Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[Nemo888]

Fungible simply means interchangeable. It is clear how interchangeable unskilled and semiskilled labourers are  in a global market. There is nothing special about 95% of seamstresses or hard rock miners. I've never had a job where I was not replaceable. If you can easily substitute one labourer for another and you pay them a wage they are by definition fungible. Globalization is mostly dependent on the fungibility of labour and  environmental externalities.

 

[a_majoor]

Detroit is a wonmderful experiment: Ontario or Quebec writ small. After the scale model testing in Detroit, we will have a better idea of how to deal with large scale government bankrupcies:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/07/18/obama-to-detroit-drop-dead/

Obama to Detroit: Drop Dead

Update: Detroit files for bankruptcy. More thoughts tomorrow. Below is our post from earlier today.

Detroit, one of the 20th century’s great American cities, is now almost certain to stagger through the early 21st century in Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The WSJ reports that the chances of out-of-court settlement are scant. Emergency manager Kevyn Orr is unlikely to reach agreements with enough of Detroit’s bondholders and pension funds to restructure the city’s debt:

Mr. Orr “has taken such a hard line with creditors that a bankruptcy filing is inevitable,” [research advisory director Matt] Fabian said. […]

A “free fall” bankruptcy filing—one without a clear plan or much agreement beforehand with creditors—is a likely outcome.

Buried in the middle of the report is a telling climax to this sorry tragedy:

Any hope of a federal bailout to avert bankruptcy fizzled last week after Mr. Orr spoke with the White House, including Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, according to city and White House officials.

This is where blue governance has brought Detroit in the end: not even a liberal Democratic administration will step in to save the pensions of thousands of public workers and African Americans, condemning countless innocents to having their pensions and health benefits gutted in bankruptcy court.

Blue model defenders will point to the cruel exodus of General Motors, the unjust outsourcing of American manufacturing, and the general unfairness of life in the big city as the culprits in the slaying of Detroit. But these champions of the marginalized should keep a few facts in mind.

Detroit has been spending on average $100 million more than it has taken in for each of the past five years. The city’s $11 billion in unsecured debt includes $6 billion in health and other retirement benefits and $3 billion in retiree pensions for its 20,000 city pensioners, who are slated to receive less than 10 percent of what they were promised. Between 2007 and 2011, an astounding 36 percent of residents lived below the poverty line. Last year, the FBI cited Detroit as having the highest violent crime rate for any major American city. In the first 12 years of the new century, Detroit lost more than 26 percent of its population.

And now Detroit’s desperate request for a bailout has been turned down by the Obama White House.

Progressive politicians, wonks, and activists can only blame big corporations and other liberal bogeymen for so long. The truth is that corrupt machine politics in a one-party system devoted to the blue social model wrecked an entire city and thousands of lives beyond repair. The sooner blues come to terms with this reality, the greater chance other cities will have of avoiding Detroit’s fate.

 

[Old Sweat]

When I read this in the Saturday Citizen I thought maybe somebody was having us on, but I soon realized the writer is bemoaning the good, old Trudeau days in the Public Service when there was oodles of other peoples' money to spend. If you wonder why we have a genormous national debt, read on. The article is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright act.


The good old days of the public service

By Stewart Goodings, Ottawa Citizen July 18, 2013

What sort of government agency still manages to hold reunions 20 years after it was abolished? Why bother remembering a department so long after it disappeared?

This summer, former staff in the Secretary of State Department held a 20 year party to recognize the year it was eliminated. At this time of angst about civil servants, I started to wonder about memories and loyalties of those who used to work in government agencies, and those who still do.

I spent 13 years in SecState, over two periods, 1971 to 78, and 1986 to 92. I started out as a junior policy officer, and finished as an ADM. While I enjoyed nearly all of my 40 plus years as a civil servant, SecState was the best place I ever worked.

It was a combination of factors; the people, the mission, the challenges, the time.

In the 1970s, it was the era of government expansion and social experimentation — new citizens groups to nurture, new social issues — gender equality — to support, new policies — such as official languages, and multiculturalism — to implement. Canadian culture was on the rise, the afterglow of Expo 67 was still alive, and we had an amazing minister in Gérard Pelletier, who actually respected his civil servants and who had an inquiring and open mind. And as for the bureaucratic leaders in the department, we had Bernard Ostry, Peter Roberts, D’Iberville Fortier, among others — outstanding and creative officials who encouraged their staff to be brave and inventive.

A few days after I arrived, I was called to the under secretary’s office. I viewed Jules Léger almost as a god, in civil service terms. Why did he want to see me, a lowly new hire in a policy shop? Amazingly, he simply wanted to welcome me to the department, and urge me to work hard and enjoy the experience of being a civil servant, as he had been for many years. He was thoughtful to speak in both French and English, a lesson in bilingualism and courtesy I was to observe frequently in SecState.

Can anyone imagine today a deputy minister taking the time to greet a new arrival in the department as Jules Léger did to me in 1971?

Official languages. This was a daily reality in the Secretary of State department. It was never forced, rarely preached, it just happened. There was no other department where the use of both languages seemed so natural and normal. Partly I suppose it was the mandate — we had responsibility for the Translation Bureau, but more than that, it was a reflection of the respect people had for each other and for the languages we had grown up with.

Fast forward to 1987 when I joined the department for the second time. I had spent almost 10 years in the British Columbia civil service before returning to Ottawa and I felt as if I were coming home. This time I was a supposed “big cheese”, but I remembered my Jules Léger lesson and started monthly coffee gatherings for new staff in my education sector.

We had an equally charismatic minister at the time — David Crombie, the former mayor of Toronto. When Deputy Minister Jean Fournier first introduced me to Crombie, I brought a smile to his face when I told him, “Minister, I think you and I will be able to see eye to eye on most issues.” We were both, shall we say, of diminutive stature. Crombie used to frustrate the staff because we would spend hours drafting speeches for him, for which he would thank us most graciously, and then completely put aside as he wove his own brand of off the cuff eloquence. He was a proud patriot and we always knew “Captain Canada” believed in the mission of the department.


In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the issues were more complex, the fiscal pressures more demanding. We did not have the latitude to create as many new programs as we did in the 1970s. But the commitment to serve the citizens of the country was as strong as ever. And when there was a success in one part of the department — for example, the Japanese-Canadian redress initiative — everyone celebrated.

For me, one of the happiest policy files was the Official Languages in Education one, where we helped, along with the provinces and territories, to promote French and English in the schools across the country. I recall visiting tiny francophone communities in Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, and Yukon and seeing the pride among parents and grandparents as their offspring regained the use of their mother tongue. I saw the passion of English-speaking Canadians who wanted to give their children the gift of a second language, and now 25 years later, it is gratifying to note the continuing growth of French immersion education in every part of the country.

By the time SecState was abolished in 1993, in one of the system’s great re-organizational convulsions, I had left to join the faculty at the Canadian Centre for Management Development. But I shared the sense of loss felt by my former colleagues as this ancient department, in existence since Confederation, bit the dust.

But astonishingly, arising out of the ashes of this collapse, came annual reunions where former SecState friends met and shared stories of their common pasts, and got caught up on the latest public service gossip. I attended a few in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and found no bitterness, just pleasure at being able to reminisce about “the good old days.” We were fellow veterans of the civil service wars, and we wore our scars and medals happily.

And now, 20 years after the final Day of Destruction, former staff, both senior and junior are acknowledging this “abolition anniversary” of a Department that attracted many of the best and brightest of their generation.

And I wonder whether current public servants will have similar memories and loyalties long after their working days are over?

Stewart Goodings is a retired federal public servant.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Labour is replaceable, not interchangeable.  This is not well understood by most supervisors today, who speak in terms of "resources".

A desktop computer is a "resource".  If it breaks, you can replace it with one which will function identically.  Good luck finding a person who can exactly replace the functionality of another.

 

[Good2Golf]

...outstanding and creative officials who encouraged their staff to be brave and inventive...

...with others' money.

Interesting that it was the very same party responsible for the heady days of social experimentation in the late-60s, 70s and early-80s that killed SecState in 93...

Perhaps that's more telling than anything when even those accustomed to largess adopt a more restrained approach...

This piece would be more acceptable/believable as a piece of satire from either extent of the political spectrum than a Liberally-indoctrinated individual...it smacks of inadvertently rubbing most of society's nose in it while trying to paint high-level institutional cronyism as a gallant cause...

...blechhh!...  ( <- Spelled out because I can't find the 'vomiting' icon on my phone.)

 

[Old Sweat]

G2G, exactly why I posted it. I do think the same function - going through oodles of borrowed money - could have been achieved by one person feeding sheets of fifty dollar bills fresh from the Bank of Canada into a shreader.

I fear back in the seventies Ottawa was full of this sort of thinking as money was no issue and careers were being made by inventing ways to spend, spend, spend.

 

[Edward Campbell]

The misery index was developed by American economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s. Put simply, it adds the inflation rate to the unemployment rate. Both, Okun opined, are dangerous to society: unemployment (too much unemployment, anyway) for obvious reasons but inflation is a danger because it destroys savings.

The Canadian misery index was around 10 for decades until about 1967 - when Pierre Trudeau took office when it began a long, steady climb until, in 1981 and 82, at the end of Trudeau's last government it plateaued at 27. (The worst it ever got in the USA was 22, during the Carter administration.)

Inflation is fuelled, directly, by government spending and Pierre Trudeau spent like a drunken sailor. During his tenure government spending rose from 17.1% of GDP to 24.3% - a 42% increase over the entire period. Both unemployment and inflation increased markedly and steadily while Pierre Trudeau was prime minister; both increased because he, consciously, adopted dangerous, unsound socialist policies that killed both jobs and savings/investment.

It was, I suppose, a golden age for Stewart Goodings and other poorly educated, irresponsible, silk stocking socialists. And they probably did believe in what they were doing, but: the "best and the brightest?" In a department responsible for bilingual education and the Canada Day ceremonies? It was a sad, sick joke that the Government of Canada played on credulous young Canadians who weren't bright enough to join PCO, Finance or Treasury or even Public Blunders and Wonders (as we used to call Public Buildings and Works, now PWGSC). Secretary of State was a notorious dumping ground for superannuated has beens, and D'Iberville Fortier and Jules Léger fit that bill to a T; they were second string diplomats, they rose to the "top," but of the smallest heap - ambassadors to places like Mexico City and Brussels, they were not posted to Washington, Bonn and Tokyo nor even London and Paris.


Edit: capitalization  :-[

 

[Edward Campbell]

The misery index was developed by American economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s. Put simply, it adds the inflation rate to the unemployment rate. Both, Okun opined, are dangerous to society: unemployment (too much unemployment, anyway) for obvious reasons but inflation is a danger because it destroys savings.

The Canadian misery index was around 10 for decades until about 1967 - when Pierre Trudeau took office when it began a long, steady climb until, in 1981 and 82, at the end of Trudeau's last government it plateaued at 27. (The worst it ever got in the USA was 22, during the Carter administration.)

Inflation is fuelled, directly, by government spending and Pierre Trudeau spent like a drunken sailor. During his tenure government spending rose from 17.1% of GDP to 24.3% - a 42% increase over the entire period. Both unemployment and inflation increased markedly and steadily while Pierre Trudeau was prime minister; both increased because he, consciously, adopted dangerous, unsound socialist policies that killed both jobs and savings/investment.

It was, I suppose, a golden age for Stewart Goodings and other poorly educated, irresponsible, silk stocking socialists. And they probably did believe in what they were doing, but: the "best and the brightest?" In a department responsible for bilingual education and the Canada Day ceremonies? It was a sad, sick joke that the Government of Canada played on credulous young Canadians who weren't bright enough to join PCO, Finance or Treasury or even Public Blunders and Wonders (as we used to call Public Buildings and Works, now PWGSC). Secretary of State was a notorious dumping ground for superannuated has beens, and D'Iberville Fortier and Jules Léger fit that bill to a T; they were second string diplomats, they rose to the "top," but of the smallest heap - ambassadors to places like Mexico City and Brussels, they were not posted to Washington, Bonn and Tokyo nor even London and Paris.


Edit: capitalization  :-[

That's slightly worse than Greece in 2013. Although unemployment is approaching 27% the economy is actually deflating (at (as of May 2013) -0.40%) so the Greek misery index is probably at about 26. The most recent misery index for Canada, in early 2013, was 7.8.

 

[a_majoor]

Sometimes the commentary is even better than the post. This talks about art, but the takeaway line is how "progressives" have set up the institutions of the Progressive State: to circumvent the preferences of the public and how they’d spend their own money voluntarily.

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/04/aesthetes-take-heed.html?cid=6a00d83451675669e2019102dab52b970c#comment-6a00d83451675669e2019102dab52b970c

We are heading to the era of ‘Meh’… Art therefore has increasingly no meaning, no relevance and eventually no observers.

Well, it’s often hard to distinguish between supposedly daring contemporary art and the kind of momentarily amusing tat I sometimes include in the ephemera posts. And while I’m happy to browse tat online, and laugh at it, I’m not so keen to waste an afternoon in a local gallery doing much the same thing, even though I’m forced to pay for it. But I’d imagine there’s always something worth seeing, somewhere. Whether that something ever finds its way into the local modish galleries may be another matter, and whether modish galleries will retain much of a connection with things worth seeing is another matter again. The things that please the eye may not even be recognised by artistic institutions.

Part of it, I think, is that the gatekeepers of such places often favour art that affects cleverness and political radicalism and thus flatters the gatekeepers’ own imagined cleverness. And so we get taxpayer-bankrolled tossers who tell us they’re “exploring” and “interrogating” something or other (in ways never made clear or discernible) and that they’re “trespassing upon patriarchal society” with “acts of resistance,” etc - all while presenting nothing you’d care to look at, except perhaps as farce or a joke at your expense.

Often, what’s funded and given space isn’t meant to be visually pleasing, or memorable, or even competent; it’s meant to be clever, at least in theory. As the critic Brian Ashbee wrote back in 1999, much of the art that’s in favour among our betters “isn’t art to be looked at; this is art to talk about and write about. It doesn’t reward visual attention; it generates text.” Which is to say, it exists for the benefit of a tiny minority of insecure incompetents who are part of the same subsidy-seeking hustle. And as they already have your money, extorted via taxation and dished out by the Arts Council, why should they care whether anyone turns up? Why should they care what you, the lowly punter, think?

[ Added: ]

Whether or not Barney The Pseudo-Artist gets that £20,000 grant has very little to do – probably nothing to do – with whether the public likes what he produces, or with whether anyone will even turn up to look at it once it’s been paid for. Which is why you can browse sites like Vimeo and find dozens of taxpayer-funded videos promoting these taxpayer-funded art events, the stats of which reveal that almost no-one was interested in watching them. Typically, we’re talking about less than fifty views, often less than ten, and sometimes none at all. Which doesn’t exactly suggest that these events were meeting some vast and hitherto neglected public appetite. But that’s the whole point of the Arts Council - to circumvent the preferences of the public and how they’d spend their own money voluntarily.

And the more fatuous and uninteresting such art events are, the more likely you are to hear a lot of ponderous bollocks. For instance, the creative titan behind the laughably bad Unrealised Potential ‘event’ describes himself like this:

My art practice is interdisciplinary and research led, framed by an exploration into revealing the ‘myth’ of the artist’s vision against the audience reading. I intend to expand and challenge an audiences experience whilst offering alternative bridges/means to interpret; this is usually through multi-part works that sit between ‘performance’ and ‘curation’. However it is the continual habit of cross-referencing seemingly opposing disciplines, narrative structures and interpretative motifs that invigorate my critical concerns/subtext to my work/projects as this paves the way to widen cultural gaps and make transparent ideological conditioning for a non-didactic ‘creative frequency’.

Readers are welcome to suggest how that statement might relate to or improve the actual crap on show.

Alternative funding models like Kickstarter and Indigogo will liberate real artists (who have some skill or talent) from having to bootlick for government funding, and with the oncoming era of bankruptcy the fatuous psudo artists (and most other people on the public teat) will be cut free. Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are marvelous tools because they circumvent the preferences of the bureaucracy and how they’d spend the public's money involuntarily.

 

[pbi]

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."  (Sir Winston Churchill,)

Having read over this lengthy and interesting thread, and reflected a bit on the evolution of my own political perspective over the years, I'd have to say that I've experienced almost a reverse effect from what Churchill identified above. Almost.

I guess I'm that despicable creature that Righties and Lefties equally hate: a pragmatist. I'm highly suspicious of mouth-foamers, shrill screamers and demagogues from either end of the spectrum. I find that they pretty much all share the same nasty characteristic: they are very sure that they know how everybody else should live their lives, and that anybody who differs from their line of thought is a mindless drone serving evil interests.

While (so far...) our political culture has largely been spared the collapse of reasonable political discourse that seems to have happened in the US over the last few years, it does seem to me to be something to watch out for. If important issues of public policy end up as die-in-the-ditch screaming matches between doctrinaire righties and lefties, with little or no genuine search for common ground to get things done, society suffers.

So here are a few random thoughts :

-"Other Peoples' Money": if the fact that an agency is publicly funded somehow cheapens the value of what it does, or calls into question the motives and abilities of its members, where does that leave the military, the police or the fire service?;

-"The Nanny State": at what point does reasonable and necessary government regulation for the public good (transportation safety, workplace health and safety, anti-discrimination, etc) become excessive to the point that it actually weakens society and strangles (or, at least, constricts) the economy? But then again, what's the track record for "de-regulation" or letting industry "police itself"?;

-"Smash the Rich": why do so many people "out there" on the Left fail to understand that business is the engine of everything, and that squashing business by punitive "feel good" corporate taxes or ridiculous labour policies will slowly shut that engine down, thus removing the goose that lays the funding egg for social programs and general prosperity?;

-"The Good Old Days"why do so many people on the Right want to turn the clock back to some imaginary "good old days" that (on closer factual examination, as opposed to fond myth-mongering) either never existed at all, or existed only for those people who "fit in"? Why does this often seem to coexist with deep suspicion (if not outright hatred) for anybody who is "different"? (immigrant, native, gay, whatever...)?;

-"Death, Prisons and Crime": Some people need to be executed, right now. They are never going to be rehabilitated and their hideous acts should forfeit their further existence. The spending of public money on them is offensive. On the other hand, what actual good does slamming people into the prison environment achieve, especially young people? If you've ever been inside a penitentiary, or know anybody who works in one, I think you might ask yourself just what kind of person we are putting back on the street after ten or fifteen years. (Maybe we should also ask what kind of a person they were before they went into the digger.) I doubt that the "official" CSC recidivism rate tells the full story: do released prisoners really go on to lead productive, non-threatening lives due to their itme in the prison? Is society really served? Or are these people just "warehoused" for a while, so we feel better about it?  "Get tough on crime" to me rings hollow if doesn't deal with the sources of the problem. It's like extinguishing a burning building but never finding out why it caught fire in the first place, so we can reduce the number of fires;

-"Watching the Watchers" Like many social conservatives, I believe that police must have the authority and the weapons to use lethal force when it's needed, and I believe that we must be very fair,careful and precise in how we judge the actions of those men and women we put in harm's way. But, like many on the "liberal" end of the spectrum, I am also 100% sure that we still must judge those actions, and that the police must be subject to broad public scrutiny, and held to a much higher standard of behaviour than Joe Citizen. ;

-"Education and Society"shouldn't a public education system be an important part of the social glue that helps to hold us together? Civic virtues; knowldge and love of country; understanding of people who are different, are to me all things that I believe a good public education system produces. If we follow some vocal people on the Right and encourage middle class families (ie: most Canadian families) to hive their children off into private schools, charter schools, home schools, religious schools, etc, who will be left in the public schools other than the sick poor and lazy? If the public education system is damaged, fix it, don't scrap it. On the other end of things, why do so many people on the Left seem to think that "education" means chanting endless paeans to political correctness, avoiding critical thought on social issues, and not teaching children about responsibility, duty and dealing with failure? I went to high school in the 1970's, at the peak of the Leftie madness in education in Ontario, so I have sme idea what I'm talking about here;

That's enough (or too much, maybe...) The older I get, the more I subscribe to that line from the movie "V for Vendetta":

"People should not fear their governments; governments should fear the people"

And therein, IMHO, lies the real problem. Governments will fear an educated and politically active population that remembers, thinks critically, and gets out there to vote. Until that accurately describes the Canadian electorate, we will get the government we deserve.

Cheers

 

[Kirkhill]

:goodpost:

 

[Remius]

Best thing I've read in a while.  I'm stealing that.

Milpoints inbound.

 

[Brad Sallows]

"Respect the dignity of all persons" is my preferred summary.  It essentially precludes exploitation, mistreatment, and dictating how others should live their own lives.  It is a remarkably libertarian principle.

 

[a_majoor]

People without a sense of history are astonished that the Obama Administration is working to muzzel opposing political groups, any press which is not on board with them and otherwise trampling on the Constitutional rights of Americans. A short history lesson from the period of the "New Deal". As an aside, this sort of behaviour really came ito its own with the Wilson Administration...

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/354706/print

The New Deal Witch Hunt
Federal targeting and intimidation of conservatives is nothing new.
By  David T. Beito

Watergate has become the default historical template for the Obama scandals, as charges about enemies lists, executive-agency politicization, and high-handed federal snooping dominate the discussion. But those hunting for historical analogies would do well to consider the even closer parallels between these events and occurrences during the New Deal and Fair Deal.

Franklin D. Roosevelt routinely audited the income taxes of such critics as Representative Hamilton Fish, a Republican who represented the president’s hometown of Hyde Park, N.Y. Democrats of that era not only found creative ways to intimidate conservative and libertarian organizations, but also, like their modern counterparts, eventually attracted charges of witch-hunting.

The modern Tea Party, however, has yet to find a more effective symbol of defiance than Edward A. Rumely. Though he is largely forgotten today, the publisher’s appearance in June 1950 before a special House committee to investigate lobbying was a defining moment.
When Rumely showed up to testify, nobody was quite sure what he would say. For the most part, he answered the committee’s questions, but he stood his ground on one issue: He refused to name the Americans who had purchased a book critical of the New Deal. Pointing to the First Amendment, he asserted that the committee had “no power to go into a newspaper publisher and say, ‘Give me your subscription list.’ And you have no power to come to us.” If the House wanted to cite him for contempt, then he promised to give it “an education on the Bill of Rights.” Chairman Frank Buchanan warned that the unfriendly witness risked a contempt resolution, and vowed not to “divert this hearing into an argument over constitutional rights.”

The elderly, affluent, and bespectacled Rumely seemed an unlikely free-speech martyr. He was born in La Porte, Ind., in 1882 and helped run the family tractor-manufacturing business. His first political experience was as a loyal ally of Theodore Roosevelt, and he depicted himself as a Square Dealer for the rest of his life.

In 1915, Rumely purchased the New York Evening Mail as a means to promote Roosevelt’s political agenda and presidential ambitions. To make the purchase, Rumely used funds borrowed from Hermann Sielcken, an American citizen living in Germany. After the U.S. declared war on that country, Rumely reported this transaction to the Alien Property Custodian. In 1918, however, the federal government charged that Rumely had violated the Trading with the Enemy Act, claiming that he had concealed the German government’s role. Rumely responded that he had not known at the time that German law required that all such loans had to be first funneled through that government. Although the alleged offense occurred two years before the U.S. entered the war, Rumely was convicted under the Act and, after appealing the case, briefly served time in 1923. When it later become known that the federal government had refused to allow Sielcken back into the U.S. to testify, a majority of the jurors, the trial judge, the prosecuting attorney, and U.S. Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone all recommended clemency. Although President Coolidge responded by issuing a full pardon, Rumely’s enemies brought up the case repeatedly over the next three decades.

During the 1930s, Rumely formed an alliance with other New Deal critics, including newspaper publisher Frank Gannett and the well-known conservationist and civil libertarian Amos Pinchot. On the same day that Franklin Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan in 1937, the trio organized the Committee for Constitutional Government (CCG). Gannett wrote the checks, and Rumely ran day-to-day operations. CCG led perhaps the first successful offensive against the New Deal, pioneering the use of direct mail and helping to defeat the court-packing plan.

It didn’t take long for Democrats to strike back. In 1938, Senator Sherman Minton of Indiana announced a sweeping investigation of lobbies, targeting forces opposed to “the objectives of the administration.” Minton-committee staff arrived en masse at CCG’s office, where they began copying files. After watching this for several hours, Rumely ordered them out, charging them with an illegal “fishing expedition.” Minton’s undoing, however, was his proposal to make it a felony “to publish as a fact anything known to be false.” The resulting public backlash over a perceived threat to free speech led to the collapse of the investigation. Over the next decade, CCG distributed over 82 million pieces of literature criticizing such policies as expanded government medical insurance, public housing, and labor legislation.

After Harry S. Truman’s 1948 upset victory, Democrats vowed to scrutinize “lobbies” (broadly defined) such as CCG. The New Republic declared triumphantly that the “New Deal is again empowered to carry forward the promise of American life” and that it was high time to investigate “the great lobbies and the millions they have spent . . . to defeat social legislation.” The AFL and CIO agreed on this goal, as did two of the best-read columnists in America, Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell. Because of haggling about whether to appoint a joint House-Senate committee (and who would be in charge), however, the congressional investigation did not begin until early 1950.

Meanwhile, CCG increased the pressure by promoting John T. Flynn’s book The Road Ahead, which warned that pro–New Deal pressure groups were pushing the U.S. into socialism. Harper and Brothers sold it for $2.50, but CCG sold it under its own imprint for $1 or less, creating an incentive to purchase copies in bulk. In the first six months, CCG distributed over 700,000 copies.

Chairing the investigation was Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat who had an axe to grind: CCG had successfully fought expansions of public housing, a goal he had championed. Buchanan defined lobbies in the broadest possible terms — including even groups that had an indirect influence on public opinion. The committee sent out a probing questionnaire to over 170 businesses and organizations, most of them opposed to Truman’s Fair Deal.

By the time Rumely made his famous appearance and refused to name the purchasers of The Road Ahead, the press was already turning against the Buchanan committee. Editor and Publisher found it guilty of “an invasion of the guaranteed right of the American people to own, hire or use a printing press without interference.” Similarly the Cleveland Plain Dealer called the investigation “Fair Deal Intimidation.” Even Buchanan’s hometown paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, condemned the probe.

When Rumely refused to name names, the committee presented a contempt resolution to the full House in August 1950. In the floor debate, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, the Democratic majority leader, resorted to language as extreme as just about any uttered by Joseph McCarthy. He condemned Rumely as “a spy in World War I, and a man who is nothing but a fascist, who is an opponent of American institutions and American government.” The resolution narrowly passed on a mostly partisan vote.

The investigation had a chilling effect on CCG; formerly dependable contributors closed their wallets, expressing fear of being named and targeted. Badly weakened, CCG faded away by the end of the decade.

Even so, Rumely had the last laugh in his legal case. In 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the contempt-of-Congress resolution. In a concurring opinion, the Court’s most liberal members, William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, endorsed Rumely’s free-speech and privacy rights in no uncertain terms. They described the Buchanan committee’s demands as “the beginning of surveillance of the press.”

By this time, some prominent liberal Democrats were losing their appetite for investigative crusades against the Right. One factor was that they were too busy beating back McCarthyism. By upholding Rumely’s free-speech rights, they could better fend off charges of hypocrisy. Even before the House cited Rumely for contempt, for example, the pro–New Deal columnist Marquis Childs pointed to him as an example of how the First Amendment protected “rightists” just as much as Communists. Later, lawyers for two victims of McCarthyism, Owen Lattimore and Corliss Lamont, cited U.S. v. Rumely in defense of their clients. Rumely had become a case study in the need to protect free speech.

It was quite a turnabout for a man whom only a few years earlier the Left had roundly condemned as a fascist, federal convict, and German spy.

— David T. Beito is a professor of history at the University of Alabama and author of Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.

 

[Shrek1985]

really glad i found this thread

 

[pbi]

People without a sense of history are astonished that the Obama Administration is working to muzzel opposing political groups, any press which is not on board with them and otherwise trampling on the Constitutional rights of Americans. A short history lesson from the period of the "New Deal". As an aside, this sort of behaviour really came ito its own with the Wilson Administration...

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/354706/print

Sort of like McCarthyism, but in the opposite direction...

 

[a_majoor]

The end of the Progressive project will not occur because of political activists (although they will certaily work hard to achieve that goal), but rather through the collapse of its own institutions through failure, internal contradictions and the sheer drain on other resources that Progressivism entails. This is actually the "good" version of the story; the "bad" ending is when the collapse of the Progressive State in violent and uncontrolled. One can only hope the revulsion of the people will be enough to allow for the controlled drawdown rather than the collapse. The positive note of private insurance exchanges rising in parallel to Obamacare shows one way of achieving the drawdown (markets like this can expand to replace much of Medicare and Medicaid as well. I also like the irony of using Revolutionary Warfare Theory against progressive institutions [the theory of parallel governments]):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304526204579097443230322758.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

Daniel Henninger: Let ObamaCare Collapse Congress can't kill the entitlement state. Only the American people can.
By DANIEL HENNINGER 

What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.

As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.

If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.

No matter what Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies do, ObamaCare won't die. It would return another day in some other incarnation. The Democrats would argue, rightly, that the ideas inside ObamaCare weren't defeated. What the Democrats would lose is a vote in Congress, nothing more.

A political idea, once it becomes a national program, achieves legitimacy with the public. Over time, that legitimacy deepens. So it has been with the idea of national social insurance.

German Chancellor Otto von Bismark's creation of a social insurance system in the 19th century spread through Europe. After the devastation of World War I, few questioned its need. In the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security system was seen as an antidote to the Depression. The public's three-decade support for the idea allowed Lyndon Johnson to pass the Medicare and Medicaid entitlements even in the absence of an economic crisis.

Going back at least to the Breaux-Thomas Medicare Commission in 1999, endless learned bodies have warned that the U.S. entitlement scheme of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is financially unsupportable. Of Medicare, Rep. Bill Thomas said at the time, "One of the biggest problems is that the government tries to administer 10,000 prices in 3,000 counties, and it gets it wrong most of the time." But change never comes.

Medicaid is the worst medicine in the United States. It grinds on. Doctors in droves are withdrawing from Medicare. No matter. It all lives on.

An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

Six months ago, that didn't seem likely. Now it does.

The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM IBM -1.73% are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity.

But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.

Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems.

Recalling Rep. Thomas's 1999 remark about Medicare setting prices for 3,000 counties, there is already mispricing of ObamaCare's insurance policies inside the exchanges set up in the states.

The odds of ObamaCare's eventual self-collapse look stronger every day. After that happens, then what? Try truly universal health insurance? Not bloody likely if the aghast U.S. public has any say.

Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger on why the failure of universal healthcare may finally discredit the broader entitlement state. Photos: Associated Press

Enacted with zero Republican votes, ObamaCare is the solely owned creation of the Democrats' belief in their own limitless powers to fashion goodness out of legislated entitlements. Sometimes social experiments go wrong. In the end, the only one who supported Frankenstein was Dr. Frankenstein. The Democrats in 2014 should by all means be asked relentlessly to defend their monster.

Republicans and conservatives, instead of tilting at the defunding windmill, should be working now to present the American people with the policy ideas that will emerge inevitably when ObamaCare's declines. The system of private insurance exchanges being adopted by the likes of Walgreens suggests a parallel alternative to ObamaCare may be happening already.

If Republicans feel they must "do something" now, they could get behind Sen. David Vitter's measure to force Congress to enter the burning ObamaCare castle along with the rest of the American people. Come 2017, they can repeal the ruins.

The discrediting of the entitlement state begins next Tuesday. Let it happen.

 

[a_majoor]

A comment from a reader of Instapundit gets it right. The Progressive State wants to eliminate the "small platoons" and leave people naked in front of the Leviathan:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/176843/?show-at-comment=284251#comment-284251

Joseph White
The long-term goal of the government's social policies are to flatten society out into one atomized mass. There will be only the state and the individual, and the individual will have no protection, no mediating institutions, between itself and the state. Antipathy towards a wide variety of actors--the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, "special interests" of all types, political parties, private universities--can all be understood in light of this fact. The government reserves special hatred for the family, because the family is older than the state and, unless steps are taken, will outlast it. It gives the individual a locus of attention besides the state, and therefore, must be crushed. The ongoing destruction of the concepts of both marriage and family by the left is intended to remove permanently the transcendent family from the political sphere, leaving only mere biological relationships, which are not enough to inspire resistance to the state.

 

[Kilo_302]

I'm far more worried about the corporate state than the "entitlement" state. As far as I am concerned, business interests have already won. We are living in the gilded age again, and the the rights won by the labour movement earlier this century have been clawed back. Our governments in the west have largely gone from their traditional role as protectors of capitalism (negotiating with the more radical leftist movements to ensure the survival of the corporate elite) to merely protecting capital. The money and corruption in politics tells the story. I don't think any of us will be enjoying life in Canada if things continue along the current path.

I would add that the idea that Obama is somehow progressive is misguided. He presides over undeclared wars, torture, the massive bail outs of the crooks on Wall Street (probably the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history) and his healthcare package is really just a hand out to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, NOT the American people. I'm with you on the dislike of Obama, but from a left perspective I suppose. I have my problems with what passes for the "left" these days. It's pretty pathetic. So gays can marry? Who cares? That's social window dressing.  That doesn't address the economic catastrophe we are faced with, or the growing inequality that will inevitably cause a collapse of some kind.

What we need is a REAL left, a radical left that is not afraid of class debate. They should never hold power, and they never really have in a democracy. Their role is to balance the power of capital through negotiating with the state. Is that system perfect? Of course not, but it's preferable to the inverted totalitarianism we have now, and the neo-feudalism we are swiftly approaching.

The irony is that the far right and the far left (of which I suppose I am a part, though I have my problems with Occupy etc etc so I hesitate to define myself on any spectrum) actually agree on many things now. For the right, government is problem, for the left, corporate power is the problem, but we agree there IS a problem. I think the reality is simply that corporate power IS the government and vice versa. It's a revolving door, they're all the same people, and they're breathing different air than us. We are all right to be angry, but let's not head down the destructive road of blaming the poor, blaming social programs, or blaming the idea of government. History has shown us that in times like these, ideas like that are extremely dangerous. In fact we could start a thread titled "Deconstructing Conservative Thought,"  the only problem is what passes as conservative these days is actually extreme economic liberalism. REAL traditional conservatives would be in favour of regulation, more concerned with conserving the environment and so on. The fact that the polices being bandied back and forth on this thread would directly aid corporate power only confirms for me that they have won and there is no hope.

 

[Kirkhill]

Curious timing - an interesting firestorm in Britain.

Ed Milliband has come out and declared his intention to continue his father's dream and make Britain socialist.

A Daily Mail journalist has revisited Ed's father's record.

Ed has attacked the attack on his father.

Cameron, Johnson and Clegg have piled on the Journalist.

Other journalists point out that the article attacked the father's record, words and beliefs and not the man.

I quote the full article and link to the responses.

Some interesting references - Socialism, LSE, Laski, - walking the same streets as Trudeau the elder.

No points for guessing my positions on the discussion.

The man who hated Britain: Red Ed's pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country
By GEOFFREY LEVY
PUBLISHED: 21:50 GMT, 27 September 2013 | UPDATED: 12:53 GMT, 1 October 2013


On a hot summer day, a young man made his way alone to Highgate Cemetery in North London to make a lifelong vow.
Solemnly, he stood at the grave of Karl Marx at a moment when, in his own words, 'the cemetery was utterly deserted . . . I remember standing in front of the grave, fist clenched, and swearing my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers' cause'.
The year was 1940. The young man was Ralph Miliband, a Jewish immigrant who, with his father, had fled to London from Belgium just weeks earlier to escape the Nazi Holocaust.


Miliband, father of Ed and David Miliband, died in 1994, aged 70, soon after the publication of his last book, Socialism For A Sceptical Age. In it, the venerated Marxist philosopher and academic continued to espouse his lifelong 'socialist' cause.
One voice, however, vehemently informed him that he was still pursuing a lost cause. It was that of his elder son David. He did not mince his words.
Having read the manuscript before publication, David wrote to his father asking, 'whether you are restating a case that has been traduced in theory or practice, or whether you are advancing a new case. I think that the book reads like the former . . .'



The word 'traduced' - which means 'disgraced' or 'denigrated' - was surely rather harsh, considering his aged father had always included his two sons (even when they were small), in the trenchant political discussions with ever-present academics and Left-wing thinkers that took place round the basement dining table of the family home in Primrose Hill, North London.

Indeed, some family friends feel this episode, not long before their father died, could have been a contributory factor towards the younger - and considerably more Left-wing - son Ed unexpectedly deciding to fight his elder brother for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2010, and, of course, beating him.

In his explosive memoirs, serialised last week in the Mail, Gordon Brown's spin doctor Damian McBride argued that Ed Miliband was obsessed with maintaining his father's legacy. Winning the leadership was Ed's 'ultimate tribute' to his father - an attempt to 'achieve his father's vision and ensure David Miliband did not traduce it'. Again, that word 'traduce'.

Ed is now determined to bring about that vision. How proud Ralph would have been to hear him responding the other day to a man in the street who asked when he was 'going to bring back socialism' with the words: 'That's what we are doing, sir.'

Ed's victory over David, made possible only with the unions' block votes, was perfectly in step with his father's fervent and undimmed conviction that 'alliance with the trade unions is not only one of the party's great strengths; it is by far its greatest strength'.

Ralph's Marxism was uncompromising. 'We want this party to state that it stands unequivocally behind the social ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange,' he told the 1955 Labour conference, as the delegate from Hampstead. 'We are a socialist party engaged on a great adventure.'

This was the immigrant boy whose first act in Britain was to discard his name Adolphe because of its associations with Hitler, and become Ralph, and who helped his father earn a living rescuing furniture from bombed houses in the Blitz.

As for the country that gave him and his family protection, the 17-year-old wrote in his diary: 'The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.'

This adolescent distaste for the British character certainly didn't stop him availing himself of the fine education that was on offer in this country, or spending the rest of his life here.

'The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.'

Quickly learning English, he got a place at the London School of Economics (LSE), which had then moved temporarily to Cambridge to avoid the bombing, and there he was taught politics by Harold Laski, a giant of Labour's Left, whom some Tories considered to be a dangerous Marxist revolutionary.
Laski was Miliband's mentor, his inspiration, the figure who encouraged his growing interest in Karl Marx.

Ralph Miliband then served three years in the Royal Navy, returning when the war was over to his studies at the LSE, and within a few years was teaching there himself.

He was already on his way to becoming a heavyweight thinker in the kind of political and academic circles whose pronouncements often attracted attention.

Joyfully, Miliband described Labour's 1945 post-war election victory as 'the country's capture from its traditional rulers'.
He relished what he called the 'genuine sense of outrage . . . of bourgeois England', adding that 'the nationalisation proposals of the government were designed to achieve the sole purpose of improving the efficiency of a capitalist economy'.

In later years, he chose to ignore the lamentable performance of nationalisation, which proved to be anything but efficient.
But how passionately he would have approved today of his son's sinister warning about some of the policies he plans to follow if he ever becomes Prime Minister. Such as giving councils draconian new powers to seize into public ownership land held by developers who fail to build on it.
Miliband senior's academic career took him away for several years to be professor of politics at Leeds University, where he missed the stiffer intellectual clashes he enjoyed in London, and to America.

Meanwhile, in 1961, he had married Marion Kozak, one of his former students at the LSE, and their first son David was born in 1965, with Ed following four years later.

David was given a second name, Wright. As Miliband's biographer Michael Newman explains, this was in honour of his father's American friend, the sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose 1956 book, The Power Elite, suggested that the political, military and economic elites control power at the expense of ordinary people.


Mills claimed that these elites see themselves as separate from, and superior to, the rest of society, and manipulate events to suit their own interests.
Ralph Miliband himself, in his 1969 book The State In Capitalist Society, declared: 'Advanced capitalism is all but synonymous with giant enterprise; and nothing about the economic organisation of these countries is more basically important than the increasing domination of key sectors ... industrial, financial and commercial ... by a relatively small number of giant firms, often interlinked.'

So he would also have applauded his son Ed's proclamation that, as Prime Minister, he would cap energy prices - an announcement that has already knocked billions off share prices, affecting many ordinary workers' pension funds.

As for the class war, Ralph Miliband declared: 'Class success means the ability of a dominant class to maintain its position in society, and to contain and subdue any challenge to its power and privileges. This is what has happened in Britain.'

He also made plain his disdain for the Establishment, which was, to his mind, nothing less than the old boy network.

This included, he wrote in a letter to his old friend Wright Mills, 'Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, the Times, the Church, the Army, the respectable Sunday papers . . . It also means the values . . . of the ruling orders, keep the workers in their place, strengthen the House of Lords, maintain social hierarchies, God save the Queen, equality is bunk, democracy is dangerous, etc.

'Also respectability, good taste, don't rock the boat, there will always be an England, foreigners, Jews, natives etc are all right in their place and their place is outside . . .'

'Class success means the ability of a dominant class to maintain its position in society, and to contain and subdue any challenge to its power and privileges. This is what has happened in Britain.'

Given this tirade, one is entitled to wonder whether Ralph Miliband's Marxism was actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder as he lived in his adoptive country.

He opposed the Falklands War with such a ferocity that he even swore - a rare occurrence - at the sight of Margaret Thatcher's soaring popularity.
'I won't write about the f****** Falklands now. It's a most depressing and bitter business and it seems to have turned Thatcher into a major political figure,' he said.

'I mean that her brand of Toryism may now come to predominate. The Falklands has served her well . . . if she is returned at the next election England will look a very different country than even in 1979.'

Though they were friends, he never agreed with his fellow Marxist Eric Hobsbawm over the latter's refusal to condemn Stalinism's 30 million dead, or the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, on the grounds that the socialist end always justified the means. Relations between them deteriorated when Hobsbawn suggested in an article in Marxism Today in 1983 that the Left might prefer 'a Thatcher government to a reformist Labour government' in which they had lost faith.

Hobsbawn was invited to the Milibands' for New Year's Eve and the two ended up having a terrific row, but they later made it up.
Like all Left-wing thinkers, Ralph Miliband knew how to explain away awkward events.

Mikhail Gorbachev's dismantling of Soviet socialism and the worker state should have shocked Miliband, but he managed to find an argument welcoming it.

He proclaimed that the Cold War had always been a useful 'bogey' for the Right, and that, 'the success of Mikhail Gorbachev in democratising Soviet society . . . would deprive conservative forces of one of their most effective weapons'.

Of course, both his sons went to the 'Establishment' Oxford University. And in recent times there have been embarrassing allegations involving how the ownership of the family house was altered - albeit perfectly legally - which experts say enabled his sons to avoid death duties.
Hardly the behaviour of tax-loving socialists.

The fact is, with all his brilliance, his Marxist teaching and his books, Ralph Miliband died a disappointed man. Labour, he conceded, remained 'a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted'. No party or grouping existed that was 'capable of posing an effective challenge'.

But right to the end, he hadn't entirely given up. Nothing had changed in his mind since his pilgrimage, in 1940, to Karl Marx's grave.
Significantly, his own tombstone now lies just 12 yards from it in Highgate cemetery.
It is engraved with the three-word inscription: 'Writer Teacher Socialist.'

Years after that early visit to the cemetery, he wrote: 'I have not, from that day to this, departed from the view that this was the right cause and that I belonged to it.'

Even his adoptive country, Britain, could still one day realise his Marxist dream. There was, he said, 'no reason for the resigned acceptance' of defeat.
'On the contrary,' he wrote, 'what it requires is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of such an alternative.'

As his son, Red Ed - who lives less than a mile away from Highgate cemetery in a £1.6 million townhouse - talks of 'socialism' being the key word for the next Labour government, perhaps that ground is indeed now being prepared

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435751/Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-Marxist-father-Ralph-Miliband-says-GEOFFREY-LEVY.html#ixzz2gWwd5sOr
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