Take a 1,100-page labor code, a law that empowers every employee with a gripe, a climate of unending grievance, and your state too can have an economic hell on earth. If your state government can’t hire enough agents and bureaucrats to enforce the mammoth code’s tangle of provisions, deputize the grumblers and their ambulance chasers to seek millions in awards, bankrupting who knows how many businesses. No surprise, that’s what California has done, and has been doing for years. The dubious law is called the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), and it is before the U.S. Supreme Court in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana. Will the High Court finally extinguish this dumpster fire of a state law? We’ll see.
In another example of the politics of the Big Lie, California’s demagogue-in-chief, Gov. Gavin Newsom, had the audacity to complain of Texas’s use (2021) of California’s well-trodden lawsuit lollapalooza, this time in defense of unborn life, when Newsom said, “We’re going to start playing by their rules now.” The brazenness is amazing, given that California has been at it since at least 2016. “Start”?
At issue before the Court is the claim of Viking Cruises that turning over employee grievance to the plaintiff’s bar is a violation of the grievance provisions in federal law. They’ve got a point. Why turn to the grievance procedure when a pot of gold awaits the grievant at the end of PAGA’s rainbow, thereby short-circuiting federal law?
Two California cases illustrate the immoral cash cow. First, Blaine Eastcott’s Rockreation (rock-climbing gym) was rocked with a lawsuit and a $3.3 million award to a two-month employee just two months into his ownership of the business. Gone are the bonuses, promotions, and wage increases for all the other workers. Second, Uber got slammed with a $7.75 million settlement. Each of the powers-that-be took their pound of flesh: $3.6 million for the state and $2.3 million for the legal eagles. Should employee gripes turn them and their grifting lawyers into millionaires, with more millions for apparatchiks to grease the palms of their supporters? I think not.
The Court should end this practice of turning the plaintiff’s bar into deputized vigilantes. The lesson should be to take your workplace grousing to arbitration as per federal and state law or seek a new job. And that means striking down Texas’s law. Waiting in the wings on the Court’s docket is a decision in the Dobbs case, which should end the High Court’s reading of abortion into the Constitution. States should have returned to them the power to regulate abortion, and make the practice of law less lucrative.
We could cut the membership of the Bar Association in half and be much better for it. But Big Government necessitates a Big Bar to navigate the legal maze and exploit its opportunities for fun and profit. It’s another embarrassment out of the land of sun, gangs, graffiti everywhere, crime, high-priced everything, homeless encampments, urban filth, and blackouts.
RogerG
*Read the article that serves as the basis for this post.
All perps don’t neatly fit into the categories of the disfavored people in the minds of our social justice warriors of high influence. By gosh, look around you!
Yet, Biden’s people are on the hunt for deadly “White supremacists”. Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, as recently as April 8 declared that “. . . the most prominent threat is the threat of White supremacists.” Jan. 6 is the excuse, as if people angered by an election outcome were ipso factor “White supremacists”. No proof, just declare it to be true, and repeat it above all. It’s the Big Lie gambit of inventing a politically useful mythology of the overpowering threat of a generalized class of people, be they amorphous outsiders, racial/ethnic groups, the rich, or the “Juden” of Kristallnacht.
Two recent incidents, though, complicate Biden’s simplistic script. On April 12, according to police, Frank James put on a gas mask and started spraying a New York City subway car with bullets. Ten were shot, 29 injured. Social media posts show a man crazed by hatred of white people. Four days later, at least two perps, one being Jewayne Price (age 22), shot 9 shoppers with 5 others injured at a Columbia, S.C., shopping mall. Motive is unknown at this time. Subsequent photos (see below) show the absurdity of stigmatizing racial identities for partisan political gain. These suspects don’t fit the script.
Watch these stories quickly go down the memory hole when compared to the unlimited exposure of Jan. 6th’s shaman man. Biden’s people are having a hard time proving the fable in court – the late acquittals in the alleged kidnap plot of Michigan’s governor, and the overcharging and acquittal of a man from the day of the Capitol riot. “White supremacy” may animate the base, but it comes up short when put before judges and juries.
We are not well-served by our mavens of haute couture, media, or politicians.
Macomb County Republican Party Convention from August of 2020.
Reporter Salena Zito, co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” of 2018, has long been sensitive to the views of those in Red America and accurately diagnosed the problem of an America dominated by an out-of-touch bi-coastal elite that set the stage for Trump’s amazing win in 2016. We have moved on, but Trump hasn’t. The Trump of 2016 is now the Trump of “I was cheated”, constantly regaling his followers at rallies with his complaints about 2020. In this column, she reports that the Macomb County, Michigan, Republican Party has had enough. At their county party convention, important for choosing county party leaders and candidates, county delegates threw out the party leadership that was obsessed with re-litigating 2020. We’ll have to wait and see if the party across the nation is willing to dodge the bullets that Trump is firing at it.
I have long maintained that Trump is principally responsible for the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats to neo-Bolsheviks, of all people, in Georgia of all places! A dispirited post-election Republican electorate was further dispirited by Trump’s post-election grandiose and unsupportable charges. If there ever was a time for “Move On”, this is it.
Trump at April 2 rally in Michigan.
Macomb County Republican delegate Jamie Roe described the scene: “Last night [April 14], everyone who was focused on winning the election in 2022 had been pushed over the edge.” He added, “Fed-up activists and elected officials joined together to remove the Executive Committee and officers from office and replace them with a new group focused solely on winning in 2022 and not on the past.”
The Trumpers have long called disloyal Republicans – disloyal to Trump, that is – RHINOs. Yet, expressing fealty to a person is much more reminiscent of “in name only” than loyalty to a party. The pot calling the kettle black? Projection?
Macomb County may be a healthy bellwether for this year’s elections. It was your typical blue-collar Democrat bastion but was shifting red as the Democratic Party became a reflection of our brain-dead college faculty lounges. A blue-collar Republican Party doesn’t have to be equally as brain dead. At last, the party may be in the process of shaking off the personality cult just in time for the Democrats’ march into cultural Marxism.
Yes, we have defenders of the proven economic creed of free markets. It’s just that it’s not evident among the high-profile windbags who inhabit today’s soapboxes, left and right. Go down the list from Trump to Bernie, Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow, France’s Marie Le Pen to French socialists, etc. All of them built fame and fortune on bashing free markets. For them, it stinks!
We should recall that old style conservatism in Europe meant a defense of feudalism, aristocratic prerogatives, and throne and altar. The old Right came by their distrust of the then-voguish ideas of free markets of David Hume and Adam Smith honestly. Choices in life were made to fit the prevailing order for these defenders of the status quo. It worked for a time. In Britain, the Parliament had its rotten boroughs (districts dominated by powerful gentry), an omni-powerful House of Lords (till the 17th century), the preeminence of the established Church and hostility to religious upstarts, its guilds to regulate labor, and taxes and legal privileges to favor local and national producers (Corn Laws, etc.). This web of government and custom restricted personal career choices and the basic staples of life. Competition and free mobility of labor and product were anathema. As such, putrid feudalism earned its reputation.
A critical illustration of the British corn laws from the 19th century.
The conservatism of Reagan was originally the platform of the 18th century British Whigs, the other party vying for public support. Liberal meant Adam Smith and free markets, not the pablum of today’s faculty lounges.
In contrast, the old Tory attitude was reflected in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whether in the books or Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. Saruman’s and Sauron’s industrialized machine of war and subsequent despoilation of nature are the principal means to seize the ring and envelop Middle Earth in the Dark Shadow.
Saruman’s Isengard as depicted in Jackson’s Lord of Rings, The Two Towers
Catholic social teachings (Tolkien was a Catholic) abides criticisms of free marketeers. Protestantism wasn’t far behind. Concerns for the plight of the poor and condemnations of crass materialism, a la Dickens, while understandable, provided cover for government intervention. Religion wasn’t even necessary. In fact, for many critics of a free economy, the religion was left behind but the hostility remained. The modern Left was born. Marx showed how, and some Christians noticing the symmetry between their readings of the Gospel and the scribblings of this atheist revolutionary gave to us the Social Gospel movement. Marxist instigators in the raiment of the clergy became a fixture around the world.
Take Bernie Sanders, socialist and paragon of the modern Left. His faith commitment slinks into a word salad. One has to wonder if his belief is of a kind that requires nothing of him, the lazy man’s faith. He explains,
“I am not actively involved with organized religion. I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”
Previously, in response to Jimmy Kimmel, he was even vaguer: “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” Whew, hiding your beliefs so as not to be repellant to the still-sizable Christian chunk of the electorate leads to a ramble through mind-numbing Bernie circumlocutions. But it works for him to advance “Workers of the world unite!” – “we’re all tied together.”
Bernie Sanders on Jimmy Kimmel’s show in 2016.
If you think that the Bernie of the Left can’t come around to meet someone on the Right, well, I give you Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s rants against billionaires could have easily emanated from AOC’s Twitter feed, or Bernie’s stump speeches . . . and maybe did. Not to say that the corporate suits’ propagation of the vile identity politics and race essentialism isn’t deserving of condemnation, but that’s not the only cause of Tucker’s bloviating. His is AOC’s gripe: the rich exploit the worker. Watch him from 2018 castigate the rich, play lefty class warfare, and embrace Bernie, while tossing into the spiel a few throw away lines for his right-leaning (me included) Fox News audience (below).
And then we have Trump. MAGA has become a cliché, a banality meant to push the view of a floundering America in need of Making America Great Again, meaning Trump. The “Again” part is a nostalgia for the 1950’s; however, it isn’t as simple as that. The 1950’s weren’t a time without troubles: massive pockets of poverty, Jim Crow, dead lakes, filthy air, filthy streets, filthy water, and society-wide health problems.
That’s not all for MAGA. For Trumpkins, the sight of too many Toyotas on the road is proof of the death of American manufacturing. The MAGA mantra is manufacturing good, fewer manufacturing workers bad. But chants only have a superficial truth to them. The decline in factory workers is real but not overall manufacturing. Technological innovation made each worker more productive and freed up others to seek fortunes in other lines of employment, as it did at the dawn of the industrial revolution when people left the farm for jobs in the cities and subsequently created a dearth of rural workers which spurred innovation on the farm. An economic need is filled by invention in much the same manner as nature’s disposition to fill a vacuum.
Contra Trump, 2016, the year of Trump’s ascendancy, set an all-time high for American manufacturing. And manufacturing’s prospects look bright if our government gets out of the way. Off-shoring may have lost its luster as more American firms see that life in kleptocracies and totalitarian nightmares isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In addition, off-shoring is a two-way street for foreign companies. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest chip producer, sees the Taiwan Strait as not much of a shield from an increasingly bellicose Xi and his People’s Liberation Army and Navy. They’re opening up shop in Arizona. Those Toyotas are increasingly coming off American assembly lines – the Tundra from a Texas one. Do I need to list all the other foreign nameplates?
A view across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan toward the PRC.
But our government won’t stay out of the way, even for my friends on the Right. Trump has tariff-love and an unstated affection for a form of central planning called industrial policy. Enthusiasts of the so-called populist right have allied with Sanders to stiff our biggest companies with the cost of any employee on the dole. Unbeknownst to the goofs is the fact that the labor market is righting itself as companies compete for workers and come to realize that the costs of a constant churn in the payroll is deleterious to business health. The chest-pounding of Trump, Carlson, and congressional lackeys is a sideshow to more fundamental economic trends. True to form, though, that won’t stop them from taking credit for any good news.
The Right under the rubric “populists” has rediscovered its vintage inner-feudalist with their frozen-in-amber economics, but nothing at this moment can compare to the state-aggrandizement of the Left’s greenie zealotry. Here’s where the two sides part company.
Our nation could be crippled in a haze of the Left’s greenie visions. A Green New Deal (GND) in a totality or in pieces would turn off-shoring into one-way street out for anyone with a bottom line. The critical mass for the suicide pill has been building for decades. Relentless pounding in the schools and media has prepared the generational ground for greenie flights of fancy from boomers to millennials to gen z‘ers. Gavin Newsom’s “California Way” – the combination of high taxes, regulatory minefields, and gauntlet of greenie infatuations touching nearly all activity – once brought to the Beltway, will only imitate the state’s outbound migration crisis of business and the middle class on a national scale.
Students protest in San Franisco for a Green New Deal in 2019.
So, Tucker, Trump, and their sycophants will accomplish little with their tariffs, subsidies, and tax bribes if firms are forced to face a firing squad of the EPA, SEC, IRS, DOJ, and state counterparts back home. If you want more on-shoring and less off-shoring, then put Leviathan on a leash. Fact is, we’ve got a free-range Leviathan. A hellhole of Jacobins awaits them. Instead of Make America Great Again (MAGA), try Make America Competitive Again (MACA).
Congressional Republicans began the process with the tax reform of 2017 and their vetoes of Obama-era regulations by means of the Congressional Review Act. The whole country will take a leap backwards if the clumsy populist Right, intent on castigating “neocons”, joins hands with the clumsy populist Left.
Hoping for prosperity by bashing job-creators is an endorsement of masochism as an organizational principle. Slavery, besides being immoral, is the height of economic masochism: the belief that owning and beating people is sufficient to make them produce. Don’t expect the turning of the men and women of commerce into bondsmen of the state by regulation, prosecution, and taxation to be any more fruitful. Sen. Liz Warren and the Bernie bros will need a new Fugitive Slave Act to go with their wealth tax and coercive ecotopia to stop capital flight.
It comes down to the clown-theory of pain as pleasure in the junk-thought precincts of economic policy. It didn’t work for the American South and won’t work for the Right’s pining for the 1950’s or the Left’s eco-nuttery. The foolishness of economic masochism is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Right and abandoned by the Left.
Santa Rosa resident who used his 2013 Nissan Leaf to power his house during a four-day blackout in Santa Rosa, Calif., as a result of the Kincade Fire. (photo: Vanessa Romo/NPR)
Surely, this wasn’t the intent of the article (here), but any sentient being could imagine the horrors of an EV world with California’s electricity grid. Remember, the clowns running the state are ecstatic about EV’s but absolutely moronic about the generation of electricity. They seem to be saying, “Hey, go buy one [$40,000 -$60,000] but your charging station will be dependent on the vagaries of the sun and wind, or the combustible, matchstick forests that could flare up at any time. No nuclear power for you.” Go figure.
The reporterette (Vanessa Romo) blithely treated the problem of finding charging stations during blackouts and raging forest fires, a recurring theme in California’s present and probable future, as another wholesome family adventure. One guy was confronting the raging Getty Fire and luckily found an answer to charging his Chevy Bolt from a Facebook group. Since the fire is busy destroying the grid, his hookup to Facebook must be through his phone. That means an operative cell tower nearby, not destroyed by fire, with power, and in range and with an unobstructive path to his phone. What happens if the charge on his cell phone is as low as his Bolt? What happens if cell reception is spotty or nonexistent? This is a theater of the absurd.
Venessa Romo of NPRCalifornia’s Getty Fire, 2019.The Holy Fire (2018) in Orange and Riverside Counties comes close to communication towers.California blackout
Another Sonoma County resident was praised for the “ingenious” use of his Nissan Leaf in an area ravaged by the Kincaid Fire. The subsequent blackout forced him to resort to his Leaf as a generator. Board certification for brain surgery isn’t required to figure out the massive problems with this “advantage”. Using the car as a source of electricity for the house depletes the car battery. This option only works if a charging station with a functioning grid hookup or global-warming fossil fuel generator is nearby. A charging station could be, but the other prerequisites might not be.
By the way, the inverter used in turning DC into the AC for his house could be employed just as well, maybe better, with a Ford-450 Diesel truck, a vehicle more useful than a glorified golf cart. A Leaf, or some such, isn’t necessary for that purpose. So, what’s the benefit for being forced to live in an EV world? You are being shoved into such an existence for no good reason.
Ford F-450 diesel
Nissan Leaf charging up.
The truth of the matter is that the whole charade is pure political theater. Concoct a catastrophe, stampede the public into mistakenly believing that the family sedan is the problem, declare unremittent war on fossil fuels, bribe and punish worker bees with artificially inflated fuel prices, close down the two remaining nuclear power plants, make your public lands combustible nature preserves writ large, and make the whole contraption reliant on the most expensive and unreliable grid in memory, and you too can enjoy the “new normal” of an asylum that calls itself a state.
We’ve seen it before. Aspiring opinion leaders in America read into prominent foreign leaders qualities that are actually a product of their own domestically produced biases and probably aren’t reflective of the foreign ruler’s true character. These political carnival barkers end up flacking for some pretty disreputable troublemakers. Or when disgraced by facts, they retreat to a stance of neutrality. It’s de ja vu all over again with much of Fox News’s primetime lineup, a myopic segment of the Right, and Vladimir Putin playing starring roles in a revived rendition of the tired play.
And I say this as a longstanding member of the Right and nationalist, albeit of the Reagan variety.
At work is naiveté and a warmed-over and coarse nationalism that previously arose in the 1940’s America First Committee (AFC). Celebrities, some in the well-published commentariat, and business eminences of the time signed up. Charles Lindbergh, R. Douglas Stuart (son of the co-founder of Quaker Oats), business titan William H. Regnery, General Robert E. Wood (chairman of Sears and Roebuck), eminent newspaper publishers in New York (Daily News) and Chicago (Tribune), future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and future political players Gerald R. Ford and Sargent Shriver found a home in the group.
Event announcing the formation of the America First Committee on Sept. 20, 1940.
Lindbergh understandably was the focus of much attention as an unofficial spokesman of the AFC. Comments such as these in opposition to sending aid to threatened countries in the wake of Hitler’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland could have easily dribbled from the mouth of Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham:
“I do not believe that repealing the arms embargo would assist democracy in Europe….” Or, “If we repeal the arms embargo with the idea of assisting one of the warring sides to overcome the other, then why mislead ourselves by talk of neutrality?”
Charles Lindbergh speaks at a rally of the America First Committee at Madison Square Garden in New York, on May 23, 1941. (AP)
Like Tucker, he levelled the now-overwrought charge of war profiteering if we send aid to countries under and next in line for conquest. Is it really shocking in a country with a still-vibrant private sector, a Second Amendment, and a military (as per Article 1 §8.13 of the Constitution) that private companies catering to this market would profit from selling their wares to our friends and allies? Would Lindbergh and his modern descendants prefer aid only if it bankrupts the companies? Or maybe they’d be satisfied with a Lenin-style commissariat to dictate profitability? The argument is preposterous.
Today’s cable channel superstars get the most exposure in this latest version of the new isolationism and vulgar nationalism. Though, others revel in the same limelight. Steve Bannon, Trumpkin par excellence, bellowed on Feb. 24, “Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept.” Candice Owens proclaimed in March,
“There is no difference, ethnically, between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously. Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians.”
Fascists of the 1930s played the same trick, the gambit of denying the legitimacy of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Abyssinia before they attempted to subjugate these lands. Frankly, the charge is irrelevant, then and today. Ukraine’s existence was recognized by Russia, post breakup of the evil empire, Europe, the UN, and the USSR: Khrushchev drew its current boundaries, and Stalin knew it well enough to isolate it for starvation (the Holodomor). We don’t need to parse cultural and historical differences; this is a done deal.
A starving mother holds her child at the height of Holodomor. USSR. Circa 1933.
And by the way, when are powerful caudillos the lone arbiters of another country’s legitimacy? Who gave them the power to play God?
Something more insidious might be lurking in our celebrities’ heads. Our modern pundits see a little of themselves in Putin. He’s a professed Christian, nationalist, and defender of the culture. So are they . . . at least as they see themselves. So, how does that wash over into standing on the sidelines as invasion and war crimes are committed? Do we really want to relive prior horrors on a continent that has experienced the long dark shadow of aggressors who were rewarded by the compliance and appeasement of their adversaries? A nuclear-armed Putin who successfully mutilated Ukraine is an emboldened Putin . . . and Red China. Pacifistic inaction by those on the side of the angels at this juncture is an invitation for costlier abominations later.
The only practical advice in situations such as these comes to us from the Roman general Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. In Latin, he wrote, “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.” Rough translation: If you want peace, prepare for war. If we, for good reasons, don’t want to do the fighting, we could certainly arm others to do it. Tucker, Bannon, Owens, and the rest of the gang of apologists need a new script other than the one written by Lindbergh and company and practiced by Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
The tenor of the times in today’s California in this protest march in the state from 2018.
The Great Skedaddle once referred to the flight of the Union Army from the battlefield in First Bull Run in 1861. No longer. Many cities and states have opted into the woke revolution . . . and people are fleeing, a Great Skedaddle II. What’s more, if we shifted the census from a mid-2020 counting to mid-2021, California would come close to losing 3 seats in the House of Representatives instead of the one. It’s the same in nearly all jurisdictions where Antifa and BLM appeasers reign supreme.
The official census is a centennial affair, but the bureau does annual estimates based on a continuing stream of data. And as a result, it gets worse for blue America. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, 10 states grew by 1% or more; eight are essentially red states. The other two (Delaware and Nevada) have maintained mostly friendly tax regimes in spite of, not because of, Dem dominance, when compared with their high-profile political cousins who routinely vote Democrat by double digits from their bi-coastal, metropolitan enclaves.
Some of the biggest losers are what you’d expect: California (-.76%), New York (-1.81%), Illinois (-1.1%), and Washington, D.C. (-2.83%). Some lost because of the continuing trend of the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt, which is slowing. Where it is accelerating can be pinpointed by county numbers. Manhattan (New York County) lost 6.9% over the one-year period; San Francisco down 6.7%; San Mateo dropped 3.5%. King County, Washington State, the home of Seattle, et al, and the mother lode of lefty votes, took the biggest step backwards in the state. With few exceptions, the county metro areas that grew the most are found in Idaho, Florida, Texas, Utah, and South/North Carolina.
An aerial view of today’s Manhattan.
One more interesting aspect to the story: states bordering California are magnets, with the exception of Oregon, thanks to the radical-Left dominance of the Portland/Willamette Valley urban corridor. Nevada did well, but the flight pattern’s sphere of influence extends to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and my own western Montana. Most of these states would come close to gaining an additional House seat if the count was held just one year later.
Indeed, the pandemic is a contributing factor, but not the sole cause of this trend. COVID ripped off the scab of a festering wound. The population hemorrhagers were more commonly the most zealous in their regulatory suffocation of lives and livelihoods. Then, they go off into climate-change hysteria, transgenderism, slashing police budgets, and a racist Anti-racism crusade. Their schools and urban spaces became open sewers riddled with crime. What’s there to like?
Let this be a warning to woke corporate boardrooms: you’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Boycotting states over election laws and protections for girls’ sports, and ads showing your fidelity to the cultural Left, is not a winning strategy. People who vote with their feet are also more inclined to vote with their dollars. Disney, rethink your opposition to parental rights. Your stand may sound glorious in your corporate boardroom, gated community, or lunchroom, but the commoners have a profoundly different take.
Please read the source article for this post here.
