Race Mob Violence and Obama

Now that it has happened, the wonder is that it didn't happen sooner. I am talking about the race-mob violence in cities like Denver. It started in 2009, according to John T. Bennett.

In 2009, a four month wave of mayhem broke out in Denver. There were at least 26 violent robberies committed by two black gangs. The victims were -- without exception -- whites and Hispanics. When the dust settled from that initial spate of violence, victims were left with injuries ranging from a skull fracture to broken noses and shattered eye sockets.

Of course the Denver police and the media did not alert people to the fact that these incidents were caused by black gangs were operating out of their neighborhoods. They didn't alert the public to the racial nature of the events at all until the local TV news finally broke ranks at the end of 2009.

Of course the rest of the mainstream media are soft-pedaling the race angle of this, as they have soft-pedaled black violence for half a century.

This wave of racist flash mob violence presents our national leadership with an astonishing opportunity to end the race madness of the last 50 years, the post-civil rights era.

Here we are in 2011 with a black president and a black attorney general. They can make history by initiating a national conversation on race and race violence. Race violence is unacceptable when it is white guys in sheets and it is unacceptable when it is black guys in baggy pants and reversed baseball caps.

But I don't think that President Obama and Attorney General Holder will do that. They are race-based politicians and, give them credit, they actually believe the poisonous race doctrines of the race industry and the identity left.

But they are standing in the way of history. America desperately wants to get beyond the corruption and the hate of race cards and race hustlers.

Think of it: here we are with a black president and a black attorney general. It is the ideal moment to close down the evil of liberal race politics. But Obama and Holder won't do it. They wouldn't know where to start.

Unfortunately, the people that will suffer for their ignorance and their bigotry are the African Americans. They desperately need a politician to lead them out of the land of racial Egypt and into the Promised Land of race harmony. But don't look for Obama to be that leader. Because he just doesn't get it.

The Liberal Establishment of Secular Religion

When we search for the central injustice pressed down upon the brow of the American people, we always end up at the central conceit of the liberal ruling class. The big liberal idea is the separation of church and state, that no one religion or sect gets into a special relationship, an establishment, with the state.

Liberals are very pleased with themselves about this. That is why it is their central conceit. Liberals are not as other men are, theocrats and moralizers trying to legislate morality. They insist that morality should be a private thing, not forced into the bedrooms of America by would-be theocrats.

But the idea that liberals are not in the moralizing business and not trying to legislate morality is a delusion. For if we expand the notion of religion from a particular religious sect or church to a more general definition, where we define "religion" as a belief system that organizes the meaning of life and establishes a definition of the good from which a system of ethics can be developed, then it is easy to conclude that our liberal masters, in violation of the spirit of the First Amendment, do in fact operate an establishment of religion, whereby liberals advance the belief system of the upper-middle class educated elite to a privileged status vis-a-vis the state. And what liberals do from the moment they get up in the morning is try to legislate liberal morality.

Have they ever succeeded! Liberal ideas are taught in government schools, in government universities; they are broadcast by government radio (NPR) and government TV (PBS). And of course the organs of the welfare state constantly broadcast and teach the essential humanity and compassion of the authoritarian welfare state. And liberals have the cultural power to run a kind of Holy Office of the Inquisition where dissidents and heretics to generally established liberal shibboleths may be shown the instruments of torture.

Oh, we are not talking about the instruments of physical torture, nothing so crude, darling. But liberals have their way of making you see the light.

There is the accusation of racism. Most Americans will do anything to escape an indictment of racism. And now liberals, with the help of the gay activist community, is making like very difficult for anyone that questions the moral status of gay marriage.

Indeed, if you disagree with any liberal notion you are risking some sort of social shaming. Create a political movement like the Tea Party, and pretty soon you will be fending off accusations of incivility, racism, extremism, and crypto-violence.

Some day, Americans will birth and grow a moral movement to end the reign of the liberal establishment of secular religion. Perhaps it is already born. It cannot come too soon. For if America is to rebuild itself out the social and economic wreckage of Hurricane Obama it must find a new moral ground, as Americans once created the moral foundation to build a movement to end plantation slavery.

It cannot come too soon. Life is good for the liberal upper-middle class in America. Liberalism has successfully built a nation and a culture well adapted to its needs and values. There is preferment and there are sinecures for those who serve the established church of liberalism. But other Americans must struggle in moral subjection and daily deal with the cultural humiliation dealt out to those that dare to question the Articles of liberal faith.

America needs a reformation, a cry of protest against liberal orthodoxy and hegemony. Only then can it become what it was prophesied to be, the shining city on a hill, still a beacon for all who must have freedom.

Warren Buffett, Crony Capitalist?

Remember the letter that President Perry (or was it Romney) sent to the Danbury Tea Party in 2015? Here is an excerpt:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of business, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Economy & State.

Yeah. It's a pity that they left that bit out of the Bill of Rights. Because what we have, in Hurricane Obama, where politics and business are all mixed up, is an "establishment" or virtual nationalization of business. And just as you can't trust divines to get mixed up in politics or politicians to get mixed up in religion, surely we can all agree now that it is death to let politicians meddle with business. Just as nobody would think of letting businessmen run the government.

Exhibit A in all this is Warren Buffett, Sage of Omaha. He's just ponied up $5 billion for some preferred shares in Bank of America, currently fingered as the weakest bank. That comes a couple of weeks after Buffett penned an Obama-friendly op-ed in the New York Times and just before Buffett hosts an Obama fundraiser at the end of September.

Perfectly harmless you say? OK, let's put Republicans in all the speaking roles. Remember when old Sam Walton penned a Bush-friendly op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, then invested a few billion to rescue bankrupt Enron, then hosted a Bush fundraiser, all the time getting calls from the president on economic policy? You don't remember that? Of course not. Neither Sam Walton or the Bushies would dare to mount such an obvious staging of crony capitalism.

If I were Warren Buffett in the US in 2011, I would be hedging my political bets. Look here. Berkshire Hathaway is valued today, August 26, 2011, at $172 billion. At any moment some political aide at the White House could sicc the SEC or the Justice Department or the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on one of Buffett's businesses, just as the SEC and the EPA are currently hounding the horizontal "fracking" business. Right now the jackals, from New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to Elizabeth Warren of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are hounding Bank of America, trying to get BofA to pull the nation's mortgage chestnuts out of the fire.

How do you get the jackals to go away? Call in Warren Buffett!

Let's go back 100 years, to the aftermath of the great Crash of 1907. Back then J.P. Morgan got the richest men in America, locked them in a room, and wouldn't let them out until they had triaged the US economy. They let the insolvent firms go to the wall, the healthy ones survive on their own, and lent money to the firms they thought would survive with a bit of help. They did all this with their own money.

Fast forward a couple of years and the politicians had their progressive knickers in a twist over the "money trust." Just a few men, you see, seemed to own most of American business. Yeah. No doubt. And those were the men who, with Morgan stiffening their backs, kept their heads in the market meltdown when everyone else was losing theirs.

I'm sure that Warren Buffett is an honorable man, not a crony capitalist. But in times like these, when Hurricane Obama could rip the roof off your business just in order to narrow the odds on a marginal state next year, what businessman in his right mind would not be paying protection money to the politicians? After all, that's a nice business you got there, Mr. Billionaire. It sure would be a pity if something happened to it.

Deconstructing Sam Harris

Sam Harris is the chap who, in The End of Faith, asserts that we need to develop a "rational ethics" instead of the transcendental ethics handed down by prophets from God.

Problem is, "rational ethics" is rubbish. You can't derive ethics from reason; that's why humans invented God. Someone has to be the "decider" as President Bush used to say.

In fact, of course, Sam Harris is a conventional liberal espousing all the liberal pieties, and this week, (per Instapundit), Timothy Sandefur has his fun with Sam Harris and his rational ethics which always turn out to support the existing ruling class and its commandments. In other words, God is a liberal.

Instapundit also links to a law review article about the foundation of law, God, and little godlets. I didn't know that humor was allowed in law review articles.

Leaving aside the question of whether God exists (and my personal view is that, since the death of God, the mystery of the nature and origin of the universe only gets curiouser and curiouser) there has to be, in any society, a declaration of commandments. Someone, or some thing, such as a Constitution, speaks with the voice of God, and everyone scurries around trying to hear the voice of God.

In my view, the point of laws and constitutions and ethics is human flourishing in its widest sense. You can set up a a terrestrial paradise, such as Communism, but if it doesn't work then humans will chuck it out. But every social system is an act of faith. Our current democratic capitalism is an act of faith. We believe that the combination of free market and the circumscribed rule of the majority is the best system yet developed for human flourishing. We know, all of us except the Sam Harrises of the world, that the authoritarian welfare state version of democratic capitalism is seriously flawed; it needs reform. The Obama administration is an effort by the Sam Harrises to give the authoritarian welfare state one more college try.

But we know that the vast administrative state is a mistake. We knew it back when Charles Dickens wrote about the Circumlocution Office and its Barnacles and Stiltstockings in Little Dorrit. We were shown an alternative to the administrative state back in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan led the US out of the stagflation of the 1970s, but liberals insisted it was all a mirage.

Ben Franklin said it all: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." Now liberals are going to learn the hard way in the dear school of the 2012 elections; it will be an annus horribilis for them, but they refused to learn from the experience of the 1980s.

We can only hope that the America that emerges from the current mess is a better America.

Democrat-voting Conservatives

For some reason it is considered a bad thing that few minorities vote Republican. It's a failure of Republican outreach, or outright racism in the Republican Party.

Michael Medved tries a variant of this. He quotes the August 1 Gallup Poll that has 41 percent of American adults call themselves "conservative" against 21 percent that call themselves "liberal." How come then that President Obama won the 2008 election 53 percent to 47 percent? The reason is simple:

The voters who support Obama in spite of ideology are to a great extent black, Hispanic, and Asian conservatives who feel drawn to right-wing ideas but remain allergic to the Republican Party.

Even in 2010, "In national balloting for House seats, only 9 percent of black voters backed GOP candidates, along with 38 percent of Latinos and 40 percent of Asians."

(Wow! 38 percent of Hispanics and 40 percent of Asians? That's better than I thought.)

The reason for the low minority share for the GOP is usually attributed to white racism and the idea that the party is a "closed country club welcoming only elderly, white, Christian males." So what's the GOP going to do about it? Huh?

I think this misstates the problem. The reason that minorities vote Democratic is that the Democratic Party is a party that celebrates hyphenation. If you think of yourself more as black, or Hispanic, or gay, or feminist rather than American then the Democratic Party is the party for you. And nothing that Republicans can do will change that.

The Republican Party is the party of unhyphenated Americans, people who believe that if you get an education, get skills, work hard, and pay your taxes, then America will deliver. The Democratic Party is the party for people who believe that without governmental intervention, they are screwed.

The Republican notion is the counter-instinctive idea that grew up in the last half-millennium and is packaged in Adam Smith's idea of the "invisible hand." The natural human instinct is to trust in family and the kindred and the tribe, and to be suspicious of the chaps down the road who might launch a dawn raid on our village any day. Trust a stranger or a chap from a different ethnic group? You gotta be kidding. Yet the fact of the last 200 years is that you can trust strangers, usually. If you do, and if the stranger is indeed trustworthy then everyone benefits. And capitalism, down the decades, has developed pretty good ways of figuring out who is trustworthy and who is not.

The two most Democratic groups are blacks and Jews. They are the folks that are the most scared of Republicans: blacks because Republicans are white and Jews because Republicans are Christian. They are scared because their leaders work constantly at making them scared. Any moment black leaders say, whites will break out the white sheets and turn back the clock on civil rights. Any moment, liberal Jewish leaders insist, Christians will start a new pogrom against the Jews. The current effort to brand the Tea Party as white, Christian, and racist is transparently part of this effort. The only way to make 90 percent of any group to agree on something is to scare them witless.

The way for Republicans to detoxify the brand has to lead through this shameless fear-mongering of black and liberal Jewish leaders. Shame the black and Jewish leaders and short-circuit their fear-mongering and you'll find the numbers moving in the Republican direction.

Let's ask a different question. Why is it that 38 percent of Hispanics and 40 percent of Asians voted GOP in 2010? Could it be that their leaders don't work night and day to frighten them off the Republicans?

The Liberal Story Falls Apart

In BigHollywood.com Lawrence Meyers writes about the way that the liberal "story" dominates our lives. Here's how it grabs our eyeballs every day in movies and TV dramas:

Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes)... Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders.

Humans understand everything as a story, and liberals, for the last century, have been the main story-tellers. It is their stories that dominate our culture and their stories that dominate politics.

When a criminal suspect fails to convince a jury of his innocence, we say that his story "fell apart" or "failed to hold up." It reminds us that we keep our stories until they fall apart and fail us.

Right now, the liberal story is falling apart, and just about all a conservative needs to do is point to liberal stories lying around in pieces on the floor.

Roger Kimball points to the liberal story about the recession that is cluttering up the national floor right now. Here's how you create a story that fails to hold up.

1. Make $1.5 trillion of risky loans to people you know are unlikely to repay them;
2. Allow financial instituions to slice, dice, and repackage the loans, leveraging them up to 30-1;
3. Require financial institutions to value their assets according to strict “mark-to-market” rules, thus denying businesses needed flexibiity during a crisis;
4. Impose onerous new regulations not only on financial institutions but on U.S. business across the board;
5. Keep talking about raising taxes so people and businesses pay their “fair share,” even though 43.4 percent of those who file pay no income tax at all;
6. Create an economic leviathan in the form of health care legislation that will simultaneously worsen health care in the U.S. while also making it wildly more expensive;
7. Keep emphasizing “green” jobs and “green” energy production at a time when unemployment is above 9 percent and energy costs are skyrocketing;
8. Invest billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money into failing private businesses with huge union obligations to keep the business going for a while longer so that the unions can squeeze more money out of the taxpayers.
9. Ignore the warnings of credit-rating agencies when they warn you are spending too much money and do not have a credible plan to address your skyrocketing deficits and then blame them when, months later, they downgrade your credit rating.

I recently had a e-mail exchange with a liberal still desperately hanging on to the narrative. Here are some of his comments:

• How much are the Koch Bros and Rove paying you and other Tea Party supporters to put out this garbage?
• The REASON we paid off the huge WWII debt was the emergence of a middle class, union benefits and wages, and a GI Bill that allowed millions of GI's to go to college and fuel the industry in the 1950's and 60's
• The real beginning date of our demise was 1980. Ronald Reagan was elected, the corporations began their ascent to total power and control and now young man, we live in a corporate oligarchy.
• 34,000 lobbyists in DC. Paying for campaigns and writing bills for their employers.
• 2% of the US owns 63% of the wealth. The top 2500 corporations paid no Fed Income tax in 2010. $2.5 Trillion in corporate cash on the sidelines creating NO jobs.

It's hard to get annoyed with that sort of stuff. It is the story of the wheels coming off the liberal "whig history," the tale of social progress directed by wise legislation and socially conscious intellectual leaders that moves us closer and closer every year to a just and equal society.

It is all falling apart right before their liberal eyes, and they can't believe it.

Corporations are People

It's interesting to read The Nation's reaction to Mitt Romney's "Corporations are People" remark. John Nichols obviously thinks that the activists of Iowa Citizens for Community Involvement scored a real coup by getting Romney to admit the truth of his oligarchic agenda.

When Romney began to ruminate on how he would not “raise taxes on people,” the Iowa activists shouted: “Corporations!”

As the crowd began to cheer on the idea of taxing corporations that enjoy the benefits of government bailouts and subsidies without—in all too many cases—giving anything back, Romney became incensed.

The former corporate CEO shouted: “Corporations are people, my friend.”

The crowd shouted: “No, they’re not!”

“Of course they are,” replied Romney, with a “there, I said it…” statement that he and his staff would later confirm as his true faith.

It is curious to experience just how central to the leftist faith is the idea of corporations as evil. And that a "corporate oligarchy" rules America.

One of the central articles of faith is a conspiratorial interpretation of the mainstreaming of the limited-liability corporation in the notion of immortal "corporate personhood." Lefties think that the development in law of corporations as entities separate from their managers and owners is a deep dark conspiracy to take over the world.

But as Thomas Crump reminds us in The Age of Steam, the truth is more prosaic. Corporate personhood was invented in the usual fudge job of legislators responding to crisis. In the mid 19th century limited liability corporations were needed in the development of railways. The risks and the scale of railway development just could not be met with informal methods of incorporation where all the equity investors were liable for debts of the enterprise without limit. People wouldn't sign up for that kind of risk. The limitation of liability meant that investors could routinely put their money into speculative enterprises like railways without worrying that mistakes or malfeasance by the managers could wipe out not just their investment bu the rest of their assets. And railways dwarfed the manufacturing industry in the mid 19th century.

The curious doctrines of our lefty friends require them to construct a narrative of corporate malfeasance. If there weren't a corporate oligarchy they would have to invent it. Otherwise there is no warrant for big government.

The immense value of the Obama administration is that it seems determined to utterly delegitimize the progressive project and its monument, big, unjust government in its massive effort to tax and regulate everything that moves. The effort bids fair to destroy the free-market economy.

The problem is that until we get there, the American people are going to suffer real hardships as the whole economy gets sucked into a maelstrom of liberal folly and fantasy.