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  • Sandbox – 13mar21

    [Jo Ann and I got our second doses of the Moderna C19 vaccine yesterday in Yuba City.  Our overlords are contemplating having all kinds of new travel regulations that require proof of vaccination, or immunity, or studying critical race theory, or something similar.  I wonder if we all will have to start carrying government issued copies of our shot and indoctrination records with us at all times as the next level of controlling our behavior and whereabouts.  gjr]

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  • Dark Days Diary – 13mar21

    George Rebane

    In less than 100 days of Biden’s administration, we have already gotten used to witnessing the next tragi-comic policy coming out in quick succession before the dust has settled from the previous one.  Bumblebrain is totally in the tank for the radical socialist/communist wing of the Democratic Party, and the Left’s fascist mobs are again loose on the streets burning businesses and government buildings while what’s left of the party’s leadership piously informs Americans daily that the nation’s greatest danger is from an insurrection mounted by right wing terrorists.  Evidence for this fear is a very visible fenced and razor-wired Festung Pelosi in which today sits our nation’s Capitol Building surrounded by thousands of armed soldiers.

    The latest legislative atrocity to emerge from a one-party Congress and the pen of a barely-there president is the $1.9T ‘stimulus’ act.  Given how much of the last stimulus is yet to be spent (over $1T), this latest is historically the most blatant vote buying scam yet to come out of Washington.  It is another gargantuan fiscal folly launched this weekend that comes at the wrong time, for the wrong amount, and purposed primarily for pork.  As Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced yesterday, a detailed reading of the bill reveals that only about 9% of the monies will go for Covid relief, and even that amount will be spread out beyond 2021.

    We are still looking for a single thing that Biden has done to benefit the country, and his promises for the future comprise are nothing short of a continuous pouring of sand into the gears of the nation’s economy and ongoing unconstitutional limits to our liberties.  The worst of these is keeping the nation’s union-ruled public schools closed.  Private schools have been open throughout the pandemic providing a deluge of data to corroborate the science that tells us open classrooms are not a danger to the students or the teachers.

    And now the American Enterprise Institute reports (here) of the latest science demonstrating that keeping the schools closed has caused, and continues to cause, more damage to kids and families than if they were opened to operate normally.  The politicians who have backed school closures need to line up behind Gov Cuomo as the government’s executioners accounting for thousands of unnecessary deaths of both the old and the young.  The latter suffering horrendously from high rates of suicide, drug abuse, social crippling, and, of course, irredeemable dumbth.

    Finally, I’ll end this entry by drawing your attention to Biden’s intention to get the government into the semiconductor manufacturing business, this, ostensibly, to alleviate the chip shortage that has come about because industry couldn’t follow the zigs and zags of the feds’ C19 response policies.  But instead of letting the markets straighten out the manufacturing and distribution problems, Bumblebrain thinks that injecting a bunch of socialist central planners into the mix will solve the problem.  No one on the Left has learned over the last century that government is the worst allocator of resources to solve ANY problem – shades of the USSR, post-war UK, Venezuela, Cuba, all of Africa, … .

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  • Another Homemade Crisis

    Taking cues from Orwell’s 1984, Big Tech has quashed discussion of 2020 election integrity.  However alarming this foray against our free speech rights, their larger aim is still more profound and threatening to our continued enjoyment and exercise of constitutional rights. … Indeed, the Left seeks no less than to assert total dominion over all conservative opinion with the goal to quell any and all challenges to their authority.  Charlemagne Institute

    George Rebane

    Confused‘If you come, you can stay.’ is the message President Biden blurted before his administration had made any preparations for the hundreds of thousands that took the invitation literally to surge across our southern border, totally abrogating the existing border security policy and overwhelming the apparatus that had reduced illegal entrants to a trickle under the Trump administration.  Today the Biden Bunch is at wits end (for them a very short trek) to try and deal with the human crisis they have launched out of total ignorance and incompetence – they didn’t have a clue what any room temp IQ could have predicted about what’s happening now, and what is on its way north.

    In bygone days farmers with movable outhouses had a working homily for dealing with such situations – ‘don’t shit in the old well until the new one’s dug.’  That piece of obvious advice went by the board with the current crop of double dummies in the White House who have opened the spigot for an uncountable number of illegal entrants.  We have now retied the hands of our border security people.  They can no longer return those they capture, but must find them humane and comfortable lodgings, or simply turn them loose into our nation’s interior.

    Meanwhile, as they play word games with ‘challenge’ and ‘crisis’, Biden’s handlers have dispatched a WH team to the border area to find out what’s really going on.  During this delay, press prevaricator Jen Psaki tells us that the border crisis was “inherited” and is being kept from the president who will be duly briefed on it when the look-see contingent returns.  In the interval, she assures the assembled reporters, that there is no use of anyone asking him about the tsunami of illegal aliens since he really hasn’t been told yet.  That is another reason they are keeping Bumblebrain away from the mics and cameras while setting a record for the delay until the president’s first press conference.  It will be pure entertainment for all to see how they finally decide to pull that one off.

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  • Ruminations – 6mar21 (updated 11mar21)

    George Rebane

    White supremacist hysteria has reached fever pitch among the progressive socialists.  Commenter BillT @ 835am cites (here) the dean of Arizona State University who announced that characteristics of precision, timeliness, quality expression (e.g. good written English), good work ethic, etc are all part and parcel of “white racial habitus” which perpetuates “white language supremacy” which means “it’s inherently white and racist”.  By the dean’s logic, then ‘black racial habitus’ that perpetuates black behavioral characteristics is inherently black and racist. (more here)

    Covid science and disinformation is discussed by Dr Scott W Atlas MD, Hoover Institution senior fellow, former professor and head of neuroradiology at Stanford.  He recently gained a furious notoriety in the eyes of all Democrats and their lamestream lackies for serving as a C19 advisor to President Trump.  In the Feb 2021 Imprimus he asks ‘Science, Politics, and COVCID: Will Truth Prevail?’  I cite his short and very informative essay as another cogent summary of my own stance on the nature of the C19 pandemic and the various disastrous government response policies to the disease.  From all of my readings (also see below), the clear answer to Dr Atlas’s question is NO!

    Fact-checking the fact checkers.  Today it is easy to make the case that media giants are “employing left-wing vetters to limit scientific debate”.  The work of fact checking by leftwingers primarily focuses on cherry picking a supporting counter-opinion report or two and using it to dun any scientific opinion that does not support the command/control narrative prescribing government diktats opposing federalist responses to the C19 pandemic.  The whole enterprise of fact checking is based on the Mega Lie that science speaks but with one voice.  The ‘one voice’ chosen by the ‘progressive health clerisy’ is then labeled consensus science to which all the hoi polloi must kowtow when thinking properly about such politicized issues as global warming and C19.  For more, see ‘Fact-Checking Facebook’s Fact Checkers’.

    [7mar21 update]  Islam's goal in/for America.  Over the years in these pages I have been very clear and explicit about my assessment as to the objective of the Islamic diaspora, especially as it is directed toward America and its western culture.  The fundamental task of all expatriate Muslims is to be missionaries and bring the infidels into the embrace of Allah and his prophet Muhammad, to whatever destination they emigrate.  Practiced as a temporary and necessary ruse, assimilation into their host country’s culture is the last thing on their mind. Here is a video of a talk on Islam’s goal for America given by a very sober Muslim woman – Download Received_938000470288815. (H/T to correspondent)

    George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and NOT due to police brutality.  The four policmen involved followed the training book and policy to the letter as attested by a continuous police bodycam video (here).  The 31may20 autopsy report showed that Floyd had almost 3 times a potential lethal dose of the drug in his system, and that he was already dying of fluid filling his lungs when the police encountered him.  The real question is why this information was kept until 25 August after three months of looting, rioting, and murder across the nation.  And given the overwhelming evidence, why are the policemen still being tried for doing nothing wrong?

    [11mar21 update]  Nevada County Trembles.  The Board of Supervisors failed to pass an already lame and vanilla resolution (here) that asks Sacramento to behave more responsibly and competently toward Nevada County.  Along with other small rural counties, we have gotten screwed by the policies foisted on the state by Gavin Newsom.  I, along with many other local citizens, have encouraged the supes to step up and make our voices heard – to wit we want more local control of our C19 responses, and we don’t want to get screwed by the state in its distribution of vaccines, federal funds, etc that are supposed help pay for our pandemic related expenses.  It turns out that at last Tuesday’s BoS meeting, the supes were too timid to pass the proposed resolution, and instead they tabled it.  When are we finally going to get the courage to make a simple peep to protest the crap that keeps coming down from Sacramento?

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  • Scattershots – 2mar21 (updated 5mar21)

    George Rebane

    Those who judge the past in terms of the here and now are doing a great disservice through their ignorance of the then and there.

    The Left’s promotion of America’s new cancel culture is in full swing.  We now have full scale censoring of politically incorrect content on our mass media – broadcast, internet, print, entertainment, … .  This incorporates the modern version of book burning.  The latest volumes to be ‘digitally burned’ and no longer available from major outlets include Justice Clarence Thomas’s ‘Created Equal’ video and , and now Dr Seuss.  Dr Seuss has been an icon of Americana and children’s literature for a couple of generations now.  Even an annual children’s reading day (2 March) was ensconced to recognize the birthday of Theodor Seuss ‘Ted’ Geisel (1904-1991).  But today our commissars of correct culture have deemed many of his works to racist and contain “crude and offensive stereotypes in several drawings of blacks and Asian-Americans.”  But those well-read in the country’s leftward lurch will recognize that such book burnings are nothing more than pages out of Stalin’s and Hitler’s playbooks to erase the old culture in order to make room for instilling their brave new world.  It was ever thus. (more here)

    Common culture counts.  That has been a fundamental tenet of RR, and is now being adopted by many other national voices to counter the Left’s all-out assault on America’s traditional culture.  Six former US education secretaries co-authored ‘America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity’ (2mar21 WSJ).  In there they cogently argue for a national education plan “to help teachers instill an understanding that is complete and honest but not cynical.”  The 6jan21 frustration that was expressed by Americans on the Mall and in the Capitol is a harbinger that the country’s political leaders, those who truly want to promote unity, should take careful note of and respond with appropriate legislation and regulatory relief for our public schools.  It’s a tall order the chances of success for which are not high given the entrenched collectivists in politics and the teachers unions.  Nevertheless, the authors cite the ‘Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy’, the culmination of a 19-month project by 300+ “scholars, educators, practitioners, and students from diverse backgrounds.” (more here) In sum, a minimally common culture for a constitutional democracy “requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good.”  The Roadmap provides the guidance for the several states to develop curricula that can provide such an understanding.

    Joe Biden puts all his credibility chips on a Big Lie, and takes a page of bombast from Trump’s playbook.  He and Team Biden, echoed in the lamestream, now trumpet the claim that he is the nation’s savior from Covid-19.  Specifically, “he is staking his legacy on the lie that the pandemic was out of control until the day of his inauguration.”  And a more comprehensive segue to the old days of ‘journalism’ was made possible by the former president’s CPAC speech.  The hiatus is over, we can now stop having to explain (or avoid) Biden, and shift back to coverage of Trump topics that fit like an old shoe.  Gerard Baker says it best (here) –

    The return to the limelight of a certain former president has triggered an unfortunate but probably inevitable relapse for the Trump addicts of our news-gathering class.  They’d gone cold turkey for a whole month and there were tentative, encouraging signs that the cure might be taking. Deprived of their favorite drug, some were gingerly discovering other, more wholesome pursuits: tackling the mountain of evidence that Andrew Cuomo might be a mendacious, incompetent, bullying sex pest; investigating the slight but tantalizing possibility that not all of America’s social and economic woes can be attributed to white supremacy; slowly weaning themselves off the urge to ask penetrating questions of the White House about Joe Biden’s rescue dog.

    What must ol’ Bumblebrain do now to get back into an adult-level news cycle?  After all, he’s still the president.  Isn’t he?

    [4mar21 update]  A CPAC puzzle?  A straw poll was taken at the recent CPAC conference at which many Republican luminaries – including former President Trump – spoke.  The poll indicated that 68% wanted to see Trump run for president in 2024, and only 55% wanted to see him nominated for the office.  This conservetarian doesn’t understand how the excess of the 68% would have him become a Republican candidate in 2024 without first being nominated – especially after he made clear that he would not support or start a third party.  From my perch it looks like a collective brain fart.  Other solutions most welcome.

    The Capitol Fortress.  Thousands of troops remain guarding our razor wire wrapped Capitol.  Why?  The Dems insist on fake intelligence reports of another imminent attempt at a rightwing ‘insurrection’ (when there never was one in the first place).  The disorganized and frustrated mob that charged the Capitol on 6 January had no idea what they were doing or were supposed to do.  They got in only because the on-duty Capitol police were incompetent in every aspect of operational planning and execution, or ordered to allow a politically useful penetration of the building.  And the mob had nothing to do with the deaths that day, that was another fabrication by the Dems and their lamestream media.  So, the whole thing today was a set-up for the Dems kabuki security theater to defend against a supposed repeat today of 6jan21.  This attack was supposed to occur according to some unknown advisory from an unknown agency in our intelligence community – perhaps the FBI.  In spite of today’s nothing burger, the military will continue to occupy DD for another two months – to defend against some unknown threat – at which time another fake intelligence advisory will launch the next phase of political histrionics to keep the public apprised of their assigned place under the heel of the state.

    [5mar21 update]  ‘A Compromise on Creationism’ – in this little 5mar21 WSJ essay (here) physician/scientist Dr Joshua Swamidass calls for reaccreditation of colleges that teach creationism as long as they also permit discussion of and courses in evolution, along with some other provisions about the transfer of creationism course credits.  (He misses the reciprocal call for accredited secular colleges to also welcome speakers who counter theistically progressive narratives.) What again astounded me was the citing of a 2019 Gallup poll that “showed that 40% of American adults ‘ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.’” (more here)  Interesting to note is that 40% with college degrees believe that the evolution of Man was guided by God, which indicates a belief in Intelligent Design (here, here, and here) that for obvious reasons is purposely confused with and perfidiously equated to Creationism by our secular humanists.  My own concern is that these ‘strictly creationists’ reject most of what science teaches about how we and universe function, knowledge that is also the basis for the politics of public policies.  How do these religionists vote?

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  • Sandbox – 2mar21

    [The rabid Left is now advising all who would listen across the land not to hire or have anything to do with people who were part of the Trump administration.  And sure enough, that aspect of our now-arrived cancel culture is taking hold.  Today many of the Left’s lackies are publicly putting such people on their permanently banned list (part of their national unity campaign).  But how would it be if those of the counter-cancel culture grew some balls and started advertising for employees whose desiderata showed they had been a part of Trump’s administration – if not on the WH staff, then in one of the cabinet level departments or other agencies that were led by political appointees who brought along their high level colleagues and former staffers to help administer the federal bureaucracies calcified with thousands of career leftwingers?  If they can do it, why can’t we?  gjr]

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  • A Sad Commentary About Unity

    George Rebane

    In his inauguration speech President Joe Biden went out of his way to emphasize and promise that his would be the administration to heal the chasm that separates Americans and bring us together again – he would unite us all.  From the policy statements that his WH started to issue immediately put paid to that particular inaugural lie; the new administration’s efforts to unite handily beat the setting sun to the horizon on that auspicious day.

    But lying is not the only precursor to the Left’s love affair with disastrous public policies.  We have to credit them also with a genuine desire to benefit society, which, after all, has been the overarching objective of collectivists – socialists, communists, …, Jacobins – since the French Revolution.  Their problem becomes evident when they present the fruits of their deliberations and then attempt apologetics to bolster their freshly minted policies.  It becomes immediately clear to most who pay attention, especially those with some book-learning, that their supportive logic for any given policy simply does not tie.  It isn’t the kind of logic that the rest of us have been taught and successfully practiced in our professions.

    This dichotomy between thinking processes by the Right and Left continued unexamined and fruitlessly debated for over two centuries until some psychologists and brain scientists at the University College London decided to do a clinical study and try to answer the question of why the logics used by the two sides are so different.  I reported on that study (here and here), and was a bit astounded to learn it revealed that collectivists use a different part of their brains than do the conservatives to solve policy problems that require use of logic tools.

    (more…)

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  • Scattershots – 26feb21 (updated 27feb21)

    George Rebane

    ‘Masks don’t work and are damaging to health’ concludes another panel of concerned physicians (here).  “The only randomized control studies that have ever been done on masks show that they don’t work”, stated Dr Eric Nepute, one of the three physicians on the ‘Unmasking Covid-19’ panel who further agreed with the now widely held belief that imposing the wearing of masks 24/7 in public is also an autocratic population control trial by governments.  Another panelist Dr Sheri Tenpenny referenced a mask-wearing study involving 25,000 German students where 68% of the subjects reported “some kind of impairment” from wearing masks.  These kinds of pushbacks are starting to pop up all over the place as imperious governments issue C19 response diktats without supplying any of the supporting science that they claim to be ‘following’. 

    ‘California’s Climate Contradictions’ include studies that present “New evidence that green policies punish the poor and subsidize the rich.” (here)  California’s insane public policies cannot stand scrutiny wherever you take a more considered and serious look at them.  Even the left-leaning non-profit Next 10 and Cal Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas concludes in a study that “California has charted an ambitious course towards decarbonizing its economy.  At the same time, California has among the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S. These two facts create a tension: decarbonizing the economy most likely requires electrification of transportation and space and water heating, but high prices push against such a transition. High prices also have troubling implications for equity and affordability.”  This is the strictly bottom-of-the-barrel thinking that we have come to expect from the state that ranks 50th out of 50 in doing anything beneficial for the taxpaying residents in its shrinking middle class.

    Illegal aliens in California will get financially stimulated (here).  If you crawl over/under our border fence and make it to California, you will be rewarded with cash money, and uncounted public welfare programs, with a promise of being shielded from federal apprehension, an eventual amnesty, and a direct path to American citizenship.  All you have to do is remember which political party made possible open borders, illegal entry, and all the good stuff that followed.  Democrats have given ‘vote harvesting’ a whole new meaning by implementing massive programs of ‘vote planting’ on the front end – yea verily, tomorrow ye shall surely reap what today ye sow.

    [27feb21 update]  I composed this little ditty for the Obama years way back in 2013.  Things have not changed much today with the new Democrat administration and Congress in charge.  And we voters have not become any smarter in the interval.  Here is the updated version of it.

    ProgressivePropaganda_2021

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  • Progressives Big Lie #7519 – Texas Power Debacle

    George Rebane

    The 24feb21 Union ran this cartoon on its op-ed pages.

    TexasElectricity_2021

    From this the newspaper’s uninformed and progressive readers have the clear takeaway that the Texas electric grid is in disarray and dysfunctional, as the recent blizzard demonstrated, because the electricity market is too ‘free’ and unregulated.  The disaster that hit Texans, and from which they still suffer, was caused by too much capitalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

    The actual cause of the grid’s failure and its normal high cost to consumers is purely and solely a government manufactured travesty, brought to you by the scumbag politicians in Washington and Austin.  (Remember, if society has a problem, government is almost always the cause.)  To get a handle on this rather complex kerfuffle, we first have to understand that across the country there have come to be two kinds of energy suppliers – more or less deregulated ‘retail generators’ and the usual regulated public utilities.  The corporatist ‘free marketeers’ led by outfits like Enron, successfully lobbied for new fed and state laws that allowed the set up of the two-tier supply structure – the deregulated retail suppliers were supposed to compete and thereby lower consumer prices below those charged by the regulated utilities.

    The corporatists anticipated their windfall by promising to set up a green power generating infrastructure that minimized reliance on coal and nuclear.  It was going to be all wind and solar with gas back-up.  The green power part was going to be heavily subsidized by the feds, and natural gas was a just-in-time fuel that could not be efficiently stored by the remaining back-up power stations.  And to transport the gas through pipelines required the operation of electrically powered compressors.  As dollar signs danced in their heads, and since the deregulation didn’t require it, the last thing in the minds of these new corporatist retail utilities was spending money to maintain and harden the electricity distribution infrastructure.   Are you beginning to get the picture? (more here)

    Now step back about 30 years when people started analyzing the vulnerability of green electric grids not backed up by reliable coal and nuclear.  They started issuing warnings which were ignored by the politicians in charge of legislation and prudent regulation.  In fact, the eco and corporatist factions caused most of these longer term studies to be shut down lest their pesky findings would get too much publicity. To add insult to injury, many jurisdictions such as in Texas, consumers were not allowed to pipe gas into their homes for heating, and codes were put in place to prohibit the building of such houses – ‘clean electricity’ was going to be the solution to all energy consumption needs.

    This insanity continued with governors (e.g. Cuomo) prohibiting the building/expansion of pipelines to bring back-up fossil fuels into their states and appropriately distribute it in the regions where subsidized green power was expanding.  The point here is, that contrary to the Big Lie cartoons like the one above, there has never been anything free about the energy markets when corporatists conspire with econuts and scumbag politicians to force consumers to choose between regulated utilities and ‘unregulated’ retail electricity generators who wind up with a captured clientele that can be charged sky-high market prices when primary (wind and solar) generators inevitably fail and back-up power turns out to be inadequate. (more here) 

    So today politicians such as Cuomo and Warren inhibit the building of needed infrastructure ranging from pipelines to gas compressor facilities, and go on to ignore and shut down studies that produce results which don’t support their Agenda21 green narratives.

    But more fundamentally, as taught by Rebane Doctrine, unfettered capitalism in any market will become rapacious as it inevitably coagulates into socially egregious, corporatist oligopolies on the road to monopoly.  (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, …)  Capitalism, as an economic order to generate and distribute wealth, is an 800 lbs gorilla that always needs some minimal regulation by the collective in a stable and liberal society.  Capitalism is God’s paramount gift to mankind’s pursuit of happiness, but it does not come free.  We recall that the good part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system, and the bad part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system.  And there’s the rub for enlightened governance.

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  • Consummating Corporatist Conspiracies

    “Conspiracy – an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.”

    George Rebane

    Over the last year or two corporatist conspiracies have come into full bloom with the various progressive factions of the government and media as counter-parties.  Today the dominant vehicle for promoting the fruits of such conspiracies is the ‘green new deal’ in all its facets.  What makes the ‘surreptitious’ part of the plan work is that most Americans think that the GND was promoted as a temporary far-left hot flash to attract the socialist cum communist factions of the Democratic Party to support Teams Biden and Pelosi.  Walter Russel Mead goes into some detail in the 23feb21 WSJ (here) to remind us that  –

    Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities. It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding. It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.

    AmazonAd_22feb21To these corporatists we add our technology oligopolies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.  A blatant example of corporatist trade of corporations’ support for suppression of competition is made in Amazon’s full page ad (see nearby photo) propagandizing of the $15/hr federal minimum wage in the 22feb21 WSJ and other lamestream outlets.  In this unashamed appeal for the government gun, Amazon wants its retail competition quashed through mandatory increases in labor costs for those small enterprises that still offer entry level job opportunities as opposed to integrating expensive new technologies or simply folding their tents.  As justification, the copy in its ad reads –

    The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.  For millions of workers, that’s 12 years without a wage increase – despite significant cost-of-living increases and the economic toll of the Covid-19 crisis.  That’s why we support the Raise the Wage Act that’s currently being proposed in Congress.  This legislation will increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour four years from now, giving 32 million US workers the raise they deserve while helping accelerate the recovery from the pandemic. … At Amazon, we saw the need to do more.  That’s why in 2018 we decided to provide all our US employees a starting wage of at least $15 an hour.  Since then, applications have doubled, our employees have had an easier time providing for their families, and local economies have seen a boost. …  We’re calling on Congress to pass the Raise the Wage Act.  It’s the right thing to do.

    This piece of drivel has more holes in it than a sieve.  Nowhere have there been millions of deserving workers increasing their skill sets for over a decade without getting raises and promotions.  There exists no permanent cohort of American workers condemned to only $7.25/hr for years.  And Amazon’s applications have doubled because misguided government lockdowns have destroyed thousands of retailers among other businesses.  During this time Amazon’s online retailing business has boomed from people ordering their necessaries from home, thereby increasing Amazon’s happy requirement to build more distribution warehouses that need thousands more workers off the unemployment rolls.  (Amazon can afford to train and pay the $15 to carefully selected and appropriately capable new employees.)  The longer the lockdowns stay in place, the more money Amazon makes.  And in return Amazon and the oligarchs promote Democrat vote-buying policies with added benefit of virtue signaling to the nation’s light readers.

    And fuhgeddabout “local economies have seen a boost”.  The promise of a $15 minimum wage has had nothing to do with any growth of local economies, growth which is only fostered by businesses that are allowed to operate at current labor costs to provide needed goods and services to people hunkered down in their homes.  Were that not so, then even more growth would come about if the minimum wage were to be $20 or $30 or even higher. As Raise the Wage Act becomes law and labor costs start rising, there will be a net fewer jobs available across the country (1.4M fewer according to the CBO), especially for the uneducated and unskilled who are also promised government checks if they vote correctly.

    Walter Russel Mead concludes his adroit commentary with –

    Business lobbies around the world are experts in regulatory capture and in diverting subsidies and mandates to serve corporate interests. It won’t be the greenest possible grid that wins the political contest; it will be the system that provides the most-entrenched interests with the highest rents that the best PR firms can present as sufficiently green. As lobbyists and green entrepreneurs rush to cash in on one of history’s greatest bonanzas, pigs will be adorned in green lipstick and white elephants dipped in green dye.

    Yes indeed, you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours.

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