In Case You Had Any Doubt

The photo is doctored, but it is more honest than any previous Obama photo op.

David J. Garrow's Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

I haven't read David J. Garrow's Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, but a friend forwarded Paul Street's review in Counter Punch.  Street's review is from a left perspective--one which would have been called New Left a few decades ago.  Thus, while Street's (and presumably Garrow's) analysis is accurate, we part ways with respect to Street's criticisms of Garrow as well as Street's conclusions and recommendations.

Street's rendition of Garrow makes some similar points to those I made in this blog in 2008 and 2009. Street puts more weight than I did--how could I have known?--on Obama's lack of substance and his pragmatism.  It was evident from the contribution numbers readily available in 2008 that Obama would be deferential to Wall Street, which he was, according to the review.  

The left has never understood that socialism begets elitism, so a more socialistic economy would beget a slightly different but essentially similar set of figures to Robert Rubin and Lloyd Blankfein.  The elites in communist and softer socialist states don't differ much from the current American elite. Cliches like "neoliberalism," "progressive" and "democratic"  confuse leftists like Street, who remain wedded to the false premise that Hoover's Progressivism was laissez faire.

While it is true that Hoover was more laissez faire than Franklin Roosevelt, the basic statist infrastructure--the Fed, the permanent war machine, the draft,  the income tax,  the process for providing regulatory subsidization to special interests--was already in place under Hoover, and he supported it.  The Republicans elected during the 1920s--Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover--had no interest in repealing the big-government institutions that Theodore Roosevelt (R), Taft (R) and  Wilson (D) had put into place.   While Taft was conservative compared to Roosevelt, he was in the Progressive tradition, favoring use of litigation over regulation of trusts to enforce federal regulation. Roosevelt had favored a more regulated approach, so he ran against Taft in 1912, enabling election of Wilson, who signed both the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act into law.

The American imperial state has been evolving since Lincoln and before, and socialism is not the solution. It is the problem. Obama was in the imperial tradition of Leviathan, and Street's review is worth reading.

Oprah Winfrey's 2012 Campaign Donations

Oprah Winfrey is a Democrat par excellence.  She was number 184 on Forbes's list of the richest Americans in 2012.  Rich Democrats get to support candidates who help them financially, but they can also go around telling people that they put others first.   We can thank Oprah for making us all a little poorer, yet at the same time we can admire her conscience with sincere gratitude. She is a saint.

Obama Victory Fund                 35,800

Obama Victory Fund                 40,000

DNC Servcies Corp.                 30,800

Obama Barack                            5,000

Colorado Dem. Party                  3,181

Ohio Dem Party                        10,000

Dem. Exec. Comm. Florida       6,818

Dem. Party Va.                           4,090

Dem. Party WI                           5454

Iowas Democratic Party             4545

Nevada State Dem. Party           4545

New Hampshire Dem. Party      1363

Liberalism Unrelinquished

George Leef wrote about the Liberalism Unrelinquished site a few weeks ago, and I signed my name to its declaration, which reads

We the undersigned affirm the original arc of liberalism, and the intention not to relinquish the term liberal to the trends, semantic and institutional, toward the governmentalization of social affairs.

The signers are academics and journalists.

The word liberal meant of or pertaining to freedom until collectivists began to misuse it during the late 19th century.  Over the past 130 years the word, in Orwellian fashion, has been transformed from its root Latin meaning to of or pertaining to collectivism and authority.

The reason it was necessary for collectivists to claim that they are for freedom was that freedom, which lasted a few centuries here, increased the standard of living and quality of life.  Millions of immigrants flocked here for a reason that they did not understand: the opportunities here due to liberalism.   In contrast, the effects of the policies of the Democratic Party and its copycat sister, the Republican Party, has been increasing government, increasing control, and declining wealth.

Instead of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, today's America watches bleak futuristic films like The Congress, which sees technological advance as escapism attendant upon widespread decline and impoverishment.  Liberalism in its true meaning requires the opposite world view: Freedom results in innovation that makes us wealthier and frees us from oppression.

My wife just told me about Elizabeth Warren's 2011 statement:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.

Obama picked it up when he said, "Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help...Somebody else made that happen."

Of course, if you're unsuccessful you didn't get their on your own either.  If you're unsuccessful it's because of violent thieves like Obama and Warren.

In any case, when I think of all the Americans who died fighting for freedom, and I realize that their descendants elected the people whom they were fighting against, people like Hitler, Stalin, Obama, and Warren,  I was reminded of the importance of language.

Calling authoritarians liberal leads to authoritarianism, and I thank Kevin Frei and Daniel Klein, who started the Liberalism Unrelinquished site, for reminding us to use the word in the right way.

Obama the Least Competent but Not the Worst Postwar President

A July 2 Quinnipiac University poll finds that 33% of voters consider Obama to be the worst post-World War II president while 28% consider Bush to be the worst.  None of the others comes close.  The largest percentage of voters, 35%, like Ronald Reagan best.  Journalists who say that it takes years for historians to determine the true quality of a president so that the numbers aren't meaningful are misguided.  First, most historians are left or statist biased so that their opinions mean zero.  Historians are ideologues, and they frequently place their ideology before the facts. Second, historians are filled with future-oriented biases and typically lack a full grasp of the gestalt of a given era.  Future historians will be at a disadvantage in interpreting today's facts.

That said, I don't agree that Obama is the worst postwar president because Nixon did more to expand government than Obama did.  Obama is a traitor and a dummy, and his freeing a traitorous soldier a few weeks ago was the result. As well, his ill-conceived healthcare act is and will be a disaster, and he has magnified the economic errors of the Bush and preceding administrations.

The opinions of Americans mean little, for America is a dumbed down idiocracy. For example, a slightly greater number say that they like Obama better than Bush on the economy, but I doubt any can identify real differences between the policies of Bush and Obama because there have not been any.  The great debate between Democrats and Republicans about the economy during the Obama years was the $800 billion stimulus spent on crooked Obama cronies, but Bush had also overseen a stimulus. I recall getting the check for a few hundred dollars.

David Vogel's Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America traces the history of business-government relations in the postwar era.  The book was copyrighted in 1989, so it doesn't tell the whole story, but the book makes clear that if you consider the president to have been worst who has most expanded government, then Nixon is worst.

Vogel describes how Nixon got into a pissing contest with Senator Edmund Muskie to see who could pass the more aggressive environmental regulation. He signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act,the Cigarette Advertising Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972, and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. Regarding the Clean Air Act, Vogel writes this (p.73):

With the passage of the House bill, the Nixon administration had firmly established a preeminent position in the field of environmental protection. It had initiated a significant strengthening and broadening of the federal government's regulatory authority over what was literally the most visible dimension of pollution control...

Vogel adds (p. 90):

The period of industry's greatest vulnerability--at least in the areas of social regulation and tax policy--coincided with the presidency of Republican Richard Nixon.  Just as it took the presidency of Lyndon Johnson to enact the legislative agenda of John Kennedy's New Frontier, so were many of the most important regulatory initiatives of Johnson's Great Society approved during the presidency of Richard Nixon.

As well, Nixon introduced what was probably the most socialistic American policy of the post-war period: wage and price controls and controls on oil prices. Not only did this policy fail; it generated Soviet Union-style lines at gas stations and was punctuated with the worst inflation since the one following Woodrow Wilson's venture into wartime socialism during World War I.

Vogel barely mentions the chief harm that Nixon did to the US: the abolition of the remnant of the gold standard that had survived under the Bretton Woods agreement. This opened up the door to ongoing expansion of government and money printing, which continues today.  I have to revise my former belief that Johnson was the worst president; Nixon was even worse than Johnson.

It is also true that the three presidents who introduced unnecessary wars, Truman, Johnson, and Bush, deserve demerits.  When you put the Vietnam War together with the Great Society, Johnson comes close to Nixon.  The abolition of the gold standard, though, was so far reaching that it reduces Nixon's position to worst.

It is shocking that a candidate as inept as Barack Obama received the adulation that he did, not only from dumbed down college students who have trouble spelling their own names but also from their professors.  It is the students who will ultimately pay the price for their choice, though.

Despotism Light

Clyde Warren Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has an excellent piece in Forbes on what he calls despotism-lite: Barack Obama's use of executive orders to circumvent the legislative process.  What is the difference between a dictator like Saddam Hussein's giving an order that's obeyed without question and Obama's giving an executive order that's obeyed without question?

Warren refers to Obama's imperious style, and he lists a number of major executive orders whose execution usurps Congressional authority.  These include executive orders concerning work-life programs, student loans, and establishing a quadrennial energy review.

Besides these programs' being useless crap, the pattern confirms that the federal government is neither a republic nor a democracy: It is an authoritarian dictatorship that lacks legitimacy.

Obama's Dismal Presidency

In 1951 David B. Truman, president of Mount Holyoke College, published The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion, a monumental, scholarly work on the political science of special interest groups and the federal government. Truman illustrates his chief points with history, and he offers insightful anecdotes about many of the chief twentieth century interest groups such as the American Federation of Labor, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Grange, and the American Medical Association. Truman integrates his discussion of interest groups with a discussion of the structure of the federal government; he shows how the structure of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court determine how interest groups behave.

In Truman's chapter on the executive branch, which is near the end of the book, he dissects the characteristics of successful and effective American presidents.  He writes this (p. 403):

The president's leadership of the legislature depends heavily upon his symbolic supraparty position. Although he cannot completely ignore the pleas of partisanship, he must play upon the multiple memberships of both fellow party-members and nominal opponents in order to effect winning support for the cause he is championing.

Truman also writes this (p. 402):

The president's partisanship and partiality among groups must be kept within limits...despite the need to maintain cohesion among the elements that helped him to power.  The process by which he is nominated and elected inevitably gives some groups better access to him than others can command, but as the dominant symbol of the nation, he cannot be completely identified with a segment of it...The measure of detachment imposed on a president by his position as a chief of state is not necessarily a handicap.  The obligation to remain minimally accessible to all legitimate interests in the society can supply him with a measure of independence and a persuasive power that effectively supplements his formal authority.

By these measures, President Barack Obama's presidency has been a failure.  He has failed to represent all of America.  This failure is due to the American media, which no longer offers diversity of viewpoints that reflect the range of legitimate views in America--a problem that Truman discusses at length but which has become more serious since Truman's day, when it was already a matter of concern. Rather, like the media in a totalitarian state, the American media attempts to delegitimize legitimate opinion that deviates from Obama's narrow party line.  

Obama represents the interests of one segment of America: the pro-Wall Street left wing of the Democratic Party.  He has made no effort to compromise, whether it be in his ideologically motivated health reform, his failed cap-and-trade proposal, his use of the IRS to target conservatives and other dissidents,  and his attacks on the states in areas like his No Child Left Behind Act, er, I mean Common Core.

Obama has so divided America that, for the first time since the 1960s, we see pockets of armed resistance to the federal government. The contretemps at the Cliven Bundy ranch is a symptom of failed president who has divided rather than united a nation.  The media's ideologues, ever eager to support the federal government's authority, paint the militia who support Bundy as extremists.  Their extremism is the fruit of Obama's extremism and the extremism of the American media, which does not tolerate dissent.

Millionaires Thank Krugman, Yellen, Obama, and the Democratic Party

As the Dow Jones industrial average nears its all-time high, those who are rich need to take a moment to praise the Democratic party and its supporters.  It is advantageous to have clever advocates, and who can be a better advocate for millionaires than those who claim that they dislike them?

The elite Democrats of academia, those who advocate taxes out of one side of their mouths and monetary expansion out of the other, are  the millionaire's best friend.  The Republicans aren't because they claim to favor the wealthy and those who work, and the public and many of the wealthy have yet to understand that the wealthy are not so because they work; they are wealthy because they own.

When Janet Yellen and the Fed reduce interest rates, the value of assets is increased, and the rich become richer.  What else can matter to the wealthy? Do gay rights, global warming, great  causes, gross income inequality, or a stagnant real wage matter?

All are distractions to the one issue that matters, the one issue about which the news will ever remain silent: the expansion of the money supply, the reduction of interest rates, the inflation of asset values, the suppression of  real wages, and the increment to the  portfolio.

On behalf of the world's millionaires, I thank Paul Krugman; I praise Janet Yellen; I sing hallelujah to Barack Obama.

Engage Mid-Hudson: Bad for You, Bad for Me

 I sent this email to David Church, Orange County (New York) commissioner of planning, and Thomas Madden, planner for the Town of Greenburgh.  Church and Madden led an Agenda-21-inspired regional planning charade called "Engage Mid-Hudson." The plan is packed with lies and superstition.  Church and Madden are front men for Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama, who are pushing for regional plans that aim to destroy Americans' living standards through ill-considered environmental regulation.  Cutting carbon emissions by some predetermined amount is based on ignorant, junk science advocated in places like The New York Times by badly educated "environmental scientists" who are ill equipped to evaluate the limits of their own training.  Ms. Muller is the public relations officer for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which funded 10 regional organizations with $10 million each to draft half-baked regional environmental plans. The Engage Mid-Hudson plan is here.

Dear Messrs. Church and Madden and Ms. Muller:

I am writing an article for The Lincoln Eagle, an 18,000-circulation monthly paper in Kingston, NY, concerning Engage Mid-Hudson’s regional green plan (executive summary attached) that was released in May.  I have a few questions for you.  Please address these concerns either in writing or by telephone:

(1)    “(The plan) was developed through a consensus-building process. “  At the initial meeting there were a number of protestors who voiced concerns about the plan. The plan does not address their concerns. At one point in the initial meeting you threatened to evict those who were disagreeing, although you rescinded that threat.  You did not appoint any who disagreed to officer positions, reserving your organization’s formal appointments  for connected retired IBM employees like Herb Oringel and other corporate-and-government insiders.  Although you ultimately were cordial in the initial meeting, the plan is misleading because it does not mention the sharp disagreement that was made evident to you and that you have failed to address.  This is also evident on your group’s website, which asks for reactions to the plan but does not permit a negative reaction. 

There is no consensus, and your plan’s claim that there is is a falsehood.  In particular Lynn Teger’s group Citizens for the Protection of Property Rights in the Mid Hudson Region was excluded from the process. If you wish to contact Ms. Teger, she can be reached at teger.lynn@gmail.com . If you do not wish to contact her for her group’s input, I would appreciate an explanation as to your selective choices as to who got to be invited to your charade.  IBMers, yes. Property rights activists, no.  There is no consensus because major opponents of your “non-binding”  plan were excluded.

(2)    You claim that carbon emissions cause global warming.  Yet, here is a graph of 5 million years of climate change, and current temperatures are well below those of five million years ago, when there were no human carbon emissions.  How is it possible that the climate is now cooler than it was before humans existed if climate warming  is anthropogenic?  If you do not know the answer, please explain why you claim to know the sources of climate change in your report, but really you, your consulting firm, Francis Murray, Andrew Cuomo,  climate scientists, and the environmental movement are ignorant about it.

(3)    You make the claim that you aim to “reduce the region’s overall contribution to climate change.” Please produce empirical evidence of any kind that specifically shows that the Catskills and Hudson Valley region make any significant contribution to climate change.  On what factual evidence other than hearsay from your consulting firm and the ignorant parties previously noted do you base this claim?

(4)    How much did you pay Ecology and Environment, Inc. to frame this plan?  The plan is a knock-off of other ICLEI-and-Agenda 21-based plans; a monkey could have copied it off other plans for free.  Please explain why 300 people who supposedly participated in this planning process came up with a model that already exists in hundreds of plans around the world.
 

(5)    In the 1930s, there were the dust bowl storms, which were worse than any storms occurring now.  Please provide me with evidence of this claim: “Critically, climate change can impact the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. The Mid-Hudson Region is already challenged by extreme weather events, particularly flooding, as evidenced in the recent hurricanes Irene and Sandy. “  Was Sandy the first hurricane or storm to affect the region? I think not.  In 1821 a hurricane made landfall in New York, flooding Manhattan to Canal Street. 

(6)    Your report lacks evidence of an understanding of cost-benefit tradeoffs.  Even if windstorms increase by 50%, is that a rationale to curtail living standards by 50%? Please clarify how you calculated the tradeoffs in the report’s many far-fetched, extreme claims, such as that there is a need to reduce automobile use or to force people in rural settings to move to urban ones.

(7)    You write that the region needs to “become radically less energy and fossil fuel intensive while strengthening the regional economy.” Please provide data or empirical evidence that the region needs to become less energy and fuel intensive.   There is no evidence that the regional economy can become stronger without fossil fuels. You implicitly make the claim that it is possible, but there is no empirical evidence that it is.  Please provide some.  You wild, unverified claims amount to superstition, not intelligent policy making.

(8)    The reduction in available farmland was caused by a massive building binge that was funded through sub-prime mortgage lending.  Earlier, the Federal Reserve Bank expanded the money supply over a century, in part to fund energy-intensive centralized agriculture, suburban development, and the automobile industry.  Could you please mention that Andrew Cuomo in 1993 had proposed expansion of home building to include sub-prime borrowers, which led to increased use of farmland for home building and ultimately harmed the financial industry? First, Cuomo advocated massive expansion of private home ownership.  Now he is attacking private home ownership.  Can you please reconcile these wild vacillations in the direction of Mr. Cuomo’s maelstrom?

(9)     You write that you aim to “foster economic development” and “make all growth smart growth.”  The term “smart growth" is vacuous and nonsensical.  Historically, economic growth occurs in the absence of government regulation.  I do not believe that you or your crew of IBM bureaucrats have the slightest idea as to how to foster economic growth.

The best way for New York to grow is to abolish Engage Mid-Hudson and fire three quarters of New York’s vampire government.  Would you please explain your track record in fostering economic development in a state that has lagged the national economic performance for decades? To be precise: What do you know about economic development?  Is Orange County successful in developing economically compared to North Dakota or other carbon energy-developing states?

(10) You make the claim that tourism can strengthen the area’s economy. Do you have any evidence that you know how to develop tourism?  You remind me of the film Roger and Me in which Flint, Michigan attempts to turn itself into a tourist mecca. They succeeded in further damaging their blighted economy--which was not as blighted as New York’s.

(11) Engage Mid-Hudson has no authority to pass legislation or regulation, yet you write in terms of targets. How can you implement targets if you have no authority?

Ann Coulter Should Apologize

Ann Coulter should apologize for calling King Hussein a retard.  Mental retardation is not a sign of bad character. Also, most mental retards have a better understanding of the United States Constitution than King Hussein does. Coulter owes retards an apology.

King Barack Murders Children, Moves to Take Away Your Right to Defend Yourself from His Majesty

King Barack sheds a tear for the children murdered in Connecticut, but he sheds no tears for the 168 children he and his colleague George Bush have murdered in Pakistan (h/t Mike Marnell).  In Vietnam Lyndon Baynes Johnson and the United States government murdered several hundred thousand Vietnamese children.  Now,  cheered on by America's backward media, Washington's serial killers aim to ruthlessly capitalize on a tragedy to  illegally prevent you from defending yourself from them.

 From The Telegraph:


In an extensive analysis of open-source documents, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 2,292 people had been killed by US missiles, including as many as 775 civilians.

The strikes, which began under President George W Bush but have since accelerated during the presidency of Barack Obama, are hated in Pakistan, where families live in fear of the bright specks that appear to hover in the sky overhead.

In just a single attack on a madrassah in 2006 up to 69 children lost their lives.

Chris Woods, who led the research, said the detailed database of deaths would send shockwaves through Pakistan, where political and military leaders repeatedly denounce the strikes in public, while privately allowing the US to continue.

"This is a military campaign run by a secret service which raised problems of accountability, transparency and you have a situation where neither the Pakistanis nor Americans are clear about any agreements in place and where the reporting is difficult," he said.

Romney-and-Obama Supporters Are Good Germans

 I am voting for Johnson not because he is not the lesser of two evils.  I am voting for Johnson because he stands for freedom, while Romney and Obama stand for totalitarianism.  Romney favors tariffs, a significant increase in government.  If your aim is to reduce government, Romney is the greater, not the lesser, of two evils.  

The same was true of Reagan in 1980.  He claimed to be for small government, but he did not reduce government, and he opened the door for massive increases in local taxes through his new federalism, whereby he downloaded programs to the states. Carter had stopped inflation by appointing Paul Volcker as Fed chairman (who implemented monetarist policies starting in 1979); he had deregulated the airlines and trucking.  Reagan reignited inflation and a 25-year stock bubble through supply-side economics, instituted new regulation in areas like human resource management, and did NOT reduce the federal government.  Can you  claim that Reagan was the lesser of two evils?  With the Republican-conceived $29 trillion bailout of banks, the Republicans' bunkum has grown old.   There has been no bigger expansion of the state than the Republican-conceived $29 trillion bailout of 2009. To support Romney is to support socialism.

Choosing between Romney and Obama is choosing between two candidates who support the Federal Reserve Bank’s swap of $29 trillion in real assets for banks’ failed investments. The Fed’s printed money comes out of my pocket--it is stolen.  

I oppose both thieving gangsters:  Romney and Obama.  Neither Romney nor Obama are the lesser of two evils. They both represent significant, direct harm to me and to this country;  their supporters participate in their national socialism, just as the good Germans did under Hitler.