Sept. 17, 2019
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
In the flash of an eye, the world’s oil supply was cut by 5 percent. The world needs more oil, but Green New Deal Dems say no.
In the flash of
an eye, the world’s oil supply was reduced by 5 percent after the Sept. 14
attacks on Saudi Arabian oil facilities including the Abqaiq oil processing
facility, which sent oil prices soaring. President Donald Trump has responded
by releasing reserves while his opponents in the Democratic presidential
primary have been pushing an agenda of banning hydraulic fracturing that
produces shale oil, off-shore drilling and ending fossil fuels altogether,
which would surely reduce global supplies and create an overnight energy and
financial crisis, pushing prices even higher. The lesson here is that the U.S.
needs to be prepared for supply disruptions. We need redundancy. Oil shale
production and supporting off-shore drilling accomplishes that, but Democrats
are now broadcasting that that can all change with just one election with the
Green New Deal.
Cartoon: Frontrunner
Is Joe Biden’s
lead in the Democratic primary on life support?
Latest fake news allegations against Justice Kavanaugh are an act of malice
Americans for
Limited Government President Rick Manning: “The New York Times and all of its
sycophants in the media need to be held accountable for publishing clearly
scurrilous sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett
Kavanaugh. The fact that the alleged
‘victim’ does not remember anything and the story was obviously made up out of
whole cloth by a source with a political ax to grind was known by the authors
of the premeditated attack piece. Yet,
these New York Times reporters published the smear anyway knowing that it would
travel around the world before the truth could get out. This was an act of
malice and the Times, which has embarked on a publicly acknowledged campaign to
stop President Trump at any cost, needs to pay the price for failing to meet
the journalistic standards of a high school newspaper.”
Peter Wood: Teaching that America is hopelessly racist
“The campaign to
delegitimize America, to recast it as a uniquely evil force for slavery and
oppression, has triumphed in a myriad of classrooms in American higher
education. But it has triumphed even more with college administrators. The vast
majority of the bureaucrats who choose common readings, plan events and invite
speakers to campus are already true believers in The 1619 Project. The deans,
provosts, and presidents acquiesce in their initiatives, where they do not
support them. The institutional stamp of higher education tells incoming
college students throughout the country: We believe in the Black Legend of
American villainy. And you should too.”
In the flash of an eye, the world’s oil supply was cut by 5 percent. The world needs more oil, but Green New Deal Dems say no.
By Robert Romano
In the flash of an eye, the world’s oil supply was reduced by 5 percent after the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi Arabian oil facilities including the Abqaiq oil processing facility, which sent oil prices soaring in trading on Sept. 16.
Houthi rebels from Yemen have claimed credit for the attacks while the U.S. has pointed the finger at Iran. Wherever the blame lies, the sudden disruption of oil supply lines and the subsequent sharp rise of prices underscores the overall fragility of global energy supplies. Saudi Arabia has said it will offset the loss of production — viewed at about 5.7 million barrels a day — by releasing reserves. President Donald Trump has similarly stepped in to open up U.S. reserves.
In the meantime, Trump’s opponents in the Democratic presidential primary have been pushing an agenda of banning hydraulic fracturing that produces shale oil, off-shore drilling and ending fossil fuels altogether with the Green New Deal, which would surely reduce global supplies even further and create an overnight energy and financial crisis, pushing prices even higher.
The U.S. is now the number one oil producer in the world at 12.4 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, built off of the oil shale boom. That’s more than Russia and Saudi Arabia, which each produce a little more than 10.5 million barrels a day, and makes up about 15 percent of the world’s 82.5 million barrels per day needed to keep markets stable.
And with about half of Saudi Arabia’s processing capacity now in flames, about 5 percent of global production, the U.S. share of global supplies suddenly just became that much more essential. The world’s population of 7.7 million depends on constant supplies of commodities like food and energy, the level of production of which are the products of the industrial revolution and globalization of the economy. It’s not going away and, if anything, needs to get bigger in order to offset future disruptions.
Just a mere 5 percent disruption of global oil supplies, even if temporary, will be enough to have an impact on prices for weeks and months ahead. In the 2000s the growth of China and the weak dollar were enough to send oil soaring to $150 a barrel.
This demonstrates that the Green New Deal, fossil fuel bans and other varieties of foolishness we are seeing from radical environmentalists, if ever implemented, will have predictable market-driven consequences that will make the 1973 Arab oil embargo or the 2008 oil bubble look tame in comparison.
Prices might have risen anyway with the strong dollar peaking and Fed easing upon us with more interest rate cuts on the horizon, with the next cut expected to come at the Sept. 19 meeting of the Federal Reserve. The bombing of the Saudi oil facilities just iced it.
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning blasted Democrats’ plans, especially in light of the attacks on Saudi oil facilities in statement, saying, “The attack on the Saudi oil fields demonstrates to Americans who are too young to remember the 1973 oil embargos just how delicate the supply lines of oil are in the Middle East. While much of the world’s energy supply may be thrown into turmoil as a result of these attacks, with higher prices, the United States stands as a nation prepared to meet these energy challenges and higher demand — due to energy independence achieved under President Trump. Hydraulic fracturing is the reason why America is part of the solution to this energy supply attack, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s dangerous promise to end fracking, and all Democratic candidates who want to end off-shore drilling, can now be seen for the foolish pandering they represent. While Warren pretends to be a serious candidate for president, no one who would put America at the mercy of Middle East oil supplies can ever again be trusted in the White House.”
Global markets are not just a light switch that environmental activists can just swoop in and shut off — as much as they would like to — without dramatic, sometimes catastrophic consequences ensuing.
Level-headed people look at these circumstances and say that as a world-leading producer, we have an obligation to fill market demand.
Environmental radicals look at the same set of circumstances and argue for what amounts to an economic suicide pact. They see disruptions of supplies as proof that an alternative is needed urgently, even if the current alternatives cannot even meet a fraction of market demands.
The lesson here — the real lesson — is that the U.S. needs to be prepared for supply disruptions. We need redundancy. Oil shale production and supporting off-shore drilling accomplishes that, but Democrats are now broadcasting that that can all change with just one election. Their response to supply disruptions will be to make them worse, no matter how bad it is for the economy.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government and is currently long on oil stocks.
Cartoon: Frontrunner
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
Latest fake news allegations against Justice Kavanaugh are an act of malice
Sept. 16, 2019, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to the latest phony allegations by the New York Times against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh:
“The New York Times and all of its sycophants in the media need to be held accountable for publishing clearly scurrilous sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The fact that the alleged ‘victim’ does not remember anything and the story was obviously made up out of whole cloth by a source with a political ax to grind was known by the authors of the premeditated attack piece. Yet, these New York Times reporters published the smear anyway knowing that it would travel around the world before the truth could get out.
“This was an act of malice and the Times, which has embarked on a publicly acknowledged campaign to stop President Trump at any cost, needs to pay the price for failing to meet the journalistic standards of a high school newspaper.”
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2019/09/latest-fake-news-allegations-against-justice-kavanaugh-are-an-act-of-malice/
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood makes the case that college campuses are radicalizing younger Americans to believe that America is hopelessly racist and must be transformed:
Teaching that America is hopelessly racist is wrong
By Peter Wood
Many more college students have read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ anti-white screed Between the World and Me (2015) than have read, say, works by the Nobel economist Robert Fogel, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (1974) or Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989). I can say that with some confidence. The Open Syllabus Project finds Coates’ book assigned in 783 courses. Fogel’s Time on the Cross is assigned in 22 courses and his Without Consent or Contract in 156 courses. Moreover, Coates’ book is now the second most-assigned book in the country in college summer reading programs.
Coates treats slavery as an institution that was never truly abolished. It continues as the pervasive racism of American society. This rhetorical flourish sells a lot of books today. Fogel, the economic historian, takes on slavery as an appallingly real institution and brings intellectual heft to the task of explaining it.
That contrast is all the more important in light of The New York Times’ plunge into re-educating all Americans about our history through the lens of African American slavery. The Times launched its 1619 Project on August 18 to a great deal of fanfare. 1619 is the year that the first black African slaves landed at Jamestown. It is a noteworthy date, but not quite what the beginning of slavery in the New World or in what would become the United States. The Spanish had brought African slaves long before. And we have at least one account by an early Spanish soldier, Cabeza de Vaca, who was captured and enslaved by Native Americans in the South in the 1520s. Slavery was an indigenous American institution long before Europeans got here.
Be that as it may, the Times wants to reimagine the European version of America as founded on slavery and stained in every possible way by the continuing effects of slavery. This is a political project more than a historical one. Its unacknowledged goal is to taint all opposition to progressive political goals as rooted in the perpetuation of oppression, and perhaps to delegitimize America itself.
The 1619 Project overstates things a bit. Slavery does have lingering consequences, and the economic, cultural, and political history of the country does reflect the awful institution. But the 1619 Project also reduces the lives of African Americans to perpetual victimhood, and it ignores the glorious ideal of freedom in American history. It reverses the traditional conception of America as an exceptional land of liberty to conceive of it as an exceptional land of slavery and oppression.
Four centuries ago, almost every Englishman believed a piece of anti-Spanish propaganda called the “Black Legend.” It presented all Spaniards and all Catholics as uniquely, demonically evil, whose cruelty was proved not least by their barbaric treatment of the Indians. The 1619 Project creates a new kind of Black Legend, which casts America as uniquely, demonically evil.
The Times is calculating that Americans are already primed to believe this new Black Legend. They have been softened up by the pseudo-history of Howard Zinn, whose elaborately distorted vision in A People’s History of the United States has been swallowed whole by millions. (A nod of appreciation is due to Mary Grabar whose new book Debunking Howard Zinn is a long-overdue corrective to the Marxist storyteller.) Others are hoping the 1619 Project will flatten what is left of resistance to anti-American mythmaking in K-12 and college history courses. The new Black Legend is already comfortably ensconced in many of our high schools and colleges. The first book college students read very likely treats it as fact.
One of the contributors to The 1619 Project, Bryan Stevenson, is the head of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is dedicated to releasing innocent people from jail. He’s also the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014), which has been the most popular single college reading for the last three years.
Stevenson wrote the same story for The New York Times and for Just Mercy: America’s justice system is racist to the core, and it aims at torturing blacks. Stevenson sees no distance between a racial lynching of an innocent man and the sober desire for justice by a judge and a jury following the law. He thinks “mass incarceration” is the result of racist animus—not a response to the unfortunate reality of too many millions of Americans choosing to commit crimes and even more unfortunate reality that a disproportionate number of those Americans who commit crimes are African American. He has no conception that it is a terrible injustice for the victims of criminals to see criminals fail to receive justice for their crimes. And he never even acknowledges that there might be an argument against him. He simply assumes that reading the book will get you ready to sign up for social justice activism, in service of the Equal Justice Initiative.
Stevenson’s Just Mercy has already been assigned to 94 colleges in the five years since it was published—it’s already the third-most frequently assigned book since 2007, and it’s on track to be the most widely assigned in a few years. In the very first year after it came out, it was the second-most popular assignment—assigned 16 times in 2015. It was the single most popular assignment in the last three years—assigned 31 times in 2016, 29 times in 2017, and 18 times in 2018. Every single one of those 94 colleges is already signed up for The 1619 Project.
So are the 54 colleges that have assigned as pre-freshman reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. So are the 13 colleges that assigned Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2009). So are the ten colleges that have already assigned Angie Thomas’ Black-Lives-Matter young adult novel The Hate U Give (2017).
The campaign to delegitimize America, to recast it as a uniquely evil force for slavery and oppression, has triumphed in a myriad of classrooms in American higher education. But it has triumphed even more with college administrators. The vast majority of the bureaucrats who choose common readings, plan events and invite speakers to campus are already true believers in The 1619 Project. The deans, provosts, and presidents acquiesce in their initiatives, where they do not support them. The institutional stamp of higher education tells incoming college students throughout the country: We believe in the Black Legend of American villainy. And you should too.
After all, the editors at The New York Times who commissioned The 1619 Project learned their defamatory history in college. The 1619 Project isn’t just a fire bell in the night that warns of distant dangers. The American Black Legend has already taken over much of our colleges, and The New York Times is just following their lead.
We must act now to reclaim our colleges and our history if we are not to lose our country.
