Free Enterprise and Social Mobility

October 31, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

At the risk of understatement, our friends on the left are fixated on equality. 

If they were talking about equality of opportunity, or equality before the law, that would be great.

Unfortunately, they want equality of outcomes. Which means supporting bigger government, higher taxes, and other policies that are likely to shrink the economic pie.

In a just and sensible society, the goal should instead be upward mobility so that everyone can get richer.

That means enacting policies that expand the economic pie.

And what are those policies? We can answer that question by looking at a new study by Professors Justin Callais, Vincent Geloso, and Alicia Plemmons. Published by the Archbridge Institute, it investigates whether there is a link between limited government and social mobility.

…an increasing share of debates in economics have centered on the study of inequality… Intricately tied to these debates is the topic of social mobility. …Using the recent data of Chetty et al…on social capital and intergenerational income mobility in the United States at the subnational-level, we…ask…whether a) economic freedom does improve intergenerational mobility in a meaningful way when using higher quality data and; b) whether economic freedom complements or substitutes the different types of social capital.

Here’s what they found.

…we find that a) economic freedom (both in aggregate form and its components) is tied to greater absolute and relative mobility; b) we find that it has no association with the racial gap in mobility; c) we find that the effect of economic freedom generally outweighs that of inequality; d) the effect of economic freedom matches those of “bridging” social capital and overpowers that of other forms of social capital. …

Table 2 regresses the four economic freedom measures against absolute, relative, and gap mobility. Note, each cell within the table represents a separate regression of one measure of economic freedom against one measure of economic mobility, which results in twelve separate regressions. …we find that (low levels) of government spending and high values of labor market freedom are highly correlated with increases in both absolute and relative mobility.

Here is the aforementioned Table 2 for data geeks.

Looking at the conclusion of the study, here are some key takeaways.

While the literature is already clear on the fact that economic freedom increases incomes, this study is the first within the United States to show that the effect of economic freedom helps those at the bottom more relative to those at the top. …Policymakers should seriously consider laxer government regulations in the labor market, as well as lowering taxes and government spending as a way to positively impact those who wish to move up the income ladder.

Sounds like a familiar recipe.

 

'Patriotic Millionaires' Won't Sign Pledge to Pay More Taxes Voluntarily

Michael W. Chapman April 20, 2023

The Patriotic Millionaires organization, whose millionaire members claim they want to pay higher taxes to the federal government, were unwilling to sign a pledge to do just that because it would require them as individuals to voluntarily pay higher taxes. Instead, the Patriotic Millionaires want Congress to pass laws making all millionaires pay more in taxes.

"A bunch of millionaires said they want to pay higher taxes and they're advocating for it, but they won't sign a pledge saying they're willing to pay the taxes that they endorse," said Stepehn Moore, a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. 

At an April 18 (Tax Day) press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, millionaire Morris Pearl, a former BlackRock executive and current chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires, said, "We are a group of hundreds of wealthy Americans and business leaders united in our concern about historic levels of inequality and the destabilizing level of wealth and power  in America."

"I'm joined by Dr. Abigail Disney and a few dozen other members of Patriotic Millionaires here today with one request to our lawmakers in there: Tax us!  We want to pay higher taxes and everyone else wants to pay higher taxes as well."..........To Read More....

My Take - Abigail Disney....first of all, that's no longer her name.....she's married, and is worth 120 million dollars,and  name dropping for some semblance of credibility, and there's something seriously wrong with her, as I outline in my article, Abigail Disney's Stunt Against Capitalism.

Is it DEI, IED or DIE? Yes, it is!

February 22, 2023 By R.W. Trewyn

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, has become a driving force in hiring practices across America.  It’s replacing equal employment opportunity, EEO, in today’s discussions when new employees are recruited. Within major corporations, universities, and elsewhere, executives specializing in DEI have become common.  As these entities upgrade to the more fashionable DEI officers, EEO managers will become obsolete. Why?  They serve the same purpose, right? Wrong!  In fact, it’s not even close. When America’s woke progressives successfully snookered the nation into accepting equity (the impractical pursuits of equal outcomes) as a replacement for equality (equal opportunity) the ballgame changed, majorly.  The topline issue is no longer about hiring the applicant with the best credentials to do the work.  Today, training and experience for a job barely count with DEI employers...............To Read More...

• Kristina Karamo becomes Michigan's first Black GOP Chair, and media mockery ensues,  February 21, 2023 By Jack Hellner - So much for being champions of diversity and applauding historic firsts.. Elected by her peers, a Black conservative made history and just became the chair of the Michigan Republican Party; no doubt, mainstream media outlets all received the same list of talking points, because the negative headlines and articles are so similar. Kristina Karamo is a “far-right election denier”:These articles could have been written by rudimentary AI, since the people pretending to be reporters clearly didn’t do their own research before writing the articles.............To Read More....
• Fifty years too late, white men are figuring out they’re in trouble February 22, 2023 -The left often attacks Tucker Carlson as a demagogue, but I find that he is mostly on target.  This infuriates the left, as his audience dwarfs its mainstream media outlets, including the sought-after younger viewer demographics. This spells trouble for Democrats, who have been able to pull the wool over the eyes of younger voters for decades (myself included, in my teens and 20s, with a very brief relapse 10 years ago).  Most young, college-educated people haven't experienced the real world of taxes, inflation, affirmative action, and other challenges of adult life.  The Biden administration's incompetence and wokeness at all costs have thrown cold water on their idealism and naïveté. That said, it appears that Tucker has had an epiphany spurred on by a far-reaching "equity" policy introduced by Biden last week.The left’s relentless push to marginalize white men through affirmative action is reaching a crescendo under Biden. To Read More....
• The future of ‘progressivism’, February 21, 2023 By J.A. Frascino, MD - The progressive movement is based on certain assumptions. It holds that human nature can be improved by mandating moral behavior through the application of regulations, incentives, and punishments. In addition, the philosophy believes that the power of the federal government can be harnessed to improve the individual, and transform society through political action. It seeks to establish a form of statism in which government experts scientifically administer a regulatory state for the common good.Progressivism has become an increasingly influential force in shaping our culture, society, and government policy since its inception at the beginning of the 20th century. In its earlier days, the movement was instrumental in establishing women’s suffrage, worker’s rights, environmental protection measures, and welfare programs. As late as the 60s, it championed the Social Security and Medicare programs and supported the Civil Rights Act, despite the internal resistance of the Southern Democrat congressional bloc..............
•  Biden’s Wonderful World of ‘Equity’ Steve McCann - Immediately after his inauguration on January 20, 2021 Joe Biden, signed an executive order placed in front of him directing the federal government to “…pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all.”  On February 16, 2023, he signed a follow-up executive order mandating that all federal agencies create teams and annual plans to insure equity within all government agencies and to utilize government programs to compel equity within the private sector. The use of the word “equity” is a deliberate attempt to hoodwink the American public, who are fully are on board with a similar-sounding word “equality.”  Equity, unlike equality, isn’t equal access to opportunity or equal protection before the law. Equity, per the American Marxists, is the redistribution of societal status, legal protection, and economic goods (i.e., jobs and material possessions) in accordance with their politized assessment of disadvantages and demographics............ 
•  A Great Awakening Decades in the Making, By J.B. Shurk  February 23, 2023 - Over at The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has again managed to generate a treasure trove of anecdotal history, evidence, and analysis from those who visit his site.  Last month, he asked readers: if "[y]ou did not take the COVID-19 shot, why not?"  The thousands of personal responses were illuminating and created a kind of timeline showing how irreconcilable conflicts pitting available scientific knowledge and common sense against the government's own actions, orders, statements, and censorship heightened public distrust of COVID mandates and "vaccines," until various tipping points spilled over into outright rejection of political, medical, and media authorities.  This month, Sundance asks a more foundational question: "When did you start really paying attention?"  In other words, when did you "recognize that things around you, things you perhaps didn't pay attention to before, were not what you thought they were"?  What was the moment when "your political awakening began"?  ...............
• Social-Justice Shrinks: How Identity Politics Infected Therapy, By Sally Satel February 21 - In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.” “We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.

  Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special.” If the client were black, Elliott was told to ask how it felt to sit with her, a white counselor. If the client felt at ease, “my job — regardless of what brought him to therapy — was to make him more aware of how being black compounded, or perhaps caused, his problems...............

  Welcome to America’s Racialized Medical Schools, by John Sailer Feb. 22, 2023 - Forget about the oath to do no harm, future doctors are being forced to swear allegiance to racial dogmas. Earlier this month, the White House announced a five-year plan for redressing racial inequality. It is essentially the Biden administration’s version of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plan, like those issued by nearly every major university, only at a vastly larger scale. The policy aims to “advance an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity and support for underserved communities” by embedding equity goals in every aspect of the government. From the highest offices of the state down to the smallest local bureaucracies, DEI now pervades almost all levels of American society. And while it was once thought that the fringe racial theories that animate the DEI agenda could be confined to small liberal arts campuses, it is clear that is no longer the case...........

  Texas A&M University Displays the Destructive Results of Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Programs, Brad Slager  Feb 22, 2023 - One of the great ironies in contemporary college systems is how rampantly anti-intellectual they have become over the course of the last generation or so. Cerebral rigor, open-mindedness, and challenging information have long been underpinning aspects of university life. These days, those same elements are regarded as threats on too many campuses. More troubling is the inability of some schools to apply common sense while looking at the concrete results of a failed experiment. This takes us to College Station, Texas. Texas A&M University has been leaning heavily into the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives that have been mushrooming across the country at universities and corporations. These social engineering programs are claimed to be set up to make the opportunity and acceptance of minorities more widespread, while critics have maintained these are more like opportunities to exact social revenge and pave the way for activism to gain more power. At TAMU, the critics are being proven correct..........

  
  

Davos and the Holy Grail of Equity

“At what point will their good intentions lead to tyranny? Did we learn nothing from the pandemic, when government overreach led to economic, health, and educational disasters?”

Caroline Breashears January 25, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

 

Participants in the World Economic Forum (WEF) seem to have mistaken Davos for Camelot. After days of talking and revelry, they have sallied forth on their quest for the Holy Grail of global equity and carbon neutrality. Along the way, they have vowed to slay the dragons of disinformation. All this will be celebrated by approved minstrels. 

If that sounds like a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you’re partially right. Like Monty Python’s knights, they try to delude us as well as themselves. King Arthur mimes riding a horse while his servant bangs coconut shells; Al Gore jets to Switzerland while prosing about the dangers of climate change. 

More importantly, the attendees at Davos appeal to the misguided who believe they really do know the way toward global resilience, prosperity, and equity. Yet these self-appointed leaders are treading a path that is all too familiar: the road to serfdom. 

“Clear and Present Danger”

Among the dragons they are battling is free speech. The WEF panel “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation” focused on a critical question: “How can the public, regulators, and social media companies better collaborate to tackle disinformation, as information pollution spreads at unprecedented speed and scale?” In this framing, “pollution” comprises toxic words as well as smoke. Perhaps one might even inhale a bad idea. 

The panel was chaired by Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN and now at Harvard University. It included Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton and Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, which published the 1619 Project despite errors flagged by its own fact-checkers. 

One would think Matt Taibbi a better panelist, given his work in exposing how the FBI pressured Twitter to spread disinformation. But the elite seem inspired by Monty Python’s script, where the knights’ minstrels who dared to criticize them (Sir Robin is no longer “brave” but “ran away”) are devoured during a blizzard. 

To be fair, Sulzberger expressed grave concerns over the state of the “information ecosystem” and the way that distrust in news sources leads society to fracture and shift away from pluralism, which endangers democracy. 

Terms like “fake news,” he opined, evoke periods of repression, such as Nazi Germany. Furthermore, society has accepted “how much the information ecosystem has been poisoned.” Fixing it “will require real sustained effort from the platforms, from political leaders, the business leaders, and from consumers themselves to reject that.” 

Yet linking President Trump to Nazis through one of his favorite phrases not only “poisons” the conversation but ironically reminds us of The New York Times‘s early support of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s. It is hard to take seriously Sulzberger’s claim to address the toxic “ecosystem.” 

Nevertheless, like all the other knights at Davos, he has answers. The solutions are to educate young readers about trustworthy news sources and for platforms to “differentiate and elevate trustworthy sources of information consistently… Until they do, we have to assume that those environments are basically poisoned.” 

“The Road Ahead”

The Davos crowd believe they can make such judgments about what is trustworthy because they are the anointed (or “extraterrestrial,” if one is John Kerry). Falling prey to what F. A. Hayek termed “the fatal conceit,” they assume they can diagnose the world’s problems and plot a better path.

In his closing remarks, “The Road Ahead,” Børge Bende told panelists on the stage that he felt “we were very aligned.” Over the last five days, “progress has been made on scaling climate ambition, driving more equitable growth, and unlocking the benefits of frontier technologies.” Moreover, “by coming together like this, we can shape a more collaborative future.”  

Yet in mapping “the road ahead,” the elite assume powers not voted to them. Those invited to Davos might feel just as special as Arthur felt because the Lady of the Lake gave him Excalibur. But in our world people do not take kindly to self-appointed leaders any more than they do in a Monty Python film. As a peasant tells King Arthur, “You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”

Moreover, the results of such a “collaborative future” are questionable. Having established his roundtable of knights, Arthur and his crew ride forth in search of the Holy Grail. At one castle, they encounter a man who defies their questions: “Mind your own business.” Outrageous idea!

Assaulted by flying cows, Arthur’s knights retreat, but they return with a Trojan Rabbit, which is taken into the castle. They feel their cause is just, but they are unable to gain entrance to the castle due to bad planning: they forgot to place soldiers in the rabbit.

It’s hilarious on film, but not so funny when we think of the participants of the World Economic Forum urging collaboration between independent businesses and governments. How many failures in planning will occur? At what point will their good intentions lead to tyranny? Did we learn nothing from the pandemic, when government overreach led to economic, health, and educational disasters?

Destination Serfdom

These are the kinds of problems that F.A. Hayek addresses in The Road to Serfdom, which traces how the good intentions of central planners lead to disaster. When planners “dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results” and replace them with “collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals,” they run into problems.

First, Hayek explains, planners trying to make judgments based on “fairness” discover that “nothing short of a complete system of values in which every want of every person or group has a definite place is necessary to provide an answer.” Planners must have powers “to make and enforce decisions in circumstances which cannot be foreseen and on principles which cannot be stated in generic form.” In fact, they must have practically unlimited powers: “a directed economy must be run on more or less dictatorial lines.” 

The result, Hayek observes, is moral corruption: “just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictators would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure.” And such moral corruption, along with the corruption of language, seeps into every level of society. 

But the Davos elite are different, supporters say. They’re trying to bring prosperity to everyone and save the planet. 

If that were true, why would participants include the leader of a country who is holding an ethnic minority, the Uyghurs, in what is essentially a concentration camp? Would “equity” mean similar concentration camps everywhere? Would China provide the plans?

Davos is, like the Camelot in Monty Python’s film, an ideal projected by people unwilling to acknowledge the unintended consequences of their knight-errantry. At the end of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, the knights are hauled away from their movie set by the police.  In the process of playing knight, one actor accidentally slit the throat of a scholar reporting on the legend of King Arthur. How much more damage might the elite from Davos do? 

Rather than looking to the World Economic Forum for solutions, we should seek the wisdom of Hayek and others who founded the Mont Pelerin Society. As they knew, the best path forward is not the quest for a holy grail of equity, but the open road of freedom. Let’s take it. 

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Caroline Breashears

Dr. Caroline Breashears is a Professor of English at St. Lawrence University. Caroline received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. Recent publications include Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and articles in Aphra Behn Online and the International Journal of Pluralistic and Economics Education.

She was recently an Adam Smith Scholar at Liberty Fund, and her current research focuses on Adam Smith and literature. She teaches courses on fairy tales, eighteenth-century British Literature, and Jane Austen. Get notified of new articles from Caroline Breashears and AIER.

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Diversity is Not Our Strength

December 23, 2021 By Glenn Dunbar

It’s fifty years now since I was at university and a great deal of my time there -- especially the weekends -- is long forgotten.

I do remember going with the intention of studying math and economics. At that time, and maybe still, there was a requirement, in the first year, to take other subjects. Whether this was to prevent specializing too soon or to provide a more rounded education or both I don’t know but, when my second year began one of those other subjects became all of my classes, either Modern History or Economic History.

At that level, the assumption was that you already knew the who, what, where, and when of historical events and the focus was on the why. So, there were no multiple-choice or true/false questions, only two-thousand-word essays on the why of important events in history. I was fascinated with these, basically, puzzles, working back in time to see what had happened to set in motion the factors behind, for example, the outbreak of wars......To Read More...

 My Take - Diversity without accomplishment is philosophy without form and incompetence without consequence.

More Nonsense from the OECD’s Poverty Hucksters

January 6, 2022 by Dan Mitchell@ International Liberty

I created the Eighth Theorem of Government to illustrate the difference between well-meaning people (who want to help the poor) and zero-sum people (who seem to think some people are poor because other people are rich).

This raises the interesting question of whether folks in the latter group are misguided or malicious?

For what it’s worth, I assume most people who fixate on inequality simply don’t understand the issue.

I like to think that they would change their minds if – for instance – they were shown Scott Winship’s devastating, slam-dunk response to Gabriel Zucman.

But there are others (like Zucman) who almost certainly know better, yet they push the inequality narrative for political or ideological reasons.

The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development definitely also belong in the malicious category.

I first exposed the OECD’s disingenuous approach back in 2012, noting that the Paris-based bureaucrats used an utterly dishonest definition of poverty to make the laughably inaccurate claim that there was more poverty in the United States than in nations such as Greece, Hungary, Turkey, and Portugal.

Well, the OECD is still being dishonest. Here’s a look at the bureaucracy’s latest “poverty” measurement.

For those of us who actually pay attention to details, the data in the above chart have nothing to do with poverty.

Instead, the OECD is showing a particular way of measuring how income is distributed (in this case, the share of the population with less than half of the average income).

To see why it is profoundly absurd to measure poverty by looking at the distribution of income, consider these two examples.

1. Haiti is a wretchedly poor nation, with per-capita yearly income of $1729. But since almost everyone (other than the political elite) in the country is equally destitute, Haiti would have almost no poverty according to the OECD’s perverse definition.
2. Poor people in the United States have income equal to (or greater than) than middle class people in other developed nations, yet OECD bureaucrats want people to think poverty is a bigger problem in America than in a backward economy like Mexico’s.

I’ll close by pointing out the greatest absurdity of all.

If something miraculous happened and everyone in the United States somehow wound up with ten times as much income next year, guess what would happen to America’s poverty rate, as measured by the OECD? How much would it decrease?

Give yourself a gold star if you correctly answered that it would not change. At all.

What a crock of you-know-what.

P.S. The OECD is not the only guilty party when it comes to lying about poverty. Others who (willingly or unwittingly) misrepresent distribution data as poverty data include:

• The United Nations
• The New York Times
• The Equal Welfare Association
• Eduardo Porter of the New York Times
• Germany’s Institute of Labor Economics
• The Obama Administration
• The European Commission
• Professor Noah Smith
• The Economist

P.P.S. It’s also worth noting that poor nations aren’t poor because rich nations are rich.

 

Leftism and Hypocrisy

January 4, 2022 by Dan Mitchell

I periodically write about our leftist friends who display remarkable hypocrisy on issues such as taxation, education, Covid, and climate.

 

Here are just a few examples.

• Joe Biden
• Barack Obama 
• Elizabeth Warren
• Hillary Clinton
• Bernie Sanders
• John Kerry
• Bill Clinton
• Gov. J.B. Pritzker

Gee, it’s almost as if there’s a pattern.

Writing for Reason, Professors Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman highlight more of the hypocrisy that seems so prevalent on the left.

 

It’s been a bad year in public relations for Champagne socialists—or if you prefer, Neiman Marxists. The socialist Twitch streamer and Young Turks host Hasan Piker bought a $2.7 million house in Beverly Hills, complete with a swimming pool and an outdoor widescreen…

Millionaire Aurora James designed Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s show-stealing “Tax the Rich” dress, which she wore to the $35,000-per-ticket Met Gala.

The phenomenon of egalitarians living in luxury while denouncing the evils of inequality is not new. …socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders…remains within the top 1 percent of U.S. earners and the top .02 percent worldwide. Curious observers may question why Sanders, a tireless critic of the 1 percent, doesn’t sell his $575,000 vacation home and give the proceeds to charity or offer them as a general donation to the U.S. government via pay.gov. The same goes for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a longtime progressive who has a net worth of over $10 million…

When the disconnect between personal behavior and expressed ideology is this dramatic, and when the person gets rich and famous for expressing that ideology, we have to wonder whether he was ever sincere or was instead merely trying to promote himself. …

Talking about socialism is cheap (indeed, even lucrative); a $2 million donation is not. Yet rather than bear a real cost to really help the poor, Piker and other prominent egalitarians adopt a philosophy that they think demonstrates their good hearts but that allows them to live high.

So is there any defense of this type of hypocrisy?

Sort of, though I’m not sure it’s very persuasive.

In a Wall Street Journal column last year, Ted Rall defended rich leftists by claiming that put values above self-interest.

 

‘Limousine liberals” have driven full circle—or rather the term has returned to its origins. Coined in 1969 by Mario Procaccino, the Democratic Party’s unsuccessful challenger to New York Mayor John Lindsay, the epithet described “hypocritical wealthy do-gooders insulated from the negative fallout of their bad ideas,” in historian David Callahan’s definition.

“This theme,” Mr. Callahan has written, “remained a staple of conservative attacks.” Sen. Ted Kennedy was a classic example. He sent his kids to exclusive private schools at the same time he was telling working-class whites to bus their kids to distressed schools in the slums. …

The accusation of hypocrisy or inauthenticity is…less logical… Had Kennedy gotten the tax system of his dreams, he and his family would have been poorer. He voted his values, not his self-interest. That’s admirable.

P.S. Libertarians can be hypocrites, of course, but the only article I’ve analyzed on the issue was not convincing.

P.P.S. By contrast, there are plenty of hypocritical Republicans.

P.P.P.S. The champion hypocrites are the bureaucrats at the OECD and IMF, who reflexively support higher taxes while receiving very generous tax-free salaries.

 

Biden’s Blind Spot: Government Should Reward Success

By Lawrence Kudlow Special to the Sun | October 27, 2021

Lots of rumors are being bandied about as to what’s in and what’s out on both spending and taxes. So far as we know, as Hillary Vaughn reported, there is no deal. My sources, who are smack inside Republican Senate and House leadership, tell me we are weeks away and even then no one knows about that.

As Hillary reported this afternoon, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard Neal, said the so-called wealth tax is out of the bill. Of course, it was knocked out this summer, then it came back, and now it’s knocked out again. Good. Very good.

Let’s pause a moment. The progressive left Democrats cannot help themselves. They’re like moths drawn to a flame. They cannot help themselves. It is a perfect example of the philosophy of the current Democratic Party that says: punish success. Successful people are bad, evil, a scourge to society.....To Read More....

 

Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Critical Race Theory In K-12 Schools And Corporations

October 23, 2021 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Yesterday I attended an in-person program at the Manhattan Institute with the title “Deconstructing Wokeness in K-12 and Corporate America.” There were two panels and a speech totaling close to three hours. Presenters included something of a who’s who of the movement opposing the spreading cancer of Critical Race Theory in schools and corporations: Christopher Rufo and Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, Vivek Ramaswamy (author of the new book Woke, Inc.), Paul Rossi (the guy who blew the whistle on CRT at Grace Church School, who is currently affiliated with the Educational Liberty Alliance), and Asra Nomani (Vice President of Parents Defending Education).

Finally, after more than a year and a half in virtual purgatory, we have resumed in-person events to discuss issues of public policy. The huge difference between in-person and virtual events is that at in-person events you get to meet the people who take important roles in contesting these issues. In addition to the presenters, several other notable participants in recent events showed up at yesterday’s event, for example Andrew Gutmann (the parent who blew the whistle on CRT at the super-snooty all-girls Brearley School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) and Maud Maron (mother of four kids in New York City public schools, who spoke out against CRT and for her trouble has been ostracized at her job defending indigent criminal defendants at the Legal Aid Society).

But for today I’d like to highlight the work of Rufo. Here’s a picture of me with Rufo at yesterday’s event:

Over the past couple of years, Rufo has rapidly gained a reputation as the most important “investigative reporter” in the CRT arena. But in my discussion with him prior to the beginning of the formal event, he admitted that his “investigative reporting” substantially consists of just sitting at his desk and receiving a flood of submissions from around the country from outraged parents and corporate employees. He has a couple of junior staffers who work with him to review the submissions and rate them on a scale of how incendiary they are. Then he writes up articles consisting mostly of direct quotes of the submitted material.

Here is a sample of Rufo’s work from 2021. All of the pieces originally appeared in City Journal.

Cupertino, California. In a January 13, 2021 piece titled “Woke Elementary” Rufo quoted extensively from whistleblower documents provided by parents in this very-upscale Silicon Valley community that is home to the headquarters of Apple. What follows comes from a third-grade class at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School. Excerpt:

[R]eading from This Book Is Antiracist, the students learned that “those with privilege have power over others” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” As an example, the reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” . . . Following this discussion, the teacher had the students deconstruct their own intersectional identities and “circle the identities that hold power and privilege” on their identity maps, ranking their traits according to the hierarchy.

It goes on and on from there. Rufo notes that the Cupertino community is 94% non-white (majority Asian) with a median household income of $172,000.

Springfield, Missouri. Rufo’s January 19 piece titled “Antiracism comes to the Heartland” drew from a mandatory “antiracism” teacher training program put on by paid consultants at Cherokee Middle School in this central Missouri town. Excerpts:

[T]he training began with a “land acknowledgement,” claiming that “Springfield Public Schools is built on ancestral territory of the Osage, Delaware and Kickapoo Nations and Peoples.” . . . [D]iversity trainers, Jeremy Sullivan and Myki Williamson, asked the teachers to “acknowledge the dark history and violence against Native and Indigenous People” before engaging in the day’s program of “social justice work.” . . . Sullivan announced the agenda: “We’re going to look at three large concepts and those concepts are oppression, white supremacy, and systemic racism.” He and Williamson provided the teachers a handout to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” which defines white heterosexual males as the “privileged social group” and women, minorities, transgender, and LGBT people as “oppressed social groups.” . . .

The diversity trainers then narrowed the focus to race, distributing another handout that outlines the concepts of “overt white supremacy” and “covert white supremacy.” The document claims that “lynching, hate crimes, KKK, neo-Nazis, [and] burning crosses” are “socially unacceptable” forms of white supremacy, while “education funding from property tax, colorblindness, calling the police on black people, BIPOC as Halloween costumes, not believing experiences of BIPOC, tone policing, [and] white silence” are “socially acceptable” forms of white supremacy.

Lots more of same at the link.

Buffalo, New York. On February 23, Rufo focused on the schools in this declining upstate New York city, in a piece titled “Failure Factory.” The Buffalo Public Schools have a “diversity czar” named Fatima Morrell, who has crafted a new curriculum to bring a “pedagogical revolution” to the city. Some details:

During one all-hands training session, the details of which I have obtained through a whistleblower, Morrell claimed that America “is built on racism” and that all Americans are guilty of “implicit racial bias.” She argued that “America’s sickness” leads some whites to believe that blacks are “not human,” which makes it “easier to shoot someone in the back seven times if you feel like it.” Morrell, who earned her Ed.D. from the University of Buffalo, said that the solution is to “be woke, which is basically critically conscious,” citing a pedagogical concept developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire holding that students must be trained to identify and eventually overthrow their oppressors. After Morrell’s presentation, one teacher reaffirmed this political imperative, declaring that students must become “activists for antiracism” and public school teachers should begin “preparing them at four years old.”

Last year, as Fox News has reported, Morrell designed a curriculum requiring schools to teach the “Black Lives Matter principles,” including “dismantling cisgender privilege,” creating “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists,” and accelerating “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.”

How is this pedagogy working out for the Buffalo school kids?

Buffalo Public Schools have been an abject failure: by fifth grade, only 18 percent of students are proficient in math and 20 percent of students are proficient in English; one-third of all students fail to graduate from high school. The numbers are even worse for African-Americans, who constitute 45 percent of the student population.

Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina. Rufo’s March 17 piece, titled “Subversive Education,” covered a 2020 teacher conference attended by some 200 educators from this, the largest school district in North Carolina.

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that “whiteness perpetuates the system” of injustice and that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum” was “doing real harm to our students and educators.” The group encouraged white teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and “disrupt” white culture in the classroom through a series of “transformational interventions.”

Parents, according to the teachers, should be considered an impediment to social justice. When one teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” the answer was clear: ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teachers said. “White parents’ children are benefiting from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).” Therefore, teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs. Any “pushback,” the teachers explained, is merely because white parents fear “that they are going to lose something” and find it “hard to let go of power [and] privilege.”

And remember, all this is just a small sample. Go here for a list of other Rufo articles from December 2020 to date. There are many more covering K-12 schools, including several from New York City (of course), several from California (also of course), Philadelphia, and other places. Also, many of the more recent pieces cover racialist training sessions in corporate America. As Rufo states at the conclusion of his piece about North Carolina, at this point the toxic racist garbage is literally everywhere:

Parents across the U.S. should not assume that their local district is immune to these trends. The new political education is spreading everywhere.

 

Kellogg’s Goes Woke While Its Workers Go Broke

Daniel Greenfield October 21, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In the late 19th century, John Harvey Kellogg, a eugenicist and celibate vegetarian, became the leading health food nut of the era and along the way accidentally invented corn flakes.

Back then Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium was a spa for the rich where patients got electric baths and enemas (the subject of a scathing parody in the book and movie, The Road to Wellville). These days, Battle Creek, Michigan is in much worse shape and Kellogg’s is the area’s biggest employer. But the corporation, like most of its multinational woke ilk, spends most of its time virtue signaling social justice while outsourcing American jobs.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, another of the multitude of hijacked radical foundations, is the biggest shareholder of Kellogg's through the Kellogg's Foundation Trust. The left-wing activist foundation had originally been founded as the W. K. Kellogg Child Welfare Foundation by John's brother who idealistically but foolishly told his board, "Use the money as you please, so long as it promotes the health, happiness, and welfare of children."

An example of the Kellogg Foundation's promotion of the happiness of children is its Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Implementation Guidebook which claims that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is racist, and saying, “People are people. We are all alike regardless of the color of our skin,” is even more horrifyingly racist.

A century after John Kellogg’s involvement with the Race Betterment Foundation which called for a registry deciding who should be sterilized in order to improve the “race”, an idea later embraced by the Nazis, Kellogg’s is hopelessly racist. The only difference is that it traded eugenic racism against black people for social justice racism against white people.

Kellogg’s cereal pushes Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby board book on parents to teach that even white babies are evil racists. “We know that by two years old children are already consuming racist ideas,” Ibram X. Kendi declared. That wasn’t true until he got started.

With some help from Kellogg’s.

But while Kellogg’s was working hard to promote the ”health, happiness, and welfare of children” by feeding them sugary cereals and teaching them that white people are evil, it was also busy wrecking the economy of Battle Creek, Michigan to make a little more money.

It didn’t count though because much of the Kellogg’s Battle Creek workforce is white.

Under CEO Carlos Gutierrez, later Bush's Commerce Secretary, much of the operation was shut down and moved to Mexico. After that Battle Creek's unemployment rate went from 3.9% to 7.5%.

"He knows exactly what it takes to make American businesses grow and create jobs," Bush said of Gutierrez.

Which was true. Just in Mexico.

Since then, Gutierrez became Romney's Hispanic chairman, and endorsed Hillary and Biden, but not until he created Republicans for Immigration Reform after turning on Mitt Romney for not being sufficiently supportive of replacing Americans. "I think we lost the election because the far right of this party has taken the party to a place that it doesn't belong," he huffed.

Maybe some Republicans opposed to endless immigration used to have jobs in Battle Creek.

The workers who do still have jobs in Battle Creek are on strike. 1,400 workers are now walking the picket line after Kellogg's announced that it would cut 212 jobs

The local union president, a fourth-generation worker, said that they were tired of Kellogg's moving jobs to Mexico.

"We work seven days a week, that’s what we do. In exchange for that, we live the American dream. At the end of the day, that’s what they want to take from all of us."

Kellogg’s prefers the Kendi dream of getting rich by accusing Americans of racism while screwing the American working class. And it’s not just the American workers who get the shaft from the woke virtue signalers in the C-suite. A few years ago, Kellogg's moved its cereal plant from Ontario to China. And it closed its Australian plant and shifted over to Thailand.

When Kellogg's isn't firing its American workers and trading them for foreign workers who will work for a fraction of the cost, it's terrorizing its workforce with Equity, Diversity & Inclusion. While Kellogg's won't pay its workers fairly, it has hired a roster of diversity executives who make 4 times their salary to tell them how racist they are.

CEO Steve Cahillane responded to the drug overdose death of George Floyd and the subsequent devastating riots by the Black Lives Matter racist hate group by falsely claiming that there were "racial injustices" and declaring that "in North America, we cannot reinforce strongly enough our commitment to a diverse and inclusive environment". In North America, maybe not as much in actual racist countries where Kellogg's offers fewer “race conscious” classes.

The 360 degree turn from the Race Betterment Foundation to the Kellogg’s Race Conscious learning series shows that horseshoe theory also applies to woke cereal companies.

“Kellogg recognized, along with the rest of the country and world, that we had entered a point of no return in terms of social justice,” a quote in Kellogg’s Equity newsletter screams. “What if we created a dialogue about the intersectionality of race and food?”

Or what if Kellogg’s stopped firing workers while telling them they’re racist?

While Kellogg’s touts the “Fight for Food Justice”, it treats its food workers like garbage. C-suite woke virtue signaling can cover up a multitude of sins. That’s why it’s taken over corporations. Instead of actually practicing ethics and decency, major corporations now hire diversity executives to assemble social justice word salads that make Corporate America sound like Che.

The more jobs Kellogg’s cuts at its Battle Creek birthplace, the more it talks about equity.

Kellogg’s boasts that it’s a Top 50 Company for Diversity and that diversity and equity are “paramount to achieving our success”, but the real secret sauce is cheap foreign labor.

An Amnesty International report accused Kellogg's and a variety of woke food multinationals, including Unilever, the parent company of antisemitic BDS advocate Ben and Jerry's, of getting palm oil from plantations where 8-year-olds worked under hazardous conditions.

While the C-suite virtue signals about social justice, children are dropping out of school to labor on plantations, women are working for $2.50 a day, and breathing in toxic pesticides.

“I don’t go to school,” a 10-year-old boy working on a plantation said. “I carry the sack with the loose fruit by myself but can only carry it half full. It is difficult to carry it, it is heavy. I do it in the rain as well but it is difficult…My hands hurt and my body aches.”

No one actually likes to see how the woke sausage or the cereal gets made.

"George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are among the many names burned into our consciousness," Kellogg's CEO Steve Cahillane declared.

Maybe the name of that 10-year-old boy or the fired Kellogg’s workers should be burned into his consciousness instead. But accusing America and white people of racism is cheap, running an ethical company is expensive. Just stop by Battle Creek or a woke palm oil plantation and find out how many children had to suffer and how many American workers had to lose their future so that Tony the Tiger could rot children’s teeth with sugar and their souls with racist wokeness.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Corporate America, immigration, recent

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Congress orders intel community to report on spies' 'diversity'

Requires report on 'inclusion efforts' 

By WND News Services October 1, 2021 

A top House panel approved the 2022 intelligence community funding package, including a provision requiring officials to brief Congress on their diversity initiatives.

The Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) — passed by the House Intelligence Committee in a bipartisan voice vote on Thursday — would require the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to periodically issue reports with “demographic data and information on the status of diversity and inclusion efforts of the intelligence community,” according to the bill’s text.

“The bill passed out of the committee today is a strong bipartisan package, and I would like to thank all of our Members and staff on both sides of the aisle for working diligently to contribute to and shape this legislation,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement after the committee greenlit the IAA........To Read More.....

 

 

Wall Street giants moving toward using financial power to pressure cities to enforce SJW agenda

September 25, 2021 By Thomas Lifson

I doubt that we'll see a lot of leftists protesting against Wall Street titans bullying local governments now that the most powerful capitalist entities are joining to progressive racial agenda.  Some Wall Street bullying is more equal than other bullying, it would seem.  But this article from Bloomberg (hat tip: Ed Lasky) gives me the willies:

Some of Wall Street's biggest buyers of America's state and local government bonds are starting to ask questions about racial equity. Five investment giants — BlackRock Inc., Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Lord, Abbett & Co., Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Vanguard Group Inc. — are working with two minority-owned underwriters, Loop Capital Markets and Siebert Williams Shank & Co., to develop and distribute a questionnaire that governments will be asked to fill out before new bond deals are arranged. It will ask about policing policies, efforts to combat race-based inequality, social services and the demographic breakdown of the government's workforce, among other things.

"The pandemic has brought up the broad range of inequity in our society and it's important to understand how everyone is working on that," said Daniel Solender, head of municipal bonds at Lord, Abbett, which manages about $36 billion of the securities.

"We want to engage: we can ask questions, we can compare different issuers for what they're doing," Solender said. "It's important for us to know what we're investing in."  The push reflects the growing influence of the socially responsible investment business, with Wall Street funds eager to cater to investors seeking to use their funds to combat global warming or promote societal change. 

The industry has been making inroads into the $4 trillion municipal securities market, a slow moving haven of buy-and-hold investors seeking tax-free income. 

To be sure, this is only a first step: asking for data.  But the very fact of asking, when the request comes from the biggest funders of municipal debt, places pressure on municipal governments and public agencies that qualify for tax-exempt bonds to change (for example) hiring practices if not "enough" people of certain races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc. are not on their payrolls.............To Read More...

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: The Holy Trinity of Leftism!

Diversity without accomplishment is philosophy without form and incompetence without consequence!

By Rich Kozlovich 

Before we go on let's dispense with that the idea the Holy Trinity of Leftism, diversity, equity and inclusion is about fairness. It's been my experience what's defined by so many as to what's fair is based on who's ox is being gored.  Who exactly wrote the Book of Fair? There is no Book of Fair, furthermore "fairness" can't be codified without being unfair to someone, anyone, or most for that matter. So who decides what's fair?

For the most part we get out of life what we put in it - at least in America. In so many parts of the world the corruption is so massive the wealth can only go to an elite ruling class, all leftists.  is a perfect example of that, but take any communist or socialist nation and you will find the same pattern.

But this is America, and anyone who wants to have a good life can have that life, and this irrational demand for fairness is nothing more than a false leftist quilt trip on those they wish to rob. If those who go to school, have a job, start a business, work long hard hours, don't do drugs, deprive themselves of a great many things in the beginning to make it big later in life in order to have luxuries, then we should ask:  Why isn't that outcome "fair"?  Shouldn't we in fact expect that outcome?

If someone takes a diametrically opposing view of life,  refusing to get educated, refusing to get and hold a job, live on welfare, become drunkards or are drug addicted, live irresponsible lives and end up in poverty and misery, then we should also ask:  Why isn't that "fair". Isn't that the outcome we should expect from such behavior?

So then, why is it fair the rest of us have to support lazy or irresponsible people with food stamps, welfare and other social programs that's created a permanent underclass who now refuse to work and live responsible lives? Why is that "fair"?   This unending march by the left to redefine words to attain their goals requires unending vigilance.  Instead of "fair" they now tout their Holy Trinity.  Diversity, equity and inclusion. 

On September 10, 2021 Sheldon Bart published this article, The Case for Merit, Character, and Capacity saying:

The politically correct write the three-word mantra “diversity, equity and inclusion” with capital letters and refer to it in acronym form as DEI. This is a distinction never accorded to such familiar triads as “duty, honor, country,” “faith, hope and charity,” or “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” You’ve never seen any of the latter set forth as DHC, FHC, etc. Despite having elevated its linguistic status, the acolytes of this political religion haven’t been thinking deeply about their Holy Trinity’s components.

He goes on to explain that "inclusion" and "exclusion" are parts and parcels of the same package.  In our lives we will include and exclude things daily, and that simply can't be avoided.  Would you include a poor athlete on a sports team?  Would you include vinegar in a sweet desert?  We include and exclude things as they fit the circumstances, so demanding "inclusion" based on race, gender or anything else is irrational, and impossible, and as he notes:

And contrary to the howls of the hypersensitive, no one need apologize for that.

We have to recognize equity and equality are two different things.  Equality means being treated the same under the law, and allowed to compete with anyone, win or lose.  Equity means everyone has nothing more than anyone else, irrespective of their abilities or character.  He goes on to define equity saying:

Equity goes a step beyond inclusion.........it really means allocating rewards to favored groups while withholding considerations from other people who earned them on the merits........ equity, which sounds fair and square, actually displaces fairness, it can also get in the way of achieving one of the social justice advocates’ legitimate goals, which is helping truly needy people...............

As for this claim that "diversity is our strength", Thomas Sowell has called this a "fact free dogma".  He cites the Balkans, and being Serbian I completely understand and agree with his assessment when he asks:

Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word "Balkanization" remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?

He goes on to ask:

Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization?

The author goes on to note:

Diversity has not historically been associated with peace and stability. Rather, increasing diversity is tearing our country apart. Diversity can be handled safely, but only by practicing inclusion and exclusion based on merit, character, and capacity, and emphasizing equality of opportunity rather than equity.

This is just common sense. What should also be clear is that those extolling the creed of diversity, equity, and inclusion have, in this regard, set common sense aside along with the history books. Instead, they exercise emotionalism and airy intellectuality. Unless common sense eventually prevails, we can look back to Colonel Greene for a projection of our future.

Understand one thing above all else. Everywhere and through all time the left has demanded perfection and promised utopia.  History has shown the left only delivers dystopia: Tyranny, misery, suffering, starvation, disease and early death.  That's history, and that history is incontestable.   

What are the alleged “compelling” benefits of “diversity“? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor’s wardrobe. - Thomas Sowell

Global Warming, Trees, and Environmental Racism

By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh ——Bio and Archives--July 20, 2021

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The global warming crowd could not get ordinary Americans to buy into their arrogant narrative that the globe is warming due to human activity such as industry, travel, car use, agriculture, breathing, flying, artificial lakes; so, they turned the Armageddon narrative into a profitable leftist climate change industry that has many allies among academics, public school teachers, the mainstream media, and crony corporatism. Who can deny that the climate changes and has done so for thousands of years?

It is not just the environmental justice the Paris accord and its previous U.N. Agenda 2030 goals, versions of controlling how people live and make a living, every aspect, no matter how insignificantly small. The narrative is now tied, like everything else the left says and does, to one’s skin color. 

Apparently, the climate and how temperatures affect Mother Earth due to solar flares, water currents around the earth, and volcanic oceanic eruptions above and below earth are now caused by environmental racism.........To Read More....

The Economics of Inequality

July 21, 2021 by Dan Mitchell

In my four-part series on inequality (here, here, here, and here), I argue that that it is more important to instead focus on reducing poverty – especially since we know the policies needed to achieve that latter goal.

In this discussion, I contemplate why some folks don’t understand that message.  One reason is that some of them don’t care.  As explained by the Eighth Theorem of Government, they are motivated first and foremost by a desire for bigger government.

And it doesn’t matter whether they are driven by ideology or “public choice.” The bottom line is that helping people climb the economic ladder is – at best – a secondary concern.

But what about the well-meaning folks on the left? Is there a way of convincing them to channel their compassion in a better direction?

As mentioned in the interview, these are the people who generally believe that the economy is a fixed pie. As such when someone like Jeff Bezos is rich, they think it means other people are poor.

So it should be simple to show them that this isn’t true. There is a wealth of data showing how good (or even just decent) policies create more prosperity.

Looking specifically at the United States, we’re much richer today than we were in the past. And that’s true whether you go back 200 years or if you simply compared today’s economy with where America was after World War II.

And the same pattern exists in other market-based nations.

But here’s what frustrates me. When I share this data with my left-leaning friends, they seem to have some sort of mental block that prevents them from reaching the obvious conclusion.

A few of them will pivot, acknowledge that broad-based growth happens, but then argue that growth is unaffected by policy.

In other words, nations can become more prosperous whether government is big or government is small.

Needless to say, there’s also a wealth of data showing that this isn’t true.

At which point the honest and intelligent folks on the left will explicitly or implicitly embrace Arthur Okun’s argument that it’s okay to have less growth if there’s more equality.

That’s when I point out that even small differences in growth make a big difference to income levels over just a few decades. Which means poor people ultimately will be richer if there’s more economic liberty.

So if they really care about the well-being of the less fortunate, they should be the biggest advocates of free markets and limited government.