What better way to slow the growth of a dynamic country such as ours, than to impose restrictive and time consuming environmental regulations. Was that possibly the plan of the Green/Globalist/Marxist Movement? Ya think??? Nancy
Traffic backs up on Interstate 70 near Silverthorne, Colo., Jan. 7, 2018. PHOTO: THOMAS PEIPERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: On Thursday the Trump Administration released a proposed rule to streamline NEPA reviews. One highlight is that the process would have presumptive limits: two years and 300 pages for a full environmental impact statement; or a year and 75 pages for a smaller environmental assessment. Thorny cases could go longer with written approval by “a senior agency official of the lead agency.”
If you visit an aging American megaproject—say, the Hoover Dam—you’ll probably see a startling statistic about how quickly it was built. Congress authorized the damming of the Colorado River in 1928, construction started in 1931, and the 726-foot concrete wonder opened in 1936. That’s a “shovel ready” job.
Today even modest public works, including roads, bridges and airport runways, can spend years in limbo, no thanks to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. That 1970 law requires an environmental study of any major project that involves federal funding or permitting. NEPA hasn’t been overhauled in 40 years, which is why the Trump Administration deserves applause for moving last week to modernize it.
Everybody wants to protect the environment. But NEPA isn’t doing the job sensibly. No single agency has responsibility for its enforcement, unlike the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act. There’s no obligation for the feds to keep a specific timeline. Environmental assessments and impact statements are often monstrously detailed, since agencies and sponsors are trying to make them litigation proof.
The result is a regulatory morass. From 2013 to 2017, the average final impact statement took more than four years and ran 669 pages, the Council on Environmental Quality said last summer. The longest file was for a contentious 12-mile expansion of Interstate 70 in Denver. The final report ran 8,951 pages, plus another 7,307 pages of appendices. The whole rigmarole took 13 years.
The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 2, 2019, during the College’s 175th anniversary gala. Videos of this and other speeches delivered during the gala are available at fourpillars.hillsdale.edu.
Today many condemn the idea of nationalism by connecting it to race hatred (e.g., white nationalism). But historically, the modern nation-state has proven uniquely suitable to preserving individual rights. The American nation in particular was successful in uniting individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and creeds into one people based on shared principles, a unique physical space, and a common national story. Our nation is the best example in human history of positive nationalism.
The key to this benign nationalism is American citizenship, based on an understanding of American exceptionalism and formed by the American melting pot. But today, our citizenship is eroding and, along with it, American nationalism in the positive sense is disappearing.
American citizenship is eroding in three ways.
First, we are blurring the line between mere residents and citizens. We have between 45-50 million non-native-born residents in the U.S. today—the largest absolute number we’ve ever had. There’s no legal problem with the 30 million of them who have green cards or have acquired citizenship—although even 30 million is a challenge for the American melting pot to assimilate and integrate.
But we also have, according to a recent Yale and MIT study, about 20 million people who are here illegally. In regard to them, the classical ingredients of American citizenship—the right to leave or enter the country as one pleases, for example, or to vote in elections, or to reside here as long as one pleases—are being blurred.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is getting incinerated by California politicians for shutting off power to two million residents amid heavy, dry winds. The publicly traded San Francisco-based utility has been found responsible for two dozen or so wildfires since 2016, some caused by power lines sagging from steel towers more than a century old.
The purpose of the blackouts was to avoid more damage from an aging grid that has not been adequately maintained. In January PG&E filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy to restructure tens of billions of dollars in liabilities, including for wildfire. Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, are predictably lambasting the company for prioritizing profits over safety. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo says he wants to turn it into a nonprofit.
Yet PG&E exemplifies the left’s “stakeholder” model, according to which businesses are accountable not only to their shareholders but also their workers, the environment and local communities and society at large. In practice, that means businesses exist to serve their political overlords.
Utilities are among the most heavily regulated businesses. In California, their rates and return on equity—that is, profits—are set by the California Public Utilities Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Every three years PG&E must submit funding plans to the CPUC, which holds public hearings with “stakeholders,” including customers and activist groups.
The commission and the state Legislature can also dictate energy investments. State law requires utilities to obtain 60% of their power from “renewable” sources by 2030. The commission has also ordered utilities to buy energy from homeowners with solar panels, paying them a higher rate than wholesale power providers get. Last year the commission directed PG&E to install 7,500 electric-car charging stations at apartment buildings and workplaces.
If shareholders want to earn a decent profit, they have to indulge their political masters’ fashionable views on matters such as climate, identity politics and corporate governance. Thus PG&E’s website defines “environmental justice” as “making better business decisions by understanding and considering the potential impacts of our activities and investments on low-income communities and communities of color.”
The utility also proclaims that “diversity and inclusion are integral to how we do business” and “are embedded throughout the lifecycle of our talent management programs.” PG&E boasts a chief diversity officer, a Diversity Council and a Compliance and Public Policy Committee on its board to review its diversity metrics.
Where is the Republican Party? As insanity spews out of the Democrat Party, the long-time overseer of limited government, free enterprise and individual liberty has no response, no unified plan to counter the Democrats, and, indeed, seems confused by the Socialist antics. The only part of the long-lost Republican cause that seems to be functioning is their near hysterics over the massive funds the Democrats are raising. Said a recent such Republican fund letter, “I’m hoping you have the courage and determination to fight for what we believe in.”
Of course, if the Republicans had the courage and determination to fight over the past two years for “what we believe in,” their fund-raising would be soaring. Instead they run candidates with nothing to say, seemingly clueless to the massive assault on our liberties. Now they wonder why they are being ignored in the elections.
Earlier this year I addressed the leadership of the Constitution Party. I presented them with the real agenda of the Democrats and I asked this question, “Do you want to be the majority party?” They answered with a resounding YES! I then gave them a strategy to win. It occurs to me that all freedom-loving Americas, no matter what party, can benefit from this strategy to use in their own local elections.
So, here is the speech I presented to the Constitution Party. Now, understand your true enemy, take these ideas, drain the swamp in your city or state, and take American back!
My Address to the Constitution Party Leadership
There has always been some kind of force loose in the world seeking domination over others. They built armies to invade, break things and kill people in order to grab resources, build wealth and power, enslave people and conquer.
We’ve lived through such threats from megalomaniacs like Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin. Secret societies have plotted to gain power in different ways.
In every case the efforts have failed. No one has ever managed to rule the entire world. In some cases they just pushed too far, too fast. Or they miscalculated the weather conditions in the lands they intended to control. It’s incredible to note that both Napoleon and Hitler failed to remember that Russia has a severe winter which ultimately led to their downfall and defeat.
However, what if such power mongers could find a way to keep their aggression under wraps and out of sight from those they intended to conquer – until it was too late.
Better yet, what if they could actually get their targeted victims to help them achieve control over them? No armies. No shots fired. Instead the victims quietly pull in the Trojan Horse and celebrate its arrival!
What if there was a way for a small, dedicated group to rule the world by simply organizing under a single unifying plan, accepted by everyone as fact and necessary?
Acceptance of the plan would see every nation voluntarily surrendering its independence and sovereignty to the aggressors!
What could possibly be such a powerful message that some of the world’s oldest and proudest nations would do that? What could get the world’s strongest religions to turn their back on their most fundamental beliefs? What would get the freest nation on earth to join in and agree?
How about the threat of Environmental Armageddon! Who could oppose saving the planet? Only selfish zealots who refuse to give up their creature comforts would oppose efforts to save Mother Earth! It doesn’t matter how many rights you think you have if you don’t have a planet to stand on.
From “Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in America’s High Schools” by John Murawski, RealClearInvestigations.com, Sept. 17:
At Santa Monica High School . . . students organize and carry out “a systematized campaign” for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project. They demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students.
Students at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale are assigned to write a “breakup letter with a form of oppression,” such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, Eurocentric curriculum or the Dakota Access Pipeline. Students are asked to “persuade their audience of the dehumanizing and damaging effects of their chosen topic.”
Students at schools in Anaheim, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco are taught how to write a manifesto to school administrators listing “demands” for reforms. Some conduct a grand jury investigation to determine who was responsible for the genocide of the state’s Native Americans. And one class holds a mock trial to determine which party is most responsible for the deaths of millions of native Tainos: Christopher Columbus, the soldiers, the king and queen of Spain, or the entire European system of colonialism. These are just a few examples of the ethnic studies courses taught at 253 California schools.
June 20, 20193:33 PM ET
What if someone you hated offered to pay off your mortgage or put your kids through college? You’d be suspicious at first, of course. Why is an enemy giving you the gift of a lifetime? But in the end, if you were smart, you’d take it. It would be too good to pass up.
Something very much like that happened in Washington, D.C., recently. The Trump administration debated moving some of the thousands of migrants now massing through our southern border into various self-proclaimed sanctuary cities across the United States.
Talk about great news for blue America. The left tells us that all immigration is good. More immigration is better. There is no distinction between legal and illegal varieties of immigration. If you disagree with any of this, you’re a white nationalist. That’s what they’ve said almost every day for the last two years.
And now, completely out of the blue, comes the man they despise most in the world, Donald J. Trump, offering them what they want more than anything: more immigrants, immediately, delivered right to their door at federal expense. It must have been like Christmas morning. (RELATED: Border Patrol Union President Says It’s ‘Absolutely Legal’ To Drop Illegals In Sanctuary Cities)
But that’s not how they responded. The left wasn’t happy about Trump’s offer. They were shocked and enraged. You know what this is, they said? It’s dumping. The headline on Mother Jones read, “Donald Trump Wanted to Dump Asylum Seekers on Streets of Democratic Cities.” In the view of The Daily Beast’s Harry Siegel, “The White House wanted to dump refugees in sanctuary cities.” He called that idea “nasty.” At the same time, almost simultaneously, both CNN and MSNBC ran headlines accusing the White House of wanting to “dump” migrants into cities.
What’s the message here? Immigrants are trash? If you wanted to defile someone’s pristine city, you’d “dump” immigrants on it? Hmm. That sounds a little … searching for the word here … racist — a lot racist, actually. But Nancy Pelosi agrees with it. She immediately issued a statement: “The extent of this administration’s cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated. Using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.”
Are you tired of hearing about the endless talk of President Trump and the Mueller Report ? This video interview of Andrew Breitbart from 2009 gives an inside look into the thinking of the man who pushed back fiercely against liberalism. Nancy
The Politics of Hollywood with Andrew Breitbart
Published on May 27, 2009
The proposal abolishes all existing state voter identification laws. Americans citizens — and possibly even non-citizens living in the United States — would be automatically registered to vote when they turn 17 years old. If any are somehow missed, another part of the bill would set up registration and voting booths on college and university campuses. Felons would be granted the right to vote and any voter who votes wants to vote somewhere other than his or her home precinct will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot anywhere else.
As every new Congress convenes, the majority party signals its priority with the introduction of House Resolution One. H.R. 1 is the bill the leadership intends to push hard and early to let the public know just what the new Congress wants and is all about.
Past House majorities, Republican and Democrat alike, have used their first bill to emphasize a substantive policy issue like the budget, educational reform, government action to stimulate the economy following the 2008 recession, tax cuts, or measures to counter terrorism.
This year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats are focused not on such substantive issues, but on jiggering with the way the country has run its elections for 200 years. All politicians relish their ability to exercise the power at their disposal, but this year’s H.R. 1 is all about increasing the Democratic Party’s chances of holding onto power.
The 116th Congress’ H.R. 1 is being heralded as the “For the People Act of 2019,” but if there were truth in labelling requirements for naming bills it would have to be called the “For the Democrats Act of 2019.” It is a 500-plus page jumble of proposals to mandate a federal takeover of our electoral system and rig future elections with an eye toward a one-party nation.
Many of the components of H.R. 1 have been tested and worked for Democrats in California. These “reforms” would force all states to emulate California and turn future elections into the sort of sham contests one sees in some nations south of the U.S. border.