Democrats keep public out of “open” meeting to make State House VAX only

By Rubashov

In the coming battles between authoritarianism and democracy, what the State Capitol Joint Management Commission pulled yesterday will be pointed to again and again – used as a cudgel to demonstrate the hypocrisy, lust for unchecked power, lack of rational balance, use of fear, and general bad faith that define the authoritarians. The culprits here are partisan authoritarian bureaucrats – paid by the taxpayer, with benefits superior to those of average taxpayers, and pensions that working people can only dream of.

On a 5 (D) to 2 (R) party-line vote, the Commission voted to block any citizen from entering the public legislative areas of the capital complex if they cannot show proof of vaccination or the negative results of a COVID test from the preceding 72 hours. This includes the public areas of the legislative chambers and the committee hearing rooms, where members of the public once had the right to testify for or against legislation under consideration. All citizens will be required to wear a mask inside the building.

New Jersey now has a vaccine-or-test mandate for entry into public political and policy forums. Citizens not in compliance will be blocked and confronted by men with guns. Any citizen wishing to speak his or her mind to power, whether individually or assembling as a group, to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, is no longer free to do so. Their papers must first be in order. Journalists will likewise be unable to provide the scrutiny that the powerful require.

When it comes to exercising the freedoms contained within the Bill of Rights, five members of a Commission have unilaterally decided that a proof of vaccination card is now more important than a passport. Indeed, the primacy of the proof of vaccination card rises as the need for a passport is diminished.

If this was really about public health, the Murphy administration would not welcome, support, and promote undocumented immigrants residing in the United States in violation of federal law. Especially as so few come from nations that have had the opportunity to offer their people vaccination against COVID-19.

In this segment, anti-authoritarian Democrat Krystal Ball examines the collusion between the Biden administration and the pharmaceutical industry to keep most of the nations of the world unvaccinated and vulnerable – while pursuing a policy of open borders. If this was about public health, the members of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission would be demanding that the national borders be as tight as are the borders they police – the doors of the state capitol building.

Of course, they will not make such a demand because they are aiding and abetting an act of hypocrisy. Now watch this video and listen to a fellow Democrat, a woman of the Left, and a believer in democracy (true to her party’s name):

“The consequences for our own population – of this greed, cowardice, and corruption – will be deadly. We can get every last solitary soul in our own country vaccinated and it is not going to matter much in the end if new variants are constantly emerging from an unvaccinated global south. The pandemic will never end so long as billions of people remain vulnerable as a laboratory for COVID to mutate and jump the vaccines that we’ve already created.”

“Stop worrying about the anti-mask Karens and start worrying about the real COVID criminals, the CEOs and the politicians who would let millions die to protect their profits.”

If Black Lives Mattered as much to the five Democrats on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission as their political bosses say they do, they would issue a statement demanding that American pharmaceutical firms drop their patent protections and allow nations in Africa to produce the vaccine. This would save a lot more lives than any Assembly resolution or protest-turned-riot-turned-looting-turned-arson ever has.

The five Democrats on the State Capitol Joint Management Commission really don’t believe in mass vaccination. This is about power, about crushing the Bill of Rights and bringing a formerly democratic people to heel. They ignore the billions of unvaccinated waiting to come to the United States illegally but demand full compliance from every citizen who wishes to exercise the Bill of Rights.

But the actions of the Democrats who run the State Capitol Joint Management Commission were actually much worse than that described so far. Apparently, someone with the keys to the State Legislature’s website was concerned enough to block access to the Commission’s virtual/remote meeting yesterday morning. We heard from numerous people who looked for the usual link on the Legislature's website to sign-up and provide public input and it wasn’t there. It had been removed.

This went against both the policy of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission and the Open Public Meetings Act. In an October 22nd memorandum to Commission members that was not publicly posted on the Legislature’s website, the Commission Chairman wrote:

Due to the current public health emergency, the State Capitol Joint Management Commission meeting will be conducted remotely. The next meeting of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission will be held on Tuesday, October 26th at 10:00 a.m. in Committee Room 4. All Commissioners will receive instructions for remote access. For anyone who wishes to submit comments on any agenda item, or to participate in the meeting, please have them contact Roger Lai at rlai@njleg.org. For anyone who would like to view the proceedings, they will be live streamed at https://www.njleg.state.nj.us. Enclosed is an agenda and briefing material for this meeting.

In other words, an average citizen, wishing to comment or provide perspective, would need to be invited by one of the Commissioners to do so, as this notice was not made public on the Legislature’s website where members of the public generally go if they wish to testify or comment. The October 26th meeting of the State Capitol Joint Management Commission was posted on the legislative calendar in the usual place on the Legislative website, but all links to testify were removed and the Commission Chairman’s October 26th memo was not publicly posted there.

In effect, public comment was suppressed by the Commission’s actions and indeed, no member of the public was heard from despite dozens going to the legislative website to sign-up to be heard from. Remembering those large numbers of citizens who showed up to the State Capitol to protest attempts to do away with religious exemptions to vaccination, perhaps this is the purpose of the new rule and not “public health” after all?

“The people in charge are intent on replacing our free democratic system with an authoritarian system, where they don’t convince you of anything, they simply make you do things. And they benefit from that.”

Tucker Carlson

BLM backs the Cuban regime. Will the NJ Legislature end its support of BLM?

By Rubashov

A Newsweek headline asks: Why Is Black Lives Matter Defending the Totalitarian Cuban Regime? Why indeed?

Newsweek continues:

The anti-government protests that have rocked Cuba in the last several days are the most dramatic expression of discontent seen on the island in six decades of communist rule. President Biden has sent a strongly worded message of solidarity with "the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom" against "Cuba's authoritarian regime," praising the protesters' assertion of "fundamental and universal rights."

…Yet not everyone was united in condemnation.

Most prominent among these is the Black Lives Matter movement, whose statement posted yesterday blamed Cuba's economic troubles on the United States embargo and hailed the Cuban regime's "solidarity with oppressed peoples of African descent." According to the BLM statement, "The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades." Preposterously, the statement also accuses the U.S. of "undermining Cubans' right to choose their own government."

The "choice," in this case, is a one-party system in which all candidates for political office must be vetted by Communist Party-controlled committees.

Wow. “All candidates for political office must be vetted by Communist Party-controlled committees?” Functions something like the county “line”.

The BLM Movement statement specifically mentioned Cuba’s support for a convicted cop-killer: “Cuba has historically demonstrated solidarity with oppressed peoples of African descent, from protecting Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur through granting her asylum, to supporting Black liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and South Africa.”

An anti-(American) police organization that supports a foreign police state. An actual police state. The real thing. Not some academic Karen’s imaginings.

Here is some news coverage of BLM’s madness:

BLM… a Ponzi scheme?

A few days ago, a group of corrupt Democrat ward heelers, that included state legislators, put out a statement attacking Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli for his support of the Cuban people in their push for democracy.  Perhaps, now we know why.
 
Last year, a chamber of the New Jersey Legislature passed a resolution explicitly supporting the same BLM (Black Lives Matter) Movement that has now formally lent its name and support to a totalitarian Communist dictatorship. In doing so, BLM has made it abundantly clear that they do not represent Black Americans who are not Communists or totalitarian or pro-dictatorship or anti-democracy.  In short, BLM hardly represents any Black Americans at all. 
 
May they now quickly consign their movement to the waste bin of history.
 
 

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.”

Robert A. Heinlein

40,000 protestors stormed the Capitol in 1932 (before social media existed)

By Rubashov

Some have suggested that what happened at the Capitol last week was an unparalleled act of “insurrection” not seen since the American Civil War.  This view passes over a lot of history. 
 
For the moment, let’s place to one side the Black Lives Matter riots of last year, which the insurance industry reports caused “the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history.”  And that’s just for the damage resulting from the riots between May 26 and June 8, 2020.
 
Wikipedia, which refers to the BLM riots as “the George Floyd protests” reports them to be on-going to this day.  Wikipedia doesn’t discuss the links between words and violence that we hear so much about today, insisting that…

While the majority of protests have been peaceful,[20] demonstrations in some cities escalated into riots, looting,[21][22] and street skirmishes with police and counter-protesters… At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 96,000 National Guard, State Guard, 82nd Airborne, and 3rd Infantry Regiment service members.[26][27][28][29] The deployment constitutes the largest military operation other than war in U.S. history.[30] By the end of June, at least 14,000 people had been arrested.” [3][31][32]

Wikipedia continues:

“…arson, vandalism, and looting between May 26 and June 8 were tabulated to have caused $1–2 billion in insured damages nationally—the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history.” [5][35]

According to Wikipedia, as of June 8, 2020, there were at least 19 violent deaths associated with the riots. A fuller accounting of the loss of life associated with the BLM riots will no doubt be available at some point in the future.

To our knowledge, the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the Black Lives Matter movement have not been suspended. We are not suggested that they should be, only stating a fact. Just as it is a fact that political bodies – like the New Jersey Legislature – adopted resolutions in support of and in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement itself.

Interestingly, no less a figure than Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell noted the "historically high unemployment" prevalent in the period leading up to the BLM riots. While this was not the Establishment line, and certainly not the message promoted by the establishment media, at least somebody remembered the historic link between economic distress and revolutions.

Now back to what happened in 1932…

When the American Army that had fought in the trenches of World War I came home, they were promised a pension or “bonus”. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 awarded these veterans “bonuses” in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each certificate issued to a qualified veteran had a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment with compound interest.

But then the economic Crash of 1929 happened, and by 1932, many veterans were without employment, literally starving, watching their families starve before their eyes.

UNIVERSAL EMPATHY WARNING: Most of these starving veterans and their starving families, most having light-colored skin, would today be considered “privileged”. This means they carry the original sin of “whiteness” and are not worthy of our empathy. (Editor’s Note)

By 1932, there were calls from various veterans’ groups demanding an early cash redemption of their service certificates. At first Congress ignored them. But on June 15, 1932, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Wright Patman Bonus Bill (by a vote of 211-176) to move forward the date for veterans to receive their cash bonus. To push the Senate into doing what they believed to be “the right thing,” 43,000 demonstrators (mainly veterans and their families) massed at the U.S. Capitol on June 17 as the U.S. Senate voted on the Bonus Bill. The bill was defeated by a vote of 62–18. So, the demonstrators decided to take over the Capitol grounds, set-up a shack city and tents, and not leave until they got their way. At this point, the media – which had been referring to the demonstrators as the “Bonus Army” or “Bonus Marchers” – began to call them “Communists”, “revolutionaries”, “criminals”, and a “weed growing on the lawn of our Capitol”.

On July 28, 1932, the United States Attorney General ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Police met with resistance, shot at the protestors, and two veterans died (both were subsequently buried at Arlington National Cemetery). President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army in. General Douglas MacArthur commanded the contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by tanks. Future Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George S. Patton were present and played roles in the drama. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

In 1991, it emerged that the federal government’s response was informed, in part, by an Army intelligence report which claimed that the demonstrators intended to occupy the Capitol permanently, as a signal for Communist uprisings in all major cities. The report, by the Army (please note) pointed an accusatory finger at the United States Marine Corps, suggesting that “at least part of the Marine Corps garrison in Washington would side with the revolutionaries”. And it did turn out that Marine Corps units, a mere eight blocks from the Capitol, were kept in their barracks.

In 1936, Congress overrode a veto by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and paid the veterans their bonus nine years early. Three years later, World War II broke out, America entered the war at the end of 1941, and the second world war ended in 1945 – the year when the bonuses were originally to have been paid.

Shockingly, to modern minds anyway, all of this happened at a time when there was no Facebook or Twitter or social media of any kind. Computers weren’t around yet – or television – and two-thirds of Americans didn’t own a telephone.

So, what was responsible for inciting the insurrection that was the Bonus March on The Capitol? Our world, so obsessed with blaming words, needs an answer.

Of course… it’s the economy, stupid.

Economic distress gives rise to real-world conditions of social unrest. It always has. It is a traditional excuse for war. The rise of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both outsiders in their political party of choice, are symptoms of this distress. Demonstrations by groups hijacked by agitators – like the BLM riots and the recent riot at the Capitol – are symptoms. Neither address the problem directly, in the way that the Bonus March did. When we see mass demonstrations demanding a return to employment, so that people can pay their health insurance premiums (or, demanding the passage of health care for all), then we will have gone beyond symptoms.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Chris Hedges saw this coming. In 2018, Hedges said: “They (the corporate/political establishment) know what’s coming. And I’ve covered uprisings all over the world, you know when the tinder is there. You never know what’s going to trigger it. You never know when it’s going to come. You never know how it’s going to express itself. But you know it’s there, and it’s definitely here.”

And Hedges offers us this reminder… “Totalitarian societies by their nature are hyper-masculine cultures and seek to banish empathy. They not only ignore the vulnerable and the weak, but they ridicule them and persecute them. They celebrate supposed values of force… empathy is seen as weakness.”

“In a free-market society, all of those companies like Goldman Sachs would have gone into bankruptcy, but we don’t live in a so-called free market, we live in a kind-of bizarre species of corporate socialism. So, in the end process of decayed states you have forces in essence cannibalizing the state itself, which is where we are.”

Chris Hedges

N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website. Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions. To submit a column for publication, please contact Marianna at Marianna@JerseyConservative.org.

Anti-Trump criminals attack GOP legislator’s family

By Sussex Watchdog

Over the past month, we’ve gone where newspapers like the Gannett corporation’s New Jersey Herald fear to tread.  We’ve covered the vandalization of family homes in Northwest New Jersey by anti-Trumpers and asked why these obvious acts of hatred were not covered in the same way as when someone spray-paints a Gottheimer for Congress sign? 
 
Does the Gannett corporation approve of violence, so long as it is directed towards people who they decide are unfashionable?  Or are they simply glad that the violent are too distracted to examine Gannett’s record closely?  Are they pleased that the violence is directed away from them?  That someone else is doing the suffering?
 
Sometime last night, a billboard advertising Space Farms Zoo and Museum was defaced with spray-painted anti-Trump slogans and foul language…  

Space Farms is owned by the family of Assemblyman Parker Space (R-24) and his wife, Jill Space, a Republican State Committeewoman and the First Vice Chair of the Sussex County Republican Committee.  When Congressman Josh Gottheimer’s (D-5) campaign sign was defaced, everyone of both parties rallied around him, the media covered it in great detail, all and sundry were appalled.  We won’t hold our breath in this instance.
 
At this sick moment in our history, the Establishment has allowed the violent to target some with impunity, while taking steps to destroy the morale and effectiveness of the police.  Average Americans have watched this and have responded by personally arming themselves to an unprecedented degree.  Any possibility of a rational debate has been screwed to death over the past few weeks.  People cannot unsee what has happened. 
 
This attack on the family of an elected representative of the people comes just weeks after two Black Lives Matter activists were arrested for spray-painting “BLM” and defacing property near the home of the elected Sheriff of Sussex County, Mike Strada.  At about the same time, ten shots were fired at the home of Sheriff Strada, while his wife and children were inside.  That crime is still under investigation and Governor Murphy’s State Police have not released the name or names of those suspected of perpetrating what could be a case of attempted murder.
 
Fresh from successfully intimidating the Sussex County Freeholder Board into passing a resolution that they dictated, Black Lives Matter activists were out in force yesterday, holding a Black Lives Matter rally in Byram while – a few miles away – engaging in an action to disrupt a planned pro-Trump rally that was called off at the last minute for safety concerns.  The stated reason was weather related.
 
Now the New Jersey Herald is willingly accepting the intellectual servitude of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Its pages today remind us of the end of the free press in Germany during that very dark period of the 1930s and 40s.  We will devote a future post to illustrate just how parallel the language is – often word for word.  It make us wonder if those running BLM are historical copycats?
 
Of course, the Gannett corporation is more than happy to spread the blame to America or “society” or the police… instead of being held to account for its own actions.  No matter how many riots or burned down buildings or spray painted slogans or murderous acts… violence does not result in peace.  You cannot compel peace or tolerance or respect at a global level.  Government cannot mandate these things.  Such things happen at the smallest, personal, and individual scale.
 
That is Gannett’s problem.  As a corporation Gannett has been wantonly cruel to its individual workers – generally, across the board, although some have believed it to be due to the color of their skin. 
 
Black Lives Matter is complicit in Gannett’s corporate viciousness.  By allowing Gannett to “take a knee” they are complicit as its public relations “fig leaf”.  But so long as they get their pay-off, Black Lives Matter doesn’t seem to care about the workers.  After all, these are academic “Marxists” of the snowflake variety.
 
Gannett pays homage to Black Lives Matter because it doesn't want anyone looking at their behavior or the behavior of some of the corporation's media outlets.  Like the recent federal class action lawsuit brought against Gannett alleging that the corporation is "running a racist workplace that makes it impossible for black workers to be promoted".  The 26-page lawsuit, with 23 pages of attachments makes for interesting reading:
 
"Gannett ran a sophisticated scheme and cover 'in the form of focus groups and other means and methods that are subjectively manipulated by Gannett to achieve its discriminatory goals and objectives.'
According to the lawsuit, Gannett 'has a corporate custom, policy, pattern, practice and procedure of not promoting African-Americans to director and leadership positions and utilizing a ‘one-and-done policy’ that disparately impacts African-American employed within the company.'
Gannett, based in McLean, Va., is best known for its flagship newspaper, USA Today. Its chain of newspapers, TV stations and other media reach than 110 million people a month, according to the complaint."
 
A journalist employed at Gannett added:
 
“In sum, the overall employment atmosphere and attitude at Gannett is hostile toward recruitment, training, leadership, management and advancement of African-Americans into top broadcasting leadership positions and opportunities.”
 
The EEOC found that it could not certify that Gannett is in compliance with the federal anti-discrimination law.  The federal class action lawsuit "seeks class certification, restitution, and compensatory and punitive damages for Civil Rights Act violations, loss of prospective earnings and a court order 'to enjoin the discriminatory practices.'"
 
Gannett was also recently sued for age discrimination over its practice of replacing older employees with younger, less expensive ones.  Over 1,300 Gannett employees have been "fired" between 2011 and 2017. 
 
Gannett is a ruthless corporation that takes knees and points fingers in a public relations spin operation designed to take the focus off them.  Black Lives Matter is aiding and abetting this scam.  Don’t be fooled.
 
We will keep you informed.  Stay tuned... 
 
 

“It is his millions of relationships that will give man his humanity… It is not our ideological rights that are important but the quality of our relationships with each other, with all men, with knowledge and art and God that count.
 
The civil rights movement has done a magnificent job but it is now faced with the ancient choice between good and evil, between love for all men and lust for a group’s power.”
 
“Every group on earth that has put ideology before human relations has failed; always disaster and bitterness and bloodshed have come.  This movement, too, may fail.  If it does, it will be because it aroused in men more hate than love, more concern for their own group than for all people, more lust for power than compassion for human need.”
 
“We must avoid the trap of totalism which lures a man into thinking there is only one way, one answer, one option, and that others must be forced into this One Way, and forced into it Now.”

(Author Lillian Smith, civil rights pioneer,
on accepting the Charles S. Johnson Award for her work)  

BLM leader: Destroy all depictions of Jesus Christ as “white European”

By Rubashov

Black Lives Matter is run by a group of self-described “trained Marxists”.  Not old school, working class Marxists, mind you.  No getting their hands dirty, blue-collar labor for these Marxists, thank you very much. 
 
In the 1960s, Marxist academics like Herbert Marcuse came up with a new form of libertine Marxism based on theories about “identity” that allowed the children of professionals to adopt the fashion of Marxism while living very comfortably in academia or growing fat off corporate grants.  It is this snowflake variety of Marxism that the founders of Black Lives Matter practice. 
 
Just remember that while Karl Marx was impoverished to the point that several of his children starved to death, Herbert Marcuse was something of a playboy whose jobs in academia and books sales made him rather rich.  Which one do you think your average upper-middle class college-educated activist would rather emulate?   
 
Unlike the devotees of Black Lives Matter, Marx was sensitive to the role of class in the American South in the run-up to the Civil War.  In his extensive writings from that period, Marx examined the class divisions inside the Southern states.  When writing about the secession resolutions, for example, Marx portrays the slave-owning class as a small but powerful minority, ruling over both the largely enslaved black population and poor whites.  Yes, Karl Marx understood and made those distinctions.
 
Black Lives Matter is not so intellectually precise as all that – instead preferring blanket condemnations based on skin-color, national origin, and such.  W.E.B. Du Bois would have seen BLM for what they are:  Racialists trapped in a perspective obsessed by skin-color.      
 
Fresh from BLM tearing down General U.S. Grant’s statue over the weekend (yes, General Grant, the man who defeated the Confederacy; yep, they forgot that without Grant there would have been no victory, no freedom, no Juneteenth, no anything) a prominent Black Lives Matter activist named Shaun King on Monday called for the removal of statues, murals and stained glass windows that depict Jesus as a “white European,” which he claimed “are a form of white supremacy.”
 
“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” King, wrote on Twitter. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”
 
“In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went?” he added. “EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down.”
 
“All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down,” King wrote in a second tweet. “They are a gross form of white supremacy.”
 
By “white friends” we suppose the BLM honcho was referring to the apostles.  Is this idiot really suggesting that he doesn’t understand that every culture since Ancient Greece has depicted its gods or God in their own image?  People with dog heads went out with Ancient Egypt.  Oh, and by-the-way, Denmark didn't exist until the 8th century  How could anyone have gone to some place that didn't exist yet?
 
Black Lives Matter must harbor levels of malevolence not witnessed since the Taliban destroyed those statues of the Buddha some twenty years ago.  The Taliban insisted that all religions kneel before them.  Remember how the world reacted when they went too far?

In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the world's tallest Buddha statues, which towered over Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley for centuries. Today, they've risen again ...

As for Shaun King?  Don’t worry about him.  The media reports that he has made millions as a fund-raiser for causes like Black Lives Matter.  Nobody in his family is going to starve.  Snowflake Marxism has been very good to Shaun. 
 
That said, he has attracted attention on how he has spent the money raised for such causes.  The New York Post reports…
 
Activist Shaun King has botched his attempt to recreate abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, The North Star, as an online venture — sparking renewed scrutiny over his financial dealings, according to a report Tuesday.
 
King’s new media outlet — which was lauded by such celebs as Susan Sarandon and Megan Mullally — has pulled in between $60,000 and $625,000 a month, depending on various figures he’s provided, the Daily Beast said.
 
Yet it has failed to deliver on nearly every one of his promises, which included building “multiple studios’’ and “hiring nearly 50 world class journalists,” the site said.
 
Read the full story here: 
 

https://nypost.com/2020/05/26/shaun-king-comes-under-scrutiny-over-botched-news-organization/
 

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
(Karl Marx, author and philosopher)

BLM’s Kaepernick joins Nike to sell a company built on modern slavery

Colin Kaepernick – the man who made “taking a knee at football games” fashionable and who became an icon for the Black Lives Matter movement – has agreed to shill for human trafficker Nike sportswear.  How is this for a mixed message? 

For at least twenty years, Nike has been criticized for its labor practices – including the offshoring of jobs to sub-contractors who use child labor and who practice human trafficking or modern day slavery to help Nike turn a very handsome profit.

Yes, Nike has been caught…

Kaepernick will be the face of Nike’s “Just Do It” 30th anniversary ad campaign.  The initial image is a close up of Kaepernick’s face with the caption: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”  Yeah, believe in something… slavery.

According to Wikipedia and numerous sources, “Nike has been criticized for contracting with factories (known as Nike sweatshops) in countries such as China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico… The company has been subject to much critical coverage of the often poor working conditions and exploitation of cheap overseas labor employed in the free trade zones where their goods are typically manufactured.”

“Nike has faced criticism for the use of child labor in Cambodia and Pakistan… Nike continues to contract their production to companies that operate in areas where inadequate regulation and monitoring make it hard to ensure that child labor is not being used.  A BBC documentary uncovered occurrences of child labor and poor working conditions in a Cambodian factory used by Nike.  The documentary focused on six girls, who all worked seven days a week, often 16 hours a day.”

“As of July 2011, Nike stated that two-thirds of its factories producing Converse products still do not meet the company's standards for worker treatment. A July 2011 Associated Press article stated that employees at the company's plants in Indonesia reported constant abuse from supervisors.”

Sources for this criticism include Naomi Klein's book No Logo and Michael Moore documentaries… including the clips from the one below…

This brings us to Tom Malinowski, a candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s 7th District.  Tom used to be one of the good guys… or maybe it was just a stepping stone, a career move?  Back in 2007, when Tom was a lobbyist for a human rights organization, he chastised the Bush administration for its “double-standard” on issues like Human Trafficking – putting foreign policy before principle and allowing regimes viewed as “allies” to get away with murder.

Fast forward to 2015, with Tom Malinowski now a member of the Obama administration and the top State Department appointee concerned with human rights.  The Obama administration decides to put business interests before principle and in an effort to broaden the markets included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, reclassifies Malaysia’s human trafficking problem.  The downgrade of the human trafficking crisis in that country comes just as hundreds of bodies of trafficking victims are discovered, buried in the forest.

160 members of Congress – a bi-partisan outpouring – condemn the Obama administration and its State Department for ignoring the plight of victims of modern day slavery.  Here are some headlines…

State Department Watered Down Human Trafficking Report

Senators: State Department ‘Heartless,’ Lacks ‘Integrity’ After Politicized Human Trafficking Report

Lawmakers threaten to subpoena all information about inflated grades for countries that have failed to crack down on forced labor, prostitution

Earlier in May, 139 graves in camps for human trafficking victims were found near Malaysia’s northern border with Thailand.

160 Members of Congress Call on State Department to Not Upgrade Malaysia Ranking in 2015 Trafficking in Persons Report

These headlines are from May 2015.  In June 2015, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Tom Malinowski testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and claims that it is all about the trade and passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Malinowski argues:

“I am convinced that, on balance, TPP will greatly aid the effort to advance human rights in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Apparently the double-standards that he decried in 2007, under the Bush administration, were okay in 2015, under the Obama administration.  See how the cookie crumbles?

In July 2015, Ranking Democrat Congressman Lloyd Doggett sent a letter to the State Department chastising Tom Malinowski and others responsible for the Obama administration’s policies.  Congressman Doggett wrote:

“Once again trade is being prioritized over trafficking enforcement.  Bending the standards to reward a country that accepts trade in women, children and forced laborers is wrong.  Malaysia adopting some new provision that will not be consistently enforced is no substitute for effective prosecution… It is easier to lower the standard than to insist that Malaysia protect trafficking victims… this (is) another indication that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not being used to bring about meaningful change on critical issues.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Andy Kim needs to be honest re. terrorist Chesimard

Democrat Andy Kim's campaign blew into South Jersey again today, with a call for more volunteers and the candidate bragging about how much out-of-state and Washington-DC-Beltway money he's trousered.  Kim is the helicopter candidate from DC, popping in to lecture the voters here, putting in a day of campaigning, then popping back to his million dollar pad in Washington, DC.

Along the way he throws up a lot of dust in voter's eyes.  His campaign communications reference war zones and the military so much that the folks we talk to -- average voters in the 3rd congressional district -- are under the impression that Andy Kim was a soldier.  Maybe that's by design.  Maybe Andy Kim's campaign set out to fool them into thinking that, but let's give Andy the benefit of the doubt and just say it is a false impression that voters are forming. 

No, Andy Kim did not serve a day in uniform.  His campaign just kind of pretends.  Yeah, kind of sad, but you know how it is...

In the midst of all this, Democrat Andy Kim forgot an important date.  The 45th anniversary of the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.  Now it's not really Andy Kim's fault -- because he doesn't really live in New Jersey and how is he supposed to remember an insider Jersey thing like that?

A memorial page, maintained by law enforcement officers for their murdered compatriots, explains as follows:

"Trooper Werner Foerster was shot and killed with his own service weapon after backing up another trooper who had stopped a vehicle containing two men and a woman on New Jersey Turnpike.

The subjects started struggling with the troopers and were able to disarm Trooper Foerster. One of the men opened fire, killing Trooper Foerster and wounding the other trooper. Despite the wounds, the other trooper was able to return fire and killed one of the subject.

The three subjects were members of the Black Liberation Army. The two surviving subjects were convicted of Trooper Foerster's murder, but the female suspect escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she has remained at large.

...An accomplice who helped the female subject escape was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list in 1982. He was arrested in 1986 for his involvement in the 1981 murders of two Nyack, New York, police officers.

Trooper Foerster had served with the New Jersey State Police Department for almost three years. He is survived by his wife and two children and is buried in Washington Monumental Cemetery, South River, New Jersey.

The Route 18 overpass on the New Jersey Turnpike was dedicated the Werner Foerster Overpass in his honor.

The Black Liberation Army was a violent, radical group that attempted to fight for independence from the United States government in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The BLA was responsible for the murders of more than 10 police officers around the country. They were also responsible for violent attacks around the country that left many police officers wounded."

If you want to know why the FBI named the accomplice, Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), as its most wanted "terrorist", you need go no further than the first paragraph of the group's activities in its Wikipedia entry:

"According to a Justice Department report on BLA activity, the Black Liberation Army was suspected of involvement in over 70 incidents of violence between 1970 and 1976.  The Fraternal Order of Police blamed the BLA for the murders of 13 police officers.  

On October 22, 1970, the BLA was believed to have planted a bomb in St. Brendan's Church in San Francisco while it was full of mourners attending the funeral of San Francisco police officer Harold Hamilton, who had been killed in the line of duty while responding to a bank robbery."

Unfortunately, Joanne Chesimard -- the accomplice in the murder of Werner Foerster -- still has some admirers here in New Jersey.  Yep, the organization that put together the famous "Women's March" in 2017 and again, earlier this year, "honored" Chesimard (Assata Shakur).  Referring to her as a "revolutionary" whose words "inspire us to keep resisting", the Women's March organization issued a statement "celebrating" Ms. Chesimard's birthday.

The Star-Ledger reported on this:

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2017/07/womens_march_wishes_nj_cop_killer_a_happy_birthday.html

Crazy stuff.  But it appears that Democrat congressional candidate Andy Kim knows these people too.  Right after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, Andy Kim went to work forming his own political action committee.  Kim's group supported the activities of organizations like the Women's March, Action Together, The Resistance, Fight Trump, and the Love Army.  Kim reports his involvement, as required by federal law, on his personal financial disclosure with Congress. 

So none of this should come as a surprise to anyone.  This isn't "new" information.  That's why we are curious that Andy Kim, a self-described "foreign policy expert", has never had anything to say about the terrorist Joanne Chesimard, whose "work" is so admired by organizations that Kim supports.

As an expert, Andy Kim must know that Chesimard's presence in Cuba is a major stumbling block to better relations between that nation and ours.  Do you have any thoughts on the matter, Andy?

And with the anniversary of the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster so recent, isn't it appropriate for congressional candidate Andy Kim to say something?

Rasmussen Poll: 67% say NO to the NFL

Americans appear to have had enough.  A new poll by Rasmussen shows 67 percent of Americans in opposition to tax breaks for NFL teams and their owners. 

Rasmussen polled this question nationally: "Do you favor or oppose giving tax breaks to NFL teams?"

In response, 67 percent answered "NO", just 18 percent answered "YES", with 15 percent undecided or not sure.  More women opposed tax breaks than men: 68% NO, 13% YES, 19% Not Sure. 

Non-white/non-African-American voters were strongest in opposition.  They answered 70% NO, 16% YES, 14% Not Sure.  African-Americans were strongly opposed however: 62%, 22%, 16%. 

There was very little difference between the parties, with Republicans and Democrats in opposition to tax breaks at 71% and 69%, respectively. 

Looks like the wheels are coming off all those efforts by rich, suburban, pseudo-leftists -- who have troubled so many of our public spaces with their attempts at becoming local B-list celebrities.  Your attempt at making a fashion statement has suffered a backlash.  Congratulations!

The dishonesty of Democrat Lacey "Kooky" Rzeszowski

The first thing that strikes you about Lacey Rzeszowski is her kind of attractively kooky intensity.  But then all that saccharine language hits you square in the brain and you remember where it was that you heard this false earnestness before -- it was on television, in those badly acted 1980's soap operas. 

And then there's the lies she tells.

Hold on to your shorts, because here comes a big one...

"Statistics tell us that the states with the weakest gun laws are the ones whose citizens suffer the most from gun violence."  Well, not really.

Here's a tip for Kooky Rzeszowski -- never claim "sanity" when inverting statistics.  Dyslexia maybe, sanity no.

The District of Columbia has the toughest anti-gun laws in America... and the highest murder rate. 

States with pro-Second Amendment gun laws like New Hampshire, Wyoming, West Virginia, and Colorado all have vastly lower murder rates than New Jersey.

There are cultural and socio-economic factors that are far more accurate in predicting the level of gun violence than is the presence of so-called "anti-gun" legislation.  If merely passing laws mattered all that much, then illegal drugs would have been unavailable the whole time Kooky Rzeszowski was growing up and going to college -- as they would be today.  And yet, somehow we suspect that the wealthy enclave in which she resides is not entirely free from the sale of illegal drugs.  Even if Kooky scrapped the Constitution and repealed the Bill of Rights, why would she believe mere laws would make guns any more difficult to buy than narcotics?

What new laws do is send men with guns into new areas of "enforcement."  If Kooky really believes that "Black Lives Matter" or indeed, that any lives matter, she should think long and hard before criminalizing something else.

In his famous article on the subject, conservative columnist George Will argued that "overcriminalization" was responsible for the death of Eric Garner, a sidewalk merchant who was killed in a confrontation with police trying to crack down on sales tax scofflaws.  Will raised the question of how many new laws are created by state legislatures and by Congress in the rush to be seen to be "doing something." 

In other words -- it is not the police who are the problem, it is the politicians who send them.  The cops only go where they are ordered to go.  It's the damnable politicians who give the orders.  And Kooky wants to give more orders, not less.

Will's brilliant column is a must read for folks like Kooky Rzeszowski -- who jump in with a solution even before the reason has yet to be determined.  Legislators preparing to propose their next round of laws that will end up being enforced by men with guns should think before they legislate.  An excerpt from Will's column is printed below:

America might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal-justice system.

By history’s frequently brutal dialectic, the good that we call progress often comes spasmodically, in lurches propelled by tragedies caused by callousness, folly, or ignorance. With the grand jury’s as yet inexplicable and probably inexcusable refusal to find criminal culpability in Eric Garner’s death on a Staten Island sidewalk, the nation might have experienced sufficient affronts to its sense of decency. It might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal-justice system.

It will stare back, balefully. Furthermore, the radiating ripples from the nation’s overdue reconsideration of present practices may reach beyond matters of crime and punishment, to basic truths about governance.

Garner died at the dangerous intersection of something wise, known as “broken windows” policing, and something worse than foolish: decades of overcriminalization. The policing applies the wisdom that when signs of disorder, such as broken windows, proliferate and persist, there is a general diminution of restraint and good comportment. So, because minor infractions are, cumulatively, not minor, police should not be lackadaisical about offenses such as jumping over subway turnstiles.

Overcriminalization has become a national plague. And when more and more behaviors are criminalized, there are more and more occasions for police, who embody the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and who fully participate in humanity’s flaws, to make mistakes.

Harvey Silverglate, a civil-liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book Three Felonies a Day to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of America’s metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned. In his 2008 book, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, Professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:

Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But “overcriminalization matters” because “making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.” The job of the police “is to carry out the legislative will.” But today’s political system takes “bizarre delight in creating new crimes” for enforcement. And “every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.”

Carter continues:

It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.

Garner lived in part by illegally selling single cigarettes untaxed by New York jurisdictions. He lived in a progressive state and city that, being ravenous for revenues and determined to save smokers from themselves, have raised to $5.85 the combined taxes on a pack of cigarettes. To the surprise of no sentient being, this has created a black market in cigarettes that are bought in states that tax them much less. Garner died in a state that has a Cigarette Strike Force.

To continue reading... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394392/plague-overcriminalization-george-will

George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist at The Washington Post.  The above column was published on December 10, 2014.

Gas-tax repealers pass Black-Lives Matter bill

Last week, the New Jersey Senate passed legislation that will throw EVERY police officer who has to make the decision to use deadly force in front of a state-appointed special prosecutor.  Under this legislation, a police officer who arrives at a school shooting incident in the nick of time and uses his firearm to stop a would-be mass murderer of children will be presumed to have done something wrong and then tossed in front of a persecutory special prosecutor. 

This legislation -- S2469 -- could not become law without the support of two Republicans, Jennifer Beck and Gerald Cardinale.  Without their votes, the bill would not have passed the Senate.

The premise behind this legislation is that county prosecutors -- just by existing within the borders of a particular county -- have too close a relationship with the police officers of that county and therefore cannot objectively investigate an incident when a police officer makes a mistake or oversteps his or her authority. 

While this might be argued for states that elect their prosecutors, such as Pennsylvania, where police unions are active in that political process; in New Jersey all prosecutors are appointed by the same person -- the Governor.  So whether you are a county prosecutor, appointed by the Governor, or the Attorney General, also appointed by the Governor, you do not run for election and there is no potential for that kind of conflict.

If a county prosecutor is too conflicted to investigate a matter within his jurisdiction simply because he or she lives and works there, then the whole idea of county prosecutors needs to be scrapped and replaced with something like the United Kingdom's Crown Prosecution Service, where attorneys are appointed to prosecute on a case-by-case basis.  But the idea of dragging a police officer in front of a special prosecutor, simply because that officer did precisely what he or she was supposed to do in a deadly situation, is preposterous. 

All this legislation will do is to create a species of state prosecutor whose worth will be determined by the number of police officers' scalps collected and careers destroyed.  It will deteriorate the quality of police organizations  and with that, the safety of every community in New Jersey.

The Assembly might consider a "sensitivity training" amendment for special prosecutor designees.  It would include eight weeks of putting on a police officer's uniform, strapping on a sidearm, and engaging in day-to-day police work like traffic stops and domestic calls.  Call it prosecutors' boot camp.   

Just why two Republican Senators -- Beck and Cardinale -- would cross party lines to vote for this misguided legislation is open to question.  We suggest that it is because they find the contemplation of labor unions and working people disagreeable.  Senator Beck is a career  politician and lobbyist, while Senator Cardinale is a politician with a profession, as well as the owner of a luxury property in the Caribbean. 

According to a press release put out by the ACLU, Beck and Cardinale casts their votes on behalf of that organization as well as Black Lives Matter Morristown, Black Lives Matter Paterson, Black Lives Matter New Jersey, the Drug Policy Alliance, Garden State Equality, New Jersey Citizen Action, and the New Jersey Policy Perspective.  Beck and Cardinale stood with the far-left to screw working police officers and their families.

Bankrupting the TTF is a Pyrrhic victory

"A Pyrrhic victory is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. Someone who wins a Pyrrhic victory has been victorious in some way. However, the heavy toll negates any sense of achievement or profit.  The phrase Pyrrhic victory is named after king Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War."  Pyrrhus said of his victory at Heraclea, "one more such victory and I will be utterly undone."

It is beginning to look as if elements of the GOP, the talk radio wing of the populist movement, and the petroleum industry (including AFP) have got their way so that in 16 short months we will see an increase in the tax on gasoline without any accompanying tax cuts.  The phase out of the Estate Tax -- long a conservative dream, long a priority of groups like AFP -- which was so close, will be gone, perhaps for a decade or two or forever. 

Economists will continue to advise people to take their money and flee New Jersey upon reaching retirement age -- so the flight of wealth, which could have been checked by the elimination of the tax on retirement income, will continue unabated.  Instead of making their donations to New Jersey charities, those donations will go to charities in states like Florida and North Carolina.

Early in 2018, the Transportation Trust Fund will finally be funded -- but low income working people and commuters and seniors and military veterans will not get their tax cuts.  They will be off the table -- and if they find their way back into legislation, the Republicans will have nothing to do with it.  It will be a gift, in whole, from the Democrats.

The crisis brought by willfully bankrupting the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) is already causing county and local governments to consider raising property taxes to cover the shortfall in road and bridge repair funding that had been provided by the TTF.  The bill will come due next year -- when the whole Legislature and the Governor's office is up before the voters.  If a 23 cents per gallon increase in the tax on gasoline had been passed in June, the decline in the retail price per gallon since would have made up for that 23 cents and more.  The increase in property taxes brought on by the bankruptcy of the TTF will not be so painless. 

But still, there are some in the GOP who look on the "no gas tax" message as the gimmick they need to at least hang on to what they have in the Legislature.  It is easy to chant, so that even the very stupid can understand it.  It is to be the GOP version of "Black Lives Matter" -- and is meant to be just as angry and misdirected and violent.  For hatred of "the police", substitute "Trenton" and you have it in a nutshell (or case).

In fact, what the NJGOP needs are well-thought-out, adult, fully-fledged policies -- policies that are informed by principles.  Once you have these, any old advertising executive can figure out how to message it, package it, sell it.  The problem with the NJGOP is that they have nothing to sell.  So it ends up selling mistrust, anger, and even hate.  That's not a product to be proud of.

The conservative movement has found itself here before.  In the 1970's there were two competing brands -- the angry, emotional, populist "conservatism" of George Wallace (a Southern Democrat); and the optimistic, ideas-driven, ideological conservatism of Ronald Reagan (a California Republican).  Happily Reagan's ideas won out over Wallace's anger.  Today, it sometimes seems like it's anger on steroids.

The dearth of principle is such and the anger so keen that there are those out there who have turned a rather pedestrian decision about how to fund road and bridge maintenance (a users' tax on gasoline vs. property taxes vs. the general fund and so on) into a question as serious as "when does life begin"  or "does the state have the right to impose the death penalty"?  These are roads we are talking about -- there's nothing metaphysical about a road -- presumably we all agree that we need roads and we assume there's nobody out there who thinks they get built and maintained for free by the Keebler elves.

But the hatred -- both fringe and corporate -- has been astounding.  President Reagan himself believed in users' taxes as a fair form of taxation and raised the tax on gasoline as the fairest way to fund transportation projects.  But that hasn't stopped fringe folk like tea partier Mark Quick and NJ101.5's Bill Spadea from cranking up the hate.  They make it sound like a debate over transubstantiation. 

The world is going to hell and these people are making the means to fund road and bridge maintenance an article of faith.  How intellectually bankrupt must they be?

America is under an intense and sustained threat from abroad and elements of that threat are possibly slipping undetected through our borders.  Our economy has turned grey -- with unemployment and underemployment, foreclosure and poverty, as its major features.  Our culture is being frog-marched in a direction chosen, not at the ballot box, not by the people, but by elites in (of all things) the entertainment industry and their corporate and judicial fellow-travelers.  Nothing democratic about it.  In the history of this Republic, have people of faith ever been less fashionable and more under threat? 

Instead of standing up for freedom of conscience, what calls itself "Republican" now, what calls itself "conservative", the best they can muster is an appeal to a gimme.  The cost per gallon hasn't kept up with inflation, hasn't gone up in 28 years, states like Pennsylvania pay over 50 cents a gallon for their roads while we pay just 14 1/2 cents, but I don't care I want mine and I want it cheap, and I don't care if my daughter has to shower with a sex offender or if my church is closed down because its practice offends the ruling fashion.  I want cheap gas!

Well, for the next 16 months, you will.  While every other problem ignored gets worse.  This is what we are now.

Trump is taking Sanders' voters

Today is the Ides of March, memorable for its connection to Gaius Julius Caesar, a Roman politician with parallels to Mr. Donald Trump.  Like Trump, Caesar entered politics during a period when the working class (the Roman Plebeians) were being squeezed out of the labor force by imported foreign labor.  In Caesar's day, the imports were slaves from newly conquered territory (Gauls, Germans, Greeks, and Spaniards).  Today the imports come from human trafficking (a modern euphemism for a form of illegal slavery) and porous borders.  Both undercut the price of labor by glutting the market.  Caesar's murder at the hands of a group of rich Patrician Senators was due, in part, to his efforts to limit the importation of slaves and secure work for the citizens of Rome.

Like Caesar, Trump is a rich oligarch who has betrayed his class to gain the affection of the common people.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported that 46,000 Democrats had switched to Republican.  That's half of all the new voters the Democrats have gained since the 2014 congressional elections.  This mirrors huge party-switches in other states, with exit-polling indicating that the candidacy of Donald Trump is the reason for much of the switching. 

Many of these voters would otherwise have been voting for Bernie Sanders, but when the Vermont Senator screwed up and told them that they don't exist, apparently they started jumping to Trump. 

"When you're white, you don't know what it's like to live in a ghetto".

Hey, doesn't Sanders know that twice as many white people are living on food stamps as are black people?  That there are more white people on welfare than black people.  Doesn't he know this?  Why would Senator Sanders diss the very working class voters he needs, in an attempt to pander to black voters?  Doesn't he know that racial and ethnic divides have historically been used to split the working class?  To pit group against group within the working class, to undermine it.  Is remedial Marxism in order?

Consider this:  Black Lives Matter's advocate Al Sharpton is managed by the same public relations firm that manages Governor Chris Christie.  Sharpton is a rich man, not a man of the Left.

Of course, Bernie Sanders' ideology was always closer to the 1960's New Left than to the class-based Old Left.  The New Left was dominated by academics and the children of the well to do.  Frustrated with the cultural traditionalism of the working class, it focused on the grievances of racial and ethnic groups, gender, and sexual identity.  Dominated by younger voices, the New Left was in a hurry to tear down the existing order in any way possible and deemed group-identity the quickest means to that end.  But of course, these younger voices grew up and, being who they were, inherited the establishment -- proving to be more greedy and rapacious than anything practiced by their parents.

Split along racial and ethnic lines, by gender and all the rest, working class jobs have disappeared overseas, the labor market at home has been glutted, and working class incomes have declined while the inequity between rich and poor is an ever-widening gulf.  Perversely, the rich have never been more "progressive."  Johnson & Johnson puts out a "progressive" LGBT video to take your mind off them selling products to children and women that cause cancer -- and covering it up for 30 years.  HSBC bank signs on to a pro-same-sex marriage brief to keep "progressive" support when it comes out that they laundered a billion dollars in drug cartel money.  "Vulture capitalist" billionaire Paul Singer pushes "gay rights" but off-shores his operations in the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes and oversight.

Today's Democratic Party is controlled by these "progressive" rapists of the working class -- making the Democrats anything but an old-order party of the Left.  As for the Republican Party, it too has long embraced the same neo-liberal economic policies practiced by the corporate "progressives" who dominate the Democrats, while the unleashing of campaign and lobbying money has given rise to an all-encompassing regime of crony capitalism that makes corruption in both parties ordinary, usual, and customary.

The parties "clash" in a series of what Daniel Boorstin called "pseudo-events," everyone bemoans "gridlock," but behind the scenes everything functions quite well if you have the money to buy it.  A crisis is manufactured, the working class get taxed, the government spends money, rich lobbyists/ vendors/ consultants/ investors get richer, the solution fails miserably, the crisis is forgotten, the national debt has grown.  A recent Princeton University study reported that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

While equal to the Democratic Party in corruption, the Republican Party actually is more democratic than the Democrats, in that its leadership does not exercise the full control over the institution the way the leadership of the Democratic Party does.  Being "Republicans" and therefore "bad" in the minds of those who set such fashions, they can't get away with the same level of wrongdoing that the Democratic Party's leadership can.  Remember, the Democrats are fashionable and therefore "good."  You will never skunk a cocktail party by announcing that you're a Democrat.

So the Democrats get to crush their Bernie, even though the polls show he is the far stronger candidate in any match-up with Republicans. 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html

But the Republicans can't crush their Trump... or even their Cruz.  The Republican electorate has slipped their leash and gone off the plantation.  Can you blame rank and file Democrats for enviously eyeing this outbreak of freedom and wanting to join in?  After being lied to for so long, being told what to think, what to do, and what to feel, it is exhilarating for some to just raise their fist and let fly that middle finger. 

The real worry to the establishment class does not come from those who are temporarily free, who will soon tire and then be rounded up by their assigned keepers.  What keeps the establishment up nights is what Ralph Nader wrote about two summers ago in his book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.  It's what groups like Represent.Us are putting into practice:

Represent.Us: End corruption. Defend the Republic.

Unlike the pseudo-left movements funded by corporate "progressives," these groups do not divide Americans by race, ethnicity, or gender.  They don't pit this lifestyle against that religion.  This is about taking on corporate cronyism and the political class and cleaning up the Republic.  This is about the one BIG thing we need to do if any of the little things have a chance of becoming something good.  This is about the PROCESS and it's not unlike the coming together of Left and Right in the United Kingdom in that country's battle over who controls their PROCESS -- Parliament or the European Union.  This IS THE FIGHT and it has and will produce some interesting alliances, as you can see below.

London Mayoral Candidate George Galloway gets a standing ovation for his speech on leaving the EU, at a Grassroots Out event. @alondonforall @georgegalloway

Sen. Weinberg: Tell Obama "Cops Lives Matter" too

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That picture on her Facebook page is curious.  Is that Senator Loretta Weinberg (D-Corzine) tickling the former confidant of the "Love Gov"?  It certainly looks like she is doing something to make Steve Goldstein smile. 

The "Lov Gov" is, of course, Eliot Spitzer of New York.  Goldstein was Spitzer's campaign mouthpiece when they were blazing their own version of the sexual revolution.  "Whatever floats your boat" is the mantra of the Kinsey-besotted "Swingers' Lobby."  Spitzer, whom Goldstein insisted was "an incredibly nice man in real life" -- even after the Lov Gov was caught hiring young women for sex, was recently in the news again.  This time he was accused in the New York media of losing it and then trying to strangle a young woman.  He was accused of this kind of "role playing" before, in a book authored by one of his young victims. Now the latest subject of his attentions has fled the country. 

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The lifestyles of rich insiders never ceases to amaze:  Sex, power, money, and let's change the world to do whatever we want.  Average people and their talk of "democracy" doesn't matter.  "Only the rich, the powerful, the well-connected, count and we decide who and what matters.  We set the fashion."

Which brings us to the misdirected "Black Lives Matter" movement that works to pit some Americans, based on their skin color or ethnic origin, against other Americans, based on their employment as law enforcement officers.  Never mind that black police officers are as ubiquitous as Irish cops once were -- especially in the higher ranks.  Black employment in policing of all types is a growth industry.

While United States Justice Department figures indicate that the number of Hispanic and Asian police officers lag behind their proportional representation of America's population as a whole, that is not the case with black police officers, who more than match it.  In some urban police departments, black officers make up more than half the department.  63 percent of Detroit's police officers are "African-American." 

In spewing hatred towards working class police officers, many of whom are black, the "Black Lives Matter" movement is allowing itself to be used by the political establishment, which is now thoroughly anti-police.  Some dislike the police because it is fashionable to do so, just as it was fashionable to hug a first responder in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.  Fashion changes.  Blue is out this year.  Others want the best police protection, but they don't want to pay for it.  For them, undermining the police weakens their position at the bargaining table.  If they can get a police officer to risk his or her life at a cut rate, that leaves more money for the vendors who fund their campaigns or for their criminal friends on Wall Street.

The real target of the "Black Lives Matter" movement should be the very politicians who have duped them into attacking the police.  In a 2014 column titled, "Eric Garner:  Criminalized to death," conservative columnist George Will wrote:

Overcriminalization has become a national plague. And when more and more behaviors are criminalized, there are more and more occasions for police, who embody the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and who fully participate in humanity’s flaws, to make mistakes.

Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties attorney, titled his 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day” to indicate how easily we can fall afoul of the United States’ metastasizing body of criminal laws. Professor Douglas Husak of Rutgers University says that approximately 70 percent of American adults have, usually unwittingly, committed a crime for which they could be imprisoned. In his 2008 book, “Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law,” Husak says that more than half of the 3,000 federal crimes — itself a dismaying number — are found not in the Federal Criminal Code but in numerous other statutes. And, by one estimate, at least 300,000 federal regulations can be enforced by agencies wielding criminal punishments. Citing Husak, professor Stephen L. Carter of the Yale Law School, like a hammer driving a nail head flush to a board, forcefully underscores the moral of this story:

Society needs laws; therefore it needs law enforcement. But “overcriminalization matters” because “making an offense criminal also means that the police will go armed to enforce it.” The job of the police “is to carry out the legislative will.” But today’s political system takes “bizarre delight in creating new crimes” for enforcement. And “every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence.”

Carter continues: “It’s unlikely that the New York Legislature, in creating the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, imagined that anyone would die for violating it. But a wise legislator would give the matter some thought before creating a crime. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they’re so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.”

Last year the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice issued its report on the Ferguson Police Department.  The report was the result of a lengthy investigation, commissioned as a response to the shooting death of a young black man by police.  The report's most notable finding -- placed front and center, although ignored by many in the mainstream media -- was that "(Ferguson's law enforcement) practices are shaped by revenue rather than by public safety needs."

That's right, the Legislature criminalizes behavior as a means of obtaining revenue for state and local governments.  The Legislature turns the police into privateers, pushing them to "earn" more for government.  Then, when something goes wrong, the very same politicians who pressured police into becoming revenue agents turn on them, setting their "movement" political allies on them to devalue police lives in order to make it easier to reduce their salaries, cut benefits, and hollow out pensions.

All you have to do is look at the way President Barack Obama has criminalized investigative journalism and whistleblowers to get a taste of how many new "offenses" have been added to the statute books.  New Jersey leads others states in adding regulations that will ultimately be enforced by men with guns.  If Weinberg and Goldstein have their way, the police will soon be used to issue citations and collect fines from people whose speech critters like the Love Gov (he of the Swingers' Lobby) finds insulting or bullying or "hateful." 

And as they add more and more for the police to enforce, they seek to make fashion statements and dupe black voters by engaging in irresponsible attacks on working class police officers.  Well, the seeds of their rhetoric has borne fruit and we are beginning to see the harvest their words have conjured.

Last week, the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), a police officer's union, reported that violence against police had escalated to the point where seven police officers had been killed in just six days.  This is the kind of headline we more often saw coming from a warzone like Iraq or Afghanistan -- not from within the borders of the United States.

National FOP @GLFOP

7 officers have been killed serving their communities in the last six days. Please pray for their families

11:11 AM - 11 Feb 2016

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President Obama has been mute about the violence this rhetoric has unleashed against working police officers and their families. 

Big government legislators, like Senator Weinberg, and their lobbyist allies, like Steve Goldstein, have been mute as well.  Now is the time for them to step up and start to undo what they have done. 

First, take responsibility.  We challenge Senator Weinberg to propose a resolution that reminds legislators, Congress, and the President that police officers only enforce the laws that the political establishment makes them enforce; that there is an inherent danger in this transaction; and that police officers are often injured, wounded, or lose their lives in carrying out the directives of the political class. 

Second, tell the President to speak up.  We challenge Senator Weinberg to sign a letter to President Obama that urges him to acknowledge the costs involved in police work.  This cost is measured in lost or damaged lives and in the stress and trauma dealt with by families and loved ones.  Making the police into villains for enforcing the laws written and decided upon by the political class is outrageous hypocrisy.

Third, make the police "peace officers" not "privateers."  Make policing about public safety and not a source of revenue.  Create a Sunset Committee to review the thousands of laws and regulations that impact police conduct and place police officers on a collision course with the growing number of out-of-work or under-employed citizens who are having difficulty paying the economic sanctions imposed on them by legislative bodies at all levels of government.  Recognize that every time you send a man with a gun to collect money for government, you run the risk that someone will die. 

Because of the vote Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Norcross) made to end capital punishment, the lives of serial killers, those who rape and murder small children, those who torture to death young women, mass terrorists, and cop killers are all spared the death penalty in New Jersey.  Let's stop legislative action from inadvertently imposing the death penalty on people who can't pay a few traffic tickets or who are selling a couple cigarettes to someone who can't afford a full pack. 

It is insane for a legislative body to spare the life of a Jesse Timmendequas while causing the death of an Eric Garner.  It is monstrous for the political class to blame the police for following its orders.