Posted on

Big Business Operating Out of Their Lane to the Ruin of All of Us

Ed Bastain, CEO of Delta Airlines, and the symbol of the woke CEO.

H.L. Mencken (1888-1956), a writer and scathing critic of contemporary enthusiasms, famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” We are inundated with a glut of presumptive problems and a host of politically-favored and chic answers, many of them “clear, simple, and wrong”. When “clear, simple, and wrong” penetrates the command-and-control centers of organizations, they get off track and pursue ends far afield of their competency. Ironically, clear-simple-wrong answers oftentimes metastasize into obtuse mission statements littered with fashionable causes. Prepare for woe if those institutions are critical to our lives.

H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.) Baltimore Sun Staff (File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche, Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner)

Thus, a business could be beguiled by a mania for “social justice”, one of the most abused phrases in modern usage. The ballyhooed answers to a suspect issue are quite probably clear, simple, and wrong but the frenzy sweeps all before it and, before we know it, ESG (environment, social, and governance) competes with profitability. The previously uncomplicated mission of profitability – which spins off many positive externalities (good things) such as more products, higher wages and fatter pensions – gets entangled in intractable social headaches. Something has to give, and right now it’s profitability with all the good that it brings.

Such is the threat of “woke capital”. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has the fortune of a small nation’s GDP, who could probably buy outright one of the UN’s members, runs a company lunchroom filled with the woke . . . like him. The simple service of making social interaction easier (instant and interactive messaging) is now complicated by opinion censorship and political donations to the enemies of economic liberty. This economic liberty is often brusquely referred to as “capitalism”. The Twitter minions are oddly supportive of the people who would strangle their capitalistic enterprise, born of economic liberty, in the crib. It’s one of the purest examples of self-negation.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

MLB, Inc., is another example. Somehow, the suits and the boys in smelly locker rooms became the arbiters of election laws. The simple act of very skilled athletes playing a stick-and-ball sport was complicated with the mission to advance the political interests of Stacy Abrams and the Georgia Democratic Party. The balancing of election integrity with the open franchise, something in the wheelhouse of government where the issues are raised and deliberated by elected representatives, is thrown askew by corporate leaders wasting their corporate reputations on a partisan crusade. One would think that angering 60-70% of your fan base is not a wise business decision. It is only possible when a business organization forgets itself and tries to act like a political one. It’s the culmination of millionaire celebrity athletes and their managing Manhattan suits – so dismissive of those smelly Walmart shoppers who buy the caps, jerseys, and big-screen tv’s – losing sight of batting averages, rbi’s, era’s, obp’s, and wins and losses.

At one time, there was an Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, who was like most franchise owners when he said, “Just win, baby.” Today, it’s “Just win, baby, and fight voter suppression.” A greater incongruency is hard to imagine.

Pro baseball as Democrat hitman doesn’t comport. Neither does Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg functioning as Democratic Party get-out-the-vote bankroller in 2020, but, oh, he was. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan (a real doctor as opposed to “doctor” Jill Biden), would say that they were helping “underserved communities” when they threw $419.5 million to two Democrat-friendly pass-throughs: the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). “Underserved” is another one of those words mangled by today’s politics.

From these two partisan philanthropies, the cash was laundered to biased groups in Democrat-rich localities. How was the money used? Consuming most of the cash was issue advocacy – universal mail-in balloting, opposing voter ID laws, etc. – staffing inner-city election offices with employees of partisan groups like Stacy Abrams’s Happy Faces, and flooding selected precincts with paid canvassers to “assist” voters and, get this, the “curing” (?) of ballots. How targeted was the effort? 25 of the 26 grants from these two NGO’s went to cities and counties won by Biden, statistically enough to swing Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the donkey party.

Stacy Abrams

It’s the same scene from the c-suites in shiny towers in deep blue metropolises to the air waves in “socially responsible” smiley-faced ads. All of the excitable ad terms are so dastardly vague, which is ideal for lefty crusades. “Socially responsible”? “Environment”? “Governance”? “Stakeholders”? If you want to talk about dog whistles, here you have the piercing sounds that’ll draw the lefty wolf packs from the far corners of the globe. The vocabulary draws out the socialistic fascism so near and dear to the swarming activists of the lefty hive.

That most fascist of all terms, “stakeholders”, is a classic. Mussolini foisted this canard on Italians and called it “corporatism”. In it, activist interests were organized into the “state”, “corporate management”, and “labor”. Just add “community voices” – i.e., lefty groups and their legal arm – to the mix and you have the “stakeholders” of “stakeholder capitalism”. Who decides the direction of this lumbering entity? Easy, the state, which means the politically powerful. Economic decisions become political decisions.

Socialism, of whatever stripe, isn’t an economic system; it’s a political one.

Is that any way to run an economy, by and for politicians and their unelected, cloistered coterie of regulators and allied NGO’s? It’s not that it hasn’t been done before. It was in many places, and in a place called the Soviet Union. Economists christened the practice “central planning”. Almost all activity goes through, or falls under the ever-watchful gaze, of the state. Take any lefty with power to wield in the U.S. Congress and you’ll see exhibited their inner-Soviet. Here’s a snippet from the Socrates of the House Progressive Caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), commenting in late September on their demand to pass the House Dems’ central planning bill (the $3.5-5 trillion monstrosity),

“. . . we have to deliver on the entirety of the president’s agenda [the humungous $3.5-5 trillion expansion of the state]. We have to deliver on child care [the state]. We have to deliver on paid leave [the state]. We have to make sure people can go to free community college [the state]. We need to make sure we’re taking on climate change [the state, big time]. We have got to address housing and immigration [the state and the state].”

These people are all about the state. They might as well plaster El Duce’s famous dictum – “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” – on Democratic Party headquarters in DC. The only difference between Mussolini’s brand of socialism and Lenin’s is that El Duce allowed the face-saving gesture of shareholders possessing the paper, but that is meaningless when the state tells you what do with them. State control trumps liberty, just as it was in Lenin’s Politburo, and just as it will be for the House Progressive Caucus.

Mussolini’s party headquarters in Rome.

And these people have the gall to call advocates of economic liberty fascists. Amazing, absolutely amazing.

The incongruous mashing of fascistic lefty activism with corporate shareholder governance creates a Frankenstein. Issues of moral import, that used to be dealt with under the principle of one man, one vote – meaning consensual government, a republic, our Constitution – are now to be decided in forums where its one share, one vote. Think about it. Institutional investors owning a million shares – like the lefty-managed BlackRock in Manhattan – have a million votes in setting corporate policies and filling management slots, not one vote. There might be thousands of stockholders but only a few are the big gorillas in the room. Imagine a huge slice of the economic fortunes of an entire nation being run according to the conscience of Manhattan.

Orwell’s Animal Farm had the ruling pigs change the central moral of the movement to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The owners of passels of shares, and thus “more equal than others”, include arms of the state like the state employee pension funds. Teamster pension-fund corruption has nothing on these lefty politicians and their allied activist organizations. These pension systems are slush funds for lefty activism, and to hell with the fiduciary responsibility to create a stable retirement for a worn-out firefighter. Sounds like corporatism to me.

CalPERS headquarters in Sacramento, Ca.

In this regard, we could profit from an extended timeout in making new laws and inventing more ways to spend more money. The National Archives are already busting at the seams. It should be apparent by now that there is a law on the books covering nearly everything that rankles us. Don’t like guns? Well, there’s a good part of the U.S. criminal code devoted to them. Don’t like climate-change alarmists and CRT hustlers messing around with your retirement? There’s the Employee Retirement Investment Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, coming on the heels of the 1960’s scandals in union-run pension systems. The law requires the highest priority be rate of return, not social causes that drive the imaginations of progressives. With retirements exploding and hefty payouts looming, money-managers would be insane to focus on anything but the highest rate of return. But, alas, that isn’t the case.

Biden has made a hash of the borders, Afghanistan, policing and civil peace, the jobs picture, inflation, energy, and all of it made worse by his COVID-authoritarianism. Add to the list mucking up our retirements. ERISA and rulemaking since ’74 wouldn’t forbid today’s ESG (or SR, “socially conscious”) investments but they must meet the rate of return standard. Fact is, the standard is no standard, post-Trump. Biden announced that his Labor Department won’t enforce the rule, leaving ample room to indulge in poor-performing ESG stock-picking.

Those ESG pickings are duds. Alicia Munnel of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research: “I really have no respect for ESG investing”. Tariq Fancy, former head of BlackRock’s sustainable investing wing:

“The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it’s not . . . . In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community”

Now Biden promises to do to us what he did to the Afghans. After some cop video goes viral, expect corporate shareholder and board meetings to embrace ESG and denounce one or another institution of civil order, and it’s off to the eventual liquidation of our pensions.

But what makes these corporate gatherings, dominated as they are by investor goliaths on a lefty jihad, the proper forum to adjudicate controversial public policies? Nothing. Corporate big cheeses, with shareholding King Kongs watching their backs, have a free hand in imposing their prejudices and social preferences on the mass of shareholders and the public at large. Gone is the need for representative assemblies, a court system to apply the law, and an elected executive to carry it out. Following the SR (“Social Responsibility”) peddlers, public policy is to be settled among the large caps in Manhattan, California’s Bay Area, LA, Washington State’s Puget Sound, Chicago, and the other c-suites in any million+ metropolitan area. Delta Airlines, Inc., may as well replace its logo with a donkey.

A favorite cause for the hyper-wealthy in their walled estates in their zoned-for-exclusion neighborhoods is the usual “climate change” and a raft of environmentalism’s other assorted extreme goals. For these people, insulated from the harmful effects of their beliefs by their ample portfolios, “follow the science” means that they have no intention of following it. Going from the heat trapping qualities of certain gases in lab experiments to the disappearance of Micronesia and the California coastal plain is more than a stretch. It’s a novel and properly placed in the library’s fiction section. A host of scientific variables are rolled to get right to the super-greenie end state.

It’s not the scientific method, hinging as it is on falsifiability (a testable hypothesis, one that can be proven correct or no). In the mind of the brain-dead activist, they go from a frenzied political assertion – not a real hypothesis with falsifiability – to coercion. This isn’t “follow the science”. It’s follow AOC.

Speaking of revolutionary public policy based on such hysterics, we have the greenie leviathan in the form of The Green New Deal waiting in the wings. Much of the Fortune 500 is fully onboard. But greenie energy doesn’t work. You can’t repeal the laws of physics and fiscal sanity by replacing high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) for low-density (wind mills, solar panels, bio-mass) without a corresponding deterioration in the quality of life. That’s certainly one way to reduce the wealth gap: shove the middle class into welfare dependency.

Forget about the rich, Lizzy Warren, they’ve got enough money in the bank to buy your vote, place on retainer an army of mercenaries in prestigious law firms, and to set up shop beyond your clutches.

It’s more than being “clear, simple, and wrong”. It’s the titans of industry operating out of their lane. Public policy is meant for a public to decide through their representative assemblies. Mars Candies needs to stick to innovating M&M’s. Delta Airlines needs to concentrate on making air travel affordable and more enjoyable. CalSTRS should have a single-minded focus on stable retirements for teachers. Everybody in their lane of competency and prudence.

In other words, shut up and sing. We could do without the bigs turning my ticket purchase into a back-channel endorsement of Stacy Abrams, Earth First, and Al Gore visits to Davos.

RogerG

Posted on

What has happened to USC? Is Something Deeper at Play?

Utah quarterback, Cameron Rising, from Ventura, Ca., via Texas, celebrates a touchdown in Utah’s 42-26 win over USC in the LA Coliseum Saturday night, 10/9.

My answers are, I can’t say for sure and I can’t say for sure. But hints are scattered about. My principal guess is that the breeding ground for football success lies in . . . wait for it . . . the regional culture. This is not the southern California of USC’s John McKay or the entire PAC-8 of Washington’s Warren Moon any longer. The whole west coast shifted deep blue which might prove to be the catalyst for a deemphasis of the manly arts (as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield would put it), like the manliest of all sports, football. Trump might have had a better chance to win California’s 52 electoral votes if the electorate was limited to the LA Coliseum’s attendance, but that isn’t the case. There’s more Bernie Bros in the state than college football fans. Socialism and love of the nanny state undermines fan and program support and player development. Again, my guess.

Hugh Hewitt last week raised an interesting point. He observed that college football is a “red” sport. The top 25 has only two slots for teams from “blue” states: Oregon (#9) and San Diego State (#24). The rest is a monotonous rendition of “red” to “purple” states, mostly “red”. In the last decade, only one “blue” team by the end of the season with any regularity has been in the running for the college football playoffs – Oregon.

Take a look at something as simple as stadium capacity. The top three are in the Big Ten – Michigan (purple, red part of the state, 107,601), Penn State (purple, red part of the state, 106,572), and The Ohio State (red, 102,780). Eleven of the top 25 are in the SEC – which should change its initials to RSC, the Red State Conference. We won’t find a blue state facility till UCLA’s Rose Bowl at #10 (91,136) and USC’s Coliseum at #20 (77,500) – both very ancient and for the most part half empty on Saturday.

The Ohio State’s “The Shoe”

Interesting anecdote: Iowa’s quarterback, Spencer Petras from Greenbrae, Ca., chose the Iowa corn fields because he wanted to play in the electric atmosphere of a Big Ten stadium, according to yesterday’s broadcast team for the Penn State/Iowa game.

Iowa’s quarterback Spencer Petras in Iowa’s 23-20 win against Penn State.
Fans swarm the field after Iowa’s victory against Penn State.
Jubilant Iowa fans on the field.

Helicopter-parent government of the blue states nurture Pajama Boys (Remember the ads for Obamacare?), not football players. The attitude spills over into athletic policy. Arizona State’s punter, Michael Turk, one of the top punters in the country, transferred to Oklahoma due to ASU’s vaccine mandate for away games. Washington State’s head coach, Nick Rolovich, is reported to have a date with the guillotine for refusing to take the vaccine.

No surprise there, college bubbles everywhere are replete with “safe spaces” and triggering hyper-sensitivities. Blue states are nothing but the college bubbles writ large. However, if the surrounding culture won’t play by the campus’s snowflake rules, COVID paranoia will play second fiddle to the gate. MSNBC anchors may go bonkers with the Chicken Little hysteria of “super-spreader events”, but many folks prefer to live in the real world of risk and are voting with their tickets to have a good time. Damn the mommy spoil-sports. Welcome to the “red” states.

Now 3-3, in USC’s losses, their opponents scored 42+ points. Swiss cheese comes to mind when talking about the team’s defense, whether in the run box or the defensive backfield. As a consequence, Utah, like Oregon State and Stanford before them, looked like Alabama when lining up across the USC defensive line. USC attracts some flashy offensive skills players but the rest of the roster looks mediocre. Since the defense can’t hold the more physical offenses, those stars get fewer opportunities to shine. By the third quarter, the team is down 24 points, the game’s tenor has been set, and the LA media darling in cardinal and gold watches his star fade.

Lapses like USC’s have been a concern up and down the west coast. The occasional good team can still be found, something unavoidable in the eight teams from LA to Puget Sound. Beyond the Coast and Cascade Ranges, the picture might look a bit different. Arizona prohibits vaccine mandates in schools, a far cry from California’s Gavin Newsom, Oregon’s Kate Brown, and Washington’s Jay Inslee – cultural socialists all. The off-putting social milieu of those states might be a huge drag on recruitment for Utah, the Arizona schools, and Colorado as they are corralled with the nanny staters. Flying from liberty zones to the lands of COVID fascism in inter-conference play creates difficulties for scheduling and compliance. A five-star recruit, young and healthy with a greater chance of serious medical problems from a frat party than COVID, has a choice between a Chernobyl-like college life or a normal experience in the SEC’s Mississippi or the Big-10’s Iowa. This might be the reason for more California talent showing up in the big schools of flyover country.

A worker at Lumen Field holds a sign stating the stadium’s mask requirement before an NFL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)

I hear that the Big-12 is shopping for some replacements for the defections of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Hear that, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado? Maybe a move to the Mountain West might be an improvement.

I am prepared for a long run of mediocrity for my much-loved PAC-12 teams. Once the rot of cultural Marxism gets fully established, the malaise infects everything from the economy to the practice field.

RogerG

Posted on

Making Lefty Politics Pay

Black Lives matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors poses for a photo at the Summit18 in Los Angeles in 2018. (photo: Amy Harris/Invision/AP)

Once again, a lefty scam artist finds exoneration in institutional fact-checkers, like Rick Rouan of USA Today (read here).

Rick Rouan of USA Today.

Most of you have heard the story: Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, went on a house buying binge from 2016 to 2020 with purchase prices ranging from $415,000 to the $1.4 million one in LA’s Topanga Canyon. The story broke in the New York Post in April 2021 and chronicled the now-familiar story of lefties making revolution pay. The story implied the possible corruption of Cullors in using BLM Foundation money to establish a personal real estate portfolio. Rouan, running interference for Cullors, refutes the story. As always with these things, the fact-checker provides useful information but misses the big point: lefty politics pays, especially for the leaders. Odd, very odd, since this comes from a self-described “trained Marxist”, by definition a hater of capital accumulation . . . while she assiduously accumulates. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Patrisse Cullors and her real estate empire.

She announced her Marxist allegiance in a 2015 interview, a year before she plunked down 510,000 clams on an LA house. The new mortgage signifies no change of heart about the revolution. This is a committed Marxist who discovered that the path to riches lies in lefty celebrity, and lefty politics is all the rage among the beautiful people.

So, what of the Post charge, or insinuation, that she’s using BLM donations to join the ranks of the Obamas? Okay, Rouan is probably right when he states that BLM, officially the BLM Global Network Foundation, wasn’t conferred with a 503c IRS designation till December 2020, but that only means, prior to that point, the sloshing around of money within the group is, let’s say, murky. In other words, no records. She admits to receiving a total salary of $210,00 since 2013. So, how does $210,000 – roughly $30,000/year – amount to qualifying for a $1.4 million purchase in LA’s prestigious Topanga Canyon?

Interesting question. One answer is in Rouan’s piece. The girl collared two book deals and a production deal with Warner Brothers, probably due to her growing fame. YouTube contributed to the gravy train. She does speeches for a fee, owns an art gallery, and has a teaching gig at a small college in Arizona; Wikipedia ads a second. She’s an entrepreneur of Marxist politics. It’s a non sequitur in logical coherency, but not so money wise.

Thus, Rouan misses the great income-making potential in appeals to the higher reaches of high-status wokism. Corporate suites and the mushy world of government contracting and employment could be marshaled to accumulate a huge mound of wealth. It may legal, but it is certainly unseemly using the role of apostle to the downtrodden to escape being downtrodden – using the doctrine of expropriation to appropriate. In comparison, televangelism looks saintly.

Or, maybe, it’s just good old-fashioned graft. It’s the same path trod by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the Obamas, etc. – race-hustlers all. George Washington Plunkett would be proud. Call it the modern version of “honest graft”.

RogerG

Posted on

Manchin’s Disgust and Dilemma

Sen. Joe Manchin (l) and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer.

Have you seen this (below)? It shows Joe Manchin (D, West Virginia), seated behind Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D, NY), as Schumer makes a caustic speech denigrating Republicans even as some Republicans joined with Democrats to temporarily raise the debt ceiling. Clearly, Manchin is not happy with what was coming out of Schumer’s mouth.

At one point, Machin says to himself, “This is crazy.” He shakes his head at times and puts his face in his hands. He later confirmed to the press what is obvious in the clip: “I didn’t think it [Schumer’s speech] was appropriate at this time.”

Watch Manchin at about the 1:45 point clearly show his disgust:

Raising the debt ceiling shouldn’t be a big deal since the Senate Parliamentarian greenlighted the use of reconciliation – simple majority vote – to raise it. A filibuster is easily made irrelevant. Schumer could get his 50 Dems and VP Harris to do it.

So, why the hyper-indignation? The Dems want Republican fingerprints on a universe-sized expansion of the national debt. Republicans were excluded from having any voice in the mammoth $5 trillion splurge that was mostly authored by the lone self-proclaimed socialist in the Senate, Bernie Sanders, and would blow up the fed’s fiscal reputation with a tidal wave of useless currency and interest rates through the roof. Why should Republicans cooperate in a train wreck of a budget bill from which they were excluded? Indeed.

How much longer can Manchin remain in a party which is completely detached from fiscal reality and is so enthralled with a socialist revolution? Good question.

RogerG

Posted on

Tyranny, American Style

Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland

What does American-style tyranny look like? Here’s an example of an all-too-familiar trend: Merrick Garland, Biden’s AG, sent a memo to Christopher Ray, Director of the FBI, to enunciate investigations of recent parent protests at local school board meetings . There’s a lot to unpack here, but a gradual slide into tyranny is in the offing. The tactic at play is to threaten citizens with the long arm of the central, federal government – the FBI for God’s sake – where they have no conceivable legal and Constitutional interest, to intimidate unwelcome speech and bankrupt political opposition. It’s dastardly and Garland and any of the FBI who cooperate ought to be punished forthwith before it becomes part of the operational DNA of our now unleashed Leviathan. “I was following orders” was no defense at Nuremberg; it ought not be here.

The flaunting of the Constitution is becoming too habitual. Some would like to trace it back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but that was blatant, out in the open, and the feds had no FBI to make the abuse readily operational; something easily undone by an election. However, the powers of the executive branch have grown exponentially. FDR had his enemies list; LBJ had his; and Nixon had his. But it’s more than that. The 21st-century feds through the executive branch meddle, control, manipulate, and intimidate themselves into all aspects of our lives. They have the people with the guns, an army of legal eagles, and a plethora of agencies to turn on an unwary citizenry.

The federal Leviathan got a second wind at their backs under Obama. A trip down memory lane would take us past the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case and the fed’s attempted prosecution/persecution of Zimmerman. A Florida jury put the kibosh to the effort. Ferguson erupted in 2014 and the feds under Eric Holder tried all he could to hang officer Darren Wilson but even he couldn’t find anything. And then there’s the IRS making their own enemies list of conservative groups (Remember Lois Lerner?). Of course, nobody was held to account but a “chilling effect” was accomplished in the interim. That’s how they work: success isn’t measured in prosecutions or in a variety of impositions but in scaring people away. Leviathan as bogeyman.

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS unit that grants 503(C) tax-exempt status to groups, appearing before Congress in 2013.

Lest we forget, do you recall those Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letters threatening schools that they had better shred due process and common sense or face the full force of the federal wolf pack? The message was clear: expediently thump any male accused of rape and open those girls’ bathrooms to any man claiming his genitals shouldn’t distract the female occupants from him being a woman . . . or else!

It begins with the fascination to make the law mean whatever you want it to mean, including the Constitution. Unleash the agents and lawyers and we’ll discover a legal rationale later. That’s the tactic. Call an event an “insurrection”, take your time investigating, raid homes and businesses with guns drawn, let the arrested languish in solitary for unspecified periods, and voilà, any more political embarrassment from the angry Trump voter is magically reduced. The feds discovered that it’s easy to bully the law-abiding working stiffs whose interaction with the law is the occasional speeding ticket in trying to get the kids to soccer practice on time. These aren’t your seasoned manacled occupants of chairs next to defense counsel before a judge.

You see, it’s all about whose ox is being gored . . . or intimidated. Hypocrisy is rampant. Andrew C. McCarthy, former US District Attorney of the southern district of NY, recounts Garland’s fastidious efforts in Clinton’s DOJ to protect the Constitutional free speech rights of fire-breathing Islamists like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (him of the World Trade Center bombing of ’93) and his extremist coterie. But now spit and fume before your local school board about the racist indoctrination in your kids’ classrooms and you become a “domestic terrorist” and the target of the Patriot Act. Not only is this duplicitous, it’s vile.

When the Leviathan discovers that threats are enough, then there’s nothing that they can’t do. Eventually, an active citizenry is cowed, passive and inert, which is just what they want in order to make you into something that you have every right to not be. I’m not certain that we haven’t slid past good old-fashioned authoritarian tyranny right to the totalitarian kind.

RogerG

Posted on

Rope-Sellers Running Your Pension Fund

Sometimes idiocy gets so entrenched that it’s mistaken for wisdom. For the rest of us, we should start to shake our elites’ false aura of authority and easily recognize some of their chic passions for what they are – nonsense. In this, I refer to our the corporate suits’ enthusiasm for woke ideology. How could adults embrace something so ludicrous? The farce would be apparent to a child.

I’m reminded of the old gag of a tractor-trailer hauling a tall earth mover but at a standstill at a bridge. Stumped as to how to get it under the bridge, a kid in a mini-van rolls by with the window down and yells, “Let some air out of the tires!” Staunching the drivel, before they mutilate our livelihoods and retirement systems, is as obvious as letting some air out of the tires.

It might take a kid to cut through the overwrought bunk to help return us to sanity. Right now, overwrought lefty foolishness is piloting the ship of our retirements. Pay attention those of you at the mercy of CalSTRS and CalPERS and the rest of the public employee pension gang. Lefty ideologues control your pension checks. One such lefty avatar is Kirsty Jenkinson, Investment Director, Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). Whew, what a mouthful, but a title that can be simply translated as “useful idiot in selling the rope that eco-totalitarians will use to hang us”.

Kirsty Jenkinson

Lenin was famous for his characterizations of supportive capitalists as “rope sellers” and “useful idiots”.

Taking a closer look at Kirsty shows the scope of the threat. This girl has an illustrious leftist pedigree, albeit one in carefully coiffed hair and suit (see below). She went from a four-year stint at Edinburgh University with a MA in “International History” to six years as an executive director at Goldman Sachs, innocuous enough till we find her as Director of “Governance & Sustainable Investment” at BMO Global Asset Management. What’s that obtuse title mean? Well, it’s a rephrasing of the leftist tag “ESG”, or Environment, Social, and Governance.

Whose Environment? Not ours, but the greenie utopia that people like Kirsty, schooled in all the lefty jargon, want to impose on us.

Whose Social? Not ours, but the “social” of the lefty faculty lounge and their legions of acolytes. Yep, that’s the stuff fed to your child through their curriculum and shows as Critical Race Theory and hides under the acronym EID – Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. All of this lingo boils down to perpetual victimhood of the “other” which is defined by a laundry list of immutable characteristics and a host of mental dispositions (“My genitalia doesn’t define my sex.”). Of course, the “social” encompasses an explosion of so-called remedies in government commands, rewards, and punishments. It’s a complete omni-competent state, as in the one contemplated by Karl Marx.

Whose Governance? Yes, ours. Meaning, they want to control us in every possible way. This political disposition leads to the reflex to funnel campaign cash to eco-socialist parties, like today’s Democratic Party. It also seeks to rope the Fortune 500 into the revolution. That gets us back to Kirsty Jenkinson.

From BMO, she ends up at the World Resources Institute as Director of Markets & Enterprise Program. Media Bias/Fact Check rates them “left-center”. It’s an eco-group with the same eco-mantras.

The BMO and WRI stints uncovered her as a lefty political activist in the corporate suite. She continued her march through the boardrooms as the Managing Director & Sustainable Investment Strategist at Wespath Institutional Investments. Are you getting the picture? This lady is into funds that have millions of dollars of other people’s money at their disposal which can be turned into seats on corporate boards. The sheer weight of shares counts for a lot. All the better to foist ESG, EID, CRT, and the rest of the lefty litany on the nation from the classroom to the workplace. What doesn’t get through in the Green New Deal will be swept up by the Fortune 500.

Racial Equity indoctrination – CRT is foundational – in a North Carolina Episcopal Diocese in 2017.

That’s not the end of Kirsty’s sojourn. She’s now the Investment Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies at CalSTRS, the second largest pension fund with $275 billion in assets. Thus, this eco-activist has an outsized influence over the financial well-being of 949,000 teachers and staff. She can wield the fund’s $300 million stake in Exxon/Mobil like a Swiss halberd and force them to renounce any effort at producing affordable energy, their core business.

Bear in mind, that greenie stuff – “sustainable” – is expensive and unreliable, and that’s before we start the slide in our and our kids’ quality of life. And that’s before pensioners begin noticing the stories of CalSTRS’s difficulties in cutting the checks. At the end of the day, eco-fantasies don’t make for corporate health, and corporate ill-health becomes the basis for a bad portfolio, and a bad portfolio equals a bankrupt pension. Get it?

People like Kirsty Jenkinson, with her lefty fairy tales, have no business using my pension to advance their ideological crusade. The fiduciary rule requires the fund managers to work on behalf of the best financial interests of their clients. A totalitarian eco-utopia is not in the best interests of the beneficiaries. If individual beneficiaries want to send a little cash to the eco-blob, more power to them. But Kirsty should have another job, other than political activist. In fact, a proper functioning fiduciary rule would demand an end to titles such as Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies.

Either she finds another role or send her packing.

RogerG.

Posted on

Left-Wing Glamour at War with Physics and Economics

Biden in the Ford F150 Lightning.

Remember Biden behind the wheel of Ford’s F150 Lightning, a propaganda stunt to make EV’s appealing to rednecks (like me)? Anyone, though, with a smidgen of brain function will notice the silliness of the whole exercise. Ford’s newest addition to its truck lineup is a Rube Goldberg contraption whose purpose is a political one, not a practical one that can only emerge from the many confrontations with reality over time, like the iconic F150. It’s what happens when greenie fantasies declare war on physics and economics.

A Rube Goldberg machine.

The saga begins with greenie dreams of heaven on earth and hatred for those not so enthralled with the dreamscape. When the dream captures the imagination of people similarly cocooned, people removed from the hoi polloi and rustics, but powerfully influential, it is shoved onto everyone else. So, if hair-on-fire congresswomen from gerrymandered, gentrified districts scream the climate-change apocalypse, out comes the snooty vilification and pressure on the corporate bigs to play along if they want to remain in the cool persons’ club.

Our excitable hair-on-fire congresswomen from NY’s 14th Congressional District.

Of course, the way is greased with other people’s money in tax credits and subsidies. To get on board the money train, the bigs conjure something that . . . works . . . but . . . . Thus, we get the Ford F150 Lightning with its 1,800 pound battery that takes 12.5 hours to recharge. The problem with EV’s has always been the battery. For the Lightning, a longer range and heavier battery is an option; the behemoth becomes a real behemoth. The problem is still the battery.

Now, imagine yourself the kind of person who actually likes, and needs, trucks. By the way, they aren’t the kind who reside in Greenwich Village flats, shop at Whole Foods, and whose personal transportation needs are satisfied by an electric golf cart masquerading as an EV car and Uber and Lyft. I’m talking about the type of people producing the grain that goes into our Boston University graduate’s plant-based Awesome Burger. An EV is as practical as a Gucci suit at a barn raising.

In such locales in the fruited plains, distance means distance, as in many, many miles. What happens when the twenty-something offspring took the sleek thing on a beer run the night before but forgot to plug it in? On your monthly trip to Costco the next day – 300 miles round trip – the contraption stops dead on the interstate. What do you do? The thing is heavy, takes 12.5 hours to charge, and nothing as simple as a five-gallon gas can offers a solution. If you are on the interstate, call for a heavy-lift, flat-bed tow truck. If you are stuck on a dirt road in a sea of rolling hills on the northern plains in the middle of winter, you die.

The northern Great Plains of the United States.

For our congresswoman from her gerrymandered, gentrified perch in the megalopolis, the answer is The Green New Deal. Capital meant for better devices and more energy will now go into upending the grid and bribing people with other people’s money to buy the contrivances, by force of law. We’ll end up with a mountain of the impractical and a lot less of the stuff that works. The state will simply step in to command the laws of economics and physics to disappear.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931.

Welcome to 21st century America. It’s a world that Salvador Dali made famous in his paintings. No, it’s not a real world, but it is to our hair-on-fire congresswoman from the Bronx/Queens. She actually believes in “her truth”, a “truth” at war with the laws of physics and economics. Biden also believes in her truth. This style of “reality” may be appealing as art in a Dali exhibit at the Met but is not so agreeable as policy to a South Dakota farmer stuck as the snow begins to fall with no cell reception.

A Russian teen found frozen to death in a car in 2020.

Left-wing glamour confronts the plain facts of existence and the results aren’t pretty.

RogerG

Posted on

Froehle’s Baloney

Arthur Brisbane, newspaper editor, wrote the following in 1911: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Yep, it is, since words require more brain juice than eye candy. Visual images strike our limbic system with greater force than words on a page. Goebbels and Lenin knew this from the get-go. Many times, illustrations or cartoons, more so than photos, get right to the point without the limitations of reality. The uber-left activist Craig Froehle in 2012 gave to his ideological compatriots an iconic absurdity. His tall-to-small threesome behind a fence on crates (see below) appeals to the zealots but does nothing for understanding.

A big part of the problem lies in the vacuousness of the political sloganeering that is “equity”, the point of the image, and one third of the verbal contraption “equity/diversity/inclusion” (Interesting to note, the more apt acronym DIE is possible by changing the order.). Oftentimes, “equity” is used without definition, as if it burst from the brain of God and to the mouths Lori Lightfoot and the radical activists running the show in the Biden administration. “Equity” is the criminal cousin to “equality”. We have at least a playground understanding of “equality”, but “equity” at the hands of our racialist carnival barkers isn’t what lights our eyes after our house’s assessment. It’s a weapon. It’s forced equality of outcome. And, for that, our lives are left open to state-run malevolence and malfeasance writ large.

A crowd whose brains have been softened to the agitprop will miss the folly and danger. Equity is a crutch for activists traumatized by life not being equal. Everywhere they look, they are horrified by inequality, inequality everywhere. They are forced to confront disparities in everything from size, talent, quick-wittedness to the incidence of low-birthweight babies by race, genitalia, income, bed partner, whatever. It’s enough to drive the traumatized to thumb-sucking.

The cure for the anxiety is found in the seizure of power to force equality. Freedom, as in equal opportunity, is repealed by the invention of “systemic racism”, or systemic . . . whatever. Just make the threat improvably “systemic” to empower the commissars to make things equal by imperial edict. The so-called malevolent “system” is a ghost presence but don’t bother with inductive or deductive reasoning for verification. We are coaxed to rely on the ghostbusters instilled with the secret gnosis, like the racialist grifters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DeAngelo from their tenured academic redoubts.

Karl Marx played the same scam, only he didn’t leave this world with a fat bank account. But his pupils succeeded if you measure success by over a 100 million dead in the 20th century. How much ruination will Kendi, et al, visit upon us?

Back to Froehle’s cartoon scam. It doesn’t take much to dispense with the message. Life isn’t a matter of crate-sharing. Those crates in the illustration are actually other people’s income, jobs, property, and their children’s education. Froehle is actually practicing a zero-sum game: the state takes from one to give to another. And the assignment of forced contributor and assigned recipient is based purely on race, or any other grouping with the political clout to nose their way into the trough.

The cartoon is childish, but even children have an instinctual grasp of the unfairness of it all. They know that one kid getting two suckers based on melanin count isn’t fair. So is the award of benefits due to genitalia, bed partner, or personal declaration that supersedes their chromosomal makeup. A child has a better grasp of intrinsic fairness than some who’ve spent too much time in classrooms, a place where education has evolved into mal-education.

But that’s where we are at: the land of Orwell’s Oceania. The Ministry of Truth practiced “doublethink” and “Newspeak”, a language that undermines language. Language relies on common meanings so sharing and interaction can take place. In this world, everything is political, including words. Language is distorted to push the “defence [sic] of the indefensible”. So, racism and sexism became “equity” to the great detriment of ourselves, our children, and our nation.

RogerG

Posted on

Progressivism Is the Problem

The federal Leviathan

James Madison, Federalist 51:
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

One of the banal buzzwords in common usage about our Constitutional government is “coequal”, as in coequal branches. It’s drummed into the head of the kiddies and is trotted out ad nauseum by the over-exposed telegenic punditry. Part of the problem lies in other banalities like “checks and balances”, with emphasis on “balances”, that reinforces the mischaracterization of our government.

Think about it. In its simplest and correct form, our republic is composed of an executive to carry out the laws, a court system to adjudicate disputes according to the law, and a legislature to legislate, make the law. Look at it. The first two act on the law that is made elsewhere, in Congress. Constitutionally, they can do little unless there is a law made by . . . Congress. Sorry, that ain’t “coequal”. If the infantry is the queen of battle, the Congress is meant to be the queen of governance in a republic.

So, what has happened to Congress, it being the weak sister in the triumvirate? Nothing, except what Woodrow Wilson and FDR did to it. You might say that they ran at full speed with Hamilton’s “energy in the executive” (Federalist 70) toward progressivism’s dream of the big state, leaving the 535 squabbling inhabitants of the Capitol Building in the dust. What started with the Wilson/FDR imperial presidency, who then badgered Congress into effectively dispensing with a sensible reading of the Commerce Clause, made its way into an imperial judiciary who regularly legislates from the bench. Congress quickly became the footstool to a hyper-president and a non-entity to our uber-judges.

There’s more to the story. The “more” concerns the progressivism that’s in the head of all self-proclaimed liberals from the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the present. Deep in their cranium is IMPATIENCE to accomplish great and heroic deeds. They’re frustrated with the divided powers and checks and would like nothing better than to dispense with the whole racket by interpreting it out of existence, which they’ve done with the complicity of the Courts.

In that, they’ve got a lot in common with the communists. Communists are impatient socialists, and not at all receptive to the cautious instincts of their Fabian/Menshevik brethren. No need to wait for electoral success when a gun will do the trick right now.

As an aside, maybe this explains the socialist Bernie Sanders’s attraction to the Democratic Party, to caucus with them and seek their party’s presidential nomination. At an intuitive level, the Democratic Party’s progressivism and international socialism are kindred spirits. They are drawn like moths to the light bulb of the big state to accomplish great and good things. The quicker, the better.

One of the chief results of this turn of affairs is a Congress that can’t even pass a budget, their principal power of the purse. The presidency thrives in the Congressional chaos. The national government ends up running on continuing resolutions to avoid the stink of obvious Congressional impotence. These mega-bills carry forward the huge junkyard of federal spending, with a plus-up for inflation and some additional items heaped on the pile. Junk becomes a forever-thing. Also, buried in the all the junk are the many loopholes exploited by presidents.

The Courts are in their own progressive universe, not having to worry about legislative impediments to the agenda or impeachment, owing to Congress’s barrenness. Yet, reform of the Courts did happen despite Congress’s infirmity. It took some doing in the Senate and abnormal clear-sightedness by the normally bombastic Trump but the majority of black-robed potentates became a majority of Constitutionalists.

The same Trump who was instrumental in helping to herd the Courts back into their proper Constitutional sphere also exhibited many of the same power reflexes of his progressive forbearers. By fiat, for example, he shifted Pentagon money for bases to money for his wall. Not that we don’t need a wall. For heaven’s sake, we need something to manage the human tidal wave who’ve discovered the American minimum wage to be professional income in their homelands without air-conditioning.

Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, on the road linking Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, on October 21, 2018. (Photo by Pedro Pardo / AFP)

One’s view of potentates in the Oval Office spins on whether they’re your potentate or someone else’s. Caught up in the right’s frenzy for Trump, some conservative pundits became Trump pundits. To be clear, the terms “conservative” and “Trump” aren’t synonymous. Catching the “populist” wind in their sails, they turned on a dime on issues such as the Iraq War, free trade, and big-state entitlements for their audience-constituents. They became big-state activists like many Democrat caucus members. It’s just a big state for your side.

Thus, in lock-step defense of Trump, they expounded on how well “Trump ran the country” or how well “Trump ran the economy”. Right there, they fall into the progressive trap. A real conservative, not a Trumpkin, would cringe at such language. The president doesn’t run the country or economy. He’s elected to only run the executive branch. In our country, the people run the country and economy (a free market), not a histrionic huckster from Queens or a doddering fool beholden to the revolutionaries in his party.

We’d be well-served if that message made its way to the people. But, alas, that popular brain is taught to venerate Saint Woodrow and Archangel Franklin. We can’t get past the progressive hokum to appreciate the blessings of debate, dialogue, and compromise in a fractured society like ours, something a Congress is meant to channel. It can be slow and messy, but at least we’ll have our rights, religion, and property instead of losing them to “energy in the executive” or “energy in the judge’s chambers”.

To put it bluntly, progressivism is anti-democratic, anti-republic, and anti-Constitution. Progressives want to take the Elastic Clause and make every place that they control as elastic in power as possible. After all, it’s the ends that matter to them, not the means. Why worry about those bickering mouths at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? It saves time and effort to simply saddle up the black robes and chief executive to build the new world. Get ‘er done is the operative principle.

None of this is explained to the kiddies or adults. Don’t expect it from the schools. We reason from unexamined progressive assumptions to . . . whatever dominates Twitter and our other screens. It’s easy to be tossed hither and yon if you’re not grounded in the basics of our Constitutional order.

Progressivism set the table for this distortion of our consensual mode of governance. Heck, for the progs, it doesn’t even have to be consensual. An all-powerful EPA, ATF, IRS, FEC, SEC, FTC, etc., works fine for them.

RogerG

Posted on

America’s Soul-Destroying Time

If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.

One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.

These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.

All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.

Please watch the video.

RogerG