Essential Marxist Reading for Liberals and Conservatives

A review and overview of The Cult of Smart, by Fredrik deBoer, All Points Books, 276 pages.

Fredrik deBoer is the author of The Cult of Smart, a book that unwittingly explains the sharp left turn of the Democrat Party and a growing number of young Americans. It also shows why the widening chasm between the far left and liberals and conservatives will never be bridged.

For those reasons alone, it’s a very important book and should be read by traditional Democrats and Republicans, although a root canal would be less painful. If the book had been published when I was younger, I could’ve learned about Marxist thinking without having to labor through Das Kapital.

At the leading edge of the millennial generation, Mr. deBoer is an avowed Marxist, a professor with a PhD from Purdue, a former high school substitute teacher, a contributor to the New York Times and other mainstream liberal publications, a descendant of “red diaper babies” (his words), and an admirer of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels. Also, like so many ideologues in history, he is the product of an apparent unhappy childhood, stemming from his mother dying when he was a child and his father dying when he was fifteen, after a life of alcoholism and depression.

The author lambastes both liberals and conservatives for believing in meritocracy and in the power of education to significantly reduce inequality. Liberals will no doubt applaud his rebuke of conservative values, and conservatives will applaud his rebuke of liberal values; but they should be aware that he wants to put a ticking time bomb of social revolution under the backsides of both of them.

Mr. deBoer goes so far as to write:

That education is the great economic leveler stands as one of the ubiquitous nostrums in contemporary politics. Barack Obama, the pope of modern American progressivism, repeated the trope endlessly, insisting that the American dream could only be secured through an invigorated education sector.

. . . we should reject the idea of education as an anti-poverty tool for being wrong on its face. Because education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former. Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in college.

A major premise of The Cult of Smart is that intelligence is hereditary and inherited to the same degree across all races. Genes help to explain why some people excel in school and in abstract thinking and some people don’t. Of course, such factors as parental influence and socioeconomic class come into play in how someone does in life, but, according to deBoer, inherited intelligence accounts for about half of success, especially in this era of knowledge work, where those with lower IQ are being left behind in increasing numbers.

The author understands the danger of the premise being misunderstood and how it can lead to racism and had led to the eugenics movement of the first half of the twentieth century, a movement that he admits was led by progressives. He makes clear that inherited intelligence, or a lack thereof, does not vary by race.

According to deBoer, it follows from the premise that additional spending on education is mostly a waste of money, because more money cannot overcome a lack of inherited intelligence, and because more money is not needed for gifted students with inherited high intelligence who are going to succeed regardless of spending levels. This goes against the liberal belief in more education spending and the conservative belief that everyone can succeed through hard work, no matter their personal circumstance.

Taken to an extreme, the idea of inherited intelligence can also go against the foundations of Western moral philosophy, namely Judeo-Christian beliefs about right and wrong, sinning and redemption, and crime and punishment. The idea calls into question how much free will and agency humans really have when all of the factors of nature and nurture are considered. This is not a new philosophical question, but it is complicated by new science, especially cherry-picked science.

It’s undeniable that humans don’t reach adulthood with a blank slate. On the nurture side, behavioral choices and learning are strongly influenced by the circumstances of childhood—by parenting, neighborhood mores, environmental factors, and socioeconomic class. On the nature side, as science is revealing but has a long way to go, behavior and learning are influenced by hormones, other bodily chemicals, and the condition of the parts of the brain that control impulses.

Take a kid who has two Nobel Prize-winning parents, who have an innate ability to concentrate and control impulses, and who lives in a house full of books in a neighborhood of college graduates. Certainly, that kid has a wider range of good choices than a kid who has a single parent on drugs, who has an innate difficulty in concentrating and controlling impulses, and who lives in a household with no books but a lot of TV, in a neighborhood of drug dealers and crime.

To that point, some behavior is so self-defeating that it’s hard to imagine that it’s the result of rationality and thoughtful consideration of the consequences.

This commentary isn’t the place to debate such deep questions of moral philosophy, but a debate is needed elsewhere in order to develop a counterargument to Marxists like deBoer, one that is geared to the way that young people obtain and process information.

To continue with the book:

Mr. deBoer is merciless in his criticism of liberals who feign concern for the poor and social justice but engage in selective breeding and do whatever they can to get their kids into the best k-12 schools and into elite universities, so that their ticket is punched for the rest of their life—and, as deBoer’s Marxist thinking goes, at the expense of the less fortunate. He questions whether the education is any better at elite schools and posits that the schools are key members of the “Cult of the Smart,” where credentialing takes precedence over other considerations and leads to self-reinforcing and self-replicating elitism.

Naturally, being an academic, he buys into the progressive zeitgeist about white privilege, about the goodness of wokeness, and about America being racist, sexist, and classist. At the same time, he lambastes his “fellow leftists” (as he calls them) for their phony virtue-signaling. He writes that if they were “simply a new kind of nouveau riche with culturally liberal politics, they would probably be harmless, if somewhat obnoxious. But there’s a far larger problem: simply by living upper-middle-class lives, these woke go-getters perpetuate inequality.”

To those who have attended elite colleges, he says:

Privilege theory, intersectionality, cultural studies—each has value and important insights to impart, but more important for your lived experience is their signaling value. Peppering your speech with abstruse academic vocabulary these fields have developed demonstrates to your social peers that you believe in the right things, that you are politically enlightened, that you are woke. And to be woke has come, in the past decade, to confer considerable professional benefits.

He goes on to cite the inconvenient truth that locales with a high number of such people have the most income inequality.

Continuing the skewering, he says that “it’s essential to bear this thought in mind: many of those who are ostensibly part of a political movement to change our society are the ones who most benefit from the status quo and who hold back others simply through living the lives they do.” Then he administers the coup de grace: “I am persistently pessimistic when it comes to progressive social change.”

He also dislikes the wealthy, as evidenced by this bloodcurdling statement: “Certainly, if I had the power, I’d ensure that the very wealthy didn’t exist.”

As with Marxists of yesteryear, deBoer has antipathy for the upper middle class, or what the Bolsheviks characterized as the petite bourgeoisie. I would add that many of today’s leftists in academe, politics and the media extend that antipathy downward to the middle class, especially the members of the middle class who have “white” values about work and marriage. However, as with deBoer, they’re largely silent about Asians having the same white values and being at the top in income in America, with a median household income of $94,903, versus $74,912 for non-Hispanic whites.

Likewise, deBoer says nothing about the realities of Marxism and one-party authoritarian government in general. Left unmentioned are the purges, gulags, mass starvations, privileges for top party cadres and their families, and, as can be seen in China today, discrimination against minorities, women, and what the party has called “sissy boys.”

Mr. deBoer even buys into the old Marxist trope that a worker paradise could be built upon the existing industrial foundation of capitalism, leading to a second phase of communism in which workers would be self-actualized and not have to toil in jobs they didn’t like. The second phase has never been realized, however. Drudgery, bad management, immovable bureaucracy, and an out-of-touch hierarchy are just as alienating, if not more so, under communism than under capitalism.

To his credit, deBoer is honest about pre-kindergarten and after-school programs being ineffectual in the long run in improving academic results. Yet he supports these programs for reasons of social welfare and because they can be a stepping stone to the kind of society he envisions.

Surprisingly, he has an objection to a universal basic income. To wit: “It has the same problem that liberal social programs almost always do: it does nothing to strengthen the hand of the poor and working-class relative to the rich, to the bosses, and to political leaders.”

Not surprisingly, he supports nationalized medical care and free college. But the latter seems to contradict his belief that college doesn’t benefit those without the intelligence to succeed in college.

He also disdains charter schools, repeats the popular canard that public school teachers are underpaid for their abilities and hard work, and claims that teachers are unfairly blamed for not being able to improve the test results of students who don’t have the intelligence to do well. He says nothing about how Norway dramatically improved its test results by making a degree in education one of the toughest degrees to obtain and raising the pay of those teachers who met the higher standards.

Speaking of standards, deBoer wants to eliminate one-size-fits-all state testing standards and curricula for public schools, a point that I agree with in concept as long as it results in furthering the education of the less gifted students who need a curriculum tailored to their intellectual capacity, and as long as it doesn’t crimp the education of the more gifted students. Easier said than done, however, given the difficulties in determining a student’s IQ and potential, as well as the political challenge of telling parents that their child doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in college.

All of the foregoing is but a prelude to what deBoer really believes and wants. He really believes that equal opportunity will never be achieved, even if all differences in individual circumstances were to be eliminated. As such, what he really wants is for the existing political and economic order to be replaced with the Marxist idea of “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need,” so that equal outcomes are achieved. He doesn’t say how that would be achieved and who would decide, but he no doubt sees ideologues like himself in charge.

Make no mistake: I, too, want to eliminate poverty and think that it’s unacceptable for a rich country like the U.S. to have widespread urban slums and rural poverty; to have high crime, broken families, and drug addiction in those places; and to have large numbers of homeless people living and dying on city streets like animals. This is particularly unacceptable in light of the trillions of dollars we have spent on foreign wars.

On the other hand, the last thing I want is for people of deBoer’s ideology to be in charge. Unfortunately, that’s what a growing number of Americans seem to want, especially younger Americans taught by the likes of deBoer.

Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Socialist Dream Is Tax-and-Spend Nightmare

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans a vote soon to push Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $3.5 trillion socialist dream budget one step closer to law

The news gets worse from there. Every other detail about this onerous legislation merits scorn, revulsion, and rejection.

The so-called Build Back Better budget resolution boasts a $3.5 trillion price tag. Taxpayers should be so lucky.

That figure assumes that several key initiatives, including the child tax credit, will expire in three to five years. Since government programs are virtually immortal, this is not wishful thinking. It’s pure fantasy.

Reasonably assuming that these programs grind on for 10 years swells the budget’s true price to $5.5 trillion. Add the Senate’s $1 trillion “infrastructure” bill, which most House Democrats hope to append, and Sanders’ budget hits $6.5 trillion.

Next, blend in $400 billion for interest payments on the exploding national debt. That pushes the “$3.5 trillion” package’s real cost to $6.9 trillion—nearly double its advertised price.

“Bernie’s budget is all about inserting the federal government into the daily lives of all Americans and spending as much money as possible while doing so,” warned Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

Democrats plan to underwrite this bachelor-party-like extravaganza by borrowing from the Chinese Communist Party and by hiking levies on America’s beleaguered taxpayers. Sanders’ budget constitutes the biggest tax increase since 1968—before man walked on the moon.

The Club for Growth Foundation counts $3.6 trillion in new taxes in this measure. Among them:

  • Higher revenues from growing the size and reach of the IRS: $266 billion.
  • A boost in long-term, combined capital gains taxes from 29% to 48.4%: $322 billion. (If the bill is enacted, investors seeking lower capital-gains taxes could find them in communist China.)
  • New IRS spying and subsequent taxes on transactions in bank accounts with balances of $600 or more: $463 billion.
  • A new global minimum tax on U.S. companies operating overseas: $534 billion.
  • A more-than-25% hike in the corporate tax, from 21% to 26.5%: $858 billion.

Add state levies on such enterprises, and U.S. companies would strain beneath the developed world’s highest tax burden. That’s dreadful for American businesses, jobs, and growth, and a boon to this country’s economic rivals.

Beyond spending and taxes, the Sanders budget would bludgeon the Land of the Free into a socialist “workers’ paradise.”

Among its far left social-engineering schemes:

  • An annual methane-emissions tax would cost dairy farmers an extra $6,504 per cow.
  • Tax credits for university “environmental justice programs”: $1 billion.
  • A $1,500 tax credit on electric bicycles that cost up to $8,000: $7.4 billion.
  • A $1,200 tax credit for “green” doors, windows, and skylights: $15 billion.
  • Individuals with incomes up to $200,000 could collect $82,000 in federal housing down-payment subsidies.
  • “Free” college: $50 billion
  • “The Democrat bill also shovels $3.5 billion of your money so D.C. bureaucrats can create something called the ‘Civilian Climate Corps’—a make-work program for young climate activists,” Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist said. “Perhaps they’ll knock on your door with a clipboard and tell you to put on a sweater instead of heating your home adequately.”

These taxpayer-funded eco-busybodies also would be unionized. And, of course, their union dutifully would kick back a chunk of their members’ mandatory dues into the Democratic Party’s campaign coffers.

“In the face of mounting inflation and economic instability, a rational Congress would enact pro-growth tax and spending reforms that pave the way to a smoother recovery,” Andrew Moylan, the National Taxpayers Union’s executive director said, adding, “Instead, current leaders are marching full speed ahead with the most sweeping expansion in the size and scope of government in decades. It’s like throwing a drowning child an anvil instead of a life preserver.”

*****

This article was published September 26, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

4 Ways to Understand Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill

House Democrats have unveiled pieces of the $3.5 trillion spending bill over the past several weeks.

Most legislation focuses on specific issues, which makes it possible to have constructive debate. However, this bill covers welfare, immigration, taxes, energy, families, and much more, making it extremely difficult to comprehend.

Providing context on this tax-and-spend bill’s size and cost helps bring into focus just how radical it is, and why some Democrats are now pushing back against it.

1. $27,000 Cost Per Household
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 data shows that there are 128.5 million households in the United States. If we divide the cost of the $3.5 trillion package across each household, the numbers are substantial in relation to a typical family budget.

This legislation would cost over $27,000 for every household in America. That’s more than the cost of a brand new Toyota RAV4 sport utility vehicle, or five years of groceries for a typical family, or 13 years of clothing purchases and tailoring for an average household.

The left tries to deflect from the exorbitant cost by pointing to tax increases focused on high-income households and businesses. Yet that fundamentally misunderstands how the economy works.

When the government increases taxes on investment, there is less incentive to start or expand a business, which is the source of the job creation and wage growth that all workers depend on.

In addition, the tax hikes in the massive spending bill would place American businesses at a severe disadvantage with our global competitors. Over time, high taxes mean lower wages, higher prices, and weak returns for individual retirement accounts.

In contrast, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (which would be gutted by the tax hikes) helped drive strong wage growth and low unemployment before the pandemic.

While we don’t yet know exactly how much the new legislation would add to the national debt, it would likely be somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. That burden would be layered on top of $28.4 trillion in existing debt, which amounts to $219,000 for every household in the country.

Adding recklessly to the debt would increase risks to the health of the economy and add to the immoral and unsustainable burden being handed down to future generations.

2. A 111-Year Spending Spree
Stores will occasionally have a contest where the winner gets to buy as much as he or she can over the course of a few minutes. Even under those circumstances, in most stores it would be impossible to grab $1,000 of goods per second.

The $3.5 trillion spending bill equates to spending $1,000 per second for 111 years straight.

Yet the spending would be crammed into just a decade, meaning that the legislation would enable a spending spree of over $11,000 per second for those 10 years.

What would Congress buy with all that money? An army of taxpayer-funded climate activists, new welfare programs that would disincentive work, corporate welfare for politically favored sectors like journalism and “green” energy, and an increased risk of 1970s-style inflation.

That’s not a good deal for the American public.

3. Far More Expensive Than Major Programs
The $3.5 trillion spending bill is enormous even when compared to other major pieces of legislation and long-term federal programs.

The inflation-adjusted cost of the interstate highway system through its completion in 1992 was $543 billion. The cost of veterans’ benefits from 1962 through 2020 was $2.9 trillion.

Amazingly, both decades-long federal efforts cost less than the $3.5 trillion spending bill.

A more recent example: The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which was the key federal response to the COVID-19 outbreak, cost $1.9 trillion.

The initial 10-year cost of Obamacare was $1.1 trillion in today’s dollars. The cost of those two enormous bills falls well short of the current package.

4. Over 2,400 Pages of Jargon, Legalese

Although final legislative text is still in flux, what has been released by House committees weighs in at over 2,400 pages—and there will likely be some additions before it’s said and done.

Moderate Democrats have made a modest request: that they have at least 72 hours to review the bill before a vote on the House floor. Yet that would be nowhere near enough time to ensure that the final product doesn’t include big mistakes or hidden handouts.

Reading legislative text isn’t like reading a novel. Rather, legislation is a dense soup of legalese and references to existing federal laws that takes serious time to consider.

At a pace of five minutes per page, someone would need 202 hours straight—not 72 hours—to properly read such a mammoth piece of legislation.

This legislation is simply too long, too expensive, and would do too much damage to the economy to properly justify it.

Rather than rushing to centralize power and control in Washington, D.C., through a series of tax hikes and new entitlement programs, Congress should take a different approach: restraining spending, maintaining a pro-growth tax code, and reforming existing benefit programs to make them financially sustainable.

This would pave the way for a post-pandemic economic boom that would benefit all Americans.

*****

This article was published on September 23, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Eliminating Crude Oil Is Like Jumping Out Of A Plane Without A Chute

The world and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are proposing banishment of fossil fuels and are focused on reducing emissions from fossil fuels at any costs, but a safety net of having a viable replacement should be in place before we jump off that cliff.

Banning oil imports, fracking, and ceasing oil production to focus on the symbolic renewable energy as the fossil fuels replacement is fooling ourselves as that “clean energy” is only electricity generated from breezes and sunshine.

Before the healthy and wealthy countries abandon all crude oil fracking and exploration that will eliminate the supply chain to refineries and put an end to that manufacturing sector, we should have a safety net to live without the crude oil fuels and derivatives that are manufactured from that energy source. Without any clones to access everything we get from crude oil; the termination of its use could be the greatest threat to civilization.

The more than 6,000 products including asphalt roofing, asphalt roads, fertilizers, and all the products in hospitals that come from the derivatives manufactured from crude oil are more important than the various fuels to the world to operate planes, trucks, militaries, construction equipment, merchant ships, cruise ships, and automobiles.

Electricity alone can recharge your iPhones and EV batteries, but wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture the derivatives that are needed to make the parts of those iPhones and Tesla’s and the components in solar panels, wind turbines, and automobiles.

Reliance on intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine is unfathomable as electricity by itself is unable to support the prolific growth rates of the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, trucking infrastructures, and the medical industry that is already about 90 percent dependent for the products from petroleum, to meet the demands of the exploding world population.

Only healthy and wealthy countries like the USA, Germany, Australia, and the UK can subsidize electricity generation from breezes and sunshine, and then, its only intermittent electricity at best. The 80 percent of the 8 billion on earth living on less than $10 a day cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag.

Those poorer countries must rely on affordable and abundant coal for reliable electricity, while residents in the healthy and wealthier countries pay dearly for those subsidies with some of the highest costs for electricity in the world.

Before the healthier and wealthier countries cease all oil production, they need to focus on an answer to what safety parachute exists to replace what we get from crude oil.

  • Before the 1900’s we had NONE of the 6,000 products from oil and petroleum products. By ceasing oil production and fracking, the supply chain to refineries will be severed and there will no need for those manufacturing refineries.
  • Without refineries we would be terminating the manufacturing of the derivatives that make the thousands of products used in our daily lives and terminating the manufacturing of the various fuels for transportation infrastructures and the military.
  • Without crude oil, the world would be in desperate need for “clones” to those oil derivatives that provide the thousands of products from petroleum that are essential to our medical industry, electronics, communications, transportation infrastructure, our electricity generation, our cooling, heating, manufacturing, and agriculture—indeed, virtually every aspect of our daily lives and lifestyles.
  • The world has had more than 100 years to develop clones or generics to replace the crude oil derivatives. Without replacements for those derivatives manufactured from crude oil, there will be gigantic reductions in living standards of the population in the so-called industrial countries, and any attempt to develop the colonial countries would come to a dead stop.
  • The “green” preachers have yet to promote the need for clones to the oil derivatives that are the basis of billionaire’s lifestyles and worldwide economies.
  • Wind turbines and solar panels are not only incapable of manufacturing any such derivatives, but the manufacturing of the components for wind and solar are themselves 100 percent dependent on the derivatives made from crude oil, the same crude oil that the world wants to eliminate from our economies.

Energy is more than electricity from breezes and sunshine. Electricity by itself cannot provide the thousands of products from petroleum that are essential to our medical industry, transportation infrastructure, our electricity generation, our cooling, heating, manufacturing, and agriculture—indeed, virtually every aspect of our daily lives and lifestyles. Nor can electricity alone, support the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures.

The greatest threat to civilization would be from the elimination of crude oil as that commodity is manufactured into the oil derivatives and transportation fuels that can bring the poor out of poverty and are the reasons, we have healthy and wealthy developed countries. Going cold turkey to electricity from breezes and sunshine is not the wisest move without a safety net to rely upon that can support worldwide lifestyles and economies as we now know it.

*****

This article was published on September 22, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

American Investors Are At Risk If Congress Continues To Give Fraudulent Chinese Companies A Pass

Beijing’s refusal to comply with U.S. law while continuing to access our capital markets has subjected U.S. investors to the risk of enormous financial losses.

Concern this week about the possible collapse of China’s Evergrande, which has a massive debt burden of $305 billion, highlights one more reason Congress needs to act to protect U.S. investors from Chinese companies.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandates the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inspect audit paperwork of all companies that issue securities in the U.S. The goal is to “protect investors and further the public interest in the preparation of informative, accurate, and independent audit reports.” More than 50 foreign jurisdictions comply with this U.S. law. But in the name of national security concerns, the Chinese government has prevented both domestic and foreign auditors of Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges from submitting audit reports to PCAOB and the SEC for inspection.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler issued a warning to Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges recently: comply with our audit rules or be delisted. But Gensler’s threat came with a caveat: Chinese companies will have a three-year grace period before they may have to face any consequences. Given all the known risks of investing in Chinese companies, Kyle Bass, Hayman Capital founder and a vocal critic of China, said the SEC’s delayed enforcement would allow Chinese companies to have an “open season on U.S. investors” for three more years.

For decades, Chinese companies have successfully tapped into the U.S. capital market and U.S. investors have helped fund China’s astonishing economic growth. As of May 2021, there are 248 Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, with a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion.

Past Fraud at Chinese Companies Listed on U.S. Stock Exchanges 

U.S. regulators have good reasons to be concerned about investors’ risk exposure because corporate fraud in China is a well-known epidemic. In 2018, auditors in China declined to endorse 219 annual reports prepared by Chinese companies because the auditors either found problems with these companies’ financial statements or had expressed concern about the companies’ likelihood of survival.

Last year, Luckin Coffee, a Chinese startup that went public on NASDAQ in May 2019, disclosed that several of its employees, including its chief operating officer, had fabricated the majority of the company’s 2019 sales. Two months later, NASDAQ delisted Luckin stock. At the time, Luckin’s share price was only $1.48, a stunning 97 percent decline from its all-time high of $51 per share less than a year ago. Investors of Luckin stock suffered massive losses.

Shortly after Luckin’s financial fraud was exposed, another U.S.-listed Chinese company, TAL Education Group, one of the largest education providers in China that offer K-12 after-school tutoring services, revealed that one of its employees had inflated the company’s sales by “forging contracts and other documentation.” The share price of TAL dropped 23 percent in one day. The accounting scandals of Luckin and TAL renewed the concern that Beijing’s refusal to comply with the U.S. law while continuing to access U.S. capital markets has subjected U.S. investors to significant investment risk.

A succession of U.S. administrations has engaged many rounds of diplomatic negotiations with Beijing, hoping that China would comply with U.S. law and let PCAOB and SEC inspect audit reports for Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges. Beijing never budged. In 2012, a frustrated SEC filed administrative proceedings against five Chinese accounting firms (all of them global firms’ Chinese subsidiaries), for failing to hand over audit records of the Chinese companies under SEC investigation. The five firms claimed that if they followed SEC’s order, they would violate Chinese laws.

Even if PCAOB or SEC were granted access to Chinese companies’ auditors, another ongoing concern is that some of China’s homegrown accounting and auditing firms are just as unreliable as their corporate clients. Rather than acting as gatekeepers, these firms have turned a blind eye to their clients’ fabricated financial statements to maintain lucrative business relationships. For example, Chinese regulators launched investigations of China’s accounting firms Ruihua and GP in 2019. The regulator found that one of GP’s corporate clients inflated its cash holding by $4 billion, and one of Ruihua’s corporate clients overstated its profit for four years by $1.7 billion.

Shell Companies Are Another Risk

Widespread corporate fraud of Chinese companies and lax oversight from Chinese auditors are only some of the many known problems investors and U.S. regulators have to deal with. Another significant problem is Chinese companies’ circuitous corporate structure.

Since Beijing bars foreigners from taking ownership in what it deems strategic sectors of the Chinese economy, many large Chinese companies created offshore holding companies or variable-interest entities (VIEs) to raise capital outside of China. Since these VIE shares do not represent ownership, they offer foreign investors minimal legal rights or protections. According to Paul Gillis, an economics professor at Peking University, in the event of any dispute between foreign investors and VIEs, foreign investors “risk finding themselves owning shares in a shell company with no assets and no business if the contracts fall apart.”

Chinese Communist Party Influence on Chinese Companies

While foreign investors do not have ownership of Chinese companies they invested in, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has vast influence over Chinese companies and their management. For example, between 2016 and 2017, more than 30 Hong Kong-traded Chinese companies required their boards to consult Communist Party committees before making major business decisions.

Yet, Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges have yet to disclose either the CCP’s ownership stake or its power to influence their business operations. Without such disclosure, foreign investors in these Chinese companies are in the dark regarding the magnitude of risks they are exposed to.

Congress Must Authorize the SEC to Act Now

U.S. lawmakers sought to protect U.S. investors and address China’s decades-long refusal to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by passing the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA) in 2020. President Trump signed it into law. HFCAA stipulates auditors of foreign public companies must allow PCAOB to inspect their audit reports of non-U.S. operations, and if “a company’s auditors fail to comply for three consecutive years, then the company’s shares would be prohibited from trading in the United States.”

The lawmakers clearly aimed at China when they drafted HFCAA, but a three-year grace period is too long to address problems we have known of for decades. While the SEC is still drafting new rules to implement HFCAA, new challenges from China have emerged.

Less than two months ago, foreign investors who have funded China’s economic growth by investing in Chinese companies had suffered their most significant loss since the 2008 financial crisis. The CCP launched a crackdown on China’s largest technology firms, private education businesses, video game makers, and food-delivery companies. Bloomberg estimates that the Chinese government’s action has wiped out $1.5 trillion in value of these companies. Even investors who do not own these stocks directly suffer losses because many mutual funds hold these Chinese stocks in their investment portfolios.

There are indications the CCP hasn’t finished its crackdown yet, as its leader Xi Jinping is determined to reshape China’s economy by will and consolidate power and control in his own hands. Xi announced in early September that China would launch a new stock exchange in Beijing to help small to medium-sized companies raise capital. China already has three stock exchanges: Shanghai, Shenzen, and Hong Kong. The establishment of the Beijing stock exchange is the latest indication that China intends to develop its own capital market further and reduce Chinese businesses’ reliance on foreign capital markets. The SEC would have very little leverage left if it waited three years to delist Chinese companies that don’t comply with U.S. law. By 2024, China’s capital market will be mature enough that these Chinese companies probably will be more than happy to take their businesses back to China and re-list on Chinese stock exchanges.

The U.S. Senate passed the Accelerating Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act this summer, which, if enacted, would reduce the three-year grace period to two. But even two years in the investment world is still a long time. American investors continue to face the risk of enormous financial losses as Beijing stonewalls U.S. laws. To truly protect American investors, the U.S. Congress needs to authorize the SEC to take action now, not two or three years from now.

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This article was published on September 22, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Arizona Audit Flags Thousands Of Suspect Ballots, Kicking Issue To State’s Attorney General

As Attorney General Mark Brnovich vows full probe, Democrats cheer findings while a key Trump lawyer calls for decertifying Arizona’s election results.

 

Editors’ Note: The release of the audit information to the Arizona State Senate and the public is a mixed bag.  Democrats have seized upon one part of the presentation, and that is that the hand count performed by the auditors did not differ markedly from the announced  election count. Hence, Biden won and the whole process was useless.  See, we told you so.

While that is true, few expected the results to reverse the election, if even such a thing is possible.

What the audit did find are numerous errors. To keep your head clear on this you must distinguish between the counting of votes and the issue of what votes are being counted. A forensic audit is not just a recount. It is additionally an examination of the votes being counted. For example, if you count 10 votes of dead voters twice, and come up with the same number, that does not mean the election was fine. You should not be counting dead voters in the first place. A correct tabulation of illegal votes is not an honest election.

Trump supporters have seized on that part of the presentation that indicates errors were sufficient in number that are likely five or six times the number of votes that gave Mr. Biden his margin of victory in Maricopa County alone.

Finally, it is clear the forensic audit process could not be fully analyzed and completed because the Maricopa Board of Supervisors did not cooperate nor did Dominion, the firm that sold the counting machines. Now it is in the hands of the Arizona Attorney General.

Below is what we feel is an objective article that appeared in Just The News.

 

Long-awaited and engulfed in controversy from start to finish, the Arizona Senate’s election audit gave America a split decision while leaving the question of whether illicit ballots were improperly cast or counted to the state’s attorney general.

The audit released Friday afternoon through painstakingly technical testimony concluded the final count of votes in the state’s largest county of Maricopa showing President Joe Biden won Arizona was accurate, but it also included tens of thousands of ballots that were suspect and require more investigation.

The more than 50,000 ballots flagged by auditors for more investigation involved concerns ranging from people voting from addresses from which they had already moved to residents voting twice. The total in question was nearly five times the 10,400 vote margin that separated the two presidential candidates, giving Donald Trump’s troops fresh reason to call for more scrutiny.

The job of resolving the question now falls to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican who has ambitions of winning a U.S. Senate seat in 2022.

Brnovich immediately seized the opportunity, announcing his office’s election integrity unit would review the questionable ballots to determine if further action was warranted.

“I will take all necessary actions that are supported by the evidence and where I have legal authority,” Brnovich tweeted a short while before the final official audit results were to be released. “Arizonans deserve to have their votes accurately counted and protected.”

Across the country, Republican efforts to audit results in states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania got a glimpse of what may be in store politically as well as a roadmap for what issues to review. Democrats and their media allies declared the election integrity issues to be over, while some prominent Republicans called on Arizona to decertify its results.

“There were significant and widespread irregularities and lawlessness in thousands of ballots, sufficient to overcome the margin of difference between Trump and Biden,” said Jenna Ellis, a key lawyer for Trump and chairwoman of the Election Integrity Alliance, which is aiding states in reviewing election issues.

“The 2020 election was irredeemably compromised, and Arizona’s legislature must do now what they failed to do in November — use their plenary authority under the U.S. Constitution and reclaim their delegates by decertifying the results, acknowledging that the certifications were based on incorrect accounting,” Ellis told Just the News. “We are in a constitutional crisis that demands accountability for the American People and election justice.”

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Continue reading this article at Just the News.

 

From Diseases to Recessions, Government Failure Is Endemic

Massive government intervention in the aftermath of the global financial crisis has not prevented the Great Recession, but had actually deepened and prolonged it until the covid-19 pandemic and government lockdowns sent the economy into a tailspin in 2020. Larger monetary and fiscal growth stimuli followed, exacerbating previous economic distortions. In the same way that countercyclical macroeconomic policies have turned the financial crisis into depression, the authorities’ health response has been good at crippling markets but never seems to deliver what is promised.

A Counterintuitive and Risky Health Response

Early on, governments embraced an overambitious paradigm of reaching herd immunity via hard lockdowns and vaccination. The famous “flatten the curve” slogan promoting lockdowns as the only solution to avoid a collapse of the health infrastructure quickly morphed into “lockdown until vaccine.” Convincing arguments that hard lockdowns are not producing better health results, but unduly restrict civil liberties, create economic havoc, and cause severe social and health long-term problems were largely ignored. Most governments in the West kept the lockdowns into place until late spring 2021, when the mass vaccination campaign was well underway.

Vaccination has been the main pillar of the government’s health response while doctors were discouraged from experimenting and using early treatments. When confronted with a problem, most rational individuals are looking for a quick, simple, and cost-effective solution. But not the Western health bureaucracies. Inexpensive early treatments pioneered with promising results were dismissed and outright prohibited.

The only early treatment promoted by Anthony Fauci and endorsed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was Remdesivir, a drug with unproven efficiency and likely side effects. The drug is also very expensive at about $3,500 per treatment. This raises serious questions about unorthodox financial interests and the role of Big Pharma in steering the government health response.

The almost exclusive reliance on vaccination in the middle of the pandemic seemed over-optimistic and risky to many experts from the very beginning. It takes many years to develop an efficient vaccine for a virus that may suffer rapid mutations, and lengthy testing is also necessary to ensure vaccine safety, in particular for an epidemic with a low mortality rate. Such concerns have not been heeded by the health authorities, which poured dozens of billions of US dollars into subsidizing the development of covid-19 vaccines. About 5.6 billion doses have already been administered globally and billions more have been ordered to cover all population and booster jabs. Pfizer/BioNTech alone expects to produce 3 billion jabs this year and 4 billion next year, with sales estimated at about $50 billion in 2021 only. If corona vaccination becomes periodical like flu vaccination, it would become a highly lucrative business worth hundreds of billions of US dollars for the Big Pharma.

Mass Covid-19 Vaccination Is No Silver Bullet

Government health experts touted mass vaccination as the only way to cut the transmission of the virus and overcome the pandemic. Yet, other scientists doubted it, because the coronavirus mutates rapidly and vaccines were not certain to block its transmission. Experts such as Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Robert Malone, and others even argued that “leaky” vaccines, i.e., those preventing the disease without stopping infections, would incite the virus to evade the stronger immune response in vaccinated people and mutate into more virulent strains. In other words, individual benefits of a lower risk of hospitalization and death could be counterbalanced by more dangerous virus mutations worsening the pandemic.

It is obviously not easy for the general public to assess the scientific evidence regarding the pros and cons of covid-19 mass vaccination. Governments have not allowed such a debate to take place in the mainstream mass media, anyway. In any case, the rapid spread of the delta variant in countries with high vaccination rates has raised serious doubts about whether mass vaccination could end the pandemic, in particular, if vaccine efficacy drops to worrisome levels after about six months and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated can show similarly high viral loads of the delta variant that are able to spread around.

If covid-19 vaccines have more therapeutic benefits rather than stopping the infection, then how could herd immunity ever be achieved? And if herd immunity cannot be reached, why segregate people by vaccination status or vaccinate children and teenagers, who are known not to get seriously ill from covid-19? These are relevant questions also due to the large number of immediate severe adverse effects and deaths linked to covid-19 vaccination in the US and the EU, and potential long-term side effects entailed by the use of relatively new vaccine technologies.

What Next?

Several experts advocate a shift in focus from mass vaccination to building up immunity and early treatments that reduce the number of patients developing severe symptoms. Voluntary vaccination should be recommended primarily to vulnerable people for whom benefits clearly exceed risks.

Yet many health authorities continue pushing for mandatory mass vaccination. Several countries, such as Israel, the UK and the US, have already started offering booster shots, while adjusting accordingly the validity of sanitary passes and extending vaccination to children. Recently, President Biden has unveiled plans to force all companies with more than a hundred workers to require coronavirus vaccinations or test employees weekly. This mandate would affect as many as 100 million Americans and has been criticized as both authoritarian and unconstitutional. President Biden claims that the vaccine is “safe, effective and free” and yet nearly 80 million Americans remain unvaccinated, allegedly undermining the government health response. This seems to defy reality given that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection or transmission of the disease, loses its efficiency within a few months, and has been associated with numerous side effects and deaths. It is not “free” either, because the cost of the vaccination campaign, going into dozens of billions of US dollars, will be paid eventually by the American taxpayer, who is pressed hard to take the shot. By the way, when was the last time millions of consumers refused a useful good or service offered to them for free?

The covid-19 health strategy leaves us with an acute sense of déjà vu. Governments have stubbornly tried to “stimulate” economic growth for almost fifteen years to no avail. All along, mainstream economists have remained blind to arguments that government intervention is making things worse by prolonging resource misallocation and fostering long-term impoverishment. We can only hope that a similar story is not playing out with far more severe consequences in the medical field.

*****

This article was published on September 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Harry and Meghan – “influential” eco frauds

Prince-in-name-only Harry Windsor and his wife Meghan Markle really, really care about the planet and climate change.

We know this because they often tell us.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (who reside eight time zones away from their monarchical fiefdom) now grace the cover of the latest issue of Time magazine for being among the “100 Most Influential People.”

This, after last July when they received an environmental “award” from the group, Population Matters, for stopping at two children, which is further evidence they care.

As the familiar expression goes, talk is cheap.

The fact that Harry and Meghan live in a 9-bedroom, 16-bathroom mansion in the Montecito enclave of Santa Barbara, California, drive a Cadillac Escalade SUV, and still use private jet travel evidently are beside the point. They made the choice of stopping at two children so as to not add to their family’s long-term carbon footprint. This begs the question, why does a family of four need triple the number of bedrooms? Would not, say, five bedrooms be enough to obviate bunkbeds and host visitors?

Their extravagant home looks like an upgrade from their royal digs when they lived in London as newlyweds, at the Frogmore Cottage.  Though their Montecito pad has one fewer bedroom, it appears to have more appurtenances.

The upshot is that you can be awarded as an influencer for having only two children ostensibly to help the planet, even as you amass square footage and consume energy sufficient to support a Cub Scout pack.

In reality, Harry’s and Meghan’s actions reveal they care as much about the climate as they do about their privacy – meaning, not at all.

This couple, who uncannily fits the definition of critical mass narcissism, interviewed with that famous media personality, the one and only Oprah Winfrey, where they were assured a series of softball questions and millions of viewers (they got both). During this televised spectacle, they played the victim and trashed the British royal family.

They are not done. Harry is working on a tell-all memoir for mega-bucks that will plunge the knife deeper into his family, revealing more dirty laundry. This is one of the ways he earns a living; after all, it’s expensive to maintain a mansion, use private jets and play polo – all while preening concern about the planet’s sustainability.

This current issue of Time magazine, that once-great media organ that has long since jumped the shark, has a dolled-up cover photo of Ms. Markle standing prominently with her quasi Prince dutifully in his place behind her. The article describes them this way:

“Springing into action is not the easy choice for a young duke and duchess who have been blessed through birth and talent, and burned by fame. It would be much safer to enjoy their good fortune and stay silent… That’s not what Harry and Meghan do, or who they are. They turn compassion into boots on the ground through their Archewell Foundation. They give voice to the voiceless through media production.”

This reads like a parody, written by their friend, Jose Andres.  If he was not paid handsomely by Harry and Meghan for such propagandistic drivel, he should have been because he earned it.

If these two poster-children for narcissism and excess were serious, principled people, they would eschew such recurring vanity, go about their business and, in Harry’s case, renounce his title of Prince and whatever ancillary royal titles remain.

If Harry and Meghan were sober-minded and committed, they also would live more modestly and set a better personal example for environmental stewardship. Two years ago the radical group, Friends of the Earth, requested that Meghan “consider less carbon-intensive modes of travel.”

Not a chance.

Incessantly carping about climate change while consuming exponentially more energy than an average family to air-condition a 15,000-square foot mansion and much more does not make for ideal spokespersons for the cause.

If the climate cottage industry writ large was serious, and the “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” was really about a healthy environment and saving Earth, it would not be spearheaded by indulgent, wealthy hypocrites like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, former Vice President Al Gore, Jane Fonda, Leo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, et. al.

All of this reminds us that the climate change agenda is not, and has never been, about the environment and preserving the planet. It is about a political agenda of power and control; about governing society to subjugate the masses while the elite class preserves and enjoys their possessions and virtue signals to the rest of us in order to feel good about themselves.

That arrangement of elites controlling societies has largely prevailed throughout history, from ancient to feudal times; and through communist and dictatorial nations in modern times.

The United States as a mostly free society has largely deviated from that historical condition. Climate change politics threatens to remove such American exceptionalism – if we allow such. Pushing back includes calling out craven influencers like Harry and Meghan who obtain publicity for all the wrong reasons.

*****

This article was published on September 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

We Need The Constitution Now More Than Ever

These are fraught days for Americans. History is said to be cyclical but there is widespread concern that we are in inexorable decline.

Our leadership role in the world which seemed secure three decades ago is under serious threat. Polls show that confidence and love of country are in decline, especially among the young. Traditional American values like freedom of speech, free-market economics and responsible fiscal policy are openly attacked.

Meanwhile, e Pluribus Unum is facing replacement by a culture obsessed with racial identity. MLK’s dream of a society where skin color doesn’t determine our judgments of each other is now itself deemed racist.

America, though, is the longest-running liberal democracy in history for a reason: our Constitution. Our great freedom document connects us to our roots, the sources of our strength. It can direct us away from hyperpartisanship toward mutual respect and agreement on shared principles – if we respect its authority.

But the Constitution has been repeatedly ignored and abused in our recent history. Many argue it is an 18th-century construct unsuited to governance in the 21st-century. Others claim it should be seen as a “living” document that means whatever someone says it means without regard to its actual content.

Since the Constitution prescribes limits on governmental powers, it particularly vexes Big Government types wishing to centralize power and enlarge their span of control. For example, a century ago President Woodrow Wilson was an early leader of the Progressive movement, which held that modern government should be guided by administrative agency experts.

Wilson thus opposed the separation of powers doctrine. He cautioned against “the error of trying to do too much by vote“, given the ignorance of the common man.

His legacy of disdain for the Constitution is reflected in today’s administrative state, in which unelected bureaucrats make binding rules (laws), direct the enforcement of those rules and adjudicate violations.

FDR later also regarded the Constitution as a problematic document requiring workarounds for him to be successful in establishing the social welfare programs and regulations thought necessary to rescue America from the Great Depression. He was so frustrated by the Supreme Court striking down his unconstitutional power grabs that he infamously tried to expand the court to15 members.

Roosevelt was temporarily rebuffed but eventually was able to secure so much of his agenda that the role of government in Americans’ everyday lives changed dramatically. Safeguards to liberty like enumerated powers and federalism suffered permanent damage.

Recent presidents have taken the constitutionally curious position that they should be permitted to exceed their normal powers when Congress won’t act as they prescribe. Barack Obama, a former constitutional law professor, correctly stated many times that he wasn’t authorized to suspend DACA deportations through executive order. There were “laws on the books“ and “I am not king“, he pointed out.

But he eventually caved, unilaterally granting work permits and legal status to first millions of illegal immigrants who entered as minors, then later to adults (later struck down). The legal fate of DACA is still pending, despite its continuing unconstitutional status.

Joe Biden used the same logic when confronted with the need for extension of the eviction moratorium passed as an emergency pandemic measure by the Trump administration. Biden acknowledged that the Supreme Court had already ruled that an extension would require congressional approval. But to appease his party’s lefties, he did it anyway, expressly ignoring the Constitution.

Donald Trump was also loathed to let the constitution interfere with what he wanted to do anyway. His most egregious transgression was pressuring Vice President Pence to reject the electoral ballots lawfully submitted by the states in the 2020 presidential election.

Pence, clearly lacking the constitutional authority to do so, refused. Fortunately, unlike previous miscreants, Trump was so thoroughly rebuked that no precedent for similar actions was created.

Part of the reason America is in trouble is that we are not protective of our Constitution, not outraged when it is abused. Judicial nominees, charged with upholding the Constitution, are vetted instead based on their political agenda.

We demean our constitution at our considerable risk. It is our bulwark against the corruption and chaos that plague impoverished nations around the world.

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Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

How the Left Is Spreading Global Warming Alarmism on the Right

If there’s one thing the Left knows cold, it’s deception. From Vladimir Lenin to Saul Alinsky, leftists are unparalleled masters of the art of victory through hoodwinking: Defeating opponents by fooling them into false agreement.

Owning the battlefield in this war starts with controlling the language. We’ve seen this play out in the debate over abortion access, with pro-choice activists redefining “pro-life” to mean anything but the conviction that life begins at conception—and swindling unwitting Christians into their ranks.

Now it’s spreading to the debate over climate change, with environmental activists claiming there’s nothing “partisan” about their one-sided campaign to fundamentally transform America. Radicals, socialists, and authoritarians know that global warming offers them the best chance to weaponize Big Government and dictate where Americans live and work, what they drive, eat, and buy, and even what beliefs they’re allowed to hold—all through fear.

Truth-loving skeptics are all that stand in their way. So what better way to defeat them than by undermining the skeptics’ unity with false promises?

Meet the “eco-Right,” the collection of lobbying, litigation, and activist nonprofits that identify themselves as free market yet who have bought the Left’s argument that the Earth is getting dangerously hot and we’re to blame. Groups like ClearPath, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and the Climate Leadership Council disagree over specific policies—some want a devastating carbon tax to reduce emissions, others want federal subsidies for expensive lithium batteries—but all want skeptical Republicans to compromise with uncompromising leftists on their global warming policies.

By doing so they threaten to undermine both affordable energy in America and the future of the conservative movement—which is why they’re often funded by the likes of George Soros as well as the Ford and Hewlett Foundations.

My colleagues and I at the Capital Research Center first broke the news on the secret liberal mega-donors bankrolling the eco-Right in order to rebrand radical environmentalism as “conservative.” Our new report, Rise of the Eco-Right, compiles years of research and investigative reporting to expose the funders, leadership, and lobbying of the eco-Right, exposing a web of overlapping boards and shared donors in service to a destructive and cynical agenda.

We’ve studied the professional Left for decades and are all too familiar with activists’ use of deception and misdirection to camouflage their agenda to the casual glance. Unlike Activism Inc., we believe that Americans should be free from fearmongering to listen to arguments from both sides and come to their own conclusions in the global warming debate. Rise of the Eco-Right aims to make it clear that climate-conscious conservatives cannot compromise with the Left because activists aren’t interested in anything less than a “green” socialist revolution.

Don’t take my word for it—that’s the crux of an open letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signed by 263 activist groups in November 2019, urging Congress to pass the Green New Deal—arguably the most sweeping legislation ever proposed in America—to combat “increasing income/wealth inequality and rising white nationalism and neo-fascism” in America.

Today’s environmentalists are more interested in “environmental racism” and “restitution for Black and Indigenous farmers” than the environment, and they’re no longer hiding it behind the fig leaf of saving the planet from greenhouse gases.

Recall the explanation that Green New Deal author Saikat Chakrabarti’s gave to the Washington Post: “Do you guys think of [the Green New Deal] as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Here’s the bottom line: carbon taxes, “green” tech subsidies, and greenhouse gas pledges will never be enough for Big Green because the debate isn’t really about those things, but power. Activists know this, which is why they’ve abandoned these “market-friendly” proposals for the ultimate prize: the utopia of socialized medicine, federal jobs for everyone, slavery reparations, and more.

The eco-Right offers the Left a backdoor for the kind of statist policies that conservatives would never support—if they weren’t falsely labeled. It’s a siren’s song that promises free-market answers to climate change but will only result in tyranny. Conservatives, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose by listening to the eco-Right—so don’t give up the ship.

*****

This article was published on September 17, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Capital Research Center.

Gen. Mark Milley: China’s Man In The Pentagon?

Hi all, I’m sorry to have been away from the keys, but I was tied up all day filming a PragerU segment about Live Not By Lies. And the Internet keeps going on and off at this hotel. Flying back home tomorrow.

Anyway, I was stunned by the news about Gen. Mark Milley today. By now you will have read that the Joint Chiefs head phoned his Chinese counterpart twice during the final months of the Trump administration, to reassure the Chinese that the US wasn’t planning to attack China — this, because Milley was worried about Trump’s mental stability. The first time was right after January 6 of this year. Here’s the second time:

Milley also reassured Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army that the U.S. had no intention of launching a strike against China, according to the paper. It was one of two secret phone calls shared with Li on the issue.

The first took place on Oct. 30, 2020, after Milley reviewed intelligence suggesting China believed the U.S. was preparing for an attack due to military exercises in the South China Sea and Trump’s antagonism toward the country, according to The Post. But Milley told Li he would be warned of an impending attack.

“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years,” he said, according to the paper. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

The top US general called the man who would be his worst enemy in the event of war — and called him on October 30 of last year! — and told him that he would telegraph the US attack ahead of it happening. What the hell?! In what kind of country does the Joint Chiefs head call America’s No. 1 enemy and assure them he will let them know if we plan to attack them? In what kind of country does the top military leader violate the chain of command like this?

If Milley was so afraid of the president’s mental state that he felt compelled to phone the top Chinese general not once but twice, why did Milley not warn Congress and the American public? This makes no sense. Where was Milley during the second impeachment trial? Milley thought he was working for a deranged Commander in Chief capable of starting a war with nuclear-armed China in a fit of pique, but he didn’t want to go public with this concern. Incredible.

Milley had to have been a source for this information. If so, then he was proud of what he did, and figured it would make him look good. I don’t care how bonkers Trump might have been, the head of the US military cannot go around the civilian Commander in Chief — especially not to do his own foreign policy negotiations with our chief foreign rival. Again: if things were as bad as Milley believed they were, he should have publicly threatened to resign, and then gone to Congress to spill the beans. If memory serves, this kind of thing is why Truman fired Gen. MacArthur. I don’t care if you hate Trump, Milley has to go.

One more time: you can think that it was appropriate for him to have called China under these circumstances, but if Milley had any guts or any sense of responsibility to the country he has sworn to defend, he would have gone public with this at a time when it would have cost him something, but might have spared the country a disaster. But he waited to tell it to Bob Woodward after he (Milley) was safe from Trump, and presumably to ingratiate himself to the people whose admiration he craves. The nation’s military chief doing something like this is beyond extraordinary. He seems like a double creep, Milley does: he didn’t make it public when it could have stopped what Milley regarded as a grave danger to world peace, but when it also would have cost him something; now he’s revealing that he carried out an act radically destabilizing of the civilian chain of command, when doing so could not do any good, but also wouldn’t hurt Milley, and might actually boost his personal stock.

Some character that one has.

*****

This article was published on September 15, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

 

Arizonans Digging Heel In Over COVID Vaccination Hesitancy

Polling is beginning to reveal a group of Arizonans will remain steadfast in their opposition to getting vaccinated against COVID-19 no matter how bleak the pandemic gets.

OH Predictive Insights, a Phoenix-based polling, and marketing firm, released its monthly Arizona Public Opinion Pulse on Tuesday, showing the results of 1,000 state residents polled between Sept. 7 and Sept. 12.

It found 22% of respondents still would refuse the free vaccination even though they expressed more concern over a surging delta variant of the virus in Arizona.

Nearly half (49%) of those who would refuse a vaccine said they are “slightly/somewhat concerned” about the current state of the pandemic in Arizona. Additionally, 1 in 5 said they are extremely or moderately concerned. Despite this, over half of the vaccine-refusing Arizonans think the pandemic will remain the same over the next month compared with those who believe it will get better or worse.

“Tracking vaccine willingness has proven especially insightful in the last 6 months as we learn that a meaningful share of residents is unwavering in their decision against taking the COVID vaccine,” said Mike Noble, OHPI chief of research. “Analyzing the data from our polling has allowed us to paint a clearer picture of which groups are the most unwilling and understand the ‘why’ behind their decision by looking into what influences their opinion one way or another.”

Arizonans’ opinion of Gov. Doug Ducey seems to have softened.

The poll found 48% approve of Ducey’s handling of the fight against COVID-19. OHPI said this represents a “significant shift” from July 2020, when he saw an 18-point negative swing.

Ducey’s recent actions on school mandates aren’t popular, however. Half of those polled opposed the law he signed that bans mask mandates in schools, with 39% saying they “strongly oppose” the measure. Moreover, 57% opposed his threat to withhold any funds from schools that would defy the ban.

Ducey posed the issue as more of an incentive, offering additional funding for schools but on the condition they are compliant with state and federal laws.

One thing that remains broadly unpopular is the prospect of another stay-at-home order, where students potentially would return to online learning.

“Arizonans have little tolerance for another stay-at-home order or closing public schools again,” Noble said. “Mask mandates were the only combative measure that earned the support of a majority of residents.”

Only 24% supported a new stay-at-home order, while 28% approved sending children in public schools home to learn online.

In a shift of fortunes, President Joe Biden saw the approval of his handling of the pandemic plummet. The survey found Biden with a minus-4% net approval on his handling of the COVID-19 issue; a 36-percentage-point swing from four months ago.

*****

This article was published on September 21, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Tax Increases Cannot Pay for the Democrats’ Reconciliation Bill

With a projected deficit of $3 trillion for this year already, congressional Democrats are moving full speed ahead to spend an additional $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years with no clear plan to pay for it.

Despite claims by Speaker Pelosi and key Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) that the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending package will be fully paid for, it’s simply not possible. The math doesn’t add up.

This spending spree is too large to be funded through tax increases. That means the federal government will have to finance it through deficit spending. This additional borrowing will just raise already soaring inflation rates and raise the tax burden on future generations.

Joe Biden has repeatedly said that he would fully repeal the 2017 tax law to pay for his spending plan, but that alone would not come close to paying for this level of spending. The entire 2017 tax cut cost $1.456 trillion according to the Joint Committee on Taxation — that’s before taking into account the law’s positive economic effects that reduced its cost. Repealing the bill entirely would still leave Democrats over $2 trillion in the hole. And that doesn’t even take into account the crippling economic effects that higher corporate taxes would have on investment, productivity, and wages.

Democrats recognize the negative economic effects that a high corporate tax rate has on the economy, which is why President Biden is proposing “only” raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent, and why House Democrats have proposed a 26.5 percent rate. While these proposals are better for the economy than returning the US to the uncompetitive days of a 35 percent tax rate, they still raise less money.

Some House Democrats are also demanding that the spending package repeal the 2017 tax law’s $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction. This repeal would cost the federal government $700 billion over the next 10 years and would benefit mostly high-income earners. It increases the price tag of the reconciliation bill, necessitating more tax hikes or deficit spending, for a huge tax subsidy to the rich.

New taxes on the rich could pay for this reconciliation bill, right? Wrong. Take President Biden’s proposal to tax carried interest as ordinary income as an example. According to the Tax Foundation, this proposal would raise only $7.4 billion over 10 years — that’s less than a quarter of one percent of the revenue needed to pay for the $3.5 trillion package, and it carries with it the negative economic consequences of raising the cost of investment and distorting financial markets.

The math does not lie. The Democrats’ spending bill won’t be fully funded. It will increase the federal deficit, possibly by trillions of dollars. With inflation rising already, all this spending will do is add fuel to the fire of already high inflationary pressures.

This package means that the value of Americans’ wages will decrease over time because inflation and interest rates will rise. And it will be middle-class Americans who feel the negative effects of this deficit spending most keenly.

This spending will also put pressure on American entitlement programs that are already nearly insolvent. Medicare Part A is projected to go broke in five years, Social Security in 13. Increased deficit spending, especially to this extent, just speeds this timeline along. All we will get is closer to what seems to be an unavoidable debt crisis.

An additional consequence that should scare lawmakers away from supporting this bill is the impact it will have on our children. This package, along with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, will increase federal debt per U.S. household from $179,000 today, to $288,000 by 2031.

Lawmakers who support this bill are marching the born and unborn into further debt and economic despair. Whether it be through job-killing tax hikes, or through slower economic growth resulting from increased borrowing and less private investment, our children will pay for this bill.

The United States needs major budget reform, not another underfunded multi-trillion-dollar spending bill that puts major burdens on Americans and future generations. During the pandemic, Congress passed multiple trillion-dollar bills to help keep the economy afloat. With the economy recovering, America does not need another one.

*****

This article was published on September 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

Results of the Arizona Audit Pending

Senator Karen Fann announced that the results of the Arizona audit should be made public on September 24, 2021.

Like many voters, we are curious to see the results. Like most voters, we have tried to follow developments that are confusing, to say the least. One thing that does emerge is that conducting a forensic audit of an election is much more complicated than one would think.

The Democrats must suspect some bad stuff will come out of this effort because they have picked up their attacks on the process.

The reliably Left-Wing Atlantic Magazine just ran a rather complete hit piece on the whole effort.

It would make sense for Democrats to step up their attacks. The purpose would be to color perceptions before even the conclusions of the audit are announced. While not very fair to the facts, that would not be the point, would it? What they wish to accomplish is to have the public not believe any of the conclusions of the audit by painting the whole process as illegitimate and unnecessary.

It recalls the famous quotes from Carl Sandberg: “If the facts are against you argue the law. If the law is against you argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

The Democrat yelling breaks into several diverse and incoherent arguments.

They contend the election was perfectly legitimate and therefore the whole process is unnecessary. Of course, many things in life are not necessary, but we do them anyway. Arizona Republican officials ranging from Governor Ducey, Maricopa County Recorder Richer, and Maricopa County Supervisors, are used frequently by Democrats as props in their arguments. They point out that these Republican officials were satisfied with the conduct of the election, and therefore that alone is proof everything was done just right. Hence, no need for an audit.

Of course, the proof is the results of the audit, not the presuppositions of Republican officials, many of whom conducted the election and therefore have their turf and reputations to protect. Besides audits are not to be confused with recounts. Both events are very rare, but forensic audits where one investigates whether the votes being counted are legitimate, as well as the vote count itself, has never occurred before in Arizona to our knowledge. State officials just don’t have much experience doing this.

The assumption is elections were conducted properly during the extraordinary events of the past year. But the contortion of rules to supposedly accommodate Covid left the electoral system vulnerable to manipulation. And what about all the money from outside nongovernmental sources, such as Facebook that went directly to officials conducting the process? None of this was “normal” so why should we immediately assume, without any questions, that the election was conducted properly?  Ironically for Democrats, if racist, misogynist, white supremacist Republicans supervised the elections, that is proof for them the process was handled well, as long as Republicans lose.

There were multiple statistical anomalies as well in the past election, which while not proof of wrongdoing, should legitimately attract attention. We will just provide just one.  The last time a President ran for his second term and lost despite gaining more votes than received the first time was 130 years ago with Grover Cleveland.  In short, this last election was highly unusual and historically odd.

The Democrat answer is that as long as election officials say they did their job properly we should believe them. To even question their performance is “an attack on our democracy.”
Horsefeathers. Our position is government officials should regularly to challenged on how they conduct their jobs. These officials are not angels and regular oversight is both necessary and desirable.

This slides into one of the major contentions of the Democrats, and that is the audit firm chosen was the wrong firm. The firm is run by political partisans who have no experience. Well, which firms have experience in a complete forensic audit? Since forensic audits have not previously been conducted, there can’t be many firms that have done this before. Notice if the elected representatives of the people (State Senators) choose the auditors, this is wrong. They should be chosen by the very officials about to be audited!

They constantly keep up the drumbeat that the owner of the firm believes in “conspiracy theories.” Besides, the name Cyber Ninjas is strange on its face.

Which theories? That the Russian collusion hoax was a theory, that the FBI and intelligence agencies spying on President Trump was a theory, that the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided he would commit treason to head off the possibility of Trump doing something stupid…these conspiracy theories?

No, not those “theories” that became facts, but the hoary theory that the election was stolen, the Big Lie.

But how can you know it is a “conspiracy theory” until the facts are known? Maybe this is another conspiracy theory that is about to become a conspiracy fact? Holding your tongue until the facts are known seems like a better policy.

There is another line of argument for which we give some credit to Dennis Prager.  Would Democrats cheat if the opportunity presented itself?

Think about it.  Democrats are no better than other people.  Democrats thought Bush and his hanging chads stole the election from Gore.  Hilliary thought the election was stolen by Trump and said repeatedly that Trump was illegitimate.  Further, Democrats believe that Trump was Hitler, a Stalin, a white supremacist.  If you thought you could keep Hitler or the Klan from coming to power, would you cheat?  It would seem you would have a moral obligation to do so.  So either Democrats are saying these things about Trump and they don’t believe them, or they do believe them and act upon those beliefs.  Given the confusion of the “Covid election”, and you thought Hitler was coming to power, would you not take advantage of the electoral confusion?

Perhaps Democrats are so concerned about the election integrity project because they have been cheating for what they believe is a moral cause but deep down know they have swallowed their own propaganda.  To be caught both cheating and fooling themselves, is just too much emotion to handle, hence the over-the-top reaction to steps simply to see that elections are honest. The reaction to voter ID is a case in point.

Here are some of the questions we hope the audit will answer: Did they verify that votes were counted only once, cast by a resident of the state, and citizen of the country, that was alive at the time the vote was cast? Was the voter properly registered? Was a valid address and signature verified? Was the vote in question tainted by the influence exerted on a vulnerable adult or through the payment of money? Was the chain of custody of votes secure? Did all votes get to counting centers in the exact condition and number when they left the voter’s hand? Once delivered, were the votes properly tabulated without computerized manipulation of the results? Were representatives of both parties always present to observe the process?

Notice how these questions are ignored. It is all attacks and attacks on Cyber Ninjas. We don’t care if the head of Cyber Ninjas believes the earth was created by a giant lizard. As long as the process answers the questions in the previous paragraph, we think they are doing the job they were tasked to do.

If these questions are answered, then all parties should abide by the results of the election.

For Republicans, there are hazards in clinging to notions the election was stolen if that proves not really to be the case.

Losing sometimes teaches you that you are doing something wrong. Holding alive a myth (if that is what it turns out to be) keeps you from doing the hard work to do better, refine a better message and find better candidates.

It also may discourage the efforts of your own supporters. After all, if the election was stolen, why engage in politics? What is the point? It is a rigged game.

However, if the results of the audit clearly show fraud of sufficient scale to alter the election results, Democrats will have to acknowledge they cheated and legislation passed by illegitimate office holders needs to be repealed. If allowed to stand, that would truly damage “our democracy.” Those guilty of cheating need to be prosecuted and those officials who were derelict in their duties need to be fired or resign.

If this audit proves to be thorough and professional, it could be a template for many other states to undertake the audit process. If it is not an honest and professional inquiry, then Arizona Republicans have damaged the cause of election integrity.

As far as the Prickly Pear is concerned, we await the evidence. We wish the Democrats would do the same, but objectivity is not something you should expect. That goes double for their public relations firm, the mainstream press.

Our greatest fear is that even as the results of the audit are rolled out, partisan attacks will continue and by constantly making ad hominem arguments, the real truth will never be heard above the din.

Democrats’ “Climate Change” Is Fake But Their Taxes Are Real

Climate alarmism provides an excuse for increased taxation of fossil fuel companies, which inevitably shift this cost burden to the consumer.

Sports coaches preach having “no memory.”  Meaning you have to forget your mistakes.

A football quarterback has to forget his last pass was an interception. Because he needs to think about his next pass.

Most, unfortunately, some of the least athletic people on the planet have taken this sports axiom to heart.  And unlike in sports – they demand we don’t remember either.

Behold the Democrats – and their “imminent doom” climate change predictions.

It is quite possible there has never been a more error-prone business – than the climate alarmism prediction business.

Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions(Editor’s Note:  You need to read this.)

As the article demonstrates, Big Media has long been doing its part.  It has spent the last half-century jamming climate alarmism down our throats.  Trying to have us forget about the last failed prediction – by immediately pivoting to the next failed prediction.  No memory, remember?

A fun part of Big Media: They incessantly lie to us – and then poll us to see if the lies have taken.  And then they lie about the poll results – when their lies haven’t taken.

But Big Media doesn’t have to conduct the poll themselves.  They’ll happily lie in support of other Leftists polling and lying about it.

Progressive Pollster: 65 Percent of Likely Voters Would Back Polluters Tax

It’s a progressive pollster, so…

The progressive pollster and Big Media lyingly mash together two very different groups of respondents:

“A survey of likely voters found that 77 percent believe fossil fuel companies have “a lot” or “some” responsibility to address climate change, including 86 percent of Democratic respondents, 66 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of independents.

“When pollsters described a proposal to levy a $500 billion fee against major creators of emissions like Exxon, BP, Shell and Chevron, respondents “strongly” or “somewhat” supported such a measure, 65 percent to 25 percent. This included 83 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of independents in support.”

I have “a lot” of interest – and am “strongly” interested – in five million dollars.  I have “some” interest – and am “somewhat” interested – in five dollars.  Lumping these two groups together – is a lie.  The actual breakout – reveals the hugeness of the lie.

43% of all voters say energy companies have “a lot” of responsibility.  The rest (34%) say “some responsibility.”  So in fact a strong majority of voters agree that fossil fuel companies bear no – or a little – responsibility for the fake premise that is “climate change.” 

And the “a lot” alarmist number – is almost entirely made up Democrats.  They’re at 62% – compared to 39% of independents and 24% of Republicans.

So the entire presentation of this poll – is a lie.

Of course, Big Media does nothing in a vacuum.  Everything they do is in support of everything other Leftists-Democrats are doing.

And, of course, Leftists-Democrats never allow facts to get in the way of a good beating.  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” – no matter how fake and un-serious the “crisis.”

This fake story on a fake poll on real taxes imposed in the name of fake “climate change” – follows immediately on the heels of Democrats proposing real taxes in the name of fake “climate change.”

Why should a half-century of climate alarmism being very, very wrong – get in the way of Democrats really taxing the crap out of us in the name of climate alarmism?  No memory, remember?

Senate Democrats to Introduce Measure Taxing Major Polluters:

“Senate Democrats are set to unveil legislation that would tax energy companies responsible for major greenhouse gas emissions to pay for the costs of climate disasters.”

Never mind the fact that NONE of the predicted climate disasters over fifty-plus years – have ever actually happened.

Never mind the fact that taxing real energy producers – means they will have to pass along the taxes to us…the real energy users.

So we will pay a lot more for energy – and the government will get a lot more of our money.

Which does nothing for the climate. 

But does a lot for the government.

Of course, they’re hoping we’ll forget all of this.

*****

This article was published on September 15, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Heartland Institute.

Sorry, AOC, Rich Already Pay Their Fair Share

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donned an elegant gown with the slogan “Tax the Rich” painted on the back at the Met Gala in New York, where guests selected by Vogue’s Anna Wintour ponied up around $35,000 a pop for tickets. The scene was reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s “radical chic” — though rather than being guests of the well-heeled in Park Avenue duplexes, today’s revolutionaries own luxury condos and drive around in government-subsidized electric cars that most Americans could never afford.

My first question, though, is: Who doesn’t want to “tax the rich”? Judging from my social-media feed, there seems to be a growing segment of people under the impression that the wealthy pay little or nothing in taxes. When you ask Americans if they support a wealth tax, a majority support the idea. One recent poll found that 80% of voters were annoyed that corporations and the wealthy don’t pay their “fair share.”

Polls rarely ask these people what a “fair share” looks like. Is a quarter of someone’s earnings enough? A third? Because the rich have been shouldering an increasingly larger share of the cost of government. The United States already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the free world. Those who make over $207,350 now pay 35% in income tax. Those who make $518,400 or more pay a 37% income-tax rate. At some point, taxation should be considered theft.

Despite perceptions, the highest-income strata of taxpayers are the only ones who pay a larger share of taxes than their share of income. In 2018, the top 1% of income earners made nearly 21% of all income but paid 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% earned 48% of the income and paid 71% of all federal income taxes.

On the other hand, in 2021, Americans making less than $75,000 are projected to have, on average, no tax liability after deductions and credits. The average income-tax rate for those making between $75,000 and $100,000 is expected to be 1.8%. More than 61% of Americans — around 107 million households — owed zero federal income taxes for the year 2020.

You don’t have to agree with me that (over)taxing the wealthy undermines job creation and growth, or that a tax system that relies so heavily on the fortunes of the few creates more cronyism in Washington and more volatility everywhere else. But the idea that the rich don’t pay their “fair share” is absurd.

At this point in the conversation, progressives will set aside their calls for a “wealth tax” and start complaining about capital gains. Here, we simply have a point of disagreement: Ocasio-Cortez would see investment profits in the hands of Bernie Sanders, head of the Senate budget committee. I would rather see them in venture-capital projects and private-equity funds that churn investment dollars and boost technology and jobs. Progressives grouse about accumulation of wealth and then want policies that dissuade risk.

Those who believe what I do will be accused of being “market fundamentalists” or beholden to the wealthy. Progressives — the kind that like to hang out at Met Galas — believe everyone is as class-obsessed as they are. I don’t give one wit about the wealthy. In fact, I hope today’s entrepreneurs are tomorrow’s new rich. We know they will be — without compelled redistribution.

How many voters do you think know that nearly 70% of the Forbes 400 richest Americans are self-made? Or that the share of the self-made wealthy had risen from 40% in the 1980s to nearly 70% by the 2010s? How many people who have fallen for the scaremongering worries of “inequality” — another leading reason for the wealth taxation —understand, as economist Mark Perry recently pointed out, that the middle-class isn’t “shrinking” because it’s getting poorer, but rather because of a long-term trend in upper-middle class growth? Ocasio-Cortez’s entire philosophy is a zero-sum fallacy.

No, progressive taxation isn’t socialism. But the policy justifications made for tax hikes these days certainly are. Ocasio-Cortez is a fraud, of course, but it’s her retrograde economic theorizing that’s the real problem. And in this age of populism, increasing numbers of Americans are accepting Marxist conceptions of American life, in which the successful are parasites and everyone else is a victim of their greed.

The reality is that no politician is going to advocate raising middle-class income taxes, despite the ever-increasing cost of government. There is only the rich to tax. Consequently, it’s become easier to pass massive expansions of the state. Everyone expects someone else to foot the bill — either future generations or their wealthier neighbors. Meanwhile, taxation has gone from being a means of funding communal needs and projects to a means of technocratic wealth reallocation. This is no way to run a country.

*****

This article was published on September 17, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Americans Support Governors’ Revolt Against Federal Vaccine Mandate, Poll Shows

New polling shows that the majority of Americans do not approve of President Joe Biden’s new vaccine mandate.

Biden announced the mandate last week, which includes requirements that any business with more than 100 employees ensure they are vaccinated or be tested weekly. Biden’s announcement included a range of other federal rules that are estimated to affect 100 million Americans.

Convention of States Action released new polling Monday that showed 58.6% of those surveyed “do not believe President Biden has the constitutional authority to force private businesses to require vaccine mandates for employees.”

In the same poll, 29.7% of voters said Biden does have the authority, and 11.7% are unsure. In addition, 55.5% of voters say the mandate “sets a precedent that could be abused by future presidents on other issues.”

A new surge of Republican governors, 27 so far, have announced their opposition to Biden’s mandate. Several lawsuits are reportedly in the works among Republicans.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been a leading critic of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 requirements, said the president overstepped his constitutional authority.

“When you have a president like Biden issuing unconstitutional edicts against the American people, we have a responsibility to stand up for the Constitution and to fight back, and we are doing that in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said. “This is a president who has acknowledged in the past he does not have the authority to force this on anybody, and this order would result potentially in millions of Americans losing their jobs.”

According to the poll, those governors have Americans’ support. The survey found 56.1% of voters “support the efforts of state governors to oppose Biden’s nationwide vaccine mandate on private businesses.” That includes 46.3% who “strongly support,” and 9.8% who “support.”

Opinions on the mandate fall largely along party lines. Nearly 80% of Republicans support the governors standing up to Biden while about 30% of Democrats feel the same way.

This poll comes on the heels of another poll released last week that showed a sharp drop in approval for Biden after the deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

The Economist/YouGov poll reported last week that Biden’s approval fell to an all-time low of his presidency, with 39% of Americans approving of his job performance and 49% disapproving.

“The drop in Biden’s approval rating is most severe among Democrats,” the poll reports. “Around nine in ten of them had approved of Biden’s performance for nearly all of his first year in office. This week, Biden’s approval rating among Democrats dropped nine points to 77% from 86% last week.”

Convention of States Action partnered with The Trafalgar Group to release Monday’s poll, which surveyed more than 1,000 likely voters from Sept. 10-12.

*****

This article was published on September 13, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

 

Is Diversity a Strength or a Danger?

What history tells us about today’s identity politics.

 

It’s an article of faith that diversity is a strength, a faith that appeals to me, given that I spent a career at the leading edge of equal opportunity, affirmative action (i.e., outreach), and, before it was hijacked by radicals and anti-intellectuals, the diversity movement.

Even the high priests on the U.S. Supreme Court have ruled that diversity is a strength, saying in their ruling years ago on affirmative action that diversity enhances learning in college.

That sounds dubious, but what do I know? The justices went to Harvard and Yale and thus are smarter and more connected to the real world—wink, wink! I went to college in south Texas, where about half the student body and half my friends were a mix of poor Mexican Americans and wealthy Mexican nationals. Like this Italian American, the Mexican-American guys were interested in girls, sports, where to buy beer, and where to find part-time work to pay for school. I don’t remember our respective ethnicities helping us learn accounting, finance and other subjects in business school.

Granted, I did learn that Mexicans who had poor and poorly educated immigrant grandparents, as I did, were no different from third-generation Italians like myself in terms of patriotism, assimilation, and aspirations.

But that was long ago, long before the diversity movement was hijacked and transformed into divisiveness. It was also before the War on Drugs went into high gear and the Mexican cartels caused extreme crime and corruption in Mexico and a marked increase in crime and in drug-addicted homeless people in border towns and states, which is not only a human tragedy but a tragedy for communities in terms of the associated blight, disease and costs.

For sure, diversity can be a strength under the right conditions and the right political, economic, and social systems. It can bring different ideas, perspectives and skills, resulting in innovations in the arts, sciences and industry while avoiding cultural and economic stagnation. That certainly holds true in my diverse extended family.

On the other hand, as will be discussed shortly, diversity can be a weakness and even danger, especially the way it is being promulgated and enforced today.

Of course, the U.S. has no choice but to make diversity work, since it is one of the most multiracial and multiethnic nations on the planet and remains a magnet for immigrants. This is a testament to its market economy and its political system of pluralism, liberal democracy, and a constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights. Yet much of the intelligentsia and academia want to replace these foundational systems with something undefined but in their own egotistical image because they see America as racist and evil. They don’t have the wisdom to paraphrase Winston Churchill and see the systems as the worst possible systems except for all others.

A big problem with today’s diversity movement is that Americans have been conditioned to believe that there are only six racial/ethnic groups: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American. But these are contrived categories that hide the fact that, as with the world at large, there are hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in America, each with its own history, customs, cuisine, beliefs, facial features, skin shade, and distant or recent experiences of being victims of atrocities or discrimination, or perpetrators of atrocities and discrimination.

Perhaps anthropologists know of a major ethnocultural group or race that doesn’t have blood on its hands somewhere in its past, but in my lifetime of reading history, I don’t know of one. The only difference between groups in this regard is time. Some have been more recent victims of atrocities, and some have been more recent perpetrators of atrocities.

The force-fitting of hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups into six categories makes a mockery out of diversity. And the categorizing hides the fact that there is no majority ethnocultural group in America. There are so many groups that each one is a minority.

Much mischief has resulted from the categorizing. This is especially true with respect to the White category, which is erroneously seen as homogenous in privilege, social status, income, education, work ethic, prejudices, and viewpoints. Under this trope, a descendant of J.P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller is no different in background, advantages and worldview from an Appalachian backwoodsman, who is no different from an orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, who is no different from a Muslim in Detroit, who is no different from a Cajun in a Louisiana bayou, who is no different from a Walloon in wherever Walloons live, who is no different from . . . . Well, you get the point, a point that is over the pointy heads of the intelligentsia.

Make no mistake, as I know firsthand from my career experience, it’s permissible and even encouraged to discriminate in diversity and inclusion programs against those in the White category, especially males, because, as the trope goes, all whites have discriminated against people of color and owe their elevated station in life to keeping other people down, in what is seen as a zero-sum economic system, in which someone’s wealth must have come at the expense of someone else.

Conversely, excruciating processes that entail huge amounts of time, energy, money, and red tape are required in organizations to ensure that so-called minorities are treated fairly and are hired and promoted in the “right” numbers proscribed by directors of diversity and inclusion.

The net result is that in the name of social justice, it’s now okay to be unjust, as long as the injustice is targeted at whites.

Try as they might, the intelligentsia can’t square this double standard with the noble idea of individual rights. To avoid going mad with cognitive dissonance, they think in terms of categories, not individuals, and then they stereotype the categories in certain oppositional ways, such as white versus non-white, advantaged versus disadvantaged, powerful versus powerless, rich versus poor, racist versus virtuous, victimizer versus victim, fragile versus anti-fragile, and so on, ad nausea.

If someone doesn’t fit cleanly into one of the categories, the person will be hammered into the “right” category in a corporate racial sensitivity seminar; or in a public school classroom, where white children are now shamed for being privileged and racist; or behind the scenes by a director of diversity and inclusion.

Naturally, such heavy-handed pounding causes resentment and divisiveness, and it can lead to a backlash of populism, nativism, and extremism.

Another name for this corruption of diversity is identity politics. Such race-based politics are reminiscent of the racial definitions in the Nuremberg Laws, or the counting of American slaves as three-fifths of a person for determining congressional representation, or the use of such labels as octoroon and quadroon to differentiate the amount of black blood in a person, or the use of the pejorative “swart” to describe Italians, as the New York Times used to do.

The counterargument is that unlike the racial categories of the past, today’s categories are employed for good purposes, not bad ones. They are employed to stop discrimination and to help the disadvantaged, it is claimed. Perhaps that’s the intent, but it’s not the reality.

The reality is that identity politics are fraught with danger, as has been seen in history and is still being seen in much of the world. For sure, diversity is a danger, not a strength, in countries where minorities don’t have rights and legal protections.

Diversity was certainly not a strength when a half-million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Tribal, ethnic and religious massacres continue today in large swaths of Africa where diversity isn’t a strength. For instance, tens of thousands Nigerians have been killed as a result of resurging conflicts between Muslims and Christians. And as Walter Russell Mead recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Ably Ahmed launched a war against the Tigrayan regional government that has now become a civil war featuring genocidal massacres and ethnic cleansing reminiscent of post-Tito Yugoslavia.” Mead went on to mention that Sudan was broken in two in 2011 by ethnic and religious conflict. Now, ethnic blood is being shed in the new country of South Sudan.

Diversity also was not a strength in the genocide of Armenians at the hands of Turks during World War I. Armenians remember the genocide but are silent about Armenian soldiers massacring several hundred Azerbaijani civilians on February 26, 1992, in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, a war that resulted in twenty thousand to thirty thousand deaths and the displacement of more than a million people. But Azerbaijanis don’t have a clean history, either. During the 1920 civil war between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Azerbaijani soldiers marched into the Armenian quarter of Shusha and massacred at least five hundred defenseless Armenians. (Some estimates put the number much higher.)

Put your finger on just about any part of a globe and you’ll find a history of ethnic and racial hatreds, especially at the borders between two nations of different ethnic and racial make-up or within nations where different ethnic and racial groups live together. The 1947 partition of India is a case in point. Not able to live together in peace, Muslims and Hindus split into two countries, with Muslims forming the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and Hindus, the Republic of India. Tension are high along the border between the two countries, which have a combined population of 1.5 billion people, or 20% of the world’s population—a 20% that lives in fear of diversity.

To the west of Pakistan is Afghanistan, a country riven by traditional hatreds and rivalries. And to the north of India is China, a country of 1.4 billion people, where the majority Han Chinese have little tolerance for ethnic minorities.

Diversity is dangerous in much of the world because the default position of human nature is to be suspicious and distrustful of those who are different—that is, those with a different culture, religion, language, ideology, and appearance. Throw economic status and class envy into the mix, and it can be a volatile combination, easily set off by an accidental or intentional spark, as was the case when the cultured and educated Weimar Republic gave way to the Third Reich.

Demonizing some groups as evil and some groups as good sets the conditions for social unrest or worse. It is particularly troubling when the demonization is done by a liberal democracy that values individual rights enough to have a Bill of Rights. And it is inexplicable that the same country doesn’t know better, considering its history of slavery and its oppression of Native Americans.

Diversity is a strength in America. Those who want to turn it into danger are a danger to civil society and should be recognized as such.

 

August Border Crossings Remain At Near-Record High

The steady flow of migrants crossing America’s southern border with Mexico remains at levels not seen in decades.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s August data on migrant encounters near the southern border showed 208,887 encounters last month. That’s around 3,000 fewer than July’s record 212,000 encounters in July but significantly more than in August 2020, which had 50,014 encounters.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security documented 62,000 arrests in August 2019. Of those, CBP said 44% were processed for expulsion.

Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow, criticized President Joe Biden’s lax response to the growing crisis at the southern border.

“President Biden’s failed border-security policies are simply unsustainable,” he said in a statement. “The men and women of federal law enforcement cannot continue to deal with these crisis-level numbers. They are already overwhelmed and overburdened. The breakdown is coming.”

The sustained rate of migration has garnered sharp criticism from Republican governors.

Arizona’s portion of the southern border has become a significant site for migrant crossings. Gov. Doug Ducey declared a state of emergency in August for Cochise, Pima, Santa Cruz, Yuma, Maricopa and Pinal counties, allowing up to 250 members of the Arizona National Guard to deploy to the border.

“Here in Arizona, we are willing to step up and do our part to protect our communities and secure the nation’s southern border,” Ducey said at the time. “I have deployed the national guard to provide logistical, field and operational support to law enforcement along the border, but there’s more work to be done.”

The governor’s office said the soldiers would assist medical operations in detention centers, install and maintain border cameras, monitor and collect data from public safety cameras, and analyze satellite imagery for current trends in smuggling corridors.

*****

This article was published on September 17, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

A Subtle Catastrophe

In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, which could have been avoided with even a hint of Executive Branch foresight, President Biden needed a win. And how did he chase that much-needed win? He ordered some 80 million American citizens to get vaccinated. This he presented to the country in a condescending temper tantrum broadcast live for all to see. “Our patience is running thin,” he said. “Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated.”

This is not what winning looks like. This looks like yet another President declaring his way to the policy outcomes he wants by executive order, Covid style.

It’s hard to imagine Biden offering a more tone-deaf response. Part of his six-pronged strategy, on the path to universal vaccinations seems clear enough to him and however many people advise him on a daily basis. That makes the difficulties with the plan, and there are difficulties down to the marrow with this ill-conceived mess, all the more incomprehensible.

The Biden plan rests on mutually exclusive premises. First, there is the implicit assertion that the vaccines work. Indeed, they work so well that we should force 80 million people to get vaccinated, whether they want to or not. This, of course, flies in the face of the other presupposition: that we need to vaccinate damn near everyone because people are simply not safe otherwise.

Aren’t those who voluntarily took a vaccine already protected? If not, the vaccines are not all that effective, and mandating them will not make them anymore so. If that’s not the objective, are we really protecting the anti-vaxxers from themselves? Since when is that an appropriate use of government power? Either way, forcing people to submit to a vaccine they don’t want as a condition of their continued employment doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And then there are the details of the Biden plan, details that should make just about everyone uncomfortable, regardless of vaccination status. First, employers with 100 or more employees must mandate their employees be vaccinated or submit negative tests weekly. It doesn’t stop there. All federal employees are mandated, as are all contractors who do business with the federal government. Additionally, over 17 million health care workers make the list too.

Since when does the United States President have this kind of authority? There is literally nothing in the Constitution that enables anything even close to this sort of thing. The President is tasked with executing the laws passed by the Congress, not writing them himself, and there is nothing in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution enabling Congress to mandate anything like this either.

Oddly, members of Congress, their staff, and employees of the federal court system are all exempted from the Biden plan. Then again, maybe this isn’t odd at all given who might be inclined to object. Better to win their favor with favors now than have them saying something about the dubious constitutionality of any of this nonsense later.

We are left with a sitting United States President who is willing to do just about anything to make it seem like he is in firm control of a difficult situation. Sadly, being firmly in control also means scolding 100 million Americans like a 19th-century schoolmarm. But maybe it’s the rest of us whose patience should be wearing thin. Where there were once meaningful limits on the exercise of federal power, we now lurch from red to blue, each team waiting its turn to inflict its vision on the other team and the entirety of the country in the bargain.

In the end, people get the government they deserve. So we get a President who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the constitutional constraints of his office. Either way, it’s unforgivable. But the red and blue teams will just put in their time until the next election, when we will do it all over again, proving we are all to blame to one degree or another.

So which is it? Are the vaccines effective? If so, why do we need to mandate them? Aren’t all those who elected to get vaccinated safe? Or are they somehow ineffective, in which case mandating them serves no purpose? And while we’re at it, how long will immunity last in the vaccinated? Vaccines are clearly effective in the short run, on that we seem to have near-universal agreement. But how will things look in the long term?

These are questions that Biden and his team should have asked before stepping into the deep end of the policy pool. Because they didn’t, we will be left with a quieter, more subtle catastrophe than we saw in Afghanistan, but it will be a catastrophe just the same.

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This article was published on September 11, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.