Engineered Extinction
By William F. Jasper
|
Source: The New American, December 1, 2003
Government
policies threaten our jobs, economy and national security by destroying
America’s basic resource industries — mining, forestry, farming and
ranching. |
Imagine
an America of closed factories, shuttered offices, and millions of
unemployed blue-collar and white-collar workers. Imagine a United
States of America that is no longer the leader in any major industrial
or technological sector — a U.S. of A. that is dangerously dependent on
foreign suppliers for many of its critical military supplies and
weapons components. Imagine an America that depends on foreign
producers not only for virtually all consumer goods but even for basic
foodstuffs. Imagine an America that is no longer a land of optimism and
opportunity for our younger generations because it has ceased to be
competitive globally and has regulated jobs, careers and
entrepreneurial activities into oblivion. Imagine a rusting and
decrepit America that can no longer economically support its aging
population. Imagine a dependent America with supplies of food, oil and
other essentials interrupted by war or terrorism. Imagine regular
electrical blackouts and brownouts similar to those that afflict
developing countries.
Not a pretty picture. But, unfortunately,
the above imaginings are gradually becoming reality. We are witnessing
the piecemeal economic destruction of the wealthiest, most dynamic
economic powerhouse in human history. The American economy is dying,
but not from natural causes. It is being strangled to death in a
coordinated pincer attack. America’s ability to survive, produce and
prosper is being systematically destroyed by socialistic taxes and
regulations that make U.S. production of virtually everything
increasingly uneconomical. Simultaneously, the same legislators and
government officials who are impeding American producers are opening
the floodgates to cheap foreign goods that are not burdened with the
same debilitating taxes, regulations and mandates.
The
hemorrhaging of U.S. manufacturers and manufacturing jobs to Mexico,
China and other overseas destinations has been a topic of heated
controversy for decades. In the past couple of years, the outsourcing
of information technology jobs and the transfer of hi-tech facilities
to India, China and Pakistan have also caused outcries of concern. Far
less has been heard of the similar woes besetting our basic resource
industries — farming, ranching, mining and timber — and the major
inroads that foreign competitors (including our declared enemies) have
made into these critical areas.
Even the most insulated and
naïve urbanite knows (we hope) that the meat, eggs, bread, fruit and
vegetables on the dinner table came from a farm or ranch. We know that
the gasoline in our tanks, the heating oil or natural gas for our
homes, and the steel, aluminum and other metals we use each day had to
be extracted from the earth. The paper, lumber and other wood products
that are essential to our lives came from trees.
The average
American urban consumer understands these simple facts — but at a very
elementary level. The overwhelming majority of Americans have no direct
contact with the people who produce the essentials of everyday life —
food, clothing, shelter and energy — and make all of our other hi-tech
and service industries possible. Joe Consumer has little to no
appreciation for the tightening straitjacket that America’s farmers,
ranchers, miners and timber harvesters have been put in, and he is
largely clueless about how the assault on these domestic industries
will dramatically impact him.
Joe Consumer must wake up to
real-world facts and shake off the pernicious fantasies sown by the
fanatics of both the environmental and “free trade” lobbies. Our basic
resource industries, suffering from decades of regulatory overkill and
nearly a decade of added burdens from the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), are now being targeted for more intensive foreign
penetration under the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
and other so-called free trade agreements.
Our Energy Lifeblood
Energy
is the lifeblood of our economy and modern society. It powers our
factories, farms and processing plants. It provides lighting, heating
and cooling to our homes, offices and businesses. It moves people and
products. Without access to affordable energy, America will shut down.
That already has been happening, despite the fact that the United
States has abundantly available energy resources and is the world
leader in developing exploration and extraction technology.
America
runs on oil and gas — literally. Fuels derived from these two sources
supply 100 percent of our transportation demand, for both commercial
and individual transportation.
Approximately 60 million American
families use natural gas to heat their homes, representing over one
half of U.S. homes. Industries depend upon natural gas to produce
plastics, steel, glass, paper, textiles, paints, clothing, aluminum,
medicines, brick, fertilizers and much more. Sixteen percent of
America’s electric generation is also fueled by natural gas. Because of
the environmental regulations on coal and oil, there has been a
significant shift to cleaner burning natural gas over the past decade.
Over 90 percent of new electric generating power plants are fired by
natural gas.
“The environmental desirability of natural gas has
led to massive growth in its demand,” said Rep. Richard Pombo
(R-Calif.), co-chairman of the Speaker’s Task Force on Affordable
Natural Gas, on September 30. “Unfortunately,” Pombo noted, “while the
federal government has embraced policies that encourage the use of
natural gas, it has effectively prevented our producers from increasing
supplies. The resulting imbalance between supply and demand will
continue to have devastating effects on our economy and our way of life
if it is not addressed quickly.”
Rep. Pombo’s comments
accompanied the task force’s report, which found that government
policies are causing low supply levels that, in turn, are resulting in
natural gas prices two to three times above the historic average. These
prices, the task force reports, have led to — and will continue to
result in — loss of jobs, strains on the economy, and severe impacts on
low-income American families.
“Our task force’s findings are
staggering,” said Rep. W. J. Tauzin (R-La.), who co-chaired the task
force with Pombo. “People are losing jobs, industries dependent on
natural gas are suffering and home heating prices continue to
skyrocket. Without increased exploration and development of our
nation’s abundant natural gas reserves, our economy and the livelihoods
of all Americans are at risk.”
The task force report noted:
While
the U.S. is currently suffering from a shortage of gas supply, natural
gas resources in the U.S. are plentiful. In fact, recent studies
estimate that the total technically recoverable North American natural
gas resource is sufficient to meet our current demand needs for many
generations. Unfortunately, government policies are preventing us from
being able to produce and use that gas.
Most of our
natural gas reserves lie beneath non-park federal lands and offshore
waters controlled by the federal government. The task force reported
that “numerous lawsuits filed by opposition groups from the
environmental community” and “numerous overlapping environmental
regulations are preventing or slowing access to natural gas resources.”
As a result, notes Rep. Tauzin, U.S. prices for natural gas are the
highest in the world.
On October 10, a study by the Government
Accounting Office (GAO) underscored the task force findings. The GAO
study found that higher natural gas prices have increased the cost of
producing nitrogen fertilizer. Fertilizer prices have skyrocketed,
forcing farmers to decrease production by 25 percent, causing financial
damage to the fertilizer industry, farmers and the economy.
Dangerous Dependence
Oil,
coal and uranium face even more draconian restrictions. Given our
nation’s economic downturn and the fact that we are engaged in combat
all over the world, does it make sense for us to import over 50 percent
of our oil — and 23 percent of that from the volatile Persian Gulf —
when we have sufficient recoverable reserves at home? Does it make any
sense considering that the environmental objections to greater oil and
gas production have been shown to be totally unfounded? Even the
Clinton administration’s Department of Energy (DOE), dominated by
radical environmentalists, acknowledged this to be the case in a major
1999 study. That DOE study, entitled Environmental Benefits of Advanced
Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Technology, pointed out that
innovative technologies and techniques have led to the discovery of
huge reserves and have made oil recovery far more efficient,
streamlined and environmentally friendly. The study advocated more, not
less, use of our oil and gas resources.
The DOE report noted
that advanced technologies are “allowing economic access to domestic
resources that are concentrated in deeper formations, tighter zones,
deeper water, more sensitive environments, and increasingly more
unconventional settings.” It reported that since 1990 “the vast
majority of reserve additions in the United States — 89 percent of oil
reserve additions and 92 percent of gas reserve additions — have come
from finding new reserves in old fields.” “With more than a century of
oil production behind us,” it observed, “more than two-thirds of the
over 600 billion barrels of the Nation’s known oil resources remain
untapped.” And more recoverable reserves are discovered almost every
day. Still, the fedgov leviathan has refused to release its suffocating
grasp on our energy resources.
Miners and processors of other
minerals also have been drawn and quartered by the government
regulators and environmental extremists. The mining industry has been
painted as a rapacious vandal who lusts to lay waste the entire
countryside. But as the House Resources Committee has noted, mining in
the United States has impacted less than three tenths of one percent of
our surface area. And more than 40 percent of the nation’s mined lands
have been reclaimed, while many historic mines are still active.
Unfortunately,
because of our anti-mining regulatory climate, we are now dependent on
foreign producers for many of these vital materials. The case of the
Mountain Pass Mine in California’s Mojave Desert is a prime example of
the destructive power of the envirocrats. Mountain Pass, the world’s
largest lanthanide mine, is a treasure trove of rare earth minerals
like samarium, lanthium, europium and neodymium. The mine owner,
Molybdenum Corporation of America, invested millions of dollars
developing uses for these exotic elements in televisions, miniaturized
motors, long-lasting lightbulbs, super magnets, and hi-tech military
applications. Thanks to these efforts, the U.S. led the world in rare
earth production and sparked a revolution in the use of these important
minerals. But federal and state regulators shut the mine down on
environmental pretexts.
Don Fife, a professional geologist and
columnist, called the government action a “regulatory outrage” and “the
coup de grace for America’s rare earth industry.” “With Mountain Pass
Mine out of business,” says Fife, “we are dependent on foreign sources
for our supply of these minerals. Since other countries produce only
small amounts of rare earths, nearly all of these militarily strategic
minerals now come from Communist China.”
Farming and Ranching
The
impact that the heavy hand of government exerts on farmers is well
illustrated by the story of would-be mushroom farmer Jim Starr. In
1998, Starr bought 11 acres of agricultural land on Long Beach
peninsula in Washington State. His plan was to raise his family there,
along with a variety of mushrooms for multiple niche markets, such as
gourmet restaurants, medicinal laboratories, and oil companies (for oil
spill clean-ups). Since he intended to run a 100 percent organic farm,
he did not expect any problems with environmental regulation. After he
had invested more than $100,000 to start up his mushroom operation, the
Army Corps of Engineers threw a wrench in the works.
The Corps
informed Starr that since his property included some 80-year-old
drainage ditches where water sometimes collected, his land had been
designated a “critical wetland.” He would have to conduct a costly,
time-consuming environmental impact study and construct raised gravel
beds for his mushroom plots. Finally, the Corps nixed the mushroom
enterprise altogether. The determined Starr decided then to try raising
grapes instead. But before he could plant his vineyard, he would have
to file (and fund, of course) another costly environmental impact study.
According
to the Property Rights Foundation of America, Jim Starr has since been
told that his property is barred from all agricultural use and has
given up trying to farm his land. Starr’s experience reflects the
crushing burden of government bureaucracy afflicting farmers large and
small all across America. Besides the costs and aggravation of direct
regulation putting them at a competitive disadvantage with foreign
producers, farmers are also hit hard by government policies that drive
up the costs of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, tractors and other items
essential to their operations. After saddling farmers with these
onerous burdens, the political class then hits the American taxpayers
for billions of dollars in subsidies and price supports to help the
beleaguered farmers.
But economic recession and “free trade”
pressure may soon spell a drastic cutback, if not an end, to the
government subsidies and price supports, at the same time that
agricultural tariffs on foreign commodities are being dropped. Cutting
subsidies to U.S. family farms, however, will not mean an end to U.S.
subsidies (through the World Bank, IMF and other international
institutions) to foreign agribusiness and U.S. corporate giants with
agricultural operations in Latin America, China and elsewhere.
Agricultural imports, which have already made major gains under NAFTA
and the World Trade Organization (WTO), will turn into a veritable
flood if the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) becomes a
reality.
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations favored
Communist China’s entry into the WTO, which has provided the Beijing
regime with greater trade advantages. During its first year of WTO
membership, China indicated it intends to target our agricultural
sector with the same aggressiveness that it has shown in going after
our manufacturing and hi-tech sectors.
The U.S. Department of
Agriculture recently released a sobering, but little-publicized, report
entitled, China’s Exports Outpaced Imports During WTO Year One. The
USDA report shows that China used its first year of membership in the
WTO to boost its overall agricultural exports to $13 billion in 2002,
an increase of more than $1.5 billion. More than $1 billion worth of
those exports flooded into the U.S., mostly in the form of meat
products, preserved food, fruits, vegetables and nuts. China’s
U.S.-bound exports would have been much higher except that bacteria,
pesticide and chemical residues in its meat products barred some of
that merchandise from the U.S. market. But U.S. corporations are
helping China to overcome these problems with new production plants and
technology. One of the sales pitches for China’s WTO membership was
that China would be a huge market for U.S. corn growers. Just the
opposite; last year China exported 531 million bushels of corn.
Daryll
E. Ray, who holds the Blasingame chair of excellence in agricultural
policy at the University of Tennessee, notes that “food sovereignty”
and “food security” are issues that are appreciated by virtually all
national governments. Except, apparently, the U.S. government.
Agricultural agreements broke down at the WTO Cancun summit in
September because of policy conflicts between the U.S., the European
Union, and less developed countries. The less developed countries did
not want to open up their agricultural sectors to a flood of food
imports that would put many of their small farmers out of business and
make them dependent on imported food. That is understandable.
“Agriculture
is different,” says Dr. Ray, “and nearly all countries view food
production as an issue of national security. We can do without a new
television or DVD player for months if we have to, but food is needed
every day. No one minds importing bananas, coffee and pomegranates.
They are a nice addition to the diet, but not essential. Wheat, rice,
corn or cassava is another matter. Most countries want to be sure that,
if possible, they have immediate local access to these staples which
form the core of their diets. Food security is as important to nations
as it is to individuals and families.” The Bush administration, like
the Clinton administration before it, and like the transnational,
one-world corporate community, opposes this sane, common-sense view.
The Bush administration will claim otherwise, of course, but its
support for NAFTA/WTO/FTAA unmasks its true colors.
America’s
cattle ranchers face threats similar to farmers from costly government
regulations and increasing pressures from cheap imports. With U.S.
congressional approval of NAFTA in 1993, Canadian and Mexican beef
imports shot up dramatically and U.S. cattle ranchers took a horrendous
hit. Imports gained 20 percent of the U.S. market. By the late 1990s,
the USDA was reporting that U.S. beef producers were losing nearly $100
per head. Tens of thousands of family ranches, including many that had
been putting beef on the American table for several generations, were
driven out of business.
The cattle operations that have survived
are, for the moment, experiencing the best beef market in years. That
is only because Canadian beef has been banned since May because of the
danger of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The FTAA would swamp
the U.S. market with meat imports from all of Latin America, virtually
ending independent family cattle ranching.
Forest Resources
Wood
products — lumber, plywood, fiber board, paper — are a renewable
resource, like other agricultural products harvested from the earth.
However, politicians, federal bureaucrats, and environmental radicals
have gone to great lengths to limit the availability and drive up the
costs of these essential commodities. From Alaska to Florida, Maine to
California, the national forests are being locked up and placed
off-limits to human use. This is effectively pricing U.S. wood products
off the market, destroying tens of thousands of jobs, and making U.S.
consumers dependent on foreign suppliers for things that should be
cheaply and abundantly available from domestic producers. Claiming
environmental imperatives for closing off the public forests to timber
harvesting, the enviro-fanatics are causing millions of acres of forest
to die from insect infestation and disease. Inevitably, this results in
massive human, environmental and economic loss from catastrophic
wildfires, as the recent California inferno has demonstrated. (See
article on page 18.)
The green extremists are not content with
merely locking up the enormous state and federal forests; they intend
to do the same with private forestlands as well. Jon Reisman, associate
professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine at
Machias, has detailed the subversive program underway in Maine that
also finds its counterparts in every other state. Prof. Reisman writes:
Hundreds
of millions of dollars in federal, state and private land trust money
are being targeted on private property in rural Maine, while the media
and political leaders applaud and enable these efforts. The natural
resource economic base of forestry, farming and fishing is steadily
shrinking and is under continuous regulatory and spiritual assault.
Forest landowners have become willing sellers and are indeed selling
out in droves. The only growth sector in the rural Maine economy is
government and non-profits that rely largely on government funding. The
population is leaving, and what remains is old, poor and powerless.
Within 20 years I expect most of rural Eastern Maine to be a “Wildland
area” — no people, no roads, no economic activity.
Prof.
Reisman refers to the forces pushing this scheme as the “watermelon
caucus,” groups and individuals that are green on the outside, red on
the inside.
The watermelon caucus, he says, is “an interlocking
network of foundations, non-governmental organizations and influential
fellow travelers who have been remarkably successful in pushing
American public opinion towards a romantic environmentalism that is
contemptuous of science, technology, capitalism, individual rights and
freedom.”
They are Marxists masquerading as environmentalists,
plain and simple. As Prof. Reisman puts it: “The watermelon caucus is
committed to socialism: public ownership of the land base.”
William
H. Beardsley, president of Husson College in Bangor, Maine, came face
to face with a member of the watermelon caucus who bragged of their
conspiratorial plan for destroying the state’s forest industries. In a
September 2000 article in the Portland Press Herald, Dr. Beardsley told
of his meeting with one of the activist leaders who laid out their
strategy. Beardsley paraphrased the watermelon strategist’s boast
thusly:
The forest industry is very capital intensive. One paper
machine costs hundreds of millions of dollars. If the industry does not
invest in Maine, Maine’s old mills cannot compete.
We do
not have to win votes to close them down or make them uneconomic. All
we need to do is create uncertainty, risk and delay and investors will
put their money elsewhere. Holding repeated referendums and achieving
regulatory delay and uncertainty is all we need to do. The rest is pure
economics.
Behind the Madness
That is
precisely the criminal scheme that they have been implementing in Maine
and elsewhere with spectacular success. However, the watermelon
Marxists have succeeded so spectacularly not because of their own
brilliance or the inherent power of their message, but because of the
enormous financial aid they have received from America’s largest
foundations and corporations, as well as the unstinting support they
have enjoyed from our nation’s major media organizations. As we have
repeatedly shown in this magazine, critical funding for the socialist
greens has always been provided by some of the biggest names in
capitalism, such as Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Turner, Mott,
Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, Nike, Merrill Lynch, AOL Time Warner,
Pacific Bell, and Citigroup.
Why do so many of the capitalist
elite fund and promote their sworn enemies? There is a method to the
madness. These elites are corporate socialists; they are monopoly, not
free enterprise, capitalists. They believe in capturing market share
not by producing better goods and services but by using the power of
government to wipe out their competition. They are internationalists,
globalists, one-worlders. They may be U.S. citizens, technically, but
they feel no loyalty to this country. Their global, corporate empires
make them “citizens of the world,” and they slavishly support the
relentless drive to empower the United Nations and transform it into a
world government with unrestrained, tyrannical power. They expect to be
members of the oligarchy that will control this planned, global tyranny.
The
main obstacle to the globalist aspirations of these corporate
socialists is the American free enterprise system (at least, what still
remains of it), with its millions of independent entrepreneurs. That is
why these one-worlders fund the Marxist schemes of the watermelon
caucus to hamstring our domestic industries. Then, while their American
competitors are crippled with regulatory burdens, they close the pincer
attack and hit them with a flood of cheap imports. Thus, they avidly
support NAFTA, the WTO, the FTAA and other “free trade” schemes. Under
NAFTA, Canadian lumber and paper goods have taken a heavy toll on our
domestic producers. If allowed to develop as planned by their “free
trade” architects, the WTO and FTAA will completely supplant domestic
producers of wood and paper products with foreign producers from China,
Southeast Asia, New Zealand, Canada and Latin America. This same pincer
attack is closing in on all of our basic resource industries.
The
Free Trade Area of the Americas, which the Bush administration is
pressing to have cemented in place by January of 2005, is the next
major offensive in this ongoing economic warfare the globalists are
waging against America. If the FTAA is allowed to become a reality,
millions of independent American businesses and tens of millions of
American jobs will face certain extinction. Ultimately, the FTAA means
engineered extinction for our freedom and national sovereignty as well.
The FTAA must be stopped, if the people of the United States hope to
remain a free, economically viable, and sovereign nation.
That
is not an impossible task. If the picture described in this article
were understood by just a small fraction of the nation’s opinion
molders, the politicians would be scrambling to unyoke America from
these schemes. Let’s remember that the Clinton administration and its
internationalist cohorts were able to fasten NAFTA on America only
after a hard-fought battle and that NAFTA narrowly passed the House by
a vote of 234 to 200 — and then only after an underhanded campaign
employing massive deception, bribery and extortion.
|
