Rebane's Ruminations

Income Inequality Revealed (addended)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 6 November 2019.]

Income inequality in America has become a hot button issue.  People in the street are being convinced daily that the inequality is somehow morally reprehensible since they are made to believe that the inequality comes from the rich stealing from the poor.  And to nail this notion into people’s heads, we are told that the top fifth or quintile of households’ average earnings are 17 times more than the average of the bottom quintile.  The problem with this number is that it is a blatantly false statistic. 

Democrats’ Big Lies #s 4682, 4683, 4684 – Three Recent Biggies (updated)

George Rebane

Let’s start with Nancy Pelosi’s whopper proclaimed from the high altar of the House – “No one came to Congress to impeach the President of the United States.  No one.”

Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to American politics since 2016 knows that high on the do-list of all the country’s leftists, and most certainly of ALL Democrat congresscritters who successfully ran for office then and in 2018, is the impeachment of Donald J. Trump.  These people, all burdened with advanced cases of TDS, give a new definition of zealotry.  Their belief in the ‘democracy threatening’ evil of Donald Trump bypasses all forms of what we used to call reason and logic, where allegations now pass for evidence and their constant repetition is testimony to their verity.  The claimed ‘justice and fairness’ of their now resolved faith-based impeachment process is ludicrous on its face, and will convince only people for whom their TDS is merely an epiphenomenon of more serious psychoses.

Moving on to Sen Elizabeth Warren’s just released ‘plan’ to tank the nation’s economy with her (and Bernie’s) Medicare-for-All single payer, nationalized healthcare program, we hear her proclamation that the proximal funding of this $30T+ $52T+ ten-year catastrophe will not require raising taxes on the middle class.  Instead, she will squeeze the needed funds from our defense budgets, major increases in corporate taxes (remember, corporations don’t ‘pay’ taxes, their customers do), and launching the government’s unabashed assault on private property by robbing the assets of the wealthy who have already paid taxes on what they own.  Were that the only sources of funding the destruction of our nation’s healthcare industry.

History, along with a pencil and a used envelope, will quickly inform any well-read person that those revenue sources will not suffice.  The country’s real stash of cash and earnings are in the middle-class.  If this atrocity ever makes it past Congress, then you can bet the ranch that the federales will quickly go after the assets of the not-so-wealthy and start massive tax hikes (a la EU) on the middle-class.  Recall the years-long screeching about our healthcare costs by the progressives (and local leftwing loonies).  With their claims of our high 12-16% of GDP current annual healthcare costs, they compare this to the 6-8% costs tallied by the EU nationalized healthcare countries (dubiously comparing apples and oranges).

Now consider that the US annual GDP is a bit north of $20T; that’s, say, $210T over ten years.  The Pocahontas Plan will then mandate an over 50% increase (up to 25% of GDP) in our nation’s healthcare costs for openers, about which we have heard nothing but the sound of silence from our crack journalists.  And if you add up all the other increased costs of social programs that Warren has planned for us, you’ll see that our fundamentally transformed government will be the two-thirds participating gorilla in the nation’s economy – these levels are reached by communists and dictatorships, and will require astronomical tax rates to fund from America’s then inevitably tanking future economy.  The socialist elites will count on the nation’s carefully nurtured dumbth (see also below) to assure that none of the (middle class) sheeple will notice.

“We have gone straight past ‘new math’ and right to ‘woke math’.”  This latest program of socialist acculturation has started in Seattle, and soon promises to come to a leftwing unionized public school near you.  The main claim of the woke educators, who back this new turn to nurture the nation’s dumbth through the creation of new millions of innumerates, is that “Western mathematics, as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence (!!??), has been used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.”  The new curriculum promises not only to leave the so-exposed young with little actual knowledge of how to do math, it will also serve to “radicalize young people with tales of oppression and groom them to be future social justice warriors themselves” as they learn “how math dictates economic oppression”.  (Consider this in light of our country's current standing in math education and proficiency, and the damage already experienced from Common Core math.)

Such assaults on our society’s abilities to transmit knowledge and think critically are part and parcel of the promised fundamental transformation of America into a compliant herd that will have no alternative than to accept the dicta of a tyrannical and technologically savvy Leviathan.  For they will have no skills which they have learned to be able to earn.  Such people will not even be able to think of revolution, let alone have the capacity to plan a successful revolt.  The road to the new dark age is being paved bit by piece as we are focused on every issue being cast in terms of ethnic identities, each illustrated as a tragic victim of western civilization. (more here)

According to my lights, these are the kind of world-class lies against which the Left’s trumpeted “lies” of Trump’s foot-in-the-mouth bombast and bravura cannot hold a candle.

‘America’s Schools (continue to) Flunk’

George Rebane

Speaking of ownership of public policies and government operations, the Democrats own America’s public schools.  They have had title for fifty years to what our children are taught, as they are subjected to somewhere from 12 to 16 years of leftwing ideologies, by unionized teachers and administrators who have laid waste to our school systems from coast to coast.

RR has carried the torch for school choice and public school reform during its entire existence.  I have worked with local public schools here and in SoCal to see firsthand who is doing what to whom, and witnessed their resulting work product.  In this regard, our local schools’ performance, along with what has been happening in California over the last decades, is faithfully recorded in the longitudinal data archive of the National Center for Educational Statistics, and they aren’t pretty.

Today we have the results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which consist of tests administered to students around the country every two years.  A report on this is found in the 31oct19 WSJ (here) with the tagline, “Despite more spending, test scores fall and the achievement gap grows.”, which about says it all.

Digging into some of the more important results, we find that the smaller cohort of smarter students are pulling away from those not so smart, whose performance continues to degrade.  These latter are prime fodder for the progressive pabulum that extols the virtues of bigger government, more transfer payments, and dunning the existential benefits of individual enterprise, capitalism, and minimally regulated markets.  These cohorts of the poorly educated continue to feed the reliable Democrat voting blocks, whose subsequent existence is denied as they become (unemployed) adults – if you’re an American leftist, what’s not to like?

As examples, only 35% of the country’s fourth graders rated proficient in reading.  Overall math and reading scores are about level, save that the top students’ scores increased slightly less than the drop in the scores of the bottom decile.  The black/white learning gap remains dismally large.

Surprisingly (or not), 4^th grade scores increased only in Mississippi, but the real success story comes from Washington DC where charter school enrollments increased 60% since 2009, much to the chagrin of unionized ‘educators’ who felt the pressure to then increase performance in other public schools.  The unions’ answer to every such report of education deficits is to demand more spending for schools.  But spending increased 15% per pupil between 2012 and 2017 from its already (globally) rate, and the result has been no improvement as cited.  “Spending has been growing at an even faster clip over the last couple of years as government revenue has recovered from the recession.”

California, the state of the double-dummy educators, increased its education spending by $102B (more than 50%!!) since 2013 with absolutely no increase in student performance from its already bottom-barrel lows in the nation.  There it is joined by the other Democrat-dominated states – drumroll please – yes, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.  Along with California, these states have also raised taxes for schools, all to no avail – the teachers’ and administrators’ pension funds suck up the new cash like a sponge.  The report concludes with – “Much of the money has gone to fund teacher pensions and administrative positions that pad union rolls. Maybe parents should go on strike to demand more accountability from the union-run public school monopoly.”

[Exit assignment - pay attention to the number and content of comments from our liberal readers.]

‘Democrats good, Republicans bad’ – Propaganda Central

'As government expands, liberty shrinks!'

George Rebane

Our intrepid columnist George Boardman in the 21oct19 Union laid out (here) a carefully concocted list of stats.

• Democrat “districts” generate 63% of GDP, while Republican districts manage only 37%.
• Democrat household incomes increased 17%, while Republican HHs only increased 3%.
• Democrat “districts” have greater concentrations (“clusters”) of college degrees.
• Democrat “districts” contain 75% of our professional and digital worker jobs, while Republican districts contain mostly agricultural, mining, and low-skilled manufacturing jobs.

With these in mind, Mr Boardman’s clear message to our light thinkers is that Democrats are the party of goodness and light, containing the smart, wealthy, and productive, while Republicans are the party of the backward, ignorant, poor, and struggling.  The better read who understand the demographics of Democrats' long-controlled urban districts will have none of this.

What this little piece of nascent propaganda omits are data on what kind of people overwhelm Democrat districts, and those who are moving in vs. out.  He says nothing about the millions of our poor, dismally under-educated, criminal, and welfare recipients concentrated in urban areas who provide the sinecures for Democrat politicians.  And Mr Boardman doesn’t tell the reader about where the lion's share of wealth is produced in our service and digital economy, along with the rampant income inequality and humongous transfer payments in these ‘districts’ and ‘regions’ all of which give rise to the skewed statistics to make such selectively massaged messages possible.

Outrageous Outages (updated 10oct19)

George Rebane

Our power here in western Nevada County went out at 315am.  We set our phone alarms and got up at 630am, and started the generator.  Turning on our local KNCO, we were advised to remain calm, safe, and that everything in the region was canceled for the day.  A PG&E lady came on to read some prepared pap and informed us that power “may be restored” starting tomorrow noon.  Another local politico advised us all to “be patient”.

I have been continuously checking the winds, both current and predicted, and found that there was no wind, measured and predicted, in the Sierra for the next 48 hours that exceeded 10mph.  Whatever ‘high winds’ (20-25mph) there were to be, were on the central valley floor.  In fact, the entire northwest of the US is unusually calm, save for that small Sacramento Valley floor pocket of light winds.  Here in the Nevada City region it is DEAD CALM as is seldom seen – not even a leaf moving.  You can do your own checking here.

For all intents and “public safety” purposes, there is no evidence that power needs to be shut off in these foothills.  The outage, predicted and delivered, appears purely for punitive political purposes that is endorsed by a progressive leftwing government whose longstanding MO has been to get Californians to accept more and more abusive government control over their lives without so much as a murmur.  In a state where a free and independent people dwell, government and their monopoly utilities would at this time have turned power back on while broadcasting apologies for having turned it off for no reasonable purpose.

But long ago that ceased to be California, where we have been taught to hunker down and accept everything from the most onerous and useless/stifling environmental regulations, highest gas and fuel prices in the Union, sky high taxes, piles of human shit and needles covering our city streets and sidewalks, crumbling roads and bridges, welfare/homeless/illegal alien capital of the country, broken public education system, corrupt (and unfunded) public employee pension system, historical exodus of companies and middle-class wage earners, …, and more of the same on the way.

We now have an under-educated ‘woke’ electorate who are fed a daily diet of pap from our lamestream outlets, putting the blame for their dire straits on the state’s successful businesses and the well-to-do who can still afford to live here.  These are guilty of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and according to all Democrat politicians (especially those in Sacramento and running for president) they must be squeezed much much more in order to redistribute their ill-gotten assets and achieve social justice in a fundamentally transformed America.

And now we are being conditioned to patiently accept the power distribution schedules of third-world countries as the latest new norm for our once golden state.

[10oct19 update]  California’s historic Great Blackout continues.  The people are finally getting sufficiently pissed since no one has seen any dangerous winds in NorCal that might affect public safety.  The PG&E officials are keeping a stiff upper lip and passing the bullshit. (more here)  Here in the Sierra foothills there has been no wind all night, and looking out my window at our forest, there is not a single leaf moving – dead air.  Our politically punitive punishment continues (The Federalist agrees).  Which brings us to the whole deal about the National Weather Service and NOAA.

Ruminations – 3oct19 (updated 6oct19)

George Rebane

Former Union publisher Jeff Ackerman writes (here) that Californians today pay and average of $4.02/gal for gasoline while the rest of the country averages at $2.64/gal.  And the escapee to Oregon goes on to point out that all of this is self-inflicted pain that the state’s voters are way past having enough between the ears to change course as Sacramento does its best to accelerate dumb laws/regulations and spread our epidemic across the country.

Gun confiscation was again disguised at the Giffords/March for Our Lives “gun safety forum” in Las Vegas. The Dems are having problems coming together on which or whether to back such confiscation schemes as mandatory buybacks.  Even Moms Demand Action have stopped short of buybacks, which leaves Beto (of AR15/AK47 fame) and the klatch of radical socialists more isolated than ever.  Many of us hope Beto will double down on his ‘Damn right, we’ll take your guns!’

No more masks for Hong Kong protesters.  An old British colonial law is to be invoked to threaten protesters with eventual arrest when they reveal their faces to government operated face recognition software that is being installed all over China today.  Here we are considering doing the same, starting with neighborhood watch cameras for recording night time crime (and anyone else who is on the street after dark).  Soon after, we’ll be fighting daytime crime and questioning people who are recorded being out of their own neighborhoods.  Isn’t technology wonderful?

[4oct19 update]  Volker’s House testimony and release of tweets are the first real disclosures that may seriously put Trump’s tit in a wringer in the ongoing impeachment saga.  Trump is by no means the first president to seek and get foreign aid against political opponents for some horse trading.  But back then it was no big deal and a known prerogative of office.  IMHO, if the sought aid concerns a material revelation about the character of a political opponent, then I don’t oppose such information gathering.  However, I do oppose purchasing fabricated ‘evidence’ of an opponent’s bad character from foreign sources.

[6oct19 update]  Harvard on capitalism (here) - whouda thought?

Agenda21 to SDGs to Agenda 2030

George Rebane

RR has covered the Agenda21 story extensively over the years primarily in its role as a template for leftwing objectives that their politicians’ public policies seek to fulfill.  (see 'Agenda 21' category) This non-binding UN initiative was formalized in 1992 and signed by over 100 nations.  The US (under Bush1) became a signatory.  A21’s objectives and means of achieving them on the level of local jurisdictions was and continues to be taught to government officials and properly politically oriented NGO staffs through a global network of ICLEIs.

ICLEI or the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives was launched under the aegis of A21.  The ICLEIs almost immediately began distancing themselves from the A21 relationship as the latter’s objectives started to be highlighted by various rightwing media outlets, politicians, and conservative blogs as harbingers of global autocracy.  The goals taken in toto were an antithesis for the retention of sovereign nation-states as the fundamental structure of world order.  A21 called for an authoritarian global government whose operational goals were actually to markedly lower human population, reduce its consumption of earth’s resources, and restrict people’s access to most of earth’s land area and natural resources.

This obviously made A21 and all references to it anathema to most Americans, and made connecting A21 to the Left’s globalist narrative a no-brainer.  Hence, the Left immediately launched a nationwide denial campaign, claiming that A21 was really some hare-brained Big Brother conspiracy cooked up by the Right.  Their proof of that was showing that none of their public policies which existentially abetted A21 objectives, actually called out A21 or mentioned A21 objectives in the laws and regulations they passed and their publicized desiderata for future legislation.  In short, A21 had to be banished from the public mind.  And so it was.

Today the objectives of A21 are all alive and well, but they have had to be repackaged by the UN under the new rubric of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and wrapped into its newly introduced Agenda 2030.  The clear hope is that within such new adornments, the public will be bamboozled a bit longer as the global Left continues to fashion and form ever more restrictive boundaries through SDG-supportive public policies, all of which need an ever larger state to administer and enforce them.  And, of course, all that will cost much more than we are used to paying now, hence the new levels of mandated tribute to Leviathan will be justified as fulfilling part of humanity’s overall moral imperative in its march into the globalist 21^st century as prescribed by Agenda 2030.  The beat goes on.  (more here, here, and elsewhere – google ‘Agenda 2030’)

Nevada County – economic disaster area

George Rebane

The more that wealth gets redistributed, the less wealth there is to redistribute.

This morning’s (27aug19) lead article in The Union by reporter Cory Fisher (here) informs the reader an awful lot about our community that most of us did not know.  It turns out our county is an economic disaster area with more working people than ever going hungry and having problems making ends meet.

According to local reports, “1 out of 7 Nevada County residents” (14.3%) were “food insecure” (term of art for hungry?).  Across all US counties 13.3% were food insecure, only 11% were in such dire straits in LA County, the country’s individual rate is somewhere around 12.5% (1 of 8), and all this in a land where over one in three of us are mysteriously fat. (more here)

Then we learn that the hunger rate in our county is not only high but screaming upward.  At the Food Bank the increase has been from 800 in May, 1,000 in July, and 1,200 in August – in other words our calorie calamity is reported to be growing at about 150% annually.  We are told this is causing our non-profit food distributors financial hardship for two reasons – increase in the county’s hungry population and a reduction in charitable contributions because of Trump’s new tax law.

Somehow the truth about the tax law and its restrictions on charitable giving is completely opposite.  The standard deduction has more than doubled to $24K for joint filers and it does not limit giving at all.  All it has done is caused more people to take the standard deduction instead of itemizing deductions such as their former charitable gifts.  This little feature has induced many people to then just skip the giving, not because they have less money, but because there is no need to give to get the tax benefit. (more here) But that’s not what the article impugns.  Somebody forgot to include that character still counts, even under the new tax law.

And the overall problem of falling income making it hard for our county’s residents to make ends meet – it then appears that our workers did not share in the country’s benefit from the tax cuts that increased lower and middle class household incomes by an average of $2,000.  (More here) When you factor in the doubled tax credits for kids, the average family has even more dollars to spend.  And here is a summary of the real impact of the Trump tax cut.

So, while the rest of the country is enjoying historically low unemployment, rising wages, and paying lower taxes, in Nevada County our poverty rate is estimated to have started increasing again after Trump was elected.  He even caused a bump in climate change that started more wild fires, which then raised county residents’ insurance rates that forced some of them to move.  The takeaway is clear, it’s only California’s enlightened public policies in housing, homelessness, education, fighting capitalists’ greed and global warming that have somehow kept body and soul together.

In the real world "Americans in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners buy more consumer goods and services than the national averages for people living in most of the wealthiest nations of the world, including those in Europe." (more here)  How can this be?  Well, for all of you who have consumed the media-delivered poverty rate for Americans, Cato’s ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’ may shed some new light on reality.  All said and done, the piece did make me wonder why Nevada County is under the reported curse.

Scattershots – 20aug19 (updated 23aug19)

“nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort”, William Ewart Gladstone (1809 – 1898)

George Rebane

I’m old enough to remember when TVs were the big new whizbang thing.  We common folks were then told of all the wonders that a live screen with sound would be bringing into our living rooms.  And then came computers, and the news was full of how businesses were doing this and that with those new-fangled number crunchers.  After that it was the internet, and we learned to expect all of its wonders, and now we read the breathless reports of AI starting to do all things good and also its (biased, gasp!) dark side.  All of those technologies quickly faded into commonplace roles in our lives.  The next big thing will be personal AGI (artificial general intelligence) companions whom we will demand and trust more than fellow humans.  And this will scare the crap out of autocratic governments – keep your eye on Sacramento and DC.

Meritocracy is a bad thing in modern society, so points out a recent article in The (leftwing) Atlantic. (H/T to Sandbox commenter)  It causes all kinds of bad psychological problems and promotes inequality – kids from richer homes are smarter than those from poorer homes (Stop the presses!).  Therefore, they wind up working ridiculously hard in school and the workplace, and get stressed out as they dominate the 1% class.  The solution, force universities to admit a certain percentage of the dumber students.  Or maybe in the future the smarter ones must have a noise making chip implanted into their skulls to disrupt longer thinking processes, or maybe the too smart ones will just be culled by the state like shown on a Twilight Zone episode long ago (here).

A Pence/Harris VP debate next year is anticipated with some glee by our liberals.  They can just see Harris taking down VP Pence in a one-on-one encounter.  I would counsel a little trimming of such hopes because Mike Pence is not a Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris is definitely not the brightest bulb on an otherwise dimly lit Democrat tree.  Harris commands little to no basis for arguing substantive issues; all she can do is attempt to sway the lightly read with emotional anecdotes.  These the VP can easily dispatch by pointing out the aggregate impacts that such radical leftwing policies have delivered elsewhere, and now portend for the country.

Preventable man-made global warming (PMGW) ascendant. Notice the increased hysterics in the media about all the disastrous effects caused by PMGW.  Time after time the warming data is shown to be politically motivated hokum, but that makes no never mind to the fear mongers (the lamestream does not air that side).  The new level of hysteria is being ramped up by the Dems for 2020 as a back-up argument for their policies that promise to deliver the country's new socialist sunrise.  The message – capitalism causes PMGW that will kill the planet, socialism is the only hope to save mankind.  A good fraction of our electorate has been carefully cultured to uncritically embrace such arguments.

[21aug19 update]  “… the clicking of jack boots and rifle bolts.” As witnessed on RR over the years, this is the form of governance legions of leftists have convinced themselves that conservative America seeks.  They ignore that it is and has been only the goose-stepping collectivists that have constructed leviathans in which citizens are kept in line by such displays and applications of state power.  But true to Lenin and Alinsky, they were taught early to counter political opponents by loudly accusing them of one’s own worst practices.  And as history has shown, you can fool enough of the people all the time to bring down somnambulant republics.

[22aug19 update] ‘Americans Are Richer Than We Think’ write economists Phil Gramm and John Early.  The Democrats and their lamestream lapdogs have done all they can to convince America that we live in a bad economy that doesn’t benefit anyone but the rich, and (go figger) they turn around and tell us that our good economy is about to take a dive.  And all will be well again once we fundamentally transform the country and put it on a firm socialist track. Such reasoning fits well with the liberal mindset.  Gramm and Early present loads of data that debunk the leftwing's advertised misery of the middle class.

Russ Steele has an excellent idea on how to take a census of rural folks who don’t have access to broadband.  Everyone has been trying to get their hands around that problem in order to come up with good public policies that enable government and the private sector to work together in correcting this deficit.  Russ suggests that we use the upcoming census to gather this data.  The details are in his 22aug19 ‘Overwhelmed and Under-counted’ letter to The Union.

US acquiring Greenland. Trump’s recent proposal to Denmark on the reprise of this idea (first proposed under President Truman) has been peremptorily identified as looney by the Left (and a few on the Right), and offered in the lamestream as further evidence that The Donald’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.  Now I don’t particularly agree with the way that our president again introduced this proposal; it should have been done quietly at lower levels of diplomatic contact.  But on the overall concept, I think that there exist several approaches in which that piece of strategically located and resource rich real estate can benefit both us and the Danes if the US got or shared sovereignty over Greenland.  The Left in their mirth appear to have put as much thought into the matter as do hyenas before beginning their bouts of ‘laughter’.  (Here is a more sober discussion of this in Politico, and here is Sen Tom Cotton's overture last year.)

[23aug19 update]  Union publisher Don Rogers writes an enticing, yet in the end disappointing, meditation on the meaning of life in today’s paper.  In his ‘The Meaning of Life?’ he takes us on a short journey of futility while keeping hope alive, and then (trigger warning) summarily drops us off with “Life is what life does”? -86-  OK, but then why bother to lead us “befuddled pilgrims” by the nose to ‘It is what it is.’?  Actually, I’m just exposing my naivete here.  One should always temper one’s expectations when reading our beloved Union. 😉

Scattershots – 12aug19 (updated 14aug19)

George Rebane

A long march to protest over-regulation in California is planned to start on 13 August in Vinton (the northern terminus of Hwy 49) and wend its way through 300 miles of rural mountain and hill country roads to end in Oakhurst on 25 August.  It will be done in daily segments which takes it through Nevada City/Grass Valley on 16 August.  People are asked to join it and/or encourage the marchers as it passes through their communities.  This grass roots civic action is the latest expression of desperation with encroaching governments at all levels that daily increase their constraints and constrictions of movement and use of public lands a la A21.  It’s to be seen how such efforts will be received and persist in a state that no longer reflects our inherited culture and values from a fast-fading America.  More here.

President Bill Clinton’s 1995 SOTU speech to Congress on his “illegal alien” policy.  Since Clinton spoke, the situation has gotten orders of magnitude worse with today’s unlawful ‘undocumented immigrant’ policies and programs promoted by our anti-American Left.  Take a look at this 90 second video, it is one that Republicans should play continuously until November 2020, if they had the balls.  Sadly, that will never happen.

[13aug19 update]  ‘Never Again’ Means Nothing If Holocaust Analogies Are Always Off Limits. This WaPo op-ed is one of the most ignorant pieces of writing I have read in a coon’s age.  Author Danya Ruttenberg attempts to excuse AOC’s comparison of our deporting illegal aliens to Hitler sending Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.  Such comparisons are especially damaging and divisive to the mildly educated minds that populate our land and now embrace socialism, they don’t have the historical background to parse the ridiculous analogies Ruttenberg presents in her column.  You have to read it yourself to understand the new directions of the Left’s propaganda machine.  Is this another one of their Big Lies?

[14aug19 update]  That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good looking yet abysmally ignorant shill for the DNC’s radical left wing is known to all who pay attention.  She was elected by the fewest of voters from her district, and receives campaign contributions from fewer still – 10 in the first half of 2019.  Her re-election campaign is funded by unknown sources outside her district, and she is handled by equally mysterious agents who consider her and her ‘Squad’ as extremely useful idiots used to manage the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party in fashioning its image as the election season heats up.  (More here)

Democrats’ Big Lie #3671 – America’s economy

George Rebane

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, our Left has marshalled their legion of liars to spread the word to the lightly read that Trump’s revamping of our economy to historical levels has not happened, and that only the top 1% derived any benefit from the tax cuts and regulation rollbacks.  This kind of concerted lying campaign does immeasurable harm to the lower half of the IQ curve, causing these folks to vote against their own self interests.  But that makes no never mind to our progressive Democrats; do whatever keeps and increases your power, and bamboozling the snuffies has always been part of the drill.

It’s instructive to take a look at the magnitude of this particular stream of lies from the Left that started back in Obama’s time when we were assured that a max of 2% annual growth was going to be “the new normal”.  And, of course, Team Obama demonstrated that dictum over his tenure which averaged growth under 2%.  These people pulled every trick in the book to stifle the economy and keep workers’ wage growth essentially flat, all the while lying that they were helping the little guy and middle class.  The little guys took it in the shorts also as the Dems boosted the minimum wage wherever possible so as to make the lower rungs of the economic ladder ever more inaccessible to our unskilled and youngest workers starting their careers.

Conservatives and capitalists have known for generations that a rising tide lifts all boats, in direct contradiction to the Left’s teaching that the only friend of the poor and unskilled is big and bigger government.  Here’s a graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate the difference between Obama and Trump (filched from the 5jul19 WSJ).

By 2012 it was clear to most Americans that Obama was a socialist who had little interest in implementing demonstrated economic principles to recover the economy from its 2009 Great Recession lows.  I waxed eloquently on this in my ‘What Recovery?’ essay.  In that piece I presented a clear and concise systems flow diagram for how the GDP is calculated from its major components.  It even pointed out how and where the government just pisses away generated wealth.

Most of us don’t have a clue when talking about economic recovery and growth.  Recovery is in the eyes of the beholder, and economic growth is not experienced as a one size fits all – different sectors benefit differentially from any given level of quoted aggregate growth, as the following graphic illustrates.

America’s economy has grown in a remarkably constant range of 3.3-3.4% annually from 1880 to 2008 on the eve of the Great Recession.  To explain the different recovery flavors, I indicated such an exponential growth as the green line in the above graph taken from ‘The Recovery Rigamarole’.  The arbitrary GDP amounts shown vary as a function of time, say, in years.  At year 40 a recession/depression occurs that takes the GDP from around 225 down to 135 over a ten year period.  At year 50 the economy begins to recover.  But from there several 'recovery' paths are possible, three of which (R1, R2, R3) are shown.  At this point it’s important to keep in mind that if the economy’s dip (red line) did not occur, then it would have continued growing at its long term (green line) rate – e.g. at year 50 it would have been about 265.

R1 is clearly a true recovery that regains the long-term growth curve.  R2 is a more tendentious recovery that does achieve the pre-recession growth rate, but perennially lags the sans recession GDP growth trend.  And finally, R3 is at best a propagandized faux recovery, achieving neither the pre-recession growth rate nor its long term trend.

The continuing dissemination of this Big Lie about Trump's economy by the lamestream is one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the ongoing progressive propaganda onslaught through the auspices of fake news.

 

Subliminal Manipulation of Votes (updated 8aug19)

George Rebane

This is possibly the scariest post to date on RR.  Dr Robert Epstein’s congressional testimony about the vote manipulation antics of Google and Facebook are jaw-dropping.  Epstein is the former editor-in-chief of the prestigious Psychology Today and continues as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research & Technology.  In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, this self-avowed liberal Democrat and strong Hillary supporter recounts numerous incidents of subliminal and so far unstoppable vote manipulation by the named tech giants.  As an example of an experimentally demonstrable vote manipulation effort Dr Epstein recounts that Google swung an extra 2.6M to over 10M extra votes for Hillary and the Democrats.  And to date there is not a thing anyone can do about this kind of activity which Epstein says will definitely be the deciding factor in the 2020 election.  We are reminded during the testimony that Alphabet – Google’s parent – was the single largest contributor to Hillary’s 2016 campaign. 

You wanna see what vote manipulation really looks like, then watch the goddam 7-minute video before someone takes it offline!  (H/T to correspondent)

[8aug19 update]  For a recent example of how these social media giants manipulate public attitudes, see the report in 'Scattershots - 6aug19' for what Twitter quietly did so as not to damage the progressive narrative about who are nation's haters and promoters of polarization.

Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

George Rebane

The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

[2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled 'National Emergency' says it all.  (H/T to reader)

[3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

[7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

Scattershots – 14jun19 (updated 20jun19)

George Rebane

Proto-socialists on parade.  I noticed in the 14jun19 Union’s lead op-ed another example of a good-hearted, light-thinker wailing about our country’s unequal distribution of wealth, and its pitifully inadequately small government.  A Ms Becky Goodwin laments that no “millionaire” attended her kids’ college graduations to pay off their student loans, and why should such largess be a sometime thing instead of a universal benefit across the land.  She gives no evidence of understanding how such inequalities contribute to the overall wealth and weal of a nation.  As a devoted leftist, she eschews private charities and wants all such benefits to come from a much larger government that gets such monies from taxing the bejeezus out of rich folks who just happened to belong to what was known as the middle class (more here).  The country is chock full of these proto-socialist Beckys who deny the label but would eagerly vote for every Bernie, AOC, and Green New Deal that comes their way.

Growing populism and middle-class anger.  If there’s any hope for liberal governments, then it may well begin with what VDH summarizes in his ‘Why Are the Western Middle Classes So Angry?’  He outlines six “gripes” that are also part of RR’s mantra –

• Illegal immigration and open borders have caused institutional chaos and cultural compromises – e.g. multicultural identity politics.
• Globalization that has enriched Western elites who have “outsourced, offshored, and ignored their own industries and manufacturing.”
• The viral explosion of unelected bureaucrats at all levels of government consisting of sinecured, feedback-proof regulators, planners, auditors, inspectors, and adjustors.
• The global lamestream media reaching and indoctrinating billions rather than practicing what was known as ethical journalism.
• The post-educational academia that now functions as a “shrill agent of cultural transformation … charging more for less learning.”
• “Utopian social planning”, a la Agenda21, that has “increased housing, energy, and transportation costs.”

VDH concludes that “because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.”

Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard?, asks our favorite Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute (see also here).  This paragon of academia, that enjoys a $39,000,000,000 endowment made possible only through the largess of western capitalism, is now teaching its students that, in fact, capitalism contains “systemic inequities”, and the “capitalist ethos” is false because it teaches that “we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions.”  Not at all, maintains Dean Rakesh Khurana, because in reality capitalism is a zero-sum game that rewards its players simply on the roll of Fortuna’s dice – remember “you didn’t build that”.  Khurana most recently disseminated this blather at Harvard’s commencement in a speech which pointedly ignored that his “parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, one of the events leading him to conclude that at least 85% of his current status is due to circumstances beyond his control. His parents presumably came to the U.S. because they saw opportunity, not “systemic inequities.” That opportunity arises from Western civilization’s accomplishments: the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression and inquiry, and the relative absence of corruption—all matters about which Mr. Khurana was silent. This civilizational inheritance allows social mobility and wealth creation unimaginable in most of the non-Western world.”  Read MacDonald’s article for the full story.  (H/T to correspondent)

‘Socialist’ Nordics are moving toward private healthcare – what a revoltin’ development!  As we have reported for years, free healthcare is unsustainable, and its dive into the mud is slowed only by providing fewer and slower services.  The answer to it is - seatbelts please - private healthcare funded through private health insurance.  Daily Signal reports that quiet trend has been going on for years with increases in such insurance purchases by 7% of Norwegians, 4% of Swedes, and leading the way, 22% of Danes who have been able to augment their ‘free’ healthcare.  A good piece, that covers what is offered to whom, when, and for how much in various countries our socialists are trying to emulate, is detailed here.

[17jun19 update] Our broken Constitution and legal system.  SCOTUS upheld the cynical double jeopardy provision that our Constitution specifically prohibits.  The Daily Caller reports,  “The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause prohibits multiple prosecutions for the same offense. An exception to this rule called the separate sovereigns doctrine allows state and federal governments to bring successive prosecutions for the same crime. Monday’s decision leaves the doctrine in place, meaning any person Trump pardons remains exposed to state prosecutions.”  The only reasonable conclusion here is that our Constitution does not apply equally to the federal government and those of the several states.  The ‘separate sovereigns doctrine’ and the entire quagmire of a sub-rosa administrative law legal system give continued evidence that our legal system is both broken and corrupt.

Cap & Trade slush fund.  Years ago when CO2 cap & trade was first proposed, I and my fellow climate change skeptics predicted that such monies would soon be used for all kinds of other progressive vote-buying give-aways by Sacramento.  Well, that day has arrived (more here).  The scumbags in the state legislature, who have claimed CA is flush with cash, can’t hide the truth any longer and have to go after money wherever they can find to fund their follies, or just to keep minimal government services going.  RR readers, of course, know what the response of the local lefties was to such predictions. (H/T to reader)

[20jun19 update]  My new favorite communist is Umair Haque. I have reported on his virulently anti-American essays before.  This prolific, yet amazingly ignorant, ultra-left ideologue is published regularly on Medium.com which is an outlet primarily by and for Millennials, and therefore deserves a regular look-see by those seeking to keep up on their thought and sentiments.  Umair’s (that’s how he signs himself) latest mind bending contributions are ‘(Why) There Was No Jackpot at the End of Capitalism’s Rainbow’, ‘The Pattern of the 21^st Century is Predatory Collapse’,  and ‘The Soviet Union of Capitalism’.  Enjoy your visit.

Soaking the Middle Class

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 June 2019.]

By this time we have all heard the nearly two dozen Democratic presidential candidates promise Americans so many free things we’ll get that most of us have lost track of all the goodies coming our way when one of the newly declared socialists replaces President Trump.  Let me just recount a partial list to get us all on the same page, because I’m going to talk about paying for all the free stuff.  We are promised Medicare for All, free college, forgiven student loans, national job guarantee, paid family medical leave, guaranteed national income, and, of course, all the things in the Green New Deal.  There is more to the list, but I think that these are enough to give the flavor of what we all are encouraged to expect after 2020.

What no one wants to talk about is how the coming workers’ paradise will be paid for.  The few candidates who dare to venture there give short answers that can be paraphrased as, ‘well, we’re gonna tax the bejeezus out of the corporations and the rich, and make them finally pay their fair share’.  And this usually brings out a sigh of relief from the light thinkers in the middle and lower income classes – ‘we’re gonna get all this free stuff and other people will be paying for it, where do I sign?’

Those requiring more meaty answers are assured that we will follow the European model, and everyone knows that they’ve cracked the code on how bigger governments are really the source of the people’s succor and largess.  However, that’s not the case when we look at their data from the EU and OECD countries.  There we quickly find that 1) they get a lot less than our Democratic candidates promise, and 2) the money to pay for it comes from the middle and lower classes, for the simple reason that the rich don’t have enough loot to foot the bill.  And there’s even a more sinister method by how the taxes eventually get raised on everyone.  The entire story with lots of numbers, charts, and graphs unfolds in the recent Heritage Foundation paper, ‘A Progressive Road Map for Soaking the Middle Class’ by Adam Michel.

Michel summarizes his research with – “Taxes on the rich cannot raise the necessary revenue to fund large European-style welfare states. If left on the current trajectory, U.S. government expenditures will require large tax increases on middle-class Americans. The current progressive agenda to further increase spending on health care, education, environmental policy, and income supports will require even higher taxes on a larger share of taxpayers. If America’s spending continues to look more and more like that of Europe, U.S. tax policy will also need to shift. In European countries, lower-income and middle-class taxpayers pay an average marginal wage tax rate of 49 percent on income above $37,000 a year, and an average value-added tax (VAT) of 20 percent. Those same U.S. taxpayers face a marginal wage tax of 32 percent and an average sales tax of 6 percent. The only sustainable way to avoid a high-tax American future is to reduce the growth rate of federal spending.”

For those still in terminal phases of denial, consider that our federal spending has been growing faster than the economy, tax revenues, inflation, Americans’ wages, and savings.  There is no alternative other than taxes have to be raised to European levels to pay for European size governments and spending.  And as Michel shows from EU and OECD data, that means tax bills will have to be raised to a minimum of three times for everyone – no one, rich, middle, or low earners will be spared.  Everyone will pay because at that level of proposed spending we will have run out of other people’s money.

The Democrats’ proposals will cost a conservative $50T over the next 10 years, more than doubling the current $4.4T annual federal budget which is already one-third funded by debt.  The tax implications are so horrendous that no one on the Left wants to talk about it as we witnessed in this week’s Democrat controlled House Committee on the Budget, which pointedly refused to consider any discussion of where the money would come from for all the things promised in just the Green New Deal.  My recommendation is that you get some answers to these questions before you vote in 2020.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  To put some meat on the above arguments.  Here are a couple of graphics illustrating the data from Adam Michel’s paper.  The first shows how much of each nation’s GDP is made up from the total tax burden its government imposes on its citizens.  The reason for America’s high ranking in most economic metrics that bear on people’s QoL should be clear.  There’s a reason why people from all over the world continue to risk life and limb to get into the United States, a reason that is totally, and I do mean TOTALLY, lost on our Left.  (Perhaps promoting policies to make us into a second rate country is the Democrats’ new stealth immigration policy that will then dramatically decrease the pressure on our borders.)

And here’s a compendium of more detailed albeit complex graphs placing the US relative to the EU and OECD countries.  It shows how tax revenues are spread over the spectrum of the countries' wage earners through the marginal rate burdens put on earnings.  It should dispel notions that all the socialist goodies currently in the EU, and promised in the US, are paid for by everyone, and not restricted to monies collected from the socially unjust rich and corporations.

The point to focus on in the above graphs is that the Democrat candidates want to put America right into the middle to upper end of the groups of blue dots representing the EU-OECD countries.  Check out the new tax rates that would apply to ALL our wage earners, and the resulting growth of government to absorb and redistribute the larger share of our nation's GDP (from the first figure, we are now only at the 27% of GDP level).  Does anyone really think that such a massive hit will not put brakes on our economy with the resulting impact on all our lives and motivation to take investment and entrepreneurial risks?  Look to Europe for the answers.

America’s politicians of all stripes know that Americans are overwhelmingly innumerate – they ‘don’t do numbers’.   Data such as presented above make no never mind to the overwhelming share of our citizens who, today more than ever, are focused on polarizing one-liners for their understanding of public policy proposals.  That is why the Democrats have no problem promising unattainable ‘free’ government benefits after they are elected to office.  The tools to make discriminating decisions on such matters were removed long ago from our public educational curricula.

Trump’s Immigration Policy

George Rebane

Our current immigration policy, such as it is, hails and invites illegal entry from distant lands, favors meritless chain migration without end, and offers entry to only one of eight immigrants who have skillsets that would make them productive members of our workforce.  Additionally, its proponents seek every opportunity to provide amnesty and a fast path to citizenship for the 11M to 20M illegal aliens already in the land.

Trump’s proposal is for more than half of our new immigrants to possess skillsets that are scarce and needed, reduce chain migration to a third of the total, and require all legal immigrants to have some knowledge of English and be able to pass an elemental civics test about the US and its forms of governance. (more here)  It is moot on the resident illegals, knowing that this aspect will be resolved through extensive negotiations with the Democrats who look forward to these millions enlarging its constituent voter base.

But all progressives, led by Pelosi and Schumer, have immediately attacked the Trump plan as obviously being against the strategic interests of the Democrats in their massive lurch to the left.  Their main argument, a la Madame Speaker, is that America has never enforced merit-based immigration, and that the generations of the 19^th and early 20^th century immigrants, who contributed so much to America’s greatness, would never have been allowed in had Trump’s policy been in place then.  This claim is false from a number of perspectives, and again exemplifies the low intellectual esteem that Democrat leaders hold their core supporters, and by extension, the country’s undecides – Team Pelosi considers them all as slogan-swallowing, double dummies.

To make matters worse, the Dems’ arguments are even too difficult for some Republicans (including the vaunted Judge Napolitano) to counter.  The truth of the matter is that when those millions from Europe and Asia arrived in generations past, they ALL possessed skills that allowed them to immediately enter our workforce as its newest productive members.  Taken within the context of predominant workforce skillsets of those times, all the arriving immigrants had the ability to start jobs that they already knew how to do, or for which their skill extensions were easily acquired.  (BTW, Mollie Hemingway, senior editor of The Federalist, was the only one who grokked that historical factor on an FN panel – track her career, she is one astute female.)  In our age of specialization, advanced technology, and automation, such jobs for the under-educated from third world countries are much harder to find, thereby putting those English-absent immigrants at a great disadvantage and make them prey for criminals and other low-lifes ready to take advantage of them and make their advent a net cost to our society.

The other factor of which Team Pelosi is ignorant or willing to dissemble is the merit-based immigration policies we have had in place since WW2.  For example, refugees from war ravaged Europe were let in only on the basis of satisfying three major criteria – having US-needed skills, being sufficiently healthy, and having a political record with no taint of communist or fascist support.  These requirements were relaxed in the post-Vietnam era when immigration policy began to support party-specific voter agendas.  As cited above, workforce merit factors in for only one out of eight legal immigrants, and, of course, zero for those most welcomed above all who are adept at climbing dilapidated fences and fording rivers.

So Trump’s totally pro-American immigration policy proposal has little chance of becoming law under the current federal government's make-up, but contributes yet one more litmus test to distinguish between the pro- and anti-American factions in our land.

Democrats’ 2020 Platform Previewed

George Rebane

Ever since Trump was elected president and the national Left mobilized their efforts to destroy his administration and unseat him, I’ve been bitching and moaning that the Democrats offered no alternative programs to implement that would “fundamentally transform” America as promised.  Well, the time has come to stop complaining because in recent months after the 2018 election the Democrats have more than filled a cornucopia of initiatives, proposals, programs, and promises to construct several election platforms for any political party dedicated to steering America into a socialist state.

This was made clear to me when I received the notes that a friend used in his talk to an organization the other day.  Its perusal reveals an extensive list of things we may expect were the country to hand over control of the executive and legislative branches to our anti-American Left (anti-American in the sense that they don’t like the America of the past nor the direction it was going before they came along, hence their need for a fundamental transformation).

Without further ado, here is the laundry list of items the Democrats want to afflict on the country starting in 2021.  It is presented as received with minimal editing.

Scattershots – 28feb19 (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

Trump won big in Hanoi.  By walking away with a smile when the Ugly Fat Kid overreached by offering to give some to get all, our president maintained his creds and caused the UFK to call a midnight news conference to claim a misunderstanding – ‘No, no, no, we didn’t demand that all the sanctions be lifted.’  Bullshit; Trump would never have left had not the UFK overplayed his hand.  Now, with visions of a prosperous Vietnam in his head, the UFK will be ready for some real give and take – I predict that he will seek the next meeting before the end of this year.  In the meantime the friendly parting will maintain the UFK’s good behavior – no testing.  All in all, a brilliant piece of foreign policy with a country that for 60+ years no other president has made any progress.

RR has concluded early and often (here) that our Millennials are America’s dumbest generation – both they and their parents were ‘educated’ in leftwing unionized public schools.  That most of them now view socialism favorably over open market capitalism gives abundant testimony that they will readily vote America into tyranny.  The culmination of dumbth indeed.

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin reminds us (here) in detail of how biased and one-sided are our lamestream media.  After two years of investigating Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia to throw the 2016 election, on 12feb19 NBC reported, “After two years and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not uncovered any direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. That's according to sources on both the Republican and the Democratic side of the aisle."  During this time the lamestream devoted more than 36 hours of intense coverage attempting to convince America that the evidence for collusion existed and was about to be released.  Instead of banner headlines for this announcement, all the lamestream outlets together basically ignored the bipartisan announcement from the Senate committee.  “But just take a moment to sit back and compare 2,202 minutes of media coverage of potential collusion with Russia — with supposedly unbiased journalists accusing a sitting American president of misconduct, lack of patriotism, impeachable offenses, or worse — to the less than one minute of coverage within the first 48 hours of an announcement that no evidence has actually been uncovered in a serious two-year bipartisan investigation, and it is abundantly clear why many Americans have lost faith in the honesty and trustworthiness of the media.”

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, our favorite manager of the masses (here), has a new book On Freedom.  There he argues that too much freedom is really not all that good for us – “What if people do not know how to find their way?” - that certain unnamed elites should really be in positions to mercifully limit our choices to only the proper ones, and then “nudge” us to the correct one before we stray too far from the social ideal, this to be prevented by structuring the country’s “choice architecture”.  While Big Brother looms large in the background, Sunstein never quite explains “which of us deserves the exalted position to design and impose nudges on others, and for what ends?” (more here)  But not to worry, after the Green New Deal gets into gear, Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and AOC will know exactly how to set up such ‘exalted positions’; all we have to do is vote correctly in 2020.

Italy will offer Universal Basic Income real soon now.  They’re going to make up the shortfall for all people earning less than their poverty threshold – but wait!  If you subsequently get a job or a better paying job, then the government will cut back you UBI payments to the extent that your earnings exceed that threshold.  Now that brilliant tactic is really going to motivate people to go work and get paid less. (more here)  Finland already had to roll up its experiment with UBI because people got real used to living on unearned handouts and only put forth effort in the black markets to increase their (untaxable) incomes.  To their benefit, even a bunch of Italy’s leftwing politicians are worried about this UBI’s impact on the national fisc which, next to Greece, is Europe’s shakiest.  The UBI was ushered in by the electorate voting for socialist Luigi Di Maio who was able to marshal Italy’s byzantine legislative machinery to launch their UBI.  That’s what enough not-too-bright voters and socialists candidates can do – given our Millennials, along with Bernie, Liz, and Kamala, we should not be too sanguine when next year rolls around.

[2mar19 update]  The crippling counters by our leftwing politicians and courts to stopping illegal entrants and contraband is having the predicted impact – more people than ever are climbing border fences and walls.  Government stats cite “The proportion of foreign nationals attempting to cross the border illegally rather than reporting to legal ports of entry has risen in the past year, according to the data. Those crossing illegally made up 73 percent of all border crossings from October 2017 to January 2018 and then rose to 83 percent for the same period of time ending on Jan. 31, 2019, NBC News reported Friday.” (more here)  Why’s that?  Well, we all know that most entrants claiming asylum don’t have a leg to stand on, and before Trump they were admitted at legal crossing points, told to appear in a US immigration court at some future date, and then turned loose never to be seen again.  Today we tell such asylum seeker to stay in Mexico until their court date comes up.  But the overwhelming share of them know they can’t qualify for asylum, so they go back to Mexico and then attempt illegal crossings somewhere down the line where they think the border is most porous.  Today they’re coming in over such porous spots at just the underside of a million a year because we can't do the right thing and build the needed wall/fence border security infrastructure.  And the anti-American Left continues to trumpet through their lamestream outlets that this does not constitute a national emergency.  (BTW, the size of an army division is about 15,000 troops.  At 80,000 illegal entrants per month, that is like an invasion force of five divisions each and every month.  And we haven’t even started reviewing the growing dollar cost of illegals in the country.)

America’s education - mandated and biased (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 27 February 2019.]

Many and perhaps most young people today have a very jaundiced view of America, capitalism, Christianity, and western civilization in general.  Instead, all across the country and especially in the academe, they have come to embrace ideas about the benefits of collectivism – especially socialism – and societies that emphasize group identities and a world order in which group membership, especially if in one of the aggrieved groups, is paramount.  Individualism, personal freedom, and entrepreneurships that promise riches are on the wane.  How did we arrive at such a societal junction from which all roads lead to a fundamentally transformed America, one that will share little with what our Founders bequeathed us, and with the system that made us the envy of the world?

Political leaders, from constitutional monarchies to communism, answer that such rapid changes in outlook and attitudes can only come from the educational system governments adopt and impose – as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.  And in the last half century there has been a lot of twig bending going on in America’s schools, and the clear evidence indicates that all the bending has been leftward.  Let’s look at three seemingly disparate facets of such evidence.

Scattershots – 25feb19 (updated 26feb19)

George Rebane

In ‘America’s Second Civil War’ by Dennis Prager, he makes the case of the Great Divide stating that, save for slavery, Americans are further apart in how they think about their country and in which direction should be its future, than during the “First Civil War” in the 19th century.  He writes in Townhall.com that “Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative. … The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism. … Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.”  This has been a seminal part of Rebane Doctrine and the RR commentaries that have expanded on these points over the years.  This message will continue here as long as it is allowed to be published.

Gov Gavin Newsom is part of the leftwing clatch that supported CA’s bullet train to nowhere and blew billions in its abortive and aborted construction.  CA having violated literally every part of the agreement with the feds for getting dollars from Washington, Trump now has stopped further funding and wants to claw back what the state has fraudulently received.  Newsom unabashedly lies in stating that the state has complied, and is really not stopping the project, but merely reducing its scope to have it now go from nowhere to nowhere on the remaining funds. (more here)  Ultimately he’ll have to go back to CA voters for more money, and he’ll probably get it from a now-dominant Democrat electorate, most of whom don’t pay very much or any taxes.  To them it will all be OPM from the greedy rich.

Edelman Intelligence conducted a recent poll which revealed that “53% of California residents are considering leaving the Golden State because of the high cost of living.” A higher share (62%) of “respondents said they believed the best days of California were in the past.” (more here and here)  This in the face of a continuing barrage of leftwing lies telling us that the state is in fine fettle with all the right-thinking people happy dancing in the streets.  As also witnessed on these pages, the progressives maintain that only the narrow-minded, ignorant conservatives are disgruntled because the Republican party has become irrelevant in Sacramento and major metropolitan areas.  People voting with their feet tell a different story.

Trump and the Ugly Fat Kid will meet again, this time in Vietnam, to continue talking about North Korea’s 'denuclearization', a concept yet to be defined by the parties.  And you can bet the ranch that their current definitions are not even close.  Here’s my take on Trump’s plan forward.  He knows the UFK cannot give up his nuclear program for the simple reason that he and his family will then be killed by the high level echelon of generals that surrounds him (because they and their families will also live only so long as the regime survives, otherwise they too will be dead meat).  So Trump will be satisfied to continue these talks, claiming progress as long as NK doesn’t resume missile flights and underground testing.  When he leaves office and a more weaker-looking Democrat (a la Obama) takes over, the UFK will immediately resume testing and threatening that will bring the world to the brink again, and also solidify his grip on his regime.  At that point Trump and the Repubs will point out that it was their clever foreign policy that kept the world safe, and now look what’s happening with the naïve Dem leadership in power.  This will be known as Trump’s Grand Ropadope to avoid war on the Korean peninsula for which no one seems to have a stomach.

[26feb19 update]  Henderson’s population surges past Reno’s as Californians arrive in droves to escape taxes, fees, regulations, and prices (especially for living units).  The numbers are truly amazing as again reported in ‘As California Loses People, a Las Vegas Suburb Grows’.  California’s small net population growth is made possible by an equally massive influx of immigrants and illegal aliens, and a high birthrate contributed by resident minorities.  Progressives are the only political segment of California’s population that is totally sanguine if not celebratory about this demographic dynamic.  The rest of us chickens continue wondering how long the state can carry on with an ever smaller cohort of highly taxed wealth generators.

Unsustainable Socialism

If it hasn’t happened, it won’t happen. - Progressive shibboleth

George Rebane

The conversation hereabouts circles the ‘sustainability of socialism’ barn as regularly as turning the pages of a calendar.   Ever since the French revolution we have always lived with socialists who in past years were harder to spot, at least until Marx and Bastiat published their pro- and con- apologies.  In those years socialists living in capitalist countries did their best to hide their socio-economic credos as they sought to fashion public policy, and letting the word ‘socialism’ be connected with their proposals was the ultimate taboo and an almost certain kiss of death.

Not so any more.  We are now almost 50 years into a public education system the common thread of which has been to turn out socialist-friendly graduates.  Most recently this subterfuge has been replaced with the educators’ blatant promotion of socialism accompanied by a revised history that strongly recommends it to young minds.  And so today we have at least two generations of 'educated' voters who are convinced that everything anti-socialist they hear in the public forum is fomented by the rightwing fascisti and their greedy capitalist running dogs.

Border Security’s True Colors (updated 20feb19)

George Rebane

For some years I have been pointing out to readers that America’s Left has a totally different outlook on the function of US borders, especially the one with Mexico.  I don’t claim to be flying solo in this interpretation, since several nationally prominent commentators of the Right have expressed their similar views and continue to do so today.  The bottom line on this observation, with loads of supporting citations, is that our Left sees the southern border as the perfect political tool for their work in the fundamental transformation of America into the peerage of socialist states preparing for the globalist future.

This objective could not have been more clear than what was reported by host Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  The program regularly presents segments promoting progressive causes and viewpoints.  Today their daily anti-Trump dump featured an interview with Gil Kerlikowske, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner under President Obama.  The entire message was of a piece in which Mr Kerlikowske strongly maintained that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at our southern border is a gratuitous political stunt to get money to build “his wall” because in reality there is no emergency at our Mexican border. (more here)

Kerlikowske then went on to outline some stats stating that the real emergency existed in 2000 when more than 1.2M crossed the southern border, and today only 400K are coming across annually, thereby making such yearly ingress of illegals most certainly not an emergency but more like business as usual.  He also pointed out that most of our drugs come in surreptitiously through legal ports of entry, and therefore we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the lesser amount of drugs coming in across fences and rivers.

The only problem he saw with today’s border operations is that there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the illegal aliens’ pleas to become permanent US residents.  During the entire course of the interview – one like so many others with leftists – there was not even a hint of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings being evidence of a border security problem.  The Left’s only existential and acknowledged problem is that these illegal entrants couldn’t be processed fast enough to get their permits to stay here.  In the de juris case then, these people can now be formally designated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because by allowing them (inviting them?) to readily cross our border, the US government has entered into the required, albeit de facto, two-party agreement with them as acknowledged immigrants.

So think about it.  The Democrats have stepped out with a clear pronouncement that today it should be our accepted policy that 400K unvetted illegal aliens should be able to easily cross our border and enter our broken immigration system which has been purposely maintained only to build and buttress the Dems' voting pool, and, more importantly, increase its immediate representation in Congress.

Few people understand the real reason the Dems oppose an accurate census of US citizens as required by the Constitution.  We have adopted the custom of allocating seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a state’s share of the country’s residents, NOT its citizens – although being a citizen is still a requirement for voting, but the Dems are working hard to also remove that ‘barrier to democracy’.  So grab an envelope and do the numbers.  It’s not hard to see that with concentrations of illegals in big population ‘sanctuary’ states, the number of representatives for already leftist states like California will increase.  And these seats will be filled by leftwingers, voted in by an ever-DECREASING share of franchised Democrat voters from each congressional district.  But no one understands this, the confusion abetted by the lamestream’s narrative that requiring a statement of US citizenship on the census questionnaire will unfairly inhibit the minority vote.

And these, dear readers, are the true colors of the Democrat Party in the early 21^st century, ever more visibly on display with each passing day.

[20feb19 update]  Great Divide reflections: >85% conservatives and Republicans believe there is a national emergency at the border; >65% of liberals and Democrats believe there is no border emergency.  The Right is astounded at this disparity and wonders how a nation with such a polarized outlook on such fundamental matters can continue, let alone function.  On the other hand, with no such concerns the Left believes the Right is just ignorant and evil, and needs to be brought to heel by whatever means it takes.

The American AI Initiative & herding cats

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 February 2019.]

The entire field of artificial or machine intelligence (AI) seems to be more misunderstood by the day, and not only on Main Street, but also in the highest levels of government.  President Trump recently signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative.  The purpose of this whatever it is, is to “focus federal government resources to develop AI” in order to “increase our prosperity, enhance our national and economic security, and improve quality of life for the American people.”

The Green New Deal (updated 8feb19)

A rose by any other name would smell … .  Wm Shakespeare

George Rebane

Well, the last bits of doubt about our Democratic Party have been swept away by the new House resolution describing a fundamental transformation of America (Barack Obama, call your office).  The Green New Deal, sponsored by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (whom we have met on these pages), is socialism writ large.  So large in fact that the reporter interviewing AOC on NPR this morning had a hard time keeping from audibly gulping as he asked the feather head details and sources of funding for the individual mandates of the GND.  She, of course, had no answers other than taxing the bejeezus out anybody and everybody in the land who could still create wealth after the proposed strictures derive their power from the barrel of a gun.

So what do these two socialists propose in their fundamental transformation?  You can read the resolution here, and some more expanded analysis here, here, and here; but let’s just lay out a few of them in short form for the sake of discussion.

• US carbon neutral in 10 years. “…this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.”
• Guaranteed government job for all. “… provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
• Government control of all medium and large corporations. “Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners.”
• Vastly higher taxes. Top rates for death taxes, income tax, and payroll taxes would increase markedly.  Also proposed is the institution of a “wealth tax” on assets.
• Government take over of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacture of certain products like pharmaceuticals, etc.

Now all this is based on the fundamental socialist tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior.  This belief by the Left is totally immune to historical data, including what France just had to rescind, and what has made NK, Cuba, Venezuela, … what they are today, and what caused the downfall of the USSR, and the massive shifts in the economies of China, Vietnam, … .

So there you have it.  Just keep your eye on the slated 40+ Democrats who sign up to sponsor this resolution – their true colors will wave proudly.  And also see how many more Democrats will be looking at their shoes while mumbling something about not belonging to the new socialist party of America.  Our Founders are spinning in their graves.

[8feb19 update]  It appears that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be the liberal loon for all seasons.  Both sides of the aisle seem to be happy dancing at the advent of this good looking 5-star ignoramus.  The Dems claim that her GND plan is just a negotiating “anchor” point stuck into the land of the ludicrous, a strategic starting point to get people dickering with each other about where we should really wind up.  Their hope is that any surviving putrid pot of progressive public policies will still be close enough to the GND anchor, and by comparison will look good to their light thinking constituents who will then support it as a ‘compromise’ with the Right.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are convinced that AOC (along with mini-minded Markey) have handed them the penultimate political prize for 2020.  WSJ’s national correspondent Kim Strassel details the blessings in her ‘The Socialist That Could’, and offers a succinct summary of “AOC, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.”

It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

And can you imagine the profusion of optics AOC has already provided and will provide during the next 18 months for Republican ads.  This woman has turned out to be a horn of political plenty for the Right that is scaring hell out of the Democrat leadership – “They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.”

Given all this political largesse, my concern now is for AOC’s safety.  The RNC should offer to share with the DNC some of the costs for added security for the congresswoman.  No conservative in the land wants anything to still her voice, or deter her from advocating the clear path she has set out for America.

Twilight in California – VDH nails it

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson, California farmer, premier academic, and syndicated columnist, has given a comprehensive analysis of California’s sunset – and I do mean comprehensive.  We have covered the work of VDH many times on these pages (e.g. here), and in ‘Wealth, Poverty, and Flight: The Same Old California’ he takes us through a cold shower look at ourselves from multiple viewpoints, using hard stats on which to base his points.  I was going to include this in the last Scattershots, and forgot.  Then two friends emailed me a kick in the pants, and on second thought, this outstanding essay demands a post of its very own to draw readers’ attention to it.

California truly is the canary in our country’s mineshaft – “Insulated coastal elites, impoverished immigrants, and a fleeing middle class.”  The Left has brought the state to its current condition of decline and decrepitude, and is now busy practicing the fine art of political taxidermy and ideological embalming to continue selling the image of what once was California.  And as VDH points out, our share of the nation’s double dummies is so high today that almost any kind of socialist bullcrap is easily peddled and readily consumed – our own county is an illustrative work-in-progress as the progressive pandemic spreads into the Sierra.

This essay is a must read, if for nothing else than to take the measure of our Left as it denies chapter and verse of what is presented, while the state continues to sink under total one-party rule that is now going into socialist overdrive.  There is no state that is more locked into the attempt to solve its every mounting problem by piling on regulations and increasing taxes.