Obama’s Extreme Dream Team

In the wake of my post yesterday about the Obama Administration’s former “Green Czar”, Van Jones, signing up to push “nature rights,” I thought it is worth looking at the radical views expressed by other continuing administration members on issues relevant to SHS.

- The “Science Czar” John P. Holdren has advocated that trees be allowed to sue. Even more alarmingly, he has stated that a child doesn’t “become a human being” until after experiencing “early socialization experiences”.  In his 1977 book Ecoscience, he also expressed support for explicitly eugenic ideas such as non voluntarily birth control of undesirable populations and establishing a transnational police force to enforce legally mandated population control.

- Cass Sunstein, the “Regulations Czar” believes in “animal standing,” which would allow animals to sue.  He also has urged that the lives of elderly people be given less value in cost/benefit regulatory analysis based on quality of life criteria.

- Donald Berwick, the (temporary) head of Medicare HEARTS the NHS! (despite the  NHS Meltdown”) has said that good health care policy “redistributes wealth,” and has  supported medical rationing.

Ezekiel Emmanuel, the bioethicist at the NHS, and now special adviser for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (while laudably opposing assisted suicide) has suggested we all have a “moral obligation” to be experimented upon and has suggested that any future age-based health care rationing scheme would not be discriminatory if it was based on the patient having lived more years (!) and supported quality of life rationing in the present tense.

Alta Charo, the University of Wisconsin Law School bioethicist, served on the Obama transition team and is now on leave to the FDA.  She has called me a leader of the “Endarkenment” (Ha!), and supports a constitutional right to do scientific research—which would obviate regulation or limits barring a compelling state interest (such as preventing the release of a virus just to see what happens—to ensure that human cloning research will not be hindered.

Quite a team.  Well, on the bright side, at least Obama didn’t appoint Peter Singer to the government.  But that may only be because he isn’t an American citizen.