Say No to Joe

 

I wrote to a friend of mine months ago that Joe Biden doesn’t exist.  Sure, his body is there, but the Joe Biden we knew is long gone.  If you doubt me, simply go to YouTube and see his debate with Paul Ryan of eight years ago and the contrast will stun you.  Biden hardly campaigned in the last few weeks before the election and when he did, he often spoke incoherently.  His gibberish frequently went viral on social media.

What this means is that you don’t really know who you are voting for.  Is it Kamala?  Is it Obama behind the scenes angling for a third term?  Is it some amorphous group led by The Squad?  The truth is that you don’t know.  Political parties have a duty to be up front with who their candidate really is.  And the reality is that whatever is behind the more moderately sounding Biden is likely a lot more radical, and indeed, AOC is already boasting about pulling Biden to the left.

What should worry you most is the commitment of the Democrats to  completely destroy what is left of the structures that hold America together.  They have announced their goals.  Do away with the Electoral College.  Pack the Supreme Court.  Get rid of the filibuster (even though getting rid of the filibuster for judicial nominations cost them a seat at the table to replace Ginsburg).     Grant statehood to  D.C. and Puerto Rico.  Give 16 year olds the vote.  Flood the country with illegals. 

The new radical Democrats have a tactical advantage.  Conservatives and libertarians are committed to a two party system, even when the liberals stretch the boundaries a bit.   A robust two party system ensures that neither side can go off the deep end.  The new radical Democrats are committed to a one party system.   They admire the CCP.  Thomas Friedman, one of their standard bearers said so explicitly.  The Chinese are able to solve BIG problems, he claimed, because they don’t have to worry about the pesky opposition or  the annoying electorate.  Worse, they have gotten comfortable with political violence.  They refused to condemn the rioting, and Kamala seemed to encourage it.  As recently as last week, Pennsylvania Tom Wolf continued to assert that the looting and rioting in Philly were “peaceful protests” while social media showed the reality of looting, burning cars, and police officers under attack. A victory by Joe Biden, especially if the Senate changed hands would mean that the entire country would be following the California and Illinois model of a one-party system.

Finally, there is the rank corruption.  Despite the media’s attempt to censor Hunter Biden’s dealings with the Chinese and the Ukrainians, the evidence is abundantly clear that the corruption was deep and widespread and that Joe knew about it and likely benefitted from it.   Hillary got away with influence pedaling, washing money through the Clinton Foundation.  Biden should not be able to hold the highest office in the country when his dealings compromise him with our greatest geopolitical adversary.

And if Biden gets elected, all the investigations into the fraudulent Russian conspiracy would die.  These are not yet completed and the American public needs to know the depth of the corruption at the FBI.

I believe that a Biden victory would ensure that the most radical elements of the Democratic party would seize power.   With Antifa/BLM as their enforcement arm, it would be a short hop to becoming Venezuela, and the Venezuelans warned us about it.

I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that if Biden wins, the American Experiment is over.  They will do enough damage to the structures that it will be impossible for Republicans ever to have the White House or Congress again.

Why I Support Trump in Election 2020

 

In less than a week, we will choose a president (although the process has already commenced).   We will choose between a sometimes blunt speaking, sometimes unpresidential showman that engages in puffery and an dementia ridden, addled old man that could hardly campaign in the final weeks and about whom Barack Obama was caught saying, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”

Despite my reservations early on about Donald Trump, the choice is clear.  

I endorse Donald Trump, and I do so for three important reasons:

Challenges conventional wisdom.

Trump’s willingness to question conventional Republican positions was apparent to me from the beginning.   I listened carefully to the debates in the 2016 Republican primary.  He was the ONLY contender that did not invoke the name of Ronald Reagan.  While Reagan was a great president and an important figure for his time, his time has passed and the fruitless search by the Republicans for the next Ronald Reagan has not gotten traction in 25 years.   Trump never mentioned Reagan.

Likewise, Trump challenged conventional wisdom on a variety of fronts--- free trade, open borders, our relationship with our European allies in NATO.   He caused many of us to rethink accepted conservative doctrine.  Yes, sometimes Trump was overbroad. He picked unnecessary fights over European wine.  He made a big deal out of renegotiating NAFTA, which amounted to minor tweaks.  But with China, he correctly saw China as a geopolitical threat and no as a fair trader, but as a trade predator, currency manipulator and intellectual property thief.  Likewise, we had a border that was essentially not being enforced.  While the conventional wisdom said that immigration is good for the country, Donald Trump recognized that this principle is not unqualified.  While there are certainly people that come across the border that contribute to our society, there are also gang members (MS13), human traffickers, terrorists and people that are coming just for the social welfare benefits.   As I mentioned in earlier posts, an immigrant can land in three potential buckets: 1) working and self supporting, 2) social welfare system, and 3) the criminal justice system.   We should only be taking the people that have skills to work and become self sufficient.    Trump has pushed back against “sanctuary cities,” a modern form of Nullification.  The Left couches his position in terms of being anti-immigration, but he is actually a proponent of the nation-state, which cannot exist in the absence of an enforceable border. Trump’s willingness to question conventional wisdom is the #1 reason I support his re-election.

Federalism

For all the howling in the MSM and claims that  Trump is a fascist, in reality Trump is a federalist and respects the federal system, especially when it counts.   The only specific action that he took without legislative action that curtailed any rights was his rather minor executive order regarding “bump stocks.” Otherwise, while he offered federal assistance, he has left action to the states when it came to dealing with COVID19 and the rioting that has taken place.  While certain states stubbornly cling to lockdowns as a solution to COVID19 (which even the W.H.O. recommends against) Trump has taken no action to coerce them into his position.   Indeed, by chipping away at the regulatory state,  bit by bit, Trump is giving away executive power.

Meanwhile, his opponent is still talking about a national mandate to wear masks, the New Green Deal, and ripping away local zoning from local municipalities and nationalizing them https://nypost.com/2020/07/21/joe-bidens-disastrous-plans-for-americas-suburbs/).  Even more destructive are the calls among Democrats to do away with the Electoral College.   Re-electing Trump would help ensure that our Republic, as a republic, continues  for at least a few more years.

Foreign policy

It is in foreign policy that Trump has demonstrated surprising acumen, especially as he brings his ability and willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and the foreign policy establishment.   Despite the cries of the MSM that Trump is impulsive and would plunge us into war (they made the same claims of Ronald Reagan in 1980), Trump has withdrawn U.S. military involvement, especially in the Middle East. 

The wailing and hand wringing of people like Richard Haass and Jim Mattis, peace broke out all over.  Trump brokered a historic peace deal between Kosovo and Serbia.  Led by the UAE, several Arab countries have recognized Israel (much to the chagrin of the Palestinians),  and Saudi Arabia could be next.

Trump has put pressure where pressure is needed.   He responded immediately to the use of chemical weapons by Assad and was unafraid to take out Iran’s Soleiamani, who was responsible for killing U.S. soldiers and wreaking havoc across the Middle East, again despite the howls of the MSM and foreign policy establishment.  His best speeches were, in fact, foreign policy speeches on foreign soil.  His speech in Poland was magnificent and his speech in Saudi Arabia where he laid out a vision for a peaceful revitalized Middle East rivaled Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate. 

But it is with China that Trump has demonstrated a sober and realistic view and toward which a major realignment needs to take place.  He understood that China has no intentions ever of being a fair trader.  China, over the years, gutted our manufacturing base, stole our intellectual property, challenged us militarily and infused our universities with espionage agents (See Charles Lieber at Harvard).  Trump wisely jettisoned the Paris Accord and kicked the TPP to the side, both of which would have advantaged China at our expense.  Our vulnerability was highlighted when we woke up to find that 80% of our pharmaceuticals were manufactured in China, and that regime would have no inhibitions about using that as leverage against us.  The coverup of the Wuhan Virus and takeover of Hong Kong demonstrated that a normal bilateral trading relationship with China is not possible.  Andrew Roberts, author of the recent biography of Winston Churchill likened Trump to Churchill in his ability to correctly spot a threat before the establishment politicians could.  The ability to constructively confront China (which Biden cannot do) is a critical attribute in this election cycle.

Finally, and most importantly, Trump loves America (unlike much of the voting base of his opponent).  His America First posture has been roundly derided by the establishment.  Trump has resisted ceding sovereignty to amorphous and unaccountable bodies.  Every CEO puts his or her company first.  Xi puts China first.  Putin puts Russia first.  Even Macron puts France first.   We should be entitled to a leader that puts America first.

Children of the West

 

Of all the disquieting events that are unfolding,  what  we are doing to our children disturbs me most.

It occurred to me that the biggest difference between the left and right is how we treat and regard our children.   And it says a great deal about how we view the future.  The contrast is unmistakable and stark.  Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac has supplanted Michelle Obama as the nation’s #1 female bellyacher.  Nicks complained that COVID is stealing her “last youthful years” (as if the rest of us plebians are not also affected).   Last week, Nicks asserted that if she had not had an abortion “there would have been no Fleetwood Mac.”   I’m not sure whether that statement is a self-rationalization or an attempt to get support from her adoring fans and justify the snuffing out of the life of her unborn child.  But it’s clear that in her mind, the tradeoff was worth it (although perhaps she could have done both,  but refuses to consider that third option).   Likewise, Michelle Obama asserted that she “gave up her dreams to have children.”  Sorry Malia and Sasha.  You seem like bright, attractive kids.  Too bad mommy carries so much resentment over you.  Contrast this with the position of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who has 7… count ‘em 7 (and had room in her life for two that are not hers, and one of her children has Downs)  to look after and still has managed to have a respectable career.  Living what must be an exhausting life, Barrett called her children “her greatest joy.” 

We are seeing the contrast played out in real time.   And our left leaning society is sending a strong message about children and our future.

In the current COVID crisis, the mortality rate among young people is practically negligible.   Yes, occasionally, you get an outlier in their 20’s that succumbs to this dreadful virus, but the reality is that it is rarely fatal in young people.  Yet, we are inflicting the burden of COVID19 on them in multiple ways.  Despite the low hospitalization and mortality rate among children and teens, we are condemning them to “remote learning.”  Remote learning is fairly ineffective and, among kids with special needs, simply unworkable.   In certain subjects, like math, kids may never catch up.  The social and mental health costs are beginning to pile up on these kids. I can tell you from my own experience that after about a half an hour or so during webinars and Zoom calls, my attention starts to drift.  I can’t imagine what it’s like for a teenage boy.  Yet, in the effort to try to protect the health of older citizens, we are shifting the costs to our children to bear.  I cannot speak for all adults, but I would happily accept a greater risk of sickness and, yes, even death to make sure that our younger generation is prepared for the challenges that are in front of them.  As a society, we have always done this---we bare costs and risks so our children don’t have to.  We sacrifice to pave the way for our children.  But our politicians have chosen otherwise.  

I have also written numerous posts concerning our inability to protect our children against violence.  I wrote an impassioned post following the Birmingham terrorist bombing and our failure to protect young girls against Islamic terror and “grooming” in Europe.  Last fall, I wrote about the heinous murders of four young schoolgirls of different races in separate incidents (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2019/12/bloody-fall.html).   In bloody Chicago, children are being gunned down nearly every weekend.   Yet, we hear little or nothing from Governor Pritzker or Mayor Lightfoot on specific step being taken to curtail this assault on our children by savage gang members.  These politicians are willing to virtually shut down the economy of the entire state for a virus that rarely causes death among young people, are willing to threaten people for violating the “rules” and have weekly press conferences to discuss where we stand, but every weekend the body count on the streets of Chicago piles up among children, and they have grown to accept it as “part and parcel” of urban life just as London mayor Sadiq Khan has accepted Islamic terrorism in his city.

Along with the violence that is perpetrated on children, sexual exploitation and sexualization of children  has become endemic in our society.    It is appearing in a myriad of places and the mainstream media is behind normalizing it.    This is an issue that is also tied to immigration, as human traffickers regularly work to bring children over the border for the sex trade (the Trump administration recently has done a superb job of finding these kids and rescuing them).   As horrible as the scandal in the Catholic Church was, it is hardly the only institution that has protected the pedophiles, not the children.  The Chicago Public School System and the Boy Scouts were fertile ground for the sexual exploitation of young people.  Sex abuse in athletics shocked the world with the Penn State case, the U.S. Gymnastics case and the long and sordid career of Larry Nassar case at Michigan State, where a large part of the school’s administration was involved in the cover up.  We have seen pedophilia surface in our political class with Anthony Weiner,  probably with Senator Menendez and Bill Clinton and now with Hunter Biden.   Our children are not being protected but rather exploited to satisfy the twisted sexual desires of these despicable people.

And now, the leftist media has been hard at work normalizing pedophilia.    “Drag Queen Story Hour” an innocent sounding event infected our libraries across the nation—an event aimed at children 3 to 8 where drag queens read stories to little children and let them crawl on their laps, clearly a thinly veiled grooming practice.  And if you write objecting, as I have, you get a polite response back suggesting you are a bigot.    The dust up at Netflix over the show Cuties, which featured little girls twerking and touching themselves was dismissed as “storytelling” by the president of Netflix.   The New York Times has been periodically running op-eds arguing that pedophilia should not be criminalized but rather is a psychological condition.  And they are attempting to change the language, ridding us of the word “pedophile” and instead substituting the more innocuous sounding “minor attracted persons” as the pedophiles have attempted to latch on to the LGBT movement to garner legitimacy.

Long term, the debt we are heaping on our children is most troublesome.   And we are burying them in debt at every level, ensuring that they will become virtual future slaves to our current voracious appetites to consume.   Our national debt now stands at a staggering $23.2 trillion with no end in sight.  While the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) rationalize this intergenerational robbery, there is no doubt this debt load will eventually have a crushing effect on their futures.  Here in  Illinois, our debt loads are rated near junk status.   The City of Chicago and State of Illinois are now trying to push through whopping tax increases to deal with it.   A young man or woman starting out their careers that wish to buy a modest condo in the city will need to peddle harder and faster so some 55 year old city retiree can be comfortably fishing off a dock in the Florida Keys.  We are robbing them of their ability to save and have some cushion so boomers can enjoy a protected, safe retirement.  

The sanctimonious world of academia (which also had a hand in the sexual exploitation of children) is doing its part to darken the futures of our young people.   Student debt stands at a staggering $1.7 trillion as college costs have outstripped inflation over the past few decades (as universities layered on administrative staff and added degrees guaranteeing no employable skills like gender and ethnic studies).   Condemning our children to near slavery, working substantially for the people that hold the debt instruments of the federal government and their student loan providers, especially as our economy is staggering after COVID19 is morally reprehensible.

Finally, there is abortion.  While the numbers continue to decline (862,000/year), states like Illinois and New York now permit abortion up to birth for any reason.   Safe, legal and rare has turned into virtual infanticide.   It sickened me to see the New York legislature cheer when the measure passed to permit unfettered late term abortion.   At one time, I was among those “uncomfortably pro-choice” (as Megan McArdle put it) people until I saw the dark place they were dragging us to.

We burned cities and kicked off hundreds of corporate and institutional initiatives because one ex-felon and meth user died at the hands of the police.  But we look the other way when it comes to the care and nurturing of our children.  I would gladly cut the EPA budget in half and establish the Child Protection Agency instead.   There must be a sense of urgency about what we are doing to make sure the next generation have a bright future.

Wither Capitalism

 

The Disrupted is a thought provoking film now being streamed at The Siskel Film Center (siskelfilmcenter.org).  The film follows three individuals – a Kansas farmer, a 3M factory worker (and former felon) and an Uber driver (formerly in the mortgage industry) whose lives have been thrown into disarray because of the vicissitudes of our economy.  The film is engaging because all three are sympathetic individuals that have been derailed and put under severe stress through no fault of their own.  All three are trying very hard.  The fifth generation farmer is being crushed by commodity prices and debt.  The Uber driver was tossed aside during the mortgage crisis.   And perhaps the most sympathetic is the 3M worker that suffered through a plant closing after putting his life back together following a prison record—doing all the things you would want him to do—work, stay married, and raise a child.  Each of them is earnestly toiling away at earning a living but has been rolled over by market forces.

The film illustrates a number of r imbalances in the U.S. capitalist system that have caused me to revisit some of the conventional wisdom that has been purveyed by economics departments.  My free trade/free market orientation was influenced by The University of Chicago and Milton Friedman, George Stigler and the like.   While  I still have a strong free market inclinations, I question whether some adjustments are necessary and appropriate.  I believe that much of the social discord and turmoil we are now feeling result from unresolved issues that resulted in the ’08 crash and ensuing Great Recession.  These  issues were glossed over and are now coming back with a vengeance.  Today, I am just going to spin out some of these issues, and in the coming months, I will be having discussions with knowledgeable individuals, and some economists when I can to discuss these issues in some detail.

-The worker.  While a certain amount of churn is necessary, expected and even desired in a free market economy, a great swath of the middle class has been pancaked by the modern economy, and many don’t really recover beyond a mere subsistence level.  The hollowing out of the middle class has been copiously written about.   But it really gained speed during the ’08 crisis when home equity was wiped out at the same time much of Wall Street was protected by the Fed.  With technology accelerating worker churn and displacement, is revisiting worker protections, guaranteed income and protections for health care warranted?

-Big Tech and Trust Busting.  The conventional position is that market will solve it.  Google, Twitter and Facebook now occupy such dominant positions and have no real competitors.  The social media giants are actively engaged in censorship and manipulation.  Twitter recently froze out Richard Grenell and suppressed certain viewpoints on COVID19.   Just as I write this, Facebook and Twitter have frozen accounts that are posting the New York Post story concerning Hunter Biden’s emails that implicate Joe Biden. The laissez-fare position would say that the market will eventually sort it out.  But in the meantime, Big Tech is doing things government cannot and it calls into question whether Big Tech should  be regulated more heavily and/or broken up. 

-Risk/Reward.  Steve Kaplan, professor at The Booth School at The University of Chicago continuously justifies the mega salaries for public company CEO’s.  And he is correct in some respects.  They are like free agent baseball stars. There is a limited supply of people capable of running large corporations.  But the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is at an all time high.  And  when CEO’s run things into the ground and still get humongous severance packages, it raises eyebrows.  After the crashes of the 737 Max, Boeing’s Dennis Mullenberg walked away with a $60 million package even though 346 of his customers didn’t walk away from crashes.   WeWork’s Adam Neumann received a massive buyout (since reneged upon) while the company was laying off thousands when the company’s IPO sputtered.  Kaplan has a point but the unseemly pay packages…especially when a company fails deserve discussion.  They give ammunition to the burgeoning socialist movement.

-Purpose of the firm/Virtue signaling The Milton Friedman view of the primary purpose of a corporation is to increase profits for its shareholders is being re-examined.   I won’t go into much detail here, but there have been some lively discussion and panels on that topic, and as to whether the corporation owes duties to a wider constituency—workers, suppliers, society as a whole. 

-Trade.  Most of us grew up on the notion that free trade enriched us all and was an unalloyed good.  We celebrated the signing of NAFTA.  World trade increased dramatically.  And free traders pointed to the reduction of worldwide abject poverty from 43% in the 1990s to around 10% today.  But China has triggered a second look at free trade.  Does free trade with a global adversary make sense, especially one that steals your intellectual property, manipulates its currency, shows contempt and disregard for behavioral norms, and shows no inhibitions about inflicting harm on you. 

-Immigration.  As with trade, liberal immigration (or lax enforcement) was seen as an unalloyed good.   But if immigrants are unskilled, illiterate, unemployable, they either end up in the social welfare system or the criminal justice system.  Furthermore, unlike immigrants of a couple of generations ago, the children of immigrants today are thrown into a public education system which (1) the taxpayer must pay for, and (2) now teaches them that the United States is an evil, colonial power.  With the demand for unskilled labor expected to decrease in the future, how much immigration do we really need?

This is meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather are some of the areas that warrant some discussion.  With capitalism under attack like never before, it is important, I think, that we open some of these issues up for discussion.

A Letter to My First Professor

 Below is a letter to my very first college professor in response to the  recent Faculty Statement (July 2020) of the English Department at The University of Chicago (https://english.uchicago.edu), in which the English Department announced that it will only accept applicants in its graduate school for the 2020-21 academic year that seek to do work in Black Studies.  

______

Dear Mr. Chandler:

 You probably do not remember me, but you were my  professor in my very first class at The University of Chicago in 1977.  As a graduate of the Chicago Public School system, I was ill prepared for the rigorous education that awaited me.  The first few papers that you returned to me were a sea of red, as you attempted to shape something worthwhile out of a very raw product. 

Some of it did stick and, in addition to you, I was blessed to have Joe Williams, Frank Kinahan and Robert Streeter attempt to finish what you started. 

 Over the past forty years, my career has taken various turns, focused mostly in law and finance.  The faculty at The University of Chicago provided me with a set of valuable writing skills and a deep and enduring love of literature, particularly American literature—Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Cooper.  The  anthologies I read during those years still sit on my bookshelf, although my tattered copy of Strunk & White has been replaced.  I blog weekly and have faithfully kept a journal since my college days.  I feel the deepest gratitude to the faculty members in the English Department at Chicago for enriching this aspect of my life.

 It is because of my respect for the Department, that I was shocked and disheartened by the announcement that the graduate English department would only accept students devoted to Black Studies in the 2020-21 academic year.  It saddens me that The University of Chicago would exclude any students that seek a degree to study anything outside the work of Black authors.  I would agree that Black Literature deserves attention as a subfield and as the Faculty Statement noted, the City of Chicago especially has a rich tradition of Black authors that produced works of literary merit.  Nevertheless, the Faculty Statement is diametrically opposed to everything the University purports to stand for. 

 As an initial matter, the statement does not say whether there was unanimity in its adoption.  It uses the word “collective” seven times in a short six paragraph essay—a word that is a clue as to the thinly-veiled Marxism now embedded within the Department.  Most astonishingly, the Faculty Statement condemns its own entire discipline of  for all of the inequities that have been visited upon Black and Indigenous people—an odd assertion that is at once self-indulgent and  self-flagellating.  Who would even want to work in a department that had such a vital role in those heinous things?  If that were true, shutting the Department down would seem to be a more appropriate remedy.  Without any support whatsoever, the statement condemns not only the English discipline, but the entire University as “a site of exclusion and violence for others.”   What violence is the author or authors speaking of, exactly?  Most incredibly, the Department excludes students interested in anything other than pursuing a degree in  Black Studies, purportedly to “build a more inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality and power.”  In its quest to have a more inclusive department, the English Department excludes students that are interested in much of the  Western canon.  It would be hard to get more Orwellian.

 As pernicious as its aims, the Faculty Statement’s writing wouldn’t pass muster in your freshman humanities class.   I have distinct memories of your fair and accurate comments that much of my initial writing was unacceptable because it was “full of jargon and cliches.”  Yet, the Department website published this paragraph:

 English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why.   And while inroads have been made in terms of acknowledging the centrality of both individual literary works and collective histories of racialized and colonized people, there is still much to do as a discipline and as a department to build a more inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality, and power.

 I am  confident that if I would have submitted a writing like the above as a student in your class, you would have rightfully skewered me.  The real “collective” is the collective groans being emitted by the spirits of Joe Williams and Frank Kinahan after reading this mishmash.

 This severe restriction by the English Department of the subject matter of graduate studies and the writing used to justify its action are alarming.   I mourn the collapse of liberal education generally and, specifically, the wholesale adoption of Critical Race Theory by a once great department.   The Faculty Statement leads me to conclude that Marxist ideology now has it in its clutches—a department that feels compelled to reject Western Civilization and to hold its own discipline responsible for the historical sins and excesses of colonialism.  The University should consider changing its motto from Crescat Scientia; Vita Excolatur (Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched)   to  Nos enim sumus sicut et ceteri (We are the same as everyone else).

 Out with the beauty of Coleridge, Dickens and Shakespeare.  In with the questionable wisdom and insights of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

 

Regretfully,