For the last two years, the Vatican has trotted out its newly-minted expert and jack-of-all-trades, Jeffrey Sachs. Embracing the image of the stereotypical member of the Ivy League elite, the Harvard-educated economist-turned-polymath and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University propounds on every topic that passes his gaze – from poverty to global warming, climate change to Thomas Aquinas, human trafficking to meteorological events, droughts, Catholic doctrine, and so on, ad infinitum. The curious love fest between Francis — the periphery pope of the poor — and Sachs — the modernist, pro-population control UN poverty guru — has raised many eyebrows among Catholics and Vatican observers alike.
Despite the assertion of openness to discussion in his recent enviro-cyclical, Laudato Si’, the pope has summarily rejected any dialogue with scientists who dispute the reality of global warming or anthropomorphic climate change. Instead, Francis relied on Sachs to do the heavy lifting, bridging the modernist Vatican/UN alliance on climate, sustainable development, and the Paris Climate Treaty. As the globe-trotting UN architect of Sustainable Development, Sachs pops up everywhere, but lately his most frequent cameos seem to take place at the Holy See. In addition to his consultative engagements in Rome, Professor Sachs dutifully served as the keynote expert promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at eight Vatican eco-summits. His hard work paid off when Pope Francis endorsed the SDGs in Laudato Si’, as well as during his Address to the United Nations during his U.S. trip.
Mission Accomplished, Jeffrey.
Sachs, the self-appointed savior of the downtrodden everywhere, has never missed an opportunity to promote his agenda to trash and blame the wealthy for all the problems in the world. Give him a platform and he will pontificate on the evils of Wall Street wealth, with particular attention payed to everyone’s favorite demons on the right, the conservative Koch brothers. Sachs repeatedly jumped on the corner soapbox at Occupy Wall Street and lambasted the 1% that is trying to ruin our planet.
While some would like to bestow on him the the titular honors of a secular Mother Teresa, it should perhaps be remembered that this papal poverty professional is handsomely rewarded for his “we are bursting at the seams” apocalyptic warnings of population explosion and impending climate catastrophe.
Sachs has earned big money writing books about poverty, sustainable development, and the greedy 1%. His latest book is entitled, you guessed it, The Age of Sustainable Development. How timely. Indeed, Sachs has been aligned for decades with his mentor and funder, George Soros – also known as one of the world’s richest men. Yet, Sachs would never criticize the activist billionaire at Occupy Wall Street.
It turns out that this peddler of class warfare on the part of the impoverished is himself not so poor. Last week, the New York Post reported that Sachs and his wife purchased a $6.25 million Upper West Side condo in Manhattan. But before you scoff over the hypocrisy of Mr. Poverty purchasing a 4 bedroom, 4 bath luxury condo for seven figures, rest assured that it is a “green” home. His new pad is in Harsen House, located at one of the city’s first LEED-certified “green” buildings. How could Sachs be labeled one of the cruel rich if he does his part and buys an enviro-friendly house – whatever the cost?
Just imagine the royalties from his popular book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet! Crowded Africa is such a problem with all those black children emitting carbon dioxide. If only Nigerians would adhere to his admonishment to limit their families to three children, maybe they could be the right kind of rich, just like him.
It’s also neat how profitable it can be when writing a book entitled, The End of Poverty: How we Can Make it end in Our Lifetime. One thing is for certain – Jeffrey Sachs has figured out how to end poverty in his own life.
Of course, here in reality we know that money isn’t the root of all evil – love of money is. Only the wealthy have the ability to offer substantive for the poor, for the Church, for culture, and for the arts. If Mr. Sachs has amassed a fortune of a size most people can only dream of, good for him; it’s simply odd that he did so while so publicly criticizing the rich and rubbing elbows with some of the most noteworthy anti-wealth and anti-capitalism crusaders in the world today.
Hypocrisy, of course, is nothing new – certainly not for global elites who instruct the poor on how to live their lives.
What is shocking is that we have a pope who listens to them.
Left-wing radicalism masquerading as Neopaganism. It started in 1990 when the Soviet Union went teats up.
Such a bore.
Not to nitpick but it started much earlier than that. It certainly received a new impetus around that time, but it has undergone a number of incarnations over the decades. You need to go back to the 1940s to find its origins as a scientific paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense of the term) but even then its roots go back way further to the early critiques of Victorian ‘modernism’ (i.e. the worldview that post-modernism derives its dialectical opposional stance in reference to).
You are giving Sachs way too much credit. His roots are not remotely connected to Blake’s “satanic mills” but to plain-vanilla left-wing economic policy of the bobo variety. He is a rancid baby-boomer leftist exhibiting the attraction for the sanctimonious Diktat typical of the genre (q.v. the UK’s George Galloway). Yet he cannot be taken too seriously. The dialectic is his real pride and joy, which allows him, in apparent sincerity, to defend skunks like Vladimir Putin!
Sach’s concern for the planet, in other words, is entirely opportunistic, what I intended by describing him as merely “masquerading” as a tree-hugger these days. That particular bit of two-step kabuki became necessary for a lot of committed Leftists over the course of the 1980s, and of course, for the bobo Marxist, he can make a lot of money whilst condemning making a lot of money. A little dialectic, with a helping of Gaia blah-blah-de-dah, goes a long way in the circles that Jeffrey Sachs moves in.
A recrudescent Fourierism has nothing to do with a slimy creature like Sachs, who enjoys more than anything else casual slanders, for example, the preposterous potshot that capitalists like the Kochs “want to destroy the planet”! It’s not that, like Sachs, they are interested in making money or creating wealth. Nothing so ordinary, no. They are nihilistic visionaries of the hitlerite sort who explicitly wish to make the planet uninhabitable.
He is every awful impulse from the 1960s erupting at once. So naturally he and the pope are best buds.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything in relation to Sachs, I was just picking up on the 1990s reference. I pretty much agree with everything you have said.
The author’s credentials are impressive. If she could just change her opinions completely, who knows?, she might even get invited for a tête-à-tête at the Vatican!
See my comment above…if it gets removed and you are interested, let me know and I’ll give you my email if you want it.
I see what you mean. As a retired teacher, I know a little about this kind of thing, about the insane bureaucracy that has grown up around “caring and sharing.” Looks as though Yore could easily fit in with the current in-crowd at the Vatican whether she changed her opinions or not.
Poor Francis.
Green is the new red,
Wonderful article!
Google
Stanley Fischer’s role in piratizing Russia’s wealth
for Sachs was intimately involved in the Rape of Russia and so when Franciscus is seen cozing up with him it surely must be an example of
The Pope reaching out to the peripheries
and helping the poor.
Remember when Franciscus fired 500 Catholics laboring in Calligraphy for the Vatican and refused to meet with them as he sent them off into unemployment? Merry Christmas Catholics.
Google
Rorate Caeli Mercy social justice and the purifies in practice- 500 Italian workers to be left in squalor by papa decision
What Our Pope and Our Cross says is distressing enough but what he does is far worse and yet he continues to invite charges of hypocrisy when what he does is so at odds with what he, sometimes, preaches.
Sachs was allowed to leave Harvard (Columbia got him) rather than be forced out after Harvard was sued because of the way their “experts” raped Russia and then Sachs utterly failed to end poverty in Africa and his plans lead to a situation worse there then when he arrived there to help and so now we get him to help the Pope.
Talk about failing up
It makes one wonder if anybody in the Vatican does any research before choosing men such as Sachs and then one thinks, Well, of course they know as much about this infamous man as does IANS for his involvement in Russia and his failures in Africa are so well known and then
one thinks, Well, that makes matters even worse, doesn’t it, for they know who he is and what he has done and the ways he has failed and yet they still chose him.
This Papacy bids well to be amongst the top worst five of all time
For reasons that are almost certainly misguided, the Vatican seems to have felt obligated to cozy up to the UN “development” advocates for years. That part is bad. If they have to pick an economist out of that camp, though, Sachs might be as good as they could get. He’s, unfortunately, one of the less objectionable among the big names in that arena… He at least draws some connections between markets and human welfare, and he at least stops short of openly advocating for pushing population control over the line into forced abortions and sterilizations ( which makes him better than, say, the UNICEF management.)
The fact that the author of this article, Elizabeth Yore, was general counsel for the Illinois Dept of Families and Social Services makes me wonder about her. The DSS in every state know what is going on regarding child trafficking since, I think, these ‘agencies’ were set up as conduits. The IL DCFS (as do other ‘child protective service’ agencies) operates under the falsehood that parents caught up in their net succumb to the coercive demands of the DCFS ‘VOLUNTARILY’, therefore the parents/families are NOT owed due process under the constitution. People involved in these agencies receive bonuses for removing children from families. This includes ‘judges’.
Here is an example of how IL DCFS operates; a class action suit:
https://www.isba.org/committees/women/newsletter/2008/10/classactionchallengingunconstitutio
Also, this information about Elizabeth Yore, from “Catholic Vote” (Anyone who gets in bed with Oprah Winfrey, who is a globalist, is, to my mind, highly suspect.)
ELIZABETH YORE
Elizabeth Yore served as Special Counsel at Harpo, Inc. for the last 5 years. In that position, she acted as Oprah Winfrey’s Child Advocate both with the Oprah Winfrey Show and in South Africa at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. Prior to that position, Liz was General Counsel for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the Illinois statewide child welfare agency. At DCFS, Liz created the first missing child unit, which
required the DCFS to immediately notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children when a foster child went missing. Illinois has been the leader in that initiative. She also spearheaded a program to aggressively prosecute human trafficking cases in the department. Prior to DCFS, Liz was General Counsel at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia, and its first Director of the International Division handling international child abduction cases. She now blogs at Yorechildren.com, twitters@elizabethyore and consults internationally in child exploitation cases.
– See more at: http://www.catholicvote.org/author/elizabeth-yore/#sthash.5VdM52zy.dpuf
And then, this glowing review, 9 months into Francis’ pontificate by Elizabeth Yore, where SHE pontificates about Francis’ love of the poor:
http://www.catholicvote.org/francis-the-lionheart/
So we have to ask ourselves, WILL THE REAL ELIZABETH YORE, PLEASE STAND UP?
Is she really “pro family”?
Lastly, here is info regarding Nancy Schafer (Florida Congresswoman) who fought Child Protective Services, and it would appear, paid for it with her life.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/03/31/852665/-The-Murder-of-Nancy-Schaefer-CPS#
There Is nothing wrong with sustainability. Just because some pro-abortionists advocate for it, does not mean that sustainability is immoral.
Pro-environment is pro-life. Why bother to fight valiantly for the right of the unborn in the womb to live if they are only going to be born into a vile world enveloped by toxic air, water, and let’s not forget, TOXIC values? Moral and environmental pollution should be the concern of pro-lifers. It doesn’t mean that both issues are EQUAL, but they are both important.
The essential difference is that no one has actually managed to create a working model for man caused global warming. Why would I equate child murder with a hypothesis that not only wasn’t proved, but doesn’t even have a model, in 50 years of propaganda?
Shame on Francis for making Dogma out of human precepts . We were Warned by Jesus against this. This is blind liberal guides global warming etc. Leading the blind.. … Francis undermines whatever litlle credibility he has left as Pope by this Peron Marxist rants and actions.