Wall Street, Manhattan, Soar

The stock market continues to boom. Yesterday, the Dow rose to 15680, topping the prior record close seen on Sept. 18. The S&P 500 index hit 1772, also a new high. The S&P 500 has finished at a new record in seven of the last nine sessions. The Nasdaq Composite Index increased to 3952, its post-2000 high.

Our New FOX Index of Wall Street health has hit 1,304. That represents travel into stock market “outer space” first reached in May, the escape velocity attained by soaring past old-time market theoretical limits of a Dow of 15,000, an S&P 500 of 1,600, and a NASDAQ of 3,500, for a total of 20,100. With a Dow 15,680 + S&P 1,772 + NASDAQ 3,952 = 21,404, we traveled yesterday to our new “outer space” + 1,304 record (see chart).

Our previous post talked about the wealth of Washington D.C., where median income has risen 23% since 2000, even as it has declined 7% elsewhere. We said resentment hasn’t really surfaced against Washington, but has against Wall Street to Washington's north.

Here’s some striking information about Manhattan, where Wall Street is based. The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall informs us that talking about Manhattan households that earn $100,000 or more “is too blunt a measure for a city with at least 389,100 millionaires, 2,929 multimillionaires and 70 billionaires.” Edsall quotes N.Y.U. political scientist Howard Rosenthal saying about the recent city mayoral election, “Just looking at voters over $100K misses something. $100K is zilch in Manhattan.”

No kidding. Manhattan has a population of 1.62 million, and that mass of people have a mean household income of $121,549 (2005).

In Manhattan, $100,000 is “zilch.”

New Elite v. Middle Class

The facts are in. The American middle class is hurting.

In the Washington Post, Neil Irwin writes,

In 1989, the median American household made $51,681 in current dollars (the 2012 number . . . $51,017). That means that 24 years ago, a middle class American family was making more than the a middle class family was making one year ago. This isn't a lost decade for economic gains for Americans. It is a lost generation. [emphasis added]

Similarly, Eduardo Porter in the New York Times tells us:

America has been standing still for a full generation[--]36 years ago. . . 11.6% of Americans were officially considered poor. . . Using the same official metric — which actually undercounts the poor compared to new methods used by the Census today — the poverty rate is 15%.

Americans work about as much as they did a quarter-century ago. Despite [that], the net worth of the typical American family in the middle of the income distribution fell to $66,000 in 2010 — 6% less than in 1989 after inflation. Though the bursting of the housing bubble and ensuing great recession takes a big share of the blame for families’ weakening finances, it is nonetheless startling that a single financial event . . . could erase a generation worth of progress for those in the middle. [emphasis added]

But is it really a lost generation? Has America truly been standing still for a full generation?

Look closely at the graph above. Notice how income rose, fell, and rose again, peaking in 1999 with the dot.com bubble, then hit that peak again in 2007 with the housing bubble before crashing to current lows, as we dropped to the 1989 peak to which our leading newspapers refer.

The graph tells us what’s bad is our failure to recover from the Great Recession of 2007-9; in fact, it’s gotten worse. Well, worse for those of us living outside the Washington D.C. area, as National Review’s Mark Steyn reminds us:

According to the Census Bureau. . . between 2000 and 2012 the nation’s median household income dropped 6.6%. Yet in the District of Columbia median household income rose 23.3%. . . Washington does nothing but government, and it gets richer even as Americans get poorer.

So, are people getting mad at the elite that makes out while the rest of the country’s middle class suffers? Maybe not the D.C. elite, but they are mad at wealth on up the East Coast. A September NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll found bad news for Wall Street: 42% have a negative view of the New York financial institutions while just 14% have a favorable opinion.  That is the lowest rating of any institution included in the poll.

And 52% think they have been either greatly or somewhat affected by Wall Street crises and its housing market collapse, a number just 7% lower than during the 2008 financial collapse’s immediate aftermath. Only 27% think the economy will get better in the next year, while 48% think it will be about the same.

But here’s another poll finding that explains how people stick with an elite that fails repeatedly to deliver economic growth:

Democrats continue to be seen as the party that is most looking out for the middle class. They lead on the question by 17% and have led on it all the way back to 1989 when it was first asked – although this was the narrowest margin in the poll. . . By contrast, just 23% say the Republican Party represents the middle class and 22% say so of the Tea Party.

That’s a mystery conservative Jonah Goldberg seemingly attributes to bad history:

It’s a little bizarre how the Left [conflates] statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers — be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos, or wonkish bureaucrats — are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia.

And yet, we’re always told that the latest rationalization for increased state power is the “wave of the future”[, a] phrase [that] became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, Communism, socialism.

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Goldberg is right, though he doesn’t explain here that statism, which supports a New Elite for a period of time, doesn’t generate middle class prosperity the way capitalism does.

Capitalism works because it decentralizes decision-making to millions who in striving for their own betterment, lift the whole economy. More and more, we are learning how the “white hats” are regular folks, and the “black hats” are the national elite, working top-down through government. Listen to ex-pollster Scott Rasmussen:

The new reality is captured in Nicco Mele’s book, The End of Big. “The devices and connectivity so essential to modern life put unprecedented power in the hands of every individual — a radical redistribution of power that our traditional institutions don’t and perhaps can’t understand,” he writes. In America, power is decentralizing and individuals are being empowered. While the trend has been building for decades, the politicians are just starting to recognize it.

One big reality check came [from] the “sequester”. In D.C., many expected the American people would rise up in revolt when the so-called “cuts” took effect. Instead, no one noticed. Outside of those who work for the government, there was hardly any impact. For those in power, that was a terrible glimpse into the reality of how irrelevant much of what they do has become.

More recently, Rasmussen added:

On gun control, the sequester and Syria, the political class showed how little grasp it has about the attitudes of mainstream America. Other issues are likely to reveal the same cluelessness as 2014 approaches. The political class world is crumbling. That’s something to celebrate.

Yes but alas, not until those outside “the political class” have mustered the organization and resources needed to force change.

(Alpha) women struggle pursuing both family and career.

Mollie Hemingway, Federalist senior editor, presents a darker picture, darker than Margaret Wente’s portrait earlier of “alpha women,” of the female struggle for full lives encompassing both “pursuit of excellence” and “care for others.” Hemingway is drawing from an article by Baylor political science professor Elizabeth Corey, who writes that efforts to balance parenting and professional work have a fatal flaw:

One requires “persistence, self-confidence, drive, courage, and initiative.” The other requires “attention, focus, care, patience, and self-sacrifice.” They are not happily harmonized.

Corey adds,

this conflict in the soul does not go away, no matter how pleasant and accommodating our colleagues may be, or how flexible our schedules. We are limited, embodied creatures. These limits mean that we cannot do everything to its fullest extent at once, and certain things we may not be able to do at all.

Seems Hemingway raises the right question. Anyway, she generated thoughtful answers from 8 parents, including one father:

• I worked hard to have a fun, exciting, high-profile career in the sports and entertainment industry. And then I had my first child. I always thought I’d return to work after my daughter’s birth, but some new software got installed in me and all I wanted to do was stay home with my baby. I was shocked. 

• [Some] jobs, like being a counselor or working with the poor, can demand precisely the kind of other focus that she speaks of so compellingly with regard to motherhood (and, to my mind, fatherhood). 

• “career pursuit” [can mean] obtaining the skills, credentials, experience, reputation, and position to pay your way. But it can also be portrayed as an idol of narcissism, personal achievement, and self-justification, which supersedes duties to family. . . disturbing . . . this view appears to be going mainstream among our future mothers. . . little room in our culture to admire putting asides [sic] one’s own comfort and desires for the good of others. 

• Work is done to support our families. This idea of them being such separate things is a fairly modern luxury. I think it’s wonderful for women to be able to pursue something other than domesticity, but family should come first, as it also should for men. 

• the U.S. workplace does not put families first. Not by a long shot. In the United States, the needs of the workplace always seem to trump the needs of the family, for both men and women. 

• "Excellence in a particular field requires persistence, self-confidence, drive, courage, and initiative.” I would agree. Why not then view child raising as a “particular field” in which the mother should strive to use her talents of persistence, self-confidence, drive, courage, and initiative? Why do we view ourselves as having wasted our talents when raising our children?

• being able to provide your child with your undivided attention whenever they demand it [isn’t] actually a desirable goal and . . . careers [aren’t] uniquely in conflict with this goal. . . a career is not necessarily in conflict with providing undivided attention on a regular basis, it is only in conflict with undivided attention on demand 24 hours a day. 

• “limited, embodied creatures” . . . means accepting that we simply aren’t meant or intended or designed to achieve both excellence and nurturing — at least, not in the fullest sense of each. It’s not a depressing or unjust reality, in my view. It’s liberating to accept it and learn to appreciate striving not for balance or ultimate success in two fundamentally conflicting arenas, but rather for a lot of success in one and medium-success in the other. 

With one exception, the unscientific sample agrees it’s hard to do both. And, I would guess, so would most alpha women.

"Yes" on Boehner Triumph

 Quotation without comment.
 
From the National Journal’s Tim Alberta:

The biggest winner of the fall fiscal crisis, politically speaking. . . is Boehner, the much-maligned GOP leader who helped usher in a government shutdown that weakened the Republican brand yet strengthened his stature among a fractured House majority. . .

in the words of conservative Rep. Marlin Stuzman (R-IN), "The speaker is stronger now within our conference than he ever has been." Don't believe Stutzman? Consider the reaction on Oct. 16 when Boehner announced to his conference that he would bring the Senate-passed bill to the House floor. Hundreds of House Republicans—including many who ultimately voted against it—stood and delivered a standing ovation in recognition of Boehner's efforts during the shutdown saga.

"I'm really impressed with how he handled things," Stutzman said Wednesday, one week after the final House vote. "He's got a tough job, and through the difficulties of the past several weeks he came out stronger."

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ). . . , who has never hesitated to jab Boehner, voted against final passage. But he proudly participated in the standing ovation. "We haven't seen this kind of unity in three years, and part of it is incredible leadership. The speaker did a great job of leading through this crisis," he said. "You know me, I'm a big critic. But you've got to give credit where credit's due. He did a great job."

Steel-Spined Sisterhood’s Surge to the Summit

I apologize for the unfortunate tone of condescension attached to my 2006 blog entry, the “party in pink,” even though I was serious about the power women wield within the Democratic party. It’s not pink softness Republicans must face. It’s spines of steel, as in “alpha women.”

Alpha women, according to columnist Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail, are

highly educated with full-time careers (and then some). They work like dogs. They have fewer children than most. They’re far more likely to be married to their first husbands. They sleep less, watch less TV and may well have less sex than other women (they’re too busy). The good news is that they exercise more. They’re devoted to their children, but never put careers on hold for them.

Wente calls them (and she includes herself) “the new female elite, a group that has emerged only in the past few decades.” They are, says Alison Wolf, a British economist, “highly educated women [who] have become a class apart.” And they have remade our world.

Wolf says this alpha women elite makes up 15% to 20% of developed world females, with every field open to them. They have more in common with alpha men than they do with the other 80% or 85% of the female population--their interests, career trajectories and priorities, Wente writes, are vastly different:

Less-educated women are still likely to work in gender-segregated fields (teaching, personal service, retail). They’re more likely to drop out of work when they have their kids, and after that, they’d rather work part time. They’re far more likely to have children out of wedlock and to be divorced. Alpha women stay in school longer, marry later, postpone kids until they’re over 30 and don’t stop working when they become mothers.

According to Wente, alpha women don’t marry househusbands; they don’t like to marry down. They want men as high-achieving as they are, including as fathers of their children. Wente believes that most women “secretly regard men without paid work as slackers.”

And alpha women are tigers when it comes to raising children:

If you are an elite parent, you will do everything you can to make sure your children have the same opportunities you’ve had, and that means education. You are willing to invest large amounts of time and money to make sure they get the best one possible. You might send them to Montessori or move to a school district with [language] immersion. You will enrich them with extracurricular activities. You’ll supervise their homework, deliver them to Kumon and hockey games [recall, Wente is Canadian], take them to Europe and send them to Harvard (if they get in). Either way, university is a given, and maybe postgraduate studies too. All this is phenomenally expensive, which is one reason why elite parents have so few children and are motivated to keep working at full tilt.

Wente also maintains that alpha women spend a lot of time trying to improve things for their female elite, a fact that causes her to suggest, “they could reflect a bit more on some of the unintended consequences of women’s liberation, including the growing gulf between the elites and everyone else:”

The rise of alpha women results in a decline in social mobility as the elites perpetuate themselves. “The tendency for children born into the ‘top fifth’ of the developed world to stay there is both high and surprisingly uniform” in many different countries, Wolf writes.

Wolf’s “top fifth” reference is for me almost eerie. We had already found that the “top fifth” of American households represents in fact a quarter of our population, making up 26% of the electorate, paying 86% of income taxes, and in contrast to those below, with 87% living in families. The top 20% of households hold nearly six times as many full-time, year-round workers as the bottom 20%.

Wente concludes,

We never think of ourselves as agents of a new class system, with people just like us at the top. The idea of it horrifies us. Yet without meaning to, we’ve become them.

Government Shutdown Lessons Learned

Progressive commentator Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post:

Apologists say that Boehner had to go through with the shutdown and go down to the wire on the debt ceiling to show the hard-core tea-party members of his caucus that "we control one-half of one-third of the government," as the speaker has said -- that a slender House majority has limited power.

“Apologists say”? I actually hadn’t heard the “apologist” line of reasoning, but it strikes me as 100% right. Boehner clearly has a tiger (his “tea party” faction) by the tail. The tiger had to see for itself there was no way forward. It’s a big victory for Boehner the tiger realized this before it allowed Obama’s Treasury secretary to take the country into default (Treasury has great latitude in how it manages government’s continuous revenue stream--October 17 was Treasury’s own deadline, not a date set by statute).

House Republicans had the power to stop payments to government and to hold off raising the debt ceiling, but with Democrats controlling the Senate and White House, did not have the power to take any positive step. Boehner couldn’t argue a hypothetical though; the “tea party” tiger had to find out for itself. As Boehner foresaw it would.

Robinson neglects to remind us the government shutdown was costing Republicans dearly each day it lasted. The loss would have turned catastrophic had the country gone into default--a catastrophic result that would have greatly benefited Democrats. Boehner saved the country and his party while denying Democrats the spectacular screw-up for which Democrats secretly hoped.

Robinson also neglects to note that Boehner achieved the result he wanted at little cost to his control of House Republicans, even though he broke the “Hastert rule”--former House speaker Dennis Hastert’s insistence that any House action have the support of a majority of Republicans. Boehner broke the rule, and the “tea party” folks, instead of being furious, were happy to have been able to vote against the bill reopening government without at the same time blocking the result.

Finally, Robinson only mentions in passing that Republicans are unlikely to repeat their stunt anytime soon, underplaying what a great achievement it is for Boehner in future battles to be able to keep government open and to cover our debts. As a partisan Democrat writing for fellow Democrats, Robinson is blinded from seeing how Boehner achieved exactly the result he was looking for.

Redefining American Class Warfare (II)

“Obama's . . . view of government is cast from the bronze of Franklin Roosevelt and the '30s. He puts our . . . public sector at the top of American life, to mandate redistribution and prosperity.”

--Alex Castellanos, CNN

Castellanos’ words, quoted in the immediately preceding blog entry, echo a much earlier discussion of how Obama parallels Roosevelt’s poor job creation record, along with Roosevelt’s brilliant political path covering that failure. Both use interest-group-based coalition building. Both rely on “the best and brightest” out of academia. Both preach class warfare, and both practice enlarging government.

For Roosevelt, it was easy to to unite his special interest groups in class warfare against the Republican “old order” of country club WASP businessmen, especially those in industry and finance. The Great Depression “old order” truly had failed the working class, farmers, veterans, the elderly, and others.

But today, Obama represents--he does not battle against--the new upper class of meritocracy winners: our progressive establishment, our top university graduates, New York Times-reading national elite.

Q: So why do Democrats engage in class warfare against their party’s own base?

A: Our elite understands 1) privilege comes with obligations to share wealth, and the rich and their lawyers make out o.k. in any case, 2) meritocracy does open doors for some bright, hard-working lower caste members, keeping the class warfare temperature down, 3) catering to the disadvantaged masses seems a sound re-election strategy, 4) enough “old order” Republicans exist for Democrats to carry on as if Roosevelt’s class warfare enemies of 80 years ago had never gone away, and 5) if Democrats don’t continue the class warfare that underpins socialism, someone else will pick up the cudgel (as Roosevelt did in the 1930s, when he took the fight away from Communists).

“Old order” Republicans--country club WASP businessmen--provide progressive Democrats a symbolic, desirably unattractive cover target for the party's true enemy--the masses of white males and their spouses centered in small businesses, the South, in churches, in rural areas, and in traditional American culture.

Democrats’ enemy, in other words, is the Nixon-Reagan-Bush “silent majority” that opposed “crime in the streets,” forced bussing, affirmative action, women’s lib, welfare queens, abortion, illegal immigration, and America’s youth-based cultural revolution. Subtle Republican appeals to white racism helped hold the white tribe together through most elections from 1968 to 2004. Race worked for Republicans.

But not since Barack Obama pulled enough unmarried women, minorities, and youth together with his progressive elite to put white males and their spouses in their place. The worm has turned.

So race no longer is the answer for Republicans, nor did economics work for Republicans in 2012. Instead race (allied with feminism, adding in youth culture including gay rights) helped Democrats win last year.

Here’s why it’s time for Republicans to take up the mantle of class warfare against the meritocratic elite, to fight under a new banner for the bottom 75% now that Democrats are the upper class:

1. People need jobs that the Democrats’ inefficient, monopoly big government focused on protecting itself doesn’t provide.

2. Buying off blocs of voters with racial (or gender) appeals doesn’t work when the other party offers jobs (Romney’s pitch didn’t connect; the Republicans’ bad).

3. Flattening America by spreading power to the private sector and to the people--drawing upon the hard work and creativity of tens of millions --is the surest path to prosperity. People want to work and will if able to do so, as they did from 1941 to 2000.

The new establishment will protect their privileges, they will fight back hard, but Republican class warfare on behalf of the people against the national elite represents our nation’s best hope; our path to a brighter future.

Redefining American Class Warfare (I)

Progressives such as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman believe we are on the verge of solving major problems, if only the “tea party” would get out of the way:

The Republican Party is being taken over by a Tea Party faction that is not interested in governing on any of the big issues — immigration, gun control, health care, debt and taxes — where, with just minimal compromises between the two parties, we’d amplify our strengths so much that we’d separate ourselves from the rest of the world. Instead, this group is threatening to shut down the government and undermine America’s vital credit rating if it doesn’t get its way. This kind of madness helped to produce the idiotic sequester — the $1.2 trillion in automatic, arbitrary and across-the-board budget cuts from 2013 to 2021 — that is already undermining . . . our strongest assets.

In other words in Friedman’s eyes, we have nearly arrived at the progressive paradise of “philosopher kings” rule discussed in the previous blog.

Friedman’s New York Times colleague, conservative Ross Douthat, has a different take on the “tea party,” viewing these populists as more the Republican future than the establishment Republicans favored by Friedman’s progressives:

the populists tend to have 1) decent ideas and 2) a better sense than their [GOP] establishment rivals of how to brand the party as something other than just a tool of rich people and business interests. . . it isn’t [right] for the Republicans to escape their current cul-de-sac, for the party leadership to “win” and the populist base to “lose” . . . Instead, somebody. . . has to both integrate and purge — leaving the Tea Party’s baggage by the roadside while [speaking] to populist impulses and taking up populist ideas, and folding both into a strategic vision . . . more connected to political reality.

Robert W. Merry, writing in the less-well-known National Interest, suggests Republicans are

a party that lacks discipline, that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to accomplish, that can’t put forth a consistent and coherent message, that can’t get its focus on the fundamental questions of our time[, first:] What is the U.S. government going to do about the debt overhang—currently approaching $17 trillion—that is tied increasingly to runaway entitlements and threatens the financial stability of the nation? The second is: What kind of nation are we going to be—a European-style social democracy or a nation committed to traditional U.S. concepts of limited government and measured federal intrusion into the private economy?

Douthat and Merry agree Republicans made a mess trying to force Obamacare funding cutoffs on a Democratic senate and president. Yet Merry advocates a traditional “shrink government” libertarian agenda instead of the European social democracy model progressives love, while Douthat favors populism that includes middle class-favored government programs.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

As these admitted setbacks and differences suggest, Republicans are fumbling in the aftermath of last year’s crushing presidential defeat, which has yielded up a progressive triumphalism colorfully described by self-identified GOP commentator Alex Castellanos of CNN:

Today's Democratic Party belongs to Elizabeth Warren. It is the party that just nominated a Sandinista trainee who returned from Nicaragua with "a vision of unfettered leftist government" for mayor of New York City, according to the New York Times. And today's Democrats think this is a good thing.

They dream audaciously, as Ruy Teixeira wrote in the Atlantic, of a new "Emerging Democratic Majority." As Peter Beinart noted in a Daily Beast piece, "The Rise of the New New Left," "Bill de Blasio's win in New York's Democratic primary isn't a local story. It's part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking."  The Democratic Party is now animated by the "mobilized left," Beinart writes, emboldened by Internet activism. Their cause was galvanized by President Obama's seemingly impossible re-election.

This blog agrees with Castellanos’ conclusion that

Obama's answer to every economic challenge has been top-down. Our governing class knows best, he believes, especially since Washington's elite now includes him. . . His view of government is cast from the bronze of Franklin Roosevelt and the '30s. He puts our . . . public sector at the top of American life, to mandate redistribution and prosperity.

Except we don’t have prosperity, now or in the near future.

The progressive victory is top of the mind to conservative Matthew Continetti, of the “Washington Free Beacon”:

Democracies love consensus—to a large degree democracies cannot function without it. But the premises of the American consensus today, whether a Democrat or a Republican holds them, are liberal. You have heard them before: the status of illegal immigrants must be made legal, so-called austerity harms the economy, governments must do something to forestall climate change, free trade is all benefits without costs, economic integration with China is a net-plus, diversity is a compelling state interest, health insurance is a right, abortion on demand is a right, Islamophobia is a bigger worry than Islamism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of Mideast turmoil, and at the end of the day human beings across the world, no matter their nation or religion or culture, are basically alike.

Continetti doesn’t believe this agenda works for most of us, citing the example of California:

California has been a laboratory experiment in liberalism, for illegal immigration, progressive taxation, generous welfare benefits, union-run public schools, generous public service pensions, and the most cutting edge environmental policies. The result. . . a hollowed-out economy and politics that satisfies the moral imperatives of rich liberals by buying off interest groups and the poor, and sends the middle class to Nevada and Arizona.

in the words of the New York Times. . . “the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind.” [We are left with] an America governed by liberal or libertarian principles, an America that has adopted economic and social policies that benefit the established and the ascendant, the smart and the wily, while ignoring or bribing the poor and low skilled.

Of the commentators, Continetti most precisely suggests progressive rule isn’t working for the rest of us. The progressive ideal is reality in the sense that progressives truly rule today. Yet the progressive ideal of equality, no classes, or rather one healthy, all-encompassing middle class, is far from reality in a political order run top-down by a meritocratic elite delivering unemployment in place of jobs.

People the same, different, better?

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.

 --Paul, Romans 3: 23-25 (around 55 AD)  

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--Declaration of Independence (1776)  

“the pursuit of happiness.” People are the same before God, and each person is an individual, unique creation endowed with a combination of apparent talents (and handicaps) that will enable him or her to take one's own road through life.

Once we humans grab a measuring stick to judge others, we affect them as well as us. While our path should be right for us, what about the rightness of measuring others? The word “equality” is different from the “created equal” that enables one to engage in “the pursuit of happiness.” “Equality” means introducing a “measuring stick.” It means someone else saying who is “unequal,” who needs help, who should be restricted or brought down. It means, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, “positive liberty” over “negative liberty.”

“Justice” is, like “equality,” another word highly valued in progressive America. And it too uses someone else’s “measuring stick,” the collective imposing its will on the individual, according to the collective’s value system. Yes we need rules and laws to live by, developed and modified by a democratic majority. But the battle to check the collective from imposing their will on the individual goes on every day, hour, and minute.

We want to minimize the collective embrace as much as possible, and maximize to the greatest extent possible each individual’s ability to achieve his or her own “pursuit of happiness.” Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, so disliked what the state had done to primitive “bands of brothers” and sisters that he branded government a kleptocracy. For the benefit of those running the show, government takes our money. And it takes away individual freedom--the freedom Jefferson so esteemed, the individual freedom Paul 2000 years ago in Romans saw God granting each of us to follow--or not follow--the path of faith.

Is hierarchy inherently good, now that it has reached its highest form in university-led American progressivism, our rule by “philosopher kings”--our national elite meritocracy--as documented in the New York Times on behalf of all of us, our era of “all’s right with the world”? Isn’t this the choice Democrats offer us today?

Or is hierarchy what we seek to leave behind, living in a world where people truly shape their own lives, pursue their own version of happiness, free as much as possible from state interference? Living as libertarians, free thinkers, and today’s conservatives advocate?

Let’s look at government-run schools for insight into the problems progressive leadership has left with America today. Government schools are relics of the industrial era, an earlier time when Darwinism and genetics seemingly predetermined human destiny.

We now know better. The New York Times’ own Nicholas Kristof in 2009 reported that studies of three groups that have been unusually successful in American schools--Asian-Americans, Jews, and West Indians--establish that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics. Success depends on perseverance and drive.

This fact is so important. We have an entire school system filled with educators who believe they are stuck with genetically-defined average to slow learners they can do little to nothing about. To cope with the bad hands dealt them, teachers strive to give their little hopeless cases a sense of “self esteem,” offering them less strenuous paths to success, denouncing “teaching to the test,” preaching that everybody is a winner, while quietly rejoicing in the progress of “high IQ” learners who come their way, winners under today’s “philosopher king” meritocratic hierarchy of the alphas, betas, gammas, and deltas government schools seem designed to serve.

In an ideal non-hierarchal America, by contrast, parents and students would choose their own paths to happiness, beginning with freely selecting a school run by the principal him- or herself with no superstructure interfering from above, with teachers empowered to encourage and help each unique individual through applied, dedicated work to achieve his or her full potential--to shoot for the stars. To succeed. To pursue happiness.

You saw it here, first.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorialized:

President Obama likes to invoke his predecessors in the Oval Office, as all Presidents do, but in one sense he is unlike the others: Presidents traditionally try to reach a rough domestic consensus if they are faced with going to war abroad. Mr. Obama wants to smooth everything over abroad so he can get back to his favorite pursuit of declaring war at home.

We said essentially the same thing a week earlier, on September 11, elaborating further in our Monday post, “Obama’s Real Enemy is Republicans.”

Rise and Fall(?) of America’s Progressive State

“Warner Bros. is in early negotiations to pick up the rights to Wilson, the just-released biography of the 28th president by A. Scott Berg. Leonardo DiCaprio, who is attached to star as Wilson, will also produce”

 --Hollywood Reporter

Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." He said this in advance of the French Revolution. Didn’t Voltaire mean, “Certainty is an absurd position, uncertainty is merely an uncomfortable one, so bring on the uncertainty of change!"?

I would suggest so. Anyway, the present doesn’t work. We need that part of the elite believing most strongly in change to draw themselves up and support a petit bourgeoise-proletarian revolution that reduces elite status and cuts into elite income, but is actually aimed at ousting progressives from power. We should be hurrying out the door the era of empires, kingdoms, dictators, and rule by “the best and brightest”.

What follows could be beneficial but messy, decentralized, more like the “creative destruction” needed to fire up the economy; good if it boosts employment and prosperity, welcomes immigrants, generates elementary and secondary education choices, delivers workable health care, and encourages two-parent, more stable families.

Here’s a related important thought from Emily Esfahani Smith, writing in the Atlantic:

the great philosophical debate [that] has shaped Western civilization for over 2,000 years [is] about the nature of the good life. Does happiness lie in feeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the virtue ethicists, think? From the evidence of [a] study [by Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina and Steve Cole at UCLA], it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

First, instinctively, we should take care of ourselves; it’s what we must do. The next step toward adding “meaning” to our own wretched life is to form and raise a family. Do that job, and your life becomes meaningful. We are given life; our charge is to pass it on. Do people focused on “feeling good” make good parents? Not likely. So see how important religion is? It helps us with our primary job--raising a family; leading a meaningful life.

For most of existence for most people, there has been little time for meaningful work beyond raising a family. A meaningful life could simply be family + religion. In America’s first century through the Civil War, for those seeking meaning beyond family and working to support it, abolishing slavery emerged as the dominant cause.

The Civil War changed America dramatically, enlarging government’s reach and creating an industrial powerhouse based in the East and Midwest. The Eastern-based academies of learning broke away from their religion-based origins and embraced science that supported industry while undermining religion. Harvard and other universities gave birth to and nurtured the new, post-slavery path to a meaningful life: progressivism.

Every elected Republican president from Grant to McKinley, 1869-1901, served in Civil War blue, and all supported industry. (Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat who disrupted the flow of Civil War veteran-presidents, bought his way out of the Civil War draft.) Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive Republican post-Civil War colonel, did usher in a new “trust busting” era in 1901, but progressivism truly arrived 12 years later with Woodrow Wilson’s presidency that began exactly 100 years ago.

Wilson’s election turned both houses of Congress Democratic. And Wilson was, of course, a former president of Princeton, a product of the very academia that incubated progressivism. Wilson brought meaning to the lives of progressives, who as the century rolled on, increasingly included not only academics but youth, those from disrupted families, or those without children. People searching for meaning in life beyond family and for that spot religion once filled.

How important was Wilson to America’s progressive tradition? Very, according to Wilson biographer, the progressive A. Scott Berg.   In a Princeton Alumni Weekly interview, Berg said,

Domestically, all our progressive presidents, from FDR to Obama, have followed the trail Wilson blazed. [And] our foreign policy, to this day, springs from Wilson’s speech to Congress on April 2, 1917, when he called for a declaration of war and said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” He implanted that moral imperative into American foreign policy, and many of his successors have sought to implement it.

Asked by his interviewer, “Why is Wilson so hated by many modern conservatives?”, Berg responded:

Wilson entered the White House with an ambitious Progressive agenda and advanced legislation in ways no president ever had. His proactivity shocked Congress and the nation, because many considered him little more than a college professor — all brains and no brawn. They did not understand how strong a politician he was.  Many right-wing critics further object to his imposing the federal government into our lives. Wilson thought there were basic inequities in this country, primarily economic, that needed to be addressed. During his first few years in office, he muscled everything from the Federal Reserve Act to the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Adamson Act with its eight-hour workday through the Congress.

The federal government expanded into areas of the economy in which it had not intruded before, a presence Wilson thought the country needed in order to prosper. With so much wealth in the hands of so few that the average American did not have a fair chance to compete, he wanted to level the playing field.

Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy-Johnson to Carter to Clinton to Obama, 100 years of progressivism and going.

Going, gone. Bigness is unruly. We have moved from massive coal-steel-auto conglomerates to a service economy where each worker counts. We have moved from big government, big industry, big unions, big media to hand-held computers, anywhere texting, twitter, YouTube, individual power, and to seeing bureaucracy as in the way. Yes the old Democratic coalition of special interests still holds together, but any performance-based elite knows it must either deliver results or give way to something else.

We used to say of Maoist China, “We know it’s doomed, we just don’t know when.” Same with the U.S.S.R. Same with American progressivism.

Obama’s Real Enemy is Republicans

We said Obama wanted to turn away from his “red line” threat to bomb Syria, because his real war is here at home. How right we seem to have been. Just five days later, the president is back doing what he loves best: savaging Republicans by name.

What’s particularly striking about Obama’s White House attack on Republicans earlier today is that it came during a police lock-down a few blocks from where Obama was speaking, a speech delivered in the immediate aftermath of a mass murder on Federal property. It was a national tragedy.  Thirteen dead, real blood still flowing. TVs were focused on the hunt for a possible surviving second shooter and on evacuation of the wounded. But the president bulled ahead anyway, dropping verbal bombs on his true enemies:

The problem is -- at the moment, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to be focused on how to grow [the] economy and build the middle class. I say, at the moment, because I am still hoping that a light bulb goes off here. So far, their budget ideas revolve primarily around even deeper cuts to education, even deeper cuts that would gut America’s scientific research and development, even deeper cuts to America’s infrastructure investment -- our roads, our bridges, our schools our energy grid.

you’ve got Republicans controlling the House of Representatives . . . So this is always going to be tough. Having said that, I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can’t get 100% of what it wants. That’s never happened before. But that’s what’s happening right now.

You have some Republicans in the House of Representatives who are promising to shut down the government at the end of this month if they can’t shut down [Obamacare]. And if that scheme doesn’t work, some have suggested they won’t pay the very bills that Congress has already run up. . .

[Obamacare] has been the law for three-and-a-half years now. It passed both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. It was an issue in last year’s election, and the candidate who called for repeal lost. The...(APPLAUSE) Republicans in the House have tried to repeal or sabotage it about 40 times. They’ve failed every time.

it’s time for responsible Republicans who share [my] goals -- and there are a number of folks out there who I think are decent folks -- I’ve got some disagreements with them on some issues -- but I think genuinely want to see the economy grow and want what’s best for the American people.

Republicans include “a number of . . . decent folks.” If that’s the president's best pitch to the loyal opposition, we are witnessing war.

Obama’s latest economic-based attack on Republicans follows a late July opening salvo delivered at Illinois’ Knox College, a speech Nile Gardiner of the Telegraph (U.K.) said

was supposed to be the president’s come-back moment, the first of a series of addresses aimed at retaking the initiative by the White House. Instead it was a train-wreck. In an hour-long address, which seemed to last forever, the president spoke in deeply partisan terms, often with bitterness and anger, lambasting his political opponents, dismissing criticism of his policies, and launching into his favourite theme of class warfare, attacking the wealthy and what he calls the “winner takes all economy.” In a display of extraordinary arrogance, he condemned what he called “an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals,” a direct reference to the Congressional investigations into the IRS and Benghazi scandals, which most Americans don’t see as phony. He also defended his increasingly unpopular Obamacare proposals, attacking what he calls “a politically-motivated misinformation campaign.”

Commentators such as Michael Barone, writing in the conservative Washington Examiner, believe they understand Obama can’t shake his love for campaigning (i.e., verbal warfare), accompanied by his disinterest in most everything else:

We have a president who loves to give campaign speeches to adoring crowds, but who doesn't seem to have much interest in governing. . . Obama called for increasing the minimum wage[, which] tends not to create but to destroy jobs, especially for young people with few skills and little work experience. He also called for job retraining. . . Unfortunately, studies have shown for years that government job training programs aren't very effective.

The president [proposed] universal pre-school education. But the administration's own studies have shown that the four-decades-old Head Start program produces little in the way of lasting educational gains. This looks more like an expensive attempt to create more jobs for teacher union members -- and more union-dues money to help elect Democratic politicians -- than a serious attempt to stimulate the economy. The problem Obama faces on this latest pivot to the economy is that most voters believe his policies have retarded rather than stimulated economic growth and job creation.

The partisanship coming out of the White House is nearly unprecedented. As Steven Law pointed out in the conservative Wall Street Journal, Obama is the first president since Nixon to refer to political opponents as "enemies," having done so in October 2010.

In the eyes of Peggy Noonan, also writing in the Wall Street Journal, intense partisanship generates fear:

a lot of people are afraid to be on the wrong side. The wrong side is against the assumptions of the Democratic Party. The right side is for those assumptions. Dig around in the executive agencies and their actions, and you’re helping the wrong side.

And that may be part of the president’s war strategy--strike fear in the hearts of the enemy and in the hearts of anyone who could be identified as aiding the enemy.

Income Inequality Rising Under Obama

My brief against progressive elite rule begins with failed job creation, followed closely by a failed K-12 education system in working class and poor neighborhoods. Democrats say one thing, do no-thing. Behind these failures is a single truth touched by my “progressive elite” characterization--we are outside a ruling class that governs for itself, not for the people.

Think our national elite is on your side? Then listen to AP reporter Paul Wiseman’s words on U.S. inequality:

• the richest 1%. . . earned more than 19% of the country's household income last year -- their biggest share since 1928 . . . And the top 10% captured a record 48.2% of total earnings last year. 

• In 2012, the incomes of the top 1% rose nearly 20% compared with a 1% increase for the remaining 99%. . . since the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1% have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95% of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1%. That compares with a 45% share for the top 1% in the economic expansion of the 1990s and a 65% share from the expansion that followed the 2001 recession. 

Comment: Obama became president in 2009. Wiseman’s statistics are an unspoken repudiation of Obama administration economic policies.

• The top 1% of American households had pretax income above $394,000 last year. The top 10% had income exceeding $114,000. 

• Economists point [out that] U.S. workers now compete with low-wage labor in China and other developing countries. Clerical and call-center jobs have been outsourced to countries such as India and the Philippines. . . technology [replaces] workers in performing routine tasks. 

• The percentage of American workers represented by unions has dropped from 23.3% in 1983 to 12.5% last year, [reducing] costs for many employers. . . one reason corporate profits hit a record this year . . ., even [with sluggish] economic growth [and] 7.2 % [unemployment]. 

Wiseman quotes Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez defending America's top earners. Saez says highly paid executives or entrepreneurs are the "working rich," not your grandfather’s elite enjoying lives of leisure on inherited wealth. Exactly!! When a Berkeley professor defends the top 1%-10%--like himself people who succeeded by merit--it confirms we are in a transformed America led by wealthy progressives, with the rest of us inferiors trailing below.

They know it. Do you? And does their rule make us all better?

Syria fade: Obama’s just not that into being commander in chief.

I was transfixed two weeks ago by John Kerry’s forceful reaction to Syrian gangster-president Bashar al-Assad’s gassing of women and children. With his secretary of state speaking so strongly, the president himself surely was planning meaningful retaliation, or so I hoped.

But then came Obama’s decision to heave the Syria grenade into Congress’ lap. Obama would let Congress take the hit for firing missiles into Syria. Obama had punted.

Well, passing the buck didn’t work out so well either. As it became increasingly clear that Congress would toss the Syria grenade back by rejecting Obama’s recommendation, in the process handing the president a prestige-deflating defeat, things looked bleak for the White House.

But at the 11th hour, Russian president Vladimir Putin offered to talk Assad into giving up his chemical weapons. Surprised and happy, Obama called for a “postponed” Congressional vote. “Peace in our time,” as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said at Munich in 1938, admittedly under much more serious circumstances.

Obama is a known quantity by now. He is a committed progressive, shaped by his professors shaped by the 1960s--we fought the wrong war! Why were we in Vietnam when the establishment was suppressing blacks and women at home? Obama is a child of affirmative action, raised by white grandparents in multi-racial Hawaii, a state with few African Americans; young, smart, and privileged enough to see how race worked for, not against, him, determined to help minorities and women supplant America’s white male power structure, to take down the America of Reagan Democrats, evangelicals, and the “new” South.

The old establishment used national security to hold the power structure together --“politics stops at the water’s edge.” Obama understood this, how the military industrial complex and the cold war diverted resources away from building economic justice at home. Enemies abroad? In Vietnam, in the Soviet Union, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Panama, in Iraq, in Iran, in Cuba, in Venezuela--these so-called “enemies” were creatures of the establishment, exaggerated threats used to keep resources away from America’s truly disadvantaged.

As Obama moved to the White House, he recognized that America’s first president of color would have a unique opportunity to take the country past old, artificial “enemies” labels, giving it paths to true peace. When that failed to work out, Obama lost interest in foreign policy beyond turning off his predecessor’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He capitalized on one national security event--the 2011 CIA-led effort to kill Osama bin Laden.

Heading into the 2012 Republican and Democratic conventions, the Gallup Poll had Mitt Romney ahead of Barack Obama by 47% to 45%. Gallup reported that in 12 of 15 previous presidential elections, the pre-convention poll leader won the election.

How much did these facts have to do with Obama’s saying more or less out of the blue on August 20, 2012, a week before the GOP convention:

We have been very clear to the Assad regime. . . a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.

Commenting on Obama’s “impromptu” remarks at the time, the Washington Post noted they “represented his strongest language to date on how the United States might respond to contain Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.”

“strongest language to date.”  Wasn’t Obama reminding the country that the leader who killed bin Laden was cautious but still tough enough for the job, deserving to lead the polls? Only one thing wrong; in his statement, the president had pledged to act.

Thus Obama’s out-of-place 2012 words have brought us to our current curious reality: the president speaks out against Assad’s atrocity, threatens destruction, but in the end, takes no action. His heart remains fixed on peace abroad, war at home.

Obama and Holder fight needed equal opportunity for black children.

"it’s bewildering, if not downright perverse, for the Obama administration to use the banner of civil rights to bring a misguided suit that would block these disadvantaged students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due."

--Washington Post editorial

“Bewildering,” “perverse” from the Obama-friendly Washington Post. And the Post is right. Democrats pose as the party of minorities, and preach education as the path to success. So why are Obama and the Justice Department suing to block Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s effort to help blacks get a better education?

In the governor’s words:

The Justice Department has challenged my state in court for having the temerity to start a scholarship program that frees low-income minority children from failing schools. . . Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder would rip children out of their schools and handcuff them to the failing schools they previously attended. And, in the ultimate irony, they are using desegregation orders set up to prevent discrimination against minority children to try to do it.

Never mind that 90% of the children receiving scholarships in Louisiana are minorities or that 100% of their parents choose to apply for these scholarships. . . a disproportionate share of those in poverty are minorities. Studies of health-care outcomes, incarceration levels and economic opportunity all show that education is key to improving quality of life.

Louisiana’s school choice program began in 2008, first in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, then throughout the state. Under the program, only low-income families with children in poor schools qualify for scholarships that send children to schools of their choice. In the past two years, students previously trapped in failing schools showed improvement on literacy and math tests, with the share performing at grade level rising 7%, even though 60% taking the test this year had been at new schools only 8 months. Not surprisingly, more than 90% of their parents reported satisfaction with their children’s new schools.

Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, is similarly outraged by the Obama Justice Department action. As Lowry explains it:

The Justice Department petition harkens back to a 40-year-old desegregation case involving state-aided white flight to private schools. That case led to a court order forbidding Louisiana from providing assistance to private schools, meant to frustrate desegregation. The document’s description of the noxiousness of past practices is quite compelling — but for the fact that it’s not 1975 anymore. Louisiana has an Indian-American governor, Bobby Jindal, who manifestly cares about the quality of education for everyone — a sentiment that the racial obsessives at Justice evidently can’t understand. [emphasis added]

the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice notes that almost every empirical study finds “that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools.” Since the advent of a voucher program in Milwaukee, the city’s private schools are only 35% white, whereas they used to be 75% white.

I believe strongly that 1) education reform is nearly our top priority, and 2) reform won’t come from within the public union-run Democratic Party. So it’s heartening for me to see the Washington Post fighting back. And encouraging as well to read Sarah Garland’s article in the progressive Atlantic. Garland writes:

the test-score gap between the children of the poor (in the 10th percentile of income) and the children of the wealthy (in the 90th percentile) has expanded by as much as 40% and is now more than 50% larger than the black-white achievement gap—a reversal of the trend 50 years ago. Underprivileged children now languish at achievement levels that are close to four years behind their wealthy peers.

middle-class children are also falling further behind their affluent peers. The test-score gap between middle-income (the 50th percentile of income) and poor children has remained stagnant; it’s the gap between the top earners and the rest that is growing rapidly. . . more poor and middle-income children are completing college these days, [yet] they can’t keep up with the growth in college graduates among the wealthiest families. . . more and more seats in highly selective schools [are] occupied by students from high-income families.

We have been arguing the fault line in America is one of class, not race. Now Garland, a liberal, says the same thing. Here’s the truth: thinking people know a poor white needs help more than a privileged black. But here’s another truth: when your coalition is built upon the public sector unions, shored up by minorities and unmarried women, you don’t dare let victimization by race or sex fade as major issues. Reform will have to come from outside the Democrats’ core coalition.

In her article, Garland builds sympathy for working class families stuck with poor schools by telling us about Larry and Krystal (who are, incidentally, black):

Larry works for the city’s medical-examiner office as a computer technician, and Krystal has stayed home with the boys since New York City laid her off from her job as an operator for its information hotline. [They] want their boys to be more successful than they have been. . .

Opportunities that would launch the boys on a path to being lawyers or doctors can seem elusive, however. Larry, a product of the New York City public schools, refuses to send his children to any of the poorly performing public schools in the neighborhood. They can’t afford Catholic school tuition—about $5,000 a year, they say. Instead, Krystal has researched privately run charter schools in the area and picked out her top choice: an all-boys charter run by the network Uncommon Schools, which receives high marks on the city’s grading system but chooses students through a lottery—meaning they won’t necessarily get in.

Arrrgh! How can this country continue condemning working class children to bad neighborhood schools, instead of providing them the same school choice privileged families enjoy?

How long?!!

Labor Day: Where are the jobs?

LABOR DAY SHOCK! TIMES DISCOVERS JOB LOSS!

It’s a surprise to me, anyway. We have talked for years about the declining (here and here) labor force participation rate. But for the New York Times to focus on job loss, well, that’s an event in itself.

When it comes to the New York Times, we share the view of Matthew Continetti, editor in chief of the conservative “Washington Free Beacon”:

A sort of pep talk to the liberal bourgeoisie. . . is what the New York Times under Jill Abramson has become. One reads it to confirm rather than challenge one’s perceptions of the world [--] The Republicans are no good, the president is doing the best he can, equality marches on, America is powerless to influence other countries, illegal immigration has no downside, the government should not be trusted except when it regulates the economy, “institutional” (i.e., invisible) racism plagues contemporary society, traditional religion is a curiosity, etc. . . The paper and its intended audience. . . form a closed circuit.

So it’s a shock, really, to have New York Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt writing:

the decline in labor force participation almost certainly receives too little attention. Each month, small changes in the unemployment rate receive great scrutiny. We often overlook just how flawed a measure of the job market that rate has become over the last 13 years.

And to make his point even more obvious, Leonhardt runs two unmistakable graphs. One shows how much the participation rate has fallen since Obama took over:

The second makes it clear we are discussing a relatively recent phenomenon. Labor force participation grew through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as women joined the workforce and the economy boomed, then plateaued during 2002-07 before its current fall:

At least the New York Times now acknowledges we have a problem. But leave it to former Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, to help us feel the emotional cost of our excessive unemployment:

Joblessness is a personal crisis because work is a spiritual event. A job isn't only a means to a paycheck, it's more. "To work is to pray," the old priests used to say. God made us as many things, including as workers. When you work you serve and take part. To work is to be integrated into the daily life of the nation. There is pride and satisfaction in doing work well, in working with others and learning a discipline or a craft or an art. To work is to grow and to find out who you are.

In return for performing your duties, whatever they are, you receive money that you can use freely and in accordance with your highest desire. A job allows you the satisfaction of supporting yourself or your family, or starting a family. Work allows you to renew your life, which is part of the renewing of civilization. Work gives us purpose, stability, integration, shared mission. And so to be unable to work—unable to find or hold a job—is a kind of catastrophe for a human being.

It’s Labor Day, and we most fervently desire a U.S. with more folks working. To get there, Noonan says, we need

a political leader on fire. . . with real passion about the idea of new businesses, new inventions, growth, productivity, breakthroughs and jobs, jobs, jobs. Someone in love with the romance of the marketplace. We've lost that feeling among our political leaders. . . Really good politicians don't try to read the public, they are the public. They don't try to be like the people, they actually are.

So Assad gets away after all with gassing his own people?

Placard on President Truman's Desk

According to the New York Times, Obama told his staff yesterday (and the public today) that before launching missiles against the Syrian government in response to Syrian regime use of chemical weapons against their own people, he:

wanted to pull back and seek Congressional approval first. . . the most compelling [reason was] that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.

The President added today:

I know well we are weary of war. We’ve ended one war in Iraq. We’re ending another in Afghanistan. And the American people have the good sense to know we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military.

So there it is. Obama seems to be passing the buck after first promising retaliation, and positions Congress--loaded with opposition from both left and right to striking Syria--to take the hit for leaving butcher Bashar al-Assad effectively unpunished for his crimes.  It's legally sound to have Congress involved, but it's up to presidents, our commander-in-chiefs after all, to lead us into hostile territory.

Help blacks? Create jobs and fix schools.

Quotation without comment.

while many Democrats have spent the last 50 years dining out on the glories of 1965 and attempting to throw figurative white sheets over the heads of Republicans, Republicans have been searching for solutions to the post-civil rights era problems plaguing black America. Who has been in the forefront of what many have called "the civil rights issue of our time" -- the schools? Republican governors like Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mary Fallin and Bob McDonnell have championed some form of school choice program for low-income students. What does everybody think No Child Left Behind was all about? Hint: It wasn't aimed at suburban kids in decent schools.

--Mona Charen, “RealClearPolitics”

“I have a dream,” and it’s jobs for blacks.

10% of black Americans were unemployed in 1963, compared with 12.6% today. For most of this time, unemployment among blacks has remained almost double the national average and that of white Americans.

--National Urban League’s 2013 “State of Black America Report”

50 years ago to the day, the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, he spoke at the 250,000 person “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” To King and chief march organizer A. Philip Randolph—president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO—the march was as much about economic justice (jobs) as it was about civil rights (freedom). After King’s speech, the first significant civil rights act passed Congress within the year. But as for jobs, blacks remain as far behind whites as they were 50 years ago.

The Urban League report quoted above makes it clear how bad it’s been for blacks under five Democratic and five Republican administrations over 50 years. During that period, the national unemployment rate during recession years only averaged 6.7%. Yet over the 50 years, the black unemployment average has been 11.6%. Only in one year, 1969, did black unemployment (at 6.4%) ever dip below the national recession average. That means for 50 years, black unemployment has been permanently in recession.

In his speech today at the Lincoln Memorial, President Obama paid tribute to the 1963 March’s focus on jobs. But, no surprise, he did so in a manner that emphasized the role government must play in fixing the problem:

the securing of civil rights, voting rights, the eradication of legalized discrimination -- the very significance of these victories may have obscured a second goal of the march, for the men and women who gathered 50 years ago . . . were there seeking jobs [yes!] as well as justice -- not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity. . . This idea that -- that one’s liberty is linked to one’s livelihood [yes!], that the pursuit of happiness requires the dignity of work [yes!], the skills to find work [oh no, government!], decent pay [government action], some measure of material security [government redistribution] -- this idea was not new.

Dr. King explained that the goals of African-Americans were identical to working people of all races: decent wages [government], fair working conditions [government], livable housing [government], old age security [government], health [government] and welfare measures [government] -- conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.

What King was describing has been the dream of every American. It’s what’s lured for centuries new arrivals to our shores [It’s government that lured immigrants here? Really?]. And it’s along this second dimension of economic opportunity, the chance through honest toil to advance one’s station in life [yes!], that the goals of 50 years ago have fallen most short. . . black unemployment has remained almost twice as high as white employment (sic), Latino unemployment close behind. The gap in wealth between races has not lessened, it’s grown [stayed the same, anyway]. . . For over a decade, working Americans of all races have seen their wages and incomes stagnate.

Obama’s got the problem right. But who’s fault is that?

Obama blames:

• “corporate profits” 
• “the pay of a fortunate few” 
• “a fortress of substandard schools and diminished prospects, inadequate health care and perennial violence” 
• “technology and global competition” 
• “Entrenched interests -- those who benefit from an unjust status quo” resisting “any government efforts to give working families a fair deal, marshaling an army of lobbyists and opinion makers to argue [against] minimum wage increases or stronger labor laws or taxes on the wealthy who could afford it just to fund crumbling schools” who say “growing inequality was the price for a growing economy, a measure of the free market -- that greed was good and compassion ineffective, and those without jobs or health care had only themselves to blame.”
• “elected officials who found it useful to practice the old politics of division, doing their best to convince middle-class Americans of a great untruth, that government [is] to blame for their growing economic insecurity -- that distant bureaucrats were taking their hard-earned dollars to benefit the welfare cheat or the illegal immigrant.” 

In other words, Obama blames his preferred enemy; his straw-man version of white, rich Republican males.

Obama does admit:

• “assassinations set off self-defeating riots” 
• “grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior” 
• “Racial politics [led to a] language of recrimination” 
• “equality of opportunity. . . was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself” 

But his concluding “dream” isn’t exactly for a nation measuring children by “the content of their character.” No, it’s rather a pean to his winning Democratic coalition of the government-dependent, the women, the minorities, and the young:

I see it when a white mother recognizes her own daughter in the face of a poor black child. I see it when the black youth thinks of his own grandfather in the dignified steps of an elderly white man. It’s there when the native born recognizing that striving spirit of a new immigrant, when the interracial couple connects the pain of a gay couple who were discriminated against and understands it as their own. That’s where courage comes from, when we turn not from each other or on each other but towards one another, and we find that we do not walk alone. That’s where courage comes from. (Applause.)

Obama isn’t fighting for jobs. He’s fighting for “good jobs and just wages” [government work makes those goals possible]. And he’s fighting for “the right to health care in the richest nation on earth for every person” (Applause); “for the right of every child. . . to get an education that . . . prepares them for the world that awaits them” (Applause); and to “feed the hungry and house the homeless and transform bleak wastelands of poverty into fields of commerce and promise” [government-built infrastructure].

In 1963, we had a march for jobs. For the next 40 years, America created millions of jobs, but it has stalled in the last decade. We need to get back to honest job creation, for the benefit of white, black, and all between. And though Obama and company still believe in big government’s ability to fix the economy, here’s the basic fact:

Only small business creates jobs.

What U.S. response to Syrian WMD used on women and children?

“When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act.”

--Samantha Power, U.S ambassador to the United Nations, in “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2002)

Thank goodness the President will respond (in some, as yet undefined, manner) to Syria’s gassing of its own women and children. The proper action, foreshadowed by secretary of state John Kerry this afternoon, cuts against bad advice by conservative Charles Krauthammer and others that the U.S. continue to stay out of the Syrian conflict--even after the horrors of gas attacks on, and massive deaths among, Syrian civilians.

Edward Luttwak, a Middle East defense specialist at the conservative Center for International Studies, offered the rationale for this bad “no intervention” advice:

the Obama administration should resist the temptation to intervene . . . in Syria’s civil war. A victory by either side would be equally undesirable for the United States. At this point, a prolonged stalemate is the only outcome that would not be damaging to American interests.

While Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) atrocity against his own people is chilling, it is also deeply chilling that American national security experts would prefer to have two enemies of Israel continue killing each other indefinitely, rather than have the U.S. weigh in on the side of gas attacks victims.

I have been reminded, again, why I don’t like Realpolitick.

Thus far, the neoconservatives best helper has been the American public’s deep aversion to another war anywhere, anytime--including in Syria. A Reuters/Ipsos poll, just taken, found that only 25% of Americans would support U.S. intervention to counter Syrian president Assad's use of chemical weapons, with 46% opposed, a decline from an August 13 Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 30% supporting intervention if chemical weapons were used, with 42% opposed.

In her book, Power had an answer for those who quote polls to block U.S. intervention in genocidal situations:

The inertia of the governed cannot be disentangled from the indifference of the government. American leaders have both a circular and a deliberate relationship to public opinion. . . constituencies are rarely if ever aroused by foreign crises, even genocidal ones, in the absence of political leadership, and yet at the same time U.S. officials continually cite the absence of public support as grounds for inaction.

Here’s hoping Power and Kerry are able to help Obama follow through (at last) with a tough U.S. response to Assad’s atrocity against his own.