… from triumph to abasement.

“So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.

Having control of the White House and both Houses  of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?

Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.

What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –

The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …

Then came the rule of the Left and –

Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:

Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.

Whereupon –

Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.

China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.

At home, gas prices have soared.

Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.

The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.

A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes …

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.

And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? …

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.

All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while  violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

When there were –

120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.

Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.

America’s undoing has taken less than a year.

Seriously dangerous inflation has begun and will rapidly increase.

Senator Rand Paul decried the “Corona relief” bill, 6,000 pages long, passed late last night (December 21, 2020), without any member of Congress having read it. And he cried a warning.

Breitbart reports:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted the $2.3 trillion government spending bill — $900 billion of which is dedicated to coronavirus relief — criticizing Republicans for voting to print money with impunity. …

Rand Paul rightly called it “a deficits-don’t-matter disaster“.

He continued:

This bill is free money for everyone. … And yet if free money were the answer, if money really grew on trees, why not give more free money? Why not give it out all the time? Why stop at $600 per person? Why not $1,000? Why not $2,000?

Maybe these new free-money Republicans should join the everybody-gets-a-guaranteed-income caucus. Why not $20,000 a year for everybody? Why not $30,000? If we can print up money with impunity, why not do it?

The treasury can just keep printing the money. That is, until someone points out that the dollar no longer has value. 

To so-called conservatives who are quick to call out the socialism of Democrats: if you vote for this spending monstrosity, you are no better. When you vote to pass out free money, you … abandon forever any semblance of moral or fiscal integrity.

He assessed that the difference between the parties on this issue “is less Adam Smith versus Marx and more Marx versus Engels.”

[He] further explained the country’s fiscal situation, noting the nation brought in $3.3 trillion last year and spent $6.6 trillion.

The deficit was a “record-busting $3.3 trillion,” he said … [though] “such extraordinary spending habits have been going on for decades.”

“Today’s money is gone, so Congress is spending tomorrow’s money,” he said, noting that the country finds itself $27 trillion in debt today with no cuts, offsets, or prioritization in Congress.

Spend all this money and leave the future to figure itself out …

He also pointed out that Congress is helping to perpetuate lockdowns “by supporting states implementing rules that are arbitrary and unscientific”.

And –

Governors are picking winners and losers while family businesses are being wiped out. The need for help is real … but it’s clear that government has worsened the economic damage and acted as the biggest obstacle to economic recovery.

Think Venezuela, comrades.

The Democratic Party has been led leftwards and has become, in all but official name, the Democratic Socialist Party.

It wants to change America into a socialist state.

Why? Do those who plan to vote for it want this country to go the way of Venezuela? Or do they not believe that that’s the way it will go?

Why would it not?

Can what has happened in once-rich Venezuela be explained by anything but Socialism and its inevitably accompanying corruption?

In October 2018 Rafael Acevedo wrote at the website of the Mises Institute:

Almost 4 million people have left this country in recent years — a country that is ranked on the 2018 Misery Index as the most miserable country of the world. Hyperinflation is destroying the hope of millions of Venezuelans that for many reasons continue living there and suffering the misery that socialism has achieved. …

At the end of July 2018, the National Assembly estimated that each week six Venezuelan children die of starvation. Some of the most important universities in Venezuela made a survey in 2017 and in that time 87% of Venezuelan households were poor; 9 of 10 Venezuelans could not pay for food; 8.2 million Venezuelans could barely afford 2 meals each day — meals with low nutrition and little protein; 6 out of 10 Venezuelans have lost at least 11Kg (24 pounds) of their body weight because of the lack of food. This is set to worsen as the crisis continues.

Recently, [Dictator Nicolás Maduro] has incrementally raised the minimum wage 3,000%, removed 5 zeros from the currency value, and eliminated some exchange control rules. Nevertheless those policies are ineffective because these measures do nothing about the root causes of the nation’s misery. The real causes, of course, [are] the socialism and a narco-terrorist regime.

Nearly 90 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty.

In 2016 the cost of a dozen eggs in Venezuela was the equivalent of $150. That would now be considered cheap.

By October 2018 inflation was an estimated 80,000% and projected to hit 10,000,000% in 2019.

Figures from 2018, collected in 2019, show that a roll of toilet paper was priced at 2,600,000 bolivares, or 40 cents; a kilogram of carrots was 3,000,000 bolivares, or 46 cents; a wheelbarrow of cash was need to buy a loaf of bread; a kilogram of tomatoes cost 5,000,000 bolivares ($0.76).

A 2.4 kilogram chicken cost 14,600,000 bolivares ($2.22):

This pile of money was needed to buy a chicken for the pot in 2018. It costs even more now.

Socialism does not create wealth, it only consumes it. Socialism steals wealth from its owners and uses it up. For a while the gullible who voted for it enjoy getting a living, “free” education, “free” health care and whatnot from the government. A little later they starve, the hospitals cannot treat them, the schools close, and they are howling in the wilderness while those who led them there feast in palaces protected by armed guards.

In 2020 the choice for the American electorate is a simple one. Vote for continued prosperity and freedom, or a change to starvation and serfdom.

This useful explanation of what the Cloward-Piven strategy is, comes from Family Security Matters, by Frank Salvato:

In 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, collaborated on a theory  … referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.” People who are familiar with the likes of Saul Alinsky and William Ayers are familiar with the strategy, as are the full complement of the Progressive Movement.

In a nutshell, the underlying principle of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to so overload the entitlement system – to add so many to the entitlement rolls, that the country’s economic system collapses, unleashing chaos and violence in the streets, thus effecting radical Leftist political change in government. Up until recently this theory has been just that, a theory, and a theory that anarchists and Progressives have salivated over for their want of execution. But today, we are seeing the fruits of the Cloward-Piven Strategy played out to success in Greece and several other financial destitute countries in Europe. …

To summarize briefly the Cloward-Piven Strategy, I turn to Richard Poe who wrote an article of the same name, which is featured at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Mr. Poe observes that Mr. Cloward and Ms. Piven sought (and “seeks,” in the case of Ms. Piven) to facilitate the fall of Capitalism by “overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.”  …

In a 1970 New York Times interview, Cloward is quoted as saying that poor people can only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them.” He then theorized that activists should refrain from demanding that government provide more for the poverty stricken and, instead, should strive to pack as many people on the welfare (read: entitlement) rolls as possible, creating a demand that could not be met, facilitating the destruction of the welfare system and massive financial crisis. As a byproduct, rebellion would be ignited amongst the people; chaos would rule the streets and governments would be damaged beyond repair, many falling to history making it possible for new radicals to assume the roles of oligarchs, ushering in new systems of government and the dismantling of the Capitalist system in particular.

Both Cloward and Piven understood that it would take pushing the American citizenry to the point of anarchy, to the point of the populace effecting violent chaos in the streets, for there to emerge an opportunity to damage our Republican form of government and our Capitalist system to the point where people would accept radical political as well as economic change. Cloward and Piven, using the philosophy of Saul Alinsky (who, by-the-by, was their inspiration in fomenting their “strategy”), knew that they would have to achieve chaos, so as to introduce the Progressive political ideology – the ideology of Democratic Socialism – to the masses as a saving grace. 

“Democratic Socialism” – remember – is a cover name for Communism.

As Frank Salvato says, the calamitous outcome of “overloading the welfare/entitlement system” is being “played out to success in Greece and several other financial destitute countries in Europe”. And it is starting to play out in the USA, under Saul Alinsky’s follower, the “community organizer” President Barack Obama.

We quote from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

In the “now they tell us” file, add a vast array of reports that have come out since the election showing just how weak the economy really is. …

Here’s just a sampling of what we’ve learned since voters decided to give Obama four more years to “experiment” with the economy.

Earnings falling: The Labor Dept. reported on Thursday that real average hourly earnings dropped again in October for the third month in a row …

Poverty rising: A new Census Bureau report, also released after the election, finds that the number of poor people in America climbed 712,000 in 2011. …

Food-stamp enrollment skyrocketing: Another government report conveniently timed after the election found that food stamp enrollment exploded by more than 420,000 in August. The number of people getting food stamps has climbed more than 15 million — or 47% — under Obama. … Today, almost 15% of the population is collecting food stamps, up from 7% just a decade ago.

Jobless claims jumping: The number of new jobless claims shot up to 439,000 last week, up 78,000 from the week before … The two states with the biggest increases in jobless claims the week before that were Pennsylvania and Ohio, thanks to layoffs in the construction, manufacturing and auto industries.

Inflation creeping up: We also learned that the annual inflation rate climbed to 2.2% in October … the third consecutive monthly increase.

Coal plants closing: A report by the liberal Union of Concerned Scientists, released (naturally) a week after the election, finds that as many as 353 coal-fired plants will close as a result of Obama’s environmental rules.

Small banks disappearing: Fortune reported three days after the election that the “overwhelming conclusion” of industry analysts and consultants was that Dodd-Frank would cause thousands of small banks to disappear. …

Obama keeps saying that his top priority for his second term is jobs and growth, but the only thing he’s pushed since his re-election is a massive tax hike on the so-called rich.

That’s despite the fact that Obama knows these tax hikes will hurt economic growth. … We know that Obama’s tax hikes will kill 710,000 jobs.

One by one, businesses will be forced to close, like this one, putting thousands out of work:

Hostess, the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, is going out of business, closing plants, laying off its 18,500 workers …

The Irving, Texas, company said a nationwide worker strike crippled its ability to make and deliver its products. …

Hostess had warned employees that it would file a motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to unwind its business and sell assets if plant operations didn’t return to normal levels by Thursday evening. …

“Many people have worked incredibly long and hard to keep this from happening, but now Hostess Brands has no other alternative than to begin the process of winding down and preparing for the sale of our iconic brands,” CEO Gregory F. Rayburn said in a letter to employees posted on the company website. He added that all employees will eventually lose their jobs, “some sooner than others.”

Thousands of members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union went on strike last week after rejecting in September a contract offer that cut wages and benefits. … Hostess has said that production at about a dozen of the company’s 33 plants has been seriously affected by the strike. Three plants were closed earlier this week.

Now they are all closing.

The economy is being systematically wrecked. How long can it be before America reaches the stage of the general strikes, riots, blood on the streets, anarchy?  Then the administration may take “emergency powers”. Congress is already being bypassed as Obama rules by executive order.

Obama has the temperament of a dictator. Will he soon be a dictator?

Is the terrible triumph of Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Barack Obama near at hand?

Taxing ‘the rich’ means impoverishing everyone, as Thomas Sowell explains with characteristic clarity:

The idea that you can single out one segment of society to be taxed or mandated, for the benefit of the rest of society, is reminiscent of a San Francisco automobile dealer’s sign: "We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you." The economy is not a zero-sum game where someone gains what others lose. The whole economy can lose when ill-considered policies gain political popularity and stifle economic growth. People who do not own a single share of corporate stock can still lose big time when capital gains taxes are raised– not only because jobs can follow capital out of the country, but also because millions of working people’s pension plans own corporate stock, and those people’s retirement incomes will depend on the value of those stocks, which is reduced by capital gains taxes. One of the biggest taxes is one that is not even called a tax – inflation. When the government spends money that it creates, it is transferring part of the value of your money to themselves. It is quiet taxation but often heavy taxation, falling on everyone, no matter how low their incomes might be. By the end of the 20th century, a $100 bill would not buy as much as a $20 bill would buy in the middle of that century. For people who saved cash, inflation amounted to an 80 percent tax. For others, it was an 80 percent tax minus whatever cumulative interest or dividends they received on the money they invested. Given the staggering cost of the government’s financial bailouts, there is no way that Barack Obama’s grandiose spending plans can be carried out without inflation.

When politicians start talking about taxing "the rich," remember the old saying [from the poem by John Donne]: "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."