Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.
See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.
If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.
The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.
A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.
Ibram X. KendiMaxine Waters
Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:
“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”
Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.
In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
Nikolai Patrushev
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
In case you haven’t heard, Biden is big on the fight against “climate change”. It’s everywhere in the earlier “bipartisan infrastructure bill”, the Build Back Better monstrosity, new EPA edicts, and in the travels of Biden’s roving climate change ambassador, John Kerry. We’re doing this as governmental Covid-panic bludgeoned the economy and the fed unleashed trillions of new dollars – 50% increase in two years – at a time when the economy registered only a 6-7% expansion. Something has got to give, and I think it’ll be our personal fortunes.
It’s a perfect storm, in the words of the economist Edwin T. Burton. You see, we need a leap in economic growth to absorb the tidal wave of new money. Don’t expect it from a greenie economy. A Greta Thunberg economy doesn’t work any better than a socialist one. On second thought, is there a difference?
16-year-old Great Thunberg
Central planning, common to both, whether to eliminate differences in wealth or fit the fantasies of Earth First (and our 16-year-old sage), replaces the decisions of millions of free individuals with the commands of a few autocrats. Right now, as inflation is about ready to rage through the economy, these autocrats are working to cripple the economic lives of millions with expensive and unreliable greenie energy while at the same time they are trying to strip our freedom of movement in their war on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine. Supply chain disruptions aren’t the only misery that awaits us.
As President Obama was famous for saying when confronting congressional Republicans, elections have consequences. Yes, they do. This time around, we replaced mean tweets and insults at rallies with a basket of lunacies.
The whole situation reminds me of the Jeff Bridges character in the movie “Airplane”. We picked the wrong time to fight climate change while our practical lives are teetering at the edge of an abyss.
Watch the clip below. It’s a hoot, and also a bit more frightening if we realize that sniffing glue is not that much different from an enthusiasm for the Green New Deal: escapes from reality.
California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., September 14, 2021. (Fred Greaves/Reuters)
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, what a hot mess. Extending it, what happens in California stays in California. Few things falser can be imagined. What happens in and for California invades the whole country without anyone’s consent. California’s manias have become our manias. It’s time to treat California as the pariah state that it is. Pariahs are isolated to quarantine their deadly influence.
Will Swaim of the California Policy Center provides sound reason to place California on the same list with North Korea (read about it here).
The Rocky Mountain states get to inhale the consequences of California’s desire to maintain combustible forests. Why? The state’s periodic droughts, normal in Mediterranean climates, blanket the golden state in a thick layer of matchsticks if not cleared. Guess what? The state’s wildlands aren’t cleared due to a glowing hatred of logging and prescribed burns. In addition, the spark, literally the spark, frequently comes from the state’s aging and neglected grid because of the state’s Public Utilities Commission fixation on the greenie fantasies of wind and solar. Anyone can see the results from their car window as they flee the flames: the ubiquitous forests of humongous windmills scarring the landscape, extensive seas of solar panels, and the costliest electricity rates with the greatest unreliability. The state’s folly now becomes our filthy air.
California wildfire smoke wafting over the skies in the Northwest and southern Canada.
What about the epidemic of “out of stock” online and off? A huge link in the supply chain lies parked off the Southern California coast. Controlling the docks in the most incompetent way possible is the ILWU, the longshoreman’s union, which fully exploits the generous powers granted to it by the state’s maniacally pro-Big Labor laws. If those containers finally get off the ship, there are few trucks to pick them up because of the state’s uniquely intense jihad against fossil fuels, half the available trucking fleet having been made illegal by state diktats. The state’s pathological obsessive/compulsiveness in regards to emissions is now a gross obstacle to interstate commerce. It’s unsettling to discover that Billings supermarkets are so heavily impacted by lunatics in Sacramento.
Container ships and oil tankers waiting in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach in California in April 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
The price of meat is rising. Well, expect it to go higher for the whole country as producers scramble to meet the commands of California’s Prop 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The state has ordered all producers from Fresno to Iowa to Canberra (Au.), wherever, to meet its demands if they want to peddle their goods in this asylum with an elected government. So, their meat products will be more expensive everywhere as producers scramble to cater to the state’s ninnies. Nobody voted for this outside this looney bin’s precincts.
The same tactic is at work in forcing the state’s climate change feverishness on all of us. First in the crosshairs are the carbon consuming and emitting conveyances in your garage, no matter the state. For years, California’s fastidious phobias on emissions shows up on all vehicles whether sold in Los Angeles or Lubbock. The Zanyland’s mammoth market share and the dictates of production efficiencies force all of us to share in the dementia. Call it the California premium that everyone has to pay. This is the second instance of California getting to set its psychotic agenda on all states with corporate America as a co-conspirator. More about this later.
A ubiquitous California smog test
Interstate commerce isn’t managed out of Congress according to the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, but effectively out of Sacramento. And, as it turns out, neither is immigration (Clause 4). The state’s official immigration policy – it’s been a sanctuary state since 2017 – routinely ignores federal law and its enforcement personnel, going so far as to make it a crime ($10,000 fine) for businesses in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Further, the state subsidizes nonprofits assisting in the law-breaking while at the same time lavishing entitlements on the law-breakers. Clearly, the state is at war with the Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4)
Pro-illegal immigration protest, California 2019.
The state is one huge affront to the rule of law: the US Constitution. The use of the state’s police powers to block interstate and international commerce should be no more tolerated than its zany regulations be allowed to affect consumers who had no voice in their creation. The state must be brought to heel. The situation has aggravated beyond a mere irritant. It’s getting close to being an existential threat to the nation.
A corrective begins with the recognition of the state as a pariah, one that habitually operates outside the bounds of our Constitution. Quarantine the madness to make certain that Californios bear the full freight of their lunacy. Take the management of their ports away from them. Institute forest management practices by sidelining the state’s powerful eco-crazed lobbies. State interference in the enforcement of federal immigration law should be treated as acts of secession. Federal legislation should prevent interstate producers from imposing costs of meeting California’s frenzies on the entire national market. What happens in California should be made to stay in California.
Over time, the need for explicit action may wane as people continue to do what they have been doing: flee the asylum run by the inmates. The state’s overbearing market share is fading as the number of outbounded moving trucks continues to mount. The problem is taking care of itself, but a little legal protection for the rest of the nation is needed along the way.
The “woke” on an American college campus.Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.
Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.
We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.
Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.
Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.
Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.
Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.
More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.
This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.
Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.
EV: noun; abr.; electric vehicle.
Frivolity: noun; acting in a way that is silly or wasteful.
Fiat: noun; an arbitrary order. (arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system)
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Put the three words together: Turning all American car owners into EV proprietors in the span of 5-10 years by government fiat is an exercise in frivolity, and ruinous in the end.
Indeed, the whole campaign is arbitrary (fiat), totally lacking in sound reasoning. The end state of having all Americans junk their fully functional family sedans, minivans, and SUVs would turn upside down wholesale patterns of living just to satisfy a splinter group’s fantasy.
What prompted this observation? AAA’s “Via” magazine and its feature article, “Going the Distance: Tips and tricks from electric vehicle owners” (Nov./Dec. 2021). The splinter group in question is abundantly replicated in the article. The three profiled EV owners are full California urbanistas from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California (Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, Irvine area). All are degreed in environmental studies, the Humanities, or digital tech. All are cloistered urbanites who visit rental properties, coastal B-and-B’s, the arts-and-crafts circuit, and venture into the forests for the snap visit to mother nature. Trip distances are short or limited in routes.
In other words, they represent the left coast fringe – socially, economically, and politically. These are the type of people who reflect the lives and norms of those who pursue an existence in rather exclusive suburban ranch houses, gentrified flats, landscaped yards, and aren’t likely to get their hands dirty working wrenches and equipment. The supporting cast of workers for this insular urban lifestyle has a separate life that is a world apart. Yet, the white collars want to force their preferences on everyone, no matter our circumstances.
Young people walking on top of canal boat
As such, one of the things that Biden brought to the White House was California, meaning its progressive personnel and monoculture. And that means the state’s eco-looniness. The EV-love in the administration’s ukases, like much that gurgles out of the left coast’s sunshine state, lacks any sound rationale, either environmental or economic.
The environmental justification is the easiest to dispense with. The ol’ bugaboo of climate change – as bellowed by that great thinker of our times, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg – is infected with leaps of faith and logic. The reality is that the atmosphere is too voluminous, its content too varied, and influences too multitudinous to justify Greta’s tantrum (Sept. 2021), “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” That should give you a flavor of the hysteria to force you out of your fully functional and efficient Chevy Suburban.
Greta Thunberg during her Zoomed UN speech on September 23, 2019.
What good is accomplished, though, by banishing the $40,000 investment in fuel, oil, metal, plastic, chips, and rubber in your garage, the euthanization of 2 million jobs in the fuel industry, and scotching the great advances in emissions and fuel efficiency down to the present? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Surely, Greta and her handlers in Big Environmentalism must realize that they have no street cred in Beijing and New Delhi – nearly 3 billion people combined and no desire to return to living in the dirt. Stack up their car fleets with ours. You would be replacing the cleaner things in our country with dirty cars, dirty power plants, and dirty air among these teeming hordes outside the developed world. Sorry, Greta, you’re nuts.
In the end, the amount of energy-trapping gases would scarcely budge, if not increase as capital seeking its highest rate of return rushes away from us to refuges of greater opportunity in places hungry to enjoy air conditioning. Dirty expands, clean shrinks. Punishing the clean is not a winning strategy.
So, why the headlong rush to the EV? Climate change doesn’t work for this lifestyle coup. Fact is, the campaign is a jumble of fantasies, fantasies about windmills, solar panels, and EVs. Greta’s fantasy sounds so simple. . . to the simple-minded.
The simple fact is that the EV is no practical substitute for the internal combustion engine. The infrastructure – repairmen, convenient and numerous charging stations, affordable parts and abundant retail outlets – will take multiple decades to arise. But the zealots are impatient: remember, 5-10 years to bankrupt you and the millions employed in keeping the existing fleet on the road. It’s reminiscent of the Stalin’s dekulakization campaign of the 1930’s. Eager to create forthwith Marx’s vision of the communal ideal, Stalin ordered (by fiat) the huge number of peasants in the Russian population – 82% of the total population – to give up their property and many of their belongings and herd them onto huge collective farms. The subsequent upheaval led to massive starvation and a huge expansion of concentration camps. An epidemic of death was inflicted on the bread basket of Russia. Similarly, lifestyle choices outsourced to the federal apparatchiks of Build Back Better will fare no better than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.
Scenes from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3.
Why should the infantile ramblings of Greta and The Squad have greater weight than my own? Their dream has incompatible elements. Hitched to universal EV ownership is windmills, solar panels, and any energy scheme conjured in a gentrified Brooklyn flat. Sadly, the lab rats who are Californians show us the results. Blackouts and the high cost of energy are the outcomes. So, just as we are bribed and whipped into EV’s, they are making the grid more expensive and unstable. Picture this: you rush out to get to work and find your Nissan Leaf with too little juice to make it to the office or get the kids to school. Blackouts just blacked out your car.
Okay, you and your kids can always Zoom . . . if the lights come back on. The pandemic lockdowns showed how that worked. More than the grid was destabilized.
As for that holiday visit to grandma’s house of 300 miles one way? Think about it, 250 miles is the likely limit before your wheels come to a dead stop. Of course, you know that ahead of time. If the grid hasn’t gone dark and you have the 6-8 hours to charge the thing before departure, you still have to restrict your route to the availability of chargers. Let’s just hope that you chose right and the plug-ins are operational. If not, expect a motel expense and an overnight layover.
If something mechanically should go awry, well, you’re stuck. The ubiquitous shade tree mechanic or guy who built a top fuel dragster won’t be of any help. The ready availability of parts and community knowledge is decades into the future. Hope that the diesel bus or train stops at the nearby hamlet.
Tesla Model S battery pack
If, by chance, you get the thing to the dealership, they might discover that the huge lithium battery pack is plated over and in need of replacement, a $20,000 part. The battery’s life was apparently cut short by all the 30-minute fast charging, a necessary activity due to much long-distance commuting or forgetting to plug the thing for the safer 6-8 hours of overnight charging. The 10-year lifespan was turned into 6. Normally, you’ll notice the deterioration in shorter operational distances as you begin to panic in the desperate search for a charge in the many and expanding derelict urban districts along the way. Maybe the thought of being held up at gunpoint disabuses you of that short excursion to Walmart.
Chances are, if you’re so into EV’s, you’re also apoplectic about open pit mines and polluted air and water, just the type of thing that inhabits third world kleptocracies, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. That’s where we find the rare earth minerals for the batteries of your feel-good EV; however, rest assured that your EV won’t be responsible for inundating the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone else in the mass of humanity will, thanks to your insatiable appetite for lithium batteries.
The utopian rush to the EV has consequences, many of them not pleasant. It’s what happens when adults turn over governance to childish and monomaniacal fanatics. Their tunnel vision becomes our tunnel vision, their leaps of logic become our leaps of logic. It’s a lesson that the editors of AAA’s “Via” magazine – Whitney Phaneuf, Katie Henry, Mandy Ferreira, and Rebecca Smith Hurd – should take to heart before they fob off on us their niche proclivities.
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Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.
Our new god, The State, speaks: “Thou shalt drive an electric car.” When this god-imposter speaks, run!
Something normally left to individual choice, along with vacation destinations, is now the province of The State. Combine a neurotic over-reaction to unprovable threats (climate change hysterics) with a growing State impulse to engineer the person along the lines of the neurosis and the result will be a pure, unadulterated mess. The State is a hammer-for-everything when a shed full of tools is the actual necessity. Our lives will begin to look like the incessant and crude pummeling of a hammer. Translation: live less well.
And, God almighty, are they out to get the internal combustion engine. Gavin Newsom, governor of the looney bin formerly known as the State of California, and emboldened by his survival of the recall, signed the death warrant for the gasoline car in the state, the lethal injection to be performed by 2035. From DC, Biden’s Build Back Better – errrr Worse – has $13.5 billion for scarring the roads and interstates hither and yon with plug-ins for the things. To make sure that you use those plug-ins, the feds will bribe you with other people’s money – to the tune of $12,500 per purchase – to buy the contraption and junk your quite functional family sedan. That’s right, replace something that works for a will-‘o-the-wisp.
*Read about the EV and its heart and soul, the battery, here.
I equate the EV craze to gender reassignment surgery. Surgeons jettison the Hippocratic Oath by destroying perfectly healthy organs to align a person’s physique to their imagination. Ditto for Build Back so-called Better: mutilate the transportation grid to better fit the fancies of the half-witted representative from NY’s 14th congressional district.
And what are we going to get out of it, besides the will-‘o-the-wisp? A mess, a big mess. How much of a mess? Just think it through. Those holiday trips to grandma’s house will be measured in battery capacity. Don’t take too many long trips, commutes, or otherwise because the trip’s mandatory half-hour quick charges degrade the batteries. Don’t expect 100,000 miles out of the thing. And just think, you were forced to give up something that works very well for . . . God only knows what. Wait for this to percolate through the economy and into higher unemployment figures and higher grocery bills and poorer diets.
That’s a ticket for a return journey to the Middle Ages.
And what of those now-common California blackouts? After all, the greenie grid functions like the greenie car. The physics of the substitution of high-density energy with low-density doesn’t add up. The trillions spent on trying to make it work is an attempt to bend the laws of nature to the half-literate musings of The Squad. What will you do with an EV with no juice to its umbilical cord and plug? Commutes will be made more formidable, the suburbs will atrophy, and its back to cramped apartment life at the mercy of Lori Lightfoot’s or Bill de Blasio’s defund-the-police rantings. Is raising kids in decrepit schools and on streets filled with gangs, the homeless, needles, and feces supposed to be “Build Back Better”?
Homelessness in LA.
Remember, the trillions and trillions going into this bottomless pit is money not spent on other things. An adult, not the eco-fanatics in Congress, would recognize this as trade-offs. Our decaying military will make it possible for the Pacific to become a CCP lake. Try a supply chain under that regime. Reliance on more expensive and unstable energy and less functional vehicles means less productivity, and productivity is the name of the game for prosperity. More money going into greenie infatuations is less money for R&D for the next wave of world-impacting innovation. Add it up . . . and cringe.
Have we lost our minds? Our car fleet is more efficient and less polluting than nearly any outside the Anglosphere and Europe. We are now expected to dispense with the great strides in the use of fossil fuels and jump headlong into electricity-everything, just at the time when they plan to make the production of it more unstable and vulnerable. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy
What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.
Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.
And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.
The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.
Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.
Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.
What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.
Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.
The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.
But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.
The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.
Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.
Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.
The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.
The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.
What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.
Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?
A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.
If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.
Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.
How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.
We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.
Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.
Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.
Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.
Need more be said?
What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.
Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.
Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.
Ed Bastain, CEO of Delta Airlines, and the symbol of the woke CEO.
H.L. Mencken (1888-1956), a writer and scathing critic of contemporary enthusiasms, famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” We are inundated with a glut of presumptive problems and a host of politically-favored and chic answers, many of them “clear, simple, and wrong”. When “clear, simple, and wrong” penetrates the command-and-control centers of organizations, they get off track and pursue ends far afield of their competency. Ironically, clear-simple-wrong answers oftentimes metastasize into obtuse mission statements littered with fashionable causes. Prepare for woe if those institutions are critical to our lives.
H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.) Baltimore Sun Staff (File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche, Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner)
Thus, a business could be beguiled by a mania for “social justice”, one of the most abused phrases in modern usage. The ballyhooed answers to a suspect issue are quite probably clear, simple, and wrong but the frenzy sweeps all before it and, before we know it, ESG (environment, social, and governance) competes with profitability. The previously uncomplicated mission of profitability – which spins off many positive externalities (good things) such as more products, higher wages and fatter pensions – gets entangled in intractable social headaches. Something has to give, and right now it’s profitability with all the good that it brings.
Such is the threat of “woke capital”. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has the fortune of a small nation’s GDP, who could probably buy outright one of the UN’s members, runs a company lunchroom filled with the woke . . . like him. The simple service of making social interaction easier (instant and interactive messaging) is now complicated by opinion censorship and political donations to the enemies of economic liberty. This economic liberty is often brusquely referred to as “capitalism”. The Twitter minions are oddly supportive of the people who would strangle their capitalistic enterprise, born of economic liberty, in the crib. It’s one of the purest examples of self-negation.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
MLB, Inc., is another example. Somehow, the suits and the boys in smelly locker rooms became the arbiters of election laws. The simple act of very skilled athletes playing a stick-and-ball sport was complicated with the mission to advance the political interests of Stacy Abrams and the Georgia Democratic Party. The balancing of election integrity with the open franchise, something in the wheelhouse of government where the issues are raised and deliberated by elected representatives, is thrown askew by corporate leaders wasting their corporate reputations on a partisan crusade. One would think that angering 60-70% of your fan base is not a wise business decision. It is only possible when a business organization forgets itself and tries to act like a political one. It’s the culmination of millionaire celebrity athletes and their managing Manhattan suits – so dismissive of those smelly Walmart shoppers who buy the caps, jerseys, and big-screen tv’s – losing sight of batting averages, rbi’s, era’s, obp’s, and wins and losses.
At one time, there was an Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, who was like most franchise owners when he said, “Just win, baby.” Today, it’s “Just win, baby, and fight voter suppression.” A greater incongruency is hard to imagine.
Pro baseball as Democrat hitman doesn’t comport. Neither does Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg functioning as Democratic Party get-out-the-vote bankroller in 2020, but, oh, he was. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan (a real doctor as opposed to “doctor” Jill Biden), would say that they were helping “underserved communities” when they threw $419.5 million to two Democrat-friendly pass-throughs: the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). “Underserved” is another one of those words mangled by today’s politics.
From these two partisan philanthropies, the cash was laundered to biased groups in Democrat-rich localities. How was the money used? Consuming most of the cash was issue advocacy – universal mail-in balloting, opposing voter ID laws, etc. – staffing inner-city election offices with employees of partisan groups like Stacy Abrams’s Happy Faces, and flooding selected precincts with paid canvassers to “assist” voters and, get this, the “curing” (?) of ballots. How targeted was the effort? 25 of the 26 grants from these two NGO’s went to cities and counties won by Biden, statistically enough to swing Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the donkey party.
Stacy Abrams
It’s the same scene from the c-suites in shiny towers in deep blue metropolises to the air waves in “socially responsible” smiley-faced ads. All of the excitable ad terms are so dastardly vague, which is ideal for lefty crusades. “Socially responsible”? “Environment”? “Governance”? “Stakeholders”? If you want to talk about dog whistles, here you have the piercing sounds that’ll draw the lefty wolf packs from the far corners of the globe. The vocabulary draws out the socialistic fascism so near and dear to the swarming activists of the lefty hive.
That most fascist of all terms, “stakeholders”, is a classic. Mussolini foisted this canard on Italians and called it “corporatism”. In it, activist interests were organized into the “state”, “corporate management”, and “labor”. Just add “community voices” – i.e., lefty groups and their legal arm – to the mix and you have the “stakeholders” of “stakeholder capitalism”. Who decides the direction of this lumbering entity? Easy, the state, which means the politically powerful. Economic decisions become political decisions.
Socialism, of whatever stripe, isn’t an economic system; it’s a political one.
Is that any way to run an economy, by and for politicians and their unelected, cloistered coterie of regulators and allied NGO’s? It’s not that it hasn’t been done before. It was in many places, and in a place called the Soviet Union. Economists christened the practice “central planning”. Almost all activity goes through, or falls under the ever-watchful gaze, of the state. Take any lefty with power to wield in the U.S. Congress and you’ll see exhibited their inner-Soviet. Here’s a snippet from the Socrates of the House Progressive Caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), commenting in late September on their demand to pass the House Dems’ central planning bill (the $3.5-5 trillion monstrosity),
“. . . we have to deliver on the entirety of the president’s agenda [the humungous $3.5-5 trillion expansion of the state]. We have to deliver on child care [the state]. We have to deliver on paid leave [the state]. We have to make sure people can go to free community college [the state]. We need to make sure we’re taking on climate change [the state, big time]. We have got to address housing and immigration [the state and the state].”
These people are all about the state. They might as well plaster El Duce’s famous dictum – “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” – on Democratic Party headquarters in DC. The only difference between Mussolini’s brand of socialism and Lenin’s is that El Duce allowed the face-saving gesture of shareholders possessing the paper, but that is meaningless when the state tells you what do with them. State control trumps liberty, just as it was in Lenin’s Politburo, and just as it will be for the House Progressive Caucus.
Mussolini’s party headquarters in Rome.
And these people have the gall to call advocates of economic liberty fascists. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
The incongruous mashing of fascistic lefty activism with corporate shareholder governance creates a Frankenstein. Issues of moral import, that used to be dealt with under the principle of one man, one vote – meaning consensual government, a republic, our Constitution – are now to be decided in forums where its one share, one vote. Think about it. Institutional investors owning a million shares – like the lefty-managed BlackRock in Manhattan – have a million votes in setting corporate policies and filling management slots, not one vote. There might be thousands of stockholders but only a few are the big gorillas in the room. Imagine a huge slice of the economic fortunes of an entire nation being run according to the conscience of Manhattan.
Orwell’s Animal Farm had the ruling pigs change the central moral of the movement to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The owners of passels of shares, and thus “more equal than others”, include arms of the state like the state employee pension funds. Teamster pension-fund corruption has nothing on these lefty politicians and their allied activist organizations. These pension systems are slush funds for lefty activism, and to hell with the fiduciary responsibility to create a stable retirement for a worn-out firefighter. Sounds like corporatism to me.
CalPERS headquarters in Sacramento, Ca.
In this regard, we could profit from an extended timeout in making new laws and inventing more ways to spend more money. The National Archives are already busting at the seams. It should be apparent by now that there is a law on the books covering nearly everything that rankles us. Don’t like guns? Well, there’s a good part of the U.S. criminal code devoted to them. Don’t like climate-change alarmists and CRT hustlers messing around with your retirement? There’s the Employee Retirement Investment Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, coming on the heels of the 1960’s scandals in union-run pension systems. The law requires the highest priority be rate of return, not social causes that drive the imaginations of progressives. With retirements exploding and hefty payouts looming, money-managers would be insane to focus on anything but the highest rate of return. But, alas, that isn’t the case.
Biden has made a hash of the borders, Afghanistan, policing and civil peace, the jobs picture, inflation, energy, and all of it made worse by his COVID-authoritarianism. Add to the list mucking up our retirements. ERISA and rulemaking since ’74 wouldn’t forbid today’s ESG (or SR, “socially conscious”) investments but they must meet the rate of return standard. Fact is, the standard is no standard, post-Trump. Biden announced that his Labor Department won’t enforce the rule, leaving ample room to indulge in poor-performing ESG stock-picking.
Those ESG pickings are duds. Alicia Munnel of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research: “I really have no respect for ESG investing”. Tariq Fancy, former head of BlackRock’s sustainable investing wing:
“The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it’s not . . . . In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community”
Now Biden promises to do to us what he did to the Afghans. After some cop video goes viral, expect corporate shareholder and board meetings to embrace ESG and denounce one or another institution of civil order, and it’s off to the eventual liquidation of our pensions.
But what makes these corporate gatherings, dominated as they are by investor goliaths on a lefty jihad, the proper forum to adjudicate controversial public policies? Nothing. Corporate big cheeses, with shareholding King Kongs watching their backs, have a free hand in imposing their prejudices and social preferences on the mass of shareholders and the public at large. Gone is the need for representative assemblies, a court system to apply the law, and an elected executive to carry it out. Following the SR (“Social Responsibility”) peddlers, public policy is to be settled among the large caps in Manhattan, California’s Bay Area, LA, Washington State’s Puget Sound, Chicago, and the other c-suites in any million+ metropolitan area. Delta Airlines, Inc., may as well replace its logo with a donkey.
A favorite cause for the hyper-wealthy in their walled estates in their zoned-for-exclusion neighborhoods is the usual “climate change” and a raft of environmentalism’s other assorted extreme goals. For these people, insulated from the harmful effects of their beliefs by their ample portfolios, “follow the science” means that they have no intention of following it. Going from the heat trapping qualities of certain gases in lab experiments to the disappearance of Micronesia and the California coastal plain is more than a stretch. It’s a novel and properly placed in the library’s fiction section. A host of scientific variables are rolled to get right to the super-greenie end state.
It’s not the scientific method, hinging as it is on falsifiability (a testable hypothesis, one that can be proven correct or no). In the mind of the brain-dead activist, they go from a frenzied political assertion – not a real hypothesis with falsifiability – to coercion. This isn’t “follow the science”. It’s follow AOC.
Speaking of revolutionary public policy based on such hysterics, we have the greenie leviathan in the form of The Green New Deal waiting in the wings. Much of the Fortune 500 is fully onboard. But greenie energy doesn’t work. You can’t repeal the laws of physics and fiscal sanity by replacing high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) for low-density (wind mills, solar panels, bio-mass) without a corresponding deterioration in the quality of life. That’s certainly one way to reduce the wealth gap: shove the middle class into welfare dependency.
Forget about the rich, Lizzy Warren, they’ve got enough money in the bank to buy your vote, place on retainer an army of mercenaries in prestigious law firms, and to set up shop beyond your clutches.
It’s more than being “clear, simple, and wrong”. It’s the titans of industry operating out of their lane. Public policy is meant for a public to decide through their representative assemblies. Mars Candies needs to stick to innovating M&M’s. Delta Airlines needs to concentrate on making air travel affordable and more enjoyable. CalSTRS should have a single-minded focus on stable retirements for teachers. Everybody in their lane of competency and prudence.
In other words, shut up and sing. We could do without the bigs turning my ticket purchase into a back-channel endorsement of Stacy Abrams, Earth First, and Al Gore visits to Davos.
