Election Roundup: Thank God For The Lazy And Dumb

You have to be well over 40 today to have much personal memory of the Reagan presidency.  But if you do, we will recall the constant denigration of the man from the media and press as lazy and dumb.  He came from rural Illinois, went to a college (Eureka College) that no one important had ever heard of, tended to lay off work around 5 in the afternoon, and knew nothing of sophisticated economics or public policy!  Yuck!  Yet the economy boomed.  (As lazy and dumb as he was, Reagan somehow managed to focus on less regulation and lower taxes.  Maybe that had something to do with it.  Or maybe it was mostly that he just didn't do too much damage.)  Meanwhile, the scintillatingly brilliant Barack Obama (Columbia College!  Harvard Law School!  Constitutional law professor!  Obvious genius!) conducted for eight years what I have called the "War Against The Economy."  Somehow the economy was stuck in the doldrums for the whole time.

Which brings me to the results of the elections yesterday.  In our local area, we got Bill de Blasio re-elected as Mayor.  We also got two other city-wide officials re-elected:  Scott Stringer as Comptroller and Letitia James as something called Public Advocate.  At least those drew opposition from the Republican Party, but the Republicans didn't come close.  The Republican candidate for Mayor, Nicole Malliotakis, got about 28% of the vote.  In Manhattan, a guy named Cyrus Vance (if you're old enough you will recognize the name from that of his dad, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State) got re-elected as DA with no opposition of any kind.  My local (Greenwich Village) City Councilperson, Corey Johnson, also got no Republican opposition, although there was a candidate from something called the "Eco Justice" party.  

For those last two races, if you didn't want to vote for these guys, one alternative was to leave that line on the ballot blank; but there was also a space at the right to fill in the name of a write-in candidate.  In both cases, I wrote in James Menton.  That's my dog.

De Blasio is about as crazed a progressive as you could find anywhere.  He famously took his honeymoon in Cuba during Castro's heyday, and during the late 80s worked for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua building the socialist utopia.  So four more years of this guy will be a disaster for New York City, right?  The New York Post put it this way last night:

Mayor de Blasio cruised to re-election Tuesday — and now New Yorkers are stuck with him for another four years.

The situation is not good, but it could be a lot worse.  The saving grace of de Blasio is that he takes lazy and dumb to extremes rarely before seen in such exalted political office. He's famous for getting up late, detouring to his gym in deep Brooklyn before heading back toward work, and arriving at his office some time around noon.  And then taking a nap in the afternoon.  If he were smart and energetic, he could do a lot of damage.  As it is, City government cruises along mostly on autopilot.  

De Blasio's campaign steered mostly free of issues.  As far as I could see, the two big things he emphasized were (1) protecting the high income New York taxpayers against federal tax increases, and then (2) socking those same people with a big increase in New York City taxes.  The first theme hit its peak in a big speech given by de Blasio just the day before the election, as reported by the New York Times:

For more than 10 minutes, Mr. de Blasio urged the audience to resist the Republican tax plan, which could do away with federal deductions for state and local taxes and in that way deliver a massive blow to the city and its taxpayers.  “President Trump’s tax plan takes dead aim at New York City,” he said. “It would undermine the success that we have achieved, and despite the hype, it would undermine the middle class in this city and, I would say, all over the country.”

And then there was the second theme, imposing a big tax increase of his own on the exact same people.  As the Post put it at the link above:

The mayor said he would push for a millionaire’s tax to help fix the city’s beleaguered subway system.

So, when the feds propose higher income taxes on New York's high earners, that's "delivering a massive blow to the city and its taxpayers" and "taking dead aim at New York City."  When he does it, it's social justice!  Like I said, this guy is not all that bright.

And what of the big promises from de Blasio's first campaign?  Those would be the promises to address income inequality and solve homelessness.  If you've been paying attention, you will already know that income inequality in New York did not improve at all in the last four years.  The two congressional districts covering the West and East sides of Manhattan -- one containing de Blasio's home and the other containing his office -- remain numbers one and three among the most-income-unequal districts in the country.   Meanwhile homelessness went up substantially even as spending on the issue about doubled.  Hey, it's only about another $1 billion or so per year -- barely a rounding error in the $80+ billion New York City budget.  Needless to say, these issues were not emphasized during the current campaign.

Across the river in New Jersey, it looks like they are not nearly so lucky.  They have elected a new governor from the Democratic Party, by the name of Phil Murphy.  The guy has not previously held elected office, so it remains to be seen, but he gives at least preliminary indications of being both smart and energetic.  Harvard College!  Wharton Business School!  A career at the high levels of Goldman Sachs!  And, he is a committed progressive!  New Jersey, you are in trouble.

I'll give just a couple of examples.  New Jersey's biggest problem is clearly its way-underfunded public employee pensions.  Although some might award the title to Illinois or California, New Jersey is in contention for the worst-funded public pension program, both as a percentage of liabilities and as a per capita burden on the state's taxpayers.  Current governor Christie has tried to negotiate to reduce the obligations, but, failing at that over union intransigence, has refused to fully fund the obligation.  Murphy says that he will fully fund the obligation.  Really, Phil?  According to this chart at Pension360, that will mean increasing contributions to the pension funds by something around $3 billion per year -- this in a state with an annual budget running about $32 billion per year.  In other words, increasing state spending by about 10% per year with no increase in services of any kind to the citizens.  He says he can do it by reducing fees paid to the money managers.  That will be at most a couple of hundred million per year.  Well, simple arithmetic never was the strong suit of these "smart" progressives.  Reality is going to come up and smack this guy in the face around about the first day he takes office.

Oh, his next big issue is making a public pension program available as an option to private employers.  In other words, doubling down on the single most glaring and disastrous failure of the government.

Smart!  Energetic!  Go for it, Phil!

UPDATE, November 9:  Yesterday, to celebrate his victory, Mayor de Blasio held a rare big press conference at City Hall.  The New York Times reports on the event in an article headlined, "Mayor Pledges to Create Fairest Big City in America."   As the headline indicates, he previewed that his big theme for the new term will be to create "fairness" in the City.  What exactly does that mean?  One thing is obvious: he is moving away from the prior themes of income inequality, poverty and homelessness -- things measured by metrics that keep getting worse on his watch -- and onto a new theme totally lacking any such potentially embarrassing metric.  It means whatever he wants it to mean!  

So how did the press conference go?  From the Times:

The news conference played out in much the way that similar events had during his first term. It started late: Mr. de Blasio arrived at City Hall after noon, after a visit to his gym, in Brooklyn. 

That's our Mayor!  I wouldn't say we're exactly safe for the next four years, but if de Blasio holds to form, the damage won't be too terrible.

In The Progressive Vision, Dictatorship Is Never Far Below The Surface

It seems that the favorite causes of the progressive left -- the two biggest at the moment being fighting "climate change" and establishing universal health "coverage" as a "human right" -- have been running into some roadblocks lately.  On the "climate" front (I put "climate" in quotes because none of this has much if anything to do with the actual climate) President Trump withdraws the U.S. from the Paris accords, appoints climate skeptics to key administration positions, and sets about dismantling various Obama-era regulatory restrictions on fossil fuels.  Abroad, China, India and others race to build coal plants, while the UN itself admits that even under its worst-case scare tactic models the implementation of the Paris accords would have little to no measurable effect on the climate.  On the universal health "coverage" front, Obamacare continues its slow inevitable decline, while multiple states (Colorado, Vermont, California, New York) that have flirted with "single payer" systems in the past couple of years have backed off when the enormous costs became evident.  What's a good progressive to do?

The answer is simple: dictatorship.  If these stupid plebes and Trumpers can't see the morality and the necessity of immediately establishing the progressive utopia, then this whole democracy thing just isn't going to work.  A few correct-thinking experts, armed with the full coercive powers of the state, can impose the needed progressive solutions in the blink of an eye.  What's to lose?

Often the advocacy for the dictatorship of supposed experts has proceeded by muted euphemisms.  I'm thinking, for example, of the statement by top UN climate bureaucrat (Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change) Christina Figueres at a press conference in February 2015 that mankind must "intentionally . . . change the economic development model" in order to stop global warming:

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.  This will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change…It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.

See?  She never mentioned "dictatorship"; or, at least, she didn't use that exact word.  But more recently, the perceived need for soft euphemisms seems to have lessened.  Let's just go ahead and say it!  A couple of examples for today:

Over in Europe, prominent environmentalist Jørgen Randers (professor of "climate strategy" at BI Norwegian Business School) took to the pages of Svenska Dagblat yesterday to make an explicit call for dictatorship to solve the "climate crisis."  According to Randers, the call for dictatorship is supported by multiple "climate experts."  At his Cool It blog, Bjørn Lomborg (who fortunately seems to have the ability to read Swedish) covers the matter, and helpfully provides a translation of the key passages.  Here are the translated headline and sub headline from the Randers article:

Democracy must be suspended to solve the climate crisis.  An elite government is better than democracy -- at least if the world is to succeed in resolving the acute climate crisis, according to Professor Jørgen Randers.  Several climate experts highlight a clear model:  China's dictatorship.  

Lomborg is rather scathing in his commentary:

Look at the costs to achieve the sort of climate policies that Randers and many others are advocating. If the EU fulfills its promise of cutting emissions by 80% in 2050 (which is the most ambitious climate policy in the world today), the average of the best peer-reviewed models show that the cost would run to at least $3 trillion per year, and more likely double that – meaning $6,000 for each EU citizen per year. Of course, few will vote for that.  [MC note -- the cost could easily be a multiple of even the larger estimate.]  Moreover, asking for a dictatorship neglects one of the main reasons for democracy: how do you ensure that the dictator does what is good for you? . . .  Look at China, which unfortunately is held up by many environmentalists as a green ideal.  It gets 86% of its total primary energy demand from fossil fuels (International Energy Agency data, latest from 2014, extrapolated to 2017). How is that ultra-green?

Meanwhile, over in the healthcare arena, we have the premier British medical journal The Lancet publishing an opinion piece on November 4 by its head editor Richard Horton, making an explicit pitch for more Marxism in medicine.  The title of the piece is "Medicine and Marx."   Unlike Randers, Horton does not actually use the word "dictatorship"; but I wouldn't call his effort "euphemisms" either.  Rather, Horton writes in the old Soviet/Orwellian Newspeak, using the words those guys employed to mean (to anybody who was alive and awake) not just "dictatorship," but "totalitarian rule by jackbooted thugs."  Example:

21st-century health care [is] better investigated and interpreted through a Marxist lens. . . .   Marxism defends a set of values. The free self-determination of the individual, an equitable society, the end of exploitation, deepening possibilities for public participation in shaping collective choices, refusing to accept the fixity of human nature and believing in our capacity to change, and keeping a sense of the interdependence and indivisibility of our common humanity. . . .  Marxism is a call to engage, an invitation to join the struggle to protect the values we share.

Wow.  Could anybody alive possibly still buy this?  As to the reference in the last line to "the values we share," John Hinderaker at PowerLine comments:

What values are those? Mass murder? Totalitarianism? Rule by a criminal elite? A rigid class system in which a few ruthless and politically connected thugs prosper, and everyone else starves?

Come on, John!  Aren't those really minor quibbles when are so close to achieving the holy grail of universal health "coverage"?

Sometimes The Adverse Results Of Unionization Occur Rather Suddenly

At my tag for Unions (located under the Archive tab) you will find many tales of heavily unionized industries undergoing long and steady decline.  These are industries like steel, automobiles, tires, supermarkets, and the Postal Service.  All of them have experienced gradual job losses in the hundreds of thousands over the course of several decades among unionized workers, although in most of the examples non-unionized competitors have arisen and thrived.  The job losses have come as the unionized firms have gradually downsized or, in many cases, gone bankrupt.  As I put it in this post back in June 2015, "Gradually, the unions put their employers out of business."   

Sometimes it's not so gradual.

Which brings me to the tale of the DNAInfo and Gothamist websites.  DNAInfo was founded in 2009 by entrepreneur Joe Ricketts as a site for in-depth reporting of local news in the New York City area.  Ricketts is also known as the lead owner of the Chicago Cubs.  I have read DNAInfo often, and linked to it many times.  It frequently had local stories not available elsewhere.  (In case I haven't mentioned it, the coverage of local stories by the New York Times is terrible.)  Earlier this year, DNAInfo acquired another NYC-oriented site called Gothamist, and the two merged.  Around the time of the acquisition and merger, there were some layoffs.  Even after the layoffs, neither of the two sites was profitable; but they were carried by capital infusions from Ricketts, even as he tried to work toward profitability.

In April the editorial employees of the combined businesses announced their intention to join a union, the Writers Guild of America, East.  Ricketts refused to recognize the union, and tried to dissuade the employees from pressing forward with a letter on April 19.  Excerpt:

I always thought of DNAinfo as a united team doing something that no one else has figured out how to do: building a viable business around neighborhood news. . . .  I want you to know that I still believe we are [on the same side]. We’re either going to make this business successful together or we won’t. And, frankly, I’m not interested in a company with an “us” versus “them” dynamic.    

The employees insisted on pressing forward, so the NLRB called a vote.  The vote was held a week ago, October 26.  The union won handily, 25-2.

The next day, it was euphoria among the union and the newly-organized employees.  Hollywood Reporter reported the story on October 27.  From Lowell Peterson, Executive Director of the WGAE:

“The people who write and produce content for digital news companies have made it crystal clear that they believe collective bargaining is essential to building sustainable careers,” said WGAE executive director Lowell Peterson. “The employees at DNAinfo and Gothamist have joined more than 700 of their colleagues in winning a voice on the job. We will form a strong, engaged bargaining committee to negotiate a contract that addresses their concerns and meets their needs.”

And from the DNAInfo-Gothamist Organizing Committee:

“This vote came after a long campaign for voluntary recognition, and we want to thank everyone who supported our effort to protect the workers of DNAinfo and Gothamist, which have been widely recognized as indispensable to local and neighborhood news in New York City.”

The euphoria was short-lived.  Today Ricketts announced that he was closing the sites.  All of the employees will be laid off.  Oops!  Perhaps they should have taken the time to read Ricketts's blog.  He had a post on September 12, basically forewarning what was in store.  The headline was "Why I'm Against Unions at Businesses I Create."  Excerpt:

I will . . . tell you what I know, and I know about starting and growing businesses.  I know that businesses constantly face a barrage of obstacles to survival – never mind success – and, in the face of that, everyone at the company needs to be pulling together or that company won’t make it.  I know that keeping a company growing and thriving requires focus and tireless effort by everyone.  Indeed, in my opinion, the essential esprit de corps that every successful company needs can’t exist when employees and ownership see themselves as being on opposite ends of a seesaw.  Everyone at a company – owners and employees alike – need to be sitting on the same end of the seesaw because the world is sitting on the other end.

I believe unions promote a corrosive us-against-them dynamic that destroys the esprit de corps businesses need to succeed.  And that corrosive dynamic makes no sense in my mind where an entrepreneur is staking his capital on a business that is providing jobs and promoting innovation.

Basically, amidst the daily struggle to make a business succeed, let alone facing ongoing need for large capital infusions, Ricketts was not interested in getting involved in fighting an adversarial union.  Can you blame him?

For another perspective -- otherwise known as the usual progressive talking points -- we can turn to a guy named Jake Dobkin, who was the owner of the Gothamist site before selling out to Ricketts.  A site called Splinter News points to a post written by Dobkin last year on the (then-independent) Gothamist site, with the following quote:

I would like to suggest . . . a commitment to overthrowing the tyrannical capitalist system that makes working people run ever faster to earn the same wages. Perhaps it is time for all creative comrades to stop struggling and realize they have joined the submerged working class, and to band together on that basis with other poor people to change the system which oppresses everyone.

Well, Mr. Dobkin, in your narrative, aren't you yourself the "tyrannical capitalist"?  And in the world you envision, who is supposed to fund the new higher wages of workers in a money-losing business?  The taxpayers?

You can see why unions -- or at least, unions on the adversarial Wagner Act model -- have no future in the private sector.  As to the public sector, we will have to see how the Janus case turns out in the Supreme Court.  

A Few More Who Think The Poor Ought To Have Access To Cheap Energy

If you were asked to name the most immoral thing going on in the world today, you would be hard pressed to come up with a better candidate than the campaign to keep the world's poor in poverty.  This campaign usually goes under the banner of "saving the planet" or "sustainability" or something similar.  There are times when it feels very lonely out here in the small group pointing out the deep immorality of this campaign.  For example, one such time was last April, when some hundreds of thousands of spoiled, wealthy Americans conducted what they called the "March for Science," demanding that cheap and reliable energy be restricted and that the price of energy be increased to a level to make sure that the poor could never afford it.  The entire progressive press and media cheered these people on.

In the camp of people calling out the "sustainability" campaigners for their immorality, I particularly favor the ones who don't mince their words.  These campaigners need to be harshly condemned.  So today I'll give a shout out to a couple of voices that aren't afraid to say the obvious on this subject.

First, Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK participated in a debate at Cambridge University on October 26, where the question before the house was "This House would rather cool the planet than warm the economy."   Cambridge, like all elite universities these days, has become a center for advocacy of de-carbonization, of de-industrialization, and of making sure that poor countries cannot get energy that is cheap and reliable and that works.  Benny's full presentation can be found at the link.  Here are a few excerpts:

[T]he fact that stopping economic development is even being advocated by some of the world’s most privileged students in Cambridge reveals how far removed this green bubble is from the harsh reality of billions of people who are desperately trying to escape poverty.  Let’s not beat about the bush: If today’s motion would ever be implemented by some radical green government, it would lead to the death of millions of poor people in the developing world, astronomical mass unemployment and economic collapse.  That’s because poor nations without economic growth have no future and are unable to raise living standards for impoverished populations. . . .  

Climate and green energy policies have lead to is the biggest wealth transfer in the history of modern Europe — from the poor to the rich. . . .  The proponents of today’s motion argue that economic growth should be sacrificed or at least curtailed in order to cut global CO2 emissions.  Denying the world’s poor the very basis on which Britain and much of Europe became wealthy — largely due to cheap coal, oil and gas — amounts to an inhumane and atrocious attempt by green activists to sacrifice the needs of the world’s poor on the altar of climate alarmism.

"Inhumane" and "atrocious."  I could have come up with even more such words, but that's a pretty good start.  Good job, Benny!

And here is another one, this time from reader Mikko Paunio, who sent me a link to his recent (October 30) article discussing why restricting fossil fuels and requiring expensive and intermittent renewables threatens public health in poor countries.  The title is "Sustainability Threatens Public Health In The Developing World."   

Paunio points out that good public health requires large amounts of clean water, which in turn requires reliable and affordable power.

We take sanitary practices for granted in wealthier countries but hygienic practices require water in quantity and uninterrupted power to supply that water and related sewage systems.

And it's not just clean drinking water that is at issue.  Good hygiene and sanitation require water not only for drinking, but also for things like laundry, dishes, toilets and sewers.

Painstaking research has shown that the provision of clean drinking water brings down children’s diarrhoea risk by [only] around 20-25 per cent in a developing country setting (31,32). This is partly because purified water is a harsh environment for those enteric pathogenic microbes that would otherwise enter the system. However more importantly, it is because so many water washable diseases remain transmissible under unhygienic conditions. . . .   [H]ygienic practices include personal hygiene, household hygiene i.e. linen and other laundry, kitchen hygiene (utensils and food), cleanliness of suitable surface materials especially in bathrooms. These require water in substantial quantities for ensuring hygiene by de-contamination and human-waste disposal, in addition to providing solely drinking water.  

And then there's the question of air pollution, particularly the indoor variety.  In countries without cheap and reliable electricity, the people of necessity turn to indoor fires of wood or animal dung for heating and cooking.  The result:

Decentralized heating and cooking in homes in the urban areas of the developing world account for most ambient air pollution and perhaps 80-90 % of the WHO estimate of up to 6.5 million annual deaths linked to such air pollution.

So where are our national and international bureaucracies on addressing these critical issues?

Instead of addressing those [water and air pollution] issues in the most practical way possible, the US in 2013 declined multilateral (World Bank) aid to build centralized power plants in the poorest countries – because to be affordable they had to use coal. Instead, the US government sided with WHO and Dr. Margaret Chan and insisted on climate change mitigation for poor countries while giving China unlimited emissions until 2030.

Where did we go wrong? When guiding the "Our Common Future" report, Director General of the World Health Organization Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland chose to deny crucial infrastructural urban development, such as the provision of fresh water supplies and the installation of sewerage systems, unless it could be done "sustainably". But the countries that need such infrastructure are often unable to raise capital on their own and need multilateral assistance from rich countries. By mandating they could only have loans if they agreed to build things that would be too expensive, we doomed those countries to failure.

I guess I can understand how the bureaucracies can get involved in these efforts that lead to mass impoverishment and millions of deaths.  After all, bureaucracies have an internal dynamic that makes them only interested in increasing their own power and prerogatives; the poor are just collateral damage.  But how is it that the faculties and students of all elite universities, and the entire progressive media, have become part of this immoral endeavor?  It's impossible to understand.

The New York Times Screws Up Economic Policy Again: South Africa Edition

From the people who can't bring themselves to use the word "socialism" in articles covering the economic collapse in Venezuela, there now comes a big article on the economic problems in South Africa.  On Tuesday the big front page article in the New York Times was all about the economy in that country: "End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms."  

It seems that now, some twenty-six years after the end of legal apartheid in South Africa, black South Africans just don't seem to be economically advancing much at all.  According to the NYT, South Africa has replaced the legal apartheid with "economic apartheid."

In the history of civil rights, South Africa lays claim to a momentous achievement — the demolition of apartheid and the construction of a democracy. But for black South Africans, who account for three-fourths of this nation of roughly 55 million people, political liberation has yet to translate into broad material gains.  Apartheid has essentially persisted in economic form.

But wait a minute!  Didn't the end of legal apartheid bring full democratic rights for black South Africans?  With blacks constituting a large majority of the citizens, isn't the government there now fully controlled by elected black officials?  Are you really suggesting that the black officials who now run the place are practicing something against members of their own race worthy of the highly charged term "apartheid"?

To be fair to the Times, they do mention government corruption as one of the reasons holding the economy back.  But then, if corruption is the main problem, wouldn't that affect all races, and not just blacks?  What's the thing that specifically holds blacks back?  We get this:

[There are] are deep-seated disparities in wealth. In the aftermath of apartheid, the government left land and other assets largely in the hands of a predominantly white elite. The government’s resistance to large-scale land transfers reflected its reluctance to rattle international investors. 

Aha!  Although the government is controlled by blacks, it's actually the evil white svengalis who hold the blacks back by clinging to the land, with the acquiescence of the corrupt government officials.  

Funny, but that's the exact same explanation for black failure to advance that has long been the favorite of Robert Mugabe and his political supporters in next-door Zimbabwe.  Over there, they took the opposite tack, and expropriated most of the land once held by whites, driving nearly all of the whites out of the country.  Surely then, all the blacks promptly became wealthy?

Unfortunately, no.  You may recall the first round of Zimbabwe's economic collapse back in the early 2000s, when Mugabe executed the first round of seizures of white-held land and handed it over to his supporters, mostly from his own tribe.  Among other things, tax revenues collapsed, so the government financed itself by printing money, leading to a huge hyperinflation.  Here is a report from NPR on where things were back in 2006:

Since the late 1990s, between four and five million Zimbabweans, or more than a third of the population, have fled the country. And the economy has shrunk by 40 percent. Last week, the City of Harare started rationing water because they can't afford to fix a pump by its municipal reservoir. . . .  The current economic crisis deepened dramatically in the year 2000, when Mugabe launched a chaotic and violent land reform program.  The program was supposed to return white-owned commercial farmland to poor blacks. But many of the farms ended up in the hands of Mugabe's friends, family and allies. And agricultural production, which used to be the backbone of the economy, collapsed.

And have things in Zimbabwe improved since then?  Actually, they're just going through another round of economic collapse now, as Mugabe, now 93, drives the last whites out of the country.  From Newsday (Zimbabwe), September 25:

President Robert Mugabe is expected in the country today, where he is set to be confronted by an economy literally on flames after a dramatic weekend that triggered scenes reminiscent of the 2008 hyperinflationary era. . . .  “In April, Mugabe made a pronouncement regarding the toxic indigenisation policy [i.e., taking land from whites and turning it over to blacks], but nothing has been done to align this to the Act. . . .  The economy has tanked. Everything that can go wrong has since gone wrong.

How does per capita GDP in Zimbabwe -- where they expropriated the white-held land and redistributed it to blacks -- compare to per capita GDP in South Africa?  The answer is, even after a couple of recent years of severe recession, South Africa remains many times as wealthy as Zimbabwe, for both blacks and whites.  Trading Economics has 2016 per capita GDP for South Africa as $7504; for Zimbabwe it's $908.  $7504 represents a middle-income country; $908 represents deep poverty for everybody (except Mugabe and his close henchmen). 

So is there any other explanation for why blacks may be failing to advance economically in South Africa?  Well, there is the fact that the government thinks the way to "help" the poor is to build millions of inexpensive homes and pass them out in a public ownership model.  See my post on this subject from April 2016 here.  It would be difficult to conceive of a better way to keep poor people trapped in poverty for life.  You will not find this subject discussed in the New York Times article.

In Politics, There's Corruption, And Then There's Really Serious Corruption

The U.S. Department of Justice seems to get a lot of its kicks these days from prosecutions of state and federal officials for alleged political corruption.  The typical case involves the pol who seems to have done a little too much to help his friends and contributors.  Among such cases that I have covered during the past couple of years have been those of former Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, ex-Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver, ex-Majority Leader of the New York State Senate Joe Bruno, and another ex-Majority Leader of the New York State Senate Dean Skelos.  If you've been following this, you will recognize that all of those individuals got convicted by juries, but then all of the convictions have been reversed or vacated on appeal.  Similar cases involving federal pols include those of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey.  In the Menendez matter, the trial is still ongoing; but this time the smart money is betting that he will get acquitted by the jury on most if not all charges, without need for intervention by an appeals court.

All of these cases involve at least some level of distasteful conduct, some worse than others.  Read about them if you want to get an understanding of how much better constituent service you might get from your local representative or governor if you should just toss a couple of hundred K his way.  (For more details, go to the links.)  But, as the string of reversals suggests, the conduct in question in these cases was of a type that doesn't go to the heart of the integrity of the political process, and may even be impossible to effectively criminalize at all.  Let alone that the amounts of money in question were relatively small (only the Silver case of those mentioned involved more than $1 million; at the low end, the Stevens case involved alleged underpayment of less than $100K for services as to which Stevens claimed that he had paid full value); and in some of the cases the money at issue did not even go to the defendant personally.

But is there any corruption out there that is really serious, in the sense that it fundamentally goes go to the heart of the integrity of the political process?  I would have in mind something involving use the power of political office itself to attack and handicap the political opposition so that those in power can remain in power themselves and keep the opponents out.  Such a thing, if it occurred, would be far more serious and far more fundamental than anything involved in the DOJ prosecutions listed above.

Actually there are two examples of such fundamental and serious corruption in the news just today.  In both of these cases, it is none other than the Department of Justice itself that is the perpetrator of the corruption.

The first example involves a program of the Obama Justice Department known as "Access to Justice."  Under that program, banks and other institutions paying big settlement amounts in cases arising out of the financial crisis could get credit by directing some portion of the settlement funds to "charitable" organizations in the game of providing legal services.  Turns out that the recipients of the grants all happened to be left-wing friends and political supporters of the then-administration.  To its credit, the Wall Street Journal was on top of this story back in August 2016 ("Look Who's Getting That Bank Settlement Cash"), and I covered the matter in June 2017 ("Corruption In The Eye Of The Beholder").  

The story returns to today's news because Chairman Bob Goodlatte of the House Judiciary Committee released some emails explicitly showing Obama Justice officials rigging the allocation of the slush fund to be sure that no conservative-oriented group could get any of the money.  The Daily Signal has the story ("Obama Justice Department’s $1 Billion ‘Slush Fund’ Boosted Liberal Groups").  

Tony West, an associate attorney general during the Obama administration who is now a top official at PepsiCo Inc., figures prominently in a chain of email messages involving his staff members, the records show. . . .  Justice Department documents show that West’s staff went to great lengths to prevent conservative organizations from receiving any of the settlement funds.  In one email dated July 9, 2014, a senior Justice official on West’s team explains how the draft of a mandatory donation provision was rephrased for the purpose of  “not allowing Citi to pick a statewide intermediary like the Pacific Legal Foundation [PLF].” The official identified the foundation as a group that “does conservative property-rights free legal services.”

So who did get in on the money?  The WSJ identified a number of the beneficiaries in that linked article:  La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more . . .  In other words, various foot soldiers of the progressive movement.  To the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.  This makes Sheldon Silver and all those other guys look so small time!

And is there yet another example of deep and fundamental Justice Department corruption in the news just today?  Yes!  Of course it's the scandal of the Trump/Russia "dossier."  And yes, this story has also been around for months -- at least the part about the existence of the dossier and its use by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants targeting members of the Trump campaign while the campaign was in progress.  From CNN, April 18, 2017:

The FBI last year used a dossier of allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump's campaign as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation.  The dossier has also been cited by FBI Director James Comey in some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe.

But now we learn that this "dossier" was actually Democratic Party opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.  From the Washington Post, October 24:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

So the Justice Department under Obama took opposition research funded by the campaign of the candidate of the President's party and used that opposition research to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the campaign of the opponent?  Now we have taken corruption to another whole new level.  Oh, and then some of the same people who committed those acts are actually now the ones conducting a supposedly "independent" investigation of the President himself?

Don't worry, the Justice Department does not prosecute its own, no matter how serious and how fundamental the corruption.

UPDATE, October 27:  Let the spinning begin!  From Bloomberg News today:

A former U.S. intelligence official is denying Republican suggestions that a salacious dossier funded in part by opponents of President Donald Trumpcould have been used to justify surveillance as part of an investigation into him and his associates. 

"Republican suggestions"?  Oh, those nasty Republicans!  But wait!  It looks like that "suggestion" comes not from any Republican, but rather from CNN, April 18, 2017.  Check my link and see if I quoted it correctly.  CNN in turn cites "US officials briefed on the investigation."  So, good try Bloomberg.  What's your next excuse?

There's lots more to come on this story.  It should keep us entertained throughout the winter.