Manchin the Fink; Ireland Apes Sri Lanka; & Owning Nothing and Liking It.
In his editor’s column this week, Michael Walsh looked into the Senate’s newly passed (and ridiculously named) Inflation Reduction Act.
'These Boots Were Made for Walking'
Yesterday, in a triumphal special session, the Senate passed the "Inflation Reduction Act" (stop laughing), with the otherwise useless vice president, Kamala Harris, casting the tie-breaker in favor of the rebranded mo' betta version of the recently deceased "Build Back Better" boondoggle. This time around, there was no Joe Manchin the Third or Krysten Sinema to put their fingers in the dikes and hold back Brandon's flood tide, both of them having sold out in exchange for some particular local fillips. In a 50-50 upper chamber, with the House in the bag, that's all the Democrats needed,
The bill will do nothing about inflation, of course. Prices will continue their upward spiral, and supermarket shelves will increasingly resemble similar establishments in the Soviet Union c. 1985. But who cares? What counts is how the media spins the vote, and the answer is: a big win for the ice-cream gobbler and chief Covid patient—fully vaxxed and boosted!—now emerging hale and hearty from the White House basement and getting ready head back to Delaware for some much-needed R&R. There's nothing the Democrat-Media Complex loves more than a comeback story. And for that Joe Biden can thank Manchin and Sinema.
Let's start with Manchin, former governor and now apparently senator-for-life from West Virginia. Having replaced John McCain as the phoniest man in the Senate, Manchin has enjoyed playing footsie with Mitch McConnell while he does his "conservative" fan dance for the rubes back home in Hootin' Holler, W. Va., a half-assed state that was gerrymandered out of rump counties of Ol' Virginny during the Civil War and hasn't amounted to a hill of beans since. Surrounded on the north by Federal powerhouses Ohio and Pennsylvania and bordered by two slave states that stayed in the Union, Kentucky and Maryland, in 1863 it chose the better part of valor and skedaddled away from the Confederacy as quickly as it could. The gutless Manchin is its perfect embodiment….
This was Manchin's -- and the headline on the Times story informs the honorable gentleman from Hind Teat, W.Va., just how much his courage is appreciated and how much good will they'll show him in 2024 when he runs for re-election:
Manchin’s Donors Include Pipeline Giants That Win in His Climate Deal
After years of spirited opposition from environmental activists, the Mountain Valley Pipeline — a 304-mile gas pipeline cutting through the Appalachian Mountains — was behind schedule, over budget and beset with lawsuits. As recently as February, one of its developers, NextEra Energy, warned that the many legal and regulatory obstacles meant there was “a very low probability of pipeline completion.” Then came Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and his hold on the Democrats’ climate agenda.
Mr. Manchin’s recent surprise agreement to back the Biden administration’s historic climate legislation came about in part because the senator was promised something in return: not only support for the pipeline in his home state, but also expedited approval for pipelines and other infrastructure nationwide, as part of a wider set of concessions to fossil fuels.
It was a big win for a pipeline industry that, in recent years, has quietly become one of Mr. Manchin’s biggest financial supporters.
The Wall Street Journal put the boot in: "Republicans thought that by supporting giant infrastructure and computer-chip bills, the West Virginian might stop a partisan spending bill. GOP Senators now look like tourists who paid $300 from LaGuardia for a taxi to their Manhattan hotel."
One of the surprise bon-bons embedded in this farrago is a huge budget boost for everybody's favorite federal agency, the IRS.
How did the GOP, which thought it had Joe Biden and the Democrats right where they wanted them just a couple of weeks ago, get into such a pickle? And why are things only going to get worse, right up to the moment when they fail to take back the Senate and under-perform in the House? Nate Silver weighs in:
As was the case when we launched the forecast a month ago, the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s midterm model still rates the battle for control of the Senate as a “toss-up.” But within that category there’s been modest, but consistent movement toward Democrats. Their chances of winning the Senate now stand at 55 percent. That’s up from 47 percent from forecast launch on June 30. It’s also up from 40 percent in a retroactive forecast dated back to June 1.
Silver's right about the Senate: does anybody really think the carpetbagging Cleveland-born Turkish Muslim. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who voted in the 2018 Turkish elections, and the washed-up football player Herschel Walker are going to win? Oz is running at least ten points behind a guy who just had a stroke, while Walker will face Warnock, a man with almost as many skeletons in his closet as Walker has. Trump has backed both Oz and Walker; after all, he's seen a lot of them on TV. Meanwhile, in Ohio, J.D. Vance is doing his best to blow what should be a gimme, and currently trails his Democrat opponent, congressman Tim Ryan, by four points.
So how did we get here? Two names immediately come to mind: Mitch McConnell, one of the leaders of the geriatric mafia in Congress, and Donald Trump.
This past week The Pipeline published the seventh excerpted essay from our new book, Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order. The book will be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. It is now available now for pre-order at the links above.
PART III: THE ECONOMIC
Excerpt from "The War on Capitalism" by Conrad Black
There has indeed in the last thirty years been a war on capitalism conducted from the commanding heights of the academy and very broadly assisted by the Western media that has been gathering strength as part of the great comeback of the Left following their bone-crushing defeat in the Cold War. As international communism collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was difficult to imagine that the Left could mount any sort of comeback anytime soon. We underestimated both the Left’s imperishability and its gift for improvisation, a talent that their many decades of predictable and robotic repetitiveness entirely concealed.
By some combination of intuition and tactical cunning, the hard Left crowded aboard the environmental bandwagon. Until the nineties, the environment was the concern of authentic if sometimes tedious conservationists such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and despite their harassment of nuclear testing by the French around Tahiti and their demonstrations against goodwill visits of American aircraft carriers, they were sincere people making an arguable case.
Suddenly they were overwhelmed by the hard Left imposing a new agenda of strangulation of capitalism by coming through the rear windows and attacking practically every industry as a threat to human survival for ecological reasons…. They made an unlikely coalition: Al Gore became a centimillionaire on this issue; the Prince of Wales mounted a great hobby horse that he still rides, and the most vocal airheads of Hollywood have ben howling like banshees on the issue for decades.
Aggressive green parties arose in many countries and harvested the naiveté and narcissistic ambition for attention of large numbers of people championing antipollution causes that in the abstract no reasonable person could oppose. They were allied or infested with the old left and skulked forward, ideological wolves in paradisiacal lambs’ clothing. Germany has no petroleum resources but had built an extensive and absolutely safe nuclear power capacity, but the aggressive German Green Party came snorting out of the Teutonic forests like a Wagnerian monster and bullied Angela Merkel’s government into abandoning the entire nuclear program. Germany in effect became an energy vassal state of Russia through the Nord Stream pipeline, the completion of which the Biden administration facilitated in withdrawing the Trump administration’s intervention to prevent the pipeline’s completion. With the Ukraine war, it is again suspended. Thus the second most important country in the Western Alliance is almost detached from it, all by the apparently innocuous and meliorist actions of Germany’s peppiest environmentalists, and with the ultimate complicity of the current U.S. president.
Tom Finnerty contributed a feature on the Republic of Ireland’s insistence on following the disastrous path of Sri Lanka and the Netherlands in attacking its own agricultural sector to placate environmental activists (including the ones in government).
The Cattle Raid of Greeney
The Financial Times reports that "Ireland’s coalition government has reached a bitterly contested deal to slash climate emissions from the country’s key agriculture sector by 25 percent by 2030." Bitterly contested because the actual farmers whose livelihoods will be effected by the deal were hoping those numbers would be lower, whereas the government—currently a coalition of the traditionally "rival" parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael along with the Green Party—wanted 30 percent emission cuts by 2030.
This deal is most likely the brainchild of Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, an environmentalist zealot who owes his outsized and wholly malevolent influence on the Republic of Ireland to his party's being the lynchpin of the unstable coalition, formed two years ago…
Ryan, who serves as the coalition's Environment Minister (of course), suggested that the cuts outlined in this deal are just the beginning, saying that they represented “a significant step in the right direction.”
For the farmers however, even these numbers are a bridge too far:
Tim Cullinan, president of the Irish Farmers’ Association, called the 25 percent cut a “massive, massive ask” that could cost farmers €2bn a year and said the government had outlined no budget to help them achieve it.... Pat McCormack, president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association, said the agreement made “whole classes of farms unviable” and would push up prices. He added: “Our livestock industry — both dairy and beef — is the lifeblood of rural Ireland and Minister [of agriculture] McConalogue and the three party leaders of the coalition have struck it at its very heart today.”.... “It’s really impossible to see how we can achieve [these] targets... without reducing herds — and that’s an income issue for us,” said Brian Rushe, a dairy farmer.
Never mind that cattle have formed the basis of the Irish economy for more than two millennia. The most famous Irish epic poem is probably The Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin bó Cuailnge), featuring the legendary hero Cú Chulainn. But modern Ireland is too smart and sophisticated to care about its heritage, one of the oldest continuous cultures in Europe, and so the cows must be sacrificed on the altar of "climate change."
One particular line in this piece is worth considering -- Tim Cullinan is quoted as saying: "This deal between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green party is all about the survival of the government rather than survival of rural Ireland." He is assuredly correct. The priority of these politicians is maintaining power, both by keeping the Green Party on side and by maintaining the good opinion of overseas elites -- rather than defending the interests of their country.
But, as the uprising in Sri Lanka is showing us, focusing on the former while ignoring the latter is a good way of losing both. While the Irish economy is unlikely to bottom out like Sri Lanka's—Ireland's status as a tax haven for American corporations makes it too important for western governments to allow that to happen—a significant standard of living increase on top of the country's ongoing Covid-instigated recession has the potential to inspire an earthquake in Irish politics. And Sinn Féin, the Socialist/Nationalist party that the coalition government exists to keep out of power will likely be the beneficiary. Judging by their refusal to support agricultural emissions cuts, despite their own environmentalist commitments, they know it.
David Solway meditated upon the meaning of the Davosian phrase “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”
'You'll Own Nothing'—and Like It. Or Will You?
The world’s farmers and cattle raisers, deprived of their livelihoods on the pretext of reducing nitrogenic fertilizers and livestock-produced methane, will own next to nothing. Meat and grain will become increasingly rare and we will be dining on cricket goulash and mealworm mash, an entomorphagic feast. We will be driving distance-limited electric vehicles rented from the local Commissariat and digitally monitored by Cyber Central—assuming we will still be allowed to drive. Overseen by a cadre of empowered financial managers who can “freeze” our assets at any time, we will possess bank accounts and credit ratings, but they will not be really ours.
Subject to a conceptual misnomer that is nothing but a vacuous abstraction, we will have become “stakeholders”—the WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s favorite word—with no real stake to hold apart from a crutch. In fact, what Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism” really means, as Andrew Stuttaford explains at Capital Matters, is “transferring the power that capitalism should confer from its owners and into the hands of those who administer it.”
Should the Great Reset ever be fully implemented, we will have been diminished, as Joel Kotkin cogently argues in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, to the condition of medieval serfs, or reduced to the status of febrile invalids, like those in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which, as it happens, was also set in Davos. As Mann ends his novel, addressing his main character Hans Castorp: “Farewell, Hans…Your chances are not good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we will not wager much that you will come out whole.”
Modern-day Castorps, we will indeed own nothing, and most assuredly, we will not be happy. As Schwab writes in his co-authored Covid-19: The Great Reset, people will have to accept “limited consumption,” “responsible eating,” and, on the whole, sacrificing “what we do not need”—this latter to be determined by our betters.
Peter Smith considered what the Australian government’s net-zero transition would actually look like.
EVs Down Under: No Bang for the Buck
A friend shared with me an account by an electrical engineer who, for understandable reasons, prefers to remain anonymous. He’d been asked whether some electric-car charging points could be installed in a large apartment building in Melbourne’s central business district. Part of his account goes something like this:
The power supply to the building had little spare capacity. Thus only 5 or 6 charging points could be installed in a building with 188 apartments.
The electrical set-up, including the mains supply on any floors to which a charger was linked, would require upgrading, as would the building’s main switchboard.
The vicinity in which the building sits was designed with a particular mains power supply in mind. Consequently, there is insufficient capacity for any significant number of charging points in each building in the vicinity. Moreover, two substations supplying the whole of Melbourne’s CBD are stretched as it is.
Do you ever get the feeling that ambitions among those demonising fossil fuels are light years beyond our capacity to deliver? In the past I tended to think of queues for elective procedures at public hospitals as being preeminent in provoking unrealisable ambitions. Whenever, and in whatever country, there were inevitably long queues and some shameless politicians promising to spend other people’s money to slash their length. Two insuperable problems. Money doesn’t conjure up experienced doctors, nurses and technicians. And second, and more intractable, demand is never sated when those enjoying unhealthy lifestyles meet free remedial treatment.
That was in the past. Now, nothing compares, or has ever compared, to the boundless and fanciful ambitions of those intent on healing the planet. Electric vehicles (EVs) are, of course, only one facet of the delusional outer limits within which they abide.
In its 'Powering Australia Plan', the Australian government projects that the proportion of light EVs on the road will increase from 0.2 percent now to 15 percent (i.e., to 3.8 million vehicles) by 2030. Financial incentives and new charging infrastructure will do the trick, apparently. And the infrastructure: 1,800 new public fast-charging stations, and 100,000 businesses and 3.8 million households with charging capacity. All these figures have been pulled out of a hat.
For example, 3.8 million households represent about 35 percent of the projected number of about 11 million Australian households by 2030. I’ll guess none of the 43 households in my aging building will have one; and ditto for lots of other aging apartment buildings, and the millions of houses without garages. As it is, the vast majority of electric cars on the road are swanning around posh inner-city suburbs; a few miles at a time. You won’t find many, if any, in working-class suburbs and none traveling the 550 miles between Sydney and Melbourne. Let’s face it, the worthless promises of politicians have reached new heights of self-deception.
Jack Dunphy wrote about the complicity of our governing elites in the present rise in public disorder which has become especially pronounced since the summer of 2020.
The Decline and Fall of the Blue Wall
For most of my career, even as crime surged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as the bodies piled up in the morgues and it seemed America’s cities were in irreversible decline, we who worked the streets could find strength in the knowledge that among the political and media elites there was still a desire for improvement if only a way to achieve it could be found.
And a way was found. Developments in law enforcement such as those instituted by the New York Police Department under William Bratton proved that, as Bratton himself is fond of saying, “Cops count.” In 1990, the NYPD investigated a horrifying 2,245 murders. In ten years the number had been reduced to 649, and in 2017 the figure dropped below 300 for the first time since 1951, a remarkable achievement in a city of 8 million people. Cops found great satisfaction in bringing this about.
Now murder and a generalized disorder are again on the rise, in New York City and many other places. But, unlike in the ‘90s, when there was broad societal agreement that something needed to be done to stem the bloodshed, today’s elites turn a blind eye to the chaos on America’s streets in the name of “social justice” and “equity” ….
So the cop on the street, faced with this escalation of disorder, is left to wonder what he is supposed to do about it. In years past, he was told to go out and find the shooters, robbers, burglars, and car thieves inflicting themselves on their law-abiding neighbors and, if the provable facts allowed, arrest them. Today, a cop who happens upon someone wanted for a crime, or whom he suspects is unlawfully carrying a gun, confronts the suspect at his peril.
Not merely the physical peril posed by a fight or a shooting, for which the cop has trained, but the peril to his and his family’s future should the arrest unfold in anything but a manner preferred by the elites who hold him in contempt….
With this in mind, in ever more instances the cop elects to go on his way and allow the suspected lawbreaker to do likewise. In short, the risk-reward calculations favor the criminal, and the results are unsurprising and everywhere to behold.
And, finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy bought a sandwich and went to a party for London Hat Week.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Beefing
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Rich Trzupek, Joan Sammon, and Tom Finnerty, as well as another excerpt from our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!