“Creative destruction,” the term coined by Joseph Schumpeter to describe the power of capitalism to create something greater from the destruction of something lesser, is an optimistic forecast of the outcome of Monday’s vote in the Iowa Caucuses.
Former President Donald Trump resoundingly won the contest, setting himself up for a triumphant return as the GOP nominee who will confront whomever the Democrats nominate this year, whether it is an ailing and unpopular President Joe Biden or a late-game substitute.
Within the Republican contest, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whom I favored, couldn’t overcome the wellspring of support for Trump that came from unfair, undemocratic prosecutions by the Biden administration and local hick prosecutors in New York City and Atlanta. Those prosecutors and officials in Colorado, Maine and elsewhere who have sought illegally and outrageously to deny voters the option of voting for Trump—supposedly in the name of democracy—helped propel his ascent.
Trump still faces former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, but the former president seems likely to prevail. Haley is a happy warrior like Trump, but will be cast as a globalist, neoconservative, establishment Republican for the simple reason that she is one. Few on the Right beyond the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Chamber of Commerce long for uncontrolled immigration, exporting manufacturing to Asia, or funding the defense of wealthy European moochers.
But Iowa was about more than the prosecutions. Trump is right on policy and right on the image of America, which appealed to Iowa voters. They want the Three Fat Years of economic growth that Trump and his economic team achieved before China inflicted the COVID-19 pandemic on the world. Through those years, Trump had ended the decade of economic malaise that created the populist wave that brought him to power. He made everyone willing to work hard better off—especially minorities.
This is an incredibly shocking video of a talk that Adam Andrzejewski, founder and CEO of openthebooks.com gave regarding waste, fraud, corruption and abuse in all levels of our government at a Hillsdale College event . He names all those that are involved in the abuse of our taxpayer money. This is not a Republican or a Democrat issue as the corruption is widely spread throughout our government. If this level of corruption is allowed to continue, our country will be greatly damaged. Please share with all your contacts. Nancy
VIDEO – CULTURE OF CORRUPTION IN THE DEPTH OF THE SWAMP
Adam Andrzejewski is the founder and CEO of openthebooks.com, the world’s largest database of public sector spending, whether at the federal, state, or local level
Does the Democratic Party represent the interests of black Americans? Larry Elder gives 10 reasons why blacks might consider leaving the Democratic Party.
Ted Van Dyk Mr. Van Dyk was active in Democratic national policy and politics for 40 years. He is author of “Heroes, Hacks and Fools” (University of Washington Press, 2007).
Oct. 19, 2018
PHOTO: CHAD CROWE
America is polarized in many ways, but one of the most significant is between generations in the Democratic Party. Coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, we present-day seniors saw liberalism as the promise of racial and social justice and broadly shared prosperity. We also saw it as a defender of civil liberties against abuses such as those that took place in the 1950s McCarthy era. Abroad, we supported a strong United Nations and other multilateral institutions to reduce conflict but had no illusions about the expansionist ambitions of totalitarian states.
In other words, the dwindling number of Greatest Generation and Depression-born Democrats came of age with a liberal tradition that is increasingly marginalized in today’s party. That was evident in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight and in the party’s use of race, sex, ethnicity and other identity markers in politics more broadly.
The best example of the old Democratic Party’s aspirations was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided that no citizen should receive favorable or unfavorable treatment based on irrelevant factors such as race, sex, national origin and religion. Our domestic agenda was further realized in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, federal aid to education and other measures designed to create greater opportunity for all, underwritten by a safety net for those who needed it.
You could feel the first big change in 1968 as a new generation in the West rebelled against established institutions and leaders. In the U.S., protest formed around opposition to the mistaken Vietnam War. I experienced this rebellion first as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s assistant in the Johnson White House, then as a vice president of Columbia University during the disorders there, and later as an active member of the antiwar movement and George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
There was idealism in the protests but also cynicism and a touch of totalitarianism. “We Demand!” often preceded the protesters’ list of objectives. You could have a discussion with them over coffee or in small groups, but when an audience was present, a professor, speaker or political candidate expressing a contrary opinion would often be shouted down, sometimes with obscene chants. “Never trust anyone over 30,” the slogan went (or, as I often thought silently, no one under 25). Those in established positions were usually judged reactionary no matter the substance of their views.
The conflation of ‘natural law’ with ‘positive law’ handed communism a philosophical victory after the end of the Cold War.
by James Taranto Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
August 18, 2018
When the U.S. withdrew in June from the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ambassador Nikki Haley described the council as “a protector of human-rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.” Aaron Rhodes agrees but thinks Ms. Haley was too gentle.
“The Human Rights Council has become a cover for dictatorships,” he says. “They assume the high moral ground of standing for ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation,’ a tactic for smothering the truth about denying freedom. Raising human-rights concerns is dismissed as divisive and confrontational, and a threat to ‘stability.’ Most of the debate there is technocratic blah-blah about global social policy—not about human rights at all.”
To U.N. watchers it’s a familiar critique, but Mr. Rhodes, 69, applies it far more broadly. In his recent book, “The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom,” he argues that virtually the entire human-rights enterprise has been corrupted by a philosophical error enshrined in the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and that this explains the travesty of the Human Rights Council.
That error is the conflation of “natural law” with “positive law.” Mr. Rhodes explains the difference: “Natural law is a kind of constraint on positive law.” Think of America’s Bill of Rights, whose opening clause is “Congress shall make no law.” The idea is “that laws have to answer to a higher law,” he says. “This is a vision of law that is very deeply embedded in Western civilization,” finding premodern expression in the ideas of the Greek Stoics and the Roman statesman Cicero, as well as in biblical canon law. Natural law is universal—or at least claims to be.
“Positive law,” Mr. Rhodes continues, “is the law of states and governments.” A statute like the Social Security Act of 1935 creates “positive rights”—government-conferred benefits to which citizens have a legal entitlement. Positive law is particular to a nation or other polity: “I live in Germany,” says Mr. Rhodes, a native of upstate New York whom I met during his U.S. book tour. “I enjoy a lot of economic and social rights there, but they reflect the political values of that community.” The Germans are “keen on being a moral society, where the state helps people. They’re statist. This is their mentality, but I don’t think it’s the same mentality here.”
Bigot, racist, islamophobe, xenophobe, not who we are as a nation, global citizen, safe spaces, civil society, social justice, inhumane, diversity – These are just some of the words we hear every day from the Cultural Marxists whose goal is to change our way of thinking about any issue that they want to control.
If we understand what their goals are, then we have a much better chance of being able to fight their insidious ideology. Nancy
Cultural Marxist academics, their sycophant students, and the main stream media are at war with America—a war of violent Marxist ideology and a war of cleverly chosen words and euphemisms that appear time and time again in many college courses, high school classes, in propaganda literature, newspapers, conferences, and in the manufactured news. Cultural Marxists are regular guests on all the alphabet soup networks masquerading as real news, spewing their hatred, their disdain and disrespect for our President, and their calls to renewed violence in the streets through their masked Black Shirts.
As David Horrowitz said, “Worse yet, this is the dominant culture in our universities, in our media, in our judiciary, in government, in unions, and in the shadow political universe of non-profits, with billions of tax-free dollars at their disposal.”
Language is a powerful tool of discourse, mass political indoctrination and agitation. Marxist Democrats are quite adept at using inflammatory language and deceptive euphemisms to suit their nefarious political ends.
The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to those who did not have a Social Security number (SSN), according to a recent audit.
The agency’s inspector general found errors in how the government documented representative payees or individuals who are designated to receive retirement or disability benefits on behalf of those who cannot manage the benefits themselves, theWashington Free Beaconreported.
Theaudit, released Friday, found thousands of instances where no SSN was found on file.
The agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who “did not have an SSN” and had not kept any paper applications supporting an individual’s case to receive benefits on someone else’s behalf, according to the inspector general.
“Furthermore, unless it takes corrective action, we estimate SSA will pay about $182.5 million in benefits, annually, to representative payees who do not have an SSN or paper application supporting their selection,” the inspector general said.
The agency also paid $853.1 million in benefits since 2004 to individuals whom the agency terminated as representative payees.
This article was written the day before the election but contains very sobering and alarming information on the fiscal health of our country and what the next president has to deal with. As if there is not enough bad news in this article, the federal debt is approaching $20 trillion very quickly and increasing the debt ceiling will face Congress and the president by a March deadline. Nancy
The President’s luck is about to run out—on his successor’s watch.
ENLARGE
U.S. President Barack ObamaPHOTO:GETTY IMAGES
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
The tragedy is that Mr. Obama spent his political capital not on growing the economy but on growing entitlements and raising costs for business via regulation. The next President needs to make faster economic growth the policy default, or every other political priority will be hard or impossible to meet. The deficit burden will get worse faster.
The final major lesson is that the next President can’t count on the continuation of low interest rates. The Federal Reserve has been Mr. Obama’s best friend not named Chief JusticeJohn Robertsas its monetary policies have helped finance a record debt blowout at lower cost. Mr. Obama issued more Treasurys than any President in history, and the Fed bought $1.7 trillion worth from 2009-2014. That helped guarantee there wouldn’t be a shortage of demand.
Congratulations to the President-elect, whoever you are, because you’re going to need it. Our deadline arrived Tuesday before we knew the election outcome, but not before we can say with confidence that PresidentObamais leaving his successor a large and growing federal budget problem.
That’s the message in the Congressional Budget Office’s summary, released Monday, of the fiscal year that closed in September. Though the subject barely came up in the campaign—little policy substance did—the federal fisc is once again heading for trouble. There are some lessons in this for the next President, who will quickly realize that Mr. Obama’s fiscal luck has finally run out—on his successor’s watch.
