Eagle from Ohio just e-mailed me the following message
>WONDERFUL, REFRESHING AND ABOUT TIME! I am so pleased to find an American who is not afraid to say the things about Hussein Obama that NEED to be said. I came across your blog quite by accident while perusing dontvoteobama.net. I thank you for sticking to your beliefs and the idea that this is STILL the USA and not quite the US of obama just yet.
Many Thanks,
Eagle
Ohio
And thank you, sir!
Monday, September 29, 2008
Conservative Chloe on the US and China
Conservative Chloe (aka Jamie) has written me an e-mail. Jamie blogs at http://conservativechloemichigan.blogspot.com/.
Jamie used to work for the Michigan State Legislature (incidentally I briefly worked for the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee). Jamie has posted a good blog concerning progressive education in Michigan that for some strange reason the Chinese government has funded. The program's curriculum sounds familiar--it is the same drivel that "social justice educators" at the Natonal Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and the half-literate graduate schools of education have been advocating for a century. A good book on this topic is Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. Progressive education was a failure 50 years ago, but the education schools advocate it.
Jamie notes:
"The new mindset and curriculum these programs want to teach our children are quite frightening. Some of the objectives for preschool and kindergarten are as follows:
* The challenge is to help children appreciate the power they have to cause change and channel that energy towards positive endeavors. By providing opportunities to take action and observe consequences, children learn to appreciate their roles as change agents and become responsible for making wise choices. (In my opinion they are teaching our children to be activists.)
* Energy is the underlying currency that fuels the universe.
* As children extend their understandings to appreciate how human action affects the natural world, they can learn about species preservation. As children observe how plants thrive or die according to heat, rain, and soil conditions (i.e. global warming), they solidify their understandings of the ever important role of environment for all creatures of the earth.
"Throughout this curriculum are quotes from various intellectuals, including Confucius. Of course they can quote Confucius but not Jesus. But the bigger question is, what on earth are we doing in America teaching our children Chinese teachings and a global education curriculum? Is there any Legislator in Michigan willing to address this issue?"
The sad truth is that our own home-grown Bill Ayers and the lunatic fringe known as the education establishment are largely responsible for the ideas that Jamie is describing. I think that the American public needs to think in terms of home schooling and privatization of education. The voucher idea is good but it has run up against too much resistance from the entrenched teachers' unions. I think the best approach would be to fight to de-fund education so that parents are pressured to send their children to private schools or home school. The public education system in America is but one more Progressive disaster.
Jamie used to work for the Michigan State Legislature (incidentally I briefly worked for the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee). Jamie has posted a good blog concerning progressive education in Michigan that for some strange reason the Chinese government has funded. The program's curriculum sounds familiar--it is the same drivel that "social justice educators" at the Natonal Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and the half-literate graduate schools of education have been advocating for a century. A good book on this topic is Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. Progressive education was a failure 50 years ago, but the education schools advocate it.
Jamie notes:
"The new mindset and curriculum these programs want to teach our children are quite frightening. Some of the objectives for preschool and kindergarten are as follows:
* The challenge is to help children appreciate the power they have to cause change and channel that energy towards positive endeavors. By providing opportunities to take action and observe consequences, children learn to appreciate their roles as change agents and become responsible for making wise choices. (In my opinion they are teaching our children to be activists.)
* Energy is the underlying currency that fuels the universe.
* As children extend their understandings to appreciate how human action affects the natural world, they can learn about species preservation. As children observe how plants thrive or die according to heat, rain, and soil conditions (i.e. global warming), they solidify their understandings of the ever important role of environment for all creatures of the earth.
"Throughout this curriculum are quotes from various intellectuals, including Confucius. Of course they can quote Confucius but not Jesus. But the bigger question is, what on earth are we doing in America teaching our children Chinese teachings and a global education curriculum? Is there any Legislator in Michigan willing to address this issue?"
The sad truth is that our own home-grown Bill Ayers and the lunatic fringe known as the education establishment are largely responsible for the ideas that Jamie is describing. I think that the American public needs to think in terms of home schooling and privatization of education. The voucher idea is good but it has run up against too much resistance from the entrenched teachers' unions. I think the best approach would be to fight to de-fund education so that parents are pressured to send their children to private schools or home school. The public education system in America is but one more Progressive disaster.
Howard S. Katz on the Bailout
Howard S. Katz has written a noteworthy blog on the banking bailout. I excerpt from it below. Howard's point is that the claim of a "crisis" is nonsense. Firms fail all the time. Fractional reserve banking causes instability. There is no need for fractional reserve banking. Inflation, which is due to monetary expansion, has caused real wages to decline 18% over the past 36 years. That is a crisis. Monetary expansion has unrealistically caused the stock market to go up, addicting Americans to easy gains through speculation at their fellow Americans' expense. That is a crisis. The failure of AIG, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual and other financial firms is not a crisis.
>"Our current financial system is quite unstable, and all of this instability results from the commercial banks...
>"The so-called business cycle of the 19th century in America resulted from the fact that all of the commercial banks were expanding their money and making more loans. If a bank started out with a 1:1 ratio against gold and expanded to a 4:1 ratio, it would find itself in a position in which a bank run was a possibility. Therefore it would reduce its lending. When the banks as a whole got too over-expanded, the most exposed bank would be hit with a run. The other banks would see this and reduce their loans. Then there would be a cycle of loan contraction. These cycles of loan expansion and contraction were incorrectly attributed to the nature of a free economic system. This is not true. In a free economy, each person must keep his promises, and the privileges accorded to commercial banks of making promises and then not having to keep them are a violation of a free market.
>"Note that these were cycles of money and credit expansion, but since they were good for the bankers, those economists sympathetic to the bankers called them economic growth. Correspondingly, the cycle of money and credit contraction was called a recession or a depression by the banker-economists. The implication here is that what is good for the banker is good for the whole country, and what is bad for the banker is bad for the country. But this is an outrageous lie. When the banker expands money and credit, there is a rise in prices, and everyone else in society has to pay higher prices for the necessities of life. When the banker is contracting, things are reversed, and the average person benefits.
>"The people of the early 19th century were a lot smarter than the people of today, and there was a political movement to eliminate the privilege of commercial bankers to break their promises. The full expression of this principle was found in a group called the LocoFocos. A compromise version of the LocoFoco movement developed into the Democratic Party and in 1828 won the presidential election with Andrew Jackson as its candidate. In 1832, Jackson vetoed the charter renewal of the second central bank, and this set the stage for the greatest economic growth of any nation in the history of the world.
>"The central bank did not return until J.P. Morgan and Woodrow Wilson teamed up in 1913 to create the Federal Reserve. The original idea was that it would be a banker’s bank and lend to the commercial banks when they had gotten up to the dangerous 4:1 ratio. If the Fed could expand up to 4:1 to the commercial banks and they could expand by 4:1 to the public, then the bankers as a whole could get a credit expansion of 16:1 – more money for the bankers and their big loan customers. The creation of the Fed led to the money/credit expansion of WWI and the 1920s, and this was offset by the money/credit contraction of the 1930s.
>"But this was small potatoes compared with the very first action F.D.R. took after assuming office in March 1933. In one day, he rammed through Congress a bill which gave the Federal Reserve the power to create money out of nothing. Instead of multiplying money by 16 this made it possible to multiply it infinitely. The nation started out on one giant money/credit expansion which continues today.
>"At first, the expansion was slowed down by the conservatives with their old fashioned idea that the budget should be balanced. The Fed is the lender to the Government and requires a Government deficit to do its evil work. But Reagan converted the conservatives to Keynesian economics (using the names “supply side” and “Reaganomics”); and since that time the money/credit expansion has increased its speed.
>"In a free market economy, the stock market moves sideways. The companies whose products gain the public’s favor go up, and the companies which lose favor go down. The stock averages move sideways. Measuring from the first Dow stock index, in 1885 to 1932, one finds that the market moved sideways. The 18-fold stock market gain from 1982-2007 was due to 2 factors: 1) As the Reagan Fed lowered interest rates, the competitive stock yield was also lowered; but the only way to accomplish this is by stock P:E ratios going up. 2) As the interest rate declined, the debt burden of these companies went down; lower costs mean higher profits. The combination of higher earnings and higher P:E ratios made for much higher stock prices.
>"So over the past 26 years a class of very rich has been created. Unlike the traditional American rich these people do nothing to earn their enormous salaries and bonuses. They are pure and simple beneficiaries of the money and credit expansion engineered by the Federal Reserve Bank and the nation’s private banks.
>"Corresponding to the gains of this class of rich there are corresponding losses to the vast majority of Americans. For example, real wages fell by 18% from 1972-2002. That has never happened to any generation in American history, not since 1623.
>"Now the fall in real wages is an economic crisis. And the rise in housing prices of 1997-2007 (which made homes unaffordable to the average person) is another crisis. But both of these real crises are ignored by the nation’s media. Indeed, the media is now bending every effort to convince people that the fall in housing prices which began in 2007 is a crisis.
>"No, the crisis you read about in the newspapers is a crisis for the bankers and their associated vested interests (loan customers, debtors in general, etc.). You see, interest rates started out at 16% (nominal T-bill) and have declined to virtually 0 (T-bill nominal) and badly negative in real terms. Negative real interest rates are a concept so absurd that they perfectly illustrate the insanity of our age. A negative interest rate means that, if you take a loan, there is no interest charge; instead they pay you for the privilege of lending to you. A negative 5% rate of interest means that, if you borrow $1000, then at the end of a year when you repay the loan, they give you $50.
>"Why would anybody lend under such terms? And yet the people who created these conditions are designated as economic experts by the media.
>"But the handwriting is on the wall for the bankers and their friends. Things just went too far, and unthinking conservatism is bringing it to a halt. In 2004, with the T-bill rate at 1%, the New York Times suggested a tightening of credit. Greenspan, always anxious to please the Times, complied. The small tightening of 2004-06 cut the paper aristocracy to the quick. Over the quarter century, they had gotten soft. Profits had come too easy. Just a tiny bit of tightness, and several big Wall Street firms were driven to the wall.
">But these people have never had to work for their money. They expect to be made rich by big daddy government. And so they go running, hat-in-hand to big daddy. And that is the source of the current “crisis.” It is a pack of lies made up by Henry Paulson...to the effect that the whole economic system (whatever that means) will collapse unless the government robs from the American people and bails out Paulson’s Wall Street friends.
>"Here is the challenge for the American people of our day. Faced with a similar challenge in the early 19th century the American people rallied behind Andrew Jackson and fought the bankers. They were largely successful, and America became the greatest economy in the world. What will Americans do today? Will they accept the word of Henry Paulson on faith? Will they pay his demanded $17,000? (Actually no one knows the exact figure.) If they do, there will be another demand on them tomorrow, and Americans will sink into a form of economic slavery to their new masters.
>"Our current financial system is quite unstable, and all of this instability results from the commercial banks...
>"The so-called business cycle of the 19th century in America resulted from the fact that all of the commercial banks were expanding their money and making more loans. If a bank started out with a 1:1 ratio against gold and expanded to a 4:1 ratio, it would find itself in a position in which a bank run was a possibility. Therefore it would reduce its lending. When the banks as a whole got too over-expanded, the most exposed bank would be hit with a run. The other banks would see this and reduce their loans. Then there would be a cycle of loan contraction. These cycles of loan expansion and contraction were incorrectly attributed to the nature of a free economic system. This is not true. In a free economy, each person must keep his promises, and the privileges accorded to commercial banks of making promises and then not having to keep them are a violation of a free market.
>"Note that these were cycles of money and credit expansion, but since they were good for the bankers, those economists sympathetic to the bankers called them economic growth. Correspondingly, the cycle of money and credit contraction was called a recession or a depression by the banker-economists. The implication here is that what is good for the banker is good for the whole country, and what is bad for the banker is bad for the country. But this is an outrageous lie. When the banker expands money and credit, there is a rise in prices, and everyone else in society has to pay higher prices for the necessities of life. When the banker is contracting, things are reversed, and the average person benefits.
>"The people of the early 19th century were a lot smarter than the people of today, and there was a political movement to eliminate the privilege of commercial bankers to break their promises. The full expression of this principle was found in a group called the LocoFocos. A compromise version of the LocoFoco movement developed into the Democratic Party and in 1828 won the presidential election with Andrew Jackson as its candidate. In 1832, Jackson vetoed the charter renewal of the second central bank, and this set the stage for the greatest economic growth of any nation in the history of the world.
>"The central bank did not return until J.P. Morgan and Woodrow Wilson teamed up in 1913 to create the Federal Reserve. The original idea was that it would be a banker’s bank and lend to the commercial banks when they had gotten up to the dangerous 4:1 ratio. If the Fed could expand up to 4:1 to the commercial banks and they could expand by 4:1 to the public, then the bankers as a whole could get a credit expansion of 16:1 – more money for the bankers and their big loan customers. The creation of the Fed led to the money/credit expansion of WWI and the 1920s, and this was offset by the money/credit contraction of the 1930s.
>"But this was small potatoes compared with the very first action F.D.R. took after assuming office in March 1933. In one day, he rammed through Congress a bill which gave the Federal Reserve the power to create money out of nothing. Instead of multiplying money by 16 this made it possible to multiply it infinitely. The nation started out on one giant money/credit expansion which continues today.
>"At first, the expansion was slowed down by the conservatives with their old fashioned idea that the budget should be balanced. The Fed is the lender to the Government and requires a Government deficit to do its evil work. But Reagan converted the conservatives to Keynesian economics (using the names “supply side” and “Reaganomics”); and since that time the money/credit expansion has increased its speed.
>"In a free market economy, the stock market moves sideways. The companies whose products gain the public’s favor go up, and the companies which lose favor go down. The stock averages move sideways. Measuring from the first Dow stock index, in 1885 to 1932, one finds that the market moved sideways. The 18-fold stock market gain from 1982-2007 was due to 2 factors: 1) As the Reagan Fed lowered interest rates, the competitive stock yield was also lowered; but the only way to accomplish this is by stock P:E ratios going up. 2) As the interest rate declined, the debt burden of these companies went down; lower costs mean higher profits. The combination of higher earnings and higher P:E ratios made for much higher stock prices.
>"So over the past 26 years a class of very rich has been created. Unlike the traditional American rich these people do nothing to earn their enormous salaries and bonuses. They are pure and simple beneficiaries of the money and credit expansion engineered by the Federal Reserve Bank and the nation’s private banks.
>"Corresponding to the gains of this class of rich there are corresponding losses to the vast majority of Americans. For example, real wages fell by 18% from 1972-2002. That has never happened to any generation in American history, not since 1623.
>"Now the fall in real wages is an economic crisis. And the rise in housing prices of 1997-2007 (which made homes unaffordable to the average person) is another crisis. But both of these real crises are ignored by the nation’s media. Indeed, the media is now bending every effort to convince people that the fall in housing prices which began in 2007 is a crisis.
>"No, the crisis you read about in the newspapers is a crisis for the bankers and their associated vested interests (loan customers, debtors in general, etc.). You see, interest rates started out at 16% (nominal T-bill) and have declined to virtually 0 (T-bill nominal) and badly negative in real terms. Negative real interest rates are a concept so absurd that they perfectly illustrate the insanity of our age. A negative interest rate means that, if you take a loan, there is no interest charge; instead they pay you for the privilege of lending to you. A negative 5% rate of interest means that, if you borrow $1000, then at the end of a year when you repay the loan, they give you $50.
>"Why would anybody lend under such terms? And yet the people who created these conditions are designated as economic experts by the media.
>"But the handwriting is on the wall for the bankers and their friends. Things just went too far, and unthinking conservatism is bringing it to a halt. In 2004, with the T-bill rate at 1%, the New York Times suggested a tightening of credit. Greenspan, always anxious to please the Times, complied. The small tightening of 2004-06 cut the paper aristocracy to the quick. Over the quarter century, they had gotten soft. Profits had come too easy. Just a tiny bit of tightness, and several big Wall Street firms were driven to the wall.
">But these people have never had to work for their money. They expect to be made rich by big daddy government. And so they go running, hat-in-hand to big daddy. And that is the source of the current “crisis.” It is a pack of lies made up by Henry Paulson...to the effect that the whole economic system (whatever that means) will collapse unless the government robs from the American people and bails out Paulson’s Wall Street friends.
>"Here is the challenge for the American people of our day. Faced with a similar challenge in the early 19th century the American people rallied behind Andrew Jackson and fought the bankers. They were largely successful, and America became the greatest economy in the world. What will Americans do today? Will they accept the word of Henry Paulson on faith? Will they pay his demanded $17,000? (Actually no one knows the exact figure.) If they do, there will be another demand on them tomorrow, and Americans will sink into a form of economic slavery to their new masters.
Orchestrated Crisis
Contrairimairi has forwarded a Discover the Networks post concerning the "Cloward-Piven strategy", which aims to overthrow capitalism by making impossible demands on the welfare state. Why leftists are intent to overthrow the current system is unclear to me because we are well on the way to achieving their totalitarian socialist goals.
According to the article, Cloward and Piven argued that potential welfare recipients should be encouraged to flood the system. That happened and capitalism did not fall, although my home city of New York became a corporate ghost town as all the industrial headquarters left and moved to Atlanta, presumably where government programs were not so generous. The article does not point out why, if Cloward and Piven were so effective as Mayor Giuliani claims, their success was limited to New York, Chicago and similar rust belt cities, but not the South. Perhaps Cloward and Piven were on the payroll of the Houston Chamber of Commerce?
The article points out that Cloward and Piven's idea led to an explosion of welfare benefits in the city. But this did not harm capitalism, as the article claims. It harmed New York City, which went bankrupt and had to curtail welfare benefits. The large corporations moved to Atlanta and Dallas. The statistic that the article gives of one in two New Yorkers having been on welfare is scary, but it begs the question as to why the city was unable to create jobs in the first place and why the welfare programs were not curtailed. This would seem to be a failure of New York's political choices. It is more convenient for Mayor Giuliani to blame Cloward and Piven than to blame himself for not reducing the city's budget by 35%, but what do you expect?
The welfare recipients could have been given brooms and told to sweep the city and welfare rolls would have fallen, but public sector unions objected and the city's politicians, including Mayor Giuliani, preferred to honor the Sanitation and other unions rather than re-build a great city. That is due to Progressivism, not Cloward and Piven.
Welfare was as much a result as a cause of the bankruptcy of New York City. Urban renewal, a bipartisan scheme, was doing harm to the City for two decades before the city's bankruptcy. You can eliminate welfare by demanding people get a job, but if you have a Progressive Republican like Robert Moses, the guy who ran urban renewal and a host of other city programs for 40 years, driving jobs out, you don't create jobs in the first place. Even in the past couple of years, with all of New York's economic decline, the leaders pass laws to harass Wal-Mart rather than repeal laws that discourage business formation.
Moses condemned many small businesses and destroyed about 20 neighborhoods along with low-rent tenements, replacing them with ugly city projects. The projects in turn engendered crime, further squashing small business.
The most important effect of Moses' road and apartment building was the neighborhood destruction and the eviction of about 3% of the city's population through eminent domain. Many neighborhoods were torn asunder by superhighways that cut through them, demolishing the customer demand base for small businesses.
Another important factor was the prevalence of public sector unions that had appeared in the 1960s. These made considerable demands on New York's budget to which both Republican and Democratic administrations acceded. As well, construction codes and a corrupt New York law known as the Wicks Law encouraged criminality and sub-quality public construction. Construction in New York is an open pit and an important source of economic decline.
As well, the Port of New York, which had been dominated by the mob for decades moved to New Jersey. Most of the port jobs were lost because of containerization. This also contributed to the bankruptcy. Instead of thinking in terms of laissez-faire policies to stimulate economic development, Robert Moses, Nelson Rockefeller and the Democratic administrations saw government-sponsored development and transfers to wealthy developers as the way to progress. But their Progressivism failed.
The dismal subway system, also due to policies of Robert Moses (and the "nationalization" of this once-private system in the 1930s) makes life in the city unbearable, further driving trade away.
The wonder is that people are willing to live in New York City at all. With high rents due to rent control and corrupt construction rules and probably the worst transportation system of any large city in the world, along with high taxes due to welfare, and an economy that is over-regulated and characterized by subsidies to big developers, it is a testimony to the city's cultural strengths that it continues to survive, albeit in a much more limited way than 40 years ago. It is no longer the center of new ideas as it once was.
I spend about half my time in New York City and the subway trips I take to Brooklyn and NYU twice a week are twice-weekly nightmares. I don't have to go to horror films. Just get on the subway, watch the rats and inhale the vomit. Truly a wonderful town.
According to the article, Cloward and Piven argued that potential welfare recipients should be encouraged to flood the system. That happened and capitalism did not fall, although my home city of New York became a corporate ghost town as all the industrial headquarters left and moved to Atlanta, presumably where government programs were not so generous. The article does not point out why, if Cloward and Piven were so effective as Mayor Giuliani claims, their success was limited to New York, Chicago and similar rust belt cities, but not the South. Perhaps Cloward and Piven were on the payroll of the Houston Chamber of Commerce?
The article points out that Cloward and Piven's idea led to an explosion of welfare benefits in the city. But this did not harm capitalism, as the article claims. It harmed New York City, which went bankrupt and had to curtail welfare benefits. The large corporations moved to Atlanta and Dallas. The statistic that the article gives of one in two New Yorkers having been on welfare is scary, but it begs the question as to why the city was unable to create jobs in the first place and why the welfare programs were not curtailed. This would seem to be a failure of New York's political choices. It is more convenient for Mayor Giuliani to blame Cloward and Piven than to blame himself for not reducing the city's budget by 35%, but what do you expect?
The welfare recipients could have been given brooms and told to sweep the city and welfare rolls would have fallen, but public sector unions objected and the city's politicians, including Mayor Giuliani, preferred to honor the Sanitation and other unions rather than re-build a great city. That is due to Progressivism, not Cloward and Piven.
Welfare was as much a result as a cause of the bankruptcy of New York City. Urban renewal, a bipartisan scheme, was doing harm to the City for two decades before the city's bankruptcy. You can eliminate welfare by demanding people get a job, but if you have a Progressive Republican like Robert Moses, the guy who ran urban renewal and a host of other city programs for 40 years, driving jobs out, you don't create jobs in the first place. Even in the past couple of years, with all of New York's economic decline, the leaders pass laws to harass Wal-Mart rather than repeal laws that discourage business formation.
Moses condemned many small businesses and destroyed about 20 neighborhoods along with low-rent tenements, replacing them with ugly city projects. The projects in turn engendered crime, further squashing small business.
The most important effect of Moses' road and apartment building was the neighborhood destruction and the eviction of about 3% of the city's population through eminent domain. Many neighborhoods were torn asunder by superhighways that cut through them, demolishing the customer demand base for small businesses.
Another important factor was the prevalence of public sector unions that had appeared in the 1960s. These made considerable demands on New York's budget to which both Republican and Democratic administrations acceded. As well, construction codes and a corrupt New York law known as the Wicks Law encouraged criminality and sub-quality public construction. Construction in New York is an open pit and an important source of economic decline.
As well, the Port of New York, which had been dominated by the mob for decades moved to New Jersey. Most of the port jobs were lost because of containerization. This also contributed to the bankruptcy. Instead of thinking in terms of laissez-faire policies to stimulate economic development, Robert Moses, Nelson Rockefeller and the Democratic administrations saw government-sponsored development and transfers to wealthy developers as the way to progress. But their Progressivism failed.
The dismal subway system, also due to policies of Robert Moses (and the "nationalization" of this once-private system in the 1930s) makes life in the city unbearable, further driving trade away.
The wonder is that people are willing to live in New York City at all. With high rents due to rent control and corrupt construction rules and probably the worst transportation system of any large city in the world, along with high taxes due to welfare, and an economy that is over-regulated and characterized by subsidies to big developers, it is a testimony to the city's cultural strengths that it continues to survive, albeit in a much more limited way than 40 years ago. It is no longer the center of new ideas as it once was.
I spend about half my time in New York City and the subway trips I take to Brooklyn and NYU twice a week are twice-weekly nightmares. I don't have to go to horror films. Just get on the subway, watch the rats and inhale the vomit. Truly a wonderful town.
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