Category Archives: Politics

America’s Colonial Class

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I’m fond of saying that America has been colonized by pod people. They look like us and they make noises that sound like us, but they are not us. They are, at the minimum, foreign and alien. They don’t want what we want. They don’t love what we love and they don’t see the world as we see it. Our political class may as well be from Kenya or Indonesia. They look at us like foreigners in our own lands. This editorial from the Times is a good example.

There is a reasonable way to confront the influx of Central American children at the southern border, and the White House is getting it mostly right.

No rational person believes this. You have to be divorced from reality to think the White House is handling this well. Yet, the lunatics at the NYTimes print such nonsense without even bothering to acknowledge the alternative.

It has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to pay for more immigration judges, for legal assistance to children and parents, and to help care for tens of thousands of children in shelters in Texas and elsewhere.

The request seeks more money for the Border Patrol, and for speedier prosecutions and deportations of adults with children, repatriating migrants and addressing causes fueling the exodus in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. And it includes an ad campaign to urge parents there to keep their children at home.

The request would be a good step toward tackling the problem, though it should have included much more for immigration lawyers and humanitarian aid, and less for agents and drones at the border. Congress should swiftly approve it, since it contains pretty much everything that lawmakers — even President Obama’s Republican critics — have been demanding.

But instead of supporting the package, Republicans are throwing up roadblocks. And through dangerous overreaction, some are urging actions that would make the situation worse. They want to make the children’s deportations speedier by amending or repealing the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law signed by President George W. Bush that gave new legal and humanitarian protections to unaccompanied migrant children from countries other than Mexico or Canada.

If this were posted to the Onion, you would not have to change a word of it. These people really believe this stuff. In order to believe such nonsense, you cannot be living in America and keeping tabs on the news. That, or you are suffering from mental illness. Yet, these people are in charge of our country. How is this different from the attitudes of the French royal class during the reign of Louis XVI?

The Red Team keeps chanting about how the solution to immigration begins with securing the border. That’s self-delusion. We face the dilemma colonized people have always faced. The solution begins with buying the wood for the gallows to be built on the Mall in Washington. It’s only then that we have truly faced up to what we have to do to fix our country.

Fake Indian Bashes Wall Street

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Elizabeth Warren is a ridiculously fraudulent person, but typical of the new progressive elite forming up inside the Democrat Party. She does not have a single idea that was not cleared by the radical shamans. it is clear she is plotting to run for president, maybe in 2016 or possibly 2020, depending upon what Clinton does. She is working steadily building her left-wing street cred.

Shepherdstown, West Virginia (CNN) – Fake Indian doesn’t roll deep.

The Massachusetts senator and reigning champion of progressives everywhere arrived right on time Monday afternoon for a campaign event in West Virginia, this one for Democratic Senate hopeful Natalie Tennant, Fake Indian’s latest stop in a national political tour boosting 2014 candidates. Her slight frame slid gingerly out of the passenger side of a blue SUV – her own car, with Bay State plates – and she greeted a volunteer with a golly-gee smile.

“Oh! Looks like it started to sprinkle out here!” Fake Indian said, peeking up at the sky.

There was no entourage, no security detail. Just an aide left behind to park the car. Not knowing where to go, Fake Indian wandered right into the side entrance of the Clarion Hotel in Shepherdstown and strode up to a police officer standing idly.

Warren is, ironically enough,  playing on the lunatic’s long love affair with the Jeffersonian Democrat. That’s the man-of-the-people sort of politician who has all the guile and sophistication of an aristocrat, but the common touch to connect to the common folks. Sort of a decaffeinated Hitler.

“Hi, I’m Fake Indian, the senator from Massachusetts,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Well it’s nice to meet you!” the officer replied. Her aide arrived, conveniently in time to box out an advancing reporter, and escorted her down a hallway.

The low-key arrival was not, it turns out, an indicator of the reception she would receive inside.

In a ballroom packed with nearly 400 West Virginians, Fake Indian was greeted like a bona fide celebrity, met with multiple standing ovations, a cascade of selfie attempts and a few shouts of “2016!”

What followed was a pugnacious and folksy speech packed with the kind of full-bodied populist rhetoric that has thrust her into 2016 presidential conversation alongside Hillary Clinton – whether she wants to be there or not.

“The way I see this, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, all those other guys on Wall Street, they’ve got plenty of folks in the United State Senate willing to work on their side,” she said, jabbing her hands into the air to make her points. “We need more people in the U.S. Senate willing to work on the side of America’s families.”

This is all nonsense, but it is good politics. The Stupid Party would be wise to take note of this. The Republicans should be playing the populist card. They are faced with a party of plutocrats and a president who thinks he is royalty. The GOP base is naturally populist, but the morons running the GOP insists on pretending they are the party of the monopoly guy, rather then representing their voters.

Tennant, she said, “is strong, she is independent, and she won’t let anybody roll over her.”

Fake Indian talked about her working class upbringing in Oklahoma, telling the story of her mother taking on a minimum wage job at Sears, an effort to save their home after her ill father could no longer work. She humble-bragged about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – the “little consumer agency” she helped launch – noting that it’s already recovered $4 billion from banks and credit card companies for American customers. And she bashed Republican opposition to her student loan bill, which would have lowered interest rates but was blocked in the Senate, saying the GOP’s first priority is defending big banks.

Warren was never poor. Her family growing up was upper middle class. Her bio, like her heritage, is completely fake. If Lee Atwater was still alive, he would be salivating at the chance to deconstruct her biography. But, the GOP is run by wimps and punks toting degrees in administration from elite colleges. Stomping a mudhole in Fake Indian is way too proletarian for that crowd.

The Pension Bomb

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Some smart guy supposedly said that democracy works great until the people learn how to give themselves a raise from the public treasury. It is one of those quotes attributed to famous people, even though it is clear they never said it. Reagan used to use the line a lot, but he is certainly not the source. Wiki blames urban legend and maybe some obscure guy from the 1940’s.

The source is not important as the sentiment is obvious. Once you start taking money from one person or group and give it to another citizen or group, you open the door to institutional robbery. Or, as some other unknown smart guys said, “A government that promises to rob Peter to pay Paul will always get Paul’s vote.” Another formulation of this is the tragedy of the commons.

That’s been the dynamic of America’s experiment with social democracy since the end of World War II. One party promises to rob one group of Americans and give some of the proceeds to another group of Americans. The game is to either fashion a majority of Peters on the promise of defending them from the Pauls, or, fashion a majority of Pauls promising to rob the Peters. When in the 1970’s it became clear that Thatcher was right and you do eventually run out of Peters to rob, we started robbing the unborn Peters through debt and money creation.

Now, it looks like we are running out of unborn Peters. The public pension time bomb is about to blow apart the present arrangements, but no one has any idea what to do about it. It is a straight forward math problem. The possible outcomes are known and few are good. Maybe if there is a miraculous change in demographics and asset values, everything will work out just fine. More likely, Detroit is the rosy scenario. As this story in City Journal explains, restructuring pensions plans is just about impossible.

When unions agreed to a deal last month with Detroit city government to freeze the city’s underfunded pension system and create a new, less expensive one, some experts hailed it as a model that other troubled cities might adopt. News reports prominently mentioned governments with deep retirement debt, including Chicago and Philadelphia, as candidates for similar reforms. But the agreement came about under a Michigan emergency law that applies to struggling cities like Detroit, which is in bankruptcy. In many states, by contrast, local laws and state court rulings have made it virtually impossible to cut back retirement benefits for current government employees, even for work that they have yet to perform. These state protections, which go far beyond any safeguards that federal law provides to private-sector workers, are one reason why so many states and localities are struggling to dig themselves out of pension-system debt, amid sharp increases in costs. It will take significant reforms to state laws—or bigger and more painful bankruptcy cases—to make a real dent in the pension crisis.

This may be a good thing. The problems created by the people of Philadelphia should be shouldered by the people of Philadelphia. The state or federal government riding to the rescue just encourages more of this stuff. Plus, the people of these localities will feel the effects of their political choices. Maybe they make better choices going forward.

The Detroit plan, negotiated by unions with the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, freezes the city’s current underfunded retirement plan so that workers will receive benefits for new work at a reduced rate. Under the old plan, an employee who worked for the city for 35 years and retired at 62 with a final salary of $60,000 could qualify for a pension of nearly $40,000. By contrast, if that same employee works the final ten years of his career under the new plan, his annual pension would be about $35,000. In addition, if the new plan becomes underfunded, the employee will have to contribute more of his own money to help cover the costs.

Detroit’s reforms aren’t unusual by the standards of the private sector, where a federal law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), governs pensions. That legislation protects the benefits that a worker has already earned but allows employers to amend a pension plan for work that’s not yet been done, a move that can immediately reduce costs. Workers have the option of seeking employment elsewhere, of course, if they don’t like the new terms.

But federal law doesn’t apply to municipal retirement systems created by state legislation. In about two dozen states, courts have declared that laws creating pensions represent a contract between an employee and government whose benefits can never be reduced once a worker enters the retirement system. Many state courts—including those in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Colorado—have been influenced by a series of California legal decisions (often referred to, collectively, as the “California Rule” on pensions) which hold that the pension contract begins immediately upon employment, and that the terms of a government worker’s pension can only change if the alterations are “accompanied by comparable new advantages,” or benefits. The California Rule, University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein has written, “Neuters the power of local governments to alter and amend, by wiping out all government flexibility to correct prior errors in pension program design or funding.” One result, he observes, “is a financial death spiral” in many municipalities.

The proper term for this is “suicide pact.” That’s what these states have created. A city that cannot raise taxes to pay its bills has to cut spending. If they are prohibited from cutting these pension deals, then they must cut other stuff. Fewer cops and fewer bureaucrats probably sounds good to libertarians, but they have never been to places like Philly or Baltimore. Fewer cops and fewer locals on the city payroll means my neighbors are coming to your neighborhood.

We see that spiral in California, where a number of municipalities entered bankruptcy in recent years, thanks in part to their inability to alter their unaffordable pensions. Courts, meanwhile, have short-circuited reform attempts. Voters in the city of San Jose, where pension costs have risen to $245 million, from $73 million in 2002, passed a ballot initiative in 2012 installing a new, less expensive pension system. But in December, a California judge invalidated the key changes, based on her interpretation of state court precedents.

The decision leaves California municipalities facing a bleak future. From 2006 through 2013, local governments that participate in the giant California Public Employees’ Retirement System saw their annual pension costs double, on average. Last year, the CalPERS board voted to require an additional contribution increase of 50 percent, phased in over five years. “While there is time to plan for the increase, the most fiscally stressed municipalities could find the increases unmanageable,” Moody’s wrote. Meanwhile, California governor Jerry Brown has signed off on another plan to rescue the state’s struggling teachers’ pension fund by requiring school districts to increase their annual contributions from $2 billion this year to $6 billion over the next seven years.

At some point, the money runs out and there’s no way to hide it. The outflow of tax payers from California is going to accelerate. Eventually, the pols will have no choice but to turn on the rich of San Francisco and Los Angeles. That will be fun to watch, but rich people only respond to force, so they will not pay up no matter how much the politicians complain. It will have to get very ugly first.

Legislators in Illinois have taken a different approach. Their state constitution bans changes to pensions, and costs have soared for both the state and its municipalities. Last year, legislators passed changes in defiance of constitutional protections, arguing in court that the state faces a “severe financial crisis” that makes reform “a valid exercise of the state’s reserved sovereign powers.” Unions are now challenging the reform law, and if they succeed, Illinois faces a $187 billion pension tab—equal to more than four times its revenues—with no plan to reduce the debt.

Illinois has lots of company. Without some way to amend the terms of retirement plans, states and municipalities groaning under the so-called California Rule face years of increasing costs and pressure on budgets that inevitably mean higher taxes and fewer services—in other words, the worst of both worlds.

Illinois will never pay those debts. In fact, none of these states with swollen pension obligations will pay those debts. Then we will learn that economists were wrong about public debt. For decades they have been arguing that debt has no negative impact of economic growth. In fact, they have consistently argued that debt boosts growth. That’s true until the point when the debtor cannot pay his debts. Then the whole thing collapses into an Argentine crisis.

That’s always been the big lie within modern economics. Debt and money creation are nothing more than the pulling forward of revenue. If you imagine a nation’s economy as a balance sheet, raising debt to fund current consumption is a zero sum game. It is just an accrual. You artificially increase revenues today, but that entry is reversed out down the line, when the debt is repaid. Our decreasingly robust recoveries from recessions are due to the metastasizing debt.

What happens when the retirees learn they will not be getting paid is not entirely unknown. They will default on their debts. The people holding those debts will follow suit. If a state like California does default on its debts, things will get very ugly in America. There are simply too many people depending on those debt payments for there to be no serious consequences to the economy at large.

I’ve often thought that the next constitution will have a few provisions in response to the inevitable debt crisis that is coming our way. One is there will be serious limits on government borrowing. Frankly, outside of war, the Federal government should never be borrowing. At the state level, debt should be limited to asset backed lending. The state pledges a bridge or road as collateral. Otherwise, government is prohibited from issuing debt.

The other change is that citizens vote where they are born. The people of California who voted for lunatics are the real problem. They should not be allowed to move to a neighboring state and begin ruining their new home by voting for lunatics. Look at the states ruined by Californians moving away from their mess. Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico used to be sensibly run states. New Hampshire was ruined by lunatics from Massachusetts. Vermont was ruined by New York lunatics.

Welcome to the Madhouse

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The worst despotism is an arbitrary one. If you find yourself living under a set of rules with which you disagree, you can adapt. Jews living in countries that banned Jews from public office, for instance, adapted and carved out happy. Blacks in the American South did not like Jim Crow, but they could live with it. The fact that literacy rates, crime rates and illegitimacy rates were much better for blacks under Jim Crow speaks to the toughness of humans. As long as the rules are fixed and known, people can and will adapt to those rules, not matter how much they hate them.

Where things get ugly is when the rules are unknown and variable. Imagine driving on a highway where the speed limit is never posted and the cops get to set the limit according to their whim. Word would quickly get out and no one would drive that road for fear of being victims of the police.  It is this arbitrariness that makes for madhouse societies. Anyway, this comes to mind reading stories like this one.

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that young adult illegal immigrants whom President Obama has given tentative permission to be in the country — so-called “dreamers” — are also entitled to driver’s licenses and ordered Arizona to issue them.

The ruling comes while the government is debating policy about a new wave of illegal immigrant children who are surging across the border in Texas, overwhelming federal authorities’ ability to handle them.

We now live in a land where the President can wave his hand and the people’s laws are invalidated or altered in ways that are contrary to their intent. We live in a land where a Federal court can force a state to issue driver’s licenses to people who are not citizens and not even in the nation legally. In theory, it means the government would have to issue licenses to an invading army.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blasted the court’s ruling, saying it could end up meaning her state would have to grant driver’s licenses to some of those in the latest wave of illegal immigrants if Mr. Obama finds ways to avoid deporting them too.

But immigrant-rights advocates hailed the decision, saying it is a major step in helping the Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. as minors by their parents, move toward some sort of normal life in the U.S.

“This is a huge victory for the young immigrants who want nothing more than to make meaningful contributions to communities in their home state of Arizona,” said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

A three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Dreamers — so-named because of pending federal legislation known as the Dream Act — are in the same situation as other illegal immigrants who have applied for legal status and to whom Arizona law grants driver’s licenses while they await a final ruling in their cases.

The judges said to treat the Dreamers differently violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Think about the madness baked into that last sentence. The US Constitution provides the structure of American political institutions. The people of France do not consider it binding on them. They have their own rules and structures. The people of Kenya have their rules. In other words, the US Constitution applies to Americans in America. These lunatic judges have just declared that all humans on earth are now covered by the US Constitution, thus making them Americans.

The 9th Circuit is a well known holding pen for liberal fruitcakes. Sadly, they are no longer outliers. They are the norm. The super structure of the nation is falling apart around us and we are left with the whimsical, arbitrary decisions of these petty despots dressed like goth druids. These people hate us and enjoy rubbing our noses in the fact we no longer are a nation of laws. The contempt for Americans in the words and deeds of these immigration fanatics is stunning.

In a madhouse society, the rulers are perpetually at war with the ruled. That’s where we are today. Elected officials furiously work to discredit the offices they hold in the eyes of the people. The keepers of the law undermine the people’s faith in the law. The law abiding today are criminals tomorrow. There are no fixed points and there are no rules. Nothing is on the level and there’s no grift that is too small. Welcome to the madhouse.

Conspiracy

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This is a story that should get more interest. The Miami Herald is a far Left outlet, so they are not the sort to engage in right-wing conspiracy. Of course, organized corruption in the FBI is not really a Left or Right thing inside official politics. Both sides go out of their way to praise the FBI as the paragons of virtue, despite the fact their entire history is one of corruption and incompetence. Bungling the 9/11 stuff, but being praised for it is par for the course. Anyway, this seems like a big deal.

It was Halloween night, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 were still fresh on the the minds of Americans.

At a time when everyone was on edge, the sight of a man disposing documents in a dumpster behind a Bradenton storage facility aroused suspicion. Summoned to the scene, Manatee County sheriff’s deputies confronted the man, who had a Tunisian passport.

According to FBI records, authorities searched the dumpster and found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad, a map of the inside of an unnamed airport, a rudimentary last will and testament, a weight-to-fuel ratio calculation for a Cessna 172 aircraft, flight training information from the Flight Training Center in Venice [Fla.] and printed maps of Publix shopping centers in Tampa Bay.”

The Flight Training Center is where 9/11 hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa., took flying lessons.

This intriguing tale and at least one other are contained in a batch of partially redacted documents released this past week as part of ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by the online news site BrowardBulldog.org. The suit, filed in 2012, seeks the FBI’s files from a once-secret investigation into a family of Sarasota Saudis who left the country abruptly about two weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars.

The main figures in the family were Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and her father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.

The report of the Bradenton incident is in some way linked to the al-Hijjis’ saga, although precisely how is unclear. The link might be spelled out in one of the many redacted passages. Nor is it clear in the unredacted portions who the man was or whether he was detained. An FBI letter accompanying the documents says the redactions have to do with national security and other exclusions.

The documents — the fourth batch released in response to the Broward Bulldog lawsuit — were located via court-ordered text searches using the names of the al-Hijjis and Ghazzawi. U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch in Fort Lauderdale is currently reviewing more than 80,000 pages of 9/11 records.

“This release suggests that the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety,” said Miami attorney Thomas Julin, who represents BrowardBulldog.org. “It’s startling that after initially denying they had any documents they continue to find new documents as the weeks and months roll by. Each new batch suggests there are many, many more documents.”

“There needs to be a full-scale explanation of what’s going on here,” Julin said.

The thing about lies and cover-ups is there is usually something lurking behind the lies and cover-ups that is worse than the lies and cover-ups. What’s strange about this stuff is we seem to know the general outlines of that thing in the shadows. Official Washington turned a blind eye to a lot of stuff, including Saudi funding of terrorism. Immediately after 9/11, there was a scramble to cover that reality up. Lying about this stuff now seems to make little sense.

A second FBI document released last week, dated Feb. 2, 2012, is similarly tantalizing — and similarly murky.

On that day, according to the document, FBI offices in Tampa and Charlotte, N.C., received information from Washington stamped “secret” stating that a “person of interest” in the FBI’s massive 9/11 investigation had returned to the United States.

The person, whose name is redacted, was reported to be “traveling to Texas and LA for business/tourism.” The person apparently told authorities upon entering the country that he could be reached in Charlotte. He provided a telephone number “associated with furniture manufacturers in North Carolina,” the report states.

Details about that were blanked out. But the report also states, “Tampa is notified that a person of interest to Tampa regarding the PENTTBOMB investigation has a valid visa for re-entry into the U.S.” PENTTBOMB is the FBI’s code name for its 9/11 investigation.

Whether this person was ever detained, interviewed or allowed to go about his/her business is unclear in the unredacted passages.

In all, the FBI released 11 pages. They contain statements reiterating that the al-Hijjis had departed the United States in haste shortly before 9/11 and that “further investigation” had “revealed many connections” between them and persons associated with “attacks on 9/11/2001.”

Those statements flatly contradict the FBI’s public statements that agents found no connection between the al-Hijjis and the 9/11 plot.

Yet they dovetail with the account of a counterintelligence source who has said investigators in 2001 found evidence — phone records and photographs of license plates snapped at the entrance to the al-Hijjis’ Sarasota-area neighborhood — that showed Mohamed Atta, other hijackers and former Broward resident and current al-Qaeda fugitive Adnan Shukrijumah had visited the al-Hijji home.

None of that information, or even the fact that an investigation in Sarasota took place, was disclosed by the FBI to Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the attacks or to the 9/11 Commission, according to former Florida Sen. Bob Graham. Graham co-chaired the joint inquiry.

Maybe this is all there is to it. The FBI lies to Congress a lot.  It is one of the things everyone knows and no one really says much about. It goes back to Hoover. Read enough about Watergate and you realize that the FBI and to a lesser extent the CIA operate outside the control of the elected government. They are part of the permanent state. The FBI covered this stuff up because they did not want to both own up to being asleep at the switch and then lying about it.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/01/4212644/fbi-records-chilling-find-in-bradenton.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/01/4212644/fbi-records-chilling-find-in-bradenton.html#storylink=cpy

Casual Corruption

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One of the interesting things about 18th century America is the way government sold favors to private interests. Ben Franklin got government printing contracts through bribery. It was not considered bribery at the time, but it would be today. Buttering up local officials to grease the skids was just the way things were done. In a land with a tiny amount of government and a tiny number of laws, you’re getting a tiny amount of public corruption. Corruption, like government, does not scale up well.

Today we have vast and complex state apparatus. So vast and complex no one knows the limits. In fact, you break the law every day. It is this vast and complex web of laws that provides cover for the colonizing pod people to rob us blind. The old expression about the devil being in the details means that the more details, the more opportunity for the devil to do his work. Big government is, if nothing else, a vast thicket of details and minutiae. This post at ZeroHedge is a good example.

It was back in April 2013, when the WSJ reported of a peculiar surge in various health insurance stocks that came moments after a report from Height Securities, a Washington-based investment-research firm that ferrets out policy news and analysis for investors, correctly predicted the Obama administration would reverse course on big spending cuts that would have hit health insurers. The note was released about 15 minutes before markets closed on Monday, April 1, leading to the following surge in the biggest Obamacare beneficiaries.

Needless to say, it is quite clear that non-public info was leaked by US legislators to a “expert network” consulting company, which in turn further propagated the information to its own clients, making them profits of up to 8.6% in milliseconds. As the WSJ summarized at the time, “The resulting stock surge is one of the most dramatic examples in recent years of how tips and insights from Washington’s burgeoning political-intelligence business can drive trading on Wall Street, potentially leading to big profits for those in the know.”

It took the SEC 14 months to finally figure out there may have been something illegal with this setup and as the WSJ followed up three weeks ago, “prosecutors are gathering evidence for a grand-jury probe into whether congressional staff helped tip Wall Street traders to a change in health-care policy, an indication the long-running investigation has entered a more serious phase.”

Trading on inside information has become so common in Washington, no one bothers to hide it. It was not always this way. In the olden thymes, officials relied on foreign junkets to cash in on their position. A Congressman would decorate their homes with goods “gifted to him” by foreign potentates. His big fancy house was probably paid for by donors or a special deal made possible by his donors. It was all legal and mostly small potatoes. Compensation in lieu of salary.

Today, public criminals like Harry Reid become millionaires making shady land deals with organized crime. John Kerry went to DC penniless. He is now worth north of $100 million. A lot of it came from marrying two rich widows, but that was levered into a fortune using inside information. With the parasitic financial system, politicians can now grab millions for themselves trading their knowledge of new rules, new investigations and new taxes.

As we see with this story, they think it is their right and privilege. Where have we heard that before?

What is unknown – and perhaps unknowable – is how much of the legislative tsunami is strictly for privateering purposes. Those million word bills are not only packed full of favors; they are packed full of gimmicks the pols can use to grow their portfolios. Since no one reads these things in their entirety, no one knows where to look for the deals tied to specific pols. In fact, the laws are now written by law firms lobbyists working on behalf of wealthy interests like corporations.

The outrageous part of this is not the corruption. Men are not angels. Washington controls trillions of dollars and that will attract the worst sort, determined to skim some for themselves. The outrage is the lack of outrage. In the 18th century you could shrug at Franklin buying off a local official for a printing contract. It was small money and the printing needed to be done. Today’s pols are like highway bandits, robbing for the sake of robbing. Yet, no one seems to care.

Fake Indian Update

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I’ve been arguing for a while now that Fake Indian will run and win the Democrat nomination in 2016. I’m not even sure Clinton runs again. She is old, fat and sick and the Left generally hates old people. The only way they back Her is if they think the Republican candidate is going to win. Given the state of the GOP, they will not be nominating a sure thing in 2016. Instead it will be some bland establishment guy who does not scare the establishment. It looks like Jonah Goldberg agrees. 

In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening for a credible antiwar candidate. Barack Obama, inexperienced and underqualified, nonetheless jumped into the vacuum. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, the issue that obsesses the base of the Democratic party is income inequality. I think that’s foolish. The underlying causes of inequality — miserable economic growth, stagnating wages, poverty, etc. — are vastly more worthy challenges. Though, in fairness, many people actually have those problems in mind when they talk about inequality.

There’s another, more important reason. In the 1990’s, the Left radicalized and, like Africanized honey bees, became very aggressive. They were convinced Clinton was too timid and let the “extreme right” push him around. Loyalty to the cause kept them from revolting against the Clintons, but the resentment turned into rage by 2000. Just as fundamentalist Muslims went violently crazy after the end of the Cold War, the American Left went bonkers when the Clintons left town.

In 2008, the most anti-Bush candidate was Obama. In 2016, the Left will embrace the most aggressively liberal candidate in the field. The Left largely feels Obama has not been aggressive enough, particularly with the Wall Street crowd. That’s what makes Fake Indian’s faux populism so appealing. it not authentic, but is makes the Left feel like they are something other than toadies to corporate America. Warren would serve the narrative, which is what matters.

There’s another component to the inequality obsession: populism. People increasingly feel that economic and political elites are enriching themselves, not by making great products or selling valuable services, but by cutting backroom deals and selling influence. This rage is remarkably bipartisan. It is the one theme that loosely unites tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers alike.

Goldberg, like most of the neocons, instinctively rejects anything that smacks of populism. That’s why they tend to get it wrong as we see here. Warren’s faux populism is the sort you see in the faculty lounge or the coffee shop at Whole Foods. It’s overly credentialed cosmopolitan provincials complaining about the rich guys who sign their paycheck and keep them in the lifestyle they deserve. They may have it good, but someone with fewer diplomas has it better and that’s just unfair.

It’s why Warren sounds so weird to working class types. If you are a part-time teacher at your kid’s Montessori school, hearing a rich white woman complain about inequality sounds inspiring.  If you’re working two jobs so your kid can go to the local state college one day, hearing an old rich woman talk like that sounds ridiculous. The Democrat party, however, is the party of Montessori school parents, not plumbers with two jobs.

Obscure economics professor David Brat toppled House majority leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary largely by tapping into that populism, particularly on such issues as immigration and Wall Street bailouts.

Senator Warren owes her left-wing hero status to the Democratic version of this kind of populism. She’s been talking for years about how the well-connected “rig the system” for their own benefit. Now, I find many of Warren’s proposed solutions — more regulation, more taxes, more government, etc. — abhorrent. But, believe it or not, I am not a Democratic-primary voter. Those who are love what Warren is selling.

I’ve been pointing this out for years. It used to be that the parties were easy to define by their marketing. The Democrats were mostly the party of the working class and rich people claiming to be for the working class. The Republicans were the party of the shop owner and other rich people. Both parties tried to fashion a majority around policy and both parties could compete in all regions of the country, based on a message aimed at the middle-class white voter.

That’s not the case today nor has it been for a long time. Here’s a quote from a 15-year old Sam Francis colums:

Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain … for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultura1 dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard.

Warren’s faux populism is an attempt to tap into this, but she is a product of the managerial class and her message is aimed at members of that class. Clinton crying poor mouth is a similar attempt. Brat is different and comparing his appeal to that of Warren is a category error. Of course, Goldberg knows this and is trying to prevent conservatives from embracing the Sam Francis style populism by demonizing all forms of populism as left-wing. It’s classic neocon subversion.

The question is whether any of it really matters at this point. Warren is no populist and she would be a slave to the bankers and corporate elites. She is an old rich white woman willing to lie for money. While I think her shtick will work for her in 2016, nothing much will change in the Democrat party. It is and will remain the party of deluded upper middle class whites. They can’t bring themselves to align with middle and working class whites, so they stick with the party of plutocrats.

Where’s This President’s Howard Baker?

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The news brings word that Howard Baker has died. He is probably best remembered for posing the most famous question in American politics. That was, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” It clarified the Watergate scandal for the public, but it also drew a line in the sand among Republicans. He was willing to fink on Nixon in order to make sure the GOP remained respectable in the eyes of the Left.

Repeated over and again in the senator’s mild Tennessee drawl, those words guided Americans through the tangle of Watergate characters and charges playing daily on TV to focus squarely on Richard Nixon and his role in the cover-up.

Baker’s famous question has been dusted off for potential White House scandals big and small ever since.

Baker, who later became Senate majority leader, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and one of the GOP’s elder statesmen, died Thursday at his Tennessee home of complications from a stroke suffered days earlier, according to an email distributed at the law firm where Baker was senior counsel. He was 88.

Baker emerged as an unlikely star of the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973.

When chosen as vice chairman — and therefore leading Republican — of the Senate special committee, he was a Nixon ally who thought the allegations couldn’t possibly be true. Democrats feared he would serve as the White House’s “mole” in the investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters and other crimes perpetrated in service to Nixon’s re-election.

“I believed that it was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing,” Baker told The Associated Press in 1992. “But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked.”

He said Watergate became “the greatest disillusionment” of his political career.

Baker’s intense but restrained style of interrogating former White House aides played well on camera. A youthful-looking, side-burned 47-year-old, his brainy charm inspired a raft of love notes sent to his Senate office; a women’s magazine proclaimed him “studly.” He was mentioned frequently as presidential material.

By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, Baker was a household name with a reputation for fairness and smarts that stuck throughout a long political career.

In the 1970’s, Republicans were faced with a choice. They could go to war with the Left, including the major media, or turn on their own man. They chose the latter. In the 1980’s, they faced a similar challenge, even though Reagan was never implicated in Iran-Contra, which was largely a non-scandal. Still, there were Republicans and Conservatives that went after guys like Oliver North.

The Democratic Party will never turn on their guy. They defended Clinton and they are defending Obama, despite abuses of power that make Nixon look like piker. They will defend the thing to the last man, no matter what evidence comes to light. They will never produce a Howard baker, who reasons that it is better to be respected by the enemy than loyal to the party. It’s also why the Left always wins.

Ramblings on Hyphen Conservatism

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Great nouns need no adjectives and good philosophies need no hyphens. In the former case, the word itself conjures all the imagery needed to convey meaning. That’s not to say adjectives are useless. Quite the contrary. The point here is that nouns like lion or lunatic easily stand on their own. Lesser nouns need helpers to get their meaning across to the recipient. If a noun needs help packing a punch or getting the point across, then maybe that speaks to the concept behind the noun.

In the case hyphenated ideas, the hyphen tells you that the old cause is no longer working and this new thing is an attempt to replace it. Neo-Conservatism, for example, was a cosmopolitan revolt against the traditional bourgeois conservatism of the previous era. More precisely and practically, it was an attempt to fuse the worldly liberalism the urbanite with the traditional social conservatism of the ruralite.

It was a complete failure.

I’ve thought for a long time now that the Left will have a free hand until the Right comes to terms with the Bush years. A similar dynamic was in place in the 1970’s after Nixon, but the emerging conservative movement was ready to take the stage, even before Nixon imploded. The overthrow of Nixon was the Old Left’s last gasp, aided by the young Turks from the New Left. In a way, they did Conservatives a favor by discrediting the northern conservatism for a generation.

I think there are a lot of parallels between Bush the Lesser and Nixon. I’m not talking about character or their conduct in office. I strictly mean as far as their impact on the political landscape. Nixon was an inflexion point for the political class. Both parties were different after Watergate and the nation was different. In the Bush years the Left radicalized and seized control of the Democratic party, making it an ideological party, so now it is the GOP’s turn to change itself.

That’s the problem. After Nixon, it was easy for the Conservative movement to sweep in and take over the GOP. Nixon resigned in disgrace and that wing of the GOP was in no position to challenge the highly popular Reagan and his sizable coalition. Bush served out both terms and many on the Right still defend the guy. What’s going on now is a battle over whether this makes any sense, given that most conservative white voters think Bush was a complete failure as president.

Libertarians have been let out of their box and represent one strain of the reformist/reconciliation effort. They have been allowed to mix with the main stream Right lately, only because they keep it interesting. Of course, Rand Paul is carrying the banner of that branch of libertarians that supported his old man. How much influence they have is debatable. It still looks like a fringe groups of weirdos to most people, but they are making inroads into the establishment.

The newest entrants are from within the Establishment Right. Ramesh Ponnuru is pushing something called Reform Conservatism. His old lady is drawing a paycheck from it so you can guess where that is heading. They have a book out which is mostly a bunch of policy proposals that have been kicking around for years. These guys are the folks who learned nothing from the Bush years, but think they can form a new coalition to challenge the Left.

Then we have Post-Modern Conservatism, which seems a bit muddle to me. I get the sense the adherents spent some time reading Mencius Moldbug. It has that vibe.

Postmodern conservatism appeals neither to the foundations of modern rationalism (a technological view of nature) nor to those of classical rationalism (the autonomy and superiority of the pure philosophic life). So in this sense it is skeptical of foundationalisms, which justifies the somewhat playful and retro name “postmodern.” At the same time, it recognizes the responsibility of reason and so cannot concede the adequacy of appeals to History, including Tradition. In this sense postmodern conservatism is neither Absolutist (dogmatic) nor relativist-historicist (skeptical); let us say it has a certain confidence in reason, or, in particular, in politics as reasoning together, but it does not claim to appeal beyond such reasoning to some finished system of reason, either modern or classical.

Starting fresh always sounds good, but you cannot escape the past. In this case, anyone not on the Left needs to reconcile themselves with that version of neo-con rule, particularly in the Bush years. The period from 1994 to 2008, with a heavy emphasis on the Bush years was, allegedly, the time when the people in charge subscribed to all the main themes of the modern Right. The result was a disaster.

If you think that sounds harsh, take a look around at the post-Bush world. Foreign policy is a train wreck. Relations with the world are at a nadir. The Right’s claim to fiscal prudence was forfeited with the Bush spending spree. Any claims to good stewardship were also forfeited when the Bush clan sold out to Wall Street. Before Bush, no one wanted to be called a liberal. After Bush, no one wants to be called a conservative, so there is no way to defend Bush and the neocons.

The old ideologies are spent, but there’s nothing ready to replace them. American Progressivism is a collection of nonsense fads, bolted onto tribalism. It is the faith of one group of whites forever at war with the other group of whites. Despite its Utopian posing, it has no end and no purpose. In that regard, it is purely reactionary. It has been bankrupt intellectually for so long no one even remembers the intellectual history of the American Left. They exist because they have always existed.

For an alternative to form from the wreckage of the American Right, they first must come to terms with the Bush years. I think we’re seeing that in fist and starts. The pending disintegration of Iraq and the general failure of the War on Terror has forced some tough discussion on members of the Right. The growth of the police state is giving libertarians room to land some punches on the Bush legacy.

As far as practical politics, the the party will resist any change, as every comma ion the party platform represents a snout at the trough. That rules out internal options for reform, so it will require an external force. Populism and a rowdy disregard for convention is probably what is needed. Perhaps some one runs for president on a Pat Buchanan type of platform, but with enough money to make it work. Something will happen, as the current state is unsustainable.

Nixon In Black Face

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This is the flashing red headline on Drudge this morning. First we were told there was a mysterious glitch in the IRS network that resulted in the loss of only the e-mails under subpoena. Now we are being told that the IRS is the only organization on the planet that does not backup its e-mail system. Instead, they rely on users to take care of that on their own, along with securing their own government issued laptops.

It was a very long time ago, so no one is supposed to think about it anymore, but Richard Nixon was run out of office for exactly this sort of thing. In fact, Nixon was chased off for talking about it. He did not actually have the IRS out harassing political opponents. it is not even clear if he talked about or simply allowed his people to discuss it in his presence. The mere hint of it was enough. Now, Magic Black Man can actually have the IRS harassing people and it is no problem.

This is from the articles of impeachment for Mr. Nixon, way back in the disco era.

Article #2 Section #1:

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.

The whole sorry episode has been washed down the drain of history, but the IRS stuff was probably the most outrageous at the time. The Watergate break-in was a big deal, but it was clear Nixon did not know about it before it happened. It was not all that clear he knew about it before it became a big deal in he press. It is where we get the expression, “It is not the crime, it is the cover-up.”

At the time, the stuff that truly offended the people as well as the political class was the potential misuse of the IRS and FBI. It is not all that clear Nixon ever ordered anything of the sort. It is less clear that anyone else seriously tried to use the IRS as a political weapon. We now know that the FBI was corrupt in ways independent of Nixon so that’s a different story. Hoover created a monster that has never truly been tamed.

The FBI had been out of control for decades, but the IRS appears to have been fairly clean. You’re always going to have some level of corruption. When you’re dealing with sensitive data like taxes, petty abuse is inevitable. What led to including the IRS in the articles of impeachment was the mere suggestion of using the IRS for political purposes. The worst you can say about Nixon and the IRS is he would have abused it if it were a different organization.

That’s what makes this story so outrageous. This administration appears to have turned the IRS into an organization that can and was used as a political weapon. In other words, Team Obama went well past anything Nixon imagined. They have corrupted a government agency that was resistant to the Nixon people. Nixon’s corruption meter may have been pegged at ten, but Obama’s goes to eleven.

What this should do, but most likely won’t, is throw cold water on Conservative Inc and their fantasies about the Left. For decades the Left held Nixon up as the poster child for bad government. Today, they are defending a guy who makes Nixon look like a Boy Scout. These are not people who are merely mistaken. They are not people with whom you can have honest dealings. These are not men of principle. The best you can say about them is they are mendacious, cynical opportunist. In reality, they are religious fanatics. Pretending otherwise is suicide.