Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[a_majoor]

Nemo, do you object to the fact that supermarkets use exactly the same system to get their bread delivered, or Tim Horton's gets their baked goods? Should Ford or Toyota stop outsourcing the vast majority of their automotive components? For that matter, would you be willing to pay double or triple the price of your phone service to talk to Dave in North York rather than "Dave" in Bombay (or simply accept the demise of customer service call centers altogether?)

Simply because the corporate entity is a hospital does not exempt them from the laws of economics, or the effects of positive and negative incentives. It is time we got with the 21rst century and move to more flexible delivery of goods and services wherever it makes sense, and not just in health care.

 

[Nemo888]

Baking bread is not a natural monopoly. IIRC when I worked in an outsourced auto parts plant the allowable limit was 11% of the vehicle. I left the duopoly of Rogers/Bell and now only pay 14$ for my phone per month and talk to a person in Chatham.

I agree the hospital is not exempt from the laws of economics. There are modest inefficiencies in sterile processing departments. But to make them so lean patients miss surgeries or get substandard surgical care is not acceptable IMO. We are creating a monopoly with public funds and the profits accrued will be sent to France not returned to the public purse.

Your knee jerk support for privatization, even when it is the wrong decision, is why I am a closet conservative. This is what I call Tea Party Conservatism. It is all dogma and doctrine and has no situational awareness. We all lose when making the other side always wrong is more important than doing the right thing.

 

[Redeye]

Your knee jerk support for privatization, even when it is the wrong decision, is why I am a closet conservative. This is what I call Tea Party Conservatism. It is all dogma and doctrine and has no situational awareness. We all lose when making the other side always wrong is more important than doing the right thing.

That's the problem as I see it too. Dogmatic adherence to ideology has replaced, for many people, any semblance of critical, reasonable thinking.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>It could have been so much better with a public/private partnership

Go through your list of objections again and try to explain for each operationally-relevant one why it is "bad" if the facility is private, but suddenly becomes "OK" or "good" if the facility is public/private.

Note that some - such as wages - are operationally irrelevant.  If the aim is achievable for less cost, it should be done that way.

 

[Nemo888]

If it was public/private at least my conservative half would be happy because it was saving money even though it was providing a clearly inferior service. (Non-sterile hospital linen is outsourced in this fashion in Ottawa by HLS. It was very profitable at first.) Now it just costs me more and the efficiencies of scale are passed on to share holder in France. Not really where I want my tax dollars going. My tax dollars are also creating a local monopoly. Now both my right hand side and left hand side agree on something. Privatizing in this fashion was stupid IMO.

Wages are somewhat relevant because of the critical implantable devices that the technicians process. You want skilled people handling them.

 

[Kirkhill]

I make my living in the food industry.

Food kills.

Food kills more people per 100,000 in the US than die on the highways (24 vs 19) or die by violence (24 vs 9) or, at a guess, than die from botched surgeries.

That includes bread from bakeries.

Should all bakeries, and other food processors, be nationalized?

I agree with your antipathy to a monopoly. 

I find nothing wrong with Government regulating by setting standards and then employing inspectors to police them.  Once that is done then I would open the business opportunity to all-comers.

Presumably, in this case, you have clearly defined the standards of excellence required.  They would make glorious jumping off points for regulations.
Equally, presumably, you have a qualified QA staff who can monitor the standards. 
They could be taken on strength of the Government, as in the case of CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency).

OR

They could be taken on strength of a PRIVATE standards monitoring organization such as CSA (Canadian Standards Association) or UL (Underwriters Laboratories).

Curious word that: "Underwriters" - as in "underwrites" your loan or your insurance policy.

The laboratory in Underwriters Laboratory, that people rely on to save lives, was initiated in the private sector to save institutions money.

 

[a_majoor]

Baking bread is not a natural monopoly.

Neither is providing services to hospitals.

I left the duopoly of Rogers/Bell and now only pay 14$ for my phone per month and talk to a person in Chatham.

So expanding your horizon of consumer choice is good when it saves you money on the phone bill but doing exactly the same thing in a hospital is bad?

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting and provocative view of the "Gunwalker" scandal that is bubbling in the United States. While it is hard to subscribe to all the views expressed here, it is equally difficult to imagine any logical reason that an idea as seriously flawed as "Gunwalker" was ever launched in the first place (or why the administration is trying so hard to cover up when it would be far easier to hang the architects out to dry). Colossal incompetence rather than evil intent?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/cloward-piven-the-ultimate-goal-of-gunwalker/?singlepage=true

Cloward-Piven: The Ultimate Goal of Gunwalker?

Posted By Bob Owens On September 17, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 145 Comments

PJMedia reader “eon” posted an insightful comment [1] in response to my September 15 article [2] on the Gunwalker scandal:

    To the best of my knowledge, no previous U.S. administration has ever destabilized the government of a putatively friendly foreign power purely for domestic political gain.

    The closest you can get would be the revolutionary movement in what is now Panama, that the U.S. nurtured to gain that area’s independence (from Nicaragua) — to facilitate building the Panama Canal. But that was a pre-existing revolutionary movement with pre-existing complaints against the Nicaraguan government that did not include stopping them from selling illegal drugs. (Editor’s note: Panama gained its independence from Colombia, not Nicaragua.)

    The gains Obama & Co. seem to be seeking come in three flavors. Ranked in order of time-criticality from their POV, they are most likely:

    1. Short-term: Increased illegal immigration from Mexico as people attempt to flee the increasing violence (allowing them to push the DREAM Act through, and “stacking the deck” in the next election via ACORN and SEIU);

    2. Medium-term: Propaganda for tighter gun laws (possibly enacted by Executive Order, bypassing the Congress);

    3. Long-term: Legalization of “recreational drugs,” helped by a “drug friendly” Mexican government, influenced by if not overtly controlled by the drug cartels.

    I strongly suspect that (3) is the ultimate objective, with (1) and (2) being seen (at least by Obama & Co.) as “stepping-stones” to attaining it.

While I personally think (3) is a non-starter even as a long-term issue, investigators and pundits closely tracking Gunwalker have long suspected a larger game was afoot.

A high-risk plot involving major elements of the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Treasury, and State, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Border Patrol, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CID), requiring approval from the State Department, isn’t something that comes from a mid-level bureaucrat. It is typically incited and decided by the very highest levels of appointed and elected officials.

As anyone with any experience in government will attest, there is massive institutional inertia against both change and risk. It is insurmountable without significant stakeholder support. In government, this means directors, secretaries, and elected officeholders.

An operation like Fast and Furious would have been jettisoned in the conceptual stages as inherently dangerous and assured of failure, as various veteran law enforcement officers have attested (including here [3] at PJMedia in an article by LAPD veteran “Jack Dunphy”):

    I can appreciate the desire to use novel law enforcement approaches in confronting the violence attendant to drug trafficking in Mexico. Someone, displaying a bit of that outside-the-box thinking, came up with the idea of allowing thousands of weapons to be bought on this side of the border with the idea that they could be tracked as they made their way through the network of cartel members and facilitators and into the hands of Mexican outlaws.

    This was a pipe dream. To me, it is inconceivable that this operation ever made it out of the first meeting where it was discussed. It goes to show how detached police executives can be from the reality of police work as it is actually practiced. There is simply no effective way to track a gun once it leaves the store where it was purchased.

We’ve long suspected that what “eon” calls a “medium-term” goal — propaganda for tighter gun laws — was the ultimate goal of Gunwalker, but the plot makes significantly more sense if Gunwalker did have multiple goals, of which gun control was just one.

A logical speculation posted by “eon” is that the short-term goal of Gunwalker was to increase violence in Mexico. This would drive more Mexican citizens northward as illegal aliens, seeking respite from the violence in their home country. Their plight would provide the administration a way to pitch the DREAM Act [4] as an act of kindness to political refugees and another step towards amnesty.

This would be a strategy straight from the Cloward-Piven [5] playbook.

As James Simpson noted several months ago at American Thinker, the Cloward-Pieven strategy is always approached the same way [6]:

  1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
  2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
  3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Gunwalker purposefully increases social unrest (increased gun violence/destabilizing Mexico), with the possible result of overloading the U.S. public welfare system (more illegal aliens fleeing the violence in Mexico and Central America). Gunwalker’s perpetrators could then use that influx to create an insurmountable constituency of poor seeking handouts from the Democratic Party. The hope of the strategy is to force a system-wide collapse of the current system, and then to rebuild the government in a variant of the strongest socialist model they think the public will accept.

It sounds too devious. It appears to fit.

Take Operation Fast and Furious in Arizona, the two suspected operations in Texas, Operation Castaway in Tampa, and the newer allegations of “Gangwalker” in the Midwest — they make sense only in the larger context of a Cloward-Piven framework.

These operations could not possibly succeed at interdicting straw purchasers, smugglers, and cartel bosses. No one actually involved in law enforcement could possibly believe that such idiotic operations could work. But these operations are logical when viewed through the context of their implementation as tactical applications designed to support a Cloward-Piven strategy.

Operation Castaway provided weapons to destabilize Central American countries and to help keep the cartel drug supply lines from Central and South America open. The unnamed gunwalking operations in Texas provided a steady flow of U.S. firearms to southern and central Mexico. Operation Fast and Furious provided the Sinaloa cartel more than 2,020 weapons in northern Mexico along the U.S. border. And to make sure the cartel wars didn’t get too one-sided, the State Department made sure the bloodthirsty Zetas were armed with American military equipment by selling them military hardware through a transparent front company [7].

The violence in Mexico triggered by the administration’s gunwalking efforts also seems logically designed to reverse a trend [8] that had begun of Mexicans and others originating from south of the border leaving the United States because of our current economic situation.

If the net flow of illegal aliens is negative, the Democratic Party’s desires are inhibited: increasing numbers of illegal aliens can create the sort of economic crisis they need to force amnesty laws, to assure a long-term Democratic majority, and to establish lock-step control over Hispanic voters as they have established over blacks.

Operation Fast and Furious doesn’t make sense as a anti-cartel operation, but it makes perfect tactical sense as a way of implementing Cloward-Piven, something that President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Secretary Napolitano, and Secretary Clinton have long embraced as followers of those radicals and Saul Alinsky. Gunwalker is the start of a coup d’état against the republic by the very souls entrusted to guard it.

Of course, this is entirely speculation at this point. It’s just damn hard to think of a more logical reason for Gunwalker to exist.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/cloward-piven-the-ultimate-goal-of-gunwalker/

URLs in this post:

[1] insightful comment: http://pajamasmedia.com/comment/1261838/

[2] September 15 article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/gunwalker-linked-to-three-more-murders/

[3] here: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/veteran-cops-recognize-fast-and-furious-as-a-foolhardy-idea/

[4] DREAM Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DREAM_Act

[5] Cloward-Piven: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy

[6] approached the same way: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html

[7] transparent front company: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/worse-than-gunwalker-state-dept-allegedly-sold-guns-to-zetas/

[8] reverse a trend: http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/03/illegal-aliens-leaving-u-s-returning-to-mexico-for-better-life/

 

[a_majoor]

How Progressives see the control of money:

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/what-solyndra-soc-security-say-about-liberalism

What Solyndra, Soc. Security say about liberalism

If you want to understand how liberals view the relationship between individuals and the government, compare their reactions to the Solyndra scandal to their statements on Social Security reform.

Earlier this month, Solyndra, the solar panel maker that received $535 million in federal loan guarantees and was touted as the symbol of President Obama's "green jobs" initiative, declared bankruptcy and had its offices raided by the FBI.

The failure of a company Obama described as "a true engine of economic growth" has raised obvious questions about the advisability of squandering taxpayer money on such endeavors. But Obama's surrogates have countered by arguing that failure is merely a natural byproduct of progress.

"The reason why fledgling, cutting-edge industries need this kind of assistance is because they can be high risk as well as high reward," White House press secretary Jay Carney said. He also observed that "what happened here is an investment did not pan out."

On Sept. 14, administration officials appearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the Solyndra loan guarantees, made a similar case.

"Support for innovative technologies comes with inherent risks," testified Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program.

Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, also drove this point home. "I think it is the nature of backing innovative technologies that there are technology risks in some situations, market risk," he said.

Yet back in 2005, when Obama was in the U.S. Senate fighting President Bush's efforts to reform Social Security in the Senate, he offered a much different perspective on risk.

"Part of what the president calls an ownership society is really a society in which we do not have social insurance and each of us are on our own, managing risks and returns in the free marketplace," Obama explained at an appearance at the National Press Club. "There's a proud lineage to such thinking. I just happen to think it's wrong."

During the 2008 campaign, Obama said that Bush-style Social Security reform "would gamble the retirement plans of millions of Americans on the stock market."

In reality, the Bush proposal didn't involve government gambling taxpayer money. It gave younger workers the option of investing a portion of their payroll taxes in personal accounts, choosing among investment funds rather than random stocks.

But looking beyond Obama's distortions, his comments have fresh meaning in the wake of the Solyndra scandal and provide insight into what he and his fellow liberals consider appropriate risk.

Obama thinks it's OK for government to risk taxpayer money on business ventures that he deems worthy of investment. But he's outraged at the suggestion that younger Americans be allowed to have more control over the allocation of their own tax dollars.

This derives from the liberal belief that a central authority run by experts will spend money intelligently (in the case of Solyndra, by jump-starting alternative energy), whereas individuals will act irresponsibly if left to their own devices (in the case of Social Security reform, by blowing their retirement on personal accounts).

Experience teaches us differently. Like many failed government ventures before it, Solyndra was a case in which ideologically driven geniuses doled out money to a well-connected company despite repeated red flags that its business model was fatally flawed. And Social Security is insolvent even though government experts have increased the payroll tax rate that finances the program 20 times since its inception.

Beyond acknowledging this reality, a free society should recognize the moral distinction between individuals putting their own money at risk and government bureaucrats playing venture capitalists with taxpayer dollars.

Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at pklein@washingtonexaminer.com.

 

[a_majoor]

More proof that the moral foundations of Progressiveism have rotted away; where are the legions of progressives protesting for the rights of Saudi women?

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/09/21/tasha-kheiriddin-saudi-arabias-ethical-oil-issue-leaves-the-left-in-the-lurch/

Tasha Kheiriddin: Saudi Arabia’s ‘ethical’ oil issue leaves the left in the lurch

Tasha Kheiriddin  Sep 21, 2011 – 1:29 PM ET | Last Updated: Sep 23, 2011 8:24 AM ET

Kudos to EthicalOil.org. In the space of 30 seconds, the non-profit group has managed to enrage an entire kingdom, put an army of lawyers to work, and make the front page of newspapers across Canada. All thanks to a television ad which does nothing but state a set of facts, and posit a choice between two products, one produced “ethically” and the other “unethically”.

The ethical product is of course Canadian crude, extracted from the oil sands, while the unethical stuff flows from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. As the ad points out, Saudi doesn’t allow women to drive, leave their homes without a male guardian present, and values their court testimony at half that of a man. As a timely aside, Newsweek magazine recently surveyed the 165 “best and worst places to be a woman”: Canada placed third, while Saudi Arabia clocked in at a dismal 147th.

But in today’s era of cultural relativism, “ethics” have become a relative term as well. How else can one explain the silence of the left, particularly feminists, on this issue? Instead of valuing the rights of half the human population, most focus their efforts instead on “protecting the planet”. When it comes to fashionable causes, oil-soaked birds take precedence over Saudi girls murdered for having a boyfriend, or women jailed for getting behind the wheel.

That’s because the left’s traditional battle cry is that all fossil fuels area source of “death and destruction”, to quote actress Daryl Hannah. She was recently arrested at a pipeline protest taking place in front of the White House, as was actress Margot Kidder. Presumably these women didn’t walk to Washington, but no matter. Oil is bad, and Canadian oil is even worse. Their fellow protesters are still camped out on Pennsylvania Avenue. The question is: why aren’t they sitting in front of the Saudi Embassy instead?

The answer is that the concept of ethical oil poses a huge dilemma for the left, because it exposes a truth they would prefer to ignore. The reality is that the oil they love to hate makes modern civilization possible. The world is not going to end its dependence on fossil fuels any time soon, indeed, until other forms of energy are price-competitive. This will only happen when oil becomes too expensive, either due to scarcity or the invention of a cheaper (read: non-subsidized) form of alternative energy.

Until that happens, the ethical thing to do is not to eschew all fossil fuels, but to make choices between their sources, just as we have done with other products. To wit: Conflict diamonds are no longer cool. Running shoes made with child labour have become verboten. An international boycott of South African products helped bring the apartheid regime to its knees. All of these goods were boycotted based on human rights concerns – just like oil from Saudi Arabia should be.

The Saudis no doubt realize this, and that may explain their draconian response. We don’t know what is in the kingdom’s letter to the Television Bureau of Canada, because its contents have not been made public. But it is hard to see their case: the ads in question are not defamatory. They merely state facts, which if more widely publicized, could make their oil less attractive than that from other sources – and fuel pressure for political change back home.

What should be done? The Television Bureau and, if necessary, the federal government, should safeguard the airing of these ads, and Canadians’ right to free speech. Consumers should demand oil that doesn’t sustain the oppression of women. And protesters should turn their megaphones on the real problem. A world without oil isn’t coming anytime soon, but a world without rights is still too many people’s reality.

National Post

tasha.kheiriddin@bellmedia.ca

 

[a_majoor]

This could be equally applicable to the economic superthread:

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/why-does-the-good-life-end/

Why Does the Good Life End?
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On September 25, 2011 @ 12:00 pm In Uncategorized | 84 Comments

A look Back

People just don’t disappear. Look at Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C. They continue, but their governments and cultures end. Aside from the dramatic military implosions of authoritarian or tribal societies — the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the end of Nazism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the annexation of tribal Gaul — what brings consensual states to an end, or at least an end to the good life?

The city-states could not stop 30,000 Macedonians in a way — when far poorer and 150 year earlier — they had stopped 300,000 Persians descending on many of the same routes. The French Republic of 1939 had more tanks and troops on the Rhine than the Third Reich that was busy overrunning Poland. A poorer Britain fought differently at el-Alamein than it does now over Libya. A British battleship was once a sign of national pride; today a destroyer represents a billion pounds stolen from social services.

Give me

Redistribution of wealth rather than emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies. Whether at Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I think that is the message of Juvenal’s savage satires about both mobs and the idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.

The subtext of Petronius’s Satyricon is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily to get by just fine without working. Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last. Around 1990, suddenly two sorts of commercials were aired everywhere: how to join a law suit by calling a law firm’s 1-800 number or how to get a free power chair, scooter, or some other device by calling the 1-800 number of
a health care company that would do the paper work for Social Security on your behalf.

Regulate, not create

Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet? All affluent societies believe that they are just too rich not to be able to afford another regulation, just one more moralizing indulgence, yet again an added entitlement. But as we see now in postmodern America, idle 250,000 acres of farmland for a tiny fish, shut down an entire oilfield, put off a new natural gas find in worry over possible environmental alteration, add a cent to the sales tax, mandate yet another prescription drug entitlement not funded, or offer yet another in-state tuition discount to an illegal alien — and the costs finally equate to an implosion as we see in Greece or California. And as we know from past collapses, a new entitlement in a matter of minutes becomes an institutionalized right whose withdrawal causes far more anguish than its prior nonexistence. Justinian learned that when he sought to cut the civil service and almost lost his throne.

Them

Not that the elite are exempt. Western moral literature, from Horace to Thackeray, focuses on the vanity of the rich who think that a greedy heir won’t really inherit their hard-won or suspect riches, or that their always aging hips and knees will always so briskly power them up the monumental stairs of their colossal homes, or that a fifth sailboat or another 1000 acres will at last end the boredom. But the rub is not whether they are rich but whether they are idle, whether they send a message that affluence can make life better, rather than affluence is inevitably corrupting. In Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, the theme is not just imperial decadence and cruelty, but also the blind passions of the mob that the elite so cynically manipulate for their own useless privilege and nonsensical indulgence.

We are good and therefore can act badly

The outsourcing of private morality to the state is a particularly modern affliction, but equally as pernicious. We witness the startling paradox that today’s private society is crasser, less honest, and more uncouth even as its government’s official morality stresses gender, race, class, and green ethical superiority. But just because the state now thankfully mandates disabled parking spaces does not mean that we honor a crippled relative more than in the past, or that our children are more likely to write a note of thanks to a grandparent’s gift. I can surely see an erosion in the public expression of manners and morality even as I sense our government is now more “fair” and “equal” than ever before.

Just because the state will sue you for the appearance of sexual harassment does not mean that leaving your laptop in a college university carrel means it is less likely to be stolen than, say, a wallet in 1955. The frightening worry is that the two are connected: the more the state steps in to to assure that we are cosmically moral, the more we assume we can relax and therefore become concretely immoral. Detroit is a symptom of that transition from family to state definitions of morality. Go to Athens today, and one can read high-sounding praises of the all-encompassing welfare state, and see all around private machinations to get out of taxes and boasts about getting a public job that requires no work and earns lots of pay.

When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.

Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.

Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.

Lala land

Unreality is an especially disturbing symptom. When Jimmy Hoffa threatens the non-unionists, one imagines that Detroit is building better, safer, more reliable cars at a better price and has for decades. When Barack Obama urges the Black Caucus to march for equality, and adopts the cadences and pose of a 1960 civil rights leader, one would think the right wing in Florida just picked Bull Connor, not Herman Cain, as their straw poll winner. When the third-generation, hip spokesman for La Raza talks about inequality, one would think she herself just crossed the border from Oaxaca, forced to flee a benevolent Mexico to work in the pits of an American Mordor.

Hope

We all know what will save us and what is destroying us. But the trick is to see how the two will collide. A new tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess — all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored. My expectation is that soon that the affluent of suddenly rich China and India will come down with the Western disease that we see endemically in Europe and among our own, even as America snaps out of it, and recommits itself to self-reliance and wealth creation. But when I look at 18th-century Venice, or 1950s Britain, or France in 1935, or 3rd-century Athens, or 5th-century AD Rome, I am worried. I don’t think we wish to live in a quiet but collapsed Greece in the age of Plutarch, forever dreaming about a far off age of past accomplishment.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Works and Days: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/why-does-the-good-life-end/

 

[a_majoor]

There seems to be a trend happening:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2011/09/obama-style-democracy-bureaucrats-know-best

Obama-style Democracy: Bureaucrats know best
By: Examiner Editorial | 09/28/11 8:05 PM
AP Photo

Most Americans complain that government is unresponsive to their wishes. But not everyone feels that way. In the space of two days, two prominent Democrats have called for less responsive government that ignores public input.

One of them, former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, penned a piece this week in the New Republic arguing, as the title says, "Why we need less democracy." Orszag wrote that "the country's political polarization was growing worse -- harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing." His solution? "[W]e need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic."

Orszag's view is typical of Obama White House alumni. Last year, former auto czar Steve Rattner wrote in his book, "Overhaul," "Either Congress needs to get its act together or we should explore alternatives. ... If our country wants to do a better job of solving its problems, it needs to find a way to let talented government officials operate more like they do in the private sector." True to the founding ideals of the progressive movement, both men are suggesting that enlightened technocrats who know best should be allowed to operate the federal government independent of popular will.

Perhaps know-it-all bureaucrats can be forgiven for harboring such contempt for the voting public. But elected officials cannot. That's why similar comments by Gov. Bev Perdue, D-N.C., are far more troubling. "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover," Perdue told a Rotary Club gathering in suburban Raleigh this week. "I really hope that someone can agree with me on that."

Perdue's office at first claimed her comments were made in jest. The subsequent release of the audio conclusively demonstrates otherwise.

The federal government's legitimacy is based upon the consent of the governed. This nation's Founding Fathers would have had it no other way. Given Perdue's apparent disdain for the American constitutional system, she might be more comfortable in the private sector, where hierarchical management is the rule. And the voters in her state should remind her next November who's the boss.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2011/09/obama-style-democracy-bureaucrats-know-best#ixzz1ZNveDrMT

 

[a_majoor]

They are stating the issue openly now in the US:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/10/a-moment-of-candor-from-harry-reid.php

A Moment of Candor From Harry Reid

Every once in a while a liberal says what he really thinks. Today Harry Reid explained why the Democrats prefer funding public sector jobs rather than permitting private sector job creation:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday indicated Congress needs to worry about government jobs more than private-sector jobs, and that this is why Senate Democrats are pushing a bill aimed at shoring up teachers and first-responders.

“It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

Yes, the private sector is doing just great. That’s why unemployment is over 9%, with “real” unemployment more like 20%. And, as I noted on Monday, government spending has done nothing but increase at all levels, even as many companies are cutting back.

Reid reiterated his emphasis on creating government jobs by saying Democrats are looking to “put hundreds of thousands of people back to work teaching children, have more police patrolling our streets, firefighters fighting our fires, doing the rescue work that they do so well … that’s our priority.” He said Republicans are calling the bill a “failure” because they are “using a different benchmark for success than we are.”

And who is going to pay for all of those government jobs? The private sector, to liberals like Reid, is nothing but a fatted calf, or–to switch animals–a golden goose that will never stop laying eggs. They really believe that the people exist to serve the government, rather than the other way around.

Meanwhile, what is the richest city in the United States? Washington, D.C., with the average federal employee making more than $126,000 annually.

What makes this even more of a howler is the people Reid is proposing to "hire" with this federal bill are employees of the State or local governments. Federal monies going through several layers of bureaucracy to "hire" people. What could possibly go wrong?

 

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And the ideological underpinnings of the OWS movement, their political allies and their enablers:

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/96415/occupy-wall-street-liberalism-socialism-tnr-1968-bureaucracy-mcgovern

Occupy Wall Street and the Return of the McGovernites

Fred Siegel

Occupy Wall Street and the Return of the McGovernites October 19, 2011 | 12:00 am 18 comments |MorePrint 
This article is a contribution to ‘Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street,’ A TNR Symposium. Click here to read other contributions to the series.

The editors of The New Republic are wiser than they know in trying to keep their distance from the Zuccotti Park protesters. In their zeal to recapture the spirit of the 1960s, the Occupy Wall Streeters are replicating the very processes that produced the current crack-up of liberalism. But if the editors arrived at the right conclusion, they came to it by a false path, one which has produced a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of American liberalism.

The core of the TNR editorial lays out what in principle is an honorable and essential difference between liberals and radicals. Unlike radicals, “liberals,” says TNR “are capitalists.” But that underlying premise of the editorial is belied by the historical record.


Herbert Croly, the founder of TNR, understood himself as a radical for whom the use of the then uncommon term “liberal” was merely a euphemism for an American sort of socialism. Croly spoke of his seminal book, The Promise of American Life—the founding document of American liberalism—as “socialistic.” It’s true that it was only in the 1930s that many at TNR openly referred to themselves as socialists. But looking back, in 1931, Edmund Wilson argued strongly for liberals to give up Croly's "gradual and natural approximation to socialism" and to embrace socialism openly.

The period from roughly 1950 to 1970 was the anomaly. It took the concussive effects of the Communist conquest of Eastern Europe in the wake of World War Two to temporarily pull liberalism off its socialist path.

The radicals of the 1960s deployed their justified opposition to the Vietnam War to blind themselves to the consequences and meaning of statism and Stalinism. Their aggressively willed ignorance produced the 1972 McGovern platform which re-wrote the traditional program of the European socialist parties in the American language of rights. Employment, educational quality, and housing were to become matters of right subject to the power of judicially supervised bureaucracies.

Since then the distinction between liberalism and anti-capitalist radicalism has been continuously effaced by the rise of a vast regulatory state staffed, in part, by public sector unionists. Statism in America eschewed a European-style ownership of the means of production. Rather its aim has been, in the name of good and defensible causes such as a cleaner environment, to run as much of the economy as possible through government, directly and indirectly. The upshot is that the American percentage of GDP devoted to government has reached European levels. And by and large liberals approve of this trend. According to a February 2010 Gallup survey, 53 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of liberals have a positive image of socialism. The Gallup findings were backed up by a December 2010 Rasmussen survey which found that 42 percent of Democrats—the people whom former Presidential candidate Howard Dean described as “The Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party”—think that the government should manage the economy completely.

The New Republic of the early 1980s saw the dangers of this trend. In a notable pre-mortem on the 1980 election it wrote that this sort of legalitarian liberalism would produce the “narcissism of individuals and groups swollen into ideological authoritarianism.” But with the partial exception of Bill Clinton, whose reinventing government efforts thinned the ranks of the federal government’s middle managers, the McGovern demands have been the platform of every Democratic presidential candidate since 1972.

The supposedly anti-authoritarian 68ers helped create a more cumbersome and bureaucratic government in the name of protecting newly minted rights. That affinity is being recreated in Zuccotti Park. It’s not just that the Occupy Wall Streeters are filled with hopes of recreating the spirit of the 60s. It’s that they are literally recreating the follies of the 60s in miniature.

Like their 1960s predecessors, they're chasing their tails trying to imagine procedural reforms that will allow the demonstrators to govern themselves, while also curbing the power of those greedy capitalists. Nick Pinto of The Village Voice found it “amazing to watch a bureaucracy being born,” as he observed the creation of one of the fifty committees called upon to govern the Zuccotti Park occupation. There are committees dedicated to managing, food, internet access, the park’s library, artists and culture, finance, outreach, site planning, graphic design, direct action, and sanitation (although the working chair of that last group acknowledges that “a lot people are dirty and don’t mind.”) Intensely self-conscious, there are information and media committees as well as an Occupy Wall Street Journal, an OWS TV group, and even an OWS archive.

Like their putative enemies on Wall Street, the OWS lawyers gamed the rules to achieve their success. In this case they were able to set up their semi-permanent site by gaming the bylaws governing Zuccotti Park, land privately owned by the Brookfield Corporation. Like the Wall Street bankers they disdain, the Occupy Wall Streeters—who, judging from my conversations with them, seem to work primarily in the media world of PR, party planning, and personal services—show little of the self-restraint necessary for self-government or productive participation in the economy. What they have in common with the bankers is that they all work in abstractions, as opposed to practical problems.

The public relations instincts of the protesters, however, have been shrewd. The McGovernites used Vietnam as a political wedge to discredit their opponents. The OWSers want to use Wall Street for their same purposes. We are, as Joel Kotkin notes, in the midst of the most undemocratic economic recovery in American history. Wall Street, which is now largely detached from the overall economy, has recovered thanks to subsidies from the Federal Reserve, while the public faces the prospects of a lost decade.

Thanks to the Bush and Obama administrations, Wall Street hasn’t been forced to pay the price for its misdeeds. But when I asked some of the Zuccotti Parkers about the politics of government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddy Mae, two of the prime players in producing the economic bubble, the question drew either blank stares or “I’ve heard of them” and little more. Though well aware of the corrupting effect Wall Street has had on Washington, most of the protesters, it seems, don’t grasp the two-way nature of crony capitalism.

Like their McGovernite forbearers, the OWS movement, though chary till now of making explicit demands, insists that key elements of the economy, from housing to health to college tuition, ought to be provided as a matter of right, and free of charge. But whereas some of their precursors knew something of the courts and judiciary because of their key role in advancing civil rights, these epigones seem to think of government as a black box: You put your wishes in at one end and a smoothly running government bureaucracy fulfills those wishes at the other end. Some of the protesters seem aware of the very reasonable Volcker rule to keep banking operations and proprietary trading by financial firms separate. What they don’t seem aware of are the 298 pages of explication to the straightforward rule, and the attendant difficulties of enforcing all of the exceptions to the rule, and the exceptions to the exceptions.

In the wake of the debacle of the Carter presidency, TNR wrote that "The biggest challenge for the Democratic party ... is to make good intentions marketable again." That’s true again today. That’s why the biggest problem posed by the Zuccotti Parkers wearing their Che Guevara t-shirts is not that they invited left-over Leninists such as Slavoj Zizek and Naomi Klein to address them. Rather it’s that the protesters, oblivious to our national debt, disregard the understandable disdain with which most Americans currently view the federal government. The denizens of Zuccotti Park seem hell bent on further expanding the bureaucratic black box when the job at hand is to it open it up so that it can be right sized and reorganized.

Fred Siegel, a Scholar in Residence at St Francis College, Brooklyn and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is working on a book about American liberalism.

 

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Transparency for me, but not for thee.....

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/10/lefty-activist-demands-oped-transparency-hides-own-funding-ties

Lefty activist demands oped 'transparency,' but hides own funding ties to Big Green, anti-energy groups
By: Mark Tapscott | 10/22/11 11:48 AM
Editorial Page Editor

An oped appeared earlier this month on PBS Mediashift that seemed to describe a civic-minded endeavor aimed at increasing awareness of who on the nation’s editorial commentary pages was trying to influence public opinion.

“Every day, Americans read the opinion and commentary of seemingly impartial ‘experts’ from think tanks on critical subjects in the pages of the nation's newspapers,” wrote Gabe Elsner.

“What these readers don't know is that the authors of these opinion pieces work for think tanks and organizations funded by the same industries they are ‘impartially’ writing about,” Elsner wrote.

Being the editor of the editorial page of a major American daily, I was struck by several things upon reading Eisner’s introduction. For one thing, his opening sentences set up a straw man by claiming that “authors of opinion pieces” claim to be writing “impartially.”

But authors appearing on opinion pages are by definition writing as advocates, not as impartial voices, so I had to wonder what Elsner was really up to.

My suspicions were heightened considerably when I read the tagline at the end of his piece where oped authors customarily describe themselves.

Elsner described himself as “a public interest advocate based in Washington, D.C. For the past five years, he has worked with a variety of non-profit organizations to elevate the voice of ordinary people in policy debates.”

Note the absence there of an organizational affiliation. A little further on in the tagline, Elsner said he “joined the Checks and Balances Project,” but provided no identifying information about the organization, except to say that it exists “to help increase transparency and inform the public on critical issues, especially related to energy.”

He also didn't say was that he is listed on the Checks and Balances Project as its deputy director.

Three days after his oped first appeared on Mediashift, Elsner responded to a comment noting his lack of transparency about himself by appending a longer tagline.

There he described himself as having led a group opposed to California’s Proposition 23, which he said “was funded by Big Oil companies.” He also listed other activities in which he supposed led student lobbying efforts in California and Washington, D.C.

He also said the Checks and Balances Project is funded by “the New Venture Fund” and “several foundations.” Note the lack of names for the latter organizations.

What made all of this notable was that these verbal gymnastics about Elsner appeared in an oped in which he argued that opinion page editors should “ask a basic question of anyone publishing opinions on their pages regarding financial conflicts of interest -- and then tell readers about the conflicts.”

But if that’s what Elsner thinks, I wondered, why the ambiguity about his own ties? So I did some digging to learn more about him and the obscure Checks and Balances Project.

Turns out that Checks and Balances Project is indeed funded by the New Venture Fund, but guess who funds the New Venture Fund? One of its funders is the Big Green power, the Sierra Club, which spends millions of dollars every year trying to stop oil and gas industry exploration, drilling and production across America.

Other grants to New Venture Fund came from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation for “conservation and science,” the Wilburforce Foundation for “Responsible Trails America” and the Azby Fund of New Orleans for “civic projects.”

One of the Packard grants was to “finance efforts to protect public lands on the Colorado Plateau threatened by oil and gas development and to provide support to tribal entities in their efforts to transition away from fossil fuels.”

Azby, incidentally, is a private foundation that receives millions of dollars in income from investments in energy companies, which is then given in grants mainly to local Louisiana charities, including numerous environmental groups like the Garden Conservancy.

As for the Wilburforce Foundation, it gives millions of dollars in annual grants to a veritable who’s who of Big Green activists groups large and small, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Earth Justice, Greenpeace and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, among many, many others.

In other words, Elsner was writing on behalf of an organization – the Checks and Balances Project - that is a front group for anti oil and gas, pro Big Green environmental activism.

Interestingly, when the Columbia Journalism Review's (CJR) Craig Silverman asked Elsner if his group has a stance on energy issues, his response was: “We don’t have a stance on energy policy.”

But that’s not all. The Checks and Balances Project established yet a third front group, TrueTies.org, to rally public support for greater transparency from authors like … Elsner about their financial support!

I’m thinking now that you won’t be surprised to learn that not a word appears on the TrueTies.org web site under its “About” entry regarding its funding.

Nor will you be surprised to know that the New Venture Fund acknowledges on its IRS 990 tax return to spending thousands of dollars on direct and indirect lobbying of government officials on environmental issues.

And it probably won’t raise your eyebrows a nanometer to discover that, according to CJR's Silverman, among the directors of New Venture Fund is one P.J. Simmons, who was deputy chairman of the Clinton Global Initiative for energy and climate change.

Bottom line? Left-wing activist kettles like Elsner have no business calling right-wing advocate pots black.

I wonder if the 50 journalists - five of whom identified themselves with the Society for Professional Journalists - who signed a TrueTies.org letter to The New York Times endorsing the demand for oped page transparency were aware when they signed the letter of the hypocrisy behind the campaign or Elsner's prevarication about his group's stance on energy issues?

I'm guessing it wouldn't make any difference if they did.

Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/10/lefty-activist-demands-oped-transparency-hides-own-funding-ties#ixzz1bZafiivM

 

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Socialists evrywhere are only aware of one mechanical device: the ratchet...

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204358004577029832225839826-lMyQjAxMTAxMDEwMTExNDEyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email

The EU's 'Non-Regression' Gambit
Environmentalists have found a way to permanently secure their agenda: laws that can't be repealed.

By JAMES L. HUFFMAN

On Sept. 29, European parliamentarians adopted a resolution calling for next June's United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro to demand that all nations adhere to the "principle of non-regression." In a nutshell, the claim is that international law forbids nations to amend or repeal laws designed to protect the environment.

Most of the European Parliament's nonbinding resolution is a catalog of the usual appeals for green this and sustainable that, backed by such mind-bending assertions as the scarcity of resources is a "new and emerging problem," and "that a green economy must be focused on decoupling economic activity from resource use." But wait, hasn't resource scarcity been the central theme of economic history? And exactly how will the green economy get by without resources?

The resolution also reiterates the well-trod "precautionary principle." That's the idea that the burden is on developers to prove their projects are without risk to the environment, rather than on environmentalists to prove environmental costs of development will exceed the benefits. If adhered to, the precautionary principle is like a trump card that can be played to stop almost any project. It's the card that author Bill McKibben and his merry band of Keystone pipeline protesters want Barack Obama to play, notwithstanding the U.S. State Department's carefully considered conclusion that the environmental risks of the pipeline are extremely low in relation to significant economic benefits.

But having a trump card is not enough for the European Parliament. They also claim it is illegal to reverse any government action taken for the purpose of protecting the environment. They want to carve in stone existing environmental regulations, apparently without regard to whether regulations have actually achieved their purposes, and without regard for competing human goals.

How do they propose to create this one-way regulatory ratchet? By insisting that nations are obliged to comply with the "principle of non-regression." According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, "the principle of non-regression is an international law principle . . . requiring that norms which have already been adopted by states not be revised, if this implies going backward on the subject of standards of protection."

Michel Prieur, a professor of environmental law and leading advocate for application of non-regression to environmental protections, argues that the principle is justified because the purpose of environmental law is to protect, not regulate, the environment. Environmental law must therefore be an exception to the presumption that legislators can always change the law, he has argued.

Give the good professor credit for chutzpah, if not logic. Though it seems a hard case to make in a democracy, who wouldn't want to have their favorite laws exempt from future legislative reversal or amendment? Between the precautionary principle and the principle of non-regression, environmentalists have a way to permanently secure their agenda. And they have convinced the European Parliament to sign on, notwithstanding the indisputable costs of regulatory compliance and the desperate fiscal condition of several European governments.

But we should not be surprised. Something resembling the non-regression principle explains the riots in Athens and the staunch resistance to reforming an unsustainable welfare state across most of Europe. Never mind, for example, that 20% of Italy's population is 65 or older while nearly one in three young adults is unemployed. (The comparable numbers are 13% and one in five in the United States.) It seems many in Europe will sooner bankrupt their governments than agree to a little regression in their entitlements.

The European Parliament is apparently blind to the obvious and direct link between their financial and economic crises and their demand that all nations be forbidden by international law to amend or repeal environmental laws. Environmental regulation is no different than any other type of regulation. If the costs of regulation exceed the benefits, the regulation makes no sense. And regulations that once made sense may later prove counter-productive.

There's no mystery why the principle of non-regression is so appealing to many environmentalists. It would exempt existing environmental regulations from review, reform and repeal, even if the costs have proven to be greater than the benefits. The mystery is why the parliament of an economically struggling continent would agree.

—Mr. Huffman, dean emeritus of Lewis & Clark Law School, is a member of the Hoover Institution's task force on Property Rights, Freedom and Prosperity.

 

[Sythen]

Pat Martin's recent Twitter rant is one more example of a sad truth: the left can dish it out, but can't take it.

Funny video by Ezra Levant on the hypocrisy of the Left.

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/featured/prime-time/867432237001/how-uncivil-left/1288376326001

 

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The silence of the Media. Luckily there are now many more POV's available, and the interested consumer of news can view (and compare) both the legacy media and upstarts like Fox and Sun, as well as thousands of blogs covering every topic under the sun:

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/11/silence-of-mainstream-media.html

The Silence of The Mainstream Media

Much of the bias of the mainstream media is not displayed by what they say but by what they omit. During the past four years there have plenty of examples of the silence of the media. Remember the media ignoring candidate Obama’s relationship with seedy figures such as terrorist Bill Ayers, Communist scholar/pedophile Frank Marshall Davis or even the fact the future president’s first political office was won in part by earning the support of the Marxist, New Party.

Protecting Barack Obama is not the only reason for the mainstream media to omit elements of a story, but protecting the President’s progressive agenda is usually involved.

Take for example this week’s release of a new batch of “climategate” emails. This batch is from around the same time as the first set, leaked two years ago, and they feature the same cast of scientists such as Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, and Keith Briffa, who starred in the first set. In these emails the scientists admit that the evidence behind man made global warming is paper thin, and the apocalyptic climate story is being pushed for political rather than environment reasons. There is even evidence of US and British government involvement in covering up evidence disproving the global warming story.

One would expect news such as this to become banner headlines across the country’s biggest papers. Those expectations would not be met. The NY Times small story in its environmental column. While someone seriously covering the story would post some of the controversial exchanges, the Times paraphrased some of them and concluded by explaining it was much ado about nothing:

    Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA, said he found such exchanges unremarkable. He noted that difficulties in modeling were widely acknowledged and disclosed in the literature. Indeed, such problems are often discussed at scientific meetings in front of hundreds of people.

    Of the new release of e-mails, Dr. Schmidt said, “It smacks of desperation.”

    Dr. Mann said he hoped the fresh release, apparently first posted to a computer server in Russia, would provide new clues for the British police as they seek to catch the hacker or hackers.

    “Who are the criminals?” he asked. “Who is funding this effort, not just to steal these materials but to promote them?”


Time Magazine reported on the scandal by ignoring the bulk of the emails and calling it a weak sequel. Interestingly it seems as if Health and Science reporter Bryan Walsh didn’t read any of the emails himself, but simply reported what others said before concluding that thy contained nothing new. Just like the NY Times, by omitting a broad selection of the emails, Time Magazine skewed the story.
                                         
Another story where the media exposed its progressive bias was the terrorist arrested by the NYPD this past Sunday.

According to the description by NYPD Commissioner 27-year-old Jose Pimentel, a loner who lives with his mother in Washington Heights was charged with making pipe bombs after a year-long investigation. The reason for Jose’s little project was that he converted to a radical form of Islam and was very upset the US killed his heroes Usama bin Laden and most especially his spiritual mentor Anwar al-Awlaki. Pimentel even learned how to make pipe bombs via Awlaki’s online magazine which included an article, "How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom."

While Pimentel’s religion was the motivating factor behind his bomb making, it went against the progressive narrative which says there is no relationship between radical Islam and terrorism. Therefore when Reuters and the Associated Press first reported the story, Pimentel’s radical faith was left out of the story he was described as an al Qaeda sympathizer (the fact that he was a Muslim convert was added the next day)

The NY Daily News managed to tell the story of Pimentel’s arrest without using the words Muslim or Islam.

Time Magazine skirts around the issue describing the terrorist as a 27-year-old al-Qaida sympathizer" who was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq,” and “A U.S. citizen originally from the Dominican Republic” never mentioning his conversion. The closest they got was mentioning that Pimentel was also known as Muhammad Yusuf.

There is the old saying that you should never totally believe what you read in the news media, that is only half true, what you don’t read is just as important. In the case of the new Climategate emails, the mainstream media’s reluctance to print a broad sampling of the conversations to allow the readers to judge their worth is an indication that their preference is to perpetuate what is increasingly becoming apparent as a hoax upon the public. Their coverage of a recent terrorist arrest indicates their refusal to be honest with their readers about the relationship between radical Islam and terrorism.

The silence of the media is just another way they present their bias. Perhaps mainstream media editors are simply worried if they allow their audience to see the full truth, their progressive handlers will eat their livers… with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

 

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Free speech, but only if you say what the political class wants to hear:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/11/28/richmond-va-slaps-local-tea-party-with-a-political-tax-audit/

Richmond, VA Slaps Local Tea Party with a (Political) Tax Audit

A few weeks back the Richmond, VA Tea Party invoiced their city after they learned that the city had allowed the occupiers to protest without filing any permits or getting insurance. When the Tea Party held its protests in 2009, the city’s permits and insurance requirements cost the Tea Party about $10,000. Since the occupiers were getting preferential treatment, the Tea Party wanted their money back.

Richmond’s response: A tax audit.

In the audit letter signed by Cynthia Carr, Field Auditor for the City of Richmond, it states that our Tea Party is delinquent in filing of Admissions, Lodging, and Meals Taxes with the city and as such our group has been targeted for a comprehensive audit. Well, aren’t we special? In fact, as part of the Business License we have with the City, a form is filled out by our treasurer every month (as required). We have never charged admission or had lodging or meals associated with our rallies. Every month the forms are appropriately filled with zeros. Ms. Carr goes on to say that if we don’t respond within 15 days, the City will make a statutory assessment–meaning they’ll pick an amount to charge us.

The city has, to date, required none of these things of the occupiers. The city’s auditor should be job shopping.

 

[a_majoor]

There is nothing really new under the sun; most of these ideas can be traced back to Plato and the ideals of the "Republic" (although the society described in the book was certainly no Res Publica):

http://jerrypournelle.com/jerrypournelle.c/chaosmanor/

Blood and Gore and Climate
Posted: December 14, 2011, 1:34 pm PST - Last updated: December 14, 2011, 1:34 pm PST

View 705 Wednesday, December 14, 2011

I’m behind as usual. I did want to call attention to “A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism” (link) by Gore and Blood. It may be that I am losing my faculties, but I at first I did not comprehend it as a serious work. It seemed like a parody, especially when I saw that the authors were Gore and Blood, but apparently it is quite serious.

It is, in fact, a fairly good if dense statement of the liberal socialist view of the future, a command economy with all the results and goals set by central experts rather than consumers, owners, and the market. Private ownership remains, but it is managed by the smart people at the center. The central premises here are almost indistinguishable from peace time fascism as put forth by Mussolini. Benito Mussolini was a life long socialist who believed in industrial efficiency and growth, and given the Italian state and culture when he came to power was able to make some spectacular gains. He not only made the trains run on time, but he also built the railroads and airports. If you look closely at the cornerstone of Da Vinci airport outside Rome, or most of the better train stations, you’ll find a bronze plaque proclaiming this a work of Victor Emmanuel II, Rex, and Benito Mussolini, Duce. Mussolini meant well for the working people of Italy, and while he was ruthless in suppressing dissent, he was really not so much more so than many in the left liberal community have been in suppressing dissent in science and academia.

Of course Blood and Gore have different central goals from Italian Fascism, and unlike Mussolini don’t seem to worry about productivity and efficiency; but then Mussolini wanted efficiency so that he would have the goods to distribute. He was a socialist, after all. He also got sidetracked by visions of the former glory that was Rome, and experimented with Imperialism in Libya and Somalia and Ethiopia, whereas Blood and Gore have different ultimate goals.

Like Mussolini, Blood and Gore set their goals independent of the consumer and the market; they after all are the Enlightened, and it would be silly to consult the Benighted about such complex matters; even Blood and Gore don’t understand climate science, but they have their teams of scientists who do, and who will frequently explain what must be done and what it will cost. Blood is enough of an economist to describe regulatory measures to manipulate the values of the enterprises whose operations he wants to control, and by fiat will make pension obligations, which the market considers as liabilities, actual assets which add to the value of the company. At least I think that’s what they mean:

    Because ESG metrics directly affect companies’ long-term value, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations and the like—investors with long-term liabilities—should include these metrics as an essential aspect of valuation and investment strategy. Sustainable capitalism requires investors to be good investors, to fully understand the companies they invest in and to believe in their long-term value and potential.

I conclude that this Gore and Blood essay is far from being intended as a joke; it’s a picture of the future they want to make, a future that has no place for Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Of course Schumpeter had a rather gloomy picture of the future:

    “ Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” Thus opens Schumpeter’s prologue to a section of his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. One might think, on the basis of the quote, that Schumpeter was a Marxist. But the analysis that led Schumpeter to his conclusion differed totally from Karl Marx’s. Marx believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its enemies (the proletariat), whom capitalism had purportedly exploited, and he relished the prospect. Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes, that it would spawn a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class’s existence. And unlike Marx, Schumpeter did not relish the destruction of capitalism. “If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently,” he wrote, “this does not mean that he desires it.” http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Schumpeter.html

What Blood and Gore prescribe is in fact the end of capitalism as it has been understood. The difference between them and Schumpeter is that Gore and Blood desire the end of capitalism without understanding what capitalism is, while Schumpeter understood it perfectly.

Another who understood capitalism described where thoughts like those of Blood and Gore had already taken much of the world before 1942 and where it was now taking them: Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in Britain and then the United States before World War II was over showed just what would happen if the regulatory state had its way.

Once again I remind you that freedom is not free, free men are not equal, and equal men are not free. But then you knew that.

= = = =

[NOTE: Italian fascism was not officially anti-Semitic until the alliance with Hitler. The Fascist State had a number of high ranking Jewish officials in its hierarchy, including the Minister of Information (who was also at one time Mussolini’s mistress).]

And now it’s lunch time.

clip_image002

President Obama: "Well, what we’re going to have to do is continue to make progress on the economy over the next several months. And where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves. But it would be nice if we could get a little bit of help from Capitol Hill."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/12/14/obama_where_congress_is_not_willing_to_act_were_going_to_go_ahead_and_do_it_ourselves.html

The usual solution to that sort of problem has been to replace the legislature, or “reform” its election laws to make the legislature more democratic. In Italy it led to the Grand Council of Fasces.

    Subj: If Congress does not act, I will act – Obama channeling FDR

    That bit from Obama reminded me of a Bonapartist piece by FDR, ordering the Congress to pass anti-inflation legislation, that James Burnham quoted in _The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom_:

    [begin quote]

  I ask the Congress to take this action by the first of October. Inaction on your part by that date will leave me with an inescapable responsibility to the people of the country to see to it that the war effort is no longer imperiled by threat of domestic chaos. In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act. At the same time that farm prices are stabilized, wages can and will be stabilized also. This I will do.

    … When the war is won, the powers under which I act automatically revert to the people — to whom they belong.

    [end quote]

    Of course, since the Emergency under which Obama is acting will never end — *can* never end — Obama will not have to worry about his powers eventually reverting to the people.