George Rebane

• OneNation.org organizes the 2oct10 Washington rally
• Disgruntled Spanish workers protest austerity measures
• The face of full employment?
• CATO grades our governors
• Pledges to ‘Repeal and Replace Obamacare’
• Where is the Prop23 funding?
• NYT’s Thomas Friedman leaves something out

OneNation.org is planning to one up Glenn Beck’s 8/28 Washington rally.  OneNation is a coalition of socialist, Marxist, and communist organizations, the same ones that are firmly lodged in Obama’s far left support group (check out their advertized membership here).  They are run by and have supplied this President with most of his policy and administrative managers.  This Saturday they intend to fill the Mall with thousands of like-minded and the I-want-more people to counteract what they correctly perceive as a threat from the county’s center and right.

Spain’s socialists promoted the wave of green kool-aid that splashed over Europe a couple of years ago, and the country paid dearly.  It lost 2.5 wealth producing jobs for every subsidized green job that was jimmied into place.  The economic impact was disastrous and Spain is now on its fiscal butt attempting to cobble together some austerity measures to keep it afloat.  Now similar demonstrations and riots are spreading out across the EU.  The unions have called for general strikes with promises that can only boggle the mind.  Preamble for California’s AB32 future?  [update] Gotta love those public sector employee unions, they’re now doing their stuff on this side of the pond.  This just in from wsj.com – “Protests Thursday against an overhaul of public-sector worker benefits turned into what Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa called an attempt at a coup d’état, and his government declared a state of emergency.”

In the meantime President Obama is doing gigs in friendly backyards telling people he feels their pain because middle class incomes have remained pretty much flat for most of the last decade and now they’re unemployed (W’s fault?  Natch!).  What the chief organizer doesn’t know or won’t tell is that with advancing technology and a dumbing population, this is a natural economic effect in these pre-Singularity times – an effect, as I have written, that will only get bigger in the coming years.  The former USSR achieved ‘full employment’ with misery to match by working out ‘solutions’ like shown in the nearby photo.  Red China and India must still apply this solution.  It does not take rocket science to figure out that our approach will be the same, and has already started with government buildings full of do-nothing, not-needed workers.  Who has noticed loss of services from California’s furloughed state workers?  And wait until the Democrats get their trade war started with China, then we’ll see what it felt like during WW2 to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’.

Cato grades our governors (here)  The grades were based mostly on fiscal responsibility – taxing and spending in their respective states.  As expected, Governator Arnold, our muscled mud-hen, got a D for helping the Dems drive the state into the mud – and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  With his ardent backing of AB32, I would have given him an F.  But then, who says that the libertarian Cato Institute doesn’t have a heart.

‘Repeal and Replace Obamacare’ is the cry on the lips of all Republican and a goodly number of Democrat congressmen seeking re-election this November.  But is this just campaign rhetoric playing on the sentiments of a fed up electorate, or will the carry through?  People are making them sign a pledge and 43 Repubs have already done so.  The WSJ reports –

According to this week’s Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, 40% of the public strongly supports repeal, and another 11% is generally in favor. CNN also found this week that 47% believes “Congress should repeal most of the major provisions in that bill and replace them with a completely different set of proposals,” a view that has held steady since Democrats passed the bill in March.

Our local newspaper The Union had a curious op-ed piece that almost passes as a news article.  It misreported the financial support for California’s  Proposition 23 (to suspend the remainder of AB32 until saner times).  From it the reader comes out with the impression that there is only one contributor from the county promoting Prop23.  Contributions to support Prop23 go to many organizations who are putting out the word on AB32’s job killing future.  (Jo Ann and I, along with many other folks, are also contributors to Prop23)  The Union piece concludes with NGO Sierra Business Council president Steven Frisch’s latest myth (that’s a misspelling of ‘misrepresentation’) that California’s existing climate change regulations (which include the part of AB32 that’s been implemented) are “creating literally hundreds of thousands of jobs in energy efficient technologies,”  In fact, there have been literally no such hundreds of thousands of jobs created – please see again the Spanish experience above – California’s unemployment still refuses to come below double digits as more companies are packing up to move.

Finally, celebrated liberal columnist Thomas Friedman writes a fairly good piece in the 28sep10 NYT outlining some requirements for the country’s plan forward (here) – especially if the Repubs win in November.  He states that, “To me, that is a plan that starts by asking: what is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.”  Not surprisingly he forgets to add that our ability to “attract, develop and unleash creative talent” is based solely in our country’s fast disappearing governance which allowed that talent to keep most of what they earned, and in the process often to become very wealthy.  There are people all over the world who have such creative urges, but they live under governments that stand in the way of expressing and gaining from such creativity.  Under our new leftwing regime we are doing our best to bring America to a level with this playing field.  I’m willing to bet Friedman does not understand this.