Fool Me Twice (3 page)

The report recommends that the State Department and the ever-effective Department of Homeland Security have more authority over the Defense Department's budget.

After massively slashing the military and its funding, and wresting control of the funding process from Congress, the 2012 Unified Security Budget seeks no less than to change the very role and mission of our Armed Forces. It complains that, after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the U.S. military's “mission objectives have grown much more ambitious.” And what do the report authors recommend? Of course! Using the military to combat “global warming,” fight global poverty, remedy “injustice,” bolster the United Nations, and increase “peacekeeping” forces worldwide.

As poverty is a key contributor to state weakness, it is imperative for the United States to be actively engaged in the fight to end global poverty as a primary focus of our national security strategy. Effective U.S. global development policy can support countries and people to manage their own way forward from poverty and injustice. As this helps improve the livelihoods of millions, it reduces the sources of discontent and disenfranchisement that fuel global security threats.

In other words, if only the polar ice caps weren't melting and our country's wealth was only redistributed to the developing world, Iran would simply
stop seeking nuclear weapons, North Korea would quit being an aggressor, those al-Qaida pests would just leave us alone, Russia and China would become partners for peace, and the bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that is today's UN would become a kind of global Mother Teresa, dispensing charity and goodness to all in need.

The CAP and Institute for Policy Studies are plotting to take billions of dollars from the U.S. military and instead use them for a “green stimulus.” These groups also envision the military as a tool to fight so-called global warming. In 2011, the IPS released a forty-page CAP-endorsed report titled “The Green Dividend,” a term the IPS defines as “a major shift of resources from the military budget to sustainable energy.”
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The report complains of an excess of military spending:

The obvious solution is to reduce military spending and apply those savings to a green technology initiative that reduces our dependency on fossil fuels, shrinks our carbon footprint, and creates jobs. Such a “green stimulus” could pull our economy out of recession.

IPS acknowledges the Obama administration made funding of “green initiatives” a significant part of his original stimulus package, but the spending of over $1 billion on risky ventures over which the private sector is highly skeptical is simply not enough for the progressive elite. The IPS now wants to shift jobs from the military sector to the “green growth” sector. It seeks to “play matchmaker and marry defense sector workers to green technology jobs.” The IPS research paper identifies the Pentagon as the “largest institutional energy user—and greenhouse gas emitter—on the planet,” arguing that if it undertook a “crash program” to convert to renewable energy sources and clean vehicles, it could make a significant impact on global emissions. It recommends redirecting much of the U.S. military budget from defense towards creating a Pentagon that is energy efficient; a military that stresses “designing and implementing a U.S. transition to a low-emissions future.” Astonishingly, the IPS calls on the Pentagon to contribute to a green world “by simply getting out of the way, by handing over unneeded military installations to be converted into green job incubators.”

The ever-resourceful IPS goes on to present five full pages of color-coded charts showing exactly which military programs can be converted to incubators for our country's “green” future.

The IPS's most recent “Green Dividend” report makes no bones about the progressive group's ultimate agenda—the virtual disarmament of much of the U.S. military, while transferring defense resources to fund alterative energy causes. With so many bloated government agencies that could be defunded, it is telling that the IPS only focuses on the Pentagon—the purveyor and protector of American strength, the key bastion of our country's exceptionalism, the sustainer of our superpower status. It seems the IPS is attempting to use environmental activism as a guise for a far more sinister aim, namely disarming the country.

The report lauds Obama's first ever U.S. Global Development Policy, which was issued in September 2010, and declares that the primary purpose of our development aid is to pursue broad-based economic growth as the means to fight global poverty.
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Unsurprisingly, the report goes on to recommend that massive funds be sent to combat global woes, including an increase of $3.5 billion to “Global Health” investment, and $2.14 billion to support United Nations peacekeeping and ensure that the United States does not fall behind in UN payments. Also outlined is a growing international consensus on “the need for rich countries, including the United States, to provide compensatory funding to developing countries to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change that are already underway.” Such U.S. funding should make up for “reductions in food production caused by increases in droughts and flooding, greater climate variability leading to increased disease, decreased access to water and, in some cases, a need to relocate entire communities. These funds must be added to traditional streams of development assistance.”

A major progressive aim is the transfer of American wealth to the developing world. To borrow a battle cry from erstwhile “Green Czar” Van Jones,
“Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth!” Now we shall see plans to use the military to do just that if Obama is reelected.

The White House's most favored think tank, Podesta's Center for American Progress (CAP), released a fifty-two-page proposal, from January 2012, in which authors Michael Werz and Laura Conley lay out a plan for the U.S. military to be used as the delivery vehicle of aid to developing countries purportedly ravaged by so-called global warming.
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Within the general schema of using the “green agenda” to redirect defense funding to dubious environmental causes, the paper “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict: Addressing Complex Crisis Scenarios in the 21st Century” contains a specific initiative to redistribute America's wealth and resources to developing countries, and to “revisit traditional divisions of labor between diplomacy, defense, and economic, social, and environmental development policy abroad.” The CAP plan ridiculously blames “climate change” for such varied world events as the so-called Arab Spring and mass migrations, while pushing the transfer of enormous U.S. assets to the developing world. Nevertheless, a close reading of the report shows it concedes in several instances that there is zero proof for its contentions about climate change being responsible for dramatic world events. Yet CAP urges massive transfers of U.S. wealth anyway. In one section, the report admits:

Climate change is among these newly visible issues sparking conflict. But because the direct link between conflict and climate change is unclear, awareness of the indirect links has yet to lead to substantial and sustained action to address its security implications.

On migration and climate change, CAP cites United Nations data to warn:

In the 21st Century the world could see substantial numbers of climate migrants—people displaced by either the slow or sudden onset of the effects of climate change.

In that same section, the report concedes:

In fact there is major disagreement among experts about how to identify climate as a causal factor in internal and international migration. But even though the root causes of human mobility are not always easy to decipher, the policy challenges posed by that movement are real.

Likewise, the “Arab Spring”—really a series of Islamist coups brought to power through short-lived democratic uprisings—is viewed by CAP through the lens of … climate change!

The Arab Spring can be at least partly credited to climate change. Rising food prices and efforts by authoritarian regimes to crush political protests were linked first to food and then to political repression—two important motivators in the Arab makeover this past year.

Using the “science” of global warming, which will be dissected in the next chapter, CAP utilizes its unproved claims about world events to call for the United States, its allies, and key regional players to “work together to create a sustainable security situation to deal with climate change, migration, and conflict.” In other words, the U.S. should provide lots and lots of money to fight climate change overseas. For starters, recommendations include an increase in funding for the Global Climate Change Initiative efforts, and more money for the Climate Adaptation Fund established by the parties to the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to counter global warming, adopted by over 190 countries. The U.S. is singled out as one “of the few global powers capable and willing to act in the common interest.” The report complains developing nations and small islands

will not only need adequate funding (no funds are allocated for migration so far), but also the expertise to carry out adaptation and mitigation efforts. These tasks could range from education or establishing early-warning systems, to implementing insurance for property and business owners, to altering crop mixtures and substantially modifying traditional land-use patterns. Assistance may also be required to help
countries aggregate accurate nationwide data to identify mitigation needs and target relief to the most vulnerable communities.

There is little doubt the Obama White House is ready to embrace CAP's recommendation of filtering world conflict through the lens of climate change and transformative global engagement, in part, based on this peculiar worldview. Already, the Obama White House Interagency Taskforce on adapting to climate change recommended the government develop a strategy to help poor countries contend with purportedly climate-induced challenges.
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The Obama administration has also already overseen the release of four official defense and engagement reviews specifically designating climate change as a major consideration in planning global development and security strategies. This acknowledgment was prominently featured in the Congressionally mandated National Security Strategy of April 2010; the Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Review, the administration's first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review; as well as the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development.
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In a shocking misuse of taxpayer money, in February 2012, one week after the Palestinian Authority entered into a unity government with the Hamas Islamist terror organization, the U.S. announced the continuation of a $100 million, five-year program initiated in 2010 to construct “environmentally and socially sustainable” buildings for the Palestinians. The website for the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem posted the plans, which include a community center and school to be built to meet “stringent third-party-verified ‘green' certification standards.”
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Already, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is funding the projects, has constructed the Safeer Center, a West Bank child-care program, one of the first of the U.S.-funded Palestinian “green” buildings to open. “Its energy-efficient insulation (visible through a small cutout), rainwater collection system and temperature-regulating window shades provide a healthy facility for more than 3,000 children,” boasted the U.S. consulate site. “These and others provide models for efficiency in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the mostly imported energy is expensive,” the site added.

Getting back to seminal Unified Security Budget report, another one of its schemes is the creation of a standing international peacekeeping force, which is also a top priority of the Connect U.S. Fund, one of the report's sponsors. The Connect U.S. Fund is a Soros-funded organization promoting global governance. Its mission, according to the group's website, is to influence “policy through integrative collaborative grant making on human rights, non-proliferation, climate change and development, and effective foreign assistance.”
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The Connect Fund provides grants to pro-UN groups such as Human Rights First, which states it has used top military brass to secure U.S. politicians' commitments against torture. Another grantee, the Center for Victims of Torture, produced a 2008 draft executive order against torture endorsed by prominent national security figures.
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Months later, a virtually identical executive order was issued by Obama.
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The Connect Fund is directly tied to the White House. Obama's hand-picked assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, Eric P. Schwartz, served as the Connect Fund's executive director just prior to his White House appointment.
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Even before his appointment, Schwartz coordinated meetings on behalf of Obama's White House transition team with the Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court, a group that openly advocates placing more blue United Nations helmets on U.S. troops and coercing the U.S. to join the UN's International Criminal Court, which could prosecute American citizens and soldiers for “war crimes” and other offenses.
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