George Rebane

Recent correspondence with Russ Steele – astute observer of the human condition, especially in Washington DC and Sacramento – brings to mind some thoughts about two particular items.

Gov Gavin Newsome confirms his scumbag politician credentials by issuing an executive order “meant to sharpen the state’s focus – and its spending – on global warming.”  Basically, his new meddling in California’s already maximally meddled public funds is going to redirect new tax receipts and fees from fuel and vehicle registrations on the progressive environmental agenda to further punish California’s economy.   He is bamboozling Californians by not using the money to fix and maintain our state’s dilapidated roadways, and he’s reaching into the drastically underfunded government employee pension funds (CalPERS, CalSTRS, UC) to induce them to further neglect their mandate  to max investment returns by redirecting existing funds to vehicles that serve the progressive propaganda narratives.  These are some of the many ongoing ‘bait and switch’ uses for directed taxes that we have been suffering from years of Democrat controlled Sacramento.  (there's more in the paywalled SacBee) 

Michelle Obama presidential chatter ascending. (more here)  The Dems are more than desperate with their clown-car load of unwinnable candidates who daily recite and sing socialist sonnets and paeans that promise to enrich the nation’s envious – those of us who are short on education, marketable skills, money, and/or gumption.  So from the wings we have had other prominent Democrat hopefuls start throwing their hats into the ring – Bloomberg, Steyer, Patrick, … – with high hopes that the DNC and Team Pelosi will pull the plug on the clown-car and offer voters a more sane looking and centrist Democrat in November.  And then there’s Michelle.  From my perch, it is hard to identify a more unqualified and unattractive candidate for president from the longer list of still sidelined Democratic personages on the national scene.  Here is a kept woman with absolutely no accomplishments to her name.  Well, maybe two.  When wife of a rising state senator, she was placed into a hospital administration job doing ‘critical’ work for $300K a year.  It was so critical, that when she left for greener pastures on Pennsylvania Avenue, no one was hired to replace her.  And then there’s her famously bust school lunch program that crashed and burned when she was First Lady.  Yet the Dems may still consider the American electorate fundamentally stupid enough to vote for her on name recognition alone, if for nothing else than relief from alternatives such as Sanders, Warren, …, and, of course, ol’ uncle silver-tongue Joe.

[30nov19 update]  Socialists are systemic liars.  They succeed in their destruction of lands and economies only because they dangle what seems as an attractive ‘easy way out’ to the huddled and great unwashed who can always be induced to yearn for something for nothing.  Today these socialist scumbags, concentrated in the leftmost wing of the Democratic Party, are floating more free-money plans than their constituents can count.  They point to the European model and make it all look like a slam-dunk as soon as they’re voted into office.  Overwhelmingly, most of these voters know nothing of the EU’s socialist goings on.  They wholeheartedly believe Democrat candidates who “insist that America could afford a European-style welfare state if only it taxed the rich more heavily.”  However, today “Europe’s beleaguered middle class knows better.”  The bottom line, as demonstrated time and again by OECD data, is that the middle class always pays.  Why?  Because that’s where the money is; the rich don’t have enough and are mobile when you start raping them.  And when the successful leave, the pie shrinks, and governments wind up trying to wring milk out of turnips.  To give a hint of their desperation, the EU governments max tax rates at north of 50% which kick in at the workers’ median income levels.  To that are added all kinds of other “social insurance contributions” topped off with a very regressive VAT of around 21% on ALL consumer goods.  On top of that there are federal real estate taxes that heavily impact people trying to retire and the young attempting to get into their own homes.  And the most hidden of all are payroll taxes on employers which reduce the wages for all European workers. (more here)

Schwab is the latest big corporation to climb aboard the Great California Exodus express.  It is now moving its corporate headquarters from fetid and fecal San Francisco to Texas, one of the nation’s go-to states with much lower costs and much lower taxes.  Schwab management saw the Democrat handwriting on the wall twenty years ago, and since 2000 has reduced its California workforce by 90%.  In Texas Schwab’s employees “can have a higher standard of living, and more after-tax income, at the same salaries.”  Meanwhile the once golden state continues spraying its companies across the country like out of a fire hose.  The rush out is now of epic proportions, about which the lamestream is silent, as are the local leftwing lackies in denial.  In the last two years alone, “660 California companies have moved 765 facilities out of the state since 2017. This includes 10 corporations that have moved their headquarters out of San Francisco.”  And guess what, the Democrat dimwits in Sacramento split between not knowing what’s happening, and not knowing what causes it. (here)

‘Does America Still Have a Common Creed?’  Stanford historian and Pulitzerist David M. Kennedy now worries “that the country no longer agrees on a shared identity of purpose.”  Regular readers know that RR has recognized this as a fundamental factor in our approaching Great Divide, and has answered that question with a firm NO!  And in these pages, the collectivist commenters have done their part to confirm that answer which is now even shared by Prof Kennedy and more mainstream academicians and observers of the American scene.  Kennedy repeats our common theme that “societies that have deep, chronic, intergenerational ethnic differences inside the same body politic don’t have particularly encouraging histories. … The basic human instinct to prefer one’s own kind to another is impossible, I think, to eradicate entirely.” Therefore forging “a coherent society out of people who are different in their origins and aspirations is a project, and a fragile one. America’s capacity for absorption has been exceptional.”  And today that capacity is almost all but gone, with no one professing a clue as how we might retrieve it.

Commenter ‘Robert Cross’ (presumably a sackhead) provides an iconic example of today’s leftwinger in the hustings, in addition to a continuing revelation into the workings of the liberal mind.  (His 1052am comment is good place to start.)  His lexicon is limited to what his national lamestream press du jour purports it to be – to most words and concepts he references, he cannot give a cogent definition – and his attempts at logic wander in a nether world that ranges between tortured and non-existent.  For example, he evinces no knowledge of and provides no record of responding to any of the extensive and referenced points my readers and I provide when we meet in the field of ideas – to illustrate, he could have contended any of the above-raised issues, instead he launches a well-oiled personal ad hominem.  We of the conservetarian persuasion are demonstrably constant champions in various degrees of free market capitalism, personal responsibility, entrepreneurial spirit, private property, limited government, textual constitutionalism, individual liberty, and America as a sovereign nation-state and a first-world hegemon.  However, the Robert Crosses of the land, as attested by years of their writings and the policies of their political leadership, daily demonstrate their affinity for the politically correct hive mind, homogenous culture, central planning and control, conformal collective action, ever larger government, identity politics, reducing the private sector, Marxian economics, and the dissolution of America’s sovereignty into a global government.  And the most important aspect of the latter belief system is that it cannot be nor dare it be substantively defended by either its national braintrust or any of its grass roots constituents (as again demonstrated in these pages).