The Meaning of the Secret Donations

Our friends at The New York Times are shocked, shocked to discover that the US Chamber of Commerce has been laundering "secret" donations for corporate special interests.

Specifically, according to a Times editorial, the Chamber has received secret donations from the insurance industry and from Wall Street.

Secret donors spent at least $138 million on the midterm elections, according to the latest figures, and 80 percent of that secret money supported Republican candidates. What will those donors get for their money, and who will they get it from?

Yes, it is very annoying that corporate interests are secretly spending money to oppose the Obama administration. Who would have thought it?

But the Times is missing the point. The reason that these corporate interests are laundering their money through the Chamber of Commerces is that they are afraid. They are afraid of what the Obamis would do to them if they came out and honestly admitted, with their contributions, that they are dead set against Obama and all his works.

Let's put it this way. The reason that many Democrats want Nancy Pelosi to continue as Minority Leader in the House is that she is a great fundraiser. Now why do you think that the lovely Nancy has such a reputation as a fundraiser? Charm? Personal beauty? A winning sales pitch? Or is it just naked threats to pay up or get thumped?

Here is a story that might illuminate the issue. Right after the 1994 elections Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich is reported to have told his people to put the screw on all the corporations. They hadn't contributed much in the runup to the elections, but now they had better learn which side their bread was buttered.

The fact is that the secret contributors to the Chamber were afraid. They were afraid of the consequences if it became known that they were contributing to Republicans.

And that, I suggest to my liberal friends, convinced of the enormous power of big corporations, is not good. Nobody, not progressives, not pro-lifers, not corporations, not unions should be afraid to contribute openly to the candidate of their choice.

As for me, I live for the day when government employee unions feel the need to hide their contributions to Democrats, because they are afraid to face the wrath of the permanent-majority Republicans.

State Winners And Losers

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis released its numbers on state GDP (called Gross State Product or GSP) for 2009 yesterday. The numbers are now up on usgovernmentspending.com. So now we can see the winners and the losers in the Great Recession.

Here are the top winners:

State	Growth Rate
Oklahoma	6.6%
Wyoming	5.4%
North Dakota	3.9%
Alaska	3.5%
Louisiana	2.5%

Looks like the energy states were doing best. Now here are the big losers:

State	Growth Rate
Nevada	-6.4%
Michigan	-5.2%
New York	-4.3%
Arizona	-3.9%
Indiana	-3.6%

Looks like two housing-crash states and two deep-blue basket cases. But Indiana?

Head on over to usgovernmentspending.com and take a look.

What Do the Soros Guys Want?

I'm confused. After President Obama has rammed just about all that a lefty president could ram through Congress and the federal bureaucracy in the last two years, the rich-bitch progressive funders at the Democracy Alliance, George Soros, proprietor, are all bent out of shape. Says Soros:

"We have just lost this election, we need to draw a line," he said, according to several Democratic sources. "And if this president can't do what we need, it is time to start looking somewhere else."

I would think that the Soros brigade would realize that now is not the time to go soft on the president. After all, he and Pelosi are the front rank in the battle to stop repeal of ObamaCare and the federal takeover of the financial system, etc.

Actually, my confusion goes even deeper. These liberal moneybags, that style themselves the "progressive movement", are working to do what? Further empower the government employee unions to loot the government? I'd say that the big problem right now for genuine progressives is that the government administrative tail is so large and expensive that it is impossible to do anything.

Well, I shouldn't be surprised. Every liberal I check on knows all about the Koch brothers, how they are the top-down funders of the Tea Party movement, and how that is bad for America. But they seem to be wholly innocent of the influence of George Soros, who seems to be much more influential on the Democratic side. Scratch a liberal these days and she is worried about the peons working like indentured servants for Wal-Mart. Maybe so, but have you liberals checked to see how many people line up for Wal-Mart jobs whenever Wal-Mart opens a new store? And how the lines are much longer when Wal-Mart opens near a liberal city like Oakland or Chicago?

And what is all this about a progressive "movement?" How can we be talking about a genuine movement when it is composed of people who like the current administrative state and just want more of it? These are people who are part of the ruling class and want more of it.

The way to think about this is to think of it as religion. Religion is about faith, faith in the meaning of life and faith in the way things work. These liberal progressives are members of the church of liberalism. They believe in the Articles of Liberal Belief and they believe that what we need is more liberalism. The only trouble is that the mass of the American people are not co-religionists. They do not worship at the church of liberalism. No re-messaging or re-focus is going to change that. Here's a SEIU honcho:

"People are determined to help build a progressive infrastructure and make sure it is there not just in the months ahead but one that will last in the long term," said Anna Burger, the retired treasury secretary of SEIU. "Instead of being pushed over by this election it has empowered people to stand up in a bigger way."

Progressive infrastructure? Does Burger not realize that liberals already have a massive progressive infrastructure in place from the liberal media to the schools to the foundations to Hollywood to their own Democracy Alliance?

Really, this is good news for conservatives. These chaps are like Tory "ultras" in the 19th century. They are like southern segregationists in the 1950s. Their whole project is running on the rocks of unaffordable programs and pensions, and they are proposing to reinforce failure.

Bring It On.

The Content of His Character

The story of each great ethnic group in America has been remarkably similar. It starts with oblivion, continues to alarm and discrimination, then to ethnic power politics and pride, then arrival, and finally assimilation.

African Americans have traveled this road in full Technicolor, for they arrived in North America not as indentured servants but as slaves. There were not mere scuffles about them, but an outright civil war. Like the Irish, blacks have chosen the path of ethnic pride, expressed in monolithing voting and corrupt political machines. Like the Irish, blacks have finally elected one of their own as president.

Martin Luther King famously looked forward to the day when Americans would be judged on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin. Everybody interpreted that as an appeal to whites to judge blacks by their behavior not their race.

But there is another side to this, the question of how blacks judge their own kind by the content of their character.

In the climb from egregious discrimination ethnic groups tend to exhibit a strong sense of solidarity. They support their own kind, no matter what, in the battle for survival. But there comes a time when they obtain real power and are no longer the weaker group in the battle of political power. There comes a point where the group gets to go through the equivalent of the Temptation of Christ. They have the power to rule the world, but will they have the character to say: get thee behind me, Satan.

In the famous trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his dead wife's lover, a black-majority jury in Los Angeles County in 1995 voted to acquit the famous football player. But in a black majority congressional district in New Orleans in 2008 the voters threw out their Representative accused of corruption, William J. Jefferson (D), the first black to represent the district since Reconstruction.

Now we have the case of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), convicted by the House ethics panel of corruption on November 16, 2010. Will the House vote to expel Charlie, as they would a white congressman? Will the black voters of Harlem vote Charlie out of office as the voters of any white suburban district would already have done?

Because when the day comes that blacks routinely judge their own leaders on the content of their character then blacks will truly have arrived as One Hundred Percent Americans.

Compared to that, the election of a black president is mere bagatelle.

The New Republican Majority

Reviewing the 2010 battlefield, RealClearPolitics' Sean Trende notes two significant facts:

1. Dems have lost rural and "Jacksonian" voters. A hundred years ago, the core of the Democratic vote was rural voters, farmers that hated capitalism and finance, particularly the finance capitalists that held their mortgages. These folks, along with the rough-and-ready Scotch-Irish from Appalachia, are gone for the Dems.
2. Dems are losing suburban and white working class voters. These folks have been the real pivot point in the electorate in the last generation, leaning towards Reagan, then Clinton, then Bush, then Obama. Now they are clearly moving away from Obama and the Democrats.

Isn't it convenient, then, for Republicans that suburban voters and the white working class are being absolutely hammered by the Great Recession? And isn't it convenient that Obamanomics really has nothing to say to these hard-hit folks?

Then there are the young voters. You have to feel sorry for the young voters. There they are, having voted just like the trusties in their government educational custodial facilities told them, and now they are utterly screwed. Do you think that maybe in two years they might be ready to vote for real Hope and Change in freedom instead of Hope and Change in big government?

Yeah. How dumb can you be, imagining that big government is going to create Hope and Change? Government is force, baby. And government is the cockpit of the special interests, all of them opposed to Change.

Think, think, think. That's the order of the day. The door is open to create a big new majority coalition. So let's all think about how to appeal to suburban voters, white working class voters, and young voters.

Job One is jobs, jobs, jobs. And we know how to do that. Cut government spending and cut income tax rates.

Then there is education. We have to help the majority of Americans escape from the liberal model of education that prepares people for jobs in the Peace Corps and a career in environmental regulation. We need to reorient education towards the dominant learning method among humans and especially among average people: learning by doing.

I say "we" but I mean "they". The conservative policy on education is that it should be driven not by educrats and edu-theorists but by education consumers: students and parents. Let us empower ordinary people to supervise their ordinary education and empower them to decide when it is time to get out of school and into the "real world" of work and training. For many people, I suspect, the moment to leave full-time education is about age 13.

Crisis is opportunity. The Obama meltdown creates the political opportunity of the century. We conservatives care about the suburban voters and the white working class. We care because we understand what a century of liberal government has done to the ordinary person, and we want ordinary people to have a free and prosperous life liberated from the dead hand of government.

Let's listen to the surburbanites. Let's listen to the white working class. Let's work with them to build an America we can all share and be proud of.

Populist Darling or Embarrassment?

You tell me. Is Sarah Palin's reality show on TLC a brilliant effort to reel in the white working class? Or is it jumping the shark, as former supporter Jennifer Braceras believes?

It's the old, old question in politics. How folksy can you get without becoming a caricature of folksiness? Democratic politicians are required to show that they are just like you and me. That goes back to Thomas Jefferson who went to his inauguration in plain clothes. Writes Ron Chernow in Alexander Hamilton:

Jefferson eliminated the regal trappings of the Washington and Adams administrations and brilliantly crafted an image of himself as a plain, unadorned American... For two weeks after his inauguration, Jefferson stayed at his boardinghouse near the Capitol and supped at the common table.

So what are we to make of Sarah Palin's folksiness? Put it this way. Suppose you were Sarah Palin and you were planning a presidential campaign. You know that a campaign is all about image dusted with a little fairy dust of issues. You know that voters really aren't interested in wonky discussions of the details of health care. You have succeeded in numerous public debates and candidate forums down the years by avoiding the policy details and appealing directly to the emotions of the voters. You've been a successful elected politician since 1992, rising from city councilmember to mayor to governor. You've been savaged by liberals for being a hick and an embarrassment. What would you do?

I'd say that the thing to do is to play up your folksiness. Talk non-stop about "common-sense conservatism." Appeal to the great unwashed middle with down-to-earth media events. And hope that it all comes together.

I keep thinking about the white working class, and in particular the white working class woman. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the white working class. It's had a pretty hard go because the Democrats have forsaken it for liberal women and minorities. And the Republicans just don't seem to get the white working class. Now here is Sarah Palin doing reality shows, hauling nets, piloting fishing skiffs, in the middle of her family. Yes, it's all rather récherché and hard to take for the educated classes. But what does it say to the working classes?

The question the pollsters always ask the voters is: Does the candidate care about people like me? What do you think?

It Can Only Get Worse

There are two practical political reasons for the Obama administration's QE2 policy. Reason one is to re-float the underwater debtors, the folks with underwater home mortgages. Until they are breathing again, the economy is going to be in trouble. The other reason is to gun the economy for the 2012 elections.

Why not? That's what Richard Nixon did in August 1971 when he took the US off the gold standard. The result was that the M2 money supply that had risen 6.5 percent in 1970 went up at the rate of 13.3 percent in 1971 and 13.0 percent 1972. In 1973, after the elections, M2 was ratcheted back to a 6.6 percent increase and we got the 1973-74 recession.

Here's what I wonder. Are the Obamis cranking the printing presses too early? Back in the 1970s the Nixon administration imposed wage and price controls in 1971. That kept the inflation under control for a while with consumer prices increasing by 4.4 percent in 1971, 3.2 percent in 1972. Then prices exploded by 6.2 percent in 1973 and 11.0 percent in 1974.

The thing to remember is that we don't have wage and price controls to make things look good in the runup to the election. Nor do we have the financial repression of the post-war years in which investors could not escape from dollar investments, and were screwed with interest-rate ceilings on bank deposits. And by going for broke a full two years before the election, the Obamis are risking big-time inflation well before the voters go to the polls.

Here's my judgment. The Democrats have lost the Mandate of Heaven; they have lost the luck o' the Irish that always made things work out for them. President Obama is a Mrs. Gummidge of a president, and everything goes contrairy with him. Things are going to get so screwed up that the 2012 election will make the 2010 election look like a cake-walk.

And here is the worst of it, if you are a Democrat. Democrats are going to be disproportionately hurt in the next few years. Whether it's social spending, green subsidies, public pension defaults, government employee layoffs, it's going to hurt Democrats more. But that strikes at the very heart of the Democratic project, which is patronage, pensions, jobs, and street money for the Democratic supporters. The very best that can happen is that Democratic supporters will lose heart and stay home. More likely is a massive Democratic split, a fight over the remaining spoils.

The worst of the worst, from the Democratic perspective, is Gov. Chris Christie. He is showing that a big fat roly-poly Republican governor can make hay over dissing government employees. He is publicizing the union official that wished for his death. He is publicizing the schools superintendent who is getting his contract renewed before state salary caps kick in. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing this successfully before. And if you can do it in New Jersey you can do it anywhere.

Things are going to get worse, and it's going to be the worst for the little people. Remember? Democrats fight for the people against the powerful.