Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Dennis the Menace At It Again; Plus, Some Cleveland History

Cleveland Communist Party Representative on Capitol Hill Dennis "The Menace" Kucinich (D-Hapless Cleveland, Ohio), who once helped bankrupt* the city as its mayor, now has a plan to end the War in Iraq. Cut off funds and leave. Sounds like "cut and run" to HazZzMat. What an intellect. Who knew?

And check out the Yoda who's giving Dennis advice on this course of action. (If you can cut through the blather.):
“I want to say that there’s one solution here, and it’s not to engage in a debate with the President, who has taken us down a path of disaster in Iraq, but it’s for Congress to assume the full power that it has under the Constitution to cut off funds. We don’t need to keep indulging in this debate about what to do, because as long as we keep temporizing, the situation gets worse in Iraq.

“We have to determine that the time has come to cut off funds. There’s enough money in the pipeline to achieve the orderly withdrawal that Senator McGovern is talking about. But cut off funds, we must. That’s the ultimate power of the Congress, the power of the purse. That’s how we’ll end this war, and that’s the only way we’re going to end this war.”
Clearly, we will now have to bow to the superior wisdumb of Comrade Dennis and High Commissar George "Peace Through Surrender" McGovern, whom, as I recall from my misspent youth, was the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1972 who lost the election to Dick Nixon in a landslide, winning only (it figures) DC and Masachusetts while losing every other state.

But hey, the elites always know better, don't they? And they still materialize without warning, like the old ghosts on Dark Shadows re-runs.

Kucinich and McGovern continue to disgrace themselves even today. They are an ongoing national embarrassment, although they still don't hold a candle to Ex-President for Life Jimmy Carter, whose more recent achievements include helping Nicuaragua's Daniel Ortega win back power and brokering the deal that bought North Korea's Dear Leader the time acquire nuke-u-lar weapons on the sly.

Let's send these dudes to Teheran to assure that the mullah-ocracy only uses its soon-to-be-announced nuke-u-lar weapons for peaceful purposes, like wiping Israel—er, the Zionist entity—off the map.

Being a Democrat is never having to say your sorry.

(Quote from Dennis above via Little Green Footballs.)

(*Note: History footnote. Kucinich resists the "bankruptcy" terminology every time it comes up, claiming the term is incorrect. He "only" caused the city of Cleveland to default on its obligations, since he refused to sell the city's municipal, and money-losing, light plant to satisfy city creditors. Like all Marxists, he's careful to split hairs with his terminology. Basically, under his financial stewardship, the city couldn't pay its bills, since it didn't have enough revenue. If you and I did that, we'd call it bankruptcy for sure. But Kucinich continues to hide behind the convenient hairsplit of legal terminology.

It is difficult to find the correct info on Kucinich and his disastrous mayoral tenure anywhere on the web including the slanted and highly favorable entry on Kucinich you can read in Wikipedia. Obviously, Kucinich's ministers of propaganda have been busily cleaning up Google references for years so that Kucinich comes across as a hero of the people, which is certainly how he likes to spin it. But in point of fact, at the time of Kucinich's brief mayoral tenure, he was raging against a corporate takeover of the city-run "peoples'" Municipal Light Plant, (1978-9). But it was little known then (and is rarely reported even today) that Muni Light generated absolutely no power at all. Don't believe me? You can confirm this fact on the organization's amateurish and badly misleading web pages where it admits that around 1963:
Service declined and the municipal light plant began to purchase electricity from other sources to meet customer demands. As a result of the operational problems, the utility quite [sic] producing power and nearly went out of
business.
In other words, the taxpayers were subsidizing its contiunuing operation with their own taxes, (or at least the taxes of those who could afford to pay them) while enjoying discounted rates not available to customers outside the phony Muni Light grid. Which is why it was such a "good deal" for "the people." Muni Light merely transmitted—at a taxpayer-subsidized discount—power produced by the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company [CEI, now part of FirstEnergy] which charged its own customers actual cost plus an agreed-upon profit margin like all utilities at the time. Of course, these customers were, in effect, helping subsidize Muni Light as well. And rate-payers outside of the Muni Light grid strongly resented this. Yet there was little they could do about it.

The continued operation of Muni Light was essentially yet another socialist scam to subsidize electric rates for some, but not nearly all, of CEI's customers. Such "deals" of course are politically popular in union-dominated industrial cities where neighborhood pork barrell projects are still very much in vogue.

Unfortunately for Dennis, however, in 1978, as the city's finances went in the tank, its creditor-banks finally decided that they wouldn't roll over the city's old debt as they had done many times. They informed the city it would have to sell off the Muni Light facilities to CEI to raise cash to support city finances rather than continuing to subsidize individual electric rates—something the dying Rust Belt city could clearly no longer afford.

You'll never learn this stuff from what you can find on the web. And you'll certainly never divine this from the dozens of hard-left web pages that still worship Kucinich's Robin Hood image, which he's carefully nursed over the years to mask over his dramatic failure as Mayor of Cleveland. Trust me. I know all about it. Because I used to live in Cleveland. The city where things never really change.

For example, Muni Light still lives on to this day as Cleveland Public Power. Still generates no electricity. This sort of thing is why the city is still pretty much in the tank, still corrupt, and still has an unbelievably high income and property tax rate, even though its far suburbs are doing rather well (and have lower tax rates).

The lesson here? Socialism costs a lot of money. Clinging to it long after it has failed to produce positive results and employing it to shore up entitlements whose time is past is one of the main reasons why the Rust Belt has never come back economically, and why the booms of the 80s, 90s, and the current ongoing boom never did help cities like Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo. They continue to tax and spend long after most of their higher wage-earning residents have fled to the suburbs or to other areas of the country to escape immense tax burdens that are among the highest in the country. Their business climate remains largely hostile. As a result, over many years, many thriving businesses, particularly those in Michigan and Ohio, long ago decamped to other locales, many in the far business friendlier and non-union South.

Anyhow, Wonker just thought you'd like to know. And now you'll be informed when Kucinich starts blathering about "social justice" and the Iraq War in the next Congress. Hard on the heels of his recent anti-Israel, anti-U.S. junket to Hizbollah-land.)

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