The Anti-Economic Freedom Party

The Club for Growth rates each member of Congress annually for their commitment to economic freedom and growth.  The 2022 ratings are not available, since the 2022 sessions are still underway.  The 2021 session ratings for the House of Representatives, controlled by a Democratic Party majority, are available here.  There are some very important lessons to keep in mind for the 2022 mid-term election coming up.

First, lets get the Big Picture View:

Republican Rating Breakdown:

28 earned 100% rating

79 earned 90-99% ratings

74 earned 80 - 89% ratings

19 earned 70 - 79% ratings

7 earned 60 - 69% ratings

3 earned 50 - 59% ratings

1 earned 40 - 49% rating

Democrat Rating Breakdown:

7 earned 10 - 19% ratings

3 earned 1 - 9% ratings

210 earned 0% rating

First Observation:  It is most remarkable that all but 10 Democrats had a 0% rating on economic freedom and growth, making the median Democrat rating 0%.

Second Observation:  The entire range of Democrat ratings was between 0 and 17%.  Democrats are extremely united in their opposition to economic freedom and growth.

Third Observation:  Republicans range from 48% to 100%.  There are Republicans who are not highly committed to economic freedom and growth.

Fourth Observation:  Democrats universally move in lock-step with Nancy Pelosi and her 0% rating, with a very few symbolic instances of rebellion, often because Nancy Pelosi was not thought to be as strongly anti-economic freedom as the Democrat wanted her to be.  Examples -- Ilhan Omar 13%, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 10%, and Rashida Tlaib 10%.

Many of these 0% Democrats will tell you they favor capitalism over socialism, but that is a lie.  They are adamantly anti-economic freedom.  They are universally in agreement that we should be driven into energy poverty.  They are universally in agreement that we should be hounded by IRS agents armed to the teeth and wasting many tens of hours of our time, with horrible economic costs.  They are universally in favor of ever more regulations weighing down small businesses.  They are universally in favor of mandating our subservience to corrupt union bosses.  They are universally determined to force our children to go to government-run schools where they are besieged with propaganda in favor big government as a supposed protection against immoral businessmen, never mind the immorality of politicians and bureaucrats.  Many of these Democrats believe the Earth cannot sustain its 8 billion people and are so anti-human as to suggest that we need to reduce the human population!  How can they make that happen?  

Simple -- destroy the capitalist private sector that provides us a high standard of living by putting it completely under the control of politicians, bureaucrats, experts in universities, and union bosses.  With the exception of a good fraction of the Republican politicians, these groups are in it only so they can exercise their own power lust.  They long for the control of the old Medieval aristocracy and clergy over the impoverished serfs.  But now with the establishment of huge databases of information on each of us, they can classify us as being in their camp as fellow elitists, in their camp as deceived dependents, or as their opposition -- that is as The Deplorables.  It is The Deplorables who want freedom and in the context of an increasingly authoritarian government, we are the Rebels.  Biden just called us near Nazis, revealing his total ignorance and transferring to us his own behavior and motivations.  Biden and the Democrats in the House of Representatives see eye to eye.  Economic freedoms must be suppressed in order that they can micromanage our lives and make us their serf slaves.

Of course our freedom of speech, freedom to write and read, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association are all also being ever more restricted too.  The Elite aristocracy cannot allow these freedoms either, because they can be used by the rebellious freedom-lovers to deny them power.

Census Bureau Admitted it Over-Counted Democrat States and Under-Counted Republican States

 I knew that the Census Bureau had been engaged in trying to over-count Democrat strongholds and to under-count Republican strongholds prior to the release of the 2020 Census results.  Those results increased the number of Representatives in the House of Representatives for Texas and Florida by one less than independent population experts expected.  Other states, such as Arizona, did not gain at all, contrary to the expectation of some.  But, I missed the announcement by the Census Bureau in late May that they had errored by over- or under-counting in the following states:

Over-counted:  Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York

Under-counted:  Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas

True to the nature of the federal bureaucracy, all of the over-counting occurred in the Democratic states and five of the six under-counted states were Republican states.  It makes me wonder if the under-counting in Illinois was predominantly in the larger area of the state represented by the five of the 18 members of the House from that state who are Republicans.  Sure enough, the new congressional district map for Illinois now has only four districts that favor Republicans.  The one competitive district before, which was held by a Republican, now leans Democrat.  One might have expected that the death toll due to killings in Chicago might have led to the loss of more than one Congressional seat in the Chicago area.

Minnesota had been projected by many to lose a seat, which it did not, perhaps due to the over-counting in Minnesota.  New York had been widely expected to lose two seats, but it lost only one, perhaps due to over-counting.  Of course, the Census Bureau announced its major errors too late to allow for corrections.  We may be stuck with these errors now until the 2032 election.

We have learned that the old media, academia, and federal bureaucrats are all functionaries of the power-lusting Democrat Party elite.  The intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department were all in the tank to falsely accuse Trump of Russian election collusion and of improprieties with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.  Then they accused him of inciting a riot that they claimed killed five policemen.  He did not incite a riot and no policemen were killed.  One later died of natural causes and four later committed suicide.  It is mighty depressing to be a policeman in a Democrat run city these days.  As for the IRS, we have the example of them running a tyrannical syndicate ungoverned by the rule of law and clearly willing to use their power to go after Tea Party and pro-Constitution organizations.  Now, it is about to have 87,000 more agents to attack small businesses and manufacturing firms, who the Democrats count as their enemies.  Then there will be all those additional bureaucrats in charge of the alternative energy economy with its expensive, unreliable energy mandates.

The federal government consists mostly of people who are not your friends.  At least not if you are an American who thinks independently, believes in productive work, has earned some property, and does not want to force his fellow man to do his will.  The Democrats love using the power of government to make you do their will, however.

USA Gasoline Price Skyrockets in Accordance with Democrat Energy Policy

 The USA average gasoline price from June 2020 to June 2022 is charted below:

For the last 6 months of 2020, the price of gasoline averaged about $2.20/gal.  The outcome of the 2020 election put the Democrats solidly in control of US energy policy.   The Democrats were really going to be able to pursue their long-stated goal of seeking the death of the American oil and gas industry, since they controlled the Presidency and both houses of the Congress.  The oil and gas industry had no choice but to respond with drastic investment caution as the Democrats canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline once again, canceled oil and gas leases, and put huge tracts of US land with great deposits of oil and gas off limits for development.  Over time, it also became clear that the government was canceling many other environmental permits actually needed to produce oil from existing oil leases and that it was generally preventing the building of new oil and gas pipelines.

Keeping oil and gas production in the US at a constant level requires a constant investment of effort and money.  This is even more true now that so much of our production is due to fracking.  The inevitable result of the Democrat anti-carbon fuel policies was that the US oil and gas industry was not willing to invest enough money to increase production enough to keep gasoline prices low.  The Democrats made it too hard to do so and any investment the oil and gas industry made was subject to later annihilation as the Democrats pursued their stated goal to kill the oil and gas industry.

The Democrats and the Federal Reserve also proceeded to flood the economy with new money.  The Treasury Department money presses printed money day and night, without pause.  The employees manning the presses and verifying the paper and ink ingredients were virtually flogged to print record amounts of new money.  Congress passed major spending bills and the Federal Reserve pursued its own money supply expansion policies.  The result was that the measure of the money supply called M2 increased rapidly from June 2021 to January 2022.  This generated a general price increase in almost all goods and services.  Oil and gas products could not be an exception.

Biden and the Democrats keep claiming these factors are not the cause of the gas price increases.  They say they were caused by increased demand as the economy recovered from Covid-19 and by Putin.  The economy was recovering, but the oil and gas industry had been readily able to supply an economy of equal size prior to the Covid-19 contraction.  Despite the Democrats, the oil and gas industry has steadily increased the number of active oil rigs since the minimum in the July to September 2020 period.  But, the number presently employed is still not as many as were employed prior to the Covid-19 downturn.  Democrat policies make banks and other lenders unwilling to lend money to the oil and gas industry and their own investors have reason to exercise extra caution in pursuing only the most lucrative projects with supporting infrastructure already in place.

As for Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that effect is responsible for the spike on the gas price curve, but note that there appears to be a rapid price increase before and after that spike that seems to be based at least mostly on other factors in play prior to the Russian invasion.

The increase in gasoline and diesel fuel prices are deleterious for our entire economy.  Add these to the high price increases in almost all goods and services, and many Americans are struggling to get by.  Americans with low incomes are hurting the most.  The Democrats say they care, but they do not care the least little bit.  They are determined to pursue their expensive oil and gas price policies with an aim to murder the oil and gas industry, no matter how many Americans are hurt.

After all, they claim it is because carbon dioxide emissions by man are an existential threat to the planet.  I have demolished that argument many times on this blog.  Others have also shown the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis to have failed in its scientific predictions.  On the basis of the scientific method, this Democrat argument holds no water, but they cling to it as though it is a religion.  It is a truth that people have chosen to annihilate millions of others due to their differing religions or lack thereof, so it is hardly surprising that Democrats of the catastrophic man-made global warming religion are very willing to do great harm to the standard of living of many, many of their fellow countrymen and of many in the developing world who desperately need the advantages of affordable oil and gas.

Those who hunger for ever-increasing power are willing to use that power brutally.  The Democrats are demonstrating that general truism by driving up the cost of our goods and services while leaving our incomes behind the curve.  This is just one more instance showing the foolishness of those many Americans deceived into believing the Democrats were the "kind" party.  Constant expressions of caring about others are a sign that someone is trying very hard to pull the wool over the eyes of the naïve.  This has been the one thing that Democrats have been very accomplished at doing.  Dealing with reality is another thing entirely.

The SEC Proposes Rule on Infrared-Absorbing Gas Emissions and Climate Risk

The SEC wants to force publicly traded businesses to predict how climate change might harm their businesses and how they might be a cause of global warming themselves.  They proposed rules for such on Monday, 21 March 2022.

Few companies are themselves expert in predicting the future climate or future weather.  They are being asked to use the available scientific knowledge about future climate and future weather. They also have to use this available scientific knowledge about the role that emissions of infrared-absorbing gases, commonly called greenhouse gases, will have on these future climate and weather conditions.  What is more, they are to be forced to predict how governments in the USA will limit and condition their operations based on fears of climate change.  Still worse, they are to be forced to make predictions of how people and nations around the world will respond to fears of climate change.

All of these requirements are proposed within a framework of censored science and of poor science with a very wide range of predictions, most of which predict much larger effects due to infrared-absorbing gases then have actually been observed.  For instance, temperature increases and the frequency of bad weather events have consistently failed to live up to the predictions of the greenhouse gas climate scare-mongers.  How can a company predict what the effect of global warming and increased bad weather events will be on its operations when the published, rubbish science cannot predict what the relation between infrared-absorbing gas emissions and subsequent warming and nasty weather events will be?  The reality, which the Democrats who have proposed these SEC rules ignore, is that increased infrared-absorbing gases in the atmosphere has a very, very small effect in causing additional warming.  The requirement, however, will be that companies will have to make their predictions based on exaggerated warming and bad weather events in line with the climate scare-mongers.

The climate fright-masters will no doubt also require that companies make these exaggerated effect predictions based on exaggerated negative effects upon their own business.  These predictions will also have to be based on some exaggerated overall effects upon the US economy and on the world economy.  They will also assume that many nations will long continue to raise the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations due to lax regulations limiting their emissions.  Exaggerated individual company effects will justify further exaggerations of the general negative effects upon the US and the world economies.

The effort for a company to perform these predictions honestly would be tremendous.  Honest predictions have nothing to do with the purpose of the proposed SEC regulations, however.  Formulas will be adopted for this purpose, which the publicly traded companies will be forced to adhere to.

So why is this being done?  The reason is that every publicly traded company is to be made to appear to believe in catastrophic man-made global warming and to take it seriously.  This in turn is to rachet up the fear that Americans have of catastrophic man-made global warming.  The self-reporting of company activities that might be affected by bad and warming weather and of company gas emissions will also give the government further information it can twist into a story of future disaster.  That disaster story will then allow even more regulation of businesses, no doubt expanding far beyond those that are publicly traded.

Catastrophic man-made global warming due to adding infrared-absorbing gases to the atmosphere given its present composition is a failed hypothesis.  For Democrats and some Republicans, this is not a reason not to use the fear of it to justify ever-increasing governmental controls over our lives.  Governmental controls are always resisted by the people, unless they are afraid of something.  Catastrophic man-made global warming is another such fear-creating tool.  The claim that businesses generally want to do harm to people has long been such a tool and is still at play in this SEC proposed rule as well.

Inflation and its Effects are Worse than Most People Think

You know that the government's consumer price index leaped up to 7.9% in February, compared to a year ago.  We have all heard that this is its highest level in 40 years.  Frequently, the government likes to remove the effects of food and energy prices, because they can fluctuate greatly and because they affect the non-elites the most.  That gasless, foodless inflation rate leaves an inflation rate of 6.4% for February compared to a year earlier.  The Producer Price Index went up even more at 9.7% compared to a year ago.  This promises price increases going forward.

Barron's has stripped out all the costs except those that are not necessary goods for everyone.  Essential foods, housing, gasoline, and utilities constitute these necessary core items.  The inflation rate for these critical items for February was 16%.

Since then, about one-tenth of the world's oil and about a quarter of the exported wheat has vanished, thanks to the Russian invasion of the Breadbasket of Europe, namely Ukraine.

It is not enough that less than wealthy Americans lost their jobs and small businesses in horrific waves of brutal Covid-19 mandates.  Now the senseless over-spending of the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate and House of Representatives has drastically diluted the value of the dollar.  The same Americans most hurt by the Chinese Communist Party generated and released Covid-19, the Democrat fear-driven response of mandates directed at small businesses, and the rising energy costs due to the irrational belief in catastrophic man-made global warming are being slammed to Earth. 

The Democrats are brutally unfeeling and staggeringly irrational.  About half of all Americans voted for them and gave them the power to do this this evil work.  Many of them are now the greatest victims of the Democrat misuse of their rule.

Biden Administration Misdirection on US Oil Production

 The Biden administration is making a habit of misdirecting Americans on the causes of the increases in the cost of oil in several respects.  They have repeatedly made the claim that U.S. crude oil production is at an all-time high, for instance.  Here is the actual data on U.S. Crude Oil production per week according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

The peak in average daily crude oil production was in the weeks of 28 February and 13 March 2020 when the average daily oil production was 13,100 thousand or 13.1 million barrels of oil.  Oil production was reduced after that due to the Covid-19 pandemic and expected lowering of demand for oil as people stayed home or at least stayed closer to home.  The week of 29 January 2021, Biden's first full week in office, the daily average oil production was 10.9 million barrels of oil per day.  The week of 25 February 2022 the daily average crude oil production was 11.6 million barrels.  This was due to some recovery in oil demand and the price of oil due to the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic.  This is still 1.5 million barrels per day below the U.S. peak oil production.

Another Biden administration misdirection is the claim that 9,000 oil leases for oil production means that any shortfall in oil production is the fault of oil production companies.  The Biden administration has made it abundantly clear that they want the prices of oil and natural gas to skyrocket, which means they want their production to lag the demand for them.  They want this to encourage the massive mistake of a false belief in an existential catastrophe due to man-made global warming.  Oil and gas production has no long-term future according to their belief system.  Twice the Keystone XL pipeline was put on track for construction and twice its construction was halted by the Democrats and the Russian-funded environmentalist special interest groups with whom they collaborate.  This has caused the loss of massive sums of capital to its investors.  Other pipeline projects have also suffered as the Democrats ruined the investment climate.

One cannot make use of a lease to drill oil if one is not allowed to produce on that lease under reasonable environmental rules.  One cannot make use of an oil lease if one cannot build a pipeline to deliver the oil to a refinery.  One commonly cannot drill or build a pipeline if one cannot borrow money from banks and other lending institutions.  The Biden administration has been strongly discouraging banks and other lenders from making loans for purposes tied to oil production, oil transport, and oil product production.  They have discouraged liquification facilities and liquified gas transport capability.  They have also placed a moratorium on further leases on federal land and on offshore oil drilling. 

If the Biden administration were to give you the go ahead to invest a billion dollars into an oil and gas production effort, would you feel comfortable that they would not halt you in the midst of your investment or at a late stage in that investment?  If you were not very cognizant of that risk, you would certainly not be someone who should have any control over the investment of a billion dollars.

The Biden administration is definitely responsible for an unfavorable climate for oil and gas production.  It is extremely dishonest of them to claim that any shortfall in oil and gas production is due to the failure of the oil and gas industries.

  

Subsidies for Electric Vehicles and Wind and Solar Power

In today's Cooler Heads Digest from Myron Ebel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comes this from the lead article by Ben Lieberman:

On electric vehicles (EVs), Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI) of the House Ways and Means Committee is pushing to change the provisions that capped the $7,500 per vehicle tax credit once a manufacturer sold 200,000 such cars. H.R. 2256 proposes raising the cap to 600,000 vehicles but only slightly reducing the credit to $7,000. For Tesla, which has exceeded the 200,000 vehicle limit, and General Motors, which is nearing it, the extra 400,000 qualifying vehicles could generate $2.8 billion each for their EV purchasers, nearly half of which are wealthy Californians. Given that other automakers would have eventually reached and exceeded 200,000 in EV sales, the revised cap could be worth tens of billions of dollars in the years ahead. EVs are way past the point of the “infant industry” rationale for these tax credits, but that does not seem to matter. 

Also under discussion for eventual inclusion in a big energy tax package are additional years for solar and wind production tax credits promised by Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA). These tax credits had been made more generous by the 2015 bill in exchange for ending them once and for all. It is not yet known how many post-sunset years the latest extension will provide. 

One fringe benefit of the debate is that it provides a brief respite from the drumbeat of claims that wind and solar have plummeted in cost and are now cheaper than conventional electricity. If true, there would be no need for yet another extension of favored tax treatment for them.

So even after all these years, electric vehicles are not ready for prime-time consumers and even wealthy Californians have to be bribed by the government to buy them.  Seems to me, I have heard Democrats complaining a lot about their conjurings of a bribe in one context, yet they are constantly bribing Americans to do their bidding.  A bribe to the advantage of socialism is no bribe, just as a lie to the advantage of socialism is the truth.  You just have to understand their reality-free context.

That last quoted paragraph is a humdinger.  Apparently, the propaganda breaks down a bit when it comes time to claim a subsidy for investments that make no sense in the free market.

The Economist: Should political parties let just anyone run for president?

In an article deploring the fact that there are 25 candidates for the Democratic nomination to run for the presidency of the United States of America, The Economist wants American political party establishments to play a much bigger role in choosing a small number of candidates who will be allowed to run in party primaries.

They even advise increasing the number of superdelegates, who played a big role in selecting Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party nominee for President in the 2016 election.  Superdelegates are not required to vote in accordance with the primary vote outcome in their states and they are usually chosen from the ranks of the Deep Party Apparatchiks.  This is a most undemocratic method for choosing a party nominee for President or any other elected office, but democracy is another of many words robbed of meaning by those elitists who hunger for power and have long grown accustomed to exercising it without challenge.  There was a backlash among Democrat voters to the role of superdelegates in the Clinton nomination that led to a cutback in the present power of superdelegates in the party.  An alternative suggested in the article is having a convention to choose a small number of candidates to put before the primary voters.  Still another is to have the party's Congress members put out a recommended slate of candidates, rather as the teachers unions do in public school board elections.

Why does The Economist think that many candidates are a problem?  Because:

"the system has thrown up too many candidates for voters to evaluate.  It rewards name recognition and social-media prowess, and asks activists to make decisions about people about whom they know little."

These are valid concerns.  However, there are so many loony birds among the candidates in this case that it is really easy to winnow out almost all of the candidates.  No, I can make a much stronger statement than that.  It is really easy to eliminate all of the Democrat candidates from any extensive evaluation because they are all nuts, power-hungry, and suffer from a huge delusion that they have the intellectual power to evaluate the needs of all Americans in their lives and to make decisions about people whom they know little.

If the people of the United States are unable to properly evaluate 25 candidates for the presidency, then how can one entertain a faith that any one of those candidates even has the capability of evaluating the real needs of 329 million individual Americans?  How can anyone maintain the delusion that any candidate can know enough about 329 million Americans to then micromanage their lives as the federal government already largely tries to do and the Democrat Party is united in wanting to do on a much grander scale?

We have a federal government that is four times the size it ought to be.  It is constantly violating the many and broad rights of the individual to life and self-ownership, liberty, to earn a living, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is constantly deciding who will be given a benefit and who will be deprived under force in order that the politicians can steal what they need to give that benefit.  Republicans have no business exercising these powers and Democrats have even less business doing so because they are even more blind to their unrealistic assumptions about their mental capabilities.

Walter E. Williams asks Who benefits from Democratic Control?

Prof. Walter E. Williams asks in his column entitled Who Benefits from Democratic Control? whether blacks are being well-served by the Democrats who are given more than 90% of their votes in most elections.

He notes that of the 20 major U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates in terns of homicides per 100,000 people, that 19 of the 20 highest murder rate cities are controlled by Democrats, many of them for decades.  The only exception of the 20 major cities is Tulsa, Oklahoma where much of my family lives.  The worst cities in murder rate are in order: St. Louis, Baltimore (nearby for me), Detroit, New Orleans, Kansas City (a sister lives nearby), Cleveland (my wife's home city), Memphis, and Newark, NJ, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC (nearby for me).

Prof. Williams also notes that many cities are losing their populations.  Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are among those whose present populations are less than half what they were in 1950.  The populations of Washington, DC, Baltimore, Camden, NJ, and many others are much reduced due to safety issues, poor schools, and unpleasant environments.

So Walter E. Williams asks blacks what do they have to lose by trying politicians who are not Democrats.

The Leftist Media Smear Campaign Continues Against Trump and Individualism

A civilized society minimizes the use of force, denying all groups and individuals the initiated use of force.  A legitimate government has the primary function of protecting individual rights from violence and the threat of the use of force.  There are minor additional functions to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from some natural threats to life.  The President of the United States has the job of executing the laws that are constitutionally intended to secure the equal rights of all American citizens.

The media dominated by the postmodernist and collectivist viewpoint has an agenda dedicated to painting all who oppose their collectivism and their claims that some factions deserve political dominance over other Americans as racists, as fascists, as angry nationalists with malevolent intent toward all non-Americans, and generally as ignorant boobs.  The factions that should rule are single women, blacks and Hispanics, union leaders, educators, radical anti-human environmentalists, government workers, and one-world collectivists --- all guided by so-called Progressive Elitists. White men and the women married to them, business owners and managers, and non-union, and in some respects union, workers are generally to be forced into submission by a huge government workforce of thugs with no compunction in violating their equal rights to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, the pursuit of happiness, and their equally broad rights to freedom of conscience and association.  To oppose bigger government and more government controls defines one as a racist even as one advances the principle that all American citizens have equal rights which should not be violated by government.  To oppose the designation of some racial or gender groups as worthy of favored government actions earns one the racist epithet.  To oppose collectivism and the lumping of individuals into broad groups and claiming that their rights are defined by the group that they have been deposited into in accordance with Postmodernist feelings, makes one a Deplorable.

The Postmodernist Left has long cast the opposition to this collectivism and the advocates of individualism as fascists and white nationalists.  There are Americans who are fascists, but fascists are in favor of big, collectivist government.  Fascists characteristically favor some factions over other factions, often with a racial basis.  Some American fascists want special favors for white Americans, while others want special favors for other ethnically defined groups.  Facism is actually inconsistent with the general beliefs of vast majority of Republicans who believe in smaller government and more equal rights than do Democrats.  Only a small minority of white fascists vote Republican in reaction to the Democrats policies favoring certain non-white groups upon racial lines.

The Democrats have a very long history of racial favoritism and have only recently in that history switched from favoring white Americans at the expense of other Americans to favoring black and Hispanic Americans at the expense of white Americans.  This kind of factionalism has been long opposed by Republicans, as has big government, although only in comparison with the Democrat's advocacy of constantly larger government.  The push of the Democrat Party to selectively prevent the exercise of the rights of white Americans, especially those of men, has pushed a few white nationalists, including some fascists, into supporting Republicans in some cases.  Those few cases have been used to paint all Republicans as welcoming fascists and white nationalists into their ranks. This is not the case, but the ballot box is secret.  The leftist media does not care about the truth.  For them, the truth is not about reality, it is defined as that which supports their agenda.

The Enlightment, or Modernist, philosophy holds that man can know reality through the use of his mind, that his efforts to think rationally are not guaranteed success without error, that he must test his observations and deductions in the management of his own life and in the choice of his values, and that he must have the opportunity to both profit from his correct thoughts and to learn from his mistakes.  The rights of the individual follow from this need to use his own mind to manage his own life.

Postmodernism fundamentally undermines this philosophy and claims that man cannot use his mind to know reality, that in reality man only acts upon his feelings, that his feelings are determined by an array of group identities, and that a huge government apparatus is required to determine which factions will prevail at the expense of which other factions because in a society governed only by feelings and group identities conflict is the expected constant.  Harmony is impossible.  Only the warfare of one faction against another for raw power is realistic.  Man cannot govern his actions by reasoned principles.  Consequently, the government must use force constantly to control the outcomes among factions.  This philosophy is the basis for a belief in socialism and in collectivism at the most fundamental level.  It produced both the Communist and Fascist versions of socialism, including the fascist variant National Socialist Workers Party Nazism. Postmodernists control most American universities and trained most American journalists and bureaucrats.  The mainstream media is thoroughly indoctrinated in this Postmodernist belief which fundamentally embraces violence first in the streets and then exercised by an all-powerful government under their control.

One can only understand the leftist media treatment of the violence in Charlottesville, VA in this context.  The leftist, collectivist media is determined to make it appear that Trump has been reluctant to condemn fascists and white nationalists, despite the fact that he did so in very clear and strong terms.  Listen to his complete press conference for yourself.  Trump also condemned violence by all factions and he was right that there were opposing groups at Charlottesville that were eager for violence and that did become violent.  It is hardly surprising that leftist forces were eager for battle in the streets.  They have a long history of this with street riots against the war in Vietnam, Republican and Democrat National Conventions, Capitalism, globalization, and the inauguration of Trump. Street riots and the use of violence are a long accepted and utilized tactic of the left and of major factions in the Democrat Party.  Why not?  Their constant advocacy of collectivism and ever more controlling government is itself dependent upon a willingness to use force to suppress the rights of individuals. As for the Nazis, they were violent in the streets from the beginning of their history as the main socialist alternative to the also violent Communists in Germany between the World Wars.

My identity is not defined by the fact that I am a so-called white American male.  My identity is defined by the use of my mind for 70 years to understand reality.  When I was a small child I realized that it was critically important to use my mind and to be as rational as possible.  The observations I have made of life, the evaluations I have made of those observations, the integration of my evaluations into a self-consistent viewpoint and philosophy, the totality of the decisions I have made and of the values I have chosen play a much, much greater role in determining my identity than does the fact that I am a white American male.  The fact that I am a white American male and was raised in a middle class military family is significant, but it most definitely is not at all adequate to understanding who I am.  There are many, many ways in which I chose how to develop my identity.

There is no way that the Postmodernists can tolerate the existence of such an individual as myself.  Apparently in the last Presidential election, many Americans had at least a significant realization that the Postmodernist media and the Democrat presidential candidate would not tolerate their deplorable natures either.  Many of us Deplorables think the natures we have developed for ourselves in our lifetimes are actually pretty decent and suit us quite well, thank you very much.  We do not intend to see our individual identities crushed by Postmodernists.

Trump may not be as smooth and consistent as we would like, but he has been courageous in opposing the media in its Postmodernist, collectivist agenda.  Compared to most politicians, he has risen for the most part as an advocate of equal rights for all Americans and for some considerable relief from oppressive government dictates.  He is trying to fight back against the Left's use of racial identity politics to rob us all of our individual identities.  It would appear that as a problem-solver in the construction industry, Trump came to hold reason in much higher regard than do his collectivist, Postmodern opponents in academia, the media, and the bureaucracy.

Throwing Away Jobs Under the Paris Climate Accord

Obama deposited about $1 billion in the Green Climate Fund for less developed nations as part of an initial U.S. payment of $3 billion he had scheduled  under the Paris Climate Accord without authorization from Congress.  This unauthorized $1 billion was the equivalent of throwing away 20,000 American jobs at $50,000 per job.  Had he managed to pilfer the full $3 billion, he would have destroyed 60,000 American jobs.

It gets worse.  The U.S. obligation for the Green Climate Fund under the Paris Climate Accord not authorized by the Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution was supposed to grow to $23 billion a year.  The rest of the developed nations were supposed to provide enough transfer money to the undeveloped nations to create an annual transfer of $100 billion a year.   The American contribution was the equivalent of destroying 460,000 American jobs.

Then on top of those plans to kill jobs, Obama and his party killed many a coal miner's job, jobs of those who transport coal, jobs of coal-fired power plant operators, jobs of those whose jobs depended on inexpensive and reliable power, and those who served all of these people with their needs.  He also prevented oil and gas drilling on public lands, prevented the building of pipelines, and planned to harass those providing us with the many benefits of the Shale Oil and Gas Revolution.  He backed mandates and unrealistic dangers to suppress fossil fuel extraction and use generally, driving up all energy costs.  His backing of the Paris Climate Accord was meant to serve as a means to apply pressure on the American people to put up with rising energy costs and the inconveniences of energy unreliability.

Obama and the Democrats sure worked hard to create American jobs!  What friends they were to the American worker.  Is it any wonder that the fraction of Americans with jobs is so low and those with jobs have gone so long without real pay increases.  The suppression of energy use was clearly going to destroy jobs and slow down the growth of future employment opportunities.  It was clearly going to reduce the growth of the American standard of living.  When you view man as the monster destroying the planet, of course you are going to want to destroy the monster.  This is exactly what Obama and the Democrats are bent on doing.  It is an intention to do great evil.

Man is not evil.  Man is the best there is in reality and the universe.  There is no other measure of the good, but that which is good for the life of each and every individual human being.  The standard of living, whether measured by human security and survival or by human flourishing, is highly dependent upon our freedom to use energy.  An article in the Washington Post a couple of days ago bemoaned the fact that low income Americans would suffer the most due to "Climate Change."  Of course, low income people are always the most vulnerable to suffering natural disasters.  They are also most vulnerable to suffering from the lost jobs I wrote about above.  They are the ones who will suffer the most in the long run if the American economy does not grow at a healthy rate.  If the American economy grows at a good and compounded rate over the years, any climate change that may happen in 2100 will be much more easily dealt with by a generally much more wealthy nation of people.  Taking advantage of our unbelievable wealth in fossil fuels to grow our economy and make all of the technological advances that allows, is the very best way to deal with the vicissitudes of nature.  Who knows, we may have another Ice Age descend on us by 2100.

Suppressing the freedom to use energy is a severely evil act.  That act is justified as a means to save nature or to save the planet, but neither is a value without man.  And, frankly, the wealthier and more developed our civilizations have become, the more they value nature and act to prevent its destruction.  This is not an either or choice.  We should not do harm to man because we are deceived into thinking it is.  Fortunately, Trump has turned away from the evils of the Paris Climate Accord.

Dismantling the Business Oppressive Dodd-Frank Act

The new minority leader in the Senate, Democrat Chuck Schumer, has been chortling that he has the votes to prevent the repeal of the anti-business growth Dodd-Frank Act.  Dodd-Frank was passed by Democrats on the heels of the Great Recession as a means of deflecting criticism from the government and its policies on home mortgages to pretend that the causes of the Great Recession were entirely or mostly due to private financial institutions.  Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank had been among the most vociferous advocates of the government policy of easy credit for home loans and had explicitly claimed before the financial crash that there was no looming credit risk.  President-elect Trump has pledged to repeal Dodd-Frank, which is a very good idea.

A very interesting article in the 17 November Wall St. Journal by Peter Wallison discusses both the false pretenses that were used to justify the Dodd-Frank Act and the harm done to recovery from the recession and to economic growth rates by that act.  On the matter of whether the act actually addressed the causes of the recession and a few of its consequences:

Signed into law in 2010, Dodd-Frank was based on the idea that insufficient regulation, particularly of Wall Street, had allowed a buildup of subprime mortgages, a housing bubble and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. The Democrats who controlled the Congress elected in 2008 acted quickly to follow out the implications of this diagnosis by adopting Dodd-Frank, the most restrictive financial legislation since the New Deal. 

Strikingly for such important legislation, there was no significant debate in Congress about whether the cause of the crisis had been correctly identified.

A later study, in 2014 by my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute Edward Pinto, showed that by 2008 more than half of all mortgages in the U.S. were subprime or otherwise risky, and 76% of those were on the books of government agencies. This leaves no doubt that government housing policies—and not a lack of regulation—created the demand for these risky mortgages. But by then it was too late. 

It is not difficult to find connections between Dodd-Frank and the historically slow recovery from the financial crisis. Here’s a sampling. 

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, a Dodd-Frank invention, was empowered to designate large financial firms as systemically important financial institutions, or SIFIs, turning them over to the Federal Reserve for “stringent” regulation. One of the council’s earliest actions, in July 2013, designated GE Capital as a SIFI. 

GE soon recognized that its huge financial subsidiary was wilting under the Fed’s control. Seeking an exit, GE wound down GE Capital, eliminating from the market an important source of funding for small and innovative firms. 

The Volcker rule, another Dodd-Frank provision, prohibited banks and their affiliates from trading securities for their own account, although there was no evidence that this activity had any role in the financial crisis. 

Soon, trading desks all over Wall Street were closing down, and traders were complaining that the debt markets were dangerously short of liquidity. The Treasury Department, deeply tied into Dodd-Frank, said it was “studying” the issue. It still is, and spreads are still historically wide. 

Small banks, the credit sources for small businesses and startups, faced new and costly regulation, requiring them to hire compliance officers instead of lending officers. 

One regulation on mortgage lending from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a Dodd-Frank agency—was over 1,000 pages long. Imagine that landing on your desk in a small bank. 

No wonder, as this newspaper recently reported, banks are no longer the nation’s principal mortgage lenders. Worse still, as reported last week, job gains at startup firms, which are major sources of new employment and technological innovation, are at their lowest level in 20 years.

I added the bold to the sentence in the quoted portion of the article.

Freedom in the 50 States Evaluated by Cato Institute

The 2016 report on Freedom in the 50 States by the Cato Institute evaluating the state of freedom through 2014 is now available.  The results of their evaluation of freedom based on fiscal policy, personal freedom, and regulatory policy are summarized in this map:

Cato provides the weightings they used for the evaluation of freedom and one can change those weightings to one's personal preferences to see how the rankings change.  But by Cato's weightings, the top ten freest states are ranked and graded as, with the party of the governor, the senate, and the house of the state added in order either as a D or an R in the year 2014:

1) New Hampshire, 0.3319, D, R, D
2) Alaska, 0.3265, R, R, R
3) Oklahoma, 0.2791, R, R, R
4) Indiana, 0.2778, R, R, R
5) South Dakota, 0.2754, R, R, R
6) Tennessee, 0.2646, R, R, R
7) Idaho, 0.2608, R, R, R
8) Florida, 0.2133, R, R, R
9) Iowa, 0.2048, R, D, R
10) Arizona, 0.1834, R, R, R

The 10 most authoritarian states with their negative scores are:

50) New York, -0.9763, D, D, D
49) California, -0.5026, D, D, D
48) Hawaii, -0.4904, D, D, D
47) New Jersey, -0.4285, R, D, D
46) Maryland, -0.4039, D, D, D
45) Connecticut, -0.2612, D, D, D
44) Illinois, -0.2554, D, D, D
43) Rhode Island, -0.1735, I (really D), D, D
42) Maine, -0.1500, R, D, D
41) Kentucky, -0.1489, D, R, D

It is interesting that the five most authoritarian states, New York, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Maryland are all more greatly deviant from the norm of freedom than is the freest of the states, New Hampshire.  If you value your freedom, it is particularly important to avoid these most negatively rated states.  New York is about three times more negative than New Hampshire is positive.  In fact, New York is almost twice as bad as either of the next two worst states, California and Hawaii.

If one were to move from New York to New Hampshire, the freedom score would increase by 1.3082.  Or if I were to move from authoritarian Maryland to where much of my family lives in Oklahoma, my score would improve by 0.6830, which is a substantial increase in freedom.  Or if you live in the Washington, DC area, living in Virginia offers a big improvement over living in Maryland by 0.5080.  If you have to live near New York City, Connecticut is substantially more free than is either New York or New Jersey.

Of the 10 most free states, all are controlled by Republicans, except two which had divided government in 2014.  Of the 10 most authoritarian governments, all were entirely controlled by Democrats in the governorship and the legislature, except the two least repressive of that set of the 10 worst, who had one of the three legs of the state government in the hands of Republicans.  It is not uncommon for libertarians to claim that the Republicans are every bit as anti-freedom as the Democrats, but these rankings make it clear that the Republicans are significantly better than the Democrats in most cases.  Indeed, one of the main reasons that the mean state freedom rankings are so much better than those of the most repressive states is because far more states are controlled by Republicans than are controlled by the more adamant deniers of individual rights found in the Democrat Party.

Hillary Clinton Makes 12 Million Illegal Aliens Citizens

Hillary Clinton, on the campaign trail, accused Donald Trump of wanting to deport 12 million Americans. He has said, though he is not consistent in this, that he wants to deport 12 million illegal aliens.  Hillary, being a Clinton, may well say that she is right because most of the illegal aliens, no undocumented persons, are from either North America (Mexico and Central American states) or from South America, so they are Americans.  But for political reasons, she is trying to create the impression that she is conferring legal status on all of the illegal aliens, whose votes she wants in the future for the Democrats and whose U.S. citizen relatives or countrymen she wants to vote for her now.  Democrats being Democrats, she is actually not at all fussy about whether her voters are really citizens of the U.S. or not.  This is only too evident in past elections and in the opposition to voter identification.

Paul Driessen on Prosecuting climate chaos skeptics with RICO

Paul Diessen asked me to publish this article on 3 April 2016, but I have been extremely busy in my laboratory, even as we have been very short-handed in the laboratory of late.  Today, I am celebrating my relief from the unrewarding effort of doing paperwork for the Individual Rights Suppression IRS) agency of the federal government today by catching up on some blog entries, even as I continue to feed samples into the x-ray photoelectron spectrometer to analyze the surface properties of materials by harnessing radiation and detectors.

Paul's article makes it clear that we are in a Ben Franklin moment similar to that faced by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, when Ben noted that "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.", as we face a Democrat and United Nations Inquisition with respect to our adherence to the catechism of catastrophic man-made global warming and weather chaos.

Prosecuting climate chaos skeptics with RICO 

Al Gore, Torquemada Whitehouse, Democrat AGs threaten to silence and bankrupt skeptics

Paul Driessen 

It’s been a rough stretch for Climate Armageddon religionists and totalitarians.

Real World science, climate and weather events just don’t support their manmade cataclysm narrative. The horrid consequences of anti-fossil fuel energy policies are increasingly in the news.

And despite campaigns by the $1.5-trillion-per-year government-industry-activist-scientific Climate Crisis Consortium, Americans consistently rank global warming at the very bottom of their serious concerns.

But instead of debating their critics, or marshaling a more persuasive, evidence-based case that we really do face a manmade climate catastrophe, alarmists have ramped up their shrill rhetoric, imposed more anti-hydrocarbon edicts by executive fiat and unratified treaty – and launched RICO attacks on their critics.

Spurred on by Senator Sheldon “Torquemada” Whitehouse (D-RI), Jagadish Shukla and his RICO-20 agitators, and their comrades, 16 of the nation’s 18 Democratic attorneys general (the other 32 are Republican) announced on March 29 that they are going after those who commit the unpardonable offense of questioning “consensus” climate science.

If companies are “committing fraud,” by “knowingly deceiving” the public about the threat of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, New York AG Eric Schneiderman intoned, “we want to expose it and pursue them to the fullest extent of the law,” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. “The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

Their initial target is ExxonMobil, but other companies, think tanks like CFACT and the Heartland Institute (with which I am affiliated), and even independent researchers and analysts (like myself) will be in their crosshairs – using a law intended for the Mafia. Incredibly, even United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch says her office has “discussed” similar actions and has “referred [the matter] to the FBI.”

These RICO investigations and prosecutions are chilling, unprecedented and blatantly un-American. They abuse our legal and judicial processes and obliterate the First Amendment freedom of speech rights of anyone who questions the catechism of climate cataclysm. The AGs’ actions are intended to browbeat skeptics into silence, and bankrupt them with monumental legal fees, fines and treble damages.

It is the campus “crime” of “unwelcome ideas” and “micro-aggression” on steroids. It is the inevitable result of President Obama’s determination to “fundamentally transform” the United States, ensure that electricity rates “necessarily skyrocket,” and carve his energy and climate policy legacy in granite.

Mr. O and his allies are on a mission: to rid the world of fossil fuels, replace them with “clean” biofuels (that are also carbon-based and also emit carbon dioxide when burned, but would require billions of acres of crop and habitat land) and “eco-friendly” bird-killing wind turbines and solar installations (that will require millions more acres) – and implement the goals of a dictatorial United Nations.

Former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres put it in the bluntest terms: “We are setting ourselves the task of intentionally to change [sic] the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years” – the free enterprise capitalist system. “The next world climate summit is actually an economic summit, during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated,” her UN climate crisis cohort Otmar Edendorfer added. “We will redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Thus, under the 2015 Paris climate treaty, developing nations will be under no obligation to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions. They will simply take voluntary steps, when doing so will not impair their efforts to drive economic growth and improve their people’s living standards. Meanwhile, they will be entitled to share $3 billion to $300 billion per year in “climate change adaptation, mitigation and reparation” money. In fact, Mr. Obama has already transferred $500 million in taxpayer money (illegally) from a State Department emergency fund to the UN’s Green Climate Fund.

No wonder developing nations were thrilled to sign the 2015 Paris not-a-treaty treaty.

Recent headlines portend what’s in store. EU electricity prices rise 63% over past decade. Rising energy costs, green policies threaten to kill steel industry and 4,000 to 40,000 jobs, as Tata Steel quits Britain. Thousands of Europeans lose jobs, as manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy prices. Unable to afford proper heat, 40,000 Europeans die of hypothermia during 2014 winter.

In Africa and other energy-deprived regions: Millions die in 2015 from lung and intestinal diseases – due to open cooking and heating fires, spoiled food and unsafe water, and absence of electricity.

Meanwhile, despite mandates, loan guarantees, feed-in tariffs, endangered species exemptions and other subsidies, renewable industries are barely surviving: SunEnergy, world’s largest green energy company, faces bankruptcy, as share prices fall 95% in one year. Solar company Abengoa US files for Chapter 15 bankruptcy. China stops building wind turbines, as grid is damaged and most electricity is wasted.

But Climate Crisis ruling elites pay little attention to this. They will be insulated, enriched, and protected from their decisions and deceptions – as they decide what energy, jobs, living standards and freedoms the poor, minority, blue-collar and middle classes will be permitted to have.

Equally disturbing, their drive for total control is based on a chaotic world that is totally at odds with what the rest of us see outside our windows. Even after “homogenizing” and massaging the raw data, climate alarmists can only show that global temperatures may have risen a few tenths of a degree (barely the margin of error) during the 2015 El Niño year, after 19 years of no temperature increase, following two decades of slight warming, following three decades of slight cooling and warming.

On the “extreme weather” front, tornadoes, snows, floods and droughts are no more frequent or intense than over the past century. No Category 3-5 hurricane has made US landfall in a record 125 months. Polar ice remains well within historic fluctuations, and sea levels are rising at barely seven inches per century.

Alarmists thus rely on computer models that predict even “worse catastrophes,” if global temperatures rise even 0.5 degrees C (0.8 F) more than they already have since the Little Ice Age ended and Industrial Era began. However, the models are hopelessly deficient, and totally unable to predict the climate.

They overstate the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide and methane, atmospheric gases chosen because they result from fossil fuel use (and from many natural sources). They assume these two gases have become the primary forces in climate change – and ignore or downplay changing solar energy, cosmic ray and geomagnetic output; major periodic fluctuations in Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean circulation; volcanic activity; regional and planetary temperature cycles that recur over multiple decades, centuries or millennia; and other natural forces that have always driven planetary warming, cooling and weather.

The models and modelers do this because these factors and their roles in climate change are not well understood, are difficult to measure, and do not fit the “humans are at fault” meme. They compound these errors by assuming that any warming will be dangerous, rather than beneficial for people and agriculture.

These oversights can be characterized as careless, recklessly negligent, or even “knowingly deceitful” and fraudulent. So can “nine inconvenient untruths” that a United Kingdom judge highlighted in Al Gore’s infamous fake-documentary movie – and Mr. Gore’s recent claim that atmospheric CO2 is fueling Zika outbreaks. Likewise for James Hansen’s repeated assertion that sea levels could rise “several meters” (117 inches) over the next century, and the bogus studies behind the phony “97% consensus” claims.

Can you picture the cabal of AGs filing RICO actions in these cases? If you want the facts, and a few chuckles about climate alarmism, see the Climate Hustle movie, coming May 2 to a theater near you.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.