If Not Now, When? Repeal Agenda 21

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

June 6, 2017

President Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

Via First Class Mail and Email

Dear President Trump

I support your decision about the Paris Agreement.  In addition, I urge your administration to consider rescinding US support for the Rio Declaration of 1992, which is associated with UN Agenda 21 and the Statement of Principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests.  As well, I urge the United States to withhold funding for all government and UN programs aimed to implement these documents.

The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and Agenda 21 are couched in economically illiterate claims about how economic development occurs and how economic inequality ought to be addressed.   For instance, they commit the United States to reducing consumption and to “promoting appropriate demographic policies.”  They do not recognize that freedom and free markets are the sine qua non for meaningful economic development.

       

The Rio Declaration is anti-scientific.  Principle 15 advocates a precautionary principle whereby if “threats,” as defined by environmental extremists, exist, “lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures.” Such vague, anti-scientific language gives a carte blanche to scientism.   It is opposed to real science, and its anti-science bias was reflected in Al Gore’s ignorant claim that science can be “settled.”

Your administration can rescind American support for the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21, and the statement on sustainable forests. It can rescind all budgetary items that support implementation of these totalitarian commitments.

                   

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert,Ph.D.

David J. Garrow's Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

I haven't read David J. Garrow's Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, but a friend forwarded Paul Street's review in Counter Punch.  Street's review is from a left perspective--one which would have been called New Left a few decades ago.  Thus, while Street's (and presumably Garrow's) analysis is accurate, we part ways with respect to Street's criticisms of Garrow as well as Street's conclusions and recommendations.

Street's rendition of Garrow makes some similar points to those I made in this blog in 2008 and 2009. Street puts more weight than I did--how could I have known?--on Obama's lack of substance and his pragmatism.  It was evident from the contribution numbers readily available in 2008 that Obama would be deferential to Wall Street, which he was, according to the review.  

The left has never understood that socialism begets elitism, so a more socialistic economy would beget a slightly different but essentially similar set of figures to Robert Rubin and Lloyd Blankfein.  The elites in communist and softer socialist states don't differ much from the current American elite. Cliches like "neoliberalism," "progressive" and "democratic"  confuse leftists like Street, who remain wedded to the false premise that Hoover's Progressivism was laissez faire.

While it is true that Hoover was more laissez faire than Franklin Roosevelt, the basic statist infrastructure--the Fed, the permanent war machine, the draft,  the income tax,  the process for providing regulatory subsidization to special interests--was already in place under Hoover, and he supported it.  The Republicans elected during the 1920s--Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover--had no interest in repealing the big-government institutions that Theodore Roosevelt (R), Taft (R) and  Wilson (D) had put into place.   While Taft was conservative compared to Roosevelt, he was in the Progressive tradition, favoring use of litigation over regulation of trusts to enforce federal regulation. Roosevelt had favored a more regulated approach, so he ran against Taft in 1912, enabling election of Wilson, who signed both the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act into law.

The American imperial state has been evolving since Lincoln and before, and socialism is not the solution. It is the problem. Obama was in the imperial tradition of Leviathan, and Street's review is worth reading.

America's Living Constitution

America has a living Constitution.  The Constitution is living because it reflects the ability of the American people to amend it.  When Americans’ values change or when scientific advance changes politics, the American people can change the Constitution in two ways. 

First, the Constitution says that two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-fourths of the states can vote to amend the Constitution.  Second, two-thirds of the state legislatures can call a Constitutional Convention that can amend the Constitution.  These democratic processes provide for shifts in public opinion. 

The Constitution does not delegate the authority to decide Constitutionality to the federal courts, nor does it give the Supreme Court the authority to legislate, nor does it give the Supreme Court the authority to amend the Constitution.  The Supreme Court claimed that it has the power to amend the Constitution in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, in which it claimed that it and only it  could identify new  penumbras of the Constitution.  This arrogation of power has given it the authority to invent law, an authority that Hitler claimed for himself through his doctrine of Fuehrerprinzip. 

In contrast, George Washington believed that the president determined Constitutionality, and Andrew Jackson felt no qualms about ignoring the Supreme Court’s claims about Constitutionality.

The Constitution does not delegate authority to amend it to the Supreme Court.  There is no provision for the Supreme Court to update, revise, or change the Constitution based on their claims of penumbras or social evolution, which Supreme Court justices, who are just legal experts, have no authority, knowledge, or competence to determine.  

The claim that the Supreme Court has such authority and that the Constitution is living in the sense that its meaning can be adjusted to reflect the caprices of the Supreme Court justices is another way to express Hitler's principle of Fuehrerprinzip—the theory that his personal whim was law. The phrase living Constitution  means the nine-fuehrer principle: Neunfuehrerprinzip.

The Trump Score Card

Four-and-a-half months into his presidency, Donald Trump has been better than I thought he would be. He  has appointed Betsy De Vos to head the education department, and I believe that Gail Heriot still has a crack at the Office of Civil Rights post.  He has repudiated a climate change treaty that deserves rethinking on Constitutional grounds, as Seth Lipsky points out in his blog in yesterday’s New York Sun.  Moreover, the president still seems serious about regulatory reform.    However, as I point out on Mr. Lipsky’s blog, he has made his best contribution in the way he has rankled the press, baiting them into one absurd impeachment cry after another. 

I rarely watch TV news, but I work out in the Route 28 Gym in Woodstock, NY, and the local lefties inevitably have the TV tuned to MSNBC and Chris Matthews’s mug.  The stridency of his and the other announcers’ carping, caviling, and cussing about President Trump has turned what once could have been fairly called a biased press into one that is shrill and hyperbolic.  The silly Russian story is less serious than the racketeering in which Hillary Clinton engaged, but the MSNBC announcers harp on it and assume that their calls for impeachment will make a difference.   They are discrediting themselves and eliminating any hope for resuscitation of their profession.

Perhaps Trump has encouraged this by design—as someone on Facebook put it, he may have succeeded in goading the media to confusedly charge, much like a bullfighter waving the muleta or red flag at the bull.  If that's not so, the end result will still turn out well.

The press now behaves much like the parties to any social dementia, such as the Salem witch trials, the Negro Plot of 1741, the Red Scare during World War I, or the public reaction to Orson Welles's War of The Worlds.

MSNBC’s Matthews is like the farmer who waved his pitchfork at Welles’s flying saucer.  What we may be seeing is the discrediting of television news and the end of the mid-to-late 20th century's centralized, broadcast news system. If so, Mr. Trump will have done more than a little good on that score alone.