Carbon Police: Intendants Extreme

It comes as no shock that every centralized national government in history longs for a way into the lives and business of their citizens, often at great expense. In imperial France under the reign of Louis XIV, the "Sun King", the royalty discovered a new way to control the masses. Systematically, the king transformed a method of replacing local autonomous town councils with hand-picked 'Intendants' that usurped the former rulers' stature and powers.

After castrating the force of town councils whose existence based itself on long standing post-feudal tradition in France, these stand-ins gave the royalty new unspeakable power to micromanage the breadth of a nation.

And with the passage of H.R. 2454, the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" (better known as the Waxman-Markey Bill), a little noticed provision may introduce that principle into action.

Alexis de Tocqueville, famed French dignitary and historian, in The Old Regime in the French Revolution blames the system of enabling centralized non-appeal-able decision making for not only the collapse of the regime, but also for the failure of the French Revolution to cement its original goals. As traditional autonomous politicking had been severed in France for several generations before the outbreak of revolution, Tocqueville theorizes that the Intendant system reaped irreparable harm on the French political-social order.

To create "green jobs," the new bill which requires the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050. To enforce these new proposed limits and collect payments of "carbon tax credits" from every home and business in America, the federal government will have to hire hundreds of thousands if not well over a million "environmental" inspectors whose influence will eventually reach to anything in America bigger than a doghouse.

Radio host and political analyst Alex Jones in his new film Fall of the Republic highlights this issue as a new attempt to force greater unnecessary government surveillance and intrusion into people's homes.

Provisions of H.R. 2454 call for each municipality in America down to a village (usually consisting of less than a thousand citizens) to employ at their own expense, a federally tied city planner along with an environmental planner to have sole decision making authority to approve or deny the legal live-ability of any construction or pre-existing structure. With this arrangement, the ultimate Intendant now arrives.

City planners have been staples of major cities for decades. But, when serving only the city government, their actions must meet the standard of the local people. This formula in itself is often the most significant power and resource of a community. In contrast, replacing well-accounted for city officials with federally-instructed implants will only serve to undermine local autonomy in America. And such was the exact intent of placing Intendants in place of local councils in imperial France.

First, university trained environmental planners and urban studies majors go to tiny villages and towns in isolated flats and ridges to instruct generations-rooted locals how best to develop their streets, buildings and insulate their homes. While honest efforts to construct a better infrastructure and sustainable environment should be lauded and pursued, federally mandating and supervising of these pursuits could create uniformed and disastrous effects. For many villages without one paid municipal employee, even financing this helpful yet unneeded regime will strain budgets, stymie diversity and ultimately hamper innovation.

And a 'city planner' would be the first for starts. Next, a presiding mayoral Intendant or even a uniform system of Intendant city councils in cities nationwide could constitute the new plan.

Jones points out in Fall of the Republic that the main agenda of the climate-change bills comes to its insistence on using federally trained watchers, spies if you will, to further regulate and weaken the power of the American people. As obscure as it may sound, this sinister provision of the cap and trade legislation in efforts to "build a green economy" may permanently regulate and even possibly destroy the very economy it promises to save.

In regulating only carbon and not the true environmental disasters which presently face us (ie. contamination of water, nuclear proliferation and genetically modified food), the cap and trade bill lacks any real solution and only exposes itself as another clever Ponzi scheme brainstormed by America's saviors at Goldman Sachs.

In this heavily politicized and emotionally charged subject often interpreted as either being for or against the environment through a simplified myth, we must remember that while putting limits on elements like carbon and oxygen may sound environmentally helpful, these elements themselves are the building blocks of human life. To begin a massive national, if not soon to be global system, of element regulation in a day where registered corporations own the seeds of life, it is no farce to say that ironically life is under attack with an arm twisting Intendant seizing and twisting the dagger of control.

Tocqueville warned much about centralization of power and in his masterpiece Democracy in America identified local autonomy as the force behind free and equal society in America. To him, the Intendants of France gutted a once-apt group of independent localities and forever severed the French people's institutional ability to rule themselves. For even after the Revolution, France forever centralized and transformed could never return to the egalitarianism which straddled the burgeoning of the modern world.

In America, similar circumstances beg the future's fate. The questions remains if this moment of Intendant does come to pass, once the People realize, will it be too late?