up in Connecticut allowed me to see the superficial hollowness that becomes so prevalent in elite society. Read more
