The corrupt Democrat Party and its Republican Party enabler

Democrat Party CORRUPTION has been going on since FDR perfected it in the 1930's.  FDR enlarged and grew the role of government astronomically and to to deleterious effect. He also bribed and corrupted local bosses, illegally used the IRS to to scare, threaten and prosecute his political enemies.  Professor Burton Folsom's classic, "New Deal or Raw Deal" catalogues all this chapter and verse.  And still Roosevelt remains an iconic and revered figure to the left, proving it cares only about winning, no matter how.  Regrettably Republicans have gone along with all this by putting up candidates like McCain, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, who choose to play by Marquess of Queensberry  rules that keep giving us acknowledged socialists leaders like Obama.

Data collection and mining for political purposes.

Here and here are two articles to read in order to begin to understand the significance of data collection by the government and its consequences to citizens.

There appear to be at least two major schools of thoughts on this subject.  The first is the government is essentially benign and although there is some loss of privacy on our part in going along with allowing all this data collection, in the end it is necessary so long as there are evildoers (i.e., Muslim terrorists) who want to take us all out anyway they can.  The second is that privacy is the cornerstone of freedom and that if we compromise on this issue anywhere at any time, we are setting ourselves up for slavery.

It is pretty obvious from the both of these two articles that the Obama campaign and then administration has mastered the data mining technology.  It has been reported that Google employees helped them in this effort.  It is also well chronicled that the Obama administration is willing to go to any lengths to win elections. In short it should come as no surprise that Democrats play WWE style hardball since this approach won elections for FDR and many others in that party over the years.  While Republicans are not saints, they have never been willing to cross legality lines in order to win elections like Democrats.

Since it's obvious by what's going on in Utah, and the IRS scandal that information gathered perhaps legally by the government can and will be used illegally by the government if it is to its advantage and if it can get away with it.  The only answer to this conundrum is to isolate the data collection program, as well as the IRS and any other government agency, from any involvement in the use of the data whatsoever.  Can this be done is the question.

Sowell on minimum wage laws and black youth unemployment

Thomas Sowell is one of America's very best practical economists and historians.  He doesn't get into his private life often, but in this article shares his experience as a black youth finding his way in New York City in 1949.  It is a remarkable story and points out how destructive liberals are meddling in the economy and in people's private lives all in the guise of "helping".  Sowell should be required reading K-graduate school.

The Mindset of the Left: Part IV

Editor's note: This is Part IV in a series. Part I can be found here. Part II can be foundhere. Part III can be found here.

At the heart of the left's vision of the world is the implicit assumption that high-minded third parties like themselves can make better decisions for other people than those people can make for themselves.

That arbitrary and unsubstantiated assumption underlies a wide spectrum of laws and policies over the years, ranging from urban renewal to ObamaCare.

One of the many international crusades by busybodies on the left is the drive to limit the hours of work by people in other countries -- especially poorer countries -- in businesses operated by multinational corporations. One international monitoring group has taken on the task of making sure that people in China do not work more than the legally prescribed 49 hours per week.

Why international monitoring groups, led by affluent Americans or Europeans, would imagine that they know what is best for people who are far poorer than they are, and with far fewer options, is one of the many mysteries of the busybody elite.

As someone who left home at the age of 17, with no high school diploma, no job experience and no skills, I spent several years learning the hard way what poverty is like. One of the happier times during those years was a brief period when I worked 60 hours a week -- 40 hours delivering telegrams during the day and 20 hours working part-time in a machine shop at night.

Why was I happy? Because, before finding these jobs, I had spent weeks desperately looking for any job, while my meager savings dwindled down to literally my last dollar, before finally finding the part-time job at night in a machine shop.

I had to walk several miles from the rooming house where I lived in Harlem to the machine shop located just below the Brooklyn Bridge, in order to save that last dollar to buy bread until I got a payday.

When I then found a full-time job delivering telegrams during the day, the money from the two jobs combined was more than I had ever made before. I could pay the back rent I owed on my room and both eat and ride the subways back and forth to work.

I could even put aside some money for a rainy day. It was the closest thing to nirvana for me.

Thank heaven there were no busybodies to prevent me from working more hours than they thought I should.

There was a minimum wage law, but this was 1949 and the wages set by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been rendered meaningless by years of inflation. In the absence of an effective minimum wage law, unemployment among black teenagers in the recession year of 1949 was a fraction of what it would be in even the most prosperous years of the 1960s and beyond.

As the morally anointed busybodies raised the minimum wage rate, beginning in the 1950s, black teenage unemployment skyrocketed. We have now become so used to tragically high rates of unemployment among this group that many people have no idea that things were not always like that, much less that policies of the busybody left had such catastrophic consequences.

I don't know what I would have done if such busybody policies had been in effect back in 1949, and prevented me from finding a job before my last dollar ran out.

My personal experience is just one small example of what it is like when your options are very limited. The prosperous busybodies of the left are constantly promoting policies which reduce the existing options of poor people even more.

It would never occur to the busybodies that multinational corporations are expanding the options of the poor in third world countries, while busybody policies are contracting their options.

Wages paid by multinational corporations in poor countries are typically much higher than wages paid by local employers. Moreover, the experience that employees get working in modern companies make them more valuable workers and have led in China, for example, to wages rising by double-digit percentages annually.

Nothing is easier for people with degrees to imagine that they know better than the poor and uneducated. But, as someone once said, "A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him."

More on Detroit's demise

Having been tangentially involved with Detroit over a few years in the 1960's, I concur with both Steven Hayward's and George Will's observations in today's Powerline post that while unions and an uncompetitive market for cars were largely responsible for the demise of Motor City (and the car industry) the ugly hand of liberalism was at work as well.

DETROIT AND THE RUBBLE OF LIBERALISM

There’s a line about the auto industry in George Will’s column about Detroit today that is worth dwelling on for a moment: “Auto industry executives, who often were invertebrate mediocrities, continually bought labor peace by mortgaging their companies’ futures in surrenders to union demands.”  (Emphasis added.)  My opinion is that the mediocrity of auto company leadership extends beyond just labor relations to the larger questions of car design and quality.  But for the competition of foreign auto manufacturers starting most vigorously in the 1970s, imagine what we’d be getting from the Big Three today.  The full story of Detroit should include the complete civic failure of big business, too, which, cossetted too long from competition, bailed out by Washington (Chrysler, 1979),

Much attention has been paid here and elsewhere to the racial politics of Detroit during its long downfall, but the business leadership of the city doesn’t come out of this story very well, either.  Take in the first minute or so of this 18-minute promotional video, made in support of Detroit’s unsuccessful bid to host the 1968 Olympics (insert inappropriate jokes here on what new events they’d have featured if they’d won), which includes such gems as “a story of a city seeking new horizons. . .”

Meanwhile, the key paragraphs of Will’s column rebuts Steven Rattner’s recommendation that Washington should bail out Detroit:

Steven Rattner, who administered the bailout of part of the Detroit-based portion of America’s automobile industry, says, “Apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs.” Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility.”
There you have today’s liberalism: Human agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart from the pesky matter of “voting in elections” — apart from decades of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels and criminals, and to mandate unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.

Here is George Will's complete article on Detroit.

Epstein on Obamanomics

Richard A. Epstein is a public intellectual whose comments on politics are typically incisive and enlightening.  In this column he takes on Obama's comments on the economy and his solutions to its problems, making the point that Obama has no even rudimentary knowledge of economics and how the economy works in real time.  For anyone who has worked in the private sector and understands supply and demand and other forces that direct and control free markets, all this is painfully obvious.  Here's Epstein on this point:

Farewell to Supply and Demand

The President’s speech at Knox College needs some close deconstruction because it sheds harsh light on a problem that has dogged his domestic policy agenda from the beginning: intellectual rigidity. The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.

Because he does not understand rudimentary economics, he relies on anecdotes to make his argument. He notes, for example, that the Maytag plant that used to be in Galesburg is no longer in operation—it closed in 2004—but he never asks what set of forces made it untenable for the business to continue to operate there. He never mentions that Maytag’s relocation of its manufacturing operations to Mexico may have had something to do with a strong union presence or the dreadful economic climate in Illinois.

Unfortunately, our President rules out deregulation or lower taxes as a way to unleash productive forces in the country. Indeed, he is unable to grasp the simple point that the only engine of economic prosperity is an active market in which all parties benefit from voluntary exchange. Both taxes and regulation disrupt those exchanges, causing fewer exchanges to take place—and those which do occur have generated smaller gains than they should. The two-fold attraction of markets is that they foster better incentives for production as they lower administrative costs. Their comparative flexibility means that they have a capacity for self-correction that is lacking in a top-down regulatory framework that limits wages, prices, and the other conditions of voluntary exchange.

Epstein's entire article is here.

This the comment of a Powerline reader who has lived in the suburbs of Detroit for a lifetime;

 A reader with first-hand experience recounts Young’s role in Detroit’s downfall:

I listened to some of your appearance the other day on the Bill Bennett show on my way to work. I would have loved to call and offer my two-cents worth on the situation in Detroit, but can’t afford the time to sit on hold for an extended period. Maybe when I retire in a year or two.

A little biographical detail to set the stage: I am not a native Detroiter. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula, went to undergraduate school in Ann Arbor from 1970-74, spent a few years in California sowing wild oats (no seed grew, thank goodness) and moved back to Michigan and into the Detroit area in 1978. It has been home ever since. As a youngster, I viewed Detroit from afar, as a college student I watched TV and listened to radio daily from Detroit while seldom actually going into the city, and as a resident I have lived in several of the suburbs but never in the city. I have watched the slow motion train wreck over several decades.

Listening to the discussion on the Bennett show, it was pretty clear that everyone gets it that the unions were probably the single biggest economic factor in the decline of the city. However, there was elephant in the room that no one seemed to want to talk much about and that is the role of race in the culture and politics of the current situation. I would submit that it was also a huge factor in the decline of Detroit and will, sadly, probably be the factor that will derail any rebound. The politics of race in Detroit are poisonous and I lay that at the feet of Coleman Young.

Young was far left, a fellow traveler of the CPUSA through membership in affiliated organizations and was deeply involved with the UAW. He was Mayor of Detroit for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994. I believe he made a cynical decision to make Detroit a majority black city, largely for his own political benefit. Whites had left the city in large numbers following the riots in ’67, but Young, I believe, was happy to see them go and subtly let them know they weren’t really wanted there anymore. The higher the black to white ratio in the city, the tighter was his grip on power.

In his years in power there were two techniques he used to cement his power and influence. One was to pack the city payroll with supporters, a tried and true tactic of municipal governments everywhere. However, his deep ties to the union movement opened the door for a huge amount of influence in compensation negotiations resulting in the high wages and generous benefits, including pensions, which are plaguing the city now.

The second technique he used was to keep race relations at a boil. When I moved here in 1978 the Detroit metro area was almost unbelievably segregated. Most suburbs, with a few notable exceptions, had only tiny black populations. Almost all the blacks in the metro area lived in the city and almost all the whites in the suburbs. My first drive up Jefferson Ave from the center of the city into the Grosse Pointes was eye opening. Within 3-4 blocks it changed from a filthy street with abandoned buildings and rundown store fronts covered with graffiti and protective steel gratings to a tree lined avenue with large well maintained homes with immaculate landscaping. There was a virtual Maginot line at the border of Detroit.

Young was a master of exploiting this divide and creating friction with the “suburbs” (dogwhistle for “whites”) and regularly used this to foster a “them (white) vs us (black)” mentality in his voter base. He was always the guy standing up to “the suburbs” and they loved him for it. He was mayor for life. Sadly, this technique was extremely effective, to the point where it not only worked on blacks in Detroit, it also worked on the whites in the suburbs. To this day, almost twenty years after Young left office, the animosity is such that any cooperative endeavors between Detroit and its surrounding communities are always fraught with a significant dose of racial politics. Blacks always think that whites want to take over and whites don’t see any benefit in doing anything that helps the city.

While the racial segregation of the Detroit metro area has eased over the years, this has actually worked to the detriment of the city. Over the past several decades crime has gone up and services have declined, making the city a much less desirable place to live, as population figures confirm. The vast majority of that population loss, I believe, has been the black middle classes who left the city for the suburbs. It is perfectly understandable that they want to move their families to where the streets are safer and services are better, most notably the school districts. The result is that the city is now largely populated by an underclass that is very poorly educated and pretty much only capable of working at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Functional illiteracy has been estimated at nearly 50% and over a third of the population is on welfare. It is a tragedy and it will be a primary factor in keeping the city from any meaningful rebound, at least in the next couple of decades. The human capital is just not there to rebuild an economic infrastructure capable of lifting the city out of its financial difficulties. (Digression: if current lawsuits filed by pensioners to protect their interests are successful a huge proportion of meager city operating finances will be untouchable and other city services will suffer enormously in the future, digging an even deeper hole for the city.)

However, the legacy of Coleman Young will be another major and perhaps even more deleterious contributing factor. The animus still runs deep between the city and any outsiders. In the current situation, the emergency manager (although black) is seen as an agent of the State government which is currently in the hands of the Republican Party (and therefore white). Understanding the Coleman Young school of politics one would expect that the voters in Detroit would react negatively to “white people” trying to take over and disempower them and this is exactly what is happening. There is very little cooperation from the city with what is going on. Dave Bing, the current mayor, has been vilified for not being sufficiently confrontational and those city officials fighting the State and the Emergency Manager every step of the way have lots of support from the populace.

One illustrative example: Belle Isle is a city park on an island in the Detroit River. Years ago it was in fact a jewel of the city. Now it is dilapidated, overgrown and generally very disreputable looking. The State offered to take over the operation of the park on a long term lease basis. The State would rehab the property and foot the bill for staffing the park. The hue and cry from the city was immediate and overwhelmingly negative and the idea was swept into the dustbin rather quickly. This proposal was such an obvious win for the city, reducing city expenditures, improving infrastructure and quality of life for Detroit residents, and it was attacked vociferously based strictly on racial politics. Sadly it played out pretty much exactly as I expected when I first heard about the proposal. Thank you, Coleman Young.

So, to make a long story short, I am afraid that I have to agree with your assessment that it will probably be more difficult for the city of Detroit to rebound than the country of Greece. At least two huge hurdles need to be surmounted and I am skeptical about either.

Our reader’s reference to Belle Isle reminded me that I recently posted a photo of that park taken in 1908, along with a number of other century-old photographs. If you missed that post, you should check it out. Belle Isle Park, 1908:

Detroit was a better place in 1908, but to be fair, it is not the only city of which that could be said.

Deconstructing ABC's Zimmerman trial coverage

Anyone interested in accurate reporting will not get it from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or any of the print media like Time, Inc, NYTimes, Washington Post, LATimes, and dozens of other corrupt outlets around the country. Anyone interested in the truth should shun these outlets.  The latest evidence of this fact comes from Jack Cashill, a real investigative journalist who works for himself because none of these outlets would have any interest in his kind of reporting.  Fortunately there are a few media venues available to Jack and the few others like him, and we are all the better for them.  His latest deconstruction of the reporting of ABC's coverage of the Zimmerman trial follows:

July 28, 2013

ABC Still Corrupting Zimmerman case

By Jack Cashill

In a perverse bit of post-trial agitprop, ABC News somehow recruited the one woman of color on George Zimmerman's "all white" jury and twisted her words to reflect the presumed editorial position of ABC News. In this clip from an exclusive Robin Roberts interview which has played just about everywhere including CBS News, Roberts says to the juror, "Some people have said, point blank, 'George Zimmerman got away with murder.' How do you respond to those people who say that?" In the edited video ABC floated about, "Maddy" answers unhesitatingly, "George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can't get away from God."

This clip led to headlines like "Juror Says Zimmerman 'Got Away With Murder'" in the New York Times. In the article by Lisetta Alvarez -- the reporter who gave the world the phrase "White Hispanic" -- there is not even a mention of the prompt by Roberts. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune ran comparable headlines.

What none of these publications mentioned -- and kudos to Slate's William Saletan for breaking the story -- is that the producers at ABC edited Maddy's response to have her say something she never intended. In the unedited version, after Roberts asks her leading question, Maddy pauses, starts her response over, and clearly plays back Roberts' question as the stated premise to her own answer, "But you can't get away from God."  In other words, this is how she would answer that question if asked.  She never implied Zimmerman got away with murder, nor agreed with the premise. In fact, she stood by her decision to acquit Zimmerman.

ABC's reporting on this case has descended to a hitherto unexplored level of journalistic malfeasance. "He called police. They suggested he stay in his car," Robert says in her introduction to Maddy's interview. How, one wonders, could ABC get something so fundamental so wrong at this stage of the game?  No, the dispatcher, who is not a police officer, never suggested Zimmerman stay in his truck, nor did he even recommend he go back to it.  Disinformation of this caliber has fed black paranoia for more than a year and continues unabated.

This corruption, I suppose, should not surprise. From the very beginning, ABC News took the lead in disinforming America about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The Martin family public relations guru, the very white Ryan Julison, was bragging about landing interviews with ABC within two weeks of the shooting in February 2012.  "Coordinated interviews with Good Morning America and the family of Trayvon Martin," Julison boasted on his Facebook page on March 10 of that year. "This has certainly struck a nerve around the country." 

On March 13, ABC's Matt Gutman violated just about every known rule of journalism, tweeting that George Zimmerman "shot 17yr old teen bc he was black, wore hoodie walking slowly."  From day one, Gutman worked under the elitist assumption that the Sanford police were either corrupt, incompetent or both and discounted whatever information led them to refrain from arresting Zimmerman, "likely not 2 be arrested."

Late on March 16 Gutman posted a piece on the ABC News website that helped set the tone of the coverage to come. He based its inflammatory headline, "Trayvon Martin Neighborhood Watch Shooting: 9-1-1 Tapes Send Mom Crying From Room," fully on the word of Julison and admitted as much. In the accompanying video piece for Good Morning America Gutman may have set a new national record for most mistakes of consequence in a two-minute news byte:

GUTMAN: It was February 25^TH.

TRUTH:  It was February 26^th.

GUTMAN: Trayvon was staying at his stepmother's.

TRUTH: Martin was a staying with Brandy Green, a girlfriend of his father's. His mother as well as his stepmother, Alicia Stanley, lived in greater Miami.

GUTMAN:  He left for the store at half-time of the NBA All-Star Game.

TRUTH:  He left hours earlier. He was dead before the game started.

GUTMAN:  The "gunshots" are triggering outrage

TRUTH:  There was only one gunshot.

GUTMAN:  Trayvon was "100 pounds lighter."

TRUTH:  He was less than fifty pounds lighter.

GUTMAN:  "You can hear him stalk Martin."

TRUTH:  He did not stalk Martin. When the dispatcher said to Zimmerman, who was following Martin, "We don't need you to do that," Zimmerman said "okay" and stopped. ABC edited out Zimmerman's "okay" and followed immediately with Gutman saying, "But then came the gunshots."

GUTMAN: Zimmerman had a record -- "battery on a police officer and resisting arrest."

TRUTH: The charges had been dropped. Gutman did not mention that fact.

GUTMAN: Police have been accused of "correcting one eyewitness, while ignoring another."

TRUTH: Yes, but the Sanford PD did so for good reason. Several eyewitnesses had seen very little. Others had seen a lot. On one 9-1-1 call from Witness #11 desperate cries of "help" are clearly audible for roughly forty seconds until they promptly stop with a gunshot. The investigators knew it was Zimmerman who was crying out. An hour after the shooting, that eyewitness, Jonathan Good, told the Sanford PD that he saw a "black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy . . . or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help." According to Good, the black man on top was "throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style."

Gutman may not have heard the audio of these interviews, but "Jon" had spoken on camera to a local ABC affiliate the day after the shooting. "The guy on bottom who I believe had a red sweater on was yelling to me, 'help, help,'" Good said. "I told them to stop and I was calling 9-1-1." In the days when real journalists still walked the planet, the case would have been closed right there.

On March 28, one week after CNN's Anderson Cooper falsely accused Zimmerman of saying "f---ing coons" on his call to the dispatcher, and one day after NBC's The Today Show crudely edited that same call to make Zimmerman sound like he was racially profiling Martin (and got sued for it), ABC News tried to regain its rightful place in the false accusation race. Leading the charge was ace fact-twister Gutman. His online lede was a powerful one: "A police video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman."

As Gutman related, the initial police report claimed that Zimmerman was bleeding from the back of the head and the nose, but in the video, obtained exclusively by ABC, "No abrasions or blood can be seen." Although Gutman did not say so, he surely implied that Zimmerman and the police conspired to exaggerate his injuries.

The folks at the indispensable Conservative Treehouse wasted no time in busting this scam. The police surveillance video, which, Gutman boasted, "was obtained exclusively by ABC News" seemed to move as it shadowed the police and Zimmerman. CCTV surveillance video cameras do not move. They are fixed and stationary. Bottom line: this was not the original video or a digital copy of the original. It was video of a video, quite possibly taken by a Team Trayvon ally using an iPhone or something like it and given to Gutman.

In releasing this copy, Gutman failed to mention the obvious reason for the apparent lack of "blood or bruises" -- namely the loss of resolution from the original to the duplicate, not to mention the fact Zimmerman's wounds had been tended to at the scene.

I could go on with another year's worth of deception by Gutman and ABC, but by April 2012 the network had done more than its share in getting Zimmerman arrested. Now, its all-stars -- Gutman and Roberts chief among them -- are doing their best to deny him vindication.  In the process, of course, they stir the embers of racial unrest, but when you've got a personal limo driver to take you to and fro, that's apparently not much of a worry.

Jack Cashill's new book "If I Had A Son" is now available for pre-order.Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/abc_still_corrupting_zimmerman_case.html#ixzz2aMXWFcFC 

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