On January 17, 1961 outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower was televised giving one of his most famous and well known speeches. The 15 minute Farewell to the Nation is largely regarded today as the “Military Industrial Complex” speech due to one lone sentence warning us of an out of control industrial complex fueling our Military while the rest of the speech has been mostly discarded.
But within that speech President Eisenhower warned us of a far greater danger that we as a nation have ignored, having fallen prey to the claims of what he then labeled a “Scientific Technological Elite” and how public policy could easily become captive to that.
Within a few years of that speech we began hearing news of our environment being in danger, of ecological disasters awaiting us in the near future, how our freedom of travel in private cars was pumping more and more pollutants into the atmosphere, how our industrial & manufacturing plants were creating “acid rain” killing livestock, poisoning the environment and life as we knew it was sure to end if not mankind itself.
In December 1970 President Richard Nixon signed into law the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency “to consolidate in one agency a variety of federal research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities to ensure environmental protection.”
Through successive administrations, the powers of the EPA have grown while our freedom of movement, building our homes, growing our businesses and powering our companies and homes has become increasingly encroached upon by EPA regulations.
Our once large powerful steel automobiles are now smaller, plastic and computerized. In some ways that has helped make them better, but in others ways they are much more expensive, more complicated to maintain and if you bought into the hype on Electric Vehicles to cut out pollution, travel far less distances and require much longer times to travel.
Our abundant resources within our nation’s boundaries lies underground as we purchase ever increasing fuels from foreign countries and push union miners out of jobs mining coal to be used or shipped to other nations for their inexpensive use.
While we here in the Pacific Northwest receive much of our power generation through hydro-electric dams on our many rivers, other parts of the nation must depend on so called “alternative sources” for energy, usually much more costly, less efficient and unreliable if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Indeed, over the years many of the very public officials clamoring for increased reliance on these methods of power generation balk when someone announces construction of them in their backyards.
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Animals Rights Activists Blocking Wind Farms
Decision Promised Soon on Cape Cod Wind Farm
While telling us the “science is settled,” many of them oppose the very inefficient and overly expensive methods they demand for us.
Add in to this the loss of jobs in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Not only for coal miners drillers, but for hundreds of thousands of others in supportive roles fueling those industries. Food servers, uniform manufacturers, tool makers, railroads that ship coal and maintain both the tracks and trains, ships that transport, union pipe fitters that build and maintain pipelines, refineries and much more. All employ people who feed their families, but goods and of course, pay revenue to the government in the form of taxes.
Instead we hear hollow promises of “Green Energy” jobs to come from companies that cannot remain in operation without very generous tax dollars given them to remain open, several now that have declared bankruptcy after ingesting Billions of our dwindling tax dollars.
We are seeing growing junkyards of discarded wind mills scattered over the country while we still see the EPA pushing for more and more regulation of our lives and the government refusing to reap our own natural resources for our use and increased employment of our citizens.
Citizens flood city council meetings falsely thinking they are doing good and only furthering the restricting of their very own lives and denying their neighbors family wage employment by fighting coal mines shipping t heir product by rail to be loaded onto ships and transported and sold to Asian Nations, who are using it to fuel their growing economies and manufacturing items that were once manufactured in America, but now imported back to us for purchase, further draining our economy of monies we used to circulate within the country.
How prophetic it was that 51 years ago, before computers and enlightenment became so popular, an outgoing President, born in the 1800’s and went through two World Wars and endured the Great Depression warned us of the very thing we would voluntarily embrace to give up liberty & freedom.
And we didn’t listen.
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