May 30, 2017 – LEFT POLICIES = RUIN

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Writing in City Journal, John Tierney provides a good example of how the Left ruins the lives of ordinary people. He writes about the refusal of New York City to allow Wal-Marts. 

If budget-cutters in Washington decided to eliminate food-stamp benefits to New Yorkers, the city’s politicians would be denouncing the cruelty of the “Republican war on the poor.” Yet Mayor Bill De Blasio and the city council are already inflicting the same sort of pain on low-income New Yorkers by denying them access to one of the nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs: Walmart.

When he was mayor, Michael Bloomberg supported Walmart’s efforts to open a store in New York, but the company faced unremitting resistance from unions and elected officials, and it gave up the fight once de Blasio moved into GracieMansion. “I have been adamant that I don’t think Walmart—the company, the stores—belong in New York City,” de Blasio said.

Walmart’s benefits are obvious to shoppers and to economists like Jason Furman, who served in the Clinton administration and was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. In a paper, “Walmart: A Progressive Success Story,” Furman cited estimates that Walmart, by driving down prices, saved the typical American family more than $2,300 annually. That was about the same amount that a family on food stamps then received from the federal government.

How could any progressive with a conscience oppose an organization that confers such benefits? How could de Blasio and the city council effectively take money out of the pockets of the poorest families in New York? Because—though they would deny it—they care a lot more about pleasing powerful labor interests, especially the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which helped lead the long fight to keep Walmart out of the five boroughs. …

 

 

 

More on the Left’s war on ordinary people comes from Hot Air’s report on the types of restaurants that are failing in San Francisco as a result of the higher minimum wage.

… The Washington Examiner takes a look at a new study by the HarvardBusinessSchool this week which specifically digs into the restaurant business in San Francisco, where they have been jacking up their minimum wage like a golden escalator. The results pretty much speak for themselves.

San Francisco’s higher minimum wage is causing an increasing number of restaurants to go out of business even before it is fully phased in, a new study by the HarvardBusinessSchool found.

The closings were concentrated among struggling, lower-rated restaurants. The higher minimum also caused fewer new restaurants to open, it found.

“We provide suggestive evidence that higher minimum wage increases overall exit rates among restaurants, where a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of exit,” report Dara Lee and Michael Luca, authors of “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.” The study used as a case study San Francisco, which has an estimated 6,000 restaurants in the Bay Area and is ratcheting up its minimum wage. Restaurants are one of the largest employers of minimum wage workers. …

 

More on the subject from American Interest.

… More interesting, though, are the study’s findings about which restaurants are forced to leave by the higher wage floors. The authors compared rates of departure of restaurants across different Yelp ratings, and found that the policy hit low and mid-quality restaurants much harder than top-tier restaurants. ”Our point estimates suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to an approximate 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant but the impact falls to zero for five-star restaurants.” …

… this study puts the appeal of superficially progressive measures like the minimum wage hike among the wealthy into sharp relief: It will help clear out the restaurant scene of establishments they don’t want to go to while taking jobs away from people they don’t know.

 

 

American Interest has more on California’s war on the working poor. this time using traffic fines. For example, $490 for stop light violations

Pressed to come up with the money to stave off its public employee pension time bomb, the state of California is jacking up the cost of traffic tickets. Reuters reports:

California legislators have raised fines for traffic infractions to some of the highest in the United States to generate revenue, and the poor are bearing an unfair burden, losing cars and jobs because they cannot pay them, civil rights activists said on Friday.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area said in a new report that the $490 fine for a red light ticket in California was three times the national average. The cost was even higher if motorists wanted to attend traffic school in lieu of a conviction or were late paying.

This is a variation of what we call the “blue civil war”—the way the tightening fiscal vise around state and local governments end up pitting Democratic constituencies against one another. In this case, poor and minority Californians, who tend to need to drive further to work, are paying the brunt of the increased traffic fines—which are going to cover the retirement hole for unionized public employees. …

 

 

Zimbabwe shows another way governments ruin lives. AP reports on farmers there cheated by the state.

Farmer Simon Kahari recently sold tobacco worth more than $6,000 at an auction in Zimbabwe, a small fortune reflecting the golden leaf’s resurgence in this southern African country. Yet because of Zimbabwe’s dire economic problems he ended up sleeping in an auction house toilet that night, hungry and wondering if and when he would be able to access his earnings.

“I don’t have any money for food or anything,” Kahari said. “I came here expecting to be paid, so now I will have to borrow.”

Many of Zimbabwe’s tobacco farmers share the same plight during the ongoing selling season of the crop, Zimbabwe’s second biggest earner after gold. While exported tobacco rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars, small-time farmers feel left out of the lucrative cycle.

A cash shortage that underlines the country’s deepening economic woes has left farmers who travel long distances to auctions unpaid, stranded and desperate.

Farmers like Kahari are not paid in cash because of the currency shortage. But they need the money because much of Zimbabwe, especially rural areas where there is little infrastructure, is a cash-based society.

Instead, their earnings are deposited into accounts that they must open at bank branches at the auction houses. Then the farmers must stick around for weeks, hoping for the daily withdrawal limit of $100 but often getting no more than $50.

Meanwhile, tobacco sales have jumped 30 percent from last year, earning $300 million so far, according to the country’s Tobacco Industry Marketing Board. …

 

 

Now for the pièce de résistance of today’s post on how the left makes everything worse, we have a story from Reuters on water so filthy and oily in Venezuela’s oil ports that the tankers filling up there have to be cleaned before the rest of the world’s ports will let them enter.

In the scorching heat of the Caribbean Sea, workers in scuba suits scrub crude oil by hand from the hull of the Caspian Galaxy, a tanker so filthy it can’t set sail in international waters.

The vessel is among many that are constantly contaminated at two major export terminals where they load crude from Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA. The water here has an oily sheen from leaks in the rusty pipelines under the surface.

That means the tankers have to be cleaned before traveling to many foreign ports, which won’t admit crude-stained ships for fear of environmental damage to their harbors, port facilities or other vessels.

The laborious hand-cleaning operation is one of many causes of chronic delays for dozens of tankers that deliver Venezuela’s principle export to customers worldwide, according to three executives of the state-run firm, eight employees of maritime firms that contract with PDVSA and Thomson Reuters vessel-tracking data. …

… At oil export terminals around the world – where crude leaks like those in Venezuela are relatively rare – an oil-stained tanker would normally be taken out of the water and cleaned with industrial equipment in a dry dock.

But Venezuela has just one small dry dock and lacks the cash or the time to send its soiled tankers there for proper cleaning, according to the PDVSA executives, ship captains and two workers from tanker cleaning companies.

So workers on a small fishing boat clean the giant tanker with thousands of scrub-brush strokes. The work – which involves scouring ships above and below the water line – can take up to ten days per vessel, a worker involved in the cleaning said.

In a scene witnessed by Reuters in April, workers wearing scuba suits baked on the deck of a small boat as they reached out with brushes to scrub the Caspian Galaxy, a tanker leased for one trip by a PDVSA customer.

The workers labored just offshore from Amuay beach, near a tourist hub and PDVSA’s largest refinery. The crews here have washed so many vessels in recent months that they have dubbed their operation “the boatwash”. …

 

 

May 24, 2017 – VILE AND VIOLENT DEMS

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The coarsening of our political life has become breathtaking. Noah Rothman writes on the potty mouth democrats. Pickerhead might run for office as a Dem. Mrs. Pickerhead pointed out the language requirement is filled.

If you can’t be persuasive, be interesting. If you’re neither persuasive nor interesting, try to be funny. And if all of that fails, just be provocative; at least your audience will remember you. For Democrats, all else has failed. They’ve giving up on being compelling, coherent, or even just entertaining. In a desperate, spastic flail to capture your attention, Democrats have settled on a tactic: shock. …

… A New York Magazine profile of obvious 2020 hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand featured the esteemed gentlewoman from New York unleashing cascade of profanity upon her interlocutor. Her interview included “one ‘f***,’ two ‘f***ings,’ one ‘bulls***,’” and a variety of other lesser but equally crude expletives, according to Politico’s Alex Caton. At a public event, while sitting across from several former speechwriters for Barack Obama, California Senator Kamala Harris (another likely 2020 candidate) castigated Representative Raul Labrador for claiming that Americans do not die for want of health insurance. “What the f*** is that?” she remarked. Her audience roared and ate it up.

Republicans “don’t give a s*** about people,” barked newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez …

… It’s not just the Democratic Party’s political professionals who are rebranding themselves provocateurs to meet the measure of the populist moment. The liberal activist class is gearing up to make their case to the public by harassing lawmakers and scaring voters to death. Politico reported on Tuesday that Democratic protesters are preparing to lay down in the streets, ship the ashes of the dead to GOP lawmakers who voted to repeal ObamaCare, and to stage mock funerals for the unwitting constituents of Republican congressmen and women. “We can’t win based on the merit of our ideas,” confessed the proprietor of a liberal super PAC, “but rather on the way in which we deliver that message.” Some might call that an admission against interest. …

… During the 2016 primaries, Trump-skeptical conservatives fretted over the possibility that, were the populist real-estate mogul from Manhattan to win the GOP nomination, much less the presidency, Americans would become inured to his loutish persona. In the process, Trump would de-stigmatize rudeness and profanity, generate a more ill-mannered civic society, and accelerate the general coarsening of the culture. They were right. They just didn’t know that it would be the Democrats, not the GOP, who would first rush to follow in Donald Trump’s footsteps.

 

 

 

John Hinderaker says the craziest Dems are the California ones.

The Democratic Party is far gone in hate, but who do you suppose are the most lunatic Dems of all? The California Democrats are obvious candidates and, sure enough, their state convention yesterday concluded with a chant: “Fuck Donald Trump!” led by California Democratic Party chairman John Burton.

AP reporter Jonathan Cooper records the moment of infamy:

Outgoing Dem chair John Burton: “all together now: fuck Donald Trump.” While crowd holds up two middle fingers. pic.twitter.com/mDvgkhY7uY

— Jonathan J. Cooper (@jjcooper) May 20, 2017

There is a lot more at Gateway Pundit, and various videos are circulating. What I want to point out is the Associated Press’s restrained response to this outbreak of Democratic Party insanity. The AP headlines: “California Democrats take aim at Trump, GOP Congress.” I guess that’s one way of putting it. …

 

 

 

Even the Sacramento Bee, one of the house organs of the CA Dems, is disgusted. Steve Hayward posts in Powerline.

One of the very best analyses of the group dynamic of the Left came from Tom Bethell and Joe Sobran years ago, when they referred to the Left as “The Hive.” Like bees or ants, the Left simply goes into action in a coordinated and instinctual fashion, without need to meet and plan. Naturally the mainstream media is a chief nest of The Hive, and it buzzes constantly on behalf of liberalism.

Hence California’s Bee newspapers—the Sacramento Bee and the Fresno Bee (both long time McClatchy properties)—are appropriately named nodes of conventional liberalism. You could rightly think of them as the Bee Hive. Normally you’d never pay any attention to their house editorials. But the Fresno Bee editorial page over the weekend took note of the spectacle of the recent California Democratic Party convention and found it was even too much for them:

Which of the “D” words would you use to characterize the actions of California Democrats at their state convention in Sacramento over the weekend? Disgraceful? Deplorable Dysfunctional?

Sadly, there’s no wrong answer here. …

 

 

 

Federalist OpEd on the growing violence of the left.

Something is wrong with the American Left. The recent spate of violent protests on college campuses has been well-documented, but the violence and intolerance championed by left-wing student activists is beginning to creep off campus and into mainstream public life.

The reason for this is straightforward enough: although progressives pride themselves on their putative tolerance and diversity, the imperatives of leftist politics are fundamentally illiberal. Justice imposed through power is the philosophical foundation of the political left, and when earnest progressives become convinced the only avenue to power is violence, their tolerance quickly falls by the wayside. Consider a few recent events, none of which involved college protesters but all of which were marked by threats of violence. 

Ahead of a town hall meeting this week in Virginia’s fifth congressional district, Republican Rep. Tom Garrett received a series of disturbing threats—not just against him but also his wife and family, even his dog. One message said bluntly, “This is how we’re going to kill your wife.”

As a result, the town hall event was heavily guarded, with uniformed and plain-clothes security lining the walls and scattered throughout the 300-seat room.

Earlier this month, Jennifer Carnahan, the new chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, received a torrent of racist hate mail and at least one threat of physical violence that forced her from her home for a weekend. …

… It’s not just angry mobs at town halls. On Wednesday, an editor at the Huffington Post called on his fellow leftists to stalk Republicans: “They should be hounded by protesters everywhere, especially in public—in restaurants, in shopping centers, in their districts and yes, on the public property outside their homes and apartments, in Washington and back in their homes states.”

Last week, senior Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald—who, let’s be honest, seems a little off—said he wants every Republican who voted for the American Health Care Act to have a family member come down with a serious illness, lose their insurance, and die. For good measure, he added that he also wants them “to be tortured.” …