Category Archives: Political philosophy

GREECE

Posted on February 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

THE PARTHENON, 2 MILES and 26 CENTURIES AWAY

Right across the street from the Parliament building in Athens there stands an outdoor café.  Many times I have sat and sipped  Ouzos at that cafe watching the changing of the guard as one stoic protector of the palace replaced another.  They strut and stomp across the plaza then placidate themselves in front of those little wooden houses that look like they belong more in cartoons rather than standing as bastions of government.  There are two guards.  Each carries an unarmed rifle.  They don’t protect anything of course; it’s a show, a demonstration of sorts.

I wonder where they are now.  Today the demonstrations are in the same place but they are of a different kind.  There are fires on the plaza.  Did they burn those silly little guard houses, I wonder.  I do know, however, that the protesters burned the German flag.  They didn’t burn the German flag because Germany contributed more funds than any other European nation to help Greece out.  They burned the flag because Germany stopped.  Feed a hungry bear and he will lick your hand.  Stop and he will bite it off.

The root problem in Greece is not financial; it is cultural.  If the Soviet Union was the triumph of Communism, then Greece is the triumph of Socialism.  The country has a history of economic distress.  In 1922 the government decreed that 50% of all privately held money in banks had to be given to the government.  The national treasury gave bonds in exchange, to be repaid on 20 years with a nominal interest rate of 6 ½ %.  Neither interest nor principle were ever paid.  The people bailed the country out, involuntarily.  It happened again in 1926, four years later another bailout.  In 1932 the country declared a moratorium on their international debt.  Bailed out again, this time by the international community, again involuntarily.

Should the world do it again?  For humanitarian reasons, perhaps we must, but for how long and how much.  Philanthropy overdone eventually becomes license for continued misbehavior.  It is Europe’s problem and Europe is doing its best to solve it.  Germany enjoys the largest and strongest economy in Europe so the cross falls primarily on the German people to bear.  We empathize.  We have been there.

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Posted in Economy, Opinion, Political philosophy

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BARACK OBAMA’S VAUNTED CONCESSION TO THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Posted on February 12, 2012 | 1 comment

Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw explains the reality of the President’s ostensible concession in a published piece aptly titled Semantics at the Highest Level.

Consider these two policies:

A. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance that covers birth control.

B. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance.  The health insurance company is required to cover birth control.

The President changed the law from A to B which is no change at all.  The claimed concession is not an about face; it’s about farce.  It has oft been said that perception is reality.  The two are not the same, of course, but the aphorism makes the point that the difference is irrelevant.  Perceptions are formed by speeches and headlines while truth and reality often remain in obscurity.  In a prior post on this subject, I wrote “If there is one thing the President knows well, it is the art of agitation, how to create it, how to use it as a tool for accomplishing an objective and even how to deal with it if it turns negative to your cause.”  The pot is still simmering on the issue but thus far Obama has dealt with it effectively.

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Posted in News, Political philosophy

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OBAMA GUTS NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

Posted on February 10, 2012 | 1 comment

Obama is making law again.  Will he ever stop?  Congress passed a law in 2001 known as the No Child Left Behind Act.  The current President doesn’t like the law, so he cancelled it.

Strictly speaking, a President cannot cancel a law with a wave of his hand or the signing of a document.  But he can sign an executive order decreeing that a given law doesn’t need to be obeyed.  The difference is a mere technicality; the results are the same.  One could also raise the argument that the entire law wasn’t rendered inoperative, only certain provisions.  But invariably when this happens, it is to alter those provisions that were controversial in the first place.  The Founding Fathers gave us a government where controversial matters were not to be decided by one person, but by the House and the Senate where the people are broadly represented.  Of course there is a form of government where the leader does have the power to make, break or change the law.  It is called a dictatorship.

Whether No Child Left Behind is bad law or not is a decision for Congress or the courts to make, not the President.  The establishment of a Rule of Law is an essential requirement for any fair and prosperous nation to succeed.  When laws once enacted by a congressional body are subject to executive change and bureaucratic interpretation you have “flexlaw”.  Flexlaw is not a set of established laws at all; it is a set of whims.  Obama and his Administration are transforming our land from a Republic into a DINO, a Democracy In Name Only.  He must be stopped.

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Posted in News, Political philosophy, Political polemics

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WILL THE CATHOLIC FLAP COST OBAMA THE ELECTION?

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 2 comments

The Catholic outrage could cost Obama the election.  But Obama doesn’t believe it will or he would not have taken the stance he did.  If there is one thing the President knows well, it is the art of agitation, how to create it, how to use it as a tool for accomplishing an objective and even how to deal with it if it turns negative to your cause.  The role of a community organizer could be summed up in three words – agitate, intimidate, mediate.  You remember, do you not, that in the primaries for 2008, Obama cited his organizing experience as a reason why Democrats should choose him over Hillary Clinton.  Politics is his profession; agitation is his method; don’t sell him short.

The Catholic demographic is heavily comprised of white middle class traditional, Truman/JFK style Democrats.  They are the tradesman, the small business entrepreneurs, the salt-of-the-earth people, proud to be American and proud of their self sufficiency and loyal to their church.  This demographic, once a stalwart of the Democratic Party, has been migrating away in recent decades.

To voters, politics is all about choosing the best people to govern them.  To a politician, politics is all about strategy and strategies are subject to change over time.  Last November, the New York Times wrote:

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

Catholic Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh put it this way,

“The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’ There is no other way to put it. To Hell with your religious beliefs. To Hell with your religious liberty. To Hell with your freedom of conscience.”

The far left has always felt contempt for the church, any church.  With the advent of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid trinity the Democratic Party’s policies and tactics are those of the far left.  A great many of the Democrat electorate have not yet realized that their party has left them.  This is a wake-up call for the Catholic Church.

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Posted in Opinion, Political philosophy, Political polemics

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TWO VISIONS of AMERICA – A STUDY IN CONTRAST

Posted on February 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

President Reagan believed in the greatness of America as a nation and the can-do spirit of the American people.  Obama believes America is a nation with an eroded foundation whose people have become lazy and unable to manage for themselves.

President Reagan restored the economy that had begun to slip under his predecessor Jimmy Carter, and he gave the credit for the recovery to the resilience of the American people.  Obama has not restored the economy he inherited and offers only accusations and excuses for his own failure to do so.

One man was an inspirational leader from the start, as head of the Screen Actors Guild, to Governor of California and then as President.  The other man was an agitator from the start, as a community organizer and then an ACORN lawyer and is still is an agitator as President.

But both men have their own brand of greatness.  One is known as The Great Communicator, the other The Great Divider.

Happy Birthday, Ron

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Posted in Audio/Visual, Political philosophy, Political polemics

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THE PARTY OF PERSONAL DESTRUCTION – A CONFIRMATION

Posted on February 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

The New Yorker magazine carries the best cartoons in the industry.  The humor is mostly apolitical without a hint of underlying agenda beyond getting the reader to smile.  However, that is where the magazine’s objectivity ends.  Judging by Talk of the Town which opens every issue, one would think Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were the publishers.  If you want to know how an honest liberal thinks, read the New Yorker.  (That is not to say that Reid and Pelosi are honest liberals.)

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for the magazine.  Lizza poured through 11,000 pages of Washington documents and wrote a 13 page article for the New Yorker entitled The Obama Memos with the tagline The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.  Post-post-partisan?  Isn’t that a double positive making it a negative?  Yes, it is.  Lizza contends that no President has been more willing to find common ground and work with the other side than Barack Obama has.  He came into office, Lizza says, with the hope and every intention of putting partisan bickering aside and becoming a post-partisan President.  When it didn’t work as he expected, Obama gave up the idea, reversed his strategy and became a post-post-partisan President.  Lizza may be right about that, but if Obama really thought he would get Republicans to accept some of his far left socialism it wasn’t out of naïveté, it was sheer hubris.

Conservatives have long known the Democratic Party to be the party of personal destruction.  From a lowly plumber named Joe to a lofty Supreme Court Justice, many a conservative has felt the injustice of the Party’s character assassination.  That is what makes this excerpt from Lizza’s article so interesting.

Another hard-edged decision helped make him [Obama] the Democratic Presidential nominee. In early October, 2007, David Axelrod and Obama’s other political consultants wrote the candidate a memo explaining how he could repair his floundering campaign against Hillary Clinton. They advised him to attack her personally…, that all campaign slogans, even the slogan “Change We Can Believe In”- had to emphasize distinctions with Clinton on character rather than on policy.

The memo went on to say we must

“frame the argument along the character fault line, and this is where we can and must win this fight.” [We will say] “Clinton can’t be trusted or believed when it comes to change because she is driven by political calculation not conviction.”

Neera Tanden is now the President of the Center for American Progress.  She was the Policy Director for Hillary’s primary campaign then later became Barack Obama’s campaign director in the general election.

“It was a character attack,” Tanden said recently, speaking about the Obama campaign against Clinton.  “I went over to Obama, I am a big supporter of the President, but their campaign was entirely a character attack on Hillary as a liar and untrustworthy. It wasn’t an issue contrast, it was entirely personal.” And of course it worked.

That’s the sad part, it works.  And who is to blame for that?  The voters.

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FOOD STAMPS AREN’T STAMPS AND THEY’RE NOT JUST GOOD FOR FOOD

Posted on February 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

Food stamps have been at the top of the news ever since Gingrich named Obama the food stamp President”.  According to the Wall Street Journal, 46 million people are on the program, that’s one out of every seven in a population of 322 million.  Aside from Social Security, it is the largest welfare program in the country.

Food stamps are money and money is fungible which means one form is as good as another.  To say that food stamps are for food is folly.  Food stamps are income and income can be spent however you wish.

Everyone eats.  Every family spends a portion of their income on food and the rest of it on everything else.  Food stamps increase the portion that can be spent on everything else.  The point here is not to condemn the Food Stamp Program.  That’s an argument for another day.  All we are saying here is that it is a de-facto general welfare program parading as something it isn’t.  The program is genuine but the title is propagandic, chosen to make more palatable to the 53% of voters who pay tax.

In the beginning, food stamps were stamps.  But stamps haven’t been issued since the 1990s.  Now the benefit comes in the form of a plastic card.  It’s called an Electronic Benefits Transfer or EBT card.  That’s not propagandic; it’s just a hold-over term, like ‘dialing’ a phone call.  And the T in EBT stands for the truth because, after all, it is a card that transfers wealth.

As long as we are on the topic let’s go all the way.  There is no Food Stamp Program.  It was ended in 2008.  In that year the Food Stamp Program became the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).  Now that is propagandic.

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Posted in Opinion, Political philosophy

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CHINA’S SECRET FOR SUCCESS

Posted on January 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

Thomas Friedman, a thoroughly honorable man of the left, champions China from the pages of the New York Times in the same way his predecessor Walter Duranty did of Stalinist Russia from the pages of the same newspaper.  Duranty denied Stalin’s atrocities; Friedman ignores China’s lack of human rights.  Friedman argues that we could solve our economic problems if only we would do as China does.

Here is a glimpse of how China does.

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad   New York Times Jan 26, 2012

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws….Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

[Workers must submit to] onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste…

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.

There is a Laffer curve for regulation.  No one has ever drawn one but one surely does exist.  Total regulation would stifle an economy and there would be no prosperity.  No regulation would be destructive to humanity and there would be no prosperity.  Somewhere in between, the curve peaks.  We are on the right side of the slope (over-regulation) and trending down.  If you want to know where China is, ask Tom Friedman.  But be prepared; he may not know.  He may not have thought about it.

Bob B

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Posted in Opinion, Political philosophy, Political polemics, Regulation

THE NEW YORK TIMES ON DAVOS

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 2 comments

The World Economic Forum is once again in cession in the posh town of Davos, Switzerland.  Today’s New York Times covers the conference with a story under the headline At Davos, a Big Issue Is the Have-Lots vs. the Have-Not.  The headline is right out of Alinsky, including the hyphens.

Believe it or not, I did not come here today to find fault with the New York Times.  I came to talk about bias; it’s just that taking examples from the Times was the easy way out.  Bias is the most insidious bias when it is subtle.  It is also very effective because from any given source it is usually incessant. Let’s examine this sentence taken from the Davos article.

“[The income gap now is] debated openly in areas where the primacy of laissez-faire capitalism used to be taken for granted and where talk of inequality used to be derided as class warfare.”  (emphasis mine)

“Laissez-faire” is from the French where it means ‘let it happen’.  In economics it has come to mean that level of market freedom  which is free-wheeling, devoid of any meaningful regulation, a little bit reckless.  Later in the same sentence we read ‘used to be derided as class warfare’.  Removing the subtleties what we get are the notions that free-wheeling unregulated markets with minimal regulation are  the essence (primacy) of capitalism and that there is general agreement that pitting the poor against the rich is not an act of class warfare (used to deride).  Of course, there is no such agreement.

And what about that word ‘inequality’ in there.  In the context of the broad subject at hand it carries with it the connotation of unfairness.

The phrasing of a sentence in that manner comes easily to a liberally minded journalist and he would disclaim any bias in it.  But you saw it.  Or did you?  I told you it was subtle.

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Posted in Opinion, Political philosophy

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FAT KIDS CHANGE THE POVERTY ARGUMENT TO INCOME INEQUALITY

Posted on January 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

We are in a bit of a flippant mood this morning so take this post with a grain of salt.  To say “take it with a grain of salt” is an old expression meaning [wikipedia data unavailable pending new law (WDUPNL)].  The expression originated when [WDUPNL].

According to a radio report, 35% of Americans are fat enough to be declared obese.  To understand the significance of any study like that , it helps to know something about the organization that conducted it.  What we found is [WDUPNL].

Okay, we don’t need Wikipedia to make our point.  The old argument from the left that heartless Republicans were responsible for a nation full of starving kids has lost its punch.  It loses its credibility when you are surrounded with all those roly pollies.  Drop the starving kids.  Go to income inequality.

Income inequality has been the theme of socialist causes down through the ages.  To substantiate that assertion we refer you to [WDUDPNL].

The obesity study is real.  So is the unavailability of the world’s best known reference source, Wikipedia.  The Wiki shutdown is a one day self-imposed action by the online encyclopedia in protest to two bills in Congress that would regulate internet content.  The bills are intended to stop piracy of intellectual property like music and video (movies).  To that extent the intent is good.  But we take the stated intent with another one of those grains of salt.  And as far as unintended consequences go, we know that is one of those things Congress does very well.  Dare we call it soft censorship?

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