Elections have consequences. Yep, they do. So, thanks go to the suburban voters in suburban districts (and a few elsewhere) for handing the House majority to a party intent on raining totalitarian environmentalism (the Green New Deal), various versions of socialism (#1 and #2 are synonymous), and impeachment on the country for the next 2 years. Regardless of what D-candidates said while campaigning, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler were swept into power. Again, thanks for the next couple of years of social/political/economic poison. Assisted suicide appears to be in vogue.
The doctors ready to administer the poison pill: Maxine Waters (D. Ca.) and Jerry Nadler (D, MY).
A public, said to be deeply concerned about “dysfunction” in DC, curiously voted for more of it. The slide into governing incontinence could be accelerated by a much-heralded romp through impeachment land, in addition to the profusion of “investigations” into matters as worrisome as the president’s dental care habits.
I’ve refrained from commenting on Mueller, choosing to wait for his report. Right now, of greater concern is the public’s perceptions about impeachment. There’s a good chance that no matter what Mueller writes it will be culled for articles of impeachment. The Mueller report and their own inquisitions will be the vehicle to hang Trump for his style and policies. Since its coming down, it would be nice to know what the public and even our own politicos know of the subject.
I don’t think that I would be too far off when I say, Not much. It’s a product of poor schooling and pop media. First, impeachment – the indictment phase of the process for removal – is a political act and the grounds for it hinge on “high crimes and misdemeanors” (HCM). What does HCM mean? It doesn’t for the most part refer to statutory crimes, even though they might be included if serious enough. It centers on what Andrew C. McCarthy (and Cass Sunstein) calls “truly egregious instances of maladministration”.
The unease about maladministration goes back to British and colonial experience. Legislatures wanted to control their royally appointed governors and judges. It’s not likely that Trump’s habit of name-calling qualifies (“low IQ Maxine Waters”, even though “foolish” would be more accurate). It’s more probable that the Dems will hang their hat on business/financial dealings and the Trump’s campaign efforts to do what Hillary’s succeeded at doing: namely, get the Russians to give them dirt on their opponent. The Steele dossier anyone?
All the bellowing about “they stole our elections in collusion with Trump” is simply carnival barking. The Dems will use whatever they and Mueller dig up to essentially go after Trump for his coarse style, a tactic which they patented years back – remember, “Bush lied, people died”.
Also, he’s a miscreant for not being politically correct. The Dems would like to censor all immigration policy options outside open borders.
Whether any charges are merited is beside the point. The sole goal is to get Trump. For the Dem caucus, “maladministration” really means to disagree with them.
So, suburban voters who voted to flip actually chose “maladministration” in order to maladministrate – i.e., we’ll be embroiled in impeachment wars for about 700 days. And be prepared for Ocasio-Cortez to be a euphemism for the Dems’ policy preferences coming out of the House.
Think of this as a personal letter to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. My purpose is to remind her that she’s 29, not 16, and should think like it.
Move over you establishment types, the youngins are elbowing their way in, and they fully intend to impose their fantasies on how the world works. Many happen to be Bernie-bros/gals/? and are fully marinated in identity pandering and socialism, the bane of millennials everywhere. The current sensation is Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), all of 29 years old and ready to lecture everyone on the need to reshape their lives to match her dream. Her beau-ideal is a hyper version of California – take California and sprinkle a heavy dose of the looney-left-on-speed. She wants to take this uber-cousin of California national, and international.
If you find this kind of thing appealing, sharp objects, intoxicants, and land salesmen shouldn’t be within reach. Personally, I think she is simpleminded. She’s proof that anyone can get a college degree and come out of it dense as granite. Oh, she can put a sentence together but it’s all so glib. She can’t help it since she knows and understands so little.
Her Path to an Erotic Relationship with Socialism
Her ignorance is only matched by her bravado, something common in a youthful zealot. There’s nothing in her background to prove otherwise. The Wikipedia bio on her reads like an inflated paper resume’. Look for yourself.
During her formative years, she was immersed in all things Hispanic. She was coddled and favored within the cramped confines of Hispanic activism. Not surprisingly, ethnic identity matters a lot to her and it shows in the inanities that roll out her mouth.
One of the oddities in social research is the fondness in the offspring of the comfortable middle and upper classes for lefty causes. AOC fits the bill since she was raised in a Westchester County, NY, a region with 2-3 times the per capita income of the district that she now represents. Things got financially dicey for the family upon the death of her father, but her general outlook had already been cemented by then. Once it had solidified, everything else would be funneled through the mental prism.
Her education didn’t correct for the silliness, and probably made it worse. Think of it: her Boston University BA in International Relations with a minor in Economics led her to … socialism. Socialism isn’t economics; it’s public administration. Socialism occurs when the government controls most of everything, ergo the public administration. Those decisions of buying and selling are taken from individuals and turned over to government bureaus. Does she know that? Was she ever schooled in its failures? Real economics either didn’t stick for Alexandra or it was the largest category of units to be cobbled together to make for a paper minor. Either way, her socialism is ipso facto proof that she doesn’t understand the subject.
A Primer for AOC
A stroll down memory lane would help fill her huge knowledge deficits, but she’s also got an experience handicap in having been born in 1989. Her mother gave birth as Reagan slipped off into retirement. The last dose of domestic socialism in the mid-60’s to the late 70’s would be only a history book recitation for her, if that. The horrors of the international variety likewise. In the US, the period’s skyrocketing crime, the pandemics of STD’s and drugs, a near decade of inflationary recession, the Sovietizing of housing in urban renewal, the dole’s destruction of the inner-city family, etc., would be conceptual at best and therefore easy to dismiss once she settled on a weltanschauung.
Overseas, the era’s wreckage was even more stark. Did it penetrate AOC’s brain? If so, there’s no evidence of it. There’s a reason for socialism’s black eye in the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the gulags and reeducation camps, the mass exterminations, and Eastern Europe throwing off its shackles and joining the West. She might have in mind the welfare states of Scandinavia as her template for socialism, but how much does she understand their situations? My guess is that she wouldn’t let any discomforting thoughts spoil the fairy tale.
Soviet-era housing in Latvia.
All the evidence points to deep and abiding ignorance. Take a look at this typical example of her airy pronouncements:
“When we talk about the word ‘socialism,’ I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.”
She’s in substantial agreement with Marx when he once said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Alexandra just resurrected the old codger whether she realizes it or not. My bet is that she’s oblivious.
She can’t comprehend that mixing “socialism” with “democracy” is just introducing more politics into the provisioning of wants and needs. More and more of life is exposed to ambitious politicos, campaigning, political donations, busybody activists, lobbying, and civil service-protected government workers. It’s unavoidable. That’s AOC’s socialism, and that’s ruination. Come on, Alexandra, do we really need more of our existence to be put to a vote? She apparently believes so.
The resurgence under Reagan and the public intellectual debate that proceeded it appear to be beyond her familiarity. A new cadre of free-market economists at the time convincingly showed that the long-neglected production side of the economic equation was, and still is, an important answer to the doldrums.
It’s based on a simple truism: an economy’s good fortune doesn’t ride on the job-creating potential of poor people. You need rich people for jobs. Rather than fleece them and cause their dollars to go underground, reduce their punishment and allow them to keep more their earnings. Ditto for the rest of population. It’s called “tax cuts” and they were successfully implemented by JFK and Reagan. The AOCs of the world want government to abscond with more of people’s earnings so a collection of short-sighted and politically powerful activists can decide. It’s why they’re socialists, and it’s why they ought not to be trusted with power.
Others in this grand discussion of the 70’s and 80’s – before AOC was even a blastocyst – started to notice the social dissolution that arose during and after the Great Society splurge. Government largesse in entitlements seemed to foster a dependency that isn’t conducive to human well-being. Work requirements for welfare, broken windows policing, block granting to the states, and removing the subsidy for underage motherhood came out of this grand rethink. Words like accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance made a comeback. Though, not for Alexandra. She’s clueless.
Alexandra, watch this short report from 1970 NBC News on Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.
She in her makeshift reasoning unknowingly wants a return to those days of Carter’s famous one-word description, malaise.
Hardly is she forward looking. She’s stuck in the past. Ocasio Cortez and others like her are still planted in the mind of Bernie Sanders and his world of 1988 when he was 37 and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Actually, her ideological lineage goes back further to Tom Hayden, the SDS, and Port Huron Statement. Her’s is a reactionary perspective, not a revolutionary one. Alexandra, here’s news for you: been there, done that. It’s old hat.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the medical school on his trip to Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1988. PHOTO: COURTESY OF VALERY VOLOVENKO
Certain basic realities haven’t set into her brain about her favorite hobbyhorse. Socialism, for instance, has peculiar centralizing tendencies. You can’t have it without a central planner. If you allow freedom and pursue only a more local variety of it, the ensuing jurisdictional competition and free choice would kill it off with great fanfare as shortages and long lines cause rapid depopulation away from the grip of local zealots like her. The only way to implement the monstrosity is to nationally impose the misery from a central point under the sway of all-powerful ideological oligarchs. Lenin realized it, but he was smarter and more dangerous than her.
In the end, a Socialist someone with plenipotentiary powers has to decide the answers to the basic livelihood questions: (1) What is to be produced?; (2) How is it to be produced?; and (3) Who’s to get it? If you allow people to freely determine these matters, some will be better at it than others and get rich. Can’t have that in Alexandra’s fantasy world. Better we have equality and squalor than inequality and plenty in her twisted mind.
The wait in long lines outside a Soviet store, 1970’s.
Be prepared to be inundated with her inanities through a sycophantic media now that she’s moved her shtick to DC . Not long after arriving, she presented her latest foray into nonsense, something dubbed the Green New Deal. Don’t think for a moment the idea is original with her. She latched onto buzz words circulating the lefty hive.
Not that the first New Deal edition was any great success. A compressed summary of the 1930’s would be as follows: (1) a depression beginning in ’29-’32; (2) the New Deal of intense government intervention, following Hoover’s, inaugurated in ’33; (3) unemployment hovered between 33% to 14% throughout the 30’s; (4) industrial production similarly languished; (5) WWII was a recess with the depression getting set to resume after; and (6) a recovery finally took hold when Congress, starting in ’47, dismantled much of the wartime/New Deal political and economic machinery.
U.S. unemployment in the 1930’s. Notice that the unemployment rate never gets below 12% throughout the 30’s.
It’s a history that won’t comport with AOC’s clichéd version of it. For people like her, the War ended the Great Depression. Rubbish. The War was the excuse to continue a steroid-induced version of the New Deal. The unemployment problem was cured by putting much of the workforce in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese and herding what’s left over into factories to arm those in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese. Industrial production went up, but factories weren’t making cars and refrigerators for the average person to enjoy. They made the stuff that was useful in killing Germans and Japanese, with much of it destroyed on the battlefield or at the bottom of the ocean. What kind of “end” is it when unemployment is solved by making millions of soldiers – a good number of them killed or maimed – and a rekindling of industrial production that leads to shortages and rationing, a set of circumstances not much different from the years before?
Here’s an unsettling historical fact for Alexandra: the New Deal in one of its first incarnations, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), had a whiff of fascism about it. It attempted to militarize the US economy as Mussolini did in Italy. The taint isn’t surprising given the fact that Mussolini was lionized in the early 30’s for providing a hypothetical antidote to the failure of capitalism. FDR and the National Recovery Administration’s Hugh Johnson had kind words at the time for the tyrant.
Like Mussolini’s corporatism, the NIRA tried to concentrate all of economic life into 3 monolithic entities (government, business, labor) to set prices, wages, and production. The thing floundered not only because of its inherent contradictions but also because it didn’t jibe with our Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1935 put a stake through the monster’s heart when some Jewish butchers (the Schechters) challenged the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to fine and jail them for violating its ukases on chicken. Is this what Alexandra means by a Green New Deal? Her thoughts on the subject were likely shaped by the mental prison of people like Howard Zinn.
If the real New Deal, if she was aware of it, would be unnerving to AOC, wait till she finds out that the real recovery from the Great Depression occurred when the evil Republicans gained the majority in the 80th Congress (’47-’49) and began to dismantle a good portion of the administrative state and its nomenklatura. Down came the War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and Office of Price Administration. Government spending was slashed. Maybe as many as a million civilian government workers had to get out of the business of telling others what to do and get real jobs. After that, we had the 50’s boom. Surely deregulation and smaller government can’t be what AOC is talking about, even though that’s what worked.
Bad Ideas Are Immortal
Bad ideas are immune to death, mainly because a new generation of the gullible hears them for the first time and mistakes them once again for divine wisdom. Absent are the reservations and the caution of maturing experience and a lifetime of study. If you expect additional years in our bankrupt public schools to correct for the deficiency – K through grad school – you’re a fool. There, the mental bankruptcy will be reinforced, not cured.
Old lefty nostrums are recirculated and repackaged to the birdbrained innocent. Every generation when young will be rich in the species. For many in today’s youth cohort, the latest craze in junk thought is the “Green New Deal”. Nothing really new here that in many ways hadn’t already been touted by Eugene Debs, Gus Hall, Earl Browder, and the aforementioned SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) of 60’s radical-Left fame. Most fundamentally, it’s a return of central planning.
Since central planning is key to the scheme, the Left’s latest rendition of the New Deal moniker isn’t much different from anything that hadn’t already come out of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency, or Stalin’s notorious Five-Year Plans. Only this one is in the service of international greenie fanatics, not the maniacs fighting some vague oppression of the international proletariat.
Step back, there’s elements of the latter in the former. The similarities of Five-Year Plans and the Green New Deal make them near identical twins of the mind. They are encrusted with lofty goals and then hemorrhage the spending and coercive means to achieve them.
But even prior to that, the plots hinge on a rigid conception of the world. G.K. Chesterton called it “the clean well-lit prison of a single idea”. It’s the notion that people need to be directed according to the likes of activists caught up in their own mental prison. Their cognitive jail is the relentless pursuit of oppressors, many invented to justify the means to the desired end. The would-be bogeymen are, for both Marxists and eco-zealots alike, capitalists or anyone who pursues a livelihood in ways the militants deem “selfish” or “greedy”. Welcome to the mental detention center lying between the ears of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and others with the same hangup.
Those who disagree are more than opponents. They are “enemies of the people” to be vanquished. This wafts with the odor of totalitarianism. Their intense gaze isn’t just directed at what you do, but also in what you think and say. In the jurisdictional hothouses where this mental smog reigns – California, New York, and Massachussets, are you listening? – the odor has gotten stronger as powerful mandarins seek to outlaw the speech of anyone who dares to disagree with the high priests of Climate Change.
They won’t be satisfied with the chump change of subsidies and test projects for their utopia. They’re into lifestyle management. You must live, think, and speak like them. Already, the schools, with their lefty curriculum and lefty teacher training, and comrades in big city media have become the boot camps for generating the latest version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers. AOC would have fit in quite nicely.
Poster of Stalin and his youth corps, the Young Pioneers.Young Pioneer walk during their school fest in Kemerovo, Eastern Siberia, 1981. The Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union, also Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization was a mass youth organization of the USSR for children of age 10?15 in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991.
It’s so reminiscent of Stalin’s collectivization of farming, extensive network of eyes and secret police covering homes and workplaces, and internal passports, leaving aside the gulags where malcontents – real or imagined – were penned. No wonder this is nothing but a prescription for producing refugees.
So, what’s in this latest edition of the 5-Year Plan … er, New Deal? Some sense of it can be found in AOC’s draft request for a “Select Committee For A Green New Deal”. (5) Here’s a taste:
A deadline of March 2020 for the House select committee to finish its Plan for a Green New Deal.
As in Stalin’s 5-Year Plan, you’ll find timelines/deadlines to achieve certain numerical goals. For example, in 10 years after passage, 100% of electrical generation will be commanded from the greenie favorites: wind, solar, biomass, etc. 100%!
A massive public works boondoggle to build the infrastructure to replace our current networks with one accommodating to the utopia. One hasty calculation by someone in the know sets the cost at $2 trillion. And I’m not taking into account the fact that much of the technology – such as storage – doesn’t even exist, and may not ever exist to any practical extent.
Mandates to meet the goals will fall upon businesses, farms, and homeowners. There will be a colossal reordering of life to achieve the targets.
The socialist dream of wealth equality will be pursued through the Plan. Lefty boilerplate like “just transition” [to the utopia] is scattered throughout.
What’s the upshot? What does all this really mean for all Americans? David Roberts in a sympathetic piece for Vox stated it quite clearly,
“… the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.” (2)
The Green New Deal is a plot against the fundamental principles of our constitutional order and civilization. It’s in the same vein as the grand pronouncements of the Marxist scolds of the past. GND boosters are out to manufacture a new person for a new society. What will happen to those who resist? Well, coercion is absolutely essential or it won’t work – or, more accurately, it won’t work as the history of communism attests, but the utopian bullies won’t even get the chance if they don’t do some silencing. Monkey wrenches will not be allowed on the path to their heaven/hell on earth.
The Teenager in Central Planning
Alexandra’s belief system is a product of profound immaturity of thought. Her thinking is grounded only in Lefty boilerplate. In many ways, she acts with all the excitement of a teenager who was introduced to some factoid for the first time but lacks the seasoned judgment to process it. In a recent twitter storm with Republican Steve Scalise, the 29-year-old Alexandra tried to correct the 53-year-old Scalise by repeatedly instructing him on the meaning of “marginal tax rates”. I think that everyone in the capitol knows term, but Alexandra acts as if she only became aware of the concept in the past few days.
She can find no fault in a marginal tax rate of 70% for the “wealthy” since she’s blind to the 60-year public debate on the matter. Apparently, her economics education didn’t inform her of the dispute between Keynesian dogmatics and the free-market ideas of the Vienna School of Economics. Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman weren’t on her reading list.
As such, she’s probably not aware that she’s gearing up to imitate Joseph Stalin. Because there’s not much rolling around in that head, the problems of our times seem so simple. They always do for the young when there’s nothing else in the cranium to cause pause. She’s the equivalent of a teenage central planner but is completely ignorant of the fact.
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is proof that there is a place for people like her. It just shouldn’t be in a room with adults. She might be a great ASB president, but her flights of fancy disqualify her from babysitting.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Bernie Sanders traveled to communist Cuba and urges a ‘political revolution.’ Will exile Miami take him seriously?”, Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald, 2/29/2016, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article62748002.html
“The Green New Deal, explained”, David Roberts, Vox, 1/7/2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez”
The Great Depression Was Ended by the End of World War II, Not the Start of It”, Peter Ferrara, Forbes, 11/30/2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/30/the-great-depression-was-ended-by-the-end-of-world-war-ii-not-the-start-of-it/#2f706afb57d3
“Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt”, David Boaz, Reason, October 2007, https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s draft proposal for a select committee on a Green New Deal, and the rationale, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/preview#heading=h.z7x8pz4dydey
“Five things to know about Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal'”, Timothy Cama, The Hill, 11/24/2018,
Chico Marx as Chicolini in disguise with Harpo from “Duck Soup”.
“Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”, Chico Marx as the character of Chicolini in 1933’s “Duck Soup”. Don’t worry, it’s relevant.
It should never amaze anyone when a politician says something out of sheer spite or plain stupidity, like the folderol on the border wall (fence, barrier, whatever). The donkey party doesn’t want a wall so a fraction of the federal government is shut down. The party mouthpieces say walls don’t work – the perps will just add a few more rungs to the ladder, they squawk – while claiming sole proprietorship of the entire “expert” demographic. But “experts” can be purchased like a pair of shoes. Look into any courtroom. Remember, “experts” helped get OJ off.
Well, don’t limit yourself to courtrooms. Cruise the environs of the rich-and-beautiful-and-mighty if you want to see walls. Try to get near their doorbell to evangelize. Walls, people with guns, security cameras, gates, singular road access to the neighborhood, if not ocean bordering 2 or more sides, and a government-imposed DMZ of zoning for the rich makes sure nobody disturbs their tranquility.
The home in Malibu for Babs (Streisand). Notice the oceans. It provides more than a great view. Also, zoning and the byzantine array of permits helps keep the hoi polloi at bay.Entering Oprah’s digs in Montecito, Ca., will be no easy task. It’s a veritable feudal castle.The Kirkeby estate, Beverly Hills. It’s famous for being the fictional home of Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies.
Funny, many of the rich-and-famous overwhelmingly vote Democrat and, ipso facto, don’t like walls … if they are on the border. They bankroll the heavy-weight Democrats in trolling Trump for pushing for a wall to protect Americans. But they, personally, love walls. I would think that the gazillions spent on them means that they work … or our Gatsbies might be admitting that they blew a lot of dough to simply look high and mighty.
Typical gates and walls of homes in Medina, Washington, on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, Seattle. Its an exclusive ‘burb for the well-heeled like Bill Gates.Mark Zuckerberg’s plush hangout in Hawaii is dutifully surrounded by walls, some 6 feet high.Zuckerberg has extended the concept to encompass his entire estate, to the displeasure of his neighbors.The concept of safety and security is becoming quite popular. Here we have a Miami condo complex within the protective womb of gates and wrought iron fences.Walls aren’t the end of it. Manpower is hired.The patron saint of today’s left, Barack Obama, was protected as president, and rightly so, behind multiple barriers and a praetorian guard.Israel’s border wall on the West Bank. Terror bombings of weddings and pizzerias has ended. Terrorists have had to resort to flying missiles over the barrier, not adding more rungs to their ladders.A portion of Greece’s wall on its border with Turkey.A portion of the barrier between Pakistan and India.
So, to paraphrase Chico Marx, “Who ya gonna believe, them or your own eyes?”
Use your lyin’ eyes to view the pics of the homes of the rich and famous, and the walls of other countries worried about who enters. If “experts” on Dem retainer say walls don’t work, check the hot shot’s shoes to see if they’ve been chasing ambulances with the lawyers.
California’s hard left lurch is a matter of much discussion. As a side-bar but related matter, there exists tech’s similarly hard left climate of opinion, much of it originated and housed in the state. Tech’s leftist orientation was made glaringly obvious in a Stanford Graduate Business School study of December 2017.* Next question: Does tech’s hard left lurch correspond to California’s transformation into a hard left bastion?
I’ll start off by saying, I don’t know. Correlation ain’t causation.
There’s no doubt, though, that tech is an overbearing piece of California’s fiscal and economic puzzle. Has its prevailing ideological bearings bled into the state’s political bloodstream? A connection can only be intimated, not necessarily proven.
The Stanford study makes clear that an incoherent blend of self-interest and lefty tropes blanket Silicon Valley and its offshoots like a thick layer of smog. Techies overwhelmingly, almost militantly, stand four-square with the cultural left in the culture war. LGBTQ everything, multiculturalism, racial/ethnic/gender victimology, environmentalism, gun control, unrestrained abortion, a rejection of traditional institutions, open borders – the usual stuff of the left-wing orthodoxy – feature prominently.
All the while, techies don’t like anybody telling them what to do, especially the government. Yet, government isn’t treated like Christianity, something for the unenlightened and hide-bound rubes. While they don’t like regulation, they seem to be fully on-board with government-directed redistribution. Is the inconsistency an attempt to paper over their guilt about their riches? Could be.
Somehow their brains allow them to harbor “no government” alongside “lots of government”. All the isms and assaults on traditional institutions, and the Robin Hood regime, mandates a whole lotta government. I suppose that they want government to make everybody else live and believe like them. At heart, then, this is Stalinism.
Some have attributed this motley collection of beliefs to the hippies of yore as there appears to be a line of mental and lifestyle, if not genealogical, descent. The hippies were a mess, though. Their hedonism and gross naivete about human nature gave us STD’s, a drug epidemic, and a new generation of Democratic Party activists. Have the techies taken over where the hippies left off? Quite possibly.
The hippies of yore (1960’s).
Now we have the techie industry taking root throughout the country, and with it, implanting its mental smog and lifestyle. In that sense, California is the future – a dystopian one.
Californians in November meekly went to the polls to shoot down an attempt to lower their gas taxes. Over the recent number of days, rural and blue-collar French hit the streets of Paris to riot against a 5% increase in taxes on gasoline prices already exceeding $6/gal. The contrast is striking (no pun intended).
Why the outburst in Paris? The citizens in the countryside and the blue-collar middle class are tired of shouldering the burden of the climate-change fixations of their urban and wealthier “betters”. “Climate change” is more than a scientific matter. It’s code for the fixers in the nomenklatura/academy alliance, buttressed by the upscale elect and their fashionable beliefs, to manipulate the lives of those not so privileged.
So, we get with the French a replay of 1789; while in California, docility. Interesting. Will the meek inherit the earth, or will it be adult firmness? My bet is on “meekness” till it becomes unbearable.
Viva la gilets jaunes (yellow vests)! But put a hold on the violence.
Watch Vice President Mike Pence’s eulogy for President George H.W. Bush. He says it far better than I could write it.
Compare the senior Bush with those presidents that came after him. Bill Clinton was, and ultimately remained, a frat boy with a lefty tinge at Bush’s age but George was flying an Avenger torpedo bomber and being shot at by the Japanese (downed twice).
A young George Bush, center, with Joe Reichert, left, and Leo Nadeau during World War II. (Robert B. Stinnett/National Archives)George HW Bush is rescued by USS Finback, Sept. 2, 1944. (Credit: PHOTOSHOT)
His son, George W., went into the Air National Guard. Then we have Barack Obama who at the same age went to Occidental and later Columbia to major in poli sci, smoke some pot, and dabble in socialist glamfests (for instance, the Socialist Scholars Conference), all in preparation for a life as a lefty agitator. Finally, we have our current and petulant twitter-in-chief, Donald Trump. He inherited daddy’s wealth and spent the rest of his life as a celebrity developer at the same time as many of his peers were risking their lives in jungles across the Pacific, as the elder Bush did in WWII.
Barack Obama in college. Occidental or Columbia? (Getty images)
Some have placed the moniker of “wimp” on the elder Bush. Such labeling is evidence of how present clichés insult the past. George H.W. Bush came from a time when a calming tone of voice and a code of decency were signs of good upbringing. How could he be a “wimp” when he was the youngest Navy aviator, survivor of two splashdowns, and still persisted in being launched from a carrier till the war ended (50+ launches)? We are so shallow today that voice and propriety can be used against you.
We could have done so much worse as we did with 3 of the 4 (maybe 4 of 4 depending on your rankings) that came after him. I salute you, President George H.W. Bush.
The “Society” in the title refers to a loose body of people and organizations who have similar backgrounds and enough of a common orthodoxy to distinguish as an identifiable social element, like, for instance, Protestants. In this case, it’s the background identifiers of degreed/middle-to-upper-class/urban/seemingly-professional and progressive/left in their philosophical orthodoxy. The “Puff Piece” in the title is the all-too-familiar journalistic softball interview with overtones of saccharine flattery that’s reserved for prominent people in the news who confirm the Society’s biases.
Case in point: “Seeking a Safe, Green Colombia” in National Geographic Magazine of January 2018 about Colombia’s ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos. He gets the treatment because he’s said to be about “peace” and he chants the clerisy’s doctrines on “climate change”. He knows the lingo and says all the right things. Thus, he’s beatified. Look at the magazine’s saintly photo from the article.
Saint Juan Santos
The “peace” part of his beatification has to do with his cramming down the throats of Colombians a detested agreement with FARC, the narco-terrorist organization. When put on the ballot, Colombians rejected it despite the weight of the world coming down on them to approve it. So, Santos got around those pesky voters with a jam-down in the legislature.
And what of the agreement? First off, Colombians hate FARC. Next, the settlement gave amnesty to murderers, bribed the killers to stop the killing and mayhem, and rewarded them with seats in parliament. For millions of FARC’s victims, what’s not to like?
Victims of FARC protest in Colombia during the peace talks with FARC.
And for that, the guy wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But what really earns his elevation to sainthood is his expressed worship of the clerisy’s iconography of “climate change” with statements like “… we are destroying Mother Earth”. For the Society’s parishioners, that’ll do it.
No such treatment was accorded the previous president, Alvaro Uribe, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. But he doesn’t sing the Society’s doctrines and he opposed the terrorist cave-in. What a flawed world we live in.
Ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. George W. Bush in 2009.
How is it possible that California gave the country Ronald Reagan, especially seen from this point in time? In 2016, Hillary’s victory margin over Trump in California was 4.3 million votes. Her nationwide popular vote bested him by 2.9 million. That means she lost by 1.4 million everywhere else. California is to the Democrats what Saudi Arabia is to the oil market. California’s blue is darkening to black – and “black” as in black hole of intergalactic fame, not race. And that means an intoxication with taxes. All that government with its programs and fashionable crusades is expensive.
The blueness has tailed off into self-flagellation. California voters this year had the opportunity to free itself of its 12 cents/gal gas tax increase but Prop. 6 failed spectacularly (51-45 early in the count) . People in the state like their high taxes. Oh, I suppose at least partly, they see it as absolutely essential in saving the planet, even though the scheme was billed as a way to pay for roads and bridges that couldn’t be paid by the state’s other astronomically high taxes.
But I don’t see how California’s 36 million population will have much sway in lowering the planet’s temps when compared to 2 billion Chinese and Indians (the subcontinent variety). The denizens of the rest of the world now know that living in the dirt isn’t the only option. Their elevation out of the hut isn’t going to happen by forsaking carbon and living according to the precepts of Marin County “sustainability” … and Zambians know it. Don’t expect such inescapable logic to penetrate the state’s semi-literate hipsters and coastal fashionistas in their wine soirées.
Evidence of tax inebriation didn’t have to wait for the 2018 midterms and Prop 6. No sooner had the Republican House and Senate blasted their tax cuts to the president’s desk for his signature in 2018 than the suzerains of the state’s ruling party went into hyper-drive to undermine them even before Trump’s ink was dry.
Bills began popping up in the state’s legislature to stick it to “corporations”, the nomenclature of virtue-signaling for today’s hip lefties. The Dems’ Kevin McCarty boasted, “It’s time for middle class tax justice”. What does “middle class tax justice” look like? Well, it means to shaft California businesses with a jump in the corporate tax rate from 21 to 35 percent. The “middle class” shtick is more virtue-signaling to the state’s real overburdened and shrinking middle class – overburdened by the likes of McCarty and his colleagues.
Getting beyond the boilerplate rhetoric, though, it’s just plain ol’ vengeance for losing in 2016.
Now, what to do about the tax-cut bill’s undeniable justice in refusing to continue to force low-tax states to bail out high-tax states with a complete federal write-off of exorbitant state and local taxes, the “state and local tax deduction” (SALT)? The puppy love of tax-happy states for nearly everything government is the well-spring for ingenious ways to hide some of their grossest taxes in other deductible categories. That other tax-drunk jurisdiction – NY – wants to disguise them in the payroll tax. Gov. Brown and his fellow lefty bootleggers in Sacramento – I’m not kidding you – want to turn their taxes into charitable giving. Yeah, it’s called the California Excellence Fund. But there’s a problem with the ploy: the IRS code declares that the giver can’t benefit for it to be genuine charity. Oh well, back to the drawing boards.
As of April 9, 2018, $269 billion in new taxes were wafting through the California state legislature. And to top it off, the midterms ushered into power more tax-happy Dems. I’m beginning to wonder if many of the state’s voters should be tested for alcohol poisoning before entering the voting booth. This goes way beyond the .06 limit. What’s holding them up as they punch the ballot?
RogerG
Bibliography:
“It’s Official: Clinton’s Popular Vote Win Came Entirely From California”, John Merline, Investor’s Business Daily, 12/16/2016, https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/its-official-clintons-popular-vote-win-came-entirely-from-california/
“Election results 2018: Proposition 6 gas tax repeal crashes, burns [Updated]”, Adam Brinklow, Curbed: San Francisco, 11/7/2018, https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/7/18071282/election-night-2018-california-prop-6-gas-tax-repeal-rejected
“High-Tax States Reach For Gimmicks”, Milton Ezrati, Forbes, 2/16/2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2018/02/16/high-tax-states-reach-for-gimmicks/#6fddec4185c5
“$269 billion in new state taxes and fees proposed”, Dawn Hodson, Mountain Democrat, 4/9/2018, https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/269-billion-in-new-state-taxes-and-fees-proposed/
“‘Time for middle class tax justice’: California corporate tax bill offsets Trump cuts”, Alexei Koseff, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/2018, https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434569.html
“California Bills Acknowledge Federal Tax Changes, Don’t Conform”, Laura Mahoney, Bloomberg News, 5/4/2018, https://www.bna.com/california-bills-acknowledge-n57982092512/
The arbitrary red/blue designations of our election maps.Going “red” in an antifa march at Berkley, Aug. 27, 2017.
By pink I mean a shade of red with red being the historical color of international socialism, not the confusing and arbitrary assignments in our election maps. Wherever an urban complex exists today, particularly one with a college, you could bet that the prevailing ethos takes a decidedly leftward lurch no matter its location. Going back to the bewildering nomenclature of our election maps, a collectivist “red” partisan can thrive in a conservative “red” state like Montana. Take the durability of “D” Jon Tester in “R” Montana for instance.
Sen. Jon Tester (D, Mt.)
The guy is poised on winning another 6-year lease in the Senate. How could it be possible? A bit of hocus pocus and the monolithic leftward lurch in the state’s urban areas is the magic elixir for success. The state won’t go full California but it could move that way incrementally.
Tester’s campaign managers (from the film “Hocus Pocus”).
You might say that Tester is a paler pink than Maxine Waters (D, Ca.), Nancy Pelosi (D, Ca.), or Kamala Harris (D, Ca.). He dilutes his pink with down-home earthiness. It’s smoke-and-mirrors. The gambit succeeds in Montana by pulling in enough rural to combine with the urban that he owns. It allows him to go NY/California on the big issues like Supreme Court nominations (“no” on Gorsuch, Kavanaugh), tax cuts (“no”), and be an enthusiast in gumming up the works.
And don’t dare dismiss compromises on gun rights since he frolics with people who would be gaga over the repeal of the Second Amendment.
So, Montana ends up with a Kamala Harris-best-buds-for-life all because he looks enough of the part to disguise his pinkish cavorting in the halls of Congress. It’s textbook on how to craft an airy persona for people who don’t have the time for the cable-tv fever swamp.
Matt Rosendale, Tester’s Republican challenger.
His opponent, Matt Rosendale, let him get away with it. Rosendale wasn’t on the air till long after Tester had him branded. So, a “red” state will have a senator on good relations with the “red” mob.
A more recent version of the “red” mob and Tester’s co-ideologists.
This is my planned (emphasis on “planned”) final thought on the Kavanaugh fracas since Justice Kavanaugh is now safely on the Court. The Blasey-Ford story was truly the perfect false allegation. She weaved a tale without a place and time, leaving aside the complete lack of witnesses. Thus, how could it be refuted? Any statement missing these details cannot be empirically examined. A defense based on alibis is almost impossible. It’s the perfect charge for igniting the mob for a political lynching.
Blasey-Ford’s tale should be treated no different from a clearly proven false allegation, with the exception of fitting a new pair of handcuffs on the perjurer. The story can’t elicit any action by anyone with adult reasoning, and needs to be handled with discretion and not in a public forum under the glare of partisan predators and their street mob. If it were otherwise, we’re back to political vengeance meted out by the Paris mob of the French Revolution.
A Parisian mob storms the Hotel de Ville in 1789.Deja vu all over again.
Sad that the Democratic Party has become the leading advocate of mob rule.
I plan no further comments, barring the elevation of Jerry Nadler (D, NY) to the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. He promises impeachment-mania to satisfy the bloodlust of the lefty street mobs.
