Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Drop to Use

At this juncture our governments are just nominal. We all take our orders for legislation from the U.N. that sends out sheafs of "suggested" regulation for all ministries and departments large and small. If a legislator or bureaucrat decides, "Hell, no, I’m not going to do that," he or she is immediately assaulted by several of the NGO’s that operate in whichever concerned sphere of influence, first gently, then a bit more influence is brought. If he insists, the poodle media is unleashed by a “study” that “shows” that women and minorities are hardest hit, and the legislator or bureaucrat is tamed.

Where I live – an excellent case study for the hellscape of our meticulously planned future – people get elected promising reform, and within weeks surrender. Any change he tries to muscle through will invite lawsuits as far as the eye can see. It will cost millions. Since the legislation is boilerplate, there is no room for local considerations. This is walking insanity, and has created unimaginable unnecessary pain. It has foreshortened lives, prevented economic activity, and destroyed opportunity. It is straight-up stupid and cruel.

Let’s take a closer look at the bars of our prison. First you have U.N. treaties. Our governments have signed hundreds upon hundreds of them, committing to a new green future. The following is the PR:

With these new actions, President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious land and water conservation agenda in American history. These actions build on more than two years of the Biden-Harris Administration’s progress and historic investments to advance conservation, restoration, and stewardship nationwide. That record includes:

  • Protecting more lands and waters in his first year than any president since JFK
  • Setting the country’s first-ever national conservation goal to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030
  • Signing an Executive Order to better protect America’s forests
  • Securing the largest investment in climate, environmental justice, and conservation ever
  • Putting the entire U.S. Arctic Ocean off limits to new oil and gas development
  • Restoring and strengthening protections for cherished places, including Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments, as well as the Tongass National Forest
  • Designating the Camp Hale - Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado
  • FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Takes New Action to Conserve and Restore America’s Lands and Waters

Take a look at the list of things ‘saved’. Note that it locks away thousands of square miles of ocean from drilling or fishing. What it doesn’t say is that the Waters of the United States gives the government control of every run-off ditch and puddle. This massive taking, which will, by the end of it remove one billion acres from American use, locks up pretty much any and all natural resources, on the grounds of "scarcity." Every single order and legislative initiative hews to this one idea: humans are killing the earth and we are running out of everything except sun and wind, which is the future and you better get used to brownouts.

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NGO's proffer "proof" that set-asides create prosperity, but if you examine the "proof", it is boilerplate for every set-aside, the prosperity is in 'service' jobs, which they claim are doctors and engineers, but which are really summer waitress and checkout cashiers. Real jobs, the ones that build families, decline. The only increase is tourism and that would have come anyway.

This inversion of reality is creates the most astonishing clusterfuck of incompetence and cruelty. Last weekend the city of Philadelphia took three days to notify 14 million people that their water was tainted by a spill from a factory. California, which had been in a “drought” for the last 20 years until the recent spate of torrential rains (not "climate change" but part of the West's natural boom-or-bust water cycle), has meant that farmers and ranchers in California, literally a bread basket for the nation, have been deliberately starved of water.

For 150 years, the western states engaged in building what I consider to be the Eighth Wonder of the World, the water system that could feed, clothe and house the known universe. For the past 25 years, the environmental movement, guided by the U.N. and Rockefeller, Ford, and a half dozen other pernicious foundations, has been breaking that water system. More than one thousand significant dams have been taken out, and thousands upon thousands of little dams and weirs in the upland ranges and forests have been removed. The result this has been, and its purpose is, to starve human development, food production, and economic well-being.

In fact, California has plenty of water. It is hidden and masterfully. In my book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, one of my later chapters declares that the takings of the United Nations, in every single country, are primarily focused on locking up water. Without water, everything dies. Controlling water means you control everything. Water, of course, is a renewable resource. But the U.N. declares it is not. Because “global warming” means everything is going to dry out.

Green watershed management is crazy-expensive. A town of 4,000 will spend $500,000 just on the planning alone. Green watershed management sends water first to "wetlands" rather than to reservoirs and then seas or lakes. A lot of the sudden catastrophic flooding of cities in the past ten years has to do with the built-in incompetencies of green watershed management.

Kevin Kiley, a young legislator in California, took this battle to the floor, showing California drought restrictions on the one hand, and a video of 20,000 cubic feet of water pouring into the ocean every second. If you are a rancher or a farmer anywhere west of the Mississippi, you have four meters on your well from each state and federal agency and any infraction means a fine of tens of thousands of dollars.

I live in a rainforest. On my land I have enough water for 80 families. When I sold my house at the top of the hill, a new owner spent $50,000 on a water catchment system. He had been told by authorities that he was going to run out of water. At the north end of my island, again, in a rainforest, green watershed management has meant that everyone pays ten thousand a year for water, their gardens are minimal and any excess use means a visit and fines. This year, the taxes on that water tripled.

How did this happen? It was subterfuge, the foolish were blandished, the media was bought, anyone objecting was silenced and cancelled, government at all levels was bullied, and every single resource we need to create an abundant world was stolen in the night. As the Bolsheviks famously put it: Who? Whom? It's them or us.

The Malign Genesis of ESG - Part I

In the weeks since the S&P 500 announced Tesla’s removal from its ESG Index while inviting Exxon to join, but leaving Chevron out, the incongruous nature of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) construct has never been more obvious. It reveals what some might consider proof of the fraud that ESG represents. But what exactly is ESG? Where did it come from? Understanding its genesis and purpose of ESG will clarify what it actually is, not what many purport it to be. 

Beginning in 2000, the World Economic Forum (WEF) embarked on an initiative that over two decades later can only be described as a Trojan-horse attack on free markets, private property, and democratic institutions. Founded in 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, the WEF describes its mission in part as, "improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas." Agenda-shaping it seems can be transformational, for good or bad, and quite lucrative.

Well-funded and well-organized, what has grown from that initial effort over two decades ago, is a sophisticated network of NGOs, foundations, and nonprofit entities working to achieve unprecedented ideologically inspired political, social, and financial change inside America and throughout the world, using the ESG construct.

Little green piggies everywhere you look.

With the promise of profit, this network engaged key asset management and banking partners, including giants like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Bank of America. Together these activist profiteers, best described as the ESG/Industrial Complex, are engaged in an extraordinary effort to fundamentally undermine and replace free markets while circumventing democratic institutions of governance and lawmaking. Seeking to force companies into behavior based on political ideology—often in defiance of the best interest of their investors—the ESG Industrial Complex represents a nefarious source of boardroom bullying and attacks on industries with which they politically disagree but whose assets they seek to control.

Using the pretense of social diversity and environmental protection needed to repair damage caused by capitalism, this network established the ESG construct. It represents a geometrically increasing impediment to many industries and the larger corporate culture. Though nebulous and ill-understood by both Wall Street and Main Street alike, it constitutes competing frameworks, reporting systems, and scoring systems for environmental and social reporting—but it lacks continuity and a quantifiable measurement. A meta-analysis of more than 1000 studies on ESG performance found that, “studies use different scores for different companies by different data providers.” These self-ascribed arbiters of politically appropriate values, behavior, and outcomes intend to identify, scrutinize, and then using ESG scores, punish public and private companies—and eventually individuals—who do not agree to live by the network’s validation feedback loop.

Objectives articulated by one of the data collection members of the ESG network include:

Though not yet widely adopted in much of corporate America, ESG has been aggressively embraced by most publicly traded companies and the financial and banking sectors. Ninety-eight percent of America’s top financial companies now disclose ESG scores, and 82 percent include the information in their financial reports as of the end of 2020. Acting as ESG advisors, these banking and asset-management firms have been able to realize premiums for management and advisory fees. For these firms, ESG represents a lucrative revenue-generating spigot and a clever mechanism by which to gain control of capital and at scale, private property. It offers them a mechanism by which to redirect and control capital and property in ways that align with their political worldview.

After decades of coordination and collaboration, the network not only has well-defined initiatives and objectives, but also defined timelines to what they call a “transitioned world.” Success for ESG necessarily harms entire swathes of society in a free market, democratic system. It is a model intended for government to manage the means of production by “transitioning” the world toward increased regulatory control, social scoring, and communal property rights using the pretense of carbon emission neutrality—a model underpinned by socialist and communist principles, including a communal stake in for-profit companies and the development of a new financial system that directs capital flows to never-defined “global goals.”

Schwab: A finger in every pie.

In its most recent report, “Accelerating the Rate of Change: 2021-2025”, the Carbon Disclosure Project, (CDP), one of the WEF-financed entities foundational to the development of the ESG construct, asserts: “all businesses—including private companies—need to overhaul their operations and ensure they will remain viable within environmental boundaries. Governments must set the example and provide the regulatory environment that supports and encourages responsible corporate action. Both businesses and governments alike must align their actions with equitable outcomes that alleviate unequal burdens created by climate change.”

These ESG collaborators are overt in articulating their intentions and objectives. In Part 2 tomorrow, I will reveal the keystone of the ESG construct and propose what must be done to render the movement impotent. I will consider stakeholder capitalism and the role economic capital holds in the fight ahead. I will explain why the domestic oil and gas sector is such a significant target by the ESG/Industrial Complex, and how controlling energy production is a necessary threshold for these activists to succeed. Finally, I will consider what Americans can do to stop this attack on our country and neutralize this threat to our way of life.

Making an End-Run Around Democracy, Part Three

[Third in a series. Parts One and Two at the links.]

I paused my last posting on this topic—let’s call it “Democracy Circumvented”—after a quotation from Dr. Roslyn Fuller, head of a progressive pro-democracy Non-Governmental Organisation, to the effect that many progressive NGOs in networks funded by billionaires were not participating in traditional acts of charity or philanthropic research but rather using their investors’ resources to “flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and drowning out others.”

That may strike you as sinister. But it’s fine as long as it’s open and above board and not financed by public or tax-exempt money. But what if the NGOs are in fact not engaged in a vigorous public debate between opposing parties but are instead players in a Potemkin play of debate in which the “debaters” on both sides, the expert witnesses they call, the judge who sums up the arguments, and the panel of jurors who determine the result are all on the same side, reciting lines written advance to reach pre-determined conclusions?

When that happens in public, political, commercial, or intellectual life—and it does—the term for it is “astroturfing.” Astroturf was coined by Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 1988, and a wit, and it’s defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “organized activity that is intended to create a false impression of a widespread, spontaneously arising, grassroots movement in support of or in opposition to something (such as a political policy) but that is in reality initiated and controlled by a concealed group or organization (such as a corporation.)”

Sharyl Attkinson,  a brave and unbuyable investigative journalist, who has made a special study of astroturfing, explains its general importance and (alas) effectiveness in modern marketing and political campaigning in several appearances across the internet, impressing even skeptical audiences:

Its specific application to progressive networks of NGOs, as outlined in Dr. Fuller’s Spiked article, is that wealthy investors have created a chain of institutions in which each link receives assistance or information from one level which it endorses and then passes onto the next level, and so on and so on, it sometimes feels, ad infinitum.

There are primary research bodies that assemble information on, say, the Green New Deal; secondary research bodies that endorse the “correct” information or point of view (and the think tanks that produce them) and undermine rival ones; motivational research groups that advise on how to tailor their emotional appeal to key constituencies; information technology panels that advise on how to ensure your message is placed before others in internet searches;  media outreach groups that package its messages in easy-to-use op-ed or soundbite forms; political education institutes that recruit potential election candidates to carry the torch in elections; and “activist” organizations that organize public protests, sit-ins, occupations of congressional offices, riots, and other civil disobedience events to suggest that a powerful movement of public opinion is backing the Green New Deal or some other "progressive" cause de jour.

And, yes, even activism can be astroturf activism.

Put so baldly, this argument sounds a little like a conspiracy theory. Well, why not? Bear the following points in mind. First, conspiracies exist, sometimes succeed, and even have serious consequences. The First World War was triggered by a conspiracy of students to murder the heir to the Austrian throne. They succeeded, and one can’t deny that the Great War amounted to serious consequences.

This conspiracy went off like a Clockwork Orange.

Second, claiming that a hostile criticism is no more than a discredited conspiracy theory is Exercise One in the conspirator’s handbook. So please test any such denial against the evidence. Third, Dr. Fuller examines  the evidence about four organizations in the food chain in detail, checking what they do, how they cooperate, and how they’re financed. What she discovered please read for yourself. It’s partly comic and partly sinister, half stage army, half octopus. But it ain’t chopped liver. And, fourthly, the most damaging accusations against the networks of billionaire-financed NGOs is made by those activists and investors who are running them in the form of enthusiastic pep-talks (quoted below).

If it’s a conspiracy, it’s what used to be called “an open conspiracy” which almost anyone can join, read about, or listen in on via the internet. Dr. Fuller listened in on a webinar in which the leaders of two of the organizations discussed here, namely Sunrise and Momentum, which are respectively a movement of young activists and a political training operation, outlined their purposes and activities. She writes:

Speakers stressed the need to become ‘the dominant political alignment’ which ‘defines the common sense of society’ and ‘directs social and economic policy’. Having realized that this would require ‘tak[ing] over the entire United States and all the institutions in it’, they began ‘finding and developing our first leaders’. This involved moving activists into ‘dorm-style Sunrise Movement Houses for three to six months’ in order to create leaders who had a deep level of commitment ‘for everything that would come afterwards’.

Dr. Fuller concedes that some of this training offers advice that is “not bad” but adds that the “entire impression is of a very steered, technocratic process that attempts to achieve theoretical concepts (‘3.5 percent mobilisation’, ‘dominant political alignment’) through a kind of brute-force factory production.” It’s a very well-funded factory production at that. And noting that a disproportionately large number of the activists and of those recruiting the activists are young and inexperienced people, from teens to postgraduates, she offers the following balanced judgment:

On one level, it is great that young people are taking part in politics. But on another level it is incredibly fake. The youthful participants aren’t so much being empowered as instrumentalized. After all, they are part of the portfolio of an investment fund that is using them to ‘shift power’, with part of the strategy being to shame politicians for not being nice enough to hysterical children.

Dr. Fuller doesn’t mention Greta Thunberg here, but for some reason Ms. Thunberg leaps to mind.

Ride of the Valkyrie.

In instrumentalizing the young activists, these well-funded progressive networks are also instrumentalizing democracy. They are seeking to manipulate the usual democratic tools—information, debate, controversy—not to create a national conversation on political goals and methods but to construct a simulacrum of that conversation in which its conclusions are determined in advance. And when those tools break in their hands—as sometimes happens when others intrude into their staged debates—they use “activism” to de-platform the intruders and to close down a debate escaping their control. We are likely to see much more of such extra-democratic politics in the future.

Indeed, just recently,  Time magazine described how such an open conspiracy of corporate executives, labor union leaders, and progressive activists employed some of these methods and some of these troops to “prevent Donald Trump stealing the election” (i.e., to help the Democrats win the election.)

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That was very much a “macro” operation. And whatever the reason, it certainly didn’t fail.

But how do these tactics work at a “micro” level—at the level of getting a parliamentary bill passed into law, ensuring that a government report conforms to progressive orthodoxies, or manufacturing a “Green” public opinion when most voters are skeptical. Next time I’ll examine a case in which the U.K. parliament found itself playing the role of junior partner to a group of progressive NGOs in manufacturing a large astroturf carpet of public enthusiasm for Net-Zero policy.

Skeptical? It seems to have persuaded Boris Johnson. Don’t miss it!

Making an End-Run Around Democracy, Part Two

[Read Part One here.]

To achieve their grand goal of social engineering, the billionaires and their activist agents create a chain of institutions in which each link receives assistance or information from one level which it endorses and then passes onto the next level, and so on and so on, it sometimes feels, ad infinitum.

There are primary research bodies that assemble information on, say, the Green New Deal; secondary research bodies that endorse the “correct” information or point of view (and the think tanks that produce them) and undermine rival ones; motivational research groups that advise on how to tailor their emotional appeal to key constituencies; information technology panels that advise on how to ensure your message is placed before others in internet searches;  media outreach groups that package its messages in easy-to-use op-ed or soundbite forms; political education institutes that recruit potential election candidates to carry the torch in elections; and “activist” organizations that organize public protests, sit-ins, occupations of congressional offices, riots, and other civil disobedience events to suggest that a powerful movement of public opinion is backing the Green New Deal or some other cause de jour.

If this is activism, it’s astroturf activism.

They might be giants.

Put so baldly, this argument sounds a little like a conspiracy theory. Be aware of three points, however.

If it’s a conspiracy, it’s what used to be called “an open conspiracy” which almost anyone can join, read about, or listen in on via the internet.

Dr. Fuller listened in on a webinar in which the leaders of two of the organizations discussed here, namely Sunrise and Momentum, which are respectively a movement of young activists and a political training operation, discussed their purposes and activities. She writes:

 Speakers stressed the need to become ‘the dominant political alignment’ which ‘defines the common sense of society’ and ‘directs social and economic policy’. Having realized that this would require ‘tak[ing] over the entire United States and all the institutions in it’, they began ‘finding and developing our first leaders’. This involved moving activists into ‘dorm-style Sunrise Movement Houses for three to six months’ in order to create leaders who had a deep level of commitment ‘for everything that would come afterwards.’

Dr. Fuller concedes that some of this training offers advice that is “not bad” but adds that the “entire impression is of a very steered, technocratic process that attempts to achieve theoretical concepts (‘3.5 percent mobilisation’, ‘dominant political alignment’) through a kind of brute-force factory production.” It’s a very well-funded factory production at that. And noting that a disproportionately large number of the activists and of those recruiting the activists are young and inexperienced people, from teens to postgraduates, she offers the following balanced judgment:

On one level, it is great that young people are taking part in politics. But on another level it is incredibly fake. The youthful participants aren’t so much being empowered as instrumentalized. After all, they are part of the portfolio of an investment fund that is using them to ‘shift power’, with part of the strategy being to shame politicians for not being nice enough to hysterical children.

Dr. Fuller doesn’t mention Greta Thunberg here, but for some reason Ms. Thunberg leaps to mind.

Patron St. Greta

In instrumentalizing the young activists, these well-funded progressive networks are also instrumentalizing democracy. They are seeking to manipulate the usual democratic tools—information, debate, controversy—not to create a national conversation on political goals and methods but to construct a simulacrum of that conversation in which its conclusions are determined in advance. And when those tools break in their hands—as happens when others intrude into their staged debates—they use “activism” to de-platform the intruders and to close down a debate escaping their control. We are likely to see much more of such covertly manipulative anti-democratic politics in the future.

Indeed, Time magazine has described how such an open conspiracy of corporate executives, labor union leaders, and progressive activists employed some of these methods and some of these troops to “prevent Donald Trump stealing the election” (i.e., to help the Democrats win the election.) That was very much a “macro” operation. And without being conspiratorial myself, I can assert that it certainly didn’t fail.

But how do these tactics work at a “micro” level—at the level of getting a parliamentary bill passed into law, ensuring that a government report conforms to progressive orthodoxies, or manufacturing a “Green” public opinion when most voters are skeptical. To examine how progressive activism can turn democracy into a ventriloquist’s dummy, I’ll be looking at Ben Pile’s monograph on the U.K.’s Climate Assembly, funded by Parliament to tell MPs what the people thought about Net Zero. It’s a fascinating story. Join me then.