Democrats have abandoned all pretense of winning the white working class.
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Earlier this month, the left-wing magazine The Nation highlighted Joe Therrien as a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A New York City public-school drama teacher, Therrien was frustrated with the shortcomings of the school system. So he quit his job and “set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion — puppetry.” Three years and $35,000 in student-loan debt later, Therrien returned home, only to find he couldn’t land a full-time job. Apparently, a master’s in puppetry doesn’t provide the competitive edge in the marketplace he’d hoped for.
Therrien joined Occupy Wall Street, constructing giant puppets and “figuring out how to make theater that’s going to help open people up to this new cultural consciousness. It’s what I’m driven to do right now.”
I think I speak for everyone when I say: Good luck with that.
One other thing: He may not realize it, but Joe the Puppeteer may be for Democrats what Joe the Plumber was for the GOP. (Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher was the Ohio man who confronted candidate Barack Obama about raising taxes on small business.)
Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times that the Democrats have made a fateful decision: “All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up . . . of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers, and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African American and Hispanic.”
After decades of trying, the white working class is now “an unattainable cohort,” according to Edsall and a slew of Democratic strategists.
The most common explanation for this failure is a self-serving and mossy tale about a racial backlash. The most recent version holds that the “tea parties,” which are about as white as the Occupy Wall Street movement, amount to a bigoted reaction to a black president. Never mind that the leading Tea Party contender for the GOP nomination is Herman Cain.
In a less-charged environment, the differences between Obama and Cain would be seen as a continuation of the great philosophical rivalry between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois, a socialist intellectual, favored promoting a “talented tenth” — a black progressive elite focused on state-run, top-down reforms — while Washington preached self-help and entrepreneurialism from the bottom up.
Today’s Democratic party has an ingrained cultural aversion to the Booker T. Washington school. Liberal elites see themselves as a multiracial talented tenth, planning the economy and guiding society. In power, they lavish support on fashionable but unproductive sectors of the economy, such as green-energy boondoggles, and they buy off big constituencies invested in ever-larger government, such as public-sector unions, the “helping professions,” and even too-big-too-fail businesses.
Their arguments sound economic and empirical, but ultimately they’re cultural in nature. The upscale white professionals the Democrats are courting disproportionately share a cultural affinity for government and faith that statist interventions are for your own good. They also believe government needs to help people succeed — or escape – the rat race of the private sector. (Remember Michelle Obama’s advice to working-class women? “Don’t go into corporate America . . . become teachers. Work for the community.”) In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama mocked the Booker T. Washington concept of self-reliance: “In Washington, they call this the ownership society, but what it really means is, you’re on your own.”
Later, Rep. Nancy Pelosi sold health-care reform as a “jobs bill” because “if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent . . . your aspirations because you will have health care,” she explained as if speaking straight to Joe the Puppeteer. “You won’t have to be job-locked.”
That might be a compelling message to the white left represented at Occupy protests. The question is whether it sounds condescending or aloof to the rest of the Democratic coalition that wouldn’t mind being “job-locked” right now.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Ending Income Inequality
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Benefiting from a hint from an article titled "Is Harry Potter Making You Poorer?", written by my colleague Dr. John Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, I've come up with an explanation and a way to end income inequality in America, possibly around the world. Joanne Rowling was a welfare mother in Edinburgh, Scotland. All that has changed. As the writer of the "Harry Potter" novels, having a net worth of $1 billion, she is the world's wealthiest author. More importantly, she's one of those dastardly 1-percenters condemned by the Occupy Wall Streeters and other leftists.
How did Rowling become so wealthy and unequal to the rest of us? The entire blame for this social injustice lies at the feet of the world's children and their enabling parents. Rowling's wealth is a direct result of more than 500 million "Harry Potter" book sales and movie receipts grossing more than $5 billion. In other words, the millions of "99-percenters" who individually plunk down $8 or $9 to attend a "Harry Potter" movie, $15 to buy a "Harry Potter" novel or $30 to buy a "Harry Potter" Blu-ray Disc are directly responsible for contributing to income inequality and wealth concentration that economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says "is incompatible with real democracy." In other words, Rowling is not responsible for income inequality; it's the people who purchase her works.
We just can't blame the children for the unfairness of income inequality. Look at how Wal-Mart Stores generated wealth for the Walton family of Christy ($25 billion), Jim ($21 billion), Alice ($21 billion) and Robson ($21 billion). The Walton family's wealth is not a result of ill-gotten gains, but the result of Wal-Mart's revenue, $422 billion in 2010. The blame for this unjust concentration of wealth rests with those hundreds of millions of shoppers worldwide who voluntarily enter Wal-Mart premises and leave dollars, pounds and pesos.
Basketball great LeBron James plays forward for the Miami Heat and earns $43 million for doing so. That puts him with those 1-percenters denounced by Wall Street occupiers. But who made LeBron a 1-percenter? It's those children again, enabled by their fathers or some other significant male. Instead of children doing their homework and their fathers helping their wives with housework, they get into their cars, drive to a downtown arena and voluntarily plunk down $100 for tickets. The millions of people who watch LeBron play are the direct cause of LeBron's earning $43 million and are thereby responsible for "undermining the foundations of our democracy."
Krugman laments in his Nov. 3 New York Times column "Oligarchy, American Style," "We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only." I'd ask Krugman this question: Who's putting all the money in the hands of the few, and what do you think ought to be done to stop millions, perhaps billions, of people from using their money in ways that lead to high income and wealth concentration? In other words, I'd like Krugman to tell us what should be done to stop the millions of children who make Joanne Rowling rich, the millions who fork over their money to the benefit of LeBron James, and the hundreds of millions of people who shop at Wal-Mart.
I'd like to end this discussion with a bit of a personal note. The readers of this column know that I never make charges of racism. Rowling is an author, and so am I. In my opinion, my recently published book "Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?" is far more important to society than any "Harry Potter" novel. I'd like to know what it is about me that explains why millions upon millions have not purchased my book and made me a billionaire author. Maybe Krugman and the Wall Street occupiers have the answer.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Benefiting from a hint from an article titled "Is Harry Potter Making You Poorer?", written by my colleague Dr. John Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, I've come up with an explanation and a way to end income inequality in America, possibly around the world. Joanne Rowling was a welfare mother in Edinburgh, Scotland. All that has changed. As the writer of the "Harry Potter" novels, having a net worth of $1 billion, she is the world's wealthiest author. More importantly, she's one of those dastardly 1-percenters condemned by the Occupy Wall Streeters and other leftists.
How did Rowling become so wealthy and unequal to the rest of us? The entire blame for this social injustice lies at the feet of the world's children and their enabling parents. Rowling's wealth is a direct result of more than 500 million "Harry Potter" book sales and movie receipts grossing more than $5 billion. In other words, the millions of "99-percenters" who individually plunk down $8 or $9 to attend a "Harry Potter" movie, $15 to buy a "Harry Potter" novel or $30 to buy a "Harry Potter" Blu-ray Disc are directly responsible for contributing to income inequality and wealth concentration that economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says "is incompatible with real democracy." In other words, Rowling is not responsible for income inequality; it's the people who purchase her works.
We just can't blame the children for the unfairness of income inequality. Look at how Wal-Mart Stores generated wealth for the Walton family of Christy ($25 billion), Jim ($21 billion), Alice ($21 billion) and Robson ($21 billion). The Walton family's wealth is not a result of ill-gotten gains, but the result of Wal-Mart's revenue, $422 billion in 2010. The blame for this unjust concentration of wealth rests with those hundreds of millions of shoppers worldwide who voluntarily enter Wal-Mart premises and leave dollars, pounds and pesos.
Basketball great LeBron James plays forward for the Miami Heat and earns $43 million for doing so. That puts him with those 1-percenters denounced by Wall Street occupiers. But who made LeBron a 1-percenter? It's those children again, enabled by their fathers or some other significant male. Instead of children doing their homework and their fathers helping their wives with housework, they get into their cars, drive to a downtown arena and voluntarily plunk down $100 for tickets. The millions of people who watch LeBron play are the direct cause of LeBron's earning $43 million and are thereby responsible for "undermining the foundations of our democracy."
Krugman laments in his Nov. 3 New York Times column "Oligarchy, American Style," "We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only." I'd ask Krugman this question: Who's putting all the money in the hands of the few, and what do you think ought to be done to stop millions, perhaps billions, of people from using their money in ways that lead to high income and wealth concentration? In other words, I'd like Krugman to tell us what should be done to stop the millions of children who make Joanne Rowling rich, the millions who fork over their money to the benefit of LeBron James, and the hundreds of millions of people who shop at Wal-Mart.
I'd like to end this discussion with a bit of a personal note. The readers of this column know that I never make charges of racism. Rowling is an author, and so am I. In my opinion, my recently published book "Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?" is far more important to society than any "Harry Potter" novel. I'd like to know what it is about me that explains why millions upon millions have not purchased my book and made me a billionaire author. Maybe Krugman and the Wall Street occupiers have the answer.
Chancellor Miller Tear Down This Wall
By Mike Adams
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Dear Dr. Miller:
Let me first express my great satisfaction over your selection as our new chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I am delighted to have a former Mississippi State Bulldog in charge of our university. I am also impressed by your qualifications. Unlike your predecessor, you were not selected on the basis of your gender or any other irrelevant demographic characteristics. You were selected on the basis of your qualifications. You deserved the position you were awarded. And you’ve been doing an outstanding job so far.
Unfortunately, some of the actions of your predecessor have damaged the climate for free expression at UNC-Wilmington. Among those actions was a decision to post our Seahawk Respect Compact on the wall of every classroom at the university. My purpose in raising this issue is fourfold. I want to 1) highlight (by underlining) a portion of the respect compact that I believe to be problematic, 2) explain how I think it could be misinterpreted, 3) relate a recent classroom incident that shows how it is, in fact, being abused, and 4) propose a solution to the problem.
The Seahawk Respect Compact is indented below. Note that the bold portions are not my emphasis. I have underlined only one small portion for emphasis:
• Several years ago, an N.C. State visiting professor expressed the view that all white people needed to be “exterminated” from the face of the earth. He was invited to debate me on Fox News and he declined. When I went on Fox to denounce him, I was not concerned about “civility.” He was not entitled to it. He’s a violent racist. Nor was he entitled to “respect” for his violent racist views. In fact, given his advocacy of violence and fear of debate he was not even entitled to respect as a human being. He just needed a good public shaming.
• Around that time, a professor here in North Carolina wrote to me saying that the Holocaust was the greatest “hoax” perpetrated in modern history. I went on national television to rebuke her. She was also invited to debate me on Fox News. Like the other racist at N.C. State, she declined. I did not - nor do I now - respect her views. I do not even respect her as a person. Put simply, nothing can make me respect an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.
• Finally, there is a professor here at UNCW who has reportedly articulated the view – in class, mind you – that 911 was the result of a planned conspiracy between Bush and “the Jews.” Because she has tenure, UNCW is stuck with the 911 conspiracy theorist as well as her anti-Semitic views. But what about the occasional Jewish student in her classroom? Should she be required to “respect” her professor’s anti-Semitic views?
I hope you see the danger in granting a “right” to be respected. Once students begin to believe that respect is an entitlement they are granted - and not a privilege they must earn - the academic work product suffers. Bad ideas are placed on equal footing with good ideas and eventually the pursuit of truth suffers as a whole. But the pursuit of truth is already suffering here at UNCW. Earlier this semester, there was a vigorous discussion in one of our social science classes. Ideas were exchanged and disagreement was articulated. But, following the conversation, something unfortunate happened. The professor sent an email to all of his students reminding them that they were required by the Seahawk Respect Compact to maintain a climate of mutual respect and civility. An important question follows: Is there any chance that the professor’s email will not adversely affect future discussions by creating a chilling effect on free speech?
You know as well as I do that student discussions are not bound by the Seahawk Respect Compact. At this public university, they are bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Therefore, I ask that you order the Seahawk Respect Compact to be removed from every classroom at UNCW. I furthermore ask you to replace it with a copy of the First Amendment so students will be reminded daily that the right to be unoffended is to be found nowhere in our constitution.
This action will also remind our students that the UNCW handbook is not the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the law of the law. It has not been preserved by the blood and sacrifice of the easily offended.
With all due respect and civility,
Mike S. Adams
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Dear Dr. Miller:
Let me first express my great satisfaction over your selection as our new chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I am delighted to have a former Mississippi State Bulldog in charge of our university. I am also impressed by your qualifications. Unlike your predecessor, you were not selected on the basis of your gender or any other irrelevant demographic characteristics. You were selected on the basis of your qualifications. You deserved the position you were awarded. And you’ve been doing an outstanding job so far.
Unfortunately, some of the actions of your predecessor have damaged the climate for free expression at UNC-Wilmington. Among those actions was a decision to post our Seahawk Respect Compact on the wall of every classroom at the university. My purpose in raising this issue is fourfold. I want to 1) highlight (by underlining) a portion of the respect compact that I believe to be problematic, 2) explain how I think it could be misinterpreted, 3) relate a recent classroom incident that shows how it is, in fact, being abused, and 4) propose a solution to the problem.
The Seahawk Respect Compact is indented below. Note that the bold portions are not my emphasis. I have underlined only one small portion for emphasis:
In the pursuit of excellence, UNC Wilmington actively fosters, encourages, and promotes inclusiveness, mutual respect, acceptance, and open-mindedness among students, faculty, staff and the broader community.As you can see, Chancellor Miller, I have a problem with the suggestion that there is some sort of “right” that extends to “every person” and which entitles him to be the recipient of “respect.” Let me explain why this is wrongheaded by sharing a few examples:
~ We affirm the dignity of all persons.
~ We promote the right of every person to participate in the free exchange of thoughts and opinions within a climate of civility and mutual respect.
~ We strive for openness and mutual understanding to learn from differences in people, ideas and opinions.
~ We foster an environment of respect for each individual, even where differences exist, by eliminating prejudice and discrimination through education and interaction with others.
Therefore, we expect members of the campus community to honor these principles as fundamental to our ongoing efforts to increase access to and inclusion in a community that nurtures learning and growth for all.
• Several years ago, an N.C. State visiting professor expressed the view that all white people needed to be “exterminated” from the face of the earth. He was invited to debate me on Fox News and he declined. When I went on Fox to denounce him, I was not concerned about “civility.” He was not entitled to it. He’s a violent racist. Nor was he entitled to “respect” for his violent racist views. In fact, given his advocacy of violence and fear of debate he was not even entitled to respect as a human being. He just needed a good public shaming.
• Around that time, a professor here in North Carolina wrote to me saying that the Holocaust was the greatest “hoax” perpetrated in modern history. I went on national television to rebuke her. She was also invited to debate me on Fox News. Like the other racist at N.C. State, she declined. I did not - nor do I now - respect her views. I do not even respect her as a person. Put simply, nothing can make me respect an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.
• Finally, there is a professor here at UNCW who has reportedly articulated the view – in class, mind you – that 911 was the result of a planned conspiracy between Bush and “the Jews.” Because she has tenure, UNCW is stuck with the 911 conspiracy theorist as well as her anti-Semitic views. But what about the occasional Jewish student in her classroom? Should she be required to “respect” her professor’s anti-Semitic views?
I hope you see the danger in granting a “right” to be respected. Once students begin to believe that respect is an entitlement they are granted - and not a privilege they must earn - the academic work product suffers. Bad ideas are placed on equal footing with good ideas and eventually the pursuit of truth suffers as a whole. But the pursuit of truth is already suffering here at UNCW. Earlier this semester, there was a vigorous discussion in one of our social science classes. Ideas were exchanged and disagreement was articulated. But, following the conversation, something unfortunate happened. The professor sent an email to all of his students reminding them that they were required by the Seahawk Respect Compact to maintain a climate of mutual respect and civility. An important question follows: Is there any chance that the professor’s email will not adversely affect future discussions by creating a chilling effect on free speech?
You know as well as I do that student discussions are not bound by the Seahawk Respect Compact. At this public university, they are bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Therefore, I ask that you order the Seahawk Respect Compact to be removed from every classroom at UNCW. I furthermore ask you to replace it with a copy of the First Amendment so students will be reminded daily that the right to be unoffended is to be found nowhere in our constitution.
This action will also remind our students that the UNCW handbook is not the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the law of the law. It has not been preserved by the blood and sacrifice of the easily offended.
With all due respect and civility,
Mike S. Adams
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
UN Mischief from Durban to Rio
By Phyllis Schlafly
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal. Advertising for this meeting features a long list of invited celebrities including Angelina Jolie, U2's Bono, Ted Turner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore and Michael Bloomberg.
The U.N. goal is to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.
The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 UN meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21. The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).
Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase "sustainable development." Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as "soft law." It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.
Bush popularized the term "new world order," but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President's Council on Sustainable Development.
Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E's of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment. Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.
Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.
Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or at least equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.
To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.
Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can't go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.
Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50 percent of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.
Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.
Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85 percent reduction in human population.
It's a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation's use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.
Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21's goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught "green" propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, what these U.N. climate conferences are all about is getting the U.N. to impose taxes that will give it an immense flow of money, so it doesn't have to worry about Congress cutting off appropriations. This means imposing U.N. taxes on currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions.
Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government. Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal. Advertising for this meeting features a long list of invited celebrities including Angelina Jolie, U2's Bono, Ted Turner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore and Michael Bloomberg.
The U.N. goal is to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.
The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 UN meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21. The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).
Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase "sustainable development." Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as "soft law." It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.
Bush popularized the term "new world order," but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President's Council on Sustainable Development.
Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E's of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment. Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.
Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.
Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or at least equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.
To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.
Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can't go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.
Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50 percent of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.
Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.
Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85 percent reduction in human population.
It's a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation's use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.
Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21's goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught "green" propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, what these U.N. climate conferences are all about is getting the U.N. to impose taxes that will give it an immense flow of money, so it doesn't have to worry about Congress cutting off appropriations. This means imposing U.N. taxes on currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions.
Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government. Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.
A Response to Oregon's Governor on Capital Punishment
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, announced last week that he would not allow any more executions in his state during his time in office.
Kitzhaber, a Democrat, gave five reasons for his decision. My response follows each one.
1. "I refuse to be part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer."
This has become one of the most frequently offered reasons for objecting to capital punishment -- that because the system is not equitable, no murderer should be put to death.
This is a reason that is devoid of reason. If a system is not equitable, you don't end the system, you try to end what is not equitable. This is classic left-wing thinking -- destroy what is good if it is imperfect. Documentary-maker Michael Moore was recently on CNN with Anderson Cooper and provided a perfect example of this way of thinking.
Moore: "2011 capitalism is an evil system set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many."
Cooper: "So, what system do you want?"
Moore: "Well, there's no system right now that exists. We're going to create that system."
The utopian streak that is an essential part of the left-wing mind is puerile and destructive: "If it isn't perfect, eliminate it."
2. "I do not believe that those executions (the two that the governor allowed) made us safer."
We all acknowledge that two executions do not make us safer (though they do make it safer for prison guards and for other inmates). Who ever said two executions would make us safer? Overwhelmingly, the reason people give for supporting the death penalty is justice. It is indescribably unjust to allow everyone who deliberately takes a human life to keep his own.
But if you want to talk safety, then yes, we who support the death penalty are certain that, applied with any consistency, it is a deterrent. The late sociologist Ernest van den Haag had an interesting thought experiment. Suppose that murders committed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays carried a death sentence, while those committed on the other days were punishable by a prison sentence. On which days do you suppose more murders would be committed?
The notion that parking tickets deter illegal parking but that death does not deter murder is truly irrational. It shows what happens when people put ideology over common sense.
3. "Certainly I don't believe (the executions of murderers) made us more noble as a society."
Why is it noble to keep all murderers alive? Was Israel less noble for executing Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust? When two men enter the home of a family of four; rape the wife and two young daughters; beat all four nearly to death, leaving them in the agony of crushed bones and skulls; and then tie them up and burn the three females to death, why is it "noble" to keep the men who did that alive?
4. Oregon has an "unworkable system that fails to meet basic standards of justice."
Opponents of the death penalty make it virtually impossible to execute murderers. They then lament how long and laborious the effort is to execute a murderer.
5. "... And I simply cannot participate in something I believe morally wrong."
Opponents of the death penalty simply assert the death penalty is immoral. That is their prerogative. But "morally wrong" in this context means nothing more than "I don't like it." Indeed, as reported in the The New York Times, "Asked with whom (Kitzhaber) had consulted, he said, 'Mostly myself.'"
Kitzhaber's moratorium delays the execution of a murderer who had raped and brutally beaten to death a woman named Mary Archer. Needless to say, the family and friends of Mary Archer disagree with the governor's action.
"We are just plain devastated," said the man who had been Mary Archer's husband. "This is such a miscarriage of justice."
Indeed it is. And worse. Societies that allow all murderers to live have lost some of their hunger for justice and certainly lost their hatred of evil. They also cheapen the crime of murder. Punishment is society's way of communicating how serious it views a crime, and there is all the difference in the world between the death penalty and life (not to mention less time) in prison.
When all murderers are allowed to live, the evil exult while the victims weep. Why is that noble?
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, announced last week that he would not allow any more executions in his state during his time in office.
Kitzhaber, a Democrat, gave five reasons for his decision. My response follows each one.
1. "I refuse to be part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer."
This has become one of the most frequently offered reasons for objecting to capital punishment -- that because the system is not equitable, no murderer should be put to death.
This is a reason that is devoid of reason. If a system is not equitable, you don't end the system, you try to end what is not equitable. This is classic left-wing thinking -- destroy what is good if it is imperfect. Documentary-maker Michael Moore was recently on CNN with Anderson Cooper and provided a perfect example of this way of thinking.
Moore: "2011 capitalism is an evil system set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many."
Cooper: "So, what system do you want?"
Moore: "Well, there's no system right now that exists. We're going to create that system."
The utopian streak that is an essential part of the left-wing mind is puerile and destructive: "If it isn't perfect, eliminate it."
2. "I do not believe that those executions (the two that the governor allowed) made us safer."
We all acknowledge that two executions do not make us safer (though they do make it safer for prison guards and for other inmates). Who ever said two executions would make us safer? Overwhelmingly, the reason people give for supporting the death penalty is justice. It is indescribably unjust to allow everyone who deliberately takes a human life to keep his own.
But if you want to talk safety, then yes, we who support the death penalty are certain that, applied with any consistency, it is a deterrent. The late sociologist Ernest van den Haag had an interesting thought experiment. Suppose that murders committed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays carried a death sentence, while those committed on the other days were punishable by a prison sentence. On which days do you suppose more murders would be committed?
The notion that parking tickets deter illegal parking but that death does not deter murder is truly irrational. It shows what happens when people put ideology over common sense.
3. "Certainly I don't believe (the executions of murderers) made us more noble as a society."
Why is it noble to keep all murderers alive? Was Israel less noble for executing Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust? When two men enter the home of a family of four; rape the wife and two young daughters; beat all four nearly to death, leaving them in the agony of crushed bones and skulls; and then tie them up and burn the three females to death, why is it "noble" to keep the men who did that alive?
4. Oregon has an "unworkable system that fails to meet basic standards of justice."
Opponents of the death penalty make it virtually impossible to execute murderers. They then lament how long and laborious the effort is to execute a murderer.
5. "... And I simply cannot participate in something I believe morally wrong."
Opponents of the death penalty simply assert the death penalty is immoral. That is their prerogative. But "morally wrong" in this context means nothing more than "I don't like it." Indeed, as reported in the The New York Times, "Asked with whom (Kitzhaber) had consulted, he said, 'Mostly myself.'"
Kitzhaber's moratorium delays the execution of a murderer who had raped and brutally beaten to death a woman named Mary Archer. Needless to say, the family and friends of Mary Archer disagree with the governor's action.
"We are just plain devastated," said the man who had been Mary Archer's husband. "This is such a miscarriage of justice."
Indeed it is. And worse. Societies that allow all murderers to live have lost some of their hunger for justice and certainly lost their hatred of evil. They also cheapen the crime of murder. Punishment is society's way of communicating how serious it views a crime, and there is all the difference in the world between the death penalty and life (not to mention less time) in prison.
When all murderers are allowed to live, the evil exult while the victims weep. Why is that noble?
Euro to Throw US in Debtors' Prison
By Craig Steiner
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
As everyone now recognizes, Europe is in an accelerating death-spiral--collapsing under the weight of its government debt and government spending. An economic collapse--or fundamental restructuring--of Europe is imminent.
The accelerating rate of Europe's collapse is surprising some people, but I'm actually surprised it's taken this long. Eighteen months ago I wrote that events in Europe might cause the Euro to collapse or force the strongest economic powers to abandon it. These conclusions were considered "fringe" just a few months ago, not to mention a year and a half ago.
Now it finally appears to be being fulfilled at breakneck speed.
In the span of just a few months, Greece has required another bailout, instituted a new government, Italy got a new government, Spain got a new government, Italy is reaching bailout-level interest rates, Spain's interest rates are going up dangerously, Portugal's debt has been downgraded to "junk" status, Belgium has been downgraded and is asking for European support, and there is increasing speculation that France is ultimately in trouble. There are assertions that the European Central Bank must take action (i.e. print money) to prevent an Italian death spiral, and must stand ready to "purchase the debt of troubled sovereigns in whatever size proves necessary." Even economic powerhouse Germany had a failed bond auction that has raised concerns about its ability to backstop all of Europe.
At this point it's becoming increasingly clear that Europe will either attempt to resolve its problems by creating a true fiscal union that will crush the sovereignty of member nations, or there will be a spectacular economic disintegration.
Despite the proclamations of politicians trying to calm the markets and saying a Eurozone breakup is impossible, their statements lack credibility. Eurozone banks are preparing for the possibility of a disorderly breakup of the Euro which is increasingly described as "probable" rather than "possible."
Meanwhile, European politicians are now proclaiming that the real problem is that they have monetary union without fiscal union--implying that the solution is fiscal unification. But Europe's problems aren't a result of a lack of fiscal unity but a lack of fiscal responsibility. This will not be solved by unifying their fiscal irresponsibility.
The European Union--as it is currently instituted--is doomed. Whether it collapses now or they succeed at kicking the can down the road a little longer, this will not be a minor economic event.
As stated above, one of the possible "solutions" being offered is a tighter economic union and "pooling" the debt of all European countries into a consolidated continent-wide debt raised by some kind of "Eurobonds." This isn't really a solution since it just redistributes the debt of Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. to the stronger countries such as Germany. Germany is resistant to this idea, understandably.
If Germany foolishly accepts liability for the debt of other countries, eventually their own credit situation will suffer and their interest rates will rise just as they have in the problem countries. Nothing can be gained by such a course of action but time. But is Germany willing to tie itself to this economic disaster and go down with the sinking ship that is the Euro?
Even if they do, Europe will at some point require external support. Given the fact that interest rates in Europe are soaring while interest rates in the United States are at record lows, it seems likely that Europe and the world will eventually look to the United States and the Federal Reserve to backstop Europe.
Of course, we can't afford it. Given our own unsustainable $15 trillion debt, we can't afford to borrow enough money to loan to Europe--and if we did, our borrowing costs would immediately go up and we'd see failed bond auctions just like Germany.
Likewise, the Federal Reserve can't print enough dollars to bail out all of Europe without turning the dollar into Monopoly money. Loan guarantees by the U.S. or the Federal Reserve would ultimately be just as unfeasible as investors would see those actions as an increased liability and risk on the part of the U.S. Government or Federal Reserve.
Nevertheless, I believe that eventually we will see calls for the U.S. and the Federal Reserve to bailout Europe. After some wrangling this option will be rejected but, during the uncertainty, U.S. interest rates will start spiking due to fears that we can't even support our own debt let alone help Europe (and possibly a fear that we might be stupid enough to try to bailout Europe).
When that happens, we may very well see an appeal to pool the debt of Europe and the United States together into a joint liability spanning our two continents. Just as some think Europe should "unite" its debt into continent-wide obligations, it's very possible that we'll see recommendations that this be taken to the trans-Atlantic level of "uniting" the debts of Europe and the United States.
What happens then probably depends on when it happens and who is president of the United States. I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama support such a "merger" while I'd hope a Republican president would be less likely to entertain that option.
Given the accelerating pace of economic deterioration in Europe, it seems likely that Europe will collapse and create huge waves in the world economy before the elections. Republican candidates for president better be ready with a confident and credible plan on what to do in response to Europe's collapse and the likely requests for economic support that we'll be receiving from Europe and the world.
And if the Republican nominee wants to win, his or her answers better be fundamentally different than Obama's.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
As everyone now recognizes, Europe is in an accelerating death-spiral--collapsing under the weight of its government debt and government spending. An economic collapse--or fundamental restructuring--of Europe is imminent.
The accelerating rate of Europe's collapse is surprising some people, but I'm actually surprised it's taken this long. Eighteen months ago I wrote that events in Europe might cause the Euro to collapse or force the strongest economic powers to abandon it. These conclusions were considered "fringe" just a few months ago, not to mention a year and a half ago.
Now it finally appears to be being fulfilled at breakneck speed.
In the span of just a few months, Greece has required another bailout, instituted a new government, Italy got a new government, Spain got a new government, Italy is reaching bailout-level interest rates, Spain's interest rates are going up dangerously, Portugal's debt has been downgraded to "junk" status, Belgium has been downgraded and is asking for European support, and there is increasing speculation that France is ultimately in trouble. There are assertions that the European Central Bank must take action (i.e. print money) to prevent an Italian death spiral, and must stand ready to "purchase the debt of troubled sovereigns in whatever size proves necessary." Even economic powerhouse Germany had a failed bond auction that has raised concerns about its ability to backstop all of Europe.
At this point it's becoming increasingly clear that Europe will either attempt to resolve its problems by creating a true fiscal union that will crush the sovereignty of member nations, or there will be a spectacular economic disintegration.
Despite the proclamations of politicians trying to calm the markets and saying a Eurozone breakup is impossible, their statements lack credibility. Eurozone banks are preparing for the possibility of a disorderly breakup of the Euro which is increasingly described as "probable" rather than "possible."
Meanwhile, European politicians are now proclaiming that the real problem is that they have monetary union without fiscal union--implying that the solution is fiscal unification. But Europe's problems aren't a result of a lack of fiscal unity but a lack of fiscal responsibility. This will not be solved by unifying their fiscal irresponsibility.
The European Union--as it is currently instituted--is doomed. Whether it collapses now or they succeed at kicking the can down the road a little longer, this will not be a minor economic event.
As stated above, one of the possible "solutions" being offered is a tighter economic union and "pooling" the debt of all European countries into a consolidated continent-wide debt raised by some kind of "Eurobonds." This isn't really a solution since it just redistributes the debt of Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. to the stronger countries such as Germany. Germany is resistant to this idea, understandably.
If Germany foolishly accepts liability for the debt of other countries, eventually their own credit situation will suffer and their interest rates will rise just as they have in the problem countries. Nothing can be gained by such a course of action but time. But is Germany willing to tie itself to this economic disaster and go down with the sinking ship that is the Euro?
Even if they do, Europe will at some point require external support. Given the fact that interest rates in Europe are soaring while interest rates in the United States are at record lows, it seems likely that Europe and the world will eventually look to the United States and the Federal Reserve to backstop Europe.
Of course, we can't afford it. Given our own unsustainable $15 trillion debt, we can't afford to borrow enough money to loan to Europe--and if we did, our borrowing costs would immediately go up and we'd see failed bond auctions just like Germany.
Likewise, the Federal Reserve can't print enough dollars to bail out all of Europe without turning the dollar into Monopoly money. Loan guarantees by the U.S. or the Federal Reserve would ultimately be just as unfeasible as investors would see those actions as an increased liability and risk on the part of the U.S. Government or Federal Reserve.
Nevertheless, I believe that eventually we will see calls for the U.S. and the Federal Reserve to bailout Europe. After some wrangling this option will be rejected but, during the uncertainty, U.S. interest rates will start spiking due to fears that we can't even support our own debt let alone help Europe (and possibly a fear that we might be stupid enough to try to bailout Europe).
When that happens, we may very well see an appeal to pool the debt of Europe and the United States together into a joint liability spanning our two continents. Just as some think Europe should "unite" its debt into continent-wide obligations, it's very possible that we'll see recommendations that this be taken to the trans-Atlantic level of "uniting" the debts of Europe and the United States.
What happens then probably depends on when it happens and who is president of the United States. I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama support such a "merger" while I'd hope a Republican president would be less likely to entertain that option.
Given the accelerating pace of economic deterioration in Europe, it seems likely that Europe will collapse and create huge waves in the world economy before the elections. Republican candidates for president better be ready with a confident and credible plan on what to do in response to Europe's collapse and the likely requests for economic support that we'll be receiving from Europe and the world.
And if the Republican nominee wants to win, his or her answers better be fundamentally different than Obama's.
The 'Inequality' Game
By Bill Murchison
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Bull corn, Sen. Schumer.
(That's the way we used to talk back in simpler times, when language and political thought still awaited the debasement they've come to know in latter times.)
New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, contends that "a major shift in public opinion" has placed "jobs and income inequality" atop the list of political issues for 2012.
Wait. Permit me to back up. He's right about "jobs." "Income inequality" -- that's the particular assertion that's odor appears to rise from the state fair livestock shed. If Democrats want, and maybe they do, to run a national campaign advocating the equalization of economic outcomes, they are welcome to the political ruin they would invite. Economic demagoguery is nothing new to America ("There's nothing surer, the rich get rich, and the poor get poorer."), but it rarely pays off the way the demagogues imagine. In economic times, even rougher than the present ones, Huey Long's and Father Charles Coughlin's gospel of eviscerate-the-bankers came to naught.
The Occupy movement, as many Democratic strategists view it, possibly out of desperation, with no other issue available to them, signals mainstream America's disgust with big money and its desire for a cut of same. That would contradict the basic American understanding -- leave aside tantalizingly worded poll questions -- that taking other people's money solves nothing in the long run.
The Democrats' newfound fascination with the economic geniuses of the streets, plazas and public parks has to do with the desire to caricature Republicans as "the 1 percent" with the money vs. the 99 percent without. Schumer seems to suppose all he has to do is deploy words like "inequality" and the game is over.
What Americans know better than their self-anointed prophets is that "inequality" is a more meaningless phrase than "diet." No two people anywhere have exactly the same resources, far less the same brains and abilities, the same outlooks on life, the same chances and/or the same hindrances.
"Equality" -- find it if you can. There's no such beast. Schumer, a major league harvester of Wall Street campaign funds, knows better than to call for evening-out income levels through government action. Notwithstanding that the presumptive remedy for "inequality" is "equality."
We have to assume, in this event, that a public figure without a plan for redistributing the country's resources isn't truly concerned with gaps in income. He is concerned with getting voters to use their imaginations -- to see such gaps not as the result of effort, circumstance, vision and plain old luck, but rather as the result of manipulation.
A manipulator, by this logic, is an evil person. Let's tar and feather him or her at the very least. Let's put the government up to raising their taxes and narrowing their opportunities for -- always, apparently, a questionable goal -- profiting from investments and labor.
Does that take care of "inequality"? Of course not. Strip "the 1 percent" of half their possessions, and it still isn't enough. They continue to enjoy more than you and I. The way to abolish inequality is to reduce Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to the status of grocery clerks.
Except that Sen. Schumer has no such notion. Nor have rational Americans of any political party or none. Candidate Obama may have told Joe the plumber it would be nice to "spread the wealth around," but that was for aural effect. The phrase fell nicely on Obama's ear, as on -- he certainly hoped - it would many other ears.
Candidate Obama knew good and well he wasn't running on a platform to guillotine the rich and install the peasants in their chateaux. Inequality was then, and remains so, a bogey for scaring voters, few of whom want actually to round up Justin Bieber and Tiger Woods -- or even, for that matter, Brothers Buffett and Gates -- and work them over for the high crime of success.
The Schumer-Democratic gambit -- castigate inequality without promising some new age of perfect equality -- is thoroughly dishonest. Which is to say, it's thoroughly modern and thoroughly predictable.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Bull corn, Sen. Schumer.
(That's the way we used to talk back in simpler times, when language and political thought still awaited the debasement they've come to know in latter times.)
New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, contends that "a major shift in public opinion" has placed "jobs and income inequality" atop the list of political issues for 2012.
Wait. Permit me to back up. He's right about "jobs." "Income inequality" -- that's the particular assertion that's odor appears to rise from the state fair livestock shed. If Democrats want, and maybe they do, to run a national campaign advocating the equalization of economic outcomes, they are welcome to the political ruin they would invite. Economic demagoguery is nothing new to America ("There's nothing surer, the rich get rich, and the poor get poorer."), but it rarely pays off the way the demagogues imagine. In economic times, even rougher than the present ones, Huey Long's and Father Charles Coughlin's gospel of eviscerate-the-bankers came to naught.
The Occupy movement, as many Democratic strategists view it, possibly out of desperation, with no other issue available to them, signals mainstream America's disgust with big money and its desire for a cut of same. That would contradict the basic American understanding -- leave aside tantalizingly worded poll questions -- that taking other people's money solves nothing in the long run.
The Democrats' newfound fascination with the economic geniuses of the streets, plazas and public parks has to do with the desire to caricature Republicans as "the 1 percent" with the money vs. the 99 percent without. Schumer seems to suppose all he has to do is deploy words like "inequality" and the game is over.
What Americans know better than their self-anointed prophets is that "inequality" is a more meaningless phrase than "diet." No two people anywhere have exactly the same resources, far less the same brains and abilities, the same outlooks on life, the same chances and/or the same hindrances.
"Equality" -- find it if you can. There's no such beast. Schumer, a major league harvester of Wall Street campaign funds, knows better than to call for evening-out income levels through government action. Notwithstanding that the presumptive remedy for "inequality" is "equality."
We have to assume, in this event, that a public figure without a plan for redistributing the country's resources isn't truly concerned with gaps in income. He is concerned with getting voters to use their imaginations -- to see such gaps not as the result of effort, circumstance, vision and plain old luck, but rather as the result of manipulation.
A manipulator, by this logic, is an evil person. Let's tar and feather him or her at the very least. Let's put the government up to raising their taxes and narrowing their opportunities for -- always, apparently, a questionable goal -- profiting from investments and labor.
Does that take care of "inequality"? Of course not. Strip "the 1 percent" of half their possessions, and it still isn't enough. They continue to enjoy more than you and I. The way to abolish inequality is to reduce Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to the status of grocery clerks.
Except that Sen. Schumer has no such notion. Nor have rational Americans of any political party or none. Candidate Obama may have told Joe the plumber it would be nice to "spread the wealth around," but that was for aural effect. The phrase fell nicely on Obama's ear, as on -- he certainly hoped - it would many other ears.
Candidate Obama knew good and well he wasn't running on a platform to guillotine the rich and install the peasants in their chateaux. Inequality was then, and remains so, a bogey for scaring voters, few of whom want actually to round up Justin Bieber and Tiger Woods -- or even, for that matter, Brothers Buffett and Gates -- and work them over for the high crime of success.
The Schumer-Democratic gambit -- castigate inequality without promising some new age of perfect equality -- is thoroughly dishonest. Which is to say, it's thoroughly modern and thoroughly predictable.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Entitlement, Not Tax Cuts, Widen the Wealth Gap
By Michael Barone
Monday, November 28, 2011
What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.
Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn't include such tax increases.
Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.
They didn't make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.
Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.
Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That's despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.
Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That's because, in Ryan's words, "the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers."
In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don't pay income but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.
The Democrats, perhaps following the polls and focus groups, have been protecting these entitlement programs that have done more to increase income inequality than the Reagan and Bush tax cuts put together.
Ryan makes three more points that may strike many as counterintuitive.
First, reductions in some transfer payments haven't hurt the living standards of most low-earners. The prime example is the welfare reform act of 1996, which reduced transfers to single mothers but induced many of them to find jobs that left them better off economically and, probably, psychologically.
Second, Americans aren't trapped in one segment of the income distribution. A Tax Journal analysis of individual income tax returns found that 58 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income segment by 2005. This comports with common experience. We move up and down the income scale in the course of a lifetime.
Finally, the inflation adjustment used in the CBO analysis was the Consumer Price Index. But that tends to overstate inflation (as any indexes tends to do, since it measures the cost of a static market basket of goods and services). A study by Chicago economist Christian Broda found that prices for goods purchased by low-earners have been rapidly decreasing, while prices for goods of high-earners have increased. Kids' school clothes may be cheaper at Walmart than they were years ago, while prices at Neiman Marcus keep increasing.
So if the question is how to compensate for increasing income inequality, higher tax rates on high-earners won't do much -- and could be counterproductive if they diminish economic growth.
A better way is suggested by the supercommittee Republicans: Limit future increases in transfer payments to affluent households, and cap deductions for home mortgage interest and state and local taxes, which are hugely lucrative for high-earners and worthless for low-earners who don't pay income tax.
These proposals won't reduce income inequality altogether. Much of the increased inequality comes from the huge increases for those in the top 1 percent of earners. But we wouldn't be better off if Steve Jobs had never existed.
Keeping entitlements as they are and raising tax rates on high-earners is a recipe for Europe-style stagnation. Ryan and the supercommittee Republicans point toward a better way.
Monday, November 28, 2011
What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.
Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn't include such tax increases.
Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.
They didn't make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.
Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.
Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That's despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.
Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That's because, in Ryan's words, "the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers."
In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don't pay income but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.
The Democrats, perhaps following the polls and focus groups, have been protecting these entitlement programs that have done more to increase income inequality than the Reagan and Bush tax cuts put together.
Ryan makes three more points that may strike many as counterintuitive.
First, reductions in some transfer payments haven't hurt the living standards of most low-earners. The prime example is the welfare reform act of 1996, which reduced transfers to single mothers but induced many of them to find jobs that left them better off economically and, probably, psychologically.
Second, Americans aren't trapped in one segment of the income distribution. A Tax Journal analysis of individual income tax returns found that 58 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income segment by 2005. This comports with common experience. We move up and down the income scale in the course of a lifetime.
Finally, the inflation adjustment used in the CBO analysis was the Consumer Price Index. But that tends to overstate inflation (as any indexes tends to do, since it measures the cost of a static market basket of goods and services). A study by Chicago economist Christian Broda found that prices for goods purchased by low-earners have been rapidly decreasing, while prices for goods of high-earners have increased. Kids' school clothes may be cheaper at Walmart than they were years ago, while prices at Neiman Marcus keep increasing.
So if the question is how to compensate for increasing income inequality, higher tax rates on high-earners won't do much -- and could be counterproductive if they diminish economic growth.
A better way is suggested by the supercommittee Republicans: Limit future increases in transfer payments to affluent households, and cap deductions for home mortgage interest and state and local taxes, which are hugely lucrative for high-earners and worthless for low-earners who don't pay income tax.
These proposals won't reduce income inequality altogether. Much of the increased inequality comes from the huge increases for those in the top 1 percent of earners. But we wouldn't be better off if Steve Jobs had never existed.
Keeping entitlements as they are and raising tax rates on high-earners is a recipe for Europe-style stagnation. Ryan and the supercommittee Republicans point toward a better way.
Give Thanks for American Exceptionalism
By Star Parker
Monday, November 28, 2011
The Pew Research Center has provided some timely food for thought as we enter our traditional holiday season.
According to a new report comparing attitudes in Europe and America, only 49 percent of Americans now feel that American culture is superior to others. This is down from 60 percent in 2002.
For those that may find this troubling, there is more reason for concern in that only 37 percent of young Americans, ages 18- 29, say American culture is superior.
What the study does not examine is what we mean by culture.
I happened to hear a discussion on one of the cable shows about this report, and the discussants were bewailing the prevalence of reality shows, Kim Kardashian, and Facebook.
But I think this is a misreading of culture. Culture is about the prevailing core attitudes of a society. And, when we look further into this same study, we find that American attitudes are distinctly different from their European counterparts and that these attitudes very much reflect what is uniquely American.
For instance, 58 percent of Americans feel that individual freedom is more important than government “guarantees that nobody is in need.” Only 36 percent of French and 36 percent of Germans feel this way.
Only 36 percent of Americans agree that success is largely determined by “forces outside our control.” But 72 percent of Germans and 57 percent of French agree with this.
And 50 percent of Americans believe religion is very important in contrast to 21 percent in Germany and 13 percent in France.
Americans are distinct from Europeans in our beliefs in the importance of individual freedom, of personal responsibility, and religious faith.
Can it be an accident that these values that are so prevalent in American culture today are in line with the principles stated in the nation’s founding document 235 years ago? That our Creator endowed us with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and “That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men.”
Distinctly American is our credo, but also that being American is defined by free choice and a set of principles rather than blind circumstance of geography or genetics.
But to point to the fact that American culture is distinct does not necessarily prove that it is better.
Is it?
Considering economic performance, there is little comparison between our nation and Europe. Per capita GDP of the US, the economic output per each individual in the country, is $47,200 in the US compared to $32,700 in Europe.
The average per capita GDP in the European Union is less than that of America’s poorest state, Mississippi ($32,764).
One hint that there might be something special going on here is that our problem seems to be limiting the number of people that want to come in, rather than preventing people from escaping.
According to the State Department, more than 5 million people are now waiting to immigrate to the United States in various family and employment categories.
Although American attitudes are distinct, they are changing and trending in the direction of Europe. So, if you think this is a problem, and I do, there is reason for concern.
I consider my own experiences and know that nowhere else in the world could I live the life I have been living.
Where else could a young black mother on welfare conclude she was on the wrong path, walk away from it, get her degree, build a business and a non-profit organization that includes on its board of advisors a former US Senator and Attorney General of the United States and a former Counselor to the President of the United States and US Attorney General?
My work is inspired by my conviction that America is truly exceptional and I pray every day that we do not lose our way.
Monday, November 28, 2011
The Pew Research Center has provided some timely food for thought as we enter our traditional holiday season.
According to a new report comparing attitudes in Europe and America, only 49 percent of Americans now feel that American culture is superior to others. This is down from 60 percent in 2002.
For those that may find this troubling, there is more reason for concern in that only 37 percent of young Americans, ages 18- 29, say American culture is superior.
What the study does not examine is what we mean by culture.
I happened to hear a discussion on one of the cable shows about this report, and the discussants were bewailing the prevalence of reality shows, Kim Kardashian, and Facebook.
But I think this is a misreading of culture. Culture is about the prevailing core attitudes of a society. And, when we look further into this same study, we find that American attitudes are distinctly different from their European counterparts and that these attitudes very much reflect what is uniquely American.
For instance, 58 percent of Americans feel that individual freedom is more important than government “guarantees that nobody is in need.” Only 36 percent of French and 36 percent of Germans feel this way.
Only 36 percent of Americans agree that success is largely determined by “forces outside our control.” But 72 percent of Germans and 57 percent of French agree with this.
And 50 percent of Americans believe religion is very important in contrast to 21 percent in Germany and 13 percent in France.
Americans are distinct from Europeans in our beliefs in the importance of individual freedom, of personal responsibility, and religious faith.
Can it be an accident that these values that are so prevalent in American culture today are in line with the principles stated in the nation’s founding document 235 years ago? That our Creator endowed us with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and “That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men.”
Distinctly American is our credo, but also that being American is defined by free choice and a set of principles rather than blind circumstance of geography or genetics.
But to point to the fact that American culture is distinct does not necessarily prove that it is better.
Is it?
Considering economic performance, there is little comparison between our nation and Europe. Per capita GDP of the US, the economic output per each individual in the country, is $47,200 in the US compared to $32,700 in Europe.
The average per capita GDP in the European Union is less than that of America’s poorest state, Mississippi ($32,764).
One hint that there might be something special going on here is that our problem seems to be limiting the number of people that want to come in, rather than preventing people from escaping.
According to the State Department, more than 5 million people are now waiting to immigrate to the United States in various family and employment categories.
Although American attitudes are distinct, they are changing and trending in the direction of Europe. So, if you think this is a problem, and I do, there is reason for concern.
I consider my own experiences and know that nowhere else in the world could I live the life I have been living.
Where else could a young black mother on welfare conclude she was on the wrong path, walk away from it, get her degree, build a business and a non-profit organization that includes on its board of advisors a former US Senator and Attorney General of the United States and a former Counselor to the President of the United States and US Attorney General?
My work is inspired by my conviction that America is truly exceptional and I pray every day that we do not lose our way.
Scientists Behaving Badly
More nails for the coffin of man-made global warming
Jim Lacey
Monday, November 28, 2011
Global-warming skeptics spend much of their time knocking down the fatuous warmist claim that the science is settled. According to the warmists, this singular piece of settled science is attested to by hundreds or thousands of highly credentialed scientists. In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons (one hesitates to refer to folks with so little respect for the scientific method as scientists) willing to falsify data and manipulate findings; or, to put it bluntly, to lie in order to push a political agenda not supported by empirical evidence. This is what made the original release of the Climategate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia so valuable. They clearly identified the politicized core of climate watchers who were driving the entire warmist agenda. Following in their footsteps are all the other scientists who built their own research on top of the fraudulent data produced by the warmist core.
Last week over 5,000 new e-mails, already dubbed Climategate 2, were released. Anyone still desiring to contest the assertion that only a few persons controlled the entire warmist agenda will be brought up short by this note from one warmist protesting that his opinions were not getting the hearing they deserved: “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.” Over the years this core group, led by Phil Jones at East Anglia and Michael Mann at Penn State, became so close that even those inclined toward more honest appraisals of the state of climate science were hesitant to rock the boat. As one warm-monger states: “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” Silly me, how many years have I wasted believing that the very point of science was to pursue the truth in the face of all obstacles. On the basis of this evidence the scientific method must be rewritten so as to state: “Science must be as objective as possible, unless it offends your friends.”
Unfortunately, from the very beginning, the core group at the heart of Climategate had no interest in “scientific truth.” As one states: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.” In other words, let’s decide on a conclusion and then use only evidence that proves that point, discarding everything else. One scientist who seems to have been slightly troubled by these methods wrote: “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” In another note to Phil Jones, this same scientist complained: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.”
Of course, nothing of the sort was done. As one e-mail states: “The figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].” Too bad these so-called scientists felt they could tell the truth only to one another and not the public at large. Some of the other truths they shared only with one another are astounding. For instance, one writes: “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!” So, despite having no confidence in any of the models the IPCC was using in its reports, this scientist was ready to support the IPCC findings to the hilt. And why didn’t he believe the models? Easy: They were designed to tell the big lie. For example, when confronted with the problem that if all the data were included, the warming disappeared, Phil Jones turned to a novel method: He used only “[time] periods that showed warming.”
At one point, Jones admits that the “basic problem is that all of the models are wrong.” Of course, there is a simple reason for this. When the models do not show what the warmists want them to show, they simply apply “some tuning.” One scientist was worried enough about this “tuning” to write that he “doubt[ed] the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” In this case, “tuning” means changing the model until it tells you what you want it to. When it became impossible to torture the models any further without making their uselessness apparent to all, the warmists resorted to changing the data.
The most efficient method of corrupting the models was to use data only from time periods when there was warming and discard others, as Jones admits to doing. This method helped one scientist reduce the cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1940 and 1970, so that he did not have to make up an excuse blaming it on sulphates, which could not be proven. Another complains that no matter how much he fiddles with the data, it is “very difficult to make the Medieval Warming Period go away.” Solving this problem in the modern era was much easier: The warmists merely changed the temperature readings for much of the 20th century and threw away the original data.
Why? One e-mail clearly explains what was at stake: ”I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” In other words, all the scientific lying was a result of scientists trying to give their political masters a major issue they could use to control people’s lives and justify wasting trillions of dollars. Success, as one warmist stated, rested on somehow convincing the public that “limate change is extremely complicated, BUT to accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.” In other words, climate science is too complex for the simpleton voters, who must be made to believe that unless we wreck the global economy the planet will bake. As Michael Mann says in one e-mail: “the important thing is to make sure they’re losing the PR battle.” Moving even further away from their original calling as scientists, the warmists spend considerable time discussing the tactics of convincing the masses that global warming should be a major concern. For instance, one states: “Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions — bad politics — to one about the value of a stable climate — much better politics. . . . the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible.”
To win the public debate nothing was out of bounds. For instance, Mann, incensed that some skeptics had trashed his work, wrote to Jones, saying he had “been talking with folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre . . . perhaps the same needs to be done with this Kennan guy . . . I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.” Steve McIntyre and Doug Kennan are well-known skeptics. In fact, McIntyre’s work was crucial in proving that Mann’s infamous “hockey stick graph” — the heart of the United Nations’ IPCC-3 report — was a fraud. Rather than contest McIntyre’s findings with evidence and data, Mann decided that his best alternative was to smear his challenger’s reputation. Skeptics always had to be on the watch for Mann’s spiteful attacks. But what is interesting is that many of his fellow warmists had a low opinion of his work. Despite this, they were slow to criticize Mann — partly because they did not want to give the skeptics any more ammunition, but also because they were afraid of him. As one warmist wrote to Jones, Mann was a “serious enemy” and “vindictive.”
Worried that their e-mail discussions might turn a spotlight on their fraud, Jones and others were constantly advising one another on how to hide the evidence. For instance, Jones once sent out an e-mail stating: “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.” To which one warmist replied: “Phil, thanks for your thoughts — guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in the open.”
Still, none of this deception would be possible without the active collusion of much of the global press, which has swallowed the warmist agenda hook, line, and sinker. As one BBC journalist wrote to Phil Jones after running a piece slightly skeptical of the warmist position:
My favorite quote of all those uncovered was from the climate criminal who asked his colleagues what would happen to them if it was discovered that climate change was “mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation,” as much of the evidence shows. He answers his own question: “They’ll kill us probably.”
Jim Lacey
Monday, November 28, 2011
Global-warming skeptics spend much of their time knocking down the fatuous warmist claim that the science is settled. According to the warmists, this singular piece of settled science is attested to by hundreds or thousands of highly credentialed scientists. In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons (one hesitates to refer to folks with so little respect for the scientific method as scientists) willing to falsify data and manipulate findings; or, to put it bluntly, to lie in order to push a political agenda not supported by empirical evidence. This is what made the original release of the Climategate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia so valuable. They clearly identified the politicized core of climate watchers who were driving the entire warmist agenda. Following in their footsteps are all the other scientists who built their own research on top of the fraudulent data produced by the warmist core.
Last week over 5,000 new e-mails, already dubbed Climategate 2, were released. Anyone still desiring to contest the assertion that only a few persons controlled the entire warmist agenda will be brought up short by this note from one warmist protesting that his opinions were not getting the hearing they deserved: “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.” Over the years this core group, led by Phil Jones at East Anglia and Michael Mann at Penn State, became so close that even those inclined toward more honest appraisals of the state of climate science were hesitant to rock the boat. As one warm-monger states: “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” Silly me, how many years have I wasted believing that the very point of science was to pursue the truth in the face of all obstacles. On the basis of this evidence the scientific method must be rewritten so as to state: “Science must be as objective as possible, unless it offends your friends.”
Unfortunately, from the very beginning, the core group at the heart of Climategate had no interest in “scientific truth.” As one states: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.” In other words, let’s decide on a conclusion and then use only evidence that proves that point, discarding everything else. One scientist who seems to have been slightly troubled by these methods wrote: “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” In another note to Phil Jones, this same scientist complained: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.”
Of course, nothing of the sort was done. As one e-mail states: “The figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].” Too bad these so-called scientists felt they could tell the truth only to one another and not the public at large. Some of the other truths they shared only with one another are astounding. For instance, one writes: “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!” So, despite having no confidence in any of the models the IPCC was using in its reports, this scientist was ready to support the IPCC findings to the hilt. And why didn’t he believe the models? Easy: They were designed to tell the big lie. For example, when confronted with the problem that if all the data were included, the warming disappeared, Phil Jones turned to a novel method: He used only “[time] periods that showed warming.”
At one point, Jones admits that the “basic problem is that all of the models are wrong.” Of course, there is a simple reason for this. When the models do not show what the warmists want them to show, they simply apply “some tuning.” One scientist was worried enough about this “tuning” to write that he “doubt[ed] the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” In this case, “tuning” means changing the model until it tells you what you want it to. When it became impossible to torture the models any further without making their uselessness apparent to all, the warmists resorted to changing the data.
The most efficient method of corrupting the models was to use data only from time periods when there was warming and discard others, as Jones admits to doing. This method helped one scientist reduce the cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1940 and 1970, so that he did not have to make up an excuse blaming it on sulphates, which could not be proven. Another complains that no matter how much he fiddles with the data, it is “very difficult to make the Medieval Warming Period go away.” Solving this problem in the modern era was much easier: The warmists merely changed the temperature readings for much of the 20th century and threw away the original data.
Why? One e-mail clearly explains what was at stake: ”I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” In other words, all the scientific lying was a result of scientists trying to give their political masters a major issue they could use to control people’s lives and justify wasting trillions of dollars. Success, as one warmist stated, rested on somehow convincing the public that “limate change is extremely complicated, BUT to accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.” In other words, climate science is too complex for the simpleton voters, who must be made to believe that unless we wreck the global economy the planet will bake. As Michael Mann says in one e-mail: “the important thing is to make sure they’re losing the PR battle.” Moving even further away from their original calling as scientists, the warmists spend considerable time discussing the tactics of convincing the masses that global warming should be a major concern. For instance, one states: “Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions — bad politics — to one about the value of a stable climate — much better politics. . . . the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible.”
To win the public debate nothing was out of bounds. For instance, Mann, incensed that some skeptics had trashed his work, wrote to Jones, saying he had “been talking with folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre . . . perhaps the same needs to be done with this Kennan guy . . . I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.” Steve McIntyre and Doug Kennan are well-known skeptics. In fact, McIntyre’s work was crucial in proving that Mann’s infamous “hockey stick graph” — the heart of the United Nations’ IPCC-3 report — was a fraud. Rather than contest McIntyre’s findings with evidence and data, Mann decided that his best alternative was to smear his challenger’s reputation. Skeptics always had to be on the watch for Mann’s spiteful attacks. But what is interesting is that many of his fellow warmists had a low opinion of his work. Despite this, they were slow to criticize Mann — partly because they did not want to give the skeptics any more ammunition, but also because they were afraid of him. As one warmist wrote to Jones, Mann was a “serious enemy” and “vindictive.”
Worried that their e-mail discussions might turn a spotlight on their fraud, Jones and others were constantly advising one another on how to hide the evidence. For instance, Jones once sent out an e-mail stating: “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.” To which one warmist replied: “Phil, thanks for your thoughts — guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in the open.”
Still, none of this deception would be possible without the active collusion of much of the global press, which has swallowed the warmist agenda hook, line, and sinker. As one BBC journalist wrote to Phil Jones after running a piece slightly skeptical of the warmist position:
I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP [Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol] in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.What is even more troubling is what appears to be the active collusion of government agencies charged with looking out for the public welfare. In one Jones e-mail, he discusses hiding data, making it clear that the U.S. Department of Energy was an active participant in his fraud: “Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get — and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.” I hope someone in Congress is interested in why the Department of Energy was involved in hiding climate data. One might assume that it would be harder to make an investment in Solyndra if the global-warming threat was proven a fraud.
My favorite quote of all those uncovered was from the climate criminal who asked his colleagues what would happen to them if it was discovered that climate change was “mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation,” as much of the evidence shows. He answers his own question: “They’ll kill us probably.”
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Inside Oakland Bubble, All Free Speech Isn't Equal
By Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, November 27, 2011
For all their whining about the "police state" and the city's failure to respect their "First Amendment rights," Occupy Oakland activists have managed to flout the law with regular impunity. Somehow demonstrators have managed to turn Frank Ogawa Plaza into a tent stew and shut down parts of the city in a so-called general strike Nov. 2, and still they think they're victims who have been deprived of their free speech rights.
But if they want to see what it's really like to fight City Hall, they should talk to Walter Hoye. Hoye's offense was to walk up to people with a sign that said, "Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help." For that he was arrested twice in 2008 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
The difference here is that Hoye wasn't peddling some amorphous grievances that might be addressed with higher taxes and more government. Hoye's sin -- pardon the expression -- is that he opposed abortion.
Please note: Police did not arrest Hoye for blocking access to reproductive health clinics. It's always wrong for one group, in the name of free speech, to infringe on the rights of others. And it's a federal crime for anyone to injure, intimidate or interfere with women seeking reproductive health care services. The penalty can be as high as six months in prison and a $10,000 fine for a first-time nonviolent offense.
But that's not tough enough for Oakland. In 2007, the City Council passed an ordinance that created a "bubble" around reproductive health clinics. In the bubble, it's an offense to approach a woman entering a clinic without her consent. The measure actually banned "counseling."
Oakland passed the "bubble" bill, argued Hoye's attorney Katie Short of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, because the City Council had a problem: Hoye wasn't violating any existing laws, so it created a new one.
Later, Oakland tweaked the ordinance to make it appear evenhanded. Problem: Oakland police required Hoye to wait for consent before he could talk to Family Planning Specialists patients. There was no such requirement for pro-abortion rights volunteers -- escorts who don orange vests and stand between anti-abortion activists and clinic patients. A three-judge federal panel that included the famously liberal Judge Stephen Reinhardt ruled that Oakland did not apply the law in a neutral manner.
"Throughout our nation's history, Americans have counted on the First Amendment to protect their right to ask their fellow citizens to change their mind," U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon wrote. "Abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, pacifists, union members, war protestors, religious believers, civil rights campaigners, anti-tax activists, and countless others have appealed to the principle, enshrined within the First Amendment, that in a democracy such as ours, public debate must be robust and free and that, for it to be so, the Constitution's protection of the freedom of speech must extend to the sidewalk encounter of the proselytizer and his prospective convert."
Berzon wrote that there has been no suggestion that Hoye "engaged in any physical obstruction or violence" or even rough language. Yet Oakland arrested and prosecuted him, and a jury convicted him. And he served his time in a county jail in 2009.
City Attorney Barbara Parker noted that courts have upheld the ordinance itself. Parker maintains, "It's the same bubble for everyone" -- protesters and escorts. She believes in applying the law equally and "respecting public safety, public health and the property rights of everyone."
I don't buy it. Mayor Jean Quan's husband and daughter participated in Occupy Oakland protests. In October, when police removed the tents, Quan invited activists back -- and soon there were more tents in front of City Hall than there were before the police moved in. City councilors embraced the encampment from the start.
Until campers wore out their welcome, City Hall and Occupy Oakland happily resided inside the same bubble.
John Russo, city attorney at the time, also -- wrongly, I think -- defended the "bubble" bill as politically neutral. However, he scoffed: "The minute they pitched tents, they were in violation of city regulations. ... If it had been 120 tents from the (National Rifle Association), right-to-lifers (or) the Boy Scouts, that would not have been tolerated."
I asked Hoye how he feels when Occupy Oakland protesters complain that they are victims whose free expression has been suppressed.
"I don't think they really know what being treated unfairly is," he answered. "I didn't see any of the kind of leniency that they received."
And: "Thank you for thinking of me. People have asked me about that."
Sunday, November 27, 2011
For all their whining about the "police state" and the city's failure to respect their "First Amendment rights," Occupy Oakland activists have managed to flout the law with regular impunity. Somehow demonstrators have managed to turn Frank Ogawa Plaza into a tent stew and shut down parts of the city in a so-called general strike Nov. 2, and still they think they're victims who have been deprived of their free speech rights.
But if they want to see what it's really like to fight City Hall, they should talk to Walter Hoye. Hoye's offense was to walk up to people with a sign that said, "Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help." For that he was arrested twice in 2008 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
The difference here is that Hoye wasn't peddling some amorphous grievances that might be addressed with higher taxes and more government. Hoye's sin -- pardon the expression -- is that he opposed abortion.
Please note: Police did not arrest Hoye for blocking access to reproductive health clinics. It's always wrong for one group, in the name of free speech, to infringe on the rights of others. And it's a federal crime for anyone to injure, intimidate or interfere with women seeking reproductive health care services. The penalty can be as high as six months in prison and a $10,000 fine for a first-time nonviolent offense.
But that's not tough enough for Oakland. In 2007, the City Council passed an ordinance that created a "bubble" around reproductive health clinics. In the bubble, it's an offense to approach a woman entering a clinic without her consent. The measure actually banned "counseling."
Oakland passed the "bubble" bill, argued Hoye's attorney Katie Short of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, because the City Council had a problem: Hoye wasn't violating any existing laws, so it created a new one.
Later, Oakland tweaked the ordinance to make it appear evenhanded. Problem: Oakland police required Hoye to wait for consent before he could talk to Family Planning Specialists patients. There was no such requirement for pro-abortion rights volunteers -- escorts who don orange vests and stand between anti-abortion activists and clinic patients. A three-judge federal panel that included the famously liberal Judge Stephen Reinhardt ruled that Oakland did not apply the law in a neutral manner.
"Throughout our nation's history, Americans have counted on the First Amendment to protect their right to ask their fellow citizens to change their mind," U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon wrote. "Abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, pacifists, union members, war protestors, religious believers, civil rights campaigners, anti-tax activists, and countless others have appealed to the principle, enshrined within the First Amendment, that in a democracy such as ours, public debate must be robust and free and that, for it to be so, the Constitution's protection of the freedom of speech must extend to the sidewalk encounter of the proselytizer and his prospective convert."
Berzon wrote that there has been no suggestion that Hoye "engaged in any physical obstruction or violence" or even rough language. Yet Oakland arrested and prosecuted him, and a jury convicted him. And he served his time in a county jail in 2009.
City Attorney Barbara Parker noted that courts have upheld the ordinance itself. Parker maintains, "It's the same bubble for everyone" -- protesters and escorts. She believes in applying the law equally and "respecting public safety, public health and the property rights of everyone."
I don't buy it. Mayor Jean Quan's husband and daughter participated in Occupy Oakland protests. In October, when police removed the tents, Quan invited activists back -- and soon there were more tents in front of City Hall than there were before the police moved in. City councilors embraced the encampment from the start.
Until campers wore out their welcome, City Hall and Occupy Oakland happily resided inside the same bubble.
John Russo, city attorney at the time, also -- wrongly, I think -- defended the "bubble" bill as politically neutral. However, he scoffed: "The minute they pitched tents, they were in violation of city regulations. ... If it had been 120 tents from the (National Rifle Association), right-to-lifers (or) the Boy Scouts, that would not have been tolerated."
I asked Hoye how he feels when Occupy Oakland protesters complain that they are victims whose free expression has been suppressed.
"I don't think they really know what being treated unfairly is," he answered. "I didn't see any of the kind of leniency that they received."
And: "Thank you for thinking of me. People have asked me about that."
From a Global Perspective, the 99 Percent Are Actually the 1 Percent
By Doug Giles
Sunday, November 27, 2011
As I watch the various college-aged Occupiers in their True Religion jeans talk about how bad they’ve got it while they tweet on their Macs during a catered lunch consisting of salmon filets with dill sauce as a Rasta Columbia grad student strums gently on his Washburn 118SW, I keep thinking, “You charmed babies don’t have it that bad.”
Matter of fact, from an earth angle, you are truly the fortunate ones and have hit the lifestyle lotto. Trust me, there are stacks of people from developing countries who would love to have what you ingrates whine about. Just ask an illegal alien.
For instance …
1. Clean Water. Please bear in mind, Occupiers, that when you crack open your Evian or get a glass of water from your dorm room faucet that 884 million people worldwide drink water out of crap puddles. Also, even though it doesn’t look like many of you cats bathe, when you do scrub your undercarriage during a five-minute shower, know that you have burned more aqua in that foray than a normal Joe in a third world county has in the last 24 hours. Just a little FYI.
2. Toilets. I know some of your crew like to forego toilets and port-a-potties and drop deuces on police cars and American flags and urinate in public, but please understand that the mere fact that you’ve got an option to use an American Standard truly tosses you into the cultural elite class. Yep, worldwide 40% of our globe’s population (2.6 billion people) is forced, out of poverty, to pop a squat in the brush because they are that broke.
3. Electricity. Next time you power up your iPhone 4S or HDTV, think about this ditty: 1.6 billion folks live without the little extravagance of electricity.
4. A Roof. Globally, one billion people would kill to live in that tent you’re inhabiting right now in that swank park you’re ruining. One-sixth of the world’s collective live in cardboard boxes. According to the NYC arrest records of the 984 OWS protestors arrested between 9/18 and 10/15, they’re dwelling in digs that average about $305,000 a pop. Can you say, “1%”?
5. Grub. Did you know the rats you guys are attracting by the food you toss away during your protest would actually be a delicacy in developing countries? If you have three squares a day (or even one) please note that you are blessed because 790 million folks, give or take, go to bed every night with their stomachs sucking up against their spines.
I could go on and on talking about how great we have it here amidst all of our inequities and absurdities, but I’ve got a Thanksgiving dinner to eat, a cigar to smoke and a giant screen HDTV to watch the Dolphins lose on that forbid me to go any further with this diatribe. For more 411 on why the OWS crowd and all Americans should bow their knee and thank God we have this nation, check out this column.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
As I watch the various college-aged Occupiers in their True Religion jeans talk about how bad they’ve got it while they tweet on their Macs during a catered lunch consisting of salmon filets with dill sauce as a Rasta Columbia grad student strums gently on his Washburn 118SW, I keep thinking, “You charmed babies don’t have it that bad.”
Matter of fact, from an earth angle, you are truly the fortunate ones and have hit the lifestyle lotto. Trust me, there are stacks of people from developing countries who would love to have what you ingrates whine about. Just ask an illegal alien.
For instance …
1. Clean Water. Please bear in mind, Occupiers, that when you crack open your Evian or get a glass of water from your dorm room faucet that 884 million people worldwide drink water out of crap puddles. Also, even though it doesn’t look like many of you cats bathe, when you do scrub your undercarriage during a five-minute shower, know that you have burned more aqua in that foray than a normal Joe in a third world county has in the last 24 hours. Just a little FYI.
2. Toilets. I know some of your crew like to forego toilets and port-a-potties and drop deuces on police cars and American flags and urinate in public, but please understand that the mere fact that you’ve got an option to use an American Standard truly tosses you into the cultural elite class. Yep, worldwide 40% of our globe’s population (2.6 billion people) is forced, out of poverty, to pop a squat in the brush because they are that broke.
3. Electricity. Next time you power up your iPhone 4S or HDTV, think about this ditty: 1.6 billion folks live without the little extravagance of electricity.
4. A Roof. Globally, one billion people would kill to live in that tent you’re inhabiting right now in that swank park you’re ruining. One-sixth of the world’s collective live in cardboard boxes. According to the NYC arrest records of the 984 OWS protestors arrested between 9/18 and 10/15, they’re dwelling in digs that average about $305,000 a pop. Can you say, “1%”?
5. Grub. Did you know the rats you guys are attracting by the food you toss away during your protest would actually be a delicacy in developing countries? If you have three squares a day (or even one) please note that you are blessed because 790 million folks, give or take, go to bed every night with their stomachs sucking up against their spines.
I could go on and on talking about how great we have it here amidst all of our inequities and absurdities, but I’ve got a Thanksgiving dinner to eat, a cigar to smoke and a giant screen HDTV to watch the Dolphins lose on that forbid me to go any further with this diatribe. For more 411 on why the OWS crowd and all Americans should bow their knee and thank God we have this nation, check out this column.
Are Progressives For the Little Guy
By John C. Goodman
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Liberals aren't liberals anymore. These days they call themselves "progressives."
Writing in The New York Times, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs said there were two progressive eras: one in the early part of the last century and the other during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. He called on liberals to create a third progressive era, in part "to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington."
To hear Sachs tell it, progressivism means being in favor of the little guy and against the special interests. Aligning himself with the motley crew that calls itself Occupy Wall Street, he writes:
As the leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has documented, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) — our first progressive-era federal regulatory agency — was dominated by, and served the interest of, the railroads. The main accomplishments of regulation were to outlaw price cutting, establish minimum prices and make the railroads more profitable than they had ever been. The experience was far from unique.
The regulatory apparatus created by the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 served the interests of large meat packers. Safety standards were invariably already being met — or were easily accommodated — by large companies. But the regulations forced many small enterprises out of business and made it difficult for new ones to enter the industry.
This same pattern — of regulatory agencies serving the interests of the regulated — was repeated with the establishment of almost all subsequent regulatory agencies. For this reason, Kolko called the entire Progressive Era the "triumph of conservatism."
The practices Kolko described were elevated to a refined science by Woodrow Wilson’s War Industries Board (WIB) during World War I. Trade associations were allowed to organize along industry lines — controlling output, setting prices and effectively functioning as an industry-by-industry system of cartels. By the time Franklin Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration (NRA) during the Depression years, planners could draw not only upon the experience of the Wilson-era WIB, but also on the far more extensive experience of Mussolini’s Italian economy — which was organized in the same way. In fact, Roosevelt’s economic vision for America was almost identical to the vision of Italian fascism.
As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, there are more than a few transatlantic parallels. The symbol of the NRA was the Blue Eagle, which businesses were expected to hang on their doors to show compliance with NRA rules. Newspapers in both America and Germany compared the Blue Eagle to the swastika and the German Reich eagle. A quasi-official army of informants and goon squads helped monitor compliance. Nuremberg-style Blue Eagle rallies were held, including a gathering of 10,000 strong at Madison Square Garden. A New York City Blue Eagle parade was larger than the ticker-tape parade celebrating Charles Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic.
Through the NRA, the federal government — backed by the full force of criminal law — intruded into virtually every economic transaction. An immigrant dry cleaner spent three months in jail for charging 35 cents to press a suit when the code required a minimum charge of 40 cents. Another case — one that went all the way to the Supreme Court — involved immigrant brothers who ran a small poultry business. Among the laws they were accused of violating was a requirement that buyers of chickens not select the chicken they were buying. Instead the buyer needed to reach into the coop and take the first chicken that came to hand. (Amity Shlaes explains the reason: buyers would be tempted to take the best chicken, leaving less desirable options for other buyers.)
In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (the so-called "sick chicken" case), a unanimous Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional. Roosevelt responded by trying to intimidate the justices and by asking Congress to expand the number of justices so that he could pack the court with judges more to his liking. Although he lost the battle, Roosevelt eventually won the war.
The Supreme Court today places very few restrictions on government authority to regulate the marketplace, no matter how indefensible the interventions.
The use of the word "progressive" by modern liberals is appropriate — to the degree that it reminds us of the historical and intellectual roots of much of liberal thinking. But there is another sense in which the word is very misleading. In general, there is nothing truly progressive about modern progressives. That is, nothing in their thinking is forward looking. Invariably, the social model they have in mind is in the distant past. Many explicitly admit they would like to resurrect Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In this sense, most people on the left who use the word "progressive" are actually reactionaries. Many are explicit about their desire to preserve the current allocation of jobs and the incomes that derive from those jobs. Although they tend to focus on opposing globalization and international trade, consistency requires them to oppose virtually all of the "creative destruction" that the economist Joseph Shumpeter said was inevitable in any dynamic, capitalistic economy.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Liberals aren't liberals anymore. These days they call themselves "progressives."
Writing in The New York Times, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs said there were two progressive eras: one in the early part of the last century and the other during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. He called on liberals to create a third progressive era, in part "to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington."
To hear Sachs tell it, progressivism means being in favor of the little guy and against the special interests. Aligning himself with the motley crew that calls itself Occupy Wall Street, he writes:
The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power.Sachs doesn't know much about history. Nor do most other people. Given Teddy Roosevelt’s attacks on "the trusts" and the muckraking novels of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, you might suppose that 100 years ago progressives were antibusiness. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The fundamental economic vision of progressivism was to not to combat special interests, but to embrace and empower them. In a very real sense, "progressivism" means rule by special interests.
As the leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has documented, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) — our first progressive-era federal regulatory agency — was dominated by, and served the interest of, the railroads. The main accomplishments of regulation were to outlaw price cutting, establish minimum prices and make the railroads more profitable than they had ever been. The experience was far from unique.
The regulatory apparatus created by the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 served the interests of large meat packers. Safety standards were invariably already being met — or were easily accommodated — by large companies. But the regulations forced many small enterprises out of business and made it difficult for new ones to enter the industry.
This same pattern — of regulatory agencies serving the interests of the regulated — was repeated with the establishment of almost all subsequent regulatory agencies. For this reason, Kolko called the entire Progressive Era the "triumph of conservatism."
The practices Kolko described were elevated to a refined science by Woodrow Wilson’s War Industries Board (WIB) during World War I. Trade associations were allowed to organize along industry lines — controlling output, setting prices and effectively functioning as an industry-by-industry system of cartels. By the time Franklin Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration (NRA) during the Depression years, planners could draw not only upon the experience of the Wilson-era WIB, but also on the far more extensive experience of Mussolini’s Italian economy — which was organized in the same way. In fact, Roosevelt’s economic vision for America was almost identical to the vision of Italian fascism.
As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, there are more than a few transatlantic parallels. The symbol of the NRA was the Blue Eagle, which businesses were expected to hang on their doors to show compliance with NRA rules. Newspapers in both America and Germany compared the Blue Eagle to the swastika and the German Reich eagle. A quasi-official army of informants and goon squads helped monitor compliance. Nuremberg-style Blue Eagle rallies were held, including a gathering of 10,000 strong at Madison Square Garden. A New York City Blue Eagle parade was larger than the ticker-tape parade celebrating Charles Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic.
Through the NRA, the federal government — backed by the full force of criminal law — intruded into virtually every economic transaction. An immigrant dry cleaner spent three months in jail for charging 35 cents to press a suit when the code required a minimum charge of 40 cents. Another case — one that went all the way to the Supreme Court — involved immigrant brothers who ran a small poultry business. Among the laws they were accused of violating was a requirement that buyers of chickens not select the chicken they were buying. Instead the buyer needed to reach into the coop and take the first chicken that came to hand. (Amity Shlaes explains the reason: buyers would be tempted to take the best chicken, leaving less desirable options for other buyers.)
In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (the so-called "sick chicken" case), a unanimous Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional. Roosevelt responded by trying to intimidate the justices and by asking Congress to expand the number of justices so that he could pack the court with judges more to his liking. Although he lost the battle, Roosevelt eventually won the war.
The Supreme Court today places very few restrictions on government authority to regulate the marketplace, no matter how indefensible the interventions.
The use of the word "progressive" by modern liberals is appropriate — to the degree that it reminds us of the historical and intellectual roots of much of liberal thinking. But there is another sense in which the word is very misleading. In general, there is nothing truly progressive about modern progressives. That is, nothing in their thinking is forward looking. Invariably, the social model they have in mind is in the distant past. Many explicitly admit they would like to resurrect Roosevelt’s New Deal.
In this sense, most people on the left who use the word "progressive" are actually reactionaries. Many are explicit about their desire to preserve the current allocation of jobs and the incomes that derive from those jobs. Although they tend to focus on opposing globalization and international trade, consistency requires them to oppose virtually all of the "creative destruction" that the economist Joseph Shumpeter said was inevitable in any dynamic, capitalistic economy.
Friday, November 25, 2011
The Bloody Face of OWS
Not quite the poster child many hoped for.
Patrick Brennan
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Occupy Wall Street has found a face — finally, one to replace Che Guevara’s. Perhaps the movement’s first iconic image, the bloodied face of Brandon Watts, was printed on the front page of the New York Daily News and Metro last Friday. Watts was in the process of being arrested when a photographer caught a striking image of him surrounded by New York police officers, his face soaked with blood and contorted in pain.
It’s a pathetic image — like many from Occupy Wall Street, of the homeless and deranged who have descended on Zuccotti Park over time. But Watts’s story demonstrates multiple facets of OWS — the brash, immature criminality of it all, the sad delusions of many occupiers, and the directionless, anarchic refuge it has established.
On Thursday, the Daily News reported, Watts was seated atop a wall on the border of the park, hurling AAA batteries at cops standing along the street. He then jumped off the barricade, charged the mass of cops, grabbed a hat off the head of one of them, and dashed back into the park, with cops in pursuit. They were eventually able to wrestle him to the ground as he fought back; his bloody wound came from striking his face against the ground, and required four staples when the police brought him to the hospital.
Watts has now been arraigned and charged with assault and grand larceny, and held on $1,500 bond (it’s expected that the protesters’ financial committee will provide his bail).
This is Watts’s fifth arrest since the protests began — previously, he had been detained for escaping from a prison van, resisting arrest, stealing temporary police fencing, and loitering in disguise. In an October interview with the New York Times, Watts claimed he had actually been arrested eight times already.
Brandon Watts is 20 years old, and came to New York from his home outside of Philadelphia, Pa. — some in the movement have asserted that he was one of the first protesters to pitch a tent in the park in September. In the same Times interview, after a friend had explained she had come to lower Manhattan because she “agreed with the Occupy Wall Street demands” (though the movement has repeatedly claimed to have none), he described his motivation for coming to the park: “I came here because it felt like something I could help out with.”
At the time of that interview, Watts seems to have been taking advantage of Zuccotti Park’s anarchy — he explained that, with his friend, he had “drunk six Four Lokos . . . a beer or two” (Four Lokos are a notorious fruit-flavored alcoholic drink, each of which is equivalent to three or four beers). Watts also explained that he had lost his virginity in the park, an event he was “amped for.”
Brandon Watts doesn’t necessarily deserve to be demonized, as he has been by some; it has been suggested that he may have real mental and emotional issues, and harsh judgment should be reserved. His violence against the police nonetheless deserves to be condemned and punished, but the lesson here is not that Watts is a “thug,” instead that the Occupy movement attracts, enables, and defends people like him.
The Left has never been particularly circumspect when picking its iconic faces, from the aforementioned Che to Malcolm X or Mumia Abu-Jamal. Though Watts’s crimes rank nowhere near theirs, he is no exception, and represents what is both pernicious and pathetic about the Occupy movement.
For one, the outpouring of support and sympathy for an accidentally injured, likely felon has been absurd, and shows just why this unruly movement won’t gain the support of the “99%.” Many Americans may be unhappy about income inequality or unemployment, but few of them think it’s right to harass the police because of those grievances and, worse, once justly arrested, break out of a paddywagon to continue to make one’s point.
Moreover, Watts represents one of the occupiers’ main constituencies — the bored or disturbed transient who has been attracted to the openness and hospitality of the movement. Many of their stories are lamentable, but those people represent one of the practical issues that have beleaguered OWS, a movement whose only clear priorities are openness and equality.
Occupy Wall Street, whose media relevance relies in large part on accusations of police brutality, has found a useful icon. But like the movement itself, Brandon Watts isn’t quite the beacon many have hoped for.
Patrick Brennan
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Occupy Wall Street has found a face — finally, one to replace Che Guevara’s. Perhaps the movement’s first iconic image, the bloodied face of Brandon Watts, was printed on the front page of the New York Daily News and Metro last Friday. Watts was in the process of being arrested when a photographer caught a striking image of him surrounded by New York police officers, his face soaked with blood and contorted in pain.
It’s a pathetic image — like many from Occupy Wall Street, of the homeless and deranged who have descended on Zuccotti Park over time. But Watts’s story demonstrates multiple facets of OWS — the brash, immature criminality of it all, the sad delusions of many occupiers, and the directionless, anarchic refuge it has established.
On Thursday, the Daily News reported, Watts was seated atop a wall on the border of the park, hurling AAA batteries at cops standing along the street. He then jumped off the barricade, charged the mass of cops, grabbed a hat off the head of one of them, and dashed back into the park, with cops in pursuit. They were eventually able to wrestle him to the ground as he fought back; his bloody wound came from striking his face against the ground, and required four staples when the police brought him to the hospital.
Watts has now been arraigned and charged with assault and grand larceny, and held on $1,500 bond (it’s expected that the protesters’ financial committee will provide his bail).
This is Watts’s fifth arrest since the protests began — previously, he had been detained for escaping from a prison van, resisting arrest, stealing temporary police fencing, and loitering in disguise. In an October interview with the New York Times, Watts claimed he had actually been arrested eight times already.
Brandon Watts is 20 years old, and came to New York from his home outside of Philadelphia, Pa. — some in the movement have asserted that he was one of the first protesters to pitch a tent in the park in September. In the same Times interview, after a friend had explained she had come to lower Manhattan because she “agreed with the Occupy Wall Street demands” (though the movement has repeatedly claimed to have none), he described his motivation for coming to the park: “I came here because it felt like something I could help out with.”
At the time of that interview, Watts seems to have been taking advantage of Zuccotti Park’s anarchy — he explained that, with his friend, he had “drunk six Four Lokos . . . a beer or two” (Four Lokos are a notorious fruit-flavored alcoholic drink, each of which is equivalent to three or four beers). Watts also explained that he had lost his virginity in the park, an event he was “amped for.”
Brandon Watts doesn’t necessarily deserve to be demonized, as he has been by some; it has been suggested that he may have real mental and emotional issues, and harsh judgment should be reserved. His violence against the police nonetheless deserves to be condemned and punished, but the lesson here is not that Watts is a “thug,” instead that the Occupy movement attracts, enables, and defends people like him.
The Left has never been particularly circumspect when picking its iconic faces, from the aforementioned Che to Malcolm X or Mumia Abu-Jamal. Though Watts’s crimes rank nowhere near theirs, he is no exception, and represents what is both pernicious and pathetic about the Occupy movement.
For one, the outpouring of support and sympathy for an accidentally injured, likely felon has been absurd, and shows just why this unruly movement won’t gain the support of the “99%.” Many Americans may be unhappy about income inequality or unemployment, but few of them think it’s right to harass the police because of those grievances and, worse, once justly arrested, break out of a paddywagon to continue to make one’s point.
Moreover, Watts represents one of the occupiers’ main constituencies — the bored or disturbed transient who has been attracted to the openness and hospitality of the movement. Many of their stories are lamentable, but those people represent one of the practical issues that have beleaguered OWS, a movement whose only clear priorities are openness and equality.
Occupy Wall Street, whose media relevance relies in large part on accusations of police brutality, has found a useful icon. But like the movement itself, Brandon Watts isn’t quite the beacon many have hoped for.
The Real Prison Industry
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, November 25, 2011
I've long thought the notion of a prison-industrial complex to be laughable left-wing nonsense peddled by Marxist goofballs and other passengers in the clown car of academic identity politics.
For those who don't know, the phrase "prison-industrial complex," or PIC, is a play on the military-industrial complex. The theory behind PIC is that there are powerful forces -- capitalist, racist, etc. -- pushing to lock up as many black and brown men as they can to maintain white supremacy and line the pockets of big-prison CEOs and shareholders with profits earned not just from the taxpayer but from the toil of prison-slave labor.
Self-described "abolitionists" in the anti-PIC cause seek to get rid of prisons altogether. Indeed, they want to abolish punishment itself.
That goes for murderers, rapists and pedophiles.
"People who have seriously harmed another need appropriate forms of support, supervision and social and economic resources," explains the website for Critical Resistance, the leading outfit in the "abolitionist" cause. In other words, if Penn State's Jerry Sandusky is found guilty on all counts, he doesn't deserve prison; he deserves "support, supervision and social and economic resources."
Personally, I think that is just bat-guano crazy.
Still, the state of our prisons has become something of a scandal. We have more prisoners today than we have soldiers, and more prison guards than Marines.
Our prisons have become boot camps for criminals. That's one reason why I'm sympathetic to Peter Moskos' idea to bring back flogging. A professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Moskos argues in his book, "In Defense of Flogging," that flogging -- aka the lash -- is more humane than prison and much, much cheaper. He suggests that perpetrators of certain crimes -- petty theft, burglary, drug dealing -- be given the option of receiving one lash instead of six months in prison.
Before you shrink from the cruelty of the proposal, ask yourself which you would prefer: six lashes or three years in jail?
Moskos' motive is to reduce the size, scope and influence of prisons while keeping them around for the people who truly must be locked up: murderers, rapists, terrorists, pedophiles, etc. I might disagree with where he would set the ideal size of our prison population (I think incarceration rates have reduced crime more than he does), or how many lashes criminals should get, but he makes a compelling case, and his objective is reasonable.
But it's not an objective shared by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA). This was the outfit that essentially destroyed then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to fix the state budget.
In a state where more than two-thirds of crime is attributable to recidivism, CCPOA has spent millions of dollars lobbying against rehabilitation programs, favoring instead policies that will grow the inmate population and the ranks of prison guard unions. In 1999, it successfully killed a pilot program for alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders. In 2005, it helped kill Schwarzenegger's plan to reduce overcrowding by putting up to 20,000 inmates in a rehabilitation program. It opposes any tinkering with the "three strikes law" that might thin the prison rolls.
According to UCLA economist Lee E. Ohanian in a illuminating paper for The American, "America's Public Sector Union Dilemma," California's corrections officers have exploited their monopoly labor power to push policies that will expand the prison population and, as a result, the demand for more guards who just happen to be the best-paid corrections officers in the country. That's why, contrary to what the Marxist sages would expect, they've successfully kept privately run prisons out of the state.
Meanwhile, incarceration costs in the essentially bankrupt state are exploding. California spends $44,000 per inmate, compared with the national average of $28,000. A state prison nurse exploited overtime rules to earn $269,810 in one year.
Also contrary to left-wing expectations, these policies have been implemented not so much by the hard-hearted captains of industry and their Republican lackeys, but by a Democrat-controlled state legislature lubricated with donations from a powerful public-sector union.
The system is now up for much-needed reform thanks to a court order mandating that California fix the prison mess. Gov. Jerry Brown, whose 2010 gubernatorial campaign received more than $2 million from CCPOA, has been forced to figure something out.
Still, I suppose I owe the folks in the clown car at least a small apology. They're still nuts, but they're right about the existence of a prison-industrial complex. They were just looking in the wrong direction.
Friday, November 25, 2011
I've long thought the notion of a prison-industrial complex to be laughable left-wing nonsense peddled by Marxist goofballs and other passengers in the clown car of academic identity politics.
For those who don't know, the phrase "prison-industrial complex," or PIC, is a play on the military-industrial complex. The theory behind PIC is that there are powerful forces -- capitalist, racist, etc. -- pushing to lock up as many black and brown men as they can to maintain white supremacy and line the pockets of big-prison CEOs and shareholders with profits earned not just from the taxpayer but from the toil of prison-slave labor.
Self-described "abolitionists" in the anti-PIC cause seek to get rid of prisons altogether. Indeed, they want to abolish punishment itself.
That goes for murderers, rapists and pedophiles.
"People who have seriously harmed another need appropriate forms of support, supervision and social and economic resources," explains the website for Critical Resistance, the leading outfit in the "abolitionist" cause. In other words, if Penn State's Jerry Sandusky is found guilty on all counts, he doesn't deserve prison; he deserves "support, supervision and social and economic resources."
Personally, I think that is just bat-guano crazy.
Still, the state of our prisons has become something of a scandal. We have more prisoners today than we have soldiers, and more prison guards than Marines.
Our prisons have become boot camps for criminals. That's one reason why I'm sympathetic to Peter Moskos' idea to bring back flogging. A professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Moskos argues in his book, "In Defense of Flogging," that flogging -- aka the lash -- is more humane than prison and much, much cheaper. He suggests that perpetrators of certain crimes -- petty theft, burglary, drug dealing -- be given the option of receiving one lash instead of six months in prison.
Before you shrink from the cruelty of the proposal, ask yourself which you would prefer: six lashes or three years in jail?
Moskos' motive is to reduce the size, scope and influence of prisons while keeping them around for the people who truly must be locked up: murderers, rapists, terrorists, pedophiles, etc. I might disagree with where he would set the ideal size of our prison population (I think incarceration rates have reduced crime more than he does), or how many lashes criminals should get, but he makes a compelling case, and his objective is reasonable.
But it's not an objective shared by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA). This was the outfit that essentially destroyed then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to fix the state budget.
In a state where more than two-thirds of crime is attributable to recidivism, CCPOA has spent millions of dollars lobbying against rehabilitation programs, favoring instead policies that will grow the inmate population and the ranks of prison guard unions. In 1999, it successfully killed a pilot program for alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders. In 2005, it helped kill Schwarzenegger's plan to reduce overcrowding by putting up to 20,000 inmates in a rehabilitation program. It opposes any tinkering with the "three strikes law" that might thin the prison rolls.
According to UCLA economist Lee E. Ohanian in a illuminating paper for The American, "America's Public Sector Union Dilemma," California's corrections officers have exploited their monopoly labor power to push policies that will expand the prison population and, as a result, the demand for more guards who just happen to be the best-paid corrections officers in the country. That's why, contrary to what the Marxist sages would expect, they've successfully kept privately run prisons out of the state.
Meanwhile, incarceration costs in the essentially bankrupt state are exploding. California spends $44,000 per inmate, compared with the national average of $28,000. A state prison nurse exploited overtime rules to earn $269,810 in one year.
Also contrary to left-wing expectations, these policies have been implemented not so much by the hard-hearted captains of industry and their Republican lackeys, but by a Democrat-controlled state legislature lubricated with donations from a powerful public-sector union.
The system is now up for much-needed reform thanks to a court order mandating that California fix the prison mess. Gov. Jerry Brown, whose 2010 gubernatorial campaign received more than $2 million from CCPOA, has been forced to figure something out.
Still, I suppose I owe the folks in the clown car at least a small apology. They're still nuts, but they're right about the existence of a prison-industrial complex. They were just looking in the wrong direction.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Hey, Occupy Wall Street: Wealth Isn't a Civil Right
By Larry Elder
Thursday, November 24, 2011
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Everything demanded by the Occupy Wall Streeters -- whether "free" health care, a "world-class education" or a "guaranteed living-wage income regardless of employment" status -- costs money.
When a CEO makes a lot of money in the private sector, it is because his company -- rightly or wrongly -- values that CEO's services at that price. To say it is "not right" that a CEO makes (fill in the blank) times more than the janitor is to say it is not right for the marketplace to set wages. If the marketplace ought not set wages, then who or what should?
Most people work for the private sector, which cannot exist without profit.
Is the OWS objection to bank bailouts on the grounds that government should not protect businesses from the consequences of their actions? Or is the objection that bailouts should be for everybody?
We already have a huge welfare state, with entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- the biggest expenditure of the federal budget. Europe's welfare state is larger, with a slightly smaller "gap" between the rich and the poor. Yet its citizens also take to the street to denounce inequality. Puzzling, isn't it?
No one can legally ask about the immigration status of a public school student, so Americans and non-Americans, including illegal aliens, receive a K-12 public education at taxpayers' expense.
Per-pupil spending for public education increased 49 percent from 1985 to 2005. Community colleges are cheap, and many states guarantee a junior college graduate admission to a public four-year college.
The physical advantage that men possess over women is an increasingly small advantage -- given the decline of labor-intensive jobs and the technology that makes it easier for machines to do hard, dangerous, repetitive work.
There are more tenants than landlords, which thus exemplifies the stupidity of "rent-control" laws. Rent-control laws disproportionately benefit the non-poor because the elite pull strings, work the system and are better connected than the non-poor. All of this matters when items of scarcity (in this case, apartments) are dispensed by government dictates rather than through prices.
Government possesses no money of its own. It raises money by taxing, by borrowing or by printing.
The bigger the government, the smaller the private sector.
Individuals can spend their money more wisely, efficiently and more humanely than can government.
People value and spend their money more wisely when they acquire it by their own efforts -- also known as work. There are real-world, direct consequences on you for squandering your own money, as opposed to when government squanders the money of its people.
Government employees enjoy job security unknown in the private sector and are often paid more than their private-sector counterparts. Greed?
People spend their money more humanely because they won't waste as much of it. Consider that to deal with "the poor," the federal government has a vast array of agencies, programs and policies. But only about 30 cents of each dollar designated for the poor actually gets in the hands of the recipient. Contrast this with the United Way, Salvation Army and other private charities where 90 cents of each dollar donated gets to a beneficiary.
Americans agree that some people -- whether faultless or irresponsible -- need assistance, if only occasionally. The only issue is how they will be helped.
Americans are the most generous people of any industrial nation. We give more of our time and money than do the Germans, British and Japanese. Note that those states have a bigger public sector than we do. Maybe they feel they gave at the office.
The U.S. Constitution isn't just any ordinary document. It is the contract between the government and its people, the ones who empower government and who -- once upon a time -- expected the Constitution to restrain government, not empower it.
Government's involvement in housing caused the meltdown -- not greedy Wall Street bankers. The same Occupy mindset caused the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, placed on human growth hormones by President Clinton, who pushed banks into lending to poor credit risks and allowed Wall Street to play with taxpayers' money.
There is no bad guy. It's not the Koch brothers, Grover Norquist or the Maltese Falcon. There is no evil entity, snorting steam from his nose, standing in an office full of Nazi memorabilia, staring out the window with the cityscape view, laughing: "Ha! Ha! Ha! Pretty soon, all this will be mine. Mine, I say!"
Life has never been so good, with so many choices, with so many more conveniences, so much less danger of dying from disease, with so many choices for entertainment and affordable travel.
When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul. But at some point Peter begins to feel taken advantage of.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Everything demanded by the Occupy Wall Streeters -- whether "free" health care, a "world-class education" or a "guaranteed living-wage income regardless of employment" status -- costs money.
When a CEO makes a lot of money in the private sector, it is because his company -- rightly or wrongly -- values that CEO's services at that price. To say it is "not right" that a CEO makes (fill in the blank) times more than the janitor is to say it is not right for the marketplace to set wages. If the marketplace ought not set wages, then who or what should?
Most people work for the private sector, which cannot exist without profit.
Is the OWS objection to bank bailouts on the grounds that government should not protect businesses from the consequences of their actions? Or is the objection that bailouts should be for everybody?
We already have a huge welfare state, with entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- the biggest expenditure of the federal budget. Europe's welfare state is larger, with a slightly smaller "gap" between the rich and the poor. Yet its citizens also take to the street to denounce inequality. Puzzling, isn't it?
No one can legally ask about the immigration status of a public school student, so Americans and non-Americans, including illegal aliens, receive a K-12 public education at taxpayers' expense.
Per-pupil spending for public education increased 49 percent from 1985 to 2005. Community colleges are cheap, and many states guarantee a junior college graduate admission to a public four-year college.
The physical advantage that men possess over women is an increasingly small advantage -- given the decline of labor-intensive jobs and the technology that makes it easier for machines to do hard, dangerous, repetitive work.
There are more tenants than landlords, which thus exemplifies the stupidity of "rent-control" laws. Rent-control laws disproportionately benefit the non-poor because the elite pull strings, work the system and are better connected than the non-poor. All of this matters when items of scarcity (in this case, apartments) are dispensed by government dictates rather than through prices.
Government possesses no money of its own. It raises money by taxing, by borrowing or by printing.
The bigger the government, the smaller the private sector.
Individuals can spend their money more wisely, efficiently and more humanely than can government.
People value and spend their money more wisely when they acquire it by their own efforts -- also known as work. There are real-world, direct consequences on you for squandering your own money, as opposed to when government squanders the money of its people.
Government employees enjoy job security unknown in the private sector and are often paid more than their private-sector counterparts. Greed?
People spend their money more humanely because they won't waste as much of it. Consider that to deal with "the poor," the federal government has a vast array of agencies, programs and policies. But only about 30 cents of each dollar designated for the poor actually gets in the hands of the recipient. Contrast this with the United Way, Salvation Army and other private charities where 90 cents of each dollar donated gets to a beneficiary.
Americans agree that some people -- whether faultless or irresponsible -- need assistance, if only occasionally. The only issue is how they will be helped.
Americans are the most generous people of any industrial nation. We give more of our time and money than do the Germans, British and Japanese. Note that those states have a bigger public sector than we do. Maybe they feel they gave at the office.
The U.S. Constitution isn't just any ordinary document. It is the contract between the government and its people, the ones who empower government and who -- once upon a time -- expected the Constitution to restrain government, not empower it.
Government's involvement in housing caused the meltdown -- not greedy Wall Street bankers. The same Occupy mindset caused the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, placed on human growth hormones by President Clinton, who pushed banks into lending to poor credit risks and allowed Wall Street to play with taxpayers' money.
There is no bad guy. It's not the Koch brothers, Grover Norquist or the Maltese Falcon. There is no evil entity, snorting steam from his nose, standing in an office full of Nazi memorabilia, staring out the window with the cityscape view, laughing: "Ha! Ha! Ha! Pretty soon, all this will be mine. Mine, I say!"
Life has never been so good, with so many choices, with so many more conveniences, so much less danger of dying from disease, with so many choices for entertainment and affordable travel.
When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul. But at some point Peter begins to feel taken advantage of.
Obama's Economy Has Run Out of Excuses
By Peter Ferrara
Thursday, November 24, 2011
The history of America's recessions is provided at the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months. Yet here we are 47 months after the last recession started, and we still have no real recovery.
Instead, unemployment has been stuck at 9% or above for the longest period since the Great Depression. Unemployment for blacks has remained over 15% for over 2 years, with Hispanic unemployment stuck well into double digits over that time as well. Teenage unemployment has persisted at nearly 25%, with black teenage unemployment still nearly 40%.
The U6 unemployment rate, reflecting all of the unemployed still wanting work and the underemployed who can't get full time work, is still 16.2%. That includes an army of the unemployed or underemployed of over 26 million Americans. And that still doesn't fully count the millions of Americans who have given up and dropped out of the work force altogether.
On September 13 came the Census Bureau report fleshing out the full meaning of no economic recovery under Obama. Median family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels. The Wall Street Journal further reported on September 14, "Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower--adjusted for inflation--than in 1978."
The poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago. The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children. The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying it. Moreover, the number of Americans ages 25-34 living with their parents has soared by 25%.
Yes, I know NBER declared the recession technically over in June, 2009, still the longest recession on record since the Depression. But the point is next month will be 4 years since the recession started, and there is still no sustained real recovery. Or as economist John Lott has emphasized, Obamanomics has produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
Obama apologists can't continue to blame the depths of the previous recession, and they can't because the historical record makes plain that the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery. Based on that historical record, we should be completing the second year of a booming economy by now.
In the second year of the Reagan recovery, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years. In the first two years of that recovery, 7.6 million new jobs were created, on the way to 20 million jobs created during the first 7 years. Presently, we are still 6 million jobs below the peak before the last recession, four years ago.
The chief excuse of the Obama apologists is "this time is different," citing the book of that title, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. But the theme of that book is exactly the opposite of what it is cited for here - that "this time is different" is never true.
The apologists cite the book to argue that what we have suffered this time was not just a recession, but a financial crisis, and the data in the book shows, they argue, that recovery from a financial crisis takes a lot longer than recovery from a recession.
But that is not the experience of the American, free market, capitalist economy. The experience of the American economy is reported in full at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as cited above - recessions since the Great Depression previously have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously 16 months, and the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. That is the standard by which the performance of Obamanomics is to be judged. Which of those American recessions were a "financial crisis" that breaks the pattern?
The data discussed in the book, by contrast, "covers sixty-six countries over nearly eight centuries." It "goes back as far as twelfth century China and medieval Europe." The data "come from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania." The experience from 12th century China, medieval Europe, spendthrift demagogues and socialist economies from Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, do not set the standard of expectations for post depression, free market, capitalist America over the last 70 years, the most powerful economic engine in the history of the world.
The data in the book is marshaled instead to explain the fundamental principles common to the data, and why, in fact, "this time is different" is actually always wrong. Seizing upon the data in the book to try to give some sort of pass to Obamanomics for failing the economic performance standards of American history is just political propaganda.
Moreover, the concept of a recession is well-defined. It is two consecutive quarters or more of negative GDP growth. By that standard, we can rigorously define when a recession starts and when it ends. But trying to label a recession as a "financial crisis," for the purposes of giving policymakers a free pass on their performance, is not similarly so well-defined. Again, which of the postdepression recessions in America was a "financial crisis" that shows a break in the pattern?
The only previous American economic performance, at least within the last 100 years, that begins to look like the results of Obamanomics is the 1930s, which makes sense because that is when America followed similar policies to Obamanomics. That is when Obama's unreconstructed, naive, Rip Van Winkle, Keynesian economics first arose. It failed then for the same obvious reasons it has failed now.
Increasing government spending, deficits and debt does not promote economic growth and prosperity, as Obama and ineducable Democrats to this day believe. What promotes economic growth and prosperity is incentives for increased production, as Reaganomics proved 30 years ago for anyone sentient who was paying attention.
Moreover, as I argue in my new publication, Obama and the Crash of 2013, unless the policies of Obamanomics are changed, the result will be another severe recession in 2013 that will make the results overall of the Obama years look similar to the 1930s. That should not be a surprise, because Obama is modeling his Administration and its policies and political strategies on the Franklin Roosevelt years.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
The history of America's recessions is provided at the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months. Yet here we are 47 months after the last recession started, and we still have no real recovery.
Instead, unemployment has been stuck at 9% or above for the longest period since the Great Depression. Unemployment for blacks has remained over 15% for over 2 years, with Hispanic unemployment stuck well into double digits over that time as well. Teenage unemployment has persisted at nearly 25%, with black teenage unemployment still nearly 40%.
The U6 unemployment rate, reflecting all of the unemployed still wanting work and the underemployed who can't get full time work, is still 16.2%. That includes an army of the unemployed or underemployed of over 26 million Americans. And that still doesn't fully count the millions of Americans who have given up and dropped out of the work force altogether.
On September 13 came the Census Bureau report fleshing out the full meaning of no economic recovery under Obama. Median family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels. The Wall Street Journal further reported on September 14, "Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower--adjusted for inflation--than in 1978."
The poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago. The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children. The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying it. Moreover, the number of Americans ages 25-34 living with their parents has soared by 25%.
Yes, I know NBER declared the recession technically over in June, 2009, still the longest recession on record since the Depression. But the point is next month will be 4 years since the recession started, and there is still no sustained real recovery. Or as economist John Lott has emphasized, Obamanomics has produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
Obama apologists can't continue to blame the depths of the previous recession, and they can't because the historical record makes plain that the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery. Based on that historical record, we should be completing the second year of a booming economy by now.
In the second year of the Reagan recovery, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years. In the first two years of that recovery, 7.6 million new jobs were created, on the way to 20 million jobs created during the first 7 years. Presently, we are still 6 million jobs below the peak before the last recession, four years ago.
The chief excuse of the Obama apologists is "this time is different," citing the book of that title, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. But the theme of that book is exactly the opposite of what it is cited for here - that "this time is different" is never true.
The apologists cite the book to argue that what we have suffered this time was not just a recession, but a financial crisis, and the data in the book shows, they argue, that recovery from a financial crisis takes a lot longer than recovery from a recession.
But that is not the experience of the American, free market, capitalist economy. The experience of the American economy is reported in full at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as cited above - recessions since the Great Depression previously have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously 16 months, and the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. That is the standard by which the performance of Obamanomics is to be judged. Which of those American recessions were a "financial crisis" that breaks the pattern?
The data discussed in the book, by contrast, "covers sixty-six countries over nearly eight centuries." It "goes back as far as twelfth century China and medieval Europe." The data "come from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania." The experience from 12th century China, medieval Europe, spendthrift demagogues and socialist economies from Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, do not set the standard of expectations for post depression, free market, capitalist America over the last 70 years, the most powerful economic engine in the history of the world.
The data in the book is marshaled instead to explain the fundamental principles common to the data, and why, in fact, "this time is different" is actually always wrong. Seizing upon the data in the book to try to give some sort of pass to Obamanomics for failing the economic performance standards of American history is just political propaganda.
Moreover, the concept of a recession is well-defined. It is two consecutive quarters or more of negative GDP growth. By that standard, we can rigorously define when a recession starts and when it ends. But trying to label a recession as a "financial crisis," for the purposes of giving policymakers a free pass on their performance, is not similarly so well-defined. Again, which of the postdepression recessions in America was a "financial crisis" that shows a break in the pattern?
The only previous American economic performance, at least within the last 100 years, that begins to look like the results of Obamanomics is the 1930s, which makes sense because that is when America followed similar policies to Obamanomics. That is when Obama's unreconstructed, naive, Rip Van Winkle, Keynesian economics first arose. It failed then for the same obvious reasons it has failed now.
Increasing government spending, deficits and debt does not promote economic growth and prosperity, as Obama and ineducable Democrats to this day believe. What promotes economic growth and prosperity is incentives for increased production, as Reaganomics proved 30 years ago for anyone sentient who was paying attention.
Moreover, as I argue in my new publication, Obama and the Crash of 2013, unless the policies of Obamanomics are changed, the result will be another severe recession in 2013 that will make the results overall of the Obama years look similar to the 1930s. That should not be a surprise, because Obama is modeling his Administration and its policies and political strategies on the Franklin Roosevelt years.
The Castor-Oil Candidate
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking grandma's castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to.
By any logical political calculus, the former Massachusetts governor is an ideal presidential candidate. Ramrod straight, fit and well-educated, he knows all sorts of facts and figures and comes across like a cinematic chief executive.
At any other time, an informed technocrat like Romney would seem a dream candidate. Yet in the run-up to this election, the people are completely turned off by Washington's so-called experts, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Attorney General Eric Holder -- and increasingly Barack Obama himself.
As a former governor and presidential candidate, Romney has been fully vetted. In these racy times, Mormonism is viewed as more a guarantee of a candidate's past probity than a political liability. So there is little chance in late October 2012 that a blonde accuser will appear out of Romney's past, or that the New York Times will uncover a long-ago DUI charge.
The calculating Republican establishment believes Romney has enough crossover appeal to independents to beat a shaky Obama. It still has nightmares of Tea Party senatorial candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, whose 2010 primary victories led to inept campaigns and Republican losses in the general elections in Nevada and Delaware.
Although conservatives dub Romney a flip-flopper for changing positions on abortion, gun control and health care, the base knew all about those old reversals in 2008, when it nonetheless praised Romney as the only conservative alternative to maverick moderate John McCain. Apparently the party has moved to the right since then. Tea Partiers worry that, once in office, a moderate President Romney would prove a reach-out centrist -- spending borrowed money like George W. Bush did on No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription drug benefit, thereby ruining for good the now-suspect Republican brand of fiscal sobriety.
The result of those worries is that Romney has become the process-of-elimination candidate. The Hamlet-like governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, hemmed and hawed and bowed out, as most knew he would. The charismatic and controversial Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin decided they were making too much money to go through another nasty political race.
If finger-pointing magnate Donald Trump was going to bet a campaign on Obama's reluctance to disclose official documents, he would have done better to demand the release of the president's mysteriously secret college transcripts and medical records rather than his birth certificate. In the debates, the audiences liked what former Sen. Rick Santorum had to say, regretting only that it came out of the mouth of Rick Santorum.
Rep. Michele Bachmann once soared as the anti-Romney and then crashed when 90 percent of her statements seemed courageous and inspired -- but 10 percent sounded kind of weird.
Then came the most promising anti-Romney alternative, job-creating Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He looked as presidential as Romney but immediately proved even more wooden in the debates. His "brain-freeze" moments were made worse by occasional goofy explanations that seemed most un-Texan.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were always crowd favorites, and they're certainly hard-charging conservatives. Yet at some point, both realized that their scant years in office were comparable, in theory, to the thin resume of Obama when he entered the presidency clueless.
Rep. Ron Paul's shrill talk on fiscal sobriety is as refreshing as his 1930s isolationist foreign policy is creepy. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is a sort of weak Romney doppelganger, raising the same paradox that money, looks, polish and moderation this year are cause for suspicion, not reassurance.
Many like businessman Herman Cain's straight-talking pragmatism. Yet more are worried that he might not know that China is a nuclear power, or that we recently joined the British and French in bombing Libya. By now, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich knows almost everything about everything. But lots of Newt's original -- and now abandoned -- positions were as liberal as Romney's. And not all that long ago, he seemed as brilliant and glib -- and recklessly self-destructive -- as his contemporary and antagonist, Bill Clinton.
To beat an ever-more-vulnerable Obama, Republicans keep coming back to someone who resembles a Romney, with strengths in just those areas where Obama is so demonstrably weak: prior executive experience as a governor, success in and intimacy with the private sector, a past fully vetted, and an unambiguous belief in the exceptional history and future of the United States.
In short, if Republicans are happy in theory that Mitt Romney could probably beat Obama, they seem just as unhappy in fact that first they have to nominate him.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Nominating Mitt Romney is sort of like taking grandma's castor oil. Republicans are dreading the thought of downing their unpleasant-tasting medicine but worry that sooner or later they will have to.
By any logical political calculus, the former Massachusetts governor is an ideal presidential candidate. Ramrod straight, fit and well-educated, he knows all sorts of facts and figures and comes across like a cinematic chief executive.
At any other time, an informed technocrat like Romney would seem a dream candidate. Yet in the run-up to this election, the people are completely turned off by Washington's so-called experts, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Attorney General Eric Holder -- and increasingly Barack Obama himself.
As a former governor and presidential candidate, Romney has been fully vetted. In these racy times, Mormonism is viewed as more a guarantee of a candidate's past probity than a political liability. So there is little chance in late October 2012 that a blonde accuser will appear out of Romney's past, or that the New York Times will uncover a long-ago DUI charge.
The calculating Republican establishment believes Romney has enough crossover appeal to independents to beat a shaky Obama. It still has nightmares of Tea Party senatorial candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, whose 2010 primary victories led to inept campaigns and Republican losses in the general elections in Nevada and Delaware.
Although conservatives dub Romney a flip-flopper for changing positions on abortion, gun control and health care, the base knew all about those old reversals in 2008, when it nonetheless praised Romney as the only conservative alternative to maverick moderate John McCain. Apparently the party has moved to the right since then. Tea Partiers worry that, once in office, a moderate President Romney would prove a reach-out centrist -- spending borrowed money like George W. Bush did on No Child Left Behind or the Medicare prescription drug benefit, thereby ruining for good the now-suspect Republican brand of fiscal sobriety.
The result of those worries is that Romney has become the process-of-elimination candidate. The Hamlet-like governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, hemmed and hawed and bowed out, as most knew he would. The charismatic and controversial Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin decided they were making too much money to go through another nasty political race.
If finger-pointing magnate Donald Trump was going to bet a campaign on Obama's reluctance to disclose official documents, he would have done better to demand the release of the president's mysteriously secret college transcripts and medical records rather than his birth certificate. In the debates, the audiences liked what former Sen. Rick Santorum had to say, regretting only that it came out of the mouth of Rick Santorum.
Rep. Michele Bachmann once soared as the anti-Romney and then crashed when 90 percent of her statements seemed courageous and inspired -- but 10 percent sounded kind of weird.
Then came the most promising anti-Romney alternative, job-creating Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He looked as presidential as Romney but immediately proved even more wooden in the debates. His "brain-freeze" moments were made worse by occasional goofy explanations that seemed most un-Texan.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were always crowd favorites, and they're certainly hard-charging conservatives. Yet at some point, both realized that their scant years in office were comparable, in theory, to the thin resume of Obama when he entered the presidency clueless.
Rep. Ron Paul's shrill talk on fiscal sobriety is as refreshing as his 1930s isolationist foreign policy is creepy. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is a sort of weak Romney doppelganger, raising the same paradox that money, looks, polish and moderation this year are cause for suspicion, not reassurance.
Many like businessman Herman Cain's straight-talking pragmatism. Yet more are worried that he might not know that China is a nuclear power, or that we recently joined the British and French in bombing Libya. By now, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich knows almost everything about everything. But lots of Newt's original -- and now abandoned -- positions were as liberal as Romney's. And not all that long ago, he seemed as brilliant and glib -- and recklessly self-destructive -- as his contemporary and antagonist, Bill Clinton.
To beat an ever-more-vulnerable Obama, Republicans keep coming back to someone who resembles a Romney, with strengths in just those areas where Obama is so demonstrably weak: prior executive experience as a governor, success in and intimacy with the private sector, a past fully vetted, and an unambiguous belief in the exceptional history and future of the United States.
In short, if Republicans are happy in theory that Mitt Romney could probably beat Obama, they seem just as unhappy in fact that first they have to nominate him.
Pro-Business States Target Anti-Business California
By Tony Katz
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
In the Nevada Development Authority's latest ad on Fox News, entertainer Clint Holmes, broadcasting from McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, extols the airport's frequent-flier-friendliness and the virtues of living and working in Nevada:
There's more to Las Vegas than the strip. We're business-friendly, family-oriented and very cost-effective. It's time to relocate your business to the real Las Vegas.
This is one in a series of NDA promotional spots. In another, a fake news correspondent from KTAX (yes...kTAX) reports that Sacramento lawmakers don't want you to move your business to Las Vegas, with, "...no corporate income taxes, no personal income taxes and low worker comp fees."
Many states are trying to attract California businesses. In the latest issue of City Journal, Steve Malanga has an article entitled, "Cali to Business: Get Out!" He begins with the story of an Irvine, California medical-technology company that relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah. The CEO, Michael Beeuwsaert, explains how regulations spurred his move:
The tipping point was when someone from the Orange County tax [assessor] wanted to see our facility to tax every piece of equipment I had,” Beeuwsaert said. “In Salt Lake City at my first networking event I met the mayor and the president of the Utah Senate, and they asked what they could do to help me. No [elected official] ever asked me that in California.
Malagna goes on to explain that California is losing not only businesses, but also investment. A California Manufacturers and Technology Association study reveals that between 2007 and 2010, 10,763 industrial facilities were built across the United States. The number of those in California? 176.
That amounted to 4.8 facilities per 1 million people, the lowest rate of any state; the national average was more than 40. The same study found that of the nation’s $350 billion in investments in manufacturing facilities, just $8.7 billion was spent in California, a per-capita rate of investment less than one-fifth the national average.
A FOX Business article highlights companies that have left California in recent years. Intel recently moved a plant, along with thousands of construction and high-tech jobs, to Oregon. Business coach Joseph Vranich reflects on the California's loss and Intel's astonishing gain:
The Intel investment in Oregon, when you add it to Arizona, is $8 billion, with a “B,” so the exodus of capital from California is running at an alarming rate... Right now, Intel will probably save about 60% on their electric bill, but when the new environmental regulations and rates increase next year, their electric bill in Oregon could well be an astonishing 80% to 90% less than in California.
Yet liberals are still arguing that the problem with California is not that taxes are too high; it's that they're too low. In a conversation I had on FOX and Friends in January, Sally Kohn of Movement Vision Lab recited the liberal meme:
So, ok , look, California is not in a debt crisis because they mismanaged things. The reason Califonia is....in a fiscal crisis is because A, we are in a recession so tax receipts are lower and B, at a federal level...we have cut taxes at the very very top to an unprecedented level, and thats why they have less money to pay for it....So, we've literally sucked all these resources out of the states, including California.
When I responded that lower taxes bring higher revenues, and that perhaps Northrop Grumman would have stayed in California rather than move to Virginia had taxes been lower, Kohn continued:
California got here by cutting taxes
California hasn't cut taxes, nor has it cut the environmental regulations that make doing business there prohibitive. Virginia, Nevada, Oregon and Utah all have profited from California's failures. And if California listens to Kohn and her fellow travelers, even more states will benefit royally.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
In the Nevada Development Authority's latest ad on Fox News, entertainer Clint Holmes, broadcasting from McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, extols the airport's frequent-flier-friendliness and the virtues of living and working in Nevada:
There's more to Las Vegas than the strip. We're business-friendly, family-oriented and very cost-effective. It's time to relocate your business to the real Las Vegas.
This is one in a series of NDA promotional spots. In another, a fake news correspondent from KTAX (yes...kTAX) reports that Sacramento lawmakers don't want you to move your business to Las Vegas, with, "...no corporate income taxes, no personal income taxes and low worker comp fees."
Many states are trying to attract California businesses. In the latest issue of City Journal, Steve Malanga has an article entitled, "Cali to Business: Get Out!" He begins with the story of an Irvine, California medical-technology company that relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah. The CEO, Michael Beeuwsaert, explains how regulations spurred his move:
The tipping point was when someone from the Orange County tax [assessor] wanted to see our facility to tax every piece of equipment I had,” Beeuwsaert said. “In Salt Lake City at my first networking event I met the mayor and the president of the Utah Senate, and they asked what they could do to help me. No [elected official] ever asked me that in California.
Malagna goes on to explain that California is losing not only businesses, but also investment. A California Manufacturers and Technology Association study reveals that between 2007 and 2010, 10,763 industrial facilities were built across the United States. The number of those in California? 176.
That amounted to 4.8 facilities per 1 million people, the lowest rate of any state; the national average was more than 40. The same study found that of the nation’s $350 billion in investments in manufacturing facilities, just $8.7 billion was spent in California, a per-capita rate of investment less than one-fifth the national average.
A FOX Business article highlights companies that have left California in recent years. Intel recently moved a plant, along with thousands of construction and high-tech jobs, to Oregon. Business coach Joseph Vranich reflects on the California's loss and Intel's astonishing gain:
The Intel investment in Oregon, when you add it to Arizona, is $8 billion, with a “B,” so the exodus of capital from California is running at an alarming rate... Right now, Intel will probably save about 60% on their electric bill, but when the new environmental regulations and rates increase next year, their electric bill in Oregon could well be an astonishing 80% to 90% less than in California.
Yet liberals are still arguing that the problem with California is not that taxes are too high; it's that they're too low. In a conversation I had on FOX and Friends in January, Sally Kohn of Movement Vision Lab recited the liberal meme:
So, ok , look, California is not in a debt crisis because they mismanaged things. The reason Califonia is....in a fiscal crisis is because A, we are in a recession so tax receipts are lower and B, at a federal level...we have cut taxes at the very very top to an unprecedented level, and thats why they have less money to pay for it....So, we've literally sucked all these resources out of the states, including California.
When I responded that lower taxes bring higher revenues, and that perhaps Northrop Grumman would have stayed in California rather than move to Virginia had taxes been lower, Kohn continued:
California got here by cutting taxes
California hasn't cut taxes, nor has it cut the environmental regulations that make doing business there prohibitive. Virginia, Nevada, Oregon and Utah all have profited from California's failures. And if California listens to Kohn and her fellow travelers, even more states will benefit royally.
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