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?

Obama's Popularity dropping in the Arab world, too?

President Obama faces, among other problems, difficulties among former supporters. the current instability in Iran and the controversy over the proposed mega-mosque at Ground Zero.   Wretchard now writes about the falling poll numbers for Obama in the Arab world.

When respondents were asked to name the world leader they admired most, Obama’s standing was less than 1%. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was cited most often (20%), followed by last year’s top pick, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (13%), and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad (12%).

The hope that appeasement would be rewarded by respect has earned the President a kick in the nose. Perceived strength generates its own legitimacy in rough places; Arabs who have traditionally feared Persia now believe it has a right to build nuclear weapons. They have watched Iran push the President’s flaccid arm down to the table and drawn their own conclusions. The policy of apologizing for America has not won friends or influenced people; it has not even delegitimized Iranian expansionism. It has produced the contrary result.

Wretchard also describes the desperate search for magic words to bring back the domestic approval seen during of Obama's campaign and inauguration, in the face of our current perilous circumstances.

Willie Brown (!) on Out-of-Control Public Sector Unions

This issue is personal to us because we are part of the California public sector pension system. The current state of the pension system means that future benefits are no sure thing.  We are also painfully familiar, with the corruption and destruction which accompanies the conviction, on the part of many State workers, that extremely generous salaries and benefits are their iron-clad right, particularly if they have friends or relatives in the right places in State government.  This situation played a big part in California's current dramatic decline.

The guy who ruled the California legislature for years (term limits were voted in largely to end his reign) has become a champion of public sector pension reform. Willie Brown has now apologized for his role in dramatically increasing salaries and pension for public employees:

Earlier this year he wrote a widely-circulated column in the San Francisco Chronicle lamenting the "out of control" civil service: "The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians -- pushed by our friends in labor -- gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages."

Reason's commentary:

Willie Brown has been fairly consistent: an extremely likeable political pragmatist with no particular attachment to principle or ideology. Which makes his new campaign worth listening to: It shows that facts on the ground are no longer possible to ignore.

Parts of the assessment of Brown were challenged in the comments.

Past over-spending is now causing serious anxiety for current State workers.  AGAIN.  William A. Jacobson:

The path of big government and the welfare state is the path to broken promises and inter-generational warfare. . . .

Those who feed the big government addiction are the cruel ones.

Is it time to go with the Irish solution? Tie government salaries (and pension payments?) to the deficit? This might be difficult for us, personally, but it could possibly help save the State of California from itself.

Or does Calfornia need someone like Chis Christie in order to avoid inter-generational warfare?   More on Christie, with a comparison to Winston Churchill.    Read the whole thing.   Could Willie Brown be effective in challenging public sector unions which are helping to destroy California?

The Federal Government faces similar challenges in the future.   Britain is further down the path of decline.

 For now, the pain in the U.S.  is being felt primarily in the private sector. “Oh, so that’s what John Edwards meant about the two Americas!”. Ironic that government workers, many dedicated to ideologies from the Left, have now inadvertently become oppressors of the working class, in a practical sense.

United States vs. Arizona: Politics in the DOJ

Amid Crises, Obama declares war - on Arizona.

There are several cases in which the Department of Justice seems to be choosing its cases based on political considerations rather than the law. Now the Department of Justice has filed a case against the State of Arizona concerning its new immigration law.  The President has compared the law to Chinese abuses of human rights.   He has emphasized the possibility of racial profiling in his condemnations of Arizona, but the actual case against Arizona is based upon federal preemption, and does NOT mention racial profiling, apparently. Arizona's law would short-change federal enforcement resourses in other states, or something.

But Arizona has not started enforcing the "problematic" provisions of its new law, while Rhode Island has. So why isn't the Obama crowd boycotting Rhode Island and calling them racists?

(a) Rhode Island has actually been enforcing the same procedures that allegedly make the Arizona law controversial, and (b) those features (checking immigration status when there is reasonable suspicion to do so, referring illegals to the feds for deportation) have already been upheld by the courts. (Indeed, reasonable suspicion is not even required for the police to be able to ask about a person's immigration status.)

Well, Obama has some company in decrying American immigration policy, which the administration is failing to enforce. Interesting op-ed here:

Attorney General Eric Holder finally filed that long-rumored lawsuit challenging Arizona’s new immigration law. In his opinion, only the federal government has the legal authority to “enforce” (read “completely ignore”) border security. If the Obama administration were convinced that Arizona would treat illegal immigration the same way the feds do, they wouldn’t have bothered to sue.


Unfortunately, Arizonans seem to take the rule of law seriously. And this is a big problem for Team Obama. Holder is worried that trained and knowledgeable local cops will actually prove that the law is enforceable, blowing his boss’s cover. Remember President Barack Obama’s claim last week that our borders are “just too vast” for us to secure them through enforcement, with fences and border patrols?


The border’s too big. The hole in the Gulf is too deep. The recession is too stubborn. Maybe we should find the president a smaller, easier-to-manage country to govern. You know - send him to the minors for a few years. . . .

Personally I think that the reason the Obama administration is going after Arizona but not Rhode Island is that Arizona passed its law during this administration. This is a challenge to Obama's rhetoric and plans concerning immigration. Hence the political selectivity in the filing of lawsuits by the DOJ.

Obama's positions on immigration are not totally unreasonable. And we do need an immigration law which allows for more rational legal immigration and assimilation, without people living in the shadows of society due to an uncertain legal status. But going to war against a state which wishes to help enforce federal law, misrepresenting the population and the state government as racist, is not the action an ethical administration should take.

On the lighter side: Democratic County Supervisor: "Arizona's law might have been justifiable if it was a border state". You know, like Rhode Island. Lots of other stupidity is also evident surrounding this case.

UPDATE: The Secretary of State indicates that the suit was filed under the direction of the President. No attempt to insulate DOJ decisions from the rest of the administration here.

More "racist" immigrant policies have also been in  force in the liberal stronghold of Madison, Wisconsin.    Oops.  The City Council doesn't want to be bashed like Arizona.  The threats by Holder have made them think twice about their current policies.

California's Cruel Austerity Program

A California appeals court has upheld an Order by Gov. Arnold Schwarzennager temporarily cutting state employees back to the federal minimum wage since the California legislature has not passed a budget and is facing a $19 billion annual deficit. (Unfortunately for the Governor, all that spending has not produced a computer system capable of changing the remuneration of State employees in this way).

And "in Illinois, the state simply has stopped paying bills".

The path of big government and the welfare state is the path to broken promises and inter-generational warfare. The workers in California and vendors in Illinois are paying the price for the unsustainable public sector union contracts which preceded them, sometimes by decades.

Yet those of us who call for fiscal sanity and reform are derided by people like Sheldon Whitehouse and other Democrats as having no compassion.

Just the opposite is true.

It's called tough love. Those who feed the big government addiction are the cruel ones.

Not intentionally cruel, of course.

California - No Budget, AGAIN

The Governor gets dramatic with a (probably ineffective) decrease in the salaries of State employees to the federal minimum wage. But this kind of drama does not produce meaningful reform in the long run.

After he was elected to replace a man who had lost control of the State budget, the governor actually tried to enact some real reforms.  He did so with a considerable amount of bravado.  Remember "girly men"?  But The Terminator was, in effect, beaten to a pulp by the entrenched Democratic legislature and decided that if he couldn't beat them, he would join them.  And his wife is from the most prominent Democratic family in America, so his changing political positions probably eased some tensions at home, too.

Better to go with something like Ireland's austerity plan than the yearly drama in California: Tie government salaries to the deficit.   The details show this to be a far more sensible plan than the "cut them all to minimum wage" approach. Glenn Reynolds notes that the Irish plan has the benefit of turning government workers into a lobby for responsible spending. And it might cut down on some corruption, too. Embezzlers, etc., would be directly affecting the paychecks of their co-workers.

Unfortunately, the response in California makes it sound more like Greece.  The government proposes  draconian austerity, then waits for protests which make austerity impossible. Those on the government payroll do more to drive business out of the state so that the budget mess gets even worse.  Politicians cave to current pressures let the guys who are elected after you term out deal with the growing problem, until everything falls apart.

The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment

I wrote about some interesting coincidences concerning the confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court's McDonald decision here.

 Captain Ed has an interesting take on the decision - noting Jocob Scollum's observation that four Supreme Court Justices argued against the Constitution and against individual rights in general:

The decision reveals a fundamental antipathy on the part of liberal jurists to the clear language of the Constitution. While we celebrate the fact that five Justices got it right, we should be very worried that the other four still would rather search for penumbras and emanations for their own idea of social engineering than in actually reading the clear text of the document they swore to uphold.

Video featuring Otis McDonald, who took the case to the Supreme Court. Why would Chicago politicians rather call in the National Guard in response to horrific crime rates than allow law-abiding citizens (well, other than themselves and their friends) to have guns? "This hurts me to my heart".

"Blogfather" Kaus vs. Barbara Boxer for Senate

Mickey Kaus, one of the two or three bloggers who got me hooked on reading political blogs (way back during the Gray Davis recall) is running against our long-time senator, Barbara Boxer, in the Democratic primary. It's kind of a David Vs. Goliath contest, so she doesn't think she needs to show up for debates. Too bad, because he seems much more sensible and intellectually engaged than Boxer - not one of my favorite politicians.

Kaus deserves the "blogfather" title. He seems to be a fairly moderate Democrat on most issues. He doesn't like corruption. He has some creative ideas sometimes. I have had a hard time following his Slate blog, Kausfiles, more recently, because it was his habit to keep adding new material to each daily post as the day wore on, and I lost track of earlier points he'd made. In recent years, I have generally only read his work when someone linked it.

He leaves a good general impression with me. But even if by some miracle he won the primary, I'd have a hard time voting for a Democrat in California, because the party machine in this state is so corrupt. I'm not real excited about the primaries, so far. Time to do some serious study, I think.

Update: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman won the Republican primaries for senate and governor. Heard Fiorina today on Dennis Prager's show. She sounded genuine and reasonable. I'm not totally happy with the way the primaries turned out - campaign finance rules have intimidated people who would otherwise give money to candidates to get their messages out. As it now stands, races are dominated by dinosaurs and zillionaires. A referendum for an open primary passed. A similar set-up in Louisiana seemed to contribute to corruption.

Mickey Kaus, with a budget of $40,000 and a very short campaign, took 5% of the vote away from Barbara Boxer. He's still trying to make some things clear to the electorate. A few decades ago, there were many more sensible Democrats like him.

Postmortem: What did he accomplish and what did he learn? Interview with Glenn Reynolds. He opposed unions, especially teacher's unions and other public unions, and immediate amnesty. Teacher's unions were the most unpopular of his "target institutions" with the people he spoke to.

The Death Spiral of the Welfare State

Greece is just the beginning of the unfolding financial disaster in Europe.

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies. . . .

And what happened in Greece is not too different from what is happening in California.

Canadian Human Rights Advocate Mark Steyn explains some of the ways the world is changing. Click to full screen mode after starting the video you select below. If you're the impatient type, just go with the Chapter 4 or Chapter 5 video. Interesting ideas, whether or not you agree with them.

Chapter 1 Breaking down the numbers: why the West is dying
Chapter 2 Unsustainable habits of the West
Chapter 3 Civilizational exhaustion
Chapter 4 Response to critics
Chapter 5 Comparing Europe and America

Grecian Formula: How Public Sector Unions Broke California

Depressing.   Follow the link to the City Journal article. And Doug Ross paints a grim picture about the financial situation of Greece, with lots of charts and graphs.

Greece's story will have a series of European Vacation sequels as Italy, Portugal, Spain and other countries also tremble under the strain of crushing debt.

Earlier, VDH gave a 4-step "Grecian Formula" for decline in the post linked here. And Mark Steyn has also compared Greece and California.

VDH again, with commentary by Wretchard - bringing bankruptcy in the UK into the picture.

Are you preparing, personally, to weather the turmoil which seems inevitable, eventually? I'm starting to take these developments seriously.

Is it possible to avoid Crony Capitalism in the U.S.?

Further to the WSJ article on Crony Capitalism by a former Fed official, Wretchard notes:

The fundamental problem with any government attempt to the fix financial industry is how to stabilize it without getting involved in it.

"For political reasons (the financial system) has no real freedom to fail. That’s why the real cost of managing the financial sector’s problem is astronomical. . . "

Greece is a frightening, current example of what could happen both in our own federal government and in California:

Once a financial crisis is in full swing all thoughts turn to preventing a collapse.

But during the lulls the last word anybody wants to hear is “no”. Everybody is addicted to business as usual. Neither Wall Street, nor the Federal Government, nor California want to be put on short leash. Ask the public service unions. The Greek debt crisis (Greece being one place where public service unions are particularly strong) showed how difficult it was to put a stop to profligacy. Demonstrators took to the streets to demand an end to the crisis, by which they meant ‘pay us our salaries’. The Economist writes that the EU and the IMF must bail out Greece even though Athens shows no sign of stopping its wayward ways. Otherwise another weak Eurozone country may be the next domino to go over. Yet that “will provide only temporary relief”. But it must be done to keep the system from crashing. Like an addict who must get what he needs the entire universe collapses to the horizon of the next fix.

Baseline Scenario writes that more taxpayer money must be infused now or things will really start to fall apart. The Greek crisis, which was never supposed to get this far, must not be allowed to go further. The catch is that the solution is guaranteed to make things go not just further, but all the way. . . .

Although the “Wall Street versus Main Street” meme may be a good administration sound bite to push financial “reform”, the idea that governments will rein in irresponsible traders is about as plausible as leaving two drunks in a warehouse full of whiskey to watch over each other. Governments are the among the most profligate borrowers of all. . . .

Read the whole thing. Sobering, along with the real-life stories about our current dire politico/economic situation. This seems like a good time for stepping back and focusing on production, developing trust and debt reduction rather than on consumption and dependence, starting at the personal level.

The End of Trust, the End of an Economy?

I heard an interview of Victor Davis Hanson by Ray Appleton today on KMJ. Evidently, he has a book manuscript now undergoing editing (by the publishers of the Harry Potter series) about ancient precedents for many of today's political developments, even those we consider to be innovative.   Should be good.

They spoke about the europeanization of the United States and its implications for the psychological health of Americans and the financial health and future of the entire world.  They also discussed some similarities between Greece and California.  The governments of both Greece and California face severe  financial difficulties caused by over-spending.  And the natural blessings (and blessings left by past generations)  in both Greece and California allow unrealistic spending to continue longer than in less-beautiful climates and less-blessed regions.

Taxes are so high in Europe that ordinary citizens are becoming as adept at tax evasion as, say, the typical nominee for President Obama's cabinet.  People don't seem to think about the long-term consequences of their actions, because "the government" will take care of everything.  They think  (something also pointed out by Mark Steyn).

Victor Davis Hanson spoke so plainly and clearly. Everything he said made sense. I wish everyone I know could have heard it.  However, he has written a short piece which I can recommend, which covers some of the same topics.  And Wretchard has written a wonderful commentary on a second piece by VDH in which VDH reports his observations while riding a bicycle around rural California, not far from us, and compares what he saw to what he sees and hears in more prosperous parts of the state.  These pieces cover topics which involve us very personally, as people who live in the most economically-depressed part of California and who are participants in the state pension system.

The first piece which increased my understanding of the world is called  "The End of Trust".   It starts out with the financial debacle in Greece as it relates to the sudden disclosure that the books were cooked concerning public pensions in California. Shortfalls come to about half a trillion dollars.   He also discusses other manifestations of the end of trust in financial dealings. 

The world is getting a little edgy when very few investors are willing to buy Greek bonds — given what they know about Greek politics and productivity. . . .

California, take note. Some Stanford economists and analysts just refigured the cooked books at the various California public pensions and found a $500 billion shortfall. The state is already broke. Its taxes are the highest in the nation, the flight of its wealthy per week unsustainable — and its teachers apparently (please explain this?) furious that their salaries are the highest in the country and their students among the worst. So we either float more bonds, or ask retirees to take a cut or freeze. The latter is not even being discussed. . . .

From what the administration announces almost daily, from the radio ads blaring now in the popular culture, and from congressional promising, I think I get the new narrative. “Trust” is an archaic construct established by capitalists to ensnare the more noble poor. When you buy that blue-ray DVD player or plasma TV (saw lots of that today at Best Buy in Fresno), in lieu of a catastrophic insurance plan, and add to it a night out at the Macaroni Grill and the multiplex, it is not all that certain you will have to pay all of that charge back. As you go from one maxed-up credit card to another, there will be a new company waiting to renegotiate your debt, and a demagogic congress person to explain why you were snookered into doing what you did.

“Walking away” is suddenly not defaulting, but a smart move when the house you were betting would go up went down in value. Note that we didn’t have any law suits five years ago against new “greedy” homeowners who woke up each year with thousands of dollars in “equity” that magically appeared out of nowhere. No one wished then to sue the speculative homeowner that banked rightly on his investment; instead, on the way down is where we get the human interest stories about greed — and the need to violate the trust of an obligation. It is all sort of analogous to the Old West stereotyped saloon scene, in which the confident would-be card player struts up to the card game, starts losing, and then overturns the table, guns blazing.

There are dangers to all this.

He then recounts prior similar events in classical history. Read the whole thing.

Wretchard's brilliant commentary:

Two articles, one by Christopher Booker describing the impending bankruptcy of the UK and another by Victor Davis Hanson describing the catatonic walk over the financial edge by California are united by a single theme: the power of denial.

You will learn a lot if you read both of the links above before you read Wretchard's "I want my MTV".

VDH in California: "Are We Parasites?"


Christopher Booker in the UK: "Don't let the voters know we face bankruptcy"


Wretchard in Australia:

Until recently the difference between the First and Third Worlds was that the Western future was real. The Western tomorrow was a definite quantity; loans would mature at a certain date, elections would be held at scheduled times and the pension check would arrive in the mail every 15th and 30th of the month. By contrast the Third World timescale had only the present. Tomorrow was ink on a calendar. Only things you could touch, take or use now were real. Checks in the future were as unreal as rocket ships and rayguns.

What a whole generation of Western political leaders have done is abolish the future. Comprehensively and perhaps irretrievably. And since that hasn’t happened in two generations, very few can even come to terms with it. Victor Davis Hanson describes the bewilderment of Californians who find that, for the first time in living memory, tomorrow isn’t coming. It’s so absurd people treat the fact with disbelief. People continue to act rich even though they’re poor. They live as if that check will arrive tomorrow even though no one can give a reason why it should. . . . 

Were you brave enough to read these articles?  Worried yet? Any ideas how to protect our future?

Pelosi: Giving Artists the Luxury of Unemployment. Meanwhile, is Obama writing Europe off?

Did I miss a great renaissance in European Art with the advent of socialized medicine there?  Nancy Pelosi imagines how the Democrats will give freedom to artists to "quit their day jobs" to concentrate on their art, by passing the Democrat's Health Care Bill.  Which we will only understand once it's passed, she says.

Pelosi has a point about the distortions produced by providing tax breaks to employers, but not to private citizens, for the purchase of health care.  (This unfair situation arose out of the desperate attempts of employers to get around wage and price controls during World War II by offering health benefits in addition to wages.  When the IRS tried to impose taxes on these benefits, the people revolted).

But Ms. Pelosi also seems to be imagining a utopian dream world where the same amount of money just magically appears and makes its way into the government's coffers even if people make much less money.   If everybody becomes an unemployed  artist, living romantically on love, beauty and a few dollars scratched together from selling his work (don't forget to pay the sales tax and self-employment tax, Mr. Artist), who will do the hard, unartistic jobs that pay the bills?  She also seems to want to punish people who become entrepreneurial to the point of hiring significant numbers of employees. And people who make "more than their fair share" of money.   If you subsidize unemployed artists, you get more of them.  If you punish job creation, you get fewer jobs.

A tax base containing more struggling artists and fewer employers and high-wage employees moves the  the "fiscal neutrality" fiction concerning the health care bill even further from reality.  It's that type of unintended consequence that helped turn Lenin's dream of a utopian society (where everyone would be freed from drudge labor to pursue meaningful work like art)  into a society featuring a privileged nomenklatura contrasted with forced labor ("we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us") along with gulags and starvation for those who did not fall into line.

Even though the vast majority of American progressives reject Stalinism, much of the utopianism of early Marxist-Leninist theory remains in their good-hearted, benevolent plans for the rest of us.  And you can tell from listening to Ms. Pelosi that she really does believe that she is helping people.  But childhood stories which she has related in interviews have also revealed that she has a profound admiration for political power.  This is consistent with her behavior in pushing through health care reform.  Benevolence is often accompanied by thuggish or dictatorial behavior.  Totalitarianism is very tempting, even (or perhaps especially) to the benevolent.

Has Ms. Pelosi not noticed the financial condition of her own state?  That's what happens when progressives control the legislature for a few decades.   Pelosi is not doing so well herself at leading the nation into a "pay as you go" direction.  And she looks forward to creating vast new federal bureaucracies where government employees will be paid better than the shrinking private sector, and where they will probably be largely exempt from the health care rationing which her romantic starving artist will experience.  Because re-arranging wealth is far more noble than creating wealth, so bureaucrats deserve better treatment.

And then it will all fall apart, as in Greece and, barring a federal bailout from better-run states, California. But maybe art can console us.  If we do better than the Europeans in that department.

 Another point by Kenneth Anderson from the link above, concerning the EU's current problems with the financial crisis in Greece:

. . . These European leaders know better than anyone on the planet how the shift to their domestic social model implies geopolitical decline. So they have no doubt as to where Obama is taking the US in foreign affairs. . .

The post linked above makes reference to a second post on the reasons developed for forming the European Union in the first place:

. . . the Obama administration’s pooh-bahs seem to have written off Europe as the past, Asia is the future. The irony is that it is precisely on account of striving so desperately, so mightily, to become a Western European democratic socialist state that the Obama administration feels no need any longer to look to Europe. It has already priced-in internally anything of ideological value Europe might have to offer, on account of the transformations under way in the US. We’ve now got — thanks to the decension of Bush and the inclension of Obama –anything of value Europe might offer in the way of values, so why pay attention to those losers? . . .

Of course, the one missing piece of that puzzle is how it is that Europe went into decline, and whether that lesson for the US has been priced-in ....

I wonder how the European art scene will change when Europeans start to internalize the possibility that America will not longer be paying for Europe's military defense? The Russian Bear is stirring. And the Islamists are on the rise.

 Any chance of a return to "hard" totalitarianism in Europe in response? It's been less than a century.  Anti-semitism is on the rise again . . .

VDH: Why Fear Big Government?

Victor Davis Hanson gives five non-standard reasons to fear big government. Read the whole thing. He's been around. He's studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He's worked in both the public and private sectors. Highlights:

1) Juvenal’s “Who will police the police?”

One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day, from the mundane to the profound. 

with examples.

2) The Power of Envy
VDH includes several examples of bureaucratic "arrogance of office" which could have been motivated by envy.

I am all for codes, building inspectors, and plant regulators, but an excess of such investigators quickly creates a priestly class who take their own frustrations out on supposedly better off others.

Side note: The $250,000 income level which Obama characterizes as representing undeserving rich people who owe more to the government just happens to be slightly above the income level of most of the salaried liberal elite. Interestingly, incomes between $150,000 and $250,000 (representing this elite class) were exempted from additional Social Security taxes under Obama's scheme. So people are to pay Social Security taxes on incomes from $100 to $150,000 plus redistributionist payments on any income above $250,000. His core constituency, the "deserving almost-rich", were not characterized as owing more to America. An his mulit-billionaire supporters were assigned no higher income tax bracket than someone working 70 hours a week to pull in $250,000 (and the ultra-rich have enhanced access to tax shelters). Obama knows how to play up economic envy without drawing negative attention to his most avid supporters.

3) Patronage

In California there are hundreds of worthless state boards with six-figure, governor-appointed officials. We assume that in our term-limited state, these sinecures are the refuges of former state assembly and senate politicians. . . .

4) The Greek four-step
VDH gives four steps involved in the current socialistic decline in Greece:

I once lived in Greece for over two years, and visit there every other summer. Any casual observer could have predicted its present fiscal meltdown, which is emblematic of big government socialism. Here is the creed of many of the EU socialist states. . .

He then outlines the results, such as:

Repressed anger is the national creed: those who work the hardest and pay the most for others less industrious or gifted barely constrain a seething resentment; those on the receiving end constantly channel envy and jealousy as mechanisms to justify why “they” should redistribute income to themselves, the more deserving.

Update: Greek debt and Goldman Sachs.
Second link: Should the EU jettison Greece? Should the U.S. jettison California?

"Every piece of evidence screams against pouring any more money down this hole.” . . . Some reckoning like this was bound to happen in the changeover to the common currency. That's why the founding documents of the EU put so much emphasis on quality public finances and curtailing support for profligate governments. A Greek default would not endanger the euro any more than a California default will endanger the dollar.

5) Ministry of Truth

Orwell was on to something in his focus on the government’s power of language to manufacture truth out of fantasy.

RELATED:
Ben Stein on the extraordinary blessings of being an American.
Ronald Reagan:
There are no "masses" in America.
Jay Cost:

Let's acknowledge that governing the United States of America is an extremely difficult task. Intentionally so. When designing our system, the Founders were faced with a dilemma. How to empower a vigorous government without endangering liberty or true republicanism? On the one hand, George III's government was effective at satisfying the will of the sovereign, but that will had become tyrannical. On the other hand, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged the rights of the states, but so much so that the federal government was incapable of solving basic problems.

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. . . .

Which helps explain where President Obama has gone wrong: "I won". and "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."

Update - Wretchard: Jay Cost missed something in the excellent article linked above:

“America is not ungovernable. Barack Obama has so far failed to govern it.” Cost is 99% right. But his argument misses the crucial 1 percent. The Left doesn’t want to govern, it wants to rule given the chance. It is as always willing to leave its own Big Tent behind at the decisive moment. The continual calls from the Democrat Left for Obama to “grow a spine” are really coded calls to say that the moment is now; that the President must ‘’seize the day, seize the hour.” It’s not as Cost imagines, a call to compromise. It’s a call to say that the time for compromise is over. They can drop the mask; they can hoist the Jolly Roger.

Noah Pollak’s description of the split between Amnesty International’s leadership and the head of their gender unit is the same story in a different setting. She was purged for her inability to support Amnesty International’s espousal of an Islamic radical. . . .

Saghal closed the letter describing her suspension with a recitation of her revolutionary credentials. It is an eerie passage which echoes structure for structure many of the protestations of innocence by the Old Bolsheviks when they found themselves in the cellars of the Cheka, stuffed there by a leadership that found they had outlived their usefulness. She wrote:

I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg’s consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty’s mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

Why does she think any of this matters? The Left is not about principles. It is about itself. It is about power. Now that President Obama has been politically weakened, look for the mask to come back on. The words of sweet reason, the entreaties to “make a deal,” and feigned affection will now make a surprise reappearance. When the Left cannot rule, it will try to govern. Until the next time.

Still, the President can't help himself - he MUST put down the opposition with his rhetoric, it seems: Radley Balko - ". . none is better at trivializing opponents’ arguments than Obama."

Bill Whittle on the World-Changing Dynamo of American Enterprise

Movie screenwriter Bill Whittle makes his case for the morality of preferring free enterprise over unrestrained State Power. Worth 25 minutes of your time to help you clarify your thinking, whether you prefer more or less government control over the private sector. Might be worth watching twice. He discusses the differences between necessary and harmful regulations on the private sector in a memorable way. Examples: General Motors and the "California Death Spiral" of unfunded employee benefits.

Note the kudzu analogy. And the reminder about intellectual inertia in the Third World.

Registration is free.

Jobs "Created or Saved" in California

Good news from Recovery.gov* about the 110,185 jobs "created or saved" in California by the stimulus spending bill. It's about time, given that previous reports estimated that the state had lost 732,700 jobs over the same period of time. What a turn-around. Read the whole thing. Follow the links.

Our higher-numbered districts (and the unenumerated one) aren’t doing well by the stimulus policy, alas. California congressional districts that do not actually exist created or saved a scant 24.2 jobs. . . Worse, they sucked up $5,740,757 to create or save those 24 jobs (sorry, 24.2 jobs), which works out to $237,221.36 per job per seven months (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was passed in February, and the recovery.gov figures are from September) — or $406,665.19 per job per year.

Even assuming that 67% of the cost per job is overhead — federal building maintenance costs, salaries for government employees, payoffs to ACORN and the SEIU, etc. — that means each job must offer an average compensation package of $134,199.51. Wow — where do I sign up to be created or saved?

With the new transparency, it’s easy to see exactly how the administration is able to report such stellar economic improvement so quickly. All I can say is hip hip, chin chin for the One!

Wait a minute. I thought this "stimulus transparency" deal was supposed to be Joe Biden's responsibility. Not the President's. But maybe the Vice President is too busy working on a new pull-out strategy for Afghanistan. You have to also make allowance for the Executive Branch, given the messy bill which was passed by the Pelosi/Reid Congress before anyone could read it, filled with dusty old programs and Democratic "wish lists" from the last couple of decades or so.

Update: in Hollywood alone, 23 million dollars in stimulus money created 21 jobs, according to Recovery.gov.

Other states are reporting similar evidence of deep concern for the people and careful stewardship over their tax dollars by the Administration and Congress:

. . . Over in Minnesota's 27th congressional district, however, it appears to be a bleaker picture for those hoping for a turnaround. The federal government's statistics indicate only 2.5 jobs have been created or saved despite the listed expenditure of $3,159,657 of taxpayer dollars.

Then there's the 13th congressional district which outperformed them all. Hard to believe, but the hard working folks in the 13th congressional district generated five jobs from just $42,109 in stimulus spending.

That would certainly come as news to most Minnesotans, since the 14th, 27th and 57th congressional districts in Minnesota do not exist, except on the Obama Administration's website. Nor does the 00 congressional district listed as spending $404,340 and creating zero jobs.

* " Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse." I guess reporting the fantasy numbers on the site itself could be considered the first report of fraud, waste and abuse. To be fair, however, how much accuracy can you expect from a program which only cost 84 million dollars? Is it really fair to start a satirical campaign to fill congressional seats for all 440 new congressional districts created or make up by Recovery.gov? Note that reporting rules may require states to distort data to make the stimulus numbers look better.

Remember, this is the government which thinks it can do a much better job of running health care than anyone else possibly could.

San Francisco - a fascinating place to visit

San Francisco has one of the most breath-taking settings of any city in the world. It is blessed with a natural port, a benign climate, rich inhabitants and all kinds of businesses. I remember my first visit, walking the city streets. I got a fallen metatarsal arch walking those hilly sidewalks. Every corner brought something new and interesting into view. I was warned by a passerby not to enter the Tenderloin district. Chinatown was fascinating. My Aunt Jean commuted over the bay to teach English to immigrants, most of them Chinese. Some of the upscale business districts had far fewer people on the sidewalks. There were panhandlers, though. Sometimes quite aggressive panhandlers.

Housing costs in San Francisco are among the highest in the nation. Service workers typically live far from the city and commute in. Lots of fairly well-off business people commute in, too. There are street people who sleep in doorways at night. But per capita, people who live in San Francisco can afford to have among the the most progressive, compassionate city governments in the nation. Especially since that government is also supported by businesses whose labor largely comes from outside the city.

We can learn from the rich city government in San Francisco a few things about how far government compassion should be taken. We can also learn from the story linked how government compassion toward a certain group of people predictably leads to a lack of compassion toward other people. Those who decide to dispense compassion through government need to weigh whether the predictable resulting lack of compassion toward others will be justified.

Dennis Prager's dream for an ideal society comes to mind: A just government and a compassionate population. As opposed to a compassionate government and a self-congratulating population.

It's a good thing that San Francisco is a rich city. The city can probably re-adjust and recover from its government's decision to become a sanctuary city, a shining example for all those morally inferior cities across America. Some nearby cities may find the quest for a civil society a little more challenging.

Union/Government Complex, Pensions the Chicago Way

Chicago Sun-Times:

City Hall's biggest pension doesn't go to a police superintendent, fire commissioner or even an alderman.

It's paid to a former steamroller operator named Dennis J. Gannon.

But Gannon's City Hall pension — $153,649 a year — isn't based on what he was paid as a steamroller operator and foreman for the city's Department of Streets and Sanitation.

Instead, Gannon took advantage of a little-known state law that allowed him to base his taxpayer-supported pension on his much-larger salary as president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, a private organization that represents more than 300 unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

And he didn't even have to retire as the federation president. He's still in that job, which paid him $215,484 in 2007, the most recent figures available.

Thanks to that law, Gannon now collects a city pension that's nearly three times what he made at City Hall. He began collecting that pension five years ago, when he was 50. By the time he turns 70, that city pension will have paid him a total of more than $3 million.

Gannon is perhaps the city's most prominent labor leader. When Mayor Daley was seeking cost-cutting concessions from city workers this summer, he turned to Gannon — and largely got them.

Dates back to 1957

Gannon defends his city pension deal.

"I'm probably not the only labor guy taking advantage of that state law,'' Gannon said.

He's right. A Chicago Sun-Times examination of the state's 17 largest government retirement plans found more than five dozen retired government workers whose pensions are based not on their public salaries but, instead, on what they were paid by labor unions, lobbying groups and other non-governmental organizations. (Emphasis mine)

And now the Democratic Congress wants to promote unionization of medical professionals via pending Health Reform Legislation. Because they believe in fairness. To their big supporters. Because everyone wants to see union bosses and big attorneys make more than surgeons, cardiologists and oncologists, who after all, are just technicians.

Incidentally, one reason the unions need help from Congress and the Administration is that they need big boosts in membership to cover their unfunded pensions. These unfunded pensions will be a huge problem for unions in the near future, unless they can turn around their flagging membership through such measures as elimination of the secret ballot in union elections.

TRUE STORY: As noted in the link above, Boeing employees in one plant have just voted to disband their union. One of my brothers-in-law once got a job with Boeing in Washington State. His supervisors were very happy with him, because he did high-quality work and got more done than the other workers. However, his unionized co-workers harassed him and he quit. He left behind a lot of security and an easy future. Because he did not feel good about pretending to work. Must run in David's family.

My brother quit working for the State in his first job out of college for similar reasons. He gave up security for integrity and independence.

General Principles: As Lawrence M. Miller noted, the establishment of unions in an industry is often a sign that management has become alienated from workers. If management pays attention to its employees, unions are generally not too attractive to those employees. And unions are just as susceptible to arrogance and corruption as are business leaders. Sometimes more so, as in the old-fashioned involvement of organized crime in Big Labor.

Management and unions can become so bound in rigid rules that they become involved in a death-spiral as they become unable to respond to changing circumstances. Witness GM and Chrysler.

Who Killed the California Economy?

We live in Central California, a "red" part of a very "blue" state. All is not well in the Blue States.

On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.

Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area. . .

Yet despite all this, the blue states appear to be continuing their decades-long meltdown. “Hope” may still sell among media pundits and café society, but the bad economy, increasingly now Obama’s, is causing serious pain to millions of ordinary people who happen to live in the left-leaning part of America. . . . .

. . . hopes that Obama would emphasize . . . basic infrastructure now have been dashed. Instead, the stimulus has been largely steered to social service providers, “green” industries, and academic research. One reason, as we now know, is that feminists saw such an approach as too favorable to “burly men” who might not have been among the president’s core fan base.

Sadly, many of those “burly men,” particularly the unemployed, still reside in the blue states. They might not be in the places inhabited by the post-industrial elites but they do live in the hardscrabble neighborhoods, industrial suburbs, and small towns from Michigan and upstate New York to California’s vast interior. . . .

Here, Joel Kotkin gets more specific, talking with Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) about what happened to California's economy, and what California's experience means for the rest of the nation. Registration for PJTV is free.

Mr. Kotkin wrote a book years ago correctly predicting the prospects for American resurgence at a time when Asia was moving forward quickly. He was once on the staff of the Washington Post. His primary emphasis in writing now appears to be economic and political geography. His viewpoint is intriguing.

He has also written a short list of 5 answers to the question, Who Killed California's Economy. You may be able to guess a few of them:

Right now California's economy is moribund, and the prospects for a quick turnaround are not good. Unable to pay its bills, the state is issuing IOUs; its once strong credit rating has collapsed. The state that once boasted the seventh-largest gross domestic product in the world is looking less like a celebrated global innovator and more like a fiscal basket case along the lines of Argentina or Latvia.

It took some amazing incompetence to toss this best-endowed of places down into the dustbin of history. . . .

Worth your time, whether you read his articles, watch the video, or both.

Update: To add insult to injury, looks like lots of California's stimulus money went to Texas.

Senator Embarrassment on gender and race

Dennis Prager nails it when he calls Senator Boxer "Senator Embarrassment". As he points out, even Californians who disagree with Senator Feinstein aren't embarrassed by her, as a general rule. But with Senator Boxer, jaw-dropping, embarrassing statements just keep coming, year after year.

Here, our junior senator, Barbara Boxer, gets arrogant about her title while questioning a general. Because she worked so hard to get that title. Her bristly feminist hostility seems so oddly out of date. Plus juvenile and rude, especially given the setting. And ignorant of the military tradition of referring to superior officers as "sir" or "ma'am". She was being honored, not disrespected.

I don't remember Senator Boxer's election as being a result of her hard work (especially compared to the work of becoming a Brigadier General). If the California Democratic Party machine had not been so dishonest and sleazy, we would have had the courteous, serious thinker Bruce Herschensohn as a senator, instead of "Senator Boxer, Ma'am". I don't think the party machine has reformed much since then. That's one reason that our state is in such sad financial shape.

And here she goes again, playing the race card against a black man. He takes offense at the suggestion that he should agree with the leaders of other black organizations just because he is black. Rightly so. The liberal hostility toward minorities who "leave the reservation" is a corrosive thing in American life. Senator Boxer was pretty clumsy in presenting her expectation that all blacks should think alike.

Interestingly, he got away with taking offense even though he was not expressing the official liberal "consensus". That's sort of rare. But remember, from Andrew Breitbart's heirarchy of political correctness:

Black trumps Woman.

From the comments: "Evidently, she was shaken but not stirred! . . why didn't she object when this guy called her ma'am?" She needs some shaking up from time to time or she'll get more and more condescending. "It was like being in Mississippi in 1945."

On the other hand, James Taranto makes a good point:

We watched the video, and we can see Alford's point. Boxer does come across as condescending, and, weirdly, she doesn't even seem to understand why a he would find it offensive for her to rebut his argument not on the merits but via a racially specific appeal to authority.

Yet Alford, by speaking on behalf the National Black Chamber of Commerce, is himself relying on just such a racially specific appeal to authority. We tend to agree with Alford and disagree with Boxer on the subject they were discussing, but the rule of etiquette he invoked--blacks may claim authority on account of their race, but whites may not seek to undermine that authority--put her at an unfair disadvantage, one that was particularly unwarranted given that the topic at hand had nothing to do with race.

On the third hand, she didn't think she had to prepare for her opponent.

More:

Boxer’s entire M.O. as senator is to wield liberal ethnic or gender groups as a bat to bludgeon any criticism to her agenda. That’s not debating, that’s bullying. That’s not respecting racial diversity. It’s using racial groups as a weapon.

Follow the second link for an interesting history of the phrase, "Truth to Power"and Boxer's dismissing of Secretary Condoleeza Rice's positions because Rice didn't have children. The last link concerns Dick Durbin's bigotry - some people are just genetically incapable of understanding others.

I'm looking forward to the time when legislators can get down to the business before them without diverting attention to unrelated race and gender sensitivities and assumptions. And when they actually pay attention to their constituents instead of their desire to increase their own power. Time for some new faces in Washington and some new political tactics in Sacramento.