Category: Accountability

Don’t Trump the Gun

Trump, president, inauguration, democracy, election, protest

The 2016 presidential election will go down in history as a doozy. The Trump win was a surprise, even shocking many of his supporters. But the most obvious lesson we learned pertains to the modal Obama-Hillary voter.

Well, make that lessons. Plural.

Today’s most vocal Democrats don’t seem to understand democracy. The “deal” of our democratic republic, as I learned in Civics and “on the streets,” is that you do your best for your party, candidate, or policy, and accept the results … until the next election. Whiners, rioters and Hollywood actors (to place them in descending order of tolerability) would serve their cause better by remembering this.
It has become commonplace, now, to make sweeping judgments about one’s opponents based on little or no information. Or erroneous info. On no basis whatsoever, nearly every lefty YouTuber and street shouter I have seen yammers on about how anti-gay Trump is. Truth is? No president has ever entered the White House more pro-gay than Donald J. Trump.
Actual policy issues mean too little to too many. What does matter? Style. Obama has “good style.” Bush had “dumb style.” Trump has “evil style.” Substance? Results?

Blankout.

Tomorrow the President-elect becomes President. And Resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue*. As skeptical as some of us may be (myself included), we owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, and the country — perhaps the world — to give the president a chance. At least, take a deep breath and let him make a mistake before pouncing.

Meanwhile, let’s also stop denigrating half the country — that is, those who voted for Trump. Consider their alternative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Part-time? Will he really spend a lot of time in Trump Tower?

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Tags democracy, election, inauguration, president, protest, Trump

Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard

Oil’s Bad that Ends Bad

Mexico, oil, nationalize, socialism, neoliberalism

Sometimes socialism seems reasonable.

Emphasis on “seems.”

Take natural resource socialism. Ores and oil are “just there in the ground” and “belong to everybody.” So it “just makes sense” that “the people” should “own” the mining and drilling and refining industries, and run these operations to share the profits to help “everybody,” not just a few.

The Mexican government bought into this back in 1938, when it nationalized the U.S.- and Dutch-based oil companies. Today, the industry is under-capitalized, its equipment old and inefficient. Mexico itself is a mess. The government is corrupt and the people far poorer than would have been the case had they not bought into the nationalization mania.

The cause of the problems should not be in dispute. “By cutting off Mexican oil exploration from foreign investment and foreign know-how,” Ryan McMaken writes in an interesting analysis, “the Mexican state has only succeeding in making the Mexican oil industry less efficient, and less capable of taking advantage of the natural resources in Mexico.”

Which is why the government has been making tentative “liberalization” moves, de-monopolizing Pemex, the government’s oil outfit.

Unfortunately, though the damage done by bad government policy and monopolistic privilege is everywhere to see, many people (especially intellectuals) in Mexico blame “neo-liberalism” and non-existent “free markets” for rising prices and the specter of economic collapse.

Once bitten by the natural resource socialism bug, it’s apparently easy to dismiss evidence. Or the common-sense notion that government over-reach has made the mess they now struggle with.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Mexico, nationalize, neoliberalism, oil, socialism

Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture moral hazard

The Damage Done

In his Washington Post op-ed, “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father,’” Mychal Denzel Smith argues that “responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression.”

He asks:

If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on bemoaning their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make? If they woke up in homes where electricity, running water and food were never scarce, went to schools with teachers and counselors who provided everything they needed to learn, then went home to caretakers of any gender who weren’t too exhausted to sit and talk and do homework with them, and no one ever said their lives were incomplete because they didn’t have a father, would they hold on to the pain of lack well into adulthood?”

Hmmm. The first question answers itself. If all children get everything they “need to thrive,” it is assumed they’ll thrive. The second question is impossible to know … at least until the creation of that perfect utopia with universal material abundance, a flawless education system and indefatigable single-parents.

Fatherlessness is not just a black problem. And let’s agree there are great single-parent (or no-parent) homes as well as terrible two-parent homes.

Still, fathers are nice. Oftentimes they help children thrive, in part by providing “electricity, running water and food” as well as “love” — both tough and nurturing. Proclaiming that fathers would not matter in a society where everything’s automatically supplied is … simple-minded.

Often called socialism.

Smith raises the issues of “racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures … the poisoning of their water.” He’s right: having a father won’t magically solve those.

But it would solve the problem of not having a father.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Original photo by Sunil Soundarapandian on Flickr

Tags black, children, father, race, racism

Accountability government transparency ideological culture insider corruption meme moral hazard national politics & policies

Corporate influence…

corporations, influence, corporation, democracy, power, government, big government, meme, Common Sense, illustration

Corporations can buy unfair favors from government…because government has unfair favors to sell.

Big Government is the problem.

Click below for a high resolution version of this image:

Tags corporation, corporations, democracy, influence

Accountability folly ideological culture national politics & policies

The Shadow of Incompetence and Racism

Post author By CS Admin
Post date January 12, 2017
4 Comments on The Shadow of Incompetence and Racism

Hillary Clinton, Podesta, list, quota, illustration

Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Hillary Clinton …

Out from the Land of Might Have Been blurps the “news from nowhere” as to what Mrs. Clinton’s cabinet would have been. Some are calling it the “ghost cabinet,” the sadder version of a shadow cabinet.

And top on the list? Secretary of State John Podesta!

Mrs. Clinton’s own recklessness regarding secrets and security protocols while she was Secretary of State was apparently not enough. It turns out she aspires to insecurity, for she had planned to give her old job to the man who protected his computer with the immortal, hard-to-guess password “p@ssw0rd.”

The sheer effrontery here — or is it just witless, callous incompetence? — is astounding.

And the insanity* gets better. At least, if the public source for this information, former Politico chief political reporter Mike Allen (now of start-up news source Axios) can be trusted, “The Environmental Protection Agency and/or the Department of Education were to go to an African-American candidate.…”

Ah, tokenism!

Notice what is not mentioned: who. Just the what. The only admitted qualification being: skin-color.

Democrats are obsessed with racism these days. They never tire of charging anyone they disagree with as racist. And yet selecting someone because of their race is … suspiciously close to being racist.

Of course, Democrats do not see it that way.

They live in a race-based bubble. But like the Podesta-Clinton security measures, it may have just been hacked — er, compromised.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Other names have been leaked. Here is a list courtesy of The Daily Caller:

Attorney General — Current AG Loretta Lynch

Treasury Department — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

Labor Department — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

Defense Department — Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official

Health and Human Services — Center for American Progress executive director Neera Tanden

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Tags Hillary Clinton, illustration, list, Podesta, quota

Accountability government transparency insider corruption local leaders moral hazard responsibility term limits

Politicians Bearing GIFs

Arkansas, corruption, term limits, Jon Woods, GIF

Yesterday, we discovered that the biggest term limits opponent in Arkansas — former state senator Jon Woods — also allegedly led an elaborate legislative fraud scheme, whereby he and a state representative traded tax dollars for cash bribes.

For now, Woods is an unindicted co-conspirator. But last week, the representative involved pled guilty to a felony carrying a possible 20-year prison term and directly implicated Sen. Woods.

Woods’s alleged criminality involves the GIF program — General Improvement Funds. Legislators can personally direct GIF dollars to pet projects and favored cronies, taking political credit. The process is similar to congressional earmarks. And just as corrupting.

In an article entitled, “How a 1997 Power Grab is costing Arkansas taxpayers millions on pet projects,” the grassroots group Conduit for Action explains that the GIF rules changed just before our new millennium, when term limits first cleaned out the state House (1998). The old batch of legislators gave themselves unchecked control over this vote-buying slush fund.

And that is when even bigger corruption surfaced. “A Federal grand jury shook the Arkansas political establishment today with a long list of political corruption indictments that reaches to the apex of the state Legislature,” the New York Times reported in 1999.

Back then, Sen. Nick Wilson was Arkansas’s loudest term limits critic … until his three-decade-long career ended with a guilty plea to 133 counts of racketeering and other public corruption.

Interesting that top legislative enemies of term limits, both past and present, wear the Scarlet Letter “C” for corruption. Coincidence?

Term limits are no friend to corruption. And vice-versa.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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