Commentary

Every so often, there’s a timely surfacing of several issues that give me the opportunity to comment on how they, intertwined, are taking America down a path to ruin led by the left’s progressive movement.

In this edition, using the news, I will attempt to explain how the Democrat Party, unions, academia, environmental activists, and an uninformed public, all aided by a compliant media, are responsible for the ill-advised transformation of our democracy.

This week, President Biden, who claims to be the most pro-worker president in history, had the audacity to join auto workers on the picket line in Michigan, after he convinced the weak-kneed auto industry CEOs to go big in electric vehicles.

They bought into his green new deal with its clean energy subsidies, and now he speaks of the CEO salaries and called on them to share the record industry profits with the workers. 

Not only do Americans not want to purchase EV’s for a number of reasons, those union workers have learned that it takes half the workers to produce an EV compared to a combustion engine auto.  Regardless of the deal the unions are able to muster, more than 100,000 auto manufacturing jobs will be lost.

Thanks to the right-to-work states, union workers only make up 13 percent of the American workforce.  But you need to be aware of the teacher’s unions and the public unions that are supported by legislators because, with that support, they collect billions of dollars for their reelection bids.  Quid pro quo.

“We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class,” said UAW president Shawn Fain.

That’s rich.  President Biden keeps repeating the story of his father who said, “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck.  It’s about your dignity.  It’s about respect.”

Victor Davis Hanson, in his American Greatness piece, “What the Left Did to Our Country,” summed up the electric vs fossil fuel issue writing, “Biden warred on fossil fuels, canceling federal leases and pipelines, jawboning lending agencies to defund fracking, demonizing state-of-the-art clean-burning cars, and putting vast areas of oil and gas-rich federal lands off-limits to drilling.”

I have been critical of academia here before, primarily for their leftist professors who put the progressive movement first, including diversity, equity and social justice, but also for their outrageous tuitions that are not preparing individuals for the real world.  I’ve encouraged college and university alums to stop making contributions.

As if academia hasn’t done enough to persuade us of the threat of climate change, I learned that Arizona State University President Michael Crow has called for a globalist revolution to counter climate change in a recently published book by ASU Professor David Orr.

The nature of the climate chaos requires revising curriculum, research and innovation throughout higher education and changing requirements for graduation so that every student in every field knows what planet they’re on, how it works, and why such things are important for our public life and for their own lives and careers, according to Orr.

Will they learn abut the thousands of petroleum-based products they use in their every day lives that depend on fossil fuels?

Unbelievably, Crow also declares that the principles of our founding fathers in the Constitution are no longer sufficient because the document fails to protect nature.

Orr writes that “the time is ripe for a bold experiment in a new kind of democracy worldwide.  Our challenge, similarly, requires us to begin the world anew, conceiving and building a fair, decent, and effective democracy, this time better fitted to a planet with an ecosphere.” OH, MY.

“As part of the new democracy,” Corrine Murdock notes that, ”Crow proposed that contemporary research universities such as ASU be the entities responsible for the social, economic, cultural, political, scientific and technological well-being of local communities.”  Excuse me … isn’t that what they were supposed to be doing?

Frankly, I’m embarrassed that we allowed environmental activists, with a fantasy of an overly ambitious all-electric energy goal of zero emissions to be attained prior to gaining the knowledge, innovation and technology, to produce alternative energy sources ourselves. 

And in the process, we gave up our energy independence, which is the primary reason we are paying more at the pump, in grocery stores and for services rendered.

Now, our once-vaunted automobile industry is facing huge losses with the strike on top of the losses built into each EV, while wind power projects are delayed and we are still dependent on China for solar components.

With colder weather approaching, we can expect to hear tales of heating oil costs and the reliability of EV batteries in snow and ice conditions.

Adding to the embarrassment over climate change and alternative energy, is our ignoring of the thousands of illegals (not migrants) who cross our southern border, free to roam our country, costing us billions of dollars in medical, shelter, food and education support.

Space doesn’t permit me to comment on reining in our weaponized Department of Justice, a reasonable solution to abortion, crime and punishment, and the seemingly runaway spending in Ukraine.

Victor Davis Hanson wonders if Americans aren’t starting to wake up to the notion that if they don’t stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

 I’d like to believe that, but I don’t see the outrage.  If Biden’s giving up of our sovereignty at the southern border isn’t treason, what is?

May God continue to bless the United States of America.