ECO-TYRANNY: HOW THE LEFT’S GREEN AGENDA WILL DISMANTLE AMERICA
By Brian Sussman
WND Books, $25.95, 316 pages

By GEORGE W. BUSH

These are extraordinary times in the history of freedom. In the Arab Spring, we have seen the broadest challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism. The idea that Arab peoples are somehow content with oppression has been discredited forever.

Yet we have also seen instability, uncertainty and the revenge of brutal rulers. The collapse of an old order can unleash resentments and power struggles that a new order is not yet prepared to handle.

Some in both parties in Washington look at the risks inherent in democratic change—particularly in the Middle East and North Africa—and find the dangers too great. America, they argue, should be content with supporting the flawed leaders they know in the name of stability.

But in the long run, this foreign policy approach is not realistic. It is not within the power of America to indefinitely preserve the old order, which is inherently unstable. Oppressive governments distrust the diffusion of choice and power, choking off the best source of national prosperity and success.

This is the inbuilt crisis of tyranny. It fears and fights the very human attributes that make a nation great: creativity, enterprise and responsibility. Dictators can maintain power for a time by feeding resentments toward enemies—internal or external, real or imagined. But eventually, in societies of scarcity and mediocrity, their failure becomes evident.

America does not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end in the Middle East or elsewhere. It only gets to choose what side it is on. Read the rest of this entry »

This week the Obama campaign debuted its attack on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Mitt Romney founded. Its two-minute ad purports to tell the story of GS Technologies, a Kansas City-based Bain investment that went bankrupt in 2001.

To hear the Obama campaign, this is a tale of greed: GST was a healthy, happy, quality steelmaker until Bain plundered its worth and stripped its 750 workers of their due. “It was like a vampire,” laments one former employee in the ad. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” 

GST is a tragic tale, though in a different way. The real story of GST is that of a private-equity firm trying to spark some life into a uncompetitive, over-unionized industry. Bain’s crime here—if that’s what you call it—was giving a dying steel plant an unexpected eight-year lease on life.

When Bain bought the Kansas City mill in 1993, steel was a scene of carnage. Global players were pouring out cheap products, and America’s high-cost steel plants couldn’t compete. The industry had lost 200,000 jobs in preceding years. In 1992 alone, the six largest U.S. steel mills had lost a combined $3 billion. Armco, the company Bain would buy the plant from, would lose $641 million in 1993.

The Kansas City plant was itself dying. At its 1970 height it employed 4,500; by the late 1980s it was down to 1,000. A year before acquisition, Armco had laid off another 75. Its equipment was old; it faced fierce competition at home and abroad.

B.C. Huselton, a vice president of the business at the time, tells me that in 1990 the Armco CEO held a meeting. “He told us, ‘Look, we either try to sell it, or we’ve got to shut it down.’” Armco had shut down another Kansas City facility, Union Wire Rope, only a few years before.

The Kansas City plant had two product lines—high-carbon rods and grinding media (used in mining)—that it felt could give it a competitive edge. But it needed investment, and Armco was tapped out. Bain nonetheless saw some potential and in 1993 joined other investors to acquire it for $80 million. Management renamed it GS Technologies (which would become part of a larger GS Industries) and poured an additional $100 million into modernization.

The strategy worked for a time. The market firmed up and GSI became a U.S. leader in steel rods. In 1994 it felt confident enough to distribute a dividend to investors. In both 1996 and 1997, GSI would realize $1 billion in revenue.

In his January 2011 inaugural address, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared it a “time to honestly assess our financial condition and make the tough choices.” Plainly the choices weren’t tough enough: Mr. Brown has just announced that he faces a state budget deficit of $16 billion—nearly twice the $9.2 billion he predicted in January. In Sacramento Monday, he coupled a new round of spending cuts with a call for some hefty new tax hikes.

In his own inaugural address back in January 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also spoke of making tough choices for the people of his state. For his first full budget, Mr. Christie faced a deficit of $10.7 billion—one-third of projected revenues. Not only did Mr. Christie close that deficit without raising taxes, he is now plumping for a 10% across-the-board tax cut. 

It’s not just looks that make Mr. Brown Laurel to Mr. Christie’s Hardy. It’s also their political choices.

Readers presumably understand that Europe’s economic crisis is also the crisis of social democracy—of the idea that markets must be made to co-exist with high levels of taxation, regulation, unionization, welfare spending and subsidized health care and education. Eutopia may be nice in theory; it may even work for a while. But eventually social-democratic policies will lead to economic stagnation, policy paralysis and national bankruptcy on the continental scale we are witnessing today.

So, naturally, Germany’s Social Democrats romped to a 13-point victory in Sunday’s elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the country’s largest state.

“All politics is local,” goes the cliché, and it would be tempting to read the German result that way, too. The state had long been a Social Democratic stronghold before tipping into the hands of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in 2005. Mrs. Merkel remains broadly liked as chancellor and doesn’t face an election until next year. And the German economy is the envy of Europe.

By RYAN TRACY

With a peak in the cycle of solar flares approaching, U.S. electricity regulators are weighing their options for protecting the nation’s grid from the sun’s eruptions—including new equipment standards and retrofits—while keeping a lid on the cost.

They are studying the impact of historic sunstorms as far back as 1859 to see if the system needs an upgrade, and encountering a clash of views on how serious the threat is and what should be done about it.

Among the events they are examining is the Canadian power outage of 1989. On March 13 of that year, five major electricity-transmission lines in Quebec went on the fritz. Less than two minutes later, much of the province was in the dark. The cause: A storm of charged particles from the sun had showered Earth, damaging electrical gear as far away as New Jersey and bringing displays of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, as far south as Texas and Florida.

The sun is expected to hit a peak eruption period in 2013, and while superstorms don’t always occur in peak periods, some warn of a disaster. John Kappenman, a consultant and former power engineer who has spent decades researching the storms, says the modern power grid isn’t hardened for the worst nature has to offer. He says an extreme storm could cause blackouts lasting weeks or months, leaving major cities temporarily uninhabitable and taking a massive economic toll.

“This is arguably the largest natural-disaster scenario that the nation could face,” said Mr. Kappenman. Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB VIGDOR

Ordinary events aren’t usually newsworthy, and North Carolina’s adoption this week of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions was an ordinary event. Twenty-nine other states already have similar bans, and North Carolina’s referendum passed by a tally that was both overwhelming (61%-39%) and almost perfectly anticipated in polls. Yet the run-up to this event was front-page news nationwide.

The media frenzy created awkwardness for President Barack Obama, as Democratic Party elders and members of his own cabinet drew attention to his “evolving” views on gay marriage. Ultimately, Mr. Obama was compelled to speak out on the issue the day after the election, bringing his evolution to a close by offering some carefully measured sentences of support to ABC News.

Why was North Carolina, of all places, the state that made the president abandon his “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance on gay marriage?

The answer is that the Old North State has become a battleground. Mr. Obama won the state narrowly in 2008, and Democrats will descend upon Charlotte in September for their national convention. Republicans, meanwhile, have captured both houses of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction and hope to follow in November by taking the governorship and the state’s 15 electoral votes to Mitt Romney.

No one is taking the state for granted anymore—least of all the voters. Nearly 40,000 more voters cast ballots in this year’s primary than in 2008, though the presidential nominating contests for both parties are settled.

This is surprising given that for much of North Carolina’s history, elections have been afterthoughts. Between 1876 and 1964, Democrats dominated the state legislature, the governor’s mansion and national elections, breaking only to select Republican Herbert Hoover over Democrat Al Smith in 1928. After the Lyndon Johnson administration, the state—like much of the South—turned toward the GOP in national elections while retaining Democrats in most state offices. Between 1968 and 2004, Jimmy Carter (from neighboring Georgia) was the only Democratic presidential candidate to win the state.

Even the Andy Griffith Show attests to the irrelevance of elections in North Carolina: Ostensibly a chronicle of a North Carolina elected official, the show introduced a re-election plotline only once in 249 episodes.

North Carolina’s long-time political stasis reflected demographic stasis—and now its state of flux reflects demographic flux. In 1960, five of every six North Carolina residents had been born there, and only one in 200 had been born outside the United States.