Capitolism: Harnessing the Power of Stupid

[CNHT]

Here Comes the U.N. Again!By Henry Lamb
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Few people know that back in 1970, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) launched an ambitious program to establish a global network of "Biosphere Reserves." This program, called "Man and the Biosphere," or MAB, is not the result of a U.N. treaty; it is simply an agreement among participating nations to manage designated land masses according to principles and strategies dictated by a UNESCO committee.

In the United States, 47 U.N. Biosphere Reserves were designated without the approval of Congress or of any state legislature. While UNESCO continues to expand the global network of 440 reserves in 97 countries, the last three areas to be designated in the U.S. were blocked by local opposition. Proponents of this program were disappointed, but not dissuaded. Here they come again.

Washington insiders speculate that President Bush rejoined UNESCO in hopes of appeasing his critics, who chastised him for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court. MAB enthusiasts are ecstatic and are planning a new effort to reinvigorate the MAB program in the United States.

A Biosphere Reserve is a massive land area divided into three zones: core wilderness areas, buffer zones and a transitional area. The plan is to continually enlarge each of the zones. For example, the Southern Appalachian MAB (SAMAB) was originally designated to be the Smoky Mountains National Park, an area of 517,000 acres. It has now grown to embrace an area stretching from near Birmingham, Ala., to near Roanoke, Va.
Why should local residents be concerned about this program? Because it empowers another layer of non-elected government officials to dictate land-use policy.

Eighty-four percent of the land in SAMAB is privately owned. This fact is an obstacle to MAB planners. Much of the SAMAB program is designed to seduce or coerce state and local governments to impose land-use policies that originate with the UNESCO committee in Paris, France.

Each of the 47 Biosphere Reserves has an extensive network of government agencies and environmental groups working to advance strategic plans that conform to the vision of land-use policy established by United Nations agencies.

These policies ignore two fundamental principles that distinguish the United States from most other nations. Private-property rights are, or should be, sacred; and public land-use policy should be enacted only by elected officials who are directly accountable to the people governed by it.

Both of these principles are anathema to the United Nations and to the agencies, organizations and individuals who work to advance Agenda 21 and Biosphere Reserves. They have been successful because they work quietly, behind the pretext of protecting the environment. Working people rarely know what's happening until after the new policies are in place, when they discover that something they would like to do with their property is already prohibited.

The ultimate goal of the Man and the Biosphere Program is described in the U.N.'s Global Biodiversity Assessment (page 993), which cites the Wildlands Project as "central" to the transformation of "at least half" of the United States into interconnected core wilderness areas so wildlife can move, uninterrupted by humans, from Mexico to Canada. Core wilderness areas are surrounded by buffer zones, which are surrounded by transitional areas where people live in "sustainable communities."

Since the Wilderness Act originally designated 9 million acres of wilderness in the U.S., the wilderness system has now grown to 106 million acres in 44 states.

The U.N. plan seeks to eventually eliminate all private property so government can manage land-use and natural resources to achieve social, economic and environmental equity, which is the essence of "sustainable development." This goal and the plans to achieve it are published throughout U.N. literature.

The people who implement these programs at the local level rarely admit, or even know, that the policies they embrace are a part of a global plan. When confronted, their response is often ridicule of the questioner, suggesting "blue-helmet conspiracy" paranoia.

But when confronted with the actual U.N. and federal documents that outline the global plans, agencies have no explanation, and, as they did in the last three attempts to designate additional Biosphere Reserves in the United States, they abandon the plan, and withdraw to regroup and form another strategy.

Virtually every community in America is under some form of transformation scheme aimed at imposing the principles and recommendations of Agenda 21. Organized, determined, knowledgeable, local opposition is the only way to stop it.

Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.

###

And that my friends is how this secession nonsense plays right into their hands...

[Lasse]

That's the beauty of the market, you don't need to be able to figure out how the product will get to you it just does.

That's why the eggheads loved communism, the planned economy, they thought that it needed to be controlled. And of course they were the ones that should decide.

Whew.. I was worried about how many people here might actually agree with EA that capitalism is evil...and not their choice of system.

Sounds like the socialist/communist on a different forum I frequent. I explained to them that many parts of the government can be replaced by private businesses in a free market, that didn't go over to well. They insisted that we need the FDA because pharmaceutical companies would try to kill off their customers by putting poison in their drugs. I specifically told them that killing customers was absurd, because it is one of the worst business decisions you could make. How could it be profitable?

I've heard many good arguments against big business; that has to be the most patently ridiculous argument I've ever heard. It makes no logical sense at all.

But then again, I guess they think pharmaceutical companies are all part of the reptoid zionist conspiracy to rule the world. That's one of few equally sensible backgrounds I can think of to back up that previous statement..

[EthanAllen]

I don't think capitalism is evil per se. I think the privileges that lead to regulatory cartelization that is inherent to capitalism, as capitalist try to protect their profits, leads to an unjust system where capital commands labor.

Why do you think that "privileges that lead to regulatory cartelization" are inherent to capitalism? Couldn't we have a non-evil capitalism by simply getting rid of the privileges?

Yes, it is called "mutualism" or free market, anti-capitalism.

http://mutualist.org/

excerpt:

Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S.  It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society.  It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system.  As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."

     Other anarchist subgroups, and the libertarian left generally, share these ideas to some extent.  Whether known as "dual power" or "social counterpower," or "counter-economics," alternative social institutions are part of our common vision.  But they are especially central to mutualists' evolutionary understanding.

     Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists.  Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself.  We are not opposed to money or exchange.  We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use.  We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid.  The "market," in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept.  What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

     Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers' cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers' cooperatives.  To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker's natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

     Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom "petty bourgeois" is a swear word.  But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans.  Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them.  They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system.  But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.

     Mutualism is not "reformist," as that term is used pejoratively by more militant anarchists.  Nor is it necessarily pacifistic, although many mutualists are indeed pacifists.  The proper definition of reformism should hinge, not on the means we use to build a new society or on the speed with which we move, but on the nature of our final goal.  A person who is satisfied with a kinder, gentler version of capitalism or statism, that is still recognizable as state capitalism, is a reformist.  A person who seeks to eliminate state capitalism and replace it with something entirely different, no matter how gradually, is not a reformist.

     "Peaceful action" simply means not deliberately provoking the state to repression, but rather doing whatever is possible (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) to "build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" before we try to break the shell.  There is nothing wrong with resisting the state if it tries, through repression, to reverse our progress in building the institutions of the new society.  But revolutionary action should meet two criteria:  1) it should have strong popular support; and 2) it should not take place until we have reached the point where peaceful construction of the new society has reached its limits within existing society.

[CNHT]

Yes, it is called "mutualism" or free market, anti-capitalism.

uuuuuuurrrrrgh

[EthanAllen]

That's the beauty of the market, you don't need to be able to figure out how the product will get to you it just does.

That's why the eggheads loved communism, the planned economy, they thought that it needed to be controlled. And of course they were the ones that should decide.

Whew.. I was worried about how many people here might actually agree with EA that capitalism is evil...and not their choice of system.

Sounds like the socialist/communist on a different forum I frequent. I explained to them that many parts of the government can be replaced by private businesses in a free market, that didn't go over to well. They insisted that we need the FDA because pharmaceutical companies would try to kill off their customers by putting poison in their drugs. I specifically told them that killing customers was absurd, because it is one of the worst business decisions you could make. How could it be profitable?

In fact, the FDA is regulation used to "cartelize" profits for big pharma because it raises the barriers to entry for competition.

So both the collectivists and individualists are wrong.

[EthanAllen]

I don't think capitalism is evil per se. I think the privileges that lead to regulatory cartelization that is inherent to capitalism, as capitalist try to protect their profits, leads to an unjust system where capital commands labor.

Why do you think that "privileges that lead to regulatory cartelization" are inherent to capitalism? Couldn't we have a non-evil capitalism by simply getting rid of the privileges?

Yes, it is called "mutualism" or free market, anti-capitalism.

Your mutualism sounds pretty good to me. Now what if, in your mutualist society, a GM type company wants to build automobiles. As long as they receive no special privileges from the state, would their existence and participation be welcome?

A GM type of company wouldn't be possible in a mutualist society. There would be no limited liability protection to pool capital, there would be no IP law, there would be no usurious profits available to accumulate the type of capital needed to build centralize manufacturing like it.

[EthanAllen]

Im sorry Ethan, but my eyes glass over as soon as you start typing.  Its magical, and I cant explain it.

You mean worse than Joe Haas?

[CNHT]

But if someone can figure out how to overcome these obstacles, are they free to open a GM plant in your shire?

[EthanAllen]

A GM type of company wouldn't be possible in a mutualist society. There would be no limited liability protection to pool capital, there would be no IP law, there would be no usurious profits available to accumulate the type of capital needed to build centralize manufacturing like it.

But if someone can figure out how to overcome these obstacles, are they free to open a GM plant in your shire?

Isn't the more interesting question "well how are we going to build cars?"

[CNHT]

But if someone can figure out how to overcome these obstacles, are they free to open a GM plant in your shire?

It is funny, isn't it? He simply runs away from questions that are uncomfortable for him to answer.

On the other hand the obstacles truly are significant. The "no limited liability protection to pool capital" is huge. I wish more right libertarians would give thought to this issue.

...if anyone knew what it meant....

[EthanAllen]

But if someone can figure out how to overcome these obstacles, are they free to open a GM plant in your shire?

It is funny, isn't it? He simply runs away from questions that are uncomfortable for him to answer.

On the other hand the obstacles truly are significant. The "no limited liability protection to pool capital" is huge. I wish more right libertarians would give thought to this issue.

I told you in the spirit of give and take that I would be willing to discuss the question you had. It was a lame response on your part.

So sometimes better than others. Did I communicate that effectively?

[CNHT]

Everyone uses your product 'at their own risk'.

[error]

Because the government prevents you from being sued for the actions of the corporations you own.

[error]

What is "No," Alex?

[EthanAllen]

But if someone can figure out how to overcome these obstacles, are they free to open a GM plant in your shire?

It is funny, isn't it? He simply runs away from questions that are uncomfortable for him to answer.

On the other hand the obstacles truly are significant. The "no limited liability protection to pool capital" is huge. I wish more right libertarians would give thought to this issue.

...if anyone knew what it meant....

This is why you're a dilettante Jane. I mile wide and an inch deep.