Monday, February 10, 2020


A Communist Pope

There is now no hiding what he is

Pope Francis has called tax cuts for the wealthy a 'structure of sin' before telling a conference at the Vatican the 'rich world can and must end poverty'.

At a seminar on economic inclusion hosted by the Church on Wednesday, Francis insisted that poverty could be beaten if the world's rich play a full part in ending inequality.

'Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,' Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences.

'We are neither condemned to inequality nor to paralysis in the face of injustice,' he later added.

'The rich world and a prosperous economy can and must end poverty.'

The Pope told attendants, including IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, that hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes are not being paid, causing health care and education to suffer. 

'We must be conscious of all being responsible,' said Francis, who has made inequality a central theme of his papacy.

'If extreme poverty exists amid riches which are also extreme it is because we have allowed a gap to grow to become the largest in history.'

'People who are poor in indebted countries suffer from strong fiscal pressure and the cutting of social services,' Francis added.

Calling for the 'globalisation of hope,' Georgieva responded that 'the first task is to put the economy at the service of the people,' highlighting the need to address the issue of 'inequality of opportunity.'

The International Monetary Fund head also urged investment in people and education.

But she also stressed the need to prioritise the environment as 'none of the economic challenges we face today will be important in 20 years if we do not today confront the challenge of climate change.'

SOURCE 





Identity politics is really for rich white people

White liberal women are paying up to $2,500 to attend dinner parties aimed at confronting their ‘racism’.

Wow. If you haven’t already read it, stop what you’re doing and read this report in the Guardian about something called Race to Dinner, an initiative whereby white liberal women in the US are paying $2,500 to attend dinners aimed at confronting their privilege and racism. It’s remarkable.

The dinners were set up by Saira Rao and Regina Jackson. The idea is that one white woman volunteers to host the dinner, and invites strangers, friends or acquaintances, all hoping to rid themselves of their allegedly racist ways. Then, a ‘frank discussion’ over dinner ensues, led by Rao, who is Indian-American, and Jackson, who is African-American. According to the report, they started the initiative to ‘challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious’.

There are so many bizarre parts of this story it’s hard to know where to begin. The attendees are literally asked to name a ‘racist thing [they] did recently’. And by ‘racist’, they don’t actually mean racist. One woman says she wants to hire more people of colour, then trails off because she is fearful of looking like a ‘white saviour’. In another exchange, a woman ties herself in knots when trying to talk about her adopted black children:

‘Morgan Richards admits she recently did nothing when someone patronisingly commended her for adopting her two black children, as though she had saved them. “What I went through to be a mother, I didn’t care if they were black”, she says, opening a window for Rao to challenge her: “So, you admit it is stooping low to adopt a black child?” And Richards accepts that the undertone of her statement is racist.’

Indeed Rao comes off far worse in this write-up than the white women she is supposed to be schooling. She has become semi-Twitter Famous in recent years for her absurd, un-self-aware musings. (She once said all her white female friends had disowned her because she kept pestering them about their privilege and racism.) In the piece, one of the less-satisfied former attendees says Rao is ‘needlessly provocative and mean-spirited, unaware of her own class privilege’.

Which reminds us of an important thing about this kind of identity politics, political correctness, wokeness, or whatever we want to call it: its primary audience is rich people, particularly rich white people. As a landmark survey by More in Common found in 2018, high income and education levels are two top predictors of support for political correctness, and white people are less likely than average to believe that political correctness is bad.

It makes sense. Woke politics is ultimately disempowering for minorities, it treats them as children who are forever bound by the invisible chains of language, culture and unconscious bias. Identitarians’ mad theories largely appeal to over-educated rich people with too much time on their hands and a heavy dose of bourgeois guilt. Wokeness doesn’t help minorities, it gives white people an opportunity to feel better about themselves and distinguish themselves from the allegedly (even more) bigoted masses.

Wokeness is a rich white person’s game, and these hilarious and expensive dinners attest to this.

SOURCE 






More impeachments, please

by Jeff Jacoby

We should be using the impeachment tool more — not less.

"In the bitter end," fumed a Wall Street Journal editorial the day after Donald Trump's impeachment trial concluded, "what has all of this accomplished? The House has defined impeachment down to a standard that will now make more impeachments likely."

Let's hope so.

Impeachment wasn't meant to be the extreme rarity it has been throughout American history. Like other legislative checks and balances — the power to override vetoes and to reject judicial nominees, for example — the power to impeach a president (or any federal official or judge) for what Alexander Hamilton called the "abuse or violation of some public trust" was expected to be used by Congress as needed. The framers of the Constitution knew that regular elections wouldn't suffice to protect the public from a bad president. That's why it was "indispensable," as James Madison told the delegates in Philadelphia, "that some provision should be made for defending the community against the incapacity, negligence, or perfidy of the Chief Magistrate."

If that was true more than 200 years ago, when American presidents wielded far less power than they do today — when there were no nuclear missiles, no multitrillion-dollar federal budgets, no sweeping executive orders — it is even truer today.

Yet the idea long ago took hold that impeachment should almost never be resorted to, and then only in cases of serious criminal conduct. To hear Trump and his supporters tell it, the impeachment of the president was a "coup" — an illegitimate assault on the rule of law and an "end run around the ballot box." Exactly the same language was used two decades ago by Democrats when President Bill Clinton was impeached.

"When impeachment talk is in the air," observed the Cato Institute's Gene Healy in a 2018 monograph, "normally sober and judicious scholars resort to violent hyperbole." He quoted Charles Black, the renowned Yale law professor, who wrote during the Nixon impeachment hearings that, given the "dreadfulness" and "deep wounding" of impeachment, Americans should "approach it as one would approach high-risk major surgery." In 1998, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe testified that impeachment was "truly the political equivalent of capital punishment." Last September one prominent Trump backer warned that removing the president through impeachment would trigger something akin to a second civil war, "from which this country will never heal."

These overwrought analogies are grounded in cultural superstition rather than good governance. The Founding Fathers regarded the impeachment process not as an unspeakable constitutional crisis, but as a mechanism for resolving such a crisis. So should we.

What would have happened if Trump or Clinton had been convicted in their Senate trials and removed from office? The president would have moved out of the White House, and the vice president — a handpicked member of his own party — would have moved in. Would that have been so awful? The closest historical example, the resignation of Richard Nixon to avoid being impeached, suggests the opposite.

"My fellow Americans," said Gerald Ford on being sworn in as president, "our long national nightmare is over."

If Clinton had been forced to yield the presidency to Al Gore, or Trump to Mike Pence, pretty much the same thing could have been said. The skies wouldn't have fallen, markets wouldn't have crashed, blood wouldn't have pooled in the streets. In both cases the country would have been better off — a lying scoundrel would have been peacefully removed from office — yet the party controlling the White House would have remained in charge of the Executive Branch.

The Trump and Clinton impeachments didn't end with the president's conviction, but that doesn't mean impeaching them was futile. In both cases, the nation got a hard look at bad behavior in the White House. In both cases, presidents were forced to defend themselves before Congress — a reminder that presidents are not kings, and that the legislative branch, which has relinquished so much of its authority in recent decades, is supposed to be preeminent. And in both cases presidents of bad character had no choice but to submit to the staining of their reputation with a scarlet "I," a stain that will remain in the history books long after the passions of the day have dissipated.

Impeachment shouldn't be a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was designed to keep powerful officials accountable, and to eject them from office when their "incapacity, negligence, or perfidy" is intolerable. That applies not only to presidents, but other federal officials as well: cabinet secretaries, agency heads, ambassadors.

And it ought to apply with particular force to federal judges. The Constitution doesn't say that judges serve for life. It says they "shall hold their Offices during good Behavior." Most of the nation's hundreds of federal judges are honorable and competent. But some have been arrogant and abusive, or rendered terrible decisions. Impeachment exists to get rid of judges who take bribes, no less than those who lose the public's confidence or issue unconscionable rulings. Yet in all of US history, only 15 judges have been impeached by the House, and only eight have been convicted by the Senate. The result has been an ever-more-autocratic federal judiciary.

Let's break the taboo against impeachment. Let's replace it with a taboo against retaining dishonest, destructive, or despicable officials in office. The Constitution provides a useful tool for preserving the integrity of our government and mitigating the electorate's gravest mistakes. That tool has grown rusty from disuse, but it's not too late to clean it off and put it to the use the Founders intended.

SOURCE 





Confused Australian Marxists

They are afraid to admit their authoritarian impulses

Andrew Bolt

I'm SO glad Marxists will again hold their annual conference at Melbourne University. When you check out Marxism 2020, you'll stop worrying and start laughing. "A world to win!" its website declares, promising a discussion on "revolutionary struggle across the globe today".

To illustrate this "revolutionary struggle", it shows a picture of one of last year's massive protests in Hong Kong. Wait!! Those protesters weren't struggling for Marxism but against it. They were fighting for their freedom from China, which is, er, Marxist

Hmm. When Marxists praise the people struggling against their tyrannical creed, it's clear they're not the sharpest sickles in the shed. But this isn't the only sign in this conference that Marxism is in decay. I know, this isn't the impression you've got from the media Left or from protests on our streets.

In fact, you've probably fretted that Marxism seems much more in your face. Last October, for instance, Marxists from the Socialist Alliance battled police in Melbourne for days outside a mining conference. Just last week, the Queensland University of Technology student union said it would allow the Marxist Socialist Alternative to set up a recruiting stall for orientation week, but banned Generation Liberty, a youth arm of the libertarian Institute of Public Affairs.

And last year the ABC's youth network announced "young people are losing faith in capitalism and embracing socialism" ... well, at least in America.

But Marxism 2020 should put your fears to rest. For a start, the quality of the speakers is appalling.

When I checked the 2014 Marxism conference I found 12 speakers were at least academics (which was alarming). But this year's conference boasts just four academics, including the ubiquitous Roz Ward, who designed the controversial "Safe Schools" program for Victoria's Labor Government.  Another, Rick Kuhn, is now half out the door as an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University.

It seems Marxist academics are getting rarer. Most of this year's speakers are instead ageing street radicals, imported nonentities from the US, and some excitable youngsters from student politics and "refugee" politics. This intellectual decline shows in the crass early-bird special — book now and get your "F--k ScoMo" T-shirt.

Marxists must be thick or blind not to realise Marxism has led to tyranny in every place it's been tried — Russia, China, Cambodia, Poland, Cuba ... But Marxism 2020 seems to be organised by people so dumb that they've planned a session to praise the "contribution of early Korean women revolutionaries and communists" but none to discuss what a hellhole those communists actually created in North Korea.

Instead, there are two sessions to make excuses for Marxism's unbroken record of bloody failure. You know all those Marxist regimes that created all that misery? They weren't Marxist at all! They got hijaCked! Student activist Jairnine Duff will explain that "the Russian Revolution is the closest that the world has ever come to achieving socialism", until it was eventually crushed" by terrible Mr Stalin.

Attention, Jasmine: Russia's revolution was rotten from the start when it was led by nice Mr. Lenin, Stalin's boss. Just one year after the Bolsheviks overthrew Russia's elected government in 1917, Lenin was already issuing orders like this:

"Introduce at once mass terror"; "Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known ... filthy rich men."

But the Marxism 2020 speakers seen unable to accept that a political theory which calls for a workers' "dictatorship" is the enemy of freedom and the creed of thugs.

They seem torn between knowing violence looks bad yet wanting to use it "We oppose terrorism and acts of individual violence as a strategy for change," says one speaker. On the other hand: "Marxists are not pacifists ... there will need to be an insurrection led by a revolutionary party ... seizure of power ... dictatorship of the proletariat" As for the police who'd defend our democracy: "Abolish them."

Notice how police are most likely to get hurt at Marxist protests? Such a history of failure, such an itch for violenCe and such ignorance.

Be glad Marxists are dying out, at least according to a survey last year by the United States Studies Centre and YouGov. "Older Australians use more positive words to describe socialism than younger people," it found.

How reassuring. The young are more woke to Marxism than their elders, and Marxism 2020 will just add one more nail to the coffin of that stinking corpse.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 3 February, 2020

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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