Extra Voices, 12.18.2017
The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the contributors to Extra Voices on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of The Frederick Extra.
UPDATED VERSION: 10:55 a.m., 12.18
I am heartened that last week Montgomery County became the first county in the nation to adopt a resolution formally acknowledging anthropogenic climate change and pledge to take steps to help reverse it. Mostly symbolic, it's nonetheless important as a catalyst to get other jurisdictions engaged in addressing climate change at a local level. A few months ago I asked the Frederick County Council to look into forming an exploratory climate change committee. I hope they follow Montgomery's lead and finally act on it.
Montgomery's announcement presents a very interesting tale of two counties. Although their seats of government are separated by only 40 miles, Montgomery's resolution is the antithesis of Carroll County's seminal withdrawal from the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) in 2011 that was spearheaded by commissioner Richard Rothschild over his fear that it was a localized arm of a broader UN "Agenda 21" conspiracy to destroy capitalism, deprive Americans of their unalienable constitutional rights, and create a one-world totalitarian government. Crazy? Yes.
Like me, nearly everyone I talk with has never heard of ICLEI or the ominous sounding Agenda 21. Here's the cliff notes version for the uninformed: In the early 1990s more than 170 nations including the US held a summit to brain-storm environmental initiatives aimed at de-energizing climate change through wise use and preservation of Earth's natural resources in order to guide humanity toward a sustainable 21st century and beyond. They aren't treaties and everything is non-binding among participating nations, their local governments, and citizens who realized the obvious: humans are over exploiting the planet's resources resulting in global pollution that is unnaturally warming the planet.
Despite possessing no scientific credentials whatsoever to dispute factual climate change science that's been accepted by most of the civilized world, Rothschild has made a local political career piggybacking off national Agenda 21 fear mongers like Tom DeWeese and Glenn Beck who decry climate change as a hoax. He's obsessed with connecting Agenda 21 to a phantom left-wing conspiracy hidden in just about every public policy he finds, to the extreme degree of abolishing Carroll's Office of Sustainability. He also engineered a circus atmosphere, anti-planning and anti-climate change science summit held at the Pikesville Hilton on Halloween 2011. To Rothschild, anything that has to do with planning or sustainability is a code word for socialistic human oppression courtesy of Agenda 21/climate change. Of course, this is 180 degrees illogical.
Take for example this confounding question he posed to a panel at the big-oil funded Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate change in 2011 (as reported in the Nation.com): "To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?” George Orwell would blush at that one.
I've gotten to know more than I would have liked to about Rothschild. For the "un-politician" he claims to be he's as polarizing a politician as any average American could ever expect to encounter. I met his former campaign manager and now current Carroll County Long Term Advisory Council chairman Bruce Holstein in 2013. Holstein and I are both accountants and we worked well together teasing out the financial fraud buried within the contracts for a joint county trash incinerator project, which Rothschild rightly convinced his fellow commissioners to extricate Carroll County from in 2014, followed shortly thereafter by Frederick County. I've since become a master naturalist and have been heavily involved in advocating for the very contentious Scenic Monocacy River plan in hopes of reaching a compromise solution to restore the River's riparian buffers while respecting property rights for landowners along the River, which runs through both Frederick and Carroll. In the process I have closely observed Rothschild's repudiation of both the plan and the citizen appointed River advisory board that produced it, which is - you guessed it - predicated on his fervent paranoia over Agenda 21 that's become reminiscent of McCarthyism. In an April email exchange he wrote this inane comment to me: "The idea that the River Board is justified in making a preemptive prophylactic first strike against all property owners does not sit well with me." What does that even mean?
No doubt Rothschild is thrilled that a liberal county like Montgomery has finally plunged head long into "radical leftist policies" thus breathing new life into his trite conspiracy theories. He may want to hold his breath though, because as inconceivable as it may seem to him and his fellow deniers who get their climate misinformation from DeWeese and the Heartland Institute, the growing acceptance of climate change invalidates the very core of his hyper-constitutional dogma which scoffs at real science and equates government regulations to near human bondage.
Of course, Rothschild is dead wrong. Credible scientific climate data from entities like NASA, NOAA, Department of Defense, and numerous other countries across the globe continues to accumulate, with the predicted causalities derived from it becoming more prevalent. In other words, climate change is happening right in front of our eyes. Try as he might to simply waive it off as heresy, the empirical evidence puts Rothschild squarely among the useful idiot crowd of deniers.
Not surprisingly, the EPA has become Rothschild's favorite foil to gain favor among his radical right political and social circles (I'm Republican myself, albeit a rational one). It is true the constitution envisioned by the Founding Fathers didn't empower the federal government to impose or enforce environmental regulations on the States. But why would it have? The word environment as used today was not part of the lexicon at the time because there was no sense of urgency to protect it. The industrial revolution had only just begun and the advent of the petroleum age that has fueled our economy along with a runaway climate was almost a century away. Climate change and the invention of synthetic toxins that poison the environment and accumulate in our bodies causing a host of diseases the Founders wouldn't recognize could have no more been imagined by them than nuclear weapons or putting a man on the moon. They could never have foreseen that humans would decimate entire ecosystems across the globe, exacerbating climate change and causing millions of people to suffer, to say nothing of the massive extinction of species that we alone are responsible for.
For Rothschild to accept any of this would require an inner expansion of thought beyond the year 1776 that accounts for the realities of modern life that our Founding Fathers couldn't possibly have imagined. I believe Rothschild is far too obtuse and brain-washed to ever undertake that level of introspection.
As a self-professed man of God one would think he would appreciate the religious principles of intelligent design and stewardship of the Earth and all of God's creation, but even with his spiritual detachment from Mother Nature, he seems genuinely oblivious that over exploitation of natural resources is a recipe for disaster. Pope Francis wrote a wonderful encyclical entitled On Care For Our Common Home in which he exhorted that climate change is the most pressing human rights issue of our time. Francis calls on all people to have a "profound ecological conversion" and states that believers in God - supposedly including Rothschild - are usually the most ardent deniers. So even Rothschild's church (I'm also Catholic, though non-practicing) would seem to regard him as a charlatan.
Rothschild also has this intensely romantic notion that the Founding Fathers were infallible and everything they said or wrote is inviolate. Never mind the fact that Thomas Jefferson, good man that he was, owned slaves when he declared all men to be created equal with an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rothschild's seemingly tacit approval of Jefferson's double standard combined with his ignorance of his Church's own doctrine helps explain why he's in a constant state of religious-political confusion.
Generally speaking, I believe freedom of private industry and the unalienable right to own private property are a preferred human condition. But I also recognize the insidious influence of corporations with their lobbyists and money that has corrupted politics at every level in our society and is perhaps our Founders' greatest fear realized, an inconvenient truth Rothschild appears to overlook. Brian Murphy is an associate professor of Early American Republic studies at Baruch College and had this to say about the Founding Fathers' view of corporations (from Harvard Business Review, April 2010): "They saw corporations as corrupting influences on both the economy at large and on government — that’s why they described the East India Company as imperium in imperio, a sort of “state within a state.” This wasn’t an outcome they were looking to replicate."
Moreover, Jefferson wrote in his first inaugural address that "A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
Any good capitalist would agree with Jefferson in principle, but the history of American capitalism is replete with examples of men injuring one another for the sake of profits that would make Jefferson bristle at his own remarks. Ever since the days of the robber barons people and the environment have been exploited, many times intentionally and subversively, resulting in financial ruin and even death to many people. Think of the bigs: tobacco, pharma, coal, oil, and now even the sugar industry has been implicated in covering up since the 1960s links between heart disease and cancer to sugary foods. Ford and Chevrolet played the human cost to corporate benefit analysis by covering up Pinto explosions and ignition switch glitches so they could keep bonuses up and shareholders happy - while people died. Wall Street, HealthSouth, Enron, and PG&E...the list of corporate injustices goes on and on like Billy Joel's tune "We Didn't Start the Fire." But Rothschild hears no evil, sees no evil because deep down he's an elitist who believes people of means have a divine right to a capitalistic dominion over the Earth, regardless of the broader societal costs.
All of these factors and more have necessitated the formation of government oversight agencies like the EPA and NHTSA to restrain our capitalistic dark side through common sense government regulations. Without the EPA, we'd all be wearing breathing masks like people in India and China, or snuffing out burning rivers. The EPA is not a panacea for solving the entire nations' environmental problems however; local governments have to get involved in cleaning up their own backyards and ICLEI is one measure to make that happen. Since Rothschild can't control the EPA from his small desk in Carroll County, he did the next best thing he could and withdrew from ICLEI, completing his circle of distrust for all things government and environmental.
Which brings us back to the Monocacy River. Even though the formation of the River Board predates Agenda 21 and ICLEI, Rothschild believes he's connected the dots among all three. He hired a quack lawyer from the Idaho based, EPA fearing, Agenda 21 believing, Stand & Fight Club to threaten the River Board on the basis they were attempting an unconstitutional taking of private property along the River (the lawyer was later banned from practicing law in Maryland for stealing from a client) and then petitioning to have a Frederick County sustainability planner removed from his role assisting the River Board for no other than reason than doing his sustainable job. Just as bad, Rothschild has so far refused to publicly acknowledge the unequivocal science that proves agriculture runoff from farms along the Monocacy is polluting the water from which over 70,000 people in the City of Frederick drink from their taps. For Rothschild, preserving the property rights of the polluters is paramount to the health, safety, and welfare of others, so he makes no attempt to find a solution to this problem. Quite the opposite, he's been shamefully running around calling the River Management Plan "a solution in search of a problem."
If by now you're wondering like I've been how this unsettled man got elected, it gets worse. He pushed for sectarian prayer at County meetings despite a court injunction and with a hypocritical disregard for teachings in the bible (Matthew 6:5); has repeatedly stalled efforts to update Carroll's ethics ordinance to comply with State law (they remain the only Maryland county yet to do so); closely associated with and accepted campaign money from Michael Peroutka, a 2004 presidential candidate for the Constitution Party and former member of the racist/secessionist leaning League Of The South (so much for the convictions of a more perfect union); and penned a screed disparaging Muslims by suggesting they are not qualified to serve as president because Islam conflicts with the teachings of Rothschild's God and therefore the principles of the constitution. Using his own crass logic, a strong case can be made that Rothschild's unchristlike behavior places himself in that very situation.
If Rothschild happens to read this essay it will likely go right over his head because he's precisely the type of person who will never admit when he's wrong and loves to insist he's right. A rational debate with him is futile. One of his favorite tag lines is to condescendingly accuse anyone who disagrees with him of possessing a "tyranny of good intentions." The only intentions I've ever observed in the tyrannical Rothschild are the self-serving kind he uses to draw attention to himself and promote his misguided political agenda.
Suffice it to say that commissioner Rothschild will leave behind a disturbing legacy of delusional and, what I would consider, unethical behavior when he leaves office next year. In my humble opinion he is mentally unfit to serve any public office in the United States of America. This is not a man I would feel comfortable sharing a pew or an office with to be sure. But for now, the good people of Frederick County who see more value in the Monocacy River plan than just preserving property rights at all costs will have to put up with him a little longer. And let me say God Bless to the good people of Carroll County. I feel your pain.
I wish him well though.
