This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nation’s Brundtland Report, which defined Sustainable Development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” But aristocratic socialists have corrupted the sustainable development movement into a vehicle to achieve vast administrative power for themselves. Nations that adopt Sustainable Development are doomed to fail at meeting the needs of the present generation and through debt accumulation from deficit spending will consign future generations to a life as debt slaves.
Through the early 1980s, socialist Latin American economies powered growth by quadrupling their indebtedness from $75 billion to $315 billion. With aristocrats controlling government, while the poor had no voice in these loan matters, nor did they benefit from them as most of the loan proceeds were siphoned off to benefit the aristocrats and their crony amigos.
When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, the U.S. economy had suffered a decade of stagflation, turning our Midwest manufacturing base into the Rust Belt. Reagan was determined to regain international economic dominance by reasserting our Founding Father’s demand for limited government and maximum personal liberty. Reagan viscerally believed what John Adams wrote:
“ the moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence”Reagan’s relentless focus overcame the bi-partisan drumbeat to continue the socialist expansion of the money supply to promote growth. He then leveraged monetary restraint with the largest income tax cut in American history to power the American economy to sustained growth with low inflation.
The inflated prices of raw material exports that Latin American socialists relied upon to pay their inflated debts, plunged by 40%. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina became insolvent as per capita GDP fell by 9% between 1980 and 1985 and 50% of their people fell into poverty. Popular uprisings drove Brazil’s military junta and Argentine’s authoritarian regime, from power. In desperation, Latin nations turned to the U.S. dominated International Monetary Fund as lender-of- last-resort. But IMF support came with mandatory demands for austerity budget cuts, public industry privatizations, and elimination of trade barriers to shrink socialist power. By 1987, the capitalist U.S. economy was the world’s growth engine and a tidal wave of foreign investment was pouring into capitalist friendly Latin economies. World socialism was in shambles as the Soviet Union disintegrated and China embraced the market economy. The release of the Brundtland Report was seen as recognition of the burgeoning capitalist globalized economy.
By 1992 memories of the pain of the Latin American Debt Crisis were fading. Aristocrats repackaged socialist plans to again usurp economic power into Agenda 21 and introduced this socialist manifesto at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Agenda 21 envisioned bestowing the UN, government bureaucracies, and major interest groups the power to suspend the rights of property under law regarding all global, national and local human economic and social interaction that might affect the environment.
Agenda 21’s four main pillars of action are (1) combating poverty, promoting health, making consumption sustainable (2) assuring atmospheric protection, protecting fragile environments, conserving biodiversity, preventing pollution and regulating biotechnology (3) strengthening the roles of children, youth, women, NGOs, local authorities, workers and indigenous peoples (4) through science, technology transfer, education, international financial mechanisms.”
European aristocrats also quietly embedded Agenda 21 powers into the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which united 17 sovereign nations under the three pillar structure of the European Union (1) prevent sovereign debt from exceed 60% of GDP (2) delegate authority to supranational decision makers authority to regulate all human economic and social interaction that might affect the environment (3) embrace the euro as their supranational currency.
With aristocratic socialists in control of supranational economic decision making, deficit spending became the preferred stimulus for European economic growth. From 1999 to 2008, the average debt to GDP for Eurozone nations grew from 50% to 70%. But as the Reinhart and Rogoff’s book: “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” famously warned in early 2009; “once a nation’s debt rises above the threshold of 90%, then growth rates fall.”
When Greece hit over 100% of debt to GDP later that year, rumors swirled the nation would default. Greek GDP shriveled and panicked depositors across Europe pulled their cash out of banks and the European Debt Crisis exploded. Total Eurozone debt now stands at a dangerous 87% of GDP and Greek short term interest rates are at 1400%. Supranational committees are enforcing austerity spending cuts, but the unemployment rate is at a depression level of 20% in Greece and 23% in Spain.
There is no Reaganesque figure today in Europe willing to battle entrenched aristocratic socialists in support of limited government and maximum personal liberty. Instead, the “present” generation of Europeans will continue to be impoverished until a future generation becomes unwilling to endure life of a debt slaves and violently over-throws their aristocratic masters.
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