RUTHFULLY YOURS

Investors get what they want (deserve?) from market pundits. If one is bullish, an expert is found who concurs. If one is bearish, a market seer will be uncovered. But the future is, at best, a guess. We can look to the past for guidance, but none of us are clairvoyants, especially in this “brave new world.”

The two decades that ended in 2000 were some of the best in stock market history, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average compounding at 14.0% over those twenty years. Since, the Average has compounded at 3%, a consequence of a difficult first nine years, followed by a big bounce off the 2009 lows. Multiples are high, but the euphoria of the late 1990s is gone.

Markets are deciphering what is happening globally, geopolitically, economically and technologically. One thing we do know is that the past few decades have not been good for large segments of the population. Since 1970, on an inflation adjusted basis, stocks, including dividends, have compounded at 4.3% and home prices at 2%. However, median incomes have compounded at only 0.5%. In the past ten years, these variances have widened. Since 2007, stock prices are up 60%, median house prices are up 30%, while median incomes are unchanged. Incidentally, over the last decade college tuitions have risen 40%. Labor force participation, over the last decade, declined four percentage points – a cost of six and a half million fewer jobs. Working Americans, who find dignity in what they do, are understandably upset.

There are many reasons for their angst: Immigration policies have let in cheap labor. Globalization has provided benefits to consumers, but at a cost of jobs. Politicians have provided entitlements to the nation’s poor and have focused on pet projects for the wealthy (like solar panels and Teslas), but have ignored the plight of the American worker. A politically-driven fixation with environmental issues has come at the expense of economic growth. Complex tax and regulatory rules have helped rich individuals and big businesses, but have hurt small companies and caused a net decline in new-business start-ups for the first time ever. And a technology boom, equal to the Industrial Revolution in impact, has obsoleted jobs.

There are still other reasons for their concern: Social Security and Medicare are at risk; an absence of defined benefit retirement plans and an aging population mean that millions are retiring without the ability to support themselves. The moral values that most Middle-American families grew up with are dismissed by coastal elites. Public schools cater to unions, not students and parents. Low interest rates have helped speculators, but have hampered savers. And, of course, 9/11 exposed a vicious and and different enemy – Islamic extremism – an enemy Obama’s Washington was unwilling to call by name.

Is there a way forward? Yes. There are things government should let alone, but there are steps they can take. Among the former is: Don’t impede technology, even though change is taxing, especially to the age-challenged. When Einstein uttered his famous quote, he was thinking of the Atomic bomb, but his words apply today. Robots have replaced factory workers and algorithms have replaced Wall Street traders. Doctors in Houston, using robots, can perform surgeries in remote New Hampshire towns. Hoteliers can deliver room service using robots. During the holidays, as many shoppers bought gifts online as went into stores – good for consumers and a blessing for truckers, but bad news for store clerks. And, when Drones and/or self-driving vehicles drop packages on our doorsteps, delivery drivers will be affected. Wireless communication has had a negative impact on copper producers and linesmen. Approximately 30% of the roughly $100 trillion in U.S. equity and bond markets are now managed passively, reducing management fees by perhaps $150 billion. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are changing the way we learn. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” is affecting multiple sectors of the economy. And, such changes have a draconian impact on labor. Snapchat, Instagram and other forms of social media mean that we are, for good or bad, continuously connected. In the military, Drones are doing the jobs of manned aircraft and “boots on the ground.” Through our smart phones, we are trackable. But the internet also allows terrorist organizations to recruit and plan operations anonymously. Do we understand the full consequences of this revolution? I would guess not, but we cannot discourage innovation.

During his campaign for the presidency Donald Trump frequently disdainfully scowled when he spoke about how most politicians were “All talk and no action.”

Candidate Trump promised that immigration would be a primary focus of his administration.

President Trump has indeed focused on multiple aspects of the immigration crisis that go well beyond building a wall along the U.S./Mexican border.

His selection of Senator Jeff Sessions to be his Attorney General was the best possible choice for this important position.

Sessions had chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest.

Consider that on February 25, 2016 that subcommittee conducted a hearing on the topic, “The Impact of High-Skilled Immigration on U.S. Workers.”

When the Obama administration conducted meetings for “Stakeholders” on the immigration issue corporate leaders were invited to attend as were immigration lawyers representing illegal aliens and special interest groups that advocate for illegal aliens.

However, no one in attendance represented the “average American.”

Even the union leaders representing the Border Patrol, ICE agents and the adjudications officers were barred from participating in those meetings.

On February 9, 2017 President Trump held a news conference in the Oval Office to conduct a public swearing in ceremony of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Immediately after Vice President Pence swore in Jeff Sessions, President Trump signed three executive orders:

Presidential Executive Order on Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking

Presidential Executive Order on Preventing Violence Against Federal, State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement Officers

Presidential Executive Order on a Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety

President Trump promised to be the “Law and Order” President and he has certainly hit the ground running.

Karl Marx famously said that historical facts and personages are repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx could not have foreseen that the ideology he birthed would experience a third phase as well: therapeutic parody. The juvenile hysteria, tantrums, inflated “resistance,” and pointless vandalism of the left-wing Democrats are signs of leftism’s last phase. But that doesn’t make the left any less dangerous.

The “tragedy” wrought by the left is evident in its blood-stained history. The 100 million people murdered by purges and engineered famines were the victims of regimes founded on gulags, show-trials, lies, persecution, “re-education,” and censorship. Their deaths are one of history’s greatest tragedies. No more successful were the attempts to give collectivism “a human face” by creating the “soft despotism” of technocratic bureaucracies and agencies embodied in the EU and American progressivism, both increasingly sclerotic, ineffective, and desperate.

The “farce” came in the sixties, as one French ’68 leftist admitted in the famous graffito, “I am a Marxist, of the Groucho variety.” In less than a decade, the New Left’s embrace of hedonism and identity politics transformed it into a life-style choice and New Age cult for the affluent, pampered boomers rich enough to postpone adulthood indefinitely, and to avoid the consequences of their utopian fantasies. After a few spasms of terrorist attacks by outfits like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the tax-payer-subsidized graduate seminar and faculty lounge, not the factory floor or the terrorist cell, became the nursery of the “revolution.”

A booming economy subsidized whole hordes of such parlor pinks, caviar communists, and radical chic poseurs. They turned leftist slogans and symbols into status commodities that capitalists from Hollywood and Madison Avenue were eager to co-opt and profit from. “Revolution” meant wearing a Che t-shirt, rocking with The Clash, and reading Noam Chomsky, pop-cultural brands that camouflaged sexual hedonism, licentious individualism, and conspicuous consumption. Finally, the “long march through the institutions” created not the collectivist utopia, but privileged elites in media, academe, and government whose stock portfolios, bank accounts, affluent zip-codes, and tony life-styles were indistinguishable from those of the robber-baron capitalists they demonized.

Now farce has become parody. Despite its dominance of the media, academe, and popular culture, subsequent decades of politically correct commissars policing language and thought; coercive regulations and laws encroaching ever more insidiously into private life and civil society; and the monstrous hypocrisy of an “effete corps of impudent snobs” who exempted themselves from the intrusive big-government regime they imposed on others less privileged and connected, all led to the repudiation of farcical leftism.

By November 2016, the eight years of Obama’s lies and blunders pushed the left-wing farce to the breaking point. The failure of a leftist president’s hijacking of the economy, and his foreign policy disasters wrought by a stale “we are the world” internationalism finally roused our generation’s forgotten men and women to throw the lefty bums out. It did not help that the Dems’ anointed candidate was the epitome of the left’s hypocritical mash-up mixing worn-out leftist bromides and shibboleths, with rank ambition, unseemly money-grubbing, and entitled arrogance.

Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burling, will receive $25,000 a month from the California Legislature.

The fee is in exchange for 40 hours of work each month on providing “legal strategies regarding potential actions of the federal government that may be of concern to the State of California,” according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch.

In response to the documents, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said that California legislators are “wasting tax dollars to bankroll another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the pretense of attacking the Trump administration.”

The contract amounts to “crony corruption pure and simple,” Fitton said. “The swamp of public corruption has taken over California.”

Controversies such as Operation Fast and Furious and the Justice Department’s spying on the Associated Press marred Holder’s time as U.S. Attorney General.

In 2012, Holder became the first Attorney General held in contempt of Congress on both civil and criminal grounds for his role in the Fast and Furious, an ATF “gun-running” scheme in which guns were sold in the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels in hopes that they could be traced to cartels and crime scenes.

Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, California State Senators de León (D-Los Angeles) and Rendon (D-Paramount) announced in a joint statement that “…to protect California’s economy and our sensible policies on climate change, health care, civil rights, and immigration,” the Legislature has hired “an expert legal team…led by former United States Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.”

The contract with Covington and Burling, which Holder felt “honored” to receive, is limited to the firm providing “legal strategies.” Should the California Legislature wish to use the firm for litigation or public advocacy work, a new “engagement letter” would be required.

Passengers reportedly fled a flight before it could take off on Saturday — after a United Airlines pilot went on a bizarre rant over the intercom.

In a ball cap and casual shirt, the pilot remarked on her appearance after she boarded the flight at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in the late afternoon, passenger Randy Reiss wrote on Twitter.

21h
Randy Reiss @undeadsinatra

So, y’all. I’m shaking right now. I just left my @united flight 455 ‘cos the captain demonstrated that she was not mentally in a safe space.

“So I’ll stop, and we’ll fly the airplane,” she says in another passenger’s video. “Don’t worry. I’m going to let my co-pilot fly it. He’s a man.” Reiss got out of his seat, collected his bag and made for the exit. “Half the flight followed my lede,” he wrote.

“Okay, if you don’t feel safe get off the airplane, but otherwise we can go,” the pilot says in the video, still cheerful, as her passengers begin to revolt.

“Did I offend you?” she says to someone in first class.

“Disarm the doors,” a flight attendant says.

Whoa! Who says women are prone to hysteria under pressure?

United Airlines did not immediately reply to The Washington Post’s questions about the incident: who the pilot was, whether she would have been allowed to fly had her passengers not fled, and whether she had been disciplined. “We removed her from the flight,” a spokesman for the airline told the Austin American-Statesman. “We’re going to discuss this matter with her.”

Texas media has more:

United Airlines says it’s investigating after a pilot was removed from a San Francisco-bound flight before it left Austin, Texas, Saturday.

Passengers say the pilot wasn’t wearing a uniform when she boarded the plane. She got on the intercom system and reportedly talked about politics, the presidential election and her divorce. Passengers also say she asked for a vote on whether to change her clothes to her uniform or fly as is. At that point, about 20 passengers got off the plane because they felt uncomfortable.

United Airlines spokesman Charlie Hobart confirmed the pilot wasn’t in uniform when she boarded the plane Friday. He says another pilot was brought in and the flight was delayed about two hours. Hobart also confirmed the pilot was the woman shown in videos posted on social media talking to passengers over the intercom.

Something new is happening before our eyes. Radicals are completing a takeover of the Democratic Party. Sure, there’s been a lot of mockery among conservatives about hyperventilating Democrats. Pundits point out the obvious: that Democrats screaming that Trump is illegitimate deliver no positive message for working class voters who want jobs and that mobs in black masks are not appealing. Such analyses fall short.

After 8 years of exploiting and enflaming the grievances of identity politics, the Democratic Party is being eaten by the monster they rode to power.

Radicals don’t need to be a majority – they never are. They dominate through mob violence, media manipulation and threats. They are now dominating Democrat politicians, not allowing them to “normalize.”

The Los Angeles Times: Democrats in Congress began the year less defiant, with a more tentative, case-by-case approach to an untested new president. They were ready to work with Trump, they said, if he met them halfway. Democratic senators confirmed a few of Trump’s Cabinet nominees without much fuss. Then their base erupted.

The Wall Street Journal: Leftist throngs have been gathering outside Mr. Schumer’s residence in Brooklyn, N.Y., demanding that the Senate minority leader “get a spine” and oppose President Trump on everything.

That probably isn’t his natural inclination. Mr. Schumer once said that a “pause” in Syrian immigration “may be necessary,” and after the election he declared himself ready to “work with” Mr. Trump. But now he has yielded to the noisy crowd.

The always insightful John Hinderaker has noticed something is up in, “What Part Of ‘You Lost’ Don’t Liberals Understand?”

The Democrats need to understand that when you lose an election, the other guys get to take office. You don’t stamp your feet and demand that they quit.

(At) a town meeting conducted last night by Congressman Tom McClintock in Roseville, California. Liberal activists … behaved so … threateningly that the Congressman had to be escorted from the hall by armed policemen.

Another disgusting moment in the history of liberalism, but this is what I find mystifying:

“I can no longer just sit back. … These people need to understand, we want them out,” said Vietnam War veteran Lon Varvel, referring to Trump and McClintock.

One of the less understood criticisms of progressivism is that it is totalitarian, not in the sense that kale-eating Brooklynites want to build prison camps for political nonconformists (except for the ones who want to lock up global-warming skeptics) but in the sense that it assumes that there is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that sphere.

Earlier this week, I expressed what seemed to me an unobjectionable opinion: that politics has a place, that politics should be kept in its place, and that happy and healthy people and societies have lives that are separate from politics. The response was dispiriting but also illuminating.

Among those who directed tut-tuts in my direction was Patti Bacchus, who writes about education for the Vancouver Observer. “That’s one of the most privileged things I’ve ever heard,” she sniffed. Patti Bacchus is the daughter of Charles Balfour, a Vancouver real-estate entrepreneur, and attended school at Crofton House, a private girls’ school whose alumni include Pat (Mrs. William F.) Buckley. It is one of the most expensive private schools in Canada. I do enjoy disquisitions on “privilege” from such people. But of course her criticism is upside-down: It is exactly we privileged people with education, comfortable lives, and spare time who expend the most energy on politics. But there are other pressing priorities, like paying the rent, for poor people. If Ms. Bacchus would like to pay a visit to West Texas, I’ll introduce her to some.

Another objection came from a correspondent who demanded: “What if politics greatly impacts every facet of your life?” That would be an excellent question if it came from some poor serf living in one of the states our American progressives so admire, such as Cuba or Venezuela, where almost every aspect of life is under political discipline, where government controls whether you eat — and, indeed, whether you breathe. But if you live in the United States and politics greatly impacts every facet of your life, you have mental problems, or you are a politician.

(But I repeat myself.)

Esar’s Comic Dictionary (1943) contains two definitions of the word “fanatic,” often wrongly attributed (by me, among others) to Winston Churchill: First, “A person who redoubles his efforts after having forgotten his aims.” Second (my favorite), “One who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject.”

If you want to see fanaticism at work, try looking for a roommate in Washington or New York City.

From the New York Times we learn of the emergence of the “no-Trump clause” in housing ads in our liberal (which is to say, illiberal) metropolitan areas. The idea is nothing new — I saw similar “No Republicans Need Apply” ads years ago when looking for apartments in Washington and New York — but the intensity seems to have been turned up a measure or two: In 2017, the hysteria knob goes up to eleven. Katie Rogers of the Times offers an amusingly deadpan report:

In one recent ad, a couple in the area who identified themselves as “open-minded” and liberal advertised a $500 room in their home: “If you’re racist, sexist, homophobic or a Trump supporter please don’t respond. We won’t get along.”