Author: RogerG

Central planning: A method of economic regulation in which investment, production, and resource allocation are coordinated according to a comprehensive national governmental plan. (lexico.com)

Democrats love the idea of central planning, not that they always and fully practice it.  When given the opportunity, any opportunity, they become giddy at the prospect of meddling in the most intimate economic decisions.  The Green New Deal is a classic in this control-freak genre of economics.  It’s understandable.  After all, let’s not forget that they are the defacto socialist party in America.

However, I must admit that the Trump-populist subspecies of Republican are intoxicated by it in their newfound affection for centrally planned tariffs in an attempt to resuscitate a 1950’s mythical ideal.

Still, the Democrats have essentially cornered the market in zeal for grand government plans to engineer a world that better suits their prejudices.  And like the now-deceased Soviet Union, they’ll fail as the unintended and disastrous consequences pile up.  We’ll live the disaster.  Regardless, Biden and fellow Democrat big cheeses are blissfully strolling down the path blazed by the USSR.

Indeed, the examples are piling up.  To address high gas prices, Biden and his people conjured the idea of increasing the supply by allowing more ethanol in the blend.  Watch for shortages and price jumps in corn meal, anything made with corn, its processed derivatives (sweeteners, etc.), all complimentary goods (meats, baking goods, machinery, ingredients, seeds, fertilizers, etc.), and substitutes (other grains such as wheat, rice, oats, soy beans, etc.).  And to think that the $6/gal. fuel was itself a result of Biden’s day-one executive orders to attack anything that would make more crude oil available in demanded volumes (XL pipeline, bans on federal leases, tax threats, an EPA run amok, etc.).  It’s a politically-engineered theater of the absurd.

And here’s another kicker: our refining capacity hasn’t changed much since 1977, the year of the construction of the last major refinery.  NIMBY’s, byzantine environmental reviews, and orchestrated hostility to fossil fuels has throttled the ability to turn the crude into affordable road trips and brimming supermarket shelves.  Instead, we get sermons to go electrical in a glorified golf cart or $60,000 Tesla.  Mind you, nothing is physically wrong with the conventional family sedan – it being made more fuel efficient and less polluting over the years – it’s just that these wunderkinds have a visceral hate for the lifestyles of soccer moms, the ‘burbs, and RV-vacations.  Under Biden, the bigotry gets a chance to be translated into policy.

Right now, the public’s focus is on shortages of everything from gasoline to baby formula, all of it trucked.  Think of the container ships piling up outside San Pedro, but don’t forget that the price of diesel is running a $1 more per-gallon than gasoline on an already inflated price base.  Today, it takes $700-$800 to fill up the required 150-gallon tanks on the big rig.  Some loads aren’t cost-effective and can’t be made outside bankruptcy proceedings.  Shortages!

So, Biden catered to eco-fantasies of his base and threw everyone else wild curve balls.  One of those batters in the box receiving the wild pitch is the oil industry.  The oil companies, like everyone else, have a survival instinct.  They have sensed over the recent years an infantile dislike for them among half-witted cultural elites.  As a result, they have increasingly tried to get on the “sustainable” bandwagon: biofuels like algae, etc.  You’ve seen the ads.  So, scarce refining capacity is devoted to them.  A Shell refinery (La.), a Tesoro refinery (Ca.), the HollyFrontier refinery (Wyo.), the Western Refining refinery (N.M.), and the Dakota Prairie refinery (N.D.) have responded to the political heat by restricting crude oil processing and a shift to the greenie will-o’-the-wisp.

Sending less gasoline from the refinery to the pumps is just one aspect of the problem.  Some refineries have simply called it quits.  The Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest refinery on the East Coast at 335,000 barrels per day, is slated to fall under the wrecking ball soon.  Lyondel Bassell’s refinery in Houston (263,000 barrels processed per day) is scheduled to close its gates by December 2023.

Some are being strangled in the crib.  The largest and newest proposed refinery, Hyperion Energy’s facility in South Dakota, is drowning in bureaucratic delays and an environmentalist insurgency.  Economic late-term abortions in the energy sector are becoming commonplace.

Tack on federal and state taxes – a dollar per gallon in California alone – and we have a pile-on for pump sticker shock and Walmarts with empty store shelves.  If you’re a climate-change hysteric, you must love misery.  Biden is proving that environmentalism is a sadistic religion.

*Read Jim Geraghty’s piece on the subject.

RogerG

Are you tired of corporate boards from Coca-Cola to Disney to BlackRock sounding more like a college sociology department?  These people are supposed to be wizened by the business bottom line, yet aren’t.  The reason might lie in their backgrounds.  These aren’t people who through grit and determination rose from hardscrabble to billionaire philanthropist showering libraries from one corner of America to another (think Carnegie).  Overwhelmingly, their world is the world of the suits and social remoteness.

Take for example Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock investment management corporation.  The guy was born to an English professor mother and shoe store owner father in Van Nuys, Ca.  He went from high school right to UCLA, Kappa Beta Phi, to an MBA, on to managing other people’s money, and co-founder of the cash-cow behemoth investor BlackRock.  And he’s a Democrat and a lefty, all 5’ 7” of him.

His is a world alien to anyone who would find personal fulfillment in Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.  It’s easy for a super-zip (zip code) groupie like Fink, isolated as he is, to be marinated in the cultural passions of his fellow insular grandees. Today, lefty groupthink is all the rage among the super-zips, and Fink is hip deep into ESG – environment, social, and governance.  What’s that?  It’s anti-capitalism for a capitalist, or a cover for how to maintain cred with the Che’ crowd in the faculty lounge.

ESG has it all for those peddling lefty bromides.  Beyond the usual race hustling, it is drowning in climate-change central planning.  One would think that central planning would be anathema to corporate suits.  Not so with this crowd, for they have bought into the lifestyle totalitarianism of the war on fossil fuels and the teenage rants of nincompoops like Greta Thunberg and AOC.  Besides, they’re rich enough to cushion any negative fallout to them personally.  So, for Fink’s BlackRock, no more money to companies on Greta’s hitlist, meaning oil companies.

Here’s Fink in a long-winded piece of nonsense: “As stewards of our clients’ capital, we ask businesses to demonstrate how they’re going to deliver on their responsibility to shareholders, including through sound environmental, social, and governance practices and policies.”  But he can’t speak for BlackRock’s shareholders since they were never polled for their views on their money being used to advance eco-totalitarianism.

Well, look out, Fink, because Sen. Dan Sullivan (R, Alaska) has written up the antidote for your high-handedness with other people’s money.  Sullivan’s “Investor Democracy Is Expected Act” wouldn’t allow money managers like Fink to act like Napoleon with BlackRock’s $10 trillion investors’ purse in order to blackmail targeted businesses into their woke political crusades.  The individual investor in BlackRock would have that power, not Fink.  Defanging Fink, and others like him in the super-zips and its soiree circuit, would be a step in the right direction of healthy free markets . . . and sane gas prices.

But I’m under no illusion that it’ll pass under the current Pelosi/Schumer/Biden regime.  However, the bill would bring to light a serious distortion in the relationship between investor and a business.  People like Fink would be properly limited to the fiduciary responsibility of enhancing shareholder value, not shills for the lefty chattering classes, if Sullivan’s bill ever survives the Democrats’ gauntlet.

*Read about Sullivan’s bill here.

RogerG

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was famous for saying, “There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies and statistics.”  The three are alive and well, and the stock and trade in the Democrats’ “will to power”.

Exploiting numbers are a favorite tactic in the pursuit of power, even if they are a product of an erroneous and deceptive calculation.  Right now, the Democrats’ frenzied lust for power puts the US Senate in their crosshairs.  The filibuster, a 50-50 split, and a couple of rogue Democrats stand in the way of their revolutionary blueprint.  The Constitution requires equal representation (2 Senators for each state) and they are popularly elected by a vote in each state. If it was really “fair” in their minds, the “fact” that their candidates received a sum total of more votes nationwide than Republicans should naturally mean that they should have more Senators, if something wasn’t wrong with the system . . . thus the drive for statehood for two more Democrat fiefdoms: Puerto Rico and DC, or 4 new Democrat solons.

The problem with the logic is that it is illogical.  The sum-total number is false.  Here’s how.  Some states, like the Democrats’ Wonderland of California have only one ruling party.  The state’s non-partisan primary puts all candidates – Democrats, Republican, independent, or whatever – on the same ballot with the top two vote-getters appearing on the general election ballot.  In a state like California, this can lead to two Democrats and no Republicans on the ballot, as what happened in 2016 in the Senate race between Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez. 12.2 million Democrat votes were registered, and zero Republican.  Add up California’s numbers with the others and, voilà, the hucksters have a talking point in their drive for power.

The same pernicious thinking is at work – i.e., something distorted in the calculation – in the war on fossil fuels, CRT, Covid hysteria, the love of the administrative state, class warfare, racialized education policies, and almost any other mania that’ll undermine the basis of our civilization.

Something to think about.  Eh?

*Thanks to Jim Geraghty for uncovering the statistical sleight of hand.

RogerG

Some facts are inescapable. California’s Department of Finance recently reported a population drop for the state for the second straight year.  The New York Times caught the story and immediately went into obfuscation mode.  The Times’s Tim Arango put the blame on Covid deaths, aging boomers, Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, and the birth dearth.  Nonsense.  The pandemic’s toll, boomers reaching senescence, shrinking maternity wards, and the effects of enforcing immigration law were either felt across the country or in all border states, and yet, with the exception of California, they still grew, especially Texas.  Lies are comforting.  They make it easy to never admit that you were wrong.  Don’t expect a mea culpa from the state’s one-party mandarins.

The Times is right to mention the state’s previous periods of population decline, as in the 1990’s in the wake of the Cold War’s end.  Defense industries such as aerospace took a hit, but even back then, some in the media were reporting that the state’s bureaucratic, regulatory, and taxation nightmares would strangle any rebirth in the crib.  The state’s policy fetishes prove that one sure way to clean the air in the LA basin is to kill off manufacturing . . . and run many other businesses out of town.  They succeeded.

Where are they heading?  You guessed it: any place that likes the ideas of wealth-creation and jobs.  In contrast, the California attitude was encapsulated by assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez when informed of Elon Musk’s decision to move Tesla to Austin: “F*ck Elon Musk”.

It doesn’t end with Musk.  The state has been flashing the middle finger at businesses like Santa Ana-based Sovereign Flavors for their decision to flee to Kyle, Texas.  Likewise, the Twitter vitriol of fanatics like Gonzalez could be leveled at a host of businesses such as Oracle, CRBE (Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis), and McKesson for accessing the Texas escape hatch.

Businesses jump ship, and families run from unaffordable housing and the second-worst schools in the nation, and the prospect of nearly unchecked crime, filth, wildfires, blackouts, and collapsing infrastructure.  It’s enough to make any resident sick to their stomach.  The residents are plagued with nausea and the ruling clique and their base wallow in falsehoods.  Go figure.

RogerG

“. . . the police power is the capacity of the states to regulate behavior and enforce order within their territory for the betterment of the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of their inhabitants.” (wikipedia.org)

I loathe to quote Wikipedia on anything of import, but the above concisely captures the police powers’ essence.  You’d think, given our time’s attempt to eliminate all distinctions conceptual or natural (think “gender fluidity”), that the word “morals” would be relegated to the ash heap.  At the same time, the “general welfare” has been mutated into the soft totalitarianism of eco-fanatical injunctions and confiscatory taxes and administrative micromanagement.  In many steps along the way, the Supreme Court has paved a yellow brick road to this hyper-state brew of unbridled, subsidized license, individualism, and centralized power.

Standing at the forefront of the Supreme Court’s paving project is 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut.  Yes, that Griswold, the Court decision that obliterated a state’s silly law restricting contraception, interjecting the Court into a state’s ruminations on the use of condoms, IUD’s, and the pill in the service of Griswold’s newly minted “right to privacy”.  And to think that it all rested on the Court’s divination of “penumbras, formed by emanations” in the Constitution.  Mind you, for the Griswoldian majority, no specific warrant is necessary, no specific Constitutional words need be present, just the hints from the legal equivalent of goat entrails (the ancient practice of haruspicy).  From there, they employed the penumbras and emanations to take unborn life – Roe v. Wade, 1973.  This wasn’t a slippery slope. It was sorcery.

Now, as the Dobbs decision looms, the cult of penumbras and emanations is all aflutter over the possibility that the entire charade will be exposed for what it is, agendized hocus-pocus.  A state can be just as silly in the exercise of its police powers as the Senate Democrats recently and horrendously were in their preposterously named “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) which was a sanction to end unborn life from conception to infanticide . . . anyway, that’s what we used to call the killing of babies before they handed the power of life and death to a distressed mother and her medical handlers.

Our new cult of death forgot that not everybody on the Court agreed on that day in 1965. Two justices dissented. One was Hugo Black (joined by Potter Stewart).  In his searing dissent, he castigated the Court majority for presuming that a federal judicial coup is justified when a state violates DC’s sensibility zeitgeist.  He emphasized that these matters are best reserved for legislators, not unelected jurists appointed for life.  A state can be silly, barring a clear Constitutional restraint not conjured by rhetorical witchcraft.  To quote his dissent,

“I do not believe that we are granted power by the Due Process Clause or any other constitutional provision or provisions to measure constitutionality by our belief that legislation is arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable, or accomplishes no justifiable purpose, or is offensive to our own notions of ‘civilized standards of conduct.’  Such an appraisal of the wisdom of legislation is an attribute of the power to make laws, not of the power to interpret them. . . .”

Yep, Black is correct that the Court has no “granted power” in the Constitution to subvert a clear legislative power guaranteed in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  If it ain’t there, penumbras and emanations can’t put it there.  And so, like a Griswold house of cards, the charade that is Roe may come tumbling down . . . as it should.

RogerG

John Stossel in the libertarian magazine Reason begins his piece “Biden Wants To ‘Make America California’” with this: “I was surprised to read [in the Los Angeles Times] that the Biden administration’s ‘role model for America’ is…California!”  Yes, Stossel is right.  Biden wants California for the rest of the country, with all the dysfunction that has caused 10,000 Californios to flee the state each month.  The number of escapees has been building to such an extent that had the Census been extended to include 2020-1 figures, California would lose 2 congressmen, maybe 3, rather than just the one.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that leading the way in the state’s population slide are the megalopolises of LA/Riverside and the Bay Area.  Interior Central Valley counties have been destinations for some, but the numbers leap-frogging the state’s borders are stupendous.  And this is what Biden is emulating?

It seems that crime, litter, graffiti, gangs, drug/homeless/feces landscapes, greenie lunacies, woke schools, high taxes, high prices, welfare largesse, gender nihilism, and energy idiocy are Biden’s ideal. And we should know where he is going since personnel is policy. California alumni in his administration include Kamala Harris (VP), Xavier Becerra (ex-Calif. AG, now HHS Sec.), Janet Yellen (UC Berkeley, an ex-Fed big wheel, now Treasury Sec.), Alejandro Mayorkas (ex-LA Federal DA, now Sec. of Homeland Security), Cecilia Elena Rouse (Del Mar resident, U. of Penn. Dean, now Chair of the CEA), Isabel Casillas Guzman (ex-Newsom flunky, now Dir. of the SBA), Frances H. Arnold (Cal Tech, now co-chair of Council of Advisers on Science and Technology), and I could bore you with more.

The same state that’s driving its residents away is now seeking to torture the rest of us. But where are we to go if the California catastrophe is federalized? The cartoonist Michael Ramirez, as he often does, captures the Biden disaster . . . which is simply a cheap imitation of the California blueprint for a fiasco.

RogerG

An anitdote to woke charades like CRT can be found, of all places, in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” song and video.  The lesson is obvious: if we go back far enough, all of us come from somewhere else other than here.  Everyone needs to get off their high horse, including the woke brigades who are corrupting the minds of our kids.  “Merit, not color” isn’t racism.  It’s how we pay homage to our essential humanity.

If you’re interested, here are the lyics:

I took my baby on a Saturday bang
“Boy, is that girl with you?”
Yes, we’re one and the same

Now I believe in miracles
And a miracle has happened tonight

But if you’re thinkin’ about my baby
It don’t matter if you’re black or white

They print my message in the Saturday Sun
I had to tell them I ain’t second to none

And I told about equality
And it’s true
Either you’re wrong or you’re right

But if you’re thinkin’ about my baby
It don’t matter if you’re black or white

Don’t look at that

I am tired of this devil
I am tired of this stuff
I am tired of this business
So when the going gets rough

I ain’t scared of your brother
I ain’t scared of no sheets
I ain’t scared of nobody
Girl, when the goin’ gets mean

[L.T.B.:]
Protection for gangs, clubs and nations
Causing grief in human relations
It’s a turf war on a global scale
I’d rather hear both sides of the tale
See, it’s not about races
Just places
Faces
Where your blood comes from
Is where your space is
I’ve seen the bright get duller
I’m not going to spend my life being a color

[Michael Jackson:]
Don’t tell me you agree with me
When I saw you kicking dirt in my eye

But if you’re thinkin’ about my baby
It don’t matter if you’re black or white

I said if you’re thinkin’ about my baby
It don’t matter if you’re black or white

I said if you’re thinkin’ about my brother
It don’t matter if you’re black or white

Alright
Alright
Alright
Yeah, yeah, yeah, now
Alright
Alright
Schamo
Yeah, yeah, yeah, now
Alright

It’s black, it’s white
It’s tough for you to get by
It’s black, it’s white, woo

It’s black, it’s white
It’s tough for you to get by
It’s black, it’s white, woo

**********

It’s amazing that we’ve gone from Jackson’s uplifting message of 1991 to the evil “fight racism with racism” of today. Shocking, in fact!

Enjoy the video.

In postscript, to be honest, I could do without the brat in the beginning.

* Thank you Armond White for the antidote to CRT.

RogerG

Take a 1,100-page labor code, a law that empowers every employee with a gripe, a climate of unending grievance, and your state too can have an economic hell on earth.  If your state government can’t hire enough agents and bureaucrats to enforce the mammoth code’s tangle of provisions, deputize the grumblers and their ambulance chasers to seek millions in awards, bankrupting who knows how many businesses.  No surprise, that’s what California has done, and has been doing for years.  The dubious law is called the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), and it is before the U.S. Supreme Court in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana.  Will the High Court finally extinguish this dumpster fire of a state law?  We’ll see.

In another example of the politics of the Big Lie, California’s demagogue-in-chief, Gov. Gavin Newsom, had the audacity to complain of Texas’s use (2021) of California’s well-trodden lawsuit lollapalooza, this time in defense of unborn life, when Newsom said, “We’re going to start playing by their rules now.”  The brazenness is amazing, given that California has been at it since at least 2016. “Start”?

At issue before the Court is the claim of Viking Cruises that turning over employee grievance to the plaintiff’s bar is a violation of the grievance provisions in federal law.  They’ve got a point.  Why turn to the grievance procedure when a pot of gold awaits the grievant at the end of PAGA’s rainbow, thereby short-circuiting federal law?

Two California cases illustrate the immoral cash cow.  First, Blaine Eastcott’s Rockreation (rock-climbing gym) was rocked with a lawsuit and a $3.3 million award to a two-month employee just two months into his ownership of the business.  Gone are the bonuses, promotions, and wage increases for all the other workers.  Second, Uber got slammed with a $7.75 million settlement.  Each of the powers-that-be took their pound of flesh: $3.6 million for the state and $2.3 million for the legal eagles.  Should employee gripes turn them and their grifting lawyers into millionaires, with more millions for apparatchiks to grease the palms of their supporters?  I think not.

The Court should end this practice of turning the plaintiff’s bar into deputized vigilantes.  The lesson should be to take your workplace grousing to arbitration as per federal and state law or seek a new job.  And that means striking down Texas’s law.  Waiting in the wings on the Court’s docket is a decision in the Dobbs case, which should end the High Court’s reading of abortion into the Constitution.  States should have returned to them the power to regulate abortion, and make the practice of law less lucrative.

We could cut the membership of the Bar Association in half and be much better for it.  But Big Government necessitates a Big Bar to navigate the legal maze and exploit its opportunities for fun and profit.  It’s another embarrassment out of the land of sun, gangs, graffiti everywhere, crime, high-priced everything, homeless encampments, urban filth, and blackouts.

RogerG

*Read the article that serves as the basis for this post.

All perps don’t neatly fit into the categories of the disfavored people in the minds of our social justice warriors of high influence.  By gosh, look around you!

Yet, Biden’s people are on the hunt for deadly “White supremacists”.  Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, as recently as April 8 declared that “. . . the most prominent threat is the threat of White supremacists.”  Jan. 6 is the excuse, as if people angered by an election outcome were ipso factor “White supremacists”.  No proof, just declare it to be true, and repeat it above all.  It’s the Big Lie gambit of inventing a politically useful mythology of the overpowering threat of a generalized class of people, be they amorphous outsiders, racial/ethnic groups, the rich, or the “Juden” of Kristallnacht.

Two recent incidents, though, complicate Biden’s simplistic script. On April 12, according to police, Frank James put on a gas mask and started spraying a New York City subway car with bullets.  Ten were shot, 29 injured. Social media posts show a man crazed by hatred of white people.  Four days later, at least two perps, one being Jewayne Price (age 22), shot 9 shoppers with 5 others injured at a Columbia, S.C., shopping mall.  Motive is unknown at this time.  Subsequent photos (see below) show the absurdity of stigmatizing racial identities for partisan political gain.  These suspects don’t fit the script.

Watch these stories quickly go down the memory hole when compared to the unlimited exposure of Jan. 6th’s shaman man.  Biden’s people are having a hard time proving the fable in court – the late acquittals in the alleged kidnap plot of Michigan’s governor, and the overcharging and acquittal of a man from the day of the Capitol riot.  “White supremacy” may animate the base, but it comes up short when put before judges and juries.

We are not well-served by our mavens of haute couture, media, or politicians.

RogerG