I watched PBS’s Frontline “The Gang Crackdown” on MS-13 till I couldn’t take it anymore, roughly ¾ of it. The program was a goulash of logic that raised more questions than it answered. And when it tried to answer some, the explanations resembled Alice going down the rabbit hole. The thing was an affront to common sense.
The broadcast tried, in the tradition of the world’s best sleight-of-hand magicians, to associate the presence of MS-13 to reactionary American public officials. As they did so, anyone watching it would be blinded by one basic question. Where do we find these MS-13 miscreants? They reside within the suddenly blossoming enclaves of immigrants, many of them “undocumented”. Suddenly blossoming! We wouldn’t have this problem if we hadn’t lost control of our borders. Dahhh!
MS-13 murder scene.
Such logic apparently never dawned on the script writers – or at least there’s no evidence of it. Instead, they steered the viewer into a sojourn of the crime and poverty of third world countries, the reactions of law enforcement, and the unchallenged opinions of open-borders activists. Clearly, the program could have benefited from more of the kind of pushback that was only reserved for Trump and federal and local law enforcement.
Activists protest the Trump administration’s approach to illegal border crossings in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2018. (AP File Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The lambasting of American authorities was partnered with an unstated inference. Call it innuendo with a light touch. Bad conditions everywhere in the world obliges the US to accept nearly anyone needy. Why else the hackneyed reference to the plight of El Salvadorans, et al? Everyone living in a dirt floor hut is now to be recast as a “soon-to-be-American”. Emma Lazarus’s poem is sentiment, but it is also suicide as public policy in the era of a gargantuan welfare state.
Frontline added nothing to the immigration debate but the tired Democratic Party talking points on the issue du jour. A little more honesty would help, as well as a little more rationality.
PG&E trucks sit on a roadside in Paradise, California on Jan. 22, 2019.
Here we go again. PG&E filed bankruptcy. The utility’s previous filing for insolvency was in 2001. The purported reason for this latest at-bat in Chapter 11 is the fear of lawsuits from devastating wildfires over the past few years (17 in 2017). Yes, the state has been burning up. A multi-year severe drought hasn’t helped. Exacerbating the problem is rural residents’ preference for suburbia in wildlands. The explosive nature of the fires is kindled by wild land management practices of an eco-crazed state government. In this maelstrom sits a huge uility. Greenie mandates on the utility industry run rampant which divert revenues from day-to-day maintenance and upgrades. With some of the highest utility rates known to man, it’s perplexing that the hardening of its infrastructure is woefully lacking. The whole situation screams of a collapse waiting to happen. Well, here we go again.
Please watch the Wall Street Journal video on the infrastructure shortcomings of the utility.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., at a Dream Act rally in Irvine, California, on Oct. 11, 2017. (CNN)
I’m not sure if the prepositions “of” or “from” or “for” apply to the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. One thing is certain though: she will take all that is California national. What does that mean? Let me list the ways. Be prepared for far-reaching, zealous gun control; be prepared for a huge spike in energy costs; be prepared for open borders; be prepared for high taxes; be prepared for a mania of regulation; be prepared for more “free” stuff from the forced courtesy of the American taxpayer; be prepared for an enhanced campaign to ride religion out of the public square; be prepared for intensified gender confusion in public policy; be prepared for militant jihads against all sorts of “isms” and “phobias”; be prepared for the elevation of abortion to a civic sacrament; be prepared for the enactment of totalitarian environmentalism; and on, and on, and on, and on. And I haven’t gotten to foreign policy.
Remember the personal assassination of Judge Kavanaugh. Harris led the mob. This kind of behavior may be celebrated west of the Coast Range, but is it a role model for the rest of the country? If it is proclaimed to be, it ought not be. The video:
A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for California as the new direction for the country. If that’s your beau ideal, by all means, be my guest. If so, one final (maybe 2) “be prepared”: be prepared for a new era of limits and your children not being able to leave home till 40.
Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles. The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.). We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious. It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior. We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains. The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor. The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering. But is it true? There’s good reason to say wowwww!
David Berreby
This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby. A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts. Fair enough. The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases. Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.
And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias. Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.
What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit. He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.
Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics. The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure. Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another. It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.
PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading. If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t! There are better biographies out there. The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses. The program says more about them than Il Duce.
One of the contributors to “The Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”.
Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement. In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe. They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants. Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.
Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.
Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”. It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea. But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama? If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.
Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence? One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end. I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love. When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.
Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem. All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”. And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know. Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.
FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism. He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration. Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal. Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?
Elections have consequences. Yep, they do. So, thanks go to the suburban voters in suburban districts (and a few elsewhere) for handing the House majority to a party intent on raining totalitarian environmentalism (the Green New Deal), various versions of socialism (#1 and #2 are synonymous), and impeachment on the country for the next 2 years. Regardless of what D-candidates said while campaigning, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler were swept into power. Again, thanks for the next couple of years of social/political/economic poison. Assisted suicide appears to be in vogue.
The doctors ready to administer the poison pill: Maxine Waters (D. Ca.) and Jerry Nadler (D, MY).
A public, said to be deeply concerned about “dysfunction” in DC, curiously voted for more of it. The slide into governing incontinence could be accelerated by a much-heralded romp through impeachment land, in addition to the profusion of “investigations” into matters as worrisome as the president’s dental care habits.
I’ve refrained from commenting on Mueller, choosing to wait for his report. Right now, of greater concern is the public’s perceptions about impeachment. There’s a good chance that no matter what Mueller writes it will be culled for articles of impeachment. The Mueller report and their own inquisitions will be the vehicle to hang Trump for his style and policies. Since its coming down, it would be nice to know what the public and even our own politicos know of the subject.
I don’t think that I would be too far off when I say, Not much. It’s a product of poor schooling and pop media. First, impeachment – the indictment phase of the process for removal – is a political act and the grounds for it hinge on “high crimes and misdemeanors” (HCM). What does HCM mean? It doesn’t for the most part refer to statutory crimes, even though they might be included if serious enough. It centers on what Andrew C. McCarthy (and Cass Sunstein) calls “truly egregious instances of maladministration”.
The unease about maladministration goes back to British and colonial experience. Legislatures wanted to control their royally appointed governors and judges. It’s not likely that Trump’s habit of name-calling qualifies (“low IQ Maxine Waters”, even though “foolish” would be more accurate). It’s more probable that the Dems will hang their hat on business/financial dealings and the Trump’s campaign efforts to do what Hillary’s succeeded at doing: namely, get the Russians to give them dirt on their opponent. The Steele dossier anyone?
All the bellowing about “they stole our elections in collusion with Trump” is simply carnival barking. The Dems will use whatever they and Mueller dig up to essentially go after Trump for his coarse style, a tactic which they patented years back – remember, “Bush lied, people died”.
Also, he’s a miscreant for not being politically correct. The Dems would like to censor all immigration policy options outside open borders.
Whether any charges are merited is beside the point. The sole goal is to get Trump. For the Dem caucus, “maladministration” really means to disagree with them.
So, suburban voters who voted to flip actually chose “maladministration” in order to maladministrate – i.e., we’ll be embroiled in impeachment wars for about 700 days. And be prepared for Ocasio-Cortez to be a euphemism for the Dems’ policy preferences coming out of the House.
Please watch the video clip juxtaposing Milton Friedman and President Trump on the issue of trade.
I can’t resist, however, throwing my 2 cents worth into the debate. On the whole: “free” trade good, “fair” trade bad. Friedman is right in bringing to light the skulduggery done in the name of “fair”. You may as well find room for “fair” in the seven deadly sins. It belongs there. “Fair” becomes the weapon for one group to gain power to unjustly extract benefits from another. For you policy nerds, it’s called “rent seeking”. Look it up.
Does Trump understand this? My guess: No. Or maybe he does but doesn’t care. Either way, the rhetorical “fair” fits into a grand misunderstanding that roils around in his head. He sees the “trade deficit” as a checking account. It ain’t! This trade balance (or imbalance) is only one part of a larger thing called the “balance of payments”. The reality boils down to the simple concept of exchange. For instance, the Chinese get dollars for what they export to us. Those pieces of paper roll around but always come back to us. We get stuff, they get paper. Simple.
The Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai. Credit Aly Song/Reuters
Where Trump may be onto something is the uneven effects of “free” trade on the country. It benefits the coasts and cosmopolitan financial centers. Taking the brunt will be manufacturing areas. Politically speaking, the blue dots get to roll around in filthy lucre as the vast red stretches in middle America see businesses shudder and wallow in an opioid epidemic.
West Virginia opioid addicts. Daily Mail, UK
And let’s not forget the danger of “free” trade with Red China. I have a problem with doing business with empire-building totalitarian kleptocracies. This ain’t normal business. For the totalitarian goon, the normal interplay of cost/benefit plays second fiddle to the ultimate end of domination at home AND abroad. Our national security is at stake. We should act like it.
“Free” trade has a social cost; “fair” trade is a moral monstrosity. When in doubt about PRC trade, let the safety and security of our people be the decider. With the free and open democracies, we should incline to “free”.
A sad scene at National Geographic Magazine headquarters after the 2016 election …. Not! It could have been given the way these people write.
Distraught Hillary campaign workers on election night, 2016.
I’m not sure how much more I can stomach of the corruption of science in popular publications like National Geographic. The magazine is not about the furtherance of geographic knowledge. It’s opinion journalism. It’s newfound mission is the chaining of the subject to a political agenda. The agenda is one that could be found among the babblings of campus social justice warriors or The Resistance.
“Social justice warriors”, also referred as the “Resistance”, protesting the Trump administration in New York City, 2017.
Time and again, issue after issue, the magazine never fails to disappoint. Pior issues led with cover stories like “Why We Lie”, “Gender Revolution”, and “Black and White”. “Why We Lie” came hot on the heels of the howling from the Left about Trump’s exaggerations and misstatements. Come on, when has hyperbole become unusual for politicians and activists? “Gender Revolution” pushed the “T” in LGBTQ. “Black and White” advanced Marxism with “people of color” replacing the oppressed and alienated proletariat. A favorite hobbyhorse is what I like to call “totalitarian environmentalism”.
What chaps my hide is the complete absence of peer review. Claims are made without any caution. The words “scientists” and “experts” are used without modifiers like “some” (I saw it only once in the cover story in “Black and White”). Opposing views are treated as if they don’t exist. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since the articles are written by non-scientists with an all-too-often reliance on politicized scientists. Going back to the aforementioned cover story, the author – Elizabeth Kolbert – was a literature major at Yale. Surely she has great interest in the study of race, but she is no scientist and has a definite ideological bias. There’s no filter of the scientist as she writes.
If you sit on the left side of the political spectrum, by all means, subscribe. In this instance, you would be approaching National Geographic as you would Mother Jones. Indeed, there’s not much difference between the two.
Think of this as a personal letter to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. My purpose is to remind her that she’s 29, not 16, and should think like it.
Move over you establishment types, the youngins are elbowing their way in, and they fully intend to impose their fantasies on how the world works. Many happen to be Bernie-bros/gals/? and are fully marinated in identity pandering and socialism, the bane of millennials everywhere. The current sensation is Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), all of 29 years old and ready to lecture everyone on the need to reshape their lives to match her dream. Her beau-ideal is a hyper version of California – take California and sprinkle a heavy dose of the looney-left-on-speed. She wants to take this uber-cousin of California national, and international.
If you find this kind of thing appealing, sharp objects, intoxicants, and land salesmen shouldn’t be within reach. Personally, I think she is simpleminded. She’s proof that anyone can get a college degree and come out of it dense as granite. Oh, she can put a sentence together but it’s all so glib. She can’t help it since she knows and understands so little.
Her Path to an Erotic Relationship with Socialism
Her ignorance is only matched by her bravado, something common in a youthful zealot. There’s nothing in her background to prove otherwise. The Wikipedia bio on her reads like an inflated paper resume’. Look for yourself.
During her formative years, she was immersed in all things Hispanic. She was coddled and favored within the cramped confines of Hispanic activism. Not surprisingly, ethnic identity matters a lot to her and it shows in the inanities that roll out her mouth.
One of the oddities in social research is the fondness in the offspring of the comfortable middle and upper classes for lefty causes. AOC fits the bill since she was raised in a Westchester County, NY, a region with 2-3 times the per capita income of the district that she now represents. Things got financially dicey for the family upon the death of her father, but her general outlook had already been cemented by then. Once it had solidified, everything else would be funneled through the mental prism.
Her education didn’t correct for the silliness, and probably made it worse. Think of it: her Boston University BA in International Relations with a minor in Economics led her to … socialism. Socialism isn’t economics; it’s public administration. Socialism occurs when the government controls most of everything, ergo the public administration. Those decisions of buying and selling are taken from individuals and turned over to government bureaus. Does she know that? Was she ever schooled in its failures? Real economics either didn’t stick for Alexandra or it was the largest category of units to be cobbled together to make for a paper minor. Either way, her socialism is ipso facto proof that she doesn’t understand the subject.
A Primer for AOC
A stroll down memory lane would help fill her huge knowledge deficits, but she’s also got an experience handicap in having been born in 1989. Her mother gave birth as Reagan slipped off into retirement. The last dose of domestic socialism in the mid-60’s to the late 70’s would be only a history book recitation for her, if that. The horrors of the international variety likewise. In the US, the period’s skyrocketing crime, the pandemics of STD’s and drugs, a near decade of inflationary recession, the Sovietizing of housing in urban renewal, the dole’s destruction of the inner-city family, etc., would be conceptual at best and therefore easy to dismiss once she settled on a weltanschauung.
Overseas, the era’s wreckage was even more stark. Did it penetrate AOC’s brain? If so, there’s no evidence of it. There’s a reason for socialism’s black eye in the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the gulags and reeducation camps, the mass exterminations, and Eastern Europe throwing off its shackles and joining the West. She might have in mind the welfare states of Scandinavia as her template for socialism, but how much does she understand their situations? My guess is that she wouldn’t let any discomforting thoughts spoil the fairy tale.
Soviet-era housing in Latvia.
All the evidence points to deep and abiding ignorance. Take a look at this typical example of her airy pronouncements:
“When we talk about the word ‘socialism,’ I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.”
She’s in substantial agreement with Marx when he once said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Alexandra just resurrected the old codger whether she realizes it or not. My bet is that she’s oblivious.
She can’t comprehend that mixing “socialism” with “democracy” is just introducing more politics into the provisioning of wants and needs. More and more of life is exposed to ambitious politicos, campaigning, political donations, busybody activists, lobbying, and civil service-protected government workers. It’s unavoidable. That’s AOC’s socialism, and that’s ruination. Come on, Alexandra, do we really need more of our existence to be put to a vote? She apparently believes so.
The resurgence under Reagan and the public intellectual debate that proceeded it appear to be beyond her familiarity. A new cadre of free-market economists at the time convincingly showed that the long-neglected production side of the economic equation was, and still is, an important answer to the doldrums.
It’s based on a simple truism: an economy’s good fortune doesn’t ride on the job-creating potential of poor people. You need rich people for jobs. Rather than fleece them and cause their dollars to go underground, reduce their punishment and allow them to keep more their earnings. Ditto for the rest of population. It’s called “tax cuts” and they were successfully implemented by JFK and Reagan. The AOCs of the world want government to abscond with more of people’s earnings so a collection of short-sighted and politically powerful activists can decide. It’s why they’re socialists, and it’s why they ought not to be trusted with power.
Others in this grand discussion of the 70’s and 80’s – before AOC was even a blastocyst – started to notice the social dissolution that arose during and after the Great Society splurge. Government largesse in entitlements seemed to foster a dependency that isn’t conducive to human well-being. Work requirements for welfare, broken windows policing, block granting to the states, and removing the subsidy for underage motherhood came out of this grand rethink. Words like accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance made a comeback. Though, not for Alexandra. She’s clueless.
Alexandra, watch this short report from 1970 NBC News on Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.
She in her makeshift reasoning unknowingly wants a return to those days of Carter’s famous one-word description, malaise.
Hardly is she forward looking. She’s stuck in the past. Ocasio Cortez and others like her are still planted in the mind of Bernie Sanders and his world of 1988 when he was 37 and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Actually, her ideological lineage goes back further to Tom Hayden, the SDS, and Port Huron Statement. Her’s is a reactionary perspective, not a revolutionary one. Alexandra, here’s news for you: been there, done that. It’s old hat.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the medical school on his trip to Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1988. PHOTO: COURTESY OF VALERY VOLOVENKO
Certain basic realities haven’t set into her brain about her favorite hobbyhorse. Socialism, for instance, has peculiar centralizing tendencies. You can’t have it without a central planner. If you allow freedom and pursue only a more local variety of it, the ensuing jurisdictional competition and free choice would kill it off with great fanfare as shortages and long lines cause rapid depopulation away from the grip of local zealots like her. The only way to implement the monstrosity is to nationally impose the misery from a central point under the sway of all-powerful ideological oligarchs. Lenin realized it, but he was smarter and more dangerous than her.
In the end, a Socialist someone with plenipotentiary powers has to decide the answers to the basic livelihood questions: (1) What is to be produced?; (2) How is it to be produced?; and (3) Who’s to get it? If you allow people to freely determine these matters, some will be better at it than others and get rich. Can’t have that in Alexandra’s fantasy world. Better we have equality and squalor than inequality and plenty in her twisted mind.
The wait in long lines outside a Soviet store, 1970’s.
Be prepared to be inundated with her inanities through a sycophantic media now that she’s moved her shtick to DC . Not long after arriving, she presented her latest foray into nonsense, something dubbed the Green New Deal. Don’t think for a moment the idea is original with her. She latched onto buzz words circulating the lefty hive.
Not that the first New Deal edition was any great success. A compressed summary of the 1930’s would be as follows: (1) a depression beginning in ’29-’32; (2) the New Deal of intense government intervention, following Hoover’s, inaugurated in ’33; (3) unemployment hovered between 33% to 14% throughout the 30’s; (4) industrial production similarly languished; (5) WWII was a recess with the depression getting set to resume after; and (6) a recovery finally took hold when Congress, starting in ’47, dismantled much of the wartime/New Deal political and economic machinery.
U.S. unemployment in the 1930’s. Notice that the unemployment rate never gets below 12% throughout the 30’s.
It’s a history that won’t comport with AOC’s clichéd version of it. For people like her, the War ended the Great Depression. Rubbish. The War was the excuse to continue a steroid-induced version of the New Deal. The unemployment problem was cured by putting much of the workforce in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese and herding what’s left over into factories to arm those in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese. Industrial production went up, but factories weren’t making cars and refrigerators for the average person to enjoy. They made the stuff that was useful in killing Germans and Japanese, with much of it destroyed on the battlefield or at the bottom of the ocean. What kind of “end” is it when unemployment is solved by making millions of soldiers – a good number of them killed or maimed – and a rekindling of industrial production that leads to shortages and rationing, a set of circumstances not much different from the years before?
Here’s an unsettling historical fact for Alexandra: the New Deal in one of its first incarnations, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), had a whiff of fascism about it. It attempted to militarize the US economy as Mussolini did in Italy. The taint isn’t surprising given the fact that Mussolini was lionized in the early 30’s for providing a hypothetical antidote to the failure of capitalism. FDR and the National Recovery Administration’s Hugh Johnson had kind words at the time for the tyrant.
Like Mussolini’s corporatism, the NIRA tried to concentrate all of economic life into 3 monolithic entities (government, business, labor) to set prices, wages, and production. The thing floundered not only because of its inherent contradictions but also because it didn’t jibe with our Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1935 put a stake through the monster’s heart when some Jewish butchers (the Schechters) challenged the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to fine and jail them for violating its ukases on chicken. Is this what Alexandra means by a Green New Deal? Her thoughts on the subject were likely shaped by the mental prison of people like Howard Zinn.
If the real New Deal, if she was aware of it, would be unnerving to AOC, wait till she finds out that the real recovery from the Great Depression occurred when the evil Republicans gained the majority in the 80th Congress (’47-’49) and began to dismantle a good portion of the administrative state and its nomenklatura. Down came the War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and Office of Price Administration. Government spending was slashed. Maybe as many as a million civilian government workers had to get out of the business of telling others what to do and get real jobs. After that, we had the 50’s boom. Surely deregulation and smaller government can’t be what AOC is talking about, even though that’s what worked.
Bad Ideas Are Immortal
Bad ideas are immune to death, mainly because a new generation of the gullible hears them for the first time and mistakes them once again for divine wisdom. Absent are the reservations and the caution of maturing experience and a lifetime of study. If you expect additional years in our bankrupt public schools to correct for the deficiency – K through grad school – you’re a fool. There, the mental bankruptcy will be reinforced, not cured.
Old lefty nostrums are recirculated and repackaged to the birdbrained innocent. Every generation when young will be rich in the species. For many in today’s youth cohort, the latest craze in junk thought is the “Green New Deal”. Nothing really new here that in many ways hadn’t already been touted by Eugene Debs, Gus Hall, Earl Browder, and the aforementioned SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) of 60’s radical-Left fame. Most fundamentally, it’s a return of central planning.
Since central planning is key to the scheme, the Left’s latest rendition of the New Deal moniker isn’t much different from anything that hadn’t already come out of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency, or Stalin’s notorious Five-Year Plans. Only this one is in the service of international greenie fanatics, not the maniacs fighting some vague oppression of the international proletariat.
Step back, there’s elements of the latter in the former. The similarities of Five-Year Plans and the Green New Deal make them near identical twins of the mind. They are encrusted with lofty goals and then hemorrhage the spending and coercive means to achieve them.
But even prior to that, the plots hinge on a rigid conception of the world. G.K. Chesterton called it “the clean well-lit prison of a single idea”. It’s the notion that people need to be directed according to the likes of activists caught up in their own mental prison. Their cognitive jail is the relentless pursuit of oppressors, many invented to justify the means to the desired end. The would-be bogeymen are, for both Marxists and eco-zealots alike, capitalists or anyone who pursues a livelihood in ways the militants deem “selfish” or “greedy”. Welcome to the mental detention center lying between the ears of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and others with the same hangup.
Those who disagree are more than opponents. They are “enemies of the people” to be vanquished. This wafts with the odor of totalitarianism. Their intense gaze isn’t just directed at what you do, but also in what you think and say. In the jurisdictional hothouses where this mental smog reigns – California, New York, and Massachussets, are you listening? – the odor has gotten stronger as powerful mandarins seek to outlaw the speech of anyone who dares to disagree with the high priests of Climate Change.
They won’t be satisfied with the chump change of subsidies and test projects for their utopia. They’re into lifestyle management. You must live, think, and speak like them. Already, the schools, with their lefty curriculum and lefty teacher training, and comrades in big city media have become the boot camps for generating the latest version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers. AOC would have fit in quite nicely.
Poster of Stalin and his youth corps, the Young Pioneers.Young Pioneer walk during their school fest in Kemerovo, Eastern Siberia, 1981. The Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union, also Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization was a mass youth organization of the USSR for children of age 10?15 in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991.
It’s so reminiscent of Stalin’s collectivization of farming, extensive network of eyes and secret police covering homes and workplaces, and internal passports, leaving aside the gulags where malcontents – real or imagined – were penned. No wonder this is nothing but a prescription for producing refugees.
So, what’s in this latest edition of the 5-Year Plan … er, New Deal? Some sense of it can be found in AOC’s draft request for a “Select Committee For A Green New Deal”. (5) Here’s a taste:
A deadline of March 2020 for the House select committee to finish its Plan for a Green New Deal.
As in Stalin’s 5-Year Plan, you’ll find timelines/deadlines to achieve certain numerical goals. For example, in 10 years after passage, 100% of electrical generation will be commanded from the greenie favorites: wind, solar, biomass, etc. 100%!
A massive public works boondoggle to build the infrastructure to replace our current networks with one accommodating to the utopia. One hasty calculation by someone in the know sets the cost at $2 trillion. And I’m not taking into account the fact that much of the technology – such as storage – doesn’t even exist, and may not ever exist to any practical extent.
Mandates to meet the goals will fall upon businesses, farms, and homeowners. There will be a colossal reordering of life to achieve the targets.
The socialist dream of wealth equality will be pursued through the Plan. Lefty boilerplate like “just transition” [to the utopia] is scattered throughout.
What’s the upshot? What does all this really mean for all Americans? David Roberts in a sympathetic piece for Vox stated it quite clearly,
“… the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.” (2)
The Green New Deal is a plot against the fundamental principles of our constitutional order and civilization. It’s in the same vein as the grand pronouncements of the Marxist scolds of the past. GND boosters are out to manufacture a new person for a new society. What will happen to those who resist? Well, coercion is absolutely essential or it won’t work – or, more accurately, it won’t work as the history of communism attests, but the utopian bullies won’t even get the chance if they don’t do some silencing. Monkey wrenches will not be allowed on the path to their heaven/hell on earth.
The Teenager in Central Planning
Alexandra’s belief system is a product of profound immaturity of thought. Her thinking is grounded only in Lefty boilerplate. In many ways, she acts with all the excitement of a teenager who was introduced to some factoid for the first time but lacks the seasoned judgment to process it. In a recent twitter storm with Republican Steve Scalise, the 29-year-old Alexandra tried to correct the 53-year-old Scalise by repeatedly instructing him on the meaning of “marginal tax rates”. I think that everyone in the capitol knows term, but Alexandra acts as if she only became aware of the concept in the past few days.
She can find no fault in a marginal tax rate of 70% for the “wealthy” since she’s blind to the 60-year public debate on the matter. Apparently, her economics education didn’t inform her of the dispute between Keynesian dogmatics and the free-market ideas of the Vienna School of Economics. Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman weren’t on her reading list.
As such, she’s probably not aware that she’s gearing up to imitate Joseph Stalin. Because there’s not much rolling around in that head, the problems of our times seem so simple. They always do for the young when there’s nothing else in the cranium to cause pause. She’s the equivalent of a teenage central planner but is completely ignorant of the fact.
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is proof that there is a place for people like her. It just shouldn’t be in a room with adults. She might be a great ASB president, but her flights of fancy disqualify her from babysitting.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Bernie Sanders traveled to communist Cuba and urges a ‘political revolution.’ Will exile Miami take him seriously?”, Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald, 2/29/2016, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article62748002.html
“The Green New Deal, explained”, David Roberts, Vox, 1/7/2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez”
The Great Depression Was Ended by the End of World War II, Not the Start of It”, Peter Ferrara, Forbes, 11/30/2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/30/the-great-depression-was-ended-by-the-end-of-world-war-ii-not-the-start-of-it/#2f706afb57d3
“Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt”, David Boaz, Reason, October 2007, https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s draft proposal for a select committee on a Green New Deal, and the rationale, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/preview#heading=h.z7x8pz4dydey
“Five things to know about Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal'”, Timothy Cama, The Hill, 11/24/2018,
Chico Marx as Chicolini in disguise with Harpo from “Duck Soup”.
“Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”, Chico Marx as the character of Chicolini in 1933’s “Duck Soup”. Don’t worry, it’s relevant.
It should never amaze anyone when a politician says something out of sheer spite or plain stupidity, like the folderol on the border wall (fence, barrier, whatever). The donkey party doesn’t want a wall so a fraction of the federal government is shut down. The party mouthpieces say walls don’t work – the perps will just add a few more rungs to the ladder, they squawk – while claiming sole proprietorship of the entire “expert” demographic. But “experts” can be purchased like a pair of shoes. Look into any courtroom. Remember, “experts” helped get OJ off.
Well, don’t limit yourself to courtrooms. Cruise the environs of the rich-and-beautiful-and-mighty if you want to see walls. Try to get near their doorbell to evangelize. Walls, people with guns, security cameras, gates, singular road access to the neighborhood, if not ocean bordering 2 or more sides, and a government-imposed DMZ of zoning for the rich makes sure nobody disturbs their tranquility.
The home in Malibu for Babs (Streisand). Notice the oceans. It provides more than a great view. Also, zoning and the byzantine array of permits helps keep the hoi polloi at bay.Entering Oprah’s digs in Montecito, Ca., will be no easy task. It’s a veritable feudal castle.The Kirkeby estate, Beverly Hills. It’s famous for being the fictional home of Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies.
Funny, many of the rich-and-famous overwhelmingly vote Democrat and, ipso facto, don’t like walls … if they are on the border. They bankroll the heavy-weight Democrats in trolling Trump for pushing for a wall to protect Americans. But they, personally, love walls. I would think that the gazillions spent on them means that they work … or our Gatsbies might be admitting that they blew a lot of dough to simply look high and mighty.
Typical gates and walls of homes in Medina, Washington, on the eastern shore of Lake Washington, Seattle. Its an exclusive ‘burb for the well-heeled like Bill Gates.Mark Zuckerberg’s plush hangout in Hawaii is dutifully surrounded by walls, some 6 feet high.Zuckerberg has extended the concept to encompass his entire estate, to the displeasure of his neighbors.The concept of safety and security is becoming quite popular. Here we have a Miami condo complex within the protective womb of gates and wrought iron fences.Walls aren’t the end of it. Manpower is hired.The patron saint of today’s left, Barack Obama, was protected as president, and rightly so, behind multiple barriers and a praetorian guard.Israel’s border wall on the West Bank. Terror bombings of weddings and pizzerias has ended. Terrorists have had to resort to flying missiles over the barrier, not adding more rungs to their ladders.A portion of Greece’s wall on its border with Turkey.A portion of the barrier between Pakistan and India.
So, to paraphrase Chico Marx, “Who ya gonna believe, them or your own eyes?”
Use your lyin’ eyes to view the pics of the homes of the rich and famous, and the walls of other countries worried about who enters. If “experts” on Dem retainer say walls don’t work, check the hot shot’s shoes to see if they’ve been chasing ambulances with the lawyers.
