Category Archives: Government

Trump Fuels a Tribal War in Nancy’s House, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on July 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

Trump is dividing and hopes to conquer the Democrats next year. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

President Donald Trump’s playground taunt Sunday that “the Squad” of four new radical liberal House Democrats, all women of color, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” dominated Monday morning’s headlines.

Yet those headlines smothered the deeper story.

The Democrats are today using language to describe their own leaders that is similar to the language of the 1960s radicals who denounced Democratic segregationist governors like Ross Barnett and George Wallace.

Consider what the four women have been saying.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Speaker Nancy Pelosi of attacking “newly elected women of color.” Was she calling Pelosi a “racist”?

“No!” protested AOC. But it sure sounded like it.

AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti attacked Native American Rep. Sharice Davids for her vote on a Pelosi-backed bill that sent $4.6 billion in aid to the border but lacked the restrictions on Trump policies progressives had demanded.

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Posted in Government, Politics, race relations

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Democrats Have Become the Party of Nonwhite Immigrants and Sexual Deviants, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on July 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Democrats are catering to a diverse array of groups, but mainstream white voters isn’t one of them. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

In the last presidential election, the Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, dismissed the white American working class as the “Trump deplorables,” “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” Now Nancy Pelosi wants the House of Representatives to censure President Trump for sticking up for America and its white core population.  What more proof do we need that the Democratic Party does not represent the core population of America?

We hear a lot from Democrats about “white supremacy.”  Yet whites are the only people who are unprotected by racial quotas and preferential treatment in university admissions, hiring, and promotions.  Whites are the only people unprotected by prohibitions against hate speech.  Any hurtful thing can be said about white people—and is.  White people are the only people who can be arbitrarily fired for speaking their mind or simply stating truths that Identity Politics, or some black person, doesn’t want to hear.  

White people still have to listen to demands from blacks for reparations for slavery as if those currently alive, white and black, have had anything to do with slavery.  Indeed, scholars have concluded that as many or more white Americans alive today are descendants of white slaves as blacks are of black slaves.  What about reparations for descendants of white slaves?

In those long ago times, slavery was a fact of life, not something that white people did to black people.  As I have pointed out on many occasions, the supply of black slaves in the New World originated in the black Kingdom of Dahomey which sold black captives from the black king’s slave wars first to Arabs and then to Europeans.

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Don’t Take The Bait, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on July 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

Trump is going to drive a wedge a mile wide into a Democratic party that is already fissuring. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

“Don’t Take The Bait”, said 4 young congresswomen yesterday in a press conference in Washington DC. They were referring to comments Donald Trump had made about them earlier. However, just the simple act of calling the press conference meant they were … taking the bait.

Yes, Trump was out of line, way out of left field territory out of line. But he did that on purpose, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, were voluntarily following him into that same left field.

I’ve been saying for over 3 years now that the role of Trump is to expose the -inherent and longtime- failures of the US political system. But when I see things like that press-op, how can I possibly think the system has learned anything at all?

If Trump’s role is to reveal the failures of the system, and that same system turns around and blames Donald Trump for all of those failures, how are we ever supposed to take the next step out of here?

Trump has been especially vicious against the 4 women, and it’s simply not enough to put that down to his racism or anything like that. There’s something else going on; how obvious would you like it?

What is happening here is not Trump pandering or virtue-signalling to his base -that’s just an added feature. The reality is that Trump, in say (re-)election mode, sees a divide within the Democratic party, drives a wedge into that divide, and twists it.

His strong if not vicious attacks on the 4 women are aimed straight at Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, plus all the rest of the centrist Dems. Trump is calling them out. So they will have to either end up supporting AOC and co, or they will not.

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Congress courageously sticks US taxpayers with a $6 trillion liability, by Simon Black

Posted on July 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

It’s an odds on favorite bet that if Congress decides to “fix” the US’s looming pension problem, it will make that problem worse. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

There seems to be an unwritten rule with lawmakers that, every time they create a terrible piece of legislation, they give it the most noble-sounding name.

The USA PATRIOT Act from 2001 was a great example. It sounds great. Who wouldn’t love a law named for Patriots?

And yet that was easily among the most freedom-killing laws ever passed in US history, giving the federal government nearly unlimited authority to wage war and spy on its own people.

There are so many other examples– the USA FREEDOM Act from 2015 (which renewed many of the worst provisions of the PATRIOT Act).

Or the HIRE Act from 2010, which created some of the most heinous tax rules of the last fifty years.

The names of these laws all sounded wonderful. But their effects were absolutely terrible.

The new SECURE Act will likely be no different.

If you haven’t heard of SECURE, it’s a new piece of legislation aimed at ‘fixing’ the US retirement system.

SECURE stands for “Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement”, which is pretty clever when you think about it.

People want to associate their retirement with a word like ‘secure’. So even without knowing anything about the law, most people will probably have good feelings about it based solely on the name.

But if you actually read the legislation, SECURE contains a number of predictably terrible consequences.

For starters, SECURE is a basically a gigantic tax increase. And it’s a tax increase that will particularly affect your children when you pass away.

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Posted in Debt, Financial markets, Government, Investing, Pensions

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What Looms Behind, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on July 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

Are we running out of fuel and technology? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a coherent pre-election debate about the mother-of-all-issues facing this republic, namely, that we can’t afford the living arrangements Americans think of as “normal” anymore. This quandary has stalked us since the millennium turned. It thunders through all the activities of daily life, and the tensions emanating from it are so agonizing and difficult to face that our politics have deflected off into the kind of hysteria spawned by bad dreams.

As the great Wendell Berry pointed out years ago, this is about the nation’s home economics: energy and resources in, production out, surplus wealth saved. America had a brush with reality in 2008 when all the distortions of our home economics came together and whapped the country between the eyes with a two-by-four. Our energy-in was faltering. US oil production had fallen to a new low of under 4 million barrels a day and we were importing around 15 million. We papered over the problem with borrowed money in ever-larger amounts. This dynamic prompted ever riskier work-arounds on Wall Street, especially “innovations” in securitized debt, which invited criminal shenanigans. It blew up badly. Wealth vaporized. Industries collapsed. Homes and jobs were lost. Lives ruined.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Debt, Energy, Financial markets, Government, Politics, Technology

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Conservatives Against Liberty, by Ron Paul

Posted on July 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

Conservatives and liberals both advance statism, but if anything goes wrong, they blame libertarians. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Recently several prominent social and populist conservatives have attacked libertarianism. These conservatives, some of whom are allies in the fight against our hyper-interventionist foreign policy, blame libertarianism for a variety of social and economic ills. The conservative attack on libertarianism — like the attack on the freedom philosophy launched by leftists — is rooted in factual, economic, and philosophical errors.

Libertarianism’s right-wing critics claim libertarianism is the dominant ideology of the Republican establishment. This is an odd claim since the Republican leadership embraces anti-libertarian policies like endless wars, restrictions on civil liberties, government interference in our personal lives, and massive spending increases on welfare as well as warfare.

Anti-libertarian conservatives confuse libertarianism with the authoritarian “neoliberalism” embraced by both major parties. This confusion may be why these conservatives blame libertarians for the American middle class’s eroding standard of living. Conservatives are correct to be concerned about the economic challenges facing the average American, but they are mistaken to place the blame on the free market.

The American people are not suffering from an excess of free markets. They suffer from an excess of taxes, regulations, and, especially, fiat money. Therefore, populist conservatives should join libertarians in seeking to eliminate federal regulations, repeal the 16th Amendment, and restore a free-market monetary system.

Instead of fighting to end the welfare-regulatory system that benefits economic and political elites at the expense of average Americans, populist conservatives are promoting increased economic interventionism. For example, many populist conservatives support increased infrastructure spending and tariffs and other forms of protectionism.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Government, Politics

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A Mid-Course Diagnosis, by Fred Reed

Posted on July 15, 2019 | Leave a comment

In the last analysis, President Trump’s foreign policy has accomplished little, nothing, or has been downright counterproductive. From Fred Reed at theburningplatform.com:

As obsolete tanks rolled in Washington for the Fourth, and fighter planes howled in adrenal provocation, and the truculent classes reveled, besotted by in America’s eternal martial priapism, the alert might have asked: What, exactly, has der carrot-topped Fuhrer actually accomplished?

A look at Trump’s report card:

North Korea: A negligible country of twenty-five million, it made itself into a nuclear power despite Washington’s opposition. Kim Jong Un, who has more balls than a pool table, faced down Trump and his bluster about fire and fury. Trump’s repeated trips to see this micro-dictaor have given Kim importance in the world that he otherwise would not have.

American sanctions, upheld by Trump, have kept the population of the North miserable while having no effect on Kim’s luxurious way of life. They have accomplished nothing else. Kim has his nukes and would be crazy to give them up, which he isn’t. Net results: Zero.

Iran: Trump’s sanctions have accomplished nothing except to keep the Iranian population miserable and without medicines. His customary rants about destruction and obliteration have had no effect. Net results: Zero.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Immigration, Military, Politics

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