George Rebane
Communist spying and influence on our national policies have long been denied/diminished by our Left. The public experience in uncovering these activities within our government was not sufficient to change any minds in our unions, mainstream media, or the halls of academe. Things should have changed when the USSR collapsed in 1991, and the subsequent opening of some KGB historical files that contained conclusive evidence of atrocities like their massacre of Polish intellectuals and its officer corps in the Katin forest, and spying/infiltrating activities in all western governments. No contrition from our progressives save a stiffer upper lip. New evidence from more released files has produced added historical works on “revealing accounts of Soviet espionage in America, from the 1930s, when the pickings were easy, to the unforgiving Cold War era.” Short summaries of books on the topic, including some classics, are presented in the 26nov11 WSJ here. We expect no change in the historically impervious Left.
‘The New Tammany Hall’ is how Leftwing historian Fred Siegel sees the last forty years of public-sector union permeation into all levels of government in America. Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, is still able to call them as he sees them. In a recent interview Siegel acknowledges that “The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it.” The quotable interview is worth a read for the independent voter, and also as a stress test for the rock solid progressive. The happy conclusion from this is that there exist Leftwing intellectuals who are still Americans first.
Many of us keep wondering how long the national ‘green jobs’ farce will be continued at a government budget near you. Organizer Obama has been touting green energy jobs for as long as he has been a sty in our public eye. Every day we hear of more corruption, misdirection, lies, and malfeasance in the government’s nurture of the crony socialism that is the country’s green energy industry. In spite of this, the traditional (read fossil) energy sector today employs over 440,000 workers, and since 2003 has grown 80% in its number of American jobs. And this growth doesn’t take into account the multiplier effect for non-energy jobs to support all these workers and their families. Now the Left is real good at claiming all kinds of multiplier goodies for their mythical green jobs projections, but howl their heads off when the same analysis is applied to real jobs and job growth in our workforce.
In the meanwhile the political corruption continues without so much as a sniffle from our journalistic stalwarts. Well almost; according to the Washington Post Obama’s $38.6B green loan program had created – drum roll please – a whopping 3,500 jobs compared with the 65,000 he touted the program would “save or create”. And please don’t look under the rug where all the Solyndras have been expeditiously swept. There is no learning here, the beat goes on.
Now for the good news (almost). Since the government nationalized the nation’s school loan program, someone in the bureaucracy had their bulb light up. To save the entire enterprise from going bust sooner than later, why not discriminate in who gets the loans. Don’t lend to students with dumbbell majors who will have little chance of paying back the loan. What a concept! But don’t hold your breath, this has yet to be implemented. And dumbbell majors got rights too, know what I mean?
Stupid once, stupid forever. My favorite socialist site truthout.com skidded on yet another patch of slick progressive history. In it Martin Bennett and Richard Walker write ‘Job Crisis: What did Roosevelt do that Obama should?’ This piece deftly cherry picks the sorry record of Depression1 in the 1930s, and concludes that we can replicate FDR’s performance (recall the National Recovery Act and its alphabet soup of jobs programs) by taxing the bejeezus out of the ‘rich’ and closing corporate loopholes. They turn a blind eye to the high hard statistic of that era that is oft repeated in these pages – unemployment was at 17+% in 1933 and still in 1939 when Sec Treas Morgenthau confessed to Congress that nothing had worked except growing government, running up the country’s debt, and extending the misery. The socialists’ standard response to such failures over the decades has been to double down and do it again. It still is.
[28nov2011 update] This morning Rep Barney Frank (D-MA) announced that he has reconsidered, and will retire at the end of his current term in Congress. This is the man who is one of the authors and energetic goads of the subprime loan mess, the pompous ass who assured the nation that Fannie and Freddie were in the best of health and doing the right thing in buying all those worthless loans, a member of the dynamic duo of the Dodd-Frank ‘Wall Street Reform Act’. Except for separating the trust and investment functions of banks and insurance companies (as they were before the ill-advised Republicans joined them), the law is a typical one step forward, three steps backward in creating unnecessary frictions in America’s financial industry. So along with the hastily retired Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) of Countrywide scandal fame, the pair will be in a timely retirement instead of jail for their shady careers on the Hill. Both leave/left easy shoes to fill, and the sad part is that the voters of Massachusetts and Connecticut have been up to the challenge.
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