Monthly Archives: March 2010

Update II: Fascism Rising (Henry ‘Nostrilitus’ Waxman)

Bush, Business, Democrats, Economy, Fascism, Government, Republicans

A couple of day ago a number of major companies came out with the preliminary assessment of the costs to each of the “Manna From Mount Olympus” bill, namely Obama’s healthscare legislation. The fascist state that America has become responds sternly to economic forecasts that go against the government’s grain. You may be called on to justify yourself if your assessment of your books diverges from the government’s.

“Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has summoned some of the nation’s top executives to Capitol Hill to defend their assessment,” reports the Washington Examiner.

Waxman wants “the executives to explain themselves at an April 21 hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigative subcommittee.”

As Byron York points out, “Waxman’s demands for documents are far-reaching. ‘To assist the Committee with its preparation for the hearing,’ he wrote to Stephenson, ‘we request that you provide the following documents from January 1, 2009, through the present:

“(1) any analyses related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T; and (2) any documents, including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T. We also request an explanation of the accounting methods used by AT&T since 2003 to estimate the financial impact on your company of the 28 percent subsidy for retiree drug coverage and its deductibility or nondeductibility, including the accounting methods used in preparing the cost impact statement released by AT&T this week.”

“Waxman’s request could prove particularly troubling for the companies. The executives will undoubtedly view such documents as confidential, but if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman.”

AN enterprise’s freedom of speech, right to privacy, prerogative to disseminate information about its finances and accounting—this government is asserting ITS right to infringe all these and more.

The Republicans had similar witch hunts when in power (which is why I’m perplexed that some conservative commentator are convinced, and keep repeating, that only now, under Obama, have they lost these freedoms). The “Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” signed into law by President Bush, was government’s response to The People hoisting their pitchforks against business. Also known as the Corporate Corruption Bill, it singled out a much-maligned minority for the kind of persecution that, if visited on women, blacks or Jews, would be considered actionable, hate-filled discrimination. Hearings were all the rage at the time too.

Update I (March 30): Related: “Dems fear honest Obamacare accounting”:

Democrats, in their zeal to raise revenues and improve Obamacare’s claimed effect on the federal deficit outlook, took away a tax break these companies needed in order to supply prescription drugs to their retirees. The tax subsidy, itself a government accounting ruse crafted in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration to dissuade corporations from dumping their retiree drug benefit programs on the then-new Medicare Part D, becomes taxable under Obamacare. Corporations are now being reminded of the harsh truth: What Big Government giveth, Big Government taketh away, too.

Update II (March 31): Henry “Nostrilitus” Waxman (thanks for the laugh, Greg):

Update IV: Another Democratic (Or Demonic) Uprising

Christianity, Democracy, Ethics, Objectivism, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, Sex

In 2008, on this space, I inquired naively, “Ever wonder why the epidemic of allegations that has almost bankrupted the Catholic Church has not caught on in the UK and Europe? I venture that this is because the pop-psychology that undergirds the allegations and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued is American through-and-through.

But, two years hence, Americans can boast of one lucrative EXport, or shall I say SEXport!? The repressed memory mythology, and my priest-did-me syndrome have been adrift at sea, but have finally dropped an anchor across the pond.

My favorite Pope, Benedict XVI, has stood up admirably against the exported $2 billion lawsuit industry:

“Christ guides us towards goodness and does not let us be disarmed by ingratitude.” He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty”.

The Pope represents an aristocracy of the mind. The Catholic Church, in its wisdom, has put in place a much-needed hierarchy for the worshiping mass of humanity.

Against this, the religion of Democracy preaches the rule of the mob and the masses—in particular instituting the lowest common denominator in all spheres of life, from morals to aesthetics. The Catholic Church is among the last historical institutions where the masses are ministered to by their betters (mostly). The impetus and instinct to bleed it dry is a manifestation of a democratic—or is it demonic?—uprising. It is driven by those who’ve, in the Pope’s words, “fallen to the lowest, vulgar levels … into the swamp of sin and dishonesty.”

Reread “SEX, GOD & GREED” by Daniel Lyons for a dissection of the veracity of the sexual abuse claims against the Church.

Update I: The “Another” of the post’s title alludes to the health care revolution, ushered in by the Obama coup.

Update II (March 30): What did I miss? Was there a priestly ritual murder? Plain murder? Boer murder? Evidence beyond hearsay of all the rest? You’d thinks so, wouldn’t you, at least from Schmidt’s hyperbole hereunder. I suggest, as I already have, the reading of Daniel Lyons’ “SEX, GOD & GREED.”

Update III: In reply to Hugo: Thanks for your always provocative posts. Still, it’s baffling to see an Objectivist poo-poo standards of evidence and due process—class action suits being but one legal emblem of the abuse of the principle of a case-by case adjudication.
Also perplexing is it to encounter an Objectivist, which I know Hugo to be, blame genocide in Rwanda on anyone other than the barbarians who, with malice aforethought, took machetes to their innocent neighbors (I was just revisiting that for my book).

Update IV (March 31): A discussion on Hardball with Pat Buchanan, a Catholic, of cover-ups and papal culpability. No discussion of the veracity and standards of the evidence, though.

Palin's Polite Politics

Elections, John McCain, Political Philosophy, Sarah Palin

What is National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre doing with the Senator from Nevada, Harry Reid? More importantly, what is Sarah Palin doing campaigning for Sen. John McCain? How like a people-pleasing woman! Isn’t it time Palin stuck to a principled set of political prescriptions, and got over her gratitude to McCain for supposedly turning her into a supernova?

Palin rushed to McMussolini’s rescue in Tuscon, Arizona, mouthing the offal she repeated on their first campaign trail: “‘Before there were protests on Main Street and marches on Capitol Hill, there was the maverick of the Senate, fighting for us.'”

On the other hand, McCain’s primary challenger, J.D. Hayworth, is a run-of-the-mill Republican, only slightly better than McCain is some respects, and worse in others.

Perhaps because there is not much of a philosophical divide between the man she supposedly owes and his challenger that Palin is doing the friendly thing for a friend. Still, the effect of endorsing Rand Paul this year, Doug Hoffman last year, and now McCain again—makes Palin seem a little flaky.

The media loves McCain (and his mindless daughter) too much to fault Palin for stumping for him.

In Memoriam Anika Smit

Crime, Democracy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

As you’ve gleaned by now, my book about South Africa is not an insta-book. By the time Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa is completed (almost there) it will have taken three years to write. The other day, I had to make a sad addition to the book:

When he bid his bonny (and only) child goodbye before leaving the home they shared in north Pretoria, Johan Smit did not imagine that he’d never again see Anika alive. On Wednesday, March 12, 2010, seventeen-year-old Anika Smit was raped, her throat slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off. Naked and mutilated is how her father found her on returning that day from work.

In South Africa the preying majority is killing off the powerless minority. In America, the demos is drunk on the power of the state to assist it in pilfering from its betters.

Democracy.