Police extorting political support in Wisconsin

Iowahawk:

Wisconsin state employee union woos Wisconsin small business support with threats of severed horse heads

Well, he is a satirist. But union supporters HAVE been "doubling down" on intimidation of local businesses as a crucial election approaches. Among other nasty practices. The videos are interesting. But this is more worrisome - Ann Althouse:

I can’t get my head around the concept of police involvement in boycotting businesses. That reads like pure corruption. I can’t believe it’s being done openly. Can someone explain to me how you can even argue that it is acceptable for police to extort political support from citizens?

Interesting to consider the circumstances under which extortion is effective.

Is California next? The legendary Democrat WILLIE BROWN, who managed California politics for years, is worried about pension costs?

Bill Whittle: Michael Moore's Right

Ace: Bill Whittle: "Michael Moore's Right: We Can Balance the Budget By Taking Money From The Rich.   Ah, but there's a catch. Great video; stay with it." Allahpundit: Long, but it has to be.

First came the video by Mary Katherine Ham's analysis of Michael Moore's simple, elegant solution to America's financial crisis.

 The reviews above concern Bill Whittle's visual illustration of a more detailed Iowahawk blog post on Moore's Madison speech ON VIDEO. Iowahawk is a genius. Bill Whittle, a screenwriter, provides the images to make his words memorable.

One thing you have to say about Michael Moore is that he is effective in persuading and energizing his intended audience. Since Moore declared war on the government of Wisconsin, Governor Walker's poll numbers have been going down, and now the Left is engaging in a deceitful and intimidating campaign to unseat a supreme court judge in Wisconsin. (They are also going door-to-door for signatures on recall petitions, while misrepresenting the language of the petitions.)

There are powerful psychological reasons for the allure of liberal social policies even in the face of economic disaster.   Mark Steyn characterizes two very different types of protesters in the London protests and riots against modest cuts in government benefits, in The Human Right to Suspend Reality, then makes the following observation:

In a democracy, there are not many easy ways back from insane levels of “social” spending, and certainly not when the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition panders to the mob by comparing them to anti-apartheid activists.

Michael Moore is apparently proud of his recent appearance on the Colbert Report.   Note, starting at about 6 minutes and 30 seconds how viciously and falsely he characterizes America's 400 billionaires, from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to the "littler Mubaraks" like Oprah Winfrey.  Who could really believe that Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are conspiring to concentrate ALL of the money in the United States into the hands of exactly 400 people?  But it's the emotion that counts -- no evidence needed.

I am in no position to judge the deepest intentions of America's billionaires, but I would imagine that not all of their motives are altruistic.  However, the leadership of the Left proclaims that it knows EXACTLY what  "the rich" are thinking.   Might this be a form of projection?  The Left tends to think of money as power more than classical liberals, libertarians or conservatives do.

The leadership of the Left knows that its primary weapon is to demonize some person or group on the other side. "Personalize and Polarize", as Saul Alinsky liked to say. It is impossible for them to portray those on the other side as having ANY honorable motives. Their worldview REQUIRES them to attribute evil motives to others, because the record of the left's economic policies has been consistently disastrous (given enough time).

Questions for Michael Moore:   If these 400 billionaires are conspiring to control ALL of the wealth in the United States, WHY DO MANY OF THEM GIVE AWAY SO MUCH OF THEIR MONEY TO CHARITY?  And why do they have so many employees?  And to whom do they sell products or services?  What is the true nature of their wealth?

Compare Moore's economic philosophy with that of Abraham Lincoln.

I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. …. I want every man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition — when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.

p.s.:   While taxes for corporations are not fairly distributed in the U.S., tomorrow the United States will have the worlds highest corporate tax rate. Not only that, but no country leans on upper-income households more than the U.S. for tax revenues. And then there's this little bit of fact to counter Mr. Moore's scary scenario of total control of America's assets by 400 very rich people:

I like to point out that the low rate at the top of the income scale is an artifact of the lower capital gain rate, that it doesn't count the double taxation of corporate income, and the fact that people usually get to the very top of the income scale once, when they sell their business or some other big asset in capital gain transactions.

In other words, most rich people reach high, temporary income levels by giving up control of the businesses or stocks which made them rich. There is, over a period of decades, a fair amount of turnover in the richest families in America. But Michael Moore will present only the worst possible characterization of "the rich" because it is part of his strategy.

Meg McArdle via Instapundit: THE RICH REALLY ARE DIFFERENT: Their Incomes Fluctuate More. “This is one of the reasons that we can’t fix all our budget problems with higher taxes on the rich – if we do that, revenues are going to collapse dangerously every time there’s a recession.” McArdle quotes Robert Frank:

Nearly half of California's income taxes before the recession came from the top 1% of earners: households that took in more than $490,000 a year. High earners, it turns out, have especially volatile incomes--their earnings fell by more than twice as much as the rest of the population's during the recession. When they crashed, they took California's finances down with them.

Mr. Williams, a former economic forecaster for the state, spent more than a decade warning state leaders about California's over-dependence on the rich. "We created a revenue cliff," he said. "We built a large part of our government on the state's most unstable income group."

As far as I can tell, if Michael Moore had his way, there would be no risky investments because there would be no rich people. Only people toiling happily under the direction of the Federal Government (or the Revolutionary Council or whatever), which would magically provide good jobs, good wages and benefits to all of the 300 million people in America. It would be a Worker's Paradise. Sort of like Cuba. THE POSSIBILITY OF BILLIONAIRES TAKING ALL YOUR MONEY WOULD VANISH.

Captains of Capitalism set out to CHANGE capitalism

Via the New York TImes, GE's profits are now highly dependent on its tax strategy:

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

In other words, you've been paying taxes to GE! Unfettered Free Enterprise rules in the United States!  Everybody follows the same rules!  Heh.

Ace says:

Via Nathan Wurtzel . . . who reminds us that until earlier this year GE owned the pro-tax MSNBC. Well, pro tax for the little people, not them. Big difference.

Which gives me an excuse to link the fantasy video in which Chris Matthews Tells the Truth. Rich Democrats DO seem awfully good at evading or avoiding taxes: John Kerry docking his yacht out of state to avoid taxes amd Clair McCaskill's maneuvers to avoid taxes on her plane are just two recent examples. Of course, the very rich don't necessarily have to be Democrats to find ways to avoid paying taxes. But high tax rates motivate the very rich to seek help from government in finding loopholes or other ways to avoid paying "their fair share".  Watch what they do, not what they say.

Special deals for certain corporations can be more damaging to the economy than loopholes for individuals because they provide the favored companies with an unfair advantage over competitors. "As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has reported, days after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Immelt wrote to GE shareholders:

[W]e are going through more than a cycle. The global economy, and capitalism, will be ‘reset’ in several important ways. The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner."

Hmmm. "regulator, industry policy champion, financier and key partner."   WHERE HAVE WE SEEN THIS KIND OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY BEFORE? ITALY?   What could possibly go wrong? 

Tigerhawk on Obama and the Fortune 500:

. . . I wish that the president would stop catering to the Fortune 500 tools. These are not the companies that innovate. They don't create a lot of American jobs in the long run, they are big enough to lobby for legislation to protect their entrenched businesses, their CEOs consort with politicians partly for the fun of it, and they are in general willing and inevitable participants in the government-corporate complex. If President Obama really wants to motivate business, he will start paying attention to the next several thousand companies, which are the real engine of growth and innovation in the great American prosperity machine.

Meanwhile, Left-wing billionaire George Soros is reportely quietly planning to push for 'a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.' Because, you know, American leadership at present is "unacceptable" to Mr. Soros, who wants to use us as guinea pigs in his grand design to establish a global sheriff. I wonder if he is boosting greater power for China at the expense of India? We know he thinks America is awful, but does he think India is worse than China because the people are somewhat more free?

I think these people bear watching. But we're too busy watching the Marxist incitements of Michael Moore, who's only a millionaire, and a former SEIU official.

Kind of reminds me of the rumor that Jamie Gorelick is on President Obama's short list to head up the FBI, even though she's the "Typhoid Mary of policy fiascos." If the villains from Enron should be in prison for cooking the books, so should she. Being a reliable Washington Democratic insider has its privileges. But even though she's not in prison, her name makes all the other candidates seem wonderful by comparison.

Progressives in American History

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that things could be worse with regard to the political actions of the Commander in Chief.

I'm thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.

Oh, and I'm not thinking of George W. Bush, but another "W" – actually "WW": Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.

President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of "self determination" and the author of the idealistic but doomed "Fourteen Points" – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.

That's a shame, because Wilson's two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson's racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. . .

An extremely interesting piece which briefly outlines the beginnings of the progressive movement in the United States and discusses the changes in progressivism over the years.

Personal note: My grandmother briefly lost her citizenship during Wilson's administration because she was married to a German immigrant.

Ed Driscoll recounts how Progressives decided, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, that they should start from zero in a variety of ways. And later, that they should go forward, into the past. Glenn Reynolds comments: Reminds me of this Neal Stephenson quote: “The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”

Michael Knox Beran: When compassion turns to coercion

The past three years have witnessed a renewal of faith in progressive social policy, a faith embodied in President Obama's pledge to lead an administration dedicated to "change we can believe in." It is a faith that, in an earlier incarnation, made one liberal, the Columbia teacher and literary critic Lionel Trilling, uncomfortable.

In his book "The Liberal Imagination," published in 1950, Trilling pointed to the "dangers which lie in our most generous wishes." Progressives, Trilling observed, believe that through the "rational direction of human life" they can alleviate misery. But the reformers, Trilling showed, are too often oblivious of the truth of their own motives.

In his 1947 novel "The Middle of the Journey," Trilling probes this hidden impulse in his portrayal of Gifford Maxim, a character modeled on his Columbia schoolmate and legendary Soviet spy-turned-anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers. "And in the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man," Maxim says. This hope tempts the progressive to embrace coercive policies in the name of social equity. "The more we talk of welfare, the crueler we become," Maxim says. "How can we possibly be guilty when we have in mind the welfare of others, and of so many others?"

Former SEIU official plans to destabilize the economy again

This guy is more serious about redistribution than Michael Moore.

But don't worry, he's going to give Wall Street's money to YOU. No word on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's money. He plans to start the revolution by focusing the hatred of the people on JP Morgan Chase in early May. (May Day communist celebration, perhaps)?

Big firms such as this make an easy target for hatred after the government bail-outs. But the consolidation of firms into entities which are considered "too big to fail" is, more often than not, favored by complex government regulation.

I think a separation of political power from the ability to amass wealth is critical for long-term prosperity. Corporations which are "too big to fail" become dependent on government to prop them up. This is a sign of decline in both equality before the law and in the firms which are dependent on government for special favors.  Other corporations, especially those without special government connections, don't know how to proceed with their businesses when regulations are fickle.  Fickle regulation was one of the ways FDR's administration inadvertently lengthened the Great Depression.

It would be better if we had more financial firms which were big enough to be stable, but not so big that they were "too big to fail". I believe that it is better for such firms to go bankrupt if they are mismanaged  than for the government to rashly set aside the rule of law and property rights in the process of "saving" them.  And it didn't help that these firms were forced by the government and "community activists" to make loans to people who would be unlikely to pay the loans back.

I believe that a separation of political power from the ability to amass wealth is critical for long-term survival of our culture.

Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore--the redistribution of wealth and the return of "$17 trillion" stolen from the middle class by Wall Street--is to "destabilize the country."

Lerner's plan is to organize a mass, coordinated "strike" on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments--thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans. This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.

What I can never figure out is why people like this are so obsessed with the concentration of money, but seem totally fine with a concentration of political power. Maybe because they believe that THEY wiill have the power. And this variant on the old "Cloward-Pivens Strategy" still seems predictably short on details concerning what happens between the "destabilization" and the utopian new egalitarianism which the "destabilization" will bring about. BUT WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Well, right off the bat, it would likely devastate the 401k retirements of most older Americans. When George Soros set out to destabilize the Bank of England, he made many British widows and widowers very poor.

And has Lerner ever heard of "hyperinflation"? Would he care if hyperinflation stole money from everyone? What about a deflation which would make debts unpayable? Which way would the destabilization go? Either way, it would cause grave problems in the lives of ordinary people. Would his dream of a utopian egalitarian society be worth the suffering he would cause?

Business Insider notes Lerner was forced out of SEIU last year for spending millions pursuing some kind of plan that looked a lot like this.

But you know who's scary? The Tea Party, man.

Libya: Whatever you think, a lot of people probably disagree with you

What do you think the U.S. approach to the Libyan crisis should be?  Some varied responses here. Could be interesting to review later.  Liberals are divided in their opinions.  Conservatives are divided in their opinions.  Some foreign tyrants are still pulling for Qaddafi. The UN undermines Obama.

March 21: Anti-war movement not dead, but subdued.

Hugo Chavez, reported March 22: End Capitalism, which may have destroyed life on Mars

“I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,” Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day. . . .

He added that the West’s attacks on Libya were about water and oil reserves.

Bolivian President, March 22: Isn't it time to revoke Obama's Nobel Peace Prize? Most Americans disagree.

President Barak Obama, March 22: installing a democratic system that respects the people’s will.?    Needs clarification. He sounds too much like a neocon here.

White House, March 22: We're not at war with Libya.  Interview of Hillary Clinton. Planning on handing off power to an undetermined group of people. President Obama cutting short his Latin American trip.

Congress, March 22: No "King's Army" in U.S.?

Joe Scarborough: Republicans have become the party of reckless interventionism.

David Brooks: The problem with multilateralism.

France proposes political steering committee to guide Libyan operations.

March 23: Center-left TNR weighs in with "What the Left got wrong".

The Hill: President Obama struggles to define mission  Glenn Reynolds offers some ancient guidance:

If you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Michael Kinsley: How did this happen?

Eric Posner: An imperial presidency?

Austin Bay:

Candidate Obama may have pursued smart politics (for the tactical purpose of gaining power) by mainstreaming ‘Bush lied, people died’ and other inflammatory nonsense. The intent was to impugn the motives of those of us who saw the GWOT enterprise as the best choice among many terrible choices. Libya, however, reveals Candidate Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions, billed as smart diplomacy by liberal media operatives, as more balderdash for the dustbin of history. It also calls into question just how smart the politics of 2005 to 2009 will ultimately prove to be for Obama and the Democratic Party.

President Obama: The exit strategy is to stick around, sort of? NOTE: Jazz Shaw writes today about the blatant hypocrisy at the heart of the UN “R2P” doctrine on which Obama relied.

Ace: Germany withdraws from the "Remarkable Coalition". Jeff G. weighs in: "If only we'd been warned."

Ace links VDH: with some "coherent principles" for conservative criticism of the Libyan operation. Then Ace goes on to discuss the current cognitive dissonance of the Left. Interesting.

. . . when they see a Qadaffy killing rebels, they don't understand. They're confused -- aren't heroes supposed to be on the side of justice and liberation?

But they've spent their whole lives ripping into America for doing just that.

Their only resolution of this contradiction is It's okay when we do it, because our hearts are pure.

On the other hand Gingrich is playing politics on this issue in an unsupportable way. More.

Fouad Ajami: The right thing at last.

Who said this?

President Obama Redefines the Term "Exit Strategy" . . . .

Doesn’t sound like an exit strategy at all.

What it does recall is Lewis Carroll.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

Down the rabbit hole?

Joe Lieberman said WHAT?

Joe Biden: Was the President's decision to use force in Libya an impeachable offense?

March 23: What is the basis of our Libya policy? National interest? "Aligning our interests and our values"?  Who is in charge?

Andrea Mitchell discusses the emerging "vision" for Libya and defines the  Obama Doctrine:

1) "When you have a catastrophe you can avert"

2) "and the benefits outweigh the costs"

3) "and you have an international or multilateral support"

4) "Go for it."

As Ace points out, # 1 almost always exists. #2 is a judgment call. #3 - GWB did this too, except that France was not on board. I wonder if the President agrees with Ms. Mitchell. Maybe we'll find out someday.

March 24: Jonah Goldberg on sterile, impersonal terms for war. Peter Wehner: "Muddled thinking creates muddled language".

Michael Moore has a simple, elegant solution

Mary Katharine Ham analyzes Michael Moore's statement that "This country is not broke." Much less Wisconsin. Because the assets of America's billionaires are not THEIRS, they are a "national resource". The video is well-done. Some of the points which get simplified in the video are clarified in MKH's companion piece linked above:

Moore would argue, of course, that those jobs would simply be nationalized and “belong to all of us” after the wealth of their creators is sapped, but who exactly would have an incentive to make Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, or Oracle profitable if all of the money they made was considered a “national resource?"

Margaret Thatcher was right: "The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money". And the idea that the property of all private individuals belongs to the State is extremely dangerous (See video at 4 minutes). Even if a government does not go so far as to claim sovereignty over your time, the loss of property rights can affect the poor even more easily than the rich.

The Left tends to conflate money with power, so many of them think that Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates and the rest of the "400 little Mubaraks" are as oppressive in relationship to Americans as Mubarak was in relationship to the Egyptians. Like most tyrants, Mubarak stole from his people. But he was also dependent on foreign aid to fund his thefts. He was able to extort this money from the West because of his political power.

Weakening the importance of property rights makes everyone more vulnerable to the government. There are ways to moderate the somewhat aristocratic compensation packages in many big corporations without government intervention. Ironically, with the exception of intervention to prevent the growth of monopolies, government regulation tends to favor the formation of "too-big-to-fail" organizations which depend on special favors from the government to protect their market share.

Allahpundit comments about the video:

In a world of cheap demagogues, few come cheaper than this.

One question, though: When he says America isn’t broke, are we sure he’s referring to the budget? My sense of this guy isn’t that he wants to rob the rich blind to eliminate annual deficits and pay down the debt, it’s that he wants wealth transfer in its rawest form — literally confiscating bank accounts (or taxing them into oblivion) and carving up the principal for distribution to people below a certain income level. Not only would all of the entitlements that are destined to cripple the federal government sooner or later stay in place, but in Mooreworld, they’d probably be expanded. Yet somehow, in some way, that $1.3 trillion wealth transfer from Larry Ellison et al. to the poor that he has in mind would solve everything. What a magical elixir socialism is.

But why stop with the ultra-rich?

What would the United States gain if in fact the government did confiscate the wealth of the so-called rich and taxed at 100% all the income above $200,000.00 per household per year?

Using the latest statistics from the IRS, in 2004 there were 2.7 million adults with a net worth above $1.5 million. If the government were to seize all the wealth above the $1.5 million threshold, Washington would realize a one-time windfall of $4.0 Trillion -- and no one would again attempt to accumulate wealth. Assuming it was applied to the national debt (unlikely with the Left in charge as they would spend it) the national debt would only be reduced from $14.5 Trillion to $10.0 Trillion.

Assuming Michael Moore and Company decide that $200,000.00 per year is sufficient for any household, then in 2008 (the latest IRS statistics) the 6.9 million filers that had adjusted gross income above $200,000.00 would have forfeited all their income above that ceiling to the government. The one-time gain to Washington D.C.: $221.0 Billion; but in the future no one would work long enough to earn more than $200,000.00 per year. Tax revenues in subsequent years would never increase unless tax rates are raised which are self-defeating and historically results in even lower tax receipts.

The long-term impact on the economy and the country would mirror that of the failed socialist nations throughout history.

Text of Moore's speech here. The Nation thinks Moore is on the right track. Reason doesn't, of course. After they tax the rich, who will they tax next? Remember that for many elite liberals, taxes are for the little people.

The age of white guilt and the disappearance of the black individual

An amazing 1999 essay by Shelby Steele, a man born to a white mother and a black father, like the President. He's older than the President, and his family was on the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. He believes that today's institutionalized white guilt leads to blacks donning a "mask" of group identity rather than adding strength to their group by developing as individuals. Every phrase in this essay seems well-placed, and I believe it is worth careful study. It is quite long for today's short attention spans, and therefore makes a useful subject for study by students wishing to expand their capacities to follow a line of argument.

One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual--as a separate consciousness--for the first time.

He draws several distinctions between life for blacks before and after 1965, and discusses shifts in "black identity" over time.  He discusses his personal experiences with the "corrupting influences" of institutionalized white guilt.

This essay helps to explain a lot of things, like:

• How "liberalism" abandoned classical liberalism to conservatives and libertarians
• Why black activists beat up conservative blacks and set fire to their vehicles
* Why "black leaders" waged a vicious campaign to get Larry Elder kicked off the air
• Why TODAY'S liberals (actually, leftists) demonize the people who disagree with them
• Why Thomas Sowell so resented Francis Fox Pivens' theories
• Why Francis Fox Pivens fought so hard against Thomas Sowell's concerns for personal freedom
• Why so many former participants in the Civil Rights Movement have turned against the Left

Near the end of the essay, Steele writes about a black author who left America during the Age of Racism, returned to America during the Civil Rights Era then returned to Europe again.  I have emphasized points which seem important to me:

James Baldwin once wrote: "What Europe still gives an American is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself." If America now gives this sanction to most citizens, its institutions still fiercely deny it to blacks. And this society will never sanction blacks in this way until it drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt. Guilt can be a very civilizing force, but only when it is simply carried as a kind of knowledge. Efforts to appease or dispel it will only engage the society in new patterns of dehumanization against the same people who inspired guilt in the first place. This will always be true.

Restraint should be the watchword in racial matters. We should help people who need help. There are, in fact, no races that need help; only individuals, citizens.

This essay also shows a little of how Steele's thinking about the future President Obama developed.  He believed that Candidate Obama would become trapped by the need to present different "masks" to his black and white audiences. He hoped that Obama would eventually be able to rise above the "masks" to express his individuality. The two "masks" could be characterized as the "Jesse Jackson model" - demanding compensation from whites who felt guilty - vs. the "Oprah Winfrey model" - offering redemption to whites who felt guilty.   Steele puts it more elegantly, of course. The President surprised Steele by winning the election. But that was not the last of the President's struggles.

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

The President now often seems more comfortable with the symbolism of being President than with the duties of office. He even suggested recently that it would be easier to be President of China.  People are starting to seem him more as an individual than they did during his campaign, and to treat him like "The President" rather than as a symbol.

Hat tips: I tracked down this article via Mickey Kaus, who was writing about consolidation of affirmative action and civil rights bureaucracies. He linked to John Rosenberg, who also wrote an interesting piece on "Diversity" as Tribalism. His latest post links the remarkable Shelby Steele essay discussed above.

If by now you haven’t thought of Shelby Steele and his soul-searching writing about white guilt, you should have. . .

Today whiteness is stigmatized by liberals like Yglesias in much the same fashion that blackness has been stigmatized by white racists. . .

Update: Ideas like affirmative action, quotas, etc. may not have started as as result of the black civil rights movement in the U.S.: "Former NY mayor Ed Koch reveals new evidence of genuine anti-Semitism on the part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:"

The transcript of those discussions, which Dr. Medoff cites, reveals what FDR said about the status of the 330,000 Jews living in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. . . The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.”

Of course, among the Jews of Europe and the Middle East who had traditionally faced limitations on their rights to hold property, etc., education was one way of surviving (and their religion encouraged education, too).

Why liberals can't communicate with conservatives

Well, this is just one of the reasons, actually. Nobel Prize Winning Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman said today with an expression of superiority that he usually didn't follow conservative sites. Kind of funny.

Crooked Timber is the most liberal site to which I keep a live link in my sidebar. Smart people there, and they usually don't get violent or obscene in their discussions. So I have something in common with Paul Krugman. Heh. Once in a while, I even join a comment thread. Anything I write has to be airtight or I am ripped to shreds (intellectually).

It's easier for liberals to stay in an "echo chamber" than it is for conservatives, because conservatives are exposed to liberal thought through the media all the time. To hear conservative stuff, you have to CHOOSE it.

Krugman recently presented statistics to back up his position that in "low-tax, low-spending" Texas the educational system was so inept as to be immoral. Iowahawk, working outside his normal specialty, ripped Krugman's statistics to bits in half an hour, with an even more devastating follow-up piece.

Pride cometh before the fall, Professor Krugman. Even one of the people he admires at Crooked Timber wondered why Krugman was so sloppy when I brought up Iowahawk's first piece in a comment thread. Maybe Krugman should stick to economics if he's going to keep his mind closed except to people who already agree with him and can say what he thinks in a different way.

National Public Radio doesn't want federal funding anymore.

Ron Schiller, the outgoing head of NPR's nonprofit foundation and senior vice president for development, wants to end federal funding of NPR. Too restrictive. The linked video shows him angling at acceptance of funding from people representing themselves as dedicated to spreading the acceptance of Sharia Law. Claire Berlinsky, who has lived in Turkey for 5 years and encourages Western outreach to moderate muslims, is very upset.

The video was produced by one group of a small, new contingent of conservative and/or libertarian activists who have decided to use some of the Left's own tactics against it. In this case, their tactics have something of a Borat/Michael Moore vibe. These tactics make many on the Right uncomfortable. There is argument about whether "we need to be better than the Left" or whether the tactics more typical of the Left give the Left a dangerous advantage. But you can't say that the output of these new activists is not enlightening.

This video comes at a very bad time for NPR (which is probably why the group who did the video released it now).  NPR puts out some good music and scientific programming.  I like the Thomas Jefferson Hour, too.  Used to really like Prairie Home Companion until Garrison Keillor became to bitter to listen to.  I think it's a good place to find out how the Left is thinking -- you get calm, reasonable voices rather than what you find at many openly lefty sites.   But maybe it's time to stop public funding so supporters can choose the programming they prefer.   It would certainly end a lot of controversy.   

Some of the words of the NPR VP are pretty astonishing. Crime novelist, Hollywood screenwriter and former supporter of leftist radicals Roger Simon  comments. He also links an unedited version of the video.  

What this video reveals is a festival of projection. . . .

“The Tea Party is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move.”

“Tea Party people” aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

As someone who supports many Tea Party views and is a former civil rights worker and also the next thing to an atheist, I had to laugh at that one. But that’s nothing compared to this:

“I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air … it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”

Holy Moly! It’s hard to imagine Betsey Lily sat there without comment, considering Sharia law — supported on their website by the people in front of her — has the some of the most Draconian provisions against women in recorded history. . . . .

. . . . I will suggest another explanation: They are stupid. Lost in a delusional world of political correctness, the elders of NPR have forfeited the ability to think critically. They simply can’t see the facts anymore — or don’t care to. It’s too threatening to their limited weltanschauung. Hence, you get idiotic projections such as Schiller’s statement of how dumb Republicans are and how what America needs is more educated elites. . . .

Whew.  Why don't you tell us what you REALLY think, Roger?

I don't listen to the political coverage on NPR much, but I have heard some quite balanced news commentary on occasion. They have conservative commentators on some shows concerning domestic politics. Of course, most of their politically-connected coverage is slanted way to the liberal side. As demonstrated in the video, many people who work there think that liberal thought is more-or-less synonymous with intellectual thought.

I was struck by one bit of apparently unconscious bigotry on NPR not long ago when on a news program, three people were discussing a new aide appointed by President Obama who had a reputation for outreach to "the other side". One commentator assured the other two that the appointee had solid liberal credentials, clearly demonstrated by the fact that he was deeply involved with a private organization which helped third world children. But conservatives give far more to private charities, on average, than liberals do. Conservatives also volunteer more hours and give more blood.

Liberals tend, on average, to favor compassion administered through government (there are a lot of exceptions, particularly among famous liberals who become spokespersons for charities or who start foundations). But the commentators just seemed to assume that no conservative would do even private charity work for children in the third world, so this appointee's involvement "proved" he was a liberal. The indoctrination runs deep in the liberal elite echo chamber.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has another interesting point about this statement by the NPR exec:

Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said.

Like those liberals gathered in Madison that kept comparing Scott Walker to Hitler, Mussolini, and Mubarak, and who accused Walker of “exterminating” union members? Well, to be fair, Schiller may never have heard about those. After all, he probably gets his news from NPR. . . .

I wonder if the NPR Exec thinks of Sharia Law as "fair and balanced"? Or is he being condescending, with the attitude that while "The West" has a responsibility to be fair and balanced, he would never be so crass as to expect a reciprocal sense of fairness from the people to whom he is speaking?

Housing or Homes?

From a man who has lived among the poorest of the poor, my pick for today's Thought Piece.

What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project.

Read the whole thing. Watch the video at the end.

Then you might want to scan the comments. Lots of fascinating life experiences are represented in these comments, from several different countries. There are lots of politically incorrect thoughts in there, some better than others. There are several observations about why high-density housing works in places like Singapore, but not in places like Pruitt-Igoe.   Plus some thoughts on the "social-engineering" architects like Le Corbusier, ("Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s. . . in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being." whose goals in designing buildings included weakening bonds between people.   It would all be so efficient and well-planned.   Lots of people in lots of countries thought he was a genius.

Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism. . .  Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. . . 

Below are a few comments I thought were interesting.  But there are others.

#10. Demolition video from YouTube, by an Austrian guy.

#20: - written by a guy who once ran a homeless shelter

Pat Moynihan told LBJ he would destroy Black families with his new welfare program. The old sociologist was right. Most families then – including Black ones – had 2 married parents living at home. Not now, thanks largely to Welfare. Now over 80% of the poor are never-married moms and their children – and very dysfunctional too. These families are the major source of poverty in the U.S. Also the major source of violent young criminals, 70% of whom are fatherless. . .

....the key to slums and dangerous housing is not architecture, nor government programs. It is the 2-parent family. As you noted Blert, boys need a father badly, especially when they get bigger. (Girls do too, although for somewhat different reasons.)

That is where we need to focus. If the stable, 2-parent, enduring family built on marriage can somehow be restored, the slums will lose most of their horror.

Otherwise, each new generation of fatherless kids becomes a civilization-destroying onslaught of new Barbarians.

When the number of fatherless children becomes too large, a family or society cannot provide enough acceptable male role models. During the Great Depression, a period of low crime in spite of widespread poverty, the marriage rate among Blacks was higher than among Whites.

#23: It's not just big projects which have problems

On the connection between Section 8 housing and high crime rates, below is a link to an article titled “American Murder Mystery,” from the July/August 2008 Atlantic. It discusses the findings of a criminologist and housing expert (a married couple) studying changing crime patterns in Memphis. . .

#69. Wretchard pipes in on his own thread:  What all this means for us today:

. . . . Maybe housing isn’t about housing at all. Back in the Tondo Days, we had people negotiating with the Marcos administration who wanted to demolish the Foreshore and relocate everyone to Sapang Palay, Bulacan, where there wasn’t a hope in hell of employment.

The people who lived in Tondo were there because they found a niche in the ecosystem as ragpickers, small tradesmen, day-laborers in nearby factories, or in service industries like home laundry and domestic service. That whole ecosystem would be bulldozed over and its human contents sent off to a rural area.

It was a recipe for disaster, but you couldn’t convince the planners, who had degrees from pretty good universities, to see that. Later, they relented and decided to reclaim some more land from the Bay and turn it into the Dagat-dagatan estate, which at least would be nearby. . .

But if housing is not about homes, then what? PR has already been mentioned. Other objects come to mind. Housing could be about votes. It is almost always about money and the subprime crisis is in some way the perfect confluence of PR, money and votes. It was the perfect vehicle to achieve all these non-homing goals. Here was an “affordable housing” project, which was good PR, for which people were to be eternally grateful through votes. And it made a pile of money too — for a while — and for some.

And then, like some terrible, virtual Pruitt-Igoe the whole subprime thing imploded and its ruin is still upon us. The fragments are still raining down. So maybe Barney Frank is right: housing has lasting value, at least for his own political faction. See he’s still in office. Yet Dionne Warwick may have been right too. “A House is not a Home”. In fact, homes have been broken up to fit people into housing. You have whole communities of single-parent, unemployed, poor people where once you might have had communities of relatively familial, employed poor people. Homes for housing is a poor trade.

But at least the machine has the votes. And of course, for the connected, there is also the money. “The poor we will always have with us.” So the only question is how to make a buck off of them.

#90. Wretchard gets REALLY politically incorrect. Beginning with an Australian example this time.

Update: #105: "Car 54 Where Are You?" Herman Munster before he was Herman Munster.