THE BOILING FROG PARTY'S RESPONSE TO THE GREEN PARTY'S RESPONSE TO OBAMA'S STATE OF DELUSION ADDRESS (2016) (Note: From my 2016 Boiling Frog Party campaign for U.S. Senate)
War Criminal in Chief Barack Obama says the state of the union is good. Climate change researcher Guy McPherson concludes that we are on the fast track to near-term human extinction, projecting that human impact on the environment will lead to the extinction of the human race by 2030 or 2040. Now, some may argue that that is a good thing, but I must respectfully disagree. Some of my best friends are human beings. Furthermore, the human race isn’t just racing down the path to collective suicide like a pack of lemmings. We are dragging the lemmings over the cliff with us, along with the polar bears, the frogs, the salamanders, the birds, and the fish. We are now in the middle of the Sixth Mass Extinction of animal species due to the stubborn refusal of human beings to live within the ecological boundaries that enable life to exist on Earth. About 52% of the vertebrate wildlife population on Earth has died off since 1970 due to human impacts on the environment.
I watched President Obama’s 2016 State of Delusion Address, followed by the Green Party’s response. I laughed when Ohio Green Party Congressional candidate Joe Manchik expressed his feelings about the President’s speech. He said: “I didn’t like it at all.” I wholeheartedly concur with Joe's assessment.
The State of Delusion Address presents an annual opportunity for the War Criminal in Chief to pitch a short-sighted political agenda to a nation of sheep led by pigs for the benefit of wolves. This is typically a misleading propaganda message that is disconnected from reality. The Head of the Corporate State wants to look good in the public eye and tell people things they want to hear.
I confess that this is the first time in many years that I have watched a State of Delusion Address. When I was just a tadpole, swimming in shallow political waters, I would sometimes watch these speeches or read the transcripts the next day, and try to count how many obvious lies I could catch the War Criminal in Chief uttering. When Presidents named George Bush spoke, their orations consisted of a string of lies held together by a paste of pointless patriotism.
Barack Obama’s style is more slick. He sounds good in a totally superficial way, while peddling the same old snake oil. In his final State of Delusion Address, I didn’t notice him speaking any outright lies. The closest thing to an outright lie I heard from his lips was his snarky remark: “If you doubt America's commitment -- or mine -- to see that justice is done, ask Osama bin Laden.” This was an apparent reference to the myth that Obama was responsible for killing this former CIA operative. For the past fourteen-plus years, both major parties in the United States have used the “big lie” of 9/11 as a false pretext for a fake “war on terror,” and for real, never-ending wars against truth, humanity, and civil rights. Osama bin Laden was a terrorist who was armed and financed by the CIA under the Carter and Reagan Administrations to wage a mercenary war against the people of Afghanistan. Bin Laden died of natural causes in mid-December, 2001. Only his ghost remained as a U.S. propaganda tool, presented to the public as a patsy for the 9/11 false flag operation.
President Obama mentioned the challenge of climate change. He correctly stated that the science is clear. Anthropogenic climate change is real, it’s here, and we need to deal with it. Those who deny that human beings are causing climate change are not dealing with reality. However, Obama is a climate change denier in a different way. He acknowledges that climate change is real while supporting international trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, tar sand oil pipelines, and petrochemical agriculture subsidies that spell out “Game Over” for the climate. His message is “Earth first; we’ll destroy the other planets later.”
Obama’s call for a technological race to discover a magical cure for climate change ignores the reality that climate change is a consequence of Ecological Overshoot. There are simply too many people in the world, consuming and polluting too much. World human population has skyrocketed from one billion people in 1803 to about 7.4 billion today, while per capita ecological footprints have grown astronomically. If the average person on Earth consumed as wastefully as the average American does today, the Earth could not sustain a human population of more than 1.5 billion people. The American way of life is over. If we don’t drastically change the way we live, life on Earth will soon be over, not just for human beings, but for most species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles. We must reduce the ecological footprint of the average American by at least fifty percent, immediately and permanently.
Unlimited growth cannot be sustained in a finite environment. If we want the human race and other animal species to survive on Earth, we need to reduce our numbers as well as our individual impacts. If we don’t reduce human population through birth control, it will happen through a massive die-off within the time frame of what should be a single human lifespan. In 2011, America’s finest news source, The Onion, prematurely announced that the human race had collectively decided to take a break from having any more children for a while. This modest proposal is a most excellent idea. Let’s have a global moratorium on human reproduction! No more kidding around. Make love, not babies. Copulate, don’t populate. Help keep the world safe FROM your children and your grandchildren. Take some personal and global responsibility for your life choices.
Human beings aren’t the only species on Earth; we just act like it. Let’s just stop breeding any more people until we manage to get our global house in order. If we somehow miraculously manage to survive until 2040 and halt climate change, then we can reassess our situation and decide whether or not to resume human reproduction under a global one child per family policy.
Nobel War Prize winner Barack Obama spoke out against impolite rhetoric that calls for carpet-bombing Muslim nations. He prefers to commit indiscriminate mass murder with a smiling face. It’s important to keep a civil tongue as you wage a relentless war against humanity. As President, he has exercised admirable restraint in his illegal bombing of seven foreign nations, dropping only 23,144 bombs during the 2015 fragment of his undeclared wars against civilian populations in the Middle East. The bipartisan consensus policy of global U.S. military imperialism has been responsible for the deaths of an estimated twenty to thirty million people worldwide since the end of World War Two.
The Boiling Frog Party calls for ending this war against humanity. The U.S. government must uphold the Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlaws war as a tool of foreign policy. Pacifism isn’t just a good idea; it’s the law!
The Green Party’s response to Obama’s State of Delusion Address was predictably underwhelming. Since my lip-reading skills are regrettably lacking, I missed much of what was spoken during the silent film portions of the Green Party’s broadcast. My laptop also dropped the connection to the live stream for a few minutes during the foreign policy segment of the discussion. Nevertheless, I think I caught the gist of the Green Party’s response.
The Green Party has admirably distinguished itself from the Democratic Party with its advocacy of a peaceful foreign policy, a single-payer national health insurance program, a fair trade policy, conversion to renewable energy resources, and ending corporate welfare. Margaret Flowers, the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Maryland correctly stated that Obama’s speech “showed how much he is out of touch with reality.” She pointed out that the United States has created the largest empire in history, with a long history of covert and overt destabilization of other countries. Joe DeMare, a Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Ohio, was right on target when he said: “Greens believe in nonviolence…. We need a nonviolent foreign policy.” It is a travesty that some Greens -- or former Greens -- have abandoned their professed core belief in nonviolence to support a war criminal in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary race. If “Plan A” is to embrace genocide, then what hope can there be for “Plan B?”
The Green Party has an excellent platform. Despite its organizational challenges, the Green Party remains the only nationally organized political party in the United States with any relevance to reality. Unfortunately, electoral politics remains a popularity contest. Truth is not a popularity contest. The visible political message presented by Green Party campaigns in the United States remains a pale shade of green, targeted to promoting progressive issues that are widely supported by existing public opinion.
What is missing from the Green Party message is the Green Party message. When Bill Clinton ran for President, he targeted his campaign message with the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” The Clinton campaign message was wrong in 1992. It is still wrong in 2016. The critical message today is “It’s ecological overshoot, stupid.” The very survival of most life on Earth depends upon taking personal responsibility, focusing on the future global impacts of our current ecological footprint. The Green Party message does address the issue of climate change, but I don’t hear a clear statement about the urgency and severity of the present ecological crisis. There seems to be a consistent message of blaming “someone else” (most notably corporations or the “one percent”) for our problems. The Green Party message addresses carbon emissions, but what about the methane emissions that threaten us with near-term human extinction?
When Earth Day was first observed in 1970, the central environmental issue was human overpopulation. The world’s human population has doubled since then, with per capita ecological footprints growing dramatically. Ecological overshoot -- the environmentally unsustainable impact of human overpopulation and over-consumption – lies at the root of the present ecological crisis, but I hear nothing about this in the Green Party’s targeted messaging. What about the impacts of petrochemical animal agriculture, the urgency of reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products, the importance of getting away from our reliance on automobiles? The Green Party’s progressive agenda addresses many of the smaller issues in the daily news, but what about the big picture? What about the reality that we are quickly destabilizing the planetary boundaries that sustain life on Earth? The mass extinction of animal species? Deforestation? Ocean acidification? Water pollution from agricultural runoffs? Changing the way we live is critical to ensure our continued survival. There are no jobs on a dead planet.
Gary Swing
Casually Soaking
Boiling Frog Party
January 14, 2016
Boiling Frog Party on Facebook:
Civilization to Take Some Time Off From Having Any More Kids (The Onion): www.theonion.com/article/civilization-to-hold-off-on-having-any-more-kids-f-26232
The 9 Limits of Our Planet… and How We’ve Raced Past Four of Them (John Carey):
Green Party Response to the 2016 State of the Union Address:
