Category: Political

Brilliant paper on America's decline by Victor Davis Hanson.

So much ignorance in the reporting of two San Francisco recall elections locally and nationally.  I just had to write this blog quickly. This home of Nancy Pelosi has had two successful recalls in three months and all the media I see gets it completely wrong.

Why me? What is my special insight?

More than five years ago I figured out that only a modest part of San Francisco was crazy woke, but that part of the electorate was most active, aggressive and was well organized because of the strong local unions and the most powerful Democrat Party West of the Mississippi.

The local San Francisco Democrat Party elects more statewide offices with its small population than Los Angeles with a population six times greater. Six times greater and one third the elected statewide offices.

Up until 1965, San Francisco had Republican mayors, state representatives and members of Congress.  That hasn’t been true since then, since the end of the hereditary elite that I have written about in earlier blogs.  

Three of the great leaders of the Democrat Party were San Franciscans and built the local party into the Statewide mega-machine.  Pat Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown.  The other great power was Jesse Unruh from Southern California.

What I figured out, with 45 years in local politics, was that a major part of the San Francisco electorate was Asian with conservative pro-police and pro-business values.  The Chinese had been co-opted into a strong voting group in the Democrat Party by Rose Pak who used the Democrat corruption to decisively help her voters.

The Chinese of Rose Pak along with a large Filipino group, Vietnamese and other South Asian settlers in San Francisco constituted a large near majority. This large population had common values:  they believed in the value of education, they supported the police and they were all part of the small business working population.

My idea was to start running city propositions that supported the police.  Based on these propositions I would raise money for this new pan-Asian group, find and reward the good community organizers and build a new conservative political machine.

I had to get the support of the police union leaders.  I tried for two years and failed.  I even went to the only honest politician in San Francisco, Quentin Kopp, who wouldn’t help me at the time because of his ties to the Democrat Party machine.

Those efforts five years ago are how I know why San Francisco was able to organize two recall elections and voted to recall three School Board members and a District Attorney.  

The Asian voting community was appalled by the School Board that had ruined the schools, with the student population dropping from 85,000 students in 1970 when I was involved to 43,000 today.  Many students moved to private schools and many white families moved to suburban schools. The number of classrooms and teachers remained the same and the administration expanded. The key mover in the recall was the School Boards elimination of the historic college prep high school (Lowell) because it had become 75% Asian.

The Asian community also voted to recall the openly communist District Attorney because he failed to stop the 10-fold increase in auto break-ins which affected nearly every Asian family in the City.  He allowed the open public robbery of every small retail business and the consequent closing of many chain stores that served the Asian community. He was also openly at war with the local police.

THAT is the story of the San Francisco recall elections.

That thud you heard while driving was the sound of having hit and driven over the American Golden Goose.

American industry has been getting a greater share of our GDP every year from overseas sales. That was our Golden Goose.  The incredible wealth of the San Francisco Bay Area is from the vast penetration of American tech all over the world and the resulting revenues from the Internet, phone apps and software.

Why we lose.

Just think for a moment of being a business person in some midsize country in Southeast Asia, the Middle-East or Latin America.

Let’s be an ad agency in Jakarta, a retail mall in Turkey or a floral distributor in Peru.  You want a new business program for your office computers and a good graphics program.  You want to find a retail food shop for your mall and you want to rent to a retail shop in the space next door.  You need an internationally respected audit firm.

Until Spring of 2022 the choice was easy. 

Then many U.S. woke companies abandoned their businesses in Russia: Microsoft, Adobe, McDonalds, Starbucks and Deloitte. Totally abandoned, no service no updates; abandoned.

Now you have to be concerned that your country’s government might fall on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy like Russia did. Other countries in the world have relied on American companies but so far have not been treated as badly as Russia, except for China, Iran, India, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

From now on you will go to an Indian or Chinese firm first.  Both India and China will soon be offering direct competition for all big American tech firms.  For international retail brands you will go to Brazilian or South Korean companies.  For auditing you will find a Singaporian firm.

Say goodbye to American business growth overseas.  America has killed or seriously wounded its great commercial global future.

America had a great monopolistic advantage after WWII, especially in airlines and communications. The advantage lasted 75 years.  It has been thrown away, by a shortsighted government.

The brilliant Ruth Wisse wants me to apologize, so I do.  I apologize for my whole family past and present; I apologize to all Americans who love America.

Ruth points out in several articles that a large swath of Jewish immigrants, beginning around 1890, came to the United States with fervent communist ideas.  That is understandable since they came from tyrannical worlds and could see no other political solution to their miserable pogrom-dominated lives.  The problem is that this tidal wave of immigration to New York grew to the millions; concentrated in a new world ghetto, this cluster of Jews never learned why America was a better alternative to communism.  They never really assimilated to their new political paradise.

This cluster of communist Jews, living in America, millions of people, never learned how attached to a horrible outmoded ideology they were.  In the 1930’s they were a dominant group in the American Communist Party and its thousands of colluding front organizations.  After WWII they remained aligned with communism and the Left.  Even as the murders of Soviet Jews became public they never denounced communism.  Even as the murderous rampages of Stalin and the Gulag become public knowledge, American Jews never publicly recanted their alliance with ultimate evil.

To this day American Jews are predominantly Lefties, unapologetically still in the same evil tradition.  The prototypical left-wing Jew is Bernie Sanders.

My mother and father were extreme Lefties.  My father became a rabbi to evangelize for Left Liberalism.  Even though his family were Californians from the 1850s and certainly were Republicans ( one of the second generation, my grandfather’s generation, was named Abraham Lincoln Phillips). My grandfather named my father Wendell after the great Boston abolitionist. 

My father became a Lefty at the U. of California and joined my mother’s New York communist clan in his 20’s.  He was so Left that I joked with him that he believed Adlai Stevenson (Democrat candidate for President twice) was more important than Moses.  

My mother’s family were the heirs to a Prussian sect of Judaism, Ethical Culture, that was a Leftist coven.  Her brother Fred Hart was an actual Marxist.  Fred made money in the stock market and was the sustaining donor of the National Guardian, a Russian communist front in the 1950s, later to become a Chinese Communist front in the 1960s. History has no record and no way of knowing that Fred provided all the Guardian’s sustaining funds from 1952 to 1972.  

My mother and her brother were the first American tourists to visit China in the mid 1960s, thanks to Fred’s vital role at the Guardian.  In that period I asked my mother why she wasn’t disturbed by the nightmares of Stalin, the Gulags and Mao. Her reply was the same as Lefties today: “Real communism has never been tried.”  

How deep was this communism?  I asked my close friend Ruth Kadish, in the mid 1990s, part of the Jewish Lefty clan, whether she had changed her mind about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg the Soviet atomic spy once the KGB files were made public.  “No, you can’t trust the anti-Soviet crowd,” she replied.

I abandoned my Lefty family tradition at age 20, having learned about the American genius from reading the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Animal Farm and living on an Israeli Marxist kibbutz.

It is now time for me to apologize for the terrible Lefty hogwash and blind ideology that my family, a part of the disgraceful pattern of American Jewry, have spread in this great American land.  I apologize to all Americans who love and appreciate America for my family's guilt.

I know the history of San Francisco because I started the first unlicensed bus tours of the City in 1972 (Third World Tours). I had to develop the spiel for the tours and train the bus drivers.  So I know that San Francisco has a long history of extremist, stupid, legislation that has often resulted in positive outcomes; lucky.  

Because the City has long had 500 appointed commissioners, nothing really gets done. The number of police officers was limited by charter to 1,500; meaning the police never even tried to be effective.  There are dozens of more legislative stupidities which is why the beatniks then the hippies settled here and why my Briarpatch had over 600 members of new small hippie businesses in San Francisco.So what is the latest legislative stupidity?  Right here: this sign is on the door of an empty restaurant and the empty grocery next door.

Our brilliant Board of Supervisors, all woke, are taxing empty retail businesses for being empty.

I can’t tell you how stupid this is.  Any business person will tell you this will not lead to any more retail rentals, it will lead to more retail rental space converted to residential and office space; the lucky outcome is different..

With more than a million square feet of retail rental space empty now because the of Covid lockdown and the perpetual homelessness destroyed retail business, much of that space will be sublet for a $1 a month to artists, dancers, yoga teachers, short term-schools and temporary office space for people who are tired of working from home.  The For Lease signs will still be up, maybe not on the store fronts but online.

That is great for the thousands of people who will get short-term nearly free space and for all the pedestrians who will now see life in the retail spaces.

Stupid new taxes will lead to the lucky outcome of more street life.

That is what friends and family keep telling me. 

However, the new California political party Common Sense supports my position. The founders of Common Sense are known by me to be the anti-dimwit politicians of the last 50 years.

There are two reasons I call the political world ‘dimwit.’  First is my personal experience over a lifetime. The second is my own sense of hypocrisy.

Those who know me and those who are familiar with my blog know that I believe humans and other simians stop learning when they reach adulthood.  For humans that is roughly age 23. Only one out of 300 persons I have met in my lifetime were able to develop new ideas and new worldviews after age 23.  The rest of the people I know and knew were only able to use the worldviews they had at that age to respond to the world.  That is my core definition of ‘dimwit.’ Viewing the world based on early life experience without the additional input of adulthood generally makes one 'dimwitted.’

The single most important experience that has colored my worldview in adulthood came when I was in my mid 20s, just at the beginning of adulthood.  I was a campaign manager for a San Francisco Republican assemblyman.  My technical position, for payroll purposes, was as a legislative assistant.  That meant I spent time in Sacramento dealing with legislators and their staff.  In the entire Assembly and Senate of 120 elected officials in 1964 there were only about 4 or 5 that I considered as intellectually above average. The rest were ‘dimwits.’ The 97% became elected officials because they were egocentric, arrogant, weird people.  

Over the next decades I worked in politics on a regular basis and I knew hundreds more elected politicians.  The ratio of 2-3% who were not dimwitted and self-serving never changed.  

Now a small group of the people I knew and observed close-up, who are not ‘dimwits,’  have joined together to form a new party, the California Common Sense Party.  They have been moved to form a new party based on their own experiences that resemble mine.

This is all by way of saying that a few of these hundreds of politicians are nice people and some are decent human beings.  I even dated a few elected women. The two qualities of being nice and being politicians are not totally incompatible.  

People like former governor Jerry Brown are the exceptions.  Jerry is smart, the son of a standard politician, and he has learned to camouflage himself and pass for an ordinary politician.

Seeing this tragic fact of American democracy led me to propose that elected legislators be replaced by a random selection of ordinary people, the Greek style of selection called ‘sortition.’  I wrote a book called A Citizen Legislature at the end of the 1970’s.  (My co-author was Chick Callenbach.)

One great mind on the political scene, William F. Buckley Jr, once said that the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book could do a better job of governing than any group of Harvard officials. Concurring with this, decades later, was Norman Podhoretz.

My second reason for this view of pervasive politician dimwittedness is my sense of hypocrisy.  How can we see the Congress of 2018 spend two years impeaching President Trump on the claim that his election in 2016 was based on fraud brought on by Russian election interference, then denying any possibility of Biden election corruption by a new Congress in 2021 and 2022?  That is hypocrisy.  I see the same hypocrisy daily on the political scene.  Gross hypocrisy equals dimwittedness.

Should my readers wonder how ‘dimwitted’ people can raise money and perennially get reelected? The answer is that political people operate in a separate tribal system.  Most of America is based on a merit system of independent ordinary people. The political system is not; it is tribal.  

The Kennedy family seems to thrive over generations, as does the Bush family.  Political machines are tribal in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and most other cities.  Nancy Pelosi’s power comes from the money connections created by her father, Thomas D’Alessandro, a powerful politician and former mayor of Baltimore.

I do not apologize for calling politicians ‘dimwits.’ To fix the problem we need to randomly select our governing class from among ordinary citizens.

In the first battle of merit vs woke, merit won. That was the real battle described in the last blog, the recall of the San Francisco School Board members.  

The School Board was 100% woke; changing the names of 44 schools such as Lincoln and Washington because the historic figures were not woke.  The Board wanted to paint over an historic mural of George Washington’s life.  The school finances were a total mess because of anti-merit incompetence of the board members. Lastly, the Board wanted to turn the century-old college prep school into an ordinary high school because the proportion of Asians was too high. 

The electorate of San Francisco voted unambiguously to recall the Board.  San Francisco is a heavily Democrat city with a union-run Party machine.  But Asian Americans are a meritocratic citizenry and they made their voices heard clearly with 3/4ths of the voters rejecting the wokie School Board.

This may be the beginning of the end for the woke media and the Democrat establishment.  America is one of the unique nations on the earth that is meritocratic.  In a direct confrontation between the wokies who are tribal, racist, elitist with union values on the School Board versus the American values shown in the recall, American values won.

I did nothing in the School Board recall election in San Francisco last week.  But I dealt with the same issue in 1961.

The two most powerful political groups in San Francisco, today, are the Chinese Americans who were organized in the 1980s by the late Rose Pak; they elected the mayor before the current mayor. And the Lowell High School Alumni.

Lowell was an issue for both groups in this election. The recalled School Board members destroyed Lowell as a college prep school which had existed for over a century. 

I helped organize the Lowell Alumni in 1961 when a new Lowell building was constructed and the appointed school board chose to eliminate it as a college prep school.  I say “I;” my role was to help Ruth Kadish, the most powerful person in the public school system(photo on the right).  Two years later she made me president of her powerful SCOPE, Service Committee on Public Education. 

We had no trouble in 1961, getting the alumni to write tens of thousands of letters to the School Board and the mayor, George Christopher.  The alumni are both powerful and made up of dozens of prominent citizens.  Today the alumni are heavily Asian Americans.  The school is over 50% Asian and has been for half a century.

One addendum; the Lefty press mentions the $2 million raised for the recall as 'shocking.'  That is a trivial number for people who are not innumerate.  For a billionaire, of which there are many in San Francisco, a $1 million political donation is the same as a $1.00 donation to a person with $1,000 in his pocket.

I am most recently disturbed by new regulations that require Venmo and Zelle to report to the IRS all transactions over $600 and require my crypto bank to report all transactions over $10,000.  

I am an ordinary American citizen who has never been to prison, never been convicted of a crime, served in the Army and paid over a million dollars in taxes (property, sales, income, excise and many other kinds of taxes.)  So what right does the U.S. government have to observe ordinary activities of my daily life? None. The ‘tyrannical’ bastards.

Tyranny is here in America. Tyranny is the best descriptor, it is generally defined as:

• Identification of Enemies/Scape goats as a Unifying Lefty Cause The Left is rallied into a frenzy over Trump and Trump supporters.
• Controlled Mass Media Sometimes the media is indirectly controlled by government, sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship is very common.
• Religion and Government are Intertwined
  The common religion of Green Eschatology is used as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious green rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the green religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
• Corporate Power is Protected
  The Wall Street, media and business aristocracy of this nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
• Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
  The Left almost always is governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon for national agencies to be used for personal power. 
• Fraudulent Elections
  Sometimes elections in places like Detroit and Chicago are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Some local Lefty governments typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

American tyranny started for me in the early 1960’s when DDT was a banned chemical. Universally banned.  I found hair lice on a partner and tried to buy 10% DDT powder.  Banned. It was the most effective treatment for hair lice. Today every public school in America has a hair lice problem because of this over wrought ban.  Mosquito-borne diseases in Africa continue out of control after 60 years because of the ban. Bans don’t need to be total.

Then lead was universally banned.  It was banned from paint and the most effective hull paint for boats that worked against barnacles was included in the ban. Bans don’t need to be total.

By the end of the 20th century the most effective anti-cramp pills used by millions of dancers was banned.  Then in the early 21st century an acid reduction pill for indigestion was banned with millions of users after decades of use.  

The FDIC, a government agency created to insure banks and to keep banks stable, banned banks from opening bank accounts for businesses that were stigmatized. That included marijuana businesses, companies lending money to blacks (pay-day lenders), firearms companies and a dozen others.

There seems to be no end to the government bans on personal living arrangements.  We were forbidden to buy incandescent light bulbs (2007.)  The government banned moth balls we used to protect our wool sweaters.  Banned natural gas hook-ups to all new homes in California eliminating gas stoves, gas furnaces for homes, gas hot water heaters and gas clothes dryers.  

People working for private U.S. corporations were to be fired unless they got mandatory vaccinations. On this outrage, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to stop enforcement.

When we get a better word, I will use it. Until then, ‘American Tyranny’ is in full force.