THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE

Keeper of the Flame of the Enlightenment

THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE

Why Socialism is NOT the Answer to Equality

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After all, how does a nation make certain that everyone leads a life that is equal?

Socialism seems to provide that answer through centralized control and wealth redistribution from the producers and those that have been successful down to those that have not done so well.

Sounds GREAT on paper, doesn’t it? So where are the pitfalls?

Well, first let us look at the Soviet Union… But wait, the Soviet Union was a Communist society! No, communism as designed by Leon Trotsky and Karl Marx required a classless society, which means there is no class that is better than or below the rest of the population.

The astronauts in the Soviet Union had better pay, better living conditions, better food, better access to healthcare, and better access to everything than an average Soviet citizen.

liticians, the military, the police, their Olympians, their factory managers, and the list goes on and on of those that had better access to goods and services than the average Soviet.

This means that the Soviet Union was nothing but a socialist nation. Just like China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the list goes on and on…

Does Xi of China live a life like the lowest peasant in China? Of course not.

Does Maduro eat like the average Venezuelan? Are you kidding me, those are all socialist states.

But wait…. Those are authoritarian socialism. We are advocating for democratic socialism.

One appears to be a “nicer” socialism after all one has the word Democratic in its name. So, is this a distinction with a difference, does it really matter? So, walk down this path with me for a minute.

Authoritarian socialism has one leader, one all-powerful person that dictates the direction of the nation, and all his edicts are carried out through a large centralized system of bureaucrats.

In Democratic socialism, people vote for a small group of people that dictates the direction of the nation, and their edicts are carried out through a large centralized system of bureaucrats.

Yes, but we get a vote so there is a difference. Take this from the macro-level of government to the micro-level of the individual and see if there is a difference.

You are sitting quietly on your couch in your living room eating a sandwich and watching TV. A burglar breaks into your house and points a gun at you, his five buddies take all of your stuff, even your sandwich.

This is Authoritarian Socialism, a ring leader and a group of bureaucrats that take all of your time, talent, and treasure to distribute to those they believe have not been treated fairly.

So how does Democratic socialism work in the same example?

Well, the same six people break into your home, they walk into your living room and calmly take a vote, of which of you get a voice, a vote. The question is asked, “Should we take all of this person’s time, talent, and treasure?”

The vote is six to one, you are the only one voting for them not to take your stuff. The ring leader pulls out his gun (yes even in democratic socialism only the government gets to have guns) and points it at you while the others take all of your stuff, including your sandwich.

So you tell me, is there an actual difference between Authoritarian Socialism and Democratic Socialism? Absolutely NOT, in both circumstances, your stuff is gone.

A little history and some facts about socialism…

#1. During the coronavirus pandemic, we saw socialism work.

Every American below a certain dollar threshold received a $1,200 stimulus check during the first disbursement. Let’s say, this payment went out to approximately 150 million Americans at a cost 180 Billion dollars. So, to put this in perspective…

The US federal budget is 4.79 Trillion. If you pay every one of those 150 million Americans $1,200 per month for one year, that is 2.16 Trillion. Almost half of the entire US budget. Keep in mind that the revenue for the US government is approximately 3.3 Trillion. We can not afford a guaranteed income, but Joe Biden wants to keep doling out the cash even to illegal aliens and prisoners.

#2. During this coronavirus issue we have witnessed democratic socialism firsthand.

For instance, the removal of the right to assemble, what goods and services you can use, and what you must wear in order to get the few services the government allowed to be provided.

England went down the path of socialism in the 1970s. In the 1960s, the UK had Europe’s most productive economy.

Within 10 years, all of the economies of western Europe had surpassed the UK. The Labour party took over in 1964 and leveled higher amounts of taxation and even more government intervention through regulation.

Now granted the 1970s were a worldwide economic mess, even a word called stagflation was created to define it. A large portion of this was due to socialism taking a great hold on Europe during this time.

Keep in mind that Western Europe and the US were the only bastions of economic power in the world. Please study England and its experiment in democratic socialism. It is the exact path that we are being taken down today, even down to the same words used, “capitalism has failed.”

#3. The United States, prior to being the United States, early on in its development was in my opinion, a socialist experiment.

Remember Captain John Smith and his famous quote from the colony at Jamestown? “…. he that shall not work shall not eat.” This occurred in 1608 after being elected president of the colony.

The seven-member colony council had been wholly ineffective, people were not working to provide for their own needs and the colony was in danger of collapse from food shortages, lack of sanitation, and other factors.

Captain Smith made his declaration and from that point on the spirit that would define the American work ethic, upward mobility, and hard work will get you places in these United States.

#4. So let’s tax the rich. Well, let us look at that for a minute.

Let’s not just tax everyone over the 1 million dollar threshold, let us go one step further. CONFISCATE EVERY DIME, every single penny that every person has that makes over 1 million dollars.

If we CONFISCATE all of the money that millionaires and billionaires have, then we will run the government for approximately 111 days. Yep, all of the combined wealth of everyone that makes over 1 million per year will only run the Federal government for approximately 111 days.

How long before they come knocking on the door of people that make a lot less to satisfy their insatiable thirst for money?

Additionally, this only funds the Federal government not the state or local governments.

#5. Margaret Thatcher had it correct in 1979 she came to power.

In her second term, she declared. “I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society—from a give-it-to-me to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.”

Another quote from Prime Minister Thatcher, “There is no such thing as ‘safe’ socialism. If it’s safe, it’s not socialism. And if it’s socialism, it’s not safe. The signposts of socialism point downhill to less freedom, less prosperity, downhill to more muddle, more failure. If we follow them to their destination, they will lead this nation into bankruptcy.”

Keep in mind, a study of England from the 1960s through 1980 is exactly the socialism the left in this country are proposing.

It has failed and left many in abject poverty, robbed them of their ambition, stolen their future through taxation and regulation, destined billions of people to poverty, killed tens of millions if not 100 million in the last century alone.

One of my closest and dearest friends Joe was a medic in the US Army in Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and went on several occasions into West Berlin.

He said the most impactful aspect of those journeys was the border crossing where he had to present himself and his papers to the Eastern Bloc Soviet/East German troops and how their eyes were empty of hope, promise, and how depressed they looked in their eyes.

Joe summed it up by saying in their was desperation. Socialism robs you at all levels by stealing your future and crushing your soul.

During coronavirus lockdowns in the America, we were basically living in somewhat of a Democratic Socialist state (and some still are)…

We were being told…

→ Where we could and could not go, with whom we could assemble, how many could gather, and what we could do when you assemble (sing in a church). Once again…some Americans are still being led around like sheep to slaughter!

→ What goods and services (down to a haircut) we could use.

→ Which businesses were considered essential and non-essential, basically determining who has value in a society and who does not.

All the while using wealth redistribution by mailing out stimulus checks and driving us further in debt as a nation, which Joe Biden and the Democrats continue to do.

I have come to realize that the most important words in the Declaration of Independence are the “Pursuit of Happiness.”

We as a nation have the right to pursue liberty, protected and enshrined in the 9th amendment of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of these United States:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

And in the 14th amendment…

“…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…….“

We are protected from government overreach in our Constitution if we would choose to stand in one voice and declare it.

The pursuit of happiness enshrines what America is, pursue what makes you happy, the individual is FIRST! Socialism steals the pursuit of happiness and places the state first and you become irrelevant.

Socialism is not progressive, it is regressive. It has been tried, it has failed.

It is now being marketed by wordsmiths and sold in a new package of Democratic Socialism.

Unwrap the package, remove the pretty bow and wrapping paper, what you will find inside that beautifully wrapped box is the same ugly, grotesque thing that has failed all across the world in grand fashion, Socialism.

Never forget that freedom without economic freedon THOR

Robert Woods is an entrepreneur that has started and built businesses in a variety of verticals from retail and hospitality to distribution and logistics. He is also a consultant to businesses that need a turn around specialist or a process improvement analyst. Currently Robert owns several businesses, including a Farm to Fork home delivery food company that delivers the Safest, Healthiest and Best Quality meats in these United States. Robert also works with select non profits that are dear to his heart. Robert is a proud U.S Army Infantry veteran.

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Border Crisis? It’s Not a Crisis to Our Communist Occupiers

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To America’s Communist occupiers, it’s not a border “crisis”. It’s an opportunity for unlimited spending, unlimited election victories and unlimited power. Biden and his criminal fellows are like heroin addicts who just discovered a huge supply of their favorite drug. They relish what rational people call a “border crisis.” Unfortunately, it’s not going to end any better than it does for the drug addict who inevitably crashes and burns. The people who voted for this debacle, and who continue to support it, are 100 percent responsible.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Why Am I Here ?

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Biden’s style — specifically how he communicates with the American people — is also a page from the FDR playbook. Two months into his presidency, he has been surprisingly disciplined and economical with his words and appearances. The verbal gaffes that dogged him throughout his long career in Washington are nowhere to be seen.”
— Paul Brandus, Opinion columnist, USA Today

I don’t know about you, but I was thrilled to hear Joe Biden tell America — with a faraway gleam in those ol’ blue Konstantin Chernenko eyes — that he’s expecting to run for a second term. The prospect must engross him, so effervescent was his campaign of 2020! Like all presidents, he’s learning on-the-job, but he’s already lapping Franklin Roosevelt in the hundred-day dash of executive action, showing those wicked CCP envoys who’s boss (why, they are, of course), and turning the depraved white supremacist state of Texas into a vibrant Honduras del Norte. As Mr. Biden would say, anyway… I’ve gone on too long about that….

Meanwhile, from offstage you could hear the crunch of his handlers chewing their Xanax, knowing that the game was a brain-fart away from disaster. Well, he only wandered away from the podium one time, and he dutifully followed the script. In fact, the script was right there in his hand the entire white-knuckle hour of this debut press conference, and he often appeared to be reading straight off the page. I’m sure he was making a funny when he said he came to the Senate 120 years ago. (Remember the battle over Wm. H Taft’s nomination to be Territorial Governor of the Philippines? And how, in the hearings, then-freshman Senator Ol’ Joe B produced three New Haven doxies who testified about Taft’s “abnormal appetites” during the nominee’s years at Yale?)
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Traditionally, presidential press conferences are opportunities to inform the nation where things stand, and to send signals to the other nations (“friend and foe alike” as JFK used to say) about America’s intentions, especially in the nuclear age, with the world so nervously on edge. What did Americans learn from Mr. Biden’s debut? Mainly that an old dog can do some old tricks, follow a script, play the politician, fill a suit, run his mouth, and go through the motions — fulfilling people’s cynical expectation that some trip is being laid on them. Foreign observers will probably note that the executive branch is being run by a politburo more secretive even than the old gang who ran the USSR. No one in this country seems to notice.

Mr. Biden’s real job is as a walking MaxWriter© signature machine, ready to sit down and serve whenever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer send another 1000-plus-page bundle of legislation to the White House, designed to ratchet up the government’s despotic power over everyday life in order to “solve the problems” of free enterprise, free elections, and free speech with free money and hyper-complexity.

Coming up soon, for instance: HR1, the “For the People [ha!] Act,” designed to maximally enable election fraud by enrolling as many live bodies as possible to vote with no chance of verifying their identities, age, place of residence, or citizenship. The act would certainly introduce many new layers of chaos and delay in ascertaining election results. It would also take away the states’ constitutional duty to fashion their own election requirements and, in the process, further erode the legitimacy of the federal government and give many states more reason to oppose and nullify it, or even secede from it — meaning, another step toward that looming civil war 2.0.

One strange exchange in the press conference especially stood out [from the official White House transcript]:

Q: [Janet Rodriguez, Univision] Thank you, Mr. President. We, too, have been reporting at the border. And just like Cecilia, we ran into a pair of siblings who came in on Monday, who were detained by CBP — had the phone number for their mother who lives in the U.S. We have contacted the mother. That’s the only way they know her kids are here because CBP, today, Thursday, has not contacted that mother. So, when can we expect your promise of things getting better with contacting and expediency and processing?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, they’re already getting better, but they’re going to get real — they’ll get a whole hell of lot better real quick, or we’re going to hear of some people leaving, okay?

Did you catch that? The siblings’ mother lives in the USA? How did she get here and when? Is she here legally? Why were these children living in another country, away from their mother, and for how long? Why did the mother abandon her children in the country she left? Did anybody notice that this story doesn’t add up?

James Howard Kuntsler

America 2021 and Nazi Germany 1930s: How Alike We Are

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Reports of the months and years leading up to Nazi Germany generally include the following characteristics of the people of that time:

Willingness to believe the narratives that fit preconceived notions, rather than objective truth;

Intolerance of those with dissenting views;

Race or cultural membership as above the identity of the individual;

Government as the first if not only solution to every problem;

A willingness to believe the state authorities over profit-making authorities, or even obvious facts.

If you look at 2021 in the United States and the overall Western world, you see exactly the same thing:

Willingness to believe the narratives that fit preconceived notions, rather than objective truth? Try arguing with a leftist Biden supporter about what he or she sees on CNN or MSNBC. Any evidence leading to a contradictory conclusion from the one reported on those propaganda machines is greeted with cries of “racist, intolerant, well, that’s just Fox News” (as if Fox News was much better.)

Intolerance of those with dissenting views? Look at what happens to anyone in corporate America or sports/entertainment who offers a dissenting view. Even die-hard leftist Democrats who challenge some aspects of “cancel culture” — America’s version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1950s and 1960s Communist China — risk being cancelled. We have seen this kind of intolerance before, in Nazi Germany as well as Communist China in the Maoist period especially (read Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” for vivid details). I am unsure any human society has seen the intensity and level of intolerance of today’s leftists. These people are truly unhinged in their hatred, even with Donald Trump long gone from the White House.

Race or cultural membership as above the identity of the individual? That goes without saying. If you’re white or male, your life must be one long apology tour. Why? Because of anything specific you did? No. Strictly and solely because of your race and gender. The now explicit premise is: “Because of your race and gender, you are inferior. You must atone for that inferiority.” Today’s anti-white and anti-male racists are precisely the same as anti-black, anti-brown or anti-any other race racists. It’s all the same thing. Unless or until you understand this fact, you will not appreciate the madness truly overtaking not just our government, but our entire culture (media, schools, entertainment, sports, corporate world, EVERYTHING).

Government as the first if not only solution to every problem? Look at what Congress has passed. Literally unending spending. Not just to “help out” the destitute, or those impaired by a crisis (COVID) primarily of the government’s and media’s own making; but with the explicit goal of making that “help” permanent. Government is literally competing with low- and medium-wage providers to pay people more money to stay home than go to work. It’s a fact. And, by their own words (and every single one of their actions, including but not limited to getting rid of the filibuster), they’re just getting started. The federal government is spending to the tune of $20, $30, even $40 or $50 trillion dollars in debt … indefinitely, and always expanding for as far as the eye can see. How on earth can this not have consequences? Only someone with a fervent faith in the unlimited power of government to create currency and spend it into infinity will not worry about it.

A willingness to believe the state authorities over profit-making authorities, or even obvious facts? Millions are getting vaccinated. They don’t even have to be forced (although that will come for the minority who defy the commands.) Would these same millions trust any private company who cannot be sued, nor in any way held responsible, for their product — if it were anything other than the vaccine? Would any of these same people getting vaccinated go to a restaurant indemnified from getting sued, or prosecuted criminally, for poisoning people? Would any of these same people getting vaccinated drive a car manufactured by an auto company who can’t be held liable if they fail to put brakes on the car that work beyond 1,000 miles? This is not a rant against vaccinations, and I’m not opposed to the legitimate desire of people to stay physically safe and healthy. But merely on the government’s word, with little to no responsibility on the part of the manufacturer? In the words of their precious, demented felon occupying the Oval Office: “Come on, man!”

In summary, the essential attributes you can expect to give rise to a Nazi Germany are all present — in spades — in 2021 America. That’s why the quasi-military occupation in D.C. — no longer a real government of laws, simply an occupation — is set to exploit everything it can to impose perhaps the greatest dictatorship the world has ever seen.

If that happens, then the great majority of people — in their lack of critical thinking and independence of soul — will have primarily themselves to blame.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Democrats’ War on Black America

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Today’s wave after wave of illegal migrants, otherwise human chattel, are overrunning and overwhelming our southern border security, by design from dementia plagued president-in-name-only Joe Biden and his hate-America-first Democrat party Marxist handlers.

This is the Marxist Democrat party war on Black Americans, cynically packaged globalist modern-day slave trading, replacing freedmen citizens with indentured aliens. Interior enforcement officers given stand-down orders are inundated with thousands of CCP Covid-19 diseased, illegal, and illiterate mendicants delivered by open-borders supremacists who have outsourced migratory human-trafficking transit logistics to Mexican cartel criminal enterprises, all encouraged, reinforced, and given sanctuary

Where are the illegal migrants re-settled? Large urban centers and small cities all across the country heavily populated by Black Americans: More than a million each in NYC and LA, hundreds of thousands from Riverside, CA to Charlotte, NC to Lowell, MA.

It all began with seemingly innocuous and noble humanitarian overtures, even possessing an element of economic necessity, given the dropping US birthrate, the nemesis of GDP growth. We can blame the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, the Democrats’ global extension of the civil rights movement.

Democrat operatives, co-opting inner city minorities, primarily Black Americans, manipulated president Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty into creating a welfare state targeting and perpetuating an entire class of the impoverished and dispossed. Jobs, opportunities, and the nuclear family were quashed to make way for accumulating raw electoral power by institutionalizing dependency, while securing votes to perpetuate — astonishingly enduring for more than 50 years — a corrupt and cynical bargain: We’ll give you minimalist economic survival with hollow promises of only marginal living standards in exchange for reliable votes.

But now, finding that urban Black voters are demographically too small a voting bloc when they either tune-out polling stations on Election Day, or vote for Donald Trump, Democrat Marxists have been hustling a new stream of voters, comprised primarily of illegal aliens, most notably in California, but increasingly evident everywhere else.

Of course, California now boasts a spectacularly high poverty rate, the nation’s worst school-age literacy and math skills, intractable homelessness, and record setting unemployment and tax burdens, for which more unskilled and impoverished illegal aliens will do nothing to alleviate.

Meanwhile, Democrats have not only abandoned their erstwhile constituency from urban Black America, they have actively implemented policies that have turned Democrat party-controlled inner cities — from Philadelphia to Baltimore to Detroit to St Louis to Chicago to Los Angeles — into third world hellholes, no better than the failed states south of the border providing the subjects for the Democrats’ diabolical human-trafficking enterprise.

And the Democrat open-borders policies have undermined black Americans’ employment, wages, and upward mobility, while draining billions (an estimated $135 billion annually) of dollars from anti-poverty programs to finance free health care, free education, and housing assistance for illegal aliens.

Moreover, the open border logistics management delegated to Mexican criminal cartels has ushered in a pipeline of fentanyl, crack cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin, much destined for the streets of Black Americans’ neighborhoods, where Black-on-Black killings, and gang wars are epidemic.

More acutely, urban Black American citizens are still suffering from CCP Covid-19 lockdowns, crippling unemployment, never-ending school shutdowns, and energy prices up one third in fewer than six months, while illegals are given free hotel rooms and free transportation to anywhere in the US.

And the latest Covid-19 “relief and stimulus” appropriates nearly $4.4 billion gifts to approximately 3.2 million illegal immigrants ($1,375 each), but only a miserly $25.00 more for each eligible American citizen, the most needy being those in the urban black communities.

Ten years ago Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University School of Labor and Industrial Relations economics professor, reported Black workers’ wages and employment are harmed the most from illegal, and low skill immigration. “No racial or ethnic group has benefited less or been harmed more than the nation’s African American community.”

In the 2010 Proceedings of the US Civil Rights Commission, “The Impact of Illegal Immigration On The Wages And Employment Opportunities Of Black Workers”, testimony from eight more policy gurus and economists (plus Briggs) found much the same.

“Finding No 5…Illegal immigration…has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men. Expert economic opinions concerning the negative effects range from modest to significant.”

And the Black labor participation rate since 1972 peaked in 2000 at 68%, dropped to 60% in 2014, recovering under Trump to 63 %. It is in freefall now, and about to get worse. All the while immigrants’ labor force participation rates have consistently exceeded Black Americans’ at 72% plus for over 35 years.

Black Americans have finally noticed torpedoes aimed at their waterlines, all launched by their erstwhile Democrat Marxist allies, and benefactors. The Harvard Harris poll in 2018 found 48% of Blacks want immigration severely curtailed:

Peter Beinhart wrote for The Atlantic in 2017 “How The Democrats Lost Their Way On Immigration,” a rambling survey of the Democrats’ intellectual and political migration from acknowledging the adverse socio-economic effects of unrestrained immigration, to a dishonest calculus using open borders as the pathogen to spawn more democrat voters.

“In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama…
“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?”

Democrats have been destroying Black American cities for two generations, and now are escorting an invasion that would forfeit a nation.

What and who would remain to govern? Richard Fernandez captured the nihilist central them of the Democrat party, perfectly:

“…It was grand while it lasted, the idea we could live without borders, without defense or even without civilization. Money for nothing and your checks for free. The music played for so long that even now no one can even imagine it could stop. How many will really prefer reality to illusion?”

Alas Richard, Democrat party Marxists prefer the reality of a deadly stroll west of Martin Luther King Blvd in west Baltimore. Democrats prefer the reality of Black-owned funeral parlors in Chicago struggling with a backlog of victims. Democrats prefer the reality of formerly bucolic cities of the Northwest and northern California, and the athletic urban bustle of NYC, now unlivable, burdened with Venezuela-style communism and mobocracy.

U-Boats off the coast of the Carolinas during WWII are an historical curio. Along with the occasional German spies landing in rubber rafts on the shores of Cape Cod, and downeast Maine. The stuff of romantic wartime thrillers. Far from the threat of an actual invasion.

Fast-forward nearly eighty years, and we are witness to an invasion designed to eviscerate urban Black American citizens, already suffering at the hands of duplicitous phony patrons. Worse, Black Americans are being tossed overboard to make room for the next deluge of victims, where the pursuit of power by the Democrat party belies any pretense of compassion, and moral standing.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_democrats_war_on_black_americans.html#ixzz6qK5iqaQT
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_democrats_war_on_black_americans.html#ixzz6qK5QVPd0
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Landmark school choice law covers 90% of the students in one state

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Karma is coming calling for the disgraceful teachers’ unions that have kept children from attending school for a year in much of the country. Successfully shaking down the federal government for nine figures’ worth of additional funding, they have ignored the science that says young children are at almost no risk from COVID. The cost to children and to the nation is unfathomable, with child suicides soaring and the future ability to function in a complex technological society impaired for a generation of future citizens.

It is my fervent hope that the selfishness, greed, and indifference to the welfare of children of the unions will finally break the monopoly of government school bureaucracies and see parents free to use taxpayer funding for the education of their children at any school of their choice. Let the bloated, inefficient bureaucracies of the government schools compete with focused, efficient private schools — existing and yet to be founded — that are not tied to lowest common denominator standards and not force-feeding left wing hate-America garbage like the 1619 Project.

The first such victory just happened…in West Virginia. And surprise, surprise, there is so far very little media attention. However, Jayne Metzgar of The Federalist covers the big news:

Last week, with very little noise or fanfare, the West Virginia legislature passed the most expansive Education Savings Account program in America. While ESAs in most states are only open to a small percentage of children, the new West Virginia Hope Scholarship will be available to 90 percent of schoolchildren in the state. Every child currently enrolled in public school is eligible, plus those newly aging in.

“It’s a game-changer,” says Garrett Ballengee of the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a conservative think tank and proponent of the bill. “If you add up every single ESA utilizer in the rest of the country, there are only about 20,000 of them. The Hope Scholarship will automatically open it up to ten times that many children in West Virginia alone.”
Applicants for the Hope Scholarship will receive 100 percent of their state education dollars — $4,600 annually — in lieu of public schooling. (County and federal funds will remain in the system.) The scholarship is usable for private school tuition, homeschool curriculum, or other education expenses. Gov. Jim Justice, a vocal opponent of ESAs as recently as 2019, has signaled he’s likely to sign.

There is an interesting history to the choice battle in West Virginia, which Metzgar covers. Previous efforts at choice legislation had been stymied by the power of unions. But the teachers’ unions overplayed their hand, including brief strikes closing down the schools, a tactic that is meaningless during COVID shutdowns.

I’ve seen estimates that thanks to the school shutdowns, over 11% of families are now homeschooling, more than doubling the previous share of homeschoolers. That’s a significant constituency, and now that teachers have lost much of the public affection they had previously enjoyed, an activist base can push for similar laws in other states, starting with the reddest among them.

In addition, in West Virginia, acting locally, parents can organize and demand that local funding going to government schools be made available for choice at private schools. It’s going to be hard for local politicians, face-to-face with parents at school board and town council meetings, to defend a monopoly for the teachers who have abandoned the children for a year, despite no scientific reason to do so. Parents forced to give up jobs and turn their lives upside-down to take care of kids no longer in schools are not going to listen to pap about protecting the public schools.

Once that local funding becomes available, watch for a massive defection from the government indoctrination camps, starting in West Virginia. Many of the best teachers would gladly flee the inflexible and arrogant bureaucracies that characterize government school systems, where holders of “doctor of education” (Ed.D. degrees like the one “Dr. Jill Biden” holds) earn large six-figure salaries making rules for the classroom teachers.

Once put on an equal financial footing with the failing government schools, focused, efficient private schools can outperform them on practically every metric.

Free the children from grip of greedy, self-interested government bureaucrats and their union co-conspirators in the destruction of our children’s future.

American Thinker

Passover Marks The Beginning of Western Civilization

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Passover begins at sundown Saturday evening, March 27.

You think you know the story. Perhaps. But, after more than 70 years, I barely know it myself.

There’s the Cecil B. DeMille version: Yul Brenner is oppressing the Jews in Egypt—conscripting them for construction projects along the Nile. With the help of frogs and locusts, Charlton Heston leads them out of slavery into technicolor freedom.

Seriously, the Passover seder is the world’s oldest continuously celebrated ritual. There are the candles and wine, the matzah and bitter herbs. (“And they embittered their lives with servitude.”) There’s the Haggadah with the four questions: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

The celebration lasts for eight days, during which we abstain from certain foods. The theme is remembrance: Remember what God did for you when He took you out of Egypt. Each Jew must feel that he was personally redeemed. Telling the Passover story is a commandment. The Haggadah says, “The more one tells about the Exodus, the more he is praiseworthy.”

Passover is just the beginning of the story. The end is nowhere in sight.

After the first Passover and the departure from Egypt, there’s the encounter at Sinai and the giving of the Law. In the DeMille version, Moses says to Pharoah: “Men shall be ruled by Law, not by other men.” Whose law? The one from the ultimate lawgiver.

Western Civilization started at a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula, where the 12 tribes assembled received not just the 10 Commandments but the entire corpus of Jewish law. Before that, time was static. There was no progress, no movement toward a conclusion.

From Sinai came the Promised Land – more than 1,000 years chronicled in the Bible. From Sinai came the kings and prophets. Judaism and Christianity started there. (Without Passover, no Easter.) The Jews went into 2,000 years of exile and their morality was spread into Europe and eventually worldwide by Christians – hence, the Judeo-Christian ethic.

The settlers who founded America were inspired by the vision of Sinai. Many gave their children Biblical names.

For them, this was the Promised Land. (For the Great Seal of the United States, Benjamin Franklin proposed a scene showing Moses leading the Children of Israel through the Red Sea.) Eventually, the colonists came to see George III as the Pharoah of the Exodus.

The Declaration of Independence didn’t spring full-blown from the brow of Jefferson. The seeds were planted at Sinai. “That all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The doors to the Supreme Court chamber depict twin tablets with the Roman numerals one through ten, a reminder of our origins in a far older code of law.

But while Passover bids us to remember, the pagan culture we find ourselves immersed in tells us to forget.

Pharoah says to Moses, “Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go?” So too says the party of the Democrats. America’s elite calls appeals to our roots religious fanaticism, and asks why we should follow men with sandals and staffs, any more than men with wigs and buckle shoes.

Forget this invisible God, progressives say. Worship our Gods: multiculturalism, equality and choice. Washington, D.C. is their golden calf.

Passover is called the festival of freedom. Patriots have never been more concerned about the preservation of our freedoms. But the Passover story reminds us that freedom isn’t free.

After the Exodus, God didn’t say to the Israelites: “Zie gezunt – go, enjoy. The beaches of Tel Aviv await you.” He led us to Sinai and gave us the Law, which was the culmination of the Exodus. For without law, we are forced to submit to the rule of men.

In America, today, there is no law. Instead, we have mindless regulations, (Wear a facemask. Maintain social distancing.), confiscatory taxation and spending like we possessed the riches of the store cities of Pithom and Ramses.

Our courts deliberately misinterpret the Constitution to advance their ideology. Flaunting the laws of Sinai has become a secularist commandment. (“Thou shalt exalt fornication and perversion.”)

Passover is the tale that never ends. There’s always a new Pharoah, a new House of Bondage, a new journey through the Red Sea and 40 years in the desert to reach the Promised Land. And they did it all without stimulus spending.

Passover reminds us of the eternal struggle (freedom and slavery) and the eternal balance (rights and responsibilities, liberty and sacrifice).

The seder ends with “Next year in Jerusalem.” But the City of David isn’t just a physical place. It’s also an ideal to strive toward – a time when the Law is universally acknowledged and Pharoah is finally defeated.

Don Feder,frontpagemag

West Virginia Passes Broadest School Choice Bill

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For a state that couldn’t pass a modest measure on Education Savings Accounts just two years ago, it’s a breathtaking turnaround. What changed?

In February 2018, public school teachers brought West Virginia to its knees. Seeking pay raises and better health plans, unions had declared a “work stoppage” in all 55 counties, shuttering every public school in the state. The “stoppage” — which was in fact an unlawful strike — dragged on for nine school days, costing children nearly two weeks of instruction. Under pressure, the Republican legislature rushed through a pay raise to pacify the unions.

The victorious teachers of West Virginia quickly became the darlings of the socialist left. Jacobin magazine, which had extensively covered the strike, ran a victory-lap interview entitled “What the Teachers Won.” News coverage touched off copycat strikes, beginning in Arizona and spreading to other states. The “Red for Ed” movement was born, uniting unions, socialists, and other far-left radicals in dreams of an American labor renaissance.

Flush with victory, West Virginia teachers’ unions got bolder. The next year, they went on strike again, taking aim at broader education policy. The Republican Senate had passed a bill granting teachers their second pay raise in two years, but they tied it to something for parents: school choice.

It wasn’t much—open enrollment, Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for special-needs students, and permission for three charter schools statewide. But West Virginia was one of the last remaining states without school choice, and “Red for Ed” wasn’t letting that go without a fight.

The 2019 strike lasted only two days. The West Virginia House of Delegates quickly caved, scuttling school choice and passing a “clean” pay raise for teachers. But 18 Republicans in the state Senate stood firm. No school choice, no second pay raise, they said. Their stand forced the governor’s hand. A special session in June resulted in the passage of modest school choice measures. Open enrollment survived; so did the three charter schools. ESAs did not.

For Republicans, it seemed a small win in exchange for two costly, bruising strikes. Unions were confident that the vast majority of West Virginians were on their side.

“Educators across the state are livid at these developments and dead-set against school privatization,” wrote the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site. “In this, they are joined by virtually all of the state’s workers and youth. . . . Eighty-eight percent of West Virginians support their public schools and oppose charters.” Leftists vowed a reckoning in the 2020 election for those 18 villainous Senate Republicans. ‘It’s a Game-Changer’

That was then; this is now. Last week, with very little noise or fanfare, the West Virginia legislature passed the most expansive Education Savings Account program in America. While ESAs in most states are only open to a small percentage of children, the new West Virginia Hope Scholarship will be available to 90 percent of schoolchildren in the state. Every child currently enrolled in public school is eligible, plus those newly aging in.

“It’s a game-changer,” says Garrett Ballengee of the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a conservative think tank and proponent of the bill. “If you add up every single ESA utilizer in the rest of the country, there are only about 20,000 of them. The Hope Scholarship will automatically open it up to ten times that many children in West Virginia alone.”

Applicants for the Hope Scholarship will receive 100 percent of their state education dollars — $4,600 annually — in lieu of public schooling. (County and federal funds will remain in the system.) The scholarship is usable for private school tuition, homeschool curriculum, or other education expenses. Gov. Jim Justice, a vocal opponent of ESAs as recently as 2019, has signaled he’s likely to sign.

For a state that couldn’t pass a far more modest measure just two years ago, it’s a breathtaking turnaround. What changed? Elections Have Consequences

State Sen. Patricia Rucker, the Republican chair of the Senate Education Committee and chief architect of the ESA effort, has a few theories about what made the difference. First, she believes the majority of West Virginians never opposed school choice in the first place; they were simply afraid to say so.

“During the strikes, I saved a folder of all the people who wrote to me in support of the education reform. I kept all of their emails,” Rucker told me in an interview. “The vast majority of them said something like, ‘Please don’t use my name. Don’t tell anyone I wrote to you.’ They were so scared and intimidated by the teachers’ unions.”

In 2019, I wrote about the climate of union intimidation that was silencing the state’s parents and teachers. When Justice commissioned a “listening tour” to gauge public opinion, the West Virginia Department of Education co-opted the effort and manipulated its findings. This lead to the much-repeated assertion that 88 percent of West Virginians opposed charter schools. But when the 2020 elections came around, voters finally spoke for themselves.

“I knocked on thousands of doors during my 2020 reelection campaign,” Rucker said. “Out of all those people, I only spoke to about five educators who were opposed to our education reform — that’s it. Most of the people who spoke to me about education were in favor of choice. Even the vast majority of educators I spoke to said, ‘I didn’t have any problems with charter schools. I think it would be good for us to have that opportunity.’”

The proof was in the poll returns. Despite fierce opposition from unions and their moneyed interests, all but two of those 18 education reformers returned to the Senate in 2020, and several more were added to their number. It was an affirmation that educational choice can be a winning political issue, even in states with a strong union presence. Contrary to their tightly controlled narrative, teachers’ unions hadn’t been speaking for the people. They had been shouting the people down. Pandemics Have Consequences Too

The COVID-19 lockdowns undoubtedly played a major role in further widening the rift between teachers’ unions and the people. As parents suddenly faced a public school system that refused to open its doors, it became harder to understand why that system should retain exclusive control over tax dollars meant to educate children.

Public opinion polls confirm a major surge last year in support for measures to fund students directly. Remarkably, although these bills are almost exclusively advanced by Republican lawmakers, public support for school choice appears to be evenly distributed across the political spectrum. Last week, one Democrat lawmaker in Kentucky reluctantly crossed the aisle to vote against union interests on school choice, citing overwhelming support from his constituents.

“In light of COVID, people are beginning to see that different children thrive in different environments,” Ballengee said. “Some kids have done really well in virtual schooling, some have done really well in hybrid, and for some these have been an absolute disaster. It’s brought home what we’ve been saying for so long: kids need different environments.”

Rucker believes the unions’ unyielding stance against school reopening has eroded their support among teachers as well as parents. “The media has really overplayed the unions’ voice about school reopening, as opposed to average teachers’ voices,” she said. “The vast majority of teachers I’ve heard from wanted to go back to school. They recognized that they weren’t reaching their kids through these virtual options. I would venture to say that there is a lot less union membership among West Virginia teachers these days. You can sense it.”

One indicator of this lack of union energy: after the riotous education showdowns of 2018 and 2019, the Hope Scholarship bill sailed through the West Virginia legislature with hardly a whimper of protest.

“This year when we pushed real reform, much more substantial than two years ago. It’s been very quiet,” Rucker said. “The unions don’t like the bill, but our phones aren’t ringing. We aren’t getting emails. It’s nothing like last time.”

The West Virginia United Caucus, a far-left teachers’ coalition, was active throughout the strikes and well into 2020, pushing hard against school reopening and advancing a left-leaning slate of educators to head the state’s largest teachers’ union. They haven’t published a tweet since Election Day. Funding Kids, not Institutions

“West Virginia now has the broadest-based ESA in the entire United States,” Rucker says. “It’s not the most money, but it’s the most inclusive – and in most areas, it’s enough to send a child to private school. This really is a game-changer for students and families. We’re focused on funding kids now, not institutions. We’re funding each student to get the best possible education they can get.”

Rucker is gratified by West Virginia’s 180-degree turnaround: an erstwhile union stronghold suddenly leading the way toward educational freedom. Legislatures in 29 states have considered education choice bills this year. It remains to be seen whether Republican lawmakers elsewhere

Are Whites Privileged or Persecuted ?

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Two Georgetown University law professors in a private conversation between themselves expressed concern that the students at the bottom of their classes were black. I believe the professors had some concern for the black students, but I am confident their main concern was “what are we going to do?”

In American universities and public schools today black under-performance of quota admission students is a serious and major problem for white professors and teachers. If the lowest class grades are concentrated in the black population of a professor’s class, the university’s powerful diversity police will investigate. Moreover, the diversity police will have to find at least insensitivity and a lack of concern if not racism. The diversity police will do this because they have to justify their existence and budget and because they like to exercise power. Moreover, if they don’t find a problem of some description, the black student union will cause an uproar, and the diversity police will become part of the problem.

I suspect the two professors were feeling out the situation. The question before them was: “How are we going to survive black underperformance in our class?” Do we flunk one or two of the worst performers and work the rest of them in with the class with a B here, a C there, so that there is no pattern that can be ascribed to us as racism? If we do this, we simply pass the problem on to the next professor, and it can continue until it becomes the bar association’s problem when Georgetown’s law graduates sit for the bar exam.

Or can we risk flunking any black student or even giving one a D? In other words, the professors’ dilemma is: we have to throw out standards in order to avoid being fired for racism.

Male professors were first up against this problem with feminism. I remember an academic telling me that he never flunked a woman, because she had the option of alleging that he had made a pass at her and flunked her because she refused. He said a C was the lowest grade he would risk giving a female student who had flunked the course. He said that over time the female students who were not up to standard learned how to communicate to him that they could be trouble if their grades were not satisfactory.

Georgetown University fired the white female law professor for saying, factually, that blacks were at the bottom of her class in grade performance. The white male was forced to resign because he failed in his obligation to report the female professor for her “racist” statement. And people think America is a free country. Academic freedom along with the First Amendment bit the dust some time ago.

Georgetown University, like most American universities, is very unfriendly to white people, both faculty and student unless the white faculty or student is a woke creature. This is proven by Georgetown University’s response to a private conversation between two white professors . The university administration, of course, made a destructive mistake. Consequently, at Georgetown University any non-white student can claim to be “offended” and thereby exercise power over the faculty and the administration. To be “offended” is a power play. Georgetown University, like most every other university and corporation, has proven that it is incapable of standing up to such a power play. Any person of color failing in performance has more power than the president and trustees of the university. At Georgetown University deans themselves have been suspended for “offending” the special privileged. Yet we continue to hear about “white privilege.”

Where is this “white privilege.” Obviously, it is not in the educational system. Is it in the capitalist corporations where white employees have to take “sensitivity training” as a condition of employment and learn that they are “systemic racists” and cannot discipline underperforming people of color?

Is it in government employment where Biden has reimposed “racial sensitivity training” on white civil servants, guaranteeing that they cannot discipline people of color?

Is in in the US military where even special forces have to submit to racial sensitivity training despite the fact that they are ordered to kill people of color in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, and are being prepared for war against “the yellor peril?”

Woke professors who lead the charge against their white colleagues are not made safe by their turncoat behavior. These despicable woke people should find a copy of Jean Raspail’s novel, The Camp of the Saints, and become acquainted with their fate. Probably they cannot find a copy in the Georgetown library where it is likely to have been removed as “offensive” or “racist.” Whatever term does the job to get rid of truth.

Today, universities are nothing but truth-killing organizations. All anyone can learn in an American university is to hate “white racist America.”

Before long the valedictorian of every university graduating class will be a black female. White gentile students will be at the bottom of the graduating classes. This will prove that racism has been overcome.

Paul Craig Roberts, UNZ Review