The Story of Annie Leonard's Socialism

A series of videos have been racking up viewings on YouTube, thanks in part to public school teachers and university professors making them a part of curriculum, and indoctrinating our children with left-wing anti-capitalist propaganda.

Annie Leonard, an activist with Greenpeace, created “The Story of Stuff,” a web video disparaging America’s consumer society and attacking capitalism (or, as she calls it, “the current economic model.”) It was funded by the mysterious Tides Foundation – the group that also funded ACORN before it became a liability to the left and rotted away.

There has been a successful effort to debunk Leonard’s indoctrination effort, which can be found at Glenn Beck’s site.

But Leonard’s own words show that this Story of Stuff project is simply a means to an end. The end, of course, is to transform America’s economy away from capitalism and towards something that can only be described as socialism.

“I go around the country and I show the ‘Story of Stuff’ film and for those of you that have seen it you know it lays out a pretty broad, pretty systemic critique of the economy – of the current economic model,” Leonard said in a May 2010 speech in South Carolina. (emphasis added)

The problem is, Leonard, and many like her, don’t have the courage to simply say they want to ditch capitalism. Instead, they use poll-tested phrases like “an economy that works for everyone.” Or, she objects to “trashing each other on the equity front,” and apparently believes “stuff” is distributed unevenly among human beings. “We’re not sharing the stuff we use well enough,” she says.

What Annie Leonard – and many other with socialist beliefs – lack is the cajones to say what they would do about it. Clearly their remedy is more government intervention in our lives. More regulation, more taxes, more nudges to get us to act as they would see fit.

They don’t do that because it would face stiff opposition. So they go about it in a different way. Consider one of her analogies from the May 2010 speech:

I’m looking forward to the day that I show the ‘Story of Stuff’ film and someone asks from the audience not ‘what can I buy differently?’ but ‘what meaningful collective action can we take to solve this problem at its root, to build a healthy, sustainable, equitable and fulfilling economy?’

So she wants to stop the consumer mindset and replace it with a “collective” mindset. Just makes you want to travel on over to Haight-Ashbury and get your smoke on, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t shop responsibly when we do shop – of course, of course – we should buy the least toxic, least exploitative product available, of course. But our power is not in perfecting our skills at choosing the least hazardous thing on the menu. The real power lies in choosing what’s on the menu and the only way to do that…is to reengage our citizen and community self to build a different kind of economy so that the only choices available to everybody are the safe and healthy choices…

While “green choices” are all the rage these days, I’m willing to bet Stalin’s goal in 2011 would have been to provide only those choices he deemed “safe” and “healthy” too. This is the problem with Leonard and her propaganda. She wants government to be the one to protect us from ourselves and while she clever in leaving us a few choices, her form of government would narrow the list to very little choice at all.

Leonard’s philosophy is what is killing America, which was once the greatest hope on earth. The socialist mindset, which prefers the term “progressive” these days, is continuing to creep into our government and society. And government schools throw open the door by showing Leonard’s “Story of Stuff” to our children every day.

The second thing that I’ve learned since releasing the ‘Story of Stuff’ film that has me worried is the intensity of the effort to silence this conversation. While the response to ‘Story of Stuff’ has been overwhelmingly positive, there are some people who make up for the smallness in their numbers and in their thinking by their disproportionate access to television TV talk shows – who want to marginalize, threaten and silence people who are speaking up for a fundamentally different economic model…not business as usual with a little recycling, but something fundamentally different.

Those that believe in the free market want to have this conversation. We’re begging you to be more open about it. Tell us the solutions so we can debate them.

I’d love an example – just one – of Leonard’s proof of a TV talk show host that has tried to silence her. Unlike those on the left, those on the right believe in everyone’s right to free speech, even if we disagree with it. That’s the America we’re trying to protect from the progressives.

So what remains to be seen is if Leonard, Greenpeace, Tides and other left-wing organizations will be successful in their quest to transform America into a nation that fits Leonard’s description:

“I cannot tell you how often someone raises their hand after watching this pretty broad critique, and says, ‘what can I buy differently to solve this problem?’ Or they say, ‘what can I do?’ And I want to know where people are and so I say, ‘what can you think of to do?’ And almost entirely, at meeting after meeting after meeting, what I hear are individual and consumer responses: I can recycle, I can ride my bike, I can change my light bulbs, I can stop drinking bottled water, I can buy organic, all of these things. Now, of course, those are all good things and of course we should all do those things but those aren’t about making systemic political and economic change. To me, those things fall in the category of being a responsible adult, like you floss your teeth and you make your bed and you recycle and that’s what you do if you’re a responsible adult – it’s like household management. That’s not economic and political transformation which we so deeply need.

How long will we allow public schools to be used to peddle Leonard’s “economic and political transformation” advocacy?