RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today we—or, rather, the remaining sane among us—commemorate the anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The official holiday was Monday, disconnected from the actual date of Columbus’s discovery and, as some would now have it, even from the actual event. Today we are called upon to disavow Columbus and all his works and to deny that any good came of his efforts. We are called, instead, to castigate ourselves and celebrate “Indigenous People’s Day” as if, in so doing, we can remove or negate historical sins by obsessing over them and refusing to see the good in the past.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/12/the-good-the-bad-and-the-better-in-our-history/

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark,” a scientist marries a beautiful young woman who has a birthmark on her cheek. Despite her being a good and loving wife, he finds himself bothered by the mark and devises a procedure to get rid of it. As the young wife undergoes the procedure, the birthmark does indeed begin to fade. Unfortunately, however, as it fades she dies. The lesson is clear—human perfection is unattainable and the effort to achieve it through human will can lead to worsen the circumstances at the root of our imperfection.

It may not seem an exact analogy but this story always comes to mind as I read about efforts to tear down monuments, first of Confederate figures and war dead, now broadening to statues honoring Jefferson, Columbus, and other great but flawed men. If ever there was a slippery slope, this is it, for evidently even Lincoln is being targeted for what are supposed to be his politically incorrect views on race. But history is the product of many interwoven threads—pull one, and you are liable to unravel others, even some that you really need for the strength of the overall fabric.

Here’s another inexact but instructive analogy, from the histories of the two countries that occupy the island of Hispaniola, discovered (to European eyes) by Columbus, and colonized in different waves by both the Spanish and the French. The Spanish colony became the Dominican Republic while the French colony became Haiti.

As they moved toward independence, the two colonies took exactly the opposite routes. The Dominicans looked to their Spanish heritage and preserved what was useful in European culture. The Haitians, on the other hand, more or less following the totalitarian impulse of the French Revolution, destroyed everything that their colonizers had built—the entire infrastructure including roads, bridges, and machinery—and looked to a kind of indigenous identity for their model of liberation. This divergent history is reflected even in the names of the two countries.

The Dominican Republic is the largest economy in the Central American and Caribbean region and has a thriving tourist industry. Haiti is, well, Haiti. It is desperately poor—the perennial object of global charity that never seems to address its multiple problems, and it operates, if one can call it that, with a per capita income perhaps one eighth that of the DR.

In tearing down statues and monuments, rather than seeking to understand the history and culture behind their erection, sifting through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the past, radical activists may gain temporary satisfaction but may also be dismantling the interwoven strands of meaning that support our freedom, prosperity, and national unity. Every culture, including those of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, has blood on its hands. After all, Cain, the first murderer, was also the founder of the first city, and by extension, the first civilization.

You don’t have to be a Southern apologist to say that the Civil War was fought for a complexity of reasons. Slavery amounted to the foremost and final reason, yes, but there was also love of home, a sense of place, a belief in duty, and a fierce independence. Some of these qualities remain part of our cultural infrastructure today and we are foolish to dismiss them or to wish them away. Comparisons of the South to Nazi Germany are inept, inapt, and intellectually irresponsible.

In addition, all the monuments are part of the history of a relatively short and successful civil war. We shouldn’t slight this. Not every country has had this outcome. Some civil wars go on for decades, as in Angola, and sometimes the evil side wins, as in Vietnam, the latter with the help of our New Left. Korea is still divided. In some countries, like present day Yemen, there may not even be a better side. England suffered through nine years of civil wars, and decades more of turmoil before parliamentary rule could be definitively established. And in the process they had to behead a king, always a messy business fraught with unseen consequences. The Northern Irish have had to tolerate outright thugs and murderers sharing power as part of the Good Friday agreement that ended their “Troubles,” and in Russia, the Bolshevik victory in the civil war that followed the October Revolution eventually culminated in forced labor, mass purges, and state-enforced famine. Likewise in China.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling community organizing tactics and strategies as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democratic Party and its ongoing “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy from within and replace it with socialism.

Radical socialist Saul Alinsky wrote his 1971 manual Rules for Radicals to instruct future generations of radical community organizers in effective tactics to transform a capitalist state into a socialist state. Obama became the quintessential community organizer.

In May 1966, The Nation published an article written by Alinsky’s contemporaries Columbia sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven. “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” described the tactics necessary to destroy capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with unsustainable demands that push society into social chaos and economic collapse. Cloward and Piven took a termite approach to destruction that collapses structures from the inside out. They specifically targeted the U.S. public welfare system to instigate a crisis that would collapse welfare and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income.

David Horowitz explains that Alinsky and his followers deliberately “organize their power bases without naming the end game, without declaring a specific future they want to achieve – socialism, communism, or anarchy. Without committing themselves to concrete principles or a specific future they organize exclusively to build a power base which they can use to destroy the existing society and its economic system.” David Horowitz has identified the humanitarian hoax of community organizing with great precision.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy used poverty as the weapon of destruction that would collapse America and replace the government with their idealized totalitarian Marxist model. They succeeded in bankrupting New York City for a time but there was not enough pressure to destroy the economy of the country. Supplying additional pressure required Barack Obama’s particular skill set.

The Cloward-Piven experiment in New York City revealed the weakness of their strategy. Community organizing provided insufficient economic pressure – success required ideological politicians and a colluding media willing to disinform the public to be successful. 21st century politics has embraced the expanded 3-step Cloward-Piven Strategy which includes gun control advocacy to eliminate any serious resistance to the effort.

Step 1 – Politicians must overburden governmental/social institutions to the breaking point.

Step 2 – Politicians must incite social chaos through divisive policies to make the country ungovernable.

Step 3 – Politicians must disarm the public so that they cannot oppose the leftist totalitarian state that will follow.

Left-wing liberal European leaders and America under Obama added uncontrolled immigration with divisive immigration policies to both overload their respective welfare systems and create social chaos. Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief spent eight years implementing the expanded Cloward-Piven strategy of economic chaos. In 2007 there were 26 million recipients of food stamps – by 2015 there were 47 million. Obama’s open border policies and calls for amnesty flooded the country with illegal immigrants further straining the system and creating economic chaos. Illegal aliens overload our welfare system, cost American taxpayers a whopping $116 BILLION, and rob legal citizens of their jobs. Obama’s executive orders created extraordinary divisiveness by importing a population of immigrants with hostile cultural norms including jihadi terrorists.

Republicans are still trying to defuse the ticking Obama Care bomb without blowing themselves up, and on Thursday the GOP cut the first wire: President Trump signed an executive order that could begin to revive private insurance markets. More to the point, Americans may start to have more choices at a lower cost.

One piece of this week’s order directs the Labor Department to “consider expanding access” to Association Health Plans, which would allow small businesses to team up to offer insurance. The purpose is to let trade groups form insurance risk pools across state lines and enjoy economies of scale. Many large companies are freed from state and some federal benefit mandates and operate under a law known as Erisa. Smaller businesses deserve similar flexibility.

More association plans might start to reverse the decline in small business coverage, and a White House fact sheet notes that the share of workers at small firms with employer coverage has dropped to about one-third in 2017 from almost half in 2010.

The order also seeks to expand the flexibility and use of health-reimbursement arrangements, which allow employers to pay back employees for health-care expenses with pretax dollars. This could be a step toward equalizing the tax treatment for smaller businesses that don’t offer coverage and thus don’t qualify for the subsidy known as the employer tax exclusion.

A third part of the order directs cabinet agencies to consider new rules on short-term insurance plans, which the Obama Administration restricted for the mortal sin of popularity. The plans traditionally could run for a year and often cover catastrophic events with relatively broad networks of doctors and hospitals. This can be a lifeline for folks between jobs.

But an Obama rule that took effect earlier this year limited the duration of the plans to 90 days. ObamaCare’s central planners hated that so many people were choosing the short-term options that can cost a third of standard plans. The Obama Administration said short-term plans don’t qualify as “minimum essential coverage” under ObamaCare, though it sure beats the risks of going without insurance.

The short-term market has historically been minuscule, but perhaps demand will be higher now given that average ObamaCare premiums have increased dramatically since 2013. One unknown is how many insurers will participate or what coverage will be included. Presumably the Administration will certify the plans as compliant with ObamaCare’s coverage mandate, though the executive order doesn’t say.

ObamaCare’s defenders are calling all of this “sabotage” and warning about “adverse selection,” in which a more robust individual market will siphon off the healthy customers that prop up ObamaCare’s exchanges. They predict a death spiral of higher premiums for the sick or elderly left on the exchanges.