Category Archives: Politics

Post-National America

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Another example of how the American ruling elite, endeavoring to break free from the constraints of national loyalty, is rendering citizenship pointless is in the area of foreign policy. In the American system, the President is tasked with negotiating treaties1. For those treaties to become law, they must be ratified by the Senate. In contract law, this is the same as a deal requiring board approval. The executives can sign what they like, but the contract is not enforceable until it is approved by the board.

The Founders recognized the dangers of giving the President sole discretion in treaty making. He could use this power to circumvent the power of the legislature by striking deals with other countries that trumped US law. Imagine Obama striking a deal with Mexico, giving Texas back, so their votes would not count in the next election.

It has always been a quarrelsome process and intentionally so. Treaties are the most important and dangerous activities performed by government. They start wars, end wars, start economies and end economies. They are not to be taken lightly so the American system has high hurdles built into the process. Presidents hate this, but they hate a lot of things that are safeguards against mischief.

The emerging Iran deal is revealing how the Obama administration is plotting to circumvent Congress and avoid submitting the matter to the Senate.

Major world powers have begun talks about a United Nations Security Council resolution to lift U.N. sanctions on Iran if a nuclear agreement is struck with Tehran, a step that could make it harder for the U.S. Congress to undo a deal, Western officials said.

The talks between Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — the five permanent members of the Security Council — plus Germany and Iran, are taking place ahead of difficult negotiations that resume next week over constricting Iran’s nuclear ability.

Some eight U.N. resolutions – four of them imposing sanctions – ban Iran from uranium enrichment and other sensitive atomic work and bar it from buying and selling atomic technology and anything linked to ballistic missiles. There is also a U.N. arms embargo.

Iran sees their removal as crucial as U.N. measures are a legal basis for more stringent U.S. and European Union measures to be enforced. The U.S. and EU often cite violations of the U.N. ban on enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work as justification for imposing additional penalties on Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress on Wednesday that an Iran nuclear deal would not be legally binding, meaning future U.S. presidents could decide not to implement it. That point was emphasized in an open letter by 47 Republican senators sent on Monday to Iran’s leaders asserting any deal could be discarded once President Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.

But a Security Council resolution on a nuclear deal with Iran could be legally binding, say Western diplomatic officials. That could complicate and possibly undercut future attempts by Republicans in Washington to unravel an agreement.

Now, the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that international law does not trump US law. That’s not an issue here. The issue here is that Obama is trying avoid the whole treaty process by getting the UN Security Council to order its member nations to abide by this deal. Failure to do so would, technically, be a violation of the UN Charter. The fact that Iran, for example, has been in violation of the UN Charter for decades, as are other nations, is not important.

What Obama is attempting to do is shift the focus from the law, which is against him, to a future political fight waged by the next president. If Jeb Bush rejects this deal, for example, he would have the added problem of dealing with the UN and, presumably, US allies. Even though he would be well within the law, the politics of taking on the UN would complicate things.

In the near term Obama would argue that the failure of the Senate to approve his deal with Iran is putting the US at odds with the “international community.” The word “community” is a magic word on the Left so that means all the left-wingers in the American media will be out in the streets ululating about how Republicans are committing treason.

It won’t result in approval, but it lets Obama and future presidents avoid compliance with the law in future treaty deals. Instead of going to Congress, they will go to the UN, giving France more say in these matters than the American people.

As we see with open borders, the end game is about rupturing the ties between the rulers and the ruled. In a nation, the rulers have a natural loyalty to their host nation and its people. Their success is the nation’s success. Citizenship, therefore, has value. Being an American, even if you were a field hand or factory laborer, had benefits just for being an American citizen.

In the post-national system our rulers are ushering in, citizenship has no value. Your elected representatives have no power as Congress (or parliament) becomes ornamental. The laws offer preferences to those that are not legal citizens in areas of employment and welfare benefits. Being a legal citizen becomes a sucker’s play. Once the people figure it out, the ruling classes are free to drop all pretense of loyalty to nation and citizenship.

The next phase is a world of cloud people, untethered from the ground below them. Like medieval lords, they extract rents to finance their lavish lifestyles, but unlike those lords they will have no sense of obligation to their subjects. In Brazil, the elite live in the hills, guarded by private armies. The rest are left to their own devices. What services provided by the elites are to mitigate against unrest.

The administrative class of the managerial elite will function as game keepers, making sure the people are fed and given minimal care. They will try to suppress violence and crime, but their main duty will be keeping the people in their pens.

Whether this will work is debatable. So far, human organization has been about scaling up the kin-tribe. The post-national cloud people look more like colonizers, which eventually ends with one side swinging from a noose. But, there was a time when no one thought a country could work.

1I Know that technically the Senate simply permits the President to ratify the treaty as part of its advice and consent authority.

Obama’s War on White People

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Obama’s war on the pale faces continues to escalate. Now we have two more cops ambushed and shot.

Two police officers were shot during a protest outside Ferguson, Missouri, police headquarters early on Thursday, police said, just hours after the city’s police chief quit following a damning U.S. Justice Department report into his force.

The shooting of the officers, who were in serious condition at a hospital, was the latest incident in months of turmoil in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, which has been at the center of an intense national debate over police use of force, particularly against black men, since a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager there in August.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters early on Thursday that a 41-year-old officer from his department was struck in the shoulder and a 32-year-old officer from the nearby Webster Groves Police Department was hit in the face about midnight as the crowd was starting to break up.

“These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers,” Belmar said. “I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems.”

He said the officers, whom he did not identify, were both conscious and hospitalized. The department planned to release more information at 9 a.m. CDT (0800 DST).

An Obama administration spokesman said, “The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism. Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.”¹

As soon as you hear the word justice, just assume what is meant is revenge and you are  closer to the truth. That’s something people have always known, until the lunatics took over the west.

The violence grew out of a Wednesday night demonstration in which several dozen protesters gathered in front of the Ferguson police department, just hours after Police Chief Thomas Jackson resigned.

The night started peacefully but about two dozen officers clad in riot gear later faced off with the protesters. At least two people were taken into custody.

Gunshots rang out about midnight turning a scene of relative quiet into pandemonium. Many of the remaining few dozen demonstrators fled, some screaming.

The line of police scrambled, with many taking defensive positions drawing their weapons and some huddling behind riot shields, according to a video published online.

Belmar said the shooter was among the demonstrators standing across from the officers.

“I don’t know who did the shooting, to be honest with you right now, but somehow they were embedded in that group of folks,” he said.

Protesters at the scene, however, said on social media that the shots did not come from where they were standing.

“The shooter was not with the protesters. The shooter was atop the hill,” activist DeRay McKesson said on Twitter.

“I was here. I saw the officer fall. The shot came from at least 500 feet away from the officers,” he said.

I’m thinking DeRay was there, knows who did the shooting and is a member of the vibrant community. Just a guess.

 

Clintonian Decline

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Watching the Clinton e-mail scandal unfold, I can’t help but think about the old Southern Methodist football scandal. For my non-American readers, this was a scandal surrounding the football (American football) program at Southern Methodist University in 70’s and 80’s. The people running the program broke every rule on the books at least once and most several times. They seemed to relish their outlaw status so no amount of warnings deterred them.

Finally, the governing body of college sports, along with their envious competitors brought the hammer down on them. For the first and only time, the “death penalty” was handed down and the program was shuttered for two years. The program never recovered and has been an afterthought ever since. A UK analog would be Chelsea being shutdown for two years and then relegated to second division permanently.

The intent of the punishment was to stand as a warning to others. If you did not respect the rules, the punishments would be severe. If you kept breaking the rules, the punishments would be draconian. The funny thing is, the results were something entirely different than expected. The fallout so frightened all of the other football playing universities, they decided that punishment should never again be used.

The result over the last thirty years is a decreasing ability of the sports playing universities to police themselves. The punishments have become ornamental and the investigations take so long no one remembers why they are on-going most of the time. The University of North Carolina, for example, was found to be faking classes and grades to keep players eligible. That was five years ago and nothing has come of it. the investigation is “on-going.”

Now, what does this have to do with the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics?

In the American system, impeachment and removal from office is the political death penalty. A judge, Secretary or executive that is deemed unacceptable by the legislature can be removed from office. In the 1970’s, the Liberal Democrats were prepared to use impeachment to remove Nixon. He resigned before it got to that point, but only because he knew he could not win at trial. The die was cast so he resigned.

The fallout was not what was expected. The Liberal Democrats were sure the Republican party would collapse. Instead, the party surged to majority status over the next two decades and the Liberal Democrats have never fully recovered. The Republicans, for their part, discovered a similar lesson twenty years later when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. They stopped short, claiming to have made their point.

The point, however, was that the death penalty, so to speak, was forever off the table. By refusing to resign, Clinton exposed what everyone suspected, but preferred not to admit. That is, the American Congress no longer had the will or ability to enforce the rules on the executive. In one of life’s great ironies, the Nixon impeachment was about reigning in the imperial president. That led to the Clinton impeachment, which solidified the imperial presidency.

Like the SMU scandal I started with, attempts to enforce the rules ended up exposing the deep rot within the system those rules were supposed to protect. The greatest irony of all is that Hillary Clinton worked on the House Watergate committee as a young attorney and was fired for unethical behavior. What she learned, it seems, is that Nixon should have fought a little harder as there was simply no stomach in the ruling class for enforcing their rules.

The 1990’s will be looked upon as a seminal period in American history. The Clinton’s willingness and ability to corrupt the political system and their brazen disregard of the rules set a dangerous precedent. Obama is now issuing edicts as if he is emperor. Meanwhile, the Congress cowers in fear. This e-mail scandal shows quite clearly that the political class is broken.

If you doubt it, look at the facts. Clinton had this private e-mail system setup. It is against the law to mishandle government documents and the mere existence of this private e-mail system is more than enough to suggest that happened and happened deliberately and with malice of forethought.

The Congress can issue a subpoena for the physical server, all written documents related to it or having originated from it, all of the people who had access to it, etc. E-mail is a two-way street so all they need is one e-mail from the government to this domain to justify their actions. That would take a competent tech about an hour to find. The claim of destroyed hard drives could easily be proof of improper use of confidential information.

In other words, the Congress has a lot of power and they could come down on Clinton if they are inclined to do so. If Clinton refuses to comply, the Constitution gives Congress the power to arrest her and bring her in to testify. If she refuses, she can be imprisoned in the Capitol jail. In other words, this whole charade could be settled by the middle of summer and it would be the last time someone tried a similar stunt.

Of course, that’s not possible. The political class is paralyzed, incapable of enforcing its own rules. That leaves the field open for rogues and criminals. In another time, Congress would have been shuttered and its members executed as the most powerful political clans closed ranks. Today, we just have the current chaos.

There is a Faulkner quality to this. The grubby, grasping Clintons are the Snopes clan, slowly subverting the Compsons, in this case the American Republic. I would like to say that Obama is Benji, but the analogy really does not work, even though it makes me laugh.

 

And the Loop is Closed

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When the Tea Party got going, a lot of people thought this was it. The normal people of America were going to first wrestle the GOP away from the donor class and then use it to wrestle the country back from the lunatics. I recall seeing a guy walking around my office building wearing a little tea bag lapel pin. He was typical. An older and less vibrant fellow, properly aware of his  own backpack of privilege, but rightly concerned with all the vibrancy going on around him, or whatever.

Those were heady days and all for naught. The bipartisan fusion party has carried the day.

Tea Party Republicans contemplating a bid to oust Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) shouldn’t count on Democrats to help them unseat the Speaker.

And without their support, there is no chance to topple Boehner in this Congress.

A number of right-wing Republicans, long wary of Boehner’s commitment to GOP efforts attacking President Obama’s policy priorities, have openly considered a coup in an attempt to transfer the gavel into more conservative hands.

But Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they’d rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing to reach across the aisle in search of compromise. Replacing him with a Tea Party Speaker, they say, would only bring the legislative process — already limping along — to a screeching halt.

I love that line, “Democrats from across an ideological spectrum.” Yeah, all those pro-life, families values Democrats are making a difference.

“I’d probably vote for Boehner [because] who the hell is going to replace him? [Ted] Yoho?” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) said Wednesday, referencing the Florida Tea Party Republican who’s fought Boehner on a host of bipartisan compromise bills.

“In terms of the institution, I would rather have John Boehner as the Speaker than some of these characters who came here thinking that they’re going to change the world,” Pascrell added.

Liberal Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) agreed that, for Democrats, replacing Boehner could lead to a worse situation.

“Then we would get Scalise or somebody? Geez, come on,” said Grijalva, who referenced House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). “We can be suicidal but not stupid.”

Boehner, who has grappled with dissent from the Tea Party wing since he took the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, has seen opposition to his reign grow this year, even as he commands the largest GOP majority since the Hoover administration.

That’s led to talk of a new coup, something that is more difficult to pull off after the election of a Speaker on each Congress’s first day of business.

Any lawmaker can file a motion to “vacate” a sitting Speaker, a move that would force a vote of the full House. The effort would almost certainly fail, as the conservatives would need the overwhelming support of Democrats to win a majority. But it would be an embarrassing setback to Boehner and his leadership team, who entered the year hoping their commanding new majority would alleviate some of the whipping problems that had plagued them in the past.

The new push back against Boehner began in the earliest stages of the new Congress when 25 conservatives voted in January to strip him of the Speaker’s gavel.

Boehner’s troubles have only mounted since then, as conservatives have thwarted a number of his early legislative priorities, including a border security bill, an anti-abortion measure and a proposal to limit the federal government’s role in public education — all considered by GOP leaders to be easy-pass bills that would highlight their new power in Obama’s final two years in the White House.

More recently, Boehner’s decision this week to pass a “clean” bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has exacerbated conservatives’ concerns about his leadership.

As proof of the discontent, 167 Republicans bucked their leadership by opposing the DHS package. Their votes protested Boehner’s move to strip out provisions undoing Obama’s executive actions shielding millions of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. from deportation.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) called Boehner’s capitulation “a sad day for America.”

“If we aren’t going to fight now, when are we going to fight?” he said Tuesday just before the vote.

Every Democrat joined 75 Republicans in passing the bill.

In the midst of that debate, a number of Tea Party Republicans warned that they’d consider an attempt to topple Boehner if he caved to Obama’s demand for a clean DHS bill.

“If it happened, conservatives would be outraged,” said one such conservative who voted against Boehner in January. The lawmaker predicted that the coup attempt might not come immediately but warned the Speaker, “It’s a long year.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus and a critic of Boehner’s legislative moves, said recently that no coup is in the works.

“That’s not the point,” Jordan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “The point is to do what we told the voters we were going to do and do it in a way that’s consistent with the United States Constitution.”

Citing Jordan’s comments, top Democrats have punted on the question of whether they would support a coup. Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the Democratic whip, acknowledged that there are “some disgruntled people who are talking about it,” but predicted that no such effort will materialize.

“If Jordan’s not talking about — he’s the head of the Freedom Caucus — it’s not going to happen,” Hoyer said this week.

The casual way in which the Democrats discuss GOP party politics is the big story here. It never goes the other way. The Liberal Democrats are a black box. No one knows what’s going on in their deep state. But, the GOP is an open book because they are essentially the straight man in this show. They are the Washington Generals to the Democrats Harlem Globetrotters. Theirs is a is a supporting role.

We’ve seen this across Europe. The countries in deep trouble has seen their main parties just about fuse into one. In Britain, the Tories are in government with the Liberal Democrats, allegedly their ideological opposite. The result is every election gets the same result. In America, giving the GOP control of Congress has changed nothing. Voters can be forgiven if they might conclude it was all a big scam.

The Undoing of the Political Class

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I’m fond of pointing out that the Roman Republic began to crumble when the Roman elite stopped enforcing their own rules. It’s the broken windows theory of policing applied to the over-class. When the ruling elite is punctilious about its rules, customs and prerogatives, the system has low amounts of corruption. Once they start to let little things slide, then it is bigger things and before long it is a free-for-all, until the strong man crosses the Rubicon and imposes order.

Way back in the 90’s, we saw the erosion of the rules begin to gain momentum. The Clintons, exemplars of their generation, seemed to love lying and double dealing. Nothing is ever on the level with them and no deal is too small. The failure to crack down on their behavior has encouraged much more of it. The Obama administration makes Nixon look like a boy scout troop. Now we see that Hillary Clinton did on a grand scale what is about to send General Petraeus in prison.

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails – on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state – traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton’s secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

You see here why this will end badly for the country. The AP is a lunatic propaganda organ so they are looking to run interference for one of their own, even if they are not sure Clinton is one of them. What Clinton did is not “highly unusual.” It’s never happened in the history of the nation. This is an outlandish breech of the law and of custom. Further, Palin and Romney were never “caught conducting official business using free email services.” Their private accounts were illegally accessed liberal fanatics while they were private citizens. Comparing the two is an obvious attempt to explain away a crime.

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account – hd***@**********il.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym – for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

The professional Right is trying hard to explain this away, but there’s no getting around the obvious. Clinton was at the head of a conspiracy to circumvent disclosure laws, record keeping laws and Congressional oversight. The unwillingness of the political class to police their own will be their undoing. If Clinton gets away with this, what’s next? An off-the-books army? Banking system?

This will not end well.

Jeb Bush’s America

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This is what’s coming.

It’s nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.

It’s a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.

Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can’t crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.

Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It’s allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The visas can be valid as long as six years.

News10 reached out to several H-1B workers over the past three months, and they all declined to comment for this story.

“The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it’s all in the interest of profit,” Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years.

Hewlett Packard laid off Brown from its Roseville plant during the height of the H-1B program, when as many as 300,000 of the workers were allowed to take jobs in the U.S. The cap for H-1B visas today is 85,000 after federal audits showed there were abuses in the program. There’s an effort on Capitol Hill to raise the ceiling again to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. And, during a recent presidential trip to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked President Obama to help loosen the restrictions on the H-1B program. India’s tech outsourcing industry makes billions of dollars every year sending programmers and engineers overseas to work for U.S. companies.

Brown is watching those new developments with interest. When he lost his job in 1996, it was just two weeks before Christmas. He says he’s afraid more Americans will be replaced by foreign-born workers.

“I’m a single income, so on that particular day, as a direct result of this program, we were unable to provide Christmas presents and I kept telling my kids that day that Santa might not show up,” Brown said.

A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said he would not comment on layoffs that happened 18 years and three CEOs ago, but he defended the visas as a needed resource for HP and the industry as a whole.

U.S. Department of Labor data shows more than 1,100 H-1B visas were certified for workers in the Sacramento area in 2014. The largest number was for Accenture, an IT company that is currently holding state contracts totaling more than $1 billion. It has 125 H-1B visa holders in Sacramento. Deloitte has another 28, and there are four dozen of them filling positions in state offices in the Capital City.

There’s no way to say exactly how many of the visa holders are doing work directly or indirectly with the state. Hundreds of the local H-1B visa holders were awarded to third-party contractors known as “body shops.” Body shops apply for the visas and then farm them out to larger IT companies looking to hire more foreign workers.

Accenture spokesman Mark Bonacci said while the company doesn’t disclose the number of employees it has by city, state or region within the U.S., “the vast majority of our people working in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and residents.”

“Only a very small percentage of Accenture’s employees in the U.S. are H-1B visa holders,” he said.

In an email, Deloitte spokesperson Courtney Flaherty said, “Our primary focus is hiring U.S. workers, including experienced California professionals and graduates.

“Our use of U.S. work permits is entirely consistent with the intent of the Federal Government’s immigration program to complement our domestic workforce with highly-skilled professionals,” she added.

Does anyone really believe there’s a shortage of willing workers in California to do this work? We’re not talking about gene-splicing or physics. California has a 12.3% unemployment rate. They are bringing in low-skilled IT people because they are cheaper than domestic versions. In most cases, they avoid paying health insurance for these people. They also get to work them like slaves. If they complain, the service that brings them over just sends them back and brings in someone who does not complain.

But, this is just the beginning. Once Jeb is installed in the White House, it is open season on Americans.

 

Bait and Switch

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Here’s an interesting article on the fate of John Boehner. A few things come to mind reading this. One is just how awful at his job Boehner has been since the start. Being Speaker is a tough job and made tougher when you are a Republican. The press is always looking to undermine you and the opposing party will use that to cause mischief. A Democrat speaker has a loyal press corp and a pleading opposition.

Boehner has made his task more difficult by making war on the conservative wing of his caucus. It’s a strange and self-defeating strategy that has led to a number of embarrassing defeats. Tip O’Neil, the best speaker in my lifetime, always avoided these showdowns. Instead, he found the votes needed in advance. When his preferred choice was going to lose, he made a big show of “letting his members voter their conscience.”

In contrast, Boehner appears to be an idiot. He can’t count to 218.

The other thing I find fascinating is the casual revelation of the bait and switch the GOP runs on their voters.

Members of the recently formed “House Freedom Caucus” offered multiple proposals to leadership that they believe would have drawn enough Republican votes to keep DHS funded and not left Boehner dependent on Democrats. Boehner, though, chose not to support the plans.

One conservative member, who asked for anonymity to speak frankly, said the mood of his colleagues will depend on how Boehner handles himself over the next week. If he tries to put a “clean” DHS funding bill on the floor for a vote, or doesn’t make overtures to conservatives, anger could boil over, the Republican said.

We’re suppose to take from this that the 52 members of the Freedom Caucus are the conservatives in the party. That means 193 other Republican members are something other than conservative. Did the voters of Fred Upton’s district (MI-9) think they were getting a non-conservative when they elected him? Bob Goodlatte (VA-6)?

I’m thinking most GOP voters went to the polls thinking their guy was a good conservative. Maybe not on every issue, but at least 90% of the time. Yet, the leadership and Boehner operate as if the conservatives are mostly a nuisance and a trivial minority of their caucus. By extension, it means they think you, the guy voting for them, are an idiot.

My own view is the parties are just the two faces of the ruling class. They run a good cop-bad cop routine on the public and take turns occupying the big offices. Voting, therefore, is a waste of time. Still, I take some pleasure in seeing that old drunk get the business from the handful of politicians with anything resembling respect for their voters.

Islam’s Threat To Progressives

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This story is a good example of how assimilation is only possible when dealing with similar people. Our rulers are terribly vexed as to why so many Western born and raised Muslims are heading off to jihad. The story of Jihad Johnny is familiar.

The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, in his mid-20s, appears to have left little trail on social media or elsewhere online. Those who knew him say he was polite and had a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith. He had a beard and was mindful of making eye contact with women, friends said.

He was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London and on occasion prayed at a mosque in Greenwich.

The friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, believe that Emwazi started to radicalize after a planned safari in Tanzania following his graduation from the University of Westminster.

Less than 1% of Western Muslims decide to go on jihad. Polling says that about a quarter of Western Muslims think killing infidels is a great idea. Those poll results are typical of others done over the last two decades. Given the nature of polling, it is probably fair to say the real numbers are significantly higher. When asked, people tend not to admit to opinions the general public has deemed wrong. Even so, my guess is the majority of Muslims in the West just want to live quiet, prosperous lives.

But, a large minority don’t want to live quiet lives. Therein lies the problem facing the West. If we suddenly found that 25% of men with red hair would one day run amok and start murdering people for no reason, we would not let men with red hair walk free. No society could tolerate such a risk. Obviously, long before now we would have either euthanized all red haired babies at birth or maintained a place to exile for all red heads, like an isle of misfit toys. Ginger Island.

Obviously, the Muslim problem is both an old problem and a new problem. The old problem dates back to the 7th century and the Muslim conquests. The answer to that problem was discovered in the 8th century.

While Abd ar-Rahman was pursuing Odo, he decided to despoil Tours by destroying its palaces and burning its churches. There he confronted the consul of Austrasia by the name of Charles, a man who, having proved himself to be a warrior from his youth and an expert in things military, had been summoned by Odo. After each side had tormented the other with raids for almost seven days, they finally prepared their battle lines and fought fiercely. The northern peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions. In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Arabs with the sword.

-The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754

The old problem, in other words, was solved by coming up with this idea of separate countries for Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam is a religion of the sword, according to the people who created the religion. Their mythology claims there will be a great final conflagration and Islam will win the final battle at the end times. There’s no reasoning with that so it is best to keep them penned up in their own lands, which has been the policy of the the world for over a thousand years.

The new problem is not so much a Muslim problem as a Western problem. The new problem starts with the new religion of the West. The religion we call multiculturalism. This religion requires Western government to invite the people of the world to move to their lands and mingle with the locals, but not accepting the culture of the locals. They imagine the nicer parts of London as the ideal utopian future, with cultured restaurants full of young, educated hipsters.

Some portion of those swank young hipsters, however, will decide to strap on a dynamite vest and walk into that “Shoreditch bohemian” hangout. So far, the single thread running through every incident is Islam. It has either been a Muslim immigrant, a man raised in a Muslim home in the West or a convert to Islam. Multiculturalism has strict rules against noticing, but it is hard not to notice when a man yells “Allahu Akbar” and then blows himself up in a crowded restaurant or starts shooting patrons at a Jewish deli.

That’s the problem the West faces. If they notice that Muslims tend not to play well with others, that means diversity may have its limits. If there is some limit as to how much diversity a society can tolerate, then there has to be a debate about where that limit lies and why. In other words, noticing the Muslim problem puts the whole project up for debate. The only “rational” response is demand everyone not notice the exploding man yelling “Allahu Akbar.”

That’s also why the West seems obsessed with discovering what mysterious force causes good Muslims to go bad. Mr. Emwazi, the fellow at the start of this post, was provided with everything one can hope from life in the West. Yet, he is described as having been “radicalized” like some sort of rage zombie, infected by a virus. They allude to his having been discriminated against or, gasp!, profiled by authorities as being the cause. This hunt for a cause, presumably, is intended to find a cure. Perhaps a vaccine at birth that prevents Muslims from going bonkers as adults.

Like so much of the late Rousseau-ist project, the true believers are scrambling around to find a suitable solution other than the ones learned over generations of trial and error. Discarding the traditional institutions that serve as the storehouse of history means relearning all of those lessons painfully learned the first time. Our rulers better be quick studies. What was once a speck on the horizon is now a short boat ride away. This will not end well.

 

The Ceremonial Congress

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One of the things important to Democrats in the post-WW2 years was to reassert the authority of Congress. The extraordinary circumstances of the previous 15 years required a temporary dictator, of sorts, but the trouble was past and it was time to put things back as they were, in terms of political balance. The Cold War, however, meant they never really could fully restore Congress as the base of Federal power. The President in a time of forever war, would forever have powers delegated to an executive in times of war or emergency.

But, Congress clawed back a lot of their power, which is why we ended up with Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. The irony there is the massive expansion of the social welfare system would ultimately eliminate much of the power of Congress. After all, parliaments have one source of power and that is the power of the purse. If you create entitlements, that power is partially eliminated. Keep adding new entitlements and new benefits and before long Congress has little power at all.

The Louvre Accords in the 1980’s will be looked upon by historians as the great undoing of self-government, in all its forms, in the West. Unlimited zero-interest borrowing has made the power of the purse superfluous. Why should anyone worry about taxes or budgets when you have easy access to unlimited funds? It’s not an accident that Congress no longer passes budgets, but instead passes unread “continuing resolutions” that just roll existing budgets over for another year, with a big grab back of new goodies added on.

The power of the purse is four fold. Congress decides what to tax, how much to tax, how to allocate the tax revenues and, most important, to supervise the spending of the money. Since the Clinton years and the capitulation of Congress at Runneymede over the budget, Presidents have little to fear from Congress regarding taxes and spending. Bush was hated by Democrats, but he got what he wanted as far as taxes and spending. After Clinton and Bush, the only power left to Congress was the supervision of the actual spending. Now, it is clear they no longer have that power.

The unwillingness of Republicans to hold the ground on what amounts to Impoundment by Obama is the last necessary concession to make Congress purely ceremonial. If they are unwilling or unable to exercise their oversight duties and instead leave it to the courts, there’s very little left for Congress to do. They can engage in busy work, go on TV and shake down private citizens for money, but otherwise they have no power. We have reached the point the Romans reached after Actium. That is, how much longer do we we pretend the republic is still reality?

I know a lot of people on the Dissident Right think democracy is a sham and the source of our problems. I tend to agree with the Founder critique of democracy as two wolves and sheep voting on what’s for lunch. Handing a veto to the least able just means the most clever and devious, the ones able to manipulate the least able and their veto, will rule the country. It’s why Western political elites are stocked with sociopaths. But, the trouble today is not that the people has too much power. It is that the people no longer have a tribune.

The issue of immigration is no greater way to illuminate this point. The public is overwhelmingly against the anarchy that has been unleashed by Obama. Voters of both parties in large majorities want greater enforcement, tighter control and tougher measures against scofflaws. As that NRO article makes clear, there were a number of avenues the GOP could have taken to force Obama to heel. They deliberately chose the one that was most likely to fail. Like borrowing limits, they are more concerned with eliminating the issue than solving the root problem.

The other interesting thing here is that we are seeing something rather strange. Revolutions and revolts have always been about a dispossessed public rebelling against their oppressive or derelict rulers. In the post-national West, we are seeing the ruling class revolt against their own people. Instead of mobs with torches and pitchforks surrounding the palace, the palace is unleashing the praetorian guards to ravish the people. As I’m fond of pointing out, we have been colonized by our own kind, who no longer see us as their own kind. The emasculation of the People’s House is the final blow.

The Fallacy of Free Trade

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Way back in the 80’s, I used to tell people we would rue the day we let Congress give up its power to manage trade. Tariffs and restrictions have well know costs and they don’t always serve the interest of the people. I read Smith’s analysis of English corn laws and I fully agree that tariffs rarely accomplish their stated goal. The world is richer when countries allow the free flow of goods between them – generally speaking. There are exceptions and they are big exceptions.

That’s the trade-off. Congress gets to play games with trade in exchange for addressing those exceptions. Free trade with Canada, for example, is a no-brainer. The free flow of goods and people between our two countries is good for both of us. Free trade with Mexico, on the other hand, is fraught with problems. Mexico is a failed state run by narcotics traffickers. Here we are all these years later and maybe it is starting to dawn on our rulers that trade is not a set it and forget it thing.

President Barack Obama has called on Congress to grant him fast-track trade authority for his Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement. The administration insists the authority, which would give Congress only an up-or-down vote on the agreement, is needed to get the best possible terms from its trade partners along the Pacific Rim.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama promised to renegotiate and improve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But it now looks like what he really meant is to expand on that flawed trade model and extend it to other countries.

Twenty-one years after NAFTA and four years after Obama’s 2011 U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement, there is abundant data documenting how this trade model has been disastrous for most U.S. businesses, farmers and workers.

Since the pacts were implemented, U.S. trade deficits, which drag down economic growth, have soared more than 430 percent with our free-trade partners. In the same period, they’ve declined 11 percent with countries that are not free-trade partners. Since fast-track trade authority was used to pass NAFTA and the U.S. entrance into the World Trade Organization, the overall annual U.S. trade deficit in goods has more than quadrupled, from $218 billion to $912 billion.

The United States now has an annual $177-billion trade deficit in goods with its 20 free-trade partners. Over the past decade, however, U.S. export growth to countries that are not free-trade partners exceeded the growth of free-trade partners by 24 percent.

The trouble has always been cultural. Canada can be relied upon to follow the rules. The Canadian government will police itself and respond to requests from our government when something is amiss. China, on the other hand, is a bandit culture and the Chinese government sees America as an adversary. Naturally, they cheat on every deal. Mexico is a failed state and lacks the ability to police themselves, even if they wanted. Free trade with these countries sets us up to be patsies, which has been the case for decades now.

The thing with tariffs is we knew the costs up front. The cost of protecting a domestic industry could be calculated. As a matter of public policy, the people decide if the price is warranted. It’s not always logical, but the costs are at least predictable. Unfettered trade brought unknown unknowns that are just starting to be understood. Those unknown unknowns have costs. The new global elite, for example, is unconstrained by national governments. The result is a class of global pirates seemingly beyond the reach of the state.

Public policy is always about trade-offs. Life may not be a zero sum game, but it is close enough to think of it that way. That means a policy that benefits one group will do so at the expense of another. Limiting trade with Mexico may drive up the cost of lawn care, but it also means you can go into an emergency room that does not look like a bus station in Tijuana. Regulated trade with China may jack up the cost of your iPad, but it also means keeping poisoned pet food from China off US shelves.

These are trade-offs to be debated by the people’s representatives. Turning them over to technocrats at the WTO is to make a mockery of self-government and open us up to predation.