Doubt American Exceptionalism?

Remember BerlinBy Joe Gschwendtner

When Mamoru Shigemitsu, the Japanese foreign affairs minister, signed the surrender papers on board the USS Missouri in 1945, the drama of World War II drew to a close. The end of the war set the stage for another great play – one in Berlin where America would take center stage. Unlike the European continent, the United States emerged from the war physically strong, economically robust --- and in a position of global leadership. As the sole owner of nuclear weapons, it would have been possible to dominate the defeated nations of Germany, Italy and Japan and destroy the malevolent Soviet Union. Instead, America harkened back to the spirit of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. With “malice towards none” our nation helped rebuild a post-war industrial world and launch it into an era of unparalleled prosperity.

This decision to act for the good of all – even our enemies – was perhaps the most significant act of benevolence by a victor that the world has ever seen. It demonstrated how exceptional America truly was. Still, it would be the smoldering Cold War that would force us to seize the stage in Berlin for a command performance.

It was not as if we were unprepared. We were, after all, the nation that proclaimed its Manifest Destiny and the one which de Tocqueville in his 1831 Democracy in America saw as uniquely placed to lead the world in “benevolent enterprises.”

What was lacking however was our failure to recognize that few other nations ever look beyond their own short-sighted, self-interests. This would cost Europe dearly at the end of the World War II when the United States worked hard to be a team player with even the Soviet Union, often to its disadvantage. In fact, much of the turmoil that became the Cold War was the result of our failure to understand Joseph Stalin and the insatiable communist appetite for territory.

From Yalta on, Stalin had fast-talked the allies into post-war concessions as trade-offs for his entry into the war against Japan. The Battle for Berlin had been grueling and in April of 1945, similarly shortsighted U.S. diplomatic accommodations on the battlefield kept U.S. forces out of the city as Soviet forces razed what little remained after allied bombing. House-to-house street-fighting by the Nazis gave communists all the excuses necessary to further dehumanize the war by raping Berlin’s women and girls, and pillaging its remaining booty. These war crimes were not just premeditated but actually promised to the soldiers as rewards for the bitter campaigns that had preceded Berlin’s “Stunde Null” (Zero Hour).

At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Harry Truman arrived with more realistic insights on Soviet eastern European expansionism than his predecessor, FDR. The Russians sought at first to retain all of Berlin but Allied Forces used physical leverage over the Soviets in the German states of Thuringia and Saxony to ensure that Berlin would be an open city, governed by four powers in a ruling body known as the Kommandatura. It was with more than some suspicion that agreements regarding the four country occupation zones were crafted and under these conditions that American forces were actually “admitted” to the city.

In the three years following the war’s end, the Russians were obsessed with reparations and followed a two-pronged exploitation of their spoils. On the one hand, their commissars exacted money from current German production activities while on the other, they stripped prime industrial machinery in their zones and shipped it by railcar back to the motherland.

In Berlin, it went well beyond economics. It became crystal clear to the Allies that Russia had every intention of transforming the city by stealth into a socialist enclave by using trained agitators, labor thugs, and former Nazi hacks. Resistance by the Allies to the Soviet master plan came slowly at first, but it went from warm to a boil almost overnight through friction within the governing combine. By late spring 1948 the fissure was beyond repair. A secretly orchestrated tri-party currency reform replaced inflated occupation Reichsmarks with new Allied Deutschemarks. The Russians were furious and they responded predictably by instituting a blockade of all traffic to and from the non-Soviet sectors. They were sure that the allies would have to submit to Soviet demands or surrender control of Berlin.

It would have been understandable if Washington had done nothing to stop the Russian land grab. Confronting the Soviet military was not a viable option as our remaining occupation forces were pitifully small -- and the potential for another major war was quite real. So it was in June of 1948 that America’s muscular exceptionalism came of age as President Truman announced the Berlin Airlift as the counter-punch to the Russian siege. The decision did not come easily. Many urged “Give-Em-Hell-Harry” to sacrifice Berlin in the name of peace. Fortunately for the citizens of Berlin, the president and his post-war generals were insightful of their enemy and Truman had taken his own full measure of the Russian beast.

The airlift itself was an impossible task. Feeding and providing fuel to a city of some 2 million people with the technology and smaller cargo aircraft of the day was beyond imagining. But there was the American “x factor” -- brilliant doses of ingenuity that revolutionized air freight management, ground approach radar and air operations.

The enormous success of the 11-month air bridge was seen in its numbers: 2.33 million tons of cargo, 277,569 flights, only 101 fatalities and the lifting of the blockade in May of 1949. But this was no solo task. America led the free world air flotilla but the Royal Air Forces of England, New Zealand, and Australia contributed mightily to these monumental numbers. The book Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves (released earlier this year) is a compelling account of this epic success and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand American courage and leadership in the post-war world.

If American exceptionalism was not obvious enough in the Berlin Airlift, it was demonstrated clearly to the whole world in the Marshall Economic Recovery Plan. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States poured upwards of $100 billion in today’s dollars to rebuild Germany and also Europe’s economy. Never in the course of history had one country taken on the responsibility of rebuilding an entire continent, including both its former enemies and exhausted allies.

The plan itself was at its core, foreign policy. It recognized that freedom in the old world would be doomed if the new world could not breathe economic life and hope into the ashes of war. Russia was also in dire straits but when offered participation in the plan, Stalin could not countenance it. The Marshall Plan was more than just a “most noble adventure” as Greg Behrman has detailed in his book of the same name; it was the signature foreign policy achievement of its time. When reinforced militarily with the NATO Treaty executed in 1949, the military-economic umbrella it represented became the catalyst of development and then the emergence of a modern-day Europe.

Thirteen years later, in 1961, Europe was back on its feet and surging. In contrast, the Soviet Zone of Germany was in shambles. It is estimated that some 2.5-3.0 million East Germans had found a way to escape Soviet domination – either by going to West Berlin or transiting through on the way to another free country. Coupled with the ongoing economic counter blockade initiated in response to the airlift, the Democratic Republic of Germany was losing its best minds to freedom and was no more than a third world nation. Reacting again to the failure of its political system, the Berlin Wall was hastily thrown up on the night of August 13, 1961.

For 28 years, an isle of freedom endured in a squalid communist sea because the United States, as the free world’s leader, refused to be bullied by ever-changing masters of the failing Soviet communist state. During that time President Kennedy joined the city with his famous line, “Ich bin ein Berliner” and decades later Ronald Reagan called on Mr. Gorbachev to tear down his wall. On November 9, 1989 the Berlin wall finally collapsed under the weariness of a dysfunctional political system unable to sustain its own economic promises.

If the story of Berlin is the story of the collapse of communism, it is even more the story of America coming of age. The rise and fall of the Berlin Wall serve as benchmarks of the Cold War – a costly economic, military and political struggle which had the highest of nuclear stakes and was won by a free world with the unswerving, courageous leadership of the United States.

Today, it is fashionable in some circles to denigrate our nation’s glorious past. We have entered into a time in which the intellectual and political leadership of this country has lost sight of our greatness. There is a clattering gong from the growing ranks of apologists who feel the need to expunge the demons of American greatness past. Many of the liberal, political elite fail to see the blessings they are still enjoying from America’s leadership and instead seek to paint our great benevolence in hues of domination and intimidation.

In 2008, Andrew Bacevich in his book, The Limits of Power, called U.S. exceptionalism into question. He concluded that our exceptionalism had become an unsustainable desire for material wealth. He saw the Cold War having given rise to the “Long Peace”, followed by an unbridled decade of interventionism, with the beginning of the “Long War” on 9/11. In essence, Bacevich sees his country with a military industrial complex, picking convenient wars with those who threaten its way of life and the oil pipelines that sustain it. It is a nation that has reached the limits of its power.

The opinions of those like Bacevich threaten to destroy the fabric of our nation and can become self-fulfilling prophecies. By attacking our nation’s very ideals, these detractors keep our nation from success and then point to our struggles as proof of their beliefs. How many of our school textbooks weave national guilt into their historical accounts making for a youthful self-loathing that is cancerous to our culture?

Granted, there are no great leaders and no great nations that have been perfect. And surely, everyone needs humility to recognize faults and correct them. But there is grave danger in being so fault-focused that we begin to believe our detractors. When we believe what our foes are saying, we lose our ability to lead. And right now, strong leadership is what the free world needs most. As a result, this attempted destruction of American exceptionalism is not a purely domestic issue. It has consequences for the entire world.

Exceptionalism recognizes the lonely challenges of leadership, the fundamental rightness and unarguable progress of the western, Judeo-Christian way of life. Moral relativism and post-modern accommodations don’t work when the enemy wages war on a way of life, innocents and children, and against all reason. Since 1776 and the Revolution that followed, our manifest destiny has been to do what is right. Steeled in the high drama of Cold War crisis and the streets of Berlin, we have proven ourselves worthy of the task. While there may be limits to our national power and its projection, our capacity and resolve to lead the free world cannot be in doubt.

Can the free world afford a U.S. retreat from exceptionalism? Consider the alternative: a stew of leadership including socialist bullies and third-rate actors like Iran, North Korea, Yemen, and Venezuela, all stirred in a pot by a hapless United Nations. None of these nations will seek to benefit anyone but themselves even though the only real hope for peace is a world leadership that is characterized by a genuine pursuit of the common good. In this way, American exceptionalism is the last and best bulwark in the fight against terrorism. As in Berlin, the world cannot do without U.S. leadership. The scream for our continuing exceptionalism is primal and strong, but never louder than from those who would be free. May God continue to drive and bless American Exceptionalism!

The Human Face of Freedom

What the Berlin Wall Anniversary MeansBy Joe Gschwendtner

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this week. Anyone in Central or Eastern Europe today, 70 or older, has spent over two-thirds of their life under Communism or jackbooted Nazis. That is, unless your courage and ambition made you willing to risk life itself like our neighbor, Emerencia Marton Kanan. Emi was born into impoverished, post-war, Communist Hungary in 1945. At age four, weakened by ingested chemicals, Emi was near death on a straw bed until a man with rare Rh negative blood offered an 11th hour transfusion. Finally off the grim reaper’s list, she then contracted TB and was removed to a hospice/sanitarium. Written off again, her mom brought Emi to her native village Nyoger at a higher, more beneficial altitude. In one of life’s outlying moments, Emi survived on curd from the churn in the milk house to sate her hunger. Open spaces, food of the earth, and perhaps the scent of more freedom put the tuberculosis into remission.

Rough hewn and semi-skilled, Emi’s Dad was a hunted man. A former government worker, he was punished with menial jobs—shoveling coal and building Budapest subways in the 50’s. He had narrowly saved his own life earlier by having escaped a forced shipment to post-war Russian labor camps. He taught Emi two things: Freedom is worth fighting for and to never give up.

At 21 Emi met Frank. He was heady with ideas, ambition and dreams of freedom, ever plotting to escape Communism. Their romance was epic in speed and intensity. They were married in 1967 and Frank Junior arrived ten months later.

Even as Frank Senior planned their Iron Curtain escape, he left the collectives to set up a welding shop with friends in an attempt to rise above subsistence level. His dreams died with him when he was electrocuted by a faulty transformer. Emi was now a widow at age 22. She worked at a local school but her attention was riveted by politics and economics.

After hearing other stories of escape, Emi engineered her own. With $140 and a Communist visa to vacation in Yugoslavia, she located a smuggler who ran human flesh across the Adriatic to Italy. On short notice she convinced her mother to join her, and, along with her sedated son, fled in the night (a story paralleling Disney’s “Night Crossing”).

During eight months in a refugee camp and refusing “easy” prostitution money, Emi survived by ironing clothes for $1.50 a day. On her own terms, she finally secured a passage for three to Chicago. Emi, by dint of her own courage would go on to self-educate, re-marry, and find her way to Colorado and the investment industry, subsequently attaining stratospheric levels of success for a female in the 1970’s. She and her husband Pat now enjoy a reflective life together as they teach photographic techniques and market artistic old world photography in Castle Rock, Colorado.

If there is anyone who can prove the case of America, as land of the free and home of the brave, it is she……….

Joe Gschwendtner is a Castle Rock businessman and writer.

Poland: A Friend Betrayed

By Joe Gschwendtner Poland’s expansive plains have made her lands a military corridor in regional skirmishes and world wars. Teutonic Knights, cavalry and tanks have controlled her vast spaces and she has been uniquely oppressed by outsiders. Outstripping this history and braving long odds, she is now a successful recovering Soviet client state, defiant and free, the beneficiary of a robust capitalism flourishing within her borders and Eastern Europe. We would do ourselves great harm to not remember that this is the Poland of Generals Kosciusko and Pulaski who fought for our freedom in the American Revolution and it is the heritage of Colonel “Gabby” Gabreski, likely the greatest American air ace in U.S. history. Her soldiers have fought bravely, shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it possible she is now a friend betrayed, the casualty of a missile defense gambit in the broader initiative of global engagement?

The current administration’s decision to cancel the promised missile defense system has left Poles scratching their heads while other allies silently writhe. Is this really a small tactical decision that eases tensions and saves money? Or have we witnessed a grave course adjustment in the ship of state? Has Poland again become a pawn of a new war? Her history of being on the receiving end of plunder and partition is instructive.

Polonians (“people of the open fields”) are fiercely independent and resilient; they have had to be. Their first millennium was marked by dominance and manipulation, first by Mongols, Tatars, Swedes, Cossacks, and Russians, their own nobility, and then the late empires of Europe. These constant upheavals stunted the growth of both democratic institutions and a middle class needed to drive them. Not until World War I’s Treaty of Versailles in 1918 and the tenuous independence it granted was Poland really in a position to act strategically.

As that document’s ink was still drying, President Josef Pilsudski and the Polish people recognized the appetite of the Soviet bear to the east. Clearly, Lenin’s records prove his intentions to recover territories surrendered by Bolshevik Russia during World War I and then to later create a Communist “Anschluss” with German Socialists using Poland as his corridor. The Polish-Soviet War that resulted in 1919 was a pre-emptive effort by Pilsudski to thwart a reconstituted Russian military from resuming its march westward. The humiliating defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw resulted in the Treaty of Riga in 1921. With Russia’s territorial urges still unrequited and smoldering, the devil’s table was set for Stalin’s later revenge and en passant machinations at Tehran and Yalta during World War II.

Poland’s geopolitical significance would rise exponentially with the dominance of mechanized warfare in World War II. Germany’s invasion of Poland began with the bombing of Wielun and the overwhelming of Gdansk on September 1, 1939, an act of a war that would put 100 million men under arms globally. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, struck weeks earlier between Germany and Russia, committed the signatories to non-aggression while allowing the Red Army to move quickly into eastern territories ceded to Poland at the end of World War I. The pact also made provisions for a later, final partition of Poland between Russia and Germany.

In a ruthless seven months of terror, Stalin initiated a comprehensive round-up of Polish intelligentsia, primarily officials, policemen, academics, and military officers. His defining act of revenge and brutality was the April 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre near Smolensk where 4,421 Polish officers were summarily executed. At three other nearby locations another 14,400 leaders were shot and buried in mass graves. Killings were clinical and efficient, virtually all delivered with a bullet to the back of the head.

With Operation Barbarossa, Hitler double-crossed Stalin and launched Germany’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. With the Polish pawn in play, the ebb and flow of unchecked warfare was visited upon the people of the open fields. Brutalized or exterminated by the Germans, Poles were then subsequently raped, plundered, and finally yoked by their Russian Slavic brethren in their counter-offensive. Most of today’s aging survivors have long gotten over the Germans, but will never forgive Russian depravities.

In a final preview of things to come, an extraordinary Warsaw uprising staged against the Germans by the Polish resistance in 1944 was unaided by the Russian Army positioned just across the Vistula. Stalin’s unwillingness to help was motivated by his Katyn-like desire to see the German defensive force destroyed by a still vigorous underground in a fight to the death. That Polish pawn played in Warsaw resulted in over 200,000 military and civilian deaths and Hitler’s vengeful order to level the city block by block.

Whether Katyn, the Warsaw Uprising and other compelling evidence was conveniently overlooked or ignored by the Franklin Roosevelt’s State Department is debatable. Indisputable is FDR’s bad call on the beguiling Josef Stalin. Unmoved by Winston Churchill’s suspicions, Roosevelt remarked: “I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man….I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The Iron Curtain and almost 45 years of oppression was the price of that gross miscalculation.

At the Potsdam Conference, Truman was more wary of Stalin, but east-west political boundaries had been established in Crimea and only minor adjustments were made. Pawned again, Poland’s national sovereignty continued to be ignored as was her ravaged populace. Russia unilaterally shifted her post-war boundaries, reclaiming Slavic peoples and territory in eastern Poland and returning territory to Poland in the west at the expense of Germany. In the process, millions of Germans and Poles were displaced and forcibly relocated.

Fortunately, the Polish people retained their indomitable resilience. They continued on with the business of rebuilding their lives after betrayal, living as Poles and not Communists, ever guided by their Catholicism. Poles who survived the German General Government and the Polish Communist State will tell you bluntly that their beliefs were unshakable and that they deceived their communist masters at every opportunity.

It was in this environment that a shipyard worker in Gdansk and the first Polish Pope concomitantly led worker-based and spiritual efforts that would finally set them free of Cold War bondage. Pawns no longer, and in concert with other eastern bloc uprisings, the Poles foiled their masters with unionized solidarity and simple Christianity. The award in 1983 of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lech Walesa was the signal event and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Poland quickly made its own political transition. Mikhail Gorbachev himself would later acknowledge that the Wall’s collapse would have been impossible without Pope John Paul II.

Nowhere in the failed Socialist states of Eastern Europe did freedom take deeper root. Along with the Czech and Baltic republics, no countries were more anxious to embrace America as a partner in the quest for freedom and Poland proudly joined the European Union in 2004. Her current economic challenges are not insubstantial, but Poland is committed to an ambitious $3.5 billion privatization effort to eliminate remaining state-run industries.

The defensive missile agreement struck with the Bush Administration in 2002 was emblematic, proof positive that Poland understood the nature of her contemporary adversaries and readily accepted her role in the Free World’s defense. The cancellation of this agreement has significant implications beyond the current tactical situation. Unlike current American policymakers, Poland knows that new threats to peace are no longer limited to powerful nations with massive military might, but also include stateless terrorist rogues and bad state actors with enough nuclear capacity to annihilate millions in the civilized world. Few countries on earth could know more about the horrors people are willing to inflict on each other.

What other nation is better positioned and willing to protect the Free World against an almost certain destruction that can be rained down upon the northern hemisphere from Middle Asia? If one correct answer is a willing Poland, how is it that the politics of globalization seem to have prevailed over common sense? Has Poland served as a pawn yet again?

Is it possible that our President has not completely studied the success and failures of his idol FDR? Are Mr. Ahmadinejad’s intentions not clear for the entire world to understand? Does he really think that Russia is ready to disown a history of territorial aggression? Has a potentially fatal miscalculation been made about the many threats we face? Is it worth the risk to find out?

A useful phone call for President Obama would be to former President George W. Bush. I suspect the conversation would go something like this:

“Mr. President, this is Barack Obama and I need your advice. When you said that you looked into the eyes of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and you could see the measure of his soul, what did you really see?”

Joe Gschwendtner is a Denver businessman and writer

Lewandowski the myth-buster

When oil is not in the headlines, wind and solar energy gets the ink. Renewable energy is seen by some as the fix for a world fouled by carbon emissions. Government subsidies and credits are up for grabs by utilities abandoning fossil fuels and “greening up” their power sources. Most states mandate renewables in their power mix. Oilman T. Boone Pickens has weighed in with his own wind-based plan. Can there be any doubt about the causes and solutions to America’s energy nightmare? Indeed there is some doubt, and in Colorado, world-class skeptics find great comfort in Stan Lewandowski, Jr., General Manager of the Intermountain Rural Electrification Association Cooperative in Sedalia. Larger-than-life, he is a philosophical brother-in-arms to Ayn Rand’s Ellis Wyatt, (Atlas Shrugged), who torched his oil fields rather than knuckle under to government regulations.

Lewandowski is nothing if not colorful on energy. He recently snubbed Governor Ritter’s invitation to join a utility task force seeking ways to reduce carbon emissions. To Stan, Al Gore’s credibility matches that of Saddam Hussein. He views An Inconvenient Truth as a timely fabrication supported by incomplete data and designed purposely to shut off rational debate on global warming. When researching the Kyoto Accords and extrapolating for the unlikely impact of full compliance, Stan’s arithmetic shows a minimal impact (four tenths of one degree Fahrenheit) on global temperatures by the 22nd Century.

So it should come as no surprise that he would routinely quote Oklahoma Senator James Imhofe by saying that the threat of catastrophic climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. It could easily have been his line. Give him a few more minutes and he’ll make a compelling case to prove it too. All this while reliably delivering electricity to Colorado as cheaply as it comes.

Lewandowski is no masked man, but nibbles at the edge of legendary status after 34 years in his IREA position, providing electricity to 137,000 customers in central Colorado. The Polish Catholic son of a union steward out of South Chicago, his working class values are those of Harry Truman’s Democratic Party, his inspiration, the life of John F. Kennedy. More than a few of his relatives were fingerless or amputees who barely survived the rough and tumble industrial life of his neighborhood. His maternal grandmother raised nine children by herself after her husband was killed by a freight train.

Stan’s movement rightward began with a growing disillusionment in his twenties, and he was deeply shaken by JFK’s 1963 assassination. Working the REA’s D.C. beat at the time, he witnessed firsthand, the uneasy crosswinds of change ushered in by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society entitlement programs. His epiphany moment with the imperious LBJ and his changing party principles is told in a story about Johnson walking across the White House lawn. A marine salutes the President and says, “Your helicopter’s ready sir”. The President’s response is “They’re all my helicopters son”.

Call him a Conservative or a Libertarian; he’ll likely smile at either label. There’s no mistaking his managerial goal: providing reliable electricity at a low cost. IREA never raised it rates from 1982 to 2004 and recently refunded over $9 million to customers. Yet, in an age that ruminates about social justice and egalitarianism, he’ll also tell you that social services are nowhere in his contract to deliver. This impolitic thinking makes Mr. Lewandowski a hot potato in these parts.

He rankles environmentalists with a well-articulated, firmly entrenched belief that coal-fired plants are a critical interim bridge to America’s strategic long-term energy calculus. At the very least, any limitations on the construction of coal-fired plants will exacerbate looming capacity problems, reduce the U.S. standard of living, and have a crippling effect on the economy.

Lewandowski supports nuclear power unequivocally, noting that not one American has ever died from an accident at a nuclear power plant. On the other hand, Stan has a healthy skepticism about the prospects of wind and solar power, seeing them as impractical in the near term and maybe forever. The unvarnished facts are that wind is unreliable, far from power grids, and needs to be backed up by high-cost gas-fired plants to provide uninterruptible service to customers. Wind proponents make no mention of this collateral data. When additional distribution lines are factored into already enhanced capital outlays, project costs can become prohibitive.

The crowning insult to environmental interests was his July 2006 letter sent out to all 900 energy cooperatives in the U.S. It sounded a clarion call, alerting them to the implications of global warming “alarmists” and the attendant economic costs of greenhouse gas regulation and cap and trade schemes. Lewandowski’s arguments were extensive, well-reasoned and backed up by 31,000 other scientists who have rejected outright, the assertion that global warming is a human-controlled, carbon-based phenomenon.

Lewandowski never backs down. Even after his enemies in the green press skewered him for spending IREA cooperative funds to buttress his politico/economic points, he is unbowed. The fire in his eyes is sharply kindled. Maybe it’s just that he’s a grown-up city kid, spoiling for a good fight.

In rejecting the catastrophic impacts of greenhouse gases, Stan uses a non-emotional, clinically frank style buttressed by government and industry statistics. He brings the core argument home as a pocket-book issue, of late harshly criticizing the economic impact of the proposed Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.

The bill’s basic mechanism allows for the establishment of carbon emission limits for all businesses that are sharply reduced over time. Corporations not in compliance would be required to buy or trade for costly permits to ensure continued operations, the effect of which is an indirect tax transfer that would be passed on to consumers. If the bill passes, Stan cites the following economic consequences in his July Watts and Volts newsletter:

 Household income reductions of up to $7,328 by the year 2030 (U.S. Energy Information Administration).

 A $1.21 Trillion increase in energy prices between 2009-2018 (Congressional Budget Office)

 The loss of 3-4 million jobs and electricity price increases of 77-129% by 2030 (National Association of Manufacturers)

At 70, Stan still delivers jolting roundhouse blows to the opposition. In the same newsletter article, he quotes Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism”.

Provided he stays robust and his wife and family are in good health, Stan will remain influential, principled, courageous, and perhaps, even victorious. He is not the insensitive maverick his detractors would have you believe. Truth be told, his flip side is a study in compassion and empathy.

Ask any employee, customer, or his union. No arbitration for 15 years and no grievances that anyone remembers either. A remarkable 25% of all employees have over 20 years of tenure, with 12 of them over 30.

A revealing vignette involves an Ethiopian friend, Wondalem Wolde, earlier employed as a doorman. While visiting D.C. years ago, Stan left his room for a cigar. Outdoors, he struck up a conversation with a young immigrant chasing his own American dream. Stan listened intently, gave him his card and told the man to look him up if his vision took him to Colorado. Indeed, it eventually did. Stan got him a job as a meter reader and one later for his wife as a receptionist. Wondalem is now a mechanic and his family successes have allowed him to sponsor 15 other relatives from the impoverished Horn of Africa.

In Douglas County, Stan is still “The Man”, a JFK profile of integrity and balance. His prediction is that global warming and its attendant insanity will collapse under the weight of its own irreconcilable science and economics. While we cannot be absolutely certain he is right, none here doubt him or his principles.

Joe Gschwendtner is a Castle Rock businessman and free-lance writer.