The Global Redistributionist at Obama’s Left Hand
Maldistribution
of Consumption and Investment Undermine Human Well-Being... Obama seeks to
cause ZERO economic growth and ZERO Population growth in US while
redistributing wealth [BANKRUPTING] the
The Neutering of the
Wednesday,
August 05, 2009
Does President Barack
Obama believe economic and population growth ought to be stopped because they
imperil the planet and that wealth should be redistributed both within the
He does not think it is ludicrous; a man
who has promoted zero growth and global wealth redistribution for years is now
one of Obama’s top advisers.
In December, Obama announced he was
naming John P. Holdren, director of the
Obama expressed admiration for Holdren’s work and said, “I look forward to his
wise counsel in the years ahead.”
So, what wise counsel had Holdren given in the past?
His curriculum vitae lists as one of his
“Recent publications” an essay entitled “The Meaning of Sustainability:
Biogeophysical Aspects.” Co-authored by Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily of the
Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, this essay served as the first
chapter in a 1995 book—“Defining and Measuring Sustainability: The
Biogeophysical Foundations”—published by the World Bank. The book is posted as
a PDF on the World Bank’s Web site.
“We think development ought to be understood to
mean progress toward alleviating the main ills that undermine human
well-being,” Holdren, Ehrlich and Daily wrote in this essay.
Table 1-1 of the essay lists both
“excessive population growth” and “maldistribution of consumption and
investment” as “driving forces” behind these “ills.”
“Excessive population growth,” the authors assert, is “a condition now
prevailing almost everywhere.”
Table 1-2 of the essay lists “Requirements for Sustainable Improvements in
Well-being.” These include “reduced disparities within and between countries.”
“The large gaps between rich and poor that characterize income distribution
within and between countries today are incompatible with social stability and
with cooperative approaches to achieving environmental sustainability,” the
authors explain.
Table 1-1 lists among the “underlying human frailties”
causing the ills of mankind as “greed, selfishness, intolerance and shortsightedness.”
These vices, they say, “collectively have been elevated by conservative
political doctrine and practice (above all in the United States in 1980-92) to
the status of a credo.”
The authors present a formula for understanding ecological “damage,” which they
say “means reduced length or quality of life for the present generation or
future generations.” This doomsday formula is: “Damage = population x economic
activity per person (affluence) x resource use per economic activity
(resources) x stress on the environment per resource use (technology) x damage
per stress (susceptibility).”
Their application of this formula rejects the notion that man, through his wit,
can not only increase individual productivity and technological efficiency but also
find new resources to fuel them.
For example, how much potential water lingers in the universe? Well, how much
hydrogen and oxygen did God create? Holdren and co-authors claim to “know for
certain” such thinking is folly.
“We know for certain, for example, that: No form of material growth (including
population growth) other than asymptotic growth, is
sustainable,” they say. “Many of the practices inadequately supporting today’s
population of 5.5 billion people are unsustainable; and at the sustainability
limit, there will be a trade-off between population and energy-matter
throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity per person
and well-being per person.
“This is enough,” they write, “to say quite a lot about what needs to be faced
up to eventually (a world of zero net physical growth), what should be done now
(change unsustainable practices, reduce excessive material consumption, slow
down population growth), and what the penalty will be for postponing attention
to population limitation (lower well-being per person).”
By the time Holdren and his co-authors wrote those words, he had been sounding
the same alarm for more than two decades.
“Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives
may be much more horrifying,” Holdren, Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich wrote on Page
256 of their 1973 book, “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.”
“A far better choice, in our view,” they wrote, “is to begin now with milder
methods of influencing family size preferences, while ensuring that the means
of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every
human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is
taken promptly, perhaps the need for involuntary or repressive measures can be
averted.”
Within this apocalyptic vision, curbing economic growth and redistributing
wealth become duties.
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in
North America and to de-develop the
Those are the words of a man who now serves in the White House, providing “wise
counsel” to a president seeking to restructure the entire