 | « on: July 05, 2009, 12:18:45 PM » |  Quote |
Below is an excerpt from an interview that Gore Vidal -- a "limousine liberal" if ever there was one -- did with Playboy Magazine.
Notice how shockingly candid he is about his anti-family/pro-eugenics views:
--------------------------------
VIDAL: ...how are we to survive on an overpopulated planet? Even if we fully exploit our food resources--including sea farming--and develop effective and equitable international systems of distribution, it still won't be possible to feed the coming generations. So there will be famine and disorder. Meanwhile, we are destroying our environment. Water, earth and air are being poisoned. Climate is being altered. Yet we go on breeding, creating an economy that demands more and more consumers to buy its products--and endless, self-destructive cycle. But though most thoughtful people are aware of what we are doing to ourselves, nothing is being done to restore the planet's ecological balance, to limit human population, to create social and political and economic institutions capable of coping with--let alone solving--such relatively manageable problems as poverty and racial injustice. Who will tell Detroit that they must abandon the fossil fuel-burning combustion engine? No one. And so the air goes bad, cancers proliferate, climate changes.
PLAYBOY: Do you think drastic reform is likely to be effected by our present system of government?
VIDAL: No. And I find that hard to admit, because for all of my adult life I've generally accepted what we call the democratic process. But it no longer works. Look at Congress. Last year, 81 percent of the people wanted strong gun-control legislation. But 70 percent of the Congress did not, on instructions from the National Rifle Association. Congress, President, courts are not able to keep industry from poisoning Lake Erie, or Detroit from making cars that, aside from the carbon monoxide they create, are murderous weapons. To this degree, at least, the New Left is right: The System cannot be reformed. I part company with them on how it's to be replaced. They are vague. I would like to be specific--"programmatic," to use a word they like even less than "liberal."
PLAYBOY: And what is your program?
VIDAL: I would like to replace our present system with an Authority--with a capital A--that would have total control over environment. And environment means not only air, earth and water but the distribution of services and products, and the limitations of births. Where the Authority would have no jurisdiction would be over the private lives of the citizens. Whatever people said, wrote, ate, drank, made love to--as long as it did no harm to others--would be allowed. This, of course, is the direct reverse of our present system. Traditionally, we have always interfered in the private lives of our citizens while allowing any entrepreneur the right to poison a river in order to make money.
PLAYBOY: Isn't what you're proposing--a dictatorship demanding absolute control over the most vital areas of our lives and yet granting absolute social and political freedom--a contradiction in terms? Isn't it inevitable that the power of your Authority would sooner or later circumscribe the private life of every citizen?
VIDAL: Though the Authority would, in its own sphere, be absolute, it would never be the instrument of any one man. There would be no dictator. The thing should be run like a Swiss hotel, with anonymous specialists going about their business under constant review by a council of scientists, poets, butchers, politicians, teachers--the best group one could assemble. No doubt my Venetian ancestry makes me prone to this sort of government, because the Most Serene Republic was run rather like that and no cult of personality ever disturbed those committees that managed the state with great success. It can be done.
PLAYBOY: Would you explain what you mean when you say the Authority would be able to limit births?
VIDAL: I mean just that. Only certain people would be allowed to have children. Nor is this the hardship that it might at first appear. Most people have no talent for bringing up children and they usually admit it--once the damage is done. Unfortunately, our tribal propaganda makes every woman think her life incomplete unless she has made a replica of herself and her loved one. But tribal propaganda can be changed. One can just as easily convince people that to bring an unwanted child into the world is a social crime as grave as murder. Through propaganda, the Japanese made it unfashionable to have big families after the War and so--alone of the Asian countries--kept their population viable.
PLAYBOY: Your ends may be commendable, but let's discuss the means. What would happen to the citizen who didn't wish to live in your brave new world--to the devout Roman Catholic, for example, who refused to accept your population-control measures?
VIDAL: If he didn't want to emigrate, he'd simply have to accept the Authority's restrictions. The right to unlimited breeding is not a constitutional guarantee. If education and propaganda failed, those who violated the birth-control restrictions would have to pay for their act as for any other criminal offense.
PLAYBOY: With imprisonment?
VIDAL: I don't believe in prisons, but there would have to be some sort of punishment. Incontinent breeding endangers the human race. That is a fact with which we now live. If we don't limit our numbers through planned breeding, they will be limited for us in the natural way: famine and war. I think it more civilized to be unnatural and voluntarily limit population.
PLAYBOY: What would become of the family if only a few people were allowed to have children?
VIDAL: The family is an economic unit, not a biological unit; and once the economic need for it is gone--when women are able to get jobs and support themselves--the unit ceases to have any meaning. In today's cities, it is not possible to maintain the old American idea of the family--which was, essentially, peasant; a tribal group working together to create food. For better or worse, we are now on our own, and attempts to revive the ancient family ideal...will fail. As for the children that we do want, I'd like to see them brought up communally, the way they are in certain of the Israeli kibbutzim. I suspect that eventually, the whole idea of parenthood will vanish, when children are made impersonally by laboratory insemination of ova. To forestall the usual outraged letters declaring that I am against the "normal" sexual act, consider what I'm talking about: the creation of citizens, not sexual pleasure, which will continue, as always. Further, I would favor an intelligent program of eugenics that would decide which genetic types should be continued and which allowed to die off. It's within the range of our science to create, very simply, new people physically healthier and intellectually more competent than ourselves. After all, we do it regularly in agriculture and in the breeding of livestock, so why not with the human race? According to the somber Dr. William Shockley--the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who once contravened liberal doctrine by suggesting that we should look for genetic differences among the races--our preservation, through advanced medicine, of physically and mentally weak strains is now making the race less fit with each generation.
PLAYBOY: Your critics would charge that the utopia you propose is actually a nightmarish world reminiscent of Nazi Germany and of George Orwell's 1984. How would you answer them?
VIDAL: Most things human go wrong. The Authority would probably be no exception. But consider the alternatives. Nuclear war to reduce population. World famine. The coming to power of military dictatorships. The crushing of individual freedom. At least the Authority would guarantee more private freedom to its citizens than they now enjoy.
PLAYBOY: Realistically, do you see any chance of such an "enlightened" dictatorship coming to power?
VIDAL: Dictatorship, no; enlightened, yes. Could it happen? Probably not. It takes too long to change tribal thinking. The majority will always prefer a fiery death, howling tribal slogans. A pity--but then, it is not written in the stars that this peculiar race endure forever. Now may be a good time for us to stop. However, since I believe that one must always act as though our affairs were manageable, I should like to see a Party for Human Survival started on an international scale, to try to persuade people to vote willingly for a life-enhancing as well as life-preserving system.
PLAYBOY: Your detractors, on both right and left, would argue that the proposals you've just made reflect a characteristic Vidal trait: intellectual arrogance and a basic elitist contempt for the people and their ability to govern themselves. Do you think they have a point?
VIDAL: I do not admire "the people," as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival--so highly developed in the individual--goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool. But then, crowds don't govern. In fact, only in America do we pretend to worship the majority, reverently listening to the herd as it Gallups this way and that. A socialist friend of mine in England, a Labor M.P., once said: "You Americans are mad on the subject of democracy. But we aren't, because we know if the people were given their head, they would bring back hanging, the birch and, of course, they'd kick the niggers out of the country. Fortunately, the Labor Party has no traffic with democracy." I want the people to be happy, but more than that, I want them to be humane--something they are not, as everyone from Jesus to Karl Marx has had occasion to notice.
--------------------------------
Now, at this point some of you are probably wondering: when was the above interview conducted? Five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen, perhaps?
Try forty years ago!
It's from the June 1969 issue.
The above excerpt is from pages 80-82 of that issue.
The only difference between then and now is that today's limousine liberals have learned to conceal their true eugenicist colors through the use of euphemism-saturated public relations rhetoric.
=
yeah that was 40 years ago, have you heard interviews with Vidal lately?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3156121348015048039
and
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drWGnF6DjM
I do agree that the libs today do conceal a similar mindset, but Gore on the other hand is a different charater as he has been (as you have shown) and continues to be open about what he feels. perhaps kids and grandkids allowed him to see things a little clearer. but i do have to tell you that is some explosive shit, thanks for posting it.
=
You're quite welcome. I should probably point out that my purpose for posting it was not to start a Gore Vidal bash-fest (which is why I left his name out of the thread title), but to draw attention to the anti-family/pro-eugenicist mindset that seems to dominate the establishment "Left," and to just how long that mindset has been around.
As for those two interviews, there's nothing in either one that indicates whether his view on eugenics is any different now than it was forty years ago.
I, of course, appreciate that he opposed both (a) draconian police state expansion measures -- such as the Military Commissions Act -- and (b) imperialistic wars of aggression when Bush was in office, but then so did Keith Olbermann (along with countless other limousine liberals):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAjVHtSO_As
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW1gKwqKjXc
Yet all that righteous indignation on the part of the establishment Left went right out the window the moment Obama took office, and has yet to return, despite the fact that (a) the "Patriot" Act, Military Commissions Act and Presidential Directive 51 are all still on the books, (b) our hornet's nest-stirring foreign policy is no less reckless, costly or imperialistic now than it was a year ago (if anything it's even more so), (c) Wall Street's parasitic fleecing of Main Street has continued unabated, and (d) Obama has broken practically every campaign promise he ever made.
So there's clearly a partisan double standard at play, here. (Much like the partisan double standard that the establishment "Right" employed for six years, as they winked and looked the other way while the Republican-controlled Congress and White House increased big government across the board.)
Now, it may be that Mr. Vidal does not subscribe to this partisan double standard, but until I see compelling evidence to that effect, I'm inclined to assume he's no exception to the general rule.
=
Notice how shockingly candid he is about his anti-family/pro-eugenics views:
--------------------------------
VIDAL: ...how are we to survive on an overpopulated planet? Even if we fully exploit our food resources--including sea farming--and develop effective and equitable international systems of distribution, it still won't be possible to feed the coming generations. So there will be famine and disorder. Meanwhile, we are destroying our environment. Water, earth and air are being poisoned. Climate is being altered. Yet we go on breeding, creating an economy that demands more and more consumers to buy its products--and endless, self-destructive cycle. But though most thoughtful people are aware of what we are doing to ourselves, nothing is being done to restore the planet's ecological balance, to limit human population, to create social and political and economic institutions capable of coping with--let alone solving--such relatively manageable problems as poverty and racial injustice. Who will tell Detroit that they must abandon the fossil fuel-burning combustion engine? No one. And so the air goes bad, cancers proliferate, climate changes.
PLAYBOY: Do you think drastic reform is likely to be effected by our present system of government?
VIDAL: No. And I find that hard to admit, because for all of my adult life I've generally accepted what we call the democratic process. But it no longer works. Look at Congress. Last year, 81 percent of the people wanted strong gun-control legislation. But 70 percent of the Congress did not, on instructions from the National Rifle Association. Congress, President, courts are not able to keep industry from poisoning Lake Erie, or Detroit from making cars that, aside from the carbon monoxide they create, are murderous weapons. To this degree, at least, the New Left is right: The System cannot be reformed. I part company with them on how it's to be replaced. They are vague. I would like to be specific--"programmatic," to use a word they like even less than "liberal."
PLAYBOY: And what is your program?
VIDAL: I would like to replace our present system with an Authority--with a capital A--that would have total control over environment. And environment means not only air, earth and water but the distribution of services and products, and the limitations of births. Where the Authority would have no jurisdiction would be over the private lives of the citizens. Whatever people said, wrote, ate, drank, made love to--as long as it did no harm to others--would be allowed. This, of course, is the direct reverse of our present system. Traditionally, we have always interfered in the private lives of our citizens while allowing any entrepreneur the right to poison a river in order to make money.
PLAYBOY: Isn't what you're proposing--a dictatorship demanding absolute control over the most vital areas of our lives and yet granting absolute social and political freedom--a contradiction in terms? Isn't it inevitable that the power of your Authority would sooner or later circumscribe the private life of every citizen?
VIDAL: Though the Authority would, in its own sphere, be absolute, it would never be the instrument of any one man. There would be no dictator. The thing should be run like a Swiss hotel, with anonymous specialists going about their business under constant review by a council of scientists, poets, butchers, politicians, teachers--the best group one could assemble. No doubt my Venetian ancestry makes me prone to this sort of government, because the Most Serene Republic was run rather like that and no cult of personality ever disturbed those committees that managed the state with great success. It can be done.
PLAYBOY: Would you explain what you mean when you say the Authority would be able to limit births?
VIDAL: I mean just that. Only certain people would be allowed to have children. Nor is this the hardship that it might at first appear. Most people have no talent for bringing up children and they usually admit it--once the damage is done. Unfortunately, our tribal propaganda makes every woman think her life incomplete unless she has made a replica of herself and her loved one. But tribal propaganda can be changed. One can just as easily convince people that to bring an unwanted child into the world is a social crime as grave as murder. Through propaganda, the Japanese made it unfashionable to have big families after the War and so--alone of the Asian countries--kept their population viable.
PLAYBOY: Your ends may be commendable, but let's discuss the means. What would happen to the citizen who didn't wish to live in your brave new world--to the devout Roman Catholic, for example, who refused to accept your population-control measures?
VIDAL: If he didn't want to emigrate, he'd simply have to accept the Authority's restrictions. The right to unlimited breeding is not a constitutional guarantee. If education and propaganda failed, those who violated the birth-control restrictions would have to pay for their act as for any other criminal offense.
PLAYBOY: With imprisonment?
VIDAL: I don't believe in prisons, but there would have to be some sort of punishment. Incontinent breeding endangers the human race. That is a fact with which we now live. If we don't limit our numbers through planned breeding, they will be limited for us in the natural way: famine and war. I think it more civilized to be unnatural and voluntarily limit population.
PLAYBOY: What would become of the family if only a few people were allowed to have children?
VIDAL: The family is an economic unit, not a biological unit; and once the economic need for it is gone--when women are able to get jobs and support themselves--the unit ceases to have any meaning. In today's cities, it is not possible to maintain the old American idea of the family--which was, essentially, peasant; a tribal group working together to create food. For better or worse, we are now on our own, and attempts to revive the ancient family ideal...will fail. As for the children that we do want, I'd like to see them brought up communally, the way they are in certain of the Israeli kibbutzim. I suspect that eventually, the whole idea of parenthood will vanish, when children are made impersonally by laboratory insemination of ova. To forestall the usual outraged letters declaring that I am against the "normal" sexual act, consider what I'm talking about: the creation of citizens, not sexual pleasure, which will continue, as always. Further, I would favor an intelligent program of eugenics that would decide which genetic types should be continued and which allowed to die off. It's within the range of our science to create, very simply, new people physically healthier and intellectually more competent than ourselves. After all, we do it regularly in agriculture and in the breeding of livestock, so why not with the human race? According to the somber Dr. William Shockley--the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who once contravened liberal doctrine by suggesting that we should look for genetic differences among the races--our preservation, through advanced medicine, of physically and mentally weak strains is now making the race less fit with each generation.
PLAYBOY: Your critics would charge that the utopia you propose is actually a nightmarish world reminiscent of Nazi Germany and of George Orwell's 1984. How would you answer them?
VIDAL: Most things human go wrong. The Authority would probably be no exception. But consider the alternatives. Nuclear war to reduce population. World famine. The coming to power of military dictatorships. The crushing of individual freedom. At least the Authority would guarantee more private freedom to its citizens than they now enjoy.
PLAYBOY: Realistically, do you see any chance of such an "enlightened" dictatorship coming to power?
VIDAL: Dictatorship, no; enlightened, yes. Could it happen? Probably not. It takes too long to change tribal thinking. The majority will always prefer a fiery death, howling tribal slogans. A pity--but then, it is not written in the stars that this peculiar race endure forever. Now may be a good time for us to stop. However, since I believe that one must always act as though our affairs were manageable, I should like to see a Party for Human Survival started on an international scale, to try to persuade people to vote willingly for a life-enhancing as well as life-preserving system.
PLAYBOY: Your detractors, on both right and left, would argue that the proposals you've just made reflect a characteristic Vidal trait: intellectual arrogance and a basic elitist contempt for the people and their ability to govern themselves. Do you think they have a point?
VIDAL: I do not admire "the people," as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival--so highly developed in the individual--goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool. But then, crowds don't govern. In fact, only in America do we pretend to worship the majority, reverently listening to the herd as it Gallups this way and that. A socialist friend of mine in England, a Labor M.P., once said: "You Americans are mad on the subject of democracy. But we aren't, because we know if the people were given their head, they would bring back hanging, the birch and, of course, they'd kick the niggers out of the country. Fortunately, the Labor Party has no traffic with democracy." I want the people to be happy, but more than that, I want them to be humane--something they are not, as everyone from Jesus to Karl Marx has had occasion to notice.
--------------------------------
Now, at this point some of you are probably wondering: when was the above interview conducted? Five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen, perhaps?
Try forty years ago!
It's from the June 1969 issue.
The above excerpt is from pages 80-82 of that issue.
The only difference between then and now is that today's limousine liberals have learned to conceal their true eugenicist colors through the use of euphemism-saturated public relations rhetoric.
=
I never even implied the interview was conducted this year.
Did you read the part where I revealed when the interview was actually conducted?
I left that part for last for a reason.
Did you read the part where I revealed when the interview was actually conducted?
I left that part for last for a reason.
yeah that was 40 years ago, have you heard interviews with Vidal lately?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3156121348015048039
and
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drWGnF6DjM
I do agree that the libs today do conceal a similar mindset, but Gore on the other hand is a different charater as he has been (as you have shown) and continues to be open about what he feels. perhaps kids and grandkids allowed him to see things a little clearer. but i do have to tell you that is some explosive shit, thanks for posting it.
=
You're quite welcome. I should probably point out that my purpose for posting it was not to start a Gore Vidal bash-fest (which is why I left his name out of the thread title), but to draw attention to the anti-family/pro-eugenicist mindset that seems to dominate the establishment "Left," and to just how long that mindset has been around.
As for those two interviews, there's nothing in either one that indicates whether his view on eugenics is any different now than it was forty years ago.
I, of course, appreciate that he opposed both (a) draconian police state expansion measures -- such as the Military Commissions Act -- and (b) imperialistic wars of aggression when Bush was in office, but then so did Keith Olbermann (along with countless other limousine liberals):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAjVHtSO_As
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW1gKwqKjXc
Yet all that righteous indignation on the part of the establishment Left went right out the window the moment Obama took office, and has yet to return, despite the fact that (a) the "Patriot" Act, Military Commissions Act and Presidential Directive 51 are all still on the books, (b) our hornet's nest-stirring foreign policy is no less reckless, costly or imperialistic now than it was a year ago (if anything it's even more so), (c) Wall Street's parasitic fleecing of Main Street has continued unabated, and (d) Obama has broken practically every campaign promise he ever made.
So there's clearly a partisan double standard at play, here. (Much like the partisan double standard that the establishment "Right" employed for six years, as they winked and looked the other way while the Republican-controlled Congress and White House increased big government across the board.)
Now, it may be that Mr. Vidal does not subscribe to this partisan double standard, but until I see compelling evidence to that effect, I'm inclined to assume he's no exception to the general rule.
=
 | « Reply #12 on: July 05, 2009, 07:32:25 PM » | Quote |
Since the views expressed by Gore Vidal in his 1969 interview are virtually identical to the eugenicist views of both today's global elite and the minions, shills and media whores who lovingly serve them, I thought I'd respond to Vidal's key claims.
That is exactly what Malthusian propagandists were waxing alarmist about over two centuries ago. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now.
Even worse is the fact that modern-day Malthusians tend to be either members or lapdog servants of the very parasitic ruling class that -- by engineering acute poverty in Third World nations -- actually caused the population explosions they incessantly whine about.
-------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Demographic transition
The Demographic transition model (DTM) is a model used to represent the process of explaining the transformation of countries from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy. It is based on an interpretation begun in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson of prior observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the past two hundred years.
Most developed countries are beyond stage three of the model; the majority of developing countries are in stage 2 or stage 3. The model was based on the changes seen in Europe so these countries follow the DTM relatively well. Many developing countries have moved into stage 3. The major (relative) exceptions are some poor countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle Eastern countries, which are poor or affected by government policy or civil strife, notably Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Yemen and Afghanistan.
Summary of the theory
The transition involves four stages, or possibly five.
* In stage one, pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance.
* In stage two, that of a developing country, the death rates drop rapidly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life spans and reduce disease. These changes usually come about due to improvements in farming techniques, access to technology, basic healthcare, and education. Without a corresponding fall in birth rates this produces an imbalance, and the countries in this stage experience a large increase in population.
* In stage three, birth rates fall due to access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off.
* During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level as has happened in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to a shrinking population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. As the large group born during stage two ages, it creates an economic burden on the shrinking working population. Death rates may remain consistently low or increase slightly due to increases in lifestyle diseases due to low exercise levels and high obesity and an aging population in developed countries.
[Continued...]
http://www.globalissues.org/article/206/poverty-and-population-growth-lessons-from-our-own-past
Poverty and population growth: lessons from our own past
Let's try to understand why, by looking at our own demographic history. As recently as two or three generations ago, mortality rates in the United States were as high as they are now in most third world countries. Opportunities for our grandmothers to work outside the home were limited. And ours was largely an agrarian society in which every family member was needed to work on the farm. Coauthor Frances Lappé's own grandmother, for example, gave birth to nine children, raised them alone on a small farm, and saw only six survive to adulthood. Her story would not be unusual in a still fast-growing third world country today.
Faced with scarcity, poor families needed many children to help with work on the farm, and because of high infant-mortality rates, they needed many more pregnancies and births to achieve the necessary family size.
In the United States, the move to two-children families took place only after a society-wide transition that lowered infant death rates, opened opportunities to women outside the home, and transformed ours into an industrial rather than agrarian economy, so that families no longer relied on their children's labor. If we contrast Lappé's grandmother's story to a latter-day urban middle-class family, we can see that children who were once a source of needed labor are now a source of major costs, including tuition, an extra room in the house, the latest model basketball shoes, and forgone earnings for every year that a professional mom stays home with the kids.
The United States advanced through the falling-birth-rate phase of the demographic transition in response to these societal changes, well before the advent of sophisticated contraceptive technologies, even while the government remained actively hostile to birth control. (As late as 1965, selling contraceptives was still illegal in some states.)
Using our own country's experience to understand rapid population growth in the third world, where poverty is more extreme and widespread, we can now extend our hypothesis concerning the link between hunger and high fertility rates: both persist where societies deny security and opportunity to the majority of their citizens-where infant-mortality rates are high and adequate land, jobs, education, health care, and old-age security are beyond the reach of most people, and where there are few opportunities for women to work outside the home.
Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are making a rational calculus for survival. High birth rates reflect people's defensive reaction against enforced poverty. For those living at the margin of survival, children provide labor to augment meager family income. In Bangladesh, one study showed that even by the age of six a boy provides labor and/or income for the family. By the age of twelve, at the latest, he contributes more than he consumes.
Population investigators tell us that the benefit children provide to their parents in most third world countries cannot be measured just by hours of labor or extra income. The intangibles are just as important. Bigger families carry more weight in community affairs. With no reliable channels for advancement in sight, parents may hope that the next child will be the one clever or lucky enough to get an education and land a city job despite the odds. In many countries, income from one such job in the city can support a whole family in the countryside.
And impoverished parents know that without children to care for them in old age, they will have nothing. They also realize that none of these possible benefits will be theirs unless they have many children, since hunger and lack of health care will kill many of their offspring before they reach adulthood.
[Continued...]
-------------------------------------
So, if "overpopulation" is not the real cause of world poverty and environmental degradation, then what is?
One of the primary causes is the horribly corrupt and parasitic process whereby international bankers extract countless billions in usurious interest from developing economies each year in exchange for the nothing out of which they create the so-called "money" they loan:
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“The Third World War has already started -- a silent war, not for that reason any less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying there are children, instead of millions of wounded there are millions of unemployed; instead of destruction of bridges there is the tearing down of factories, schools, hospitals, and entire economies….It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-is9t2BP7og (A pertinent clip from The Money Masters)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6WstddMJZQ (An interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)
http://propagandamatrix.com/forum/index.php/topic,1012.msg14486.html#msg14486 (When Money Eats The World)
-------------------------------------
But outlawing fractional reserve banking and allowing countries to issue their own paper money debt-free and interest-free to fund the production and repair of public goods everyone can see and benefit from (roads & bridges, maglev rail, etc.) would be to put the criminals who head the IMF and World Bank out of business, and we all know NWO minions aren't about to call for that.
Another primary cause is the anti-labor/pro-land speculation tax system that nearly all governments impose on their respective populations:
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"This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour -- nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times....People began to say, perhaps naturally, if this is what State absentation comes to, let us have some State intervention.
"But the State had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly, -- the landlord's monopoly of economic rent, -- thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into the factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labour market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus." [Emphasis original]
"It is incontrovertible, I think, that the rapidly-increasing destruction of the Amazon rain forest...is directly attributable to the fact that the Amazon basin is the only part of Brazil where free or cheap land is available, and this, in turn, is attributable to the fact that nearly four-fifths of Brazil's arable acreage is covered by sprawling latifundios, half of which are held by speculators who produce nothing. Were the artificial scarcity of available land in the rest of Brazil corrected, as the Georgist remedy would unquestionably do, pressure on the Amazon basin would obviously cease."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZkfmY1PMng (The Great Tax Clawback Scam)
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=160421.0 (Answers to common objections)
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But you'll never hear NWO minions call for a reversal of that trend, either, because that would mean eliminating economic free-riding by overprivileged, politically-connected absentee landlords and slumlords.
All we'll get are the usual top-down, Nazi-style control measures that merely concentrate that much more political and economic power into the parasitic hands of the very criminal, psychopathic plutocrats who caused this mess in the first place.
On issue after issue after issue, these plutocrats create a problem -- e.g., "terrorism" (via false flag ops), a financial collapse (via derivatives), widespread disease (via bioterrorism and contaminated food supplies), mass stupidity (via compulsory schooling, chemical lobotomization and TV-based mind control) etc., etc., -- then add insult to injury by posing as our saviors from the very problem they themselves created!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QKU6M_j2uM (Problem-Reaction-Solution)
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...how are we to survive on an overpopulated planet? Even if we fully exploit our food resources--including sea farming--and develop effective and equitable international systems of distribution, it still won't be possible to feed the coming generations. So there will be famine and disorder.
That is exactly what Malthusian propagandists were waxing alarmist about over two centuries ago. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now.
- "Here is a difference between the animal and the man. Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens. Both the seal and the man eat salmon, but when a seal takes a salmon there is a salmon the less, and were seals to increase past a certain point salmon must diminish; while by placing the spawn of the salmon under favorable conditions man can so increase the number of salmon as more than to make up for all he may take, and thus, no matter how much men may increase, their increase need never outrun the supply of salmon.
"In short, while all through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the limit of subsistence is independent of the thing subsisted, with man the limit of subsistence is, within the final limits of earth, air, water, and sunshine, dependent upon man himself."
-- Henry George, Progress and Poverty, pp. 131-2
Even worse is the fact that modern-day Malthusians tend to be either members or lapdog servants of the very parasitic ruling class that -- by engineering acute poverty in Third World nations -- actually caused the population explosions they incessantly whine about.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Demographic transition
The Demographic transition model (DTM) is a model used to represent the process of explaining the transformation of countries from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy. It is based on an interpretation begun in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson of prior observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the past two hundred years.
Most developed countries are beyond stage three of the model; the majority of developing countries are in stage 2 or stage 3. The model was based on the changes seen in Europe so these countries follow the DTM relatively well. Many developing countries have moved into stage 3. The major (relative) exceptions are some poor countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle Eastern countries, which are poor or affected by government policy or civil strife, notably Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Yemen and Afghanistan.
Summary of the theory
The transition involves four stages, or possibly five.
* In stage one, pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance.
* In stage two, that of a developing country, the death rates drop rapidly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life spans and reduce disease. These changes usually come about due to improvements in farming techniques, access to technology, basic healthcare, and education. Without a corresponding fall in birth rates this produces an imbalance, and the countries in this stage experience a large increase in population.
* In stage three, birth rates fall due to access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off.
* During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level as has happened in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to a shrinking population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. As the large group born during stage two ages, it creates an economic burden on the shrinking working population. Death rates may remain consistently low or increase slightly due to increases in lifestyle diseases due to low exercise levels and high obesity and an aging population in developed countries.
[Continued...]
http://www.globalissues.org/article/206/poverty-and-population-growth-lessons-from-our-own-past
Poverty and population growth: lessons from our own past
Let's try to understand why, by looking at our own demographic history. As recently as two or three generations ago, mortality rates in the United States were as high as they are now in most third world countries. Opportunities for our grandmothers to work outside the home were limited. And ours was largely an agrarian society in which every family member was needed to work on the farm. Coauthor Frances Lappé's own grandmother, for example, gave birth to nine children, raised them alone on a small farm, and saw only six survive to adulthood. Her story would not be unusual in a still fast-growing third world country today.
Faced with scarcity, poor families needed many children to help with work on the farm, and because of high infant-mortality rates, they needed many more pregnancies and births to achieve the necessary family size.
In the United States, the move to two-children families took place only after a society-wide transition that lowered infant death rates, opened opportunities to women outside the home, and transformed ours into an industrial rather than agrarian economy, so that families no longer relied on their children's labor. If we contrast Lappé's grandmother's story to a latter-day urban middle-class family, we can see that children who were once a source of needed labor are now a source of major costs, including tuition, an extra room in the house, the latest model basketball shoes, and forgone earnings for every year that a professional mom stays home with the kids.
The United States advanced through the falling-birth-rate phase of the demographic transition in response to these societal changes, well before the advent of sophisticated contraceptive technologies, even while the government remained actively hostile to birth control. (As late as 1965, selling contraceptives was still illegal in some states.)
Using our own country's experience to understand rapid population growth in the third world, where poverty is more extreme and widespread, we can now extend our hypothesis concerning the link between hunger and high fertility rates: both persist where societies deny security and opportunity to the majority of their citizens-where infant-mortality rates are high and adequate land, jobs, education, health care, and old-age security are beyond the reach of most people, and where there are few opportunities for women to work outside the home.
Without resources to secure their future, people can rely only on their own families. Thus, when poor parents have lots of children, they are making a rational calculus for survival. High birth rates reflect people's defensive reaction against enforced poverty. For those living at the margin of survival, children provide labor to augment meager family income. In Bangladesh, one study showed that even by the age of six a boy provides labor and/or income for the family. By the age of twelve, at the latest, he contributes more than he consumes.
Population investigators tell us that the benefit children provide to their parents in most third world countries cannot be measured just by hours of labor or extra income. The intangibles are just as important. Bigger families carry more weight in community affairs. With no reliable channels for advancement in sight, parents may hope that the next child will be the one clever or lucky enough to get an education and land a city job despite the odds. In many countries, income from one such job in the city can support a whole family in the countryside.
And impoverished parents know that without children to care for them in old age, they will have nothing. They also realize that none of these possible benefits will be theirs unless they have many children, since hunger and lack of health care will kill many of their offspring before they reach adulthood.
[Continued...]
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So, if "overpopulation" is not the real cause of world poverty and environmental degradation, then what is?
One of the primary causes is the horribly corrupt and parasitic process whereby international bankers extract countless billions in usurious interest from developing economies each year in exchange for the nothing out of which they create the so-called "money" they loan:
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“The Third World War has already started -- a silent war, not for that reason any less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying there are children, instead of millions of wounded there are millions of unemployed; instead of destruction of bridges there is the tearing down of factories, schools, hospitals, and entire economies….It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more shattering than a laser beam.”
-- Luis Ignacio Silva, as quoted on page 238 of A Fate Worse Than Debt by Susan George
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-is9t2BP7og (A pertinent clip from The Money Masters)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6WstddMJZQ (An interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)
http://propagandamatrix.com/forum/index.php/topic,1012.msg14486.html#msg14486 (When Money Eats The World)
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But outlawing fractional reserve banking and allowing countries to issue their own paper money debt-free and interest-free to fund the production and repair of public goods everyone can see and benefit from (roads & bridges, maglev rail, etc.) would be to put the criminals who head the IMF and World Bank out of business, and we all know NWO minions aren't about to call for that.
Another primary cause is the anti-labor/pro-land speculation tax system that nearly all governments impose on their respective populations:
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"This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour -- nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times....People began to say, perhaps naturally, if this is what State absentation comes to, let us have some State intervention.
"But the State had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly, -- the landlord's monopoly of economic rent, -- thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into the factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labour market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus." [Emphasis original]
-- Albert Jay Nock, Free Speech and Plain Language, pp. 320-1
"It is incontrovertible, I think, that the rapidly-increasing destruction of the Amazon rain forest...is directly attributable to the fact that the Amazon basin is the only part of Brazil where free or cheap land is available, and this, in turn, is attributable to the fact that nearly four-fifths of Brazil's arable acreage is covered by sprawling latifundios, half of which are held by speculators who produce nothing. Were the artificial scarcity of available land in the rest of Brazil corrected, as the Georgist remedy would unquestionably do, pressure on the Amazon basin would obviously cease."
-- Robert V. Andelson, Commons Without Tragedy, p. 32
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZkfmY1PMng (The Great Tax Clawback Scam)
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=160421.0 (Answers to common objections)
-------------------------------------
But you'll never hear NWO minions call for a reversal of that trend, either, because that would mean eliminating economic free-riding by overprivileged, politically-connected absentee landlords and slumlords.
All we'll get are the usual top-down, Nazi-style control measures that merely concentrate that much more political and economic power into the parasitic hands of the very criminal, psychopathic plutocrats who caused this mess in the first place.
On issue after issue after issue, these plutocrats create a problem -- e.g., "terrorism" (via false flag ops), a financial collapse (via derivatives), widespread disease (via bioterrorism and contaminated food supplies), mass stupidity (via compulsory schooling, chemical lobotomization and TV-based mind control) etc., etc., -- then add insult to injury by posing as our saviors from the very problem they themselves created!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QKU6M_j2uM (Problem-Reaction-Solution)
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