The Silver Bullet For Victory

By Tom DeWeese June 30, 2020 American Policy Center

Is tyranny our fate?

The question now becomes, what do we do? Obviously, we have one of two choices. We accept our fate, or we fight. Are we finished? Do we quit? Do we surrender?

It would be easy to do any of those things. No one would blame us. We gave it the good fight. We could hide behind the idea that ancient conspiracies set our fate long before we were born. Members of secret societies somehow trumped every ideal we hold – and overpowered every move we made.

We could pat ourselves on the back and say, well, they were just too strong. What could we do? Tyranny is our destiny. Is that what you want to tell your grandchildren when they ask you what you did to preserve the ideal of America?

In another era, we could have loaded up boats and sailed to a new world to live by the ideals we hold. But that was already done. People ran from tyranny. They came here – to America. Now tyranny has caught us. And there’s nowhere else to run. We either accept our pre-ordained “fate” or make a stand. This is it, my friends. This is the moment when we decide the future of our ideals.

You know the ideals I’m talking about. That you are born with liberty. That it is your natural right to speak your mind, start a business, own and control property, build your dream home – and expect it to be there for as long as you like, practice your religion exactly as you believe, and, above all, expect that the government will protect those rights at all costs.

We know by witnessing history that totalitarianism does not work. Government control of the actions of the people only leads to poverty and misery. We know that people pinned under the heavy hand of government do not produce for their masters. We know that that there are no such things as faceless, nameless masses in some undefined “common good.” We know that the United States was the first nation ever created that recognized the natural rights of individuals – and America’s history has proven that such a system is the only one that produces prosperity and happiness.

Do we fight for those ideals of liberty? Or will we allow them to be lost forever under some global village? Do nothing, and they have made the decision for us. What can be easier than that?

Fighting Back

But if we decide to fight, then we truly must know what we are doing. Half - hearted attempts at rallies and letter writing, like we’ve done in the past, didn’t get the job done then and certainly won’t get it done now. No short cuts. No silly rhetoric.

I’ve got to tell you that I get some pretty strange stuff in my office. Letters, e-mails, phone calls. People write to me with ideas they think will put us on the road to victory. Everybody’s looking for that one quick fix. The right slogan. The silver bullet – that will defeat our enemies and restore freedom to America. Almost daily, I receive someone’s solution – the great plan that no one else has thought of.

A good friend of mine, for example, wrote a huge book that carried all of the facts and figures to prove his position against a certain government program. He called me to say all we had to do to turn things around was to get a copy of the book into the hands of every single Member of Congress.

I tried to explain that Congressmen can’t read. In fact, they now have the votes in Congress operating exactly like a fast food restaurant. Truly, about the only question they ask now is, “Do you want to super-size that?”

I’ve received buttons, bumper stickers and tee shirts – all created to provide “the message” that will turn everything around. I’ve receive phone calls resulting in long discussions about how to come up with just the right sound bite that will capture the nation’s imagination and send the scoundrels to the tall grass. And my personal favorite – “we’ll use words that will be so innocent sounding that the other side won’t know what we are really up to”.

The Silver Bullet

So, what is the silver bullet to save our liberty? I’m going to give it to you. I often hear it lamented that the Republic is dead and that we are now controlled by Washington. You know what – I have found that isn’t true. The Republic is still there buried under the weight of un-elected planning commissions, visioning statements, and review boards.

Squeezed in, under all of that, is the Republic of our Founding Fathers, rusting from lack of use. But it’s still there and still armed with the silver bullet the founders provided to guarantee that no one could take it away. You see, our founders created this Republic to be self-protected by making government at the local level the most powerful force.

The Silver Bullet is the “precinct captain”. You scoff? You were hoping for something much more exciting! Well, that’s probably the very reason we’ve ignored it.

We would much rather turn our attention to Washington, Congress, or the President. Why then, are these government entities so powerful today? Because we’ve let them become powerful by placing all of our attention on them – while ignoring involvement in local government.

But the power still lies in the precinct captain. Our opponents know it. They have left no lowly office untouched. Check it out. Go to your local government and check out the policies being implemented by the game warden and the dog catcher – Sustainable Development and animal rights, most likely. City treasurer. City clerk. The people who collect the taxes and issue permits. What are their policies? How about the planning/development department and its policy for building permits? Sustainable Development? Now move on up to City Council and Mayor.

In 2005, the United Nations held a major conference in San Francisco on Sustainable Development. The main targets for the conference were the mayors. Those who attended were asked to sign two documents – the Green Cities Declaration and the Urban Environmental Accords in which the Mayors pledged to undertake 21 action items over the next few years to implement Sustainable Development.

These action items included water policy, energy policy, transportation, and health. The mayors were provided sample legislation and pledged to enact it. The policies called for the implementation of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty and Agenda 21.

One week later, in Chicago, the U.S. Conference of Mayors called for the very same policies, making Sustainable Development and Kyoto the two priorities of the nation’s mayors.

In short, our enemies know that the power to impose this tyranny on us is now at the local level. It will do little good to spend time trying to stop it through Congress or the White House. What does the UN understand that you and I don’t? That it doesn’t matter what Washington’s policy is. They will just get the local cities and towns to do it anyway – because the towns and cities have the power to decide for themselves.

Think Globally – Act Locally

Think globally – act locally is not just a slogan. It’s an agenda. Now, to save our Republic and way of life, we need to make it our agenda. The Founding Fathers did.

Make a chart of every single position available in your county. Break it down to the precinct level and then the ward level. List every office. Every board position. Now you will begin to see how large a task it is. But take it one step at a time. Start to fill those spots.

Work quietly. Please don’t hold a press conference to announce to the community that you plan to take it over. Work through what ever party you want – even the Democrats. The goal here is to get our people, who understand the Sustainablist agenda, into places of decision making. It would be a dream come true to have candidates from every party running on the same issue. It’s a goal to shoot for. The other side seems to have achieved it.

But make sure those candidates are people who understand the entire picture of Sustainable Development and Agenda 21. It will do you no good to help elect candidates who are, perhaps, good on one issue, like gun control or abortion, but fail to see the whole picture. Those are the very people who will fail you later.

Take over a precinct. Just one. You will control the election of every candidate at every level – at least in your little part of the city. Then take two.

You will need precinct workers to make sure our people get to the polls. You will need poll workers to make sure our votes are counted. Make sure they are people you can trust.

Run a candidate for the lowest office in town. Control it. No position is without power. Then do it again. Go up the ladder. Get more precincts. Grow, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Step by step. Control enough precincts and even presidential candidates will seek you out for help in getting elected. You will control the candidates. You can stop the bad ones from even being able to run. Again, only help elect local officials who oppose Sustainable Development. Refuse to support the lesser of two evils.

Pay attention to the non-elected review boards, policy committees, and planning commissions. Can you get one of your people on it? Who is doing the appointing?

Can you imagine the damage we could do to Sustainablist goals by getting one person on the local architectural review board?

You need to have the ability to create controversy against policies by current office holders. This will help you find like-minded folks to join you. And it will help create issues so your candidates can win. Remember, most people would oppose them if they knew the truth. Tell them. Spread out.

A New Chamber of Commerce?

Consider this idea. If your local farm bureau or Chamber of Commerce isn’t representing you – start a new one. Understand this – you don’t have to just take their double dealing. Go around them. Show up at council meetings, or at the meetings of any agency or board that purports to make policy that affects you.

As a new group representing business interests, homeowners, or farmers, demand your say. Back up your demands by issuing news releases and doing interviews on local radio and television – representing your new group. Start saying over and over again that the governing body isn’t representing the interests of your constituents.

If you make enough noise as the group which is truly standing up for farmers or businesses or homeowners, those individuals will follow you. You will pull the power structure right out from under the established organizations that have been taken over by our enemies.

Sure, we are way behind. Sure, we have a massive job ahead of us and we would be fools to delude ourselves otherwise. But, after all of our hard work over the years, after being a lone voice in the wilderness, something has started here.

Now is not the time to circle the wagons or give up. Now is the time to move out, get involved, and turn the tables. Stop being polite to your oppressors. Tell them their time is through. Tell those who pretend to speak for you in Washington to either get on board with our agenda – or get out of the way. We are no longer going to go quietly into the night.

Get mad. But get busy. And do what it takes to win. Organize at the local level – use the power the Founding Fathers gave us to preserve the Republic – and throw off the yoke of tyranny.

Write this down and keep it in front of you at all times: “The right of the individual to own and control private property is the foundation of liberty.” And now write this: “Precinct Captain is the root to victory.” That’s the silver bullet that leads to sustained liberty. Put the two together and restore and preserve this Republic.

Now that’s something to tell your grandchildren when they ask what you did in the great war to preserve American liberty. Salute, and tell them “I was a Precinct Captain.”

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s Betrayal of Its Own Industry

My address to the Colorado Independent Cattlemen’s Association

October 16,2019 by Tom DeWeese Farming, Property Rights, Sustainable Development @ American Policy Center

I’m not a cattleman and I’m not going to pretend I know everything you are facing. But I do know that the major weapon being used against your industry is the misnamed control devise called Sustainable Development. I know why and I know who the players are. I hope I can leave you today with some ideas on how to fight them.

To begin, let’s set the terms and make one thing very clear. The use of the word sustainable may sound like a comfortable term, not threatening. After all, you, your parents, and those before them have probably been successfully working the same land for decades. That’s true sustainability. But that is not what it means to those forces pushing that term today. Sustainable today means sustained control. Sustained power. And very soon – sustainable poverty for many.

Most people immediately equate Sustainable Development with environmental policy. Of course, concern for the environment is the justification most often used for its implementation. But, in fact land, and economic control are at the heart of Sustainable policy and, assuming it is simply good environmental stewardship proves to be a serious and dangerous mistake.

The term “Sustainable Development” was born on the pages of the 1987 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. It is basically the policy for the implementation of Agenda 21 which came along in 1992. The announced purpose of Agenda 21 was a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society”.

Now to make this blue print effective they needed us to voluntarily give up our liberties. What could be such a powerful threat to get us all to do that? Well, how about the threat of Environmental Armageddon? It doesn’t matter how many rights you think you have if you don’t have a planet to stand on! Climate change is the tool of choice to scare us all into voluntarily surrendering our liberties to this BLUEPRINT to change human society. And that’s why they will not give up on this scam – no matter how much true science debunks it.

If you doubt that then let me share this quote from Christina Stewart, the former Canadian Minister of the Environment: “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony … climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” That “justice and equality” she speaks of is redistribution of wealth – which means socialism. Sustainable Development is not just a conservation policy to assure we are good stewards of the land: rather, it affects every corner of our lives.

The Sustainable ground troops are made up of hundreds of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), including the Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. They, and hundreds more like them, helped to write Agenda 21.

How many of you have heard of the Wildlands Project? In the 1980s one of the most radical environmental organizations emerged – named Earth First! Its leader was Dave Foreman. Earth First! saw themselves as “Eco-Warriors” the Esprit de Corp of the radical environmental movement. Monkeywrenching was their tactic of choice. Sabotage. They destroyed mining equipment, blew up power transmission lines and spiked trees. That little bit of fun meant they drove a spike into a tree. When the timber company then cut the tree down and sent it to the mill, as the saw blades hit the spike they would explode. Timber production stopped! Victory for the Eco Warriors.   

Forman had big plans. He said, “My three main goals would be to reduce human populations to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full compliment of species, returning throughout the world.” Do you see any room for you and your cattle in that vision?

Oh, but these were just the ravings of a radical lunatic – not to be taken seriously. Well…not so fast! You see, Foreman’s ideas became the basis for the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty. “Rewilding” became the term to lock away over 50% of all the land in every state – back to the way if was before Christopher Columbus came this way. No human activity. No roads. No homes. No industry. That became the basis for the whole Sustainable movement.

Foreman got specific about how he saw YOUR future. “Our vision is simple. We live for the day when Grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to Grizzlies in Alaska. When gray wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to Greenland.”

One of Foreman’s fellow Earth First!ers said, “The native ecosystems and the collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.” You see, this “vision” became the driving force for the entire radical environmental movement. It was first expressed in the 1970s in the UN’s Habitat 1 Conference that said, “Land… cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.” That’s how you reorganize human society.

Thomas Lovejoy, a Clinton appointed Science Advisor to the Department of Interior said, “We will map the whole nation…determine development for the whole country and regulate it all.” That is Sustainable Development.

Why is the excuse of environmental protection their most diabolical weapon? Because the environment doesn’t obey political boundaries. Rivers run through many towns and states. Then we have the corridors of crops and wildlife patterns. So environmental protection becomes the perfect excuse to move national sovereignty out of the way and open the borders to the “natural migration” of people.

On the county level we then have a need for a coalition of multiple counties working together on “mutual” needs, thus reducing your power at the ballot box to elect the kind of local government you desire. Then there is the matter of that boundary around your house – your private property – that the community needs to control – just to protect the environment, of course.

It is essential that every American understands that these leading issues we face today are not just random concerns that accidentally find their way into the forefront of political debate. They are all interconnected to be policies of Sustainable Development and the restructuring of our way of life. Their selected tactic is to control the land, water, energy, and population of the Earth. To achieve these ends requires, among other things, the destruction of private property rights and elimination of every individual’s ability to make personal life-style choices, including personal diet. That’s why the American Beef Industry is such a tasty target.

Of course, no totalitarian-bound movement would ever put their purpose in such direct terms. That’s where the environmental protection excuse comes in. Instead, American cattle producers are simply assured that no one wants to harm your industry, just make it safer for the environment. The gun industry might recognize that such an assurance sounds a bit familiar. Same source, same tactics, same goals.

Enter Bill Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development, (which was created a year after Agenda 21 to assure it’s policy of Sustainable Development became the rule of law). The President’s Council included representatives of most federal agencies, many of the NGOs who helped write Agenda 21 at the UN level, and representatives of global corporations. The President’s Council laid out the “Principles of Sustainability” called “Our Vision of a Sustainable United States of America.”

To carry out these plans, the President’s Council created a task force called the Sustainable Agriculture Task Force. The purpose, according to the report – “The Sustainable Agriculture Task force is developing an integrated vision of sustainable Agriculture, focusing on sustainable production practices and systems. The Task force will recommend goals and actions in the areas of agriculture-related research and education, technology, and farming practices and system to the Council for National Action Strategy.” So the offered solution to “fix” the beef industry is “sustainable certification”. All the cattle growers have to do is follow a few simple rules and all will be fine, peaceful, and profitable.

Now, enter the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB). The task force led the way to its creation. In all of their “expert wisdom” based on this Taskforce, here are some of their reasons why they claim the beef industry is not sustainable.

1. Deforestation – the claim is that farm animals require considerably more land than crops to produce food. The World Hunger Program calculated that if the land was used to grow grain and soy instead of cattle the land could provide a vegan diet to 6 billion people. Do you get that – a vegan diet!

Of course, as I’m sure you know, most grazing land in the U.S. cannot be used for growing food crops because the soil wouldn’t sustain crops. It’s also interesting to note that in Brazil, the WWF managed to force that government to lock away almost 50% of that nation’s land into unusable parks. Now they are working on that same goal in the American west.

2. Fresh Water – they claim that the America diet requires 4,200 gallons of water per day, including animal drinking water, irrigation of crops, processing, washing, etc. Whereas a vegan diet only requires 300 gallons per day. Apparently they don’t plan to irrigate the land to grow wheat or to wash the vegetables.

The interesting thing about this detail is that the actual sustainable policies they are enforcing to fix this problem destroy the small family farms in favor of the very giant corporate factory farms they profess to oppose.

Food Productivity – say the Greens, food productivity of farmland is falling behind the population and the only option, besides cutting the population, is to cut back on meat consumption and convert grazing lands to food crops. However, the only places where such shortages may exist are in totalitarian societies where government is controlling food production and supplies – Just like the Green’s plan for sustainable beef.

3. Global Warming – here we go! Say the Greens, global warming is driven by energy consumption and cows are energy guzzlers.

But there’s more to the story. Cow flatulence! A single dairy cow, they claim, produces an average of 75 kilos of methane annually. Meanwhile, environmentalists want to return the rangelands to historic species, including buffalo. And a buffalo, grazing on the same grass on the same lands, would emit about the same amount of methane. It’s a non-issue.

Not long ago many farmers were being harassed by government agents over pollution in streams running through their land. The government charged that the cattle were the cause and demanded they build a fence to keep the cattle from the stream. They demanded, they harassed, and they threatened. Then they found that the pollution wasn’t being caused by the cows, rather the source was feral hogs. Of course, an environmentalist, who has never worked a ranch or farm and rarely comes out of his New York high-rise, might not know that.

So, these are some of the reasons why it’s charged that beef is unsustainable and must be ruled, regulated and frankly, eliminated. These are charges brought by anti-beef vegans who want all beef consumption stopped. In cahoots, are environmentalists who seek to stop the private ownership and use of land under the excuse of environmental protection.

And the sad fact is, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the organization many have been trusting to represent your interests, has betrayed you by allowing itself to be used as the Judas Goat to lead the industry to sustainable slaughter.

To bring the cattle industry into line with this world view the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has accepted the imposition of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, which is heavily influenced, if not controlled, by the World Wildlife Fund, one of the top three most powerful environmental organizations in the world and a leader of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which basically sets the rules for global environmental policy.

This is the same World Wildlife Fund that issued a report saying, “Meat consumption is devastating some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable regions, due to the vast amount of land needed to produce animal feed.” The report went on to say that, to save the Earth, it was vital that we change human consumption habits away from meat. Again, the fact is, most land used for grazing isn’t capable of growing crops for food.

Regulations using these principles impose a political agenda that ignores the fact that smaller, independent cattle growers have proven to be the best stewards of their own land and that for decades have produced the highest grade of beef product in the world. Instead, to continue to produce you will be required to submit to a centralized control of regulations that will never end and will always increase in costs and needless waste of manpower.

To follow the sustainable rules and be officially certified, you, as a cattle grower, must agree to have much of the use of your land reduced to provide for wildlife habitat. There are strict controls over water use and grazing areas. This forces you to have smaller herds, making the process more expensive and economically unviable for the industry. In addition, there is a new layer of industry and government inspectors, creating a massive bureaucratic overreach, causing yet more costs for you.
The Roundtable rules are now enforced through the four packing companies that control the entire American beef market. Your ability to get your cattle to market is getting harder every day – unless you comply with rules that are simply designed to put you out of business. And yet, if you do comply, you will certainly go out of business.

Do you understand the game that is being played on you? You are not supposed to win – you are supposed to quietly comply and then die. You cannot reason with them. You cannot compromise with them. You follow their rules. They own the game.

So as the packers, Cargill, Tyson, JBS and National Beef, force their expensive, unnecessary, and unworkable sustainable certification on American cattlemen, they are systematically bringing in cheaper product from other countries that don’t necessarily adhere to strict, sanitary, safe production. As a result there is a noticeable rise in news reports of recalls of diseased chicken and beef in American grocery stores. They get away with this ruse because their first step was to remove the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) from the packaging in stores so consumers have no idea where the product is coming from.

This, then, is the situation that is threatening the American beef industry. If one reads the documents and statements from the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations Environment Program, and others involved, it is not hard to realize that the true goal is not to make beef better, but to ban it altogether. And believe it or not, the fact that some of the beef sold in stores is becoming lower grade and even diseased, works in the Sustainablist’s favor too – because the ultimate goal is to stop the consumption of beef. So fear is a valuable tool.

The question must then be asked, why is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association allowing this to happen, and indeed, joining with the Sustainable Beef Roundtable to force these policies on its members? The answer is actually quite tragic. They have beaten you into submission with that word Sustainable. American ranchers, farmers and livestock growers have been targets of the environmental and animal rights movements for years.

You just want to be left alone to work your farms and herds like your forefathers have done for more than a century. But the pressure is growing day by day. So, many have come to believe that if you just go along – put the sustainable label on your product — then this pressure will stop. In short, it would be a pressure valve release.

I’m sorry to tell you that it is not a release. Compromising and trying to play ball with these zealots is not going to make it go away. You must understand that the goal is not about improving your industry or environmental protection. The tragic reality is this is a drive for the destruction of your industry. Remember, the UN calls this the reorganization of human society. You and your way of life are to be reorganized to fit their view of human existence.

The attack has now grown to major proportions with the Green New Deal. Beefeaters have no place in the sustainable paradise of city apartment dwellers who accept government controls to choose for them what they are permitted to eat.

R-CALF USA, the courageous group leading the fight to save you, has managed to slow the Sustainable capture of the industry. But the packers’ control is a major roadblock if you can’t reach the market. R-CALF has filed Abuse of Conduct suits to shed light on the anti-trust activities of the monopoly tactics of the packers. It’s a good and valuable start.

However, the beef industry cannot recover on its own. Your story must be told to the consumers. They must become outraged about the real reasons prices are soaring and quality is going down, as the danger to their own health is increasing. You must focus on how to get your message out to consumers that a force is loose in our country that is robbing them of the freedom of choice for their own dinner plate, perhaps even for their own health. You know these facts – but the average American doesn’t. Now how do you do that? You are in a crisis situation. That calls for drastic, creative measures.

You must get dramatic to get the attention of consumers. You must get the American people to understand the threat to the beef industry. I have a modest little suggestion as to how you can get the attention of the entire nation – and start a nation-wide discussion on your plight.

Here is my modest suggestion to help you get the public’s attention. Start a cattle drive right down the main street of cities across the country. Drive your cattle right to city hall or the state capital. As you pass through town people are going to be very startled and curious, to say the least. Take advantage of that by passing out leaflets that tell them why you are doing this.

Now that you have everyone’s attention, tell your story. Hold a news conference right there on the steps of city hall or the state capital. In that news conference, demand that “Country of Origin” labels be put on all beef products so you know where your food comes from.

Second, demand that the Department of Agriculture reject this sustainable myth and protect the American free market that has always provided superior products.

Third, expose the packers by name. Help the American consumer become your ally in every grocery and steak house in the nation. Demand American beef for Americans! So, if they see that cute little WWF panda on the label – they’ll drop it like a hot potato.

Above all, publicly call out the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to get its collective head out of the sand and join you before the entire industry is destroyed. Expose the fact that the NCBA is working directly with your mortal enemy, the World Wildlife Fund, which believes that beef consumption must be stopped in order to save the earth.

At your news conferences ask this question of the NCBA: Why would the WWF be welcomed into any part of your industry? It means they can effectively destroy you from the inside. And that is exactly what they are doing.

Can you imagine the impact this would have if you had five cattle drives in five cities in one day? It would get international attention. The only way you can survive is to fight.

I know some of you may be thinking this idea of a cattle drive is over the top. Perhaps it will cause more trouble than it’s worth. Well, just a few weeks ago several thousand farmers in the Netherlands staged a protest over similar government restrictions on their industry by blocking the roads into The Hague. The resulting traffic jam brought nearly the entire country to a halt. And the people supported the framers. The national government immediately reacted and called an emergency meeting to discuss the situation. The point is you must do something dramatic to get the nation’s attention!
So-called sustainable policy is not a free market. It is a government-sanctioned monopoly that is little short of a criminal enterprise. This is a dark, evil force with a one-sided goal designed to put you out of business and control or destroy your industry.

If you intend to survive, you must all become modern day Paul Reveres. That means taking direct, creative action. The very future of our nation and its ability to feed itself, while remaining free and strong, depends on the choices you make today. As martyred rancher LaVoy Finicum said, it matters how you stand!

Growing Government Tyranny – Democrats Empower it. Republicans Are Clueless.

September 19, 2019 by Tom DeWeese @ American Policy Center

Where is the Republican Party? As insanity spews out of the Democrat Party, the long-time overseer of limited government, free enterprise and individual liberty has no response, no unified plan to counter the Democrats, and, indeed, seems confused by the Socialist antics. The only part of the long-lost Republican cause that seems to be functioning is their near hysterics over the massive funds the Democrats are raising. Said a recent such Republican fund letter, “I’m hoping you have the courage and determination to fight for what we believe in.”

Of course, if the Republicans had the courage and determination to fight over the past two years for “what we believe in,” their fund-raising would be soaring. Instead they run candidates with nothing to say, seemingly clueless to the massive assault on our liberties. Now they wonder why they are being ignored in the elections.

Earlier this year I addressed the leadership of the Constitution Party. I presented them with the real agenda of the Democrats and I asked this question, “Do you want to be the majority party?” They answered with a resounding YES! I then gave them a strategy to win. It occurs to me that all freedom-loving Americas, no matter what party, can benefit from this strategy to use in their own local elections.

So, here is the speech I presented to the Constitution Party. Now, understand your true enemy, take these ideas, drain the swamp in your city or state, and take American back!

My Address to the Constitution Party Leadership

There has always been some kind of force loose in the world seeking domination over others. They built armies to invade, break things and kill people in order to grab resources, build wealth and power, enslave people and conquer.

We’ve lived through such threats from megalomaniacs like Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.   Secret societies have plotted to gain power in different ways.

In every case the efforts have failed. No one has ever managed to rule the entire world. In some cases they just pushed too far, too fast. Or they miscalculated the weather conditions in the lands they intended to control. It’s incredible to note that both Napoleon and Hitler failed to remember that Russia has a severe winter which ultimately led to their downfall and defeat.

However, what if such power mongers could find a way to keep their aggression under wraps and out of sight from those they intended to conquer – until it was too late.

Better yet, what if they could actually get their targeted victims to help them achieve control over them? No armies. No shots fired. Instead the victims quietly pull in the Trojan Horse and celebrate its arrival!

What if there was a way for a small, dedicated group to rule the world by simply organizing under a single unifying plan, accepted by everyone as fact and necessary?

Acceptance of the plan would see every nation voluntarily surrendering its independence and sovereignty to the aggressors!

What could possibly be such a powerful message that some of the world’s oldest and proudest nations would do that? What could get the world’s strongest religions to turn their back on their most fundamental beliefs? What would get the freest nation on earth to join in and agree?

How about the threat of Environmental Armageddon! Who could oppose saving the planet? Only selfish zealots who refuse to give up their creature comforts would oppose efforts to save Mother Earth!         It doesn’t matter how many rights you think you have if you don’t have a planet to stand on.

The truth it, that’s exactly the force you and I are facing today as it drives, almost unopposed to change our life style, economic system, and system of government.

The Club of Rome, one of the main forces behind this hidden plan to rule the world openly explained their tactic and goal saying, “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All of these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Diabolical! Turn man against himself so that he voluntarily submits to subjugation. The threat of global warming became the weapon of choice.

And it doesn’t matter if true science refuses to cooperate in this scheme as actual global temperatures really are not rising and there continues to be no evidence of any man-made affect on the climate. Truth hasn’t been important to the scaremongers.

Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation said, “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”

To further drive home their complete lack of concern for truth, Paul Watson of Green Peace declared, “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”

Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change told us outright what the real goal of the threat of Environmental Armageddon truly is. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” Of course, she means free enterprise.   
  
The blueprint for the implementation of this grand plan was revealed in 1992 at the UN’s Earth Summit. It was called the Agenda for the 21^st century – or just Agenda 21.

From its inception in 1992, at the United Nation’s Earth Summit, 50,000 delegates, heads of state, diplomats and Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) hailed Agenda 21 as the “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”

The 350-page, 40 chapter, Agenda 21 document was quite detailed and explicit in its purpose and goals.  They warned us that the reorganization would be dictated through all-encompassing policies affecting every aspect of our lives, using environmental protection simply as the excuse to pull at our emotions and get us to voluntarily surrender our liberties.

So in their zealotry to enforce the grand agenda, social justice became the “moral force” over the rule of law as free enterprise, private property, rural communities, and individual consumption habits became the targets, labeled as racist and a social injustice.

Such established institutions and free market economics were seen as obstructions to the plan, as were traditional family units, religion, and those who were able to live independently in rural areas.

Finally, Agenda 21 was summed up in supporting documents this way: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced. It requires a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals, and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”

The policy of Agenda 21 is called Sustainable Development. You hear the term used in every part of our society, from community development to production of our food supplies, to manufacturing of nearly every product.

While sold as a means to secure a happy, healthy future of equality for all as it protects the environment, sustainable development policy, as it is enforced in every single community in the nation, has proven to be a direct attack on free enterprise, private property, and individual choice in our lives. It is the epitome of tyrannical, out of control government.

Ironically, its perpetrators were quite open and honest in their plans. We just didn’t want to listen.

The official report from the UN’s Habitat 1 Conference explained the reasons for the attack on private property. It said, “Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subjected to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.”        That is a direct attack on the entire American economic system.

But it gets even clearer. Peter Berle of the National Audubon Society said, “We reject the Idea of Private Property.”

Thomas Lovejoy, science advisor to the Department of Interior admitted, “We will map the whole nation…determine development for the whole nation, and regulate it all.”

Harvey Ruvin, the Vice Chairman of ICLEI said, “Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective.”

That is Agenda 21!

For over twenty years I have been labeled a conspiracy theorist, scaremonger, extremist, dangerous, nut case. I’ve been denied access to stages, major news programs, and awarded tin foil hats. All because I have worked to expose Agenda 21 and it’s policy of sustainable development as a danger to our property rights, economic system, and culture of freedom.

Now, the Sustainable forces have taken their plans to the ultimate, inevitable point. No longer are they trying to hide its true goal – global domination. Now we have the Green New Deal.

I warned that Agenda 21 would control every aspect of our lives, including how and were we live, the jobs we have, the mode of transportation available to us, and even what we eat. The Green New Deal is a tax on everything we do, make, wear, eat, drink, drive, import, export, and even breathe.

In opposing Smart Growth plans in your local community, I said the main goal was to eliminate cars, to be replaced with bikes, walking, and light rail trains. The Green New Deal calls for the elimination of the internal combustion engine. Always higher and higher taxes will be used to get the public to “voluntarily” reduce their use of such personal transportation choices. That’s how it works, slowly but steadily towards the goal.

I warned that under Smart Growth programs now taking over every city in the nation that single-family homes are a target for elimination, to be replaced by high-rise stack and pack apartments in the name of reducing energy use. That will include curfews on energy use, mandating power be turned off during certain hours.  Gradually, energy use of any kind will be continually reduced. The Green New Deal calls for government control of every single home, office and factory to tear down or retrofit them to comply with massive environmental energy regulations.

I warned that Agenda 21 Sustainable policy sought to drive those in rural areas off the farms and into the cities where they could be better controlled. Most recently I warned that the beef industry is a direct target for elimination. It will start with mandatory decreases in meat consumption until it disappears form our daily diet. The consumption of dairy will follow. Since the revelation of the Green New Deal the national debate is now over cattle emissions of methane and the drive to eliminate them from the planet. Controlling what we eat is a major part of the Green New Deal.

I warned that part of the plan for Agenda 2030 was “Zero Economic Growth.” The Green New Deal calls for a massive welfare plan where no one earns more than anyone else. Incentive to get ahead is dead. New inventions would disrupt their plan for a well-organized, controlled society. So, where will jobs come from after we have banned most manufacturing, shut down most stores, stopped single-family home construction, closed the airline industry, and severely regulated farms and the entire food industry? This is their answer to the hated free markets and individual choice.
In short, the Green New Deal represents the largest step ever taken by the Socialists/ Sustainablists forces that have been pushing Agenda 21 for 27 years.

But just as I was met with scoffing and charges of being a conspiracy scaremonger, the Green New Deal has now been met with scoffing and lack of concern. When I said the Green New Deal was the most radical step to enforce Agenda 21, many of my own supporters sent me snarky emails laughingly telling me that, “This is too nuts to ever be made into law!” Ha Ha!!!!

Then the laughing really started when the Republican-controlled Senate brought the Green New Deal up for a vote and the tally was 57-0. They didn’t even vote for it themselves, went the joke. Such a silly, stupid little girl, they said with great hilarity!

Leaders of many establishment conservative organizations in Washington, DC laughed too.

Well, the fools are the Republicans, and the establishment Conservative Movement in Washington, DC, which have failed to understand the determination of these forces behind that “silly little girl.” They set a trap and the Republicans marched right into it.

What really occurred is that this Green New Deal pushes the radical agenda way beyond anything ever imagined by Republicans and conservative leadership. In short, the Socialist Democrats made a classic negotiating tactic. They came to the table and delivered the most radical, complete, all-inclusive agenda for the total take-down of the American Republic, our free enterprise system, our property rights, and our way of life.

The Republicans were completely unprepared for it. Since they have ignored my warnings for 27 year, the Green New Deal sounded too nuts. Too far out. No one would fall for it. They laughed and dismissed it without a thought. The Senate vote showed them!

But watch what has happened since the Senate vote and the laughing began. One hundred Democrat Members of Congress have signed on to the House bill. Almost every one of the 20+ Democrat presidential candidates is talking about it. The news media is filled with stories on pieces and parts of the Green New Deal.  The discussion is growing.

But here’s the kicker – here’s where the laughing stops as the Republicans fall into the trap!!! Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz announced that he is working on the Green REAL Deal!!!  Says Gaetz – his bill will be more reasonable. In the Senate, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander is countering with his “Manhattan Project for Clean Energy.” The difference? Almost nothing! Senator Lindsey Graham said “We owe it to the country to have an alternative to the Green New Deal.” He said he was frustrated because large parts of the Republican Party still resist the idea of climate change legislation.

Sen. Graham and other faltering Republicans seem to not understand that any attempt to provide “an alternative to the Green New Deal” means an automatic endorsement of the radical and wrong-headed leftist environmental movement.

This is exactly what the Democrats where counting on. They made an outrageously radical proposal that moves the agenda miles down the road and then – to be more “reasonable” the stupid Republicans join right in with just a little smaller proposal. That’s how we lose our nation – by being “reasonable” to tyrants.

The fact is, almost 50% of the Green New Deal is already in the works. California has set a deadline to force homeowners to install wind and solar power as traditional energy sources of oil and gas will be phased out within ten years.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the City Council is moving to eliminate zoning protections for single-family homes, calling such protections “racist.” That same attack on single-family homes is taking place in the Oregon state legislature, the Chicago city council, and the Baltimore city council, to name just a few. This marks the drive to abolish private property rights.

Smart Growth programs are in every city in the nation – targeting the elimination of private cars for transportation, in favor of public buses, trains, and bikes — just as called for in the Green New Deal.

Landlords are being targeted as the drive is on for rent controls – even as government is piling on the costs through higher taxes and more and more controls on energy use. How long can the landlords hold out?

And now comes this news. As the Congress, news media, and presidential candidates debate the “good ideas” of Green New Deal, New York City Mayor William De Blasio has rushed to introduce his own version. It’s a bundle of  ten bills designed to meet the massive reduction of energy use called for in the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement which President Trump refused to join. Among its provisions are a ban on glass skyscrapers, hot dogs, and massive cut backs in energy use. Just as called for in the Green New Deal, the legislation seeks to eliminate more than one million cars from the road.

State by state, city by city, the radical provisions of the Green New Deal are being put into force – or at least openly considered. Controls on what we eat, how we live, and how we move about. Call it Agenda 21 or the Green New Deal –  it’s a disaster to our economy and our way of life. It’s happening at a rapid rate. So who is laughing now?

The challenge to us is, what do we do about it? The fact is, every political party is talking about taxes, healthcare, immigration, and gun control. But no party is addressing the pain of the ranchers who are under siege of the federal government that is taking their land and their water.

No political party is talking about the attack on our food supply such as the World Wildlife Fund’s take over of the beef industry. Yet we are getting reports daily now of dangers found in diseased beef.
No political party is talking about the over-taxing, and destruction of single-family homes and neighborhoods.

No political party is even discussing the destruction of our local system of government through the establishment of non-elected regional councils. These councils are eliminating political boundaries and the power of locally-elected representatives. The American system is disappearing in silence.

No political party is talking about the massive influence and control of the private, non-governmental organizations and planners that have invaded every single level of government, pushing these insane policies we now recognize in the Green New Deal.

NGOs are deeply entrenched in Congress, every state legislature and every county commission and city council.  There they lobby, push, demand, and intimidate to get your elected officials to make their private agendas law. The fact is they are not government agencies and they have no power unless your elected officials give it to them. And they have no intention of giving up their power.

The only way we can toss them into the street is to elect people who understand their tyrannical agenda and will take strong action to remove them from the halls of government.

Democrats empower them. Republicans are clueless. Libertarians are pathetically confused by the whole process, continuing to believe that Public/Private Partnerships are free enterprise.

The Constitution Party is the only party that understands what needs to be done.  You’ve never had a better opportunity to grow and change things and achieve your mission to restore the Constitution.

Do you, as a political party, want to get the attention of millions of Americans who are suffering from this government over-reach? Do you want to defeat the socialist democrats and the ‘Me Too’ Republicans?  Do you want to restore the American Republic?

Then get mad and be the party that takes on these issues. Thousands of victims are desperate to hear any elected official, any party, even mention these policies that are overrunning every single city, county, and state.

They are losing everything. They have been shut out of the American dream. And if they hear you take on these issues in upcoming campaigns at every level of government – they will flock to you. Americans are starting to wake up to these dangers and they desperately want a new voice that stands for freedom!

Run candidates for city council, county commission, and the state legislatures, who will articulate these issues. Make it your mission to run these enemies of freedom out of town on a rail.

Speak to these victims – these desperate Americans. Name the names of the NGOs – challenge them. Challenge their policies and their funding sources. Show the pubic what a danger they are. And then challenge your opponents as to why they are giving these NGOs such power and influence.

Elected officials keep referring to these NGOs and planners who live off the federal grants as “stakeholders.” They are not stakeholders! You are the stakeholoders. They are carpetbaggers – there to grab everything they can.

Paint a clear picture as to what life in American will be like under these policies. Will every choice Americans make in their lives be like a visit to the DMV? Make your opponents responsible for their own policies. Put their names to them. Make them defend their plans.

Help the people see the truth! That’s how you drain the swamp and restore the United States of America!

 

                    

Poverty, the Compassion Cartel, and Environmental Racism

August 5, 2019 by Tom DeWeese Environment, Featured, Property Rights, Sustainable Development, United Nations

In 2006, I was surprised to find myself sitting at a formal dinner in the middle of a 200-year-old debating society at Cambridge University in England. In a few minutes I, and five others were about to engage in a debate over the usefulness of the United Nations. But here, for a few minutes longer, at the long dinner table with the crisp, white tablecloth, I was sitting next to one of my fellow debaters, Salis Shetty, the head of the UN’s Millennium Project.

I had ignored him through most of the dinner, but with just a few minutes left before the debate I finally turned to him and said, “You realize you don’t have a prayer, don’t you?”

He looked at me and asked, “About what?”

I replied, “Ending poverty by 2015 through the use of redistribution of wealth.” (That was one of the eight listed goals of the UN’s Millennium Project, accepted by world leaders in 2000.)

He said, “Yes, I know.”

I began to talk with him about the need to help the poor escape from poverty on their own rather than being condemned to life-long bread lines. I talked about the need to establish private property rights as a means to build wealth. I mentioned that there was estimated to be almost $10 trillion in “dead capital”(property in the world that no one is allowed to own or invest in). That’s enough capital to help a lot of poor people break out of their dire situation.

Mr. Shetty looked at me as I made these observations and said, “Hernando de Soto.”

“Yes!”  That’s exactly whom I was quoting. De Soto is an economist from Peru who has made it his life’s work to help end poverty in the world by promoting private property ownership.

To my amazement Mr. Shetty looked at me and said, “I have associates who are looking on this (de Soto’s ideas) favorably.” Just as he said those words, the call came for us to head to the debating hall for our event. Of course we were on opposite sides.

As soon as the debate was over (I was outnumbered five to one, as usual) I made a beeline to Mr. Shetty and said, “You and I started a conversation and I want to finish it.” A few weeks later I traveled to New York City to meet with him in his UN office. During that meeting, he told me that, in his city in India, the local government was beginning to go over property records and officially register ownership, something that had never been done before. The result was that the economy of the community was starting to improve.

That is exactly the point that Hernando de Soto is making as he travels the world meeting with national leaders. The core reason for poverty is bad government. In most of the world, people may “own” their homes, perhaps via an underground economy, but they have no official records through the government to prove it. Without that official proof or registration, they have no means to use the property for equity loans and investment, so it is essentially dead capital, as de Soto has labeled it.

In his book, “The Mystery of Capital, Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else,” de Soto explains the major difference between the American system and most other nations of the world. Here, every single piece of privately held property — homes, even large equipment, is registered. In fact, the County Registrar’s office is one of the most important tools of freedom because it’s where every American can prove ownership of their property. Because of that system, average Americans can use their property as a tool to obtain loans. At least 60% of American companies have been started thorough equity loans on private property. And those privately held companies went on to employ about 60% of the American workforce. That is how private property ownership made the United States the richest nation in the world, almost over night. Lack of such a system is the reason much of the rest of the world fell into extreme poverty. In those cases the people have no way out of poverty and are forced to rely on government handouts. 
                 
De Soto’s book was called “The blueprint for a new industrial revolution,” by the Times of London. Today de Soto travels the world, meeting with world leaders who seek his guidance on how they can end poverty in their nations. Yet, when he tells them the secret is private ownership of property, many balk, telling him with a troubled smile, that the people in their nations “just aren’t ready for such a policy – they don’t understand the concept of private property ownership.” So the promise of a great new financial revolution that could spread wealth and freedom to every corner of the world never gets off the ground.

A few years ago I had the great privilege of a private meeting with Hernando de  Soto. He told me a story of one such meeting he had with a national leader. He’s been in enough meetings with world leaders that he can now almost anticipate what they are going to say. In this particular meeting, he said he knew the leader was going to tell him that his people just weren’t ready for private property ownership.  So, before the meeting, de Soto sent a team into the neighborhood around the presidential palace and knocked on doors to ask the people if they owned their homes. Every single one of them said yes, they owned their home. So de Soto’s team members asked each to produce any kind of evidence they might have to show that ownership. They did. It might have been a bill of sale, a receipt or even a copy of a will. In any case, they had something to prove their ownership in a country where property ownership was not supported by the government.

De Soto took copies of these items with him to the meeting, and before the discussion could begin about how the people of his country didn’t understand private property ownership, Hernando de Soto spread his evidence on the table and said to the leader, “your people understand property ownership, now let’s discuss how they can legally own it and build capital from it.”

There are three main reasons the world has not experienced de Soto’s new financial revolution. First is bad government led by dictators who refuse to give up their power over the people by supplying them the means for ending poverty. Poverty is very helpful to dictators because poor people are powerless to rise up against them. Poverty is also convenient to rouse the rabble against political opponents and spread fear.

Those who are barely hanging on from meal to meal are easy to scare with threats from any proposal that dares to differ from the redistribution schemes, even if, in the long run, that would be the best means for them to find a way out of poverty. The Left has used this fear effectively to build hate and resistance against those who promote free enterprise.

The second reason the world is sinking into ever greater poverty is the Environmental movement- the new-style dictatorship that actually prefers people to remain poor, living in mud huts with no infrastructure, running water or electricity. That, they claim, is sustainable.

Believe it or not, there is a worldwide Sustainable Development policy to prohibit funding of development projects in Third World countries if the projects don’t fit the environmental agenda. It’s called the Equator Principles. According to their own documents, the Equator Principles were established in association with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation in 2003. They have been adopted by at least 73 financial institutions around the world, covering over 70% of international projects such as dams, mines, and pipelines. At least three leading American financial institutions are associates of the Equator Principles, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.

In short, such policy actually leads to what can only be called Environmental Racism. A few white, rich people who live in luxury in their first-world nations have made a determination that some who now live in mud huts with no indoor power and no clean running water, must stay that way because these elites have determined it is more ‘sustainable” for the planet.

Stopping development for the poor has become a major drive by Sustainablists. At the Earth Summit in 1992, Chairman Maurice Strong famously said “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrial nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Zero economic growth is the announced goal to assure their well-ordered sustainable society stays dormant, thereby assuring their control. Of course, the result will only be more poor people – all in the name of saving the environment.

But fear not, these same power mongers aren’t satisfied to condemn just those already living in poverty. Apparently they are so determined to control every human action on the planet that they are equally happy to condemn the rest of us to such a future – for the planet, of course. Author Ted Trainer has written a book entitled “Transition to a Sustainable and Just World,” which is really nothing more than a blueprint for establishing Marxist principles into your local community. In the book Trainer writes, “The alternative has to be the simpler way, a society based on non-affluent lifestyles within mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies under the local participatory control and not driven by market forces or the profit motive, and with no economic growth. There must be an enormous cultural change away from competitive individualistic acquisitiveness.” The call for zero economic growth was also heard at the UN’s Rio+20 Summit in 2012.  Trainer’s motto for us all is that “you must live on less!” That is their definition of Sustainable Development. Of course they only mean this future for you and me, not the powerful elite.

Such ideas of destroying human civilization are, in fact, rampant throughout the Green movement. Paul Ehrlich, professor of Population Studies at Stanford University demanded that “a massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” Apparently, the advocates of such a desire to make us all poor have missed a very important fact. Only in wealthy nations do people have enough money and time to worry about protecting the environment. The poor worry only about one thing – survival. It is also in the poorest areas where population numbers explode. In rich, secure nations populations are actually going down. So it would seem logical that if one wants to protect the environment and reduce populations then Capitalism would be the economic system of choice. But of course, none of this is really about helping the poor or the ecology. It’s about power.

The third reason for depressed economies and a growing number of poor is what I call the “Compassion Cartel.” Government, private charities and foundations have made poverty big business. It’s the excuse for nearly every governmental spending program. Help the poor! Tax the rich! How dare they get wealthy while others suffer? And the preferred way to eliminate poverty is redistribution of wealth. It’s easy to convince someone to donate to a cause when emotions and guilt are employed. Reason and rational thought take a backseat.

Back to my debate in Cambridge: After the debate was over, the hosts sponsored a reception. As I entered the door, I was confronted by one of the students, who asked with puzzlement – “sir, you really don’t believe in redistribution of wealth?”

I answered, “No, it’s theft.”

And she said, “But if you have more than you need, shouldn’t you share it with someone who needs it?”

I said, “Why should I?”

She looked like I had slapped her. Here she was, one of the bright young students at one of the great schools in the world, and she had never heard an argument against redistribution of wealth or for a free market. As I spoke to her, giving detail after detail about how a free market and property can eliminate poverty, more than 50 other students began to gather around.

I explained that if I take money from each of them today to feed someone more unfortunate, then tomorrow they will need another meal –and again the next day, and the next. You have gained nothing in the battle to help them, other than to delay their agony another day. At best you have offered a band aid. At worse, such policy doesn’t prevent poverty. Something else is causing that poverty and you haven’t addressed it. So, tomorrow there will be more poor, and more the next. And each time you will be forced to provide more and more aid from your now dwindling funds, until one day you too may find yourself forced to be in the receiving line. When I finished my explanation there was a moment of silence and then the young student said, “What an interesting point of view. How can I learn more?”

I wanted to scream “Economics 101!”

Today, anyone who points out such economic facts in a failed welfare system is called heartless and probably racist. What kind of evil person calls helping the poor theft?  Well, take a good look at the world we live in. According to Mr. Shetty’s Millennium Project, there are currently 1.2 billion people living in poverty. Fifty thousand deaths a day occur worldwide as a result of poverty. Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases. More than half the world’s population lives on less that $2 per day and 800 million people go to bed hungry every night.

To combat all of this we have the Compassion Cartel. We have thousands of charitable organizations and faith-based programs designed to feed the children, along with education programs designed to create awareness of poverty and starvation. Their ads run on television nightly pulling at our heartstrings to “do something.” Most of these charities have built huge private organizations, with highly paid administrators working out of impressive buildings with large staffs. That doesn’t include the huge government programs operating at an even larger scale on your tax dollars. As I said, poverty is big business.

Every politician preaches the gospel of helping the poor and as a result, more than half of every American’s pay check disappears into government coffers even before it hits our own pockets. Billions of dollars of aid pour into federal and international programs to distribute to countries around the world to help feed the poor. Poverty reductions have been set. Goals have been announced, Deadlines for ending poverty have been determined and every national and international leader has signed documents to pledge that poverty must be eradicated. In 2015 it was called Agenda 2030. In 2019 it’s called the Green New Deal.

What is the result of this worldwide focus on poverty? Well, we have more poor! It’s a growth industry. Why? Because not one of these programs offers a single plan to allow the poor to help themselves. Instead, the Compassion Cartel has sentenced every single poor person in the world to a future of life-long breadlines, allowing them to be victims of demagogues, con artists and harsh, hopeless, futureless lives. There is no consideration for their goals and dreams and no real understanding of the hopelessness of their lives. And the middle class of once wealthy nations like the United States is quickly dissolving under the burden of the redistribution schemes. Result – more poor in our once proud nation.

If the self-proclaimed compassion industry had true concern for the poor, it   would begin an international drive to empower the poor by allowing them to build their own wealth – thereby getting themselves off of the breadlines.

Hernando de Soto has offered that way. He has called for the establishment of private property rights that would allow people around the world to build personal wealth and the ability to invest in new enterprises that would, in return, employ more, help build infrastructure to allow still more to have electricity, heat, cooling and clean water in their homes, improving health and the quality of their lives. Step by step these improvements would lead to creating more wealth worldwide, reducing the burden on the rest of us, and in turn, help all of us build even more wealth, strengthening quality of life. Help the poor help themselves and it will also help you. That is a winning compassion for all.

But to take such a step would require a rejection of socialism and an embracing of capitalism. And that, says the Compassion Cartel, can never be allowed, because that would lead to empowering individuals to control their own lives.

Instead, in the name of compassion, sustainable oppression in a well-ordered society is so much more efficient.

   Tom DeWeese tom@americanpolicy.org
 

Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence.

Growing Drive to Destroy the Beef Industry

Posted June 10, 2019 by Tom DeWeese in Environment, Farming, Featured, Sustainable Development

The American beef industry has long been a tasty target of the environmentalists and their allies in the animal rights movement. To understand the reason is to know that protecting the environment is not the goal, rather the excuse in a determined drive for global power. Their selected tactic is to control the land, water, energy, and population of the Earth. To achieve these ends requires, among other things, the destruction of private property rights and elimination of every individual’s ability to make personal lifestyle choices, including personal diet.

Of course, no totalitarian-bound movement would ever put their purpose in such direct terms. That’s where the environmental protection excuse comes in. Instead, American cattle producers are simply assured that no one wants to harm their industry, just make it safer for the environment. The gun industry might recognize that such assurance sounds a bit familiar. Same source, same tactics, same goals.

So the offered solution to “fix” the beef industry is “sustainable certification”. All the cattle growers have to do, they are assured, is follow a few simple rules and all will be fine, peaceful and profitable. Enter the players: the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), and the U.S, Department of Agriculture.

First, let’s reveal the Sustainablists’ stated problems with the beef industry. What’s not sustainable about raising beef? According to the environmental “experts”, there are ten reasons why the meat industry does not meet sustainable standards:

1. Deforestation – the claim is that farm animals require considerably more land than crops to produce food. The World Hunger Program calculated that if the land was used to grow grain and soy instead of cattle the land could provide a vegan diet to 6 billion people. Do you get that – a vegan diet! The fact is, most grazing land in the U.S. cannot be used for growing food crops because the soil wouldn’t sustain crops.
2. Fresh Water – they claim that the America diet requires 4,200 gallons of water per day, including animal drinking water, irrigation of crops, processing, washing, etc. Whereas a vegan diet only requires 300 gallons per day. Apparently they don’t plan to irrigate the land to grow wheat or to wash the vegetables.
3. Waste Disposal – factory farms house hundreds of thousands of animals that produce waste. They claim these giant livestock farms produce more than 130 times the amount of waste humans do. The interesting thing about this detail is that the actual sustainable policies they are enforcing to fix this problem destroy the small family farms in favor of the very giant corporate factory farms they profess to oppose. In addition, those global corporations which join the Green cabal have the ability to ignore many of the “sustainable” restrictions, unlike the small, family farms that are much better at protecting the environment on their own.
4. Energy Consumption – For the steak to end up on your plate, say the Greens, the cow has to consume massive amounts of energy along the way as the cattle are transported thousands of miles to slaughter, market, and refrigerate. And let’s not forget, the meat must then be cooked! Well this transportation argument is a direct result of the existence of a limited few packing companies in cahoots with the Green Lords that dictate the market as they work against a more decentralized, local industry. Meanwhile, last time I checked, Tofurkey – made from soy — also has to be cooked!
5. Food Productivity – say the Greens, food productivity of farmland is falling behind the population and the only option, besides cutting the population, is to cut back on meat consumption and convert grazing lands to food crops. As noted in point 1, most grazing land cannot be converted. Everything dealing with the sustainable argument is based on some unseen crisis. Yet we do not have a world-wide food shortage or pending famine. In fact, the media is persistently reporting “price-depressing crop surpluses.” The only places where such shortages may exist are in totalitarian societies where government is controlling food production and supplies – kind of like the Green’s plan for sustainable beef.
6. Global Warming – here we go! Say the Greens, global warming is driven by energy consumption and cows are energy guzzlers. But there’s more to the story. Cow flatulence! A single dairy cow, they claim, produces an average of 75 kilos of methane annually. Meanwhile, environmentalists want to return the rangelands to historic species, including buffalo. And a buffalo, grazing on the same grass on the same lands would emit about the same amount of methane. It’s a non-issue.
7. Loss of Biodiversity – What are some of the examples the Greens give for loss of biodiversity? Poaching and black market sale of bushmeat including everything from elephants and chimpanzees to birds??? Please explain what this has to do with the American cattle industry – other than a pure hatred of anyone who eats meat of any kind. And that, of course, is the argument from the animal rights/vegan wing of the Green movement that is leading the assault on cattle.
8. Grassland Destruction – apparently this is based on the Green premise that domesticated animals like cows replaced bison and antelope, which, in turn, caused a loss of biodiversity of species. I’ve got two pieces of news for you. First, the Native Americans so revered by the Greens, hunted bison before the white man arrived. Take a trip to Bozeman, Montana and see the cliff where they used to run entire herds to their death, not just selectively choosing a few to eat. Second, the Greens, not the cattle ranchers, forced the reintroduction of wolves, and that has caused a near annihilation of the antelope and elk herds.
9. Soil Erosion – the Greens claim that U.S. pastureland is overgrazed, causing soil erosion. In truth, a great many of today’s cattlemen are third and fourth generation on their land. Those ranches could not have existed for over a hundred years if they were so careless in taking care of the land. It is vital to their survival to assure the land stays in good shape. Of course, an environmentalist who has never worked a ranch or farm and rarely comes out of his New York high-rise might not know that.
10. Lifestyle Disease – this is my favorite of the reasons why beef is supposedly unsustainable. In short, it’s because of stupid people! This one is blamed on “excessive” consumption of meat, combined with environmental pollution and “lack of exercise” leading to strokes, cancer, diabetes and heart attacks. So it’s the beef industries fault that people eat too much and refuse to exercise. The solution – ban meat consumption. Yet, doctors are now realizing that meat eating is not the problem, carbs are.

So, these are the ten main reasons why it’s charged that beef is unsustainable and must be ruled, regulated and frankly, eliminated. These are charges brought by anti-beef vegans who want all beef consumption stopped. In cahoots, are global Sustainablists who seek to stop the private ownership and use of land, all hiding under the blanket excuse of environmental protection.

To bring the cattle industry into line with this world view the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has accepted the imposition of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, which is heavily influenced, if not controlled, by the World Wildlife Fund, one of the top three most powerful environmental organizations in the world and a leader in the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which basically sets the rules for global environmental policy.

This is the same World Wildlife Fund that issued a report saying, “Meat consumption is devastating some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable regions, due to the vast amount of land needed to produce animal feed.” The report went on to say that, to save the Earth, it was vital that we change human consumption habits away from meat. As pointed out earlier, the fact is most land used for grazing isn’t capable of growing crops for food. Further, to have the WWF involved in any part of the beef industry is simply suicidal.

It’s interesting to note that the “Principles for Sustainable Beef Farming,” issued for the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef by the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Working Group (SAI), follow the exact guidelines originally presented in the United Nations’ Agenda 21/ Sustainable Development blueprint. Agenda 21 divided these into three categories including, Social Equity, Economic Prosperity and Ecological Integrity. Using almost identical terms, the SAI plan for Sustainable Beef uses the following headings for each section of its plan: Economic Sustainability, Social Sustainability, and Environmental Sustainability.

Under Social Sustainability are such items as Human Rights, Worker Environment, Business Integrity, and Worker Competence (that means that workers are required to have the proper, acceptable sustainable attitudes and beliefs). Under the heading Environmental Sustainability are Climate Change, Waste, and Biodiversity, for the reasons already discussed.

Regulations using these principles impose a political agenda that ignores the fact that smaller, independent cattle growers have proven to be the best stewards of their own land and that for decades have produced the highest grade of beef product in the world. Instead, to continue to produce they will be required to submit to centralized control by regulations that will never end and will always increase in costs and needless waste of manpower.

To follow the sustainable rules and be officially certified, the cattle growers must agree to have much of the use of their land reduced to provide for wildlife habitat. There are strict controls over water use and grazing areas. This forces the growers to have smaller herds, making the process more expensive and economically unviable for the industry. In addition, there is a new layer of industry and government inspectors, creating a massive bureaucratic overreach, causing yet more costs for the growers.

The Roundtable rules are now enforced through the packing companies. You see, the cattlemen actually have no direct market. Instead, they first bring their product to feedlots for final preparation. The feedlots then sell the cattle to the packers. The packers are the ones who then have direct contact with stores, restaurants and other entities that actually buy the beef. The packers are a major force in the Roundtable, working side by side with the WWF, and so dictate the rules to the feedlots to comply with sustainable certification for the cattle they will buy from the growers. If the beef they obtain isn’t grown according to the sustainable beef principles then the packers refuse to buy it. That has quickly put smaller feedlots out of business. Consequently, it also destroys the cattle growers who rely on the feedlots to take their product.

There are only four main packing companies in the United States. These are Cargill, Tysons, JBS and Marfrig. These packers have already successfully taken control of the hog and poultry industries. Tysons is now raising its chickens in China to ship here. JBS and Marfrig are both from Brazil. It’s interesting to note that one of their first tactics was to remove the country of origin labeling from the packaging so that consumers have no idea where their product is coming from. So as the packers force their expensive, unnecessary, and unworkable sustainable certification on American cattlemen, they are systematically bringing in cheaper product from other countries that don’t necessarily adhere to strict, sanitary, safe production American producers are known for. As a result, there is a noticeable rise in news reports of recalls of diseased chicken and beef in American grocery stores.

Some cattle growers have tried to fight back by creating new packing companies to compete and provide an honest market. However, the costs to do so are huge, as high as $50 million. One such company called Northern Beef Packers was formed, using all the latest state of the art, high-grade processing. The four established packers reacted by drastically reducing their prices to the grocers, thereby destroying any hope of establishing a market for the new packing company.

This then is the situation that is threatening the American beef industry. If one reads the documents and statements from the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations Environment Program and others involved, it is not hard to realize that the true goal is not to produce a better grade of beef, but to ban it altogether. The question must then be asked, why is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association allowing this to happen, and indeed, is joining with the Sustainable Beef Roundtable to force these policies on their members?

The answer is actually quite tragic. American ranchers, farmers and livestock growers have been targets of the environmental and animal rights movements for years. They are beaten down. Like the rest of us they just want to be left alone to work their farms and herds like their forefathers have done for more than a century. But the pressure is growing day by day. So, they have come to believe that if they just go along – put the sustainable label on their product — then this pressure will stop. In short, they see it as a pressure valve.

The reality is it’s not going to go away because the goal is not environmental protection, rather the destruction of their industry and control through what the UN calls the reorganization of human society. The attack has now grown to major proportions with the Green New Deal. Beef eaters have no place in the sustainable paradise of city apartment dwellers who accept government controls to choose for them what they are permitted to eat.

There are efforts to fight back. A group of cattlemen has organized under the banner of R-CALF (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund) and they have managed to slow the Sustainable capture of the industry.  But the packers’ control of the industry is a major roadblock if the cattlemen can’t reach their market. R-CALF has filed Abuse of Conduct suits to shed light on the anti-trust activities of the monopoly tactics of the packers.

However, the beef industry cannot recover on its own. There must be outrage from the consumers who are facing higher prices, possible inferior meat, and the danger of disease because of this sustainable tyranny. If you want the right to your own food choices instead of the dictatorship of radical Greens, then get mad. Demand that “Country of Origin” labels be put on all beef products so you know where your food comes from. Demand that the Department of Agriculture rejects this sustainable myth and protects the American free market that has always provided superior products.
The so-called sustainable policy is not a free market. It is a government-sanctioned monopoly that is just short of a criminal enterprise. Stand with American farmers and cattlemen. If Americans don’t fight back now we will lose the freedom to our own dinner plates in the name of sustainable lies.

Tom DeWeese tom@americanpolicy.org

Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence.

Shocking Update on the Green New Deal!

By Tom DeWeese

Yes, the Green New Deal was voted down in the Senate. But that is only the beginning of the fight – not the end.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal has hit this country like a ton of bricks – and it’s the best thing that has ever happened to our efforts to expose the tyranny of Agenda 21 policies.

Now, I have discovered an explosive new document hidden on a French Non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) website.

Yes, France has its own Green New Deal, and foreign NGO’s are often more open and honest in their intentions than American NGOs who hide their real goals in innocent-sounding rhetoric.

And remember, these Agenda 21/Green New Deal policies are GLOBAL. The whole world is targeted to enforce these policies.

Here are just a few of the details this French green group – called Novethic – has revealed of the insane regulations that will be the used to enforce our own Green New Deal. (I’m quoting them directly from the document):

• “New single family home construction, except trailers, prohibited. New buildings must be exclusively condos with a maximum per capita living area of 320 square feet.”

 Remember, I warned that under Smart Growth programs now taking over every city in the nation that single-family homes are a target for elimination, to be replaced by high-rise stack and pack apartments in the name of reducing energy use. The Green New Deal calls for government control of every single home, office and factory to be torn down or retrofit them to comply with massive environmental energy regulations.

• “For short trips less than 3 miles, the standard should be ‘soft transport’ (bicycles)… Mandatory fixed working hours in order to simplify the implementation of public transport and carpooling.”

In opposing Smart Growth plans in your local community, I said the main goal was to eliminate cars, to be replaced with bikes, walking, and light rail trains. The Green New Deal calls for the elimination of the internal combustion engine.

• “Quotas to limit the consumption of imported products. Especially coffee, chocolate, exotic fruits…ban on substitutable processed foods, sodas, all junk food, hamburgers, pizzas, pasta, chicken nuggets…Meat consumption to decrease by 10% per year from 2020 to 55 pounds per person per year in 2030…the consumption of dairy products will follow the same trend.”

Most recently I warned that the beef industry is a direct target for elimination. It will start with mandatory decreases in meat consumption until it disappears form our daily diet. The consumption of dairy will follow. Since the revelation of the Green New Deal, the national debate is now over cattle emissions of methane and the drive to eliminate them from the planet. Controlling what we eat is a major part of the Green New Deal.  

The Sustainablists have boldly thrown off their cloaking devices and admitted that their goal isn’t just “voluntary environmental protection.”

Instead, they are now openly revealing that their real goal is socialism and global control, just as I’ve been warning about for these past twenty seven years.

Now they are determined to take congressional action to finally make it the law of the land.

Keep in mind, each of the quotes in bold above is from a real document detailing the extent of these tyrannical policies intended to destroy our culture, control how you live, and what you eat.

Over these years elected officials have listened to the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, ICLEI, the American Planning Association, and many more, as they assured that their plans were just environmental protection - just good policy for future generations. Well, now the truth is right in front of you. There is no question of who and what is behind this. And no doubt as to what the final result will be.

The Green New Deal has laid bare the horrible reality of my warnings. New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has unwittingly given you and me the weapon we have needed to destroy Agenda 21.

Finally Americans across the country are talking about it. Now many more can see the truth to my dire warnings. Now is our time to strike with everything we have to stop it.

I am leading that fight. I have won some incredible victories against them to protect property rights and push them back. But I am facing a massively funded enemy. Your support is what keeps me going.

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