The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements of the outcome, are drafted with what is called “transparent impenetrability”. The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so what are we complaining about?

Since the Chairman’s note is very long, I shall summarize the main points:

Finance:

Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred of the provisions in the Chairman’s note will impose huge financial costs on the nations of the West.

The world-government Secretariat:

In all but name, the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”.

Bureaucracy:

Hundreds of new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach. In an explicit mirroring of the European Union’s method of enforcing the will of its unelected Kommissars on the groaning peoples of that benighted continent, the civil servants of nation states will come to see themselves as servants of the greater empire of the Secretariat, carrying out its ukases and diktats whatever the will of the nation states’ governments. Many of the new bureaucracies are disguised as “capacity-building in developing countries”. This has nothing to do with growing the economies or industries of poorer nations. It turns out to mean the installation of hundreds of bureaucratic offices answerable to the Secretariat in numerous countries around the world. Who pays? You do, gentle taxpayer. Babylon, Byzantium, the later Ottoman Empire, the formidable bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, the vast empire of 27,000 paper-shufflers at the European Union: add all of these together and multiply by 100 and you still do not reach the sheer size, cost, power and reach of these new subsidiaries of the Secretariat.

In addition to multiple new bureaucracies in every one of the 193 states parties to the Convention, there will be an Adaptation Framework Body, a Least Developed Countries’ Adaptation Planning Body, an Adaptation Committee, Regional Network Centers, an International Center to Enhance Adaptation Research, National Adaptation Institutions, a Body to Clarify Assumptins and Conditions in National Greenhouse-Gas Emission Reductions Pledges, a Negotiating Body for an Overall Level of Ambition for Aggregate Emission Reductions and Individual Targets, an Office to Revise Guidelines for National Communications, a Multilateral Communications Process Office, a Body for the Process to Develop Modalities and Guidelines for the Compliance Process, a Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions by Developed Countries, a Body to Supervise the Process for Understanding Diversity of Mitigation Actions Submitted and Support Needed, a Body to Develop Modalities for the Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, an Office of International Consultation and Analysis; an Office to Conduct a Work Program for Development of Various Modalities and Guidelines; a network of Developing Countries’ National Forest Strategy Action Plan Offices; a network of National Forest Reference Emission Level And/Or Forest Reference Level Bodies; a network of National Forest Monitoring Systems; an Office of the Work Program on Agriculture to Enhance the Implementation of Article 4, Paragraph 1(c) of the Convention Taking Into Account Paragraph 31; one or more Mechanisms to Establish a Market-Based Approach to Enhance the Cost-Effectiveness Of And To Promote Mitigation Actions; a Forum on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Work Program Office to Address the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; a Body to Review the Needs of Developing Countries for Financial Resources to Address Climate Change and Identify Options for Mobilization of Those Resources; a Fund in Addition to the Copenhagen Green Fund; an Interim Secretariat for the Design Phase of the New Fund; a New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Body to Launch a Process to Further Define the Roles and Functions of the New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism; a Technology Executive Committee; a Climate Technology Center and Network; a Network of National, Regional, Sectoral and International Technology Centers, Networks, Organization and Initiatives; Twinning Centers for Promotion of North-South, South-South and Triangular Partnerships with a View to Encouraging Co-operative Research and Development; an Expert Workshop on the Operational Modalities of the Technology Mechanism; an International Insurance Facility; a Work Program Body for Policy Approaches and Positive Incentives on Issues Relating to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries; a Body to Implement a Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures; and a Body to Develop Modalities for the Operationalization of the Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures.

The world government’s powers:

The Secretariat will have the power not merely to invite nation states to perform their obligations under the climate-change Convention, but to compel them to do so. Nation states are to be ordered to collect, compile and submit vast quantities of information, in a manner and form to be specified by the secretariat and its growing army of subsidiary bodies. Between them, they will be given new powers to verify the information, to review it and, on the basis of that review, to tell nation states what they can and cannot do.

Continuous expansion:

The verb “enhance”, in its various forms, occurs at least 28 times in the Chairman’s note, Similar verbs, such as “strengthen” and “extend”, and adjectives such as “scaled-up”, “new” and “additional”, are also frequently deployed, particularly in relation to funding at the expense of Western taxpayers. If all of the “enhancements” proposed in the note were carried out, the cost would comfortably exceed the annual $100 billion (or, for that matter, the 1.5% of GDP) that the note mentions as the cost to the West over the coming decade.

Intellectual property in inventions:

Holders of patents, particularly in fields related to “global warming” and its mitigation, will be obliged to transfer the benefits of their inventiveness to developing countries without payment of royalties. This is nowhere explicitly stated in the Chairman’s note, but the transfer of technology is mentioned about 20 times in the draft, suggesting that the intention is still to carry out the explicit provision in the defunct Copenhagen Treaty draft of 15 September 2009 to this effect.

Insurance:

The Secretariat proposes, in effect, to interfere so greatly in the operation of the worldwide insurance market that it will cease to be a free market, with the usual severely adverse consequences to everyone in that market.

The free market:

The failed Copenhagen Treaty draft stipulated that the “government” that would be established would have the power to set the rules of all formerly free markets. There would be no such thing as free markets any more. In Cancun, the Chairman’s note merely says that various “market mechanisms” may be exploited by the Secretariat and by the parties to the Convention: but references to these “market mechanisms” are frequent enough to suggest that the intention remains to stamp out free markets worldwide.

Knowledge is power:

The Chairman’s note contains numerous references to a multitude of new as well as existing obligations on nation states to provide information to the Secretariat, in a form and manner which it will dictate. The hand of the EU is very visible here. It grabbed power from the member-states in four stages: first, acting merely as a secretariat to ensure stable supplies of coal and steel to rebuild Europe after the Second World War; then as a registry requiring member states to supply it with ever more information; then as a review body determining on the basis of the information supplied by the member states whether they were complying with their obligations on the ever-lengthier and more complex body of European treaties; and finally as the ultimate law-making authority, to which all elected parliaments, explicitly including the European “Parliament”, were and are subject. Under the Cancun propsoals, the Secretariat is following the path that the plague of EU officials here have no doubt eagerly advised it to follow. It is now taking numerous powers not merely to require information from nation states but to hold them to account for their supposed international obligations under the climate-change Convention on the basis of the information the nations are now to be compelled to supply.

Propaganda:

The Chairman’s note contains several mentions of the notion that the peoples of the world need to be told more about climate change. Here, too, there is a parallel with the EU, which administers a propaganda fund of some $250 million a year purely to advertise its own wonderfulness to an increasingly sceptical population. The IPCC already spends millions every year with PR agencies, asking them to find new ways of making its blood-curdling message more widely understood and feared among ordinary people. The Secretariat already has the advantage of an uncritical, acquiescent, scientifically illiterate, economically innumerate and just plain dumb news media: now it will have a propaganda fund to play with as well.

Damage caused by The Process:

At the insistence of sensible nation states such as the United States, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, and Italy, the Cancun outcome acknowledges that The Process is causing, and will cause, considerable economic damage, delicately described in the Chairman’s note as “unintended side-effects of implementing climate-change response measures”. The solution? Consideration of the catastrophic economic consequences of the Secretariat’s heroically lunatic decisions will fall under the control of – yup – the Secretariat. Admire its sheer gall.

Damage to world trade:

As the power, wealth and reach of the Secretariat grow, it finds itself rubbing uncomfortably up against other supranational organizations. In particular, the World Trade Organization has been getting antsy about the numerous aspects of the Secretariat’s proposals that constitute restrictions on international trade. At several points, the Chairman’s note expresses the “decision” – in fact, no more than an opinion and a questionable one at that – that the Secretariat’s policies are not restrictive of trade.

The Canute provision:

The conference will reaffirm the decision of its predecessor in Copenhagen this time last year “to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”, just like that. In fact, temperature in central England, and by implication globally, rose 2.2 Celsius in the 40 years 1695-1735, as the Sun began to recover from its 11,400-year activity minimum, and rose again by 0.74 C in the 20th century. There has been no warming in the 21st century, but we are already well over 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial levels. The Canute provision, as some delegates have dubbed it (after the Danish king of early England who famously taught his courtiers the limitations of his power and, a fortiori, theirs when he set up his throne on the beach and commanded sea level not to rise, whereupon the tide came in as usual and wet the royal feet), shows the disconnect between The Process and reality.

Omissions:

There are several highly-significant omissions, which jointly and severally establish that the central intent of The Process no longer has anything to do with the climate, if it ever had. The objective is greatly to empower and still more greatly to enrich the international classe politique at the expense of the peoples of the West, using the climate as a pretext, so as to copy the European Union by installing in perpetuity what some delegates here are calling “transnational perma-Socialism” beyond the reach or recall of any electorate. Here are the key omissions:

* The science: The question whether any of this vast expansion of supranational power is scientifically necessary is not addressed. Instead, there is merely a pietistic affirmation of superstitious faith in the IPCC, where the conference will “recognize that deep cuts in global [greenhouse-gas] emissions are required according to science, and as documented in the [IPCC’s] Fourth Assessment Report.

” * The economics: There is no assessment of the extent to which any of the proposed actions to mitigate “global warming” by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide or to adapt the world to its consequences will be cost-effective. Nor, tellingly, is there any direct comparison between mitigation and adaptation in their cost-effectiveness: indeed, the IPCC was carefully structured so that mitigation and adaptation are considered by entirely separate bureaucracies producing separate reports, making any meaningful comparison difficult. Though every economic analysis of this central economic question, other than that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, shows that mitigation is a pointless fatuity and that focused adaptation to the consequences of any “global warming” that may occur would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective, the Cancun conference outcome will continue to treat mitigation as being of equal economic utility with adaptation.

* Termination: Contracts have termination clauses to say what happens when the agreement ends. Nothing better illustrates the intent to create a permanent world-government structure than the absence of any termination provisions whatsoever in the Cancun outcome. The Process, like diamonds, is forever.

* Democracy: Forget government of the people, by the people, for the people. Forget the principle of “no taxation without representation” that led to the very foundation of the United States. The provisions for the democratic election of the new, all-powerful, legislating, tax-raising world-government Secretariat by the peoples of the world may be summarized in a single word: None.

How did this monstrous transfer of power from once-proud, once-sovereign, once-democratic nations to the corrupt, unelected Secretariat come about? The story begins with Sir Maurice Strong, an immensely wealthy UN bureaucrat from Canada who, a quarter of a century ago, established the IPCC as an intergovernmental, political body rather than as a scientific body precisely so that it could be maneuvered into assisting in the UN’s long-term aim, reiterated at a summit of senior UN officials this May by Ban Ki-Moon himself, of extinguishing national sovereignty and establishing a world government.

The Process began in earnest in 1988, when the IPCC was established. Shortly thereafter, on a June day in Washington DC deliberately chosen by Al Gore because it was unusually hot, his political ally and financial benefactor James Hansen appeared before a Congressional committee and put before it a wildly-exaggerated graph predicting global warming over the coming 20 or 30 years. Yet June 2008, the 20th anniversary of his testimony, was cooler globally than June 1988, and worldwide warming has happened at less than half the rate he predicted.

The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 allowed environmental groups and world “leaders” to grandstand together. From that summit emerged the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which began holding annual conferences on “global warming”.

The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed its signatories to cut back their national CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Most are not going to make it. The US Senate, with Al Gore as its president, voted 95-0 to reject any treaty such as Kyoto, which bound only the West while leaving developing nations such as China to emit carbon dioxide without constraint.

Very little progress had been made by the time of the Bali conference in 2007: but at that conference a “road-map” was constructed that was to lead to a binding international treaty in Copenhagen in 2009.

Just one problem with that. The US Constitution provides that, even if the President has signed a treaty, his signature is meaningless unless the treaty has been debated in the Senate, which must ratify it by the votes of at least 67 of the 100 Senators. It became clear to everyone, after the Obama administration failed to cajole or bully even 60 Senators into passing the Waxman/Markey cap-and-tax Bill, that no climate treaty would pass the Senate.

Worse, the Secretariat grossly overreached itself. Believing its own propaganda to the effect that none but a few vexatious, fossil-funded sceptics believed that “global warming” would be small enough to be harmless, it drafted and posted up on its website a 186-page draft Treaty of Copenhagen, proposing to turn itself into an unelected world government with unlimited powers to impose direct taxation on member nations without representation, recourse or recall, to interfere directly in the environmental policies of individual nations, and to sweep away all free markets worldwide, replacing them with itself as the sole rulemaker in every marketplace (treaty draft, annex 1, articles 36-38). Some quotations from the draft reveal the sheer ambition of the UN:

“The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism. … The government will be ruled by the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies.” (Copenhagen Treaty draft of September 15, 2009, para. 38).

The three central powers that the UN had hoped to grant itself under the guise of Saving The Planet from alleged climate catastrophe were as follows:

“Government”: This use of the word “government” is the first use of the term to describe a world government in any international treaty draft.

“Financial mechanism”: The “financial mechanism” was a delicate phrase to describe a new power of the UN to levy unlimited taxation directly on the peoples of its member states: taxation without representation, and on a global scale.

“Facilitative mechanism”: This mechanism would, for the first time, have given the UN he power directly to coerce and compel compliance on the part of its member states, by force if necessary. The Treaty draft describes it as –

“… a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies, as the prevailing instrument, to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate.”

In short, there was to be a New World Order, with a “government” having at its command a “financial mechanism” in the form of unlimited rights to tax the world’s citizen’s directly, and a “facilitative mechanism” that would bring the rules of all formerly free markets under the direct control of the new UN “government”, aided by an already-expanding series of bureaucracies.

At no point anywhere in the 186 pages of the Treaty draft do the words “democracy”, “election”, “ballot”, or “vote” appear. As the EU has already demonstrated, the transfer of powers from sovereign democracies to supranational entities brings those democracies to an end. At the supranational level, in the UN, in the EU and in the proposed world government, decisions are not made by anyone whom we, the voters, have elected to make such decisions.

The exposure of the draft treaty in major international news media panicked the UN into abandoning the draft before the Copenhagen conference even began. Instead, the UN is now legislating crabwise, as the European Union does, with a series of successive annual agreements, the last of which was the Copenhagen Accord, each transferring more power and wealth from individual nations to its supranational bureaucracy. The latest of these agreements is being finalized here in Cancun.

The European Union, which has stealthily stamped out democracy over the past half-century by a series of treaties each transferring a little more power and wealth from elected hands in the member states to unelected hands in Brussels, has been advising the Secretariat on how to do the same on a global scale.

After the spectacular bloody nose the Secretariat got in Copenhagen, it was most anxious not to endure a second failure in Cancun. To this end, it obtained the agreement of the German government to host a monthly series of conferences in Bonn in the early part of 2010, some of which were open to outside observers and some were behind closed doors in a comfortable suburban palace, where the new way of legislating for the world – in secret – first came into use.

The Chinese regime, anxious to get a piece of the action, agreed to host an additional session in Tientsin a few weeks ago. The purpose of this near-perpetual international junketing – which the national delegates have greatly enjoyed at our expense – was to make sure that nearly all of the elements in the Cancun agreement were firmly in draft and agreed well before Cancun, so as to avoid what too many journalists have tediously and obviously described as a “Mexican stand-off”.

It is precisely because of all this massive and expensive preparation that the note by the Chairman, whose main points are summarized above, may well reflect what is finally decided and announced here in a couple of days’ time. The Chairman is not simply guessing: this Note reflects what the Secretariat now confidently expects to get away with.

However, following the Copenhagen disaster, our grim future New Masters are taking no chances. They persuaded their friends in the mainstream news media, who cannot now easily back out of their original declarations of blind faith in the Church of “Global Warming” and are as anxious not to lose face as the Secretariat is, to put it about that at Cancun this year and even at Durban next year very little of substance will occur.

The intention is that, after not one but two international climate conferences, the second of them in Rio in 2012 on the 20th anniversity of the Earth Summit that began it all, the Secretariat will have become so wealthy and will have accreted so much power to itself that no one – not even the US Senate – will dare to resist ratifying the Treaty of Rio that brings democracy to an end worldwide and fulfils Lord Mandelson’s recent statement that “we are now living in a post-democratic age.”

Over my dead body. The people know best what is best for the people. The governing class no doubt knows what is best for the governing class, but does not necessarily know what is best for the people, and must always be kept in check by the ballot-box.

If we are to have a world government at all (and, as the science of “global warming” alarm continues to collapse, the current pretext for world domination by a privileged few is wearing more than a little thin), then it is essential that the world government should be an elected government, and that, as Article 1, Section 1 of the US Constitution makes plain when it grants “All legislative power” to the elected Congress and to the now-elected Senate, none shall make laws for the world or impose taxes upon the world except those whom the people of the world have elected by universal secret ballot.

How can we, the people, defeat the Secretariat and keep the democracy we love? Simply by informing our elected representatives of the scope, ambition, and detail of what is in the Cancun agreement. The agreement will not be called a “Treaty”, because the Senate, particularly after the mid-term elections, will not pass it. But it can still be imposed upon us by the heavily Left-leaning Supreme Court, which no longer makes any pretence at judicial impartiality and may well decide, even if Congress does not, that the Cancun agreement shall stand part of US law on the ground that it is “customary international law”.

I call on COP16 delegates and the citizens of the world to repent of this dangerous course and so inform their government officials. It is the power of individual nations and individual citizens that is being taken away. It is democracy, that will perish from the Earth unless this burgeoning nonsense is stopped.

Printed from: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/30957

Many people charged with DUI (Driving Under the Influence) or DWI (Driving While Intoxicated) in Texas have a particularly difficult time dealing with their criminal charge, often because it is the first crime for which they have ever been arrested. These arrests can result in serious consequences. A person who is convicted of a DWI can face heavy fees and penalties, a loss of driving privileges, and may be sentenced to serve jail time. Given that so much is at stake in a DUI or DWI case, it is important to hire an experienced criminal defense attorney who has handled many DWI cases in Fort Worth and Dallas, and who will guide you through the legal maze of the Texas criminal justice system and Department of Public Safety (DPS). They will also help get your license back and acquire an occupational driver's license if necessary.

If you are arrested because you’ve been driving while intoxicated in Fort Worth, Texas, just call the folks at Baker and Dameron.They are fine criminal defense attorneys. They will take care of you. Just have a look at their website: Baker and Dameron

– John Adams 

Countries in which the principles of classical liberalism were more or less applied, and in which the majority of citizens were thereby enabled to reach levels of personal freedom and prosperity unprecedented in all of mankind's history, have been under attack for more than a century and a half by Radical Socialists and their fellow-travelling LSD's. (LiberalSocialDemocrats) Military conflict, both directly and by proxies, was tried. Economic competition was tried. Attempts were made to exploit internal divisions of tribalism, religion and class. Nothing worked completely but the counter efforts have been costly and draining.

Currently, we are in the midst of three major crisis events. Terrorism poses physical and economic challenges; the fabricated carbon dioxide 'crisis', which is causing spineless 'western' governments to pander to the Global Warming/Climate Change Swindlers, is a serious threat to our overall economic health; and the banking/financial crisis, fabricated by super-zealous LSDs and 'Davos Men', is being peddled by world governments as a 'catastrophe' if trillions of dollars of new taxpayer debt is not piled on top of the existing back-breaking pile.

In the past, it has taken only one major crisis event to bring radical socialist totalitarian dictatorships into power. (See "On Socialism" at http://www.tapc.ca)

Will this daunting combination of crises be enough to bring us down? Can we resist the final fall into world wide socialist dictatorship? Will new voices emerge to trumpet the sources of personal freedom and prosperity and lead us out of danger?

These are the questions hanging over all our heads today.

__________________________________

Some pundits have claimed that Canadians are deferential to governmental authority. Horseradish! As long as governments delivered service and support close to our expectations, stayed (mostly) out of sight and took less than 25% out of our pockets to pay for their goings-on, we were basically indifferent to them.

Canadians and their governments up to the end of the St. Laurent-quarterbacked government, explicitly and/or implicitly understood that personal freedom can only be realized, nay maximized, in a peaceful and ordered environment that works. It's pretty hard to get on with things when bullets and bombs are whizzing about one's ears. The beauty of Canada was the social contract that good government provided the peaceful and ordered environment which enabled free people to get on with their daily lives and pursue their dreams to the extent of their abilities and ambitions.

Good government was supposed to serve and support people, not rule them or boss them about. Government for the people, not of the people.

But, since the 1960's, through the Pearson-Kent, Trudeau, Mulroney, Chretien and Harper regimes, we've suffered the imposition of drastically more bureaucratic interference in our lives, a disastous Euro-Charter that bestows uneven and undeserved rights on some people living in Canada and the increase to nearly 50% of our incomes being torn from our pockets by government taxes and fees. We're not deferential – we're disgusted, disdainful and disengaged.

Canadians have endured fifty years of wasteful, unprincipled, irresponsible, corrupt and incompetent governance that has become isolated from the concerns of most Canadians. Our frustration comes from not having:

a)      alternative principles and policies to combat the socialist siren-song of  'free bread and services' entitlements.

b)      leadership capable of communicating these principles and policies in language that can stimulate the majority of Canadians to adopt them as their own.

c)      institutional processes that would enable the comprehending majority to take back their country.

__________________________________

At this point, can we agree on five fundamental assumptions?

1.      That the vast majority of human beings would prefer to live in a community where the people are healthy, wealthy and wise rather than sick, poor and stupid and that only a tiny minority of psychopaths/sickheads would prefer living in either totalitarian slavery or the chaos of anarchy.

2.      That human beings are both preservative and progressive – desirous of maintaining the status quo, and, desirous of change for the better. Preservation and progression are

universal, polar instincts within each person. Their influence on a person's actions

      varies with time and circumstances.

3.      Similarly, that we each harbour the duality of a need to establish our unique identity in a crowded world, and, a need to cooperate with others for survival. Since we lived

      together in caves, we've been engaged in an ongoing process of negotiating a balance

      between private need and collective obligation, personal desire and public duty, self-

      assertion and group support. In truth, these are not conflicts – they are the two faces

      of self-interest. Our survival as a species required the merging of the one into the

      many in a growing, always-revising set of shared agreements that permitted

      optimum support for personal freedom. That is why we invented government.

4.      That good governance is essential to civilization. Surely every sensible person can agree that only in a peaceful and ordered environment can we have the personal freedom that enables the pursuit of a good life. Law, regulation and the institutions of good governance are essential to creating and sustaining that peaceful and ordered

      environment. The key issues are who decides what good governance is, and, who

      controls the people who occupy the positions that provide good governance.

5.      That two conditions describe a free people: a) they have the power to control what

      their governments do, and b) they have the power to control the authorities in their

      governments.

____________________________________

The classic definition of socialism is: "(the) principle that individual freedom should be completely subordinated to (the) interests of (the) community." [Concise Oxford Dictionary – Fourth Edition, 1951] ("Ask what you can do for your country.")

The people who are opposed to the socialist principle and all its consequences have handicapped themselves by allowing socialists to define the agenda and the terms of the struggle.  Socialists have even been allowed to define the alternative to "socialism"!

Most often, "capitalism" is said to be the opposite of "socialism". But capitalism is merely one of three ways to describe how human beings do business. (Barter and mercantilism are the other two.)

The term "capitalism" was coined by Karl Marx who intended this branding to help in his crusade to destroy private property and market enterprise, and to promote socialism.

By the early 1960's, that part of the LSD establishment responsible for language had managed to get the definition of socialism changed to some variation of, "a system where the means of production, distribution and exchange (i.e., business) is owned and controlled by the community as a whole." (i.e., the state).

But human affairs embrace much more than business and socialism is not just about business. Socialism is a fundamental worldview affecting all aspects of the human condition, and can only be countered and defeated by a worldview of equal scope.

Adolf Hitler, the evil genius of National Socialism, understood. In a public speech in Munich on July 22, 1922, he said, "Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation: …  that man is a socialist."

The core meaning of socialism is that the community is the basic value in human affairs. The individual person is nothing – only the community's welfare matters.

Problem is, communities aren't living beings. They don't have a body, mind and soul. You can't take a community out for a beer and talk things over. Communities of any size, be they a club, an association, a church, or a nation, always 'act' according to the wishes of the people who control them.

Throughout history, whether they shot their way to the top or got there by inheritance, election, or appointment, it has been the power elites/establishments/oligarchs in the positions of authority who have decided the interests of their communities and thereby controlled the people in them.

Oligarchic establishments have consisted of an autocrat, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy and a theocracy bound together by their need to survive as a minority among the majority – the people of their communities. For millenia they survived by claiming they ruled by 'the will of the gods'. They shifted to 'the will of the people' when too many revolutions broke out. Always they believed the socialist worldview justified their existence and that they alone knew what was best for their communities.

Totalitarian dictatorships can exist only where and when the socialist worldview prevails, and, socialism automatically breeds dictatorship.

_______________________________________

"Personalism" is the opposite of "socialism". The core meaning of personalism is that the individual is the basic value in human affairs. The personalist worldview is the necessary precondition for personal and political freedom. If personalism prevailed, the individuals in a community would determine the terms and conditions of their own good governance. It's called democracy ‑ government controlled by the people. Mankind's age long hunger has been for democratic governance operating on the personalist worldview.

It might be useful to think of personalism as the third phase in mankind's struggle toward personal and political freedom. The term "Personalism" wasn't used to describe a school of thought or worldview until the 20^th century, However its roots extend back 3000 years.

For most of those years, personalist thinkers have been identified as 'humanists'.

The Lokayata system formed a part of the Vedantic school of thought about 1000 BCE. It held that only those things that could be sensed by human beings were real, in contrast to the hypotheses about gods that were universally peddled at the time.

From the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE in Asia, thinkers such as Lao Tze, Confucius and Buddha were teaching the alternative that goodness consisted of human actions and values rather than supernatural mysticism

From the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE in Greece, thinkers such as Anaxagora, Pericles, Democritus and Aristotle were teaching that human beings could understand their world without recourse to supernatural mysticism. Their thinking influenced the development of democracy, freedom of thought and the exposure of superstition.

Jesus Christ taught that god was within each and every one of us and that all we had to do was love one another to achieve heaven on earth.

During the Dark and Middle Ages, the oligarchies of western Europe just about succeeded in snuffing out the light of humanism, but, from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries,, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus and Petrarch resurrected the classical Greek thinkers, challenged the orthodoxies of the Catholic church and the Divine Right of Kings, and helped usher in the Renaissance.

Humanism was greatly strengthened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by thinkers like Newton, Locke and Hume who helped usher in the Enlightenment.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men like Jefferson, Smith and Mill helped crystallize the principles of classical liberalism that brought so much personal freedom and prosperity to that part of the human race race that embraced them and the twentieth century witnessed the valiant rearguard action of Von Mises, Hayek and Friedman who attempted to stem the red tide of socialism

The core of classical liberalism was that the welfare of the individual person was the basic purpose of governance. Its underlying principles included limited government, low taxes, personal responsibility, rational self-interest, property rights, natural rights, civil liberties, individual freedom, equality under the law, market enterprise, free trade domestically and internationally, service and support for individual enterprise, help for those in need and freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly. Its primary thrust was to equip and enable free people to get on with their daily lives and pursue their dreams and goals to the extent of their abilities and ambitions thereby enriching the entire community.

Classical liberalism competed with socialism for the hearts and minds of the same client class for more than a century until the 1960's when the Pearson-Kent and Kennedy regimes triumphed in Canada and the USA respectively, and the LSD's took control of the agenda, media and education. .

Liberalism is dead because Liberal Parties finally caved in to socialism in their lust for power. Libertarians are trying to say they are the new champions of liberal principles, but their distaste for government renders them uncredible. And the attempt by conservatives to become the champions of liberal principles is a bit like the wolf trying to pass as little red riding hood's grandmother by dressing in her nightgown.

In the few remaining countries in which more than one political party is still allowed to contend for the votes which will give it the power to control the country's governance, all parties compete, not on the basis of sovereign, alternative principles and policies, but on the basis of which one can promise to deliver the biggest basket of entitlements. 'Libs and Tories – same old stories!'

It is for consideration whether, in order for liberal principles to regain dominance and save civilization by defeating socialism, they should be re-branded as personalism.

______________________________________

There are many definitions of Personalism. Here are a few:

"Any philosophical system based on the assumption that the human person is the fundamental value." [Webster's dictionary – New Lexicon Edition, 1987]

"Any of various systems of thought which maintain the primacy of the person on the basis that reality has meaning only through the conscious minds of people."

[Canadian Oxford Dictionary – 1998 Edition]

"Personalism is the school of thought that consists of three main principles, and which can broadly be qualified as a species of Humanism:

d)     Only persons are real (in the ontological sense),

e)      Only persons have value, and

f)       Only persons have free will. [Wikipedia]

"Since reason is a faculty of the individual person, not the collective, the individual person is the basic human value." [Author]

"Any doctrine or movement which emphasizes the rights and centrality of the individual human being in his or her social, political, intellectual, etc. milieu. [Webster's New World College Dictionary – 2005]

"A personalist civilization is one whose structure and spirit are directed towards the development as persons of all the individuals constituting it. They have as their ultimate end to enable every individual to live as a person, that is, to exercise a maximum of initiative, responsibility and spiritual life." [Emmanuel Mounier]

"To Personalism, personality is the supreme value. Society should then be so organized as to present every person the best possible opportunity for self-development – physically, mentally and spiritually – since the person is the supreme essence of democracy and hostile to totalitarianism of every sort." ["Personalism', 1943, by Ralph Tyler Flewelling.]

____________________________________

It might be useful to highlight some of the main differences between Personalism and Socialism.

Personalism: Good people will produce a good group.

Socialism: A good group will produce good people.

Personalism: People are defined by their character – their own words and deeds.

Socialism: The group defines the character of the people in it.

Personalism: Concern for a person's welfare.

Socialism: Concern for a group's welfare.

Personalism: A person's rights, privileges and responsibilities are based on their membership in the human race.

Socialism: A person's rights, privileges and responsibilities are based on their membership in a group.

Personalism: Government by the people for the people.

Socialism: Government of the people for the people.

Personalism: Law serves the people.

Socialism: Law serves the group.

Personalism: Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to yourself.

Socialism: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Personalism: Group interests are determined by the members of the group.

Socialism: Group interests are determined by the group's governors.

Personalism: People-up cooperation.

Socialism: Top-down compulsion.

Personalism: People tell governors what to do.

Socialism: Governors tell people what to do.

Personalism: A position of authority bestows the obligation to serve.

Socialism: A position of authority bestows the right to rule.

Personalism: Governments exist to serve their citizens.

Socialism: Citizens exist to serve their governments.

Personalism: Favours the passion of the majority to govern themselves.

Socialism: Favours the passion of the few to rule the majority.

Personalism: People-up democracy.

Socialism: Top-down oligarchy.

Personalism: The people are the country.

Socialism: The government is the country.

Personalism: Peace and order by compliance, values, custom, responsibility, lawfulness and informed support.

Socialism: Peace and order by compulsion, edict, charter, rules, force and resigned submission.

Personalism: Reason and freedom.

Socialism: Faith and slavery.

Personalism: Congregational.

Socialism: Episcopal.

Personalism: 'City hall is mine!"

Socialism: "You can't fight city hall!"

Contemporary personalist thinkers such as Emmanuel Mournier and Borden Bowne have influenced such as Pope John Paul II and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and such disparate political party leaders as Helmut Kohl and Pierre Trudeau.

___________________________________

For a preliminary draft of Principles and Policies which could serve to stimulate the formation of a successful political movement based on a personalist worldview see http://www.tapc.ca

For a more detailed proposal for structures, roles, financing and taxation in a government guided by a personalist worldview see "Personalism v. Socialism" by C.W. Conn published by http://www.authorhouse.com 

Charles W. Conn. Hastings, ON. February, 2010.

Karl Marx held that economic activity governed all of humanity's interests. While this is patently false, he and his fellow socialists were able to persuade many that centrally planned control of economic activity by the proletariat of a community was the best way to serve all the interests of that community.

As a result, by the early 1960's, that part of the establishment responsible for language had managed to get the definition of socialism changed to some variation of a SYSTEM where the means of production, distribution and exchange (i.e., the economy) is owned and controlled by the community as a whole (i.e., the state).

The question is, of course, who determines the interests of the community?

With only one exception, the early Roman Republic, the interests of every community have always been determined by a very small minority of the members of that community using the authority of the socialist principle. This minority might usefully be labelled the power elite or the establishment.

The establishment has always had four segments. In the beginning, the position of a headman or chief was supported by his hunters/warriors, his gofers/relatives and his shamans/witch doctors. For thousands of years pharaohs, kings, emperors, caesars, tzars and kaisers were supported by aristocrats/lords, court ministers/scribes and priests/scribes. In the so-called age of enlightenment we have had presidents, prime ministers, fuhrers, duces, secretaries and chairmen supported by the wealthy, the bureaucrats and the educators/advisors/consultants (Lenin's 'useful idiots').

These four segments of the establishment have mostly supported each other in order to maintain the orderly environment essential to their continued existence. Together, they have held the power to control all the institutions of government, which, in turn, have controlled the populations of all communities.

Through the ages, occasional revolts of their slave/serf populations have erupted and been ruthlessly put down. Contrary opinions cannot be tolerated – conventional wisdom must prevail for the establishment to function.

Always, the establishment has used the classic, collectivist wedges of tribalism (national interest) and/or religion and/or class to divide and control or drive their populations.

For millenia, the moral justification for their positional authority was based on faith and force instead of reason; "The will of the gods", "The Divine Right of Kings", "Obey your rulers for they are appointed by God".

The massive dislocations in western Europe from the mid-1300's to the mid-1800's – the little ice age; the plagues; the wars; the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment; the growth of science and mechanical inventions; the industrial revolution; and the discovery of 'new' continents – all combined to sharply increase populations and migrations and, more importantly, to create a new, aspiring 'middle class' between the establishment and their serfs.

At the same time, thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and many others were articulating the principles of personal freedom, equality and prosperity that characterized the other basic principle of governance – that the welfare of the individual person is its basic purpose.

This was powerful stuff and, as a defensive tactic, "The will of the people" came to be cited by the establishments in a few countries as the justification for their choices of the interests of their communities.

But that wasn't enough. By the early 1800's, rapid industrialization in parts of western Europe and North America had created a growing class of people who had moved from the countryside into dismal urban conditions as bare-survival employees in factories. They were labelled 'huddled masses' or 'ignorant masses' or 'proletariat'. Although a vast amount of new total wealth was being created by the industrial revolution, initially most of it increased the wealth of the establishment members who had built and financed the industrialization in the first place. As fair as this may be in theory, there is no question but that some people suffered some savage abuses at the hands of their new masters. And they weren't happy about it, so they were open to ideas about how their dismal conditions might be changed.

Two camps offered competing remedies.

The liberals proposed measures such as education, open markets, free trade, better housing, wages, working conditions and public health conditions that would enable individuals to see more clearly and strive more effectively to realize their potential. Essentially, they wanted to help people learn how to fish so they would always be able to feed themselves.

Although the principle was ancient, the term 'socialism' was coined at this time and from Saint-Simon to Marx, from Dickens to Shaw, socialists proposed to remedy the condition of their client class by giving them fish. Little concern was expressed about the source of the fish other than that they would come from either co-operative effort or robbing the wealthy. A handout instead of a hand up.

A multitude of schemes and groups were proposed and formed – a few were even tried, all over western Europe and North America.

The liberals tended to be persons from or close to both old-line factions of the establishment (Tories and Whigs in Britain) who sought to effect change primarily through the political process and legislated modification of the practices of government.

The socialists divided along three fault lines – Fabian idealists who advocated member-controlled, co-operative communities; Democrats who advocated the peaceful assumption of control of their countries' government institutions by election; and Radicals who advocated violent revolution and seizure of control.

All four promised their control would benefit their common client class immensely, at the expense of 'The Establishment'.

Over the hundred years from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, the liberal approach secured a substantial improvement in conditions while the socialists largely laboured in vain. The radical socialists did manage to stir up occasional riots but they were mostly occupied with writing fiery pamphlets in secret basements or garrets. Labour Unions rose to become an activist subset of the democratic socialists, and by the 1920's, the Fabians had disappeared into the ranks of organized liberal or socialist parties.

And then occurred a crisis event essential to the success of radical socialism – World War I, 1914 to 1918.

Ten million soldiers were slaughtered and fifteen to twenty million were wounded on all fronts in World War I. They were virtually all aged 18 to 45 – young men in their prime – and virtually all from the non-establishment class. What had begun as a patriotic war for king, kaiser or country, in defence of freedom, justice and rights, came to be seen by many as a war between national establishments misusing their populations to do the fighting and dying.

And many in the common client class saw red and were open to considering any remedy that would replace the establishments that had forced such an incredible slaughter and chaotic aftermath upon them. They were no longer willing to accept the steady pace of change advocated by the liberal establishments or democratic socialists. They were ready for radical socialist revolution.

In Russia, Lenin, a fervent Marxist, had been advocating the violent overthrow of the Tzarist establishment since the mid-1890's. His conviction was that socialism could only be brought about by a small, highly-centralized, highly-disciplined party committed to leading the proletarian revolution anticipated by Marx.

His Democratic Socialist Workers Party was largely ineffectual because of the deadlock between his supporters and those members who advocated convincing enough of the proletariat to elect them to a majority in the Duma (the Russian legislature).

Lenin was finally able to take control of the Central Council of the party in 1903, whereupon he promptly named his supporters the Bolsheviki ('ins', in Russian) and the others the Menshiviki ('outs' in Russian).

Over the next 14 years of riots, depression, war, anarchy, exile and internal conflict, Lenin's Bolsheviks wrote a party manifesto, seized control of the Petrograd Workers and Soldiers Soviet ('council', in Russian) and created a private army of Red Guards.

Finally, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks, with only 200,000 members, cut through all the confusion at gunpoint and seized control of the institutions of the Russian government in Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg – the national capital at the time.

In March 1918, Lenin pulled Russia out of the war, changed the party's name to the Communist Party, moved the capital to Moscow and embarked on a ruthless, five-year campaign of battle, murder, banishment, imprisonment and eradication of opposition parties which consolidated the Communist-socialists in complete control of the institutions of government in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by 1922.

At the same time, in the midst of their terrible struggle to consolidate their positional authority, the Communists were aggressively exporting their model of revolution to remedy the ills afflicting all the other "workers of the world". Aided and abetted by the Comintern (Communist International) based in Moscow, copycat socialist parties all over the world began the process of turning the majority of the world's nations into single-party dictatorships and unleashing the horrors of the twentieth century in which hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered by people in the name of the people for the good of the people.

The Communist Party hierarchy, and those of the previous establishment who went along with them, became the new establishment in Russia.

In Italy, Mussolini was writing and editing various socialist newspapers like Avanti ('Forward'), and sitting high in socialist councils, in the early twentieth century. He enlisted in the Italian army in 1915, was wounded and discharged, and in 1917 assumed the position of editor-in-chief of a new socialist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia ('The Italian People').

By 1918, he had become disillusioned with both the democratic socialists and the liberal establishment's inability to remedy the chaos in Italian society that had been horribly exaggerated by the war and was calling for a 'strong man' to sweep away the rot.

In 1919, he founded the 200-member Fascisti in Milan. ('Fasces' was the Latin name of the symbol of a magistrate's power in ancient Rome. It consisted of 12 wooden rods bound tightly around a battleaxe to symbolize the power of the original 12 tribes bound together in unbreakable unity.) The Fascists created a private army of Black Shirts, drafted a manifesto that Marx would have approved and began a campaign of bully tactics borrowed from radical socialists everywhere.

However, Italian Fascists were also intensely nationalistic and dreamed of establishing a new Roman Empire. The communist party was already active and was competing for support among the same client class as the Fascists. The Fascists were able to gain support among industrialists, the propertied class and other members of the existing establishment because they were not only promising to bring order out of chaos, but also to eliminate the Communist Party.

In 1922, Mussolini and his Black Shirts led the now-numerous Fascist Party's 'March on Rome' that took over the institutions of the Italian government. In short order, by murder, imprisonment, banishment and all the other measures of socialist dictators, Mussolini created the single-party, Fascist-socialist dictatorship in Italy.

The Fascist Party hierarchy, and those of the previous establishment who went along with them, became the new establishment in Italy.

In Germany, Hitler stayed in the army after the war and in September, 1919, was ordered to check out a tiny group of less than a hundred members called the German Workers' Party in Munich. The country was awash with socialist agitators and the army, intent on trying to preserve order as part of the establishment, was keeping a close eye on them all.

Hitler found a group of earnest amateurs who held some positions that he personally favoured. He was immediately named to the seven-man executive committee and in January, 1920, took over the party's propaganda and organizing functions. By the summer of 1920 he had assumed effective control of the party; helped draft its 25-point manifesto full of standard Marxist-style promises; renamed the party the Nazional Socialistische Deutsches Arbeiters Partei ('National Socialist German Workers' Party') – NSDAP or Nazi for short; designed all the symbols and flags the Nazis used to such advantage; and begun the formation of the party's private army of Brown Shirts.

Like many Germans, Hitler was pathologically convinced that the German army had been 'stabbed in the back' by the civilian government and forced to surrender without being defeated in WWI. Furthermore, the huge indemnities and territorial losses imposed by the Allies were felt by many Germans to be too onerous and too insulting for a major nation of the first rank to accept. Any self-respecting nation would require revenge, so they thought.

That nationalist fervor underlay all the other Nazi promises to restore order from chaos, improve the economic condition of the proletariat and wrest wealth from the Jews in Germany and lebensraum (living room) from Slavs and other untermenschen ('lesser human beings') in eastern Europe.

The existing establishment easily put down the Nazi's 'Beer Hall Putsch' in November 1923 and Hitler spent 8 months in jail writing Mein Kampf ('My Struggle') for the crime of trying to pull off his Mussolini-style coup.

The Nazis spent the next ten years in a life and death struggle with the Communist, democratic socialist and establishment parties for the soul of the nation and the votes of the same client-class. The Nazi's private army – the brown-shirted SA – grew to a fully armed gang of 400,000 thugs. Riots, parades, murder and mayhem were a regular feature of life in the decade, along with the Depression.

The industrialists, landowners, aristocracy and others of the establishment held the 'little Corporal' in contempt but liked his promises to restore German greatness, restore order and destroy communism. He promised change. They thought they could control him.

Finally, in January 1933 after the Nazis had secured 38% of the vote, Hitler was able to bully the senile President Hindenberg into naming him Chancellor because he seemed to be the only person capable of bringing order out of the chaos and depression threatening the collapse of the country. The Nazis promptly burned down the Reichstag (Germany's legislature), banned all other parties and began their programme of murder, imprisonment and control typical of life in the socialist dictatorship of the 'Thousand Year Reich'.

The National Socialist Party hierarchy, and those of the previous establishment who went along with them, became the new establishment in Germany.

Thus, in a breathtakingly brief time, three of the most important countries in the world had fallen to radical socialists and become dictatorships. In Russia, class was the major wedge, while in Italy the tribal (nationalism) wedge was added, and in Germany, all three wedges – class, tribalism and religion – were employed by the new establishments to control and drive their populations.

The Fascists and Nazis claimed to be different from, and bitter enemies of the Communists and managed to convince almost all the rest of the world that this was so. In reality, they were identical in all but the method by which they intended to take over the world. The Fascists and Nazis intended to conquer other countries by war. The Communists intended to take over other countries from within. All three parties sought and got support from the same client class and were begun by radical socialists.

And all were led by the three most powerful, smooth-tongued orators of the twentieth century who were able to move their audiences to uncritical adoration.

Orwell's 'Animal Farm' (1945) is the classic modern description of the process. In that short little story, the pigs convinced the other animals they would be better off if they banished farmer Jones and ran his farm themselves. After they had done so, the pigs moved into farmer Jones' house, ate his food, drank his liquor and forced the other animals to work much harder for them than they had had to work for farmer Jones.

Orwell's book was just one of many from the 1920's through the 1950's that attempted to fight back against the spread of the socialist menace. Argument was voluminous by both eminent scholars and some of the most prominent writers of popular fiction.

Among the first was 'Socialism' (1922) by the eminent Austrian economist, Ludwig Von Mises. It has been called the most thorough and devastating demolition of socialism ever written. In it, Von Mises critiqued every form of socialism and demonstrated how they all destroyed communities and reduced them to slavery, chaos and poverty. He continued to write and lecture well into the 1950's.

A student of Von Mises and another pillar of the Austrian school of economics, Frederik A. Hayek, wrote the classic 'The Road To Serfdom' (1944) in which he passionately warned of the dangers of state control over the means of production and clearly described the inverse relationship between individual freedom and government authority.

Both 'Socialism' and 'The Road To Serfdom' are still being published.

Aldous Huxley, in 'Brave New World' (1932), described a socialist "Utopia" wherein "Alphas" controlled a brain-deadened population of test tube clones and conditioned automatons who spent their days in meaningless work and their evenings in random sex, group play, surround-sound/feely/scented movies or virtual reality adventures/games. All were accompanied by the constant taking of the "soma" drug provided free of charge by the "Alphas". When he wrote 'Brave New World Revisited' (1958) Huxley declared he feared the socialist hell he had described was coming much faster than he had thought it would.

Sinclair Lewis wrote 'It Can't Happen Here' (1935) and Taylor Caldwell wrote 'The Devil's Advocate' (1952). Both depicted the misery of life in a United States that had become a one-party dictatorship. Interestingly they both described Canada as a nation of free people and a refuge for U.S. escapees.

George Orwell's other classic '1984' (1949) was a straightline projection into the future of conditions in the socialist dictatorships of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. While the date has come and gone, he did write about constant war demanding total control by the authorities, degradation of the language by 'newspeak' and criminal prosecution of 'unacceptable' opinion, among other grotesque violations of personal freedom.

Ayn Rand wrote two epic novels about the lives of individuals who struggled against the deadening degradation of conditions under socialism in a future U.S.A. In 'The Fountainhead' (1943), Howard Roark's testimony is perhaps the most powerful declaration of the value of the individual ever written. 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957), described what happened when the capable people finally shrugged and stopped 'doing for their country'.

Some books were made into movies starring the biggest names in Hollywood.

In case you think the process is modern, read how Joseph turned the people of ancient Egypt into slaves in Genesis, Chapter 41 and Chapter 47 – verses 13 through 26. All that's needed is a crisis event.

The crisis event of World War II enabled the capture of government institutions by radical socialists in eastern Europe, Red China and much of southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Many nations in northern Africa and South and Central America had long been held by one-party dictatorships using the authority of the socialist principle. The current situation is that three-quarters of the nations in the world are 'not free'.

In the 1920's –'30's, the 'western world' began using the grossly inaccurate terms of 'left' and 'right' to describe (supposedly) opposing party groupings. In Europe, it was Social Democrats versus Christian Democrats; in the U.K., Labour vied with Conservatives (with a tiny rumplet of Liberals hanging on by their fingernails); in the U.S.A., Democrats contended with Republicans.

In Canada, the apparent contention is between the (New) Democrats on the left, the Liberals in the middle and the Conservatives on the right. However, after World War II, the Liberal party abandoned any pretense of liberalism in their unprincipled hunger for power and joined the (New) Democrat socialists in policy and practice. There hasn't been a real alternative to the LiberalSocialists because the 'Progressive' Conservative party was different in name only. It changed its name to the Conservative Party, but in January 2009 brought in a budget planning a huge increase in debt that pandered to the threats and demands of the LiberalSocialists.

With only a little bit of tongue in cheek, it might save space to link 'Liberal' + 'Socialist' + 'Social Democrat' + 'Democrat' into 'LSD'. (For younger readers, LSD was a favoured hallucinogen of the 1960's 'druggie' culture. It made users see things that weren't there.)

The war of ideas in North America raged for forty years. But the tipping point was reached with the onset of the Kennedy regime in the U.S.A. and the Pearson-Kent regime in Canada in the early 1960's. And that was that. The LSD establishment had finally gained control of the agenda, the media and education.

There were brief breaks in the clouds with the Thatcher government in the U.K. and the Reagan administration in the U.S.A. but, when they were over, the inducements of entitlements to free bread and services were renewed with even greater vigour. All paid for with money from government; that government had taken from other people of course.

Canada never did enjoy a break.

[It's ironic that, since the 2000 federal election the U.S.A. has been demonstrating its history-challenged confusion by calling Republican states 'red' and Democratic states 'blue'!]

LSD's are relentless. It must be that the privileges, perqs and positional authority inherent in institutional employment are a powerful incentive to grow more and bigger institutions. When the piety of 'for the good of people' is added, it must be a hard-to-resist temptation.

And personal freedom and prosperity can be hard to achieve and maintain in an environment that despises them. How soothing to have someone else say they'll look after everything – if you just trust (vote for) them.

But serfdom and slavery are much much worse! The problem is they sneak up on uncareful victims who relax their vigilance while pursuing the 'good life'.

North America is the last bastion of memory of classical liberal personal freedom and prosperity. It has been under attack since the end of WWII by the Communist socialists and their fellow-travelling LSD's. Cold War military conflict, both directly and by proxies, was tried. Economic competition was tried. Attempts were made to exploit internal divisions of tribalism and class. Nothing worked completely but the counter efforts were costly and enervating.

Currently, we are in the midst of three crisis events: the real crisis of radical terrorism poses a physical challenge; the fabricated carbon dioxide crisis, which is causing hysterical governments to pander to the Global Warming/Climate Change Swindlers, is a serious threat to our overall economic health; and the banking/financial crisis, fabricated by super-zealous LSDs and 'Davos Men', is being peddled as a 'catastrophe' if trillions of dollars of new taxpayer debt is not piled on top of the existing back-breaking pile.

Will this daunting combination of crises be enough to bring us down? Can we resist the final fall into socialist dictatorship? Will new voices emerge to trumpet the advantages of personal freedom and prosperity inherent in classical liberalism and lead us out of danger?

These are the questions hanging over all our heads today.

Charles W. Conn, Mississauga. February 2009

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" — and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.

The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.

This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will "open the floodgates for special interests" to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years' worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: "What do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?"

In Krugman's world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of "these people" — only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on "guns, God and gays" instead of economic redistribution.

And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that "I said something that everybody knows is true."

In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters' underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or "tea party" gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen.

The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, "Nixonland," progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, "Chain Reaction," Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.

Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then — recall former president Carter's recent assertion that opposition to Obama reflects racism — even though survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices, whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, "The Assault on Reason," in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to "any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals." This right-wing politics involves a gradual "abandonment of concern for reason or evidence" and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.

Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, "still believe in Enlightenment reason," while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. "They like to read and think," Westen wrote. "They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right."

Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs — including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are "divorced from reality" and that the results show why "it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country." His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, "Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?"

I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his "Jaywalking" interviews?

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant — they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.

"There may be other ideas that you guys have," Obama said. "I am happy to look at them, and I'm happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we're able to say, 'The other party, it's their fault'?"

Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.

In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders — from Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to Obama's White House, with many stops in between — have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.

To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.

Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush's aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin's college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.

Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at all.

By Gerard Alexander

February 7, 2010

The trouble is that each successive year seems to bring with it an ever-expanding platform for seemingly endless throngs of social engineers, radical activists, and left wing politicians telling us that doom awaits us if we don't comply with their lofty agendas to reform western societies. Ice ages, Global Warming, ozone holes, Y2K, massive extinctions, and so on. The amazing thing is that we keep on listening, and we keep on panicking with each new blaring pronouncement of impending catastrophe.

This past year we were told that financial markets would collapse, that we would be faced with the most severe depression since the 1930's, that we would die in great numbers from a global pandemic, and that an environmental catastrophe was about to unfold unless we turned over control of all these issues to our massive government machines. Now stock markets are on the rise, economic recovery is underway, the swine flu came and went with a whimper, and much of the climate change research is being called into question. And yet we listen and believe it all every time the panic-mongers unleash more rhetoric. Why?

Because we somehow still trust those whose motives are to destroy confidence and instill fear. A great many government agencies and global authorities are now staffed with radical activists whose purpose it is to gain control of the levers of western society, at the expense of open markets and free enterprise. As severe as that may sound, I believe it to be true. Each successive recession that has occurred in the past 30 years has been met with a greater level of government intrusion into the natural operation of the business cycle. Government believes that it is its duty to remove hardship, economic peaks and valleys, and to artificially restore prosperity, at the long term cost to the taxpayer. 2009 was the pinnacle of this trend with its TARP, auto bailouts, cash for clunkers, and phony job creation schemes that have left 10% of American workers officially unemployed, but more likely over 17% without jobs.

Fear is never going to be far away from us as long as we accept the pronouncements of officials with ulterior motives. We have to think for ourselves, but perhaps that is what is lacking in today's busy world. Maybe we somehow have a perverse need to be afraid of something, and maybe we want somebody else to do our thinking and acting. The H1N1 hoax is a perfect example. Margaret Chan Director General of the World Health Organization declared "it is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic". She appealed for "global solidarity", and to be "on high alert". No wonder people freaked out. It sounds like the end of the world is being predicted by a high ranking international bureaucrat.

Panic and fear are debilitating. What may start as responsible concern is all too often raised to genuine panic by those who wish to have us believe that the problem (if it exists at all) is beyond our control. "All we have to do is be ignorant, and anxious….and we forfeit our sovereignty to political types". says Dr. Irvin Wolkoff, a Toronto psychiatrist. Public officials have learned this response and have begun to turn it into a strategy for bigger government.

All countries have given over personal freedoms to governments to varying degrees, but the United States is undergoing the most pronounced transformation of all in recent times, as President Obama along with a majority Democratic Congress has raised the level of government control to new proportions with its massive and ill conceived Health Care Reform Bill. Unfortunately for him and the Democratic Party, a heavy price will be paid in the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, as American voters lash out against the cost and intrusion of this massive monstrosity. It will however be too late for the American taxpayer, and for the previous health care system which could have been improved without a government takeover.

Who knows what we'll find to be afraid of in 2010? One thing is for sure though, social engineers from government and global agencies will be falling over each other to concoct the next massive disaster that will surely befall our vulnerable under-governed world.

Richard Scott, December 22, 2009.

Right now, we are about 10 years into a new 30 to 40 year warming phase, about 160 years into a 500 to 700 year 'little warm age' and about 20,000 years into and near the peak of the latest of the interglacial periods which have been alternating with glacial periods about every 100,000 years within the current ice age which began about 40 million years ago.

In the 160 years since the current 'little warm age' began about 1850, the global average temperature has increased by 0.9 degrees C – less than 1 degree worldwide. Some areas warm while others cool. That's why it's called an 'average'. The global average was still 1 degree cooler in 2000 AD than it was in 1000 AD.

In those 160 years, the oceans have not submerged the Pacific atolls and oceanside harbours around the world have not been submerged. The polar bear population has nearly doubled in recent decades and the 95% plus of glacier ice in the world, on Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland and Ellesmere Island, is increasing due to increased precipitation. That's why they are 'calving' as their outer edges grow over the water that can't support their massive weight.

Anybody who paid attention in high school should know these facts and any statement that human activity is the cause of these cycles is a bald-faced lie. The sun's varying activity, interacting with the oceans that cover 75% of the earth's surface, and the earth's natural geothermal activities, are the primary drivers of climate change. It's hard to know who is worse – the chicken-little liars or the brain dead lemmings who believe the lies.

The greenhouse effect is the boon that permits all life on this planet to exist! Carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activity causes less than one quarter of 1% of the greenhouse effect. Human beings had nothing to do with creating the greenhouse effect and can have absolutely nothing to do with affecting it. The earth enjoyed its greenhouse effect and was going through warming and cooling cycles long before man even existed let alone had fire!

Furthermore, warming climate increases the release of carbon dioxide from the oceans – increases in carbon dioxide do not warm the climate! Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is what plant life breathes. Thus, it is essential to all life on this planet. Botanists routinely increase the level of CO2 in closed environments by three times normal atmospheric levels in order to stimulate plant growth and submariners don't consider CO2 levels dangerous until they are 20 times higher than the normal amount.

Finally, less than 30 years ago, the same class of Swindlers was screaming about the end of the world unless massive amounts of taxpayers dollars were devoted to them and their causes because the world was COOLING!

We simply have to knock some common sense into our legislators and prevent them from passing any measure based on treating carbon dioxide as a problem.