Monthly Archives: November 2012

Remember: We’re Supposed to be More Like France, Now

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Arcelor-Mittal, the European branch of the Indian Mittal group, employs roughly 20,000 people in France in its sundry steel mills.  One of those mills, located in Florange in Lotharingia, is too far from the coast, causing excessive logistical costs, and oh by the way, Arcelor-Mittal’s 13 million tons of steel produced in France accounts for over 25% of the estimated 40 million tons’ excess capacity throughout the EU market.  Twelve years ago, Mittal’s predecessor in interest, Acelor, wanted to close this particular mill about in 2009 or 2010, but a momentary spike in contracts lead them to delay the closing.

It’s been completely idle for roughly a year.  Arcelor-Mittal has been actively seeking a buyer, but without success.  Now France is proposing to nationalize the mill, not to run it, you see . . . but to sell it.  Anyone want to bet how quickly the official position will change once the government is the owner?

How many millions upon millions of Euros will the French taxpayers get to shell out for the nationalization?  And then to run the thing, because otherwise the — hold onto your hats, kids — whacking 600 jobs that would be lost to a permanent closure just can’t be sacrified, etc. etc. etc.  By the end of the day this thing will be Solyndra with rusticles dangling from it.

Let’s review, just once more for the slow-witted among us:  There’s enormous over-capacity in the European steel industry.  This particular mill is rather old, and is inconveniently located.  It’s too expensive to run.  It’s small.  No one wants to buy it.  This makes it a perfect investment for the taxpayers why, now?

By the way, the same French minister who announced that nationalization was officially being considered because Arcelor-Mittal won’t promise to keep employing and paying 600 people whose efforts in this steel mill are no longer necessary to supply the European demand for steel also allowed that Mittal is no longer desired as an investor in French industry.  He walked that rather extraordinary statement back very quickly, but really:  Was that opinion casually expressed?  Maybe the Hindus should just cut off a few French heads here and there, and then they’ll be as welcome in France as the Religion of Peace.

This is how they roll in France these days.  According to Dear Leader and the Deep Thinkers (sounds a bit like a band, doesn’t it?) we’re supposed to become more like these boobs.  Oh my ears and whiskers.

But It’s Free!

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Rubes.  Suckers.  Gulls.  Marks.  Pigeons.  Swedes.  Patsies.  Fools.  Stooges.  You thought you voted for “free healthcare” or “access to healthcare.”  What has impressed me most about all the public exercises about “free healthcare” and “access to healthcare” and similar sloganeering is how ambiguous the slogans actually are.

For instance, “free healthcare” means nothing more than that what you receive you aren’t directly charged for having received (it doesn’t, because it can’t, mean that the service is actually provided at no cost to anyone).  It may not be the healthcare you want, or need, but hey! you don’t get a bill for it, so why are you complaining?  Oh, yeah, here’s an example: this is why.  That “free annual examination” means only that your doctor can talk about with you what you already know, viz. “previously diagnosed stable conditions,” or in plain English, things that haven’t changed.  Want more?  Want him to look at that new oddly-colored mole on your back?  Or the one that was there last time but is now three times the size it was then?  Well, that’ll be another appointment and gee golly, the doctor’s next non-free appointment schedule is for Monday . . . in eleven months.

Similarly, “access” to healthcare means no more than that someone will provide you access to healthcare.  In other words, someone will set himself up as gate-keeper between you and your doctor.  We know it doesn’t, because it can’t, mean that everyone gets exactly all the healthcare he believes he needs, or even actually needs, because in point of fact there is a finite number of providers, and unless we’re going to take a leaf from the Great Awakening, and adopt a whosoever-will policy about licenses to practice medicine, demand will always outstrip supply (sort of like it does today).  So someone has to make the decision that of three patients who all want X but there’s not enough to give all three X, and so two get X and one gets Y . . . and none of those three patients, or the doctors involved, participates in the decision as to which of the three patients gets Y or in fact what Y actually turns out to be, in terms of care.

You Have to Admire Ambition

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So Brer Morsi (or Mursi, however they spell it) has just granted himself pretty much absolute power, non-reviewable by any court or other tribunal.  He’s decided that he’s the “guardian of the revolution.”  Bear in mind that, as of right now, there’s not even a constitution in Egypt.  The assembly that is supposed to be working one out is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, to the extent that the minority parties have walked out.  So Morsi’s operating on a blank slate.  He’s already marginalized the military council that had been sort of running the show.  This new decree sidelines the court system as well.

At least Adolf had the common courtesy to have his lap-dog Reichstag pass the Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich, better known to history as the Ermächtigungsgesetz, or the Enabling Law of 1933.  In fact, not only did he have them pass it, on two successive occasions he got them to extend it when it came up to its sunset clause.

Among Morsi’s first orders under his newly-usurped powers is the re-trial of his predecessor.  He doesn’t think a life sentence for Hosni Mubarak is adequate.

And this, gentle reader, is the crew whose ascendency in Egypt our own Dear Leader greeted with “relief.”

At least some sense of decency endures in Egypt, though.  The Brotherhood’s offices (actually, it was the offices of the Brotherhood’s political arm) got torched in reaction to Morsi’s power grab.  Good for them.  Keep it up.  Next time, though, see if you can’t trap some of them inside before you light it up.

He’s Too Polite to Say It Aloud

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. . . so I will say it for him:  This post could just as easily have been titled “Wish in One Hand and Shit in the Other”.  Then see which fills up first.

You can wish that 2+2=4 were not a true statement.  You can demand that it not be a true statement.  You can mount the barricades to threaten death and ruin to everyone who maintains that it is a true statement.  You can even obtain widespread consensus among the Deep Thinkers that it is a racist, sexist, oppressive, imperialist dogma that 2+2=4, and should be condemned by all Right Thinking People.  You can forbid the schools to expose impressionable youth to the slander that 2+2=4.  You can even believe in your heart of hearts that it is not a true statement.

But you’re still a damnfool if you cross a bridge built on the theory that 2+2=4 is incorrect.

The notion, which apparently just over 50% of the American electorate now supports, that you can have more of everything at less cost to everyone and no cost to most, has a great deal in common with Trofim Lysenko’s theories of genetics.  Even the Soviets quietly dropped him.  Even the Red Chinese turned away from the Great Leap Forward (not before it had harvested some 45 million dead Chinese, though).  Will we have sense enough to embrace mathematics before it’s too late?

Or will Carter’s bagger and cashier dutifully troop down to the polling place every two years and pull the lever for those who promise them that we can make 2+2 come out to some number other than 4?

That’s Going to Leave a Mark

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. . . on the face of Andrew Sullivan, proprietor of the Daily Dish.  He objects to Via Meadia, it seems, as he has in the past, for . . . well, this time for examining just why it is that huge slices of America do not see things the same way as the rest of the world, or even Comrade Sullivan.

The specific issue this time is why Americans by and large just do not see it as objectionable that Israel should respond to repeated and indiscriminate rocket launches from the Gaza Strip by attacking, with reasonable particularity, the specific locations, organizations, and persons whence originate those rocket attacks.  Very briefly summarized, Mead distinguishes the two theories of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.  The former proposes that a “just war” (just to whom? the simple reader might ask) must be fought to support a legitimate cause, such as self-defense; the latter proposes that even a war for a just cause must be fought justly — by the rules, “fair.”  A “just war” must satisfy the demands of both.

Mead traces the intellectual pedigree of jus ad bellum and jus in bello — especially the latter — to the peculiar circumstances of European history and even more so the history of European war-fighting.  Jus in bello was a notion cooked up theoretically to protect the peasants who formed the overwhelming majority of the European population from the excesses of dynastic wars.  For an informative, easily-read description of what those excesses were like to the peasants over whose homes, families, and livelihoods the armies moved, you can’t do much better than Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.  In a pre-gunpowder age, one diminished the war-fighting capacity of one’s opponent by destroying his army if one could, and whether or not one could, by destroying his source of wealth to continue fighting (kind of like . . . the 20th Century, when you think about it).  That latter objective meant killing his peasantry, slaughtering their animals, and burning their crops.  Starving people cannot pay rent, cannot work the manorial lands, cannot bear arms.

Jus in bello, with its notion of proportional response, theoretically protected the peasantry by forbidding their destruction disproportionately to the scope and severity of the attack.  As Mead observes, why would a peasant care if the lord of the manor was the Count of Anjou or the Duke of Burgundy?  The peasant was still subject to all the delights of heriot, mortmain, boon labor, compulsory tithes, and host upon hosts upon hosts of other manorial exactions, from forbidding him to grind his grain except at the lord’s mill to forbidding him to buy wine except of the lord’s vintage.  So much the theory.

For a visual depiction of how well jus in bello worked in practice, we refer to Francisco de Goya.  His The Third of May, 1808, depicts French shooting civilians in reprisal.  From his series The Disasters of War we see graphic depictions of rape, mutilation, and prodigious death.  We think of the miles upon miles of scorched earth the Russians presented to the invading French in 1812.  Jus in bello, in other words, provided much greater protection in theory than in practice.

Hamas, al Qaeda, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, et al. deny the right of Israel to exist as a state.  Even its self-defense is not a legitimate cause.  For that matter they by and large deny the right of Jews to live, or at least to live as Jews.  Everything Israel does in war, because it is done to further an abomination (by which is meant living Jews, either in their ancestral homeland or anywhere else, for that matter, in case you hadn’t recognized it), is by hypothesis unjust.  Israel cannot fight a just war.

As Mead points out, the bulk of Israel’s other critics shake out, or say they shake out (and one ought never to assume that the stated grounds of objection to Israel’s actions are made in good faith), on the line that Israel’s fighting of its wars of self-defense is not “proportional,” that it is not fighting by the rules.  That criticism has never obtained much traction in America.  That collective response of “Huh?” to the cry that Israel is using (literally) a howitzer to kill a fly originates in America’s experience of war, according to Mead.  In contrast to European experience of essentially dynastic conflict which as an incident produced suffering of non-combatants, Mead calls out the American experience, which is of course bereft of such warfare.  What Americans have had rich experience of is existential warfare, from the mutual efforts at extermination waged by settlers and aboriginals to Sherman’s march, to the world wars, to the great combats of the battle between socialist slavery and freedom in Korea and Vietnam.  Mead correctly points out that America’s experience of war is of clashes of entire peoples, in which conflicts the notion of playing by the rules to protect the peasantry has little meaning.  The opponent’s peasant is not just your opponent’s source of rent and fodder for his cavalry; the peasant (so to speak) as a member of the opposing people is your actual enemy by virtue of his status.

The result is that Americans as a whole place little value in playing by the rules, and from the time of the Minutemen potting at the redcoats on their way back to Boston have never done so.  We place enormous value in winning at all costs, because in a clash of peoples, the loser doesn’t just give up some territory.  The loser suffers cultural and even physical extinction.  This statement is not exaggerated; Hitler in outlining the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union to his generals emphasized precisely the cultural and physical implications for the losers, which he erroneously supposed would turn out to be the Slavs.  As it came to pass, it was large swathes of what had been German territory for centuries which were stripped of their pre-war inhabitants, either by flight, or killing, or deportation, and which today, a scant 67 years after the shooting stopped, evidence only traces here and there of the people who had tilled the soil for generations. 

When the stakes are survival itself as a people and a culture, the duty to defend one’s people and territory is raised to an absolute.  For the reasons Mead points out, the idea of jus in bello “sails right over the heads” of most Americans because they do not see rule-abiding as a protectable value in war.  When they perceive (accurately) that Israel and its people are attacked with the stated objective of annihilating them, both politically and physically, it doesn’t strike them as objectionable that Israel does not moderate its response, that it greets low-tech pin-pricks with massive high-tech retaliation.

The first linked article of Via Meadia explains, or attempts to explain, to Andrew Sullivan the distinction between analyzing a viewpoint and endorsing it.  Sullivan appears to believe that, by engaging it on its own terms Mead endorses the American impatience with, or non-comprehension of, jus in bello.  A difficulty perceiving the difference between analysis and agreement seems to be a recurring problem for Sullivan, at least when it comes to his strictures against Walter Russell Mead.  Sullivan’s stated championship for diversity of thought and good-faith engagement with one’s opponent in same appears to shoot more than a bit wide of the mark.  In an instructive (one is tempted to borrow the Earl of Ickenham’s “pleasant and instructive”) take-down, Mead lays an open palm across Sullivan’s face which is likely to leave a bit of a mark.

And just for the record, I am firmly in the camp which recognizes Israel’s right to respond however it thinks expedient to attacks upon it, from whatever source and with whatever methods, and which likewise denies the right to quibble to those nations which sat on their hands as Hitler built his gas chambers and crematoria.  The lecturing-Israel-on-the-polite-rules-of-warfare card is one that is simply not in the deck, so far as I am concerned.

Dept. of Sic Transit

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Today I got to experience two completely unrelated things, both of which served to remind me of the passage of time.

Today for lunch my father and I ate at a local chain restaurant.  We had the lunch buffet.  He paid, as he always insists on doing.  He’s also in his . . . ummmmm . . . later 70s.  I am not.  After some few minutes puttin’ down the chow, I noticed the cash register receipt.  It reflected a charge for “2 Sr Buffet”.  Now, perhaps they determine eligibility for a senior discount based on the age of the payor, and not the age of the eater.  But that scarcely makes good business sense, does it?  Granddaddy hauls in his three strapping grandsons, each one between 18 and 25 and each one a (as Mark Twain would describe them) “famine breeder,” and they’re going to let all four eat at the price of some octogenarian with poor digestion who can’t sleep at night if he eats a big lunch?  But I am holding out for the restaurant making a foolish business decision, because the alternative is that the cashier (female and somewhere in that 24 — 40 range where you really can’t tell) thought me self-evidently old enough to qualify for the senior discount.

The other thing to happen was in the quarter that formed part of the tip.  It was nice and shiny, and so I looked at it to see what state quarter it was.  It was a 2012 Hawaii quarter.  I picked it up, and in an instant I was back in 1982 East Berlin.  I still recall the feeling of incredulity, the ludicrousness, of communist currency.  You quite literally could cut through one of their 1 Mark pieces with tin snips or light-duty wire cutters.  Seriously; I tried it one one when I got back; it went easily.  Their “money” was exactly that transparently worthless.  When you went to visit the capital and showpiece of the worker’s and peasant’s paradise, they forced you to convert at least 25 good, solid Deutschmarks, for exactly 25 marks of funny money.  On neither occasion (I visited East Berlin then and then once more, in early 1986) could I manage to find anything — anything at all — that I could both spend 25 marks on and that I wanted enough to tote it home through the check-points.  That obviously fraudulent money was the symptom and symbol of the train wreck that finally ran out of steam less than a decade later.

We appear to be now just about at that point here in the U.S.  That 2012 Hawaii quarter was noticeably lighter than its mates only a year or two older.  How long before you can take a pair of wire cutters and snip a Unites States coin, sovereign currency of the mightiest power in world history, clean in two?

Another Rube Self-Identifies™

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This time it’s Susan Estrich.  She voted for Dear Leader.  She voted for Him for many reasons, mostly involving his promises to provide free stuff to people.  She voted for Him because of her concerns for things she likes, like “ObamaCare,” which she doesn’t want to see repealed; like environmental suffocation of American businesses regulation, which she doesn’t want to see rolled back; like contraception (which she conflates with Roe v. Wade, which of course dealt with abortion, not contraception), which she doesn’t want to see at “risk”; like local schools being held in thrall by centralized bureaucrats more generously funded by a munificent Uncle SugarDaddy; like the federal assistance to New Jersey and New York in cleaning up after Tropical Storm Sandy, which she didn’t want to see diminished (although the Staten and Coney Islanders might politely inquire just how the level of federal assistance they’re getting could be diminished); like ending the war in Iraq, which He ended, and the war in Afghanistan, which He is committed to ending.

She didn’t, she wants us to know, vote for Him because she thinks she doesn’t pay enough in taxes.

That’s a comfort (I’m chewing on my index fingers, trying not to append h***y to the end of that).  I’m so glad that you voted for an ethnic separatist mountebank of a class warrior not understanding that he remains, as he has always been, dead set on increasing taxes on “the rich.”  I do have just one teensy li’l ol’ question for you:  How in the Sam Hill do you propose to pay for all that stuff you did vote for, all of which involves the spending of money (except arguably the war stuff, but then all that means is that in 20 years when we have to go back in and do it all over it will cost that much more, so I’m not willing to concede that point to you, at least not 100%)?

Estrich’s plight is in fact lamentable.  She qualifies as “rich” by Dear Leader’s standards, which means that her neck is on the block.  But unlike all them other rich people who don’t have to work, or “work all the jobs” she has to (and whose existence angers her), she actually “earns” almost every penny she makes.  (a)  Well done, Mme. Estrich.  You caught the car; you’re living the American Dream.  You’re part of the 1%.  I congratulate you; I really, honestly do.  And know what?  Your being in the 1% does not impoverish me to the extent of a single dime.  So enjoy the fruits of your labors.  Enjoy them now if you please, and live up to your income.  Or live well below your income and put some by, so that one day you, too, can “not have to work,” which brings up (b) Where do you imagine the wealth of the “truly rich” came from?  Someone busted his ass to make that money, to put the family just over that hump where what they’ve not lived on, what they’ve put by, begins to generate a significant amount of income, which (because by hypothesis these folks are actually living on less than they earn) those who have gone without can now put out to additional productive uses, all the while they continue to live below their “earned” incomes.  And at some point the calculus shifts; at some point paying full-time attention to what you have managed to save up makes more economic sense than going to the office each morning to try and figure out how to make payroll next week.  You can make more money selecting other people to worry about how to make payroll than by worrying yourself.  And by hiring that person you give him (or her) the chance one day to reach the position where you now are.  You call this “not having to work”; in the world of Paying Your Own Way it’s called minding the store.  At some point your particular “store” no longer has a bricks-and-mortar front, but rather consists of all the fruits of enjoyment deferred, of piano recitals missed, of little league games arrived at late in the 3rd quarter, of young children for whom daddy (or mommy, nowadays) is a tired voice at the end of a telephone line.  That’s the price, Mme. Estrich, of “not having to work.”

What Mme. Estrich is noticing is that when the government simply decides that you’ve made as much money as it’s willing to let you make, and decides to confiscate the balance so that it — not you — can decide how to spend it, what’s it’s really doing is artificially forcing you to live up to your income.  That amount that you were doing without, so that one day you might “not have to work,” or so that, in the event of some untoward event like, oh . . . say, the bursting of a governmentally-inflated housing bubble tanks the economy and we have 44-plus months of 8% unemployment, you and your family have something to live off of, so that your children don’t lose the only house they’ve ever called home, so that you don’t have to explain to your children why there’s no money for them to go and visit their only set of cousins next summer, so that you don’t have to choose between a pair of shoes for you to replace the worn-out ones you have, or a brake job on the car that’s got “only” 230,000-plus miles, so that the one you drive, which has 248,000 miles, might last a little longer, so . . . oh hell, Mme. Estrich, if I have to explain it to you, then you really never will understand.

But you will understand the tingle of the cold steel on the back of your neck, won’t you?

Respectfully, Mme. Estrich, I don’t think you have thought through your political preferences very carefully.

In addition to her economic remedial education, I also submit that Mme. Estrich has a little additional soul-searching to do.  Remember her mentioning her “anger” at those who “don’t have to work,” or work as hard as she does?  A scant few lines later she rolls this one out onto the table: 

One of the amazing things about this country is that the middle class doesn’t hate the rich. We are not a society divided by economic castes. Yes, there are real issues as the gap between the top and the middle, between CEOs and those in good but not great jobs, grows. But beginning a new term with what will look to many like a class war is not the way to fulfill the real mandate of this election, which is to bring us together, not turn us against each other.

I guess it’s OK to get all angry about all them folks who don’t have to work, as long as you don’t “hate” them.  And truly, was she not paying attention to the actual campaign that Dear Leader ran?  Did she really think that the election was fought on the one side by people who were actually proposing to undo Roe v. Wade, and on the other by people who weren’t stoking a class and race conflict?  What color is the sun on your planet, Mme. Estrich?  I don’t even own a television and I picked up that much about the campaign.

In short, you got exactly what you voted for.  You just got rooked into thinking you were voting for all the other stuff.

Rube.

™”Another Rube Self-Identifies” is used without permission of, but with extreme gratitude towards, Instapundit.

Well Now; Here’s Another Coincidence

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On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln got at least one prediction flat wrong:  “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here . . . .”  That’s not quite how the thing worked out.  My mother has a 1953 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which I have made her swear a solemn oath to “heir” to me (out in these parts, “heir” is a verb).  Part of why I like it is that, being from when it is, it lacks all the bilge-water tripe uttered by the sundry darlings of the lefties over the next 50-plus years; the reader is spared all the claptrap about how awful Europeans are, and how the world would be much more swell a place if only someone would put the U.S. in its place &c. &c. &c.  We’re also spared excerpts from what some speech writer put into some hack politician’s mouth, as well as similar offerings from the ghost-written memoirs of people like Dear Leader.  When you read a quotation in there from, for example, Clemenceau, you can be pretty sure that those were actually Clemenceau’s words.  And at the risk of hazarding a prediction, in 100 years Dear Leader’s legacy will still be able to stand beside the Lion’s all day and not cast a shadow.

In any event, what has always struck me about that particular book is that, by a wide margin, the longest single quotation is the Gettysburg Address, in full (it’s also unusual in that respect, although that is most likely a result of its brevity).  In terms of political thought, it’s a rather extraordinary speech.  It was of course delivered in the midst of what Lincoln described as “a great civil war” which had begun, as Lincoln himself had pointed out to I believe it was Horace Greeley, who had demanded he take positive action to end slavery, as a war specifically to save the Union, and only to save the Union.  Lincoln said as much: he would save the Union whether it meant freeing all, some, or none of the slaves.

And what Union was it Lincoln set out to save?  The Union of the Constitution.  That Union was about many things.  It was about creating a defensible polity (and people today forget just how fragile the U.S. was when the guns finally fell silent in 1783).  It was about transforming a gaggle of ex-colonies, no small number of which viewed each other with only slightly less suspicion as they did Britain, into a single polity, and making that place a single economic space.  It was about spanning the horns of simultaneously creating sufficient central power that the country could endure and not fall play-thing to predatory or just cynical European powers, and yet also so arranging the attributes of that power that its citizens could never say of it, as the motion was made (and carried, too, if I recall correctly) that the power of the crown “had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished.”  It was about trying so to create commonalities of interest that the bane of republics historically — faction — would not form, grow, and eventually swallow the nation (we haven’t falsified that proposition yet, I’d observe, and based upon the gloating about the particulars of Dear Leader’s recent electoral triumph we may not pull it off).

What that Union was not about was “equality” in any greater than an abstract sense, if that.  The three-fifths clause is only the most widely-cited example.  But the original document made no effort to guarantee any degree of uniformity of political or civil rights, beyond to say that Congress (and here I must observe how comically incorrect the judiciary has been in this respect) may not do certain things.  The original Constitution (and I do include the Bill of Rights, as it was presented for ratification so immediately) does stipulate that certain rights shall not be abridged (notice it does not say by whom), such as speech, assembly, petition, and the keeping and bearing of arms.  It also provides that right of “the people” (the same “people” as mentioned in the Second Amendment, by the way) to be secure in their persons and property from unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be diminished.  [N.b. I’ve always wanted to hear how it was that the exact same draftsmen who spoke of “the people” in the Fourth Amendment and by it meant individuals somehow used precisely the same words two amendments previously, yet really meant to say “the states, as states,” when, just a few amendments later, they demonstrate explicitly that they understood both concepts of “people”=individuals and “states”=the different political entities of the Union, and drew a plain distinction between them, when they provided that the powers not granted by the constitution to the federal government, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the people or to the states respectively.  Maybe I’m just dumb.]  There’s also no equal protection clause in the original Constitution.

So much for the Union Lincoln had said he was going to war to preserve.  He gets to Gettysburg, and in that speech holds aloft in blazing rhetoric not the dry structures of the Constitution, with its “shall be vested” and so forth, but the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . .”  You won’t find that in the Constitution.  According to Lincoln now, the nation’s very foundation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  This was something new indeed.  It was something sufficiently novel to his fellow citizens, then and for generations later, that it took the Civil Rights Movement to actualize what Lincoln spoke, 149 years ago today, over a newly laid-out cemetery.

In 1887 there died a young American woman, a poet.  She was Jewish; her family had been in North America since colonial days.  This is important in light of the words for which she will forever remain known.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

As mentioned, what is unusual about Emma Lazarus is that, while Jewish, her family did not come to America as part of the tired, poor, huddled masses that flooded in between the end of the Civil War and World War I, and particularly not among the hosts of Eastern European Jewry fleeing the Tsar’s pogroms and the resentments of their fellow citizens (although they weren’t fully citizens, most places) as the disruptions of industrialization turned on its ear a world that had grown stable, and brutal, and poor over centuries.

The interesting thing about Emma Lazarus’s death on November 19, 1887, and the Gettysburg Address 24 years before, on the same date, is that it was precisely the propositions enunciated in the Declaration, and which Lincoln had elevated to the very organizing principle of the U.S., that brought the tired, poor, huddled masses.  Immigration to the U.S. had always been popular, and the recent immigrants had always written back home in lyrical praise of their new country and its fecundity.  Immigrants had fled disaster before, from the general grinding poverty of the Scots-Irish to the acute catastrophe of the potato famine.  They’d come seeking religious freedom, freedom from the press-gang into the maw of the new mass armies Napoleon had bequeathed to the continent.  Many, if not most, came just to be able to own some land.  But it seems to me, from what I’ve read, that the promise of Equality, the Land of Unlimited Possibilities, as a beacon to immigrants is peculiarly a post-Civil War phenomenon.  America as the New Holy Land appears (and again, I am comfortable that there are sufficient counter-examples as to keep this well within the bounds of over-generalization) to have arisen in the minds of the common man, from the shtetl to the tenement to the peasant piling his dung heap as a consequence precisely of the Declaration’s statement of principle being placed firmly front and center in America’s self-understanding.  Is it unreasonable to wonder whether, had Lincoln not been martyred, had his every pronouncement not been elevated nearly to holy writ, that the reinterpretation of the country’s foundation which he offered 149 years ago today would have taken, and stuck?  That America’s self-understanding as a nation of poor, tired, huddled masses would have become so central to what we are about?

Looks Like the SPLC Has Some Competition

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Let’s see, a committed socialist who has announced an intention to pursue gun control “under the radar” is elected.  People across the entire country go on a guns-and-ammo-buying splurge, before the feds start regulating the civilian firearms industry into oblivion.  No, wait, this ain’t got nuthin’ to do with people justly fearing that someone who’s announced an intention to subvert their Second Amendment rights intends to . . . subvert their Second Amendment rights.  What this is about is a bunch of bitter clingers gettin’ ready to have them a race war against . . . Mexicans!

Full disclosure:  I own several firearms.  I haven’t shot any of them in probably five or more years.  They’re all mostly muzzle loaders, and not those egregious modern plastic-stock-and-camouflage-patterns-everywhere, with center-fire percussion (o! the horror!).  No thankee; I have a .50 cal. Hawken, a .45 cal. Kentucky rifle, a .44 cal. 1847 model Walker cap-and-ball revolver, and a .44 cal. 1851 Navy revolver.  An honest man’s muzzle loader, they all are.  If I had the money I’d buy a Model 1911 .45 cal., for home and personal defense.

I’ve never sensed in myself the slightest inclination to go shoot a Mexican.  I’ve never heard any of my acquaintances express such a desire.  I’ve never even overheard a stranger express such a desire.  Around here at least until recently, the overwhelming proportion of Mexican immigrants were some of the workingest guys you ever saw in your life.  And they did excellent work, too.  And at least out here in the sticks you hardly ever saw one in jail.  Too busy working.  So with all possible respect for Ms. Alcoff, she’s as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

Here’s the money quotation from the article (no pun intended):  “While the Associated Press reported last month that rising firearm sales resulted from a fear of increased gun laws, Alcoff said this is instead evidence of the Latino community being targeted.  ‘These groups are not harmless,’ Alcoff said. ‘The principle target here…is not an unspecified or abstract immigrant population, but generally Latino immigrants from Mexico or Central America.’  In fact, Alcoff is currently lobbying for more recognition of specific instances of Latino racism as hate crimes. Her talk was hosted by The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and previewed her forthcoming paper about racism.”

[Side note:  The author of the article is a graduate stoodint at the Kolumbia Skool o’ Journalism and Activism, or something like that.  The spell-checker didn’t catch “principle” instead of “principal.”]

We are not vouchsafed a definition of what is a “radical” group.  For that matter we’re not told what constitutes a “group” or how one distinguishes between on the one hand people who happen to agree on a range of particular matters and publicly express that agreement, and on the other people who actually sit down and organize themselves into a group which coordinates the actions of its members in respect to those matters.  What we do have to guide our thoughts on where Ms. Alcoff is headed with this is the semantic practices of folks like Morris Dees over at the Southern Poverty Law Center.  To ol’ Morris, anyone who disagrees with the left-most wing of the Democratic Party is by definition a “hate group.”   Morris has earned himself a very handsome living raising money to combat “hate groups,” although it’s not clear that he’s ever managed to reduce any ambient level of hate against anyone, anywhere.  That dear Ms. Alcoff is trying to poach on his turf is given away by the next-to-last sentence of the quotation:  She’s lobbying to have a legal category of offense recognized.  That’s Step 1; the next steps will then involve her establishing one or more “foundations” the mission statement of which is tracking “Latino hate crimes,” and combatting “hate groups” which target not some “unspecified or abstract immigrant population, but generally Latino immigrants from Mexico or Central America” and assisting alleged victims of same by filing lawsuits, preferably against defendants who have a reputation to lose and the ability to pay to protect it (this is, by the way, the “Rev.” Jackson’s preferred tactic with his operation).  Anyone want to bet whom Alcoff envisions as the executive director of this newly-created Latino-hate-crimes industry?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Anyone?

The grievance trade is an industry, and a very handsomely lucrative one for its insiders.  The “Southern Poverty Law Center,” run by one Morris Dees, has (at least according to its 2010 Internal Revenue Form 990) no offices or branches other than its main office in Montgomery, Alabama.  So far as I am aware it has never lifted the general economic condition of any portion of the South (or any other part of the country, either), through legal measures or otherwise.  Its statement of “What We Do,” from its website, allows that, “The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and exposes their activities to law enforcement agencies, the media and the public. We publish our investigative findings online, on our Hatewatch blog, and in the Intelligence Report, our award-winning quarterly journal. We’ve crippled some of the country’s most notorious hate groups by suing them for murders and other violent acts committed by their members.”

Monitoring and exposing is a fantastically remunerative activity.  For 2010, the Center reported $36,125,562 in contributions and grants and $2,297,571 in investment income.  It also reported (Pt. V line 4a) having overseas financial accounts in the Caymans and in Bermuda (this would explain why you saw Morris Dees so vociferously defending Mitt Romney’s overseas financial interests . . . oh, right, never mind).  As of the end of 2010 it reported net assets of $238,134,564; that’s right, almost a quarter-billion dollars.  Just its cash holdings were $7,649,689.

In terms of what it spent, the Center reported spending $10,984,964 on “providing legal services to victims of civil rights injustice and hate crimes,” and $12,480,500 on “educating” sundry audiences.  That’s from Pt. III of the 990, where they are to list their three largest program services by expense.  Those are the only two entries.  It appears that the $10,984,964 for “providing legal services” also includes $1,390,052 of “case cost expense” (Pt. IX (Expenses) line 24). 

For grants made by them they report $0.  Nothing.  Those whom they “educate” are all people who one would think ought to recognize a crime when they see one: local law enforcement officials and the like.  The Center makes no mention of educating any poor people of any color or ethnicity at all, to provide them the skills that they will need not to remain poor across generation after generation after generation (from acquaintances I’ve known over the years who work in the government hand-out industry it’s not too unusual for their case loads to include families in which it’s been three or more generations since anyone in the extended family held a job, any job), like how to avoid rip-off scams, or how to do family budgeting, or how to search for a job, or where to look for money to fund a trade or vocational school program.  In short, the SPLC evidences no interest, at all, in actually alleviating the condition of their target constituencies.

Back to their program expenses.  I mean, wow.  Not quite eleven million dollars on litigation.  I’m sure they must really have left a crater on the landscape of hate and bigotry, right?  Well, in Pt. VIII (Revenue) they report $165,405 in “court awards,” which sounds like awards of attorney’s fees, and they report holding in their IOLTA trust account $504,252 for distribution to their clients.  Now, that latter number is not a correct indicator of what judgments they in fact have obtained and collected for their clients during the year.  They do mention that since 2004 they’ve distributed nearly $2 million to sundry immigrants they claim to have helped.  Their hate crime litigation page lists a good number of lawsuits in which they’ve won significant verdicts for victims of what appear to be racially-motivated criminal acts.  Most of the cases listed are several years in the past, some over ten years old.  Is it unreasonable to ponder what they’ve done for actual victims lately with that $11 million annual litigation budget?  I got to see, recently and from a fairly close if second-hand remove, the dynamics of a very large, very well-funded litigation by grievance industry outsiders against local entities, in which a good deal of the accusation was that a decision taken decades ago, before its physical and physiological implications could even have been known (I mean, literally, the science just wasn’t there at the time), was somehow motivated by racial animus.  The eventual resolution of the suit provided a pittance to the supposed victims . . . and an enormous fund-raising banner for the outside litigation sponsor, which waved it prominently at every opportunity.

In other words, there’s a jolly good reason to harbor suspicion that what the SPLC does is litigation-as-fundraiser.  “See how we’re really goin’ after them meanies!  Your pre-addressed envelope for your contribution to fighting hate is enclosed herewith.”  In Pt. IX, line 24, other expenses they show $4,248,454 for “educational publication”; $2,716,159 for “postage and shipping”; $2,356,843 for “printing and lettershop”; and $1,654,728 for “other development cost.”  That comes to $10,976184, or 99.92% of their total program outlays on “providing legal services.”  The Center spent $1,926,027 on their five largest independent contractors (Pt. VII Sec. 5), of which the top two (accounting for nearly a million of that) appear to be database-related services, and the next three are described as telemarketers.  Now folks, you’re simply not going to convince me that there are so many millions upon millions upon millions of hate-mongers in the U.S., spread among their claimed 2,292 hate and “patriot” groups that they can’t hire some college kid to design and run their database to track them all.  They need to pay almost a million bucks to outside contractors so they can keep up with the bad guys?  No, what they’re spending nearly a million dollars on is managing and massaging their donor base.

There is, however, one small set of locations in which the SPLC has in fact alleviated poverty.  In Pt. VII, director and executive compensation, they identify their most highly compensated key employees.  All of them are stated as working 40.00 hours per week for the organization, which I neither understand nor quite believe.  In a Form 990 one of the things you’re concerned with is demonstrating to the IRS that your organization is not serving as a tax-exempt vehicle to line the pockets of the insiders beyond a reasonable compensation for services actually rendered to the organization for purposes associated with its tax-exempt functions.  So that would give you a built-in incentive to err on the side of overstating the hours those insiders spend working, right?  Maybe I’m wrong and they just shoved down the 40.00 hour figure for all of them just as a matter of choice.  Whatever; I’m not sure it makes a difference.  But here we go:  Morris Dees, identified as “chief trial counsel,” comes in with $343,676 compensation package; Richard Cohen, as president, runs $339,764; Teenie Hutchison, the sec’y/treasurer, is running $159,752, and Joseph J. Levin, Jr., “general counsel,” is a bargain at $184,411.  That’s $1,027,603, or 7.31% of the $14,066,129 total salaries and wages they report.  In truth its doesn’t seem as though the senior staff is receiving a disproportionate share of the total compensation the Center pays out.  But over $340,000 to one lawyer?  At a non-profit?

This is where I’m coming from in excoriating Morris Dees and his quarter-billion dollar nest-egg:  For about twelve years I was on the board of directors of our local humane society.  For roughly nine of those years I was its president.  The facility consisted of a beat-up old single-wide trailer to which had been tacked a jack-leg built concrete block facility.  The roofs leaked, everywhere.  The heater broke multiple times per winter.  In summer there was one air conditioner in the whole place.  The shelter was utterly dependent on donations for food, cleaning supplies, toys for the animals, everything just about.  It could afford to pay minimum wage to two or three part-time employees, and a miserly salary to a shelter manager.  The entire operation was seldom more than two weeks away from having to shut its doors completely.  Our county is about 40 miles from a larger metropolitan area.  That city’s humane society handled about four times the numbers of animals that our little society handled each year.  Its budget was roughly twenty-five times ours.  The population base from which it could draw support was roughly 19 times our size.  My mother for several years was a priest at a tiny congregation out in the country.  The church finally got plumbing and electricity in the late 1980s.  Most of her congregation would qualify as “poor as Job’s turkey” by any reasonable standard.  These were folks for whom a $10 per month pledge made a noticeable dent in the family finances.  Recently when the local humane society was again within days of shutting up shop, the question was posed to these people whether to pitch in.  Someone said, “Let’s give them $500.”  Done.  Three minutes.

So I’m familiar with how genuine non-profits work, non-profits that actually benefit the communities in which they work.  I therefore bristle when I see the likes of Morris Dees sitting on a quarter-billion dollars and accomplishing damned near nothing that can be measured, other than raking in that $36,125,562 in grants and donations the SPLC reported for 2010.

I likewise bristle when I read of people like the Alcoff woman, who to all appearances wants to leverage her fellow-citizens’ very well-founded fears of the federal government’s designs on their individual freedoms into a job for herself, along the template of the “Rev.” Jackson and Morris Dees.

Heightening my sense of a snake oil salesman when I read of the Alcoff woman is my awareness of things like this.  According to the folks at the Pew Foundation, net immigration from Mexico has stopped, and may have even reversed.  While the current awful state of the U.S. economy has doubtless contributed to that, of greater long-term importance is the falling Mexican birth rate, cited in the article.  The long and short is that Mexican women are just barely replacing their population now.  Mexico is not going to have large surplus population to send abroad.  So the prediction that the massive numbers of “Latinos” in the U.S. by 2050 sparking a race war as all them Awful Anglo-Saxons decide to fight to preserve their hegemonic place in the society are rather over-blown.  What’s going to happen to those here now is that over the next few generations (and we’re still 38 years from 2050, by the way) they’ll intermarry, move around, settle in, put their feet up, and the next thing you know they’ll view Cinco de Mayo as maybe another excuse to crack open a beer or twelve.  Sort of like the Irish and St. Patrick’s Day.  By the way, another interesting factoid the Pew report mentions is that measured as total percentages of all immigrants, both the Germans and the Irish were bigger immigrant waves than the Mexicans.  Yeah, you can travel around parts of the Midwest and see lots of black-red-gold decorations, lots of eagles spangled onto things, but really:  Who really cares that one’s ancestors came here from Mecklenburg in the 1890s?  Or Donegal in the 1850s?  Ms. Alcoff, being largely innocent of history it seems, does not appear to notice that all immigrant groups across all U.S. history have “threatened” the status quo, and there’s never been a race war to show for it.  Poor Ms. Alcoff; if she wants to make a living as a grievance monger she’s going to have to lobby the government to create the market for her services . . . which it just so happens she’s in fact doing.

This isn’t about hate, or oppression, or challenging cultural hegemony.  It’s about the Benjamins.  Just like it always is.  Ask Morris Dees.

Update (20 Nov 12):  And right on cue, Bloomberg offers this op-ed on making sure that “non-profits” aren’t really about, you know, making profits.

 

 

Have to Wonder How This Made it Past the Dissenting Opinion Suppression Committee; or, Tom Friedman Call Your Office

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At the New York Times, yet even.  They actually mention what happened under their socio-economic darlings’ responsibility.  Twice in the same op-ed:  The piece is of course about the dozens of millions starved to death in the Great Leap Forward (I suppose we ought to be thankful that Dear Leader didn’t adopt that as his campaign slogan this time around), which lasted four years, but it also gives a nod to the Holodomor, in which Stalin bagged as many Ukrainians in a year and a half as Hitler picked up Jews over twelve years.  [I have to wonder if anyone in the editorial department made any observation about the NYT‘s own Walter Duranty, Stalin’s mouthpiece and white-washer, who as a NYT reporter won a never-repudiated Pulitzer for his intentional misrepresentations about Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.]

The bunch who brought you the Great Leap Forward is the same ruling clique which Tom Friedman, also of the NYT, laments isn’t in charge here in the U.S.  Well, perhaps not them exactly, but he’s on multiple occasions bemoaned that the U.S., with all that messy checks-and-balances thingy, just can’t quite respond as rapidly and effectively to circumstances as specifically Red China.  He’s all for a little single-party dictatorship around the edges, if it means we can be more “efficient,” presumably in having the government take over everything it feels like. 

OK, one more time, for even the slowest-witted NYT pundits (or subscribers):  The Great Leap Forward is precisely the reason that we have checks and balances; it is Exhibit A in the seminar on why you want government policy to move slowly, and with multiple chances to be derailed.  It was, as the linked article explains, a bunch of party insiders who understood zero about the actual processes of growing things and making things who simply declared that Output Will Be Raised to X.  Their underlings then hopped to it to report that output in fact had been raised to X, which of course suggested to the insiders that they hadn’t been sufficiently ambitious, and so then they decreed 4X.  Meanwhile, back in the provinces, the regional and local apparatchiki decided that if they ever wanted to become insiders, they’d better just go ahead and make it 7X because the guys in the next province over had only gone to 6X.  And so they did, thereby prompting the insiders to move the goalposts again. 

And on the ground, there was no food.  Entire villages died out.  There’s a good story of the carnage in Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts:  Mao’s Secret Famine.  As with so many other instances in which it comes time to count communism’s dead bodies, it’s hard to get a handle on how many were done to death; the 36 million figure is probably conservative.  When the Soviet Union had a census after the Holodomor, Stalin didn’t like it that the head-count was several million shy.  So he had the census bureau shot, and sent out a new team with instructions to go count again.  Got a much more acceptable result, he did.  The system Tom Friedman wishes upon us makes a state secret of the basic census numbers.

The Great Leap Forward, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and similar but not-quite-as-deadly interludes are what happens when government works efficiently.  It very efficiently plows millions of its citizens under the turf.  The reason that government “efficiency” necessarily does this is that the very fact of “efficiency” destroys the feedback loops which serve to inform and therefore restrain private conduct.  If Ford builds a crappy car, it won’t sell.  Ford will know that it’s not selling within weeks of its launch.  It will be on the horn with every regional sales management team in the country to find out why it’s not selling.  If it can’t be made to sell, Ford will jerk it back off the market within a matter of months, and either re-design it or quietly shoot it in the head and hope no one noticed.  It will do this because if it does not, the consequences of Ford’s lousy decision-making will come back to roost with Ford.  When you have a coercive power on one side of the equation, and on the other people whose incentive structure is to mollify, not modify that coercive power, then you get bogus feedbacks.  You get the regional party chairman earnestly reporting to Peking that Whatever-the-Hell Province has increased production to 60,000 metric tons per acre of grain, which prompts Peking to figure that he’s got to be slacking off at least a little, and so we’ll just go ahead and set the “norm” at 78,000 metric tons and see how he does with that. 

In a coercive system, as all government is, you also have the decision maker insulated from the consequences of his decision.  Dear Leader’s EPA will suffer not a whit if huge areas of the U.S. power grid, dependent on coal-fired electricity generation, have to ratchet rates through the roof as the generators have to shut their turbines down because they can’t comply with ever-heightened emissions requirements.  The EPA jobs will never go away; their offices will never go dark.  If the electric-operated foundries now find their products no longer competitive, even behind tariff walls, they will shut down.  That feedback will not register in those locations where the decisions are made.

It is therefore important to realize that calls for government “efficiency” are actually calls to hand the power over and bugger the consequences.  Hayek pointed out decades ago that the essential function of the free market is to communicate information rapidly and accurately to widely dispersed decision-makers, none of whom have the capacity to know all the inputs into anyone else’s decision matrix.  Government fiat does not, cannot match either the speed of communication or the reliability.  In fact, since government regulation assumes something that cannot exist, viz. concentration at a single decisional locus of all pertinent information, you will inevitably get measurably incorrect decisions because you’re basing them on bad information.

Given the NYT‘s predilection for totalitarian systems, it’s nothing short of amazing that they printed this op-ed.  Wonder how long before it gets disappeared down some memory hole.