Want capitalism? It thrives in the world formerly known as “Third”.

India's Modi

When I was a young man, the West was strong, the East its rival, and the poverty-stricken Third World the battlefield. I’ve lived to see today’s remarkable transformation beyond the Asian tigers, beyond the China miracle, to the rise now of India’s 1.26 billion people, 17.5% of the world, so big it has the population of two continents--Europe and North America--combined (1.27 billion).

India’s new leader, Narendra Modi, according to Shikha Dalmia in TIME, just utterly defeated the ruling Congress Party in part by deflating Congress’s “vote-bank politics”: welfare subsidies to special constituencies to win votes, which Modi said was “ruining the country without improving living standards.”

Modi moves India forward by denouncing the very vote buying that America’s ruling party employs as a substitute for jobs and economic growth--the real goal both the Indian and American people seek. Our national elite, as described by William Tucker in the conservative American Spectator, suffers

the kind of stagnation Thorstein Veblen warned against in The Theory of the Leisure Class. When you couple an aristocratic upper crust that has lost interest in economic progress with a lumpenproletariat that doesn’t understand growth and only wants handouts from the government, you have a prescription for long economic decline.

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that Nigeria, Africa’s largest nation, is like Modi’s India surging forward by moving away from government. Says Brooks:

80% of Africa’s workers labor in the informal sector. That’s because the formal governmental and regulatory structures are biased toward the connected and the rich, not based on impersonal rule of law. . . Individual and social creativity is zooming ahead. Governing institutions are failing to perform the basic, elementary tasks.

Capitalism works better--in India, in Nigeria, in the U.S.--when government stays out of the way. Yet America’s ruling elite demands more government. It’s done in the name of economic redistribution (see previous post). But ironically, we find America’s most pronounced inequality in regions where Democrats are in charge.  

Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle, after noting Democrats represent 70 of the 100 wealthiest congressional districts, explains:

The rich of America’s affluent urban areas tend to be the beneficiaries, one way or another, of a global tournament economy in which markets are often close to “winner take all,” and vast sums can flow to people who are just a little bit better than their competitors. The wealthy in Republican districts, on the other hand, are more likely to be competing in [lesser] local or national markets. . . where sales are ground out one at a time. Because the sums involved are smaller, the wealth gap is also smaller -- and business owners are less likely to be sympathetic to the idea that their success has a huge luck component.

In urban areas at the nexus of those global industries, where the rich are bidding up the prices of real estate (and, by extension, of everything else that is bought or sold on that real estate), inequality qua inequality is an issue with huge political salience. But in the rest of the country, structural changes in those local and national industries are much more likely to worry people. When a big local employer closes down because of competition from China or Amazon.com Inc., the gap between rich and poor may collapse dramatically.

McArdle helps us understand--in terms used in this piece--that the Third World is gone, or, rather, that the Third World (China) is now a part of our everyday lives. We live in a single world where wealth and power are concentrated at the top, where the upper class, having arrived, is focused on protecting its position and so uses government to prevent revolution partly by buying off the poor. It’s the Rome of bread and circuses. It’s the Congress Party in India, socialist governments in Africa, social democrats in Europe, and it’s progressive Democrats in Manhattan, San Francisco, West L.A., Boston, and Washington.

Big winners and big losers in the global economy share the sharp income gap of a large city. And they congregate in the world cities, including America’s but also London, Paris (and its Swiss suburb), Dubai, Hong Kong, Tokyo where they have more in common with each other than with their poor at home. The global product cycle favors first the bright inventors, entrepreneurs, financiers, the lucky, big winners who launch ventures and live in world cities. But product development then moves down the food chain to mass manufacturing in the Third World by former peasants, uplifting these billions in a raw “survival of the fittest” competition that can and does slam Middle America and other former First and Second World working classes.

In the U.S., it means Democrats at the top and bottom on one hand, and on the other, Republicans in the middle struggling together between the two extremes, sharing common difficulties. For those in the U.S. middle, as for the raw Third World masses, the private sector promises more than government power and largesse.

Choose “equality,” or choose freedom.

Webb

“We have a situation in this country where the people at the very top have moved away from everyone else in terms of how they live, how much money they make and in some cases the amount of taxes that they pay.”

--James Webb (D), ex-Virginia Senator

Inequality. It comes with a free economy. To fix it, you need the power to redistribute wealth. In the name of adjusting economic distribution, you surrender some freedom. And in the end, you’ll be left with Animal Farm’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The price of “equality” is the downside of “positive liberty.”

Those in power who presume to act in your behalf are in truth following the model of Plato’s Republic and the Catholic Church. It’s the path that at 19th century elite universities brought meritocracy to the fore, the path of Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat,” of Progressives, social democrats, and big government + big business corporate welfare. It’s the top-down, “government knows best,” “blue model” power structure favored by today’s Democrats.  

Hensarling

“This is a call to action for Republicans and conservatives today to reject the Washington insider economy. Let the Democrats embrace it. Let’s embrace the Main Street competitive economy — its fairness, its empowerment, its morality. And when we do, America’s future will be one of unparalleled freedom, opportunity and growth.”

--Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas)

Economic growth. It needs a free economy. You allow entrepreneurs to succeed or fail in a free market, with the winners creating jobs and prosperity. Some will do better--that’s the downside of “negative liberty”--but all deserve an equal opportunity to pursue happiness. Government should help ensure equal opportunity through education and the rule of law, which is not the same as presuming to deliver equality.

We need freedom from church or royal rule, freedom to be educated yet succeed without being credentialed, the capitalism of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that led to the rise of the middle class and business-led prosperity aided by limited government. It’s what’s working in much of Asia today, the classic, bottom up “liberalism” ironically now advocated at home by today’s “conservative” Republicans.

Liberals Undermine Middle Class

Eric Hoffer

Tom Bethell used to be with the progressive Washington Monthly, and now edits the conservative American Spectator. Bethell recently reviewed Fred Siegel’s 2012 book How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, which as we earlier pointed out, targets a progressive elite alienated from the Democratic Franklin Roosevelt-to-Lyndon Johnson  emphasis on uplifting America’s working class.  Bethell quotes Siegel’s attack on “gentry liberals. . . every bit as class-conscious” as British Tories, elitists who in the 1960s took up “the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights.” [emphasis added]

Bethell draws on other conservatives who share the Siegel perspective on gentry liberals, including Michael Barone, who wrote that “the roots of American liberalism are not compassion but snobbery,” and Joel Kotkin who said the anti-democratic character of modern liberalism

undermines much of the reason we became progressives in the first place, which was to help the middle and working classes. The gentry’s stridency and hypocrisy—what’s OK for them is not for everyone else—is utterly transforming liberalism today.  

Bethell’s hero is Eric Hoffer, the self-taught longshoreman-philosopher whom Bethell honored with a book. Hoffer disdained liberals as “intellectuals,” and believed intellectuals fear the masses, even as they retain their votes, because

In a democracy the intellectual is without an unquestioned sense of superiority and a sense of social usefulness. He is not listened to and not taken seriously. The truth is that intellectuals never found a democratic society acceptable. Bagehot himself was convinced: “If you once permit the ignorant class to rule you may bid farewell to deference forever.”

Hoffer also taught us: 

It is incredible how few foresaw that the coming of affluence would cause a shift from the pursuit of wealth to the pursuit of power, and that such a shift would be the origin of great evils. Where there is widespread plenty, common people will no longer be regulated and disciplined by the invisible hand of scarcity. Order and stability will have to be deliberately imposed by despotic power. At the same time, the well-off will no longer be able to derive a sense of uniqueness from riches.

Intellectuals raised to rule must protect their meritocracy--in theory (not in practice) built upon an equal opportunity to advance through education. Meritocracy preaches the virtues of pursuing learning over wealth (even as the power learning's winners acquire routinely produces affluence), and in the name of democratic socialism, intellectuals seek to undermine the capitalist system that offers all an equal opportunity to gather riches; the miracle economy that has uplifted masses by the billions worldwide.

Democrats, once again the party of race.

Holder: America racial "cowards" (2009)

"If it's wrong to use race to deny people opportunities, it is equally wrong to use race to help some at the expense of others. Using skin color rather than merit to pick winners and losers is a policy that fosters cynicism. Such policies only serve the politicians, who hand out the spoils, using racial preference as governmental levers as they win power and treasure for themselves. . . There is a race industry in politics. And many elites — from politicians to journalists — continue to argue in favor of race-based policy. But here's the thing: Mr. Obama was elected twice. Twice."

 --John Kass, Chicago Tribune

John Kass, a conservative, has the courage to write words that will brand him a racist. Yet Kass lacks the courage to call Democrats what they are. It’s Democratic politicians, and Democrats alone, who use “racial preference as governmental levers as they win power and treasure for themselves.” And the “elites” who “argue in favor of race-based policy” are exclusively progressive Democrats.

Republicans feel unfairly associated with racism and would be only too happy to end campaigns based upon race, and upon sex, and upon sexual preferences. The politics of victimhood, of race, sex, or sexual preference identity, is the politics practiced by the party that elected Obama twice. Twice.

In my adult lifetime, Democrats were the party that tiptoed past legalized segregation in the South in order to hold together a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats--Dixiecrats who by virtue of their seniority controlled almost all leadership positions in Congress--and northern liberal Democrats who helped elect Woodrow Wilson (2x), Franklin Roosevelt (4x), Harry Truman, and John Kennedy + Lyndon Johnson in the years before 1964. Years when famous racists were Democrats. It’s a fact, and a fact that embarrassed me and millions of other Democrats at the time.

In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater voted against Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act, and thereby won South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the only states he carried outside his native Arizona. In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon lost Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana plus Arkansas to third-party Southerner and Dixiecrat George Wallace. In the process, Nixon almost lost the 1968 election.

Following that close call, Nixon embraced a “Southern Strategy” aimed at winning over white Southerners so alienated from the Democratic civil rights drive that they wasted “lost cause” votes on Goldwater in 1964 and Wallace in 1968. The “Southern Strategy” eventually turned the more conservative South into the Republican Party’s main base of strength.

After the “Southern Strategy” helped deliver Nixon’s sweeping 1972 victory, Democrats won the White House only when they nominated Southerners who could grab some of that good ol’ Southern voting--Georgia’s Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Arkansas’ Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 (Al Gore, ostensibly from Tennessee but really a senator’s son raised in Washington D.C., lost his home state and the rest of the South in 2000).

The Southern Strategy worked for Republicans until Obama’s elections. The Democrats’ national elite plus government and government-supported employees at the top, combined with minority, unmarried female, and youth “victims” at the bottom, has now grown to roughly 60% of the electorate.

And so, the GOP “Southern Strategy” has backfired, as did Romney’s “voluntary deportation” swipe at Hispanics in 2012. The GOP hasn’t since 1988 effectively employed the code-word racism of “crime in the streets,” “forced busing,” “welfare queens,” or in that final occasion, “Dukakis freed Willie Horton.”

Republicans are back to suffering as they did more than half a century earlier from Democrats’ use of the race issue. This time, however, progressives employ race against white males, not for holding onto white Southern support.

Michelle Wie’s Long Winding Road

Michelle Wie, the 24 year old American daughter of Korean immigrants, had the tragedy of the Korean ferry Sewol very much on her mind Saturday, as she won her first ever LPGA golf event on U.S. soil. Wie, backed by a large, friendly crowd, won in her Hawaii home, as Korea mourned the ferry sinking with 302 dead or missing, most of whom could have been saved. Nearly 3/4ths of the passengers were 16- and 17-year-olds from suburbian Seoul’s Danwon High School.

Wie paid tribute to the lost Koreans with a black ribbon pinned to her golf cap, and after winning, saying she sent out “good thoughts and prayers and to all the family in Korea right now. It's very unfortunate."

But fortune finally did smile on Wie, after a 79-event winless drought going back to 2010.

Wie’s first tournament as an LPGA member was the season-opening SBS Open at Oahu’s Turtle Bay in February 2009, a predecessor event to the Oahu Lotte Championship she has just won. Wie in 2009 held a three-stroke lead with eight holes remaining, but ended up losing by three to Angela Stanford, the same woman she beat by two strokes Saturday, after starting four behind Stanford.

In August 2009, Wie distinguished herself in the team-America Solheim Cup competition against Europe, going 3-0-1. Then in November, she won her first professional tournament, the Lorena Ochoa Invitational in Guadalajara, Mexico, ending an 80-match professional tournament drought. She won again in August 2010, the the CN Canadian Women's Open, her last victory before the 79-tourney drought that ended Saturday.

Wie’s mother was a Korean women’s amateur golf champion and a Miss Korea pageant contestant, and her father a University of Hawaii professor. Wie began golfing at age 4.  She enjoyed much early success before turning pro in 2005, winning in 2003 at age 13 the Women's Amateur Public Links tournament, becoming the youngest person ever, male or female, to win a USGA adult event. Wie's 6-foot height and her 300 yard drives made her an international childhood sensation, as did her efforts to enter male PGA events.

2006-08 were bad years for Wie. She injured her wrists in 2006 and broke three bones in her left wrist in a 2007 fall. “Golf Channel’s” Randell Mell reports golf swing coach David Leadbetter saying people never understood how the injuries Wie endured through the years hurt her game. The injuries changed her swing, which Leadbetter then had to rebuild.

Mell wrote:

“I don’t think there’s been enough said about how many injuries she’s had and how they hurt her golf swing,” said four-time major championship winner Meg Mallon, who captained Wie in the 2013 Solheim Cup. “She had to revamp her swing because she couldn’t bend her wrists very much.”

there were emotional injuries, too. Wie, her parents and her managers made mistakes. There was disrespect withdrawing from Annika Sorenstam’s tournament in the middle of a round in 2007, with Wie citing injury when it appeared she was going to fail to shoot better than 88, a high score that would have disqualified her from playing in LPGA events for a year. The next day, she was seen hitting balls.

After 2010, Wie endured her second long victory drought: 2011-13. Two years ago, in 2012, the blogger at “autographs for sale,” who had dropped the price of his Wie autographs by 50% and predicted the possibility of no sales, wrote that Wie’s

LPGA career to date has been profoundly disappointing. Even worse, it seems like her game is declining. Wie’s 2011 season was worse than 2009 or 2010, and she’s gotten off to a horrendous start in 2012, badly missing the cut at the last 2 events. . . Wie may eventually be remembered as the most hyped, least accomplished player in LPGA history.

Wie’s Stanford education may also have been a distraction. She attended Stanford for five years, 2007-12, going only to the Fall and Winter quarters, and golfing through the Spring and Summer. Leadbetter said that after graduating from Stanford, Wie was expected to elevate her game with her focus no longer divided. Instead, she slumped in 2012, missing the cut 10 times in the 16 events where there were cuts, missing five cuts in a row.

According to Mell:

Wie said . . . her frustration mounted seeing no rewards for all the hard work she was putting into her game. There was no fun in that. “It was sad,” Leadbetter said. “She was working hard, putting in more hours on the range, and nothing was happening. She was desperately trying to make something happen. She was forcing things. Once you start losing confidence, it’s hard.”

Leadbetter said he saw the frustrations choking Wie’s love of the game. While Wie’s game showed signs of rebounding in 2013, Leadbetter sensed a weariness in her. At year’s end, he told her to take five weeks off without touching a club. . . When she returned to Florida to see Leadbetter for a preseason boot camp before starting this year, she was revitalized. They picked up with changes that were working late in the ’13 season.

Now, back on top after a decade of trials, Wie is first in LPGA money winnings ($616,555), first in scoring (69.57), first in hitting greens in regulation (81%) and first in rounds under par (25). Mell quotes Wie saying, “I’m really in a good place with my swing right now.”

Monogamy = Civilization

 "It is one of the great social tragedies of our time that marriage is flourishing among the most advantaged and self-actualized groups in our society and waning among those who could most benefit from its economic and child-rearing partnership. "

--Report, National Marriage Project, University of Virginia

Our third consecutive posting about the importance of marriage.

I am stunned by the simplicity of William Tucker’s assertion--in his book Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human--that monogamy is the bedrock of civilization.

David DesRosiers summarizes Tucker’s book in a recent (conservative) Washington Times article. Before civilization, there was polygamy:

it made natural-selection sense for a man and a woman to pair off for hunting and gathering, and this condition lasted 5 million years. In the safety of the jungle, polygamy works for the alpha male and the offspring are attended to.

However:

Once [humans left] the jungle [for] the open plains, sexual equity becomes a requirement of survival for the offspring. “Civilizations are born,” Tucker writes, “when two people trust each other, namely a man and a woman. At this moment, we come out of the cold isolation of nature and begin to construct something that we call human society.”

Tucker claims polygamy made a comeback 10,000 years ago with farming, because those with the most land and largest herds took a greater share of women for themselves. But then, Tucker’s reasoning takes an important, counter-intuitive twist, as he claims:

monogamy, just like polygamy, is an elite-driven enterprise. Monogamy requires self-restraint and forward thinking among the strongest. These powerful few recognize the bellicose logic of polygamy and choose sexual equity because of the internal peace and prosperity that follows.

To support his findings, Tucker points to “the founders of Athens and Rome, who legislated sexual equity into their founding laws,” to “Christianity, which ordains and spiritualizes monogamy,” to “the Victorians that made sure that monogamy was reflected in the general mores and public policies.”

We have alpha men, but Tucker says monogamy requires alpha women:

The feminine vipers of the harem are replaced with astute and virtuous women who stand by their men — and up to power. “The real reason why monogamy prevailed in Western Civilization was not because of examples from the Bible, but because the Catholic Church had a crucial ally in a new icon of Western Civilization — the Virtuous Woman.”

DesRosiers concludes, “Culture is a product of human choice and necessity. What made man and the ‘West best’ is our monogamy. Sexual equity creates better societies.”

Comment: Today, we have “alpha women.” Good. But Charles Murray has told us we’d be better off if on the subject of marriage, our “alpha”-dominated national elite “preached what it practices” (they already marry each other), because the lower class has lost the old virtues--lost them since the 1960s “triple revolution” of sex, civil rights, and equal rights for women.

The dominant culture currently only preaches marriage for gays. We need marriage for children. And for these children, we need the ideal of monogamy that our own marriage vows swear us to follow.

Wanna a better country? Promote Marriage!

“As was true 50 years ago, there are those who dismiss the Great Society as a failed experiment and an encroachment on liberty; who argue that government has become the true source of all that ails us, and that poverty is due to the moral failings of those who suffer from it. There are also those who argue ... racism is so embedded in our DNA that . . .the game is rigged.”

--Barack Obama, 4.10.14

Sigh, Obama once again bashing straw men.

In truth, the “Great Society” was a “failed experiment,” victim of a resource-draining Vietnam disaster, but very popular at its launch 49 (not 50) years ago. Lyndon Johnson’s program wasn’t an “encroachment on liberty;” it just didn’t work. Responsible critics don’t call government “the true source of all that ails us”--government performs essential services outlined in the preamble of our (still sacred) constitution.

Conservative critics don’t go after poverty as a “moral failing,” but do look for cultural differences written about in liberal David McClelland’s The Achieving Society 53 years ago, well in advance of Johnson’s presidency. And it’s simply outrageous to suggest, as did our first African-DNA president Thursday, that America is so racist “in our DNA” that we’ll never treat blacks fairly.

Face it: our culture is failing us. Why do left and right blame each other when the adverse impact of family breakdown affects us all? It’s a subject discussed in our last post, and worth returning to again and again.

As did Cynthia M. Allen in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Allen recently wrote about Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 study of black family breakdown, which triggered a “bounty of research correlating family structure to the economic mobility of children — or lack thereof.” Allen quotes the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project’s finding that “children of divorced mothers or [those] who were born to unmarried mothers are less likely to be upwardly mobile.” Given all the recent talk of social inequality, Allen uses the Pew study to stress family structure has ripple effects. It correlates with upward mobility, not only within the family, but also at the community level.

Marriage is important. The Brookings Institution reports that marriage is “a mechanism through which advantage is protected and passed on.” Less affluent women are more likely to have children outside of marriage and raise them on their own, often in similarly-structured communities, where they “enter vicious cycles of downward mobility.”

Allen, using highly understated language, tells us that “attempts to redistribute income and expand the welfare state. . . have not had the success that lawmakers expected.” Allen would rather turn to Ron Haskins, director of Brookings’ Center on Children and Families, who says, “do something about family structure,” adding that in the war on inequality, we should be supporting policies that promote more stable families. In other words, promote marriage.

Family Breakdown and Working Class Depression

"Father Knows Best" (1954-60)

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will recently noted that when House GOP budget chair Paul Ryan spoke of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” and added “there’s a real culture problem here,” he was accused of “racism, blaming the victims.”

Will wrote that Ryan

had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe — had tiptoed into [i]n March 1965, [saying] that “the center of the tangle of pathology” in inner cities — this was five months before the Watts riots — was the fact that 23.6% of black children were born to single women, compared with just 3.07% of white children.

Forty-nine years later, 41% of all American children are born out of wedlock; almost half of all first births are to unmarried women, as are 54% and 72% of all Hispanic and black births, respectively.

These oft-repeated figures remain shocking, staggering.

Will believes that

The family is the primary transmitter of social capital — the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individual’s life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty. [emphasis added]

The 1960s brought us a civil rights movement that “dismantled barriers to opportunity,” and a simultaneous “social regression driven by the explosive growth of the number of children in single-parent families,” resulting in a “continually renewed cohort of adolescent males from homes without fathers” producing “turbulent neighborhoods and schools where the task of maintaining discipline eclipsed that of instruction.”

Will added that Moynihan observed “something ominous . . . the decline in the minority—then overwhelmingly black—male unemployment rate [accompanied a] simultaneous rise of new welfare cases.”

Will explains:

Policymakers had long [believed] in social salvation through better economic incentives [rather than consider] the decisive factors are not economic but cultural — habits, mores, customs[. I]t is easier for government to alter incentives and remove barriers than to alter culture.

To Will, any government belief in money-based solutions “is refuted by the importance of family structure,” with “the challenge” facing broken families “to acculturate those unacquainted with the culture of work to the disciplines and satisfactions of this culture.”

Will quotes Nicholas Eberstadt’s findings that “labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are demonstrably lower in America than in Europe” and “a large part of the jobs problem for American men today is that of not wanting one[,” leading to an] “unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men.”

Will asks “why the problem Moynihan articulated half a century earlier has become so much worse while . . . the astonishingly rapid receding of racism and discrimination — has become so much better,” and blames “what Moynihan called ‘the leakage of reality from American life.’”

Will and Ryan fault government policy for turning newly-free minorities into government dependents. Transfixed by the juxtaposition of Moynihan’s 1965 focus on single-parent families with the simultaneous liberal triumph of civil rights, the “War on Poverty,” and the “Great Society,” they treat activist government as the cause of family breakdown.

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart--a work we have covered in detail here--also blames government policy for family breakdown, which Murray, Will, and Ryan all place at the center of working class difficulties. Murray, by writing about whites only, frees his analysis from accusations of racism, a ready charge when both Will and Ryan talk about “inner cities.”

Family breakdown is worse among blacks, but affects all races.  Murray specifically blames 1960s social policy that

made it economically more feasible to have a child without a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let government handle community problems you and your neighbors formerly took care of.

Modern America began in the 1960s. There were three revolutions--sexual, civil rights, and equal rights for women--all made more emphatic by the government’s Vietnam disaster that deprived our then-WASP male national elite of its moral authority. Vietnam paved the way for revolution in America just as World War I triggered the Russian Revolution and World War II led to the triumph of Chinese Communism.

The old culture that idealized the American “Father Knows Best” family with the father providing, the mother nurturing, and the children protected, turns out to have been the 1960s most consequential casualty.

Conservatives Protecting Washington’s Liberal Elite? Looks Like.

This blog is eight years old.  In March 2006, the first 60 days of its existence, we warned conservative outlets like Fox News helped give the mainstream media freedom to express openly their progressive preferences. Now John Podhoretz, writing in the conservative New York Post,  pushes the same point:

the mainstream media — the prestige press and the network television commentariat — are committing sins both of commission and omission. At times, they act as the president’s blocking tackles in some respects, speaking with contempt and dismissal when the scandals are even mentioned.

When they are not actively working in his defense, the media’s managers are downplaying the scandal stories . . . and the failure to pursue them aggressively has the effect of quieting [scandals] down.

Why is this happening?

mainstream media heavyweights [are] liberated from the responsibility of covering Obama administration malfeasances because of the . . . alternative conservative media that have arisen over the past 20 years — talk radio, Fox News, and multiple websites.

Right[-wing] media means that the stories are being covered[, relieving the mainstream of] responsibility they might otherwise feel to do the job themselves. Even better, . . . the stories are being covered in such a way that the mainstream media can dismiss them and attack them.

“Something’s Rotten in DC”--the Media

“were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

--Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson                            Attkisson                            Eilperin

Jefferson’s words are among the strongest ever endorsing a free press. What worried Jefferson, though, along with “no press” was “a compliant press” that simply pushed the government’s line. Recall that Jefferson also wrote:

The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.

Today we have a press, and it works with the government--the “standing army of newswriters” Jefferson feared.

We earlier wrote about Sheryl Attkisson’s resigning from CBS News because the network didn’t appreciate her investigative reporting’s touching the Obama administration along with Republicans. Attkisson recently opened up to a CBS colleague, saying:

Nobody was interested in. . . [i]nvestigative reporting[. It] gets a lot of backlash. They don’t quite know how to deal with it. Why not just put on stories that don’t draw [trouble]?

She drew a clear picture of how tightly the “standing army of newswriters” works with (liberal) government:

If I need something answered from the White House. . . I’ll call our White House Correspondent[, who] may ask [White House Press Secretary] Jay Carney or one of his folks about an issue and they will be told “ask that at the briefing and we’ll answer it.” They want to answer it in front of everybody. They do know it’s coming and they’ll call on you. . . I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s sometimes more coordination. . . I think people would be surprised at the level of cooperation reporters have in general with politicians.

About her planned book, Attkisson added:

I’ve been wanting to write about the unseen influences on the media by coordinated, paid factions, whether they’re from political, corporate or other special interests, the tactics they use to manipulate the images we see. . .It’s become a way of life and I don’t think the public is aware of how much nearly everything you see today may be influenced, in some fashion, by a paid interest that wants you to think something.

We’ve also shared news about Democrats’ obsession with billionaire conservatives Charles and David Koch. Los Angeles Times house conservative Jonah Goldberg tells us:

The Democratic party raises vast sums off demonizing the Koch brothers. (Slate’s David Weigel reports that fundraising e-mails mentioning the Kochs raised roughly three times as much as those that didn’t mention them.) [And] many media outlets are all too willing to take their cues from Democratic talking points.

Goldberg mentions a recent Washington Post story “insinuating that the Kochs have a lot to gain from the Keystone pipeline.” Conservative “PowerLine” blogger John Hinderaker had earlier provided the details: Washington Post reporters Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin story was headlined, “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.”

According to Hinderaker, the story came from a two-page report by the far-left International Forum on Globalization. In truth, the Koch brothers aren’t the biggest lease holders--their holdings are but 3% of Alberta’s total reserves--and in fact the Kochs stand to lose more from the competition the Keystone pipeline will pose to their U.S.-based refining interests than they would gain from their Alberta fields.

Hinderaker asks:

Why would the Washington Post embarrass itself by republishing a thoroughly discredited attempt to link the Koch brothers to the Keystone Pipeline? Because that is a Democratic Party talking point, and the Post is a Democratic Party newspaper. But the truth is a little worse than that. Who is Post reporter Juliet Eilperin? Among other things, she is married to Andrew Light, who writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress is an Obama administration front group headed by John Podesta, who is a “special advisor” to the Obama administration.

As we see, Elperin is one of the “standing army of newswriters” Jefferson warned us about, those who “serve the ministers.”

How Democrats Plan to Hold the Senate

Brown (R)            Shaheen (D)

Here is “Politico’s” (James Hohmann’s) tip-off on how Democrats will defend in 2014 their vulnerable Senate seats (in this case, New Hampshire):

Jeanne Shaheen starts with a double-digit lead in recent polls and a $3.4 million war chest. . . she’s seeking to portray herself as independent from Obama; playing up her historic achievements as a woman; and, certainly not least, preparing to rip [Republican Scott] Brown to shreds. [emphasis added]

It’s the 2012 Democratic playbook “to a T”: suck up the available money, rally the base (in this case, unmarried women), and best of all, “rip (the opponent) to shreds.” But there’s a new twist for 2014--separate the Democrat from Obama and Obamacare.

Democrat Harry Reid: Nevada’s Dirty Money + DC’s Swamp

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

Harry Reid is going after the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, spending $3 million of PAC money on anti-Koch TV ads and on the Senate floor, attacking the two as “un-American.”

Matthew Continetti, writing in the conservative Washington Free Beacon, finds this all ironic, especially when Reid says the Koch brothers “rig the system to benefit themselves.” Reid “should know,” Continetti writes, then proceeds to document how thoroughly Reid has turned the system to Reid’s advantage:

• the “Clark County Conservation of Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002” delivered a “cavalcade of benefits” to real estate developers, corporations, and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to Reid’s sons’ and son-in-law’s firms. 

• Firms tied to the Reid family, the Los Angeles Times reported, earned more than $2 million from 1998 to 2002 “from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington.” How much more have they earned in the 11 years since--9 of which Reid has been Senate Democratic leader? 

• After a 2011 trip to China, Reid began touting the virtues of ENN Energy Group, a Chinese firm that sought to build a $5 billion solar farm in Nevada. Reid’s son Rory represented ENN, and commissioners friendly with Reid’s family agreed to sell property to ENN for one-sixth of the land’s appraised value. 

• Reid pressured Homeland Security officials to approve the visas of Chinese casino investors represented by Rory Reid. 

• Reid has “sponsored at least $47 million in earmarks that directly benefited organizations that one of his sons, Key Reid, either lobbies for or is affiliated with.” 

• Reid sponsored a $22 million earmark to buy a bridge over the Colorado River connecting Laughlin, Nev. gambling resorts to Bullhead City, Ariz., where Reid owns 160 acres. 

• Reid benefitted from Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore using associates as “straw donors” to run more than $130,000 in dirty money to Reid’s campaign. (Whittemore unfortunately was sentenced to two years in prison for violating campaign finance laws.) 

Ryan Elisabeth Reid

• Reid used $31,000 in campaign funds to buy “gifts for my staff and supporters” provided by granddaughter Ryan Elisabeth Reid, Rory Reid’s daughter, a “performing arts professional” living in Brooklyn. 

• Ryan Reid is the artistic director of the Sprat Theatre Company, which benefits from Caesar's Palace--a Reid supporter--funding a proposal to bring Ryan Reid’s play to Vegas, “because she needs the help.” 

 Continetti concludes:

“I must study politics and war,” John Adams said, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” In Harry Reid’s America a man must win political office so that his sons may have the liberty to practice law and register as lobbyists, engage in rent-seeking and government relations and crisis management and communications, in order to give their children a right to live in Brooklyn, to enroll in the New School, to visit the Vermont Studio Center, to have cronies finance their off-off-off-Broadway shows, to enjoy their allowance from grandpa.

News Viewership: Fox v. the Rest

Pew Research has taken a fascinating look at the news business. It shows what readers here already know--Fox is way ahead of the cable news competition. Look at the following graph:

But how do the cable news audiences compare to viewers of the broadcast channels’ evening news programs?

Prime time is three hours--it’s six 1/2 hour slots. Since Fox News averages 1.75 million viewers over six 1/2 hour slots, that’s a count of 10.5 million viewers for the 3 hours, even if many or most are the same person (they aren’t). The total of CNN and MSNBC audiences over the same period is (0.62 x 6 =) 3.7 million for MSNBC, and (0.54 x 6 =) 3.2 million for CNN, equaling 6.9 million for the two networks combined.

Here’s a graph of the network evening news audience, showing the networks are maintaining their ratings:

Pew has supplied the audience average for each of the three network shows separately, enabling us to compare the networks, which only capture viewers for 1/2 hour leading into prime time, to cable news channels with their total (3 hour) prime time audience:

Pew also has a graph showing how cable news revenue has increased over time:

Using Pew’s figures for the evening broadcast news show earnings, multiplied by 4/3 to achieve an annual total, we can compare the current revenue picture for the three cable news networks with the advertising revenue earned from the three network news shows. The cable news channels, with more time to sell, naturally earn much more than network news.

Fox earnings at $1.9 billion, in fact, almost match the $2.1 billion total earned by CNN, MSNBC, and the three evening network news shows combined.

The Sweet Smell of DC (Loot)

From a Washington Post article last November by Greg Jaffe and Jim Tankersley, we learned that the Washington DC region “added 21,000 households in the nation’s top 1%,” while “no other metro area came close.” The authors wrote about the importance recycled taxpayer money plays in generating DC wealth (see charts):

[military] service contracts nearly tripled in value. At the peak in 2010, companies based in Rep. James P. Moran’s congressional district in Northern Virginia reaped $43 billion in federal contracts — roughly as much as the state of Texas. At the same time, big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.

You sense Jaffe’s and Tankersley’s regional pride as they tell us:

The signs of the new Washington are everywhere — from the Tiffany & Co. store that Fairfax County development officials boast is the most profitable in the country to the new Tesla dealership in Tysons Corner. Tens of thousands of the nation’s best-educated workers have flocked here, some for contracting jobs, some simply to be part of the newly energized business climate. The money and brainpower have supercharged the region.

Life imitates art. Washington is becoming the “Capitol” one sees in “The Hunger Games”:

Washington has been the beneficiary of a ­decade-long, taxpayer-funded stimulus package. “We could have been a dodo bird,” said Mark Muro, policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “Instead we are the center of the universe.”

Illinois’ Rauner Stops Unions from Dictating GOP Winner

Rauner

Says the conservative National Review’s Eliana Johnson, private-equity millionaire Bruce Rauner is “poised to give Illinois governor Pat Quinn a run for his money” and become the state’s first Republican governor in 12 years. A minor surprise--Rauner, like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, isn’t afraid to battle the state’s public unions:

Rauner’s targets didn’t take it lying down: The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Illinois Education Association, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the Democratic Governors Association spent north of $3 million attacking him and trying to divert votes to one of Rauner’s primary opponents, state senator Kirk Dillard.

That’s far more than Democrats spent — $1.2 million — trying to steer Republican votes to Todd Akin in the 2012 Senate primary in Missouri, where Akin was viewed as the weakest candidate to take on vulnerable Democrat Claire McCaskill. [No kidding. Akin lost after calling some rapes “legitimate”.]

Of course, the Missouri race isn’t the only time Democrats fixed an election by supporting a weaker Republican or third party candidate. Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid helped nominate Sharron Angle over a stronger opponent in the 2010 Nevada Republican primary. Obama campaign chief (and Montana native) Jim Messina in 2012 arranged funding for a no-chance Libertarian in red state Montana who took enough votes from the Republican candidate to push Democrat John Tester back into the Senate. And Bill-Hill Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe similarly arranged for money to go to a Virginia no-chance Libertarian who took votes from McAuliffe’s Republican gubernatorial opponent.

Finally, in Illinois in 2014, the Democrats’ dirty tricks didn’t work. The Rauner forces--they haven’t won yet!--remain defiant. Said one,

We have to be bold, tough, and fundamentally change government. Lobbyists run the government for special interests, and career politicians let it happen — powerful union bosses and trial lawyers on the Democratic party . . . and a large part of the Republican party too.

Washington’s Clueless Elite on Road to Ruin

Louis XV

Conservative political wonk Michael Barone recently compared the debacle Obamacare poses for Democrats to the French Army’s situation in 1940--stunned, and out of options following the Nazis’ surprise panzer blitz through the Ardennes.

But to me, the France analogy Washington Democrats face today is not to war. It is to an earlier French era marked by decadence in the capital, poverty elsewhere. It is to the 18th century collapse of France’s Ancien Régime, which led to revolution.

Here is the city (Washington = Paris), described by Georgetown resident George Will in his hometown newspaper:

D.C. is awesomely wealthy, full of fine clothes, sumptuous food, gleaming restaurants, and . . .attractive people. . . The recession missed Washington, a town that produces nothing except problems for the rest of America yet is better off than anywhere else in America.

We spend $1 trillion annually on federal welfare programs, decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that if one-third of the money for poverty programs was given directly to the poor, there would be no poor. But there also would be no unionized poverty bureaucrats prospering and paying dues that fund the campaigns of Democratic politicians theatrically heartsick about inequality.

Corruption 2014 style, versus corrupt France in 1789.

Will himself places liberal Washingtonians in British country estates more than in French chateaus, a minor difference considering how debt and taxes overwhelmed both:

“Downton Abbey” . . . is a languid appreciation of a class structure supposedly tempered by the paternalism of the privileged. And if progressivism prevails, the United States will be Downton Abbey: Upstairs, the administrators of the regulatory state will, with a feudal sense of noblesse oblige, assume responsibility for the lower orders downstairs, gently protecting them. [P]eople smitten by “Downton Abbey” hope to live upstairs during a future reign of gentry progressivism.

Of course, there is a television show that purports to capture the actual lifestyle of today’s Washington, and the conservative City Journal’s Andrew Klavan notes the show’s popularity with the left is a surprise, given its damning message:

"House of Cards" relentlessly and continuously undermines the left-wing narrative, whether it intends to or not. In its heightened way, it shows the government as exactly what it is: a power center, inspiring all the soulless perfidy and amoral ambition that any power center is prone to inspire.

This is devastating to left-wing philosophy, because the central flaw of leftism is not its ceaseless cynicism about business, individualism, religion, or the common man—it’s that its cynicism evaporates into unicorn-and-rainbow stupidity when it comes to government. Insurance companies are too greedy to handle health care, but not the government. Individuals are too reckless to own guns, but not the government. Religion is too corrupt to preach morals, but not the government. The people are too foolish to know their own good, but not our old friend Uncle Government.

The liberal elite running Washington, you see, remain clueless about the bad job they are doing, much as were the 18th century French nobility. Again, George Will:

it is so sublime to be a liberal nowadays. Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates. [In this respect,] Obama’s proposed $1 billion “climate resilience fund”. . . will succeed. It will enhance liberals’ self-esteem — planet-saving heroism is not chopped liver — and will energize the climate-alarmist portion of the Democratic base for November’s elections.

Don’t buy this portrait of a rich, indifferent upper class, mismanaging the country down the path to revolution? Then at least listen to Sean Blanda of 99U (a website for young creatives), who tells us "How Barack Obama Gets Things Done:"

The president wakes up at seven o'clock. He works out 45 minutes a day every day, not including his regular basketball games. He watches a lot of "SportsCenter." Dinner each night with his family. To limit "decision fatigue," he likes to set policy via memos where he can check the box on "agree," "disagree," or "let's discuss."

Or, as France’s Louis XV supposedly said, “Après moi le déluge.”

Seasons change; media continues offing conservatives.

"Barack Obama, who was the embodiment of liberal hopes and dreams, is turning out to be a one-man political wrecking ball when it comes to his party–and to liberalism more broadly."

--Peter Wehner, Commentary

Liberalism is down in America today because it isn’t working--slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, a stimulus law that went “pffft,” and that “wrecking ball” itself--Obamacare. Liberal troubles mirror those of Spring 2006, when after the Hurricane Katrina debacle, with an Iraqi civil war exploding during Bush 43’s failing presidency, and fueled by a relentlessly anti-war media, pundits predicted the Republican loss of Congress come Fall.

In 2006, liberals, including Alan Wolfe in the Washington Monthly, knew Republicans were unfit to rule. In an article titled, “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” Wolfe wrote:

Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government. . . . As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster.

Eight years later, conservative Jim Geraghty in a National Review article titled, “Why Liberals Can’t Govern,” has turned the tables, writing:

Liberals’ belief in the inherent goodness of a far-reaching federal government drives them to avert their eyes from its wildest abuses, even when they are occurring right in front of them. Waste and mismanagement are ignored, dismissed, downplayed, and excused, because confronting them too directly would undermine the central tenet of their worldview: that the federal government is an irreplaceable tool for making the world a better place.

Members of the Obama administration judge the federal bureaucracy the way they want the electorate to judge them: by their good intentions, not their actual results.

Still, the very media that tipped the scales against Bush in 2006 remain committed to helping liberals in 2014--a big difference between the challenges facing Obama in 2014 and those Bush confronted eight years ago. In the face of bad progressive government, today’s media advance the liberal cause the same way they did in 2006.

Indeed in every election since they contributed to Democrat Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980, the media go after Republicans; successively Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, George W. Bush, Dick Chaney, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, the “Tea Party,” Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie. As Kevin D. Williamson in the conservative National Review points out, its a wall-to-wall media effort, from comedians to wonks:

there is no substantive difference between what [Jon] Stewart does and what, e.g., Ezra Klein does because for the Left the point of journalism is not to criticize politics or to analyze politics but to be a servant of politics, to “destroy” such political targets as may be found in one’s crosshairs. For the Left, the maker of comedy and the maker of graphs perform the same function. It does not matter who does the “destroying,” so long as it gets done.

Mike Hashimoto, in the Dallas News, surprises by telling the back story of what happens to reporters who stray from the “destroy conservatives” Job #1. He writes that Sharyl Attkisson, who “made a career of holding both sides of official Washington to account, announced with a five-word tweet that . . . ‘I have resigned from CBS.’”

Hashimoto quotes “Politico’s” Dylan Byers:

Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias. . . She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air. . .

Attkisson’s own reporting on the Obama administration. . . had led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting. She is currently at work on a book — tentatively titled Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington — which addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the Obama administration.

Hashimoto notes that Attkisson was one of the few Washington reporters to cover the “Operation Fast and Furious” story--the Obama Justice Department’s gun-walking fiasco, for which her reporting won both Edward R. Murrow and Emmy awards. But Attkisson also won an Emmy for her investigation into shady Republican fund-raising--in the end, not enough to keep her at reliably-liberal CBS.

Wealth and the Staying Power of Nationalism

“in Crimea right now[, w]e're approaching this in the language of Marxism. . . We're the ones that believe in economic determinism if the stock market tanks, if the oligarchs have trouble with their wealth. I'm not sure Vladimir Putin thinks that way. He's thinking like a nationalist, not in terms of economic categories.”

 --George Will, Conservative Panelist, “Fox News Sunday”

Russia

This blog believes the success of capitalism and democracy will bring about peace. If the people have their way, government will allow the market to flourish, because people want “peace and prosperity.”

Unfortunately, government, activist government, gets in the way--a kleptocracy that has to justify its existence by searching for problems to solve. So governments tend to fan nationalism (government as protector) and push socialism (government as provider)--two “isms” that cut against “peace and prosperity.” (With Hitler, the two came together as “National Socialism,” forming a true witches' brew.)

Singapore

So no surprise, really, that Vladimir Putin would risk damaging his nation’s economy in order to advance Russian nationalism. No surprise, but sad anyway.

If you look at the per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of world nations, measured in purchasing power parity and using CIA data, Russia at $17,200 is roughly half as wealthy as the European Union as a whole, and as Japan, France, and Israel individually.  Russia instead is in the same neighborhood as Argentina, Malaysia, and Panama.  Russia’s per capita GDP, in fact, is only $4,500 above the world average.  No wonder Putin boosts nationalism, not economic progress.

Hong Kong

In a ranking of nations by per capita GDP, who are some of the surprising winners?

Singapore’s per capita GDP is $61,400, near the very top and ahead of the U.S. at $50,700. Also ahead of the U.S.--Hong Kong at $52,300. In my lifetime, what a change! Taiwan, another Chinese entity, is at $39,400 nipping at Germany’s heels ($39,700), and ahead of the United Kingdom, Japan, and France. This truly may be China's century.

Taiwan

The Czech Republic has come out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the old Soviet Warsaw Pact nations at $27,600, now ahead of old NATO’s Greece ($24,900) and Portugal ($23,800). Botswana, at $16,400, leads Sub-Saharan Africa, and ranks ahead of European Belarus, North American Mexico, and NATO member Turkey.

What about struggling nations?

Modolva

Modolva’s per capita GDP is only $3,600, leaving a European nation that borders the Ukraine trailing India ($4,000) and just ahead of Ghana ($3,500). Thailand, at $9,900, is now barely ahead of China ($9,800). It used to be the rich rice bowl of Southeast Asia.

Palestine

The Philippines, at $4,700--less than half Thailand’s per capita GDP--continues its economic struggle. Sadly, the West Bank and Gaza have a per capita GDP of only $2,900, less than 9% of Israel’s $32,800.  Finally, Haiti ($1,300), Nepal ($1,300), and Afghanistan ($1,100) are the poorest non-African nations.

Ukraine = Poland, “that little corner of the world”

"The fact that Putin has seized Crimea, a Russian-speaking zone of Ukraine, once part of Russia, where many of the citizens prefer to be part of Russia and where Russia has a major naval base, is not like taking Poland."

--Thomas Friedman, New York Times

I find it beyond belief that Tom Friedman could write such a sentence. Friedman knows better, but he is cynically counting on his audience--the supposedly-sophisticated New York Times readership and their syndicated counterparts elsewhere in the country's wealth pockets--not knowing enough about Europe in 1939 to call him on it. Danzig was at the time a German-speaking zone in Poland, once part of Germany, where most citizens preferred to be part of Germany and near where Germany had a major naval base.

Had Friedman uttered the word “Danzig,” his sentence justifying Russian seizure of Crimea would have immediately sunk, having struck against thoughts of Crimea's parallel to Danzig and Hitler’s conquest of Poland. So Friedman deliberately avoided saying Danzig, instead rolling on to write thoughtlessly:

that little corner of the world is always going to mean more, much more, to Putin than to us, and we should refrain from making threats on which we’re not going to deliver.

“that little corner of the world”?! That’s the way the West treated Czechoslovakia when it gave up the Sudetenland at Munich in September 1938, paving the way for Hitler to grab the rest of that unfortunate nation six months later.

But concerning Danzig, in March 1939 according to Wikipedia:

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, [sought] a deal with Hitler regarding Danzig (and possibly the Polish Corridor), and Hitler hoped for the same. Chamberlain and his supporters believed war could be avoided and hoped Germany would agree to leave the rest of Poland alone.

Yes Mr. Friedman. The parallel between Putin in 2014 and Hitler 75 years earlier seems almost exact.

Ukraine: Washington Post Tells President to Buck up

A Washington Post editorial Sunday titled, “President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy,” cautions the free world's leader to “get real” when it comes to Russian aggression in the Ukraine:

The urge to pull back — to concentrate on what Obama calls “nation-building at home” — is nothing new. . . There were similar retrenchments after the Korea and Vietnam wars and when the Soviet Union crumbled. But the U.S. discovered each time that the world became a more dangerous place without its leadership and that disorder in the world could threaten U.S. prosperity.

as long as some leaders play by what [Secretary of State John] Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not.

While the United States has been retrenching, the tide of democracy in the world, which once seemed inexorable, has been receding. In the long run, that’s harmful to U.S. national security, too. As Putin ponders whether to advance further — into eastern Ukraine, say — he will measure the seriousness of U.S. and allied actions, not their statements. China, pondering its next steps in the East China Sea, will do the same. Sadly, that’s the nature of the century we’re living in.

Comment: There are signs Germany is an even weaker link than Obama in forging a necessarily-strong response to Russian aggression.

Living the Worst Economy Since Great Depression

The Democrats gained control of Congress in 2007. On January 1, 2008, as the Great Recession began, 138,365,000 Americans were working out of a population of 302,786,000, or 45.7%.

On the first day of January 2009, the fourth month of a steep economic decline and also the month Barack Obama became president to complete Democratic control of government, only 133,976,000 Americans were working: 43.9% of a 305,529,000 population. Bad times.

Under Obama, we have undergone a far too slow recovery.  This past  January 1, the job count stood at 137,386,000, but population had increased to 317,298,000, meaning that during “recovery,” the working population share fell further to only 43.3%.  If employment had merely kept pace with population growth since Obama took over, we would have had 1.94 million more people working. But if the economy had recovered to the 45.7% share of population working when the recession began in 2008, then 7.6 million more people would be employed!





As for real GDP under Obama, it fell -2.8% in 2009, grew by 2.5% in 2010, only 1.8% in 2011, and rose 2.8% in 2012. In 9 previous post-World War II recessions (excluding the brief 1980 recession), the GDP recovery rate 3 years from the recession's start averaged 9.5%, with no recovery less than 5.3%. But 3 years after the current recession began, recovery stood at -0.8%!

Now we have learned that real GDP grew at an annual rate of just 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2013, 80 basis points below January’s +3.2% estimate. That means last year’s real GDP rose only 1.9%, a drop from 2.8% in 2012. Our GDP growth rate is actually stalling, falling to just 1.2% above population increase.

Why don’t we grow? Joe Rego at the conservative Wall Street Journal writes the Keynesian economists who dominate Democratic Washington are fixed on demand, explaining that high post-recession unemployment and slow growth stem from weak demand for goods, producing weak demand for labor.

But Rego looked elsewhere for an explanation, quoting University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan, who

studies the supply of labor and attributes the state of the economy in large part to the expansion of the entitlement and welfare state, such as the surge in food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and other safety-net programs. As these benefits were enriched and extended to more people by [Obama’s] stimulus, he argues in his 2012 book The Redistribution Recession, they were responsible for about half the drop in work hours since 2007, and possibly more.

there [may have been] "a general lack of awareness" and economists simply didn't realize everything that government was doing to undermine incentives for work. "You have to dig into it and see it," Mulligan explains. "[Obamacare]'s not going to come and shake you out of your bed and say, 'Look what's in me.' "

Rego is less charitable than Mulligan, guessing liberals prefer the public remain ignorant of how government is growing our dependent class.  And speaking of our lower class, Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post writes

the official poverty rate is a lousy indicator of people's material well-being. It misses all that the poor get -- their total consumption. It counts cash transfers from government but not non-cash transfers (food stamps, school lunches) and tax refunds under the [Earned Income Tax Credit]. Some income is under-reported; also, the official poverty line overstates price increases and, therefore, understates purchasing power. Eliminating these defects, economists Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame built a consumption-based index that estimates the 2010 poverty rate at about 5%. People at the bottom aren't well-off, but they're better off than they once were. Among the official poor, half have computers, 43% have central air conditioning and 36% have dishwashers.

Samuelson’s point is that above the bottom 5%, we have an underclass able to survive in its present state. Samuelson continues,

"a hand up, not a handout". . . failed dismally. America remains a tiered society with millions at the bottom still living more chaotic and vulnerable lives. Government's capacity to boost them into the mainstream was oversold. Although Head Start produces some gains for 3- and 4-year-olds, improvements dissipate . . . by third grade. . . the breakdown of marriage and spread of single-parent households suggest that poverty may grow. . . Low-income men may flunk as attractive marriage mates. Or, "women can live independently more easily rather than put up with less satisfactory marriages," as Brookings' Isabel Sawhill says.

We are back to the link between family breakdown, dependency, and poverty.