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Hidden among the many wonderful things to see during my first Moscow visit, was the disturbing sight of old Russian women standing along buildings on Gorky street as it left Red Square and passed the Lenin Library and the Hotel Moscow. It was December 1991 and cold and snowing, They stood in the lee of the buildings and offered items for sale to passersby. Pathetic things they hoped would attract interest and money. One woman held out a spoon. Another, a bar of soap. They stood shuffling their feet warding off the cold, their heavy coats covered in snow. This was the new Russia.
Teenagers on Arbat Street’s open market had things to sell too and they could instantly spot westerners trailing the scent of hard currency They claimed they were “biznessmean” in a Freudian slip of pronunciation that promised very little for those in Russia too poor and too old to surf the trends engulfing their country. Those Russian women came to mind when reading Daniel Greenfield’s post on The Environmental Apocalypse. The progress of civilization is the growth of human efforts to find ways to protect those least able to cope. But we have become unhinged as the left admits to no limits for their vote buying schemes. Now, in an orgy of progressive environmentalism, our culture creates more spoon sellers. Those Russian women are easy to find in Greenfield’s post.
Early in the morning, while most are still sleeping, groups of elderly Chinese women spread out across city streets. They tear open trash bags, pick through the litter and sort out bottles and cans that come with a deposit. And then they bring them to the local supermarket to a machine that scans and evaluates each can, accepting and rejecting them one by one, and finally printing out a receipt.
The interaction between the elderly immigrant who speaks broken English or the homeless man who is barely holding it together… and the machine is a stark contrast between what the new smart clean green economy pretends to be and what it actually is.
The machine, like so much else that we design, is impressive, but its existence depends on someone digging through the trash with their hands for much less than minimum wage to extract a generally useless item.
The entire bottle economy, which has more than a passing resemblance to the trash sorting operations in the Third World carried out by despised and persecuted minorities, like the Zabbaleen in Egypt, is artificial. The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.
The elderly Chinese women dig through the trash because politicians decided to impose a tax on us and an incentive for them in the form of a deposit. All those useless 1980s laws created a strange underground economy of marginalized people digging through the trash.
Every time politicians celebrate a recycling target met and show off some shiny new machine, hiding behind the curtain are the dirty weary people dragging through the streets at the crack of dawn, donning rubber gloves and tearing apart trash bags. They are the unglamorous low-tech reality of environmentalism.
These are the Green Jobs that aren’t much talked about. They pay below minimum wage and have no workplace safety regulations. They are the Third World reality behind the First World ecology tripe. It’s not that the people who plan and run the system don’t know about them. But they don’t like to talk about them because they come too close to revealing the unsavory truth about where environmentalism is really going.
Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern and progressive. It’s the exact opposite. It’s every bit as modern and progressive as those sacks of cans being hauled by hand through the streets to the machine. …
… Communist modernism was a Potemkin village, a cheap tacky curtain and behind it, the sweating slave and the stench of Babylon. The modernism of the progressive is the same facade covered in sociology textbooks, New York Times op-eds and teleprompter speeches. Behind it lie the ruins of Detroit, tribal violence in the slums of every major city and an economy in which there is no more room for the middle class except as clerks in the government bureaucracy. And it doesn’t end there.
The elderly Chinese woman picking through the trash in search of empty beer bottles isn’t the past. She’s the future. Recycling is big business because the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It’s just one example of an artificial economy and it’s small stuff compared to the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.
The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can’t sleep at night because they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an imminent environmental crisis.
The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power over every man, woman and child on earth. …
… Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn’t even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too many people too comfortable. …… The sustainable logic of the slum that makes us better people by making us more miserable.
The Soviet idea of progress was feudalism dressed up in Socialist red. Environmentalism dresses up feudalism in Green. It seeks to reverse all the progress that we have made in the name of progress. Environmentalism is as sophisticated as a Soviet collective farm, as modern as the homeless people dragging bags of cans along on sticks to feed the machine and as smart as a slum made of trash.
Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches and sustainability is that need to impose progressive misery.
Beneath the glossy surface of environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they must be punished, to become better people.
And the Keystone decision is a part of this. Stephen Moore on how the administration is choking the middle class by selling out to watermelons – people who are green on the outside and red all the way through.
… Obama has made the laughable claim recently that the pipeline would lead to “only 50 permanent jobs.” So a $3 billion multistate pipeline that stretches more than 1,000 miles shouldn’t go forward, because it won’t boost employment permanently? Someone might want to explain to the president that in the private sector there is no such thing as a permanent job. (Those are to be found only in the government.)
We will surely see more of these blue-versus-green economic-development battles emerge in the months and years ahead. Already West Virginia has flipped from Democratic blue to Republican red in recent years because of the Left’s war on coal, while other resource states — including Colorado, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Virginia, and, who knows, maybe even New York — could shift into the red column once the old blue-collar Reagan Democrats realize that the greens who run and now finance the Democratic party have become unhinged, and constitute a clear and present danger to the jobs and livelihoods of middle-class America.
Hollywood elites, and billionaire hedge-fund managers like Tom Steyer, can live with that result. A Pew Research poll has found that Keystone is unpopular with only two demographic groups: Democrats who earn more than $100,000 and Democrats with postgraduate degrees.
But the working class in America that cares a lot more about a paycheck than about stopping the rise of the oceans is tiring of being the frontline victim of this green menace. Barack Obama won the 2012 election because he persuaded middle-class voters that he cares more about them than do the Republicans. The latest Keystone XL pipeline travesty is the most recent evidence that this is a lot of bunk.
Switching gears, we’ll spend some more time on the Court’s affirmative action ruling. Charles Krauthammer sees much to celebrate.
Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court’s ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race.
The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6 to 2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer’s rationale. It couldn’t be simpler. “The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.”
Finally. After 36 years since the Bakke case, years of endless pettifoggery — parsing exactly how many spoonfuls of racial discrimination are permitted in exactly which circumstance — the court has its epiphany: Let the people decide. Not our business. We will not ban affirmative action. But we will not impose it, as the Schuette plaintiffs would have us do by ruling that no state is permitted to ban affirmative action. …
… As with all great national questions, the only path to an enduring, legitimate resolution is by the democratic process.
That was the lesson of Roe v. Wade. It created a great societal rupture because, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, it “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the [abortion] issue.” It is never a good idea to take these profound political questions out of the political arena. (Regrettably, Ginsberg supported the dissent in Schuette, which would have done exactly that to affirmative action, recapitulating Roe.) …
John Fund notes the scatter-brained aspects of Sotomayor’s dissent and Eric Holder’s agreement.
You can often tell when advocates of one side in an argument fear they will ultimately lose. They change their branding. A few years ago, warnings about “global warming” were replaced with scare stories about “climate change.” One reason? The Earth had stopped appreciably warming in the late 1990s, making the change a PR necessity.
Supporters of affirmative action are now signaling similar weakness. What was called “racial quotas” in the 1970s and has been referred to as “affirmative action” since the 1990s is giving way to a new term: “race-sensitive admission policies.” The language shift is telling — race-based preferences are losing intellectual, judicial, and political support. …
… In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder made an eye-opening statement during an appearance at ColumbiaUniversity. In backing racial preferences, he said he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease. . . . The question is not when does [affirmative action] end, but when does it begin. . . . When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”
I submit that many Americans — regardless of race — are increasingly exhausted by what Chief Justice Roberts declared in 2006 was this “sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
It’s clear where Eric Holder would take us — an endless fixation on race that inevitably brings its own racial discrimination. It’s clear Justice Sotomayor would take us in pretty much the same direction. She would just pretty up the “sordid business” by coming up with new euphemisms for it.
Paul Mirengoff has more on Holder and Sotomayor.
As I noted here, Justice Sotomayor dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision upholding what should be a truism: the Constitution permits a state to prohibit race discrimination by public institutions. Sotomayor was joined by the ultra-leftist Justice Ginsburg. However, she failed to persuade the only moderately leftist Justice Breyer, who joined the 6-2 majority.
Attorney General Holder calls Sotomayor’s dissent “courageous.” Her dissent is lots of things — verbose and nonsensical, for example. But it’s difficult to identify a sense in which it is courageous.
Will the dissent bring disapproval from those whose approval Sotomayor values — the mainstream media, academia, and the folks with whom she hangs out in New York and Washington? Of course not; it will be applauded in these precincts.
Will it bring disapproval from Sotomayor’s friends in the Obama administration? Of course not; it will be applauded there too, as Holder’s statement shows.
Will Sotomayor’s dissent cause her to be criticized in her presence by President Obama before a crowd of rowdy politicians and a national television audience? No. Obama reserves that treatment for conservative and center-right Justices.
Will Sotomayor’s dissent cause her taxes to be audited by the IRS? I don’t think so.
To view Sotomayor’s dissent as remotely courageous one must pretend to be living in the America of the 1950s. It’s no coincidence that one must adopt roughly the same pretense to discern any sense in her dissent.
Now the important stuff. Last week we learned beer is good for grilling meat. Today’s great news - chocolate is good for us. NY Times has the story.
In recent years, large-scale epidemiological studies have found that people whose diets include dark chocolate have a lower risk of heart disease than those whose diets do not. Other research has shown that chocolate includes flavonols, natural substances that can reduce the risk of disease. But it hasn’t been clear how these flavonols could be affecting the human body, especially the heart. New findings from Virginia Tech and LouisianaStateUniversity, however, suggest an odd explanation for chocolate’s goodness: It improves health largely by being indigestible. …