Leading GOP Politicians Oppose Campus Due Process

In the Weekly Standard, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. describe how the overwhelming majority of GOP senators, governors, and congressmen have failed to support Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's revised regulations under Title IX of the Education Amendments. The revisions undo much of the skewness in procedures concerning sexual harassment cases on campus.  

Among the abuses that have occurred, and that some GOP politicians appear to support, are, according to Johnson and Taylor: 

pervasive pro-accuser bias among academic officials; secret training of adjudicators to believe accusers even in the face of discrediting evidence; bans on meaningful cross-examination; concealment of exculpatory evidence; designation of a single bureaucrat as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury; and numerous other due-process outrages. 

Johnson and Taylor contacted Republican members of the  Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee to gauge their views. Lamar Alexander and Bill Cassidy  favor DeVos's proposed changes. None of the other committee members responded to Johnson and Taylor's inquiry.  The Republican senators on the committee who did not respond are as follows:

Michael B. Enzi

Senator Richard Burr
Senator Johnny Isaakson

Senator Rand Paul

Senator Susan Collins

Senator Todd Young

Senator Orrin Hatch

Senator Paul Roberts

Senator Lisa Murkowski

Senator Tim Scott

It is unclear whether the failure of ten Republican senators to respond indicates opposition to the amendments, cowardice, or lack of time and resources.  

A House Republican who has supported the amendments is Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. In contrast, Thomas Kean Jr., a Republican in the New Jersey state senate, is proposing New Jersey regulations that will please left-wing extremists who oppose due process.  Kean aims to preempt federal due process requirements by substituting state-based rules. Republican Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire is also siding with the left.

Perhaps a broader survey of  elected Republicans' positions on education reform would be beneficial.  I have been wondering for many years as to why elected Republicans seem to behave in a self-defeating way.  They are unperturbed at universities' functioning ideologically; they have no qualms about funding ideologically imbued cultural studies, social science, and humanities courses that indoctrinate students to be anti-Republican Party activists; they are unconcerned about the failure of universities to validate the efficacy of funds spent with respect to both education and job placement.  

  

It appears that what is happening is that since left wingers dominate education lobbies and few Americans who are not part of the lobbies take an interest in education, Republicans respond primarily to left-wing demands.  

That is a self-defeating cynicism because the higher education institutions banish Republican professors and teach students to hate Republicans. It reminds me of the faux quotation from Lenin: The last Republican will be he who votes the dollar to the educationist who teaches the student who buys the rope that hangs him.

What may be needed is a focused lobbying organization that counteracts educationist lobbies that take $200 billion a year in public money out of the economy, much of it amounting to dead weight social loss.  They have overseen a 50-year stagnation in the real hourly wage, questionable job outcomes for the bottom half of the college population, education programs that indoctrinate rather than educate, and administrative bloat. 

Reinvigorating the Contract Clause

George Leef has a great piece in Forbes this week on the effect of erosion of the contract clause on individual liberty. George discusses a case that will soon come before the Supreme Court, Sveen v. Melin, in which a husband who had divorced his wife but wanted to keep her as his life insurance beneficiary died. The state of Minnesota had declared that spousal beneficiary designations are to be revoked upon divorce, so the state has deprived his wife and their children of insurance money. The capriciousness of state and federal law undermines the ability to do business. The current judicial rule given to courts is vague and expansive, and since the New Deal courts have served as a rubber stamp to every dictatorial decision big-government advocates favor. Although I gag every time I think about President Trump's tariff decision, this kind of case is a reason to continue to support the Republican Party. It's hard, though.

A nation that has exchanged its welfare for neither liberty nor security can be written off.

Claremont Review of Books

937 West Foothil Blvd., Suite E

Claremont, California  91711
c/o Charles E. Kesler, Editor 

Dear CRB:

I have received a couple of issues of Claremont Review of Books.  It is well written and challenging.  I do not, however, wish to receive further copies.  You can keep my subscription payment as a donation; please take me off your subscription-and-mailing list.

While pursuing a corporate and then an academic career, I took about 25 years off from a brief interest in libertarianism that crested in 1980.  In 2003, with the Iraqi War, I began profiting from investing in gold.  To relieve my guilt about betting against the dollar, I renewed my interest in stemming America's 216-year-old statist goosestep that has led to the dollar's decline. 

It turned out, five years later, that the GOP, the Democrats, and the Federal Reserve Bank had so mismanaged the US's monetary system that Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld had managed to squander two thirds of a trillion dollars in Federal Reserve-counterfeit--80 percent of the nation's money supply at that time.   Since then impoverishment of America's productive classes through counterfeit channeled to its exploitative financier class has not troubled the two parties, the Wall Street-owned media, the Wall Street-subsidized universities, or the American people themselves.   As a result, I no longer feel guilty about short selling the dollar; morally, I relish it.  Moreover, I plan on a permanent disengagement from political concerns. As Montaigne put it and Jefferson once quoted: "L’ignorance est le plus doux oreiller sur lequel un homme peut reposer sa tête." 

America is not a democracy, nor is it a republic; it is a progressive-totalitarian oligarchy ruled by financiers run amok.  The promise of American democracy is paltry and dull.  It is a democracy with two choices: (a) Republican, Taft Progressives who bailed out Goldman Sachs and (b) Democratic, Roosevelt Progressives who bailed out Goldman Sachs.   

In order to win the public to accepting the financiers' fake Progressive dialectic in 1912, Progressives promised rising standards of living and freedom. They failed to keep their promises; that is, the promise of American life is a fraud.  Socrates chose to abide by the laws of Athens because he had made an implicit contract, but my ancestors were defrauded.  I, for one, don't plan on hanging around, so I don't care what happens here.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

The Enemy is Progressivism, Not Obama: Dinesh D'Souza's 2016

I just saw 2016: Obama.  Dinesh D'Souza is right: Obama is a traitor.  Nevertheless, the film's lack of historical perspective is troubling. D'Souza's ignoring history allows him to exaggerate Obama's importance.  Moreover, D'Souza colors his facts wrong.  For example, indebtedness that has arisen during Obama's administration is not new.  The president who threw the U.S. into a pattern of heavy indebtedness was D'Souza's former boss, Ronald Reagan.  Moreover, the bigger financial problem is the Republican-and-Democratic-supported bailout.

D'Souza claims that Obama is using debt to bankrupt us. He forgets that Reagan's supply-side economics was just a variation of Keynesian economics. D'Souza forgets that it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard and so permitted the past 40 years of Fed plundering; he forgets that it was George W. Bush, supported by both McCain and Obama, who initiated $29 trillion--more than twice the American economy--in Federal Reserve subsidies to banks. Obama's indebtedness is tiny in comparison to the Fed's 2008 and 2009 bailouts, which the Republicans as well as Obama conceptualized and continue to support.   

Traitors linked to Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations have been running America for a century. The Republicans have plenty to answer for, such as Prescott Bush's and other Brown Brothers Harriman associates' funding of Stalin and Hitler as Anthony Sutton outlines in his history of Skull and Bones.  Sutton describes how David Rockefeller met on a regular basis to trade ideas with a Soviet ambassador at a time when it was illegal to do business with the Soviets. The CFR favored trade with and subsidies to the Soviet Union at a time when billions were being spent to build defenses against them, and more than  50,000 Americans died in Vietnam.

In other words, the disloyal, internationalist pattern started with Woodrow Wilson, JP Morgan, and Bernard Baruch, and continued through David Rockefeller and the investment bankers of today.  Obama is a symptom of Federal Reserve-based capitalism, but D'Souza paints him as a radical new cause.  It was George H. W. Bush's administration that signed the anti-American, anti-colonialist UN Agenda 21. If anti-colonialism is new to the highest levels of American policy making, as D'Souza claims, why did Bush sign Agenda 21?   It is true that Obama is aggressively implementing Agenda 21, but if the Republicans oppose it, why did Bush adopt it? What did Bush mean by new world order, a phrase taken out of the history of Progressivism and Skull and Bones, and does Bush's new world order differ from Obama's in more than a few details?   

Since the beginning of Progressivism in the late 19th century, the Progressives have posed false dichotomies, aiming for a synthesis that differs from both thesis and anti-thesis. The roots of Progressivism were in the nineteenth century German universities where the first American Progressives, such as Daniel Coit Gilman, creator of the modern American university, were educated.  Left versus right, liberal versus conservative,  and Republican versus Democratic  serve to divert attention from the synthesis:  massive rents paid to special interests and Wall Street via the Fed's counterfeiting mechanism.  Both Democrats and Republicans have consistently excelled in paying them.  The political synthesis that will result from totalitarians like Obama and Romney is totalitarianism, but the way to fight it is to step outside the conflict and destroy its pretended universality, not to demonize Obama.  The kind of false dichotomy that D'Souza offers is part of the totalitarian trend.

The points that stick in my throat are Obama's apparent anti-Zionism, hostility to Israel, and hostility to the British.  An America that transfers tens of trillions of dollars to banks will not be of much help to Israel in any case.

Carl Paldino Takes out Alphonse D'Amato

 Former New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino sent this e-mail to former New York Senator Al D'Amato. Paladino is wrong.  D'Amato isn't a fraud; slime can't be a fraud. 

From: Carl Paladino
Date: June 29, 2012 12:32:12 AM EDT
To: "adamato@parkstrategies.com" <adamato@parkstrategies.com>
 

Al, keep your nose out of WNY politics or I will expose your underbelly. You are a spineless fraud and you're going down with Skelos. Did you have fun at Andrews $50k party? You are such a low life parasite. It's all about money and you could care less about the people and republican principals. What are you going to do when I tell the people that you were the prime mover of Andrew's gay marriage bill so he could pound his chest as the most powerful governor the state has ever known and you could have access as a lobby for the big buck clients you extort.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

From: Carl Paladino
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 6:12 PM
To: Carl Paladino
Subject: FW: Al D'Amato, the predator

Al, the following is typical of the many comments that I received in response to my earlier e-mail to you.

I was asked by many the reason for my e-mail.  It’s simple and really gets to the heart of what is wrong in New York State.

Al D’Amato, in concert with his surrogates Dean Skelos and George Maziarz were approached last year by Andrew Cuomo and his minions to make a deal.  Cuomo wanted to show everyone in the State that he could do anything with the complicit New York State Republican led Senate with RINO Dean Skelos at the helm including getting legislative approval for the extreme left issue of gay marriage.  Getting that law passed would allow Cuomo to pound his chest Tarzan style and also would allow Cuomo to payback the gay community for their 2010 unwarranted but effective bashing of my candidacy.  

In return D’Amato, the prime mover of the effort, would get access to Cuomo on initiatives that he needed for his lobbying clients who pay big bucks.  

Anyone who thinks that the holdup of the Marcellus shale drilling permit has anything to do with the merits being argued in public is a fool drinking cool-aid.  It’s all about Mr. Green showing up at the doors of the likes of D’Amato the lobbyist.  “Quid pro quo” is denying upstate 25,000 jobs at $75,000/year.  How sick is that Al. 

Knowing that Skelos and Maziarz (with his special inclination) were spineless and could not vote for the bill, the cabal picked 4 republican senators (Grisanti, Alessi, McDonald and Salland) and promised  they would each get $500,000 in contributions from the gay community and future favors from the cabal including campaign support.

Freshman Senator Grisanti from Buffalo intended to do the right for his constituents when he got in office.   Cuomo, Maziarz, Skelos and D’Amato brought heavy pressure on him to sell out and at the last minute he threw his integrity under the bus, broke his promises to the people who donated to his campaign and voted for the law. 

I believe that if Mark came out and told the truth about what happened to him and revealed the hypocrisy of the  cabal’s complicity the people of his district would be forgiving, but that will not happen because the cabal continues to stroke and intimidate him with false hope.

Romney Outpolls Obama

The Rasmussen Poll finds that Romney noses out Obama 46%-45%.  I'm trying to figure out whether that's good or bad.  Rasmussen also finds that in a national generic congressional poll the Republicans are leading by 46% to 36%.  The difference is volatile, though; last week it was less than half that.

The numbers may result from Obama's unpopular health care law.  Rasmussen finds that 53% of the public favor its repeal.  If 53% favor repeal and 45% favor Obama, either almost all the 9% undecided presidential voters favor repeal, or some Obama supporters do.  That makes sense because we're talking about American voters. It would be interesting to know whether a few percent both favor Obama and favor repeal of Obamacare.  Also, the public is skeptical of Obama's economic program.  Rasmussen finds that only 49% of Americans say that their home is worth more than when they bought it, and only 27% think that the country is headed in the right direction.

All of this raises the specter of a double-breasted Republican victory: Republican control of congress and the presidency. On the one hand, that may have the effect of repeal of the health care law. Also, it would slow the environmental initiatives of the Obama administration: the attacks on energy development, the local initiatives like Smart Growth and LEED, and the concomitant attacks on home rule and democracy.   Unfortunately, the Republicans have backed erosion of home rule and land rights too, but to a lesser degree.  It is not clear that government will shrink under double-breasted GOP control; rather, the Republicans have previously consolidated Democratic expansions of state power and big government.  If they do, in fact, repeal Obamacare, it will be a first.

At the same time, the Republicans have been good at causing inflation, expanding military spending, and government tyranny.  All of this goes goes back to the Progressive era, with the establishment of the Fed (under Democrat Wilson, who was elected with the aid of Republican Roosevelt), the FBI, and the Palmer Raids.  (Incidentally,  if you haven't seen Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar starring Leonardo DiCaprio, I recommend it.)

The Bush administration accented the problems with Republican government:  crony capitalism, pork barrel waste, and monetary expansion.  In other words, the problems with electing Republicans are about the same as the problems with electing Democrats.  The difference is that the Republicans bloat government to subsidize Republican special interests while the Democrats bloat government to subsidize Democratic special interests.  Both subsidize Wall Street. 

I am in favor of  a third party, either the Libertarian Party or a new party if Ron Paul chooses to establish one.  Governor Gary Johnson would be a first-rate candidate on the Libertarian ticket. He is more moderate and more competent than either Obama or Romney.  Unlike Romney, who is a crony capitalist who has made his living through connections and monetary expansion, Johnson built a real business from scratch.  He did not expand government in New Mexico; he fought a Democratic legislature to restrain government. In America, now, a third party candidate like Johnson is a more moderate choice than either a Democrat or a Republican.

Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Unschooled on Race and Conservatives

Leonard Pitts, Jr. writes a spin piece in today's Seattle Times (h/t Adam Schmidt on Facebook).  Pitts  argues that African Americans would be insane to support conservatives because conservatives have always been anti-Black. 

Pitts illustrates the historical ignorance that characterizes the American left and its pitiful media. Social conservatives in New England were the leaders of the abolitionist movement.  For example, John Brown's father was associated with Oberlin College, where Charles Finney, leader of the Second Great Awakening, was president. Oberlin, a Calvinist Presbyterian School, was the first college to admit African Americans in 1835.  Wikipedia writes of Charles Finney:

In addition to becoming a popular Christian evangelist, Finney was involved with the abolitionist movement and frequently denounced slavery from the pulpit. In 1835, he moved to Ohio where he became a professor and later president of Oberlin College from 1851 to 1866. Oberlin became active early in the movement to end slavery and was among the first American colleges to co-educate blacks and women with white men.^[8]

<sup>Pitts is also wrong because, later in the 19th century, the Mugwumps, who tended to support laissez faire as well as reforms such as the Pendleton Act, tended not to be anti-Black. They were the post-bellum Republican elitists during the period of carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.  During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan's first victims were African American Republicans.  George Wallace, the leader of 1960s racism, was a Democrat and a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As Pitts points out, the worst racists were Democrats. Although Pitts calls them conservatives, the racist Democrats voted for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt just as the northerners did. Pitts's argument is circular:  racism is conservative, therefore, conservatives are racists.  But the advocates of limited government were not necessarily more racist than the supporters of big government and big business--the GOP.  On the one hand, it is true that Andrew Jackson, the founder of today's Democratic Party, was a racist and that his Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney was responsible for the Dred Scott decision.  But the New York labor unions were probably more anti-African American than Jackson was.  That The Miami Herald's syndicated columnist Pitts is apparently unfamiliar with the Draft Riots and organized labor's sympathy for the South during the Civil War is an embarrassment to the pathetic legacy of American journalism.</sup> 

Pitts's argument is tautological:  racists are conservative, therefore conservatives never stood up for blacks.  In fact, the first “conservatives” might be said to have been the pro-laissez faire Mugwumps, who favored the gold standard, opposed tariffs, and favored limited government.   The founder of The Nation, EL Godkin, was not overly supportive of African Americans, but he was no racist.  The Republican Party in the late 19^th century was a big government, pro business party, and mostly laissez faire (at least in words).  

At the same time, the Progressives, especially Woodrow Wilson, were frequently overt racists.  Eugenics was a significant facet of Progressivism, and as C. Vann Woodward points out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Jim Crow exploded during the Progressive era, not the Gilded Age, which was characterized by policies and leadership that conservatives support today. 

One source of Pitts's confusion (besides being due to an ideologically extremist university and educational system that indoctrinates in left wing groupthink rather than educates, leaving people like Pitts ignorant) is that popular lingo confuses laissez faire with conservatism and social democracy or socialism with liberalism. Thus, the Wikipedia article calls Charles Finney "progressive," but he would be considered a social conservative today. 

On the one hand, the first big government socialist president in American politics was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was not a racist. On the other hand, the first president who was a conservative (defined in opposition to the first "liberal," Roosevelt) was William Howard Taft, and he wasn’t a racist either.  Roosevelt backed Taft before he learned that Taft would not support regulatory solutions to the trust issue—that he would instead support a litigated settlement in the Standard Oil case.  The Taft Supreme Court (Taft was the only president to later become Chief Justice) was  conservative.  Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1912, electing racist-cum-Progressive Woodrow Wilson in Taft’s place.  Wilson began the American socialist project by pushing through the income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank the following year, 1913.  He also implemented Jim Crow in Washington, DC.

Princeton, of which Wilson had been president, has been well known as the most anti-Semitic of the Ivy League universities.   Here is what Wikipedia says about Taft:

Taft met with and publicly endorsed Booker T. Washington's program for uplifting the black race, advising them to stay out of politics at the time and emphasize education and entrepreneurship. A supporter of free immigration, Taft vetoed a law passed by Congress and supported by labor unions that would have restricted unskilled laborers by imposing a literacy test.^[63]

Moreover, the Southern Democrats, the racists,  repeatedly supported left-wing Democrats. They voted for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson.  It was not until the 1960s that racism and the Republican Party crossed paths.  By then, both parties had become advocates of Progressivism and supporters of the Roosevelt/Rockefeller agenda. In 1944, the entire Jim Crow South voted for the paragon of American socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Alabama, for example, the state remembered for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott of the 1950s, voted 81% for FDR.  In 1952 and 1956, the most social democratic candidate between FDR and BHO was Adlai Stevenson.  In 1956, the ONLY states in which Stevenson won were the Jim Crow states:   Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

So Mr. Pitts, you're a doody head.

Republican Mathematics

David Rockefeller = Nelson Rockefeller = Nixon = Kissinger = H. W. Bush = W. Bush = Romney = Cain = Santorum = Gingrich = Obama.

Or, to put it as a poster here just did, choosing between Romney and Obama is like choosing between Chase and Wells Fargo.

Vote Libertarian in 2012

The Obama presidency has worsened the Bush administration's mismanagement of government and the economy. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama aims to extend the profligate spending that he and the Democratic Congress budgeted in 2008 and 2009 with only slight reductions. Although the Republicans have pushed for modestly greater reductions in spending, even the most conservative budget this year will exceed the Bush administration's bloated budget by ten percent. Moreover, contrary to his campaign claims, Obama has extended military involvement overseas and has continued the Patriot Act.

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that the GOP's 2012 presidential playing field is blurry. That is, no candidate can command much support. Astonishingly, 16% of Republicans support Donald Trump, a dishonest, eminent domain socialist who was born on third base and cannot figure out how to reach home plate without government subsidies, looting of private property, cheating contractors and repeated bankruptcy. Someone needs to investigate whether Trump has received financing from organized crime in connection with his Atlantic City investments. Trump exemplifies the failure of the American economy under Progressivism, and he is a product of the stupid Federal Reserve Bank policies that led to the 2008 financial meltdown, have stopped the growth of the real hourly wage and guarantee that future generations of Americans will be much worse off than previous ones.

With 16% of Republicans supporting Trump, an additional 13% support Governor Mitt Romney. Romney implemented a failed socialist health plan in Massachusetts, and his policies are largely the same as Barack Obama's. As a presidential candidate for 2012, his first impulse was to aim to attempt to win financial backing from the same socialist Wall Street slime that finances Trump, that supported Obama in 2008, that received trillions in welfare payments in 2009, and that would not exist without ongoing welfare subsidies from the Federal Reserve Bank.

Now, Americans are loyal to the two party system for a good reason. If a third party were to be elected they might do some bizarre, radical things. They might:

-Start three wars at a time
-Quintuple the nation's money supply and hand the printed money to cronies, commercial banks and incompetently run Wall Street stock jobbers.
-Encourage the Fed to hand between $12 and $25 trillion to the same incompetently run financial firms at the expense of taxpayers
-Repeal Americans' sacred liberties by legalizing unconstitutional searches and seizures under pretext
-Borrow nearly a trillion dollars and give it out to politically connected friends, claiming that it is a "stimulus," ignoring that the only justification for "stimulus" is that private savings rates are high so that government spending is needed to stimulate the economy.
-Declare that a firm like Boeing doesn't have the freedom to open a plant in a new state because it has labor troubles in the state in which it currently does business
-Replace the education system with an ideologically driven, politically correct indoctrination system that does not teach reading, writing and arithmetic
-Pass a cap and trade law that would condemn and loot a large portion of Americans' private homes
-Declare morality to be dead and then claim that on moral grounds they have the right to tell Americans what to eat, what kind of light bulbs to use, and that they should be servile to a United Nations dominated by tyrants.

Wait, that's what the Democrats and Republicans have done. I really don't see how a third party could be worse. So why don't Americans want to vote for third parties? It's because they're bloody morons who cannot think for themselves and do what the even bigger morons in the legacy media tell them to do.

Therefore, libertarians have to engage in damage control. The best way to limit both parties' ability to do harm is to split the government into a Republican-dominated Congress and a Democratic Party-dominated presidency.

The six percent of Republicans who are Ron Paul supporters can and might consider doing just that by voting for the Libertarian Party should Ron Paul fail to win the GOP nomination.

Mairi Is Fed Up with the GOP

I just received this e-mail from Mairi of Chicago:

>I watched last night, as word came down that a deal had been reached to extend the 2011 budget. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was ENRAGED!
Carl Cameron gave his view of what had happened, and I have to tell you, I have despised that man since he leaked the stories of Sarah Palin being attacked by staff members of John McCain's candidacy as a "diva". The man is a jackanapes, IMHO...

Personally, I have had it with the GOP. They are just DemocRATS on quaaludes. They have tried to convince the American public each time they caved in and passed a CR, that they were gaining in spending cuts with each new resolution.....unfortunately, the amount of spending so far overshadowed any supposed cuts, those CR's were rendered eunuchs. There was no victory in their passage.

And now we come to last night's marathon negotiations. Republican cronies tried to place such a happy spin on what had occurred, claiming that never before in history had so many spending cuts been accomplished. Fact of the matter is, never before in history has America ever been faced with such enormous debt that even our grandchildren and great grandchildren will be devastated by it's effects. The global economy is teetering on the brink, and if America falls, NO ONE SURVIVES the consequences.

There is no "happy spin" on what happened last night in the Capital. Republicans caved. They blinked, their knees knocked, and DemocRATS took full advantage.
I am FINISHED with Republicans. I am finished with the likes of Michele Bachmann and Allen West, Rand Paul and Jason Chaffetz. They sound so on the side of the American people, but fact of the matter is, not one of them has stood tall on the eligibility issue, or LtC. Terry Lakin. They can claim all they want that they value the Tea Party and all the principles and virtues of Constitutionality that it embraces, but as I see it, they are just party hacks taking advantage of an opportunity. I am pleased that they voted "no" to the deal, but that is negated by the outcome. Not one has the cajones to LEAD!

In the future, I will be looking to alternative parties like the AIP and the Constitution Party to begin picking up the slack with candidates who know, understand, and revere our Constitution. It's time for the former Whig party to consider a comeback, or even possibly the Tea Party becoming just that, a new "Party". Those in the future who claim affiliation with Republican or DemocRATS will not gain my support. I really felt confident after last November that Republicans could not only be led to the water, but would actually drink. They, IMHO, have refused. They have no concern for the Constitution, and the fact that they caved so easily, without a threatened government shut-down so welcomed by the American people this time around, is all the evidence I needed to convince me, that while these two parties exist in D.C, nothing will ever change for the better.
I HOPE everyone is signed up for GOOOH.com, and will familiarize yourselves with ALL of the "alternative" parties which embrace the Constitution. I consider the best to be, "the American Independent Party", "the Constitution Party", and probably at this point, even Libertarians.

I am open to suggestions from any of you.........2012 will be here before we know it, and it's time to have Constitutionalists in the forefront. There are GREAT candidates already waiting for the opportunity to have your support, like John Dummett, who has been trying to gain support and recognition for some time now. It behooves us to become familiar with real candidates who need our support to win against the Reps' and Dems' power brokers and money. It will be important to identify Constitutionalists, make others very aware, and build enough awareness that these candidates WILL prevail. I have Faith after last November that we CAN and WILL achieve the goal if we remain focused.

GOD Bless,
Mairi

It's Official: Yess Now Heads Ulster County GOP

Robin Yess just forwarded the first news report of her assumption of the chair of the Ulster GOP. Actually, you heard it here first on September 6.  I was unable to attend last night's meeting for health reasons, but I assume it went smoothly because I told Robin I would come if she needed an extra body.  Congratulations to Robin, who will be an effective and successful chair!

The Mid Hudson News writes:

PORT EWEN – The Ulster County Republican Committee has chosen First Vice Chairwoman Robin Yess as the new leader of the party.  Yess succeeds Mario Catalano, who chose not to seek re-election as chairman.
Yess believes this could be the year for Republican candidates in November, given the discontent by many with the way Democrats have been running the state and federal governments.
“The pendulum is swinging in the other direction now as we know it does in politics, so I think our candidates have a really good chance this November,” she said.
Yess said the Republican committee will further the message of the Grand Old Party and work to get their candidates elected this fall.

---

Conversation with Contrairimairi about Failure of GOP

Me:

Unfortunately here in New York the GOP is decidedly socialist and no change is in sight despite the Tea Party. The Tea Party itself is confused. There is little hope of progress here, the state will continue to decline until the economy collapses.


Mairi:

I've been following your postings about the goings on there. I am not certain that we CAN take America back in 2010 or 2012. There are so many "progressives" entrenched in both parties, that I think weeding them out is almost hopeless. The strong contenders here in Illinois are "progressives" even though running under the "R" banner. It's a joke, and it's HORRIFYING! People here are claiming they will not vote for anyone but a "D" or an "R", and it's looking like any "extra party" contenders will be thrown off the ballot here anyway. There are "suspicious" claims by the same two individuals challenging their signature petitions. If you remember, that's how BO won here in the past.


The candidate I was previously working for won entry to the ballot for an underdog, but the challenges, even if unfounded, seem to be "SOP" and moving forward regardless of the evidence to keep other contenders ON the ballot.

If we are afforded the possibility of electing only candidates from either major party who are still hell-bent on destroying the Constitution, what's the gain? Pelosi or Pelosi-light. Either way, the Constitution is still under a major assault that I am not certain we can rebuff in time.


GOD Bless,

Mairi

P.S. - One small bit of good news, it has been found out that Gillibrand accepted donations from a man who has sent contributions to hamas. (He has also contributed to the GZM.) She is claiming to have no knowledge, and promising to "look into the matter", but this will NOT be good news for her!

Me:

All of the GOP bloggers I have been hanging out with for the past 5 years are turning out to be party hacks, loyal to Rick Lazio who accepted a bonus for securing $25 billion in bailout money for JP Morgan. I'm asking Larwyn to take me off her mailing list.  I consider Republicans to be no different from Democrats.  The Republicans are more anti-freedom than the Democrats.

A People Gets the Government It Deserves

"A people gets the government it deserves."  The former president of the United Auto Workers Union, Doug Fraser, said that to me while riding in a taxi cab downtown from Columbia University.  The year was circa 1990.  I was a doctoral student and Fraser was a visiting scholar at the Business School.

Although I disagreed with Fraser politically he made an excellent point.  Earlier that week I showed him an article about him in the newspaper of the Socialist Workers' Party, the Militant, that was being sold right outside the Columbia main gate.  I bought a copy as a goof and there was an article about the guy whose lecture I was about to hear.  The Militant didn't like Fraser, nor did Michael Moore, whose film 1988 Roger and Me criticizes the UAW leadership as being too friendly to management.  Fraser had stepped down in 1983 (he passed away in 2008).

What kind of government does America deserve?  Most of the Republicans I know are unhappy with the way things are going, but are eager to vote for establishment candidates who aim to continue the course.  Most of the Americans I know suspect that things have not gone well but do not trouble themselves to question the economic policies of the politicians for whom they vote, returning the same politicians to office who created the policies that caused thing to go the way they are going.

In my town, Olive, NY, a large percentage of Republicans, more than half, refused to sign nominating petitions. Many complained that they did not know anything about the candidates.  When I suggested that they attend Town Committee meetings they refused. 

Most Americans accept the opinions espoused on television and in their local newspapers, not questioning whether the government that has resulted from those opinions is functioning fairly, competently or liberally. Or, they complain about the way things are but do not trouble themselves to learn about why things are going that way. 

When confronted with alternatives, such individuals prefer the tried and true path, true to the trend of a reduction in their standard of living and their freedom.  The worst among them are the party activists who assume that the same slop that the GOP has served for the past two decades is just delicious and they definitely intend to serve it again even though it is warmed over for the twentieth time.

A people get the government they deserve.  To quote Alfred E. Neumann as my response to Doug Fraser, "What--me worry?"

Mercy Killing Strategy: Become a Democrat

I am coming to think that because the State of New York is too corrupt for reform, the best strategy will be to become a Democrat, support their policies, and so encourage more rapid economic collapse in the state.  The Republicans do not help the state, they merely slow down the pace of corruption slightly.  Mercy killing is wrong when it comes to humans but when it comes to economic catastrophes like the Democrats' economic policies the right course may be to hasten things.   The same at the national level.  The currency depreciation and banking catastrophes that the two party system has caused should be accelerated so that the system finally collapses and can be replaced.

My strategy would look something like this.  Enroll in the Democratic Party. Support more expansion of government and entitlement programs; more stimulus packages; more state employees.  Push up spending on Medicaid. So many needs, taxes must be raised.  Drive ever more people out of New York.

Economic collapse isn't far off, and helping the Democrats will hasten it.  When the state collapses, radical change may then be possible.  It is a high risk strategy because New Yorkers have been so badly educated that they believe the pro-bank media and so will probably aim for even more state control and socialism in response to the final collapse.  But that's not a given, and there's probably more hope for change then.  An increasingly authoritarian and socialistic economy is a given in any case, and the Republicans lack the competence to improve things.  Also, the GOP in New York City is just as left wing as the Democrats, so there is little hope.

The GOP is a lost cause and New York State needs to be taken out of its misery.

RLC Has a Mission

I just submitted the following to the Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) blog.

RLC Has a Mission

In his historical tour de force, On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenal traces the process of centralization of power in Europe from the fall of Rome. He paints a picture of an unstoppable centripetal force, power, whose ever tightening grip on humanity was hastened first by the increasing power of monarchs and then by the rise of democracy. Prior to mass rule that began with the French revolution and Napoleon, war was limited by the resources of local feudal rulers. Total war became possible with the rise of democracy and nationalistic centralization. The great wars of the twentieth century which saw unprecedented numbers killed were the product of nationalism, mass rule and socialism, indeed, of national socialism and socialism in one country. These last are the ideologies of both the Democratic and Republican parties today.

For a century the United States showed that in the absence of centralization economic progress would come quicker, the public made better off, and war limited to local expansionism. But the Civil War began a process of Progressive centralization, and elite Americans of the Gilded Age after the Civil War, envious of the status of German universities, sent their sons to graduate school in Germany and were surprised when they returned advocating ideas that would forestall freedom and progress. Not having access to the ideas of von Mises, Hayek and Schumpeter, elite Americans adopted German historicism, according to which they, as an expert elite, deserved power and that power ought to be centralized to that end. They chose to remake America in Germany’s image fifty years before the rise of Hitler.

We live with the heritage of their nationalist and now internationalist Progressivism. Progress has slowed; retirement savings are insufficient to cover the needs of the largest cohort of retirees in the history of the world; the Progressive health care system has faltered and been redesigned to restrict care; and for the past forty years Americans have seen the”promise of American life”, an ever increasing standard of living, betrayed and slowed to a halt as the Federal Reserve Bank and the federal government have transferred ever more resources to banks and speculators.

De Jouvenal saw the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the ultimate success of “power” in the United States. But the process has taken longer and become more intense as the centralizers’ ideas, one after the next, have failed and destroyed sections of America’s freedom and affluence. The nation retains its preeminent role because of the nineteenth century’s gains and because its diminishing sphere of private initiative remains larger than under the rigid socialism that dominates Europe and the rest of the world.

No one can calculate the damage that power has done to the nation. It is probable that, based on the absence of real wage growth since the gold standard was abolished in 1971 and the 2% compounded growth of real wages between 1800 and 1971, the real hourly wage today is but 40% of what it might have been without the depredations of the federal and state governments. But Americans are relatively worse off than that because of increases in taxes at the state and federal levels.

Both parties, Republican and Democratic, have participated in the relentless expansion of power. The Republican is the more likely of the two to be transformed from a socialistic, elitist party, to one that represents freedom and decentralization. Hence, there is no more important task in politics today than that which the Republican Liberty Caucus has set before itself: to reform the GOP and transform it into a party of freedom and decentralization; to overturn the process of centralization of power; and to reestablish America as a land of freedom.

Given the low quality of public debate and the domination of the public media, this is a difficult task. Struggle we must.

Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party Meeting a Triumph

Tom Santopietro and his board of directors are doing an excellent job on the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party. The group met for its regular monthly meeting on the second Monday of each month. About 50 people attended. The group is planning several protests and bus trips to Washington, including an April 15 tax day protest.

Don Wise for State Assembly

The highlight of the evening was a talk by a conservative Republican State Assembly candidate, Don Wise. Mr. Wise owns a successful construction firm, Apex Building. He says that he has seen the Ulster-and-Dutchess County economy crumble under the Democratic Party policies of Assemblyman Kevin Cahill. Mr. Cahill claims to have brought jobs to the county economy and someone shouted "Erie County!" I added "Broward County!"

According to a local Democratic Party newspaper, the Kingston Freeman, Wise ran for Town Supervisor in the Town of Ulster three years ago, for State Assembly in the 1980s, and for County legislature. Naturally, when the Democrats report on Republicans they look for ways to slander them, and the articles in the Freeman are no exception.

Mr. Wise is articulate, intelligent and thoughtful. He presents a positive image. Mr. Wise aims to freeze state spending and eliminate waste in fields like education. After the meeting I questioned him as to why he does not advocate cuts in state government. He says that he is still formulating his aims. Kevin Cahill, the incumbent, is in contrast a big government advocate.

A nurse at the meeting who works in a local hospital told me privately that about one half of Medicaid spending in New York is pure waste, and that the percentage of waste in New York's Medicaid system is greater than in other Democratic Party- dominated states. In 2006, according to this source, Medicaid amounted to 23% of spending in the average state budget. According to a 2005 New York Times article, Medicaid abuse in New York is in the billions. The Times does not discuss systemic waste such as the transfer of personal assets in order to obtain Medicaid funding for long term care. According to the Citizens' Budget Commission:

"New York has the highest Medicaid spending among the 50 states, accounting for 15 percent of the national total, although it covers only 8 percent of beneficiaries.

"By comparison, California accounts for 11 percent of national spending while covering 18 percent of the beneficiaries. New York’s cost per person enrolled in the program, program, $7,912 annually, is 75 percent higher than the national average of $4,484, and nearly three times the California average of $2,770."

That was written near the end of the Pataki (R-NY) administration in 2006. In other words, Pataki had held office for 12 years and those facts were true at the end of the 12 years. Has the two party system enabled the voters to choose?

In addition to Medicaid, there is massive waste in state operations. The Department of Social Services not only provides welfare, the Department is itself a welfare program for non-working state employees. All of the agencies massively overspend and over-employ.

We might rename New York "The Emperor Has No Clothes and It's All Waste" state. I wish Mr. Wise all success in his election bid, but with the Democratic Party's strong local propaganda-and-lying machine led by the Kingston Freeman, it will be an uphill battle.

Other Business

Tom Santopietro, the president of the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party, defended Glenn Beck against unnamed attacks (I wonder who the attacker might be) but emphasized that the Tea Party is non-partisan. Tom mentioned that he objects to the GOP's use of the Tea Party name, which it has been doing unethically in some western states. Tom also mentioned that he was frustrated with Sarah Palin but still supports her to a degree.

I raised my hand at three different points and suggested that the Tea Party (a) focus exclusively on state and local candidates and issues (of course, as Chris Johansen mentioned in the car, big issues like Obamacare and cap and trade need to be included); (b) establish an ongoing state legislative bill monitoring process whereby Tea Party members might be alerted to bills about which to contact the state legislature; and (c) that I personally do not think that there is a single national politician, Republican or Democratic, who is fit to be president because they are all tainted by the same special interests that inspired the 2008 bailout. In other words, there is no small government candidate in either party.

Someone in the audience raised his hand and said angrily that he blogs for the American Thinker blog and that he does not trust any organization any more, including the Tea Party. He questioned Mr. Santopietro as to why there is no formal platform. I raised my hand and offered to help Mr. Santopietro put together a platform and offered to include the gentleman who raised the point on the platform committee. A similar proposal was discussed when I attended in January, I recall. No action has been taken.

Concluding Thoughts

The group is inexperienced but is making important progress. Tea Parties around the country need to support local candidates and avoid national ones. National politics is irrelevant at this point because the federal system is corrupt. It will need to be overturned as it has already failed. In place of the current system a more decentralized one with greater emphasis on states' rights (as in the Tenth Amendment) and reduced federal power would be better. Before the Constitution there were the Articles of Confederation. The nation needs to return to its roots. The fact is that about 30 states have a larger population than the entire nation did in 1783, approximately three million. The national population is too large to support a federal democracy. Powers currently granted the federal government, including constitutional interpretation, social security, medicare, labor law, most business regulation (except for unavoidable issues such as true interstate commerce) and monetary policy should be downloaded to regional or state governments. If New York favors massive inflation, for example, that should not force other states to subsist under inflation.

Republican Socialism, Obama's Second Term and the Tea Parties

The Obama presidency is so far a failure. Obama's bailout of money center banks and Wall Street coupled with his corrupt stimulus package amount to the largest effluence of waste in world history. This is the pattern that destroyed Athenian democracy and the Roman empire. In the case of Rome, Septimius Severus in the second century gave large benefits to the Roman army. Rome had long before adopted a welfare system that allowed the citizens of Rome free bread and circus. The Roman system was stable and took several centuries to decline. Rome's scale was the cause of both its stability and its decline as Rome was essentially a Ponzi scheme that depended on ongoing conquest. The extraction of wealth by interest groups contributed. In the case of Athens, the second greatest democracy in the history of the world, imperialism, its war with Sparta, and class warfare led to its failure.

Now, America is weakened by socialism of both the Roman and the Athenian varieties. The war on terror is a legitimate challenge, but the Bush administration handled both the Afghan and Iraqi wars incompetently, resulting in excessive cost. Fourth generation warfare, the use of embedded special forces, should have been adopted early on, but Bush preferred to defer to the second generation warfare concepts of Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. In any case, the two wasteful wars were coupled with subsidies to Wall Street, the TARP plan and the bailout of Goldman Sachs, AIG and other money center banks.

In a free economy these institutions would have been put into chapter 11, reorganized, the management replaced and the firms split up into more manageable components. This would have been done by bankruptcy courts. The opposite policy of direct subsidization and federal intervention, i.e., socialism, was pursued at the behest of the Republicans and George W. Bush. The Obama administration added some pirouettes, but the basic socialist policy and a large portion of the socialist spending was directly due to George W. Bush and the national GOP leadership, from Newt Gingrich to Karl Rove.

The recent victory in Massachusetts suggests that Americans are upset but that their views are confused. If Americans are upset about the bailout, why did they not question Scott Brown's position on the bailout? In 2000 America elected George W. Bush expecting a conservative, not a socialist. Now, they vote for Scott Brown without asking whether he too is a socialist.

Now that health care has stalled, my 2008 claim that Obama was chiefly elected to put the bailout into place increasingly looks true. Not that John McCain wouldn't have done it too, which raises significant doubts about the GOP at the national level. What makes the GOP different from the Democrats? In other words, in the end there may have been little difference between Obama and McCain.

Both would have given trillions of public money to banks and Wall Street and done little else. At the state and local level, yes, the GOP is still the smaller government party. Not so at the national level. The national GOP leaders are big government Progressives.

In 2012 Obama will have the advantage of incumbency, and if he now transitions to a more libertarian posture, which is what Clinton did, he is likely to win in 2012.

Perhaps the position of Scott Brown on the bailout seemed unimportant this month in light of the threat of the health plan, which served to galvanize the public, including many non-Republicans. If Obama is smart, he won't allow a repeat of the health care fiasco. He will avoid further drama and focus on reducing cost, winning the two wars and balancing the federal budget.

Had Al Gore pursued the Clinton strategy in the 2000 election he would have won. But he rejected Clinton's approach in favor of New Deal social Democracy. He lost.

Oddly, the GOP took Bush's election to mean that it should return to the Progressivism of Nelson Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt. It remains a puzzle why Newt Gingrich and his colleagues adopted a big government mindset, but the GOP only can win if it rejects it. Let me repeat that. If the GOP wants to win, it needs to adopt a small government mindset. The social conservatives coupled with the neo-conservative big business socialists were not enough to win the presidency. They won't be in future.

The rank and file in the GOP need to find new candidates to run. The 2008 leadership was entirely in favor of Wall Street socialism and big government and so is tainted. But in order to find new leadership, the rank and file needs to take action. The Tea Parties are playing this role, but I remain unconvinced, at least at the national level.

The Tea Parties have not demonstrated the ability to focus on key issues and resist the cooptation that the GOP's establishment will attempt. I will be delighted if they do, but so far few national leaders have emerged. While the Tea Parties can play a useful role at the state and local levels, it is at the national level where the GOP has floundered worst, and I have yet to see national level deliberation that reflects the ability to overcome the national GOP establishment and Obama.

Letter to the Olive Press

Dear Editor:

One of my neighbors took some offense at my recent characterization of Democrats as thieves in the pages of the Olive Press. My neighbor is not a thief, and that is probably true of a majority of the 36% of Americans who are registered Democrats. Nevertheless, I stand by my letter. For there are two kinds of Democrats: (a) thieves and (b) those fooled by (a). Category (b) Democrats might blame 2,500 years of propaganda. In Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper argues that Plato was the first to propagandize for collectivism by identifying collectivism with altruism. But collectivism has almost always helped the rich at the expense of the poor, not the reverse. Thus, "limousine liberals" advocate a class- and self-interested view.

The (a) category goes back to the days of Boss Tweed and "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall". In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) extended the federal edifice that the Progressive Republicans led by Theodore Roosevelt (TR) had established. The crux of the New Deal was FDR's abolition of the gold standard, which permitted the Federal Reserve Bank unlimited power to create ("print") money. The chief function of the Federal Reserve Bank has been and still is to expand the money supply by printing new reserves and then depositing them in money center banks who have the power to print a multiple of the money, as much as six times, of which they lend a disproportionate share to Wall Street. If you doubt that a disproportionate share goes to Wall Street, check out Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed about Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The banking system had lent this early hedge fund 100 billion dollars when it collapsed. One hundred billion that time was more than one percent of the entire economy but LTCM employed only about 200 people. This kind of thing has accelerated during the Bush-Obama administration, with Obama donating untold trillions to his supervisors on Wall Street.

On the local level, the corruption of the Democrats never disappeared, even with the diminution of Tammany Hall in the 1930s under the Mayor Fiorello Laguardia (R-NY). Today, government employees, school teachers, and businesses who receive contracts, that is, category (a) Democrats, unabashedly steal from their neighbors. Category (b) Democrats, confusing collectivism with altruism, confuse the schoolteachers', government employees' and contractors' greed with altruism.

At the level of federal government operations, the edifice that TR and FDR created opened the door to special interest politics. No one knows how much of the federal government's operations budget actually performs any valid "service". Newspapers avoid questions like this, preferring to cheer for the bailout and Obama. My guess is less than 20% goes to any public interest purpose. 80% of your federal taxes are squandered.

Today we are facing a health reform bill, that category (b) Democrats have been told will help the poor. It will not. If you compare the performance of health industry stocks over the past two years with the stock market in general, the fall in the health stocks has been two thirds smaller than in the stock market generally, 8% versus 23%, since January 2008. The stock market thinks that the health reform bill will be a boon to the health industry. This will not be the case for the general economy. New regulations will increase costs; health benefits will be reduced; and the uncovered poor will be forced to buy coverage. It makes category (a) liberals happy to know that people making $50,000 per year will have to pay $6,000 for coverage. For these will be forced to sell their homes and live in city projects while category (a) limousine liberals can buy their houses as investments as they congratulate themselves about their liberal consciences.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

A RINO's Stripes

Tony Romm of The Hill.com reports that Dede Scozzafava has endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, in the NY 23rd Congressional District rather than the Conservative whom the Republicans are backing. The Republican leadership asked "Republican in Name Only" ("RINO") Scozzafava to step down from the race because she was trailing the Conservative, Doug Hoffman.

Like most Democrats and RINOs, Scozzafava reminds me of a woman I once met at a local bar: "Buy me a scotch and I'll do you a 'fava'".

Roman-Style versus Barbarian-Style Progressivism

Today's American ideology is Progressivism, the belief that the state knows and does best, and that the average person is capable of assessing only so much as the state allows. People are not able to decide how to save for retirement or how take care of their own health care. Nor are they able to choose what kind of physician to hire or the quality of the butcher from whom they wish to purchase meat. They cannot decide how much school to attend or whether they would like to support a government program to study martians or the regulation of energy. All of these and many, many more decisions must be made by their "betters", by bureaucrats and officials educated in state-run schools and taught the catechism of the state religion--that the STATE IS GOD; that GOVERNMENT KNOWS ALL; and that BARACK OBAMA IS OUR SAVIOR.

But within America's secular faith, the faith in the omnipotent state, there is a serious competition between two schools of Progressives. One school of Progressives descends directly from the Roman dictatorship of Augustus Caesar, and so is the more reactionary of the two. The other descends from the manorial rule of the Barbarian savages who invaded the Roman Empire in the late first millenium.

The Roman Progressives hold that the plebeians must be given their due. They must be provided with bread and circus. They must be told that they are most important. The Roman Progressives know that no matter how much money they transfer to themselves, to Wall Street and to the Ochs Sulzbergers' friends, the plebeians will support them so long as they say it is done in their name and so long as they have their free bread to prove it. The Roman-style Progressives are of course the Democrats.

The Barbarian Progressives agree with their forebears, Clovis and Charlemagne, that the plebes need not be taken into account at all. They believe with Aristotle that some were meant to be masters and others meant to be slaves. They, like the Roman Progressives, understand that the public is simply too simple minded to understand that the policies that they advocate, beginning with the Federal Reserve Bank, are harmful to them. Instead of relying on bread-and-circus, the Barbarian Progressives motivate their simple minded followers with anger about the Roman-style Progressives. The Barbarian-style Progressives are of course the Rockefeller Republicans.

The term Progressivism refers to the progressive looting of those who work on behalf of those who do not; the looting of those who buy milk and bread on behalf of those who run hedge funds and the New York Times.

Progressivism rode to power on the promise that more democracy would "solve problems". Since its ascendancy in 1900 or so, it has caused involvement in at least five foreign wars; it has doused the fiery innovation and productivity growth of the 19th century; it has left Americans with a stagnant real wage; it has caused the Depression of the 1930s; the stagflation of the 1970s and the bailout of 2009; it has caused increasing wealth inequality as the Progressives oversee the massive transfer of America's wealth to the super-rich via the Federal Reserve Bank; and it has seen the crippling of cities as destructive government programs dominate their landscapes.