Pension Funds, Meet the “Super Bubble”

Earlier this month, outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown predicted “fiscal oblivion” if California’s state and local agencies are not granted more flexibility to modify pension benefits. As if to help Governor Brown make his point, U.S. stock indexes took an obliging plunge. The Dow Jones average cratered in December, dropping nearly 16 percent in three weeks, from 25,826 on December 3rd to a low of 21,792 on December 24th. And whither hence? Nobody knows.

If history and trends are any indication, however, “up” is unlikely. Depicted on the chart below is the performance of the Dow Jones Index from 1995, when the markets began first showing signs of “irrational exuberance,” to the extremely exuberant present day. Clearly shown are the past two bubbles, the internet bubble of 2000, the housing bubble of 2007, and what we may call the “super bubble” or “everything bubble” of 2018.

Dow Jones Stock Index – 1995-2018 

It doesn’t take an economist to notice a pattern here. The Dow Jones Index, which tracks closely with all publicly traded equities in the U.S., more than doubled in the four year heady runup to its January 2000 peak, than went into decline for nearly four years, before doubling again between 2004 and 2007. Then when the housing bubble popped, the Dow went off a cliff, dropping to half its 2007 peak in little over a year. In the ten years since 2009, the Dow has exploded again, tripling to a high of 26,743 in September 2018. What now? Visually, at least, another correction is past-due.

There are all kinds of economic reasons why what is visually indicated on the above graph is exactly what’s going to happen. At best, we may hope for stocks to merely stop going up, which is sort of what happened after the internet bubble popped. But what’s different this time?

One key difference is that this time, lowering interest rates is not an option. In January 2000 the Federal Funds rate was 5.5 percent. By June of 2003 it had dropped to 1.0 percent. When interest rates drop, stocks become relatively better investments than fixed rate investments. Lower interest rates also induce more people to borrow, creating liquidity, stimulating consumer spending, which helps corporate earnings which drives up stock prices. The cause and effect is reflected in the stock market history – by 2003, after lowering interest rates by 4.5%, the stock market finally began to recover.

In October 2006 the rate had risen to 5.25 percent. In September 2007, as home sales were starting to drop, it was lowered to 4.75 percent. When the housing bubble popped, and the stock market crashed, the Federal Reserve responded by steady lowering of the Federal Funds Rate. By December 2016 it had dropped to 0.25 percent, the lowest rate possible. What should be of concern, is that the rate today, 2.5 percent, is only half as high as it was during the past peaks. During the previous two bull markets, the Federal Reserve was able to bounce the rate up to around 5 percent before the bears came calling. This time, assuming we’ve hit the peak, only half that increase, to 2.5 percent, was achievable.

A consequence of low interest rates is more borrowing, which is a good thing if that borrowing stimulates economic growth that translates into investments in productivity. But borrowing has not been used to stimulate productive investments. Instead, much of the corporate borrowing over the past decade has been used to finance stock buy-backs. This is a dangerous strategy, causing short-term growth in earnings per share, but loading debt onto corporate balance sheets that will have to be refinanced at interest rates that are increasing, at the same time as investment in research and modernizing plant and equipment has been neglected.

In recent years, borrowing has also been an overused tool of government, starting with the federal government. Federal borrowing accelerated in mid-2008, and hasn’t slowed down since, climbing to over $21 trillion by the 3rd quarter of 2018. As interest rates rise, servicing this debt will become far more difficult. Meanwhile, all U.S. credit market debt – government, corporate, and consumer – has continued to increase. After dipping slightly to $54 trillion in the wake of the burst housing bubble, it was up to a new high of $68 trillion by the end of 2017.

When interest rates fall, not only is the stock market stimulated. Bonds make payments at fixed rates, so when the market rate drops, the price of these bonds increases, since they can be sold for whatever price will give the buyer the same return as the current market rate. Interest rate reductions also cause housing prices to rise, since when interest rates are low, people can afford bigger mortgages since they will be making lower monthly payments. The opposite is also true, which is unfortunate for investors. All else held equal, rising interest rates means lower prices for bonds and housing.

What does this mean for pension funds?

When the super bubble pops this time, all assets will drop in value. Everything pension funds are invested in, equities, bonds, and real estate, will all drop in value. Even if extraordinary measures are taken to stop the decline – such as the fed purchasing corporate bonds – there will be nowhere to run. Public sector pension funds have not prepared for this day of reckoning. CalPERS, for example, in its most recent financial statements was only 71% funded. That would be ok at the end of a bear market, but at the end of a bull market, that is a disaster waiting to happen.

As it is, using CalPERS as an example, government agencies are going to have to nearly double their annual payments. The primary reason for this increase appears to be so the participating agencies will eliminate their unfunded liability on a 20 year repayment schedule. To-date, agencies were making those repayments on a 30 year term, and using creative accounting to minimize the payment amounts in the early years. CalPERS does not appear to have lowered the amount they are expecting their investments to earn, and this is critical. Because while they have lowered their expected rate of return to “only” 7.0 percent, they have also quietly lowered their long-term assumed inflation rate. This means they are still relying on nearly the same real rate of return for their investments.

When the super bubble pops, the challenges facing pension funds will not be the only economic problem facing Americans. Unwinding the debt accumulated during a credit binge lasting decades will impact all sectors of the economy. The last thing the fragile finances of government agencies will need is even higher required contributions to the failing pension funds. Instead those running these pension systems need to try new approaches, including modifying benefit formulas, but also redirecting investments into local infrastructure projects – projects that not only create jobs, but address practical and urgent goals such as building resilient, upgraded backbones for supplying water, energy, and transportation.

In early 2019, the California Supreme Court is about to issue one of its most consequential rulings ever, in the case CalFire Local 2881 vs. CalPERSIt is possible this ruling will grant government agencies (and voters) more flexibility to modify pension benefits. Such an opportunity cannot come too soon, if fiscal oblivion is to be avoided when the super bubble finally pops.

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The Great Green Wave Hits the American Petri Dish

The Great Green Wave is cresting again. In October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a terrifying special report predicting widespread and imminent climate catastrophe. In November, legacy bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released an equally terrifying “Fourth National Climate Assessment.” In both cases, news reports in establishment media included the usual cataclysmic images; starving children, dying cattle with their ribs poking through their emaciated flesh, monstrous masses of ice cascading into the ocean, and raging wildfire infernos.

Needless to say, none of these media reports bothered to explore for possible examples of exaggerated findings, or selective use of data, or political bias, much less any hidden agendas at work. In terms of providing more moderate interpretations of the data, notwithstanding the dismissive coverage of the Trump Administration’s skeptical reaction, consumers of establishment media got nothing. The BBC has now gone so far as to ban any coverage of climate skepticism; the major search engines and social media merely relegate it to the algorithmic backwaters.

Worse, however, is the establishment media’s complete inability to fathom—and report—just how utterly impossible it is to accomplish the goals supposedly required if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. One economic estimate—outlandish but at least as credible as the temperature forecasts—puts the cost of the U.N.’s climate recommendations at over $100 trillion for a reduction of 0.5 degrees centigrade.

But the experts who craft these alarming reports and temperature forecasts aren’t stupid. So what are they really up to?

Economic Development and Governance in the 21st Century
Anyone who hopes to see all the nations of the world achieve the good life enjoyed by developed nations will not have to dig very deep to recognize how hard it’s going to be to meet that challenge. Economic development requires access to affordable energy. And if everyone in the world consumed just half as much energy as the average citizen in the U.S. consumes, worldwide energy production would have to double. This is an undertaking fraught with danger. What kind of energy? Where?

It is easy to imagine dozens of epic disasters as the nations of the world rush headlong towards producing twice as much energy. Toxic air in Beijing. Oil-soaked death zones in the Niger DeltaDeforestation of thousands of square miles of Indonesian rainforest to grow palms to harvest the diesel oil. Wind turbine blades slicing endangered raptors out of the skies, while on the ground their low frequency sound drives humans mad. A generation of children enslaved and slowly poisoned, as they grub their way through filthy open pit mines looking for veins of cobalt in the rocks. Mountains removed to extract the coal. FukushimaDeepwater HorizonThree Gorges. Shall we double the size of this growing list? And yet we have to.

Less imaginable at first glance, but equally dystopian, are efforts rolling out especially in the developed nations to conserve energy. In every primary category of resource consumption, access to affordable abundance—which used to be a defining characteristic of a developed nation—is disappearing. But how can this relentless quest for efficiency be in dispute? Shall Americans continue to consume nearly 20 times as much energy per capita as Africans? Shall we quadruple or quintuple energy production worldwide, instead of merely doubling it, so that everyone can live more like Americans, and so Americans don’t have to sacrifice anything?

This is the charitable explanation for what’s going on. Many of the smartest climate activists know of the fundamental uncertainty in the climate theories they parrot to the masses. For them, climate alarmism is the Noble Lie. It is the best way to scare nations into cleaning up their ecosystems, developing cleaner sources of new energy, and to adopt technologies to more efficiently exploit scarce resources.

The Green New Deal
No analysis of climate alarmism, however, would be complete without the uncharitable explanation for its strength and momentum.

One honest presentation of the broader leftist agenda behind climate alarmism would be the Green New Deal, a product of the U.S. Green Party. Among other things, this sweeping political platform relies on a carbon tax to eliminate unemployment by guaranteeing government jobs to anyone, and going to “100% clean energy by 2030.”

While America’s far-left Green party may have come up with the idea of a Green New Deal, the Democrats are running with it. Led by the far-Left media darling, incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and encouraged by returning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), what is certain to generate excitement is the carbon tax. But what will fund all of these government jobs and investment in renewables after 2030, when use of fossil fuel will supposedly be eliminated?

The prospect of increasing taxes in the name of environmental protection is nothing new. But the notion that energy production on the planet can double without significant reliance on fossil fuel is ludicrous. There’s nothing wrong with developing cost-effective renewable alternatives to fossil fuel. There’s nothing wrong with adopting innovations that enable more efficient energy use. But why is it being taken to an extreme? Why are the establishment elites encouraging draconian restrictions on resource production and consumption of all sorts—energy, water, land—in a nation like the United States, where there are ample reserves of all three?

Put simply, how does one explain the paradox whereby the most successful capitalists in the history of the world are promoting what appears to be socialism, complete with rationing and redistribution?

One way to make sense out of this is to imagine Western elites—wealthy individuals, multinational corporations and international investors—as engaging in capitalism on a global scale, while at the same time promoting socialism for the populations under them. Whether or not this socialism is desirable depends on individual expectations. If one is accustomed to working and earning a middle class lifestyle in a developed nation, socialism imposes a crippling burden of high taxes and a high cost-of-living. If one is a destitute immigrant who has recently arrived from a nation where political violence, extreme poverty, and rampant corruption are a way of life, socialism in a developed nation is paradise.

The New American Experiment
The Great Green Wave that’s back at the top of the leftist agenda is part of a larger movement to transform America.

The Green New Deal, complete with carbon taxes and a “wealth tax” on fossil-fuel corporations, as a way to deliver guaranteed jobs and other redistributionist benefits, can be sold to voters by joining together several grassroots factions. Leftists, socialists, thoroughly indoctrinated environmentalist zealots, along with millions of immigrants, are all likely to support the Green New Deal.

The power of this new coalition, despite 50 years of nurturing, is only now poised to become the dominant voting coalition in America. A generation of indoctrinated K-12 students have now reached voting age, having spent their entire childhood enduring ghastly accounts of the earth being destroyed by profit mongering oil companies. Two generations of immigrants, most of them lacking advanced job skills and coming from dirt-poor nations, are also now voting by the millions. These cohorts are joining traditional liberals and turning battleground states blue, one at a time.

The burdens of green socialism will fall onto the shoulders of an American middle class that already faces extinction. American taxpayers already support a military that provides security and the rule of law in nearly every corner of the world. American consumers already pay inflated prices for prescription drugs, in order to fund pharmaceutical research and development that translates into these same drugs being profitably sold at a fraction of that price in the rest of the world. The American middle class subsidizes an overbuilt financial sector, a grossly overpriced system of higher education, and a grossly overpriced unionized public sector. Now, they will pay more for every resource—gas, electricity, water, housing, land—in order to stop climate change.

The opportunities presented by taxing and regulating carbon dioxide in all of its direct and indirect forms of utilization might actually mitigate its sheer oppressiveness. But this money isn’t going to be used to create abundance. It isn’t going to be used to build nuclear power plants all over the world to deliver cheap electricity. It isn’t going to be used for dams, aqueducts, and desalination plants, to refill Lake Chad and the Aral Sea, or to irrigate the Sahel and the Deccan Plateau.

No, it’s going to be used to monitor and micromanage the energy and resource consumption of every individual on earth, expressly starting with what will be an increasingly restive multicultural American populace. And what works in the American petri dish will be rolled out around the world.

From the enabling high-tech multinationals, to compliant mega-corporations in the anointed industries, to international financial firms and wealthy global investors, the Green New Deal and its equivalent across other Western nations will be a gold mine. Meanwhile, grassroots beneficiaries will include public sector workers, transnational bureaucrats, the lucky few who work in the correct industries, and those who had nothing before immigrating to the West. The American middle class—exploited, villainized and voiceless— will descend to the global mean.

What Is Worth Fighting For?
Two questions are worth fighting over. First, is the radical curtailment of fossil fuels really the proper course of action?

What if fossil fuels were cleaned up, so, for example, you could breathe healthy air again in Beijing, but not banned? What if the private sector were simply allowed to develop big new infrastructure around the world, sometimes in partnership with governments, sometimes on their own? What if desalination, water reuse and potable recycling, and other new water infrastructure delivered water abundance, all over the world? What if these supposedly forbidden projects were the best way, and maybe the only way, for human civilization to adapt to climate change by creating wealth and freedom?

Second—and more pertinent, since social cohesion is a prerequisite for having sufficient wealth to even consider how to direct it—to what degree do Americans and other citizens of Western nations deserve to have a higher standard of living than people in the developing world?

To hear the leftist argument, they have no right to a better standard of living, and in fact they should do nothing but atone for the misery they’ve inflicted on the world throughout the centuries. But is this accurate? Is this fair? Isn’t environmentalism a product of Western culture, along with republican democracy, capitalist innovation, nearly all advances in technology, and Christian values of charity and tolerance? Should Americans sacrifice their privileges, if they’ve earned them? Cede their national identity? Become hated strangers in their own land?

Here then, is where an uncharitable explanation for the Great Green Wave is called for.

Why aren’t environmentalists focusing on saving the oceans from overfishing, or wildlife in Africa from poachers, or forests in Indonesia from biofuel plantations? Why aren’t they replanting the mangrove forests that used to protect tropical coasts from storm surges? These are existential threats that are based on facts, not theories that are most definitely not beyond serious debate. Why is climate the prevailing yet futile obsession of our time, if not to thwart the aspirations of emerging nations and the mobility of aspiring individuals? Why shouldn’t we use private sector wealth to invest around the world in practical, cost effective, clean energy solutions including fossil fuel, and accelerate the ascendance of all nations into greater freedom and prosperity?

Why?

The reason is power and profit, justified by comforting and virtuous sounding rhetoric. Sold by international elites to whom all that power and profit will accrue, supported by a voting coalition stacked with the duped, the fanatical, the frightened, and the resentful, and swung to ballot victory by manipulable foreign imports.

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The Immutable Algebra of Global Energy and Population Trends

Compassion for a child in distress is automatic. You do everything you can for that child. You use all the resources you can muster. But what if an entire continent is in distress? What if billions of children are in distress?

This is the question for which there are no easy answers. Because across the developing world, billions of people still endure political violence and extreme poverty. The most afflicted nations are almost always the nations experiencing rapid population increase. And the solutions being proposed, mass immigration and rapid transition to renewable clean energy, require authoritarian, global governance that will rob the people of the developed world of their freedom and prosperity, at the same time as it does little or nothing to help the people living in the developing world. But it is the path of least resistance.

The reason for pursuing flawed solutions has more to do with where the global elites mean to apply authoritarian pressure than with whether or not more lives will be improved, or the planet’s climate will be preserved.

Before exploring alternative solutions, the scope of the challenge should be quantified. The best way to do this is by reviewing trends in global population and energy consumption. The figures to be presented draw on two sources, the World Bank Population Estimates and Projections, and the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

GLOBAL POPULATION TRENDS

The two pie charts below depict projected global population by region in 2020, and 30 years hence, in 2050. They are sliced by region, with the categories as defined by British Petroleum in their annual energy review. The “Russosphere” refers to the nations of the former Soviet Union that have not joined NATO. The other categories are fairly self explanatory.

As can be seen, more than half of the world’s 7.7 billion people—4.2 billion—live in the Asia/Pacific region, including the demographic heavyweights of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. As can be seen, five of the other six regions have between 0.3 and 0.5 billion people each. The exception is Africa, with a projected 2020 population of 1.3 billion.

What happens between 2020 and 2050 is extremely significant. First, note the diameter of the second pie chart. The increase in area is exactly proportional to the projected increase in global population between 2020 and 2050. As can be seen, in terms of people inhabiting planet earth, the footprint doesn’t get all that much larger. The world’s population will grow by 25 percent. But where will this growth occur?

The projected population in the Asia/Pacific region will grow by a half-billion, and the population of the six other regions excluding Africa will increase from a total of 2.2 billion in 2020 to 2.5 billion in 2050. Africa, by contrast, will roughly double in population, from 1.3 billion to 2.5 billion. That is, over the three decades between 2020 and 2050, Africa will add 1.2 billion people to its population, whereas the rest of the world combined will add another 0.8 billion.

If projected population growth were spread evenly among nations over the next 30 years, that would pose a different set of challenges. But the problem we face is that between now and 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population growth will occur on the most undeveloped, poverty-stricken continent on earth.

GLOBAL ENERGY TRENDS

To understand just how inadequate current globalist policies are with respect to immigration and energy, especially when facing an exploding population among the most undeveloped nations on earth, global energy trends offer clarity. The next chart shows per capita energy use by region last year. To make the data as intelligible as possible, all energy use—from wood burning to nuclear power—is normalized and expressed in terms of gallons of oil. The differences between regions are profound.

As shown, the average North American—that includes citizens of Canada and Mexico, along with the United States—consumed energy last year equivalent to 1,662 gallons of oil. That’s nearly twice that of the other relatively heavy energy consumers in Europe, the Russosphere, and the Middle East, and it’s nearly four times more than in Central or South America, or in the Asia-Pacific. But take a look at Africa.

The per capita energy consumption by Africans in 2017 was equivalent to 101 gallons of oil. Less than one-sixteenth the amount of energy North Americans consume.

The next chart shows projected global energy use by region in 2020. It is derived from the data shown on the previous pie chart depicting global population by region in 2020, multiplied by per capita energy use by region. The units expressed are “billion tons of oil equivalents,” that is, they depict how much all worldwide energy use would be, if the energy used were exclusively oil.

By the way, for the uninitiated, this is a common practice among energy economists in order to show the relative proportions of energy production and consumption in normalized units. A gallon of gas contains within it 120,429 British Thermal Units, or BTUs, of energy; one kilowatt-hour contains 3,412 BTUs. You can convert all types of energy to, to name a few common examples, BTUs, or joules, or metric tons of oil. Take your pick.

It is obvious from looking at this chart that North America and Europe use far more energy than the global average. Equally obvious is just how small Africa’s slice of global energy consumption is currently, only 3.3 percent of the total despite representing 17.4 percent of global population.

So how will this same chart look in 2050?

GLOBAL ENERGY PRODUCTION NEEDS TO DOUBLE

Below is a pie chart showing one scenario for global energy consumption by region in 2050. First consider the area of the chart, which is exactly twice that of the pie chart for 2020. For the purposes of this analysis, imagine that total energy consumption worldwide will double by 2050. Further suppose that the per capita consumption of energy worldwide will be allocated equally to every human on earth. The implications of these assumptions provide useful insights.

For starters, if energy were consumed equally everywhere, and the total amount consumed were doubled, that would require North Americans to reduce their per capita energy use by 50 percent. In reality, Americans, who consume more energy per capita than Canadians or Mexicans, would have to reduce their per capita energy use by morethan 50 percent.

This bears repeating: If global energy consumption doubled, the per capita energy available worldwide would be less than half of what Americans currently consume.

This isn’t a value judgement. It’s just basic algebra.

Next, note the African slice of this energy consumption pie for 2050. At the energy equivalent of 6.9 billion tons of oil, for the Africans in 2050 to enjoy less than half as much energy as Americans currently enjoy, they would consume a quantity of energy equal to half of all energy consumed worldwide today. And to accomplish this by 2050, energy consumption in Africa would have to increase by a factor of 36. These are mind-boggling statistics. Yet they perfectly illustrate the magnitude of the development challenge facing Africa, insofar as access to affordable energy is one of the prerequisites to reducing poverty.

RENEWABLES VS ALL OF THE ABOVE

It is into the granite face of these immutable demographic and economic facts that the agenda of the renewables lobby collides. Global population and energy trends indicate that the production of energy will need roughly to double in the next 30 years in order to better assure a peaceful evolution of the most economically and politically fragile regions in the world.

The next pie chart, resized down to the 2020 projected total global energy consumption equivalent to 14.4 billion tons of oil, depicts renewables as producing a 0.8 billion-ton-oil equivalent of the total, or 5.6 percent. This 2020 projection, by the way, relies on continued rapid growth of renewables over the next few years, based on the increase of 16.6 percent between 2016 and 2017. In 2017, renewables only provided 3.6 percent of total global energy. These 2020 projections are a best case scenario.

Now imagine this pie chart again doubled in size. Imagine renewables providing 100 percent of this total—the equivalent of 26.7 billion tons of oil. Does that sound ridiculous? Maybe it does, but going “100 percent carbon free” by 2045 is the goal of recent legislation in California. To do this worldwide between 2020 and 2050 would require renewables to increase by a factor of 34 (from 2017 levels, 55).

Imagine wherever you see one windmill, there are 50. Imagine wherever you see a stretch of open space covered with photovoltaics, you see 50 times that much area so covered. Imagine the footprint of these devices, their cradle-to-grave environmental impact. Their contribution to the heat-island effect. Their contribution to avian slaughter, their consumption of land and air. Imagine the ecological impact of producing, maintaining, and reprocessing batteries capable of storing tens of thousands of gigawatts, all over the world. Imagine the cost.

Fact is, we are not going to run out of fossil fuels. At current rates of consumption, proven reserves of oil will last another 179 years; natural gas, 54 years; coal, 505 years. Over the past several years, these reserve ratios, reported on the basis of proven, economically recoverable reserves of fossil fuel resources, have been increasing, not decreasing. “Proven” reserves of conventional fossil fuel will continue to increase into the foreseeable future, without even accounting for vast deposits of so-called unconventional reserves such as methane hydrates. Doubling energy production worldwide within 30 years is a daunting challenge. It is impossible quickly to achieve that goal without fossil fuel, and concern about running out is unfounded.

NO SOLUTIONS ARE EASY

It goes beyond the scope of this analysis thoroughly to assess the cost and environmental impact of installing wind and solar systems, along with grid upgrades and mega-storage. Suffice here to say their environmental impact, their scalability, their sustainability, their practicality, and their cost are all problematic.

Similarly, it goes beyond the scope of this analysis properly to debunk the climate hysteria that is used as cover for this astonishingly flawed approach to delivering adequate energy worldwide. But given the incendiary nature of any flirtation with climate change “denial,” here are links to a few noteworthy climate contrarians: Jo NovaJudith CurryRoger Pielke Jr.Marc Morano, the Heritage Foundation’s Environment website, JunkScience.com, the Science and Environmental Policy ProjectWatts Up With That, and Bjorn Lomborg. Please note: these websites range from blatantly insouciant to eminently measured, but all of them offer valuable information.

It is necessary, however, to connect climate alarmism not only to flawed energy policies, but also to futile immigration policies.

The argument goes something like this: Because imperialist Western nations rapaciously exploited resources in the developing world, they impoverished these nations. At the same time, the Western nations burned fossil fuel, which created droughts and extreme weather in the developing nations, which further worsened their plight. For these reasons, Western nations must admit refugees from developing nations, because if the West had left these countries alone and if the West had not ruined their climates, these nations would be thriving. At the same time, and for the same reasons, Western nations must pay reparations to developing nations, in order for them to recover from the damage caused by the West.

There are two mind-numbingly obvious flaws to this argument, even if you agree with its premises. First, the West cannot possibly absorb hundreds of millions of immigrants. Second, “reparations” in the form of foreign aid, at least to-date, are the real reason the populations in these nations continues to explode. But to propose alternatives, an uncomfortable fact has to be confronted. Africa is a welfare continent, and welfare for Africa has failed.

AFRICA – THE WELFARE CONTINENT

Most evidence gathered over the past 60 years suggests that Africa is a welfare continent in some of the worst connotations of that term. For example, the average number of children in Somalia in 1960 was 7.3, but by the year 2000 that average had actually climbed to 7.6, suggesting that Western food aid and Western medicine lowered the death rate, and lowered infant mortality, but accomplished little in terms of female emancipation, or nurturing indigenous prosperity that correlates with lower birthrates. Somalia is typical.

Burgeoning Nigeria, a nation projected to have 410 million citizens by 2050, saw average fertility decline only slightly, from 6.4 in 1960 to 6.1 in 2000. Fertility in Ethiopia, destined to have nearly 200 million inhabitants by 2050, went from 6.9 in 1960 to 6.5 in 2000. Average fertility in tiny Uganda, where more than 105 million people are expected to reside by 2050, went from 7.0 in 1960 to 6.9 in 2000. Estimates for 2020 are just that: estimates. There is no hard evidence that the population rate of increase in sub-Saharan Africa will slow sufficiently for Africa’s projected population in 2050 to “only” reach 2.5 billion.

The ironic reality is that Africa quite likely would have been better off if no foreign aid, at least as it was formulated, had reached its shores after 1960. Not only did foreign aid play a vital role in enabling Africa’s population to have already more than quintupled since then and now, but to the extent that foreign aid was feeding people in nations that should have been developing their own rich agricultural potential, or providing medical treatment to people in nations that as a consequence had less incentive to train their own doctors, the aid instead went into the pockets of corrupt dictators who had no interest to invest in a brighter future for their nations.

RETHINKING FOREIGN AID, FOREIGN INVESTMENT, AND ENERGY POLICIES

The hard choice comes down to how the powerful Western nations want to apply their wealth and influence to help humanity and heal the planet.

The path we’re on requires shoveling billions in food aid and medical aid to developing nations, with the utterly unsustainable result being exploding populations in societies that don’t evolve and advance internally, because they don’t have to.

The path we’re on requires a parallel campaign to import as many refugees as possible from these developing nations, with the only result being increasing economic burdens on the host nations, and increasing political and cultural conflict in the host nations, with negligible quantitative impact on the destitute and expanding populations of the source nations.

The path we’re on demands a preposterous renunciation of fossil fuel, despite fossil fuel currently providing 85 percent of all global energy, despite the fact that fossil fuel will remain cheap and abundant for at least another generation, if not much longer, and despite the fact that global energy production needs to double in the next 30 years, and nobody has any idea how else that can be accomplished.

Globalism, which underlies these supranational strategies, especially in the context of climate change and immigration, has become a particularly malevolent version of imperialism turned inward. It is an authoritarian response to challenges that are indeed existential—exploding populations of destitute nations, an insatiable global appetite for more energy, and environmental degradation. But it is precisely the wrong response. What happened?

The reason globalism has turned against the populations of developed nations is because that is the path of least resistance. To intervene in Africa, or Honduras, for that matter, with solutions that would work, would revive accusations of imperialism, while simultaneously enraging environmentalists. It is easier for Western elites to blame their own societies for the misery in the developing world. It is easier to import people from the developing world, saturating them with anti-West, redistributionist propaganda, and to bring enough of them in to change the political equation in those nations forever. This strategy is the easiest path towards granting the Western elites carte blanche to continue down the path we’re on. But it’s the wrong path.

The effect of these policies, already well underway, is to exploit the populations of the developed nations, artificially inflating the prices they pay for everything; energy, water, transportation, housing, land, in the name of social equity and saving the planet. The benefit to the elites who own the artificially constrained productive assets is more profit—as costs remain flat and competitive supplies are restricted, profits go up. That is happening today.

The entire scheme is dangerously untenable. Eventually people in the developed nations will rebel—both against the engineered scarcity and against each other in a needlessly fractured culture. And eventually people in developing nations will starve by the millions, if not billions, as Western food and medical aid cannot keep pace with rampant population growth.

Those worried about the climate consequences of the alternative strategy—competitive abundance—should ask themselves what’s worse: a climate that may warm incrementally, possibly due in part to burning of fossil fuel, or another 2 billion people, desperate and destitute, stripping the rainforests for fuel, and wiping out the last great remnants of wild game for the protein.

Western elites must support responsible but competitive and accelerated development of all natural resources, instead of pretending that scarcity will further the goals of social equity and environmentalism. The prosperity that ensues will lead to lower birthrates and urbanization, taking pressure off wildernesses. The increased wealth will fund environmental mitigation.

Western elites must accept the inaccurate but virulent moral opprobrium that will accompany actually investing in places like Africa, as opposed to merely sending food and medical aid. They must embrace compassionate nationalism. They must accept alternatives to the de facto nihilism of mass immigration.

Throughout the developing world, and especially in Africa, Western elites must invest in clean fossil fuel, electricity grids, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, inter-basin water transfers, heavy industry, aquaculture, mega-cities, and universities. To protect their investments, they may have to negotiate charter cities or charter regions with the host nations, where Western laws will be enforceable by Western nations. Achieving stability in these areas won’t be easy. It will invite accusations of imperialism. It may also enable a bright future for not millions, but billions of children.

And maybe it won’t work. But it’s better than the path we’re on.

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The Varieties and the Potential Impact of Post-Janus Litigation

The landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in the Janus vs AFSCME case has given government workers the right to not only refuse union membership, but to refuse to pay any dues or fees to that union. In the wake of this ruling, new lawsuits have been filed on behalf of plaintiffs who allege the unions are attempting to circumvent the Janus ruling.

Enforcing Provisions of the Janus Ruling

A notable example of such a case is Few vs UTLA, In this case, the plaintiff, Thomas Few, is a special education teacher in Los Angeles. Few was told that he could end his membership in the United Teachers of Los Angeles union. But even as a nonmember, the union told him that he would still have to pay an annual “service fee” equivalent to his union membership dues. Few’s position, which is likely to be upheld, is that he cannot be compelled to pay anything to a union he does not choose to join, regardless of what the payment is called.

This lawsuit and others are likely to ensure that the Janus ruling is enforced. The practical result will be that government unions lose some of their members, and some of their revenue. But how many? After all, there is a valid economic incentive for public employees to belong to their unions. In California, unionized state and local workers earn pay and benefits that average twice what private sector workers earn.

For this reason, most people refusing union membership will be doing so for ideological reasons. They will find their objections to the political agenda of these unions to be more compelling than the economic reasons to support them. But there are additional ways the unions compel public employees to remain members.

For example, in some cases, within the same bargaining unit, unions will negotiate pay and benefit packages for their members that are more favorable than the pay and benefit packages they negotiate for the non-members. In some cases in academia, only union members are permitted to sit on faculty committees that determine curricula and hiring decisions.

Challenging Exclusive Representation

This right to exclusive representation is the next major target of public sector union reformers. They argue that it is unconstitutional for public sector unions – whose activity the Janus ruling verified is inherently political – to advocate on behalf of non-members, or to represent non-members, or to exclude non-members from participating in votes or discussions on policy, or to deny non-members the same negotiated rates of pay and benefits as members, or, possibly, all of the above.

Just filed this week in the US Supreme Court is the case Uradnik vs IFO, which worked its way through the lower courts in under a year. It is possible it will be heard in the 2019 session. This case calls for an immediate end to laws that force public-sector employees to accept a union’s exclusive representation.

Kathleen Uradnik, a professor of political science at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, alleges that her union (“IFO” or Inter Faculty Organization) “created a system that discriminates against non-union faculty members by barring them from serving on any faculty search, service, or governance committee, and even bars them from joining the Faculty Senate. This second-class treatment of non-union faculty members impairs the ability of non-members to obtain tenure, to advance in their careers, and to participate in the academic life and governance of their institutions.”

There is a strong possibility that within a few years, if not much sooner, this case will be heard and ruled on by the US Supreme Court in favor of the plaintiff. If so, the future of public sector unions will be altered in ways even more significant than Janus. Unions will be prohibited from discriminating in any way against non-members who are part of their bargaining unit. They also will be powerless to stop public employees from withdrawing completely from their bargaining unit to – gasp – represent themselves in salary and benefit negotiations, something that professionals in the private sector have always done.

The Impact of Non-Exclusive Representation

An impact of a favorable Uradnik vs IFO ruling that would have even greater consequences would be if it enabled the emergence of competing unions. What if two or more unions represented a bargaining group? What if a super-union emerged whose membership welcomed government workers from an entire state, or entire profession, or the entire nation. What if these super-unions embraced a political agenda that ran counter to the left-wing agenda that has dominated public sector unions for decades?

The possibilities are tantalizing.

What if faculty members in America’s colleges and universities had the option to join a conservative union with a national membership that advocated a return to pro-Western college instruction, an end to reverse discrimination, a restoration of academic merit as the sole criteria for admission and graduation, and the abolition of divisive courses of study that offer no useful skills? What if conservative faculty members who have been silent all these years had the power of a national union to protect them from the Left?

What if K-12 teachers across America had a national union to protect them when they objected to curricula designed to turn immigrant children against the people and traditions of their host culture? What if police and firefighters across America had a national union that advocated unequivocally for a merit-based system of immigration? What if civil engineers across America had a national union that was implacably opposed to the environmentalist extremism that has doubled the cost of infrastructure projects and quadrupled the time it takes to complete them?

Enforcing Janus will begin to undermine public sector union power, which is deployed almost exclusively in the service of the Left. Enforcing Uradnik may actually create a balance of power between public sector unions that lean Left vs Right, and that, in turn, would represent a seismic shift in the political landscape of America. At the least, it would neutralize the tremendous boost that public sector unions have given the political Left in America. At most, it might create a hitherto unthinkable consensus in America that public sector unions are indeed inherently political, and have far too much political influence, and must be subject to draconian restrictions including losing the right to collectively bargain, if not complete abolition.

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California’s Rigged Election Process is Coming to America

The conventional wisdom of the experts who monitor elections in America is unvarying: Voter fraud is statistically insignificant. These sanguine claims are made despite the fact that internal controls are often so poor, or even nonexistent on election integrity, that it is nearly impossible to know if voter fraud has even occurred. In every critical area – voter identification, voter registration, duplicate voting, absentee ballots, ineligible voting, ballot custody, ballot destruction, counterfeit ballots, voting machine tampering – gaping holes exist that invite systemic fraud. But so what? How relevant is voter fraud, if the entire system is already rigged to favor one party over the other?

Come to California to see what’s going to roll out across America in time to guarantee a progressive landslide in 2020. It may be legal. But it’s so rigged it would make Boss Tweed blush.

When planning for the November 2018 election, California’s Democrats didn’t just aim to pad their supermajority in the State Legislature. They weren’t going to be satisfied with a sweep of every elected state position, including Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Controller, Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner, and Superintendent of Public Instruction. They knew they could do that, but they aimed higher. They were bent on eliminating every Republican Congressman they possibly could, and they did pretty well in that. Going into the 2018 election California’s Republican Congressional Caucus had 14 members. After the election, there were only 7 left.

The way they did this was to pass laws designed to rig the system.

Three laws in particular combined to stack the deck against Republicans. First, the Motor Voter law was passed. This meant that as soon as any California resident acquired or renewed their driver’s license or state ID, they were automatically registered to vote. Second, the state legislature authorized counties to automatically send absentee ballots to voters, even if they had not requested those ballots. Third, the rules governing ballot custody were changed so that anyone could turn in absentee ballots, not just the actual voter.

The opportunities presented by these three laws were fully exploited by Democrats. According to a Republican campaign worker who operated in one of the Orange County congressional districts where an incumbent Republican was narrowly defeated by a Democratic challenger, for a week prior to November 6th, the Democrats had over 1,000 people on the ground, going door to door, collecting ballots. Armed with precise voter information, they only knocked on the doors of registered Democrats, and in thousands of cases, they actually collected the ballots and brought them to a polling center for the voter.

According to Orange County GOP chairman Fred Whitaker, 250,000 ballots were dropped off on election day. The actual amount of harvested votes may have been much higher, since harvesting was occuring for weeks prior to the election. In Orange County, out of 1.1 million ballots cast, 689,756, or 62 percent, were “vote-by-mail” ballots.

This is not your ordinary get-out-the-vote effort. For each congressional district in play, the cost per thousand full-time paid vote harvesters was approximately $125,000 per day. Tens of millions were spent by the Democrats, and it made the difference in several congressional races. This process of vote harvesting swept across California, funded by well-heeled public sector unions (which collect dues in excess of $800 million per year in California), and by leftist billionaires such as California’s own Tom Steyer.

To be fair, Republicans could have taken advantage of these same corrupt laws to harvest votes from registered Republicans. But not only did the Republicans rely primarily on a vastly outnumbered handful of unpaid volunteers, they didn’t even bother to provide their volunteer canvassers with up-to-date data in the phone apps they were using to determine which voting households to approach.

California’s Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, quoted by Politico, reacting to charges that the Democrats stole close races, said, “Our elections in California are structured so that every eligible citizen can easily register, and every registered voter can easily cast their ballot.”

You can say that again. In a scathing commentary on just how rigged California’s election laws have become, former California State GOP Chair Shawn Steel wrote, “California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule.” In addition to automatic voter registration, automatic sending of absentee mail-in ballots, and legalized vote harvesting, Steele itemized additional ways the Democratic legislature has rigged elections in California.

They have legalized pre-registration for 16 and 17 year olds, based on the accurate assumption that these youths, products of leftist indoctrination in California’s K-12 public school system, will vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. They have legalized the right for convicted felons and, in some cases, prison inmates to vote, based on the accurate assumption that these cohorts tend to favor Democrats. They have even passed laws in some California cities that permit non-citizens to vote in local elections.

There’s more. California’s legislature passed a law that requires a mailed ballot merely to be postmarked by election day. These ballots then have over a month to get counted. They have also permitted “conditional ballots,” wherein an unregistered voter can decide on election day to vote, and they will be simultaneously registered and handed a ballot. In California, 40 percent of the votes were tabulated after election night. Who were these 41 percent? Why is it they were overwhelmingly supporting Democrats?

The answer to this question casts the entire split between Democratic and Republican voters into a harsh perspective.

What sort of voter needs to be automatically registered instead of taking it upon themselves to sign up?

What sort of voter waits until election day to finally register and vote?

What sort of voter would not vote unless a mail-in ballot was automatically mailed to their home without them even requesting it?

What sort of voter needs someone to come to their home, remind them to vote, then collect their ballot and bring it to a polling place for them?

What sort of voter is your average convicted felon, or prison inmate?

The Democrats passed laws in California that allowed them to harvest hundreds of thousands of votes, if not millions of votes, from people who are the least engaged politically. They have built a system that harvests millions of votes from the most apathetic, most easily manipulated, low-information voters in the electorate. And that strategy, because it worked so well, is on its way to every state in America.

Count on it to happen fast – wherever Democrats control a state legislature, California’s new election rules will become law. In those states, using government union money and foot-soldiers, augmented with limitless funds from globalist left-wing billionaires, the Republican party will be wiped out forever. The massacre will not spare countless battleground congressional districts currently held by Republicans.

Is there voter fraud in America? There probably is, because as noted, the process is so riddled with loopholes and weaknesses that statistically significant fraud could be occurring and we would never know. But why rely on just fraud, when you can also rig the laws to harvest millions of votes?

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Alternatives to the Nihilistic Futility of Mass Immigration

In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted mass-starvation by the mid-1970s due to an exploding human population outstripping agricultural capacity. Global population in 1968 was 3.5 billion. Today there are 7.6 billion people living on planet earth. Clearly, Ehrlich’s dire predictions were wrong, but the book was a huge bestseller.

In 1987, author and commentator Ben Wattenberg published The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies? In this prescient book, Wattenberg correctly identified the early signs of what is now widely understood—in every developed nation on earth, birthrates are well below replacement levels. Wattenberg’s book didn’t sell nearly as well as Erlich’s. The truth is, Ehrlich wasn’t entirely wrong. Throughout most of the so-called “developing world,” birth rates remain well above replacement levels.

To illustrate his point, Ehrlich made frequent reference to the “doubling time” of a population. It’s an apt concept because it refutes the argument that human innovation and enterprise can accommodate limitless population growth. In a public lecture at Stanford in the 1970s, Ehrlich drew a grim laugh when he explained that eventually unchecked human population growth would result in a solid sphere of human flesh expanding into the universe at the speed of light.

The fact that population growth rates vary among nations, with extremes at both ends, is not sufficiently acknowledged. It is central to discussions of immigration and refugee policies, environmental health, economic models, and the fate of nations and cultures. Yet despite its centrality, exploring practical solutions on this topic invites accusations of racism, ethno-nationalism, even neo-colonialism.

To explain why this discussion cannot be avoided, Ehrlich’s concepts are useful. And alongside exploring the implications of a population’s doubling time, the implications of a population’s “halving time” shall also be included. To provide an example from each extreme, the following cases use data from Somalia for the high-growth scenario, and Japan for the negative growth scenario.

Somalia currently has a population of 11.3 million. On average, women have 6.2 childrenInfant mortality is 8 percentLife expectancy is 55. Their population is projected to increase to 27 million by 2050, a doubling time of under 30 years. At this rate, in just 800 years there would be a Somali standing on every square foot of land area on Earth including Antarctica. In other words, there would be 1.5 trillion Somalis. Can human innovation accommodate this? Perhaps. With high-rise cities and colonies throughout the solar system, why not? But where does this end?

It has to end somewhere. Using Ehrlich’s approach, to visualize what a doubling time of 30 years means, and taking into account the average human body consumes two-cubic feet, within 3,000 years, there would be a solid ball of Somali flesh extending to just beyond the orbit of Jupiter, nearly a billion miles in diameter. In 5,000 years this cosmic flesh ball would exceed the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. And within 10,000 years—a span of time that is neatly symmetric with recorded human history—there would be a solid ball of human protoplasm expanding at the speed of light in all directions, on track to absorb the entire known universe.

Based on Japan’s projected population pyramid in 2050, where the population of Japanese aged 75-79 is expected to be more than twice as numerous as those under the age of five, Japan’s population will drop by 50 percent every 70 years. This means that in less than 2,000 years there will be only one Japanese person left in the world. And to extend the metaphor, in less than 5,000 years, what is left of the Japanese people will occupy the volume of one human ovum. The Japanese will disappear into nothingness.

How Japan Copes With Population Decline
These comparisons, while mathematically accurate, are hypothetical to the point of absurdity. But the consequences of these trends are relevant now. How these demographic realities are dealt with in the coming decades will, perhaps more than anything else, define the type of global civilization we leave our children and grandchildren. Examining the policy response by the Japanese to their population decline is useful, since Japan is the only nation on earth with both a homogenous population and a strict policy against mass immigration.

The Japanese have countered their population decline by becoming world leaders in robotics. Their economy, while superficially considered weak due to high debt and monetary deflation, is actually quite robust by other standards. Despite recent setbacks, the Japanese have a history of trade surpluses, meaning their debt is primarily held internally. And because their population is in slow decline, their housing and infrastructure spending is limited to maintenance and upgrades. Their productivity and innovation remain among the highest in the world.

Japan is pioneering an economic model that adapts to a stable, declining population. While this is not necessarily something all nations must accept, it offers important tips for the future. Moderate population growth probably can continue indefinitely, as humanity continues to urbanize and begins to harvest resources elsewhere in the solar system. What is unsustainable and unacceptable, however, is for human populations, anywhere, to continue to double every 30 years.

Somalia’s Population Continues to Explode
How Somalia’s population continues to increase at its current rate is instructive, since it applies more generally to dozens of much larger developing nations across mostly Africa and the Middle East. In the context of a GDP of $7.1 billion, Somalia has an annual trade deficit of $2.1 billion. They receive foreign aid equivalent to 27 percent of GDP, along with remittances sent from Somalis living overseas equivalent to 22 percent of GDP. Nearly half of all Somalis, 46 percent of the population, are “food insecure.”

According to the CIA, “Somalia scores very low for most humanitarian indicators, suffering from poor governance, protracted internal conflict, underdevelopment, economic decline, poverty, social and gender inequality, and environmental degradation. Despite civil war and famine raising its mortality rate, Somalia’s high fertility rate and large proportion of people of reproductive age maintain rapid population growth, with each generation being larger than the prior one. More than 60 percent of Somalia’s population is younger than 25, and the fertility rate is among the world’s highest at almost 6 children per woman—a rate that has decreased little since the 1970s.”

With rare exceptions, Somalia’s situation is mirrored across the continent. Africa’s population has exploded as a result of foreign aid in the form of medicine and food, without commensurate advancements in governance, infrastructure, the rule of law, advanced literacy, technical capacity, individual freedom and internal stability, or any of the other hallmarks of developed nations.

Africa is a welfare continent. In 1960, when most African nations achieved independence, the population of the entire continent was a mere 285 million. Today there are 1.3 billion Africans, and by 2050 Africa’s population is estimated to exceed 2.5 billion.

How Cultures are Altered by Foreign Aid and Welfare
Why the Japanese choose to reduce their population, and why the Somalis choose to increase their population so rapidly, cuts to the heart of cultural issues as much as economic ones. As median income rises, birth rates fall. In a nutshell, that explains the declining populations of developed nations.

But what if instead of affluence, guaranteed subsistence is offered? This describes the impact of foreign aid in Africa, and the result is a sustained population explosion. And as aid falters or is interrupted by war and instability, as the efficacy of aid becomes precarious in direct proportion to the additional hundreds of millions each decade who depend on it, the inevitable result is mass migrations. Which is equally problematic.

In developed nations, a comprehensive system of welfare awaits the migrant. This is completely unlike the challenge of indentured servitude, or at the least, freedom devoid of government assistance, which greeted immigrants to America prior to the 1960s. The result is predictable; a population explosion enabled by welfare, and an immigrant culture where entrepreneurial talent makes the logical choice to work in the informal economy to avoid losing the welfare benefits.

Without indulging in conspiratorial fantasies, the incentives to perpetuate mass migrations are obvious. Immigrant communities that depend on government benefits will vote for Democrats. Somali immigrant Ilhan Omar, recently elected to represent Minnesota’s 5th district, adds to the far-left wing of congressional Democrats. Omar, along with far-left Democrat Keith Ellison who narrowly won election as Minnesota’s new attorney general, were elected with overwhelming support from Minnesota’s burgeoning Somali population. Similar patterns are observable from California to Texas to Florida, and everywhere in between. In America, immigrants from developing countries are turning red states blue, and they are turning blue states bluer.

Current Welfare and Foreign Aid policies are Unsustainable
None of this is sustainable. Socialism, whether through foreign aid to developing nations, or through more government benefits approved with the swing voters coming from developed nations, eventually collapses. Productive citizens, outvoted, overtaxed, and disenfranchised in their own nations, lose their incentives to work hard. This leads to several inevitable conclusions.

First, it is beyond the capacity of developed nations to accommodate ongoing migrations from the developing world. Just the increase in Africa’s population each decade exceeds the entire current population of the United States or Western Europe.

Second, current foreign aid policies are completely unsustainable, because they facilitate this population increase without improving any of the other “humanitarian indicators” that might lead to a cultural shift towards lower birth rates.

Third, while it is possible to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, the more people there are, the harder that gets. The environmental impact of Africa’s population quadrupling in the last 60 years, and doubling yet again in the next 30 years, is nothing short of catastrophic.

Solutions Exist, But They Won’t Be Easy
French President Emmanuel Macron has been refreshingly blunt about Africa’s challenges. Speaking in Lagos earlier this year, he said, “I am sorry; if you have seven or eight children per woman, even when economic growth is 5 percent, you will never end the fight against poverty. In Europe, centuries ago we had such large families, but ask the women today. If it is their free choice then I am fine but when this situation is due to forced marriage and no education, it is crazy.”

Paul Ehrlich devoted chapters of The Population Bomb to his ideas for how to lower population growth. None of them anticipated the fact that in developed nations, it turned out that affluence was all it took for birth rates to fall voluntarily. Ehrlich’s prescription for the developing world was harsh. He suggested “triage” where nations on a clear path to self-sufficiency would continue to receive food aid, and nations failing this test would have food aid eliminated. But despite its progressive brutality, Ehrlich was recognizing that foreign aid, just like welfare, is unsustainable when the ratio of payers to recipients is relentlessly narrowing.

What can be done?

One controversial idea that deserves development and discussion is the concept of international charter cities. This would involve a nation or coalition of nations being invited into, say, Mogadishu, to set up a zone administered by the visiting nations, subject to their laws and law enforcement. The resulting stability would encourage foreign investment. Over time, these charter cities could become charter regions, where it is conceivable that migrations could be reversed. For example, Somali expatriates, from St. Paul to Sweden, might welcome the chance to return to their homelands to live and work in an area where economic growth and political stability offer them a return to the land and culture they cherish, without sacrificing the safety they found abroad.

Another idea, equally controversial, would be to use foreign aid funds to instead co-invest with private partners in big infrastructure in Africa. For example, within the security of charter regions, constructing nuclear power plants. Or throughout Africa, to invest in economically beneficial infrastructure projects that violate some environmentalist wishes while fulfilling others. An example of such a tradeoff would be an aqueduct to divert water from the Ubangi River to Lake Chad. Just a small percentage of runoff from the mighty Ubangi would restore Lake Chad, enriching the economy and the ecosystems across the Sahel.

Industrializing Africa might actually save the environment, because with economic development, not only are smaller families a welcome consequence so is a cleaner environment. Another demonstrated result of prosperity is the voluntary migration of people from rural areas into cities. With urbanization, economic growth can reduce the footprint of humanity on Africa’s great wildernesses.

The course currently plotted for humanity is alarming. Mass migrations from the developing world will eventually turn developed nations into socialist police states with diminished economies and shattered dreams. Meanwhile, unchecked population growth in the developing world will create political, economic and environmental havoc. It is time for new approaches and clear thinking.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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California Burning – How the Greens Turned the Golden State Brown

In October 2016, in a coordinated act of terrorism that received fleeting attention from the press, environmentalist activists broke into remote flow stations and turned off the valves on pipelines carrying crude oil from Canada into the United States. Working simultaneously in Washington, Montana, Minnesota, and North Dakota, the eco-terrorists disrupted pipelines that together transport 2.8 million barrels of oil per day, approximately 15 percent of U.S. consumption. The pretext for this action was to protest the alleged “catastrophe” of global warming.

These are the foot soldiers of environmental extremism. These are the minions whose militancy receives nods and winks from opportunistic politicians and “green” investors who make climate alarmism the currency of their political and commercial success.

More recently, and far more tragic, are the latest round of California wildfires that have consumed nearly a quarter million acres, killed at least 87 people, and caused damages estimated in excess of $10 billion.

Opinions vary regarding how much of this disaster could have been avoided, but nobody disputes that more could have been done. Everyone agrees, for example, that overall, aggressive fire suppression has been a mistake. Most everyone agrees that good prevention measures include forest thinning (especially around power lines), selective logging, controlled burns, and power line upgrades. And everyone agrees that residents in fire prone areas need to create defensible space and fire-harden their homes.

Opinions also vary as to whether or not environmentalists stood in the way of these prevention measures. In a blistering critique published earlier this week on the California-focused Flash Report, investigative journalist Katy Grimes cataloged the negligence resulting from environmentalist overreach.

U.S. Representative Tom McClintock, whose Northern California district includes the Yosemite Valley and the Tahoe National Forest, told Grimes that the U.S. Forest Service 40 years ago departed from “well-established and time-tested forest management practices.”

“We replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect,” McClintock explained. “Ponderous, byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to ‘save the environment.’ The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.”

All of this lends credence to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s fresh allegations of forest mismanagement. But what really matters is what happens next.

Institutionalized Environmental Extremism

California’s 2018 wildfires have been unusually severe, but they were not historic firsts. This year’s unprecedented level of destruction and deaths are the result of home building in fire prone areas, and not because of wildfires of unprecedented scope. And while the four-year drought that ended in 2016 left a legacy of dead trees and brush, it was forest mismanagement that left those forests overly vulnerable to droughts in the first place.

Based on these facts, smart policy responses would be first to reform forest management regulations to expedite public and privately funded projects to reduce the severity of future wildfires, and second, to streamline the permit process to allow the quick reconstruction of new, fire-hardened homes.

But neither outcome is likely, and the reason should come as no surprise—we are asked to believe that it’s not observable failures in policy and leadership that caused all this destruction and death, it’s “man-made climate change.”

Governor Jerry Brown is a convenient boogeyman for climate realists, since his climate alarmism is as unrelenting as it is hyperbolic. But Brown is just one of the stars in an out-of-control environmental movement that is institutionalized in California’s legislature, courts, mass media, schools, and corporations.

Fighting climate change is the imperative, beyond debate, that justified the Golden State passing laws and regulations such as California Environmental Quality Actthe Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, and numerous others at the state and local level. They make it nearly impossible to build affordable homes, develop energy, or construct reservoirs, aqueducts, desalination plants, nuclear power plants, pipelines, freeways, or any other essential infrastructure that requires so much as a scratch in the ground.

Expect tepid progress on new preventive measures, in a state so mired in regulations and litigation that for every dollar spent paying heavy equipment operators and loggers to do real work, twice that much or more will go to pay consultants, attorneys, and public bureaucrats. Expect “climate change” to be used as a pretext for more “smart growth,” which translates into “stack and pack,” whereby people will be herded out of rural areas through punishing financial disincentives and forced into densely populated urban areas, where they can join the scores of thousands of refugees that California is welcoming from all over the world.

Ruling Class Hypocrisy

Never forget, according to the conventional wisdom as prescribed by California’s elites, if you don’t like it, you are a climate change “denier,” a “xenophobe,” and a “racist.”

California’s elites enjoy their gated communities, while the migrants who cut their grass and clean their floors go home to subsidized accessory dwelling units in the backyards of the so-called middle class whose taxes pay for it all. They are hypocrites.

But it is these elites who are the real deniers.

They pretend that natural disasters are “man-made,” so they can drive up the cost of living and reap the profits when the companies they invest in sell fewer products and services for more money in a rationed, anti-competitive environment.

They pretend this is sustainable; that wind farms and solar batteries can supply adequate power to teeming masses crammed into power-sipping, “smart growth” high rises. But they’re tragically wrong.

Here the militant environmentalists offer a reality check. Cutting through their predictable, authoritarian, psychotically intolerant rants that incorporate every leftist shibboleth imaginable, the “Deep Green Resistance” website offers a remarkably lucid and fact-based debunking of “green technology and renewable energy.” Their solution, is to “create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary.”

These deep green militants want to “destroy industrial civilization.” At their core, they are misanthropic nihilists—but at least they’re honest. By contrast, California’s stylish elites are driving humanity in slow motion towards this same dire future, cloaked in denial, veiled coercion, and utopian fantasies.

This is the issue that underlies the California wildfires, what causes them and what to do about them. What is a “sustainable” civilization? One that embraces human settlements, has faith in human ingenuity, and aspires to make all humans prosperous enough to care about the environment, everywhere? Or one that demands Draconian limits on human settlement, with no expectation that innovation can provide solutions we can’t currently imagine, and condemns humans to police-state rationing of everything we produce and consume?

That is the stark choice that underlies the current consensus of California’s elites, backed up by dangerous and growing cadres of fanatical militants.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Can Public Sector Union Power Ever Be Stopped?

Imagine you’re hoping to support a candidate for local office who will enact reforms that will improve your city, maybe even save it. Someone who will fight tirelessly to eliminate work rules that force agencies to hire more people than are actually necessary. Someone who will insist that incompetent public employees are fired. Someone who will finally do something about compensation and benefit packages that are threatening to bankrupt the city.

What do you say to them, when their response to your suggested reforms is this: “That’s all great, and I’d like to do it all, but who’s going to give me the million dollars for my campaign that I’m not going to get from the public employee unions if I actually try to do any of it?”

That is the sort of conversation that takes place, or would take place if anyone bothered to ask, multiplied by thousands, every election cycle in California.

Public employee unions run California. They exercise nearly absolute power in the state legislature, and in nearly every city, county, school district and special district. Can public sector union power ever be stopped?

Earlier this year, a California Public Policy Center analysis estimated that for 2016, total membership in California’s public sector unions was 1.15 million, and total revenue was $812 million. This equates to a stupefying $1.6 billion that these unions collect and spend every election cycle.

 

California’s Public Sector Unions (including local affiliates)
Estimated Total Membership and Revenues

While the figure of $1.6 billion per election cycle is a credible estimate, attempts to come up with precise information on California’s public sector union dues is nearly impossible. In California there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of individual local public sector union affiliates. All of them file separate 990 forms, often including financial transfers between entities that have to be offset in any thorough analysis.

Determining how much of California’s public sector union revenue is spent on politics is also a nearly impossible task, despite several online “transparency” portals, including OpenSecretsFollowTheMoneyVoteSmart, and the California Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance “Power Search.” These portals are primarily focused on national races, and in some cases, statewide races, but none of them descend to the thousands of California’s local races, where hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every election.

Moreover, the portals can only display the information they’re given. California’s government unions, like most sophisticated political players, mask their total spending through multiple committees and transfers.

An excellent analysis of how much of teachers union dues end up being spent on political campaigns was written in 2015 by RiShawn Biddle, editor and publisher of Dropout Nation – a leading commentary website on education reform. He writes: “The pro bono consultants who went through the unions’ published national, state, and local tax returns estimated based on their research, interviews, and sampling that roughly one third of the unions’ efforts went toward political advocacy.”

One-third. In California, that is equal to approximately $540 million per election cycle. That is, California’s public sector unions likely spend over a half-billion per election cycle. And this spending does not include other “non-political” spending. For example, not reportable as political spending can include massive public education campaigns that are designed to influence voters but aren’t engaging in explicit advocacy.

Also not considered political spending, but having immense political impact, is litigation. There are countless examples of how government union power is exercised in California’s courts. Pension reforms in San Jose and San Diego, approved by voters, were eviscerated through relentless court challenges. Statewide pension reform pushed by Gov. Brown and partially realized in the PEPRA legislation of 2012 was undermined, and continues to be undermined, beneath an ongoing avalanche of lawsuits. Charter schools are the targets of continuous litigation designed to wear them out. You can do this, when you have hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in every quarter, year after year.

California’s political landscape over the past 20-30 years has been defined by public sector unions. While the recent Janus v AFSCME decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has taken away the ability of government unions to compel payment of fees, the unions are resorting to clever contractual gyrations to make it extremely difficult in practice for anyone to stop paying. That too, will have to sort itself out in court, where union money guarantees tenacious defense and endless appeals.

Even if public employees can easily withdraw from paying government unions, in many cases, why would they? These unions have made California’s public employees some of the highest paid public servants on earth. A California Policy Center study in 2017 concluded “The composite average total compensation (pay and benefits) for a full-time city, county or state worker in California during 2015 was $121,843; for the average full-time private sector worker in California, including benefits, it was 62,475, which is 51% of what the public sector worker earned.” As a result, it is no coincidence that California’s state and local governments confront over $1.0 trillion in debt and unfunded pension liabilities.

The political and financial power of public sector unions has transformed California politics. Their influence is felt everywhere; education, environmental policy, the business climate, important cultural issues. In every area, their primary agenda is to grow their membership and influence. The effect of this agenda is pernicious. If schools fail, spend more public money on schools. If crime increases, hire more police and build more prisons. Wherever society fails, grow unionized government.

Perhaps the next major U.S. Supreme Court case concerning government unions will abolish them due to this inherent conflict between their agenda and the public interest. Perhaps someday they will be outlawed entirely. That would be a happy, happy Thanksgiving indeed.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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Restoring America’s Ability to Assimilate Immigrants

Embracing the art of the possible requires a painful prerequisite, which is to eliminate the impossible. This is not compromise, it is sanity. Formulating a viable American immigration policy requires making these difficult choices. So many options are impossible.

If the goal of immigration reform is to preserve American culture and prosperity, then the question such reformers must ask is what strategies will have a chance at success. Heated rhetoric about hordes of gangbangers and birth tourists overrunning our border will work, maybe, with about 40% of American voters. Cryptic escalatory references to how “the 2nd amendment will save us” are futile jabberings. If it had to, the American government would deploy swarms of slap drones and other high-tech counter-insurgency gadgetry that would neutralize America’s rebel “militias” in hours. These are impossible options.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way. American culture and prosperity can be preserved. Immigration policy can move to a merit-based system, where admittance is based on applicants having valuable job skills, English language proficiency, good health, and cultural compatibility. There is a way to build a consensus among American voters that demands these reforms. The question is where to look.

A recent article by Henry Olsen, “Arizona Illustrates the RINO Revenge,” explains “just how tenuous the Trump coalition’s hold on power is.” He continues: “Whether it is regaining a portion of the RINOs or a winning a much larger share of Hispanic or African-American votes, he and the MAGA movement need more supporters to succeed.”

Here again it is necessary to consider the art of the possible. Are RINOs or liberals ever going to support immigration policies that preserve American culture and prosperity? Probably not. These voters, mostly members of the upper middle class, love to virtue signal their aversion to any border policy that might invite even hints of “racism,” at the same time as they love the cheap labor that immigrants provide to clean their floors and cut their grass. They will be the last to be convinced.

What about, however, the “people of color,” those voters that constitute the other half of the Democratic block? Why should Trump Republicans settle for ten percent, or even forty percent, of their votes? What would it take for these voters, most of whom are either immigrants or have immigrant parents, to embrace American culture as passionately as the Irish and German immigrants of a century ago, and want to defend it?

The answer is simple: Attack and permanently discredit the forces in America that are doing everything they can to prevent assimilation. There are three critical fronts in this war.

University Campuses and K-12 Public Education

The degree to which the extreme Left now dominates university campuses in America defies brief description. America’s universities are training people of color to despise traditional American culture and to believe they are predestined to experience life-long discrimination in a hostile culture steeped in “white privilege.” But the programs that enable these seditious actions can be challenged in court, because they are discriminatory, they violate academic freedom, they undermine the economic value of an expensive college degree, and in public universities they waste taxpayers money.

Examples include the Orwellian diversity statements that applicants now have to submit to be considered for faculty positions. The discriminatory affirmative action plans. The segregation of “Safe spaces.” The expensive, divisive, and economically useless Ethnic and Gender Studies. The incredibly expensive “inclusion” and “diversity” bureaucracy. The abuse of Title 9 by opportunistic bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Not only can court rulings destroy many of these programs, but people of color can be convinced to reject this nonsense. Because the degrees they’re earning are worthless.

Rescuing America’s public elementary and secondary schools is equally important. There is no reason young people today cannot embrace America’s proud heritage regardless of their national origin. But instead of receiving a balanced education that highlights America’s unique contributions to universal equality of opportunity, there is an inexorable shift towards textbooks that disparage America. One of the central figures in this growing movement to turn America’s youth against their own nation is the late Howard Zinn. His biased history textbooks are designed to fill impressionable, rebellious youth with cynical resentment against everything that’s made America great; capitalism, private property, Christianity, democracy, meritocracy, the Protestant work ethic, and Western Civilization itself.

Fighting the Leftist influence in K-12 schools starts with providing alternatives. Charter schools. Vouchers. Continuing to attack the Leftist agenda of the powerful teachers unions. These fights can play out in the courts, but they can also be fought at the grassroots. Because Leftist controlled public K-12 schools are failing to educate students. And the students who are the most negatively affected by Leftist mismanagement are those who live in low income, immigrant communities.

Exposing the Environmentalist Attack on the West

Nobody denies the urgency of many environmental challenges. Asian trawlers strip mining the oceans for protein. African poachers slaughtering critically endangered species. Chinese power plants belching so much soot they spread toxic clouds across half a continent. Rapid, unsustainable population growth across most of the planet’s equatorial regions. But the trajectory of all attempts to mitigate these genuine challenges is fatally slowed in deference to a corporate, fascistic imperative: Fighting “climate change.”

One may stop just short of declaring the entire climate change movement to be nothing more than a despicable hoax, inspired by globalist dreams of absolute profit and power. Humans can alter climate, probably more through land use than through CO2 emissions, but these impacts need to be honestly studied in order to consider practical options. Instead the climate alarmists demand that humans phase out all use of fossil fuel within a few decades. This is patently, ridiculously impossible. Moreover, even if it were possible, according to their own “scientific” projections, it’s already too late. So what’s really going on?

What the climate alarmists are creating, some of them consciously, others as unwitting accomplices, is artificial scarcity of virtually all critical resources; land, homes, electricity, gas and oil, water, transportation. This enriches wealthy elites who own the means of production. They eliminate competition, drive up prices, and collect higher returns. Throughout the Western World they have boxed in cities, supposedly to preserve “open space,” they’ve shut down power plants, they’ve prevented construction of dams and desalination plants, they’ve prevented projects to widen and upgrade roads. The solutions they’ve offered punish low income communities most of all. High-density, high-rise apartments with sky-high rents. Expensive electricity and expensive gasoline. Water that’s rationed yet still costs more every year. Roads crammed beyond capacity, causing the most harm to those commuters who must live far from their jobs in order to afford their rent.

Why isn’t this an attack on immigrants? Why isn’t this an attack on people of color? Why should they continue to vote for people who used to allow land development to lower the price of land and housing, but now require everyone to cram into the existing footprints of legacy cities? Why should they vote for people who reject the cost-effective solution of installing scrubbers on smokestacks to enable clean use of fossil fuel, and instead sell subsidized solar rooftop systems to the wealthy, which forces everyone else pay higher utility rates to fund the grid upgrades necessary to accommodate distributed power? Why should they vote for people who, instead of just building a few dams and permitting desalination plants to supply water to coastal cities, impose water rationing and charge higher rates? Why should they vote for people who could widen the freeways, but instead pour hundreds of billions into mass transit solutions that are impractical and always end up underutilized?

It’s not hard to make this case. It takes courage more than money. Courage to be called a “denier.” But if enough people insist on a rational response to climate change alarm, “denier” will lose its power to silence. And the people who are the most negatively affected by Leftist climate alarm policies are those who live in low income, immigrant communities.

Meeting Big Money with Big Money

Saving America’s culture and prosperity is tough, because most wealthy people don’t consider preserving America’s culture and prosperity as a high priority. Their moral argument goes like this: We will shift people and capital to wherever we find the greatest return on investment, because if all of us maximize our returns, collectively we will foster more rapid global economic growth. That’s a comforting argument, especially when you’re disenfranchising an entire nation. But there’s a fatal flaw to this argument.

American culture, and more generally, Western Culture, is the engine that gave birth to individual rights, capitalist entrepreneurship, democratic republics, the rule of law, a sizable middle class, and the prosperity, adaptability, and stability that enabled their wealth. Not only do the ordinary people who are the inheritors and carriers of this culture deserve better, but if their culture is destroyed, the security that wealthy people enjoy will also be destroyed. Hardcore Leftists know this. The wealthy RINOs, including leftist and libertarian oligarchs, often do not. They are naive.

In the November 2018 election, leftist oligarchs and NeverTrump billionaires vastly outspent the Republicans. Pierre Omidyar, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffet, Tom Steyer, and George Soros, to name a few, spent hundreds of millions to elect Democrats. Usually reliable right-leaning oligarchs, such as the Koch Brothers, not only failed to match the torrent of funding from the left, but they were selective in their support, abandoning Republicans who were too “Trumpian.”

Not only were Republicans outspent in 2018, but the Democrats were smarter with their money. Billionaire Tom Steyer , who overall spent $123 million on the 2018 midterms, funneled $3.8 million for targeted youth voter registration, voter contact and get-out-the-vote efforts just in California, and just in toss-up congressional districts. Democratic operatives collected individual voter data from online and offline sources, testing thousands of online ads, which allowed them to pinpoint which individual voters in pure Republican households were most receptive to crossing party lines. They recruited an army of amateur opposition researchers to “read every line of every document” of targeted Republicans’ lives, voting records, and disclosure reports. These anti-MAGA billionaires did everything right. Their upgraded tactics, and their unprecedented funding, are here to stay. Who will counter their efforts?

There are 565 billionaires in the United States. Most of them are globalists; some left-wing, some libertarian. But not all of them. It would only take a determined effort by two or three of them, using their money as strategically as the Democrats and RINOs just did, to change the game. It’s time for some of them to step up. Because as it is, in the U.S. there are well established, well organized networks of think tanks and super PACs on the left and the right. But neither of these networks embrace a vision of American Greatness that puts Americans first.

Understanding Who’s On Your Side

There is a vision of compassionate nationalism that makes an uncompromising commitment to the interests of the American people, but does so in recognition of the fact that only a strong America, a very strong America, can help midwife the eventual emergence of a global civilization that embraces Western values. The battle to reform immigration laws and assimilate newcomers is not racial, it is cultural. The enemies of assimilation, for the most part, are globalist oligarchs and their mostly White liberal pawns.

The great independent voting block are those millions of Americans, nearly 25% of the population, who have either recently arrived in America, or are first generation Americans. Many of them are intermarrying with Whites, especially Asians and Latinos. These voters are up for grabs for a host of reasons.

To generalize, Asians resent being held back by affirmative action. Latinos resent being displaced by even more recent immigrants – as do African Americans. And all people of color are increasingly receptive to the argument that Democrats have done nothing to help their communities. Welfare has failed. Unions have ruined public education. College courses in ethnic and gender studies are a joke. And as anyone with a smile and an open heart immediately learns, America is not a racist nation. We are the friendliest people on earth.

Americans are right to fear unchecked immigration. But their enemy is not the immigrants themselves. It is the liberal fascism that robs everyone of opportunities who is not already wealthy. It is Leftist hatred that trains immigrants to dislike America and Americans. As the truth about the leftist elites is exposed, as they are accurately revealed as plutocratic, manipulative profiteers who are indifferent to the plight of ordinary Americans, people of color will join the MAGA movement. And with their participation, many White RINOs and moderate liberals will at last feel comfortable also joining.

Resistance to the “resistance” is not futile. With a positive, welcoming attitude, combined with a well funded, winning national strategy, America’s new immigrants will be assimilated. And that will be wonderful thing.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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how to assimilate

 

Why America’s “Minority Majority” Will Never Happen

In America today, the phrase “It’s ok to be White” is considered “hate speech.” Last week, in trend setting California, that was the clear message coming from Sacramento’s leading local television news network, KCRA. Watching this top story on November 3rd, you would think co-anchors Gulstan Dart and Kellie DeMarco were reporting on another synagogue massacre, instead of an incident at a local college where some anonymous “racist” had taped a few pieces of 8.5″ x 11″ copy paper to campus bulletin boards that read “It’s ok to be White.”

What happened in Sacramento wasn’t an isolated incident. “It’s ok to be White” flyers have been printed and posted elsewhere in the U.S. You can even buy “It’s ok to be White” t-shirts on Amazon Prime. The posters have appeared at Duke UniversityTufts University, the University of Delaware, the University of Denver the University of St. Thomas, and elsewhere.

The reporter on the scene in Sacramento, Walter Makaula, dutifully pointed out that “messages of inclusion and diversity” were posted “everywhere” on the Sacramento’s American River community college campus. “Black Minds Matter.” “Womyn & Femmes Circle.” But posting “It’s ok to be White” was apparently hateful. As Dean of Student Services Joshua Moon Johnson reassuringly stated for the camera: “Quickly we addressed the situation and made sure campus police were called and made sure we had those removed.”

Good job, Mr. Moon-Johnson. Such bravery. Such resolute action.

The common sense questions to this typical response are many. Why is this offensive? Why is this rather bland affirmation of white personhood considered a threat? Why is it called “hate speech?” And what is it that might inspire someone, presumably a white student, to print a few of these signs and post them around their campus?

Could asserting that “It’s ok to be White” be a perfectly understandable reaction to an educational culture where literally anyone who is not “White” is obsessively celebrated? A reaction to institutional discrimination where anyone who is not “White” is granted preferential treatment in admissions, scholarship awards, and future hiring decisions? And wouldn’t knowing these flyers would trigger a hysterical overreaction, despite containing content that is trivial by any objective standard, motivate an irreverent and spirited student to post them?

While the origin of the phrase “It’s ok to be White” is allegedly linked to “white nationalists,” that shouldn’t alter its meaning. You can’t outlaw a reasonable phrase merely because unreasonable people uttered it. When you do, and make an overwrought fuss every time the phrase is encountered, you are inviting millions to also utter it.

The term “White” is inclusive, not exclusive, and cultural, not racial

But what is “White”? Could it be that the term “White” is destined to become perceived as inclusive instead of exclusive? Eric Kaufmann, writing for UnHerd, has coined the phrase “Whiteshift,” which he defines as “the voluntary assimilation of minorities into the majority though intermarriage.” Kaufmann goes on to explain how this voluntary assimilation can occur, characterizing it as “a process which will need active telegraphing as mixing won’t be strong enough on its own to make much difference to social cohesion until the end of the century.”

While Kaufmann is writing about the United Kingdom, his prescriptions for assimilation apply in America as well. He writes: “The Left needs to back away from excessive accusations of racism and dreams of radical social transformation. Conservatives should worry less about Muslims, Hispanics or the behavior of other minority groups and focus instead on defending the interests of those who seek slower cultural change. This is not just about immigration levels, but should involve ethnic majority citizens inducting mixed-race children into myths of British [American] ancestry.”

In this context, American “multiculturalism” is clearly the wrong approach. An entire collection of industries have been built in America to capitalize on a divisive obsession with race and ethnicity, and the elaborate scaffolding of ranked victims based on their race and ethnicity. From campus “Chief Diversity Officers” to corporate human resources departments, to the plaintiff’s bar, to pandering politicians, to the Academy Awards and the like, American culture has acquired an unhealthy obsession with race.

In a society where actual racism is universally condemned and utterly marginalized, new offenses have been invented: microaggression, unconscious racism, white privilege. And with the new offenses, new solutions: trigger warnings, safe spaces, speech codes. The new goal? To create a utopian society where equality of outcome across all races is achieved. That is impossible, which is perhaps the point. No industry wants to solve its reason for existing.

Demographics favor an inclusive definition of “White.”

The good news, however, is this entire paradigm of race and ethnicity as the defining issue of the left-of-center establishment is about to collapse, for a reason the race careerists are not expecting and will not be able to counter. Quite simply put, the “White” race is assimilating “people of color” at breathtaking speed. Not just culturally, but genetically.

In 2015, over 17 percent of marriages in America were across “racial” lines. It is the reality of ethnic intermarriage that will add critical weight to the conservative argument for cultural assimilation, just as intermarriage in America between immigrants of various European ethnicities propelled cultural assimilation ala the “melting pot” in previous centuries.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post published a fascinating article entitled “The Demise of the White Majority is a Myth.” They write: “Under a more expansive definition that counts as white anyone who so identifies (even if they also identify with another race or ethnicity), the white population is not declining; it’s flourishing. The Census Bureau’s inclusive projections show a white population in excess of 70 percent of the total for the foreseeable future.”

This observation, backed up by demographic data, provides abundant reasons for optimism. As the Washington Post author puts it: “Projections of racial demographics should reflect the great changes in the meaning of race in America. But stories about the impending demise of white America are rooted in outmoded notions of racial exclusivity. These stories of white decline obscure the ongoing changes to America’s color line, and they serve only to divide.”

Watch out, professional race hustlers. Your entire livelihood is “rooted in outmoded notions of racial exclusivity.”

The next great American era of assimilation could be just around the corner

Based on demographic data as cited by the Washington Post, when one uses the inclusive definition of white, America is destined to remain around 75% white for decades to come. Using any other definition renders unsustainable the Leftist strategy of identity politics. How can they continue to carve out preferential treatment for “people of color,” if nearly everyone is mostly “White,” yet qualifies? And if they use a more exclusive definition of White, where will they draw the line? What would stop Elizabeth Warren copycats from litigiously demanding they too receive preferential treatment? The current system of racial redress via racial quotas across all aspects of American life is going to collapse of its own weight.

The hopeful reality that Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, in very different ways, has propelled America towards is new wave of American cultural assimilation. Trump because he was the raging bull in the china shop of political correctness. Warren because she exemplifies the absurdity of race based career opportunism.

The alternative to identity politics is unity politics. Affirmation of a trans-racial, 21st century American melting pot where conservative and libertarian values, derived from Western traditions, are overwhelmingly accepted and protected. And contrary to conventional wisdom, another great wave of American assimilation may be in the offing.

Demographics are indeed destiny, and America’s current demographic trends point to a future where White lineage is predominant in so many people who also have a lessor percentage of “non-White” heredity, that these millions of Americans will embrace their American heritage. They will reject special preferences for themselves or anyone else, and celebrate American history and traditions with the same fervor as the great waves of ethnic immigrants who arrived over a century ago from Southern and Eastern Europe.

“It’s ok to be White.” Absolutely. Because “White” is destined to become an ethnically inclusive term, devoid of divisive connotations. Chief Diversity Officers may wish to find a new line of work, along with all those minions of overpaid bureaucrats they manage.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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