'Environmental Justice' or Crude Power Politics?

On September 28, a category 4 hurricane struck Florida, destroying many communities on the Southwest coast, knocking out power for millions of people, and causing devastation. Estimates are that it will cost more than $50 billion to clean up and rebuild.

Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the storm, vice president Kamala Harris intimated that, in the distribution of aid, poor people and ethnic minorities would be prioritized, because it is the “lowest income communities, and communities of color that are (most) impacted by these issues.” With the hurricane raging, there was shock, and significant pushback against this blatantly racialist statement, since it is (still) widely understood that weather does not discriminate, and colorblind need should be the only criterion for aid.

Both Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) immediately announced that no racial standard would apply. But for all the criticism, and assurances that the aid will be distributed by need, Harris and the Biden administration will have the last laugh. As it happens, on September 24, Michael Regan, the (first black) head of the Environmental Protection Agency had announced the creation of a new national office of environmental justice in his agency. (There are smaller offices of environmental justice larded throughout several other agencies, and there has been a small office for this at the EPA for decades.)

This new office will be funded with billions of dollars allocated in the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act. These billions will be available to groups that cater to minorities and low-income communities. The office will effectively be funding both left wing "climate change" activists and black activist groups informed by "Critical Race Theory."

And learn to spell.

The EPA was created by president Nixon in 1970, to establish and run major environmental and anti-pollution programs, many of which were actually needed at the time. Those founding concerns included the despoiling of nature with toxins, polluted lakes and rivers, and especially smog and industrial pollution in our cities. Between 1970 and 1990, more than a trillion dollars was spent on combating these issues, 60 percent of which went to urban area cleanups, many near low-income neighborhoods. The EPA was so effective that it essentially put itself out of work.

Nevertheless, it persists. In 1994, a mere quarter century after its founding, Bill Clinton used an executive order  #12898 to insist that the EPA inject the then-new concept of "environmental justice" into its mission. That was on top of the need to incorporate the tenets of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into the redress of pollution, which was already part of the mission statement. This is ironic, because Title VI states that the recipients of federal assistance (states, cities, etc) cannot discriminated by race and the usual other considerations. As a practical matter, though, "environmental justice" is all about discriminating in favor of certain minorities and the poor. As is the entire "Equity" agenda added by the Obama and Biden Administrations.

So the insertion of racial and class matters into environmental policy is not new. The EPA has been handing out "environmental justice" grants for years. But they have been relatively small, in the $25,000-$50,000 range. Most have gone to local community projects, often with an employment-training aspect for local youth or recent parolees. What is new is the magnitude of the funding, and, therefore, the resultant actions likely to ensue.

The Office of Environmental Justice at the EPA will now be the locus for some $47.5 billion, which the federal government will be spending on "environmental justice" priorities. There's another $13 billion in block grants for community-led projects, meant to empower low-income communities of various races, from urban blacks to Native Americans. Then there is another $15 billion for greenhouse gas reduction in "disadvantaged communities." So, that’s $90 billion before you even get to tax credits  for solar and wind power in the projects. The money is accompanied by a complicated Equity Action Plan, mandated by Biden’s executive order 13985, which sets up many ways to get money to "underserved communities." And yet, many environmental groups think this is insufficient.

Such astonishing profligacy with taxpayer money is not only an opportunity for graft, theft, and pure corruption, but also a mechanism for flooding low-income districts, and the activists and organizations within them, with cash, in the name of creating "equity" in face of "climate change." What does "injustice" in face of "climate change" actually mean? TOne "environmental justice: argument is that it is hotter in poorer neighborhoods because there aren’t as many trees and parks. Should we then be spending these billions on landscaping at public housing projects and Section 8 developments?

Then watch the cash roll in.

That seems frivolous when many of the country’s large urban low-income housing projects suffer from far worse problems than lack of shady groves for lounging in summer heat. Mold, blight, structural problems, flooding, rodents, non-working elevators, and crime all seem more urgent. But money used for remediation, which the Trump administration did via the Department of Housing and Urban Development, doesn’t signal virtue, or spread money to the activist left.

This looting of taxpayer dollars to enrich favored racial/class groups and "climate change" activists, has had one useful function: revealing the real game. That racket is all about the use of state power to reward allies and favored voting blocs. Nothing will come of this money as it is earmarked. There is no stated environmental policy by which to measure the utility of dollars spent. Weather will continue to affect everyone, white or black, in its path. This hundred-billion plus is just a boon to those who hand it out and those who receive it. It reduces the woke concern with climate to its crudest form: money. 

CCCP Redux -- Who Will Stop Them?

As we daily slip further under the yoke of illegal, unconstitutional, authoritarian – but so far unopposed – Democrat usurpation of liberty and law via their unconstitutional Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP) power grab, it's important to remember America's history. We've been here before.

If one were to define "slavery" objectively, the issue that kicked off our bloodiest war when Democrat slaveholders attacked free America (600,000+ Americans dead), that definition of slavery would include human beings -- Americans -- being forced to:

No difference exists between the above objective description of slavery and government today by the CCCP Democrats. Democrats are the party of slavery. They always have been. They always will be. It's the core of their ideology. It is what authoritarianism is about. It is what “rule by experts” is about, which is what Progressivism is. Democrats are "true believers" in slavery now, slavery forever.

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Democrat voters either a) agree with and are comfortable with slavery, or b) are ignorant of America as it exists today and thus  supporting “Progressive” slavery out of intentional ignorance; they don't want to know. Knowing would get in the way of their un-examined ideology. There is no "option c."

The difference between now and 1861? Today, the slave owners own the government and are using all the powers of the government - judicial, legislative, executive, law enforcement, medical, military to enslave Americans.

The similarity? Free states & governors can, in fact within their job descriptions, their superior role under our Constitution, and their constitutional duty, must resist slavery, as did free Americans waging war against Democrats 160 years ago.

Then, slavery was based on race; today it is based on the chimera of “climate change,” the racism of CRT, and the Covid-19 house arrest across the West and “unwise,” unconstitutionally-mandated “vaccines,” crushing the hopes, dreams and livelihoods of tens of millions, all the while contributing to massive and unexpected increases in non-Covid hospitalization and excess deaths, child abuse, suicide, spousal abuse, and massive decreases in education of our youth, our economy and prosperity, and our free future.

The effect of these policies is the destruction of the Western middle class which, at this point, can only be seen by those paying attention as the goal of the Progressive globalists enforcing this neo-slavery. These people aren’t dumb; what they are doing to us is intentional.

The question is: will Americans take any and all actions necessary to end slavery - again - in America? Is liberty, law, government of the people by the people and for the people, still worth fighting for, for ourselves and our posterity? Or will you really, as the globalist elites say, be “happy owning nothing,” not even yourself? The clock is ticking.

The New CCCP

The consequences of the actions of the ruling Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP), unsupported by the Constitution through which the sovereign States created the federal government (Article 7, “Establishment of this Constitution between the States”) to do specific things for the States as their servant… likely are existential.

Using the phantasm of a “vaccine,” the ahistorical “1619 project” and Marxist Critical Race Theory to indoctrinate our children, and the hoax of Climate Change as the basis of CCCP governance, our health, our prosperity, and our future as a free nation intentionally are being destroyed.

Western governments are proving power-mad, simultaneously anti-data and anti-science, and seem to have decided to bend us to their will when they exist only to serve ours. In America, the Biden presidency “wildly” contravenes our Constitution and laws, destroying our liberty, education and prosperity in the massive fundamental transformation promised by his predecessor.

Did somebody say "handlers"?

Rarely mentioned in the unprecedented number of articles from all sides about the conflicts between the administration and the country regarding Covid, CRT racism, and Climate is the increasingly-common, entirely new construct: “Biden’s handlers."

While clear to thinking people that Joe Biden is not in charge of the federal government, people from across the spectrum don‘t find it at all alarming that the world’s most powerful economic and military nation has no widely accepted chief executive; indeed, is being run by a junta elected by no one, visible to no one, accountable to no one, and doing the bidding of who-knows-whom-but-certainly-not-the-People, while wreaking untold and generational damage on our prosperity, freedom and liberty. That this is not supposed to be how America works is obvious to the citizens who care about America’s future.

This anti-American junta has led, predictably, to the emergence of columns and books about secession. Since we have nothing in common any longer, why pretend that we do, or that we still have a nation in any form but geographic? While secession may be the answer, it ought not be the go-to argument for those supporting the Constitution, the rule of law, and what has come to be called “legacy” (i.e. as-founded) America. This is true for an abundance of reasons. Two stand out:

The first of these is that, as with immigration law (the fourth major area of divisiveness after Covid, CRT, and Climate), it is not correct to say that what is not being tried is “broken.” (How would we know?) And what is not being tried is the enforcement of “the supreme law of the land,” the Constitution. How do we fix this? Simple, really – get governors to recognize that they are not in Triple-A ball awaiting a callup to The Show in D.C.; they – the governors – are The Show.

The States as superior to the federal government; this is how the country was designed to work. It ought to be no surprise that when the nation is not working as designed… it’s not working. And it is not working in executive decrees about climate, Covid, education, immigration, transportation, bathrooms – and a host of other things. A host in which the federal government has neither legal nor Constitutional authority for involvement, yet which is being allowed by our governors.

Look to the statehouses, comrade.

For those worried about five unelected persons in black robes – they are a part of that same federal government specifically limited by the States. Did the States, when creating the federal government, grant authority over marriage? Bathrooms? Medical jabs? Nope. When the SCOTUS branch of the federal government colors outside the lines by taking and ruling on cases outside their authority, the legal and Constitutionally-expected action of governors is: ignore them.

Can we fix this? Do we have governors willing to step-up? More importantly, have we citizens and voters willing to reject the overreach of the feds by electing governors putting their state above federal usurpation, as per the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution?

Based on the Virginia election, the answer is, “Yes.” Governors of eighteen States have said “No” to Biden's unconstitutional "vaccine mandates," suing that the mandate is a violation of federal law. Arizona, the nineteenth State suing the feds has sued the mandate as a violation of the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection clause. Why? Because the federal government has neither the authority nor the legal power to make or enforce rules or laws (or mandates) outside its enumerated powers.

These 19 governors are doing their jobs pretty much as the Founders designed, and as currently accepted. Exactly as designed would be to ignore the mandate and SCOTUS. Asking permission for a right already theirs has no upside; it implies a willingness to accept a negative answer the Court lacks authority to give, as well as making it more difficult to exercise that right in the court of public opinion. States are beginning to take back their reserved powers – and it is about time.

Diversity is our strength.

Let’s use immigration law as the example for the second reason.

The difference between authority and responsibility is that the former can be delegated while the latter cannot. The States delegated the authority to the federal government to deal with immigration. Because America is a union of sovereign States, the responsibility for immigration remains with those who made that delegation: the States. The federal government refusing delegated authority does not remove the responsibility from the States to deal with the issue. In SCOTUS’ ruling on Arizona v. United States, the federal government mistook (by an ahistorical, false assumption that the federal government is superior to the States that created it) its delegated authority for responsibility and unconstitutionally usurped the latter; the States retain the responsibility for immigration and should so act.

If governors followed the Constitution, the fact of a barely-sentient president with incontinence issues. would not matter, nor would a Supreme Court making up whatever it wants. Because they don’t, these do.

If California voters want to die of thirst as they go bankrupt in the dark – that’s their choice. If Blue states want to increase their infection rates, they can vax to their heart’s myocarditis content. If adult states recognize that it is better to treat patients using therapeutic drugs successfully all over the world (and which is how herd immunity is achieved) than to deny therapies, they should use ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and monoclonal antibody all they want.

Only governors can make America work again. Virginia is the 20th State to say, “Enough!” and begin working as designed again. Let’s hope we have more to come.