Obama’s talent for wasting scarce resources is formidable. Even more impressive is the president’s ability to frame waste as thrift. When you purchase something you don’t need, with funds you must borrow, on the pretext that years down the line the outlay will pay dividends ─ it’s safe to say you’re a wastrel. To convince ─ and coerce ─ America to squander, B.O. is proposing to subsidize cash-strapped Americans in retrofitting their homes with costly green gimmickry.

This is but one example of how this dedicated central planner is directing resources not his into inefficient, expensive technologies, with the aim of shaping production in politically pleasing ways. Big Brother Obama’s latest “clever” exercise in the misallocation of confiscated capital has been dubbed Cash for Caulkers. (To “caulk” is to hermetically seal.) It was preceded by a similar act of legislative creative destruction ─ Cash for Clunkers ─ in which desperate car dealers were “incentivized” to entice greedy, gormless consumers into junking perfectly good rides and purchasing new ones, and in the process taking on more debt.

But that bit of economic Brownian motion nudged the GDP upwards (which gives you an indication of the credibility of this politically massaged indicator). So now, BO is urging Congress to provide “temporary incentives for Americans to weatherize their homes.”

The fool-in-chief’s first order of business in pushing people to purchase fashionable items they do not need was to sell them on the latter’s sex appeal. His pitch the president staged at a Home Depot store in a Washington suburb, where he talked-up the sexy aspects of home insulation. Obama still sells. If the Big O thinks something is sexy, it too will sell. Besides, a tinsel nation needs little convincing to splurge on trendy big-ticket items.

State-sponsored “sexy” technologies in the West have decidedly ugly outcomes for worker bees in the East. The Copenhagen Crowd’s cravings must be sated, but not by despoiling California, if you know what I mean.

Enter the Chinese worker.

“You buy a Prius hybrid car and think you’re saving the planet,” divulged Lindsey Hilsum of PBS’s “News Hour,” “but each motor contains a kilo of neodymium and each battery more than 10 kilos of lanthanum, rare earth elements from China. Green campaigners love wind turbines, but the permanent magnets used to manufacture a 3-megawatt turbine contain some two tons of rare earth.”

Mining for rare earth metals is not the cleanest undertaking. Hybrid hypocrites prefer by far that it be done by the poor villagers of the Baiyunkuang District of Darhan Muminggan in Inner Mongolia, northern China. There lie the largest deposits of rare earth metals.

The Prius is packed with the stuff.

The Limousine and Learjet liberals who legislate “green” industries into being prefer to outsource all energy-related extraction. Leave it to the industrious Chinese to “meet 95 percent of the world’s demand for rare earth.” As most of the separation and extraction of rare earth metals is done in China, “the pollution stays in China, too,” reports Hilsum from Baiyunebo in Inner Mongolia.

The environmental problems include air emissions with harmful elements, such as fluorine and sulfur, wastewater that contains excessive acid, and radioactive materials, too.

And “local villagers whose farmland has been ruined by seepage from the lake pay the price.”

Laments one such farmer: “The Baotou Environmental Protection Bureau tested our water, and they concluded that it wasn’t fit for people or animals to drink or for irrigation. … Rare earth is the country’s resource, but small people like us need to eat, too. We live on farming, but the crops no longer grow, and we will go hungry.”

Tough luck, you provincial little man. NIMBYs (not-in-my-backyard environmentalists) like Big Brother O and his Copenhagen accomplices plan these screwy, skewed production lines, and in the process supplant sustainable industries. To satisfy their “visionary,” voracious excesses ─ and do the dirty work for them ─ witless NIMBYs have unwittingly conscripted the Chinese Worker.

©2009 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
December 18

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Environmental lobbies abhor all by-products of human existence, unless generated by illegal aliens. In that case, the vast latrine and land fill created along the border with Mexico, as millions of illegals defecate and despoil their way to their destinations in the US, are just dandy.

To interfere with the natural formation of this outsized outhouse is to “jeopardize the quality of life and beauty of South Texas.” Or so implied the president of the National Audubon Society. He was protesting the decision, late in the day, of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to “expeditiously install additional physical barriers and roads at the border to deter illegal activity.”

Chertoff, a Bush boy—and therefore a Johnny-come-lately to the idea of a border—has been under pressure from a few of the barrier’s congressional backers. They worry that environmental restrictions would postpone construction indefinitely. Quick on the trigger, the Sierra Club bleated that the Bush administration was threatening “endangered species and fragile ecosystems along the Rio Grande.”

That the human inhabitants along the border are the worse for wear has never mattered much. Drug-trade related turf wars between gangs, brazen assaults on border patrolmen by invaders (often aided by American officials), and kidnappings—these are considered eco-friendly.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)

Thankfully, a handful of Congress members concluded that the tsunami of trespassers is worse for the environment than the fence itself. So they pressed on. On second thought, scrap that. This is an election year. Republicans have probably figured out that if they fail to secure the border, conservatives will stay home.

To that end, the Department of Homeland Security proceeded to waive certain environmental laws for various project areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, so as to begin completing, this time apparently in earnest, the 700 miles of fencing mandated by the Secure Fence Act.

The Act was forced on the ruling class in 2006 by a passionately non-partisan American public, sick and tired of the farce on the southwest front. Naturally, after the primping and preening that accompanies the signing of a bill into law just prior to midterm elections, the politicians promptly side-stepped the popular will.

Deadlines came and went. Two-tiered fencing morphed into a single tier, and 700 miles were whittled down to 370, of which only between five and 70 were initially erected, as a token. Legal challenges from environmental lobbies were indulged; and legal aid to the attorneys of illegal aliens authorized. Brave border patrolmen were incarcerated for refusing to fold like the fence.

If ever asked by the pulp-press (fat chance), Clinton and Obama will respond as though the Bill of Rights has been suspended. It hasn’t. In a free society, rooted in private property rights, land owners along the border would have likely formed militias to repel trespassers from their land. In an unfree society, it falls to the state to simulate that protection, while compensating the few who reject it. Indeed, as the Chicago Tribune has reported, “the waivers will not affect the legal battles between the Homeland Security Department and private landowners.”

Who knows how McCain—a recent convert to conservatism—might respond? I have a vague idea how he should not respond: McCain might consider modifying his mantra about illegal aliens being God’s children to whom he owes a path to citizenship. This is not about the Arizonan’s relationship with God and His creatures; it’s about McCain’s relationship with the Constitution.

The Constitution binds a president to uphold the law; it doesn’t authorize him to legislate compassion. In the event he is elected, McCain could very well choose to exercise the plenary power of pardon granted to the president. But conferring political rights on millions of scofflaws—that would be an enormous abuse of presidential power.

Crunchy cons and assorted Republicans for unfettered immigration will concur with Hillary and Hussein in protesting even a temporary suspension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s many fettering laws. They should not be given the time of day. The EPA is an incontinent legislator, as are most government departments.

That the government has used its discretionary waiver authority to temporarily suspend a few of its countless “land management” laws, never vetted by voters, is no tragedy. In fact, government should waive more superfluous regulations if this means fulfilling its one constitutionally mandated function: defending the nation’s borders.

The Constitution trumps the “rights” of critters.

©2008 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
April 4

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