Alexandra Swann's Blog, page 22
May 30, 2013
To Smart Growth, Sustainable Development, Downtown Arena Ball Parks and the Politicians Who Love Them: Just Say No
Today's post is written jointly to all residents of cities out there who are thinking of embracing "smart growth" and/or burdening yourselves with the debt of a downtown arena stadium to spur economic development as well as to anyone in El Paso who is considering voting for Steve Ortega for Mayor in the June 15th run off election. I have just one word of advice for both of you--don't.
El Paso has spent the last couple of years trying to figure out how to redefine itself. Our rabidly "progressive" city council passed a new landscape ordinance which requires more greenspaces and less parking as a part of a plan to beautify our city. Our newly adopted master plan calls for smart growth and a redeveloped downtown where multi-storied, mixed use buildings comprised of retail on the bottom and apartments on the upper levels will line narrow streets. We are spending $27 million on upgrading our notoriously badly run bus system--Sun Metro. And the crowning jewel of this new, green us is a brand new Triple A ballpark stadium which we are building on the site of our former city hall. We imploded the latter building, which was only about 30 years old, on April 14, and moved our city offices, so that we could build a new arena stadium for a minor league baseball team which is moving to El Paso. Combined costs for moving the city offices, imploding city hall and building the arena ball park were initially estimated at between $85 and $100 million. After two years of meetings and investment in a public relations firm, we even have a new city motto--"El Paso: It's All Good."
The problem, of course, is that it's not all good. Our redevelopment comes at the cost of nearly half a billion dollars. According to a news story by KVIA-TV's Matthew Smith, our city will not break even on the stadium expense for 250 years. That is at the current cost of $50 million, but this past Tuesday the team owners came back to city council requesting an additional $10 million for "upgrades" to the stadium that were not part of the original plan. The official groundbreaking ceremony for the stadium happened today, although construction began a couple of weeks ago, and already we are short on the budget for this boondoggle. The project manager says that if the additional funds are not appropriated--which presently they are not, since city council refused to allocate the extra money--voters will not get the ballpark they were promised.
As it happens, the voters did not get any say on this project in the first place. If they had, I am quite certain that there would be no stadium under construction and city hall would still be standing. City council made the decision to build the stadium without waiting for an election because they said that this was too great an opportunity to pass up. Voters did vote on nearly half a billion dollars in quality of life improvement bonds and a new hotel tax, but these ballot issues were sold to us with the explanation that the stadium was a "done deal". El Pasoans could not be trusted to understand the benefits of the stadium well enough to be allowed a vote on it, so we could vote only on whether we as a city would pay for the costs with higher property taxes or whether visitors would pay for it with higher fees.
Since the contractors are already asking for more money, I am wondering whether anyone on city council considered the cost of upkeep, maintenance or repairs on this project. While the city won't recover it's initial expenditures for 250 years, it appears that the stadium will probably be needing some upkeep within the next twenty years which appears to be about the average life span of a stadium.
Consider Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, which, in 1989, built a $25 million 10,000 seat baseball stadium, the largest baseball stadium in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In 2008, Pennsylvania asked taxpayers for $35 million to upgrade the stadium. Those funds were to be matched by the redevelopment program grants for a presumed expenditure of $70 million dollars. By 2011, the stadium was requesting an additional $40 million in renovations.
Who is going to pay the costs of the upgrades and repairs for our stadium? One of the team owners, Paul Foster, openly balked at the suggestion that he and his partners and the city should split the cost of the additional $10 million that the contractors are already requesting. Who is going to foot the bill for the remaining expenses? As deputy city accounting manager Bill Studer told Matthew Smith in that KVIA-TV interview last fall , "They [minor league downtown sports arenas] all lose money from a strictly accounting thing."
But these costs are inconsequential compared to the benefits of a downtown stadium--right? Wrong. Stadiums lose money from a strictly non-accounting thing too. According to a study conducted last year by Colgate University, only 8 of 55 downtown stadiums constructed with at least 25% public funds are currently fostering economic development. A February 2, 2012 article on Bloomberg.com titled, "As Superbowl Shows, Build Stadiums for Love and not Money" candidly addresses this issue. According to Bloomberg, "Public funding for sports stadiums has been found in dozens of studies over several decades, to fall short of the promised benefits and to cost taxpayers more than expected." Bloomberg cites a study by Harvard associate professor of urban planning Judith Grant Long, who found that the cost of public funding for stadiums typically runs 40% higher than initially promised. These stadiums are the gift that keeps giving--taxpayers continue to pay for the stadiums decades after they are no longer in use. Further, stadiums do not bring economic development to most regions; they just move entertainment dollars around the city. Bloomberg cites a study by Jordan Rappaport and Chad Wilkerson of the Federal Reserve bank of Kansas City which says that even when bringing in a professional sports team the number of jobs created "is almost certainly less than 1000 and likely to be much closer to zero." Other studies cited in the same article indicate that bringing in sport teams kills some jobs and reduces wages. The higher taxes needed to fund stadium projects--such as our hotel tax--can have the net effect of dissuading would-be visitors, and the types of jobs the stadium produces are low wage seasonal jobs. Bloomberg's conclusion: "public funding for new sports stadiums should be up to voters to decide. Cities should make sure the public has access to independent evaluations of the costs and benefits of building a stadium--not just the inflated 'economic-impact studies' done at the behest of team owners and publicized in the media."
The stadium, combined with the Smart Growth projects downtown and the huge debt that our city is amassing in bonds, will have the net effect of draining revenues from other areas of the city and leaving our city with a profound shortfall. At present, no one is considering this downside to all of our new spending. Instead, our current mayor won an award as one of the world's top five mayors for embracing smart growth and sustainability. The New York Times featured our city in an article this week about how we are embracing the future by getting rid of our city hall and building a downtown arena stadium. I wonder how many of those in our city who read this week's story also know that The New York Times in 2011 wrote stories about how the young "creative class" that we want so badly to bring to El Paso was moving into downtown Detroit to revitalize its downtown. And yet, in spite of a massive federal bailout of the auto industry, a downtown stadium, and renewal efforts sponsored by Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken loans, on May 13th Detroit announced that it has a $167 million cash shortfall and that it cannot pay its bills. If Detroit is forced to file bankruptcy, it will become the largest city in the United States ever to do so. First place in that category belongs right now to Stockton, California which was forced to file bankruptcy last year after a 15 year spending spree that included building a downtown arena stadium and a new city hall. Stockton's city hall cost $35 million and sported a $197,000 monthly payment. When Stockton defaulted and could not no longer pay, Washington Mutual foreclosed on the building housing the city government. One important difference between Stockton, California and El Paso, Texas--according to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2011 Stockton's median income was just over $55,121 annually while El Paso's median income was just over $39,000.
New York Times columnist economist Paul Krugman insists that our country does not have a debt problem--in spite of the fact that the U.S. is almost $17 trillion in debt. He says that we are in fine shape fiscally and should actually be spending more money on infrastructure as our gift to the next generation rather than getting our house in order. No wonder the New York Times is glowing about El Paso's expenditures.
The controversy over the Triple A stadium has accomplished something else--it has eclipsed concerns that the citizenry might have about sustainable development and smart growth. The city's new master plan moves to encompass more and more of our city into "smart zones" where property can be taken by eminent domain for the greater good and where land rationing and unreasonable zoning restrictions drive up the costs of housing for everyone, and yet that story is not being covered. We are too busy looking at the stadium.
Right now, El Paso is having a Field of Dreams experience as city council, the owners of the Triple A baseball team that is moving here, and progressives around the nation whisper in unison, "if you build it, they will come." But Field of Dreams was just a movie--a Hollywood fantasy in which transforming a cornfield into a baseball diamond changed the lives of the people in a community. In real life, massive debt does matter, for a nation and for a city. As our taxes continue to rise, services continue to drop and our city does not experience the economic boom that has been promised, we are going to deeply regret the day we allowed our city to go down in flames. If we don't get our house in order now, in a few decades we may again find ourselves in national headlines for a new, more humiliating distinction, as we take the number one spot for the largest city in the nation to declare bankruptcy.
Right now we cannot stop the ball park--it is already under construction--but we can refuse to allocate one more dime for it. We can stop the expansion of "smart growth" by demanding that the city planning office stop rezoning areas of our city. We can vote in a pro-business mayor and insist that all of our representatives immediately stop throwing away our hard earned dollars and return to fiscally sensible policies. We can demand a balanced budget and insist that we don't spend what we don't have. And if we are successful then I propose a new city motto--"El Paso, Texas, Where Solvency is Cool". That won't get us an article in The New York Times, but it will sure feel great when we are paying our taxes and looking at the city budget.
El Paso deserved better than what we are getting. Your city, wherever it is located, does too. So when the snake oil salesmen come to your town promising downtown redevelopment involving "green" housing, smart growth and sustainable development anchored by an arena stadium or some other massively expensive entertainment venue paid for by public funds, do yourselves a favor. Just say no.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
El Paso has spent the last couple of years trying to figure out how to redefine itself. Our rabidly "progressive" city council passed a new landscape ordinance which requires more greenspaces and less parking as a part of a plan to beautify our city. Our newly adopted master plan calls for smart growth and a redeveloped downtown where multi-storied, mixed use buildings comprised of retail on the bottom and apartments on the upper levels will line narrow streets. We are spending $27 million on upgrading our notoriously badly run bus system--Sun Metro. And the crowning jewel of this new, green us is a brand new Triple A ballpark stadium which we are building on the site of our former city hall. We imploded the latter building, which was only about 30 years old, on April 14, and moved our city offices, so that we could build a new arena stadium for a minor league baseball team which is moving to El Paso. Combined costs for moving the city offices, imploding city hall and building the arena ball park were initially estimated at between $85 and $100 million. After two years of meetings and investment in a public relations firm, we even have a new city motto--"El Paso: It's All Good."
The problem, of course, is that it's not all good. Our redevelopment comes at the cost of nearly half a billion dollars. According to a news story by KVIA-TV's Matthew Smith, our city will not break even on the stadium expense for 250 years. That is at the current cost of $50 million, but this past Tuesday the team owners came back to city council requesting an additional $10 million for "upgrades" to the stadium that were not part of the original plan. The official groundbreaking ceremony for the stadium happened today, although construction began a couple of weeks ago, and already we are short on the budget for this boondoggle. The project manager says that if the additional funds are not appropriated--which presently they are not, since city council refused to allocate the extra money--voters will not get the ballpark they were promised.
As it happens, the voters did not get any say on this project in the first place. If they had, I am quite certain that there would be no stadium under construction and city hall would still be standing. City council made the decision to build the stadium without waiting for an election because they said that this was too great an opportunity to pass up. Voters did vote on nearly half a billion dollars in quality of life improvement bonds and a new hotel tax, but these ballot issues were sold to us with the explanation that the stadium was a "done deal". El Pasoans could not be trusted to understand the benefits of the stadium well enough to be allowed a vote on it, so we could vote only on whether we as a city would pay for the costs with higher property taxes or whether visitors would pay for it with higher fees.
Since the contractors are already asking for more money, I am wondering whether anyone on city council considered the cost of upkeep, maintenance or repairs on this project. While the city won't recover it's initial expenditures for 250 years, it appears that the stadium will probably be needing some upkeep within the next twenty years which appears to be about the average life span of a stadium.
Consider Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, which, in 1989, built a $25 million 10,000 seat baseball stadium, the largest baseball stadium in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In 2008, Pennsylvania asked taxpayers for $35 million to upgrade the stadium. Those funds were to be matched by the redevelopment program grants for a presumed expenditure of $70 million dollars. By 2011, the stadium was requesting an additional $40 million in renovations.
Who is going to pay the costs of the upgrades and repairs for our stadium? One of the team owners, Paul Foster, openly balked at the suggestion that he and his partners and the city should split the cost of the additional $10 million that the contractors are already requesting. Who is going to foot the bill for the remaining expenses? As deputy city accounting manager Bill Studer told Matthew Smith in that KVIA-TV interview last fall , "They [minor league downtown sports arenas] all lose money from a strictly accounting thing."
But these costs are inconsequential compared to the benefits of a downtown stadium--right? Wrong. Stadiums lose money from a strictly non-accounting thing too. According to a study conducted last year by Colgate University, only 8 of 55 downtown stadiums constructed with at least 25% public funds are currently fostering economic development. A February 2, 2012 article on Bloomberg.com titled, "As Superbowl Shows, Build Stadiums for Love and not Money" candidly addresses this issue. According to Bloomberg, "Public funding for sports stadiums has been found in dozens of studies over several decades, to fall short of the promised benefits and to cost taxpayers more than expected." Bloomberg cites a study by Harvard associate professor of urban planning Judith Grant Long, who found that the cost of public funding for stadiums typically runs 40% higher than initially promised. These stadiums are the gift that keeps giving--taxpayers continue to pay for the stadiums decades after they are no longer in use. Further, stadiums do not bring economic development to most regions; they just move entertainment dollars around the city. Bloomberg cites a study by Jordan Rappaport and Chad Wilkerson of the Federal Reserve bank of Kansas City which says that even when bringing in a professional sports team the number of jobs created "is almost certainly less than 1000 and likely to be much closer to zero." Other studies cited in the same article indicate that bringing in sport teams kills some jobs and reduces wages. The higher taxes needed to fund stadium projects--such as our hotel tax--can have the net effect of dissuading would-be visitors, and the types of jobs the stadium produces are low wage seasonal jobs. Bloomberg's conclusion: "public funding for new sports stadiums should be up to voters to decide. Cities should make sure the public has access to independent evaluations of the costs and benefits of building a stadium--not just the inflated 'economic-impact studies' done at the behest of team owners and publicized in the media."
The stadium, combined with the Smart Growth projects downtown and the huge debt that our city is amassing in bonds, will have the net effect of draining revenues from other areas of the city and leaving our city with a profound shortfall. At present, no one is considering this downside to all of our new spending. Instead, our current mayor won an award as one of the world's top five mayors for embracing smart growth and sustainability. The New York Times featured our city in an article this week about how we are embracing the future by getting rid of our city hall and building a downtown arena stadium. I wonder how many of those in our city who read this week's story also know that The New York Times in 2011 wrote stories about how the young "creative class" that we want so badly to bring to El Paso was moving into downtown Detroit to revitalize its downtown. And yet, in spite of a massive federal bailout of the auto industry, a downtown stadium, and renewal efforts sponsored by Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken loans, on May 13th Detroit announced that it has a $167 million cash shortfall and that it cannot pay its bills. If Detroit is forced to file bankruptcy, it will become the largest city in the United States ever to do so. First place in that category belongs right now to Stockton, California which was forced to file bankruptcy last year after a 15 year spending spree that included building a downtown arena stadium and a new city hall. Stockton's city hall cost $35 million and sported a $197,000 monthly payment. When Stockton defaulted and could not no longer pay, Washington Mutual foreclosed on the building housing the city government. One important difference between Stockton, California and El Paso, Texas--according to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2011 Stockton's median income was just over $55,121 annually while El Paso's median income was just over $39,000.
New York Times columnist economist Paul Krugman insists that our country does not have a debt problem--in spite of the fact that the U.S. is almost $17 trillion in debt. He says that we are in fine shape fiscally and should actually be spending more money on infrastructure as our gift to the next generation rather than getting our house in order. No wonder the New York Times is glowing about El Paso's expenditures.
The controversy over the Triple A stadium has accomplished something else--it has eclipsed concerns that the citizenry might have about sustainable development and smart growth. The city's new master plan moves to encompass more and more of our city into "smart zones" where property can be taken by eminent domain for the greater good and where land rationing and unreasonable zoning restrictions drive up the costs of housing for everyone, and yet that story is not being covered. We are too busy looking at the stadium.
Right now, El Paso is having a Field of Dreams experience as city council, the owners of the Triple A baseball team that is moving here, and progressives around the nation whisper in unison, "if you build it, they will come." But Field of Dreams was just a movie--a Hollywood fantasy in which transforming a cornfield into a baseball diamond changed the lives of the people in a community. In real life, massive debt does matter, for a nation and for a city. As our taxes continue to rise, services continue to drop and our city does not experience the economic boom that has been promised, we are going to deeply regret the day we allowed our city to go down in flames. If we don't get our house in order now, in a few decades we may again find ourselves in national headlines for a new, more humiliating distinction, as we take the number one spot for the largest city in the nation to declare bankruptcy.
Right now we cannot stop the ball park--it is already under construction--but we can refuse to allocate one more dime for it. We can stop the expansion of "smart growth" by demanding that the city planning office stop rezoning areas of our city. We can vote in a pro-business mayor and insist that all of our representatives immediately stop throwing away our hard earned dollars and return to fiscally sensible policies. We can demand a balanced budget and insist that we don't spend what we don't have. And if we are successful then I propose a new city motto--"El Paso, Texas, Where Solvency is Cool". That won't get us an article in The New York Times, but it will sure feel great when we are paying our taxes and looking at the city budget.
El Paso deserved better than what we are getting. Your city, wherever it is located, does too. So when the snake oil salesmen come to your town promising downtown redevelopment involving "green" housing, smart growth and sustainable development anchored by an arena stadium or some other massively expensive entertainment venue paid for by public funds, do yourselves a favor. Just say no.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
May 21, 2013
The REAL Hunger Games--Food Rationing Coming to a Dinner Table Near You Courtesy of the U.N.
Update: June 5th is World Environment Day and the UN is asking people worldwide to pledge to reduce their "foodprint".
The mega bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games, is set in a post-apocalyptic world where food is rationed and seconds are served up to the region whose champion can emerge as the games' victor. The books and now movies have been a huge success--partially because in America we have no real concept of what food rationing means. The last time we had rationing was during World War II when every American was encouraged to grow a "Victory Garden" and sugar was in short supply. But if global climate change enthusiasts and the leftists in our country have their way, we will soon be back to victory gardens and food rationing as a permanent fixture of our society.
To understand where the newest push for government control is coming from, it is essential to understand that the main premise of environmentalists and the entire climate change movement, which has been encapsulated in Agenda 21, is that the primary danger to the world is the affluence of the West, and particularly the United States. THE PROBLEM: We produce too much, we consume too much and we have too much. Our wealth is something that other countries aspire to emulate, but it is unsustainable. THE SOLUTION: Exchange the free market systems and freedom that created Western/American prosperity in the first place for a Central Planning system where are all resources are owned by the government and rationed to the populace. This will intentionally destroy American wealth and reduce us to the level of poor third world countries, thereby achieving the levels of social equality that Agenda 21 demands. Maurice Strong, the chair of the UN Earth Summit in 1992, expressed this goal in his opening remarks:
"The same processes of economic growth which have produced such unprecedented levels of wealth and power for the rich minority and hopes of a better life for everyone have also given rise to the risks and imbalances that now threaten the future of rich and poor alike. This growth model, and the patterns of production and consumption which have accompanied it, is not sustainable for the rich; nor can it be replicated by the poor. To continue along this pathway could lead to the end of our civilization."
Sixteen years later, Presidential candidate Barack Obama restated this goal in the language of the people in a stump speech in Roseburg, Oregon delivered May 17, 2008:
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes at 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the Tundra, and just expect that every other country is going to say, 'Oh, okay, you guys keep using 25% of the world's energy even though you only account for 3% of the world's population.'" (Emphasis added)
The past four and half years have seen huge strides in the advancement of the global environmentalist agenda. Through the proliferation of Smart Growth communities which ration land usage and make housing more expensive, coupled with the Dodd Frank bill which cuts off access to home mortgage loans for 60% of Americans, the government is remaking us into a nation of renters who will spend our lives in tiny urban apartments. Through subsidies of public transportation combined with energy policies that raise the prices of both automobiles and gasoline, the government is going to force as many of us as possible to give up our cars. The next stage--rationing our food and telling us what we can eat, is right around the corner.
Ever since President Obama took office, the first lady has been harping on the nation that we need to be eating healthier diets. We saw pictures of her White House garden where she supposedly grows vegetables for her family. Many thought that her new role as food police was just her "project". Then Mayor Michael Bloomberg began restricting the use of salt in restaurants in New York and limiting the size of soft drinks. He tells us that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens' health by dictating what we eat. So what's really going on? Why, with all of the problems we are facing as a nation, is the state and federal government so interested in what we eat?
Last year at the Rio + 20 Summit, the current Secretary-General of the U.N. launched the U.N.'s Zero Hunger Challenge. The Zero Hunger Challenge is one of the Ban Ki-Moon's top priorities, and on the surface a campaign to end worldwide hunger sounds very noble. But like everything else that the U.N. has proposed for the last twenty years, the Zero Hunger Challenge is not really about ending hunger; it's about controlling food and forcing the industrial nations of the world to adopt a system of "sustainable agriculture". Two of the goals give this away--eliminating over consumption and food waste. The EPA website features a page showing that Americans waste 35 million pounds of food each year. So how do we eliminate food waste? Cut back the amount produced and ration the amount of food available.
The problem with the obesity campaign is that for the most part it has not been well received. Even uber liberal Bill Maher has said that he has a problem with the government regulating how much we eat and drink. So now, the climate change people are trying a different tactic--after telling us for years that one in three American children is obese, they are now telling us that one in five American children is hungry.
That is the theme of a documentary A Place at the Table which was released in March of 2013. A Place at the Table takes statistics that nearly 20% of Americans are living in households with "food insecurity" and distorts them to imply that 1 in 5 children are malnourished or hungry as a result. This theme is being echoed in a current ConAgra Food campaign which shows little children carrying folding chairs to a long table where a good meal is waiting for them. The voiceover for this ad tells us that one in five children does not know where their next meal is coming from, but we can help by purchasing foods from the ConAgra family of foods, and they will donate funds to end hunger in America. This propaganda even made its way into this season's Dancing with the Stars as the band who performed the song in the ConAgra commercial sang the song they wrote for the ConAgra campaign on the show and then repeated the same statistic.
If you listen carefully, the ConAgra campaign never says that 1 in 5 children is hungry--although that is strongly implied. The reason for this is that the statistics are coming from the USDA's definition of families as "food insecure". According to the statistics about 20% of U.S. households is food insecure--meaning that they are struggling to provide food at some point during the year.
So...1 in 5 American kids is hungry--right? Wrong! In one of the most deliberately misleading attempts to deceive the American public into destroying itself ever to be imposed on us, the Administration and the U.N. are distorting and misrepresenting the facts about hunger in America. Food insecurity does not necessarily have anything to do with actual hunger at all because the USDA has two categories of food insecurity. The first category of food insecurity is food insecurity with no reduction in caloric intake or reports of missed meals. Because this category is so broad, The Texas Food Bank Network has a definition of food insecurity on their website. "Food insecurity is the most broadly-used measure of food deprivation in the United States. The USDA defines food insecurity as meaning 'consistent access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources at times during the year.'" The site goes on to define what food insecurity does NOT mean, "it is not correct to state that specific individuals in a food insecure household (such as children) definitely experience outright hunger or specific coping mechanisms. Rather than describing these individuals as food insecure they should be described as 'living in a food insecure home'...it is not correct to assert that every food insecure household is experiencing food insecurity 'right now', will experience hunger 'tonight' or 'does not know where its next meal is coming from.'"
So how many children are actually going hungry? The USDA has a separate category to classify families where the children have reportedly experienced hunger--food insecurity with hunger or a reduction in caloric intake. That percentage is not 20%; it's just over 1% or about 374,000 US families.
Look, even one hungry child in America is one too many, but 1% of children who are experiencing hunger is a much more manageable number that we could undoubtedly handle with the current safety nets in place. The other 19% are not actually going hungry--they are just eating less nutritious high calorie foods that cost less than those foods the USDA recommends as part of a balanced diet. Parents may be feeding them sugary or salty, high calorie foods. This is how the government and the left leaning media reconcile the problem of childhood obesity with the problem of childhood hunger--in the world of global environmentalist double speak, hunger and obesity are actually the same thing.
In the trailer for A Place at the Table the narrator, actor Jeff Bridges, tells us that the problem with food insecurity is not that there is no food available but that the right food is not available to families who need it, and he challenges us to finally make the tough choices to end this problem. What are those choices?
Environmentalists hate the U.S. system of agriculture because while they admit that it produces a lot of food, they complain that this "high output" system of agriculture which feeds our whole nation is bad for the earth and unsustainable. Cornell University has summarized this "problem" for us in their study on food mapping, food sheds and sustainable agriculture, "Our agricultural system currently provides a cheap and abundant supply of food. However, agriculture also causes negative impacts on the environment, rural economies and human health." We have too much, we produce too much, we consume too much, and apparently we waste too much.
The solution is to get rid of high output farming, and the fertilizers and pesticides that it requires, and move to a system of small, sustainable farms. These farms are to produce the food that is needed locally for each area so that we can stop the current transportation of food--the average vegetable travels 1500 miles from field to market--that leads to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. This new push is reflected in the "buy local" food campaigns that are popping up everywhere now. The Cornell Study on food sheds studied the possibility of growing all the food needed for upstate New York with the food coming from within 30 miles of population centers. The food sheds would be tied to population models, so in order for the food shed concept to work, mobility to and from cities would have to be greatly controlled and restricted or the food planners would not be able to accurately predict how much they needed. Rosa Koire talks about some of the potential restrictions on freedom that this might pose in her book Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21 . One area that Koire does not cover--travel. If food is rationed per person based on the population, a resident of one of these cities would not be able to even entertain out of town guests!
Implementation of the food shed concept requires a plan for individual food rationing. This system of rationing is called a "food print"-the amount "needed to feed an average person in New York with a balanced diet from local land and crop resources with sustainable management practices." Cornell's model included 63 g of meat and dairy per day--about 1/3 of current average consumption of meat and eggs. By setting a maximum caloric intake for each individual per day and regulating the proportion of vegetables to meat and dairy, the experts at Cornell have calculated that they can feed most of upstate New York with resources within 30 miles. Unfortunately, researchers concluded that they cannot use these systems to feed any of the major population centers--including New York City.
Cornell's model is generous because it does include some meat and dairy. Many of the environmentalist proponents of sustainable agriculture and the accompanying food rationing want us on strictly vegetarian diets because livestock require large amounts of water and consume large amounts of vegetation--both of which make them an inefficient food source. According to the UN, 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock production. By moving Americans to a "same calorie" vegetarian diet, we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.
What the UN, the environmental /climate change lobby and the White House are not telling us is that the modern "high output" systems of farming are the reason that we are able to avoid famine and starvation. My mother comes from the mid-West and grew up around farmers. Farmers used to experience years where they lost a lot of their crops and finally the farms would fail. When people depend on local farmers for food and the crop fails, the "food shed" has no way to sustain itself. A rationed food system where the local population is forced to rely for its primary sustenance on whatever is grown within thirty miles would not lead to happy, well-fed people eating a healthful balanced diet--it will lead to people fighting and killing each other for every scrap of food available during times of scarcity. What the U.N. is proposing, and the Administration is promoting, is that we give up a system proven to produce a supply of cheap, plentiful food for everyone for a system that historically has proven to produce famine and starvation.
In the Zero Hunger Campaign and its promotion through the White House, the entertainment industry and the media, we see a repeat of a cycle that is becoming all too depressingly familiar. First, the government creates a problem--high unemployment and high dependency on government programs through anti-business policies which make it hard for Americans to find jobs. Restrictive energy policies increase the price of food. Then the government comes in with a ready-made solution to the problem they just created--more government control over still another sector of our society. All "sustainability" initiatives are about controlling consumption and producing rationing, scarcity, poverty, misery and need. Many Americans are suffering serious financial problems which have led to the growth of the first category of "food insecurity"--people who are strapped for cash and trying to make ends meet. This is not due to our system of food production. It is due to excessive government regulation that kills jobs and makes it tougher for people to find work that pays well. It is due to rising energy costs resulting from energy policies that raise the prices of transportation and energy usage. Nobody is denying that families in the U.S. are suffering financially. But the answer is not more regulation and greater central planning which will lead to more poverty and more suffering. The answer is energy policies that reduce costs so that the price of energy goes down, which will show up in the cost of those vegetables that travel 1500 miles. The answer is business-friendly policies that encourage growth so that the underemployed and those relying heavily on government assistance can find work and provide better for their families.
Next year we have a major opportunity to stop some of this madness. Many seats are up for re-election in Congress and the Senate. Find out where your candidates fall on the issues of the UN, sustainability, smart growth, smart code, climate change and all of the other monikers that Central Planners hide behind. Don't just rely on specific party affiliation to tell you who you should vote for--advocates of Agenda 21 and climate change operate in both parties. Read candidate interviews and policy statements to find out where they stand, and vote these globalists out of office while we still can. If we don't, we may find ourselves living out some version of The Hunger Games in our own lifetimes.
Read Alexandra's novel on Agenda 21, The Planner, Free on Kindle through July 6th.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
The mega bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games, is set in a post-apocalyptic world where food is rationed and seconds are served up to the region whose champion can emerge as the games' victor. The books and now movies have been a huge success--partially because in America we have no real concept of what food rationing means. The last time we had rationing was during World War II when every American was encouraged to grow a "Victory Garden" and sugar was in short supply. But if global climate change enthusiasts and the leftists in our country have their way, we will soon be back to victory gardens and food rationing as a permanent fixture of our society.
To understand where the newest push for government control is coming from, it is essential to understand that the main premise of environmentalists and the entire climate change movement, which has been encapsulated in Agenda 21, is that the primary danger to the world is the affluence of the West, and particularly the United States. THE PROBLEM: We produce too much, we consume too much and we have too much. Our wealth is something that other countries aspire to emulate, but it is unsustainable. THE SOLUTION: Exchange the free market systems and freedom that created Western/American prosperity in the first place for a Central Planning system where are all resources are owned by the government and rationed to the populace. This will intentionally destroy American wealth and reduce us to the level of poor third world countries, thereby achieving the levels of social equality that Agenda 21 demands. Maurice Strong, the chair of the UN Earth Summit in 1992, expressed this goal in his opening remarks:
"The same processes of economic growth which have produced such unprecedented levels of wealth and power for the rich minority and hopes of a better life for everyone have also given rise to the risks and imbalances that now threaten the future of rich and poor alike. This growth model, and the patterns of production and consumption which have accompanied it, is not sustainable for the rich; nor can it be replicated by the poor. To continue along this pathway could lead to the end of our civilization."
Sixteen years later, Presidential candidate Barack Obama restated this goal in the language of the people in a stump speech in Roseburg, Oregon delivered May 17, 2008:
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes at 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the Tundra, and just expect that every other country is going to say, 'Oh, okay, you guys keep using 25% of the world's energy even though you only account for 3% of the world's population.'" (Emphasis added)
The past four and half years have seen huge strides in the advancement of the global environmentalist agenda. Through the proliferation of Smart Growth communities which ration land usage and make housing more expensive, coupled with the Dodd Frank bill which cuts off access to home mortgage loans for 60% of Americans, the government is remaking us into a nation of renters who will spend our lives in tiny urban apartments. Through subsidies of public transportation combined with energy policies that raise the prices of both automobiles and gasoline, the government is going to force as many of us as possible to give up our cars. The next stage--rationing our food and telling us what we can eat, is right around the corner.
Ever since President Obama took office, the first lady has been harping on the nation that we need to be eating healthier diets. We saw pictures of her White House garden where she supposedly grows vegetables for her family. Many thought that her new role as food police was just her "project". Then Mayor Michael Bloomberg began restricting the use of salt in restaurants in New York and limiting the size of soft drinks. He tells us that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens' health by dictating what we eat. So what's really going on? Why, with all of the problems we are facing as a nation, is the state and federal government so interested in what we eat?
Last year at the Rio + 20 Summit, the current Secretary-General of the U.N. launched the U.N.'s Zero Hunger Challenge. The Zero Hunger Challenge is one of the Ban Ki-Moon's top priorities, and on the surface a campaign to end worldwide hunger sounds very noble. But like everything else that the U.N. has proposed for the last twenty years, the Zero Hunger Challenge is not really about ending hunger; it's about controlling food and forcing the industrial nations of the world to adopt a system of "sustainable agriculture". Two of the goals give this away--eliminating over consumption and food waste. The EPA website features a page showing that Americans waste 35 million pounds of food each year. So how do we eliminate food waste? Cut back the amount produced and ration the amount of food available.
The problem with the obesity campaign is that for the most part it has not been well received. Even uber liberal Bill Maher has said that he has a problem with the government regulating how much we eat and drink. So now, the climate change people are trying a different tactic--after telling us for years that one in three American children is obese, they are now telling us that one in five American children is hungry.
That is the theme of a documentary A Place at the Table which was released in March of 2013. A Place at the Table takes statistics that nearly 20% of Americans are living in households with "food insecurity" and distorts them to imply that 1 in 5 children are malnourished or hungry as a result. This theme is being echoed in a current ConAgra Food campaign which shows little children carrying folding chairs to a long table where a good meal is waiting for them. The voiceover for this ad tells us that one in five children does not know where their next meal is coming from, but we can help by purchasing foods from the ConAgra family of foods, and they will donate funds to end hunger in America. This propaganda even made its way into this season's Dancing with the Stars as the band who performed the song in the ConAgra commercial sang the song they wrote for the ConAgra campaign on the show and then repeated the same statistic.
If you listen carefully, the ConAgra campaign never says that 1 in 5 children is hungry--although that is strongly implied. The reason for this is that the statistics are coming from the USDA's definition of families as "food insecure". According to the statistics about 20% of U.S. households is food insecure--meaning that they are struggling to provide food at some point during the year.
So...1 in 5 American kids is hungry--right? Wrong! In one of the most deliberately misleading attempts to deceive the American public into destroying itself ever to be imposed on us, the Administration and the U.N. are distorting and misrepresenting the facts about hunger in America. Food insecurity does not necessarily have anything to do with actual hunger at all because the USDA has two categories of food insecurity. The first category of food insecurity is food insecurity with no reduction in caloric intake or reports of missed meals. Because this category is so broad, The Texas Food Bank Network has a definition of food insecurity on their website. "Food insecurity is the most broadly-used measure of food deprivation in the United States. The USDA defines food insecurity as meaning 'consistent access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources at times during the year.'" The site goes on to define what food insecurity does NOT mean, "it is not correct to state that specific individuals in a food insecure household (such as children) definitely experience outright hunger or specific coping mechanisms. Rather than describing these individuals as food insecure they should be described as 'living in a food insecure home'...it is not correct to assert that every food insecure household is experiencing food insecurity 'right now', will experience hunger 'tonight' or 'does not know where its next meal is coming from.'"
So how many children are actually going hungry? The USDA has a separate category to classify families where the children have reportedly experienced hunger--food insecurity with hunger or a reduction in caloric intake. That percentage is not 20%; it's just over 1% or about 374,000 US families.
Look, even one hungry child in America is one too many, but 1% of children who are experiencing hunger is a much more manageable number that we could undoubtedly handle with the current safety nets in place. The other 19% are not actually going hungry--they are just eating less nutritious high calorie foods that cost less than those foods the USDA recommends as part of a balanced diet. Parents may be feeding them sugary or salty, high calorie foods. This is how the government and the left leaning media reconcile the problem of childhood obesity with the problem of childhood hunger--in the world of global environmentalist double speak, hunger and obesity are actually the same thing.
In the trailer for A Place at the Table the narrator, actor Jeff Bridges, tells us that the problem with food insecurity is not that there is no food available but that the right food is not available to families who need it, and he challenges us to finally make the tough choices to end this problem. What are those choices?
Environmentalists hate the U.S. system of agriculture because while they admit that it produces a lot of food, they complain that this "high output" system of agriculture which feeds our whole nation is bad for the earth and unsustainable. Cornell University has summarized this "problem" for us in their study on food mapping, food sheds and sustainable agriculture, "Our agricultural system currently provides a cheap and abundant supply of food. However, agriculture also causes negative impacts on the environment, rural economies and human health." We have too much, we produce too much, we consume too much, and apparently we waste too much.
The solution is to get rid of high output farming, and the fertilizers and pesticides that it requires, and move to a system of small, sustainable farms. These farms are to produce the food that is needed locally for each area so that we can stop the current transportation of food--the average vegetable travels 1500 miles from field to market--that leads to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. This new push is reflected in the "buy local" food campaigns that are popping up everywhere now. The Cornell Study on food sheds studied the possibility of growing all the food needed for upstate New York with the food coming from within 30 miles of population centers. The food sheds would be tied to population models, so in order for the food shed concept to work, mobility to and from cities would have to be greatly controlled and restricted or the food planners would not be able to accurately predict how much they needed. Rosa Koire talks about some of the potential restrictions on freedom that this might pose in her book Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21 . One area that Koire does not cover--travel. If food is rationed per person based on the population, a resident of one of these cities would not be able to even entertain out of town guests!
Implementation of the food shed concept requires a plan for individual food rationing. This system of rationing is called a "food print"-the amount "needed to feed an average person in New York with a balanced diet from local land and crop resources with sustainable management practices." Cornell's model included 63 g of meat and dairy per day--about 1/3 of current average consumption of meat and eggs. By setting a maximum caloric intake for each individual per day and regulating the proportion of vegetables to meat and dairy, the experts at Cornell have calculated that they can feed most of upstate New York with resources within 30 miles. Unfortunately, researchers concluded that they cannot use these systems to feed any of the major population centers--including New York City.
Cornell's model is generous because it does include some meat and dairy. Many of the environmentalist proponents of sustainable agriculture and the accompanying food rationing want us on strictly vegetarian diets because livestock require large amounts of water and consume large amounts of vegetation--both of which make them an inefficient food source. According to the UN, 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock production. By moving Americans to a "same calorie" vegetarian diet, we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.
What the UN, the environmental /climate change lobby and the White House are not telling us is that the modern "high output" systems of farming are the reason that we are able to avoid famine and starvation. My mother comes from the mid-West and grew up around farmers. Farmers used to experience years where they lost a lot of their crops and finally the farms would fail. When people depend on local farmers for food and the crop fails, the "food shed" has no way to sustain itself. A rationed food system where the local population is forced to rely for its primary sustenance on whatever is grown within thirty miles would not lead to happy, well-fed people eating a healthful balanced diet--it will lead to people fighting and killing each other for every scrap of food available during times of scarcity. What the U.N. is proposing, and the Administration is promoting, is that we give up a system proven to produce a supply of cheap, plentiful food for everyone for a system that historically has proven to produce famine and starvation.
In the Zero Hunger Campaign and its promotion through the White House, the entertainment industry and the media, we see a repeat of a cycle that is becoming all too depressingly familiar. First, the government creates a problem--high unemployment and high dependency on government programs through anti-business policies which make it hard for Americans to find jobs. Restrictive energy policies increase the price of food. Then the government comes in with a ready-made solution to the problem they just created--more government control over still another sector of our society. All "sustainability" initiatives are about controlling consumption and producing rationing, scarcity, poverty, misery and need. Many Americans are suffering serious financial problems which have led to the growth of the first category of "food insecurity"--people who are strapped for cash and trying to make ends meet. This is not due to our system of food production. It is due to excessive government regulation that kills jobs and makes it tougher for people to find work that pays well. It is due to rising energy costs resulting from energy policies that raise the prices of transportation and energy usage. Nobody is denying that families in the U.S. are suffering financially. But the answer is not more regulation and greater central planning which will lead to more poverty and more suffering. The answer is energy policies that reduce costs so that the price of energy goes down, which will show up in the cost of those vegetables that travel 1500 miles. The answer is business-friendly policies that encourage growth so that the underemployed and those relying heavily on government assistance can find work and provide better for their families.
Next year we have a major opportunity to stop some of this madness. Many seats are up for re-election in Congress and the Senate. Find out where your candidates fall on the issues of the UN, sustainability, smart growth, smart code, climate change and all of the other monikers that Central Planners hide behind. Don't just rely on specific party affiliation to tell you who you should vote for--advocates of Agenda 21 and climate change operate in both parties. Read candidate interviews and policy statements to find out where they stand, and vote these globalists out of office while we still can. If we don't, we may find ourselves living out some version of The Hunger Games in our own lifetimes.
Read Alexandra's novel on Agenda 21, The Planner, Free on Kindle through July 6th.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
The REAL Hunger Games--Food Rationing Coming to a Dinner Table Near You Courtesy of the U.N.
The mega bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games, is set in a post-apocalyptic world where food is rationed and seconds are served up to the region whose champion can emerge as the games' victor. The books and now movies have been a huge success--partially because in America we have no real concept of what food rationing means. The last time we had rationing was during World War II when every American was encouraged to grow a "Victory Garden" and sugar was in short supply. But if global climate change enthusiasts and the leftists in our country have their way, we will soon be back to victory gardens and food rationing as a permanent fixture of our society.
To understand where the newest push for government control is coming from, it is essential to understand that the main premise of environmentalists and the entire climate change movement, which has been encapsulated in Agenda 21, is that the primary danger to the world is the affluence of the West, and particularly the United States. THE PROBLEM: We produce too much, we consume too much and we have too much. Our wealth is something that other countries aspire to emulate, but it is unsustainable. THE SOLUTION: Exchange the free market systems and freedom that created Western/American prosperity in the first place for a Central Planning system where are all resources are owned by the government and rationed to the populace. This will intentionally destroy American wealth and reduce us to the level of poor third world countries, thereby achieving the levels of social equality that Agenda 21 demands. Maurice Strong, the chair of the UN Earth Summit in 1992, expressed this goal in his opening remarks:
"The same processes of economic growth which have produced such unprecedented levels of wealth and power for the rich minority and hopes of a better life for everyone have also given rise to the risks and imbalances that now threaten the future of rich and poor alike. This growth model, and the patterns of production and consumption which have accompanied it, is not sustainable for the rich; nor can it be replicated by the poor. To continue along this pathway could lead to the end of our civilization."
Sixteen years later, Presidential candidate Barack Obama restated this goal in the language of the people in a stump speech in Roseburg, Oregon delivered May 17, 2008:
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes at 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the Tundra, and just expect that every other country is going to say, 'Oh, okay, you guys keep using 25% of the world's energy even though you only account for 3% of the world's population.'" (Emphasis added)
The past four and half years have seen huge strides in the advancement of the global environmentalist agenda. Through the proliferation of Smart Growth communities which ration land usage and make housing more expensive, coupled with the Dodd Frank bill which cuts off access to home mortgage loans for 60% of Americans, the government is remaking us into a nation of renters who will spend our lives in tiny urban apartments. Through subsidies of public transportation combined with energy policies that raise the prices of both automobiles and gasoline, the government is going to force as many of us as possible to give up our cars. The next stage--rationing our food and telling us what we can eat, is right around the corner.
Ever since President Obama took office, the first lady has been harping on the nation that we need to be eating healthier diets. We saw pictures of her White House garden where she supposedly grows vegetables for her family. Many thought that her new role as food police was just her "project". Then Mayor Michael Bloomberg began restricting the use of salt in restaurants in New York and limiting the size of soft drinks. He tells us that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens' health by dictating what we eat. So what's really going on? Why, with all of the problems we are facing as a nation, is the state and federal government so interested in what we eat?
Last year at the Rio + 20 Summit, the current Secretary-General of the U.N. launched the U.N.'s Zero Hunger Challenge. The Zero Hunger Challenge is one of the Ban Ki-Moon's top priorities, and on the surface a campaign to end worldwide hunger sounds very noble. But like everything else that the U.N. has proposed for the last twenty years, the Zero Hunger Challenge is not really about ending hunger; it's about controlling food and forcing the industrial nations of the world to adopt a system of "sustainable agriculture". Two of the goals give this away--eliminating over consumption and food waste. The EPA website features a page showing that Americans waste 35 million pounds of food each year. So how do we eliminate food waste? Cut back the amount produced and ration the amount of food available.
The problem with the obesity campaign is that for the most part it has not been well received. Even uber liberal Bill Maher has said that he has a problem with the government regulating how much we eat and drink. So now, the climate change people are trying a different tactic--after telling us for years that one in three American children is obese, they are now telling us that one in five American children is hungry.
That is the theme of a documentary A Place at the Table which was released in March of 2013. A Place at the Table takes statistics that nearly 20% of Americans are living in households with "food insecurity" and distorts them to imply that 1 in 5 children are malnourished or hungry as a result. This theme is being echoed in a current ConAgra Food campaign which shows little children carrying folding chairs to a long table where a good meal is waiting for them. The voiceover for this ad tells us that one in five children does not know where their next meal is coming from, but we can help by purchasing foods from the ConAgra family of foods, and they will donate funds to end hunger in America. This propaganda even made its way into this season's Dancing with the Stars as the band who performed the song in the ConAgra commercial sang the song they wrote for the ConAgra campaign on the show and then repeated the same statistic.
If you listen carefully, the ConAgra campaign never says that 1 in 5 children is hungry--although that is strongly implied. The reason for this is that the statistics are coming from the USDA's definition of families as "food insecure". According to the statistics about 20% of U.S. households is food insecure--meaning that they are struggling to provide food at some point during the year.
So...1 in 5 American kids is hungry--right? Wrong! In one of the most deliberately misleading attempts to deceive the American public into destroying itself ever to be imposed on us, the Administration and the U.N. are distorting and misrepresenting the facts about hunger in America. Food insecurity does not necessarily have anything to do with actual hunger at all because the USDA has two categories of food insecurity. The first category of food insecurity is food insecurity with no reduction in caloric intake or reports of missed meals. Because this category is so broad, The Texas Food Bank Network has a definition of food insecurity on their website. "Food insecurity is the most broadly-used measure of food deprivation in the United States. The USDA defines food insecurity as meaning 'consistent access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources at times during the year.'" The site goes on to define what food insecurity does NOT mean, "it is not correct to state that specific individuals in a food insecure household (such as children) definitely experience outright hunger or specific coping mechanisms. Rather than describing these individuals as food insecure they should be described as 'living in a food insecure home'...it is not correct to assert that every food insecure household is experiencing food insecurity 'right now', will experience hunger 'tonight' or 'does not know where its next meal is coming from.'"
So how many children are actually going hungry? The USDA has a separate category to classify families where the children have reportedly experienced hunger--food insecurity with hunger or a reduction in caloric intake. That percentage is not 20%; it's just over 1% or about 374,000 US families.
Look, even one hungry child in America is one too many, but 1% of children who are experiencing hunger is a much more manageable number that we could undoubtedly handle with the current safety nets in place. The other 19% are not actually going hungry--they are just eating less nutritious high calorie foods that cost less than those foods the USDA recommends as part of a balanced diet. Parents may be feeding them sugary or salty, high calorie foods. This is how the government and the left leaning media reconcile the problem of childhood obesity with the problem of childhood hunger--in the world of global environmentalist double speak, hunger and obesity are actually the same thing.
In the trailer for A Place at the Table the narrator, actor Jeff Bridges, tells us that the problem with food insecurity is not that there is no food available but that the right food is not available to families who need it, and he challenges us to finally make the tough choices to end this problem. What are those choices?
Environmentalists hate the U.S. system of agriculture because while they admit that it produces a lot of food, they complain that this "high output" system of agriculture which feeds our whole nation is bad for the earth and unsustainable. Cornell University has summarized this "problem" for us in their study on food mapping, food sheds and sustainable agriculture, "Our agricultural system currently provides a cheap and abundant supply of food. However, agriculture also causes negative impacts on the environment, rural economies and human health." We have too much, we produce too much, we consume too much, and apparently we waste too much.
The solution is to get rid of high output farming, and the fertilizers and pesticides that it requires, and move to a system of small, sustainable farms. These farms are to produce the food that is needed locally for each area so that we can stop the current transportation of food--the average vegetable travels 1500 miles from field to market--that leads to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. This new push is reflected in the "buy local" food campaigns that are popping up everywhere now. The Cornell Study on food sheds studied the possibility of growing all the food needed for upstate New York with the food coming from within 30 miles of population centers. The food sheds would be tied to population models, so in order for the food shed concept to work, mobility to and from cities would have to be greatly controlled and restricted or the food planners would not be able to accurately predict how much they needed. Rosa Koire talks about some of the potential restrictions on freedom that this might pose in her book Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21 . One area that Koire does not cover--travel. If food is rationed per person based on the population, a resident of one of these cities would not be able to even entertain out of town guests!
Implementation of the food shed concept requires a plan for individual food rationing. This system of rationing is called a "food print"-the amount "needed to feed an average person in New York with a balanced diet from local land and crop resources with sustainable management practices." Cornell's model included 63 g of meat and dairy per day--about 1/3 of current average consumption of meat and eggs. By setting a maximum caloric intake for each individual per day and regulating the proportion of vegetables to meat and dairy, the experts at Cornell have calculated that they can feed most of upstate New York with resources within 30 miles. Unfortunately, researchers concluded that they cannot use these systems to feed any of the major population centers--including New York City.
Cornell's model is generous because it does include some meat and dairy. Many of the environmentalist proponents of sustainable agriculture and the accompanying food rationing want us on strictly vegetarian diets because livestock require large amounts of water and consume large amounts of vegetation--both of which make them an inefficient food source. According to the UN, 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock production. By moving Americans to a "same calorie" vegetarian diet, we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.
What the UN, the environmental /climate change lobby and the White House are not telling us is that the modern "high output" systems of farming are the reason that we are able to avoid famine and starvation. My mother comes from the mid-West and grew up around farmers. Farmers used to experience years where they lost a lot of their crops and finally the farms would fail. When people depend on local farmers for food and the crop fails, the "food shed" has no way to sustain itself. A rationed food system where the local population is forced to rely for its primary sustenance on whatever is grown within thirty miles would not lead to happy, well-fed people eating a healthful balanced diet--it will lead to people fighting and killing each other for every scrap of food available during times of scarcity. What the U.N. is proposing, and the Administration is promoting, is that we give up a system proven to produce a supply of cheap, plentiful food for everyone for a system that historically has proven to produce famine and starvation.
In the Zero Hunger Campaign and its promotion through the White House, the entertainment industry and the media, we see a repeat of a cycle that is becoming all too depressingly familiar. First, the government creates a problem--high unemployment and high dependency on government programs through anti-business policies which make it hard for Americans to find jobs. Restrictive energy policies increase the price of food. Then the government comes in with a ready-made solution to the problem they just created--more government control over still another sector of our society. All "sustainability" initiatives are about controlling consumption and producing rationing, scarcity, poverty, misery and need. Many Americans are suffering serious financial problems which have led to the growth of the first category of "food insecurity"--people who are strapped for cash and trying to make ends meet. This is not due to our system of food production. It is due to excessive government regulation that kills jobs and makes it tougher for people to find work that pays well. It is due to rising energy costs resulting from energy policies that raise the prices of transportation and energy usage. Nobody is denying that families in the U.S. are suffering financially. But the answer is not more regulation and greater central planning which will lead to more poverty and more suffering. The answer is energy policies that reduce costs so that the price of energy goes down, which will show up in the cost of those vegetables that travel 1500 miles. The answer is business-friendly policies that encourage growth so that the underemployed and those relying heavily on government assistance can find work and provide better for their families.
Next year we have a major opportunity to stop some of this madness. Many seats are up for re-election in Congress and the Senate. Find out where your candidates fall on the issues of the UN, sustainability, smart growth, smart code, climate change and all of the other monikers that Central Planners hide behind. Don't just rely on specific party affiliation to tell you who you should vote for--advocates of Agenda 21 and climate change operate in both parties. Read candidate interviews and policy statements to find out where they stand, and vote these globalists out of office while we still can. If we don't, we may find ourselves living out some version of The Hunger Games in our own lifetimes.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
To understand where the newest push for government control is coming from, it is essential to understand that the main premise of environmentalists and the entire climate change movement, which has been encapsulated in Agenda 21, is that the primary danger to the world is the affluence of the West, and particularly the United States. THE PROBLEM: We produce too much, we consume too much and we have too much. Our wealth is something that other countries aspire to emulate, but it is unsustainable. THE SOLUTION: Exchange the free market systems and freedom that created Western/American prosperity in the first place for a Central Planning system where are all resources are owned by the government and rationed to the populace. This will intentionally destroy American wealth and reduce us to the level of poor third world countries, thereby achieving the levels of social equality that Agenda 21 demands. Maurice Strong, the chair of the UN Earth Summit in 1992, expressed this goal in his opening remarks:
"The same processes of economic growth which have produced such unprecedented levels of wealth and power for the rich minority and hopes of a better life for everyone have also given rise to the risks and imbalances that now threaten the future of rich and poor alike. This growth model, and the patterns of production and consumption which have accompanied it, is not sustainable for the rich; nor can it be replicated by the poor. To continue along this pathway could lead to the end of our civilization."
Sixteen years later, Presidential candidate Barack Obama restated this goal in the language of the people in a stump speech in Roseburg, Oregon delivered May 17, 2008:
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes at 72 degrees at all times whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the Tundra, and just expect that every other country is going to say, 'Oh, okay, you guys keep using 25% of the world's energy even though you only account for 3% of the world's population.'" (Emphasis added)
The past four and half years have seen huge strides in the advancement of the global environmentalist agenda. Through the proliferation of Smart Growth communities which ration land usage and make housing more expensive, coupled with the Dodd Frank bill which cuts off access to home mortgage loans for 60% of Americans, the government is remaking us into a nation of renters who will spend our lives in tiny urban apartments. Through subsidies of public transportation combined with energy policies that raise the prices of both automobiles and gasoline, the government is going to force as many of us as possible to give up our cars. The next stage--rationing our food and telling us what we can eat, is right around the corner.
Ever since President Obama took office, the first lady has been harping on the nation that we need to be eating healthier diets. We saw pictures of her White House garden where she supposedly grows vegetables for her family. Many thought that her new role as food police was just her "project". Then Mayor Michael Bloomberg began restricting the use of salt in restaurants in New York and limiting the size of soft drinks. He tells us that the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens' health by dictating what we eat. So what's really going on? Why, with all of the problems we are facing as a nation, is the state and federal government so interested in what we eat?
Last year at the Rio + 20 Summit, the current Secretary-General of the U.N. launched the U.N.'s Zero Hunger Challenge. The Zero Hunger Challenge is one of the Ban Ki-Moon's top priorities, and on the surface a campaign to end worldwide hunger sounds very noble. But like everything else that the U.N. has proposed for the last twenty years, the Zero Hunger Challenge is not really about ending hunger; it's about controlling food and forcing the industrial nations of the world to adopt a system of "sustainable agriculture". Two of the goals give this away--eliminating over consumption and food waste. The EPA website features a page showing that Americans waste 35 million pounds of food each year. So how do we eliminate food waste? Cut back the amount produced and ration the amount of food available.
The problem with the obesity campaign is that for the most part it has not been well received. Even uber liberal Bill Maher has said that he has a problem with the government regulating how much we eat and drink. So now, the climate change people are trying a different tactic--after telling us for years that one in three American children is obese, they are now telling us that one in five American children is hungry.
That is the theme of a documentary A Place at the Table which was released in March of 2013. A Place at the Table takes statistics that nearly 20% of Americans are living in households with "food insecurity" and distorts them to imply that 1 in 5 children are malnourished or hungry as a result. This theme is being echoed in a current ConAgra Food campaign which shows little children carrying folding chairs to a long table where a good meal is waiting for them. The voiceover for this ad tells us that one in five children does not know where their next meal is coming from, but we can help by purchasing foods from the ConAgra family of foods, and they will donate funds to end hunger in America. This propaganda even made its way into this season's Dancing with the Stars as the band who performed the song in the ConAgra commercial sang the song they wrote for the ConAgra campaign on the show and then repeated the same statistic.
If you listen carefully, the ConAgra campaign never says that 1 in 5 children is hungry--although that is strongly implied. The reason for this is that the statistics are coming from the USDA's definition of families as "food insecure". According to the statistics about 20% of U.S. households is food insecure--meaning that they are struggling to provide food at some point during the year.
So...1 in 5 American kids is hungry--right? Wrong! In one of the most deliberately misleading attempts to deceive the American public into destroying itself ever to be imposed on us, the Administration and the U.N. are distorting and misrepresenting the facts about hunger in America. Food insecurity does not necessarily have anything to do with actual hunger at all because the USDA has two categories of food insecurity. The first category of food insecurity is food insecurity with no reduction in caloric intake or reports of missed meals. Because this category is so broad, The Texas Food Bank Network has a definition of food insecurity on their website. "Food insecurity is the most broadly-used measure of food deprivation in the United States. The USDA defines food insecurity as meaning 'consistent access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources at times during the year.'" The site goes on to define what food insecurity does NOT mean, "it is not correct to state that specific individuals in a food insecure household (such as children) definitely experience outright hunger or specific coping mechanisms. Rather than describing these individuals as food insecure they should be described as 'living in a food insecure home'...it is not correct to assert that every food insecure household is experiencing food insecurity 'right now', will experience hunger 'tonight' or 'does not know where its next meal is coming from.'"
So how many children are actually going hungry? The USDA has a separate category to classify families where the children have reportedly experienced hunger--food insecurity with hunger or a reduction in caloric intake. That percentage is not 20%; it's just over 1% or about 374,000 US families.
Look, even one hungry child in America is one too many, but 1% of children who are experiencing hunger is a much more manageable number that we could undoubtedly handle with the current safety nets in place. The other 19% are not actually going hungry--they are just eating less nutritious high calorie foods that cost less than those foods the USDA recommends as part of a balanced diet. Parents may be feeding them sugary or salty, high calorie foods. This is how the government and the left leaning media reconcile the problem of childhood obesity with the problem of childhood hunger--in the world of global environmentalist double speak, hunger and obesity are actually the same thing.
In the trailer for A Place at the Table the narrator, actor Jeff Bridges, tells us that the problem with food insecurity is not that there is no food available but that the right food is not available to families who need it, and he challenges us to finally make the tough choices to end this problem. What are those choices?
Environmentalists hate the U.S. system of agriculture because while they admit that it produces a lot of food, they complain that this "high output" system of agriculture which feeds our whole nation is bad for the earth and unsustainable. Cornell University has summarized this "problem" for us in their study on food mapping, food sheds and sustainable agriculture, "Our agricultural system currently provides a cheap and abundant supply of food. However, agriculture also causes negative impacts on the environment, rural economies and human health." We have too much, we produce too much, we consume too much, and apparently we waste too much.
The solution is to get rid of high output farming, and the fertilizers and pesticides that it requires, and move to a system of small, sustainable farms. These farms are to produce the food that is needed locally for each area so that we can stop the current transportation of food--the average vegetable travels 1500 miles from field to market--that leads to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. This new push is reflected in the "buy local" food campaigns that are popping up everywhere now. The Cornell Study on food sheds studied the possibility of growing all the food needed for upstate New York with the food coming from within 30 miles of population centers. The food sheds would be tied to population models, so in order for the food shed concept to work, mobility to and from cities would have to be greatly controlled and restricted or the food planners would not be able to accurately predict how much they needed. Rosa Koire talks about some of the potential restrictions on freedom that this might pose in her book Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21 . One area that Koire does not cover--travel. If food is rationed per person based on the population, a resident of one of these cities would not be able to even entertain out of town guests!
Implementation of the food shed concept requires a plan for individual food rationing. This system of rationing is called a "food print"-the amount "needed to feed an average person in New York with a balanced diet from local land and crop resources with sustainable management practices." Cornell's model included 63 g of meat and dairy per day--about 1/3 of current average consumption of meat and eggs. By setting a maximum caloric intake for each individual per day and regulating the proportion of vegetables to meat and dairy, the experts at Cornell have calculated that they can feed most of upstate New York with resources within 30 miles. Unfortunately, researchers concluded that they cannot use these systems to feed any of the major population centers--including New York City.
Cornell's model is generous because it does include some meat and dairy. Many of the environmentalist proponents of sustainable agriculture and the accompanying food rationing want us on strictly vegetarian diets because livestock require large amounts of water and consume large amounts of vegetation--both of which make them an inefficient food source. According to the UN, 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock production. By moving Americans to a "same calorie" vegetarian diet, we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6%.
What the UN, the environmental /climate change lobby and the White House are not telling us is that the modern "high output" systems of farming are the reason that we are able to avoid famine and starvation. My mother comes from the mid-West and grew up around farmers. Farmers used to experience years where they lost a lot of their crops and finally the farms would fail. When people depend on local farmers for food and the crop fails, the "food shed" has no way to sustain itself. A rationed food system where the local population is forced to rely for its primary sustenance on whatever is grown within thirty miles would not lead to happy, well-fed people eating a healthful balanced diet--it will lead to people fighting and killing each other for every scrap of food available during times of scarcity. What the U.N. is proposing, and the Administration is promoting, is that we give up a system proven to produce a supply of cheap, plentiful food for everyone for a system that historically has proven to produce famine and starvation.
In the Zero Hunger Campaign and its promotion through the White House, the entertainment industry and the media, we see a repeat of a cycle that is becoming all too depressingly familiar. First, the government creates a problem--high unemployment and high dependency on government programs through anti-business policies which make it hard for Americans to find jobs. Restrictive energy policies increase the price of food. Then the government comes in with a ready-made solution to the problem they just created--more government control over still another sector of our society. All "sustainability" initiatives are about controlling consumption and producing rationing, scarcity, poverty, misery and need. Many Americans are suffering serious financial problems which have led to the growth of the first category of "food insecurity"--people who are strapped for cash and trying to make ends meet. This is not due to our system of food production. It is due to excessive government regulation that kills jobs and makes it tougher for people to find work that pays well. It is due to rising energy costs resulting from energy policies that raise the prices of transportation and energy usage. Nobody is denying that families in the U.S. are suffering financially. But the answer is not more regulation and greater central planning which will lead to more poverty and more suffering. The answer is energy policies that reduce costs so that the price of energy goes down, which will show up in the cost of those vegetables that travel 1500 miles. The answer is business-friendly policies that encourage growth so that the underemployed and those relying heavily on government assistance can find work and provide better for their families.
Next year we have a major opportunity to stop some of this madness. Many seats are up for re-election in Congress and the Senate. Find out where your candidates fall on the issues of the UN, sustainability, smart growth, smart code, climate change and all of the other monikers that Central Planners hide behind. Don't just rely on specific party affiliation to tell you who you should vote for--advocates of Agenda 21 and climate change operate in both parties. Read candidate interviews and policy statements to find out where they stand, and vote these globalists out of office while we still can. If we don't, we may find ourselves living out some version of The Hunger Games in our own lifetimes.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
May 10, 2013
They Have Found the Enemy and He is Us
Last Friday, Huffington Post featured an article under its "Green" section--Climate Study: Religious Belief in the Second Coming of Christ Could Slow Global Warming Action. According to the article, 56% of Americans believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, and this belief reduces the possibility of strongly believing that the government should take action on climate change by more than 12%.
Over the past twenty-one years, since the UN Earth Summit introduced Agenda 21 and first began a massive global push to rebuild our society into a new "green" utopia, the US has been enduring growing indoctrination that our way of life is bad, that we are using up the world's resources and that we need to consume less and live less well because by doing so, we will preserve the planet in better condition for future generations.
The Obama Administration has accelerated this push as much as possible. I say as much as possible because although they have pushed the goals of Agenda 21 forward in every way that they were able to do so, the federal initiatives they hoped to pass, such as the Cap and Trade bill and Chris Dodd's Livable Communities Act, came under so much opposition that they could not be passed. Instead, Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, one city at a time, as city after city greedily grabs federal funds to build roundabouts and invest in public transportation and build low income "Smart" housing in the downtown areas and to restore and renovate downtown at the expense of the suburbs. On April 5th, I wrote about how the Obama Administration is cutting off funding for transportation projects that benefit the suburbs in favor of federal funding for environmentally-friendly sustainable housing projects. Without a federal law mandating sustainable housing or "Smart Growth" the government has to resort to a carrot and stick approach. While that has worked well in a lot of communities, such as El Paso, Texas, where we are currently investing $13 million in federal funds along with $14 million of state and local money to turn one of our main thoroughfares (North Mesa Street) into a Transportation Corridor for our notoriously inefficient city bus system, in other areas the country is experiencing a growing backlash against Agenda 21, Smart Growth, sustainable living, and the inherent threats to private property, individual freedom and Constitutional rights that these represent. Last June Alabama became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law outlawing implementation of Agenda 21 within its borders and banning membership of any of its cities or townships in ICLEI--the UN affiliated NGO charged with bringing Agenda 21 to local communities. The state of Oklahoma is now in the process of passing its own legislation to outlaw participation in Agenda 21 and yesterday I saw that the legislature of Missouri is reviewing similar legislation.
We who believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are not planet haters who want "dirty air and dirty water" as Sean Hannity so frequently says. We don't litter garbage about with the attitude that our actions don't matter because the Lord is coming back soon and the earth will be burned up anyway. Christians believe in stewardship and that includes stewardship of God's creation. But most of us who believe in the Second Coming do so because we have read the entire book of Revelations which also foretells a world government led by the Antichrist. Whether we individually believe that the AntiChrist is an individual person or a world system or both, we know that it will bring genocide and destruction on a level never before experienced. To believe in the Second Coming is to keep a watchful eye on world events at all times for signs that this world system may be coming to fruition.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the students and intellectuals were celebrating Marxism and collectivism, the Russian peasants, the only religious block of people in the nation, were alarmed. When the Communists ordered that the farms be collectivized, many of the peasants refused to do so because they believed that collectivism was a signal of the coming of the AntiChrist. Because of their lack of cooperation, whole communities of them were imprisoned in their own houses and starved to death by the Communist government as a means of silencing the opposition. Belief in the Second Coming and opposition to world systems that are at odds with the teachings of the Bible can and some times do have lethal consequences.
I was both interested and alarmed yesterday to read Erick Erickson's insightful Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community in which he addresses "a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a 'new legalism' of radical faith." Erickson's article makes some great points about unrealistic life expectations in the church, and I agree with a lot of them. But I wonder at whether the "radical faith" movement is really about trying to be "awesome" as Erickson supposes, or whether it is about evangelical leaders trying to protect their position in a world moving toward globalism by preaching a vision that is pretty much in lock step with what Big Brother wants.
Christianity Today published an article in March of this year written by Matthew Lee Anderson entitled, Here Come the Radicals detailing how David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne and Kyle Idleman are teaching "radical faith" and dominating the Christian bestseller lists by encouraging young believers to reject American materialism and middle class comforts in exchange for communal life and life in the inner city. Platt's book, Radical, released in May of 2010, was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. At his encouragement, his church in Brook Hills, Alabama raised more than $525,000 for Compassion International's child survival programs. His book, according to the CT article, takes the American church to task for the culture of "self-advancement, self-esteem and self-sufficiency," and upbraids us for our "individualism, materialism and universalism." His book, and Shane Claiborne' s The Irresistible Revolution, also strike out against American nationalism.
Look, as a life-long Christian--I asked Jesus to come into my life when I was five--I understand the conflict between balancing the demands of modern life and the call of Jesus to "come follow me." And I also acknowledge that God, on occasion, calls individual people to leave their lives and go do something extraordinary for Him. Our church supports a young woman who felt called by the Lord to go to the Philippines and start a mid-wifery clinic when she was about twenty years old. Now, ten years later, she is still there and is living out her faith in practical ways to help poor women with no access to medical care.
The danger of the radical faith movement is that it basically preaches the same dogma being currently trumpeted by the mainstream media and by the current leftist government and the progressive globalist movement worldwide. 1. The American way of life is bad. 2. American Nationalism is bad. 3. The middle class is bad. 4. Suburbs are bad, and people who choose to live in suburbs are selfish. The "radical faith" movement just files the goals and teachings of "radical environmentalism" under the heading "Gospel" and adds the hashtag #WWJD. And if I don't accept those ideas, I am not just an unworthy citizen of the planet who is greedily consuming the world's resources; I am probably not a "real" Christian at all. If we are not willing to embrace radical faith, perhaps we don't have any faith and our whole Christian life is a lie.
This brand of Christianity conveniently ignores some very important truths:
1. American nationalism and specifically the U.S. Constitution protect the freedoms of every citizen, particularly in the areas of religious liberty and speech, and therefore allow the uninhibited growth of Christianity. In countries where there are no constitutional protections, life for Christians is dangerous. For examples of life without these protections, think North Korea where 70,000 Christians are estimated to be imprisoned because of their faith, or Iran where Pastor Saeed is serving an eight year prison sentence in Evan prison for his work with evangelism. Yet, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was one of the speakers last year at the Rio 20 conference which was the 20th anniversary follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit which birthed Agenda 21 and he is active in the UN's efforts to remake America.
2. The American way of life and prosperity which the "radical faith" theologians decry makes it possible for one congregation in Alabama to raise over half a million dollars for Compassion International. Because of freedom and prosperity, America has been able to export Christian ideals and missionaries and aid throughout the world--a feat which would not be possible in their austere utopia.
3. The globalist movement currently underway to destroy the American middle class, rid our society of private property and single family housing in the suburbs,and force Americans into miserable crowded conditions in the inner cities, will not produce the levels of prosperity needed to maintain the lifestyles of evangelical leaders who are making themselves rich on books peddling poverty as a virtue.
What the Church, and this country needs, is something really radical--pastors and people who stand up for Freedom and the Constitution and property rights as gifts from God rather than liabilities to be discarded so that we can have greater personal growth. Real stewardship is protecting and preserving those rights and passing them on to the next generation along with our faith so that those who follow us can live and work and worship in freedom just as we have and so that they can have the opportunities that freedom affords to live their lives as they believe that God is calling them to do as individuals.. 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The pastors in this country who are willing to teach this message are the true revolutionaries.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Over the past twenty-one years, since the UN Earth Summit introduced Agenda 21 and first began a massive global push to rebuild our society into a new "green" utopia, the US has been enduring growing indoctrination that our way of life is bad, that we are using up the world's resources and that we need to consume less and live less well because by doing so, we will preserve the planet in better condition for future generations.
The Obama Administration has accelerated this push as much as possible. I say as much as possible because although they have pushed the goals of Agenda 21 forward in every way that they were able to do so, the federal initiatives they hoped to pass, such as the Cap and Trade bill and Chris Dodd's Livable Communities Act, came under so much opposition that they could not be passed. Instead, Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, one city at a time, as city after city greedily grabs federal funds to build roundabouts and invest in public transportation and build low income "Smart" housing in the downtown areas and to restore and renovate downtown at the expense of the suburbs. On April 5th, I wrote about how the Obama Administration is cutting off funding for transportation projects that benefit the suburbs in favor of federal funding for environmentally-friendly sustainable housing projects. Without a federal law mandating sustainable housing or "Smart Growth" the government has to resort to a carrot and stick approach. While that has worked well in a lot of communities, such as El Paso, Texas, where we are currently investing $13 million in federal funds along with $14 million of state and local money to turn one of our main thoroughfares (North Mesa Street) into a Transportation Corridor for our notoriously inefficient city bus system, in other areas the country is experiencing a growing backlash against Agenda 21, Smart Growth, sustainable living, and the inherent threats to private property, individual freedom and Constitutional rights that these represent. Last June Alabama became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law outlawing implementation of Agenda 21 within its borders and banning membership of any of its cities or townships in ICLEI--the UN affiliated NGO charged with bringing Agenda 21 to local communities. The state of Oklahoma is now in the process of passing its own legislation to outlaw participation in Agenda 21 and yesterday I saw that the legislature of Missouri is reviewing similar legislation.
We who believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are not planet haters who want "dirty air and dirty water" as Sean Hannity so frequently says. We don't litter garbage about with the attitude that our actions don't matter because the Lord is coming back soon and the earth will be burned up anyway. Christians believe in stewardship and that includes stewardship of God's creation. But most of us who believe in the Second Coming do so because we have read the entire book of Revelations which also foretells a world government led by the Antichrist. Whether we individually believe that the AntiChrist is an individual person or a world system or both, we know that it will bring genocide and destruction on a level never before experienced. To believe in the Second Coming is to keep a watchful eye on world events at all times for signs that this world system may be coming to fruition.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the students and intellectuals were celebrating Marxism and collectivism, the Russian peasants, the only religious block of people in the nation, were alarmed. When the Communists ordered that the farms be collectivized, many of the peasants refused to do so because they believed that collectivism was a signal of the coming of the AntiChrist. Because of their lack of cooperation, whole communities of them were imprisoned in their own houses and starved to death by the Communist government as a means of silencing the opposition. Belief in the Second Coming and opposition to world systems that are at odds with the teachings of the Bible can and some times do have lethal consequences.
I was both interested and alarmed yesterday to read Erick Erickson's insightful Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community in which he addresses "a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a 'new legalism' of radical faith." Erickson's article makes some great points about unrealistic life expectations in the church, and I agree with a lot of them. But I wonder at whether the "radical faith" movement is really about trying to be "awesome" as Erickson supposes, or whether it is about evangelical leaders trying to protect their position in a world moving toward globalism by preaching a vision that is pretty much in lock step with what Big Brother wants.
Christianity Today published an article in March of this year written by Matthew Lee Anderson entitled, Here Come the Radicals detailing how David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne and Kyle Idleman are teaching "radical faith" and dominating the Christian bestseller lists by encouraging young believers to reject American materialism and middle class comforts in exchange for communal life and life in the inner city. Platt's book, Radical, released in May of 2010, was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. At his encouragement, his church in Brook Hills, Alabama raised more than $525,000 for Compassion International's child survival programs. His book, according to the CT article, takes the American church to task for the culture of "self-advancement, self-esteem and self-sufficiency," and upbraids us for our "individualism, materialism and universalism." His book, and Shane Claiborne' s The Irresistible Revolution, also strike out against American nationalism.
Look, as a life-long Christian--I asked Jesus to come into my life when I was five--I understand the conflict between balancing the demands of modern life and the call of Jesus to "come follow me." And I also acknowledge that God, on occasion, calls individual people to leave their lives and go do something extraordinary for Him. Our church supports a young woman who felt called by the Lord to go to the Philippines and start a mid-wifery clinic when she was about twenty years old. Now, ten years later, she is still there and is living out her faith in practical ways to help poor women with no access to medical care.
The danger of the radical faith movement is that it basically preaches the same dogma being currently trumpeted by the mainstream media and by the current leftist government and the progressive globalist movement worldwide. 1. The American way of life is bad. 2. American Nationalism is bad. 3. The middle class is bad. 4. Suburbs are bad, and people who choose to live in suburbs are selfish. The "radical faith" movement just files the goals and teachings of "radical environmentalism" under the heading "Gospel" and adds the hashtag #WWJD. And if I don't accept those ideas, I am not just an unworthy citizen of the planet who is greedily consuming the world's resources; I am probably not a "real" Christian at all. If we are not willing to embrace radical faith, perhaps we don't have any faith and our whole Christian life is a lie.
This brand of Christianity conveniently ignores some very important truths:
1. American nationalism and specifically the U.S. Constitution protect the freedoms of every citizen, particularly in the areas of religious liberty and speech, and therefore allow the uninhibited growth of Christianity. In countries where there are no constitutional protections, life for Christians is dangerous. For examples of life without these protections, think North Korea where 70,000 Christians are estimated to be imprisoned because of their faith, or Iran where Pastor Saeed is serving an eight year prison sentence in Evan prison for his work with evangelism. Yet, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was one of the speakers last year at the Rio 20 conference which was the 20th anniversary follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit which birthed Agenda 21 and he is active in the UN's efforts to remake America.
2. The American way of life and prosperity which the "radical faith" theologians decry makes it possible for one congregation in Alabama to raise over half a million dollars for Compassion International. Because of freedom and prosperity, America has been able to export Christian ideals and missionaries and aid throughout the world--a feat which would not be possible in their austere utopia.
3. The globalist movement currently underway to destroy the American middle class, rid our society of private property and single family housing in the suburbs,and force Americans into miserable crowded conditions in the inner cities, will not produce the levels of prosperity needed to maintain the lifestyles of evangelical leaders who are making themselves rich on books peddling poverty as a virtue.
What the Church, and this country needs, is something really radical--pastors and people who stand up for Freedom and the Constitution and property rights as gifts from God rather than liabilities to be discarded so that we can have greater personal growth. Real stewardship is protecting and preserving those rights and passing them on to the next generation along with our faith so that those who follow us can live and work and worship in freedom just as we have and so that they can have the opportunities that freedom affords to live their lives as they believe that God is calling them to do as individuals.. 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The pastors in this country who are willing to teach this message are the true revolutionaries.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
They Have Found the Enemy and He is Us
Last Friday, Huffington Post featured an article under its "Green" section--Climate Study: Religious Belief in the Second Coming of Christ Could Slow Global Warming Action. According to the article, 56% of Americans believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, and this belief reduces the possibility of strongly believing that the government should take action on climate change by more than 12%.
Over the past twenty-one years, since the UN Earth Summit introduced Agenda 21 and first began a massive global push to rebuild our society into a new "green" utopia, the US has been enduring growing indoctrination that our way of life is bad, that we are using up the world's resources and that we need to consume less and live less well because by doing so, we will preserve the planet in better condition for future generations.
The Obama Administration has accelerated this push as much as possible. I say as much as possible because although they have pushed the goals of Agenda 21 forward in every way that they were able to do so, the federal initiatives they hoped to pass, such as the Cap and Trade bill and Chris Dodd's Livable Communities Act, came under so much opposition that they could not be passed. Instead, Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, one city at a time, as city after city greedily grabs federal funds to build roundabouts and invest in public transportation and build low income "Smart" housing in the downtown areas and to restore and renovate downtown at the expense of the suburbs. On April 5th, I wrote about how the Obama Administration is cutting off funding for transportation projects that benefit the suburbs in favor of federal funding for environmentally-friendly sustainable housing projects. Without a federal law mandating sustainable housing or "Smart Growth" the government has to resort to a carrot and stick approach. While that has worked well in a lot of communities, such as El Paso, Texas, where we are currently investing $13 million in federal funds along with $14 million of state and local money to turn one of our main thoroughfares (North Mesa Street) into a Transportation Corridor for our notoriously inefficient city bus system, in other areas the country is experiencing a growing backlash against Agenda 21, Smart Growth, sustainable living, and the inherent threats to private property, individual freedom and Constitutional rights that these represent. Last June Alabama became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law outlawing implementation of Agenda 21 within its borders and banning membership of any of its cities or townships in ICLEI--the UN affiliated NGO charged with bringing Agenda 21 to local communities. The state of Oklahoma is now in the process of passing its own legislation to outlaw participation in Agenda 21 and yesterday I saw that the legislature of Missouri is reviewing similar legislation.
We who believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are not planet haters who want "dirty air and dirty water" as Sean Hannity so frequently says. We don't litter garbage about with the attitude that our actions don't matter because the Lord is coming back soon and the earth will be burned up anyway. Christians believe in stewardship and that includes stewardship of God's creation. But most of us who believe in the Second Coming do so because we have read the entire book of Revelations which also foretells a world government led by the Antichrist. Whether we individually believe that the AntiChrist is an individual person or a world system or both, we know that it will bring genocide and destruction on a level never before experienced. To believe in the Second Coming is to keep a watchful eye on world events at all times for signs that this world system may be coming to fruition.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the students and intellectuals were celebrating Marxism and collectivism, the Russian peasants, the only religious block of people in the nation, were alarmed. When the Communists ordered that the farms be collectivized, many of the peasants refused to do so because they believed that collectivism was a signal of the coming of the AntiChrist. Because of their lack of cooperation, whole communities of them were imprisoned in their own houses and starved to death by the Communist government as a means of silencing the opposition. Belief in the Second Coming and opposition to world systems that are at odds with the teachings of the Bible can and some times do have lethal consequences.
I was both interested and alarmed yesterday to read Erick Erickson's insightful Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community in which he addresses "a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a 'new legalism' of radical faith." Erickson's article makes some great points about unrealistic life expectations in the church, and I agree with a lot of them. But I wonder at whether the "radical faith" movement is really about trying to be "awesome" as Erickson supposes, or whether it is about evangelical leaders trying to protect their position in a world moving toward globalism by preaching a vision that is pretty much in lock step with what Big Brother wants.
Christianity Today published an article in March of this year written by Matthew Lee Anderson entitled, Here Come the Radicals detailing how David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne and Kyle Idleman are teaching "radical faith" and dominating the Christian bestseller lists by encouraging young believers to reject American materialism and middle class comforts in exchange for communal life and life in the inner city. Platt's book, Radical, released in May of 2010, was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. At his encouragement, his church in Brook Hills, Alabama raised more than $525,000 for Compassion International's child survival programs. His book, according to the CT article, takes the American church to task for the culture of "self-advancement, self-esteem and self-sufficiency," and upbraids us for our "individualism, materialism and universalism." His book, and Shane Claiborne' s The Irresistible Revolution, also strike out against American nationalism.
Look, as a life-long Christian--I asked Jesus to come into my life when I was five--I understand the conflict between balancing the demands of modern life and the call of Jesus to "come follow me." And I also acknowledge that God, on occasion, calls individual people to leave their lives and go do something extraordinary for Him. Our church supports a young woman who felt called by the Lord to go to the Philippines and start a mid-wifery clinic when she was about twenty years old. Now, ten years later, she is still there and is living out her faith in practical ways to help poor women with no access to medical care.
The danger of the radical faith movement is that it basically preaches the same dogma being currently trumpeted by the mainstream media and by the current leftist government and the progressive globalist movement worldwide. 1. The American way of life is bad. 2. American Nationalism is bad. 3. The middle class is bad. 4. Suburbs are bad, and people who choose to live in suburbs are selfish. The "radical faith" movement just files the goals and teachings of "radical environmentalism" under the heading "Gospel" and adds the hashtag #WWJD. And if I don't accept those ideas, I am not just an unworthy citizen of the planet who is greedily consuming the world's resources; I am probably not a "real" Christian at all. If we are not willing to embrace radical faith, perhaps we don't have any faith and our whole Christian life is a lie.
This brand of Christianity conveniently ignores some very important truths:
1. American nationalism and specifically the U.S. Constitution protect the freedoms of every citizen, particularly in the areas of religious liberty and speech, and therefore allow the uninhibited growth of Christianity. In countries where there are no constitutional protections, life for Christians is dangerous. For examples of life without these protections, think North Korea where 70,000 Christians are estimated to be imprisoned because of their faith, or Iran where Pastor Saeed is serving an eight year prison sentence in Evan prison for his work with evangelism. Yet, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was one of the speakers last year at the Rio 20 conference which was the 20th anniversary follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit which birthed Agenda 21 and he is active in the UN's efforts to remake America.
2. The American way of life and prosperity which the "radical faith" theologians decry makes it possible for one congregation in Alabama to raise over half a million dollars for Compassion International. Because of freedom and prosperity, America has been able to export Christian ideals and missionaries and aid throughout the world--a feat which would not be possible in their austere utopia.
3. The globalist movement currently underway to destroy the American middle class, rid our society of private property and single family housing in the suburbs,and force Americans into miserable crowded conditions in the inner cities, will not produce the levels of prosperity needed to maintain the lifestyles of evangelical leaders who are making themselves rich on books peddling poverty as a virtue.
What the Church, and this country needs, is something really radical--pastors and people who stand up for Freedom and the Constitution and property rights as gifts from God rather than liabilities to be discarded so that we can have greater personal growth. Real stewardship is protecting and preserving those rights and passing them on to the next generation along with our faith so that those who follow us can live and work and worship in freedom just as we have and so that they can have the opportunities that freedom affords to live their lives as they believe that God is calling them to do as individuals.. 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The pastors in this country who are willing to teach this message are the true revolutionaries.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Over the past twenty-one years, since the UN Earth Summit introduced Agenda 21 and first began a massive global push to rebuild our society into a new "green" utopia, the US has been enduring growing indoctrination that our way of life is bad, that we are using up the world's resources and that we need to consume less and live less well because by doing so, we will preserve the planet in better condition for future generations.
The Obama Administration has accelerated this push as much as possible. I say as much as possible because although they have pushed the goals of Agenda 21 forward in every way that they were able to do so, the federal initiatives they hoped to pass, such as the Cap and Trade bill and Chris Dodd's Livable Communities Act, came under so much opposition that they could not be passed. Instead, Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, one city at a time, as city after city greedily grabs federal funds to build roundabouts and invest in public transportation and build low income "Smart" housing in the downtown areas and to restore and renovate downtown at the expense of the suburbs. On April 5th, I wrote about how the Obama Administration is cutting off funding for transportation projects that benefit the suburbs in favor of federal funding for environmentally-friendly sustainable housing projects. Without a federal law mandating sustainable housing or "Smart Growth" the government has to resort to a carrot and stick approach. While that has worked well in a lot of communities, such as El Paso, Texas, where we are currently investing $13 million in federal funds along with $14 million of state and local money to turn one of our main thoroughfares (North Mesa Street) into a Transportation Corridor for our notoriously inefficient city bus system, in other areas the country is experiencing a growing backlash against Agenda 21, Smart Growth, sustainable living, and the inherent threats to private property, individual freedom and Constitutional rights that these represent. Last June Alabama became the first state in the U.S. to pass a law outlawing implementation of Agenda 21 within its borders and banning membership of any of its cities or townships in ICLEI--the UN affiliated NGO charged with bringing Agenda 21 to local communities. The state of Oklahoma is now in the process of passing its own legislation to outlaw participation in Agenda 21 and yesterday I saw that the legislature of Missouri is reviewing similar legislation.
We who believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ are not planet haters who want "dirty air and dirty water" as Sean Hannity so frequently says. We don't litter garbage about with the attitude that our actions don't matter because the Lord is coming back soon and the earth will be burned up anyway. Christians believe in stewardship and that includes stewardship of God's creation. But most of us who believe in the Second Coming do so because we have read the entire book of Revelations which also foretells a world government led by the Antichrist. Whether we individually believe that the AntiChrist is an individual person or a world system or both, we know that it will bring genocide and destruction on a level never before experienced. To believe in the Second Coming is to keep a watchful eye on world events at all times for signs that this world system may be coming to fruition.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917, while the students and intellectuals were celebrating Marxism and collectivism, the Russian peasants, the only religious block of people in the nation, were alarmed. When the Communists ordered that the farms be collectivized, many of the peasants refused to do so because they believed that collectivism was a signal of the coming of the AntiChrist. Because of their lack of cooperation, whole communities of them were imprisoned in their own houses and starved to death by the Communist government as a means of silencing the opposition. Belief in the Second Coming and opposition to world systems that are at odds with the teachings of the Bible can and some times do have lethal consequences.
I was both interested and alarmed yesterday to read Erick Erickson's insightful Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community in which he addresses "a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a 'new legalism' of radical faith." Erickson's article makes some great points about unrealistic life expectations in the church, and I agree with a lot of them. But I wonder at whether the "radical faith" movement is really about trying to be "awesome" as Erickson supposes, or whether it is about evangelical leaders trying to protect their position in a world moving toward globalism by preaching a vision that is pretty much in lock step with what Big Brother wants.
Christianity Today published an article in March of this year written by Matthew Lee Anderson entitled, Here Come the Radicals detailing how David Platt, Francis Chan, Shane Claiborne and Kyle Idleman are teaching "radical faith" and dominating the Christian bestseller lists by encouraging young believers to reject American materialism and middle class comforts in exchange for communal life and life in the inner city. Platt's book, Radical, released in May of 2010, was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. At his encouragement, his church in Brook Hills, Alabama raised more than $525,000 for Compassion International's child survival programs. His book, according to the CT article, takes the American church to task for the culture of "self-advancement, self-esteem and self-sufficiency," and upbraids us for our "individualism, materialism and universalism." His book, and Shane Claiborne' s The Irresistible Revolution, also strike out against American nationalism.
Look, as a life-long Christian--I asked Jesus to come into my life when I was five--I understand the conflict between balancing the demands of modern life and the call of Jesus to "come follow me." And I also acknowledge that God, on occasion, calls individual people to leave their lives and go do something extraordinary for Him. Our church supports a young woman who felt called by the Lord to go to the Philippines and start a mid-wifery clinic when she was about twenty years old. Now, ten years later, she is still there and is living out her faith in practical ways to help poor women with no access to medical care.
The danger of the radical faith movement is that it basically preaches the same dogma being currently trumpeted by the mainstream media and by the current leftist government and the progressive globalist movement worldwide. 1. The American way of life is bad. 2. American Nationalism is bad. 3. The middle class is bad. 4. Suburbs are bad, and people who choose to live in suburbs are selfish. The "radical faith" movement just files the goals and teachings of "radical environmentalism" under the heading "Gospel" and adds the hashtag #WWJD. And if I don't accept those ideas, I am not just an unworthy citizen of the planet who is greedily consuming the world's resources; I am probably not a "real" Christian at all. If we are not willing to embrace radical faith, perhaps we don't have any faith and our whole Christian life is a lie.
This brand of Christianity conveniently ignores some very important truths:
1. American nationalism and specifically the U.S. Constitution protect the freedoms of every citizen, particularly in the areas of religious liberty and speech, and therefore allow the uninhibited growth of Christianity. In countries where there are no constitutional protections, life for Christians is dangerous. For examples of life without these protections, think North Korea where 70,000 Christians are estimated to be imprisoned because of their faith, or Iran where Pastor Saeed is serving an eight year prison sentence in Evan prison for his work with evangelism. Yet, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was one of the speakers last year at the Rio 20 conference which was the 20th anniversary follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit which birthed Agenda 21 and he is active in the UN's efforts to remake America.
2. The American way of life and prosperity which the "radical faith" theologians decry makes it possible for one congregation in Alabama to raise over half a million dollars for Compassion International. Because of freedom and prosperity, America has been able to export Christian ideals and missionaries and aid throughout the world--a feat which would not be possible in their austere utopia.
3. The globalist movement currently underway to destroy the American middle class, rid our society of private property and single family housing in the suburbs,and force Americans into miserable crowded conditions in the inner cities, will not produce the levels of prosperity needed to maintain the lifestyles of evangelical leaders who are making themselves rich on books peddling poverty as a virtue.
What the Church, and this country needs, is something really radical--pastors and people who stand up for Freedom and the Constitution and property rights as gifts from God rather than liabilities to be discarded so that we can have greater personal growth. Real stewardship is protecting and preserving those rights and passing them on to the next generation along with our faith so that those who follow us can live and work and worship in freedom just as we have and so that they can have the opportunities that freedom affords to live their lives as they believe that God is calling them to do as individuals.. 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The pastors in this country who are willing to teach this message are the true revolutionaries.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
April 25, 2013
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
In 1979, the modern Christian theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer and the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C.Everett Koop co-authored a book titled, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. Published within the decade that saw the legalization of abortion on demand through Roe vs. Wade, the book explored the premise that acceptance of abortion leads to a general devaluation of human life on at all levels. Abortion leads to infanticide, which leads to euthanasia, which eventually leads to genocide. Schaeffer and Koop wrote,
I read Whatever Happened to the Human Race over twenty years ago, but I have been reminded of it in the last few days watching the events surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial. Anyone who has followed this trial at all knows that Gosnell is the 71-year old abortion doctor and proprietor of the "Women's Medical Center" in Philadelphia who is on trial for murder of infants born alive and at least one adult patient. Various workers in the clinics have testified that when infants survived the abortion procedure, Gosnell snipped their spinal cords or in some cases slit their throats. Jack McMahon, Gosnell's attorney, argues that although Gosnell did perform abortions past the 24 week limit written into the state's statute, not one of the babies he is accused of harming was over 24 weeks and there is no evidence that any of them was born alive. His arguments persuaded the judge in the case to throw out three of the infant murder counts against Gosnell for "Baby A, "Baby B" and "Baby C" as well as five counts of corpse abuse. (Apparently, babies were kept in jars and their feet and sometimes entire legs were severed and preserved as well. Multiple babies appeared in photographs which showed their upper spinal columns had been cut in order to snip the spinal cords.) Four remaining counts of infanticide and one count of murder of an adult remained against Gosnell on Tuesday, April 23 after the judge's ruling.
Yesterday, in an apparent about-face, the judge reinstated the murder charge for "Baby C". "Baby C" survived its abortion procedure, and according testimony by clinic workers, was laid on a counter where it lived for twenty minutes and moved its arms. Workers testify that they "played" with the baby by pulling on its arms and watching it pull back before killing it.
The outcome of this hideous trial and Gosnell's ultimate fate remain to be seen but the reaction to it by our society reveals a lot about how far we have fallen morally. The mainstream press has remained silent on a trial that is one of the most grisly, scandalous, and shocking of my lifetime. I have seen photos of the empty courtroom seats reserved for the press. When Gosnell announced this week that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Huffington Post actually made that a headline. But when the judge reinstated the murder charge for a baby brutally murdered after twenty minutes of life, I saw the update on my Twitter feed because TheBlaze.com had covered the story. The disgusting, macabre details of this man's crimes are the stuff of nightmares, but in a society where grisly, bloody violence sells almost as well as sex, and people will pay high ticket prices to see slasher movies like the "Saw" series, nobody wants to talk about Kermit Gosnell.
Why? I have seen some conservative commentators speculate that the media does not want to cover the Gosnell trial because it shows abortion for what it really is--murder. That's part of it; but it really is only a part of media black out of this story. The other part is that our society is rapidly morphing into the society that Schaeffer and Koop predicted and feared--a society without compassion, without empathy, without concern. We are fearsomely close to pre-Nazi Germany in our attitudes about the value of human life.
In 1949, Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist from Boston who had been consultant to the Secretary of War and had served with the office of the Chief Council for War Crimes in Nuremberg from 1946-1947, wrote a paper titled, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship." He writes that before Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, a barrage of indoctrination had already begun against, "traditional, compassionate nineteenth century attitudes against the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view." This propaganda spread everywhere, from mass entertainment, as in a German film called, I Accuse in which the husband of a woman suffering from life-long multiple sclerosis finally euthanizes her while a sympathetic colleague plays the piano softly in another room, to the public education system which included high school textbooks such as Mathematics in the Service of Political Education, 2nd edition 1935, 3rd edition 1936, which included "problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled. One of the problems asked, for instance, is how many new housing units could be built, and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly-wed couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for 'the crippled and insane.'" In other words, the German people were fed a steady diet of a philosophy that some lives are not as important as others, and that the less worthy lives were draining funds which could be used for the happiness of those more deserving than they.
Hitler did not issue the first euthanasia order until 1939, after the German people had received a sufficiently steady diet of this philosophy to no longer object. The organization that he established to kill children under the Third Reich was called Realm's Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution. Patients who were being killed were transported by "The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick" which billed their relatives for the cost of their extermination while falsifying the death certificates so that they would not understand how their loved ones had actually died. Leo Alexander tells us, "It all started with the acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as a life that is not worthy to be lived." From there, Hitler was able to kill more than 9 million people in Europe.
What does all of this have to do Kermit Gosnell? Very simply, I believe that the media black out of the Gosnell trial has less to do with protecting the abortion industry than it does with an overall move to retrain our society away from respect for life and the sanctity of life and towards an overall apathy and callousness toward the deaths of others. We are now seeing our own media propaganda in this direction. In the last twenty four months, I have seen an episode of The Mentalist in which a regular character who is dying of cancer decides to commit suicide and asks the show's main character, Patrick Jane, to stay with him while he dies so that he will not be alone. Although Jane is at first very uncomfortable with this request, he does stay and performs sleight of hand coin tricks to distract the dying man until his life ebbs away. Criminal Minds last year featured an episode in which the ex-wife of one of the main characters also finds out that she is terminally ill and decides to commit suicide and asks that her ex-husband stay with her while she is dying. Again, he is uncomfortable, but she has already consumed a fatal dose of some toxin, and so he compassionately holds her while she expires. I want to note that in neither one of these shows did the principle character do anything to actively kill the person who died or to actually assist in the suicide, but the overall message was that they were compassionate good people by respecting the other person's right to die and by being a friend and not interfering. This is the first step in saying that death can be preferable to life.
There are going to be a lot of other steps. Next year many parts of The Affordable Care Act will be fully implemented. This coverage was supposed to provide every American with full access to health care regardless of health issues or pre-existing conditions. Are we still so naive that we really think that a government who can't manage to pay the air-traffic controllers in order to avoid long delays at the airport will be able to cover the cost of every American's healthcare? Even Democrats like Max Baucus are now calling the Affordable Care Act a "train wreck". What the Act will do is force Americans to think in terms of which lives are worth saving. The oft mocked "death panels" are a necessity when a society of finite resources takes it upon itself to make health choices for every person. As Alexander points out, "It is important to realize that this infinitely small wedged-in lever from which all this entire trend of the mind [the German mass euthanasia program] received its impetus was the attitude towards the nonrehabilitable sick." When we as a society have to start making these decisions what will we choose? Should healthy young people not be able to get as many benefits from the government because public resources are being used to treat people with chronic illnesses, or seniors with cancer? How many scholarships could be given to our best and our brightest if the money were not being spent caring for the "crippled and insane"? And so it begins.
Whatever happened to the human race? The Germans could have chosen not to listen to the propaganda. They could have chosen to reject Hitler and his social engineering and ethnic cleansing in favor of respect for all life and protection for all people. They didn't. The choice is now ours. Will more of us stand against Kermit Gosnell, not just for the sake of the 8 original infants he was charged with murdering and the many, many more who died as the course of his normal practice, but because we understand that more is at stake than the life of a 71 year old abortion doctor in Philadelphia and his victims? Will we allow ourselves to be lulled into apathy ("Those babies weren't wanted anyway. Who would have taken care of them if they had lived?") Hitler succeeded in his genocide in large part because German people from every walk of life supported him and furthered his goals. If the Germans had refused to participate, they could have stopped the Holocaust before it began. What will we do?
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
We are concerned that there is not more protest, outcry, or activism in regard to these issues of life and death. We can even recognize that there are people who are led to starve children to death because they think they are doing something helpful for society. Lacking an absolute ethical standard, they have only the concept of what they think is beneficial for society to guide them. But we cannot understand why other people, those with a moral base--and we know there are many of them--do not cry out. We are concerned about this because, when the first German aged, infirm and retarded were killed in gas chambers, there was likewise no perceptible outcry from the medical profession or from an apathetic population. It was not far from there to Auschwitz.
I read Whatever Happened to the Human Race over twenty years ago, but I have been reminded of it in the last few days watching the events surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial. Anyone who has followed this trial at all knows that Gosnell is the 71-year old abortion doctor and proprietor of the "Women's Medical Center" in Philadelphia who is on trial for murder of infants born alive and at least one adult patient. Various workers in the clinics have testified that when infants survived the abortion procedure, Gosnell snipped their spinal cords or in some cases slit their throats. Jack McMahon, Gosnell's attorney, argues that although Gosnell did perform abortions past the 24 week limit written into the state's statute, not one of the babies he is accused of harming was over 24 weeks and there is no evidence that any of them was born alive. His arguments persuaded the judge in the case to throw out three of the infant murder counts against Gosnell for "Baby A, "Baby B" and "Baby C" as well as five counts of corpse abuse. (Apparently, babies were kept in jars and their feet and sometimes entire legs were severed and preserved as well. Multiple babies appeared in photographs which showed their upper spinal columns had been cut in order to snip the spinal cords.) Four remaining counts of infanticide and one count of murder of an adult remained against Gosnell on Tuesday, April 23 after the judge's ruling.
Yesterday, in an apparent about-face, the judge reinstated the murder charge for "Baby C". "Baby C" survived its abortion procedure, and according testimony by clinic workers, was laid on a counter where it lived for twenty minutes and moved its arms. Workers testify that they "played" with the baby by pulling on its arms and watching it pull back before killing it.
The outcome of this hideous trial and Gosnell's ultimate fate remain to be seen but the reaction to it by our society reveals a lot about how far we have fallen morally. The mainstream press has remained silent on a trial that is one of the most grisly, scandalous, and shocking of my lifetime. I have seen photos of the empty courtroom seats reserved for the press. When Gosnell announced this week that he would not take the stand in his own defense, Huffington Post actually made that a headline. But when the judge reinstated the murder charge for a baby brutally murdered after twenty minutes of life, I saw the update on my Twitter feed because TheBlaze.com had covered the story. The disgusting, macabre details of this man's crimes are the stuff of nightmares, but in a society where grisly, bloody violence sells almost as well as sex, and people will pay high ticket prices to see slasher movies like the "Saw" series, nobody wants to talk about Kermit Gosnell.
Why? I have seen some conservative commentators speculate that the media does not want to cover the Gosnell trial because it shows abortion for what it really is--murder. That's part of it; but it really is only a part of media black out of this story. The other part is that our society is rapidly morphing into the society that Schaeffer and Koop predicted and feared--a society without compassion, without empathy, without concern. We are fearsomely close to pre-Nazi Germany in our attitudes about the value of human life.
In 1949, Leo Alexander, a psychiatrist from Boston who had been consultant to the Secretary of War and had served with the office of the Chief Council for War Crimes in Nuremberg from 1946-1947, wrote a paper titled, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship." He writes that before Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, a barrage of indoctrination had already begun against, "traditional, compassionate nineteenth century attitudes against the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view." This propaganda spread everywhere, from mass entertainment, as in a German film called, I Accuse in which the husband of a woman suffering from life-long multiple sclerosis finally euthanizes her while a sympathetic colleague plays the piano softly in another room, to the public education system which included high school textbooks such as Mathematics in the Service of Political Education, 2nd edition 1935, 3rd edition 1936, which included "problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled. One of the problems asked, for instance, is how many new housing units could be built, and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly-wed couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for 'the crippled and insane.'" In other words, the German people were fed a steady diet of a philosophy that some lives are not as important as others, and that the less worthy lives were draining funds which could be used for the happiness of those more deserving than they.
Hitler did not issue the first euthanasia order until 1939, after the German people had received a sufficiently steady diet of this philosophy to no longer object. The organization that he established to kill children under the Third Reich was called Realm's Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution. Patients who were being killed were transported by "The Charitable Transport Company for the Sick" which billed their relatives for the cost of their extermination while falsifying the death certificates so that they would not understand how their loved ones had actually died. Leo Alexander tells us, "It all started with the acceptance of the attitude that there is such a thing as a life that is not worthy to be lived." From there, Hitler was able to kill more than 9 million people in Europe.
What does all of this have to do Kermit Gosnell? Very simply, I believe that the media black out of the Gosnell trial has less to do with protecting the abortion industry than it does with an overall move to retrain our society away from respect for life and the sanctity of life and towards an overall apathy and callousness toward the deaths of others. We are now seeing our own media propaganda in this direction. In the last twenty four months, I have seen an episode of The Mentalist in which a regular character who is dying of cancer decides to commit suicide and asks the show's main character, Patrick Jane, to stay with him while he dies so that he will not be alone. Although Jane is at first very uncomfortable with this request, he does stay and performs sleight of hand coin tricks to distract the dying man until his life ebbs away. Criminal Minds last year featured an episode in which the ex-wife of one of the main characters also finds out that she is terminally ill and decides to commit suicide and asks that her ex-husband stay with her while she is dying. Again, he is uncomfortable, but she has already consumed a fatal dose of some toxin, and so he compassionately holds her while she expires. I want to note that in neither one of these shows did the principle character do anything to actively kill the person who died or to actually assist in the suicide, but the overall message was that they were compassionate good people by respecting the other person's right to die and by being a friend and not interfering. This is the first step in saying that death can be preferable to life.
There are going to be a lot of other steps. Next year many parts of The Affordable Care Act will be fully implemented. This coverage was supposed to provide every American with full access to health care regardless of health issues or pre-existing conditions. Are we still so naive that we really think that a government who can't manage to pay the air-traffic controllers in order to avoid long delays at the airport will be able to cover the cost of every American's healthcare? Even Democrats like Max Baucus are now calling the Affordable Care Act a "train wreck". What the Act will do is force Americans to think in terms of which lives are worth saving. The oft mocked "death panels" are a necessity when a society of finite resources takes it upon itself to make health choices for every person. As Alexander points out, "It is important to realize that this infinitely small wedged-in lever from which all this entire trend of the mind [the German mass euthanasia program] received its impetus was the attitude towards the nonrehabilitable sick." When we as a society have to start making these decisions what will we choose? Should healthy young people not be able to get as many benefits from the government because public resources are being used to treat people with chronic illnesses, or seniors with cancer? How many scholarships could be given to our best and our brightest if the money were not being spent caring for the "crippled and insane"? And so it begins.
Whatever happened to the human race? The Germans could have chosen not to listen to the propaganda. They could have chosen to reject Hitler and his social engineering and ethnic cleansing in favor of respect for all life and protection for all people. They didn't. The choice is now ours. Will more of us stand against Kermit Gosnell, not just for the sake of the 8 original infants he was charged with murdering and the many, many more who died as the course of his normal practice, but because we understand that more is at stake than the life of a 71 year old abortion doctor in Philadelphia and his victims? Will we allow ourselves to be lulled into apathy ("Those babies weren't wanted anyway. Who would have taken care of them if they had lived?") Hitler succeeded in his genocide in large part because German people from every walk of life supported him and furthered his goals. If the Germans had refused to participate, they could have stopped the Holocaust before it began. What will we do?
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
April 5, 2013
Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 and how the Obama Administration is Using Housing Policies to Shape America
The big story this week, besides the threats of imminent annihilation from North Korea, is the apparent push from the White House to encourage banks to loosen the current mortgage credit restrictions. So much media attention has been given to this that an uninformed observer would believe that the federal government is really working to expand homeownership back to pre-2008 levels.
I think this narrative, and the conservative furor/backlash being heard on conservative news shows like Hannity, is exactly the story that the White House wants the press reporting. By having this narrative in the media, the White House can make a case for a populist push to force "bad greedy banks" to make more loans to deserving Americans who have had their credit damaged during the recession, and they can make conservatives who oppose them out to be heartless bad guys. In reality, the true story of mortgage lending is very different than either side of this issue is reporting.
The truth is that the qualified mortgage standards being implemented next year will shut between 15% (according to the CFPB's estimates) and 40% (according to the QM critics estimates) of potential homeowners out of the market completely. Much is being made of the fact that FHA allows credit scores as low as 500, and down payments as low at 3.5%. In fact, most banks will not make an FHA loan without a credit score of at least 600 and many require 620 or 640. But new guidelines expected to be released in the next few months will raise downpayment guidelines for qualified residential mortgages up to 10%. While Fannie, Freddie and FHA have a seven year exemption before the loans they make have to qualify under the new guidelines, many mortgage professionals are looking ahead to the end of the seven years at a massive mortgage and housing constriction when the new guidelines are fully implemented for all lending types. And in the immediate future, the implementation of the Qualifed Mortgages and the Qualified Residential Mortgages and the 3% cap on points and fees next year is going to cut off access to mortgage credit and to mortgage credit providers.
So why is the Administration talking out of both sides of its mouth on this issue? Very simply, the Obama Administration wants to discourage private ownership, especially in the suburbs, and wants to encourage "sustainable development"--densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Manhattan. The problem is that Americans like homeownership, we like cars and we like suburbs. So the Administration does not want to say in a public forum that they are actively working against these aspects of American life. Instead, they have pushed through massive pieces of legislation such as Dodd Frank that contain thousands of pages of still to be written regulations that endanger private homeownership while they publicly claim to want to help Americans buy their own homes.
On March 18th, the National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz wrote an opinion piece entitled "Obama's Plans for the Suburbs: And How to Stop Them." On March 15, President Obama spoke at the Argonne National Laboratory and proposed $2 billion on an energy security trust fund for renewable fuel research and as part of the speech he promised "to shift our cars entirely...off oil" As Kurtz noted in his column, even the New York Times was skeptical since the President did not provide any real details as to how he would accomplish this.
On that same day, however, the Department of Energy released a series of reports called "Transportation Energy Futures" which outline a plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80% by 2050. Part of this report includes "the effects of the built environment on transportation." This report is a blueprint for restricting development in suburbs. Proponents of "smart growth" and "sustainability" hate the suburbs because they represent individual housing and private transportation, both of which are at odds with the United Nation's Agenda 21,an aggressive environmental blueprint to dramatically change the living conditions of the world. Agenda 21 has been in various stages of implementation on the local level for over 20 years as cities and communities embrace Smart Growth, but the Obama Administration is dedicated to using federal resources to stop suburban development, to limit private automobile ownership and to force Americans into small tightly packed apartments to and from which they will either walk or use public transportation.
To achieve this, the Department of Energy report recommends two policy options which are most likely to encourage dense development without exceeding the federal government's current authority. The first requires eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, which is perceived to incentivize many people to purchase homes who would not otherwise do so. The second is to tie future federal aid, federal grants, and federal funding to "Smart Growth" projects. The DOE suggests that federal funding for schools and roads could be forced to pass a population density litmus test which would mean that suburbs would not qualify for these funds.
Kurtz also notes that on March 15th--the same day of Obama's speech at Argonne and the DOE report-- Bloomberg reported that the Obama Administration has announced plans to order all federal agencies to consider global warming before approving large projects. As the Bloomberg report notes, this strategy could block highway construction and suburban development projects.
I agree with much of Kurtz's article, but I think he is overlooking some key factors. First, he states that he does not believe that the mortgage interest deduction will be done away with. That may or may not be true--but after spending 15 years in the housing industry I believe that tax exempt interest is a secondary consideration in whether people purchase homes. Homeownership is the American dream, and for many Americans being able to write the interest off their taxes is not a primary incentive to buy--it is an added perk of doing so. However, Obama already has a cadre of weapons in his legislative arsenal to stop the growth of the suburbs. The new qualified and qualified residential mortgages are going to ultimately have such a great effect on who can purchase and who cannot and how much they can purchase that additional disincentives to purchasing single family homes will probably not be necessary. Smart Growth and Sustainable development policies tend to make housing much more expensive. In Portland last year, the new "affordable housing" urban project was a one-bedroom condo selling downtown for around $160,000. The new qualified mortgage guidelines state that a borrower's total debt cannot exceed 43% of his or her total income. What many do not seem to realize is that lenders, who are afraid of punitive government actions, have already placed serious limits on how much income they will consider for a borrower. For instance, last Christmas I was working on a loan for a man who had been a self-employed attorney for 30 years. Because he was retiring, his income was declining from year to year, although he still earned more than enough money to more than meet all of his current obligations and buy a small investment property. But the lender did not want to be accused of making a mortgage loan to a person who did not "qualify" so they had a rule that if the income were declining for two years in a row, regardless of the current income filed on the taxes or the overall ability of the person to meet his financial obligations--they would not allow us to consider any of his self-employment income. In the case of the attorney, the only income the underwriter would consider was just his fixed Social Security monthly income.
Such practices are going to cause many self-employed or under employed Americans to not qualify to purchase housing period. Americans who have had their hours cut due to the economy or Obamacare or who are working more than one job to make ends meet are going to have an increasingly difficult time qualifying. Millions of others are going to qualify for such low loan amounts that all they will be able to afford is a small urban condo. The Obama Administration does not have to make controversial public policies regarding housing--they just have to continue writing regulations which make it impossible for average Americans to afford homes.
The other part of this "carrot and stick" approach to implementing Smart Growth is also already happening through federal grants for sustainable projects. Kurtz points out that House Republicans blocked funding for the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants in 2012. However, as he also mentions, there are a lot of grants out there now that builders and developers can use to build "Smart Growth" projects.
Consider "Block 21" in Aurora Colorado, a new mixed use urban housing project being built for the low, low price of $160 million through a joint partnership of Waveland Ventures LLC, Jackson Street Holdings LLC, and Arrival Partners LLC. The project includes a six story 200 room four star hotel (the brand will be announced later this month) with a pool and fitness center and a 30,000 square foot meeting room. It also features a four-story apartment complex with 100 units, a club house and a swimming pool, and 10,000 square feet of ground level retail space. Like all "Sustainable" communities, Block 21 will also feature the "Quadrangle" a heavily landscaped urban park.
The developers tell us that "Block 21" is named for Army hospital 21, a World War I hospital that once stood at the medical complex adjacent to the new development. Perhaps that is true, but it is an amazing coincidence that the name invokes images of Agenda 21, the United Nations aggressive environmental initiative which calls for "human settlements" very much like Block 21.
The most interesting part of Block 21 is the financing source. According to RE Business online, Waveland Communtity Development, a wholly owned subsidiary of Waveland Ventures, has received $312 million in tax credits since 2007. In addition to tax credits for Block 21, Waveland has also secured a commitment for the senior debt via the Federal EB5 program to finance the project.
That's exactly how this works--starve funds from the projects the government wants to kill and supply funds to the projects the government wants to promote. As Smart Growth projects are incentivized with tax credits and federal funding we are going to see more Smart Growth developments and less and less financing for suburbs. And as individual borrowers can no longer qualify to purchase homes in the suburbs, we will see more and more of these homes and ultimately more suburban communities going first into foreclosure, and then descending into "blight" only to be ultimately bulldozed and destroyed just as happened last year in Ohio with homes that could not be sold.
In his article, Kurtz recommends that Americans get involved in the process and let their Congressional
Representatives know that they need to block funding for Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants. That is a good start. Another good start is to support candidates who are informed about Agenda 21 and the threat that it poses to American freedom and the American way of life and to support only those candidates who stand against it. A third is to stop falling into the trap of pretending that lending and mortgages are evils of the 21st century. As long as Americans continue to pretend that cutting off access to credit is doing our country a favor, we are playing right into the hands of the politicians who are remaking our society into one in which private property and single family home ownership no longer exist--a society where everyone lives and works exactly where the government tells them to. That is not the future that I want to leave to the next generation. What about you?
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
I think this narrative, and the conservative furor/backlash being heard on conservative news shows like Hannity, is exactly the story that the White House wants the press reporting. By having this narrative in the media, the White House can make a case for a populist push to force "bad greedy banks" to make more loans to deserving Americans who have had their credit damaged during the recession, and they can make conservatives who oppose them out to be heartless bad guys. In reality, the true story of mortgage lending is very different than either side of this issue is reporting.
The truth is that the qualified mortgage standards being implemented next year will shut between 15% (according to the CFPB's estimates) and 40% (according to the QM critics estimates) of potential homeowners out of the market completely. Much is being made of the fact that FHA allows credit scores as low as 500, and down payments as low at 3.5%. In fact, most banks will not make an FHA loan without a credit score of at least 600 and many require 620 or 640. But new guidelines expected to be released in the next few months will raise downpayment guidelines for qualified residential mortgages up to 10%. While Fannie, Freddie and FHA have a seven year exemption before the loans they make have to qualify under the new guidelines, many mortgage professionals are looking ahead to the end of the seven years at a massive mortgage and housing constriction when the new guidelines are fully implemented for all lending types. And in the immediate future, the implementation of the Qualifed Mortgages and the Qualified Residential Mortgages and the 3% cap on points and fees next year is going to cut off access to mortgage credit and to mortgage credit providers.
So why is the Administration talking out of both sides of its mouth on this issue? Very simply, the Obama Administration wants to discourage private ownership, especially in the suburbs, and wants to encourage "sustainable development"--densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Manhattan. The problem is that Americans like homeownership, we like cars and we like suburbs. So the Administration does not want to say in a public forum that they are actively working against these aspects of American life. Instead, they have pushed through massive pieces of legislation such as Dodd Frank that contain thousands of pages of still to be written regulations that endanger private homeownership while they publicly claim to want to help Americans buy their own homes.
On March 18th, the National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz wrote an opinion piece entitled "Obama's Plans for the Suburbs: And How to Stop Them." On March 15, President Obama spoke at the Argonne National Laboratory and proposed $2 billion on an energy security trust fund for renewable fuel research and as part of the speech he promised "to shift our cars entirely...off oil" As Kurtz noted in his column, even the New York Times was skeptical since the President did not provide any real details as to how he would accomplish this.
On that same day, however, the Department of Energy released a series of reports called "Transportation Energy Futures" which outline a plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80% by 2050. Part of this report includes "the effects of the built environment on transportation." This report is a blueprint for restricting development in suburbs. Proponents of "smart growth" and "sustainability" hate the suburbs because they represent individual housing and private transportation, both of which are at odds with the United Nation's Agenda 21,an aggressive environmental blueprint to dramatically change the living conditions of the world. Agenda 21 has been in various stages of implementation on the local level for over 20 years as cities and communities embrace Smart Growth, but the Obama Administration is dedicated to using federal resources to stop suburban development, to limit private automobile ownership and to force Americans into small tightly packed apartments to and from which they will either walk or use public transportation.
To achieve this, the Department of Energy report recommends two policy options which are most likely to encourage dense development without exceeding the federal government's current authority. The first requires eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, which is perceived to incentivize many people to purchase homes who would not otherwise do so. The second is to tie future federal aid, federal grants, and federal funding to "Smart Growth" projects. The DOE suggests that federal funding for schools and roads could be forced to pass a population density litmus test which would mean that suburbs would not qualify for these funds.
Kurtz also notes that on March 15th--the same day of Obama's speech at Argonne and the DOE report-- Bloomberg reported that the Obama Administration has announced plans to order all federal agencies to consider global warming before approving large projects. As the Bloomberg report notes, this strategy could block highway construction and suburban development projects.
I agree with much of Kurtz's article, but I think he is overlooking some key factors. First, he states that he does not believe that the mortgage interest deduction will be done away with. That may or may not be true--but after spending 15 years in the housing industry I believe that tax exempt interest is a secondary consideration in whether people purchase homes. Homeownership is the American dream, and for many Americans being able to write the interest off their taxes is not a primary incentive to buy--it is an added perk of doing so. However, Obama already has a cadre of weapons in his legislative arsenal to stop the growth of the suburbs. The new qualified and qualified residential mortgages are going to ultimately have such a great effect on who can purchase and who cannot and how much they can purchase that additional disincentives to purchasing single family homes will probably not be necessary. Smart Growth and Sustainable development policies tend to make housing much more expensive. In Portland last year, the new "affordable housing" urban project was a one-bedroom condo selling downtown for around $160,000. The new qualified mortgage guidelines state that a borrower's total debt cannot exceed 43% of his or her total income. What many do not seem to realize is that lenders, who are afraid of punitive government actions, have already placed serious limits on how much income they will consider for a borrower. For instance, last Christmas I was working on a loan for a man who had been a self-employed attorney for 30 years. Because he was retiring, his income was declining from year to year, although he still earned more than enough money to more than meet all of his current obligations and buy a small investment property. But the lender did not want to be accused of making a mortgage loan to a person who did not "qualify" so they had a rule that if the income were declining for two years in a row, regardless of the current income filed on the taxes or the overall ability of the person to meet his financial obligations--they would not allow us to consider any of his self-employment income. In the case of the attorney, the only income the underwriter would consider was just his fixed Social Security monthly income.
Such practices are going to cause many self-employed or under employed Americans to not qualify to purchase housing period. Americans who have had their hours cut due to the economy or Obamacare or who are working more than one job to make ends meet are going to have an increasingly difficult time qualifying. Millions of others are going to qualify for such low loan amounts that all they will be able to afford is a small urban condo. The Obama Administration does not have to make controversial public policies regarding housing--they just have to continue writing regulations which make it impossible for average Americans to afford homes.
The other part of this "carrot and stick" approach to implementing Smart Growth is also already happening through federal grants for sustainable projects. Kurtz points out that House Republicans blocked funding for the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants in 2012. However, as he also mentions, there are a lot of grants out there now that builders and developers can use to build "Smart Growth" projects.
Consider "Block 21" in Aurora Colorado, a new mixed use urban housing project being built for the low, low price of $160 million through a joint partnership of Waveland Ventures LLC, Jackson Street Holdings LLC, and Arrival Partners LLC. The project includes a six story 200 room four star hotel (the brand will be announced later this month) with a pool and fitness center and a 30,000 square foot meeting room. It also features a four-story apartment complex with 100 units, a club house and a swimming pool, and 10,000 square feet of ground level retail space. Like all "Sustainable" communities, Block 21 will also feature the "Quadrangle" a heavily landscaped urban park.
The developers tell us that "Block 21" is named for Army hospital 21, a World War I hospital that once stood at the medical complex adjacent to the new development. Perhaps that is true, but it is an amazing coincidence that the name invokes images of Agenda 21, the United Nations aggressive environmental initiative which calls for "human settlements" very much like Block 21.
The most interesting part of Block 21 is the financing source. According to RE Business online, Waveland Communtity Development, a wholly owned subsidiary of Waveland Ventures, has received $312 million in tax credits since 2007. In addition to tax credits for Block 21, Waveland has also secured a commitment for the senior debt via the Federal EB5 program to finance the project.
That's exactly how this works--starve funds from the projects the government wants to kill and supply funds to the projects the government wants to promote. As Smart Growth projects are incentivized with tax credits and federal funding we are going to see more Smart Growth developments and less and less financing for suburbs. And as individual borrowers can no longer qualify to purchase homes in the suburbs, we will see more and more of these homes and ultimately more suburban communities going first into foreclosure, and then descending into "blight" only to be ultimately bulldozed and destroyed just as happened last year in Ohio with homes that could not be sold.
In his article, Kurtz recommends that Americans get involved in the process and let their Congressional
Representatives know that they need to block funding for Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants. That is a good start. Another good start is to support candidates who are informed about Agenda 21 and the threat that it poses to American freedom and the American way of life and to support only those candidates who stand against it. A third is to stop falling into the trap of pretending that lending and mortgages are evils of the 21st century. As long as Americans continue to pretend that cutting off access to credit is doing our country a favor, we are playing right into the hands of the politicians who are remaking our society into one in which private property and single family home ownership no longer exist--a society where everyone lives and works exactly where the government tells them to. That is not the future that I want to leave to the next generation. What about you?
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
March 18, 2013
Minimum Wage and Maximum Earnings--Opposite Sides of the Same Coin
About ten years ago I attended a spring time regulatory conference for the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. During these conferences, which were held in Washington DC and which always concluded with a grassroots lobby day on Capitol Hill, we heard various invited speakers. During this particular conference, one of the speakers who had been invited to meet with our group was a consumer advocate attorney who decried the fact that some borrowers paid higher interest rates for credit than did others.
The attorney began by lecturing us softly, "Wouldn't it be great if everyone could have a 7% interest rate?" At the time that this conference took place, the optimal rates for borrowers with good credit were probably between 5.8 and 6.5% so the consumer advocate assumed that she had padded the prime market interest rates enough to make them attainable to all.
Immediately, some of the men in our group stood up and took turns at the microphone which had been provided to facilitate audience interaction so that they could explain why it was not possible for everyone to have a 7% interest rate. Interest rates are based on both credit history (demonstrated history of paying one's bills) and credit depth (length of time accounts have been opened, number of accounts, type of accounts, etc.) as well as ability to prove income, employment, consistency of employment, length of employment, debt ratios and other factors which make loans more or less risky. Riskier loans have higher interest rates and less risky loans have lower interest rates. (At the time this conference was held there were a lot of loan products on the market, including stated income and no income loans).
After listening to reasons that her proposal was ridiculous and unworkable, the attorney responded, "Okay, okay. What if it were a 15% interest rate? It doesn't matter what the interest rate is, so long as it is the same for everyone ."
The consumer advocate attorney was blissfully unaware that inherent in the "unfairness" of higher rates for some borrowers and lower rates for others is a system of built in rewards for desired behavior. If her suggestion were to be implemented and everyone got the same rate regardless of their credit profile or work history or savings history, responsible borrowers would no longer see any benefit to carefully managing their finances and irresponsible consumers would have no incentive to improve their credit rating, or to try to hang on that job longer in order to get a better work history, or to save some money for a rainy day. If everyone gets the same reward regardless of their level of effort or initiative, no one gets much of anything and no one has any motivation to try to improve their situation.
I was reminded of this today as I saw Elizabeth Warren's comments made last week in front a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension began circulating conservative news sites and the Internet. During the course of the hearing, Senator Warren wondered allowed why minimum wage isn't $22.00 an hour, adding that it would be if it had kept pace with the growth of the economy since 1960.
Since the State of the Union when President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour, I have read numerous commentaries about the problems that will be caused by increasing minimum wage. Many of these have been well written and researched, and they make valid points that higher minimum wage cuts jobs for entry level workers, does nothing to substantially help those in poverty--many of whom actually do not work at all--and ultimately hurts the business that create jobs and provide the economic growth in this country. Beyond these arguments, however, I believe that the push to increase minimum wage to higher and higher levels belies another huge issue that I have not heard anyone discuss--the desire for the government to determine and regulate how much everyone can make.
For that reason, I found it particularly interesting that Elizabeth Warren would propose that minimum wage should be $22.00 an hour. Remember that before Warren was a freshman Senator from Massachusetts, she was the interim director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the massive new government agency created by Dodd Frank. She was also one of the architects behind Dodd Frank, which created extensive new regulations for financial services and the mortgage industry, including regulating the maximum amount of compensation that mortgage loan originators can earn. Over the past two years, experienced originators have left the mortgage industry as the government has limited compensation more and more. Those restrictions began as regulations saying that originators cannot be paid by both the borrower and the lender, making it illegal for brokers to negotiate individual fees with borrowers. Next year, in 2014, the provisions of the Dodd Frank bill that mandate a set cap on fees and points will be implemented. As a result of these rules, many experienced originators have left and are continuing to leave the mortgage industry, leaving newer and less experienced originators in the marketplace.
The problem with setting maximum compensation for a profession is that it accomplishes very much the same effect as saying that every person should get the same interest rate. A free market system contains built in incentives for hard work, education, additional training, personal growth and long hours. Professionals who are willing to apply themselves, to get the additional training they need and to work the additional hours do so in the hopes of reaping financial rewards for that extra labor. But to liberals like Elizabeth Warren, being able to command higher fees for a greater level of expertise is not good business--it is cheating. To Warren, a loan originator with 20 years experience, numerous certifications and a track record of closing thousands of loans is no more valuable to the consumer than a newly licensed originator working on her first loan. They are the same and they should receive the same compensation.
Over the past three years that I have been writing this blog I have warned several times that the mortgage and real estate industries were a proving ground for policies that liberals plan to implement in industries across the board. Now that Warren is in Senator, she can advocate for $22.00 an hour minimum wage just as she advocated for capping our compensation at levels so low that experienced originators cannot keep our doors open as independent business people. By arguing that entry level employees should be making over $45,000 a year to flip hamburgers or answer the telephone, she is really saying that experience, hard work and education do not have any compensatory value.
To the socialist mindset, this argument makes perfect sense. To have a system where harder working, better educated, more competent people make more money than those who are less skilled or less well educated or less ambitious is inherently discriminatory. (And when I speak of education here, I am not only referring to formal education through degrees--I am also referring to industry specific training which is often expensive to obtain.) The solution to this discrimination is to raise the minimum wage and lower the maximum compensation--both through higher taxes and through regulations which set caps on compensation. By narrowing the wage gap between the entry level and the experienced professional, liberals remove any incentive to work harder or to become better trained. But, then again, to liberals the issue is not really how much anyone makes, so long as everyone makes the same amount.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
The attorney began by lecturing us softly, "Wouldn't it be great if everyone could have a 7% interest rate?" At the time that this conference took place, the optimal rates for borrowers with good credit were probably between 5.8 and 6.5% so the consumer advocate assumed that she had padded the prime market interest rates enough to make them attainable to all.
Immediately, some of the men in our group stood up and took turns at the microphone which had been provided to facilitate audience interaction so that they could explain why it was not possible for everyone to have a 7% interest rate. Interest rates are based on both credit history (demonstrated history of paying one's bills) and credit depth (length of time accounts have been opened, number of accounts, type of accounts, etc.) as well as ability to prove income, employment, consistency of employment, length of employment, debt ratios and other factors which make loans more or less risky. Riskier loans have higher interest rates and less risky loans have lower interest rates. (At the time this conference was held there were a lot of loan products on the market, including stated income and no income loans).
After listening to reasons that her proposal was ridiculous and unworkable, the attorney responded, "Okay, okay. What if it were a 15% interest rate? It doesn't matter what the interest rate is, so long as it is the same for everyone ."
The consumer advocate attorney was blissfully unaware that inherent in the "unfairness" of higher rates for some borrowers and lower rates for others is a system of built in rewards for desired behavior. If her suggestion were to be implemented and everyone got the same rate regardless of their credit profile or work history or savings history, responsible borrowers would no longer see any benefit to carefully managing their finances and irresponsible consumers would have no incentive to improve their credit rating, or to try to hang on that job longer in order to get a better work history, or to save some money for a rainy day. If everyone gets the same reward regardless of their level of effort or initiative, no one gets much of anything and no one has any motivation to try to improve their situation.
I was reminded of this today as I saw Elizabeth Warren's comments made last week in front a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension began circulating conservative news sites and the Internet. During the course of the hearing, Senator Warren wondered allowed why minimum wage isn't $22.00 an hour, adding that it would be if it had kept pace with the growth of the economy since 1960.
Since the State of the Union when President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour, I have read numerous commentaries about the problems that will be caused by increasing minimum wage. Many of these have been well written and researched, and they make valid points that higher minimum wage cuts jobs for entry level workers, does nothing to substantially help those in poverty--many of whom actually do not work at all--and ultimately hurts the business that create jobs and provide the economic growth in this country. Beyond these arguments, however, I believe that the push to increase minimum wage to higher and higher levels belies another huge issue that I have not heard anyone discuss--the desire for the government to determine and regulate how much everyone can make.
For that reason, I found it particularly interesting that Elizabeth Warren would propose that minimum wage should be $22.00 an hour. Remember that before Warren was a freshman Senator from Massachusetts, she was the interim director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the massive new government agency created by Dodd Frank. She was also one of the architects behind Dodd Frank, which created extensive new regulations for financial services and the mortgage industry, including regulating the maximum amount of compensation that mortgage loan originators can earn. Over the past two years, experienced originators have left the mortgage industry as the government has limited compensation more and more. Those restrictions began as regulations saying that originators cannot be paid by both the borrower and the lender, making it illegal for brokers to negotiate individual fees with borrowers. Next year, in 2014, the provisions of the Dodd Frank bill that mandate a set cap on fees and points will be implemented. As a result of these rules, many experienced originators have left and are continuing to leave the mortgage industry, leaving newer and less experienced originators in the marketplace.
The problem with setting maximum compensation for a profession is that it accomplishes very much the same effect as saying that every person should get the same interest rate. A free market system contains built in incentives for hard work, education, additional training, personal growth and long hours. Professionals who are willing to apply themselves, to get the additional training they need and to work the additional hours do so in the hopes of reaping financial rewards for that extra labor. But to liberals like Elizabeth Warren, being able to command higher fees for a greater level of expertise is not good business--it is cheating. To Warren, a loan originator with 20 years experience, numerous certifications and a track record of closing thousands of loans is no more valuable to the consumer than a newly licensed originator working on her first loan. They are the same and they should receive the same compensation.
Over the past three years that I have been writing this blog I have warned several times that the mortgage and real estate industries were a proving ground for policies that liberals plan to implement in industries across the board. Now that Warren is in Senator, she can advocate for $22.00 an hour minimum wage just as she advocated for capping our compensation at levels so low that experienced originators cannot keep our doors open as independent business people. By arguing that entry level employees should be making over $45,000 a year to flip hamburgers or answer the telephone, she is really saying that experience, hard work and education do not have any compensatory value.
To the socialist mindset, this argument makes perfect sense. To have a system where harder working, better educated, more competent people make more money than those who are less skilled or less well educated or less ambitious is inherently discriminatory. (And when I speak of education here, I am not only referring to formal education through degrees--I am also referring to industry specific training which is often expensive to obtain.) The solution to this discrimination is to raise the minimum wage and lower the maximum compensation--both through higher taxes and through regulations which set caps on compensation. By narrowing the wage gap between the entry level and the experienced professional, liberals remove any incentive to work harder or to become better trained. But, then again, to liberals the issue is not really how much anyone makes, so long as everyone makes the same amount.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
March 15, 2013
Rejecting Big Government and Common Core Standards in Favor of Parental Rights
Last week Glenn Beck's pantomime of giving triage to a dying Lady Liberty while she lay bleeding and gasping on the floor of his studio went viral across the conservative internet. Beck finished his pantomime by admonishing parents to get their kids out of government schools because the schools are turning the kids against the parents.
Beck is exactly right about this; one of the reasons that our country is sliding so far to the left is that progressive social engineering has been happening in this country for over 40 years. Now, however, social engineering is accelerating to a whole new level as the Common Core Standards are implemented across the country.
In today's column, conservative blogger and bestselling author Michelle Malkin explains that Big Government wants to control not only what your children learn, but how they process it, respond to it and feel about it. They also want to be able to track your children's behaviours, attitudes, likes and dislikes from infancy through high school graduation, and use that information both for research and for profit. Malkin cites a Department of Education report which underscores that the true intention of Common Core Standards is not to make sure that all children learn, but that the Federal Government has a firm grip on exactly what attitudes, beliefs and concepts the children leave school with. States Malkin,
Read Malkin's full article, which also contains a link to Glenn Beck's recent work on CCS, here.
In an era when our young people are graduating from school with minimal skills and competencies, but a strong foundation in liberalism, sex ed, and socialism, it is outrageous that politicians in both parties are pushing the Common Core Standards and this new federal tracking of students attitudes and behaviours. The CCS, along with President Obama's new push for universal preschool, the folly of which has been explained in today's Morning Bell, are designed to ensure that the government can get fully inside the head of every kid in America starting at age 4 and lasting through high school. Children who have been indoctrinated into this system are foundational to the liberal, socialist, godless society that our federal educational system has been building for the last generation.
After the 2012 elections, I saw Charles Krauthammer interviewed on Fox News. He was asked whether he believed that the young people who voted for Barack Obama the second time were a permanent block of reliable liberal voters. He responded that normally people become more conservative as they get older--as they get married and get jobs and mortgages and have children of their own, the desire for universal welfare is commonly replaced by the desire for lower tax brackets. Traditionally what Krauthammer says has been true; young radicals grow into middle aged accountants with values that more closely resemble their parents. But in the case of the new generation that is growing up, I think Krauthammer's formula no longer applies. The 60's hippies were rebelling against a "plastic culture". They understood the values of their parents--they just rejected them only to find out that liberal, leftist politics work better in theory than in practice. Unlike the previous generations of young people who grew up, got married, got jobs and cut their hair, this new generation is actually not rebelling against anything. They have been programmed and engineered into an odd conglomeration of Peter Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey and Karl Marx. They have been taught that they should never have to work, be responsible, or grow up, that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that intolerance is the only sin a person can commit and that traditional family structures are old-fashioned, boring, repressive, and no fun. People so indoctrinated at such an early age cannot "grow up" to be conservative, responsible adults--they don't even have a concept of what that means. Children who start out at age four in government daycare, spend their formative years in a completely socialist system, and then spend their college years enjoying "Sex week" at major universities are going to emerge so damaged ,that they will never rehabilitate into stable, productive, hard working Americans who support freedom and independence. (This is the 21st century "Jedi Mind Meld" that Obama complained two weeks ago that he could not use on Congress and Senate. Progessives know that they just have to be patient--they cannot change the attitudes of "set in our ways" freedom loving conservatives, but if they can get control of our children, they can make us as extinct as the dinosaur within one generation.)
And that takes me back to Beck's speech about getting kids out of the public school system. I am a product of homeschooling--my mother homeschooled me and my nine younger brothers and sisters starting in 1975, before the word "homeschooling" had even been coined. We did not meet another homeschooling family until I was fourteen years old. We used accredited correspondence schools and skipped no grades whatsoever, but each of us had a master's degree from California State University before our seventeenth birthdays--completely educated by a very hard working woman with only a high school diploma whose previous work experience consisted of being a secretary.
Homeschooling provides students with a completely different world view than that held by people in public or private schools. Today there are estimates of between 2 and 6 million homeschoolers in this country, including second generation homeschoolers such as my nieces and nephews. This block represents a small but significant segment of people who have been taught to think outside of the system. Homeschooling by parents who really want to not only educate their children but shape their character and prevent their indoctrination into the "New World Order" is the best hope that this country has for salvaging its future.
Homeschoolers beware, however, because the federal government's Common Core Standards are coming to a textbook near you. Many companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers have signed on to the Common Core Standards. Last week, homeschooling mother and conservative advocate Tina Hollenbeck began contacting companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers to find out whether their companies were not aligned with CCS, were coincidentally aligned, or were consciously aligned. She has compiled three lists which are now available on her website which you can visit here. Her website also contains a link to her Facebook group.
If you just simply cannot homeschool, you can still opt out of the Federal database tracking system being implemented through the Common Core System. Malkin's blog references a form that parents can sign and submit to school districts to protect the privacy of their children and prevent the federal government and major corporations from tracking their kids through school. This will at least protect their privacy, though it won't do much to protect their minds.
If you are interested in homeschooling, numerous resources are available to help you get started. The time and the money you will spend are not just an investment in your children--it is an investment in America's future, which is currently hanging in the balance.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned
me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her
newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of
Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions
without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information,
visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Beck is exactly right about this; one of the reasons that our country is sliding so far to the left is that progressive social engineering has been happening in this country for over 40 years. Now, however, social engineering is accelerating to a whole new level as the Common Core Standards are implemented across the country.
In today's column, conservative blogger and bestselling author Michelle Malkin explains that Big Government wants to control not only what your children learn, but how they process it, respond to it and feel about it. They also want to be able to track your children's behaviours, attitudes, likes and dislikes from infancy through high school graduation, and use that information both for research and for profit. Malkin cites a Department of Education report which underscores that the true intention of Common Core Standards is not to make sure that all children learn, but that the Federal Government has a firm grip on exactly what attitudes, beliefs and concepts the children leave school with. States Malkin,
"The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.”
Read Malkin's full article, which also contains a link to Glenn Beck's recent work on CCS, here.
In an era when our young people are graduating from school with minimal skills and competencies, but a strong foundation in liberalism, sex ed, and socialism, it is outrageous that politicians in both parties are pushing the Common Core Standards and this new federal tracking of students attitudes and behaviours. The CCS, along with President Obama's new push for universal preschool, the folly of which has been explained in today's Morning Bell, are designed to ensure that the government can get fully inside the head of every kid in America starting at age 4 and lasting through high school. Children who have been indoctrinated into this system are foundational to the liberal, socialist, godless society that our federal educational system has been building for the last generation.
After the 2012 elections, I saw Charles Krauthammer interviewed on Fox News. He was asked whether he believed that the young people who voted for Barack Obama the second time were a permanent block of reliable liberal voters. He responded that normally people become more conservative as they get older--as they get married and get jobs and mortgages and have children of their own, the desire for universal welfare is commonly replaced by the desire for lower tax brackets. Traditionally what Krauthammer says has been true; young radicals grow into middle aged accountants with values that more closely resemble their parents. But in the case of the new generation that is growing up, I think Krauthammer's formula no longer applies. The 60's hippies were rebelling against a "plastic culture". They understood the values of their parents--they just rejected them only to find out that liberal, leftist politics work better in theory than in practice. Unlike the previous generations of young people who grew up, got married, got jobs and cut their hair, this new generation is actually not rebelling against anything. They have been programmed and engineered into an odd conglomeration of Peter Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey and Karl Marx. They have been taught that they should never have to work, be responsible, or grow up, that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that intolerance is the only sin a person can commit and that traditional family structures are old-fashioned, boring, repressive, and no fun. People so indoctrinated at such an early age cannot "grow up" to be conservative, responsible adults--they don't even have a concept of what that means. Children who start out at age four in government daycare, spend their formative years in a completely socialist system, and then spend their college years enjoying "Sex week" at major universities are going to emerge so damaged ,that they will never rehabilitate into stable, productive, hard working Americans who support freedom and independence. (This is the 21st century "Jedi Mind Meld" that Obama complained two weeks ago that he could not use on Congress and Senate. Progessives know that they just have to be patient--they cannot change the attitudes of "set in our ways" freedom loving conservatives, but if they can get control of our children, they can make us as extinct as the dinosaur within one generation.)
And that takes me back to Beck's speech about getting kids out of the public school system. I am a product of homeschooling--my mother homeschooled me and my nine younger brothers and sisters starting in 1975, before the word "homeschooling" had even been coined. We did not meet another homeschooling family until I was fourteen years old. We used accredited correspondence schools and skipped no grades whatsoever, but each of us had a master's degree from California State University before our seventeenth birthdays--completely educated by a very hard working woman with only a high school diploma whose previous work experience consisted of being a secretary.
Homeschooling provides students with a completely different world view than that held by people in public or private schools. Today there are estimates of between 2 and 6 million homeschoolers in this country, including second generation homeschoolers such as my nieces and nephews. This block represents a small but significant segment of people who have been taught to think outside of the system. Homeschooling by parents who really want to not only educate their children but shape their character and prevent their indoctrination into the "New World Order" is the best hope that this country has for salvaging its future.
Homeschoolers beware, however, because the federal government's Common Core Standards are coming to a textbook near you. Many companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers have signed on to the Common Core Standards. Last week, homeschooling mother and conservative advocate Tina Hollenbeck began contacting companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers to find out whether their companies were not aligned with CCS, were coincidentally aligned, or were consciously aligned. She has compiled three lists which are now available on her website which you can visit here. Her website also contains a link to her Facebook group.
If you just simply cannot homeschool, you can still opt out of the Federal database tracking system being implemented through the Common Core System. Malkin's blog references a form that parents can sign and submit to school districts to protect the privacy of their children and prevent the federal government and major corporations from tracking their kids through school. This will at least protect their privacy, though it won't do much to protect their minds.
If you are interested in homeschooling, numerous resources are available to help you get started. The time and the money you will spend are not just an investment in your children--it is an investment in America's future, which is currently hanging in the balance.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned
me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her
newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of
Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions
without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information,
visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
March 7, 2013
King John, the Bill of Rights, and Assassination by Drone
When I was in school, I read a poem entitled, "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury". The poem relates how the Abbot of Canterbury was a kind and generous and loved man, who was well respected throughout England. He was also one of the wealthiest men in England--wealthier than King John himself. The king became increasingly enraged by stories of the Abbot's goodness, kindness and generosity, and he coveted the Abbot's wealth, so one day he summoned the Abbot to appear before him in court. When the Abbot arrived, the king told him that he must return to court in three days time to answer three questions for the king. If the Abbot failed to appear or if he were unable to correctly answer each question, he would immediately be executed and all of his wealth and property would be forfeited to the king. Following were the three questions for which King John demanded answers:
Question 1: How long, to the minute, will the king live?
Question 2: How much, to the penny, is the king worth as he sits on the throne with the royal crown on his head?
Question 3: What was the king thinking while the Abbot was answering the first two questions?
In the poem, the Abbot leaves the court in dismay and immediately travels to England's greatest scholars to try to find the answers to the questions. He goes to the universities--he travels to Cambridge and to Oxford, he asks the wise men of the church, but everywhere he goes, he hears only that no one can answer such questions for another person. Finally, at the end of the second day, he arrives back at his estate grief-stricken because he knows he will die the following day, and he is greeted by a faithful servant who tells the Abbot that he can answer each question for the King, and persuads the Abbot to allow him to go in his place to face King John.
I have been reminded of that poem several times lately as our government has reauthorized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens under the NDAA and most recently when the Attorney-General announced last week that the Administration does have the authority to kill American ciitzens on U.S. soil using drones. Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul spent more than 12 hours filibustering CIA nominee John Brennan's nomination simply to make the point that no Administration should have power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process. Paul made some excellent points, including the one that once we give up our rights and freedoms, we cannot expect to get them back.
What amazes me about the filibuster is that any American cannot see clearly that drone attacks against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil are an egregious violation of our Constitutional rights. Yet, this morning the Wall Street Journal attacked Paul for his "political stunt" saying that he had managed to rally "libertarian college students in their dorm rooms." How demeaning and insulting! I stayed at work an extra hour last night to send #standwithrand tweets so that he would know that, like millions of Americans, I appreciate what he is doing on behalf of liberty. I am certainly not a libertarian and I have not been a college student in over 20 years. The men and women with whom I interacted on Twitter last night were largely people like me--working professionals who care about the Constitution, freedom and the Bill of Rights. Regardless of what the WSJ, Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham like to pretend, we are not a mindless army of anarchists. We know that in a free society, the government must operate under the boundaries of its own laws. No person can be above the rule of law--not the Attorney-General, not the president of the United States, not anyone.
Our founding fathers understood this principle all too well. They had lived in a society where the king was above the law--his whims and wishes trumped any written legislation. While the story of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury is almost definitely fiction, it highlights the real abuses committed by King John against his subjects--abuses so severe that finally his nobles forced him to sign the Magna Carta guaranteeing some rights and protections to some portions of society. While the Magna Carta granted very limited protections, the document became the basis for the concept that the king is not above the law, and that concept became the basis for our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Each right we are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights--the right to freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to trial by jury, the right of due process, the right to keep and bear arms--all were guaranteed to us by people who understood what it meant to have no rights. They wrote down our freedoms for us so that we could learn them and live under them.
Today we have a society that has been free for so long that we have lost sight of what it means not to be free. When the current Administration tells the American people that a senior level official should have the right to examine the evidence and determine whether to assassinate a particular person, an alarming number of people in this country seem to think that this is acceptable. Many leaders of both parties, and many in the press, seem to believe that this power of assassination or imprisonment without trial would never be abused or used to destroy a person who was not guilty of a serious crime against the country and who did not pose an imminent threat to its security. History suggests the opposite. From the Old Testament Story of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who murdered their neighbor Naboth and stole his vineyard because they coveted his property and he refused to sell it, to more modern examples of citizens living in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years who reported fellow citizens as traitors to the government and had them executed to get their apartments, history teaches that people are often motivated by greed, pride, envy, lust and a desire for personal gratification and that these are often the driving forces in their decisions to execute another person. What is to stop the "senior official" from killing the rival for his lover's attention, or executing the owner of a home he wants, or assassinating any person who stands between him and some desired goal. Perhaps, as in the case of King John and the Abbot, envy could be the sole basis for determining that a certain individual or group of individuals was a threat, or, as in the case of most tyrants, an honest disagreement with a certain policy or idea could target a particular individual for termination. Due process and a trial by jury system is of paramount importance in a world where selfishness, greed and anger are basic human instincts.
Today, Jay Carney reluctantly read a statement from Eric Holder informing the American people that drone strikes are to be restrained under the guidelines of the Constitution and that the President does not have the power to assassinate non-combatant Americans on U.S. soil. I applaud Rand Paul and the fourteen Senators who stood with him yesterday in getting this admission out of the White House. As Paul said in his statement following Carney's announcement, "under duress and public humiliation" the White House decided to uphold the law. I am just disappointed that it took a 12 hour filibuster to get the White House to admit that it has a legal obligation to uphold the Constitution, and I am saddened that on the day after the filibuster so many Americans do not seem to understand the importance of protecting and defending this document that was created to protect and defend each of us.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Question 1: How long, to the minute, will the king live?
Question 2: How much, to the penny, is the king worth as he sits on the throne with the royal crown on his head?
Question 3: What was the king thinking while the Abbot was answering the first two questions?
In the poem, the Abbot leaves the court in dismay and immediately travels to England's greatest scholars to try to find the answers to the questions. He goes to the universities--he travels to Cambridge and to Oxford, he asks the wise men of the church, but everywhere he goes, he hears only that no one can answer such questions for another person. Finally, at the end of the second day, he arrives back at his estate grief-stricken because he knows he will die the following day, and he is greeted by a faithful servant who tells the Abbot that he can answer each question for the King, and persuads the Abbot to allow him to go in his place to face King John.
I have been reminded of that poem several times lately as our government has reauthorized indefinite detention of U.S. citizens under the NDAA and most recently when the Attorney-General announced last week that the Administration does have the authority to kill American ciitzens on U.S. soil using drones. Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul spent more than 12 hours filibustering CIA nominee John Brennan's nomination simply to make the point that no Administration should have power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process. Paul made some excellent points, including the one that once we give up our rights and freedoms, we cannot expect to get them back.
What amazes me about the filibuster is that any American cannot see clearly that drone attacks against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil are an egregious violation of our Constitutional rights. Yet, this morning the Wall Street Journal attacked Paul for his "political stunt" saying that he had managed to rally "libertarian college students in their dorm rooms." How demeaning and insulting! I stayed at work an extra hour last night to send #standwithrand tweets so that he would know that, like millions of Americans, I appreciate what he is doing on behalf of liberty. I am certainly not a libertarian and I have not been a college student in over 20 years. The men and women with whom I interacted on Twitter last night were largely people like me--working professionals who care about the Constitution, freedom and the Bill of Rights. Regardless of what the WSJ, Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham like to pretend, we are not a mindless army of anarchists. We know that in a free society, the government must operate under the boundaries of its own laws. No person can be above the rule of law--not the Attorney-General, not the president of the United States, not anyone.
Our founding fathers understood this principle all too well. They had lived in a society where the king was above the law--his whims and wishes trumped any written legislation. While the story of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury is almost definitely fiction, it highlights the real abuses committed by King John against his subjects--abuses so severe that finally his nobles forced him to sign the Magna Carta guaranteeing some rights and protections to some portions of society. While the Magna Carta granted very limited protections, the document became the basis for the concept that the king is not above the law, and that concept became the basis for our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Each right we are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights--the right to freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to trial by jury, the right of due process, the right to keep and bear arms--all were guaranteed to us by people who understood what it meant to have no rights. They wrote down our freedoms for us so that we could learn them and live under them.
Today we have a society that has been free for so long that we have lost sight of what it means not to be free. When the current Administration tells the American people that a senior level official should have the right to examine the evidence and determine whether to assassinate a particular person, an alarming number of people in this country seem to think that this is acceptable. Many leaders of both parties, and many in the press, seem to believe that this power of assassination or imprisonment without trial would never be abused or used to destroy a person who was not guilty of a serious crime against the country and who did not pose an imminent threat to its security. History suggests the opposite. From the Old Testament Story of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who murdered their neighbor Naboth and stole his vineyard because they coveted his property and he refused to sell it, to more modern examples of citizens living in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years who reported fellow citizens as traitors to the government and had them executed to get their apartments, history teaches that people are often motivated by greed, pride, envy, lust and a desire for personal gratification and that these are often the driving forces in their decisions to execute another person. What is to stop the "senior official" from killing the rival for his lover's attention, or executing the owner of a home he wants, or assassinating any person who stands between him and some desired goal. Perhaps, as in the case of King John and the Abbot, envy could be the sole basis for determining that a certain individual or group of individuals was a threat, or, as in the case of most tyrants, an honest disagreement with a certain policy or idea could target a particular individual for termination. Due process and a trial by jury system is of paramount importance in a world where selfishness, greed and anger are basic human instincts.
Today, Jay Carney reluctantly read a statement from Eric Holder informing the American people that drone strikes are to be restrained under the guidelines of the Constitution and that the President does not have the power to assassinate non-combatant Americans on U.S. soil. I applaud Rand Paul and the fourteen Senators who stood with him yesterday in getting this admission out of the White House. As Paul said in his statement following Carney's announcement, "under duress and public humiliation" the White House decided to uphold the law. I am just disappointed that it took a 12 hour filibuster to get the White House to admit that it has a legal obligation to uphold the Constitution, and I am saddened that on the day after the filibuster so many Americans do not seem to understand the importance of protecting and defending this document that was created to protect and defend each of us.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her newest novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
