Category Archives: culture

What DSA Wants for the United States

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The Democratic Socialists of America has published its Program. The categorizations are mine.

  • Government-owned means of production—land, labor, capital and general infrastructure and capital goods
    • publicly-owned social housing
    • strictly regulated investment properties
    • universal rent control
    • publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure
    • phase out the use of fossil fuels
    • earth’s resources for all
    • public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries
  • National security
    • disempower police unions [there’s a pro-worker move]
    • abolish the police and prison system
    • defund the Department of War
    • end economic warfare against [enemy] countries…such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran
    • end ICE detention and deportations
    • legalize migration
    • grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status
  • Government—national—structure
    • replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy
    • expand the House of Representatives
    • abolish the Senate
  • Economy
    • reparations
    • aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations
    • Protect, expand, and enforce the rights of all workers to form, join, and strike with their unions, regardless of industry [except for those Evil Police, which are being eliminated, anyway]

This also is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is absorbing into its own core with its enthusiastic embrace of the DSA, the objections of the small right wing Establishment of Party notwithstanding.

How Far Have the Brits Fallen?

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We’re all well aware of the shambles Labour—and the Tories before them—have made of the UK economy, of what they still so cutely think of as their borders, and of their foreign policy.

Look elsewhere, too, for instance at the nation’s flagship airport, Heathrow, in western London. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of…well, lookie here…. It’s owned by a consortium consisting of

Ardian, a French private investment company
Qatar Investment Authority
Public Investment Fund, a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund
Australian Retirement Trust
GIC, a Singaporezn sovereign wealth fund
China Investment Corporation, a People’s Republic of China sovereign wealth fund

In their aggregate, they own 100% of Heathrow, all under the transparent fig leaf of FGP Topco Limited, which is headquartered in Middlesex. And circularly, its acquisition by Ardian and Qatar Holding LLC (Qatar Investment Authority) was approved by the European Commission in 2024.

Do the Brits own anything of their own anymore? This would be bad enough, but five of those owners are foreign governments, which own, collectively, 67.4% of that erstwhile pride of the United Kingdom.

The Racism of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s demonstrated once again, and disgustingly so, by a law “professor” at the University of Michigan, Barb McQuade, with this post of hers:

By forcing a “colorblind” Constitution, Roberts usurps the proper role of Congress. Congress may limit rights if law is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest, such as promoting diversity or reducing disparate impact discrimination.

Never mind that—as McQuade must surely know—there is nothing in our Constitution that mentions promoting diversity or reducing disparate impact discrimination. There is, on the other hand, the first Article of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, which explicitly bars preferential treatment under any guise. The salient clause mandates equal protection of our laws—of which our Constitution is the supreme Law of our nation. There are exactly zero caveats or exceptions in that clause.

Keep in mind, instead, that McQuade is a member of the erstwhile Democratic Party, now Progressive-Democratic Party

  • that forced a bloody civil war over States’ “rights” to keep slaves
  • that after losing that, created the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate and murder blacks and their white supporters
  • that enacted generations of Jim Crow laws aimed at functionally disenfranchising blacks
  • whose cultural and Party icon, Woodrow Wilson, resegregated the Federal government after it had been integrated in the post bellum decades—blacks should be grateful for the protection of segregation, he held
  • whose next hero, Franklin Roosevelt, enacted national-level minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from migrating north to compete (successfully, as it was turning out) against white laborers on the wages they were willing to accept and who refused to integrate our armed forces
  • that emphasized Party bigotry by expanding it to include sexism with its ongoing zealous push for identity politics
  • that explicitly still(!) holds blacks to be intrinsically inferior by classing them as permanently oppressed and unable to compete at all without special government treatment.

McQuade is far from alone in her racist bigotry, and (tertially) it’s a sad commentary on the degradation of what was once a strong, high quality law school that she’s employed there.

H/T ralflongwalker

It’s Broader than That

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Dominic Green, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression, wrote of the German government’s attempt to censor—to bar from public viewing—a movie that was, by most accounts, badly done schlock (Green’s term). The rationale was that the movie depicted unrepentant and graphic violence by German vigilantes against Germany’s “immigrants,” the illegal aliens present in that nation.

German regulators’ problem with Citizen Vigilante wasn’t its depiction of unspeakable acts, but their unmentionable perpetrators. For years, European governments did their best to deny that mass immigration, notably from majority-Muslim societies, correlated to documented rises in the number of sexual crimes, especially gang rape.

Green closed his piece with this:

We like to think of the arts as our conscience, pushing social problems to our attention. If Europeans must rely on cinéastes of Mr Boll’s caliber to depict Europe’s current problems, it’s because no one else wants to admit their nature and extent.
Mr Boll has illuminated the crisis of political legitimacy and social order that is rapidly unraveling Europe’s peace. His film was censored to keep the peace. That shows the severity of the continent’s crisis, and the fragility of Europe’s peace.

It’s broader in scope than that, though. Government censorship, of nearly anything in any milieu, is a clear and dispositive sign of the intellectual bankruptcy, arrogance of Knowing Better, of cowardice of the politicians and bureaucrats who inflict it. Even the (legitimate) censor of slander is after the fact, not preemptive.

If the citizenry cannot speak freely, they cannot be free. It’s on those citizens in their aggregate—We the People as we put it in the opening phrase of our Constitution—not just individual makers of bad movies or one-off rich idealists, to change out those politicians who would limit our speech.

A Truism, and a Solution

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote this while commenting on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise for our nation’s then-penchant for solving problems locally rather than crying to Mama Government:

A statute can’t manufacture civic energy or entrepreneurial zeal. That has to come from citizens who are politically engaged or not hindered in their efforts to continue the American dream.

That is plainly true. And, pedantically, it echoes Aristotle’s and Plato’s remarks about politics and citizens’ role in it.

The solution is just as plain, and it’s made so by the failing, and increasing depth of the failure, of our public school systems to properly educate our children. We need the competition of school choice, the freely done setup of voucher and charter schools and of homeschooling, whether individually or parents setting up homeschool pods. That competition even improves the performance of local examples of public schools.

That last, though, requires the reduction, if not elimination, of teachers unions, organizations whose management teams care not a farthing about our children, nor even of their teacher members, but only about their own political power.