AOC Call For ‘Prison Abolition’ May Have Potential

A common characteristic of the 2019 news cycle is that it is often difficult to distinguish reality from satire. The glitch in the matrix that is 2019 often blends the two together in a way often makes satire seem more real than reality while reality can seem totally unreal. Figures from both sides of the political spectrum are included in this phenomenon, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most prevalent players in today’s surreal news cycle.

Last week, AOC figured prominently is a story that claimed that climate change alarmists thought it would be necessary to eat babies for humanity to survive. The “baby-eater” story turned out to be a hoax, but, not to be topped, AOC returns with a series of tweets from her personal verified Twitter account in which she advocates “prison abolition.”

On Monday, AOC tweeted that “mass incarceration” needed to be replaced by “decarceration & [sic] prison abolition.”

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1181196457145225216?s=20

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1181198160045195269?s=20

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1181207065072676864?s=20

Okay, you may think, we do incarcerate too many people in this country. But what about the tens of thousands of violent criminals who would go back to committing violent crime on us ordinary law-abiding citizens if they were decarcerated?

Well, AOC has an answer to that, by which I mean that she does not actually have an answer. “Our lawmaking process means we come to solutions together,” she tweets, kicking the can down the road.

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1181207079190708224?s=20

AOC’s non-solution is reminiscent of Will Rogers’ suggestion in World War I that the ocean should be boiled to deter German U-boats. When asked how this could be accomplished, Rogers replied, “I’m just the idea man.”

AOC is evidently just the idea person, leaving the implementation and practical problems to others.

Allow me to make a suggestion on how to handle decarceration and prison abolition. In the 1981 film, Escape From New York, the entire island of Manhattan was converted into a maximum-security prison. While the movie was considered science fiction at the time, maybe the idea of walling off large areas and using them as free-range prisons has finally come. We can quibble over what parts of the country would be best suited for conversion to prisons, but I submit that New York City has the infrastructure and capacity to house the nation’s criminals well into the coming decades.

The plan has something to make everyone happy. Conservatives get to keep violent criminals off the streets (of other towns anyway). Liberals get more humane conditions without cages. Average Americans get to not have their streets flooded with drug dealers, rapists, and murderers. Maybe we could even sweeten the pot by building a wall around the island of Manhattan for added security. That would help win support from Keynesians and Donald Trump.

There really isn’t a strong argument against turning New York into a prison. The city is past its prime and crumbling in many areas. The Statue of Liberty would be outside the prison area and New York residents and pizza makers could be transplanted to much nicer parts of the country (just NIMBY, although I will take a New York pizza shop). We could even let AOC keep her old district.

I know I said before that AOC was a major player in the surreal news cycle, but maybe she’s on to something here.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Pro-Trump Group Claims Responsibility For Baby-Eating Activist

When a woman interrupted an AOC town hall yesterday to advocate eating babies to stop climate change, many people thought it was too good to be true. An obviously mentally-disturbed woman who was advocating a crazy policy that seemed to embrace the twin pillars of leftist ideology, abortion and climate change, was like a caricature of what many people think leftism is. One of my rules of thumb is that if it seems too stupid to be true, it probably is (although this guideline gets tested more and more these days, it seems), and that turned out to be the case with the baby-eater.

As Gabriella Hoffman pointed out earlier today, the woman was part of a hoax. A group called the Larouche PAC claimed responsibility for the in-person trolling on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/larouchepac/status/1179933213021626368

If you haven’t heard of Larouche PAC, don’t worry. It’s a name that I haven’t heard in decades. I remember “Lyndon Larouche” as a perennial fringe candidate from elections in the 1970s and 1980s, but being a kid then, I never knew much about him.

As it turns out, Lyndon Larouche was a Quaker and a conscientious objector during WWII. Beginning in 1944, he served with the US Army in noncombatant roles in India and Burma. At this point in his life, he was already dabbling with Marxism and joined the Socialist Workers Party when he returned after the war. In 1967, he organized his followers into the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and created a private intelligence network in which his supporters sent in information from around the world. During the 1970s, Larouche had contacts with both leftist groups such as the CPUSA and right-wing groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby.

By the late 1970s, Larouche was transforming from a Marxist to a fascist. He ran the gamut of the political spectrum with contacts in both the CIA and the KGB. He supported fusion energy and the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), while also embracing a variety of conspiracy theories. Larouche was famous for pamphlets that railed against the British, who he believed controlled international trade, as well as Jews and Israel, which he said was “a hundred times worse than Hitler.” A Holocaust, denier, in the 1980s, he also advocated concentration camps for AIDS patients. In a pamphlet series that became a book called “Children of Satan,” he alleged that followers of Leo Strauss in the Bush Administration, led by Dick Cheney, misled Congress and the American people in order to invade Iraq and that the September 11 attacks were an “inside job.” His group was considered to be a cult by many observers.

Larouche was convicted, along with several supporters, on charges of credit card fraud, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice in the 1980s. He ran a losing campaign for Congress while in jail. Larouche was never elected to public office even though he ran for president a total of eight times, most recently in 2016. However, in 1986, two of his supporters won Democratic nominations for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in Illinois. He faded from the headlines but remained active in politics well into the 21^st century. He died in February of this year.

I say all that to say that Lyndon Larouche was a complex man who had a wide range of political positions, many of them contradictory. He was also well-known as a nut. Considering the breadth of his policy platform and the fact that politics makes strange bedfellows, it should not be surprising to learn that the modern Larouche PAC supports Donald Trump.

The Greenwich (Ct.) Time reported last year that two members of the group were demonstrating with signs that read “DEFEND TRUMP” and criticized former special counsel Robert Mueller. The couple said that they like Trump’s economic policies. The website for the Larouche PAC is also unabashedly pro-Trump. The top of the home page contains several articles referencing the “coup” against Donald Trump as well as a number of articles attacking the British (including a press release that purports to have evidence that the British were behind the 2016 election meddling) and Joe Biden. A video on the site shows Larouche supporters with a display in Manhattan working to “protect the Donald Trump Administration from the coup.”

A 2017 article, posted while Larouche was still alive, on the site exults, “Not since William McKinley has a President been so clear in his intent to return the nation to the economic tradition of Alexander Hamilton, to end the policies of British Imperial free trade, and make a full commitment to industry, manufacturing, scientific advancement and world peace. Not since Franklin Roosevelt has our nation applied these principles for national recovery and development, which are so urgently required today. The American people must now take it upon themselves to understand this American System tradition, and the means by which it can be applied most successfully today.”

The common denominator in all this seems to be the group’s opposition to climate change policy. A Larouche webcast is titled, “CO-2 Reduction is a Mass Murder Policy” and the question at the AOC town hall was focused on climate change. Donald Trump also has a history of opposition to climate change policies and withdrew from the Paris Accords.

That the Larouche PAC and Donald Trump converge on the issue of climate change is not necessarily an indictment of the president. Nor does it mean that all climate change skeptics are nutjobs. But the underlying truth is that the Larouche PAC does support Donald Trump, even though there is no evidence that the president was aware of the group’s support, or even of its existence, before yesterday.

The trolling of the AOC town hall was a masterful piece of performance art, but the group behind it is a shadowy fringe group that is neither fully left nor fully right. They do seem to be fully enshrouded in tinfoil, however. Hopefully, the publicity from the “baby-eater” stunt will fade and the group will return to the obscurity that bigoted conspiracy theorists deserve.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Cruz And AOC Are Coming Together On Contraception

They say that politics makes strange bedfellows and nowhere is that more true than the unlikely alliance between Texas Senator Ted Cruz and self-identified democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The two, who are polar opposites in almost every way have indicated their agreement on a bill to prohibit former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists and now seem to have found common ground on birth control.

Cruz reached out to AOC yesterday on Twitter after the New York leftist tweeted that birth control should be available over the counter. Cruz responded that he agreed and offered to team up on a “simple, clean bill” that would make birth control available without a prescription.  At press time, AOC had not yet publicly responded to Cruz’s offer.

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1138840867777712128

Making birth control more readily available is an idea that makes sense. Over recent decades, out-of-wedlock births in the United States have risen dramatically. The CDC reports that births to unwed mothers now account for almost 40 percent of births. The unmarried birth rate for women under 44 is slightly higher than 40 percent.  

The reason that the government and taxpayers should care about the unmarried birth rate is that when an unmarried parent raises children, the family often qualifies for federal benefits. The growth in the entitlement state driven by single-parent families contributes to both the increasing federal deficit and the increasing American dependence on the government. Children raised in single-parent households are also more likely to have a variety of bad outcomes such as becoming a juvenile delinquent, poor performance in school, abuse alcohol or drugs, and becoming a single parent themselves.

Although the Census Bureau reported in 2016 that the majority of American children live in two-parent families, the share of children in two-parent households has fallen by about 20 points since 1960. About 23 percent of American kids live in a single-parent household headed by their mother. Of the children in two-parent households, about 99 percent live in homes where the parents are married.

The hope is that if birth control is more readily available then fewer parents will choose to have children before getting married. If birth control is available and used consistently, it might also help to reduce the number of abortions. The most common reasons given for abortion all revolve around the mother’s belief that she is not ready to have a child, i.e. abortion is being used in lieu of birth control.

One of the biggest potential problems with the increased availability of cheap birth control is that the US birth rate is already too low. The birth rate has been declining for several years and is already below the level at which the current population will replace itself. The coming population decline could have negative effects on everything from economic growth to maintaining America’s global dominance.

There might be more problems with the legalization of OTC birth control from AOC’s side of the aisle. Reason Magazine described earlier this year how, despite years of usage and research that prove the safety of birth control medications, Democrats and Planned Parenthood started resisting the idea of cheap, OTC contraception just as Republicans were warming to the idea.

This isn’t the first time that Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez have teamed up. The two have previously worked together to push for a ban on former congressmen becoming lobbyists. As with birth control, the roots of the congressional lobbying ban idea came from Twitter with Cruz responding to an AOC tweet. So far, the duo has not presented legislation to Congress.

As a conservative, I have more problems with a ban on lobbying than with cheap contraception. Even though lobbyists are never popular with voters, the profession is specifically protected by the First Amendment on two grounds. First, lobbyists enjoy the same free speech rights as other citizens and, second, the right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” is also included at the forefront of the Bill of Rights.

Nevertheless, I do applaud Cruz and AOC for having the courage to reach across the aisle in an environment where compromise is considered to be toxic by many. For Cruz’s part, it represents a significant departure from his “my-way-or-the-highway” attitude seen in the 2013 government shutdown. His compromises with AOC may mean that the Texas senator is maturing as a legislator.

The truth is that compromise is the only way to get things done in Washington. That’s not a bug either. It’s a feature that the framers built into the Constitution to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The authors of the Constitution wanted Americans to work together to solve their problems and make the country better, not simply denounce the other side as traitors or criminals and issue Executive Orders or national emergencies. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

Bernie And AOC Team Up To Attack Credit Cards

An epidemic of economic illiteracy seems to have inflicted both parties. While Republicans suffer from President Trump’s fixation on taxing imports to make America great again, Democrats, eager to prove that they also fail to understand basic economic principles, have unveiled a proposal for price controls on credit cards.

The proposal is the brainchild of the Democratic Party’s two leading democratic socialists, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and is targeted at what the pair call “exorbitant credit-card interest rates” in a statement. Their “Loan Shark Prevention Act” would a 15-percent federal cap on interest rates and empower individual states to establish lower limits.

Channeling Ron Paul’s references to “banksters,” Sanders said, “The reality is that today’s modern-day loan sharks are no longer lurking on street corners breaking kneecaps to collect their payments. They wear three-piece suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions in total compensation and head financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and American Express.”

Per the statement, the pair claims that the median credit card interest rate is currently 21 percent and argues that there is no reason for banks to charge such a high interest rate.

“There is no justifiable reason that a person—no matter their background—should be charged an interest rate higher than 15 percent,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Rates higher than 15 percent are predatory debt traps, designed to keep working families underwater and allow predatory companies to enrich themselves off the misfortune of others.”

Like many bad ideas, this one sounds good on the surface. Bankers make an easy target for populists and everyone hates paying credit card bills.

In reality, however, high interest rates on credit cards do serve important purposes. One of the most important purposes is to discourage consumers from carrying even larger amounts of revolving debt. By March 2018, Americans carried $1.027 trillion in debt on their credit cards. Without high interest rates, the amount of indebtedness would be even higher.

By making revolving credit expensive, banks encourage consumers to only charge to their cards what they can pay off at the end of the month. If you pay off your balance every month, you don’t pay any interest at all.

High interest rates also signal the risky nature of credit card loans. Credit card default rates are down from a high of 6.7 percent during the Great Recession, but credit card payments are often one of the first things to stop when times get hard. With an average balance of $6,354, banks can be left on the hook for many thousands of dollars when credit card holders default.

Even though credit card debt can be hazardous to your financial health, credit cards are a near-necessity of modern life. The availability of high interest rate cards allows many people who are considered credit risks to get a card that would not be available to them otherwise. If the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez bill becomes law, the effect would be a shortage of credit for many Americans. It is axiomatic that price controls, such as an interest rate cap, lead to market shortages.

In the early days of credit cards, the now-ubiquitous plastic payment devices were used almost exclusively by the wealthy. It has only been in recent decades that credit cards became commonplace among the middle- and lower-income groups. Under the Democratic proposal, it’s likely that the trend of easily available credit for the common man would be reversed.

Some would argue that reducing credit card use would be a good thing. I have sympathy for this argument as a guy who has paid off thousands of dollars in credit balances more than once. Credit cards are a financial tool that can be very destructive if used improperly.

The problem with the Bernie-AOC solution is that government intervention in the markets would inhibit people who need access to credit from getting it. Rather than reducing credit card use overall or capping interest rates, a better solution would be to teach consumers to use credit responsibly.

Until then, I'm sure that Bernie and AOC would give voters the guarantee, "If you like your credit card, you can keep your credit card."

Originally published on The Resurgent

Chutzpah: AOC Blames Anti-Semitism Backlash On AIPAC

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is not Jewish, but the freshman Democrat is not lacking in chutzpah. The congresswoman, who is of Puerto Rican descent, sent out a fundraising email in the wake of the recent scandals of anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party. That in itself is not unusual. However, the fact that the email blamed AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group, for the backlash against Democratic anti-Semitism is an uncommon act of brazenness.

The email was revealed on several Twitter accounts yesterday. Beneath AOC’s campaign logo, the email leads off with a quote from an unnamed “AIPAC activist” who allegedly said that AOC, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) “are three people who, in my opinion, will not be around in several years.”

https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status/1103774281450835973

“It’s official,” the email continues in bold print, “AIPAC is coming after Alexandria, Ilhan, and Rashida.”

“Rashida, Ilhan, and Alexandria have at times dared to question our foreign policy and the influence of money in our political system,” the email claims. “And now, lobbying groups across the board are working to punish them for it.”

To be clear, the attacks on the three women are because of anti-Semitic comments as well as statements on policy that can only be described as ignorant. For example, last month Rep. Omar tweeted an accusation that AIPAC money controlled US foreign policy. This accusation was false on its face since AIPAC does not make contributions to political candidates and other pro-Israel groups typically donate more money to Democrats than to Republicans.

Omar issued a statement in which she apologized “unequivocally” and then promptly equivocated by “reaffirm[ing] the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry.”

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1095046561254567937

Rashida Tlaib posted a similar tweet in January in which she claimed that senators who voted against the BDS movement to boycott Israel “forgot what country they represent.” Like Omar’s accusation, Tlaib’s tweet implies that support for Israel and Jewish companies was because of corruption or divided loyalties.

https://twitter.com/RashidaTlaib/status/1082095303325609984

In the past, liberals have pointed out that the BDS – boycott, divest, and sanctions – movement was itself anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League wrote that “all too often, BDS advocates employ anti-Semitic rhetoric and narratives to isolate and demonize Israel.” In 2017, the Huffington Post pointed out that there was a strong correlation between BDS activity and anti-Semitic incidents, saying, “BDS activity does not merely encourage, but also causes anti-Semitism.”

For her part, AOC has casually dismissed the anti-Semitic comments of her fellow congresswomen. In February, she tweeted that Rep. Omar “demonstrated a capacity to… learn about [the] history of anti-Semitism….”

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1095393011654103040

Omar and Tlaib don’t seem to need to learn about anti-Semitism, a school of thought in which they seem to be well-versed. The company they keep suggests that, despite their denials, that they are quite comfortable with their anti-Jewish attitudes. In January, Tlaib posed with a Palestinian activist known for his support of Hezbollah and Omar is scheduled to speak at a benefit for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) this month. CAIR has a long history of supporting terrorist groups.

While there are also anti-Semites among the alt-right supporters of the Republican Party, Democratic anti-Semitism is becoming more open and mainstream. The failure of the Democratic House to pass a simple resolution condemning anti-Semitism this week is a telling indicator of which way political winds are blowing within the party.

Originally published on the Resurgent

What Do Tucker Carlson, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez Have In Common?

Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez have made the news recently with their attacks on billionaires and capitalism. As proof that politics makes strange bedfellows, however, Tucker Carlson, the conservative, Trump-supporting Fox News commentator is sounding more and more like the two Democratic congresswomen.

To make the point, look at the three quotes below and try to determine which came from Carlson and which came from Warren and Ocasio Cortez:

·        “I’m definitely against a system where really the only success stories are like 27 billionaires who hate America, which is where we are now.”

·        “Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”

·        Uber is “not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers.”

If you suspected that this was a trick, you’re right. All three quotes are from Tucker Carlson. The first was from the 2018 Student Action Summit, the second from Carlson’s January 3, 2019 monologue in response to a Mitt Romney op-ed, and the third from an August 30, 2018 segment on his Fox News show. Without context, the lines could just as easily have come from Alexandra Ocasio Cortez or Elizabeth Warren, however.

Carlson’s rhetoric against billionaires and capitalism seems strikingly similar to Cortez’s statement last week that, “I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

Adding to the populist pileup is Elizabeth Warren, who recently unveiled her plan for a wealth tax on the superrich. “We are now in an America where one-tenth of one percent has about the same wealth as 90 percent of America,” Warren said. “And here’s the deal. Forty percent of America today can’t come up with 400 bucks in an emergency. That is not an economy that is sustainable, and it’s not a democracy that’s sustainable.”

The meeting of the minds between Carlson and the Democrats represents a crossover between the populist tendencies of the right and left. Carlson almost acknowledged this in a Jan. 26 interview with Salon.

“My intention in writing it [his monologue responding to Mitt Romney] was to remind the Republican Party that these are now issues of concern for you,” Carlson said, “because for a hundred years you represented capital over and against labor. I mean that's kind of the purpose of the Republican Party. They used to represent the investor class, right? So, the conventional criticisms of the Republicans as the party of management were 100 percent true, obviously.”

“What I wanted to remind Republican lawmakers was that it's no longer true, that's not your constituency anymore,” Carlson added. “You have a new constituency and it's people who are primarily wage earners and primarily, not low income, but lower income.”

Carlson seems to have bought into the liberal idea of a society that is divided into winners and losers rather than the traditional conservative belief that a rising tide floats all boats. A free market economy will necessarily produce wealthy people who have ideas that form the nucleus of companies that earn profits and create jobs. In contrast to the view that wealth is bad, the companies created by the wealthy help in the economy in two main ways. First, they provide jobs and, second, they provide products that raise the standard of living.

One such American success story is Amazon, but rather than celebrating the company that provides more than 600,000 jobs and made life better for millions, Carlson is critical. “Thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low. And guess who pays for that? You do,” he wrote last year. “Frankly, I don’t believe that ordinary Americans should be subsidizing the wealthiest person in the world because he pays his employees inadequate wages.”

Oops, sorry. Bernie Sanders actually said that. But Tucker Carlson made a statement that was very similar: “Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world by far, and possibly the richest human being in all of human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefit.”

Bernie and Tucker ignore the fact that there is no such thing as a bad job. Some Americans prefer part-time jobs so that they can spend more time with their families. Some take part-time jobs in addition to a full-time job. In any case, minimum wage jobs usually lead to higher paying jobs after the worker gains experience. This could be through promotions within the company or finding a better job at a completely different company. In any case, it is well established that mandating that companies increase wages [DT1] leads to fewer jobs.

The truth is that wages are increasing for all Americans. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2018 that wages saw the biggest gain since 2009. While wages were slow to recover in the wake of the Great Recession as unemployment fell to less than four percent. As the economy grows, workers will benefit with higher wages as the market for labor tightens.

When conservatives embrace populism, they lose sight of the economic truths that have benefitted the West for hundreds of years. The result is a mishmash of emotion and policy that leaves both sides of the political spectrum confused and overlapping. That confusion didn’t begin in 2016 when Donald Trump espoused a trade policy that was very similar to that of Bernie Sanders. There was already a considerable anti-trade movement growing in the GOP even before Trump appeared on the scene, but the Republican populism was accelerated by the 2016 election.

Carlson’s solution seems similar to the Democrats in that he wants someone to direct the economy to do what he wants it to. He even told Salon that he is open to voting for Elizabeth Warren if she promises to exert centralized control over the economy in a way that he wants.

“If there was a Democrat in 2020 in this election who made that primary plank in the platform, I would vote for that person. That's how important I think it is,” Carlson said. “If Elizabeth Warren came out and said, ‘I wrote a whole book on this and I want our economy to support parents on one income, families on one income, not so we can hire some person from the Third World to work at minimum wage and raise your kids, but so that you can have an intact family. You can live in a way that we all know is better.’”

But Carlson’s goal of directing the economy to support single parents can only be achieved through bigger government that takes away wealth from people who earned it. That is not conservative or a free market policy.

Admittedly, workers have suffered over the past decade since the 2008 financial crisis. Wages were slow to recover in the Obama years and manufacturing jobs took a hit, although the populists misidentified the culprit. It was automation rather than outsourcing that caused much of the pain. Today, the economy seems to be undergoing a shift as part of the technological and internet revolutions, but a changing economy doesn’t mean that the underlying laws of economics are no longer valid.

Free market capitalism is still the ideology that has lifted millions out of poverty and the expansion of fairness through government control that Carlson and others seem to suggest would restrict the free market’s ability to help workers, not help it. Unfortunately, the idea that Big Government can make capitalism more fair is where the Democrats and the populist wing of the Republican Party come together.

Originally published on The Resurgent

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 [DT1]https://www.businessinsider.com/minimum-wage-leads-to-job-losses-2017-3