"The enemy gets a vote"

Way back in the last millennium when I wrote or helped write operations plans for the US Army, I always remembered a catch phrase we planners had used for a long time: "The enemy gets a vote."

Which is to say that when we acted, the enemy reacted and almost immediately the plan's assumptions would be negated. That's why we also said, "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." Dwight D. Eisenhower put it this way: "Planning is absolutely essential, but plans are useless."

And so we come to this administration trying to manage the world's oil supply. Bureaucrats' plans bear all the hallmarks of "static analysis," when planners assume there is only one variable and that they can control it, and nothing else changes and the result is always unicorns and rainbows. This is, ahem, especially true under Democrat administrations, and nowhere more in evidence than the current administration's energy policy, headed by a publicly inept Secretary of Energy who admitted on camera that she has no idea how much oil the United States uses per day.

She also said that the Biden administration cannot do anything to bring oil prices down because oil prices are "controlled" by OPEC.

But don't worry because President Biden has announced that OPEC should increase production and that he is ordering 50 million barrels of oil to be released from the US Strategic Oil Reserves (SPR). That'll show 'em!

Here is an excerpt from the White House press release:

The U.S. Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in two ways:

32 million barrels will be an exchange over the next several months, releasing oil that will eventually return to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the years ahead. The exchange is a tool matched to today’s specific economic environment, where markets expect future oil prices to be lower than they are today, and helps provide relief to Americans immediately and bridge to that period of expected lower oil prices. The exchange also automatically provides for re-stocking of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over time to meet future needs.

18 million barrels will be an acceleration into the next several months of a sale of oil that Congress had previously authorized.

That final graf means that 36 percent of the oil released will be sold to other countries, including China. The 32 million barrels released to US oil companies will take place " over the next several months." Last year, the US used just more than 18 million barrels of oil per day, but that was in a year of low economic activity. This year's figures have not been published but are certain to be significantly higher.

But using only 2020's consumption, what the White House announced is that over the next several MONTHs the administration will add a grand total of 1-2/3 days of oil to the American market. Wow!

But wait! There's more! I gotcher proof that static analysis is useless rat cheer! OPEC decided it gets a vote! Hey, where did they get that idea?

The administration said that it would release 32M barrels to the US economy over time, expecting it to drive down oil prices, then purchase 32M barrels for the SPR at lower prices than today's. (India and Japan also said they would release oil from their national reserves.)

So OPEC plus Russia basically said, "Lower prices later? Nope, not a chance. We will simply cut production by at least an equal amount that you are releasing."

Who could not have seen this coming? Only this White House and its Secretary of Energy.

Why we can't afford 99-cent gasoline

If you like the very low gasoline prices, even though we are not supposed to drive anywhere, get used to it. Oil's spot price may drop some more, yes (it plummeted today after Thursday's highest-rate increase ever in one day). But production is going to drop. Usually, that means gas prices rise. Not this time. And that is actually very bad news.

Cheap gas and nowhere to go. That's bad.

American oil frackers operate at a loss much below $60 per barrel (depending where they are located). The largest such operation, the Permian Basin, needs about $65 per barrel to make a profit. It straddles Texas and New Mexico.

The drop in oil price was triggered by Russia's refusal to cut production at the Saudis' request. So the Saudis jacked production up to drive the price down and punish the Russians. Well, good luck with that:

After oil prices collapsed in the worst drop in nearly three decades—courtesy of the renewed Saudi-Russia rivalry on the oil market – Russia’s Finance Ministry said on Monday that Moscow had enough resources to cover budget shortfalls amid oil prices at $25-30 a barrel for six to ten years.  

Not coincidentally, both the Saudis and the Russians would like to see America's frackers permanently closed and the United States to return to a major importer of oil, not net exporters as we are right now.

One way or another oil prices will rise. That seems a cloud but actually it is the silver lining. The cloud is cheap oil. Active-rig counts fell this week in the US by 160, year over year, to 722. On the other hand, US oil production remains near an all-time high at 13.1 million barrels per day. Go figure.

And next month may be even more dramatic.

Analysts say that the month of April could see the largest supply overhang in the history of the oil market.

“We now expect the y/y demand loss to peak in April at 10.4 million barrels per day (mb/d), and annual demand to fall by a record 3.39mb/d in 2020,” Standard Chartered wrote in a note.

In the short run, the oil market surplus could reach a peak of 13.7 mb/d in April, Standard Chartered said, with an average surplus of 12.9 mb/d for the second quarter. The inventory buildup could reach a gargantuan 2.1 billion barrels by the end of the year, “stretching the midstream of the industry to its limits,” the bank wrote. That figure represents an upward revision of 50 percent from the 1.4-billion-barrel inventory surplus the bank predicted…just a week ago.

Other analysts have even more dramatic scenarios. Eurasia Group says demand could fall by as much as 25 mb/d in the next few weeks and months. The historic glut means that the world could run out of storage space. “The combination of weakening demand and excess supply is hardly going to be accommodated by onshore storage,” Giovanni Serio, head of analysis at Vitol, told the FT. “At a certain point…we will need to fill all the boats.”

 So severe is the situation that for practically the first time in long memory, "Texas Weighs Curtailing Oil Production for First Time in Decades."

Texas regulators are considering curtailing oil production in America’s largest oil-producing state, something they haven’t done in decades, people familiar with the matter said.

Several oil executives have reached out to members of the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the industry, requesting relief following an oil-price crash, the people said. U.S. benchmark oil closed around $25 a barrel Thursday.

Texas, which hasn’t limited production since the 1970s, was a model for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has sought to control world-wide oil prices in recent decades. OPEC and Russia were unable to reach a deal on reducing output in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped trigger the current collapse in prices.

It is unclear whether regulators will ultimately act to curtail production, but staffers are examining what would be required in such an event, the people said.

Oil prices have always been manipulated by producers. Even so, at the end of the day, demand has always been in control. And now the worldwide demand has dropped like an anvil and will continue to do so. The largest users of petro products - shipping and aviation - are harboring vessels and canceling flights. That will likely accelerate.

That said, oil production is going to plummet because, as stated above, we are running out of places to put it. That does not mean that gas prices will suddenly rise. The huge over-supply will see to that. But cheap gas prices are not going to offset the real pain dropping demand will cause: higher unemployment not only of oil-industry workers, but businesses whose revenues depend on customers using oil just to buy or get to their products or locations, such as hotels, tourist attractions, airline workers, dock workers, gas station owners and workers, the list is very long.

I am not an economist by a long shot, but unless we stop our "insane over-reaction," there is going to be a lot of pain to come that 99-cent gasoline will not pay for.

Update: How low can it go? "How Low Can Oil Go? One Forecast Sees $5 a Barrel." Which means that gasoline will be not much higher than free - and yet it will be also more difficult to find because gas stations will be closing at accelerated rates as oil prices plummet.

Why health care is not a human right

I first wrote this in 2009, but it seems relevant to today as well; I have updated it.

Is health care a human right, as the United Methodist Church says? I don't see how. Human rights, as Americans have always understood them (beginning with Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders) are a fact of nature that cannot be rescinded by human beings. Rights are immutable, indeed, unalienable ("Not to be separated, given away, or taken away" Dictionary.com, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.)  As a precursor to his Declaration theology that unalienable human rights are a endowment by God, Jefferson wrote in his pre-revolution essay, Summary View of the Rights of British America, " The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force may disjoin, but cannot destroy them."

Since his day, and certainly preceding it, the historic American understanding of human rights is the exercise of individual freedom, especially in the political realm, for both public and personal good. We have historically never understood our rights as encompassing access to services or commodities.

Rights are inherent in each individual equally, they are not divisible. Take the Declaration's famous insistence that among human rights is "the pursuit of happiness." Note that it is the pursuit of happiness that is a right, not the achievement of it. Nor is one person more entitled to pursue happiness than another, no matter one’s station in life. Besides, happiness (what Jefferson meant was not happiness as we use the word today, but a state of contentment in life and possessions) is not something that can be given us, it is something we have to create.

It does sound all high-minded to say that, like rights, health care should be equal for everybody, which I suppose is why clergy are so susceptible to say so. It's more than obvious that no one in the Congress or the White House believed it in 2009 when Obamacare was enacted. If they had, the act would have required members of Congress and the rest of the federal government to fall under the "public option" along with the rest of us proles. But they’ve protected their turf completely and much better turf is theirs than ours. I’ll believe that equal access and care for everyone is a moral imperative when the people who say it is a moral imperative place themselves under the same imperative.

The presumption that health care is a right, and therefore must be equal for everyone, is founded on two critical errors of understanding. The first is that health care is a resource that is simply available for those who need it, or that can be made equally available through proper legislation and regulation. The second error is that medical care and access to it can be rationed by command more equally, economically, and fairly than by demand.

Health care is not a resource to be exploited

Medical facilities and doctors are not phenomena of nature, like water or petroleum are. Hospitals don’t just appear. They are produced. Medical care is not a resource that can be "mined" through more regulation to be more plentiful. Medical care is a service. 

Specifically, it is a contracted service, in much the same way that legal assistance, automotive maintenance or pastoral care are services. Why? Because men and women choose of their own accord to get medical training. Once graduated, doctors, nurses, paramedics and technicians of various kinds reasonably expect that they will be compensated at a rate greater than their costs to enter the profession, greater than their extremely high overhead to run the practice, and enough to make their grueling hours materially worthwhile for themselves and their families.

This fact has very direct consequences under the Medicare and Medicaid systems we have today. The Atlantic's business journalist Meg McArdle explains:

[W]e have a comprehensive national health care plan for seniors. Yet we have a shortage of geriatricians, the one specialty that you would think would be booming. Why? Because Medicare sets a single price for the services of geriatricians, and it is low. Since the field is not particularly enticing (though arguably it really should be, since geriatricians have extremely high job satisfaction compared to many more popular specialties), very few people go into it. It's one of relatively few specialties that consistently has most of its slots and fellowships unfilled.

Moreover, the skills and equipment a doctor or hospital possess are their individual property, not the property, even partially, of the state or public. (There are publicly-owned facilities such as VA hospitals, but in operation there is no difference to the general public between them and private facilities). No one has a natural right to someone else's property. To think we do directly violates the Tenth Commandment. As McArdle says, "People have no obligation to perform labor for others. I may not [justly or legally] force a surgeon to save my mother at gunpoint."

That means that to receive a doctor's services, the doctor and a patient must come to a mutually-agreeable arrangement of what medical care will be provided in exchange for a specified fee. This is a commercial transaction no different in type than hiring a plumber, cab driver or lawyer. That medical services may be life critical does not change the fundamental nature of the contract.

We have access to medical care only as long as a doctor is willing to provide it. No one has to become a doctor or continue in medical practice. If any "reform" of the present health care system reduces the rewards of practicing medicine or complicates the practice, fewer men and women will so choose, as in Britain today (see below). Access will then go down for everyone and costs will inevitably rise, no matter what the rate-payment of the public option is, because access or its lack is itself a cost and also drives other costs.

Health care is a service

As Michael Keehn explains, health care is a service but not a community service. Police and fire departments provide community services. That seems obvious enough, but consider: fire departments do not protect your home individually. The fire chief definitely will let it burn to the ground if firefighting needs are greater elsewhere in the town. Just look at what is happening near Los Angeles as of the date of this post. Police and fire protection are in fact rationed to protect the lives and property of the greatest number of people possible with the resources available. But when the resources (manpower, equipment or money) run out, individuals are exposed to greater danger or loss though the community at large may still be protected.

Individual residents of a city do not contract for their community’s police or fire protection. When you call 9-1-1 because someone broke into your home while you were in bed, you don’t have to sign a contract with the police when they arrive, specifying the actions you want them to take and how much you are going to pay.

In contrast, medical care is an individual service. Doctors do not provide their services to the community as a whole, but to individuals. Because of that, each patient enters into a contract with his/her doctor specifying the medical services to be received and how much it will cost. This is mostly mediated through insurance companies, of course, which greatly simplifies the contracting process. The result is that a patient 's health is protected in a way that their safety or homes are not protected by the police or fire departments.

Interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church rejects the idea that health care is a human right. The Most Reverend R. Walker Nickless, bishop of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa, explains.

[T]he Catholic Church does not teach that “health care” as such, without distinction, is a natural right.

The “natural right” of health care is the divine bounty of food, water, and air without which all of us quickly die. This bounty comes from God directly. None of us own it, and none of us can morally withhold it from others. The remainder of health care is a political, not a natural, right, because it comes from our human efforts, creativity, and compassion.

Like any human endeavor, health care is finite. It can be properly understood only as such. Any reform that treats medical care as if it can be made infinitely available is a product of cloud-cuckoo land. Medical care, like every other finite thing, must be allocated. The current buzzword for that is "rationed." That’s the foundation of the second critical mistake people are making about health care, that medical care and access to it can be rationed by the government more equally, economically and fairly than by consumers. 

Philip Barlow, Consultant neurosurgeon at Southern General Hospital, Glasgow, explains why "Health care is not a human right." 

Update, March 2020: In 2009. Philip Niles wrote that the real question is not whether health care is a human right, but "How much health care is a human right?" His essay is no no longer online. It is a good question because since medical care is finite. He says, 

With all of the emotional and financial investment in health care, it is important to address the situation with an actionable approach - not an ideologic one.  My suggestion is to quantify just HOW MUCH health care we believe is "right" to provide, recognize that we should cap public health care spending, and focus the moral/fiscal debate on how high that cap should be set.  Let's achieve our ambitions of providing access for the uninsured with the most likely way of succeeding: by haggling about the price.

There is always a price to be paid, one way or another. What politicians seeking votes seem to do is ignore that price (paid by the consumer) and cost (borne by the provider) are not the same. When a political candidate promises free health care for everyone, they conveniently ignore that free care is simply, literally impossible. 

Look at it this way: as I write, we are in the midst of the coronavirus concerns, with a few thousand died from it worldwide and several in the US, where cases are rising. Now imagine you are a government-employee administrator for Medicare For All the next time such a potential pandemic arises -- and most assuredly there will be a next time. 

You have to choose between funding two heart-replacement surgeries plus rehab routines or funding the testing of 50,000 potential virus infectees for the illness. You do not have the funds to do both. 

Which do you choose? Why? And how do you respond when the untreated persons demand it anyway because it is a human right? 

There is always this question: Who pays and in what coin? One candidate this year had either the temerity (or carelessness) to tell his audience the day before the S.C. primary, "Your taxes are going to be raised" to pay for Medicare For All. How much will taxes be raised? He did not say, but presumably they will raised an amount corresponding to the cost of providing the medical care to the population. In other words, everyone will still pay an insurance premium now called taxes, and the tax rate will never go anywhere but up. Why? Because every other nation with "free" health care finds it over-utilized and under-resourced. 

Take Canada, for example, which many politicos say can be a model for us. In reality ...

... Canadians' out-of-pocket health costs are nearly identical to what Americans pay—a difference of roughly $15 per month. In return, Canadians pay up to 50% more in taxes than Americans, with government health costs alone accounting for $9,000 in additional taxes per year. This comes to roughly $50 in additional taxes per dollar saved in out-of-pocket costs.  Keep in mind these are only the beginning of the financial hit from "Medicare for All." 

Canada's public system does not cover many large health costs, from pharmaceuticals to nursing homes to dental and vision. As a result, public health spending in Canada accounts for only 70% of total health spending. In contrast, Medicare for All proposals promise 100% coverage. This suggests the financial burdens on Americans, and distortions to care, would be far greater than what Canadians already suffer. ...  

More serious than the financial burdens is what happens to quality of care in a government-run system. Canada's total health costs are about one-third cheaper than the U.S. as a percent of GDP, but this is achieved by undesirable cost-control practices. For example, care is ruthlessly rationed, with waiting lists running into months or years. The system also cuts corners by using older and cheaper drugs and skimping on modern equipment. Canada today has fewer MRI units per capita than Turkey or Latvia. 

Moreover, underinvestment in facilities and staff has reached the point where Canadians are being treated in hospital hallways. Predictably, Canada's emergency rooms are packed. In the province of Quebec, wait-times average over four hours, leading many patients to just give up, go home and hope for the best.

The piper must always be paid. And so it shall be for us, but both in currency and in other than money. Medical care is always rationed. Always. And the rationing takes place within three areas:

1. Price to the consumer, presently mediated through 
1. insurance premiums and co-pays, and
2. Medicare and co-pays and Medicaid.
3. Under MFA, those will be taxes and the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
    
2. Quality of the care provided, mediated through 
1. the training of the physicians, nurses, and other medical staff
2. the quality and availability of medical supplies and equipment.
3. costs of the providers as related to price to the consumers.
    
3. Availability of the care, mediated 
1. always through the number of practitioners and where they work, and that is almost always mediated through compensation,
2. and by what medical specialties they practice, noting that this is heavily related to compensation also (see Megan McArdles' observation above). 
3. by limiting or even eliminating medical for some demographics, say by age, as now-suspended presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg said explicitly.

What we are falling into in this debate is the "Do something!" fallacy: 

1. The status quo is deficient, so something must be done!
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, this must be done. 

Absolutely anything can be justified by that template - and is being justified. But remember: medical care is always rationed, either by price and cost, or by quality, or by availability. When we go to the polls in November, we will not be voting for free health care for everyone. We will be voting only for how we want health care rationed in the coming years, and we will be merely hoping without any evidence anywhere in the world that it will be better than what we have now. 
  

Finally, The New York Times in 2009: "Why We Must Ration Health Care."

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.

The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it.

This is not where are now except for the VA. Which should tell us something.

Forbes covered the way health care works (well, doesn't work) in Britain: "Britain's Version Of 'Medicare For All' Is Struggling With Long Waits For Care."

Consider how long it takes to get care at the emergency room in Britain. Government data show that hospitals in England only saw 84.2% of patients within four hours in February. That's well below the country's goal of treating 95% of patients within four hours -- a target the NHS hasn't hit since 2015. Now, instead of cutting wait times, the NHS is looking to scrap the goal. ...  

The NHS also routinely denies patients access to treatment. More than half of NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, which plan and commission health services within their local regions, are rationing cataract surgery. They call it a procedure of "limited clinical value." It's hard to see how a surgery that can prevent blindness is of limited clinical value. Delaying surgery can cause patients' vision to worsen -- and thus put them at risk of falls or being unable to conduct basic daily activities.  

"It's shocking that access to this life-changing surgery is being unnecessarily restricted," said Helen Lee, a health policy manager at the Royal National Institute of Blind People.  

Many Clinical Commissioning Groups are also rationing hip and knee replacements, glucose monitors for diabetes patients, and hernia surgery by placing the same "limited clinical value" label on them. Patients face long wait times and rationing of care in part because the NHS can't attract nearly enough medical professionals to meet demand. At the end of 2018, more than 39,000 nursing spots were unfilled. That's a vacancy rate of more than 10%. Among medical staff, nearly 9,000 posts were unoccupied.

But don't worry. We will be promised that we will do it different. But there is zero reason to believe that American politicians and bureaucrats are magically more generous, more compassionate or smarter than Britain's. 

Or for that matter, Canada's, where the government determines medical care, and so uses that power to favor selected constituencies. In Canada, rare but expensive medical treatments go grossly underfunded while the government spends enormous sums on cheap treatments and meds that vast numbers of voters use. Like this:

A girl who died of leukemia was given a final send off after her friends signed her casket with loving messages on January 30.  

[…]Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman. Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton’s Juravinski Hospital didn’t have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure. Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.  

[…]Dr. Ralph Meyer, Juravinski’s vice-president of oncology and palliative care, told Ontario’s TheStar.com there are plenty of others facing the same situation as Laura in Canada.

Free birth control immediately? Check. Free needles to inject illegal narcotics? Check. Free condoms? Check. Free abortions on demand? Check. Life-saving operation for a single leukemia patient? Not a chance. Leukemia patients are too few to form a voting block, so let 'em die. 

Then there is the Catholic-run hospice in Canada that the government is requiring closure because it refuses to kill its patients. 

A hospice in Canada has lost its funding and is being forced to close after refusing to offer and perform medically assisted suicides. The Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, British Columbia, will lose $1.5 million in funding and will no longer be permitted to operate as a hospice as of February 25, 2021. 

Fraser Health Authority, one of the six public health care authorities in the province, announced on Tuesday that it would be ending its relationship with the hospice over its refusal to provide medically assisted deaths to its patients.

Anyone who thinks that none of this can happen under Medicare For All is living on a different planet than the rest of us. The only way the Democrat party thinks of goods and services is by in-groups and out-groups. And that is where they will allocate funds, spending bite-size on as many people as they can, because the real purpose of Medicare For All is not medical care. It is to enhance and keep political power. 

The Monday Link Massacre

An American civil cold war began in 2016. Next year it will get hot. The Long Civil War.

Will Trump go to war to protect Saudi oil? Nope. Foreign Policy: The Real Reason Trump Won’t Attack Iran

Because like the Terminator, it's what they do. It's all they do. Peggy Noonan: Why They’ll Never Stop Targeting Kavanaugh. This too: Democrats' Kavanaugh Smear Implodes -- Again

Remember: Hillary said your kids are not yours. They are the Village's. And you don't get a say in how to raise them. 

Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer’s tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:

Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking.

("When the Ideologues Come for the Kids," By Andrew Sullivan, Intelligencer). John Sexton comments,

Bret Weinstein published a video arguing much the same thing. He said, “People who are the object of ire from the intersectionalists are going to be backed against the wall together. Who are they going to be? Well, primarily they are going to be straight and white and male.” He went on to predict that this combination of telling people that a) racial identity is paramount and b) your racial identity is suspect creates a breeding ground for the kind of white nationalism that we’d all like to avoid. Sullivan adds another note to his criticism, which is that there is no rational way out of this cult because reason has little to do with it. This is a substitute religion:

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. 

Speaking of ideologues coming for the kids, I give you Greta Thunberg.

Funny how Greta never goes outside white-majority countries to preach her religion. China and India are by leagues the worst polluters on earth. Has she gone there? Nope. Will she go there? You can bet your life savings, but I won't bet mine. Why? Well, I call racism, and I am darn serious about that.

Let us remember, though, that the Green movement depends on exploitation of black people.

A CBS News investigation has found child labor being used in the dangerous mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mineral cobalt is used in virtually all batteries in common devices, including cellphones, laptops and even electric vehicles.

A report by Amnesty International first revealed that cobalt mined by children was ending up in products from several companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Samsung.

This is not news at all, except to CBS, of course. Electricity-powered cars, as as those Andrew Yang said must 100-percent replace petrol-powered cars, are horrendously polluting to manufacture because of their raw materials, especially rare-earths that are found mainly in Africa.

Forced child labor - actually, chattel slavery - had been used there for years and years for mining. But white elitists in America demand their Teslas, so let the black kids die, who cares. And yes, I am serious about writing that. The green movement in America is racist and exploitative to its very core.

Not to mention that Greenists are often (well, usually), factually incorrect:

But that's okay, because as Joe Biden and AOC have pointed out, the Left deals in Truth, not mere facts.

The Big Money behind Greta Thunberg: "Behind the schoolgirl climate warrior lies a shadowy cabal of lobbyists, investors and energy companies seeking to profit from a green bonanza" -- Greta’s very corporate children’s crusade

Liberals to black Americans: We do not want to hear what you think. We want to hear what we think, coming out of your mouths. White Liberals Lecture Candace Owens On White Supremacy. She Leaves Them In Tatters. Indeed, she does.

This is the Democrats' authority on being black in America, Prof. Kathleen Owens of the University of Chicago, testifying before the House Oversight Joint Subcommittee as they took on the subject of white supremacy.

And here is Prof. Owens directly lecturing black American Candace Owens on how she does not understand what it's like to be black in America.

And here is the tear-down Ms. Owens delivers in return.


Speaking of white supremacy, here it is:

More links to the enslavement of children in the Congo:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/09/26/blood-batteries-cobalt-and-the-congo/#6c3ed237cc6e

https://www.iisd.org/story/green-conflict-minerals/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/children-as-young-as-seven-mining-cobalt-for-use-in-smartphones-says-amnesty

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/Child-labour-behind-smart-phone-and-electric-car-batteries/

The Climate Change Cult is a religion that does not turn away from child sacrifice.

But let's end with a smile.

The Left has no self awareness

The writer of this New Republic piece is utterly without a sense of irony that every city he mentions in the article has been under Democrat rule for decades.

The New American Homeless -- Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. 

As a longtime renter, Goodman was acquainted with the capriciousness of Atlanta’s housing market. She knew how easily the house could slip away. Seeking to avoid this outcome, she ensured that her rent checks were never late and, despite her exhausting work schedule, became a stickler for cleanliness. So strong was her fear of being deemed a “difficult” tenant that she avoided requesting basic repairs. But now, reading the landlord’s terse notice, she realized that these efforts had been insufficient. When her lease expired at the end of the month, it would not be renewed. No explanation was legally required, and none was provided. “You think you did everything you’re supposed to do,” she told me, “and then this happens.”


A clue lay in the neighborhood’s accelerating transformation. Up and down her street, old, shabby dwellings—many of them, like the one she rented, casualties of the previous decade’s foreclosure crisis, purchased at rock-bottom prices by investors who had simply waited around until they appreciated in value—were being sold, gutted, and reconstructed. In retrospect, a flyer on her doorstep from Sotheby’s International Realty, offering to “pay cash, close quickly, and save you the hassle of multiple showings and cleaning/renovating/staging/pictures,” was an ominous sign. Goodman’s landlord, a doctor who runs an international nonprofit, told me recently that she didn’t renew the lease for financial reasons. “With the area taking off,” she explained, “it was the perfect time to unload the property.” When we spoke, she was preparing to sell the house.


Goodman had 30 days to relocate her family. 

This absolutely is a real problem for many people, and not just black Americans (though probably proportionally more). I have talked with more than a few people in this kind of situation who could not afford to live closer than 45-60 minutes to their wage jobs. In the north-of-Nashville town where I live, there are many white men and women who also commute 45 minutes or more to their jobs - but they are not making only $10 per hour or so, either.

In many franchised service businesses, such as styling salons or fast-food chain, workers cannot rely on working as a set location day to day. There is a Great Clips where I get my hair cut. I have never had it cut by the same stylist twice. Its staff on the job changes almost daily. One of them told me their location assignments are usually day to day, and sometimes they are told to go work at a salon very far away.

My very basic haircut costs about $10 with my military-vet discount. I put a twenty on the counter and bid her farewell.

New Republic does not propose a solution for the "working homeless" problem, but I will offer one now: Stop electing Democrats. I mean, as someone once said, What do you have to lose?

Working multiple jobs is suddenly a problem

Here we go again. Naturally, the progressive originally posting this never explains why this is a problem:

According to the BLS, the rate of persons working more than one job from 1995-2000 was more than 6 percent, but I can't recall what party was in the White House then. Had to have been a Republican, though!

Then, 

... the multiple jobholding rate began to recede. By the mid-2000s, the rate had declined to 5.2 percent and remained close to that level from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, the multiple jobholding rate decreased to 4.9 percent and has remained at 4.9 percent or 5.0 percent from 2010 to 2017. (Link).

For 2018, the rate is reported by the BLS as 5 percent. 

Again - why, exactly, is this bad? To that question, only the sound of crickets chirping.

The WSJ wrote about this a year ago: "Does everyone have two jobs?"

Do Americans have too many jobs? Democratic Socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last week that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs” and “people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said people are “working minimum wage jobs that won’t support them or they’re working two, three or four jobs.” But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show only a small minority of Americans work multiple jobs. That percentage has been around 5% of working Americans since 2010, though it was higher before then. ...  Are people working “60, 70, 80 hours a week”? Rarely. But for a brief dip during the recession, private-sector employees have worked an average of 34.2 to 34.6 hours a week since BLS began tracking the data in 2006. The average stood at 34.5 hours in June. BLS considers 35 hours a week “full time,” so working 70 or 80 hours would be equivalent to two full-time jobs. Only 360,000 people worked two full time jobs in June—0.2% of the workforce. There may well be people working 60 hours a week or more on one job—but if that were common, the overall average for hours worked would be well above 34.5.

I can only conclude that in this, as in countless other areas, for Americans to work more than one job at a time when a Democrat is president is morally-commendable industriousness but when a Republican is president is the result of an oppressive, immoral and economically-punitive administration.

Reparations truth

NFL Legend Burgess Owens testified before a Senate committee on the topic of national reparations to black Americans because of slavery.

Wow, Burgess Owens just stunned everyone:

“I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race... Let's pay restitution. How about the Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race..." pic.twitter.com/ZXuwncFreV

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) June 19, 2019

Remember: if reparations becomes a reality, the number of back Americans will triple or more. After all, that which is subsidized, increases - it's the oldest law of economics. Therefore, "If Congress votes reparations, everybody will be black."

Update: Coleman Hughes: The Moment You Give Someone Reparations, You've Made Them Into A Victim -- "Columnist Coleman Hughes expressed his opposition to reparations for slavery at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday. Hughes, a writer for 'Quillette,' said the moment one is given reparations they are made a victim without their consent."

COLEMAN HUGHES: Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery...

Reparations by definition are only given to victims, so the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent. Not just that, you’ve made 1/3 of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent, and black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner.

Update: Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History, by Mona Charen. "Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it."

The answer is "Everything"

Forbes: "Why The Left Doesn't Understand Health Care"

In one case, an insurer prevented a woman from getting a CT scan her doctor ordered. In another, a mother couldn’t afford the full regimen of special bags needed to clear her cancer-stricken daughter’s lungs. In a third case, a woman lost her health insurance and could not afford end-of-life chemotherapy.

These examples come from National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union. To prevent further incidents like these, the union favors a universal, government-run health care system. A lead editorial in the New York Times last week appeared to endorse their thinking.

Here is what these folks are missing.

The events described and many more like them happen every day. In every country. All over the world. And more than 90 percent of the time, the insurer is the government. According to one report, one out of every six British cancer patients is denied access to the latest cancer drugs. That’s mainly because the British National Health Service has decided that the drugs are too costly relative to the gain.

Read the whole thing.

Medical care is always going to be rationed because it is finite. So will we have medical care rationed by the decisions of its users and recipients, who can best assess the choices they face, or of bureaucrats in Washington who just look at ledger sheets - and given the nature of today's Left, the political identity group of who will receive preferential access and subsidies?

Medical care is provided according to three overlapping factors:

Affordability

Access

Quality

Pick which two you want in a system because you will never get all three at the same time. And if medical care gets nationalized, you won't even get two. 

"Medicare for All"

"Medicare for All" - as goes the UK, so will go USA

Want to know what medical care will be like if we get so-called Medicare for All (MFA) that Democrats are proposing? Well, here ya go: "Why the UK Suddenly Is Suffering from a Physician Shortage."

Why? Because MFA's costs are so incredibly high that massive tax raises will be enacted in the vain hope they will pay for it. They won't, but the taxes will still be levied. And as goes the UK will go the USA:

The NHS is in a state of perpetual crisis characterized by doctor shortages, long wait times, and rationing. The UK lost 441 general practitioners last year and had 11,576 unfilled vacancies for doctors as of last June.

The respected Financial Times explains:

An investigation [in March] by the Financial Times found widespread evidence of consultants refusing to take on extra work to clear patient backlogs fearing extra pay would bust tax allowances on their pensions contributions, triggering five-figure tax bills. …

[T]he Department of Health conceded that around 3,500 consultants and GPs had retired early over the past three years due to pension tax charges.

The tax system is so labyrinthine that some doctors discover they actually have negative income flows - it costs them more out of pocket to stay in  practice than to leave it.

Doctors respond to these perverse incentives the same way many rational actors would: by closing up shop. All parties agree the UK’s progressive tax policy triggered this cascading medical shortage.

But fairness, comrades! Onward to the future!