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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Capitalism</title>
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		<title>‘Privileged’ Georgetown Student ‘Understands’ His Mugging</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/privileged-georgetown-student-understands-his-mugging/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=privileged-georgetown-student-understands-his-mugging</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/privileged-georgetown-student-understands-his-mugging/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2014 05:14:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Georgetown Student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mugging]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Friedfeld]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246260</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Congratulations, academia, you win.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ft.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246263" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ft-450x337.png" alt="ft" width="259" height="194" /></a>In the November 18 issue of the university newspaper <em>The Hoya</em>, Georgetown senior Oliver Friedfeld wrote an op-ed about his own mugging at gunpoint the weekend before. It was entitled, “<a href="http://www.thehoya.com/i-was-mugged-and-i-understand-why/">I Was Mugged and I Understand Why</a>.” His explanation is another nail in the coffin of American sanity and another victory for progressive brainwashing in academia.</p>
<p>Asked by a reporter if he were surprised that an armed robbery occurred in upscale Georgetown, the “solidly middle-class” Friedfeld immediately replied, “Not at all.” After all, he explains, “We live in the most privileged neighborhood within a city that has historically been, and continues to be, harshly unequal.”</p>
<p>Since economic disparity undoubtedly caused his attackers to rob him, Friedfeld thinks it’s unfair to refer to them as “thugs,” “criminals” or “bad people.” He “trusted” that they weren’t out to hurt him; they only wanted his possessions. “While I don’t know what exactly they needed the money for” – I’m guessing an iPhone, new Air Jordans, or drugs, but almost certainly not food to survive – “I do know that I’ve never once had to think about going out on a Saturday night to mug people&#8230; The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine.”</p>
<p>Apparently it is common sense and a grasp of individual responsibility that are light years away from Friedfeld’s experience. First of all, he has no way of knowing if these “kids” are worse off than he; they could be fellow Georgetown students, for that matter. Second, he has never had to contemplate threatening people with a (probably illegally obtained) firearm in order to take what doesn’t belong to him, not because he has never been poor, but because, like most of us, he has chosen to be law-abiding. To assume that poverty <em>made</em> them rob him is an unconscionable slap in the face to the impoverished who work hard and long to make ends meet but who nonetheless have the honor, dignity, and moral conscience to lead law-abiding lives. But this is the progressive mindset: that some vague, irresistible entity called “society” somehow overrides our personal ability to choose to act rightly or wrongly.</p>
<p>“I’d venture to guess,” Friedfeld continues, “that our attackers have had to experience things I’ve never dreamed of.” So what? People are not automatically compelled by their “experiences” to commit armed robbery; they must make many decisions along the way, choices that are their <em>own</em> responsibility. Not necessarily in this order: they make decisions to commit a felony, to obtain (again, probably illegally) a firearm, to load it, to conceal it and their identity, to go out and stalk a victim, to select one and then to draw that weapon and force the victim to the floor at gunpoint to take his possessions. At every step of the way, that criminal is under his own power to stop himself, to call off this felonious act that could very well result in an innocent person’s death.</p>
<p>“When I walk around at 2 a.m., nobody looks at me suspiciously,” says Friedfeld, “and police don’t ask me any questions. I wonder if our attackers could say the same.” Again, so what? Does he truly believe that people are driven to commit crimes because others view them with suspicion? This reasoning isn’t compassionate, it’s simply nonsensical. It’s depressing to think that the Georgetown University education Friedfeld has pursued for four years hasn’t resulted in critical thinking skills.</p>
<p>He goes on: “Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’ It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.” You read that correctly: he has no right to judge armed bandits who were willing to shoot him had he resisted, because that would be “otherizing” them, or some such politically correct idiocy.</p>
<p>For a moment, let’s grant Friedfeld’s point. Let’s assume the armed robbers did indeed steal from him because poverty drove them to it. If that’s so, then Friedfeld is so brainwashed that he can’t see that <em>he</em> has been otherized by the <em>criminals</em> who targeted him for his affluence. <em>He</em> has been made the rich <em>Other </em>fromwhom it is acceptable to steal. Because, income disparity.</p>
<p>“Young people who willingly or unwillingly go down this road have been dealt a bad hand,” writes Friedfeld. But even the D.C. police officer who responded to the mugging told Friedfeld that he too had come from difficult circumstances, and yet had made the choice not to turn to crime. “This is a very fair point,” Friedfeld conceded. “We all make decisions.” It’s more than a fair point – it is the <em>only</em> point. Regardless of one’s situation, your choices – not your situation – define you.</p>
<p>“If we ever want opportunistic crime to end, we should look at ourselves first&#8230; When we play along with a system that fuels this kind of desperation, we can’t be surprised when we’re touched by it.” Again, he has no evidence to assume that his attackers were driven by “desperation,” but in any case, opportunistic crime will never end, because human beings will never rid themselves of greed or immorality. All the income equality in the world won’t bring an end to that.</p>
<p>Brace yourself for Friedfeld’s pathetically weak conclusion: We must “devote real energy,” he writes, “to solving what are collective challenges. Until we do so, we should get comfortable with sporadic muggings and break-ins. I can hardly blame them.” So his solution to armed robbery is to urge us to accept being compassionate, understanding victims until we can get our collectivist utopia up and running.</p>
<p>To paraphrase Iriving Kristol, a liberal is simply a conservative who hasn’t been mugged by reality yet. But today, not only is a mugging not enough to drive some sense into a young progressive, it actually <em>confirms</em> his worldview about economic inequality. It confirms, not the armed robber’s guilt, but the <em>victim’s</em> guilt for (presumably) being better off. This is precisely the sort of “victim-blaming” that drives progressives into a rage when applied toward rape victims. But when it comes to “white privilege” and “income inequality,” moral equivalence rules, and reason flies out the window.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on the <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
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		<title>A Professor’s Left Illusions</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/a-professors-left-illusions/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-professors-left-illusions</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/a-professors-left-illusions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2014 05:39:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti americanism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Danusha Goska]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[illusions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leftist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244252</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The revelations of a former "progressive."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Danusha_Goska.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244254" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Danusha_Goska-450x337.jpg" alt="Danusha_Goska" width="312" height="234" /></a>Recently I was contacted by Dr. Danusha Goska – a writer and professor in New Jersey, the author of the novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Save-Send-Delete-Danusha-Goska/dp/1846949866"><em>Save Send </em>Delete</a>, and a former leftist. “I am a teacher,” she introduced herself to me. “I see what my former comrades on the left have done to young minds.” She shared with me her excellent <em>American Thinker</em> articles “<a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/ten_reasons_i_am_no_longer_a_leftist.html">Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist</a>,” “<a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/coming_out_as_proisrael_on_facebook.html">Coming Out as Pro-Israel on Facebook</a>,” and “<a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/islam_postmodernism_and_poltiical_correctness.html">Islam, Postmodernism, and Political Correctness</a>,” which prompted me to ask if she would be willing to share some of her political revelations and thoughts with FrontPage Mag.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson</strong>: <em>Professor Goska, you wrote that you decided to leave the left when you decided that, instead of hating, you “wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.” Can you elaborate on that?</em></p>
<p><strong>Danusha Goska:</strong> When I was a grad student, I was stricken with a crippling illness, a vestibular disorder, for which there is little proven treatment. I spent whole days functionally paralyzed and unable to stop vomiting.</p>
<p>My social world then was utterly left-wing: former Peace Corps volunteers, university students and professors, artists and writers. A subset of my left-wing friends repeatedly hammered into me how much they hated America on my behalf. “Oh, I hate America because we don’t have socialized medicine. Oh, I hate America because there’s so much capitalist pollution and that’s probably why you are sick.”</p>
<p>I can’t tell you how freakishly weird these interactions were. I used to want to shout at people: “Why do you think that telling me how much you hate America is helping me? It’s not helping me. Please do something positive. I have an illness that makes me vomit and paralyzes me and I can’t go to the grocery store. I could use some seltzer water. Am I asking too much?”</p>
<p>And they could not do that small thing – bring a friend who can’t stop puking some seltzer water. But they could rage against the Catholic Church for – what – not selling Vatican artwork and funding my surgery.</p>
<p>I am still friends with some of these folks. They are still banging the same drum: how imperialistic America is. How hypocritical Christianity is. How life-destroying capitalism is. They never talk about doing anything positive for anyone because I don’t think they ever do. Their entire political and ethical stance consists of loudly denigrating capitalism, Western Civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Islamic gender apartheid, systematic abortion of female fetuses in China, India’s caste system that reduces over a hundred million human beings to the status of pariah dogs: none of these ever receive a peep of criticism.</p>
<p>It is my unscientific impression that devout Christians and Jews, including secular Jews, are the people most likely to be consciously and regularly doing something concrete, however small, to make the world a better place. I stumbled across a Facebook meme about a 99-year-old Iowa seamstress who creates one dress every day for children in Africa. I immediately thought, “She’s got to be a Christian.” I googled the story and discovered that she sews for a Christian charity.</p>
<p>“If not me, who? If not now, when?” are words that many of my Jewish acquaintances live by, whether they know Rabbi Hillel or not. This includes secular Jews, who, in my own unscientific, subjective experience, are disproportionately represented among those who do concrete things, however small, to make the world a better place.</p>
<p><strong>MT:</strong> <em>You mentioned to me that, as a teacher, you see what your former comrades on the left have done to young minds. What have</em> <em>they done?</em></p>
<p><strong>DG:</strong> Two years ago, one of my students said, “I wish we had been taught to feel proud of something. To feel part of something. To love our country and to feel that we were part of some big thing, like they did back during World War Two. I guess that kind of patriotism, of being part of something, is just not popular anymore.”</p>
<p>Mind: I did not steer the conversation this way at all. This yearning was voiced, spontaneously, by my student. And there’s more: this student is a Muslim. This young, Muslim-American student was hungering to be encouraged to esteem her own country, and American teachers denied her that.</p>
<p>Students are taught about America’s failures. That’s a good thing. I’m glad I teach my students about Jim Crow. Context is everything. Two months after graduating from college, my first job was teaching in a remote village in Africa. I discovered that Arabs have an ongoing slave trade in Africa. This one fact rocked my world. I had been led to believe that the Atlantic Slave Trade was the alpha and omega of slavery, and that if only we could wrest control from these inherently oppressive white males we’d be one step closer to Utopia.</p>
<p>“Where there is no vision the people perish.” There is a hole in young people that can be filled only by transcendent ideals. Those ideals should be formed in response to neutral facts, not ideological indoctrination. Vulnerable young minds should be cherished, not exploited as recruits.</p>
<p>I am a teacher, not a minister or counselor. I don’t try to sell students on any one point of view. I do try to introduce them to the tools and methods of inquiry: peer review scholarship, the formation of research questions, the testing of hypotheses, investigating alternative points of view.</p>
<p>There are too many professors who don’t do that. There are too many professors who use the power they have – the power of grades, yes, but also the power of funding, humiliation, intimidation, flattery and inclusion into the in-crowd – to pressure students to adopt a given point of view as the route to success. That point of view is all too often a nihilistic, scorched earth cynicism that, as mentioned above, tears down but builds nothing to replace the targets of its destruction, and that encourages academic elites to assume an unearned status as above the common man.</p>
<p><strong>MT:</strong> <em>You’ve written that we must overcome the stultifying effects of political correctness, and that “free speech is the best friend Muslims have.” What do you mean by that?</em></p>
<p><strong>DG:</strong> First, thank you for asking me this. This matter is very urgent and close to my heart. I grew up, and currently live, in Passaic County, New Jersey, which is said to have the second largest Muslim population in the U.S. I grew up with Arabs and with Muslims. I have had Muslim friends, boyfriends, bosses, coworkers, and students. I love many Muslims. I feel for them the kind of love you feel for any close friend. When I was a girl, one day a Muslim friend turned to me and said, “When the time for jihad comes, if you don’t accept Islam, I will have to kill you.”</p>
<p>The simple truth is that Islam is different from the other world belief systems: Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. None of these includes anything like the call to jihad. Islam does. No, most Muslims are not active jihadis, but a critical mass are, and we cannot predict which Muslim will become an active jihadi. We need free speech about jihad in order to solve the dilemma we all face: peaceful integration of existing Muslim populations into American life, a rational foreign policy, and our own security. We need this free speech from professionals for whom speech is their sharpest tool: journalists, political, military and religious leaders, academics, and creative artists.</p>
<p>Right now we are not hearing free speech. Rather, we hear dogma fashioned to forfend free speech. This dogma is so predictable we could all chant its creed in unison: “Islam means peace. Not all Muslims are terrorists. The Bible contains shocking verses. Christians do bad things.” We recently heard Ben Affleck and Nick Kristof mouthing these Orwellian bromides on the October 3 episode of <em>Real Time with Bill Maher</em>. In the absence of the free flow of ideas, the average Joe, who is not as stupid or as docile as the Ben Afflecks and Nick Kristofs of the world think he is, is becoming fearful and concluding that our culture is not addressing jihad. Many average Joes are deciding that they are free agents, and must go it alone. You can see it in internet discussions. People – nice people, average people – are talking about what kind of ammunition they are stockpiling.</p>
<p>What is better for Muslims in the U.S.? A frank conversation about our best response to jihad, or our cultural leaders mouthing bromides that demonize free inquiry, while millions of average people plan to be vigilantes? Can we please have the conversation we need to have about, say radical mosques and how petro-dependency steers public policy before we start shooting innocent people? If Americans felt that they could openly express their fears about jihad and receive honest and informed replies, if they felt that their leaders had their best interests at heart and were addressing radical mosques, petro-dependency and the threat of free agent jihadis, I don’t think as many people would be talking about stockpiling ammo.</p>
<p>I think of one Muslim man I know. He is a mechanic. He interacts with Americans all day long. He is liked and respected by his customers. He’s an older guy who has lived in this country most of his life. He sacrificed much to leave his Muslim-majority homeland and come here to enjoy the fruits of democracy. I think the chances of his ever hurting anyone are near zero. He has expressed to me his hatred and rejection of terrorism. I think this man would be totally open to America having a frank conversation about addressing extremism in our country. But we are afraid to have that conversation. I think my Muslim friend believes more in American ideals like free speech than someone like Ben Affleck. I think the Ben Afflecks of the world fail my Muslim friends.</p>
<p><strong>MT:</strong> <em>Tell us about your novel </em>Save, Send, Delete<em>, a debate between a Catholic and an atheist</em>. <em>What’s the philosophical thrust of that debate, and why was it important enough to you to write a book about it?</em></p>
<p><strong>DG:</strong> <em>Save Send Delete</em> is a true story. Several years back I was wrestling with the big, hard questions: Is there a God? Why is there suffering? I saw an atheist on TV and I sent him an email. To my great surprise, he wrote back. We corresponded for a year, debating the existence of God, and we fell in love.</p>
<p><em>Save Send Delete</em> isn’t a left-wing book or a right-wing book. It’s about confronting God and love and trying to dig down as deeply as possible for worthy, livable truth. But even if I were not a believing Christian, I would shudder at the message of “capital A” Atheists. Recently Salon made waves by publishing Jeffrey Tayler’s criticism of Islam. Here’s the thing – Jeffrey Tayler is a proselytizer who exploits discomfort with Islam to peddle capital A Atheist tracts. “If you don’t like suicide bombings you should agree with me that all religion is evil,” is his main idea. Religion, he says, is like pestilence-spreading rats in the sewer. We must eradicate it. This has long been the thinking of mass murderers from the French Terror to the Khmer Rouge.</p>
<p>Capital A Atheists use their “Flying Spaghetti Monster” concept to sell total relativism. All religions are the same; Mother Teresa is just as bad as Osama bin Laden. We may as well believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster as in anything else. This extreme relativism is deadly. Our inability to differentiate between cultures is comparable to being unable to differentiate between nourishment and poison.</p>
<p><em>Save Send Delete</em> makes the case not only for faith, but for civilization, in the face of the absolute relativism, the scorched earth, of the capital A Atheist Flying Spaghetti Monster mentality. In it I write about being a teacher who communicates to her students that Western Civilization, for all its flaws, is worth it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Tax Noose Tightens</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-hendrickson/the-tax-noose-tightens/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-tax-noose-tightens</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-hendrickson/the-tax-noose-tightens/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 05:30:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[damage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244257</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Team Obama erects its invisible Berlin Wall. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/plk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244264" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/plk-450x230.jpg" alt="plk" width="293" height="150" /></a>The political left in America remains obsessed with its grandiose visions of social engineering, increased government control of economic activity, and redistributive “justice.” For them, the state can never have too much power. Incurable<a href="http://www.viisionandvalues.org/2013/02/the-spendaholics-offensive/"> spendaholics</a> and, in President Obama’s case, actively pursuing a <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/obama-and-marxs-ten-point-platform-part-ii/">Marxist economic platform</a>, they never have enough money to spend; hence, they are constantly plotting and striving to confiscate ever-more of the wealth produced in the private sector. With their ravenous and insatiable appetite for more revenues, they behave like a pack of <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/19/team-obama-tax-predators-on-the-prowl/">tax predators</a>.</p>
<p>Even as Obama’s approval rating continues to sink, thereby jeopardizing Democratic control of the Senate after next Tuesday’s election, Team Obama has continued to tighten the tax noose around the necks of American citizens and businesses.</p>
<p>First, the pursuit of citizens: On Oct. 26, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-25/hundreds-give-up-u-s-passports-after-new-tax-rules-start.html">Bloomberg reported</a>, “The number of Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship increased 39 percent in the three months through September” from the year-earlier period, seemingly due to the intrusive asset-disclosure rules that took effect July 1 under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Obama still hasn&#8217;t achieved his ultimate tax fantasy—a UN-imposed and –administered global tax—but FATCA significantly ramped up the administration’s ability to monitor and pursue Americans’ wealth wherever in the world it may be.</p>
<p>Second, the aggression against businesses: Over the last few months, Team Obama has chided, vilified, and harassed American corporations that have been preparing to implement tax inversions—that is, purchasing a foreign corporation and then moving corporate headquarters to the foreign domicile to reduce the corporation’s tax liability. This has led to the nauseating spectacle of the minions of this most un-American of presidents publicly questioning the patriotism of Americans seeking refuge from the tax noose.</p>
<p>The common theme here is obvious: Americans are trying to escape the economic predations of our government. Let that sink in for a minute: For most of our history, America was a haven, a refuge—the place that people from around the world came to in order to escape the predations and oppressions of predatory governments. This was the Land of Opportunity, the place to come to pursue the American Dream—your dreams—in liberty, and get as rich as your talents and initiative would carry you.</p>
<p>Now, under the influence of progressive ideas, we have become politically corrupt and degenerate. Embracing the morally debased ethos that one is entitled to something for nothing in this world, and that it is right and proper for government to provide it even if it has to take property from others, we have approved of the erection of a massive transfer state characterized by an unseemly squabble over who gets what from whom. The government routinely takes the property of its citizens so politicians may buy the support of various voting blocs of individuals and of rent-seeking businesses practicing cronyism, not <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson-capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi/">capitalism</a>. It is this morally and economically bankrupt state, sliding into a creeping tyranny of unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies which American citizens and businesses seek to escape.</p>
<p>Our founders would be heart-broken to see what succeeding generations have wrought. They would grieve that the current political class has turned America into a place where success is penalized, wealth is demeaned, the rich are persecuted, and property rights are disdained. It makes me sad and angry that America has become a place that people and businesses who have prospered feel they need to flee. This isn’t the real America.</p>
<p>Although the trend toward anti-America, the land of creeping tyranny, has been around for a long time, it is getting worse under Obama. A president who understood in American principles and believed in the American dream would seek to reduce the tax burden on individuals and businesses (the <a href="http://www.visionandvalues.org/2010/08/rethinking-the-corporate-income-tax/">optimum corporate income tax</a> rate would be zero percent) to make America more inviting to them, they instead treat them like criminals, enemies, or prisoners. FATCA represents the latest move to strip individuals of the last remaining shreds of financial privacy. The Treasury Department’s heavy-handed efforts to keep businesses from escaping offshore amount to the erection of an invisible Berlin Wall designed to thwart the desire to be free of an oppressive state.</p>
<p>Indeed, the way Team Obama is going about erecting that Berlin Wall is particularly egregious. In late September, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that the Treasury Department has drafted new rules designed to prevent corporations from undertaking tax inversions. This is one of the many ways in which Obama has been making good on his threat to bypass Congress and rule by executive fiat. Essentially, Obama, Lew and the Treasury Department usurped the legislative prerogative of Congress. It is Congress that always (and rightly) has written the tax laws that govern American corporations. One hopes that, after the election, Republicans will have enough backbone to challenge Lew’s new rules in court.</p>
<p>Another disturbing aspect of Team Obama’s maneuvers against tax inversions is its collusion with the unelected bureaucrats, both American and foreign, of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD has a plan called the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project that finds ways for national governments to gather and share more detailed information about corporations’ finances. The OECD also has been encouraging member countries not to engage in tax competition (i.e., not to cut tax rates to attract more businesses to their countries) but instead to keep tax rates high.</p>
<p>The OECD role in helping Team Obama to corral American corporations is galling in several respects: 1) It is completely hypocritical for OECD bureaucrats, whose generous salaries are tax-exempt, to plot with governments to avoid reducing taxes on others (although this stance shouldn’t be surprising, since the OECD is funded entirely by taxes collected by national governments, so they aren’t about to bite the hand that feeds them); 2) Foreign-based, unelected bureaucrats, many of them not even Americans, are using our own tax dollars against us to plot strategies to keep our tax burden high (another cynical example of “your tax dollars at work”); 3) The OECD needs to drop the “D”—“Development”—from its name. This multilateral cabal indeed practices “Cooperation” by conspiring with tax-hungry governments to keep business taxes high, but they are clueless about “Development.” By working to keep business taxes high, they are acting contrary to every known economic theory of development. Even Lord Keynes understood that taxes essentially impede development rather than assist it.</p>
<p>Team Obama, which now includes international bureaucrats, continues to tighten the tax noose around the necks of Americans. They are doing everything they can to make it more difficult for Americans to elude the noose. In the long run, this may help our cause: With no place to hide, we may reach critical mass and find enough Americans who realize that we have no alternative but to fight back.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: You&#8217;re Not A Liberal!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:56:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collectivist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242903</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">More and more these days, people who call themselves &#8220;liberals&#8221; have bumper-sticker philosophies that are liberal &#8212; they&#8217;re not even leftist. They&#8217;re infantile. In his latest FIREWALL, Bill Whittle dissects one of these childish, undeservedly self-righteous positions and compares the modern &#8220;liberal&#8221; to the real deal. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FAA_So0d01w" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi Everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You know how it is on Facebook. Every now and then a friend pops up who you haven’t seen in a long, long time. I had one of those fiend pops just the other day, and so I went to her page to see how she’s doing.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Just fine, and nothing new.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">She did have one of those interminable political pictures though, and while I have seen a few that were really dumb, this one was in line for the prize. And I about let it go – cause otherwise you’ll go mad – when I realized it was a share from a Facebook page called BEING LIBERAL, which has over a million followers.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So here’s what Being Liberal proudly posted as a nugget of political wisdom:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It says: “When all the trees are cut down…when all the animals are dead…when all the waters are poisoned… when all the air is unsafe to breathe… only then will you discover: you cannot eat money.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You know, I’m sorry – I have to take a swing at this. First the jab, then the uppercut…</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Let’s start with the point of the poster.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I hate to break this to you, you blindingly stupid young thing, but even before I saw this picture I already knew that you can’t eat money. I learned this not through a program of nonviolent resistance to the corporate death machine, but rather through trial and error, at age two. By the time I was two I had experimentally determined that you cannot, in fact, eat money, and thus was prepared to delve deeper into economics. But I am glad to see that you have achieved mastery of the fundamental concept. If you keep at it, you may discover – at this rate, somewhere around age 85 or so – that while you cannot eat money, you can use money to buy food. That money could be pretty seashells, shiny pebbles, gold, paper, binary digits or cigarettes, but as long as there is money it is useful in order to buy food in a way that not having money is not useful.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’ll note in passing that not only are the trees not being cut down, but that there is far more forest in the United States today than there was a hundred years ago; in fact, there may be more today than before the Europeans arrived in the first place.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The animals are not all dead. I saw an animal on the way to work today. Like the forests – where they live! &#8212; there have never been more deer in America, and the buffalo – nearly wiped out a century ago – are back in numbers that make buffalo burgers routinely available.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The waters are not poisoned. They used to be. The Cuyahoga river caught fire at least 13 times between 1868 and 1969. The last time was 45 years ago – it, and the rest of the nation’s waterways, are far, far cleaner now. You’d have a point if you were your grandmother.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Likewise for the air. That’s all very 20th century. The air is much cleaner than it used to be – in places where we value money. Capitalist countries. Leftist countries – you know, leftists like you guys – are indeed filthy. China’s air pollution is so bad it makes up a third of the air pollution in San Francisco! But that because the left values the state over the individual, and the Chinese state wants the money from a manufacturing economy and the Chinese individual, as usual, can go pound sand.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now to the bigger point: namely, YOU ARE NOT LIBERALS. This isn’t liberalism: this isn’t even leftism &#8212; it’s infantilism. It’s the philosophy of children, because that’s what you are. I know you feel brave, holding up that sign, speaking truth to power. You have no right to feel brave, because the risk of anything happening to you with that sign in America is Zero.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((CHINESE STUDENT AND TANKS))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">See this guy? That’s an individual, risking his life to fight the armies of socialism. He’s a hero, you’re not. That took courage. What you’re doing doesn’t. Like everyone else on the left, you want something – in this case moral superiority – but you don’t want to pay for it. So you just take it. See how easy it is?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You’re not liberals – none of you are. You know who is a liberal?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((JEFFERSON))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This guy. We’ll use the image of this dead white male to represent the other dead white males who were, in fact liberals. They were called liberals because they believed in liberty – which meant, and still means, simply the freedom to be left alone.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((JEFFERSON / PROTESTOR SPLIT))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The man on the right wanted people to be left alone. He believed in private property, strict limits on the power of government, freedom of speech, private ownership of weapons and was the founder of the Democratic party.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The woman on the left wants to government to take care of her health care, birth control, housing, food and transportation. She’s a collectivist who hates private property, wants to expand the government into every aspect of not just her life but yours as well, believes in speech codes and political correctness, wants guns banned and is the inheritor of the democratic party.</p>
<p>The man on the right spent a lifetime of study, debate and reflection trying to determine the nature of man, his history of rare success and frequent failures and with his fellows spent a lifetime trying to devise a realistic formula for the pursuit of happiness.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The woman on the left likely doesn’t know who the man on the right is.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>What Is Income Redistribution?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-is-income-redistribution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2014 04:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income redistribution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thomas Piketty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238592</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LUuDw6-sUes" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In which our host explains the leftist fantasy that is income redistribution to himself.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p>Thomas Picketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century has excited leftists with its call for more income redistribution.  The Financial Times and others say the books’ data are suspiciously skewed but the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman says he’s received confirmation of Picketty’s numbers on an interplanetary communication device that you can make yourself out of ordinary tinfoil you find at home.</p>
<p>Today, to clarify the underlying issues, the Revolting Truth presents this helpful Q&amp;A.</p>
<p>Q: What is income redistribution?</p>
<p>A: Income redistribution is when you go to work or start a business or make an investment — and earn money — and the government takes the money away from you and gives it to someone else.</p>
<p>Q: So you mean it’s stealing?</p>
<p>A:  No, it’s income redistribution.</p>
<p>Q:  But what if I won’t give them my money?</p>
<p>A:  Then armed men come to your house and take it.</p>
<p>Q: So then it’s armed robbery?</p>
<p>A:  No, it’s income redistribution.</p>
<p>Q:  Well, when the men try to take my money at gunpoint, what if I call the police?</p>
<p>A:  The men are the police.</p>
<p>Q:  The police are robbing me at gunpoint???</p>
<p>A:  It’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  What if I have a gun too?</p>
<p>A:  That would be wrong.</p>
<p>Q:  If they’re robbing me at gunpoint, why is it wrong for me to defend myself with a gun?</p>
<p>A:  Huh?</p>
<p>Q: Look, instead of taking my money away to give to other people, why not just give those other people jobs?</p>
<p>A:  It’s because there aren’t enough jobs to go around.</p>
<p>Q: Why not?</p>
<p>A:  Because people aren’t spending enough or creating enough businesses or investing enough.</p>
<p>Q:  But that’s because you took their money away!</p>
<p>A:  Right!  That’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  Let me get this straight.  We need more income redistribution because there’s too much income redistribution?</p>
<p>A:  Congratulations.  Now you’re smarter than Thomas Picketty.</p>
<p>Q:  That’s it.  I’m buying a gun.</p>
<p>A:  But it’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  Pound sand, you Communist thug.</p>
<p>Well, I hope this handy guide has been helpful in understanding Capital in the 21st Century.</p>
<p>Q:  Come near me again and I’ll blow your head off!</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Jesus, Today’s Church, and ‘Inequality’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jesus-todays-church-and-inequality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:20:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bible]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jesus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[What Jesus really said (and didn’t say) about the poor, the rich, and inequality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-237236" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg" alt="pl" width="245" height="300" /></a>That Jesus commanded His disciples—of which I am one—to love “the poor” is beyond dispute. Equally beyond dispute, however, is that, regardless of what growing legions of left-leaning clerics would have us believe, Jesus <em>never—</em>never <em>ever—</em>addressed the issue of “inequality.”</p>
<p>The head of my church and the most visible religious leader on the world stage today, Pope Francis, is as guilty a culprit as is anyone on this score. The Pope made headlines on more than a few occasions since his tenure began when His Holiness condemned “inequality” generally, and the traditional American economic system in particular, with a bluntness that would have made Barack Hussein Obama blush.</p>
<p>Ours is “an economy of exclusion and inequality,” Pope Francis insisted. Our system of “inequality” both results from and encourages “laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.” Thus, “masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”</p>
<p>Worse, the Pope informs us, our “capitalist” system with its “inequality” violates the divine injunction against “killing,” for “such an economy <em>kills</em>” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>Pope Francis may be the most well known Christian leader to conflate Jesus’ teachings on the proper treatment of <em>the poor </em>with the issue of income and wealth “inequalities.” But he speaks for countless lesser known representatives of Christianity.</p>
<p>Take Norma Cook Everist, a professor of church and ministry. In an article that she penned for <em>The Lutheran, </em>Everist insists that things haven’t changed a lick since Martin Luther said that “the poor” are routinely “defrauded” by “the rich.”</p>
<p>“Inequality,” Everist remarks, divides the world into “makers” and “takers” while fostering the godless fiction that some people, and even “some children,” are “worth more” than others, and that some, “the poor,” are of “‘of no worth’[.]”</p>
<p>The project of reducing the Gospel to an activist’s manual on addressing “inequality” is fraught with difficulties.</p>
<p>First, as already noted, it is simply <em>dishonest: </em>there is no basis, Biblical or otherwise, for equating an obligation to care for the poor with an obligation to endorse political policies ostensibly aimed at reducing “inequalities” in income and wealth. Decent minded people of all faiths and no faith have long recognized the need to care for those in poverty, and Christians specifically have always been acutely aware of this as a moral imperative.</p>
<p>But it hasn’t been until the emergence of large, centralized governments, immensely affluent, industrialized societies, and the dominance of secular, egalitarian ideologies—i.e. phenomena that don’t appear until relatively late in Christian history—that anyone, much less any Christian cleric, has thought to identify compassion for the poor with the amelioration of “inequalities.”</p>
<p>Second, even the tireless emphasis that pastors place upon Jesus’ relationship with “the poor” is less than fully honest, for it is grounded in a selective reading of the New Testament.</p>
<p>“The poor” is as ambiguous as it is emotionally-charged a term. Most of the people among whom Jesus spent His time were certainly not rich by the standards of their day, and some of them did indeed live in grinding poverty. While it’s true that there was no “middle class,” it’s equally true that just because the tax collectors, farmers, fishermen, carpenters and so forth with whom He appears to have fraternized were not rich, neither were they all impoverished.</p>
<p>That today’s clerics fail to make these discriminations between those to whom Jesus ministered by referring to them all as “the poor” reflects their awareness of the emotional <em>and </em>moral appeal of this moniker. After all, “the poor” are, well, poor: only the heartless could fail to feel for them. And “the poor” also lends those so designated moral authority, for being the <em>victims</em> of their circumstances, “the poor” are always <em>blameless</em>.</p>
<p>Third, this <em>exclusive stress</em> on Jesus’ fondness for “the poor,” whether by accident or design, conveys the impression that He was <em>exclusively fond</em> of “the poor,” a respecter of persons by virtue of their socio-economic condition—exactly what the Bible insists God <em>is not. </em></p>
<p>This notion, in turn, further underscores a sense of moral superiority among “the poor” by fueling it with the fiction that their poverty is a saving grace. “The poor,” in other words, can too easily think that it is <em>they, </em>not “<em>the rich,” </em>that count for more in God’s eyes.</p>
<p>Some observers, like the 19<sup>th</sup> century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, thought that this, in fact, was the whole purpose behind Christianity. In referring to it as a “slave morality,” Nietzsche’s point is that it serves, and was always meant to serve, the psychological and emotional interests of the poor masses, namely their interest in exacting a sort of imaginary vengeance against the wealthy by demonizing them while insisting upon their own “blessedness.”</p>
<p>Admittedly, Nietzsche was an enemy of Christianity. But he <em>became </em>an enemy <em>after </em>having been raised Christian by his Lutheran minister father. In any event, one needn’t accept Nietzsche’s reading of Christianity—I do not—in order to see that those Christian leaders who use their pulpits to blast “inequality” lend it considerable plausibility.</p>
<p>Finally, Jesus excoriated “the rich,” yes; but He was no less hard on “the poor,” including and particularly His closest followers. Conversely, sometimes Jesus lavished praise upon “the rich.”</p>
<p>For 2,000 years, whether rightly or wrongly, Christendom’s worst villain has been, not the rich and famous Herod, Pilate, or Nero, but Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ closest disciples and a “poor” man who relinquished what possessions he may have had in order to follow Him. Moreover, Jesus regularly castigated his “poor” disciples for their lack of faith, and, sometimes, compared them unfavorably with wealthy Gentiles, like the Roman Centurion whose <em>servant </em>Jesus healed.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is worth noting that besides Himself, the greatest example of Christian charity that Jesus extolled is that of the Good Samaritan, a <em>rich </em>man who deployed some of his ample resources to help a stranger in need.</p>
<p>We also shouldn’t forget that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were rich members of the priestly class with whom Jesus must’ve been particularly close, for not only did they attempt to prevail upon their fellow Pharisees to refrain from turning Jesus over to the Romans. Following Jesus’ crucifixion, both prepared His body for burial in the tomb that Joseph secured for Him.</p>
<p>All of this can be found easily enough in the four canonical Gospels which are read in Christian churches throughout the world every Sunday. That these points are neglected by so many ministers is due, I submit, to their obsession with combating, not poverty, but “inequalities” in income and wealth—a topic, this Christian has been at pains to show, having nothing to do with either the whole of the Bible or The New Testament.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Dinesh D&#8217;Souza Tells the True Story of America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/dinesh-dsouza-tells-the-true-story-of-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dinesh-dsouza-tells-the-true-story-of-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2014 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dinesh D'Souza]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236412</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["America" demolishes the Left's false narrative of the United States. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MV5BMjM0MjgyOTQ4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTQ1NzQ3MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-236413" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MV5BMjM0MjgyOTQ4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTQ1NzQ3MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg" alt="MV5BMjM0MjgyOTQ4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTQ1NzQ3MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_" width="211" height="252" /></a>Dinesh D’Souza’s latest film, “America, Imagine a World Without Her,” which <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2014/07/america-movie-dinesh-dsouza-exclusive-clip-abraham-lincoln-video/"><span style="color: #042eee;">earned</span></a> a rare A+ rating from CinemaScore, is apparently such a threat to progressive ideology that Costco initially ordered the book on which the movie is based <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-removing-dsouzas-america-from-shelves/"><span style="color: #042eee;">removed</span></a> from its shelves. One can understand why: the film is a devastating takedown of those who see America as the primary source of evil in the world.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The picture opens with a what-if scenario that includes the assassination of George Washington by a British sniper, and the subsequent disintegration of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty, as D’Souza asks, “What would the work look like if America did not exist?”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The question is used as a vehicle to set up—and subsequently knock down&#8211;the left’s grievance agenda and its victims. Those grievances include theft of land, labor and the American Dream, as well as genocide, segregation and racism. The victims include Native Americans, black Americans, Hispanics and ultimately all Americans. &#8220;These indictments developed separately, and each has been around for a long time,&#8221; D’Souza explains. “But now they’ve come together in a single narrative of American shame.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The main driver of that narrative is historian Howard Zinn, whose polemic, “A People’s History of the United States,” has been required reading in thousands of American public schools and universities for years. &#8220;When I hear young people on the campus repeat the narrative of American shame, I know they haven’t been told the whole story,” D’Souza notes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He proceeds to fill in the gaps, explaining most of the world’s history is driven by the &#8220;conquest ethic,” where those who are conquered have their land taken and are invariably made slaves in the process. For example, while the left singles out the settlers of the New World for “stealing&#8221; Native American territory, D’Souza reveals the same land transfers occurred in precisely the same manner among tribes who successively conquered one another. The charge of genocide is debunked when D’Souza explains that far more Indians died from disease than slaughter, and the same lack of natural defenses that made Native Americans vulnerable to European-borne maladies are the ones that made Europeans susceptible to the Asian-borne diseases that devastated Europe. Tellingly, no one refers to the European tragedy as genocide.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">More historical gaps are filled in with regard to the history of the Mexican War and American slavery. All of Mexico was conquered during a rebellion against the oppression of dictator Santa Ana, but half was returned, and Mexican war debt was retired in the process. And while D’Souza freely admits the legacy of slavery was theft of life and labor, he reminds us that 300,000 Union soldiers gave their lives to free the slaves. “What’s uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery,” D’Souza states. “And what’s uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Once again D&#8217;Souza emphasizes that singling out America for the sins of the word is a fool’s errand because slavery existed in every culture in the world from the Egyptians to the Chinese to the African to the American Indians (long before Columbus) and, as we are reminded, slavery exists even today.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">D&#8217;Souza also fills in some important historical gaps with facts that would likely surprise many Americans. These include the existence of free <i>black</i> plantation masters who owned more than ten thousand slaves of their own, and the story of black American Sarah Breedlove, aka Madam C. J. Walker, who became the nation’s first female self-made millionaire marketing a line of beauty and hair products for black women.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">D’Souza employs the same technique in debunking the leftist accusations of American imperialism, and the “theft” of the American Dream that capitalism ostensibly represents. From WWII to the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, D’Souza reminds Americans that not only have we stolen nothing from these countries, but expended considerable blood and treasure re-building them. And the free-market capitalism that has showered this nation with unprecedented wealth succeeds &#8220;not through coercion or conquest, but through the consent of the consumer.” “The wealth of America isn’t stolen, it’s created,” D’Souza asserts. “The ethic of conquest is universal. What’s uniquely American is the alternative, equal rights, self-determination, and wealth creation. If America did not exist, the conquest ethic would dominate the world.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The movie points out that the American left embraces a conquest ethic all its own. &#8220;The shaming of America is not accidental, it’s part of a strategy,” he warns. It is a strategy formulated by the likes of radical leftist Saul Alinsky who was &#8220;the godfather in the art of using shame for political shakedown.” The cultural revolution of the ‘60s provided Alinsky with his army of shakedown artists who have since infiltrated media, academia and, most importantly, government. Ever-expanding government has given us a nation where agencies like the IRS, the EPA, the DOJ and the NSA “are all collecting information and storing it on every American,” D’Souza warns. He explains that Barack Obama didn’t create this liberty-stifling reality. Rather, it created him.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the closing of the film, he lays out where the nation has been, and where it must go. “The Revolution was a struggle for the creation of America. The Civil War was a struggle for the preservation of America. World War II was a struggle for the protection of America. Our struggle is for the restoration of America.” And while he would like to see the emergence of a leader as forceful and inspiring as Washington, Lincoln, or Reagan, he makes it clear that the ultimate restoration of America must be engendered by the people themselves.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is important to note that D’Souza freely owns up to the many of the nation&#8217;s historical shortcomings. Yet unlike the American left, he offers some much-needed&#8211;and factual—context to the narrative. Because leftists like Zin and others are more than willing to leave out so many uplifting American stories in an effort to realize their agenda of national transformation, D’Souza insists we have a moral obligation to reinstate them and prevent it from happening.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He also offers fair warning to the historical revisionists. &#8220;We won’t let them shame us. We won’t let them intimidate us. We are going to start telling the true story of America,” he declares.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">D&#8217;Souza has definitely hit a leftist nerve. Their reviews of his picture ooze with <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-america-imagine-the-world-without-her-1201253480/"><span style="color: #042eee;">condescension</span></a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/america-imagine-the-world-without-her-movie-review/2014/07/01/a420aac6-012e-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html"><span style="color: #042eee;">disdain</span></a> for his point of view, with Media Matters <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/07/09/five-media-figures-who-endorse-dinesh-dsouzas-r/200046"><span style="color: #042eee;">referring</span></a> to it as “racially charged agitprop.” Yet the bet here is a lot of Americans would like to see a movie that contains stories about the goodness and greatness of our nation, even as it illuminates the cast of characters and the shame-inducing agenda that forms the heart of their efforts to denigrate American exceptionalism. Costco, whose co-founders Jim Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman are big Obama supporters, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2014/0709/Costco-removes-then-puts-back-the-book-America-by-conservative-writer-Dinesh-D-Souza"><span style="color: #042eee;">reinstated</span></a> D’Souza&#8217;s book following an outpouring of protests. It is most definitely in Americans’ best interests to see what they wished to suppress.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: Get to Work!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-get-to-work/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-get-to-work</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-get-to-work/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2014 04:45:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bill whittle]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Get to work]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235037</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/point.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235041" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/point-450x284.jpg" alt="point" width="314" height="198" /></a>Everywhere we look today we see SCANDAL FATIGUE gripping the nation. It&#8217;s bad enough that Leftist policy has crippled the national economy; in his latest FIREWALL Bill Whittle explains why you shouldn&#8217;t let the Clown Car Cavalcade of Incompetence cripple YOUR economy as well. Watch and discover why America is bigger than these weenies at their worst. Video and transcript below:</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Dsc9E5CZyFA" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT: </strong></p>
<blockquote><p>GET TO WORK!</p>
<p>Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>During the winter Olympics, I saw a commercial for the 2014 Cadillac ELR. I haven’t felt better about America since… well, since November of 2008 actually. I can’t play the whole thing – let me just play you my favorite part:</p>
<p>((CLIP))</p>
<p>The Left hates this, of course: they see in it everything they hate about America. They say he is arrogant and strutting. That’s not strutting: that’s a guy who has someplace to be.</p>
<p>And arrogance? You want arrogance? Arrogance is a guy becoming President of the Harvard Law Review, then never writing a law review. Near as I can tell, the only qualifications this guy has for being President of the United States is that he used to hand out forms in Chicago. That’s arrogance.</p>
<p>Anyway, here’s a quick splash of cold water to snap me you of scandal stupor and help you cope with the clown car cavalcade of incompetence: the stupidity, the power-grubbing, vote-buying, pandering student-council weenieness of these losers, race hustlers and envy mongers on the Progressive Left. I’m speaking now to the rest of you: you know, the ones that go to work. The ones that can open a jackknife and know how to change a tire. The men who don’t have to climb on a chair and call the exterminator when there’s a spider in the shower; the women who keep things humming and who love good men and wish there were more of them around.</p>
<p>Yes, these has-been commie slackers and layabouts and agitators are busy tearing things down as fast as their soft, undersized hands will let them. Yes, as usual, these cheerleaders for failure and shortages are trying to mind your own business and generally gumming up what is a beautiful, humming hive of activity if you’d just leave it alone. Yes, these losers and weenies in are ruining what was once good money and screwing over the economy. But don’t let them screw over your economy.</p>
<p>We’re descended from people from all over the world who’d had it up to here with kings, potentates, sultans, Emirs, Democrats and other control freaks.</p>
<p>((BIDEN))</p>
<p>For example, this idiot – just picking one from a bouquet of idiots in government &#8212; rides around in limousines and private jets. He didn’t earn the money to pay for that – you did. Not only could this guy not run a company like Wal-Mart – he couldn’t run a single Wal-Mart.</p>
<p>((CLINTON))</p>
<p>This control freak talks about a selfless life of public service, and how poor she is, and how her life is a tale of sacrifice and woe and hardships suffered on your behalf. What is she worth? $50 million? But when she writes a book called IT TAKES A VILLAGE, the subtitle of that book is AND A VILLAGE NEEDS A CHIEF. And guess who she has in mind?</p>
<p>And we’re going to let these people run our lives? We are? Really? Here in America? We’re going to let this Goat Rodeo of failure take away our God-given optimism, ambition and vision. THESE idiots?</p>
<p>No. I don’t think so. Their moment has come. Their moment has passed. They’ve tried everything, and everything they tried failed. Even they don’t believe this crap anymore.</p>
<p>So don’t let these losers ruin your day.. Americans have been outsmarting government since there’s been America. Do what people like Hilary Clinton and Jon Ketty do: go make a pile of money, and then hire the best accountants you can afford to use every legal trick in the book to pay as little tax as possible.</p>
<p>Start a business. Get to work! Find that one young person in a hundred who wants to work hard, reward the hell out of him or her, and watch what happens to the rest of them. They’re all wealth redistributing socialists so long as it’s someone else’s wealth being redistributed to them. When it’s time to take what they’ve earned and give it away other, just watch them go William F. Buckley on you, right in front of your eyes.</p>
<p>So get out there and get to work! If you don’t like being a janitor, there are free online courses on becoming a plumber. If you don’t like being a plummer, there are free online courses in math or science or business. Go be whatever you want to be. That’s why this whole thing was built in the first place. Get to work!</p>
<p>Or don’t! You want to hang out by the dumpster behind the 7-11 and smoke dope all day, that’s your business. We don’t care. You want to be the Due, be the Dude. But the Dude doesn’t take other people’s stuff. The Dude abides. You want to take it easy for the rest of your life, fine. Abide. But some of us get up and go to work so we can have thorium reactors and fast cars and loud guns and a house, or two, or three or jet airplanes or boats or whetever else we want because we can.</p>
<p>My working hard doesn’t hurt you. It helps you, actually, but that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it so I can have fun, so I can pursue happiness. My happiness. You’re going to let these weenies ruin that birthright?</p>
<p>This country was born by defeating the most powerful military force on the face of the earth. We’ve beaten Nazi technical genius, Japanese fanaticism, a half-century of socialist despair and misery and now Islamic brutality – hell, we even fought other Americans – and we’re still here. We’ve got six flags on the moon. You can’t stop that kind of creativity, ambition, vision and passion, and if you think a strutting, jug-earned Narcissist failure from Chicago is going to be the end of that then you have another think coming.</p>
<p>Nes pas?</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: My Friend Failure</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-my-friend-failure/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-my-friend-failure</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-my-friend-failure/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 24 May 2014 19:34:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jefferson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[my friend failure]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226190</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><strong>Bill Whittle talks about our inalienable right to fail our way to happiness. See the video and transcript below:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/JlLbFZxrzrc" height="315" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT:</strong></p>
<blockquote><p>MY FRIEND FAILURE</p>
<p>Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>When I was 10, I met a lifelong friend named Steve. That was back during sleepover age, so one morning I got a bowl of imitation Froot Loops in a bowl of what looked and tasted like grey water, which they explained was powdered milk. Their parents had sat the kids down and given them a choice: crappy food and a decent house, or decent food and a crappy house. They didn’t have enough money for both.</p>
<p>Steve&#8217;s dad was a Geology professor. And one day, he and his partner came up with a Carbon 14 dating procedure that quicker, cheaper and more accurate. All three. So they took it to the University and offered to partner with them as a business.</p>
<p>And they failed. The University said no. And facing that failure, this tenured professor, struggling to feed a family of six, quit his teaching position and started a company which for a while did about 94% of all of the C-14 dating done in the entire world. He became a multi-millionaire. He hired geology grad students who would also be facing lifetimes of powdered milk, tied their compensation to revenues, and now they are millionaires too.</p>
<p>When Thomas Jefferson came back with his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin and Adams and all the other Founders must have been amazed: Life – yes. Liberty – obviously. But the pursuit of happiness? That wasn’t just revolutionary – it was transcendent.</p>
<p>See, Jefferson knew you didn’t have a right to happiness – who can guarantee that? But he had a vision of place that didn’t guarantee the right to be happy, but the right – the inalienable right &#8212; to try to be. What Jefferson guaranteed in the Declaration was not the certainty of success but the guaranteed opportunity to fail.</p>
<p>For example, two bicycle mechanics in Ohio decided they wanted to build a flying machine. They didn’t just go out there and stat flapping canvass wings: they researched the latest data on air pressure, and armed with that information they set out to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina… Not with a flying machine, but with a glider.</p>
<p>But the glider didn’t work. It wasn’t flying nearly as well as it should have. They checked their numbers against the best data of the day – again and again and again – until finally these two practical men decided the only answer was that the data must be wrong.</p>
<p>They failed. They went back to Ohio, dejected. They didn’t quit, but they didn’t just come back with a bigger glider, either. Methodically, and carefully, and frugally, and anonymously, they built something the world had never seen before: the first wind tunnel. What they were really building was a foundation. Once they had accurate air pressure data the rest would be just math.</p>
<p>And on December 17th, 1903 at Kill Devil Hill mathematics became mythology. And because they were individuals, using their own money, they were allowed to fail. They had made failure their friend. They learned from failure. Meanwhile, the simultaneous, government-sponsored Langley aerodrome project – a massive undertaking with an incredible-for-the-time budget of $50,000 – was too big to fail and kept going splash. Into. The Potomac. River.</p>
<p>Some time later, two guys named Steve had an idea for a computer that everyone could use. IBM turned them down flat, and their dream was shattered. Thank God, because if they had succeeded, we’d have never heard of them, and I wouldn’t have one of these and neither would you.</p>
<p>The problem is, it’s getting harder to fail in America. The founders of Apple, Amazon, Google – all of them say they could never get started in America today due to regulations gumming up our God-given Right to Fail.</p>
<p>And worse then that, the self esteem movement means that kids don’t even get to keep score playing Little League baseball. If you can’t survive failure on a baseball diamond at 10, you’re not likely to give it a try with a business plan at 30. Are you?</p>
<p>I have history of failure. Back in 1979 my friend the Geology professor put up $6000 into that company so we could make three movies. One was a Student Academy Award Regional finalist, but we didn’t sell anything and he lost every penny. Catastrophic failure. And then, several years later, he backed me again – and lost every penny – again &#8212; and then, years after that, he did it again. Only this time, here I am, a product not only of the failures I endured, but the ones he endured that made mine possible. You’d have never heard of me without him.</p>
<p>Failure, hardship and setbacks are our companions on the roadway life. We must make them our friends, or they will be our mortal enemies. We can learn from what failure has to teach us, or we can go hide from them in a ditch for the rest of our lives.</p>
<p>I’ve lived in a ditch. It sucks. Get out there and fall down.</p></blockquote>
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		<title>The Climate Change Fundamentalists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/the-climate-change-fundamentalists-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-climate-change-fundamentalists-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2014 04:13:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225847</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In our new brave world, heretics must be punished.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/end-is-near.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225849" alt="end-is-near" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/end-is-near.jpg" width="282" height="211" /></a>Climate change fundamentalists are predicting an apocalypse. Human depredation in the form of unbridled materialism is the cause. Any dissent from the fundamentalists’ doomsday prophesies if their radical prescriptions to save humanity and Mother Earth are not followed is regarded as heresy. </span></p>
<p>Charge the well-funded climate change “deniers” with committing “criminal negligence” for “their willful disregard for human life,&#8221; says Lawrence Torcello, a philosophy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After all, heretics must be punished.</p>
<p>Stop job-creating energy independence initiatives such as the Keystone XL pipeline, says the former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, which he called the &#8220;fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.&#8221; Hansen was arrested during the course of a civil disobedience protest against the pipeline as he sat in front of a banner proclaiming, &#8220;Witness for Climate and Creation.&#8221; Who knew that a pipeline transporting oil to the United States, which would otherwise travel by rail or be shipped elsewhere such as to China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon gases, would upset God’s plan of creation?</p>
<p>Hansen co-authored with other like-minded scientists and economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and adviser to the United Nations, a scare-mongering paper entitled “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature.” The paper, published in December 2013, predicted “mass extinctions” of species and demanded “urgent change to our energy and carbon pathway to avoid dangerous consequences for young people and other life on Earth.” The authors moralized that human-caused climate change is on par with the evil of slavery. It represented inter-generational injustice, they said, for which they recommended there be legal remedies.</p>
<p>James Gustave Speth, formerly dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality from 1979 to 1981, wrote an indignant letter to the New York Times on May 13, 2014 complaining that the “United States’ response to the climate crisis has been beyond pathetic. It is probably the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic.” What is Speth’s solution? Ideally, as he described in his book <i>Red Sky at Morning</i>, he would like to see “a world environment agency entrusted with setting international standards and enforcing them against laggard countries.”</p>
<p>Even some scientists who agree that human-induced greenhouse gas buildup is a real problem policymakers should address believe that the climate change fundamentalists are going too far. For example, Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science&#8217;s Department of Global Ecology, discussing his reaction to the Hansen-Sachs paper, said he was  &#8220;concerned about the presentation of such a prescriptive and value-laden work&#8221; in a piece that wasn&#8217;t marked as an opinion. Caldeira has also said, regarding the Keystone pipeline, that “I don’t believe that whether the pipeline is built or not will have any detectable climate effect.”</p>
<p>Rather than providing balanced scientific data and reasoned analysis to persuade lay people of the potential adverse environmental consequences of human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases with recommendations for practical incremental approaches to dealing with these consequences, the climate change fundamentalists reject any notion of a gradualist approach. As Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, explained: “Climate change is a fact. But apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it harder to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in turn makes it harder to know how to deal with it.  The danger is that we become so infected with the apocalyptic virus that we end up creating a real catastrophe — the meltdown of our economies and lifestyles — in order to avoid an imaginary one.”</p>
<p>The doom merchants aim to shove radical economy-wrecking prescriptions down our throats by parading before us their version of the plagues &#8211; draught, intense rain storms, floods, fires, pestilence, very warm temperatures and very cold temperatures, all of which they attribute to human-caused climate change. The idea that some natural events may be random occurrences in a universe that far transcends human activity is foreign to the climate change fundamentalists who believe that Mother Earth itself is anthropomorphic.</p>
<p>One problem that the climate change fundamentalists have in persuading the rest of us the sky is falling is that they keep changing their explanations.  For example, the catchphrase “global warming” was rebranded as “climate change” when their computer models could not account for the fact that average atmospheric temperatures have risen little since 1998.</p>
<p>There are intellectually honest scientists in climatology who are willing to admit something is going on that the computer models may have missed.  “A few years ago you saw the hiatus, but it could be dismissed because it was well within the noise,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. “Now it’s something to explain.”</p>
<p>However, the climate change fundamentalists rationalize that looking at ten or fifteen year trend lines is a waste of time. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” said Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Nevertheless, the fundamentalists want it both ways.  Now they tell us that every unusual day-to-day weather phenomenon is a result of human-caused climate change.</p>
<p>Another problem for the climate change fundamentalists is that many of their prior doomsday predictions have not come true. In 1972, for example, Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen was reported in the Christian Science Monitor as predicting that a general warming trend over the North Pole “may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2,000.”</p>
<p>Al Gore, one of the original climate change prophets of doom, predicted in 2008 that the entire North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years.</p>
<p>While the Arctic Sea ice extent has declined, it has far from disappeared. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, “Arctic sea ice extent for April 2014 was 14.14 million square kilometers (5.46 million square miles). This is 610,000 square kilometers (236,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average extent, and 270,000 square kilometers (104,000 square miles) above the record April monthly low, which occurred in 2007.”</p>
<p>Here is another dire prediction that did not quite come to pass. Michael Oppenheimer, the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, predicted in a book of his published in 1990: “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots … [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.”</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.weather.com/sports-rec/weather-ventures/lightning-time-lapse-photo-platte-river-20140513">Platte River in Nebraska has not dried up</a>, and the continent-wide black blizzard and computer shut downs have not materialized.</p>
<p>Moreover, the hyperbolic rhetoric we hear from climate change fundamentalists does not correspond with what we observe around us ourselves, nor with some relevant empirical data.</p>
<p>For example, the Obama administration recently released its National Climate Assessment. It gave several examples of what it claimed to be the drastically worsening effects of human- caused climate change during the last fifty years, stating that “Americans are noticing changes all around them.” Two such examples we are purportedly seeing play out in extreme weather aberrations right now according to the Obama administration’s Assessment:  “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours…large increases in heavy precipitation have occurred in the Northeast, Midwest, and Great Plains where heavy downpours have frequently led to runoff that exceeded the capacity of storm drains and levees, and caused flooding events and accelerated erosion.”</p>
<p>People who shivered in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, during one of the ten coldest winters in those states since records were kept, would probably not agree with the Obama administration’s description of shorter, warmer winters. Indeed, large parts of the United States just experienced one of the longest and coldest winters in forty years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that overall, for the winter period from December 2013 through February 2014, the “contiguous U.S. experienced much drier and colder than average winter that ranked ninth driest and 34th coldest on record.”  Those records go back to 1895.</p>
<p>As for rainfall, we are certainly experiencing heavy downpours of rain. But this is not a phenomenon that has sprung up only in the last fifty years.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, which began with extremely heavy rains in the central basin of the Mississippi in the summer of 1926, was the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. This occurred more than seventy-five years ago, well outside the most recent fifty year period in which human activity supposedly created the weather conditions of very heavy precipitation and floods cited by the Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment as evidence of accelerating human-caused climate change here and now.  If the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is not considered far enough back in time to put the Obama administration’s Assessment findings in perspective, then consider the Johnstown Flood Of 1889. More than eight inches of rain fell in less than a one day period, resulting in a flood that took more than 2000 lives.</p>
<p>As for empirical data, the following is a chart prepared by NOAA which shows the percentage of the land area of the contiguous 48 states that experienced much greater than normal precipitation in any given year starting with 1895, which means it scored 2.0 or above on the annual Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The thicker orange line shows a nine-year weighted average that smoothes out some of the year-to-year fluctuations.</p>
<p>The biggest spike was in 1940. The years 1910 and 2000 were nearly equal in terms of the percentage of land area of the contiguous 48 states that experienced much greater than normal precipitation. There is no discernible accelerating upward trend line in the last fifty years.</p>
<div id="attachment_225848" style="width: 460px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/figure2.png"><img class="size-medium wp-image-225848 " alt="figure2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/figure2-450x324.png" width="450" height="324" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Data source: NOAA, 2013</p></div>
<p>None of this is to deny that human activity worldwide contributes to climate change via the cumulative impact of human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. The questions to be debated are the extent and imminence of the problem, as well as the best measures to deal with the problem without wrecking our economy in the process. This is where the climate change fundamentalists become unglued. They do not want a policy debate. They want immediate action on their terms. Anyone questioning their dogma is blackballed.</p>
<p>For example, a paper written by an eminent climate change researcher Professor Lennart Bengtsson and four other scientists, which challenged the basis for predictions regarding the speed of global warming, was recently rejected for publication in a scientific journal because it was said to be “less than helpful.” Professor Bengtsson, an author of over 200 papers and former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology which has contributed to United Nations reports on climate change, was harassed for daring to question the received dogma. He said: &#8220;I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.”</p>
<p>Through their excommunication of serious-minded scientists who dare to raise questions and their increasingly strident and dogmatic proclamations, the climate change fundamentalists are turning into Cassandras whose prophesies are being tuned out by the public. Sadly, they drown out more reasonable voices who can contribute positively to the public’s understanding of the multiple dimensions of climate change and sensible solutions.</p>
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		<title>The Progressive Paradigms Lost</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-paradigms-lost/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-progressive-paradigms-lost</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223847</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the central myths animating the Left are losing their credibility. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Obama-teleprompter-speech.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223858" alt="Obama-teleprompter-speech" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Obama-teleprompter-speech-366x350.jpg" width="256" height="245" /></a>The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative that gives people an identity and a morality. With these paradigms we can sort out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the political goals we should pursue, the ones we should avoid––and who gets the power to decide. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Every human community from the most primitive tribe to the most advanced civilization functions in terms of some sort of worldview. For nearly 2000 years Christianity provided the dominant paradigms of Western civilization. Modernity, however, developed a new and dangerous twist on this eternal human behavior. With the rise of the natural sciences, people began to dream of a new paradigm based on science, not the irrational myths and superstitions of religion. Whole new disciplines arose to teach and institutionalize these new “scientific” truths about human identity and behavior. Soon anthropology, psychology, sociology, and political science displaced the old philosophical, traditional, and theological understanding of human life.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Isaiah Berlin describes this historical process and its consequences: “The success of physics seemed to give reason for optimism: once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation, and men’s wishes, within the limits of the uniformities of nature, could in principle all be made to come true . . . The rational reorganization of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.” The progressive worldview is easily recognizable in this description. Just let technocrats armed with science and backed by the coercive power of the state take over the organization of society from the myths of religion and the superstitions of tradition, and we will achieve the utopia of prefect freedom, justice, and equality.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This whole notion, of course, is itself a myth, one whose bloody consequences stain every page of modern history with genocides and gulags. Humans are not material things in the world that can be understood by the laws of nature so reliably that people can be organized and controlled like the cogs and wheels in a watch. People are too complex and intricate, too mysterious in their motives, too spontaneous in their actions, and too unpredictable because of their radical freedom to chose. Yet from Freud and Marx down to today’s evolutionary psychologists, this myth of the “human sciences” is marketed as real science, beyond discussion or qualification as much as the laws of gravity or the heliocentric solar system.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Whenever progressives address an issue, one is subjected to these mythic paradigms dressed up in spurious science, and delivered with the arrogance of the “enlightened” who patronize or demonize their opponents as ignorant or evil or both. Of course, these attitudes bespeak the mythic origins of the paradigm, its source in faith rather than reason, its tenacity resulting from the careful selection of evidence that confirms it, and the equally careful discarding of evidence that challenges it. In this respect many progressives resemble the members of a cult, with the same demand for orthodox dogma never to be challenged, the same uncritical deference to scientific authority, and the same intolerance of heretics or infidels who dare to question that orthodoxy and refuse to conform to its revealed truths.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The random perusal of any daily newspaper or cable news show will provide numerous examples. The great feminist myth holds that sex identity is a socio-political construct. The traditional behaviors and preferences of men and women, once understood to reflect their different natures, have been imposed on women by men whose power depends on the “patriarchy” that subordinates women in order to serve male power and privilege. Hence any disparities between men and women must reflect not nature, but the lingering effects of this unjustly constructed sex identity. Given that modern “science” has unmasked this regime of oppressive power, the state must be enlisted to rectify the inequalities “patriarchy” inflicts on women.  The government must create laws and use its coercive power to punish those who break them. Any challenges that contradict this paradigm must be silenced, shunned, or demonized, for they concern not just disparities between men and women, but violate an important metaphysical belief of the left––radical equality, the notion that equality of result is more important than equality of opportunity available to all, which traditionally was defined as the freedom for people to rise as far as their particular talents and virtues can take them.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hence Obama’s recent speeches on the lingering differences in income between men and women, in which he peddled the long-exploded canard that women make only 77% of what men make. The truth is, when one controls for type of job, length of service, hours worked, how dangerous the job is, and whether women have children or not, most of that disparity disappears. Indeed, educated women under 30 earn more than their male peers in most cities in the U.S. But those qualifying details don’t serve the paradigm that holds all people are equal and only fail to achieve equal results because of injustices in social, cultural, political, and economic structures. The authority for asserting this ideological, not scientific, position comes from the spurious “77%,” which implies a rigor and precision beyond discussion or challenge except by the evil or ignorant.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Another theme of Obama’s recent speeches has been income inequality, which he asserts is growing worse and unfairly limits the opportunities for advancement of the less privileged. This “crisis” is also about the dogma of radical equality. It reflects a pre-modern, zero-sum vision of wealth as fixed and limited, so that the abundance of one necessarily demands the penury of another. It also seemingly does not get the dynamism of capitalism, its “creative destruction” that generates and distributes new wealth, and that over time continually reshuffles people and families in and out of income levels as the talents of individuals find opportunities to better their lot and transcend their origins.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But, like the magical 77%, simplistic statistics are paraded as scientific evidence supporting an ideological preference. So we are told that the incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans grew $59 (adjusted for inflation) from 1966 to 2011, but the incomes for the top 10% rose by $116,071. But for most of those 45 years the people in each cohort weren’t always the same. As Stephen Moore and James Pierson </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://spectator.org/articles/58135/dont-eat-rich">point out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, “The myth is that the super-rich stay at the top of the income ladder year after year, and few new entrants are allowed to break into the elite club. Wrong. The IRS found that only four of the 400 (1 percent) made the cut every year. There were 3,672 different taxpayers who made the top 400 list at least once over the seventeen-year period studied. Over half of them made the list only once or twice. Three quarters of the individuals who rose to the heights of this top 400 list were there for six years or less. There is no permanent upper class in America.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for the lower income cohorts, a Treasury Department </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/Income-Mobility-1996to2005-12-07-revised-3-08.pdf">study</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of income mobility between 1996 and 2005 showed that over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile, about half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005, and only a quarter of the “super rich,” the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996, were still that rich in 2005. What has slowed this movement is the historically sluggish economic growth that has followed the Great Recession, a consequence in large part of Obama and the Democrats’ statist and redistributionist economic policies. Implementing policies that spur economic growth obviously would help to restore the income mobility seen in times of high growth like the 1990s.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet all Obama can propose is raising the minimum wage, a symbolic gesture at best, and one repeatedly demonstrated to kill jobs for those most in need of work. We see again the progressive paradigm of radical equality dressed up as a rational response to statistical facts. As Thomas Sowell </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/011110-517702-how-media-misuse-income-data-to-match-their-preconceptions.htm?p=2">writes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, “Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a ‘problem’ for which a ‘solution’ is necessary. They have created a powerful vision of ‘classes’ with ‘disparities’ and ‘inequities’ in income, caused by ‘barriers’ created by ‘society.’ But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the ‘barriers’ assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.” In short, serving the paradigm trumps growing the economy.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Radical equality is one of the key paradigms of the progressive worldview, a leftover leftist dogma based not on reason or the possible, but on a Manichaean worldview in which greedy capitalists unjustly appropriate more than their fair share of wealth, a problem to be solved by a technocratic government using its coercive power to redistribute wealth and punish the “malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,” as the 1936 Democratic party platform put it. Those who challenge this dogma and the policies it engenders are vilified as selfish and evil, while those who champion it are anointed as the generous and good. The paradigm is in its D.C. heaven, and all’s right with the world of the progressives.</span></p>
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		<title>Ignoring Hip-Hop Ensures a Democratic President in 2016</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/ignoring-hip-hop-is-ensuring-a-democratic-president-in-2016/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ignoring-hip-hop-is-ensuring-a-democratic-president-in-2016</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 04:25:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[youth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221676</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Right seals its own fate by rejecting a popular genre of music and its millions of fans.    ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Hip-Hop-graffiti1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221677" alt="Hip-Hop-graffiti1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Hip-Hop-graffiti1-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a></span><strong>[This is the third part of Ronn Torossian&#8217;s three-part series on why hip-hop and Jay-Z are worthy of America&#8217;s respect. To read part 1, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/bill-oreilly-is-wrong-jay-z-is-worthy-of-americas-respect/">click here,</a> for part 2, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/welcome-the-hip-hop-world-into-the-conservative-tent/">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wise conservatives might ask why Barack Obama was re-elected despite terrible approval ratings. According to Gallup, Obama averaged 49.1% job approval during his first term in office.  His performance was subpar, he broke repeated promises, and the economy still struggled, yet he was handily re-elected. Despite the facts that it will be an 8-year Obama reign and that there’s no strong GOP candidate, conservatives continue to claim to know it all.</span></p>
<p>Conservatives don’t open their minds – and Democrats are likely to win the election again in 2016.  Conservative ideology shouldn’t be changed &#8211; it is right and the left is wrong on the issues.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">However, dictating to people what they should listen to and how they should dress is un-American. Hip-hop crosses all racial and ethnic lines – all across the country. Conservatives who endlessly criticize hip-hop are wrong and don’t understand what hip-hop is. They also don’t have a clue what their children are listening to, nor do they have any clue how to affect popular culture.  Wake up – the world has changed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On college campuses nationwide, youth listen to hip-hop. Leaving aside the fact that hip-hop crosses all racial boundaries, are these haters aware that hip-hop’s largest consumer base is the Hispanic community? With the continued growth of Hispanics in America, how does the GOP intend to capture these votes? Consider hip-hop. It is so hypocritical for pro-capitalism conservatives to<em> hate</em> on an entire industry which has such mass appeal.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hip-hop has empowered a whole new generation of people who were previously disenfranchised. Few American industries are more entrepreneurial than hip-hop. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Take these lyrics from Ma$e: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Now what the hell is you lookin&#8217; for?/ Can&#8217;t a young man get money anymore?/ Let my pants sag down to the floor/ Really do it matter as long as I score?&#8221; </span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In America, whether you wear a hoodie like Mark Zuckerberg or a 3-piece suit, indeed you can succeed. In a shock to some who read this site, kids today grow up wanting to be entrepreneurs, not doctors or lawyers. Hip-hop encourages that. We don’t want government hand-outs, we want to earn our money.  Conservatives should let hip-hop fans know they don’t judge and accept people who want to create their own rule book.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So many of us, whether it is Jamie Glazov, the editor of Front Page Magazine, who came to this country as a refugee, or me, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/5WPRSpeakers">Ronn Torossian</a>,<span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> who grew up in the Bronx with a single mother, need role models and people we can relate to. Kids today who don’t have huge opportunities need positive thinking – and so too do people of all ages. That’s offered in hip-hop.  Take the words of Eminem, who says, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” or the greatest rapper alive, Jay-Z, who says, “I’d rather die enormous than live dormant.” Dreaming big is important and hip-hop allows us to envision and realize those dreams. In contrast, Americans don’t see government officials as enviable no matter where they fall on the political spectrum.</span></p>
<p>My children are blessed to attend private school with very smart and well-connected kids and families – I wasn’t able to do that. Thankfully, they have so many opportunities I didn’t have, and the non-stop work ethic is something that is hard for many of us to associate with good ol’ boys in the GOP.  Can’t the GOP adopt some of the quotes and language from hip-hop to widen its base?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sean “Diddy” Combs has a work ethic unlike anyone else. As he says, “I demand the best. Sleep is forbidden. If you work for me, you have to roll how I roll. I’m not really human. I’m like a machine.”  Or Will Smith, a brilliant actor, whom so many watched on TV as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Smith said, “The first step before anyone else in the world believes it, is that YOU have to believe it.”  They are so right &#8212; and we need to know we don’t need to go to Harvard to be successful and make it. Why not identify with these people and let them know that the conservative movement believes they should be rewarded for their hard work, by paying lower taxes and keeping more of their money? Conservatives would gain so many votes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How about this gem from Birdman? “Your work ethic has to be to the ceiling. You’re gonna get out of this what you’re putting into it.” And while the conservative movement struggles with ways to balance social values with a conservative ethos, aren’t there “values” related issues on which we can cooperate? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Take Jay-Z’s great song “Mama I made it”: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“I told you one day I&#8217;d get you a home /I didn&#8217;t know it could possibly be in Rome/ Told me don&#8217;t wait on nobody get your own/ So with me myself and my microphone I made it. &#8230; Mama I made it.” </span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is it not completely hypocritical to attack these lyrics or values?  How many welfare cases have become millionaires because of hip-hop?  How many honest businessmen used to be criminals because of hip-hop?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sean “Diddy” Combs, whose father was killed when he was 33, was a criminal. Yet he says: “This is my plan. When I’m in the studio making a hit record, I’m not trying to make a hit record; I’m making one. This is what I studied. This is why I stay up twenty hours a day.” His children will have great opportunities in America – and that’s the American way.  True conservative values.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">LL Cool J, the rare Republican in hip-hop, said, “Success is achieved and maintained by those who try and keep trying.”  If one reads the comments from conservatives on recent FrontPage hip-hop related articles, we are destined to fail yet again amongst the young and amongst pop culture because our minds are closed. Conservatives aren’t trying – they know it all. It’s unfortunate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A classic hip-hop song, one I remember hearing ad naseum in the Bronx in the 1980s, featured a rapper named Special Ed rapping, &#8220;I&#8217;m talented, yes I&#8217;m gifted/ Never boosted, never shoplifted/ I got the cash, but money ain&#8217;t nothing.&#8221; I remember hearing countless people understand the importance of making money and doing good things in the world.  Even if one is unconventional, he should seek to make big things happen. Closing out hip-hop completely is simply absurd and a definite way to close out major segments of America.  It’s a major mistake.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Every day before I go to work, I listen to Jay-Z’s “My 1</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">st</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Song,” as it inspires me to work hard and always challenge myself for more: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I&#8217;m just, tryin to stay above water y&#8217;know/ Just stay busy, stay workin/ Puff told me like, the key to this joint/ The key to staying, on top of things/ is treat everything like it&#8217;s your first project, knahmsayin? Like it&#8217;s your first day like back when you was an intern/ Like, that&#8217;s how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry/ Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first/ And my thirst is the same as &#8211; when I came/ It&#8217;s my joy and my tears and my laughter it brings to me/ It&#8217;s my ev-ery-thing/ Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first/ And my thirst like the first song I sang.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">My </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR firm</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> has grown because we will not be outworked – no one will ever try harder than us.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Obama will go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever. One of the reasons is that he has made an enemy out of anyone domestically who disagrees with him. The many conservatives who have issues with hip-hop should make more of an effort to understand the movement and why it appeals to so many who are outside of the norm. Don’t make them your enemies, especially since Hispanics keep growing in America.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The world has changed. There’s a multi-racial President in the White House.  It’s not all the same as it used to be. Conservatives should start figuring out how to move on and capture more youth, minority, and Hispanic votes, or they can forget winning an election for the near future. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The challenge, as Jay-Z put it in “A Dream,” is “Remind yourself. Nobody built like you, you design yourself.” The GOP needs to open the tent to people who understand the reality of America in 2014 and beyond.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Leftists Love Global Warming Because They Hate the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:25:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Noah]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219387</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Hollywood turned the story of Noah into a warning against carbon sin. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/flooded_ny.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219393" alt="flooded_ny" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/flooded_ny-432x350.jpg" width="302" height="245" /></a>This week, Secretary of State John Kerry announced to a group of Indonesian students that global warming was &#8220;perhaps the world&#8217;s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Because of climate change, it&#8217;s no secret that today Indonesia is &#8230; one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth. It&#8217;s not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.&#8221;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Hollywood prepared to drop a new blockbuster based on the biblical story of Noah. The film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, centers on the story of the biblical character who built an ark after God warned him that humanity would be destroyed thanks to its sexual immorality and violent transgressions. The Hollywood version of the story, however, has God punishing humanity not for actual sin, but for overpopulation and global warming &#8212; an odd set of sins, given God&#8217;s express commandments in Genesis 1:28 to &#8220;be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.&#8221;</p>
<p>This weird perspective on sin &#8212; the notion that true sin is not sin, but that consumerism is &#8212; is actually nothing new. In the 1920s, the left warned of empty consumerism with the fire and brimstone of Jonathan Edwards; Sinclair Lewis famously labeled the American middle class &#8220;Babbitts&#8221; &#8212; characters who cared too much about buying things.</p>
<p>In his novel of the same name, Lewis sneered of his bourgeois antihero, &#8220;He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty.&#8221; Lewis wrote, through the voice of his radical character Doane, that consumerism has created &#8220;standardization of thought, and of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows it that they&#8217;re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent.&#8221;</p>
<p>Lewis, of course, was a socialist. So were anti-consumerism compatriots like H.G. Wells, H.L. Mencken and Herbert Croly. And their brand of leftism was destined to infuse the entire American left over the course of the 20th century. As Fred Siegel writes in his new book, &#8220;The Revolt Against The Masses,&#8221; this general feeling pervaded the left during the 1950s, even as more Americans were attending symphony concerts than ballgames, with 50,000 Americans per year buying paperback version of classics. That&#8217;s because if the left were to recognize the great power of consumerism in bettering lives and enriching culture, the left would have to become the right.</p>
<p>Of course, consumerism is not an unalloyed virtue. Consumerism can be utilized for hedonism. But it can also be utilized to make lives better, offering more opportunity for spiritual development. It&#8217;s precisely this latter combination that the left fears, because if consumerism and virtue are allied, there is no place left for the Marxist critique of capitalism &#8212; namely that capitalism makes people less compassionate, more selfish, and ethically meager. And so consumerism must be severed from virtue (very few leftists critique Americans&#8217; propensity for spending cash on Lady Gaga concerts) so that it can be castigated as sin more broadly.</p>
<p>In a world in which consumerism is the greatest of all sins, America is the greatest of all sinners. Which, of course, is the point of the anti-consumerist critique from the left: to target America. Global warming represents the latest apocalyptic consequence threatened by the leftist gods for the great iniquity of buying things, developing products, and competing in the global marketplace. And America must be called to heel by the great preachers in Washington, D.C., and Hollywood.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Immigrant Taxi Drivers Targeted in De Blasio&#8217;s New York</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/immigrant-taxi-drivers-targeted-in-de-blasios-new-york/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=immigrant-taxi-drivers-targeted-in-de-blasios-new-york</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/immigrant-taxi-drivers-targeted-in-de-blasios-new-york/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 05:06:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[de blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[taxi drivers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214521</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Marxist city planners will make the American dream that much harder for new arrivals. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bill-de-Blasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214528" alt="Bill-de-Blasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bill-de-Blasio-426x350.jpg" width="298" height="245" /></a>Now that Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken office, he can reassure the nervous business community by curbing some of the election rhetoric, which some among his supporters have taken to new levels.  Mayor de Blasio told his tale of two cities from an economic standpoint, suggesting that the gap between the wealthy and poor was vast and growing exponentially.  Yet, during his inauguration the Sanitation Department’s chaplain, Rev. Fred Lucas Jr. compared New York City to a “plantation” when he delivered the invocation. The turn from a debate on economics to racism is indicative of how some will attempt to divide the people of this great city. The race-baiting began as Lucas said, “Free us from the shackles of partisan politics, political correctness and personal egos and agendas,” continuing, “Let the plantation called New York City be the city of God, a city set upon the hill, a light shining in darkness.” Is New York City a plantation where the poor are oppressed and enslaved and treated as black people were in the South prior to the Civil War? This is the atmosphere that Mayor de Blasio must oppose.</p>
<p>In today’s New York City, there is the taxi driver union&#8217;s Moses, <a href="http://www.bhairavidesai.com/">Bhairavi Desai</a>, the head of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), an organization which represents approximately 15,000 NYC taxi drivers.  Desai is the de-facto partner of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and together they have conspired to take hard earned money from what is really the last vestige of easy-to-find work for new immigrants.  They created what amounts to a multi-million dollar slush fund, supplied with a six cents per fare tax from every ride – about $600 per year.  This is said to be for “disability insurance and health-care navigation services.”</p>
<p>There is no law governing this tax, but drivers cannot refuse it.  Is that fair?  Even worse is that the fund is overseen by Desai and her group, not by healthcare experts or investment advisors.  Desai, who has always claimed to be a populist and has routinely decried capitalist values, has done what she claims big business does – takes advantage of the poor and naive.  Cab drivers work very hard; many of them came to this country to pursue the great opportunities which exist here, but are not aware of their rights and due process.</p>
<p>When Desai was a presenter at the Brecht Forum’s 29th Annual Intensive Introduction to Marxism, she suggested capitalism was part of the destructive waves that “mark our times and even threaten life on this planet.” She further bewailed the “complicity of capitalism in perpetuating these ills.” Yet, she readily took the near $10M deal in exchange for total acquiescence to the former TLC Chairman and former Mayor Bloomberg’s poorly devised attacks on the taxi industry. A lawsuit filed by drivers objecting to this forced tax said: “In exchange for the forced $10 million in contributions to the NYTWA’s coffers, the drivers receive &#8216;healthcare&#8217; services that include neither true healthcare coverage nor services that the drivers are force to pay for.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/bhairavi-desai/">Bhairavi Desai</a> is also a devoted advocate for the “Cuba, Palestine, and El Salvador solidarity movements.”<b> </b>These “solidarity” movements are largely anti-American &#8212; and the types of places many of her member drivers run away from to pursue their American dream. Hard-working cab drivers of New York City, often immigrants, come to this country to make a better life for their families, not to rail against the greatness of capitalism, but to pursue it.  They are subject to a policy that lines the leadership coffers at their expense, much like the reasons Marxism failed globally.</p>
<p>Mayor de Blasio should take the helm as a strong captain and put every New Yorker on notice that racism – and Marxism – is out of bounds.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A New “Animal Farm” Targets Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/a-new-animal-farm-targets-capitalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-animal-farm-targets-capitalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/a-new-animal-farm-targets-capitalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Dec 2013 05:46:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andy Serkis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[animal farm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[george orwell]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Greed]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213971</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Some movies are more subversive than others.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/andy.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213976" alt="andy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/andy.jpg" width="342" height="180" /></a>Actor Andy Serkis is set to direct an upcoming movie adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel <i>Animal Farm</i>. But there will be a slight deviation from the story’s original focus: rather than serve as a cautionary tale about Communist totalitarianism, this updated version will address Hollywood’s predictable, go-to embodiment of evil, the Darth Vader of our time: corporate greed.</p>
<p>Orwell’s brilliant allegory<i> Animal Farm</i> was written during World War II as a satire on Soviet Communism (and very nearly wasn’t published, critical as it was of our Russian ally). It has since been adapted to film twice, a British animated version in the mid-1950s, in which the ending was altered to be more upbeat for its young audience, and a “live-action” take in 1999 featuring talking animals with the voices of an all-star cast including Kelsey Grammer, Ian Holm, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patrick Stewart.</p>
<p>Serkis, known primarily for his role as Golem in the epic <i>Lord of the Rings</i> movie trilogy, and as the ape Caesar in the<i> Planet of the Apes</i> reboots, <a href="http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/film-tv/news/serkis-animal-farm-is-emotional-29864244.html">announced</a> that his version would address the political aspects of the novella, but not as overtly as the previous films: “First and foremost, we are not making a film about Communism and Stalinism because if Orwell was writing the story today, he would be talking about other relevant topics like globalization and corporate greed,” he explained.</p>
<p>Well, first and foremost, Serkis is not making a film about Communism because if he were, the project probably wouldn’t get a green light from the studio. Hollywood eschews making films about Communism’s ugly reality, and prefers to focus instead on ones about anti-Communist “paranoia,” about the witch hunts led by such easily-demonized caricatures as Joseph McCarthy against courageous Hollywood martyrs like devoted Stalinist <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1859">Dalton Trumbo</a>. <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1271">George Clooney</a>’s <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Clooney%20Proud%20to%20Be%20Labeled.html"><i>Good Night and Good Luck</i></a> is a prominent recent example.</p>
<p>If Hollywood features Communists at all, it tends to paint them as beautiful idealists like Warren Beatty in <i>Reds</i>. The result is that Hollywood is leaving untouched a wealth of powerful true dramas that could be mined from the history of cruel and oppressive Soviet Communism, because at heart the wealthy capitalists of Hollywood (such as Howard Zinn fanboy <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/matt-damon-brings-equality-to-the-planet/">Matt Damon</a>, whose recently released <i>Elysium</i> is a blatant class warfare propaganda) lament the collapse of that utopian vision. But they have kept it alive by rebranding it as progressivism – and Hollywood is not about to make a movie critical of the progressive dream.</p>
<p>(A notable exception is last year’s TV series <i>The Americans</i>, about a husband-and-wife team of Soviet agents undercover in Reagan-era Washington D.C. I have written <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/the-americans-rooting-for-the-kgb/">here</a> about how that show, at least in its first season, showed American society positively, depicted the FBI as unequivocal good guys, and betrayed not a hint of sympathy for the protagonists’ ideology. That may change in the upcoming new season – and if so, I will report on that – but for now, <i>The Americans</i> is a lonely rarity among Hollywood’s output in its willingness to paint Communists as ruthless, subversive ideologues, and America as a land of freedom and prosperity.)</p>
<p>As for Serkis’ assertion that today the iconoclastic Orwell would be writing about globalization and corporate greed: I think it more likely that Orwell would still be writing about the issues that preoccupied him then, because those issues are still as relevant as ever: the conflict between liberty and oppression and the critical role of language in that clash (his essay “<a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm">Politics and the English Language</a>”  is a must-read). “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936,” Orwell wrote ten years later, “has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Socialist though he was, rather than take to the streets with the violent Occupy Wall Street movement, he might be taking up his pen against the <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=MHKAVKVKI6FG">abuses of government surveillance</a>, the left’s alliance with the creeping totalitarianism of Islamic theocracy, and the oppression inherent in the left’s shrewd manipulation of political language, such as its relentless push for submission to speech codes and its intolerance of politically incorrect expression.</p>
<p>Serkis promises that in his new <i>Animal Farm</i>, he will be investigating “the world of the overarching ego that corrupts the innocence of the potential utopia that the animals create.” I have no idea what his political inclinations are, but this statement – that ego-driven capitalist excess corrupts and derails the “potential utopia” that the animals would otherwise naturally create for themselves – is a pretty clear hint. The utopian vision of a socially “just,” neatly organized society cleansed of messy human nature is leftist to the core.</p>
<p>“We’re making a family film,” said Serkis. Of course, because progressives are nothing if not proselytizers for their political religion, and they know how critical it is to preach their gospel to the youth. Hence all the family-friendly, anti-corporate, animated environmentalist propaganda films in recent years like <i>Wall-E</i>, <i>Happy Feet</i>, and <i>The Lorax</i>. Serkis’ <i>Animal Farm</i> seems destined to be burdened by a similar sort of heavy-handed agitprop.</p>
<p>“So, if you like the archetypes,” continues Serkis, “all the characters are exactly the same and will represent the same as the book. It&#8217;s just that we’re not pinning them down to specific political targets, <i>i.e</i>. Napoleonism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, et cetera.” But what is <i>Animal Farm</i> without a political target? In fact, it’s likely the target here will be capitalism itself.</p>
<p>Capitalism is messy, no doubt about it, and that drives progressives wild because it resists their efforts to conform it to their ends. They are reduced to trying to equate it with greed, but in fact greed is a human characteristic, not solely a capitalist one; after all, the people in power in Communist societies live like kings while everyone else stands in bread lines. At least capitalism offers mechanisms for self-correction.</p>
<p>It’s not that corporate greed can’t be the subject of an entertaining movie – look at Oliver Stone’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF_iorX_MAw"><i>Wall Street</i></a>, for example – but to hijack <i>Animal Farm</i>’s anti-Communist message and twist it into “<a href="http://embankmentfilms.com/films/animal-farm.html">a modern commentary of the perils of corporate greed</a>” makes this film a tragedy.</p>
<p><i>Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.</i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>The Festival of Dangerous Ideas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/the-festival-of-dangerous-ideas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-festival-of-dangerous-ideas</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/the-festival-of-dangerous-ideas/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:45:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Simon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Festival of Dangerous Ideas]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213784</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More like the festival of bad ideas.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/fest.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213787" alt="fest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/fest.jpg" width="335" height="470" /></a>“America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics,” wrote David Simon, author and creator of the gritty television crime drama <i>The Wire</i>, in a recent <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire">article</a> in the UK <i>Guardian</i>. “There are definitely two Americas.” Indeed there are, although Simon blames this chasm not on the political momentum of the radical left, who are hell-bent on leading us into a post-American future, but on the failure of a Reagan-era capitalism to build “a just society.”</p>
<p>Simon’s article is an extract of his presentation at this year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, which ran for two days last month. <a href="http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/about/program_fodi_2013.aspx">The Festival of Dangerous Ideas</a> saw Simon join a range of “notable thinkers” in discussion and debate “about all sorts of ideas that are dangerous in different ways,” <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/festival-dangerous-ideas-the-wire">said</a> the festival’s curator Ann Mossop. “Dangerous can be that kind of dangerous that gets you killed, or it can be the kind that means you have to rethink your opinion on something. But it can also be something that is quite fun, that takes a lighter view of the kind of dangerous ideas of everyday life.” Of course, it’s one thing for ideas to be provocative, and another for them to actually be any good, but I digress.</p>
<p>The event’s thinkers included anti-bullying flagbearer, anti-Christian bully Dan Savage, who was on hand to promote open marriages, which he claims save more relationships than destroy them; web theorist Evgeny Morozov, who has <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/new_kids_on_the_block#sthash.vPp1Mopv.dpuf">criticized</a> the United States government’s “Internet Freedom Agenda” for convincing our enemies abroad “that Internet freedom is another Trojan horse for American imperialism”; Hanna Rosin, a <i>Slate </i>and <i>Atlantic </i>writer whose book <i>The End of Men: And the Rise of Women</i> posits that the patriarchy is dead; anti-globalist ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, whose <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M3WJQbnHKc&amp;list=PLKKWbWvkO0GDOrcrePUcGWiWhQDjS7j89&amp;index=10">presentation</a> was called “Growth = Poverty”; and <i>Guardian</i> writer Erwin James, a convicted double-murderer who now advocates for prison reform. His <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CjjW9rVBdE&amp;list=PLKKWbWvkO0GDOrcrePUcGWiWhQDjS7j89&amp;index=8">presentation</a> was entitled “A Killer Can Be a Good Neighbor.”</p>
<p>(In the future, if the Festival of Dangerous Ideas organizers want to broaden the event’s range of “notable thinkers” and present some really shocking ideas that run counter to the orthodoxy of the self-congratulatory liberal elite, concepts that might challenge their rigid worldview, perhaps they could consider inviting such notables as Thomas Sowell, Mark Steyn, and David Horowitz, for some really eye-opening balance. Just a suggestion.)</p>
<p>Simon’s show <i>The Wire</i>, , in which his marginalized and “economically irrelevant” characters on the streets of Baltimore butted up against government and bureaucratic forces beyond their control, ran from 2002-2008 and was known for addressing sociopolitical themes like the drug war and poverty. Today Simon confronts those issues more directly in such venues as last month’s Festival or in the <i>Guardian</i>.</p>
<p>In his address, entitled “Some People Are More Equal Than Others,” Simon excoriated capitalism’s inability to correct America’s income inequality, solve environmental problems, and heal the racial divide. He argues that since 1980 – the beginning of the Reagan era, though he doesn’t refer to it – we have increasingly embraced a profit-obsessed capitalism that has severed itself from “the social compact.” We have abandoned an American dream that was accessible to all and that gave us “the American century,” “all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.”</p>
<p>The result is that America has become “a horror show” in which family income is declining, basic services such as public education are “abandoned,” and the underclass is “hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor.” He also claims that “capital” has bought the electoral process, effectively shutting down the popular will and crushing hope. Actually, what has shut down the popular will at the voting booth is rampant voter fraud, but again I digress.</p>
<p>“That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time,” Simon declares,” that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric [than profit] for human progress.” Capitalism is a great engine for building wealth, but a poor “blueprint for how to build the just society”:</p>
<blockquote><p>So I’m astonished that at this late date I’m standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don’t mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don’t embrace some other values for human endeavor.</p></blockquote>
<p>He doesn’t describe himself as a Marxist, however:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.</p></blockquote>
<p>“The only thing that actually works,” he argues, “is not ideological&#8230; It’s pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism.” I’m not sure what the best aspects of socialistic thought are, but this country finds itself torn in two precisely because we have at the helm a man who, like Simon, argues for wealth distribution to build a “just society.” How does that seem to be working out? How does the utopian impulse to mold a “just society” always end? Not in the elimination of poverty but in less freedom and less prosperity for <i>all</i>.</p>
<p>Simon wants to rise above ideology, but the radical left, which ascended into power five years ago, is nothing if not ideological, and the socio-economic horror show Simon decries has been facilitated, fed, and exacerbated, not ameliorated, by Barack Obama and his handlers. David Simon is correct: there are definitely two Americas, and the way to begin closing that divide and propel us into another “American century” is to focus on keeping us a “free” society, not a “just” one.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Our Ideologically Biased Language</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/our-ideologically-biased-language/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=our-ideologically-biased-language</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/our-ideologically-biased-language/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:15:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income inequality]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213316</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the words we use give the Left the upper hand in any debate. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/CAPITALISM1000-500x333.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213322" alt="CAPITALISM1000-500x333" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/CAPITALISM1000-500x333-450x299.gif" width="315" height="209" /></a>From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the subject of “income inequality” has been rolling off of the tongues of some of the planet’s most visible figures over the last couple of weeks.  The former went so far as to describe as it as “the defining challenge of our time.”</p>
<p>In his book, <i>The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, </i>F.A. Hayek reminds us of this pearl of wisdom from Confucius: “‘When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.’”<i> </i></p>
<p>The words surrounding this topic of “income inequality” need to be meticulously reconsidered (if they’ve been considered at all).</p>
<p>“<b>Capitalism</b>,” for example, as Hayek notes, was invented by German academic and self-described “convinced Marxist,” Werner Sombart.  Friedrich Engels commended Sombart on being the only German professor to have achieved a genuine understanding of Marx’s <i>Das Kapital.</i></p>
<p>“Capitalism” conjures, and is meant to conjure, an image of a <i>consciously designed system </i>intended to serve the interests of a minority—the owners of capital—at the expense of the overwhelming majority of us—the laborers.  Clearly, the word itself cooks the case against such a system.</p>
<p>“<b>Free market economy</b>” is also problematic in that it implies the existence of something that exists over and above the sum total of the countless transactions of the billions of individual human beings that comprise it.  It is <i>not</i> “the market” that determines the price of a product. Rather, product prices are the function of patterns formed by untold numbers of people freely seeking the satisfaction of their needs and wants.</p>
<p>“<b>Free <i>enterprise</i> system</b>” is another common term not without its challenges. It is better than both “capitalism” and “free market economy,” it is true, but it still suggests a premeditated <i>system </i>designed to marshal all agents into the service of <i>one </i>grand <i>enterprise</i>, the realization of a “unitary hierarchy of ends,” as Hayek characterized it.  Plus, with the word “enterprise” in its name, such a system sounds as if it is for the benefit of <i>entrepreneurs—</i>and most people don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>“<b>Distribution</b>,” as has been long remarked upon, is as misleading as any a term when it comes to describing the property arrangements of a free association of human beings (a “free <i>society</i>”).   This nefarious word is meant to have us think that there is some agent or committee of agents responsible for divvying up shares of money from some preexistent pile and <i>distributing </i>them, <i>arbitrarily, </i>to the rest of us: some get more, some get less.</p>
<p>Of course, this is a gross, indeed, a childish, misunderstanding of how income comes about in the real world—even in societies whose governments aren’t self-divided like that under which Americans live.  No government has one red penny that it hasn’t extracted from someone who first earned it.</p>
<p>There is one final term that liberty’s apostles <i>must </i>challenge.  Interestingly, to my knowledge, no one has yet to mention this point, but there is none that is as crucial as this.</p>
<p>It is imperative that liberty lovers stop referring to “<b>income inequality</b>” as if there is any sense to it, for “inequalities” in income are nothing more or less than <i>differences </i>in income.</p>
<p>Between any <i>two </i>human beings all manner of differences can be found.  Among large numbers of human beings the differences promise to be staggering, and when those human beings make their dwelling in a “free society,” their differences from one another will be infinite.  Ironically, it is just those who insist upon the moral imperative of rectifying differences in income who otherwise are admonishing us to <i>celebrate </i>our differences, or our “diversity.”</p>
<p>And this is one reason why they will never abandon the word “inequality” in favor of the more honest term of “difference” when speaking of differences in income.  Yet there is another.</p>
<p>“Equality”—equality <i>before God </i>and/or <i>under the law</i>—has been a <i>moral</i> ideal in the West for centuries, at least since the dawn of Christianity.  This ideal has enjoyed a particularly privileged position in the American imagination since the founding. The champions of “redistribution” exploit this fact by assuming, <i>a priori</i>, that differences in income are violations of the moral ideal of equality.  That is, they <i>assume </i>that income differences are “inequalities” and, thus, immoral.</p>
<p>That this is their strategy can be seen from the fact that, to paraphrase a respondent to another one of my pieces, differences in the price of labor (income) are treated as “inequalities” to be rectified while differences in the prices of other goods never are even remarked upon.  We never hear about “price inequality.” We never hear about how unjust it is that individual pencils cost but pennies to purchase while a brand new Mercedes cost tens and tens of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>For far too long, liberty’s defenders have subtly reinforced the position of their opponents by using the latter’s terms.  It is high time that we recognize—and call out—these terms for the ideological devices that they are.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Pope and Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-pope-and-capitalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-pope-and-capitalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-pope-and-capitalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:17:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213361</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Explaining the great blessing of the free market system to humanity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PopeFrancis-finger.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213362" alt="PopeFrancis-finger" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PopeFrancis-finger-450x339.jpg" width="315" height="237" /></a>Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation, levied charges against free market capitalism, denying that &#8220;economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world&#8221; and concluding that &#8220;this opinion &#8230; has never been confirmed by the facts.&#8221; He went on to label unfettered capitalism as &#8220;a new tyranny.&#8221; Let&#8217;s look at the pope&#8217;s tragic vision.</p>
<p>First, I acknowledge that capitalism fails miserably when compared with heaven or a utopia. Any earthly system is going to come up short in such a comparison. However, mankind must make choices among alternative economic systems that actually exist on earth. For the common man, capitalism is superior to any system yet devised to deal with his everyday needs and desires.</p>
<p>Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. With the rise of capitalism, it became possible to amass great wealth by serving and pleasing your fellow man. Capitalists seek to discover what people want and produce and market it as efficiently as possible as a means to profit. A couple of examples would be J.D. Rockefeller, whose successful marketing drove kerosene prices down from 58 cents a gallon in 1865 to 7 cents in 1900. Henry Ford became rich by producing cars for the common man. Both Ford&#8217;s and Rockefeller&#8217;s personal benefits pale in comparison with that received by the common man by having cheaper kerosene and cheaper transportation. There are literally thousands of examples of how mankind&#8217;s life has been made better by those in the pursuit of profits. Here&#8217;s my question to you: Are people who, by their actions, created unprecedented convenience, longer life expectancy and a more pleasant life for the ordinary person — and became wealthy in the process — deserving of all the scorn and ridicule heaped upon them by intellectuals, politicians and now the pope?</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine the role of profits but first put it in perspective in terms of magnitude.</p>
<p>Between 1960 and 2012, after-tax corporate profit averaged a bit over 6 percent of the gross domestic product, while wages averaged 47 percent of the GDP. Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is its role in guiding resources to their highest-valued uses and satisfying people. Try polling people with a few questions. Ask them what services they are more satisfied with and what they are less satisfied with. On the &#8220;more satisfied&#8221; list would be profit-making enterprises, such as supermarkets, theaters, clothing stores and computer stores. They&#8217;d find less satisfaction with services provided by nonprofit government organizations, such as public schools, post offices and departments of motor vehicles.</p>
<p>Profits force entrepreneurs to find ways to please people in the most efficient ways or go out of business. Of course, they can mess up and stay in business if they can get government to bail them out or give them protection against competition. Nonprofits have an easier time of it. Public schools, for example, continue to operate whether they do a good job or not and whether they please parents or not. That&#8217;s because politicians provide their compensation through coercive property taxes. I&#8217;m sure that we&#8217;d be less satisfied with supermarkets if they, too, had the power to take our money through taxes, as opposed to being forced to find ways to get us to voluntarily give them our earnings.</p>
<p>Arthur C. Brooks, president at the American Enterprise Institute and author of &#8220;Who Really Cares,&#8221; shows that Americans are the most generous people on the face of the earth. In fact, if you look for generosity around the world, you find virtually all of it in countries that are closer to the free market end of the economic spectrum than they are to the socialist or communist end. Seeing as Pope Francis sees charity as a key part of godliness, he ought to stop demonizing capitalism.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Only Capitalism Can Fix Obama’s Socialist Website</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/only-capitalism-can-fix-obamas-socialist-website/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=only-capitalism-can-fix-obamas-socialist-website</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/only-capitalism-can-fix-obamas-socialist-website/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2013 05:51:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bureaucracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Healthcare.gov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212113</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Socialism only works until you run out of free-market talent.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/aca_marketplace_ap_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212114" alt="Health Overhaul Florida" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/aca_marketplace_ap_605-450x305.jpg" width="270" height="183" /></a>Every leader has his great challenge. FDR had WW2. JFK had a trip to the moon. Ronald Reagan had the Cold War. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama has a website.</p>
<p>ObamaCare loyalists are calling the bid to repair the broken site a “moonshot” and quoting lines from Apollo 13 as if trying to fix an overgrown government website is like surviving a return to earth with a damaged spacecraft. America has gone from challenges like building 75,000 combat aircraft in a single year during WW2 and beating the Soviet Union to the moon… to trying to make a website work.</p>
<p>Obama’s two victories were widely credited to his Internet savvy. But the digital Hope and Change campaign was really more of a bait and switch. When it came to getting elected and staying popular; he outsourced the work to private sector professionals.</p>
<p>Obama’s digital strategy campaign was handled by talent from successful companies like Facebook and Google; including a Facebook co-founder. His health care website was put together by the usual crony contractors who were adept at pulling the right political strings to win no-bid contracts despite their terrible track records.</p>
<p>The Obama campaign would never have turned over its political fate to a company whose only virtue was that a top executive had gone to college with Michelle Obama. But it had no objection to tuning over the health care and private information of millions of Americans to their tender digital mercies.</p>
<p>Obama put his political fortunes ahead of the health and welfare of Americans. It was only when the Healthcare.gov disaster dealt a severe blow to his poll numbers that he called in a “tech surge” of engineers from Google and other politically friendly companies who had made his campaign work.</p>
<p>He didn’t call them in because he cared whether Americans had access to health care. If he had; he would have called them in a lot sooner. Instead he did it to bring his poll numbers back up again.</p>
<p>Obama’s bait and switch promised private sector level sophistication for a giant Socialist boondoggle. The digital strategy that had made him seem tech savvy was worlds away from the grinding bureaucratic mess that made Healthcare.gov the disaster that, despite all the claims to the contrary, it still is today.</p>
<p>Healthcare.gov could never have actually run like Amazon or iTunes; no matter what Obama promised. That idea was as ridiculous as trying to graft a water buffalo onto a greyhound. The private sector and public sector are different species of technology workflow.</p>
<p>Government employees are not all incompetent idiots and private sector employees aren’t all geniuses. There are plenty of smart people who work for the government and plenty of stupid people who work in the private sector.</p>
<p>It’s the process that is fundamentally different.</p>
<p>The Standish Group states that 94 percent of large federal information technology projects undertaken during the past decade were unsuccessful. These staggering numbers made the Healthcare.gov disaster inevitable.</p>
<p>Google and Facebook exist because small groups of students pushed themselves to accomplish ridiculously ambitious goals. If CGI, the primary Healthcare.gov contractor, had received a government contract to create Facebook to government specifications and with government oversight; there would be no Facebook today.</p>
<p>The issue isn’t difficulty level. It’s culture.</p>
<p>After Khrushchev’s visit to the United States; he tried to reproduce the innovations in agriculture and construction that he had been shown. These efforts proved to be a miserable failure.</p>
<p>Khrushchev bought seed corn from the United States and unveiled a massive corn planting campaign. But the Soviet agricultural system treated corn the way that it had wheat with disastrous results. Corn planting techniques weren’t a great mystery; but the Soviet system was a rigid bureaucracy incapable of learning anything new or adapting its methods to the task. Instead, like all bureaucracies, it tried to adapt the task to its usual methods and its ideological armor made its ignorance into a virtue.</p>
<p>The same thing happened with Healthcare.gov. Instead of trying to adapt the methods to the task, the system treated the construction of a website like any other policy; with rigid guidelines emerging out of constant meetings setting up an inflexible process for getting it done without actually understanding what it was that was being done.</p>
<p>Like the Soviet bureaucrats planting corn where it wasn’t meant to go; their American counterparts relentlessly kept spending money on a website built around their guidelines without even seeing if it worked. Like their Communist brethren, they refused to report failure up the chain of command and instead treated success as a function of their procedures… rather than of the functional outcome.</p>
<p>Obama, like Khrushchev, was humiliated and caught by surprise when he realized that his grand project had fallen apart. Both Socialist leaders had thought that it was enough to order their subordinates to imitate a successful free market product without understanding that it’s the production process that makes the product. Trying to imitate the product without the production process is a recipe for disaster.</p>
<p>To a bureaucracy, success is not defined by how much corn you grow or how many users a website can handle; but whether every proper procedure was followed in the production of the corn or the website.</p>
<p>For his tech surge, Obama has been forced to go outside the government bureaucracy and its crony capitalist clingers to private sector engineers. Like Lenin’s New Economy Policy or the Soviet Union’s increasingly desperate attempts at enlisting American aid to fix its agriculture; Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the ideological government he runs is unfit for the task that he has set it to.</p>
<p>A temporary free market fix may eventually get Healthcare.gov working again but can’t address the roots of its failure which are not in mere code; but in the bureaucratic DNA of government. A few engineers will eventually get the website working; but they can’t fix the entire broken culture behind it.</p>
<p>The website doesn’t matter. Healthcare.gov isn’t Facebook or Google where the service is the product. It’s meant to serve as a distribution gateway for products that have come out of the same dysfunctional bureaucratic process. Fixing Healthcare.gov isn’t like fixing Google or Facebook. It’s like fixing Amazon’s website without fixing its corporate culture, its warehouse distribution, its advertising and its products.</p>
<p>No matter how many Facebook or Google vets hack the Obama campaign or Healthcare.gov; they can’t fix the underlying problem with their real product… which is government bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Margaret Thatcher famously said that the trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. That’s the economic trouble with Socialism. The functional trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of the free market talent to make its projects plod along without breaking down.</p>
<p>Obama’s solution to everything is more government. And how is the same government process that can’t make a health care website work, going to make a health care system work?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> on<strong> The Glazov Gang </strong>discussing his new collection of conservative writings, <strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=SZLFMGIYTBFM">The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times:</a></strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Why Is the Pay So Lousy?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/why-is-the-pay-so-lousy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-is-the-pay-so-lousy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/why-is-the-pay-so-lousy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wages]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210241</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The make-or-break elements of a prosperous economy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/small-wages.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210247" alt="small-wages" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/small-wages-450x279.jpg" width="315" height="195" /></a>Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job in the Sarbanes-Oxley-Dodd-Frank-Bernanke-Sebelius-Obamacare economy, and even if you’ve beaten the 31-year record and are still part of the 62.8% of American adults who are working even though job creation in October was less than the increase in the adult population (204,000 vs. 213,000), and even if your weekly hours haven’t been cut to 29 or your health plan outlawed because it was, in the words of New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone, &#8220;lousy,&#8221; you still might be wondering what happened to your raise.</p>
<p>I have some bad news.  You don’t get paid much more because of how difficult your back-breaking labor is. You don’t get a raise because you’re so much smarter than everyone else in the world. You don’t see an increase in your wealth just because you have an Ivy League degree.</p>
<p>You get paid more because of the quantity and quality of accumulated capital that is invested in your work.</p>
<p>Let’s take a step back for a moment. When we talk about pay, we really mean the stuff – food, clothing, shelter, Newcastle Brown Ale, iPhones, superbowl tickets – that the wages that you receive can buy.  It is futile to earn more money if the value of the money is collapsing due to inflation (that is, the price of everything is going up faster than your wages), or less stuff is being produced, leading to higher prices for everything that is still being produced. You could earn a billion deutschmarks an hour, but if that amount of money will only buy a single egg, as it did at one point during the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany in 1923, then you’re not rich. If, on the other hand, entrepreneurial capitalism, with its division of labor, improvements in technology and automation and visionary leadership, is having the result that less labor is required in almost every industry to produce stuff than what was required before, then prices of stuff that wage earners buy will fall relative to the wages they receive.  At the end of the day, it’s not rising wages that counts so much as <i>the falling prices of the stuff people buy with their wages</i>.</p>
<p>If you take almost any professional, whether a plumber, a gardener, a computer programmer or a doctor, and transplant him or her from an advanced country like the United States to work in a second-tier or Third-World country, that professional will earn less than – perhaps only a fraction of – the pay he or she earned in the First World. In some cases, the relative loss of income may be offset by some elements of a lower cost of living, but that effect is limited; ultimately the material quality of life will be much lower.</p>
<p>Why is that?  The professional is just as smart in Mexico or Rwanda as (s)he was in Germany or Singapore. But (s)he has less capital to work with. Just as a worker with a bulldozer is more productive than a worker with a shovel, all professionals depend on a developed infrastructure, state-of-the-art machinery, computers, technological instruments, information and transportation systems, communications networks and more to get their work done in the most productive way. Every worker in the First World sits on top of a gold mine of capital accumulated from prior generations, which he or she had no hand in building, to make his or her work that much more productive and valuable.</p>
<p>The capital that undergirds the economy takes many forms, from the obvious and tangible assets of land, factories and machines, to the less-obvious and intangible ones of management methodologies, technological processes and know-how, advanced and uncorrupted legal systems and private property rights.</p>
<p>Those last two are the make-or-break elements of a prosperous economy. Because if private property is not respected and defended, and/or if contracts are not enforced, and/or if the justice, tax and/or regulatory systems are corrupt, capricious and arbitrary, then the formation and deployment of capital will be retarded or destroyed no matter how many physical and intellectual resources are available. If you don’t believe this American on this point, ask the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, author of &#8220;The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else,&#8221; who documented all of the &#8220;dead&#8221; capital that exists in the Third World, due to the lack of a system of recognition of ownership, in order to unleash its power to create wealth for all.</p>
<p>This point cannot be stressed enough: Physical assets like coal, oil, gas, timber, minerals etc. are worthless without a system of private property and prices in which unarmed, unprivileged and unpersecuted non-government entrepreneurs, large- and small-scale, may operate.  The world is full of resource-rich countries, from Mexico to Nigeria and from Venezuela to Russia, which pathetically under-perform other nations like Japan, Switzerland and Singapore, which have no such endowments but which have well-developed legal systems of private property recognition and contract enforcement.  Russia, with its 13 time zones and vast natural resources, has a per-capital standard of living that ranks roughly 50<sup>th</sup> in the world.</p>
<p>So if you are not seeing an improvement in the purchasing power of your wages or the material standard of living over time, and the same thing is happening to millions of people just like you (a.k.a. your cohort), and there isn’t a major war on, chances are that intangible capital is faltering. And that in turn is probably due to attitudes and policies promulgated by politicians complaining that the &#8220;rich&#8221; aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, closing off natural resources to development, and slapping so much regulation on businesses that they spend ever more time and energy on compliance instead of innovation, effectively working for the government instead of for their customers. That has been the trend in the United States since 2001 with Sarbanes-Oxley, accelerating since 2009 with Dodd-Frank and the Pelosi-Reid regulatory apparatus.  Obamacare, with its effective abolition of voluntary cooperation between employers, employees, patients, doctors and insurance companies, is the single most destructive factor in this picture today.</p>
<p>High and rising wages depend on the quantity and quality of liberated capital invested in the labor. Whether you are a banker or a tree surgeon (and when I say banker I mean it in the traditional sense of a trusted conservative steward of customers’ money as opposed to a politically-connected financial manipulator), the respect and defense of capital and private property matters to you, and you need to participate actively in the civic society for the furtherance of that respect and defense.</p>
<p><em>Howard Hyde is author of &#8220;<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>,&#8221; available in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6">Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">paperback</a> editions from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>. He edits the website <a href="http://www.hhcapitalism.com/">www.hhcapitalism.com</a>. Email: <a href="mailto:HHCapitalism@gmail.com">HHCapitalism@gmail.com.</a> Follow on Twitter: @HowardHyde.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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