Liberals Call Inflation Scaremongering

Invest in inflation. It’s the only thing going up. – Will Rogers

World War II ration card

The left is trying to justify the escalation of inflation as “Inflation isn’t inexorably a bad thing. In fact, it used to be considered good.” This is another overt attempt to habituate American consumers to soaring prices and to a new low standard of living and to shortages food, goods, and services, a diminished quality of life. What scaremongering about inflation gets wrong - The Washington Post

Inflation represents economically a rapid rise in prices caused by a range of factors. The rate of inflation is calculated by averaging the percentage growth rate of the prices of a selected sample of commodities, traditionally called a “basket of goods.”

There is not much good about inflation but plenty of bad: financial costs and a social cost. Even Keynesian economists recognize that inflation is damaging to the economy in general and to society.

Bondholders, for example, are exposed to losses from inflation. If the overall price level rises, the purchasing power of $1,000 for example, at bond maturity, diminishes, making bond investment an uncertain proposition.

Rising inflation makes it risky to enter any long-term contracts. Lending and borrowing money are also a big gamble – neither lenders nor borrowers would be eager to enter such long-term contracts. But investment becomes impossible without long-term loans. This results in a stagnant economy. A stagnant economy with high inflation then experiences stagflation.

Inflation causes consumers to change their behavior and no longer shop where they used to, they look for bargains elsewhere. Businesses engage in similar practices, they start shopping around for cheaper suppliers; businesses experience rising costs as well, which then slows down the efficiency of the economy.

Low inflation does not necessarily lead to high inflation in theory. In practice, we have seen what happened with hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, in Venezuela more recently, and in the Weimar Republic. There are pictures from that period of a man pushing a wheelbarrow of currency (Deutsche Marks) to buy a loaf of bread and of children building a pyramid of cash during the hyperinflation of the 1920s because it was just as cheap as using sticks or other materials.

In 1989 an article described how Nicaraguans stopped using piggy banks to save coins because due to the 161% inflation for a two-week period – a “penny saved is a penny spent.” Even offering 70% interest rate per month for saving accounts at banks did not persuade Nicaraguans to save money, they spent it as soon as they got it before more inflation deteriorated its value. (New York Times, June 22, 1989, p. 2)

A wise sage, Yogi Berra, allegedly said long ago, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Indexing (adjusting monetary payments to the reported inflation rate) “seeks to reduce the social costs of inflation” for two reasons: 1) to reduce the capricious redistribution of income caused by inflation; and 2) to reduce the blow caused by our tax system which levies taxes on nominal interest (no adjustments are made for the decline in the purchasing power of money) and nominal capital gains (the difference between what an investor pays for an asset and what it sells it for, again, not taking into account the loss of purchasing power of money).

Inflation strips the purchasing power of wages. Seldom do wages rise faster than inflation but they do occasionally. Keynesian economists believe that in the long run “wages tend to outstrip prices if new capital equipment and innovation increase output per worker.”  Democrats, however, have been telling us since Obama that we must get used to “the new norm” of a lesser standard of living, a low growth economy, and a diminished country.

Inflation has been measured with the traditional basket of goods, food (at home, cereals, bakery products, meat, poultry, fish and eggs, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, other foods, away from home, alcoholic beverages), housing (shelter including rent, homeowner costs, fuel, fuel oil, coal and bottled gas, piped gas, and electricity), clothing (men’s women’s, boys’, girls’, footwear), transportation (private and public), medical care (hospital stays), entertainment (ticket prices), other goods and personal care services (shampoos, toothpaste, soap).

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is used to make cost of living adjustments to wages and pensions each year. However, seldom do cost of living increases match the actual inflation rate.

The CPI market basket was altered in 1986 to reflect higher spending on housing and food eaten away from home. During the Obama administration, the way inflation has been calculated, “core inflation,” has omitted prices for groceries and gasoline, a move that makes inflation rate appear lower than it is.

The excuse for this omission was that food and gasoline prices are “sensitive to external shocks.” The price of gasoline and food are often the result of fiscal and monetary policies (money printing ad nauseam) by administrations in charge, both Republican and Democrat.

The escalating prices of food and the disruption in the supply chain world-wide has been the result of the pandemic created by globalists with a gain-of-function Corona virus which caused unnecessary deaths from purposeful lack of proper medical treatment and bankruptcies of millions of small, medium, and large businesses across the globe. Americans were also paid by a Democrat regime to stay home, leaving millions of jobs available and unfilled.

The fact that globalists are trying to destroy the fossil fuel industry is no longer a conspiracy theory as President Biden has closed the XL Keystone pipeline on the first day of his presidency, sending oil prices into shock, doubling gasoline prices at the pump, and changing the American status under President Trump from an oil exporting country to an oil importing country again dependent on the OPEC cartel and its oil production manipulation.

The calculation of CPI understates inflation by “excluding housing prices” but not rent and “hiding enormous increases in health care, schools, prescriptions, and higher education.” … What scaremongering about inflation gets wrong - The Washington Post

The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the Laspeyres formula on:

-          Selected shelter services (housing at school, excluding board)

-          Selected utilities and government fees (electricity, residential water and sewage maintenance, utility (piped gas service, state motor vehicle registration and license fees)

-          Selected medical care services (prescription drugs, physicians’ services, hospital services, dental services, services by other medical professionals, and nursing homes and adult day care) Calculation : Handbook of Methods: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov)

The CPI, if used correctly, is a prime indicator of inflation and recession. It reflects economic trends but influences them as well.

When inflation becomes galloping inflation as it did at the turn of the twentieth century, one mark in 1918, at the time of the Armistice, was worth 726 million marks in late 1923. Germans burned their marks as it was cheaper than buying wood for their stoves.

Inflation is an ancient problem. When Emperor Valerian was captured by barbarians in 259 A.D., Romans rushed to turn their money into goods, thus creating a rate of inflation at 1,000 percent over 17 years (too much money chasing too few goods).

Emperor Diocletian tried to curb inflation by passing an edict which fixed maximum prices (price fixing) on 1,000 goods, food, raw materials, textiles, wages, and transportation. It was an utter failure even though the punishment for violating his edict was death.

This is nothing new as our Federal Reserve System (the Fed), in control of our monetary policy (money stock and interest rates) is printing too much money to help pay our Democrat government’s bloated spending and debt to support their globalist mantra, Build Back Better. It should be more aptly renamed, Build Back Broke.

The Biden regime claims that inflation is 7 percent - the highest it has been since 1982, but is it only 7 percent? How accurate is this CPI? Go to the grocery store and the gas station and you decide.

Left-wing Mob Rule Nation and Kristallnacht

Minneapolis looting by paid rioters KWNG photo

I escaped communism in late 1970s and, in forty years, my adopted country changed from the beacon of freedom and prosperity, with ample opportunities to succeed, promoting one’s individual talents, to a left-wing mob rule nation where the Nazi’s Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” is repeated by paid rioters around the nation in Democrat-leadership cities, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Nashville, San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, Memphis, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Madison, Denver, Albuquerque, Columbus, Houston, Phoenix, Louisville, St. Louis, Oakland, and Boston. https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/kristallnacht

I do not see how a country can survive if half the population and one of its two major political parties are dedicated to its destruction. These people want to destroy everything normal people value and replace it with a totalitarian nightmare they call “globalism.” This is war but only one side seems to be fighting.

Communist agitators have filled our population ranks thanks to indoctrination from colleges, universities, public schools, politicians at all levels of government, the mainstream media, and entertainment. Universities are no longer the seat of learning and of expression of divergent opinions but a “bedrock of extreme ideologies.”

Tenured professors like the woman at the University of Alabama in Birmingham allegedly tweeted to teach rioters how to take down monuments. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/1/univ-of-alabama-professor-instructs-rioters-on-how/

Sen. Joe McCarthy was vindicated, the declassified Venona Papers have proven that fact, but he was crucified nevertheless for telling the truth that we have many American communist traitors among us. https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/

Conservatives had hoped that the opposition party, the Republicans, would provide a divergent side to the ideological war that has been escalating for years. To the Republicans’ Robert’s Rules of Order strategy, the Democrats lie, cheat, beat, and steal with gusto. https://robertsrules.org/

They attack anybody who disagrees with them physically, legally, illegally, economically, psychologically, etc. Republicans call for and use proper legislative and legal procedures, reason, logic, civilized means of solving disagreement and conflict, and negotiations. Charles Maranto aptly wrote, “Democrats have a crime family approach” to conflict resolution. “Republicans have been strategic and tactical imbeciles.”

President Trump is but one man who is fighting a tsunami of well-organized and perfectly oiled Democrat machine with one goal in mind, to fundamentally transformation our “evil” nation into the utopian socialism all Democrat politicians and their useful idiots followers and millennials want, a free for all Shangri La that never existed. They know, they are going to do communism “right” because they are smarter than anybody else.

It is nice to get involved in politics and pick and support the right candidates, however, until we change the mindset of the population to a state where they are proud of their own country as the best, most tolerant, and least racist country in the world, nothing will change, the decline to socialism and communism will continue. You must change the prevailing philosophy among the younger generations, a philosophy that says that America is evil and racist, none of which is true, on the contrary.

Do they understand what a bankrupt and tyrannical socialist state truly is? No, because their teachers, media, greedy and corrupt politicians, and Hollywood have lied to them since the 1970s.

I lived in the socialist nightmare Rep. Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) advocates and demands, under the boot of the Communist Party, and it was not pretty:

-          Freedom, individuality, creativity, and entrepreneurship were crushed

-          If you did not work, you did not eat, welfare per say did not exist; the proletariat received a meager pay, “commensurate to their effort”

-          If you spoke out, you were beaten, jailed, or killed

-          We lived in concrete apartments with little water, heat, and electricity

-          The Antifa-like government goons knocked on our doors and beat us up if we did not comply with the tyrannical rules.

If America goes, so will the rest of the free world. Europe survived the clutches of Hitler only because anonymous and heroic American boys and men fought and died for their freedom. We rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan. We protect Europe militarily still and, if we go, the rest will collapse as well into poverty and tyranny just like Cuba and Venezuela.

President Trump is trying to do the right thing for America, but he is one man, with little help from the Republican Party, and even if he wins again in November, that will only take us to 2024. What will happen after that? How fast will we sink further into socialist chaos at the hands of the Democrat Party lording over everything? Look what is happening to the Democrat-controlled cities and states and you will know exactly what will happen to America.

Lessons Learned from The Chinese Wuhan Virus Global Crisis

 What are my lessons learned from the Chinese Wuhan virus global crisis and “pandemic?”

I live in Reality Ville and know the face of communism and forced collectivism. I’ve stood in food lines, toilet paper lines, and other essentials’ lines every day in the first twenty years of my life. The number one lesson I learned today is that globalism is EVIL.

Globalism does not serve the interest of our country; it serves the interests of like-minded globalists invested heavily in cheap labor in China and profits at all costs. Globalism, no matter what professors tell their students, does not serve the interests of the average American citizen who has no idea that 90 percent of his/her prescription drugs and OTC drugs are made in China, a hostile communist nation.

Economically speaking, it is not a good idea to allow a potential enemy to produce items for key industries needed for survival of our children and grandchildren. Our nation cannot defend itself in case of attacks, whether military or viral ones, if its key industries’ production depends on a potential enemy.

I learned that we should bring our drug manufacturing and other key industries back to America as soon as possible and we should lobby Congress to pass legislation to make that happen. And if they should object, then the Executive Order pen must be used.

I learned from this Chinese Wuhan Virus crisis that nationalism is necessary if we are to survive. I learned how fragile we really are in the 21^st century despite our technology or perhaps because of it.

I learned from this Chinese Wuhan Virus crisis that our President Trump was right about China all along and was correct in promoting incentives to industries to return to America.

I learned that we should never trust the communist government of China. This misplaced trust in a communist country is now lethal to our economy.

I also learned that it is going to cost us trillions of dollars to recover and a long time for mom and pop businesses to come back if ever.

The American “bread and circuses,” football, baseball, volleyball, hockey, and other organized sports and competitions may never come back in the same form.

I learned from this “pandemic” that having family time is amazing and we should go back to the basics of family life, turning off the blue screens of the highly addictive and intelligence-robbing smart phones.

I hope Millennials learned, after the shock of having to stand in line for food and toilet paper, that the socialism they so desperately desire is a disaster that will never work no matter who is in charge.

I hope all socialists in this country who want socialized medicine learned that socialized medicine in Italy and in communist China were quickly overwhelmed – rationing ensued and they had to make hard choices for treatment.

Americans learned, I hope, that socialized medicine does have death panels, rationing of medical care based on a person’s age and utility to society.

I learned from this Chinese Wuhan virus crisis that the European Union did not respond well to its member states with medical help.

I also learned that unfettered liberalism screaming for open borders and releasing medically unvetted foreigners among their midst was a disaster waiting to happen and it did. Yes, disease does not recognize borders, but we can screen people for disease and illnesses that can cause a potential pandemic globally. Isolation and quarantine do work.

Preventive medical tests before admission into a country is a great idea, it is not an intrusion on a person’s manufactured global rights. You don’t have rights in a country you have invaded or are a guest of. You must follow their rules, regulations, and laws, including borders.

We isolated ourselves in our homes, gave up rather quickly our constitutional liberties for our own “good” without as much as a whimper – the controlling globalists won, and the media won.

We learned that President Trump was right to build the fence on the southern border.  He was also right about restricting travel from China.

I learned from this “pandemic” that family life in general was improved by staying home and cooking instead of eating in restaurants so much. It was fun to take the kids to the park and re-discover nature, play in the sand, get dirty, chase the dog, fish, instead of watching TV non-stop, playing electronic games, or being obsessed with social media all the time. Life became simpler and more enjoyable, it seemed that we lived it more fully.

I learned from this “pandemic” that schools closed and taught their students online, eliminating a lot of unnecessary personnel and administrators. And why pay high college tuition when you can learn online much cheaper?

The Chinese Wuhan virus crisis taught me that some Americans are still kind and generous, that some went to work despite their immediate contact with a lot of potentially infected people. But they did it anyway because they have a great work ethic, love to help other Americans, and needed the well-deserved paycheck they earned.

I learned that Americans are just as shameless to hoard food and essentials as the hoarders I encountered under socialism. Some became scalpers and stores price-gouged their customers, taking advantage of the shortage caused by increased demand and decreased supply.

Despite the mainstream media telling us otherwise, it is not racist to say that the Corona virus originated in Wuhan, China. To the liberals out there glued to their favorite leftist alphabet soup “news” channel, Chinese is a nationality, not a race.

From the Chinese Wuhan virus crisis, I learned that the Wuhan province was the location of 10,000 5G stations rolled out by the end of 2019. It is probably a “tin foil hat” coincidence but I am a skeptic and I do not believe in coincidences.

And I like a good conspiracy theory any day. Exposure to so much radiation leads to a microwave illness with flu-like symptoms and 54 other additional health problems listed here. https://5g-emf.com/wuhan-was-the-province-where-5g-was-rolled-out-now-the-center-of-deadly-virus/

The 5G roll-out announcement was made by the communist Chinese government. Here is the English version. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-10/31/c_138517734.htm

Last, but not least, Americans learned that toilet paper became the number one hoarded item, and nobody understood why.

Democrats, the political opportunists that they are, would never let a virus crisis go to waste. “Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told caucus members last week that the [stimulus] bill was ‘a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.’” Would that vision be Democrat socialism? https://news.yahoo.com/dem-rep-told-colleagues-coronavirus-145245071.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=fb But then everybody knows that Democrats in Washington do not have a problem putting their political ideology ahead of the welfare of the American people.

What some of my friends learned about the Chinese Wuhan Virus Crisis? Here are some salty and pointed opinions:

-          “How easily all Americans gave up their constitutional freedoms following a deliberate, media-created and hyped panic.

-          Never outsource anything to a communist enemy.

-          What socialism feels like.

-          How selfish and unethical 75% of the population is.

-          How stupid we are, how easily manipulated, and how incompetent the clowns are who lead various countries.

-          That despite millions of years of evolution, we are still Neanderthals.

-          How happily Americans surrendered their freedoms, they were not even fighting.

-          It was scary how many politicians and people were willing to ignore the Constitution’s protections when we needed them the most.

-          Life can change on a dime.

-          Prepping under Obama’s reign was a great decision.

-          Never trust a communist but I knew that before.

-          There is a lack of deductive reasons ability and an abundance of panic mode among many.

-          This Corona Pandemic is a sinister international conspiracy against America… The cause, the symptoms, the mortality and morbidity are not even a fraction of the H1N1… but we are not lead by a communist in the White House, we are led by a true patriot and great leader of the world, President Donald J. Trump.

-          Bring our manufacturing base back to America’s soil and employ American workers.

-          The “social distancing” quarantine came easy to me as I’ve been an introvert all my life.

-          The communists still want to take over the world.”

I sadly learned that people lie, cheat, and steal on a mass scale in order to get what they want, putting others at great risk, and neighbors are not neighborly at all in parts of the country where liberalism reigns supreme.

Channeling White

Having been forced in my youth to wear a uniform designed by the communists who dictated our daily lives, every move and breath we took, you can imagine my dismay at seeing the Socialist Democrat women appearing dressed in white at the State of the Union (SOTU) address of President Trump last night.

Like a high school club of “beautiful girls” who reject the plain girls in class, this group of women was petty, sour, dour, attention-hungry, scowling, smirking disrespectfully, and displaying overt and in-your-face derision, setting aside any statesman’s decorum and propriety, barely engaging their “occasional cortex.”

Were they channeling the White Ladies of Havana, Cuba, who march in silence every Sunday after church to protest the communist regime on behalf of their fathers, brothers, and sons who were jailed and tortured by the Castro brothers’ totalitarian regime for their anti-communist beliefs?

This Soviet-funded and supported rule had destroyed the formerly prosperous island and had brought it to the brink of disaster and total servitude to a tyrannical regime that still pretends today to care for the impoverished proletariat while the elites in power add millions to their bank accounts in the west.

Were the white-clad Democrat women channeling  the abortionist white lab coats, the “angels of death” that kill the innocent unborn under the guise of “choice” and then use their discarded and carefully selected body parts for dubious research?

Were they channeling the racist white-hooded KKK?

Were they channeling the non-existent and invented “white privilege” they’ve been bombarding our society with in the last ten years, poisoning the waters of civil discourse and destroying any divergent ideas in public or in academia?

Were the white outfits an expression of innocence? If so, whose innocence?

White and environmental green must be the new red for these Democrat Socialists in Congress. The sad part is that they were elected to high office by indoctrinated Americans and illegal aliens to represent all of us. They are ruling over our lives without any deception and pretense that there is equal representation or a separation of powers. They flaunt their alliance with a supine academia and media who read on air the daily socialist Democrat message supplied on Teleprompters.

 

Communism Revived as Globalism

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful." – C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“It’s a brave new world,” one in which radicals are elected to high office in a system more corrupt and ignorant than ever imagined possible. The voters believe in the “shiny illusions of socialist/communist hell and are racing to implementation.”

Americans are not quite sure when the surge to communism finally planted its roots in the population at large and things began to change. Some argue it was the 1950s, others the 1960s. Over time, the corrupt main stream media and the progressive-controlled education system brought us slowly but surely to today when good people are overwhelmed by manufactured news and personal attacks meant to marginalize anyone who disagrees with the socialist agenda, while the entire system of liberty and justice for all is collapsing.

The dangerous cult of personality which mesmerized an entire nation into submission to a magical black president now includes Millennials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who, despite her International Relations degree, is, by her own admission, totally ignorant of world politics, and two Muslim women who took their oath on a book that contradicts everything our Constitution stands for and are flinging vulgarities and anti-Israel /anti-American insults to the American public.

The same MSM that gives them ample air time to insult anyone who disagrees with them, was mostly silent when three new Congressmen, real American heroes and Purple Heart recipients, were sworn in, the “5 eyes, 5 arms, 4 legs … All American” as Rep. Mast said.  Jim Baird (R-Indiana) lost his left arm in Vietnam. Brian Mast (R-Florida) lost both legs in Afghanistan. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) lost his right eye in Afghanistan.  Nobody saw them on the evening news but air time was extended ad nauseam to the “new breed of women politicians” who offends us with overt anti-Americanism.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s strong and strange socialist charisma appeals to a large segment of the American population, liberals and Democrats alike, who have made a cult hero out of a former bartender.

Maduro of Venezuela was a taxi driver before he became president.  He appealed to low-information voters who have now managed to self-destruct under the leadership or lack thereof of a socialist, long on rhetoric, and short on the knowledge how to successfully lead a country rich in petroleum, a formerly prosperous nation, now a basket case of poverty, rationing, and hunger. He drove it into the ground, turning into the hell-hole of socialism that it is today.

The Cuban model, the Castro brothers communist dictatorship, ended in disaster in Venezuela just as it did everywhere else socialism/communism had been tried.

Should she be ignored in hope that she goes away back to the obscurity she came from? Liberals are already talking of making her president. People with real skill, intellect, sound judgment, and logical arguments must speak out with intelligence and force. But when they do, would anybody listen?
I am not at all surprised that young and old Americans alike are suddenly infatuated with the empty promises of socialism and communism and do not listen to reason. Decades of socialist indoctrination in public schools and progressive MSM are finally paying off for Democrats and their globalist fellow travelers.

In the country of my birth, where millions have suffered and died under the boot of socialism and of Ceausescu’s Communist Party dictatorship, there does not appear to exist a significant and strong conservative wing, politics in Parliament swing back and forth between socialists and communists. How is that possible when their parents and extended families lived in such hell of fear and brutal oppression for decades?

Young Romanians view any foreigners, no matter how poor in their own countries and how far left leaning they are, as rich capitalists who abuse and steal from the poor. Their parents have been told for decades under communism that capitalists exploit the working class, out to steal their rights to utopian communism that left them hungry, cold, and poor in perpetuity. It is extraordinarily bizarre to see young generations, with their smart phones, cars, plenty of food, and other electronic gadgets produced by capitalism, indoctrinated by schools and the media into believing that free-market capitalism poses a fundamental threat to their avowed neo-communism.

A young American friend, who currently lives with his wife in Romania, is considering moving his family to America. As Darius explained, “she’s fixated on the idea of living in an America that probably hasn’t existed since the 1990s at the latest.” He is afraid to discuss any conservative ideas with the young Romanians who openly and proudly express their communist affiliation, rejecting all other ideas that contradict and diverge from their proletarian ideology.

It is no surprise that such young people were indoctrinated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who made their way into the Iron Curtain as soon as it “fell” in 1990. George Soros boasted in an interview that he was the first to be given access into Romania after Christmas 1989 when Ceausescu was executed for communist crimes against his own people. Soros allegedly met with the minister of education to discuss the new curricula post Ceausescu’s regime.  Scores of young Romanians studied abroad with financial help from his foundations, assuring their allegiance to the new world globalism.

I have met several such students in 1991, who had been brought to an all-black southern U.S. college to study for Masters Degrees in management. When the two-year university indoctrination ended, they went back to work in the recently fashioned government comprised of former communist upper echelon apparatchiks who had rebranded themselves into the new world globalists.

The “sudden” infatuation of the West with socialism/communism has been developing over decades as the communists had planned to go underground and rebrand themselves into the global communists of today, championed by the United Nations and “civil society,” meaning intellectuals, academics, and other lapdogs of liberalism who advertise and promote everything the U.N. publishes.

Vladimir Bukovsky explained these phenomena in the upcoming English version of his book, “Judgment in Moscow.” He had found documents in Russia to prove that the reason the horrific crimes of the former Soviet Union and its satellites were not punished like the Nazi crimes were fifty years before was the “Kremlin’s links to and influence over Western political parties, governments, media, and prominent individuals, as revealed in the documents. It was these powerful links, he writes, that prevented any push to prosecute the extreme human rights abuses that took place over the decades of Soviet rule. As a result, the Communist Party and KGB elite were left to regroup and re-establish their power – with new names and new methods, perhaps, but the same goal: to undermine Western democracy.”

It is with sadness, agony, and dread that I see daily evidence of Western democracies turning back to the future. Some people never learn from history and must repeat it no matter how disastrous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rule of Party of One

Photo credit: Wikipedia web

It is upsetting to find out that a principal asked a high school student to remove his baseball jersey at a game where everyone was encouraged to wear patriotic t-shirts.  His white jersey sported the American flag, the name Trump, and number 45. The student had to remove the shirt deemed as making questionable political statements and incite violence. It is hard to understand how our president’s name and number would incite violence. One may not agree with his policies but he is our president, governing over the best economy in decades.

But our country now is negatively transformed and divided by one party, the Democrats, who are busy inciting mob violence among their followers and even paying them to create violent mob situations in the public arena, wearing dark clothing and masks like the cowards that they are, harassing innocent Americans in restaurants, shooting Congressmen on a softball field, banging on the doors of the Supreme Court, blocking traffic in Portland while one policeman is watching, interrupting Senate hearings with chants of hatred, shoving elderly people and hurting peaceful protesters, carrying bats and injuring anyone who dares to wear a hat or t-shirt supporting our president or attending his rallies.

Democrats are masters at demonizing the opposition, accusing them of hate crimes, and calling them Nazis, bigots, xenophobes, islamophobes, racists, and many other descriptors of sheer hatred and intolerance. They are following in the footsteps of Soviet communists and Nikita Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” to fundamentally transform life around the globe.

Nothing could stand in the communists’ way. When Ukrainians refused to collectivize their agriculture, to give up their land and private property for the “greater good,” peasants were attacked with demeaning and dehumanizing words craftily chosen, “kulaks” and “enemies of the people.”

In the insane world of Bolshevism and communism, it was patriotic to kill the opposition. Stalin even “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” During a very dark period of history, 1929-1933, the number of deaths rose to 10 million, with another 10 million placed in slave-labor camps in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far North. (Conquest without War, Pocket Books Inc., 1961)

When Stalin tried to go further, asking permission to execute members of opposition groups within the Communist Party, the Politburo and the Central Committee refused. But it was only a temporary reprieve as the blood bath escalated.

After Sergei M. Kirov, a Politburo member, was killed by a young Party member, the annihilation of “class enemies” exploded. It is important to note that young party members were always the “useful idiots,” short on real knowledge, and long on ginned up ideological hatred and class animosity rhetoric.

Historians agree that Kirov’s murder was the signal to escalate the repression. Show trials wiped out all the Bolsheviks who led the Revolution, all the surviving members of Lenin’s Politburo. Communists ate their own useful idiots. They had dared to raise their voices against the carefully crafted cult of personality of Comrade Stalin and thus against the “teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”

Made-up, unfounded, and unproven accusations sent millions of useful idiot Russian communists and non-communists in front of the firing squad. It was a horrible way to get rid of the opposition.

It is for this reason that the recent Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings in the American Senate were hard to watch and daunting as the “show trial,” complete with screaming paid communist Democrats in the gallery, was based on allegations from 36 years ago, and not corroborated by any credible evidence or believable witnesses.

It was eerily reminiscent of a Soviet-style “show trial.” Instead of the person being executed after the Soviet “show trial” where the outcome was already predetermined, in the American “show trial” called hearings, the accused’s entire life and professional life were assassinated in a legal system in which the accused is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.  

Even though the Senate is not an actual court, the guilty “accused,” who had to prove his innocence, was already sentenced in the blaring court of public opinion.  The precedent has been set. If you ever find yourself in a real court and in a similar situation, who is going to come to your defense when you are already deemed guilty in the court of public opinion?

If you don’t have freedom of speech and assembly, and are afraid for your life in a public place, are you really free, or are you living under the rule of the party of one and their paid violent mobs?

Hysteria, Hate, and Histrionics Defines the Left

Narrenschiff - Woodcut

Lacking any substance and sinking deeper into the abyss of irrelevance, the Democrat Party’s platform seems to be defined by the cause of defending illegal aliens over Americans, invaders who have broken our laws by crossing the border illegally. Mexican officials and liberals claim that immigration of any kind is a human right.

Going a step further, Democrats are defending MS-13 gang members who have terrorized Salvadorans, robbing and stealing from ordinary citizens who are so scared for their lives, they give them everything they want – clothes, money, chicken, food, and anything else they demand.

Now these animals who maim and kill for ritualistic sport are coming to our shores among unaccompanied minors housed on our military bases and in church-run shelters. The President was right about them.

The Democrats defend the children who are separated from their parents, sometimes desperate parents who send them alone on foot and on a train called the Beast, sometimes opportunistic and irresponsible parents who send their young with a coyote to the border.

In the case of the woman who crossed the border twice with her child, she left her husband and other children behind. Her asylum petition does not seem like such a sure case if the other children left behind and her spouse are safe. It did not stop Time magazine from running a cover with her crying child and a towering Trump, implying that Trump had separated the poor toddler from her mom - they were together.

But the Border Patrol told Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA in an interview that unaccompanied children are not like ordinary American children of that age, they are “hard core.” They have organized hierarchies even as young as five, ready to “take your lunch money.” They take cookies from the weaker ones. The older kids, ten to thirteen, engage in sexual activities through the chicken wire fence that separates girls from boys. When the agents put up plywood on the fence, they drilled holes in the plywood in order to continue their sexual activities. https://www.facebook.com/turningpointusa/videos/1718816781500364/UzpfSTEwMDAwMDAxOTUyNjA0ODoyMDIyODY4MDUxMDU3MTU5/

Why do Democrats and their socialist ilk hate patriotic Americans who love their country and want the best for its citizens, including border protection and sovereignty? Because Democrats have been successfully brainwashed and indoctrinated in public schools and have become strident and militant proponents of the new world order, of global communism, and of open borders. Anybody else who believes differently is a threat which must be marginalized and eliminated. And the money coffers are full; there is enough to go around for many years of social unrest and societal disruption in the style of their socialist guru, Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals.

Every day another famous or infamous Democrat celebrity is taking the stage to vilify, misrepresent, and threaten the opposition with disrupting their lives, their peaceful access to grocery stores, gas stations, movies, restaurants, or just walking down the street.

Public officials of the Trump administration are being stopped and harassed in public places by unhinged liberals triggered by speeches of Representative Maxine Waters who claims that she has a right to peaceful activism. Calling for violence publicly is not peaceful. When you restrict someone’s civil liberties in this manner, it is not peaceful activism.

It is a mass hysteria, hate, and histrionics stoked by the MSM, reading their marching notes from the Democrat Party. The western world is shaking its collective head as to what is happening to our country.

The more successful the Trump economy becomes, the more strident the Left becomes. And the “Right Wingers,” patient and tolerant group that they are, keep their silence hoping that the insanity of the left will die down and everyone will go back to the hole they crawled out of. But, since they have nothing else to offer their voters and supporters, they offer childish tantrums unbecoming of adults.

You would think that all political groups would get behind a good economy even though they may hate our President, because a good economy benefits all Americans. But that is not what the left is about. They show their hateful colors every day by projecting it onto conservatives.

Four years ago, Nancy Pelosi riled Berkley graduates in her commencement speech by urging them to be disruptors. As some on the left followed her advice, now Pelosi has changed her tune and warned people to be civil. Civility is a rational direction but the radical left is still sore and bruised from their election loss two years ago and they are not going to accept Trump ever as their president. They are certainly entitled to free speech as long as it does not incite mass hysteria and violence. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/206417-pelosi-tells-grads-be-disruptors

Speaking to a criminal justice organization in Los Angeles, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said about the critics of the administration’s immigration policies, “The rhetoric we hear from the other side on the issue, as on many others, has become radicalized. We hear views on television today that are on the lunatic fringe, frankly.” http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-sessions-downtown-20180626-story.html

As one reader, Mike F., put it, “Liberals have never been on the right side of anything. What they touched ended up corrupted, tainted, deluded, diluted, compromised, unworkable, overly expensive, and unwieldly. They started the KKK, the Jim Crows laws, used fake news, and photo shopped pictures to incite hysteria in their base.”

We learn Civility as toddlers and in kindergarten. Civility has a different definition for liberals. Civility for them is harassing our Press Secretary so much that she now requires Secret Service protection 24 hours a day. Civility for Democrats is bringing mobs at prominent Republicans’ homes and disturbing their peace with offensive chants and drums. Civility is throwing the carcass of a charred animal on the front porch of a Republican with small children. Civility is harassing administration employees in restaurants, cinemas, and at gas stations.

 

Poverty or Conveniently Hidden Statistics

Great Depression Food Line

Americans in general are confused about poverty – people and economists define it differently. People who think themselves “poor” desire socialism and are perennially voting for their favorite Marxist Democrat while complaining endlessly how unjust and rigged the system is, how the Man keeps them down and how there is no equality and social justice. Nobody admits that personal responsibility and a failed work ethic might be the culprit of their own poverty.

To say that poverty induced by socialist dictatorships is hard to shake would be an understatement. Ask Cubans and Venezuelans about their lives in the workers’ paradise that Fidel and Chavez forced upon them while the two dictators stashed away stolen billions.

Lately, as the social justice, income disparity, income inequality, economic justice rhetoric intensifies, more global and Hollywood elites crawl out of the woodwork to confuse, agitate, and inflame the low information voters.

When almost 50 percent of the American public does not work and relies on some form of government welfare paid for by the other 50 percent of the working population, it is perplexing when former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers states that “The U.S. may well be on the way to becoming a ‘Downton Abbey’ economy.”

Downton Abbey is a British television show that highlights a wealthy British family and their servants at the turn of the 20^th century. It seems to me that the 50 percent of Americans that are already working have become unwilling servants to the other 50 percent on welfare whose main job is to vote for the same politicians who promise to deliver additional unearned income tax and “entitlements” by taxing the “rich” even more.

It is galling to hear people, who pay no taxes, work and get paid cash under the radar of the IRS, receive welfare, earned income tax credit, are paid by unions to show up and protest people who work for a living, screech that the “rich are not paying their fair share.”

Who is victimizing these people who consider themselves poor and downtrodden? If you ask them and their political representatives who became rich in office, voting and implementing policies that keep their constituents poor, it is the rich who are at fault. Personal responsibility in their bad choices are never mentioned.

The former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said, “I consider income inequality the most dangerous part of what’s going on in the United States.”

It is interesting to evaluate such statements now when America is plagued by huge unemployment, trillions of dollars of new national debt, anemic GDP growth, weak job creation, disastrous economic policies, out of control spending, devaluation of the dollar through constant quantitative easings, heavy corporate taxation which causes Congress-enabled overseas exodus of capital, government rules and regulations that destroy jobs and prevent the creation of new ones, and Obamacare, encompassing a huge portion of the economy and wasting trillions of dollars in the process of destroying the world’s best health care system.

To promote class envy and discontent, Saul Alinsky recommended class warfare, the division of people into wealthy and poor in order to make it easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor. Increasing the debt to unsustainable levels allows the government to increase taxes on the middle class, thus producing more poor people who are easier to control.

 
As strident rhetoric of income inequality comes from the left, even Keynesian economists recognize that reasons other than the progressive taking points in the main stream media are the culprits:

-          Differences in ability such as I.Q., poor health, and “entrepreneurial ability”

-          Differences in intensity of work

-          Risk taking

-          Compensating wage differentials (some jobs are more dangerous, unpleasant, demanding)

-          Schooling and other types of training

-          Work experience

-          Inherited wealth

-          Luck

Progressives view income inequality as a harbinger for poverty. This is not necessarily true because poverty is a relative term. A person who considers himself poor in one country can be rich in another. Consider some of the reasons for poverty:

-          Tyranny

-          Perennial welfare

-          Bad choices in life

-          Lack of education

-          Poor choices in degrees

-          Absence of middle class

-          No opportunity for success

-          No resources, living in a barren area

-          Suppression by rulers and government

-          Not willing or afraid to put forth the effort and time to invest in oneself

-          Comfortable in generational poverty status quo

-          Mental and emotional handicap or addiction

-          Mental illness (much homelessness is caused by mental illness)

-          Cultural factors, i.e., generational poverty

-          Social mobility or lack of mobility

-          Religious oppression

Pope Francis called on governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in order to curb the “economy of exclusion,” hinting at the “injustices of capitalism.” (AP, “Pope Demands ‘Legitimate Redistribution’ of Wealth,” May 9, 2014)

Americans are already the most generous nation with their time, money, expertise, food, medicine, and education for those less fortunate. We don’t need the government to step in and confiscate in a Stalinist fashion our hard work in the name of the ill-conceived and unjust Marxist brand of “social justice.”

People should not want someone else’s wealth or welfare on a constant basis, they should look for the opportunity to work for a better life, not expect crumbs from a tyrannical communist government or from a government beholden to crony capitalist corporatist interests.

The generous “government” welfare to those 50 percent low information voters who are elated with the current global status quo does not come just from the rich who pay plenty of taxes, but also from people who often work long hours every week, two or three jobs to make ends meet, and sometimes cannot afford to buy the very things welfare recipients purchase with someone else’s hard work. Additionally, what the government gives so liberally with other people’s money, it can certainly take away.

Progressives have worked hard to cause permanent physical poverty and mental penury in America, while discrediting and blaming capitalism for “income inequality:”

-          killing job opportunities for the poor (enacting higher pay for minimum wage jobs, creating Obamacare, pushing solar and wind energy against fossil fuels)

-          keeping poor Americans out of good schools (forcing them out of successful charter schools like the one in D.C. into public schools to appease the teachers’ union)

-          giving generous welfare that dis-incentivizes work and creating a Democrat plantation mentality (a destroyer of the human spirit and of the work ethic)

-          supporting and funding abortion and single mother households with government as the daddy in order to destroy the family nucleus

-          championing illegal immigrants instead of American workers

-          fighting for criminals, not the victims

-          indoctrinating our children into the enslaving tenets of Marxism and the religion of environmentalism

-          erasing any symbol of Christianity in our public life and promoting Islam to our young and impressionable children

-          destroying any symbols of patriotism that unite us

-          deconstructing historical truth to suit the progressive agenda

This administration is creating two Americas, one that works and one that does not work but votes for entitlements they have not earned. The plan is to reduce income inequality by debasing and punishing the successful through the forced redistribution of their wealth and income.

That is not to say that there are no Americans who do not genuinely need temporary or permanent help but have fallen through the cracks of welfare. It is people who know how to milk the system who benefit the most from the welfare largesse.

Being on welfare is not just the result of lack of a good education, bad choices in life, unwillingness to work, of a culture of entitlement (it is free and the government owes it to us), it is also a function of bad luck, personal injury, illness, and hard times during cyclical economic downturns.

The federal government uses personal income tax receipts to provide two-thirds of welfare funds, while state and local governments provide one-third from state tax receipts. Economically speaking, welfare is categorized as transfer payments.

The largest transfer of payments (welfare) goes to Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), housing vouchers, State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

Keynesian economists thought that tackling poverty by giving the poor EITC income would not destroy their incentives to work. The federal government gave them a supplemental “grant,” proportional to earned wages. EITC began in 1975 but became more generous after 1993. (Baumol and Blinder, Economics, 2007, p. 458)

We do know how well EITC works since illegal aliens, using an IRS issued number to encourage them to file income taxes, have taken advantage of this IRS loophole, raking in $6.3 billion a year in tax refunds, claiming children who are not even residents or citizens of this country.

Cato’s Michael Tanner suggests that making people more comfortable in poverty (more food, housing, health care, free day care) and government dependence is a bad idea.  The quickest solutions to get out and stay out of poverty are simple – finish school, do not get pregnant outside marriage, get a job, any job, and stick with it.

Having spent more than $25 trillion on welfare since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program, “many Americans are less capable of self-sufficiency today than when the War on Poverty began.” The Heritage Foundation describes the pathway to self-sufficiency as work and marriage.

According to Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, “the welfare state should be reformed to promote self-sufficiency and require recipients of welfare to work or prepare for work as a condition of getting aid.”

In their article, “15 Facts about U.S. Poverty the Government Hides,” they explain that U.S. Census statistics about poverty “exclude nearly all welfare benefits,” taking into account only the poverty threshold for a family of four which in 2015 was $24,036.

The writers debunk leftist activist groups who talk about hunger when in reality “most of the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages.” Acknowledging that “poverty and homelessness” are often confused, Rector explains that “only 9.5% of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers; the rest live in apartments or houses. Forty percent of the poor own their own homes.”

In 2014 the U.S. government spent over $1 trillion on welfare for the poor and low income families. This figure did not include Social Security and Medicare, Rector said. Welfare in the form of cash, food, and housing was $342 billion.

Rector makes the case that “the Census counts poverty in the U.S. by ignoring almost the entire welfare state” which is generous by most measures. “The cash, food, and housing spending alone was 150 percent of the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.” And even families in alleged “extreme poverty,” spend “$25 for every $1 of income the left claims they have.”  http://dailysignal.com/2016/09/13/15-facts-about-poverty-in-us-government-buries/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRJeFl6Y3hPR1EwTnpRMSIsInQiOiJScTZxbFRvQVNKTHd3Tm11bGpUNFc4cFNkaldyWXZ2cUxnbitzak5YM25iVmRMSjJrUXBLdExDaWE2NFwvT0tvYkNlM3lIYzk4RW5lQ3hyZUJCOHk5ZEFnR1Fya3haVnhPS1ZDdnBcLzNQeUhNPSJ9

Eradicating poverty should be more than just streamlining welfare – it should be about fighting the real causes of welfare dependency: the breakdown of families, rejection of faith, truancy, dropping out of school, having babies outside of marriage, drug use, crime, and lack of personal pride, responsibility, and accountability for one’s actions. Spreading the wealth, the socialist goal, is a dystopia that will further enslave people into perennial poverty.