By ilana mercer
“We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That’s a lot of jobs; that’s a lot of new economic activity.” So intoned Hillary Clinton, during the first presidential debate at Hofstra University, New York, on September 26.
Where have we heard this before? Like Clinton, President Obama hasn’t a clue how a viable market is created and sustained. Solyndra, if you recall, was awarded $527 million from taxpayers. Each of the temporary, unsustainable jobs created by Solyndra and touted by Obama cost $479,000. Obama thought this was sufficient to secure a profitable market for the product.
Clinton is every bit the cretin when it comes to the market economy.
Donald Trump, however, is good at this; business is his bailiwick. He has spoken so well in interviews about the unviable nature of the green energy industry (unless, of course, it’s privately funded and the risk is neither subsidized nor socialized). Trump can’t allow the arrogant certitude begun with Obama and Solyndra to continue with Clinton.
For Trump understands how demand is generated and sustained. How many times has he recounted on TV, for example, that so expensive are solar panels, that by the time these panels have paid for themselves—also known as “a return on investment”—it’s time to replace them? In a May appearance in Bismarck, North Dakota, on the occasion of his reaching and surpassing the magic delegate threshold (chronicled in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed”), Trump spoke eloquently about deregulating energy. Clean coal can be restored, he remarked, if regulations are reduced. The money quote Trump should repeat, from that appearance: “Free-up coal and let the market work. Market forces are a beautiful thing.”
Indeed they are.
Back to the larger principle: When Clinton dares to mention the environment and how much money she’ll steal from you and me to enrich and entrench global bureaucracies who’ll adjudicate environmental affairs—Trump must bring it back to America First. And to immigration.
NumbersUSA has studied and documented in detail the impact of an annual influx of 2-3 million people (counting the illegal intake), on our American ecosystems.According to “Roy Beck’s celebrated demonstration of the population consequences of current US immigration policies,” the devil is in the unsustainable numerical details. In the four decades prior to 1965—which is when the Act that heralded the age of legal mass immigration was undemocratically enacted—America welcomed an average of 178,000 immigrants each year. Beck calls these years the Golden Era of immigration, characterized as they were by tight labor markets, which encouraged capital investment, and increased productivity and hence wages. America was solidly middle-class. Like others in prosperous developed countries, Americans had “chosen family sizes that allowed for a stabilized U.S. population.”
Formulated by federal fiat in 1965, the new immigration policy saw an exponential increase in the number of legal immigrants admitted annually into the US. Throughout the 1990s immigration averaged 1 million legal immigrants a year. Combined with the number of illegal arrivals, the annual intake exceeded 3 million. As a result of this increase, “every aspect of American society has changed,” attests Beck.
As on most matters of national identity—language and faith, for example—elite and public attitudes diverge on immigration. “In nineteen polls from 1945 to 2002,” writes Samuel P. Huntington, “the proportion of the public favoring increased immigration never rose above 14 percent.” Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans want immigration cut—not because they are “deplorable,” to go by Mrs. Clinton’s libel—but because they experience mass immigration first-hand. Indeed, government immigration policy reflects America’s “denationalized elites,” who are committed to transnational and sub-national identities. From their vantage point, cultivated usually from the serenity of their stately homes, these open-border libertarians and utilitarians will often tout the advantages of high-population density.
Apparently, Cairo and Calcutta are models for the specialization that comes with an increased division of labor. However, if American history (circa 1894) is anything to go by, the scarcity and high cost of labor helped propel this country into its position as the world’s leading industrial power. These factors, observed historian Paul Johnson, “[G]ave the strongest possible motive not only to invent but to buy and install labor-saving machinery, the essence of high productivity, and so mass production.”
History notwithstanding, Clinton’s open-ended immigration policy amounts to a philosophy of act globally, trash locally. Thus when Clinton so much as mentions the environment, Trump ought to bring it back to America’s natural resources; remind her that non-traditional rates of immigration have required doubling the expenditure on infrastructure—building twice as many schools, sewage treatment plants, roads and streets. “The majority of all new additional infrastructure needs over the past quarter century are the result of Washington’s immigration policies,” notes the aforementioned Mr. Beck.
In California, a school will have to be built every day in perpetuity to keep up with the unremitting influx. Urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overcrowding, pollution, and rural land loss—there isn’t a community in the US that’ll escape the social and environmental degradation witnessed in California and Florida.
Look, the destruction of this country’s social fabric has never bothered leftists or environmentalists. But what of its natural treasures? They claim to care about those. At the current rate of immigration, 40 percent of America’s lakes and streams are no longer fishable or swimmable. What will be their fate in the middle of the century?
If Trump had advisers who coached him in argument, debate would proceed as follows: No sooner would the woman, The Hildebeest, begin to prattle about working with “our global partners” to save the planet—than Trump would pounce. He’d ask her to tell the American people what she imagines is the impact on the environment of the millions rushing the southern border, and then defecating and despoiling their way to their destinations in the US.
This vivid description is not mine, but courtesy of a Time magazine cover, in which the reporters bewailed “a land on the southern border turned into a vast latrine, revolting mounds of personal refuse everywhere and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart.”
Clinton and her gangreens are cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. Population explosion they consider a global—not a local—problem. They’ll gladly trash Americans for their lavish lifestyles, but about the imperiled quality-of-life across American communities they couldn’t give a tinker’s toss.
Yes, ecosystems are intertwined, but talk Trump must, and passionately so, about the natural environment around us and what Hillary Clinton’s annual deluge of immigrants and refugees is doing to our country’s ecosystems and their critters.
The change in ‘American Society’ and the affect on ‘National Identity’ caused by immigration did not start ‘after 1965’. It started when the first Europeans arrived at the turn of the 1500s and gathered pace after the colonists started arriving in numbers in the 17th Century.
Eventually in 1776 these immigrants set up an entirely new State being created which finally occupied the whole North American Continent South and East of the Canadian border. The existing American ‘National Identities’ and ‘the ecosystem’ which supported them and their ‘way of life’ was eventually deliberately and forcibly destroyed by the immigrants and their all powerful State which invited the world to send it ‘their huddled masses yearning to be free’. Now that these ‘huddled masses’ entrenched themselves in the USA they want to withdraw the invitation and fossilise the ‘culture’ they they’ve established there.
Immigration came in wave after wave following colonisation, mostly voluntarily from every nation you can think of. But a much more sinister and damaging forced immigration of Black African Slaves was also involved, and a breeding program instituted to breed more of them. America is still living with the consequences and the descendants of the White European immigrants who caused it all, are the first to blame everyone else..
The difficulty I have with the American Right and ‘neo cons’ in general, is that they have no sense of history, and are so deeply unconservative. They think that history started the day their own migrant ancestors became established in America. Some very recently indeed. Even the first colonists arrived barely five hundred years ago. The Ice Age ended 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, following which indigenous cultures thrived until the Europeans arrived. And America was inhabited long before the Ice Age even started.
This ‘America First’ nonsense is just one bunch of immigrants wanting to close the doors after their ancestors have entered freely, done whatever they like, set up their own Super State, and they now exclude anyone else. It’s a Statist attitude beyond belief which is wholly alien to Libertarian thought.
Donald Trump’s family came either from Scotland or from some Village in Germany (it depends which side of the family you look at). So what right has he to bang on about ‘immigrants’. Why should his family, and ultimately he, be given privileges of residency which he now wants to deny to Mexicans.
At the moment ‘immigration’ is either illegal or legal depending on whether the present immigrant imposed American State says it is. What basis is that for ‘law’? This American State is a ‘Johnny come lately’ institution in itself, has only been going 240 years and might itself be gone in another 240. Have a sense of history!!
Anyone who really believes in ‘America First’ would start by deporting all the descendants of the immigrants who’ve arrived in the past 500 years back to where they came from. If they really wanted to take their policy through to its’ logical conclusion, they’d deport everyone, and the last to leave could switch off the light. Even the ‘Native’ Americans came from somewhere.
This is a rather odd view. It seems to be rooted more in hatred for America than a sense of history. I cannot agree with this opinion. Perhaps it is because I am an American, but I think my objection is more substantive than a mere expression of self-interest or sentimentality. The view you lay out here is a recipe for perpetual ethnic conflict. There is hardly a group of people in existence today that would not be required by one or more other groups to relinquish the territory which they now occupy and upon which they were born and raised.
You say European Americans ought to be deported back to their respective homelands. My ancestry is Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, Austrian, and Hungarian. Which respective homeland should I return to? And which of them will be glad to have me? My culture is different from that of any of the societies I’ve just listed.
You say that because the European immigration to America was to the detriment of their predecessors that we would be hypocrites to deny others the right to see us displaced. I never displaced anyone. No one presently alive stole wide swaths of land from the Native Americans. But yes, they were displaced. This displacement was a terrible thing. Why would anyone wish the same to happen again to any group of people?
According to the opinion you detail above, no one ought to be allowed to resist the territorial and concomitantly cultural displacement and destruction of his own people because, after all, we all came from somewhere and we all pushed someone else aside to make room for ourselves, so who are we to tell others they can’t do the same to us?
Very well then, but to be consistent with your view, the people now displacing us have invariably already displaced other groups of people in their pasts, as well. So seeing as how all groups everywhere are guilty of the same sin, I see no additional sin in hypocritically defending my people, my culture, and the territory that sustains both from present or future invasions by fellow hypocritical past displacers.
[quote]”Anyone who really believes in ‘America First’ would start by deporting all the descendants of the immigrants who’ve arrived in the past 500 years back to where they came from. If they really wanted to take their policy through to its’ logical conclusion, they’d deport everyone, and the last to leave could switch off the light. Even the ‘Native’ Americans came from somewhere.”[unquote]
I think somebody’s been over-dosing on Howard Zinn.
I think Trump might do better to challenge Clinton on the “global warming” lies. It could be a big vote winner, as I hear that most Americans these days are sick and tired of all the hype. All he would need is a few well aimed facts (and I don’t mean scientific ones). For example, about how the IPCC, Obama, the EPA, the leftist media and others have lied about and puffed up the subject for years. He would also be doing a huge service to all good people in the rest of the world.
This tendresse that all sorts now have for the Populist Trump is going to start wearing thin (if and) when he is elected as president and assumes office and becomes President Trump.
Trump is good at business? He is good at capitalism, I’m not sure about business. He did write a good business book, though: The Art of the Deal. One of the best business books ever written.
But I’ve been watching Trump carefully and it’s all just noise. He is just like every other presidential candidate of recent times: scrutinise him on the details and consider what he is actually saying, rather than allow oneself to be distracted by all the pop music and noise, and one comes to a depressing realisation: Trump is thoroughly neoconservative. For one thing, he can’t make a speech on foreign policy without maligning Iran. It may be ‘Neocon-Lite’, but that’s presentation, for the benefit of Joe and Mandy Voter.
The rest is nuance, though in fairness the nuance may be important – Russia has a broad spectrum of interests across which the United States has foolishly engaged, and if President Trump and his advisers insist on compaction in U.S. interests abroad, that might be a good thing.
However, I can’t ignore certain facts about Trump. When it comes to it, Donald Trump gets down on his hands and knees and crawls to the right people. I have seen it with my own eyes.
My guess is that a Trump America will be as state-centric and regulated as a Hillary America, and will be as aggressive, interventionist and militaristic as the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama Junta.
The focus, emphases and some of the policies will be differ, but it’s largely business as usual.
Having made those points, I still hope for a Trump victory, not because of anything Trump might do, rather because of what he will refrain from doing that Hillary would do, and because of the tone a Trump presidency would set, which I think would lay the groundwork for something more radical and meaningful from the nativist current.
As always with my scepticism about Mr Trump, I hope I am proved wrong.