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Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) is encouraging residents in his city to tattletale on their neighbors who defy his stay-at-home order. Specifically, he's targeting businesses that continue to remain open despite not being considered "essential" (at least by government standards).
“If any non-essential businesses continue to operate in violation of the stay at home order, we’re going to act to enforce the safer at home order and ensure their compliance,” Garcetti said. “You know the old expression about snitches. Well, in this case, snitches get rewards.”
Does Mayor Garcetti know that Hitler's Germany, Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, and the dozens of lesser dictators of the 20th century also rewarded people who ratted on their friends, relatives, acquaintance, and neighbors? Of course he does. Garcetti, et. al. just think there is nothing wrong with it. They want power and control at all costs and neighbor-finking is just one tool in the toolbox. And they will pay you for it.
For the Left, no matter the name of their party, it should never be asked, "Do their ends justify their means?" For in their minds, the end always justify any means. There is no line that must never be crossed to achieve their purposes. There are only lines that should not be crossed yet.
So how did the "inform on your neighbor" program work in Hitler's Germany? It turned the country into a people afraid of one another - even of their own family members - all day, every day. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (short for (Geheime Staatspolizei-Secret State Police),
... encouraged German citizens to report anything they thought was “suspicious”. Though denunciations by the general public may have been “sincere” in the early days of the regime, by the later years, the denunciation/informer process was becoming widely abused, and even the Gestapo understood this.
It was not uncommon for squabbling neighbors to settle grudges or simple disputes by reporting one another to their local Gestapo office. Common accusations included overhearing defeatist talk, listening to foreign radio broadcasts(BBC), or even overhearing criticism of the Führer or the Nazi party. In one instance in Essen, a woman accused her elderly disabled neighbor of listening to the BBC in the evening, claiming she heard this when putting her ear up to the common wall. The man was brought in for questioning, and denied the allegations, claiming he and the neighbor had a troubled past. He then hanged himself in his cell the next day. Couples involved in marital disputes also realized that they could use the denunciation process to their own advantage, and these comprised a significant percentage of reports. One woman in Mannheim accused her spouse of making derogatory remarks about Hitler, but an investigation revealed she was involved in an affair with a soldier and wanted her husband “out of the way”. In one particularly disturbing incident, an idealistic grandmother, overhearing her beloved grandson make disparaging remarks about the Führer, and having no idea how severe the penalty was for such a crime, allegedly denounced him to the Gestapo in the hope this would dissuade him from making further such remarks.
Regardless of the motivations of the denouncers, what the process did do, was essentially turn Nazi Germany into a self-policing state. It’s estimated that some 40% of all denunciations were based on the settling of some personal grudge or score... . It got so bad that a Reich Ministry of Justice internal memo dated from August 1943 declared that “The denouncer is the biggest scoundrel in the country”.
So Garcetti is implementing not merely a dictatorship-style government, he is also implementing means by which jilted ex-girlfriends will be paid for lying to police about a former boyfriend, or a man with a longstanding dispute with a next-door neighbor can get even by turning the neighbor into a prosecuted enemy of the people.
To paraphrase Tome Wolfe, fascism is always being planned by the Republicans, but is always implemented by the Democrats.
Welcome to the age of the Amerikanische Staatspolizei, let's just call it the Amstapo for short.
The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people. We’ve had a century of relative peace on our southwest border, and aside from dealing with an occasional surge of illegal immigration, we have assumed that it will continue. It will not.
Culiacan should be a wake-up call that the war now underway in Mexico will not stay there, and that we’d better start thinking about what that will mean for America.
You may have read the news just a few days back: the Mexican military captured not one but two of El Chapo’s sons in the heart of Culiacán, the Sinaloan capital. One son freed himself—which is to say his entourage and retainers at hand overpowered and killed the soldiers at hand—and then, in a decisive riposte, seized the entire city center of Culiacán to compel the liberation of his brother.
The forces that emerged were in the literal sense awesome and awful. Heavy weaponry that would be familiar on any Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni battlefield was brought to bear. More and worse: custom-built armored vehicles, designed and built to make a Sahel-warfare technical look like an amateur’s weekend kit job, were rolled out for their combat debut. Most critically, all this hardware was manned by men with qualities the Mexican Army largely lacks: training, tactical proficiency, and motivation.
Then the coup de grace: as the Chapo sons’ forces engaged in direct combat with their own national military, kill squads went into action across Culiacán, slaughtering the families of soldiers engaged in the streets.
Same post: "You might think nothing could be worse than ISIS. You’d be thinking wrong."
After about three months of training it was time for the “final exam,” which involved “cutting people up a special way,” Capache explains. Recruits took turns administering a specific, byzantine series of stabs and slashes to a live victim—usually a thief or petty criminal the cartel deemed deserving of such punishment. The first series of ordered knife cuts was meant to torture for information without killing. Then to strike fatal blows. And at last to cut up the body by hand for disposal. — In Mexico’s Drug Cartel Country, a Murderer Who Kills Murderers Tells His Story Trust me, you don’t want to RTWT ]
Last weekend [in August] in Berkeley, Calif., a group of neo-communist antifa — “anti-fascist” — thugs attacked peaceful protesters at a “No to Marxism in America” rally, wielding sticks and pepper spray, and beating people with homemade shields that read (I kid you not) “No Hate.” The Post reports how one peaceful protester “was attacked by five black-clad antifa members, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself.” Members of the Berkeley College Republicans were then stalked by antifa goons who followed them to a gas station and demanded they “get the [expletive] out” of their car, warning, “We are real hungry for supremacists and there is more of us.”
The organizer of the anti-Marxism protest is not a white supremacist. Amber Cummings is a self-described “transsexual female who embraces diversity” and had announced on Facebook that “any racist groups like the KKK [and] Neo Nazis . . . are not welcome.” The protest was needed, Cummings said, because “Berkeley is a ground zero for the Marxist Movement.”
As if to prove Cummings’s point, the antifa movement responded with jackboots and clubs — because their definition of “fascist” includes not just neo-Nazis but also anyone who opposes their totalitarian worldview.
And let’s be clear: Totalitarian is precisely what they are. Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defended antifa’s violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, “Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists” who believe that physical violence “is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis.
Well, the Nazis were socialists, but saying that provable historical fact makes progressives' heads explode.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invented the word fascist as the name of his post-World War 1 party, which he symbolized with the ancient Roman symbol, fasces, a bundle of reeds tied together with an axe, used by the Roman magisterium to symbolize the power of Roman law over life and death.
The Roman fasces, symbol of the Italian fascisti party of the early 20th century.
In 1932, Mussolini defined Fascism for the Italian Encyclopedia. It included this nugget:
The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, th`e Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....
...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....
Sound familiar? It's almost a transcript of the Democrat debates so far.
Mussolini's street enforcement arm were called the Blackshirts, who were,
...originally the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party and, after 1923, an all-volunteer militia of the Kingdom of Italy under Fascist rule, similar to SS in Nazi-Germany. Its members were distinguished by their black uniforms (modeled on those of the Arditi, Italy's elite troops of World War I) and their loyalty to Benito Mussolini, the Duce (leader) of Fascism, to whom they swore an oath.
Hitler copied the concept with the National Socialist Sturmabteilung, SA, who unofficially were called Brownshirts. In the early stages of the Nazi movement the Brownshirts were simply paid street thugs. Later Hitler put them under military-like discipline and they carried out planned, focused violence against Jews, communists, trade unionists and others.
So who is Antifa? They are the street thugs of the American Left, committing violence against Americans of other political persuasion. As for the Democrat party, if I had a dollar for every time a prominent Democrat or presidential candidate denounced Antifa and its violence, I would be, um, broke.
But Antifa is well funded and its leaders, at least, are paid, according to the LA Times, which also points out that paid protesters are not exactly a new thing in American politics. Most of Antifa consists of "useful idiots," but the ranks of trained and very capable Antifa blackshirts (for black is their preferred color of dress) are growing.
This is simply the socialist-left template. Military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz said that war is a continuation of politics by other means. For socialists, violence is a continuation of politics - but not by "other means," for the Left defines politics in warring terms: "class struggle," "rising up," "workers' revolution," and such. Politics and violence therefore are not separate activities. Politics is simply a continuum that encompasses both non-violence and violence.
This is why I have maintained for three years that there is a new American civil war coming, no matter who is declared the winner of 2020's election. If Trump wins, organized, pre-planned Antifa violence will erupt the same day. If Warren or another Democrat wins, violence will follow later, as the fascisti victor turns toward emplacing socialist rule over Americans.
Mexico is already a nation at war with itself. It is on the precipice of failed state status. And as Mexico is now, the United States will be in only 13-14 months. I pray we will not come to a sauve qui peut state of affairs.
In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of "the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.
Her "Accountable Capitalism Act" directly requires government-mandated management of corporate and mutual funds - in fact, almost every kind of security and equity sold on the American markets -- and 80 percent of equities are held by institutions; 37 percent of all equities are held specifically by retirement funds such as 401(k) and 401(c)3 accounts and similar funds.
What will happen to your personal retirement account? A sharp plunge in value immediately which will never be recuperated compared to today's arrangement. If you are in or near retirement, get ready to drastically scale back your standard of living.
Warren also proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under this plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes new strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This plan is Orwellian. The idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked.
"Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates.
For the purpose of comparison, we used the Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year economic outlook released in January 2017. The CBO’s economic forecasts tend to mirror the consensus of other economists.
The results of this comparison are stark.
So yeah, we should turn all our government to "experts" who know what is going to happen long ahead of time.
The term "anti-fascist" is of Soviet origin, and it was used before and during World War II to make the aggressive, murderous, war-criminal regime of Joseph Stalin seem more palatable. The entire point then, as now, was to make it seem like the U.S.S.R. had a lot in common with normal, decent people's views, even as millions were being shipped off to die in the archipelago of slave-labor camps that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced for eight years. (His crime? An irreverent reference, in a letter, to Stalin's moustache.) ...
We may not take today's anarcho-communists as seriously as we did back when they had the power, the weapons, and the infrastructure to murder tens of millions of people. But their goals are no different. As they put it, they don't want a "U.S.A. at all." The country they want to occupy the center of North America has no First Amendment, no freedom of expression, and people with opposing views (of any views, not just Nazis) are beaten, imprisoned or murdered for intellectual dissent. They may run the gamut from anarchism to revolutionary socialism in their views, but they have far more in common with fascists than they do with the people they seek to attract with the sweet-sounding "anti-fascist" label.
Read the whole thing.
Antifa and neo-Nazis? It is a distinction without a difference.
The condemnable events in Charlottesville, Va, over the weekend have brought out the usual tropes of accusations from all sides of the political spectrum. I am not writing here about the justification, or lack thereof, of what either the demonstrators or counter-demonstrators did. I want to address specifically the charge made that the demonstrators, usually referred to generically as the "alt-right," were actually right wing groups or organizations, and that the counterdemonstrators, the so-called "anti-fascists," or antifa, were completely at the other end of the political spectrum.
That is, the media and others are characterizing the riots and the bloodshed as the result of the Right and the Left making combat upon each other.
This is untrue.
What happened was that two nationalist-supremacist groups came to blows, both with deep Marxist roots, and each wants to rule over the other. (What did you think they would do, hold hands and sing kum-bah-ya?)
We are calling one side the "alt-right" for no other reason than it's easier to keep score, I guess, like we call one team a home team and the other visitors, but they're both baseball teams. What we really saw in Charlottesville was two far-left groups having at each other because neither will countenance a competitor.
Yes, some of the demonstrators carried Nazi flags, just as some of the counter-demos carried hammer-and-sickle Soviet flags. In fact, those flags are almost interchangeable. Everyone knows and acknowledges that Soviet Communism was based on Marxism, hence Marxism and its spawn today are "Left," but everyone also apparently thinks that Fascism and Nazism apparently just sprang up out of thin air with no relation to political theories and contexts that came before, and that Fascism and Nazism were and are "Right."
Untrue. Both Fascism and Nazism were founded on Marxist theory and belonged firmly on the Left side of the spectrum, according to their founders. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler gave a series of interviews to a trusted party member named Hermann Rauschning, in which Hitler explained Nazi theory, founding and outlook. By the end of the decade, Rauschning had left the party and fled to the United States. There he published a book entitled The Voice of Destruction, also known as Hitler Speaks, summarizing his interviews (New York, NY, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940).
Below is a set of quotes in which Hitler himself explains Nazism's Marxist roots. Note that Hitler even invited German Communists to join the Nazi party, saying he would welcome them.
"I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order."
"It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it…. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will."
Hitler was clear in his conversations that Nazism was Left-Socialist and that even Communists were urged to join with him:
"But we National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one."
Otto Wagener, in Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 26
"After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism."
Otto Wagener in Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 288
As for Fascism, it was the name of the political party founded by Benito Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini, the century's preeminent fascist, invented the word to describe his national political system. As a young man, Mussolini was politically groomed and nurtured by Marxists. He became an active member the Communist International. He corresponded with Vladimir Lenin almost until Lenin died. Mussolini broke from the Comintern for two main reasons. First, he saw little chance of it succeeding in bringing forth international communist revolutions. Second, he rejected the "international" part because he realized that what that really meant was "Russian controlled." Benito was an ardent Italian nationalist and opposed subordinating Italian socialism to Russian oversight. In 1932, Mussolini wrote this definition of fascism:
The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....
..The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone ... .
That is practically the template of today's Left.
Later I will address more specifics of why Nazism was solidly Leftist. For this post I will leave the last word to Jeff Goldstein on FB:
I told you all before and I’ll repeat it now: the alt right is not conservative, and it is every bit as driven by identity politics and blood essentialism as the prog left.
Antifa, BLM, CAIR, the New Black Panthers, La Raza, the Pussy Hatters, the KKK — these are all identity movements and all formed and animated by the kind of identity politics championed by the left, and legitimated by the likes of Edward Said and other academic cultural Marxists who recognized the way to power was to divide, and then control, particular identity groups, whose narratives they seek to create and police.
The alt-right is only “right wing” in the continental sense. The American conservative is classically liberal, while the American progressive is Fabian socialist.
Don’t listen to labels; follow the assumptions made by each movement — the alt right, the prog left — and you’ll soon recognize that they are the same. This is tribalism, no more and no less. What we are witnessing is an attempt to corrupt the ideals of a propositional nation based on individualism and individual universal rights (and that’s how our Constitutional republic is designed to operate) — a lesson Google’s pillorying of a software engineer as “anti-diversity” should have made clear.
You should reject this archaic collectivism from whatever group espouses it, because in the end it is simply anti-individualism dressed in mob attire to bolster cowardice and bigotry in numbers.
More later.
Update: As a clarification, I am not saying that Nazism was founded on nothing but Marxism. Of course there were other influences, and Nazism's Antisemitism did not spring from Marxism. Antisemitism was endemic across most of western Europe and went all the way back to the Black Plague years, centuries before, when the Jews got blamed for the plague.
And it's been pretty well covered how German Teutonic mythicism shaped a lot of Hitler's ideology on the supremacy of Aryan blood and German destiny. But as for the political workings of Nazi government and economic structuring, there was not a lot of daylight between what the Soviet communists did and what Hitler did. Unlike the Soviets, Hitler did not outright seize and nationalize industries and businesses, but he did wholly dictate terms of business to them, what they could manufacture, how much they could charge, who would get first claim on output, whom they could hire. German industry remained private really in name only. And if they were smart, business owners joined the Nazi party, just as Soviets knew that to become plant managers and plan supervisors proven reliability as a party member was a basic requirement.
Update: Here is an excellent question:
Update:I am always glad to get cordial correspondence, including when the writer does not agree. Ronnie S. writes,
What you say about endemic Jew-hatred in Europe is true but Marxism carries with it its own strain of Jew-hatred. There is a reason why the term "socialism of fools" has been used to describe anti-semitism. Much modern Jew-hatred has sprung from the left, not the least of which, as you point out, has been the Nazis. Dennis Prager's book about anti-semitism, Why The Jews?, has an entire chapter on leftist Jew-hatred.
Marx himself was no friend to the Jews and he was the venue by which a lot of old tropes about Jews and money got turned into bankers and capitalists manipulating the world.
Author Donald Crankshaw writes,
I read with interest your post about neo-Nazis being on the Left, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Certainly, Nazism descends from Marxism, but modern understanding of Nazism seems to completely focus on their beliefs about racial purity, not their political philosophy, and I'm not convinced neo-Nazis are any better informed.
I tend to think that what we saw in Charlottesville is the endgame of identity politics. You can't slice and dice the polity into a hundred different identity groups and designate all the groups but one as victims and the other group as the oppressor, and not expect some of that group to embrace that oppressor identity (though they put it in terms of being inherently superior). And much of the rest of that group to redefine themselves as victims.
Yes, I think a couple of commentators pointed out something like that not long after the election. When one side thinks that group-member identity is the most important thing, based mainly on skin color or race-ancestry, they should not be surprised when the largest such group on the country, white men, start to embrace the idea. I am not endorsing the idea, but anyone who has formally studied human-systems theory (as I have) understands that in systems of relationships, including or especially politics, there is no such thing as a truly isolated shift in equilibrium of a sub-system or relationship.
Donald adds, "My wife and I are currently running a Kickstarter for the second volume of Mysterion, our anthology of Christian-themed science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories. If you're interested, the link is www.mysterion2kickstarter.com. We're in the last week of the Kickstarter, and still short of our goal, so any and all help spreading the word is appreciated."
From Dissecting Leftism, a blog by John J. Ray, Ph.D., who describes himself as a "former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society" and "former anarcho-capitalist."
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
Just the name of Hitler's political party should be sufficient to reject the claim that Hitler was "Right wing" but Leftists sometimes retort that the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not informative, in that it is the name of a dismal Stalinist tyranny. But "People's Republic" is a normal name for a Communist country whereas I know of no conservative political party that calls itself a "Socialist Worker's Party". Such parties are in fact usually of the extreme Left (Trotskyite etc.) ...
Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists.
The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.
How Liberals Are the New Autocrats - The Daily Beast The Daily Beast is hardly a journal of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, but it cuts directly to the quick: with the concentration of wealth in the self-appointed elites, democracy around the world is fading fast:
Increasingly the call is not so much for a benevolent and charismatic dictator, but for an impaneled committee of experts to rule over our lives. Former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman argue openly that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations.
The new progressive mindset was laid out recently in an article in The Atlantic that openly called for the creation of a “technocracy” to determine energy, economic, and land-use policies. According to this article, mechanisms like the market or even technological change are simply not up to the challenge. Instead the entire world needs to be put on a “war footing” that forces compliance with the technocracy’s edicts. This includes a drive to impose energy austerity on an already fading middle class, limiting mundane pleasures like cheap air travel, cars, freeways, suburbs, and single-family housing.
Read the whole thing. At an increasing pace, politics in the West, especially in America, is the surest way to wealth, a 180-out from the West's history. As I explained almost two years ago in, "America is adopting the Middle East model, and it's not Islam," in the Middle East "wealth came from political power because there was no means to create wealth of significance apart of political power."
So for centuries, nay millennia, the way to become wealthy there was first to gain political power. This pattern survives to this day. Saddam Hussein, for example, was a nobody of no material means until he literally murdered his way into power in Iraq in 1979. It was after gaining control of Iraq's government that Saddam became wealthy beyond all avarice.
Now the point of this little history lesson is this: In the United States, the means to create wealth and the exercise of political power in public office are being steadily unified. We are already well along to adopting a Middle East model. Since the Obama administration came into being, the wealthiest counties of America and the most politically-powerful counties of America have for the first time become the one and same - all concentrated in and around Washington, D.C.
Through minute regulation of economic activity, America's political class is deliberately suppressing wealth creation over the broad expanse of the country, while funneling tax dollars to favored cronies. Remember, for example, Solyndra?
At the same time, the political figures are using their offices to gain personal wealth.
Heretofore, the means to create wealth was dispersed. As the result, political power was dispersed along with it. Wealth gains political power, but political power was not needed just to create wealth. How bad has political thievery become? James Bessen of Boston University Law School says it is so deep that political lobbying is now the second-largest influence on profits for America's large companies.
Government gets bigger and more powerful, which lures companies into viewing Washington as a profit center, which then leads to more policies that expand the size and power of the federal government, which leads to further opportunities for rent-seeking behavior. Lather, rinse, repeat.
What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life. ...
Sound familiar? It ought to: this has been the economic policy of both parties for at least the last 50 years, with different emphases by one party or the other. American federal polity long ago became centrally located on a less-lethal version of Lenin's question, "Who? Whom?" For Lenin, the question was about who would die and who would live. But for both the Republicans and the Democrats it is about money and power:
Who will receive the largess they will use tax dollars to provide?
Whom will be the class they plunder to get it?
And how will they spend it to suborn, corrupt or crush so they can keep power?
That is not merely the primary principle of American federal governance today, it is almost the only principle there is. Bernie Sanders notwithstanding, the American Left is not socialist at all; it is fascist, which began in and never departed from Leftism. (Mussolini had been an active member of the Communist International before resigning to start the Fascisti party.) The Republicans are fascist, too, just not as much. But give them 15-20 years and they'll catch up.
I posted earlier about the controversy that a vital anti-allergy medicine in auto-injector EpiPens has risen to about $500 per pen.
Republican Senator Charles Grassley has called for an investigation. Yet health care affordability has been a tentpole Democrat issue since the 2008 campaign. Why, since it took years for the price to rise that high, have the Democrats been silent on this?
The West Virginia Democrat’s daughter, Heather Bresch, is chief executive of the company, which appears to have hiked the price of the epinephrine auto-injector by 400 percent since 2007. The device, which is used to treat severe allergic reactions, now costs more than $600 per dose. ...
Mylan employees and the company’s PAC contributed a total of $60,750 to Manchin between 2011 and 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
This is crony capitalism business as usual. The Obama administration turns a blind eye to the price gouging because of the party connection and because it basically is a fund-raising operation for a Democrat senator: High prices garners funds for Mylan to roll back into the Democrat purse. You know, like federal unions' mandatory membership requirements and what happens to those mandatory dues.
“Right now we don’t have any comment,” Manchin spokesman Jon Kott said in an email Tuesday.
Of course not. They don't need to. The flurry of media coverage will now cease.
The White House's top spokesman refused on Wednesday to condemn the company or its top executive, whose father is a Democratic senator, for dramatically increasing the price of EpiPens.
"As it relates to this specific issue, you know, obviously I'm not going to make specific comment or specifically second-guess the pricing strategy or the business practices of one private enterprise," Josh Earnest, President Obama's press secretary, said on Wednesday.
He was reacting to reports that Mylan N.V. had boosted the price of the life-saving allergy shot 400 percent, to roughly $500 per dose. Earnest and other officials have had more violent reactions to similar price spikes in the healthcare industry that have often been blamed on corporate greed.
Earnest also had no comment on the fact that Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
Investigators unanimously concluded the decision to award the degree last fall, nearly a decade after Ms. Bresch left the program, was rife with favoritism.
The findings triggered the resignations of Provost Gerald Lang and business school dean R. Stephen Sears from their administrative posts, and launched widespread calls for the ouster of President Michael Garrison, a long-time family friend and former business associate of Ms. Bresch, whose boss, Mylan Chairman Milan Puskar, is WVU's biggest benefactor.
This site has gone through a few iterations. Archived posts from March 2002 - Aug. 22, 2008 may be found at two URLs on the the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 2002 and 2003-2008.
This site became active in October 2007 and most of the 2008 posts at the link above are duplicated here. We sometimes transfer earlier posts from the previous sites to this one, but we do not revalidate the links therein. Posts on this site dated before October 2007 are transferred posts.
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