You know the old saying about giving a man a fish. When I look back at my debts of gratitude towards the Leftists that made my welfare their business, I try to distinguish that which was useful and inspirational from that which was by turns condescending, phlegmatic and authoritarian. The Left gave me a fish and told they could teach me how to fish, but that I'd never compete with the rich white fishermen in Beverly Hills. I went next door to Beverly Hills and figured it out myself. Now I build some of the best fishing line in the world.
As I have arrived at a fairly useful and comfortable place, mostly by my own doing and the vagueries of chance, it's easy for me to dismiss the Left. But I have been seriously considering exactly what the proper appeals are for Socialist Project upon humanity despite its obvious need for altruism.
To that end, I have put some George Orwell and Franz Kafka on my future menu, but these and other ingredients are on a slow burning back burner. Here's today's piece.
I am intrigued by something I received, unbidden, from the 78th Assembly seat holder about her efforts to cede some acreage onto public land which includes the remains of some 1400 year old aboriginal settlement. And I find it ironic that this government entity would find it useful to include this with pride. Of course one understands the bourgeios sentiment associated with giving propers to pre-European cultures here on the North American continent, but exactly how this translates into *empowerment* of Hispanics and Latinos is literally vague. Although how it will rhetorically be used by La Raza is as plain as day, depending upon the corporate face of contestants for the land within the aegis of the 78th. To wit, Walmart bad, cultural center good.
Included in my thoughts about this are some stunning revalations about the unread sections of the new Immigration Bill, somewhere within the machinations of our Congress. According to this legislative analyst with her partisan fealties the greatest deception of the Bill is that it transfers billions of dollars out of the funding of government bureacracies into a new estate of community organizations. Let's allow that to percolate a moment. The new Immigration Bill funds billions of dollars of community organizations, as opposed to government bureacracies.
Now unless one is so naive as to think that all community organizations are created equal, I'd like you to take a guess as to which community leaders are likely to be funded. Without failing to note the unusual scrutiny placed by the IRS on Tea Parties of late, I would summarize my opposition to this heinous idea in two parts. 1). The Civil Service is non-partisan and subject to strict regulations. Community organizations are not. 2). This is transparently an attempt to get the Federal Government into the business of the heretofore private business of astroturfing.
I should also mention in passing that I am not surprised, now having watched 'The Andromeda Strain' for the first time, that under the Obama Administration we find more coming under the purveiw of the Centers for Disease Control. I believe that Obama's scientism finds its practical way to power by defining more American liberties as threats to health. The properly funded CDC study will show how the number of bullets in Texas correlate scientifically with x morbidity, and thus the goverment, in the interests of health, uses incontravertible medical evidence to execute gun control.
If we owe people fresh to the Post-War American standard of living something through the arms of altruist government largesse, isn't it a high paying job? What I learned in economics was that America has a minimum wage so that jobs are harder to come by, but also more permanent. That if we dropped the minimum wage, more people would have more part-time work with lower benefits. What is the precarious balance? Well as the post-war prosperity has found no new industries with low-hanging economic fruit we've seen both, a rising minimum wage, rising unemployment and rising fractions of part-time low benefit jobs. Nobody wants to take a whack at redefining Exempt from Non-Exempt do they? I didn't think so. So the job situation is what it is, structurally speaking.
But what if you're a community organizer, or an activist volunteer? Has anyone ever heard of what level of civil service exam you have to pass.. oh wait. There's nothing like that. You just need too much time on your hands and no real job. Show up and they put you to work, with no pay. Until the Immigration Bill passes. Or maybe there's another law in the future that puts billions of federal dollars into the hands of useful community organizers or the proper sort. It does solve a lot of problems doesn't it?
I suspect that this sort of make-work will function at the level of say Congressional appropriations. It's another kind of Affirmative Action, which is to say it fulfills our obligations to people on the outside by getting them on the inside. That is, until somebody not beholden to that system gets into office and decides that taxpayer money should go somewhere else. The institutionalization of community organizations funded through partisan legislation is a brilliant maneuver for everyone except the class of flunkies it pays the minimum wage. But if your view of society is that we need community organizations driven by political expedience and not businesses driven by markets, then your vote matters as much as my dollar. For now.
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