America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Friday, November 19, 2021
BIDENOMICS - Don’t Ask About Empty Shelves, Our Leaders are Too Busy Saving the World
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center specializing in investigative reporting on the Left and Islamic terrorism.
While the supply chain crisis left American store shelves bare, Biden went to a UN climate conference to save the world. Saving the world is a whole lot easier than stocking shelves. Ask any teenager.
Saving the world used to be the preoccupation of dilettante intellectuals who could solve all of the problems of the world in their heads, but couldn’t handle the simplest life tasks. The rise of socialism has reduced much of the world to the same grandiose incompetence. The western world has been put into the hands of men and women who can’t get anything done, but promise to change the world.
Like the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, we have become a nation of moral crusaders and misery where goods shortages are papered over with wars against intangible social problems. Public officials no longer solve problems, like ivory tower academics they delve into root causes and produce theories explaining why the problems can’t be solved without changing society and humanity.
It’s as if you invited a plumber to fix your toilet only to lectured about the history of plumbing in ancient Egypt, gender roles, and social expectation while your toilet goes on flooding the floor.
While Democrats go down the rabbit hole of root causes, their cities are overrun with crime and human waste, prices for everything skyrocket, and some goods can no longer be had at any price. Confronted with this reality, they build walls of words, seizing on talking points to convince the public that the problems don’t exist or that they’re actually symptoms of deep social problems going back centuries even though they only date back to last week. Either approach frees them from having to solve them.
Do elites turn socialist as they become more incompetent or do they become more incompetent as they embrace socialism? The chicken and the egg problem that made even formerly prosperous Eastern European and Latin American countries into miserable failed states, that divided the two Koreas between booming industry and mass hunger, is arriving in America with much the same outcome.
American bureaucracy is bigger than ever. The growth of administrators in every field outpaces that of ordinary workers, clients, and products produced. No single decree from a scowling boss in Moscow turned a booming nation of individualists into a timid managerial state with endless rules that apply to every facet of work and everyday life. It was the slow accumulation of individual inertia, cultural safetyism, and crises, real and manufactured, that fossilized into a state of permanent administration.
The hunger of the administrative state for more power and the natural insecurities of its wards gave us everything from the welfare state to universal masking. The shutdowns and mandates of the pandemic are only the latest inevitable development from a system that reacts to every crisis with collective panics that transfer power from the public to unelected bureaucrats. Whatever the details of a crisis, its primary function is to generate more regulations and more overseers to see everyone follows them.
None of these regulations do anything except generate more insecurity and seize more power. Each succeeding generation views unrestricted freedom as an increasingly alien condition. A generation terrified of the Second Amendment birthed a generation terrified of the First Amendment. Each set of restrictions is deemed insufficient by the frightened generation that is raised under their rule.
If you think today’s college students are snowflakes, wait until the children who were raised to fear their own parents as sources of infection and to wear masks everywhere finally come of age.
It’s no great challenge to convince a society of frightened people that the end of the world is near.
Call it the ice age, global warming, climate change, or whatever panic brand replaces them when the marketers and pollsters decide that the current term is insufficiently triggering: to people who have been taught to be afraid of everything the end of the world is an entirely plausible scenario.
Environmentalism, like every root cause crisis, tells us to be afraid of ourselves. The terror of our words, our faces, our thoughts, and our possessions has always haunted the Left. Where visionaries saw possibilities, socialism has only seen threats. Its promises to save the world don’t spring from a place of courage, but of fear of others and of the inability of its acolytes to come to grips with real life.
Those who can, do. And those who can’t, warn others that doing anything is the root of all evil.
What else could such a worldview bring forth other than the incompetence, corruption, and tyranny that we see all around us. Problems become power grabs and so there’s no incentive to solve them, only to make them worse. Leftist ideology rationalizes most problems as inherently unsolvable in the short term, only in some long term utopian eventuality that reboots all of human society around its ideals.
Problems like empty store shelves or crime in the streets are ultimately caused by capitalism, individualism, the nuclear family, and the existence of humanity. There’s no solving them without addressing root causes like human nature, civilization, and the survival instinct. Like the USSR, the goal posts for solving even the most mundane problems get moved all the way into infinity.
This arrangement is quite convenient for the bureaucracies, public and private, from which leftist systems and ideologies draw their power. It frees teachers not to teach, companies not to innovate, and officials not to solve problems even as they organize moral crusades against the end of the world.
The true purpose of bureaucracy is always to eliminate competition. The chaos of individualism is collectively managed by stultifying regulations whose goal isn’t fixing problems, but preventing surprises. The administrative state can accept the deaths of millions as long as it follows the rules. That’s why all the administrators who forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus infected patients were never held responsible for the mass deaths that resulted from their horrifying decisions.
Most were even rewarded.
The pandemic shutdowns weren’t motivated by fear of infections, but of unscheduled and uncontrolled infections. The administrative state doesn’t mind people dying, as long as they decide who dies.
And who lives.
World leaders fleeing problems at home to talk global warming at the UN’s COP26 are leaving behind real challenges that they’ve given up trying to solve and are saving the world. What makes leaders like Biden or Boris Johnson, Merkel or Trudeau, who have badly screwed up the prosaic problems they were tasked with believe that they can change the climate when they can’t do much smaller things?
Western leaders no longer tackle real problems that can be solved, only imaginary ones that can’t. Like their socialist forebears they define an overwhelming problem, economic classes, systemic racism, or climate change, and then spend all their time at seminars on how to best tackle its root causes. The solution invariably involves moving money around in ways that favor them and their power base.
This brand of messianic workshopped Communism is even worse than the original because actual Communist regimes at least cared about production while wealthy western leftists outsource production to third world countries so they can spend more time fighting systemic racism or the weather.
Our shortages may be currently less severe than those of a proper Communist dictatorship, but our leaders are even more detached from the basic responsibility of elected officials which is not to “safeguard democracy”, but to justify their work to the system and the people who elected them.
With Biden, America skipped past Lenin and Stalin to go right to the Brezhnev era with senescent apparatchiks overseeing the decline of a country and an economy they don’t actually understand.
America’s elites, bad or good, used to understand how things actually worked. And then they became the products of Ivy League institutions which traded practical skills for abstract theories. Our elites have learned how to lie to us and to rob us, and tell us it’s for our own good, and how to retreat into academic theories to avoid dealing with reality. They’ve learned how to manipulate the artificial systems of bureaucracy and its abstract rule sets, but know next to nothing about the real world.
They’re happy to save the world. Just don’t ask them where the beef is.
BIDENOMICS = TO SERVE THE RICH, WALL STREET, BANKSTERS
AND BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS
AND ILLEGALS
MISERY AHEAD, $300 OIL, ECONOMIC PAIN JUST BEGINNING, ENDLESS DIGITAL MONEY, RETIRE IN DEBT
Americans are now facing the highest inflation in 30 years. People are even starting to talk about the “misery index” again -- and I haven’t heard that term since the Carter administration. Unfortunately, inflation hits low and middle-income Americans the hardest. You can bet that Speaker Antoinette and President Asterisk aren’t feeling the pinch. Maybe that’s why they’re not acting very interested in the problem. But the rest of us are sure interested.
Inflation isn’t a simple matter to control. It is a complex issue that is affected by many factors.
Whenever the government lowers the value of our money, inflation goes up. When our geniuses in Washington put more money into circulation by either borrowing it or printing it, the value (buying power) of the money goes down. It is simple supply and demand economics. The more there is of something, the less valuable it becomes. Venezuela has tons of money -- and it takes a ton of it to buy bread. The Venezuelan currency is the Bolivar, and they’re issuing it in 50,000 Bolivar notes now -- because that’s what it takes to buy anything. Venezuela proves that you can’t print your way out of inflation. Our federal government currently has over $29 trillion in borrowed money. What does President Gremlin want to do? Borrow $5 trillion more for his various spending boondoggles. Because he simply doesn’t understand this principle.
Product scarcity also factors into inflation. Gold and diamonds are valuable for one reason, and one reason only -- they’re rare. If we had to sweep diamonds off the sidewalk everyday no bride would want one on her engagement ring. It’s simple supply and demand again. If there’s not enough of something to meet the demand, people are willing to pay more for it and prices go up.
Which brings us to our failing supply chain. If there aren’t enough products on the shelves, the remaining products get a bit pricey. COVID restrictions and work disincentives have starved the country of skilled workers. Democrat-sponsored emission standards in California have created a shortage of trucks to move products inland from West Coast ports. Further, California’s AB5 killed private contracting in the state, and is creating a shortage of drivers to pilot the trucks that aren’t available anyway. And just like that, we have over 100 cargo ships parked off the West Coast, unable to unload, empty store shelves nationwide, and skyrocketing prices for those scarce products which are available.
What is President Gremlin’s plan? His Build Back Better program of course. A massive deficit spending program which will:
Borrow enough money to further devalue the dollar
Fund the Green New Deal to impose further environmental restrictions on an already failing system
Expand AB5 nationwide and exacerbate the supply chain labor shortage
Like every Democrat, his only solution to any crisis is to do more of the same thing that created the crisis.
We can’t talk about inflation without also talking about production costs. I know this is a hard one for liberals to understand. If Joe’s reading this, he needs to pay attention. When it costs more to make and deliver a product, prices go up. Who knew?
So, what’s Joe doing to lower production costs? Well, he’s extended unemployment benefits -- paying people to not work. Businesses across the country are suffering from labor shortages. They’re overcoming that by offering higher pay, and passing on that increased labor cost to their customers.
A big piece of the processing expense is the price of energy. It takes a lot of electricity to turn a raw hunk of aluminum into a shiny new rim for your car. Therefore, skyrocketing energy costs are also contributing to inflation. When the price of fuel goes up, Americans don’t just feel it at the pump. They feel it when they buy rims for that car -- and every other product as well. So, what is President Gremlin doing to help with spiking energy costs? He’s cancelling pipelines, closing others, restricting fracking, and cancelling drilling permits. That should do the trick.
But let’s not forget about those overhead expenses -- of which taxes are a big one. President Gremlin’s Build Back Better program also includes massive tax increases -- especially for businesses. That’s why Senator Kyrsten Sinema is fighting the program. Those taxes will increase the cost for every company to stay in business. They will pass those costs along, and prices will go up.
But inflation isn’t only driven by scarcity and costs, it is also driven by expectations. When buyers (of anything) expect prices to go up, they try to make their purchases before the increases take effect. In so doing, they increase demand, and drive prices up.
For example, when investors expect a commodity – like, say, oil -- to go up, they buy oil futures. Futures are a contract to buy a certain amount of oil in the future at an elevated price. They’re hoping the price goes up even more than their contract price. If it does, they can sell their contract and make a profit.
But by buying the futures, they’ve already driven up the future cost of oil and triggered inflation. That’s why gasoline prices went up so quickly when good ole Joe went to war with the oil industry. President Gremlin’s policies convinced everyone that the price of oil was going up, investors jumped into the futures market, and they drove the price up -- fast. Average Americans are worried that they may not be able to heat their homes this winter, but it’s been a real party for the big dollar investors -- most of whom are donors to the Democrats. You don’t suppose there’s a connection there, do you?
Is there anything Joe can do to change that investor behavior? There sure is. He’d simply need to announce that he’s opening up drilling, endorse fracking, and give the green light to pipeline projects. Investors will expect prices to drop, and they’ll bail on the futures market like rats from a sinking ship. But that would require admitting that Donald Trump was right. That’s not going to happen with this administration. Sorry Americans, your wallets aren’t as important as Joe’s pride -- at least not to Joe.
If there’s anything that President Gremlin has failed to do to make inflation worse, I can’t think of it. But then, I’m not an economist. But know this: The next time President Asterisk assures us that inflation is only transitory -- it’s only as transitory as his administration.
John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He currently writes at the American Free News Network (afnn.us). He can be followed on Facebook or reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
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President Joe Biden on Wednesday dodged responsibility for record-high energy prices and asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil companies for “anti-competitive behavior.”
With nationwide gas prices reaching historic highs, inflation marking a thirty-year high, and a supply chain that seems permanently broken, President Biden is presumably seeking to escape responsibility for his failed energy agenda by placing blame on oil companies.
“I do not accept hard-working Americans paying more for gas because of anti-competitive or otherwise potentially illegal conduct,” President Biden said. “I therefore ask that the Commission further examine what is happening with oil and gas markets, and that you bring all of the Commission’s tools to bear if you uncover any wrongdoing.”
“The Federal Trade Commission has authority to consider whether illegal conduct is costing families at the pump,” Biden referenced the record-setting gas prices around the country. “I believe you should do so immediately.”
President Biden’s request for the agency to investigate oil companies comes as the Biden-Harris administration has conducted a regulatory war on American energy.
Just after taking office, Biden revoked the Keystone XL Pipeline. The pipeline would have transported 35 million gallons of crude oil per day from Nebraska to the Gulf Coast.
Biden has also allowed Russia to access European energy markets by building a pipeline from Russia to Germany. The project is a direct hit to American producers who sell oil to European nations.
President Biden is also weighing whether to cancel a 78-year-old Line 5 oil Michigan pipeline. The pipeline may be terminated because 12 federally recognized tribes asked the administration to do so.
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll on Wednesday, just 40 percent of registered voters approve of Biden’s energy policies. The poll also revealed the majority of voters believe President Biden is untrustworthy, dishonest, and incapable of leading the nation.
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