By Rick Manning
The fundamental transformation is entering its third and final stage through the nomination of Kamala Harris to be president of the United States.
Barack Obama’s presidency was phase one – the Overton Window phase.
The idea of “fundamental transformation” was never even uttered by a presidential nominee until candidate Barack Obama opened the door during his speech in Columbia, Missouri on October 30, 2008 when he declared, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
The country was in the midst of a financial meltdown and while President George W. Bush and his administration did much of the work to stabilize the situation, they left the country to the newly elected Obama to institute long-term measures to help ensure stability.
And Obama through the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation created an agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Board which was given far reaching power to regulate the financial industry free from congressional or presidential involvement. The net effect was a virtual regulatory take-over of what remained of a free-market capital distribution system.
Obama also assailed the one-sixth of our economy health care system, pushing through the Affordable Care Act, which has had the dual effect of transforming our health care system into a health insurance system, and creating a middle-class health care entitlement by raising eligibility for Medicaid up to 300 percent of the poverty level.
Today, just more than a decade later, after repeated half-hearted efforts by Senate Republicans to repeal it, even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 doesn’t call for Obamacare’s repeal. The forces for a private, doctor/patient focused health care system have been totally routed to the detriment of those seeking quality health care, but just another massive expansion of government power and spending.
The election of President Donald Trump put a temporary halt to the ‘transformation’ with an emphasis on ending the foreign outsourcing of America’s industrial capacity and a massive, successful regulatory rollback re-energizing America’s oil and natural gas sectors to the point that our country dreamed beyond energy independence to energy dominance.
Upon the installation of Joe Biden as President Trump’s successor, phase two of the fundamental transformation began with the climate change used as the excuse. Building off of regulatory success in the Obama administration which effectively cut off capital for coal-fired power plants, the Biden administration successfully passed something ironically known as the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA had little to do with inflation reduction and everything to do with converting America from a land where electricity was inexpensive and abundant to one completely dependent upon electricity that by regulatory design was expensive with distribution managed.
Chevron Oil Company’s CEO came back from the globalist orgy at Davos, Switzerland in the Biden years declaring that no company would build another major petroleum refining facility in the U.S. ever again. Why? Because there was no capital available to finance it at a reasonable rate because the expectation was that the government would effectively put oil and natural gas out of business by ending demand through electric vehicle incentives, etc.
The Biden administration, following the suicidal state of California’s lead, put into place a timeline for requiring automakers to only sell electric vehicles, effectively forcing automakers to discontinue research and development for gasoline powered cars and expand factory and other expansions into building electric vehicles. It really doesn’t matter that there is little demand for these vehicles on a mass scale, the Biden regulations and expectations for capital investment are attempting to end gasoline powered vehicle production due to an expectation of their extinction.
The Biden administration has also sought to dictate to the utility grid, which produces the electricity that America depends upon, a conversion over to much less efficient and reliable wind and solar energy versus expanding dependent and resilient natural gas, coal and nuclear powered generators.
While it seems inconsistent to create a policy dynamic which creates total dependence upon electricity generation and then destroy dams that produce that electricity and pray that the sun shines and the wind blows for the heater and air conditioning to work, this policy makes complete sense if you are attempting to convert the American economy away from being market based and toward one which follows federal government dictates.
To a lesser degree, the Biden administration has also declared war on the domestic agriculture industry seeking to force cattlemen off the land, and warring against the farms which provide the food which makes the U.S. the envy of the world.
Culturally, the Biden administration took the Obama policy of forcing a single school district in Illinois to accommodate transgenders to the next level by embracing the war on normal through education regulations that dramatically expand indoctrination in the schools. This transformation is shown by a March 2024 Gallup Poll which found that, “the number of Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ has more than doubled” since 2012.
The subhead of the Gallup article “More than one in five GenZ adults identify as LGBTQ+” tells the story of the generational transformation that has occurred since Obama’s presidency. This change shows the direct impact of the Phase One and Two takeover of the public school systems and its effect of younger generations. Note that 9.8 percent of Millennials claim to be non-heterosexual compared to 4.5 percent of Gen X and 2.3 percent of Baby Boomers.
This is why Joe Biden has repeatedly called the 2024 presidential election, a battle for the soul of America. He is right.
A Kamala Harris presidency will lock in the fundamental transformation of the energy and electricity generation system strangling the capacity for America to grow economically and creating an economically forced urbanization of Americans who neither will be able to afford a personal vehicle nor the electricity to make it run.
And this is why President Trump’s clarion call to Make America Great Again continues to resonate voters who don’t live on the relatively densely populated east and west coasts.
The only way to reestablish our economic independence and end the capital strangulation of the essential abundant electricity generation and fossil fuels sector is to rip the Green New Deal incentives built into the tax code by the IRA out by the roots. And for Congress and a potential Donald Trump-led administration to aggressively utilize the lifeline handed by the Supreme Court decision to cut bureaucrats autocratic power over the legality of regulations by identifying and stripping out regulations that are only tangentially reflective of the law they are based upon.
Unfortunately, just as the building blocks for fundamental transformation were put in place in 2009, it will take decades to reestablish anything resembling a market based economic system. But, the job President Trump did in ending tens of thousands of regulations in his first term set that stage, and a second term can re-establish an electricity grid that produces and can deliver the amount of electricity needed for 2030 and beyond while taking the thumb off of the investment scale in favor of electricity generating fuels that are Obama/Biden/Harris’ plan to collapse the largest economy in the world into darkness, collapsed under the weight of demand which dramatically exceeds the supply.
No matter who wins in 2024, the 2030s are going to look different than the 2010s. The question is will we live in a world where we have to ask government permission to turn on the light switch in our home.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
