Wreckers

US Steel’s Mon Valley Works, Braddock, Pa.

Biden can’t have his cake and eat it too. I mean that he can’t be a firebrand for eco-extremism and an advocate of American manufacturing. The core problem lies in the so-called rubber meeting the road. His eco-allies won’t tolerate the reality of a manufacturing plant while he announces an airy platitude about eco-manufacturing from the rarified altitude of Mount Washington, DC. You know, like his professed fondness for the manufacturing of wind turbines here in America. He must realize that eco-zealots will torpedo, or wreck, the actual building of an actual manufacturing facility. A total disconnect is at work here.

This is what a business faces: activist-generated protest over a proposed approval natural gas generating plant in New Orleans, 2018.

Eco-zealots, by definition, can’t allow it. These acolytes of the religion of Environmentalism are stuck in the memory of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire 52 years ago. They can’t handle the idea that today’s manufacturing isn’t the manufacturing of 1969. They lie down in the brush waiting for a project to appear and pounce.

Well, it happened. The Allegheny County Health Department torpedoed US Steel’s $1.5 billion improvement and expansion project at its Mon Valley Works in the Pittsburgh area, and a thousand direct jobs, along with thousands of indirect ones, disappeared. You can read about it here.

Braddock, Pa., with the Mon Valley Works in the distance.
Dr. Debra Bogen, the newest director of the Allegheny County Health Department, speaks at a press conference announcing her new position on Wednesday, March 4, 2020.

Stalin used “wreckers” to hide his monumental mistakes in his grand industrialization plan. It included extracting farm produce from the peasants – some 80-90% of the population – in order to finance it. It, in turn, resulted in the Holodomor famine of the 1930’s – 8-10 million starved to death. Stalin’s new plants produced a lot of rubbish and the country’s breadbasket would forever come up short.

Peasants accused of wrecking in one of Stalin’s many show trials of the 1930’s.

Biden’s “wreckers” aren’t mere scapegoats as they were for Stalin. Biden’s wreckers lie in his coalition: eco-fanatics don’t mix with his alleged fondness for manufacturing. He can bellow all he wants, but try to get a real plant approved. That’s the problem when a walking contradiction gets elevated to power. Crap happens.

Please read the article.

RogerG

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