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Wednesday, May 7, 2008Irony Man
Yes, I loved it. I've got an Y-chromosome, what do you expect? He is a man wrapped in a robot, wrapped in a missile. Oh, and he shoots lightning. He kills terrorists. He saves children. According to CNBC, Americans paid over one hundred million dollars in one weekend to see Iron Man do all that stuff.
We'll probably see it again. I liked the politics of it. I'll pay to watch someone insult my politics once, if the movie is good, but the only people who get a second mini-van load of fully-paid-up Bowyers are the ones we agree with. Marvel gets us again because Iron Man is an entrepreneur. In fact, horror of horrors, he inherited the business from his father. In double fact (duck, incoming spoilers), the only Americans who oppose him are the lackeys of his upper-middle-management corporate weenie COO.
The first half of the movie is an uncensored love note to
Yes, Iron Man, an arms manufacturer, does make a public announcement about walking away from the missile business, but only so he can build the ultimate missile and then wear it like a suit. Like Bruce Wayne before him, Iron Man is a billionaire. He gives some of it away, but he keeps most of it himself, and uses it to make things, including the kinds of things that kill Jihadi terrorists.
Now that I think about it, the weenie COO is the one who does all the foundation stuff. He's a glad handling flack in public but when he is revealed in all his evil, he talks a lot more like Henry Kissinger (vee muss mentain ze balintz uv powah).
In fact Iron Man is the moral clarity guy, no winking and nodding at bad guys around the world. The bad guys have stubble, turbans and heavy Arabic accents. They torture people, including our hero. They slaughter families.
Iron Man doesn't spend any time trying to understand their rage. He admits that he had unwittingly with the best of intentions supported these fanatics in the past, and that the only thing he can do now is to make a better weapon and use it to go after them.
When Churchill went to war with Jihadists in the
This article originally appeared on TownHall.
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Jerry appeared on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company on Monday, May 5th. The show aired at 7:00 PM EST.Wednesday, May 7, 2008Jerry Bowyer on Kudlow & Company
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Monday, April 28, 2008Don’t Blame the Markets
The government compels banks to make loans in poor neighborhoods even if the applicants are not considered prime borrowers. You may not know about that because the Community Reinvestment Act is not exactly a household (excuse the pun) name.
But the commercial banks do know about it. They have a CRA department. They get a CRA rating. They know that the way to get a high CRA rating is to make loans to poor applicants or in poor urban neighborhoods regardless of the financial prudence of the loans.
They know that if they don’t do this, they will be punished severely by the regulators when they try to make any major change which is dependent on regulatory approval. And they know that pretty much every major change a traditional bank makes is, in fact, subject to regulatory approval. So, they grit their teeth and stamp a big inky “yes” on an application which they know, according to traditional financial standards, deserves a “no.”
Up until 1995 the Community Reinvestment Act was largely a requirement to support “community groups” in poor neighborhoods. Of course, this often meant left wing groups like ACORN, etc. But after 1995 the scope of the law was dramatically increased.
Over the strenuous objections of the banks themselves and some Republicans in Congress, CRA was renewed and modified in such a way that it gave far more power to the federal government to punish banks for not lending more widely in poor neighborhoods.
The classic “fair housing” laws from the Martin Luther King Jr. era of civil rights were deemed insufficient. Under CRA, not only were realtors required to sell to qualified buyers regardless of race, which they should have been, but banks were accused of a new kind of “financial redlining” if they didn’t provide the funds. Income, credit history, assets, debts were out. Urban neighborhoods were in. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act pushed things along too by requiring banks to ask about and disclose the race of its mortgage applicants. In effect, banks were forced to provide the evidence of their own alleged discrimination.
Subprime loans to minority applicants exploded ten fold in the mid-1990s as a result. In fact the
Under New Deal-era regulatory rules of Glass-Steagall, commercial banks and investment banks were separated. When that act was repealed as part of banking deregulation in 1999, commercial banks and investment banks were able to merge, subject to approval by regulators.
However, the banks’ CRA rating was taken into account in the decision. This meant that a high CRA rating became an important prerequisite for mergers, which increased the pressure on the banks to make these risky loans. The banks also were given permission to put these loans into packages of securities that could then be sold into investment markets.
Last week, a front page Wall Street Journal article set off a national debate about the legacy of Alan Greenspan. Critics have been taking the former chief of the Federal Reserve to task for failing to see the alleged excesses of the marketplace and neglecting to issue new diktats to punish those excesses accordingly.
But it is not Mr. Greenspan’s fault that Congress substituted identity politics for financial prudence, although his easy money in 2003 didn’t help much. If anything, Mr. Greenspan regulated too much.
The fault lies with the small army of hard left political hustlers who spent the early 1990s pushing risky mortgages on home lenders. And the fault lies especially with the legislators that gave them the power to do it.
This article originally appeared on the New York Sun.
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Monday, April 28, 2008James Madison to America: This Is What We Warned You About
As a Pennsylvania voter, I’m particularly fascinated by the identity politics that I see playing out every day before my eyes. It’s kind of ironic, since this is the state in which the founders met in to write a constitution which they intended to protect their posterity from the destructive effects of political factions. They warned us about the destructive power of political fanaticism. Not only has the modern Democratic Party failed to heed those warnings, but it has spent the last 40 years writing factionalism into its internal party rules. Identity politics may have worked for Democrats, from time to time, in the past. But now that the two leading candidates hail from different officially recognized racial, age and gender groups, the party is over. To quote Mr. Obama’s pastor ‘the chickens have come home to roost’.
James Madison wrote a pro-constitution editorial (known to history as Federalist 10), that described in prescient terms precisely why political factions are dangerous. When there is liberty, he argued, some men will create more wealth than others. Property and class factions are the result. Members of these different economic classes are tempted to pass laws which help themselves at the expense of the overall public good. Over time this excessive self-regard distorts the gift of reason and causes people to think and speak in ways that seem strange to the country at large.
Ambitious men with rhetorical skill exploit these factions, rising through them to positions of power. In fact, these ambitious men need factions in order to gain what they want. Groups of politically alienated voters are ideally suited to a demagogue’s desire for power and prestige. The narcissists and the fanatics feed one another.
Over time factions tend to move farther and farther away from reality as the reason-destroying power of fanaticism intensifies. Washington, following Madison’s lead, warned us in his Farewell Address that the power of party (his word for faction) tends to create convulsion and ‘false alarms’; that is social unrest and bizarre warnings about phantom dangers.
According to Madison, eventually factions can gain so much power that they are able to promote laws which destroy the liberty of other citizens. For instance (and these examples are his, not mine) they may erasing debt obligations, or impose trade restrictions in order to protect certain interest groups from foreign competition, or perhaps impose special taxes on the numerically small propertied classes . Both Madison and Washington also warned future generations about the role of foreign powers in this process. Faction leaders often identify less with America than they do with their country of origin. For all of these reason, factions should be discouraged, and their effects minimized, said the men who met in Philadelphia.
As I write this, I’m less and less clear whether I’m writing about Philadelphia in 1788 (when the constitution was implemented) or Philadelphia in 2008 (as I see it shredded). You probably are too. Last month, Barack Obama initiated his Pennsylvania campaign by giving a speech in Philadelphia on race in America. Ironically enough, that speech was delivered at the National Constitution Center, across the street from the place where Madison and Washington and the rest issued the Constitution of the United States, a documented explicitly designed to rectify the factionalism to which America has been so vulnerable. My National Review colleague Byron York was there and spent time talking with member of the audience. Over and over again, he found, not people who were satisfied that Barack had sufficiently distanced himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but people who agreed with Wright in the first place. The comments of Obama supporter, Gregory Davis seem pretty typical, “I wasn’t offended by anything the pastor said. A lot of things he said were absolutely correct…. The way he said it may not have been the most appropriate way to say it, but as far as a typical black inner-city church, that’s how it’s said.” There in a nutshell is the problem of faction, one group speaking about the nation as a whole in levels of hostility which are simply incomprehensible to the general public.
It’s not just race and gender, it’s also age. My mother, who has come out of retirement to help the Northampton County Department of Elections deal with the overflow of new voter registrants told me that the cards she sees are overwhelmingly registering as Democrats and they are overwhelmingly coming from college students. Do you have any doubts about who those students intend to vote for?
The factionalism of interest group also spills out into what the founders called ‘sectionalism’, that is factions which correspond with geographical divisions. The sections now are less a matter of upper and lower then they are a matter of toward or away from. City,/suburb/exurb has replaced Southern state/border state/northern state as the sectionalism of the 21st century. Philadelphia belongs to Barrack; the southeast suburbs are battleground counties, and Pittsburgh’s industrial west belongs to Hillary.
In other words, Pa Democrats like their brethren around the country, are tearing their party apart along race, age, gender and geographical grounds.
Who can blame them? Democratic voters are just doing what they’ve been trained to do – they’re thinking of themselves as members of factions. Over and over the Democratic Party has rewritten its internal rules to assuage the anger of unsuccessful political factions. This pattern started after the rioting at the 1968 convention with the McGovern-Fraser commission. Delegate quotas were established based on age, race and gender. Party caucuses were structured in ways that favored organized activist groups.
The rhetoric followed the rules. Jesse Jackson articulated the new arrangement perfectly in the Democratic convention of 1988 when he likened his party to a quilt made from individual patches of cloth, stitched together by his grandmother. On their own, they could not expect to rule, ‘your patch is too small…’ he told them each in turn. But sewn together women, blacks, latinos, and unions could take the nation.
Al Gore articulated it inadvertently when he bungled the motto from the Great Seal: E Pluribus Unum, which he translated as “from one, many”. It is, in fact, the opposite “from many, one”. His Latin was pretty weak, but his ability to translate the mood of his party was spot on.
What, if not factionalism, lies at the heart of Hillary’s ‘its tough for a woman out there’? What, if not factionalism, lies at the heart of Obama’s church with it’s the-government-intentionally-created-Aids-to-kill-black-people paranoia and its Afro-centricity?
Step by step, the warnings of Federalist 10 have been trodden underfoot, until finally age, race and gender have moved from the edges of the party to its very center. Delegate quotas, activists-dominated caucuses, the replacement of winner-take-all with proportional delegate systems…even proposed fixes such as super delegates and front-loaded primaries, are all fruit which comes from the same poisoned tree – the rejection of the founder’s vision of a nation protected from factionalism.
G.K. Chesterton once said that if you find a boundary stone in the middle of a field, and you don’t know why it’s there - don’t move it. For the past four decades the party of Jefferson has been moving the ancient boundary stones. This year’s Democratic primary chaos stands as a monument both to the arrogance of the generation of 1968 and the wisdom of the generation of 1788.
This article originally appeared on TownHall.
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Monday, April 28, 2008Pennsylvania Divided
As a Pennsylvania voter, I'm disheartened by the identity politics now playing out as both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battle for votes among Democratic Party factions.
One in five supporters of Mrs. Clinton here say they won't vote for Mr. Obama should their candidate lose (and vice versa, according to pollster Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall College). Only 12% of nonwhite Pennsylvania voters support Mrs. Clinton. Only 29% of white ones support Mr. Obama. Gender and age cohorts break along similarly sharp lines, with women and older voters going for Mrs. Clinton, men and young voters trending toward Mr. Obama.
As a student of political history, I see these poll results as something deeper than a passing nomination squabble. For at least 40 years, Democrats have been playing identity politics and empowering factional blocs within their party.
Though others might pick a different starting point, I'd trace the start of that process to 1968 Chicago, where antiwar protestors rioted outside of the party's national convention and party leaders inside responded by creating the McGovern-Fraser commission. That commission went on to write presidential nomination rules establishing delegate quotas based on age, race and gender. State parties followed suit by structuring caucuses to favor organized activist groups such as unions.
And so now Pennsylvania Democrats, like their brethren around the country, are splitting along race, age, gender and geographical lines as they are forced to choose between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. But then, why shouldn't they? Democratic voters are just doing what they've been trained to do – thinking of themselves in group terms.
I find all of this disheartening because allowing the narrow interests of political factions to force decisions and policies onto the whole is something that James Madison warned us against. In a pro-Constitution editorial (which history has come to know as Federalist 9), he described in prescient terms precisely why political factions are dangerous.
When there is liberty, he argued, some men will create more wealth than others. Property and class factions are the result. Members of these different economic classes are tempted to pass laws which help themselves at the expense of the overall public good. Over time this excessive self-regard distorts the gift of reason and causes people to think and speak in ways that seem strange to the country at large.
If that sounds a little like the Democratic Party today, it may be because the party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison has come to be dominated by factions. In the Keystone State, those factions include African-Americans who dominate the inner-cities, upper-class white voters in the suburbs, working-class voters in the middle regions of the state, and Latinos, seniors and college students who are dispersed in geographic pockets. And of course, ubiquitous unions.
Voters head to the polls in Pennsylvania on April 22 in a process that is supposed to lead eventually to a Democratic presidential nominee. But in watching Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama traverse the state, it's hard to see how one candidate will emerge from the many Democratic factions slugging it out.
Mr. Obama is hoping to overcome Mrs. Clinton by energizing college students. And anecdotal evidence suggests that a surge of support among college-age voters may be helping him. Recent statewide polls show the race tightening. My mother, who is volunteering to help the Northampton County Department of Elections process new voter registrants, is watching the Obama surge first hand. Among the new registrants she sees, the vast majority are Democratic college students, most of whom, we can presume, will vote for Mr. Obama.
Mrs. Clinton is trying to turn out her own supporters, who include traditional working-class Democrats, middle-class suburbanites and, of course, women and seniors.
Last month, it appeared that Mr. Obama's campaign was to be split apart on the edge of growing fears among white Democrats over incendiary and, at times racially charged, comments his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, delivered from the pulpit over a 20-year period that Mr. Obama attended his church in Chicago. All the while, Mr. Obama hadn't raised an objection to Rev. Wright's sermons.
To save his campaign he showed up in Philadelphia – the city where Madison and the rest drew up the Constitution in 1787 – and gave what some called "The Speech" on race in America. In doing so, Mr. Obama likely saved his presidential campaign. And he did it, in part, drawing a line all the way back to "that group of men [who had] gathered" across the street in Constitutional Hall in 1787 to write one of the founding documents of the nation. In other words, by reaching beyond the factional politics of the Democratic Party.
Democrats might have once hoped that Pennsylvania would settle their nomination fight. Instead, it has shown how dangerous it is to put voters into factional blocs that can then be exploited along racial lines. To the extent that Democrats suffer this year for not learning that lesson earlier, well, to quote Mr. Obama's pastor (who himself was quoting Malcolm X): "the chickens have come home to roost."
This article originally appeared on the Wall Street Journal.
