"On the ninth day of Copenhagen,
the GreenFrauds gave to me. . . "

This report from the Heritage Foundation reminds me of people who point out that it's ludicrous to think the U.S. government can run health care if they can't even distribute H1N1 flu shots.

"They Can't Even Run a Conference, Let Alone the Global Economy," posted at The Foundry, a Heritage blog. For one thing, unregistered participants were stuck out in the cold for hours, according to the NYT. They had two years to plan the event, but evidently failed to solve the problem of 45,000 participants fitting into a venue that holds 15,000.

The Copenhagen Climate conference is serving "sustainable food." Yum. We haven't begun to see nanny state policies in this country compared to what is in place in socialist countries like Denmark. But this is the direction that ObamaTeam and his Leftist friends would like to take the U.S. State-approved labels for everything. It's little wonder these people don't understand capitalism.

"Sustainable food" is the catchphrase at COP15 [COP15 is just the catchy acronym for the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference]. Dictated by the COP15 greening policy, crude materials, food and packaging has to comply with the standard requirements for acknowledged marking arrangements such as Max Havelaar, the European Union Eco Lable and the Nordic Swan - or equivalent. Furthermore, the food production will be characterized by low energy consumption and environmentally sound waste disposal.

There are other words in the Green lexicon you need to know if you want to follow what these people are doing. One of these is "fairtrade." For example, if you go to the Max Havelaar website, you'll read a lot about fairtrade food products. Fairtrade is an organized social movement that's been around for about 20 years. It's a market-based approach that aims to "help" producers in developing countries. What could be wrong with that, right? Like everything else if you're a Green, then concepts like sustainability and fairtrade are givens. It's "fair," right? Do they ever stop to consider that there might be another side to fair trade?

"The supermarkets... sell Fairtrade as premium lines, with margins to match. Any intelligent person will ask themselves a simple question: should I pay up to 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the grower; or should I just buy the regular ones and give the difference to a decent development charity?" Philip Oppenheim, The Spectator, November, 2005

"We don't for one minute think the solution to all problems in world trade is Fairtrade. What we want to create is a situation where it is no longer acceptable to do nothing, where every company, and every individual, has to do something to make the world fairer." Harriet Lamb, Executive Director, Fairtrade Foundation

In other words, it's the often-seen favorite Leftist false dichotomy--do it our way or you are doing nothing. It always seems to come back to that--we will require you to build a better ("fairer") world because you are unethical schlubs and you would never do this on your own. Like at church, for example. Just like Lady Michelle Obama has said that Obama will "require" us to volunteer. Huh? Fairtrade seems to be part of that same mindset. Going back 20 years or so and looking at the beginnings of fairtrade, I imagine it would have started out as a good thing to do--voluntary compliance and all that. Unintended consequences, however, always hover over these movements like a dark cloud. Also, when mega-corporations like Nestle jump on the fairtrade bandwagon, then the whole concept becomes suspect, as far as I'm concerned.

Why are Leftists always such suckers for this kind of crap? I think it has something to do with weak critical thinking skills--they simply don't understand logical fallacies, for example--in fact, they argue using logical fallacies. But there must be more to it than that. Perhaps it's also because a lot of Leftists have never seen the inside of a church in their adult lives, so their solution to everything is secular and therefore they think solutions must be dictated; they have no idea, since it's outside of their experience, that people at church actually do this sort of thing voluntarily out of the goodness of their hearts.