Free Republic

It's been a quarter-century since author John Naisbitt blithely described manufacturing as a "declining sport" that Americans could easily offshore to Asia. Since then obituaries for U.S. manufacturing, both mournful and enraged, have been written many times...Snip... Manufacturing's role in promoting job and income growth is often understated. Although overall industrial jobs have diminished by almost five million since the late 1970s, the loss has been concentrated largely in lower-skilled positions. The number of higher-skilled positions, with a median hourly wage of $24, jumped by more than 36% between 1983 and 2002 to nearly 4.5 million, according to a 2006...

The myth of Kyoto By Peter Worthington, For the Toronto Sun January 9, 2005 Throughout the Cold War, until the final collapse of the Soviet Empire, there were always people in the West -- usually well-educated -- who believed in the good intentions of communism. Universities were an incubator for Marxism and a benign view of Soviet altruism. When Sovietism became tainted after "aberrations" like crushing the Hungarian rebellion (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), admiration was shifted to China and the humanitarianism of Mao Tse-tung. Until he was also discredited. Such people tended to blame the West (i.e....

According to its proponents, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, will create a "free trade" area encompassing the entire hemisphere -- from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. According to President Bush, the FTAA, which is scheduled for completion next year, would "make our hemisphere the largest free-trade area in the world, encompassing 34 countries and 800 million people." The result would be new export markets for American goods and a corresponding increase in our national prosperity and the standard of living throughout the hemisphere. At least, that's the story. It's an attractive one, and to many a...

Our standard of living is being deliberately undermined to merge our nation into a centrally directed global economy.As part of his September 2001 visit to the U.S., Mexican president Vicente Fox accompanied President Bush to Toledo, Ohio, where they addressed a carefully selected crowd of 8,000 people. Toledo was chosen because of its large and growing Mexican immigrant population. This changing demographic in America’s heartland was presented as symbolic of the growing interdependence created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The New York Times described how both Presidents Fox and Bush "praised the contributions of Mexican immigrants and...

Volume 34, Number 21 Thursday, April 17, 2003 Study predicts Boeing downsizingGeographers say airplane manufacturer will exit from passenger jet manufacturing By ELLEN GOLDBAUMContributing Editor The red ink flowing from the airline industry in recent months has consistently grabbed headlines, but during the next decade the U.S. economy will be affected by an even more significant loss with the nation's eventual exit from the building of passenger aircraft, a market the U.S. has led for more than half a century, according to a research paper by two UB geographers.The paper, which was published last month in the journal Futures,...

When the dictator, Josef Stalin, first appeared at the brand-new United Nations accompanied by representatives of Soviet "labor unions," other delegates cried foul, asking, "How can there be labor unions in a government-run society?" Stalin explained, "Ah, but these are Non-Governmental Organizations," and the term "NGO" first came into the world's vocabulary. Nowadays, most of us are likely to think of NGOs as large-scale charitable organizations who work all over the world providing medical care in disaster situations, food to famine sufferers or advocacy for political prisoners. One of the main reasons we even recognize the names of the well-known...

Unless Congress regains a modicum of sanity, the United States of America is about to rejoin an organization dedicated to the destruction of the last vestiges of Judeo-Christian civilization. For reasons inexplicable to most sensible Americans, in September 2002, an otherwise sensible President George W. Bush told the United Nations that the U.S. will rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a wild-eyed bunch President Reagan abandoned in 1984, noting that it was utterly corrupt and the U.S. had no business being a member of such a group. Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of the insidious nature...

There has been no spring on the East Coast of the United States this year. Even into the early days of June, the weather has remained cold and damp. One is tempted to ask, "Where is the global warming that has been predicted?" but this cold spell in the US is offset by a heat spell in India that has killed dozens of people. Is global warming occurring there, but not here? Is global warming occurring at all? No. The entire global warming hoax is based on computer models and they are designed to produce the kind of data that...

SHOULD LENIN’S BIRTHDAY BE A HOLIDAY, alongside the national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the new California holiday honoring union boss Cesar Chavez? Why, you might ask, would Americans celebrate the birthday of this mass murderer Marxist, the founder of the is-it-dead-or-only-sleeping Soviet Union? But the sad fact is that our children in public schools and colleges probably are directed to celebrate Lenin’s April 22 birthday and his values, whether they know it or not. Schools and the media now call this date Earth Day, a date that oddly falls each year only a week before an...

The extent to which green-left thinking on the environment has taken hold in the mass media and at all levels of education has made it the dominant voice in the so-called environmental debate. There is not one opinion leader or political party, especially the Democrats, that has not been heavily influenced by it one way or another. However, it would be a serious mistake to assume that the green-left is ideologically united. It is not. Basically it comprises two factions: the Marxist-Leninist faction and the utopian faction. Both are temporarily united by their mutual loathing of capitalism. I say temporarily...

Environmentalists -- notorious for making doomsday predictions about man's industrial activities while appealing to "science" -- are now turning to religion to halt the "sins" of industrialization and development. Over a year ago in a full-page article ("Keep Faith With Nature" -- Calgary Herald, Jan. 16, 1999), eco-activist Harvey Locke exhorted: "we need to restore a sense of the sacred to creation if we are to save it." He urged greens to "reach out to those who have religious and spiritual impulses and strive with them to protect the full diversity of life on Earth." Other prominent environmentalists since, such...

Please look at the statistics named below from the BLS website. I made you aware of this, because it pertains to my question. There are these charts that illustrate what has been happening the last 7 years with mass layoffs. When you go to the BLS website, you can click on Mass Layoffs, scroll down to most requested statistics, and then pick these two catagories: Overseas relocation, and Manufacturing. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ml BLS is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Anyone who has submitted themselves to the agony of watching the US Security Council debate has surely concluded the UN is not only incapable of fulfilling its primary mission to avert wars, but is criminally negligent. UN supporters have accused their opponents of over-stating the case about the threat it poses to national sovereignty, the right of ours and other nations to self-governance. They dismiss documents like the Charter for Global Democracy as merely a "wish list" of private organizations that do not reflect the true UN agenda. If, however, one accepts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as the official...

I was watching a recent "Meet the Press" and was struck by two commercials, one by British Petroleum (BP) and one by ExxonMobil. Both strove to convey a message of environmental responsibility, but the BP commercial failed the truth test on several counts. The BP company motto these days is "Beyond petroleum" and the tag line of its commercial was "It´s a start", suggesting that BP is working toward a future where it will focus on energy sources other than petroleum. It spends an estimated $100 million a year to convey this message and there is very little truth in...

Green and animal rights organizations do not subsist on the sale of calendars, books, and stuffed animals. They are wealthy beyond the comprehension of millions of Americans and others who support them in the belief they are "protecting the environment" and saving animals from "cruelty" and "extinction." You will be astonished to learn that there are more than 4,000 environmental groups in America today. "And the number is growing," warns Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, "and they are really out to get you. Worse, they have the clout and the money to do it."...

Back in the 1930s when I was a teen, (yes, I’m that old) we would cut grass, deliver papers, sell magazines, shovel snow and other things to make a bit of money. One of the prime causes of the need for money was to have a dime to go to the Saturday movie matinee. For the ten cents we got two feature length movies, a news reel, a cartoon and, most important, that week’s installment of the current serial. We just had to find out if the hero or heroine, the good guys (White Hats) had been able to escape...

The Nature Conservancy did something extraordinary last Tuesday when it announced it had protected nearly a quarter million acres of northern Maine forest by providing Great Northern Paper Co. with $50 million in cash and loans. For the first time ever, an environmental organization had become a major creditor of a paper company. The plan represents the kind of pragmatic approach to protecting land that sets The Nature Conservancy apart from other environmental groups: It is willing to deal with businesses like the paper companies and the oil producers that other environmental organizations consider the enemy. The Nature Conservancy is...

A Green leader here called the allure of free market capitalism "sinister" and referred to economic growth as "the engine of [environmental] degradation." Fred Edwards, a board member of Friends of the Earth Scotland, told CNSNews.com that the U.S. and Europe must "start talking less about immediate gratification and...not worship economic growth as we do." Edwards made his comments Thursday at the "People's Earth Summit," a parallel event to the U.N.'s Summit on Sustainable Development (Earth summit). When asked if the developing world should emulate the U.S. and western Europe's economic structure, Edwards was emphatic: "They certainly shouldn't," he said....

In the last essay, titled "Paul Bunyan Meets Sierra Sue Happy and the Democrats," we learned that Paul Bunyan, as well as many other American folk heroes, were being deconstructed and then reconstructed into politically correct social icons by leftist groups like the Sierra Club aka Sierra Sue Happy. We found out that the Democratic Party has become the legislative arm of the radicalized environmental movement. We learned that 6 million acres of Western forests have burned to the ground, some of it to bedrock. This will ensure that some of those forests may take generations to grow back. That...

MATTOLE VALLEY, CALIFORNIA -- "Fight every battle as if it were Armageddon, for if you don't, the next one will be." That was the advice, now legendary, imparted forty or more years ago to environmentalists by David Brower, long-time leader of the Sierra Club and later founder of Friends of the Earth. Spoken or unspoken, that dictum drives nearly every legal maneuver and public relations tactic of the arch-environmentalists today. Its most recent manifestation is the intense fight they are waging against efforts to cull underbrush, scrub trees and dead or dying large trees from national forests to reduce forest...

The United Nations will throw its biggest environmental party in 10 years later this month in Johannesburg. In preparation, the UN has rushed to publication a preliminary report about a new environmental pestilence, the so-called Asian Brown Cloud (ABC). The UN says the Brown Cloud will kill millions and wreck the Asian monsoon, which is responsible for feeding about 2 billion people in one way or another. But, like many UN environmental reports, this one fails to mention some crucial points. Nightmarish reports like the one about the ABC have a way of appearing right before big UN environmental conferences...

You probably thought that, when President Bush rejected the Kyoto Global Warming Protocols, that was the end of it for all of us. At least until Jan. 20, 2005. But California now has a law with a stated goal to make California the front-runner in complying with the Kyoto Protocols. It sets up a "voluntary" CO2-emissions reporting system and registry, and provides for the granting of emission-reduction credits, a la Kyoto. Complying with Kyoto means reducing all carbon dioxide emissions by at least a third from current levels. Operators of passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks are allegedly responsible for approximately...

Joel Kovel's recent (2002) book THE ENEMY OF NATURE is a book about capitalism and ecology. Kovel's thesis is simple: capitalism is destroying the world, and only ecosocialism can save us from it. His logic is impeccable; Kovel starts by impressing us with the gravity of the ecological crisis facing us today, and proceeds to an analysis of what "capital" is and why it is the enemy of nature. First of all, capital is a relationship between human beings. "It is humans living as capital, people who become capital's personifications, who destroy ecosystems." (39) Capital "represents that regime in which...

On March 14, 2002, a program to capture the Capitalist system and control it for the purpose of advancing the twisted values of environmentalism was spelled out in a presentation titled "Restructuring the Global Economy." According to the Greens behind this plan, "Economic globalization is the greatest single contributor to the massive ecological crisis of our time, yet this is an aspect that is often ignored by the media, NGOs, policymakers, and citizens. Its inherent emphasis on increased trade requires corresponding expansion of transportation of infrastructures, airports, seaports, roads, rail-lines, pipelines, dams, electric grids, many of these are constructed in...

The utter desperation of the Greens can be seen in the latest report from the World Wildlife Fund claiming that the Earth’s population will have to colonize two planets within fifty years because ours is running out of the capacity to meet the needs of our six billion inhabitants. This is such utter nonsense one assumes that any reasonably intelligent person would dismiss it outright. Worse, it is a deliberate lie and its perpetrators callously know that what they want to achieve are the headlines it will generate in the media whose predilection for scare campaigns is an offense to...

Let us begin with the understanding that there is no such thing as "light pollution", yet this idiotic notion is generating legislation to "save the night skies" from it. It is one more example of the way environmentalists will use any bizarre excuse to secure control over our lives and our property rights. The fact that publicly elected officials would give serious consideration to such nonsense reflects the degree to which environmentalism has destroyed common sense. Where’s the connection, you ask? Consider being told it is against the law for you to put up Christmas lights as decoration or that...

The junk scientists, for reasons which headshrinkers or the FBI might look into, have been doing a scam job on America's people and government, all damaging to the national welfare. Along with the envirocrats, the educrats and the propaganda end of the medical profession, they work night and day, aided and abetted by the liberal media, to shut down economic activity and return us to the spinning wheel. Their tools are junk ecology, phony studies, the power-trippers at the Environmental Protection Agency and a Rousseau-like preference for nature over humanity. Here are a few of the hundreds of documented examples....

It has been my practice for the past seven years to use the words and written material from any group or organization to try and show the American people that the blueprint for the destruction of our nation and our God-given rights is right in front of their eyes - if they would just look. The following is a short excerpt taken from the web site of The Wildlands Project, http://www.wildlandsproject.org/ The Wildlands Project The goal of the Wildlands Project is to set aside approximately 50% of the North American continent (Turtle Island) as "wild land" for the preservation of...

Against Capitalism "We already have too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." -Paul Elrich, Stanford University biologist and Advisor to Vice President Albert Gore "I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecological society under socialism. I don't think it's possible under capitalism." [Judi Barri of Earth First? quoted by Walter Williams, cloumnists with Heritage Features][Syndicate, State Journal Register, June 25, 1992] "The immediate source of ecological crisis is...

Theory Most of the many Americans who would label themselves as environmentalists, do so on the basis of a genuine advocacy of a proper stewardship of man's environment. Indeed, by such a yardstick we're all "environmentalists" - a conscious desire for a polluted and demonstrably hazardous environment would be patently irrational. Implicit but rarely explicit in such advocacy, is the premise that human health and well-being is at least a, if not the, standard of value and prime motivation. For this reason - and the fact that a majority of people are not versed in philosophy, much less Objectivist philosophy...

A few folks have written to me asking when I was going to do a column about the fires raging out West. The body of my column is a response to that inquiry. Suffice it to say it replaces the long scholarly piece, with tons of quotes and documentation, that I was going to write. However, the following quotes come from reputable silviculturists and need to be taken to heart. If only the powers that be would consider them. Most of all those who vote for politicians who are venal and self-serving need to know how they vote matters. When...

Quoting a "recent study," Britain's The Independent published a story on June 13, which claims that "smoke stacks of America have brought the world's worst drought to Africa." After Hurricane Mitch dumped torrential rains on Central America in 1998 that destroyed thousands of homes when entire mountainsides slid into the valleys, Argentine delegate to the U.N. Climate Change meetings in Buenos Aires, Ms. Maria Julia Alsogaray, told the assembled thousands that the rains were caused by American pollution. Were these claims true, we could simply hire Pecos Pete to lasso Mitch and drag him off to Africa. Problem solved. The...

"We have got to share this planet with the other living creatures, and sharing means not merely preserving them in zoos or National Parks, but setting aside huge areas. Whole regions perhaps that will be free of human interference. Ideally, I would like to see certain large areas of the planet set off-limits to human entry of any kind, even aerial over flights." -Edward Abbey-Deep Ecology for the 21st Century: The Natural Wonder: An Ecocentric World View. New Dimensions Radio, 1998. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The only hope of the Earth is to withdraw huge areas as inviolate natural sanctuaries from the depredations...