June 3, 2018

      Every society has a Ruling Class. In the United States, it is the super wealthy and those with Ivy League educations – especially those with degrees from Harvard or Yale. The leaders of our bureaucracies, major newspapers, opinion journals, think tanks, courts, corporations, universities, media conglomerates and political class come from one of these two groups – or ambitious individuals who have ingratiated themselves with these groups.

      This was not necessarily a bad thing, as long as our Ruling Class was competent. But in the mid-twentieth century, the value system of our Ruling Class began to deviate with that of the ruled. Our Ruling Class became for more hedonistic, greedy, cowardly and arrogant. It became socially acceptable for powerful men to dump their wives for younger more nubile women. Judicial decisions that bypassed democratic process removed God from public schools, allowed pornography to proliferate and legalized abortion. The media portrayed those with conservative family values as sexist buffoons.

      Drug use became fashionable among the Ruling Class. Harvard professor Timothy Leary became a media darling in the sixties by promoting LSD use. Marijuana and cocaine were staples at fashionable Manhattan parties. In fact, when President Nixon initiated the so-called War on Drugs, it had to be curtailed because so many elite scions were being arrested.

      Our Ruling Class still wanted to make the world safe for democracy, but didn’t desire to be killed or maimed doing so. Thus, protests against the Viet Nam War began at elite universities and culminated with the abolishment of the draft and an all-volunteer army that consisted mostly of minorities and lower middle-class whites.

      Tax cuts on the superrich by President Reagan created the incentive for a new class of robber barons to raid corporations and strip workers of their health care and pensions while moving their jobs overseas. Wall Street was able to speculate with impunity and get bailed out while the ruled got the bill and foreclosure notices.

      This Ruling Class incompetence first decimated the jobs and family structure of urban minorities. African-Americans returned in disproportionately high numbers in body bags from Viet Nam, while the crack epidemic of the eighties turned their neighborhoods in to warzones. The Ruling Class yawned. But then the same phenomenon happened in white rural America – family destruction, joblessness, opioid overdose deaths and body bags from Iraq and Afghanistan.

      But rural white American did something that black America did not. It started leaning Republican and then supported a man for president that the Ruling Class considered to be a crude joke – Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the main spokesperson for the Ruling Class, Hillary Clinton, ridiculed Trump’s supporters at a tony Manhattan fundraiser hosted by Barbra Streisand while an inaccurate CNN poll had her ahead of Trump by 14 points.

      In what historians will record as the greatest political gaffe in modern history, she ridiculed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” screeching “[they are] racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it” to the cheers of her Ruling Class crowd.

      Then Trump committed his first real crime – he won. Our Ruling Class has not taken this well and remains determined to remove Trump from office. But then Trump committed his second crime – he governed competently. A combination of tax cuts and deregulation has the economy roaring. The crack down on illegal immigration has resulted in the lowest unemployment levels of blacks and Hispanics since statistics have been collected. For the first time in recent memory, the wages for the working poor are increasing. Slow progress is being made on many difficult foreign policy issues.

      But the Ruling Class will not give up, insisting that Trump colluded with the Russians in spite of no obvious evidence. But with Trump presiding over peace and prosperity, the Ruling Class is forced to put all their marbles into Robert Mueller’s investigation – as it appears less likely they can defeat Trump at the ballot box. Thus, expect Trump to subpoenaed or indicted by a grand jury in the near future.

      How this will end is beyond me. But our Ruling Class seems to keep asking itself, “Why did the country but this joker in power?” What they should be asking is “How did we rule so incompetently that the desperate voters saw Trump as their only recourse?”

February 26, 2018

      America has become an angry society. Family destruction and income inequality have left many young males in the dust. Judicial rulings have made it impossible to institutionalize the mentally ill. Thus, we have disturbed angry young men who view their lives as empty wishing to make a statement. And they do so by gaining access to powerful guns and killing innocent victims.

      The latest massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida by a lone gunman, Nikolas Cruz, has pushed the country over the edge. This must stop. But how?

      Liberals and the media have reflexively attacked the NRA (National Rifle Association) and this time they have drawn blood. Many view the NRA as an impediment to sensible gun reform and major corporations are disavowing this organization. Momentum is gathering to ban so-called assault rifles.

      But many forget that many of these rifles were banned from 1994 to 2004 and gun massacres still occurred, the most notable of these being Columbine in 1999. Furthermore, many gun owners view our incompetent government as the cause of the Florida massacre and they have a point.

      This high school, like many schools, had a deputy sheriff named Scot Peterson whose job was to protect the students. Yet when he heard gunshots, he did nothing. Three other deputy sheriffs arrived and proceeded to follow Peterson’s lead and do nothing. By the time more back up police arrived; they were reportedly flabbergasted that these deputies heard gunshots for four minutes and did nothing.

      But it gets worse. Police had been called to Cruz’s house thirty-nine times. In one instance, he threw his mother against the wall when she restricted him from using his Xbox. Other callers expressed dismay that he had guns. Florida even has a law called the Baker Act, which allows authorities to hospitalize potentially mentally ill or violent individuals for evaluation. But this was never done. One concerned citizen called the FBI. An agent came to this citizen’s house and he showed the agent a YouTube video of Cruz stating “Im [sic] going to be a professional school shooter.” The agent took a picture of the video and then proceeded to do what the FBI does best – nothing.

      This problem is solvable, but not if our feckless law enforcement officials are afraid to engage violent criminals and our mental health community prefers to push pills rather than institutionalize those who are ill or dangerous. Liberals will fight to disarm the public while the NRA will point out that if our police and FBI are so useless, why can’t we have guns to protect ourselves? A reasonable compromise would be to refuse anyone with violent tendencies or serious mental problems from owning a gun. But our polarized politics have rendered even a civil discussion impossible.

      Thus, the most likely outcome is that nothing will be done other than trial lawyers becoming rich from the inevitable lawsuits. The judgments will be huge and the taxpayers will get the bill. Scot Peterson and the other deputies who did nothing will get their fat pensions, courtesy of the taxpayers they are supposed to defend. Crime may not pay, but pretending to fight it certainly does.