A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.
If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.
Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.
How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.
We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.
Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.
Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.
Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.
Need more be said?
What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.
Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.
Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.
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.
Friday, Greg Popovich regaled us with a lecture on the evils of Columbus. Popovich’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. You’d think that an Air Force Academy grad would have a better head on his shoulders. One reason that a half-wit like Popovich can get away with this moral flim-fllam is the pile of Red Chinese money going into the pockets of people like Popovich and Le Bron. Bash a guy dead for centuries but don’t disturb the CCP money train. It’s revolting.
Greg Popovich
A Himalaya-size hypocrisy envelops Popovich and the NBA when it comes to a “just” society. Ask the people of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs. As the people of Hong Kong face “disappearance”, as a surveillance state with its chain of gulags blankets the nation in ways that rival anything in Orwell’s imagination, as the Uyghurs face certain annihilation, Popovich and other millionaire titans of Big Sports, Inc., conveniently go mum, so long as the flow of Chinese cash from sneakers, caps, and jerseys continues unimpeded.
The NBA’s conspicuous moral blackout is even more galling when we come to know that Red Chinese officialdom is conducting a snuff film of the Uyghur people with forced sterilizations and the officially-sponsored rape and adultery of Uyghur women by ordering Han Chinese men to live in the homes of jailed Uyghur husbands. Now that’s racist, racist with a capital R.
Uyghur inmates in a concentration camp in Xinjiang province.
To set the record straight, let’s go back to real history. The world’s 15th,16th, and 17th centuries were a violent time, and it wasn’t limited to Columbus and company. Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec empire was made easy by the defection of the indigenous Aztec-oppressed from daily, ritual human sacrifice. Other Native Americans peoples were not immune to culturally-based brutality. “Marauding” is applied by anthropologists to tribal assaults on rival tribes, usually at night or in the early morning. Massacre sites of men, women, children, the old, the young, and the infirmed are the stuff of the archeological record.
An example Mohawk savagery occurred in 1642. A band of Hurons with two French priests accompanying them were attacked by a force of Mohawks. Many were killed while others were taken captive, including the two priests. One of them would survive to tell the tale. In a letter in 1643, Father Jogues wrote,
“On the eighth day we fell in with a band of two hundred Indians going out to fight (on an island in Lake Champlain); and as it is the custom for savages, when out on war-parties, to initiate themselves, as it were, by cruelty, under the belief that their success will be the greater as they shall have been the more cruel, they thus received us: First rendering thanks to the sun, which they imagine presides over war, they congratulated their countrymen by a joyful volley of musketry. Each then cut some stout clubs in the neighboring wood in order to receive us. After we had landed from the canoes, they fell upon us from both sides with their clubs in such fury, that I, who was the last and therefore the most exposed to their blows, sank overcome by their numbers and severity before I had accomplished half the rocky way that led to the hill on which a stage had been erected for us. I thought I should quickly die there; and therefore, partly because I could not, partly because I cared not, I did not rise. How long they spent their fury upon me He knows for whose love and sake it is delightful and glorious thus to suffer. Moved at last by a cruel mercy, and wishing to carry me to their country alive, they ceased to strike. And thus half dead and covered with blood, they bore me to the scaffold. Here I had scarce begun to breathe, when they ordered me to come down to load me with scoffs and insults, and countless blows upon my head and shoulders, and indeed my whole body. I should be tedious were I to attempt to tell all that the French prisoners suffered. They burnt one of my fingers, and crushed another with their teeth; the others already thus mangled they so wrenched by the tattered nerves that even now, though healed, they are frightfully deformed.”
I suppose that Indigenous Peoples Day would have a different ring to the indigenous peoples who were captured to keep the sacrificial altars of Tenochtitlan filled with a steady supply of open chests. Yeah, you’d be right to say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but at least admit cruelty isn’t the sole possession of those from European locales. Europeans landed on a continent that was beset with savagery.
In the Mandan tribe, you were suspended by hooks (and had your fingers chopped off).
Popovich, please stop the moral grandstanding. Your hypocrisy in the service mammon is loathsome.
And you wonder why the NBA’s popularity is fading in the US. Thank people like the money-grubbing charlatans of the NBA.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )
Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.
I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.
Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.
Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.
As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.
EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.
We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.
What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.
As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.
Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.
The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.
Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.
We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.
Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.
Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.
Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.
And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.
Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.
The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.
Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.
Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.
Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.
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.
