Why We'll Never Win the Nobel Prize Vine & Fig Tree will never win the Nobel Peace Prize, of course. The Nobel Committee has a socialist bias. Look at a list of past winners. Mostly leftists. (And nearly all unknown to the average American). In 1990 the Prize went to communist Mikhail Gorbachev "for his leading role in the peace process" leading to the end of the cold war. Clearly that honor should have gone to Ronald Reagan. In 1993, F.W. de Klerk shared the Prize with Nelson Mandela. Doesn't that show the Committee is not biased against right-wingers? No; de Klerk capitulated to Mandela the Marxist-Leninist. Reagan stood up to Gorbachev. De Klerk was rewarded; Reagan was snubbed. Yasser Arafat, murderer and terrorist, won the Nobel Peace Prize.  
  Jimmy Carter’s peace prize in 2002 may have been awarded partly as a political swipe at the Bush administration. Rush Limbaugh would make a better nominee than Al Gore, the current favorite.  
  The most recent winner, Muhammad Yunus,of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, is an advocate of socialism and was well-funded by left-leaning financiers. His ideas have been exposed as economic frauds.  
  Lew Rockwell writes:

Some time ago, the Nobel Prize committee changed the definition of the antiwar prize to include activism for government welfare and environmentalism (exactly the sort of coercive redistributionism that undermines social peace). This was a direct betrayal of the founder, who had stipulated that the prize be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Not that this was the only act of treachery. In the years since Alfred Nobel's death, such monsters as Teddy Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, and Henry Kissinger have been honored. I suppose we should be grateful they didn't give it to Bush.

Once again, though the peacemakers shall be called the sons of God, they will not be named Nobel laureates.

  
  Still, most people look up the Nobel Prize for Peace as something admirable. Our goal is not to win the Prize, but to do something so admirable that people who don't realize how biased the Prize is will think we deserve to win it.  
Our strategy Americans have an incredible amount of disposable income. Yet as their incomes increase, their percentage of charitable giving declines. Christians are most culpable in this area. Ron Sider has pointed out statistics which are both damning and encouraging. The World Bank reports that 1.2 billion of the world's poorest people try to survive on just one dollar a day. At least one billion people have never heard the gospel. Studies by the United Nations suggest that just an additional $70–$80 billion a year would be enough to provide access to essential services like basic health care and education for all the poor of the earth. If they did no more than tithe, American Christians would have the private dollars to foot this entire bill and still have $60–$70 billion more to do evangelism around the world. The power of the State or the United Nations would not have to be increased to accomplish these goals.  
  But more negatively, American Christians not only fail to give charitably, but they allow half their income to be taken by an atheistic government and to be used for generally anti-Christian purposes. Over $500 Billion will be spent on the wars in the Middle East during the Bush-Clinton-Bush-[Clinton?] administrations, killing millions of non-combatant civilian men, women, and children, and stirring up anti-American opposition and recruitment opportunities for terrorism. No credible Democrat candidate for President in 2008 will be campaigning to completely end U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. In short, no candidate of either major party in 2008 will be advocating the foreign policy of America's Founding Fathers.
  In one of our campaigns, we have suggested how America's Founding Fathers might have spent $500 billion U.S. dollars to build a Christian-capitalist Iraq rather than destroy all Christianity in the country and create an Islamic terrorist theocracy in its place.  
  I believe that millions of Americans can be persuaded to end the destruction of the Middle East and to extend the benevolent reign of the Prince of Peace. The real target audience here is evangelical Christians, who are so close yet so far. If they can be persuaded to stop supporting the Secular Welfare-Warfare State, the greatest strides toward peace can be made since the Nobel Prize was established.  
 
It is promising to note that many Nobel Prize-winning organizations began in a garage or at a kitchen table with some "extremists" saying "This isn't right. We have to do something about it." In his Nobel Lecture, Yunus recalls that
Grameen Bank was born as a tiny homegrown project run with the help of several of my students, all local girls and boys. Three of these students are still with me in Grameen Bank, after all these years, as its topmost executives.
 Zechariah 4:10
For who has despised the day of small things?

Job 8:7
Though your beginning was small, Yet your latter end would increase abundantly.

  MoveOn.org has recently illustrated the power of the Internet to permit a small minority to define the political agenda of the mainstream. Vine & Fig Tree hopes to harness that power for an agenda so old it appears radically new.