In America, the First Amendment allegedly guarantees the right of the people to publicly speak and debate public issues. It also guarantees the right to peaceably assemble for political activities. Most important, it guarantees the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. It used to be that every American child learned this in grammar school civics. It was the defining concept of what it meant to be an American. It is what distinguished Americans from other citizens and subjects of the world.
The only people talking about free speech these days are fringe heretics in the Dissident Right. All of our best people now agree that the only way for the people to be truly free is to require everyone to get permission from the authorities in order to have an opinion. It is the only way to keep the peace in a multicultural society. After all, diversity is our strength and nothing is more sacred than our diversity. Therefore questioning diversity is no different than calling for violent revolution. We embrace all opinions, except the wrong ones.
The trouble our betters have is that the pesky First Amendment is still a part of the Constitution. Passing crime-think laws in America is much more difficult than it is in a modern utopia like China. Unsurprisingly, the way around this problem, the inspiration, comes from China. Instead of having the government censor speech, the government leans on monopolistic “private companies” to police the media. It’s not an accident that the tech giants all worked with the ChiComs to build out the Great Fire Wall of China.
America is now a world where you need permission to speak. If you post heretical material on social media, the tech giants shut off your access. If you keep at it and find ways around the censors, the authorities send the mass media after you. That’s what happened with this fry cook in Ohio. He kept saying unapproved things, so the Times was sent in to investigate and raise awareness. He is now in the process of being un-personed. Thank goodness Carlos Slim is here to defend us from these people!
Most Americans look at these complaints about speech and just roll their eyes. After all, they still have thirteen flavors of the same official opinion on their cable system and, let’s face it, the only people complaining about this stuff are bad people. The trouble, of course, is that this stuff never stops with the bad people. Having found a clever way to get around Constitutional limits on the state, the people in charge are now applying these new techniques to get around the fundamentals of self-government.
That’s what we see here with this story about the credit rating agency Moody’s, dictating policy to cities and towns.
Coastal communities from Maine to California have been put on notice from one of the top credit rating agencies: Start preparing for climate change or risk losing access to cheap credit.
In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default.
“What we want people to realize is: If you’re exposed, we know that. We’re going to ask questions about what you’re doing to mitigate that exposure,” Lenny Jones, a managing director at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “That’s taken into your credit ratings.”
Americans have figured out that climate change is mostly a racket cooked up by rich people and fanatics to skim money from the public. Americans are willing to go along with low-cost virtue signalling, like toting around grimy canvas sacks to the food market, but no one is on-board with returning to the Bronze Age to please Gaia. As a result, local politicians will pay lip service to global warming, but they have no interest in acting on it, even when offered bribes. It’s a good way to get voted out of office.
The way around this is to have private firms do what the stupid voters refuse to do.That’s compel government to enact the polices the greens demand. No one can get mad at Moody’s. They are just a private firm acting in their interests. Unless you’re some sort of America-hating commie, you must support private business. This is just how the market place works. You’re not against the free market, are you? It’s not hard to imagine a time when credit agencies and banks assign credit ratings to politicians in advance.
In 1881, Pope Leo XIII commissioned a study of what is now called corporatism. The result was a definition that imagined society as an organism. Within the organic state were natural groupings of men, to whom the state delegated power to organize labor and capital, on behalf of the state, within their sphere of control. A generation later, the Charter of Carnaro was a constitution built on these concepts. Most historians view this as the direct precursor to Italian fascism.
The point is that cooperation between private interests and public interests is not a new thing in Western society. What’s new to our age is the scale and power of private interests. Under fascism, the state defines society and everything is subordinated to the state. In our age, the roles will be reversed. The “private” interests will define the state and public interests will be subordinate. The state, of course, will exist only as a theoretical construct, as borders and boundaries are antithetical to global interests.
From the perspective of the modern elites, it is an ideal solution to the problems of self-government, democracy and multiculturalism. Instead of government representing the various interest groups in society, government will now look like a corporate HR department. It will safeguard the interests of senior management. Instead of town hall meetings where citizens address their elected officials, we’ll have leadership seminars where management shares their vision with the populace.
This will not end well.
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How prescient the “welcome to Valhalla, Mr. Beale” speech was in “Network”
Sir, May I tactlessly take this moment to point out that using the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ interchangeably is beyond disingenuous. Global warming is nonsense, a sort of jingoistic ploy to sell lightbulbs to the already dim. It does not exist, end of story. Climate change, on the other hand, is very real. Earth is a dynamic system of systems, constantly in flux, and the climate is forever changing. We see this in the fossil-, tree-ring-, and ice core records. I appreciate that the media know little, so they think these two terms are equivalent. They are most… Read more »
On a more serious level one thing that must be overcome in the near term is the assumption that consolidation is inevitable and therefore good. We should be against both big government and big business.
Any Republican who doesn’t seem to get this should be impaled along with everyone in his extended family.
Problem is that’s where Republican politicians get their money. Servicing their donors is their reason for existing. They’ll run as small government conservatives, or even as God forbid, populists, if we force them to. But legislate and govern that way……? Impaling is a lovely thought, but the GOP is rigorously designed to avoid that danger. The only solution I can see is….well I can’t see any at present. Trump campaigning was a lovely thought, but he’s been outmaneuvered by Ryan and McConnell into a typical Republican tax plan as maybe his sole legislative accomplishment. Maybe just start with burning down… Read more »
The Republican Party must burn, and die, ideally with anguish and pain.
Perhaps we should ALL vote for democrats; give them 100% of the vote, and weird them out. They rely on division and rancor to “energize the base”. The GOPe would die, of course, but the masquerade of a two-party Republic would end, the Left would be trolled, and it would be comedy gold to watch them ‘analyze’ the result.
They’d know something’s happening, but they wouldn’t know what it is…
It’s waaaay past time for s second American Revolution. Only problem us, who do we shoot first?
I’ve had fun sending this to the Gaiaists If the links don’t work for you try searching for a slab of text. – You will, of course have the good taste not to use Google….. http://www.investors.com/po… “At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time,… Read more »
Hello Z-man, The corporate/private cooperation in the global warming arena (and probably everywhere else) has been growing for a while. I work in the insurance industry and found out about two years ago that our company was being asked what we were doing to compensate for the increased risk of loss we face due to global warming. At the time I tracked down some of this was coming from and there appears to be an international network of groups pushing for this stuff. The Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey Report & Scorecard was one resource I found very helpful. This… Read more »
So, is this payback by the rating agencies to the Progs. for not punishing them for their enabling role in the Housing Bubble of the mid-aughts_? Pretty bold move by said agencies and likely unwise, I’d say. It’s likely evidence for their living in the Cloud-land bubble. Seems to me that these credit rating agencies have serious potential exposure on several fronts: – Political; Along with the rest of Wall St. from either Trump populists or the Bernie Bros. A couple of tax law changes can cripple their nice little profitable oligopoly. An they are a safe, convenient political target… Read more »
They took down Client #9, the otherwise despicable Eliot Spitzer, for pointing out the tiny monoline reinsurance companies backing the then-new CDS market. (Frightening to contemplate that they used today’s witchsteria.) Munis and state GO’s, general obligation bonds, are the hollowed out core of public pension systems. Broke cities, investing in hi-yield bonds by broker cities, ‘insured’ by CDS hedges that no one can pay. They hammered S&P for disagreeing with Pocahontas Warren and Barney Frank’s gay pedophile pimp boyfriend. Moody’s got the message. So we got the CFPB as a national ACORN, official marauders to crush all enemies, a… Read more »
Speak for yourself.
Return of Spirit of Bronze Age…Revolt of Vitalism, Destruction of the cities in fire!
Bronze Age Pervert
I know which I prefer.
As do I.
Criminalization of “wrong thinking” has been a wet dream of the elites for centuries. Communism and Fascism have been political fronts established, in part, to empower the authorities to prosecute wrong thinkers. The communication tools we use to have a conversation are the same ones used by them to identify us. It is only a matter of time before High Noon arrives, and only a 2nd Amendment with teeth in it gives us any hope of prevailing. It all sounds like a serious, adult version of the middle school playground social dynamics, because that’s what it is. People sticking their… Read more »
I can’t imagine how much worse things might be in the U.S. by now if the NRA weren’t holding down the fort. God bless ’em!
Its all good until someone lights up the NY Times for ruining his life solely for posting bad think on a web blog. If reporters and whole editorial staffs received the Steven Paddock treatment, that shit would stop PDQ.
Im very surprised it hasnt happened yet
And yet, everywhere, freedom of speech actually reigns supreme – even in communist China and the USSR. You can only lie and cheat for so long – and then people get wise to you. For me – I used to be what you deplorable bigots would have called a ‘neocon’. I drank the koolaid, bought the tee shirt, and had all my tickets validated and up to date. And like our hateful host… eventually I started noticing things that I wasn’t supposed to. About blacks. About Jooos. About women. Stuff that didn’t fit the narrative. At first I thought I… Read more »
Yup, just like in the Soviet Union. Everyone pretends, but many of us know what is really going on. Reading between the lines is an art form. What you can do with what you glean from the fake news is another matter—again, like the Soviet Union.
I think you folks might be falling into a bit of despair due to saturation. All you hear and see tells you how hopeless the sheeple are, wrapped in their cocoons of multimedia soma. Silence is not necessarily acquiescence I see little pinholes of light peek through The facades more and more frequently now. Comments slip out, shared looks, etc. Old sea story: subs were so quiet that they used algorithms to look for holes in the background noise, the absence of natural sound. So ask yourself, are the birds chirping in your AO? Or is it getting quiet, like… Read more »
Hi, LFMayer: “…multimedia soma.” So true. I am there. Except my external sensors are still active. There’s lots going on out there, masked by noise, or, as you say, occuring in the silence.
They (the U.S. Congress) have been trying to “modify” (weaken) the First Amendment for some time now. A couple of years ago it was HR 569. I believe that one has been shelved but I know it’s been replaced by a newer (and I’m sure just as disgusting) HR number – just don’t know what it is off the top of my head.
Got off my duff here this afternoon. HR 569 died in the 114th Congress. The 115th Congress resurrected it as SR 118 (which has passed) and HRes. 257.
Article at this address: https (colon, FS, FS) www (dot) gatestoneinstitute (dot) org/10544/criminalize-free-speech
Creeping sharia and watch what you’re thinking there buddy.
Ratings for colorfulness, cake harassment, and bathroom equality coming soon!
All-important economic indicators.
Can’t manage risk without ’em.
They are always one step ahead of us. Like most of the Constitution, it doesn’t need to be ratified or changed, just interpreted differently. Free speech laws haven’t changed but look at what you can’t say or do now. Want to start a bakery?
This will not end well for whom? Every municipality will not have entrance signs or Lions clubs logos but mission statements.
The constitution has always been overrated. There are many, many countries that have constitutions that sound as good as ours. The problem is that they, simply, don’t adhere to them. These documents are really nothing more than pretty words on expensive paper. It’s the people that make them work. We the people have always been the secret ingredient.
The US Constitution is as revered as your average corporate credo nowadays.
Gonna say it again. RoboCop society without all the cool shit.
Good thing recognizing and saying what you just did isn’t a crime yet. Or is it?
Right now, I’d be willing to bet that your average person in Communist China actually has more freedom of speech than your average American does, considered broadly. No, you can’t criticize the government in China, but that’s about it. When compared to the long, long list of things that have become un-discussable in the U.S. over the last twenty years, this is starting to look pretty moderate.And actually, a government based on the Charter of Carnaro would probably be freer than what we have now. The retreat from the First Amendment in this country has been astonishingly fast. The NRA… Read more »
That’s because the ACLU’s mission was not then and is not now “free speech.” It was just another weapon with which to beat white America about the head.
“I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.”
ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, 1935
Yeah, it helps when you actually believe in the right that you are supposedly defending…
“I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.”
What he really means:
“I don’t want to abolish the State. I want to replace it with another State. I want to abolish property ownership for those who produce wealth and give it to those that do not produce wealth. Which includes me.”
And while we’re at it, three cheers for the NRA. The right to own, and defend yourself with, a gun is one of the few traditional American freedoms that has not been utterly eroded over the last thirty years – in some ways, it’s even expanded. The NRA’s secret of success is to behave exactly the opposite of the way that Conservatism, INC. has behaved the last few decades. They are proud, they are feared, and they have absolutely no interest in winning the approval of their enemies. They will not be shamed, they will not be silenced, and they… Read more »
O…….K! Thanks for sharing.
Is that you, Jim Zumbo?
They have wonderful food spreads at their conventions. For the enjoyment of the anointed, soft handed pudges. Paid for by all the naive Fudds.
Keep feeding the political creatures and you’ll have moar political creatures. Ymmv
That’s a good quote because it illustrates the muddle headed thinking that lefties typically engage in. How are they going to get disarmament without using the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion? Sole control by those who produce wealth = capitalism. Social ownership of property is yet another thing that NEEDS the instrument of the state and it’s violence and compulsion. I believe that one of the problems here is that the left has always been able to define their goals relatively easily. Socialism is an easy sell to the masses because they just interpret it as… Read more »
“ No, you can’t criticize the government in China, but that’s about it. When compared to the long, long list of things that have become un-discussable in the U.S. over the last twenty years, this is starting to look pretty moderate.”
There’s an old saying that has circulated online and in magazines for awhile:
“In most countries you can do anything but criticize the government. In the US you can’t do anything except criticize the government.”
It’s tyranny in China but it’s lazy and inconsistent tyranny that’s generally only applied if you’re making a scene. I’m not sure what to call China. It’s a shithole but what adjective to describe the shithole? Dunno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64X6My18LA8
I watched the video and all the law enforcement punishment and detention was prompted by illegal behaviors, like driving without license, prostitution, drug-dealing or -taking. I don’t see a problem with that. I guess that’s how you maintain order with over a billion people populating your country. The western guys who made the video kept talking about what “you can get away with.” Is that the western mentality these days, how you can casually break laws and get away with it? Since I don’t plan on driving without a license, doing drugs or engaging with prostitutes, sounds like I’d be… Read more »
Ursula; The assumption you seem to be making is that the PRC cops are all basically honest and that they are punishing only the guilty. This is never a good bet, even in a first world country such as ours, much less in second or third world one* In the opening story in the video, the *cops* decided that the narrator’s friend’s drivers license was not in order and so they took his scooter right there and then and there was nothing he dared do about it. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t in order. He was completely at… Read more »
Thanks. Very interesting video. I can’t believe the material, standard-of-living improvements since I was there on biz in the early ’90s. But according to the video, the PRC legal ‘system’ hasn’t changed much WRT any ‘rights’ the ordinary folk might (not) have. However, the arbitrary and capricious punishments seem to have transformed into legalized theft instead of the stretch in a labor camp that was the go-to in those days. Evidently, since so few had any material possessions then, your labor was all they could take as a punishment, short of your life. Interestingly (not in a good way), we… Read more »
Police State.
No, you can’t criticize the government in China, but that’s about it.
This is probably true. When I lived in authoritarian places like Kuwait, UAE, and Russia there was a list of stuff that *would* get you in deep shit, but otherwise nobody cared what you did or said. On aggregate, I therefore felt more free than I did in the UK where absolutely everything is, one way or another, the business of the state.
Yes, modern technology is bringing with it some changes that favor the rise of tyranny via surrogate players, and that is a tangible threat to individual liberty moving forward. But that is not the whole story. This same evolution of technology is also providing new tools and means to combat these would-be tyrants in ways never before seen in our history. As with the extinction of privacy, personal security will soon be a thing of the past. Even if the cloud people literally retreat into the clouds, that will afford no real protection against retribution or reprisal for despotic deeds.… Read more »
Don’t underestimate the role of market forces to counteract some of this nonsense. I, for one, will be anxiously waiting to buy the bonds of cities and states downgraded because of “climate change” inaction. Should be quite a bargain. Thanks Moody’s.