From Canada’s Financial Post:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict…

….bla bla bla

A few minor asides:

The current President of China (2003-present), Hu Jintao, has 2 sons with his wife. (Specifying “with his wife” because we’re only counting legitimate children here)

The last President (1993-2003), Jiang Zemin, had 2 sons with his wife.

The President before that (1988-1993), Yang Shangkun, had 3 children with his wife.

The current Premier of China (2003-present), Wen Jiabao, has one son and one daughter with his wife.

The last Premier (1998-2003), Zhu Rongj, had one son and one daughter with his wife.

The Premier before that (1988-1998), Li Peng, had 3 children with his wife.

The Premier before that (1983-1988), Zhao Ziyang, had 5 children with his wife.

The Premier before that (1976-1983), Hua Guofeng, had 4 children with his wife.  Hua was Premier in 1979 when the One Child Policy was instituted.

The Premier before that was Mao himself. He had at least 4 wives, one of whom is believed to have had 3 of his children and one 6, but Mao was generally such a freak no one really knows.

And, according to her own website, the author of the FP article excerpted above has a couple if kids of her own…

I left the business to stay at home with our two babies, Eric and Julie, for six years.

From WaPo:

The Miami trial of a Venezuelan entrepreneur who grew rich doing business with President Hugo Chávez’s populist administration has exposed how some top government officials have profited from a corrosive web of corruption in the oil-rich country.

Kickbacks, bribes and secret payoffs have become a feature in the socialist administration, which had claimed a break from the past but instead has seen several officials implicated in multimillion-dollar corruption schemes, according to testimony and conversations taped by the FBI. The trial has also revealed the Chávez government’s determination to funnel state funds to its allies in Latin America and the lengths it will go to to keep the aid secret…

…Transcripts of the taped conversations reveal intricate details of the collaboration between Venezuelan businessmen and government officials during Venezuela’s recent oil boom as they pilfered public funds through no-bid contracts, kickbacks and secret commissions.

“It’s basically a bunch of guys in their late 30s, all of whom saw an opportunity when Chávez went into power,” said Kenneth Rijock, financial crime consultant for World-Check, a London-based firm that provides risk analysis for banks and other institutions. “They’ve been riding his coattails since, benefiting from sweetheart deals, kickbacks and other corrupt practices.”

Read the whole article. And consider, we’re about to elect a Socialist president who’s former principal financial supporter is in prison for pilfering state funds.

The mask slips…

“Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly superior to us (sic) now…”

Actually:

No informed, intelligent person would favorably compare China’s infrastructure to that of the US.

There’s an excellent chance that Obama is an idiot, but I think his comment here is driven more by ideology than (lack of) intelligence.

I think Obama genuinely admires China’s totalitarian, communist system. If the US were “doing the same thing,” Obama wouldn’t have to worry about petulant voters or press questioning his right to rule. He wouldn’t have to deal with uppity capitalists challenging his authority to restructure our economy, dividing the spoils among his cronies.

Obama’s model (from The Economist):

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow’s Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing’s new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing’s third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents.

For Beijing’s airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and 10,000 residents resettled. They were barred from unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges though their farmland had been grabbed. Officials threatened them with violence if they refused to leave.

The World Bank says that roads are sometimes built only to convert countryside into revenue-generating urban land. Combined with a lack of adequate public transport, Beijing’s polluted air and congested streets, to which 1,000 cars are added daily, are evidence of the problem.

The government wants to build a new mag Lev train line. Residents along the route are fearful of noise and radiation from the trains.

Complaints still abound about the way things work. Highways—both expressways and other intercity roads—are studded with traffic-slowing toll booths. China reportedly has 70% of the world’s tolled roads and its tolls are the highest in the world (using exchange rates adjusted according to currencies’ purchasing power). To cut costs, lorries routinely overload. This helps to make the roads among the most dangerous in the world (89,000 deaths in 2006 by official reckoning; the actual number may be much higher). And it pushes up the cost of maintaining them. 

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”

From American Thinker:

Just as class struggle forms the nucleus of Marxism, so does it sit at the very core of the Left’s climate alarmism.  At a glance, the regressive nature of fiscal Carbon control schemes, be they taxation or cap-and-trade, would appear to be antithetical to liberal thinking.  But beneath the veneer of both the domestic and international green agenda lies a devious wealth-redistribution plan compared to which all predecessors pale…

Read the whole thing.

From a WSJ article on the recent cap and trade bill:

…(T)he bill would put a cap on carbon emissions that gets lowered every year. But to ease the pain and allow for economic adjustment, the bill would dole out “allowances” under the cap that would stand for the right to emit greenhouse gases. Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a package of manager’s amendments that mandates total carbon reductions of 66% by 2050, while earmarking the allowances.

When cap and trade has been used in the past, such as to reduce acid rain, the allowances were usually distributed for free. A major difference this time is that the allowances will be auctioned off to covered businesses, which means imposing an upfront tax before the trade half of cap and trade even begins. It also means a gigantic revenue windfall for Congress.

Ms. Boxer expects to scoop up auction revenues of some $3.32 trillion by 2050. Yes, that’s trillion. Her friends in Congress are already salivating over this new pot of gold. The way Congress works, the most vicious floor fights won’t be over whether this is a useful tax to create, but over who gets what portion of the spoils. In a conference call with reporters last Thursday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explained that he was disturbed by the effects of global warming on “crustaceans” and so would be pursuing changes to ensure that New England lobsters benefit from some of the loot…

…Ms. Boxer would only auction about half of the carbon allowances; she reserves the rest for politically favored supplicants. These groups might be Indian tribes (big campaign donors!), or states rewarded for “taking the lead” on emissions reductions like Ms. Boxer’s California. Those lucky winners would be able to sell those allowances for cash. The Senator estimates that the value of the handouts totals $3.42 trillion. For those keeping track, that’s more than $6.7 trillion in revenue handouts so far….

This is a collectivist’s dream. The government creates an entirely new commodity (carbon credits) which the private economy will require to function. Half of the new commodity is auctioned off under conditions of artificial and escalating scarcity. The other half is handed out by bureaucrats and politicians to favored constituents, putting the government in a position to select winners and losers across the economy by fiat.

From a related piece by Charles Krauthammer:

….For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself….

….Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society….

Maxine Waters (D-CA) on her plans for American oil companies:

A little background on Waters:

Waters was named in 2005^[2] and 2006^[3] as one of the “most corrupt” members of congress by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. They said, “Her ethics issues arise from her exercise of this power to financially benefit her daughter, husband and son.” They said that Waters’ daughter Karen charges other politicians to appear on mailers sent to constituents in Los Angeles showing her mother’s support for the politician. Karen has received $450,000 in fees from this endeavor and Waters’ son Edward has received $115,000. Waters’ husband Sidney benefited from his wife’s connections with his hiring as a political consultant by a firm, Siebert, Brandford, & Shank, seeking government investment. Sidney Williams earned $500,000 from this consulting, which consisted of introducing Siebert to politicians his wife had supported. Sidney and Edward Williams also benefitted when they won a contract to run a Los Angeles golf course, with the decision made by a county supervisor who had won a close race after Waters’ endorsement and from which they made financial gain of between $140,000 and $400,000.^[4] Citizens for Ethics says this violates House ethics rules for family members’ financial gains.

Waters seems to realize mid-sentence that her use of the term ’socializing’ might be controversial.

But why not use the correct term? The arbitrary government seizure of massive amounts private capital, purportedly for the common good, is Socialism. HRC espoused a very similar idea regarding corporate profits in February 2007.

Around the world left-wing political parties openly embrace the moniker of Socialism, and rightly so - that is what they stand for. Most developed countries have mainstream political parties that are members of The Socialist International (”Progressive Politics for a Fairer World“). Spain, Germany, Italy, Norway, even Iraq are presently ruled by SI member parties. And good for them - at least their voters know what they are getting.

For some reason the DNC is one of few left-wing parties in the world that avoided openly embracing the term. Perhaps it is because Americans aren’t stupid - we know that from National Socialists to International Socialists, political movements identifying with the term Socialism have too often ended up implicated in the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of people through depravation, war, and extermination.

As an aside, check out Powerline’s coverage of the rest of the hearing.

We’ve written before about how the Dems are pulling out all stops to isolate Colombia, an island of free market democracy in a sea of militant, maxist dictatorships (here, here, here, here, and here).

Now House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is changing House rules and seriously undermining the credibility of US diplomacy to avoid an inevitable House vote that will support Colombia. Maybe she likes favors militant, marxist dictatorships over legitimate democracies. Or maybe she really doesn’t care, and just does whatever her union leash-holders tell her to do.

Its really hard to believe how Pelosi can justify this to herself. She must be assuming her own constituency (CA 8th district - ie San Francisco) is too spaced out to question her actions. Unfortunately for the rest of us, she’s probably right.

Lifted entirely from PWB:

This morning, Nancy Pelosi announced that the House Democrats will change their rules so as to be able to table the pending trade agreement with Colombia rather than bring it up for a vote within 90 days, as is currently required:

Today, I discussed with my caucus the prospect of a rule change that we will bring to the floor tomorrow.It’s not really a rule change; it’s sort of in keeping with the rules of the House. And that rule will say that we will remove the timetable from the consideration of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Pelosi also said that if the agreement were voted on now, it would lose, a claim that I think is highly doubtful. In fact, Pelosi wants to protect Democrats from having to vote on an agreement that is pretty obviously in America’s interest, but has been vociferously denounced by her party’s Presidential candidates.

This morning, White House press secretary Dana Perino was asked about Pelosi’s announcement:

QUESTION: And on another subject, do you want to talk about Speaker Pelosi’s decision to put off a vote on the Colombia trade bill?PERINO: Sure. I’m happy to have a chance to respond to that. Speaker Pelosi today did something unprecedented in the history of negotiating trade deals in announcing that Democrats would change the rules in the middle of the game. ***

Today’s announcement shows that any sense of good faith in our process of negotiating trade has evaporated.

We think this is an awful precedent. We think it’s a terrible thing for this administration, but it’s also terrible for all future administrations, both Republicans and Democrats, because countries will not be able to have faith in our word when we’re negotiating trade deals.

We worked tirelessly to work with members of Congress on this trade bill, and we did it according to the rules. We achieved a bipartisan agreement with Speaker Pelosi last May — May 10th, 2007 — to reopen trade agreements to address labor and environment standards that she was concerned about. Those concerns were addressed by us.

We held over 400 consultations with members of Congress. We provided draft implementing legislation in advance. We even shuttled members of Congress to see for themselves the progress in Colombia.

We went over and beyond the requirements of trade promotion authority to try to get this done.

Trade promotion authority also has requirements for Congress, and that is that at the end of a 90-day period — 90 legislative days — that there be a vote.

It is clear that there are many in the Democratic Party who would like to kill this deal. And they want to do so without having to have their fingerprints on it. And they want to do it in a way where they don’t have to take a vote.

Perino went on to say, in answer to a follow-up question:

They also don’t make the case that it would be bad for our workers. Because, right now, almost all of the products coming into our country from Colombia come in without tariffs. But that is not true for our products that we’re trying to sell to Colombia. And that’s all we’re trying to do with this Colombia free trade agreement.

I liked this exchange, too:

QUESTION: You sound a little angry. Is the White House…

PERINO: I think we’re pretty fired up about it. Look, I just — it is the right thing to do. The free trade agreement with Colombia is the right thing to do, and they know it. And that’s why they don’t want to have to take a vote on it because their special interests are pressuring them not to let this deal go through.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

PERINO: The unions. The unions.

As usual, the Democrats have put politics ahead of sound public policy.

Also, don’t miss the WSJ Review and Outlook on the same subject.

Update 4/10/08

Another nice WSJ piece on the topic.

Of all the things Congress “investigates” this should (but won’t) be one.  From the WSJ:

…A hard drive recovered from the computer of a killed Colombian guerrilla has offered more insights into the opposition of House Democrats to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

A military strike three weeks ago killed Raúl Reyes, No. 2 in command of the FARC, Colombia’s most notorious terrorist group. The Reyes hard drive reveals an ardent effort to do business directly with the FARC by Congressman James McGovern (D., Mass.), a leading opponent of the free-trade deal. Mr. McGovern has been working with an American go-between, who has been offering the rebels help in undermining Colombia’s elected and popular government…

…”Receive my warm greetings, as always, from Washington,” Mr. Jones began in a letter to the rebels last fall. “The big news is that I spoke for several hours with the Democratic Congressman James McGovern. In the meeting we had the opportunity to exchange some ideas that will be, I believe, of interest to the FARC-EP [popular army].”

Mr. Jones added that “a fundamental problem is that the FARC does not have, strategically, a spokesman that can communicate directly with persons of influence in my country like Mr. McGovern.”…

Not surprising, McGovern has spent his entire professional life in government, only recently as an elected official. No wonder he thinks undermining a popularly elected, free market government in Colombia makes sense, favoring Marxist terrorists.

We’ve written before about DNC’s efforts to support the enemies of Colombia (and the US) here, here, and here.

I don’t care what his politics are, the sound of crowds of people mindlessly chanting someone’s name is downright creepy to me.

In the tradition of Leni Reifenstahl, here’s the latest Will.i.am Obama video:

Of course the only colors in the video would be black, white, and red. Something about those colors really get certain types revved up.

Reminds me of a passage from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At this point in the book we’re following Sabina, an immigrant from communist Czechoslovakia living in France.

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet Imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don’t want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.

Kundera, living most of his life behind the Iron Curtain (like Ayn Rand) knew a little something about the importance and fragility of individual liberty. I suspect slogans like ‘We are One’ and Obama’s plans to massively expand the power of government would have creeped him out, too.

From Czech President Vaclev Klaus’ speech at Heatland’s climate change conference in NYC last week:

…I am the only speaker from a former communist country and I have to use this as a comparative — paradoxically — advantage. Each one of us has his or her experiences, prejudices and preferences. The ones that I have are — quite inevitably — connected with the fact that I have spent most of my life under the communist regime. A week ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: “Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical — the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.” What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism….

…What frustrates me is the feeling that everything has already been said and published, that all rational arguments have been used, yet it still does not help. Global warming alarmism is marching on. We have to therefore concentrate (here and elsewhere) not only on adding new arguments to the already existing ones, but also on the winning of additional supporters of our views. The insurmountable problem as I see it lies in the political populism of its exponents and in their unwillingness to listen to arguments. They — in spite of their public roles — maximize their own private utility function where utility is not any public good but their own private good — power, prestige, carrier, income, etc. It is difficult to motivate them differently. The only way out is to make the domain of their power over our lives much more limited. But this will be a different discussion…

…I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniac ambitions, want to regulate and constrain the demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to think about or experiment with. Without resisting it we would find ourselves on the slippery “road to serfdom.” The freedom to have children without regulation and control is one of the undisputable human rights and we have to say very loudly that we do respect it and will do so in the future as well…

…What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.

This brings me to politics. As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory (between Mises and Hayek on the one side and Lange and Lerner on the other), the arguments we had been using for decades — till the moment of the fall of communism. Then they were quickly forgotten. The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travelers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same “fatal conceit.” To my great despair, this is not sufficiently challenged neither in the field of social sciences, nor in the field of climatology. Especially the social sciences are suspiciously silent…

…We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. Now it concerns the whole mankind, not just the citizens of one particular country. To discuss this means to look at the canonically structured theoretical discussion about socialism (or communism) and to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom. This should be the main message of our conference.

Nice references to Hayek’s two masterpieces (The Fatal Conceit and The Road to Serfdom). He also makes an implicit and apt reference to Public Choice Theory.