Category Archives: Business

Surprise, Surprise: Ramaphosa Can’t Fight The ANC’s Pro-Corruption, Pro-Crime Lobby

Business, Crime, Government, Labor, South-Africa

In South Africa, reports The Economist, “Economic life is dominated by big business, big labour and big government.”

only an elite few ever have a place at the table. … Firms face too little competition, cushy labour laws lock the jobless out of work and the public sector provides woeful services. Many well-paid teachers barely teach. Many bureaucrats do little but slow-walk paperwork and embezzle. Most are never held accountable. A quarter of South Africans enjoy a middle- or upper-class life, while the rest struggle to get by. When a country has an insider-outsider problem, you cannot let the insiders dictate terms.

The problem, really, is that African National Congress bosses will have Ramaphosa’s head if he does anything to threaten their hold on “big business, big labour and big government.”

Ramaphosa is near-powerless before “the pro-corruption lobby within the ruling African National Congress (ANC).”

MORE: “The need for speed: Cyril Ramaphosa is running out of time to reform South Africa.”

But let’s not beat about the bush: Ramaphosa has failed to recognize—and aggressively move against—systemic crime against his white, productive minority. In fact, Ramaphosa categorically denies the ethnic cleansing of South Africa’s white farmers.

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On The Tucker Carlson Show, It’s Whine, Whine, Whine About Harvey Weinstein

Business, Conservatism, IMMIGRATION, Media, Nationhood, Republicans

Non-stop coverage of corporate corruption is now the standard fare on Tucker Carlson’s show.

The Fox News host used to, courageously, tackle the national existential questions of immigration and the future of America as we know it, once it is entirely swamped by an imported Democratic constituency. Mr. Carlson now hardly does so any longer (or, perhaps I don’t listen long enough).

Today, October 23, 2019, there was the usual, daily whine, whine, whine about Harvey Weinstein and the MSNBC cover-up. Like I care.

Then it was on to some anon crook who got rewarded mightily by someone despite having run a Ponzi scheme. How unusual and news worthy is that in America? Never happens, right? Of course

The country is crumbling. Big national issues loom with terrible urgency. The borders are open, and, by the looks of it, no court will permit a president to EVER shut them. Yet Tucker Carlson
devotes 30 minutes of each show to whine, whine, whine about Weinstein and MSNBC.

The Tucker Carlson Show appears to have become one long Republican talking point.

* Image courtesy The Unz Review.

UPDATED (10/22/019): Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City

Business, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Regulation, Technology

NEW COLUMN IS “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City.” It’s on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would.

Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it was. 

“Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town,” mused  Bourdain. “A flood of them—tech industry workers, mostly male, derisively referred to as tech boys or tech bros—is rapidly changing the DNA of the city, rewiring it to satisfy their own newly-empowered nerdly appetites.”

That the “tech boys” “are so dull,” as members of a Seattle band say—and sing—in no way assuages their heated effect on the housing market. A street artist called “John Criscitello … told Bourdain how the high-tech influx has driven up housing costs and forced artists [like himself] out of the neighborhood.”

Yes, Big Tech is exacerbating homelessness in Seattle and the surrounds. While correlation is not causation, the ongoing and never-ending, annual importation of a sizable feudal elite from China and India must be factored in the homelessness equation.

“Buoyed by the city’s thriving technology industry, Seattle has consistently been the hottest housing market in the nation.” Commensurate with the explosion in the number of Seattle neighborhoods in which homes cost $1 million has been an explosion in the region’s homeless population.

“Households must earn about $140,000 a year to afford mortgage payments – nearly double the city’s typical income,” but on par with the “average base pay” of a software engineer in the Seattle, WA area. …

…   “Unabashed liberal” outfits like the Economist, the Brooking Institute and the Seattle Times blame inadequate supply for the housing crisis, ignoring the demand side of the supply-and-demand housing equation whereby, “Big Tech is permitted to petition The State for permission to import The World at a price heavily subsidized by the disenfranchised American taxpayer. Through government immigration policies, a ceaseless demand for housing has been generated.”  (See “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1.”) ….

… READ ON. NEW COLUMN, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City,” is on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

* Image courtesy of The Unz Review.

UPDATED (10/22/019):

NEW COLUMN: Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech Harm The Homeless

Business, Economy, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Technology

NEW COLUMN is “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech & The Homeless.” It is currently on Townhall.com , The Unz Review and WND.com.

To expatiate on the subject of homelessness in Seattle, Tucker Carlson regularly invites on his Fox News show a Republican liberal who broadcasts out of Seattle.

Aside from a pastiche of liberal ideas, Sleepy in Seattle has nothing remotely perceptive or probative to say about homelessness in the Emerald City. Eventually, this young know-nothing will read this column and parrot it back to Tucker.

Then, perhaps, will Carlson’s viewers stop being gulled by Big Tech and the other multinationals who are exacerbating the problem of homelessness in Washington State.

For these stateless corporations are the major importers, into King County and the surrounds, of a high-tech, feudal elite that compounds the homeless quagmire.

If anything, the corporations who straddle the globe rely on immigration ignoramuses to perpetuate the single-cause theory of homelessness: addiction or mental illness.

However, even if drug addiction and mental illness are seen as necessary in causing homelessness, they are seldom sufficient. Substance abuse and mental anguish can, in themselves, be the consequence of other exogenous, existential and intractable circumstances.

Like being priced out of your homeland’s housing market. For good.

Big Tech must be quite pleased to see homelessness attributed exclusively, by the usual cast on TV, to addiction and mental illness—when, in fact, homelessness is driven, primarily, by the systematic and permanent eviction from the housing market of vulnerable, working-class people.

In truth, our country is consigning its economically weakest members to the homeless encampment, through the never-ending importation of a high-rolling, high-tech elite, which, in turn, artificially inflates the price of housing. In perpetuity.

According to the Seattle Times, “fewer than 50 percent of people without homes are addicts.” “There are more families with children than chronically homeless people” in the encampments.

Underlying homelessness are factors such as “loss of a job,” “eviction,” medical bills and foreclosure, the last of which “destroys credit ratings, making former homeowners no longer eligible for loans or, in many cases, rentals.” Forever.

“We must no longer allow politicians, policy influencers and the media to get away with the laziness of conflating substance abuse and homelessness,” inveighs Lola E. Peters.

Peters, a local writer, is correct. Alas, while implicating the tech-driven population explosion in our state’s housing crisis, Ms. Peters frames the unrelenting influx from China and India as an organic, natural, made-in-America population explosion. …

 

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech & The Homeless,” is currently on Townhall.com, The Unz Review and WND.com.