We await a heavy-handed anti-capitalist measure of therapy about to be unleashed on the world from the supreme seat of power, the Oval Office, as two world leaders link their voices, trumpeting the global redistribution of wealth because of Climate Change. The redistribution of your wealth, you middle-classians. The Argentinian Pope, Pope Francis, with as much pomp and pageantry as this Administration can muster, will be revered and his presence burnished by our uninformed and un-inquisitive media.
The redistribution of your cash, borrowed cash that is, will be implemented through misrepresentation of your direct responsibility for climate change. You, middle class America are responsible for the poverty of Africa, Asia and of any of 150+ nations around the globe where people are impoverished. You polluted the air, so you affected the climate, so you made it warmer, so you will pay for climate change. Since the dots don’t line up on this sham, this Administration knows how to effectively play the middle class, . . . lavish the Pope with as big a dose of ‘pomp’ as you can spend money on, and the media will applaud, filling the Pope’s sails with air. This will imbue an added measure of credibility onto Obama’s new co-sponsor on the road to confounding the middle class — the accommodating media will do the rest.
Not be outdone by Obama, Congress has invited the Pope to a first-ever papal appearance on Capitol Hill. Boehner and McConnell know not what they do. Surprising?
Pope Francis has ventured far from his religious province, and has become a politician. The Pope has also conflated capitalism with the financial markets (Wall Street), ignoring that the two have for some time had opposing purposes. Launched from the intellectual context of a passionately presented ‘concern’ for the poor, the Pope will seek to shame and guilt the American middle class and its capitalist system into accepting responsibility for the ills of 7.2 billion people.
You, the American middle class, should be accountable for the hundreds of millions who cannot economically grow their way out of poverty because you have polluted the environment and raised temperatures to such a degree that potential wealth creating activities such as agriculture, fishing, and forestry are impossible. Ignore the fact that North American air is now cleaner and is aspiring less pollution than at any time in over a century even as the population has exploded. Forget the facts. You, middle class America are guilty. What? You didn’t know that your creation of climate change is a religious concern?
In Pope Francis, religious doctrine collides with freedom of the individual, and conflicts with the most positive ecosphere known to man for encouraging natural human self-actualization — open and free capitalism. Papal decrees are intended for spiritual impressions, not political ideology or even economics, IMHO. His communism-promoting and warm visit with Castro this week is further evidence of his peculiar incursion off the papal path. It is highly difficult to understand his hate of capitalism, in view of the fact that he lived through the destruction of a very successful and thriving Argentina under the type of government he now espouses. In becoming so overtly political and straying from being a moral compass housed in the Catholic Church, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, even as he seems well intentioned, exposes himself to being taken advantage of, by very skilful political operatives.
The fallacious sophistry of the Administration with much evidenced disdain for American capitalism and the vast American middle class is about to capitalize on selected slices of Pope Francis’ unusual (unusual for a Pope) personal political canons. Forget about his stance on pressing concerns such as abortion and life’s sanctity, the Obama political team will use the Pope’s stance on ‘climate change’ to power-up Obama’s launch of his latest legacy-monument — Cap and Trade, Obama Style.
The Obama team is ignorant of the fact that America’s spine is comprised of entrepreneurs. Always has been. From farmers, to storekeepers, to wheel manufacturers, to software designers, entrepreneurs thrived, forging through new boundaries of creativity and productivity in the creation of jobs, and in the formation of wealth. The Administration’s ignorance has advanced and infringed on the entrepreneur, degrading America’s spine. Instead of a government providing protection for the individual and the individual’s self-fulfillment through enforcement of laws and judicious oversight, this purposeful ignorance has been allowed to invade and disturb independence of action and of thought.
Energized by an ignorant and crippling Administration, the giant blob of corrupted government bureaucracy has not only smothered the middle class through centrally established directives, killed personal initiative while pretending to protect consumers, and enriched bankers while saving them from the laws of the land, it is blaming the American middle class for the world’s ills.
Open your wallets. Here they come.
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.