Nothing screams conservatism like production and consumption

 FDR merely gave you a check every month in your retirement, but conservatives gave you gas.

Speaking of Margaret Thatcher, "right-wing" candidate for Japan PM backs "hardline conservative" policies of easy money and aggressive spending of it LOL

"Let''s devalue the Yen and spend the hell out of it"

 

Right-wing Sanae Takaichi is set to be Japan’s first female prime minister

Japan’s ruling party picked hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi as its head on Saturday, putting her on course to become the country’s first female prime minister in a move set to jolt investors and neighbors. ...

Takaichi, who says her hero is Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, offers a starker vision for change than Koizumi and is potentially more disruptive.

An advocate of late premier Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” strategy to boost the economy with aggressive spending and easy monetary policy, she has previously criticized the Bank of Japan’s interest rate increases. ...

It's obviously the nationalism, anti-globalism, and possible militarism which really bother the writer from Reuters:

... But her nationalistic positions — such as her regular visits to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, viewed by some Asian countries as a symbol of its past militarism — may rile neighbors like South Korea and China. ...

Takaichi also favors revising Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution and suggested this year that Japan could form a “quasi-security alliance” with Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China. ...

“We hope she will ... steer Japanese politics in an ‘anti-globalism’ direction to protect national interests and help the people regain prosperity and hope,” Sanseito said in a statement.

 

If Japan really wanted to scare the world, maybe it could peg the Yen to the price of plutonium, the vast majority of which in the world it owns, and start aggressively selling it to the highest bidders. 

 

"That will teach them"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine FDR telling Churchill in August 1941 to make peace with Hitler and fork over Britain's coal to America

 

A Day of American Infamy

Bret Stephens, The New York Times

... If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy. ...

Sometimes it's not the economy stupid: Headline employment under Obama didn't recover until May 2014, but he got re-elected in 2012 anyway

 Six years and four months went by: Jan 2008-May 2014.

And economic confidence actually declined from -11 in 2012 to -10 in 2014 when it did!

It's one of the craziest things in US political history, comparable to FDR getting re-elected throughout the Great Depression, which his economic experimentation only made worse.

By October 2012, 72% said the effects of the Great Recession were still the most important problem, compared to 43% today in October 2024, but it didn't matter that Obama wasn't solving it. He beat Romney anyway.

Is this one of those sometimes?

The same phenomenon may be happening today, but in reverse.

Harris stands to lose despite economic indicators which are chugging along in her favor, or at least not falling apart, to which those 43% seem oblivious.

Civilian employment in July and September 2024 remains near the November 2023 peak. Core inflation is still too high at 2.7%, but it isn't in the 5s anymore like it was for four straight quarters. Congress has thrown the book at the economy since 2Q2020, with nominal GDP growing at an astounding 9.84% compound annual rate because of pandemic spending. That's been a double-edged sword, however, exploding the national debt, inflation, and interest rates.

But economic confidence is Obama-like negative, and has been since it crashed during the pandemic in April 2020 to -32 from its highest level in 20 years under Trump just two months before, in February 2020 at +41.

Trump didn't shut down the economy in 2020, but governors sure did. It was a stark demonstration of just how quickly the wrong leadership can make everything go to hell in a hand basket overnight. The people today aren't wrong to lack confidence.

Ominously for incumbent VP Harris, Gallup thinks 2024 is most analogous to 1992, when Americans booted the incumbent Bush 41 even though the recession had ended more than a year before in 1991.

Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than half of Americans (52%) say they and their family are worse off today than they were four years ago, while 39% say they are better off and 8% volunteer that they are about the same. The 2024 response is most similar to 1992 among presidential election years in which Gallup has asked the question. ...

With a majority of Americans feeling they are not better off than four years ago, economic confidence remaining low, and less than half of Americans saying now is a good time to find a quality job, the economy will be an important consideration at the ballot box this year. As inflation persists and economic concerns dominate voters' minds, the upcoming election may hinge on which candidate can best address these pressing issues.

 

It's still the party of FDR, who turned away the M.S. St. Louis in 1939 and a third of its passengers ended up murdered in the camps

 

Lying to the enemy is standard practice with Chicoms, Muslims, and Democrats

Obama no Reagan, no FDR: Democrat candidates for 2020 attack Obama legacy less than four years after he left office

Marshall Auerback: George W. Bush's naïve China Fantasy mimicked FDR on Joseph Stalin

Liberalism misunderestimating our enemies, as usual, because it believes human nature is essentially good.

All of our bets on China have been wrong:

In contrast to diplomat and historian George Kennan’s famous telegram about the old Soviet Union (which correctly rebutted US president Franklin D Roosevelt’s naïve assumptions about Josef Stalin and provided the diplomatic underpinnings for a sustained policy of Western containment after World War II), today’s Cold War 2.0 is typified by what author James Mann calls the West’s “China fantasy,” a notion encapsulated by former US president George W Bush’s remark: “Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.”

Drudge is wrong: The deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history didn't occur in Pittsburgh, not by a longshot

The deadliest anti-Semitic attack occurred in 1939 when FDR refused to let the MS St. Louis of the Hamburg America Line dock with its over 900 Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany.

The ship eventually had to return to Europe and it is estimated that over 200 of its Jews ended up being exterminated in the camps.

So much for the Jewess's sonnet:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

FDR: Public employee unions shouldn't exist at all because they can paralyze government and its operation

Here, August 16, 1937:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."

Let this be a sign unto you: The era of libertarian looting ushered in by Reagan now reaching apogee will be followed by another FDR-like "progressive" era of welfare statism

Bernie tapped into the amorphous socialism clamored for by today's young people who face dim job prospects while saddled by large college debts for degrees incommensurate with what's available in the job marketplace. This is the direct result of the takeover of public education from bottom to top by the left. It never delivers what it promises, except for hope.

As "millennials" replace the Baby Boom at the polls, their vote will transform America, and already has. Obama and Bernie were signs of this. Expect a return to high taxation of the rich, even larger federal government, and the transformation of existing welfare state programs into universal systems.

Like it or not, that's the future. Patriotism will take the form of socialism for Americans instead of for the world.

Now that Republicanism has thoroughly committed itself to globalism, libertarians are advised to take the money and run. 

The Courts had and have absolutely no business ruling on the president's travel ban, wrote FDR's former attorney general

Noted here:

Writing for the Supreme Court in 1948 (in Chicago & Southern Air Lines v. Waterman), Justice Robert Jackson — FDR’s former attorney general and the chief prosecutor at Nuremburg — explained that decisions involving foreign policy, including alien threats to national security, are “political, not judicial” in nature. Thus, they are

wholly confided by our Constitution to the political departments of the government, Executive and Legislative. They are delicate, complex, and involve large elements of prophecy. They are and should be undertaken only by those directly responsible to the people whose welfare they advance or imperil. They are decisions of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude, facilities nor responsibility and have long been held to belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial intrusion or inquiry.

Crumbling credibility: The New York Times can't decide if we had interment camps or internment camps

Here.

Pittsburgh Tribune Review Agrees Obama Is Essentially A Fascist

According to an editorial in Saturday's Pittsburgh Tribune Review, here, agreeing with John Mackey the CEO of Whole Foods, Obama is essentially a fascist. The editorial approvingly quotes this definition of fascism by libertarian Sheldon Richman:

“As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. For those with the hubris to think they, not free markets, could better serve society, ‘fascism‘ (or as we prefer, 'fascistic economics') was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone (classic) liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism.”

Just when you thought there's been no progress defining for the public who and what is Obama, a businessman and a newspaper provide some:

"The general parallels to Obamanomics are glaring. Throw in the specifics of ObamaCare — then consider forays into national industrial policy and state protection of organized labor cartels — and the parallels are blinding", the editorial says.

Not that America's odd mixture of socialism and capitalism is something new.

It was Herbert Hoover, as far as I know, who was the first liberal to identify the American phenomenon of a mixed economics. Hoover located it in the blended strongman presidency of FDR, which was based more on Roosevelt's admiration for Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler as leaders than it was on substantive convictions about the dismal science. The alphabet soup of government which we take for granted today is the direct descendant of Roosevelt's impulse to try something, try anything, until it worked. Well, they're still trying.

Under Roosevelt, perfectly good food was deliberately destroyed by government to keep it from reaching the market in order to support prices in a deflationary economy even as people went hungry all across the country. Today we deliberately devote half the corn crop to produce an expensive, politically correct fuel boosting the cost of food animals while the number of people on food stamps is at an all time high and consumer demand has fallen like a rock. In the immortal words of Curly, if at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed.

But Hoover the loser was on to something, even if calling the man who beat him an un-American dictator lover was beyond the pale for some people. History eventually proved Hoover right when FDR broke with American tradition dating from the founding by running for a third term, and then a fourth. It took until 1951 for the American people to wake up and put a stop to that, with the ratification of the 22nd Amendment. Some dictators are assassinated, others just end up in the circular file. In many ways, Roosevelt simply out-Hoovered Hoover's own liberalism. People forget that FDR ran on what amounted to a repudiation of Republican liberal economic interventionism in the economy, and promptly ramped it up beyond anyone's imagination after he was elected.

But the blended system in America surely began much earlier. We could dial it back probably all the way to Lincoln himself, which would be fitting if only because the current occupant of The White House who practices fascism goes to such great pains to style himself after him, the president who chose to make the principle of national union over sovereign States the new definition of America. That fact of working a revolution, of remaking the country, should trouble everyone who has an ounce of independence left flowing through his veins, which is what troubles so many people who hear Obama speak of transforming the country. For half of us, one such revolution was enough.

This year we might do well to reflect on a later example, however, seeing that it is the anniversary of the abolition of private banking 100 years ago. It's strangely coincidental. The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in 1913 by a fanatical progressive Presbyterian named Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who hated the encumbrances placed upon government by the constitutional order and wanted to forge a new world where nations disarmed, lived in peace and cooperated toward a common goal, with the US not at its then natural place, at the head. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in thoroughly partisan fashion by Democrats who had swept to power in the election of 1912 and rammed it through the Congress without Republican support. Their dollar then is now worth 4 cents.

If Woodrow Wilson doesn't yet remind you of Obama and ObamaCare, maybe its because after 100 years of the pernicious effects of American style fascism, you're just too poor to pay attention.

Vern McKinley Connects Long History Of Bailouts In US Especially With 1930s

Vern McKinley's new book on 100 years of bailouts in the US is reviewed here, including this quotation from the book:

“the number of agencies deploying bailouts multiplied, the safety net became bigger and bigger, and the primary beneficiaries were soon concentrated among the largest of financial institutions, who came to rely on and demand this ready source of government backstopping…” 

The word "fascism" never occurs in the review, but the smell is unmistakeable and Herbert Hoover would have recognized it.

FDR, The Enemy of Money, Devalued the Dollar Nearly 70 Percent Overnight

FDR in 1933

Executive Order 6102

Gold priced in dollars went from its historic price since 1879 of $20.67 the ounce to $35 in 1934. Gold was confiscated because the government claimed the American people were hoarding it, thwarting commerce. Kind of like today where people hoard cash but government interferes with interest rates so that you get no return and are more likely to spend it. History rhymes.

Pat McIlheran Reminds Us Wisconsin's Governor Walker is Actually to the Left of FDR, and the Last Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee

From one of America's best columnists writing today:

Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee's mayor in the 1950s and the last card-carrying Socialist to head a major U.S. city, supported labor. But in 1969, the progressive icon wrote that rise of unions in government work put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials. Government unions "can mean considerable loss of control over the budget, and hence over tax rates," he warned.

There was "a revolutionary principle rather quietly at work in American government," he wrote.

The principle was working at about 100 decibels in Wisconsin's Capitol last week, once the union drum-beaters got going. What worked them up was the money they'd concede, they said, but even more that Walker would make their unions surrender the control they'd gained over every government budget.

There is much more at this link.

Half of CPAC This Year is Libertarian, Heckles and Walks Out on Dick Cheney

The Libertarians hate the Department of Defense and the US military more than they hate the much larger, arguably unconstitutional, social welfare state erected by FDR.

Bunch of queers.

Story and video here.

RC Whalen Wants Us To Declare FDR's 'Emergency' Over Already

Some excerpts:

President Herbert Hoover said of the New Deal that it was an attempt to crossbreed Socialism, Fascism and Free Enterprise, part of a collectivist revolution led by FDR and carried within the Trojan horse of economic emergency. ...

The second half of volume three of President Hoover’ s memoir, The Great Depression, contains a scathing critique of his successor -- and also an admission of personal responsibility for the catastrophe. It features several times the word “ fascism ” to describe many Roosevelt-era prescriptions for fighting the Depression, a blunt reminder that much of what FDR did during these dark years was borrowed from the strong men of Europe — Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Stalin in Russia.

Don't miss the rest, here.