Wasting Time With Alex

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Why who is in the WH matters.

Many of my fellow conservatives have taken the stance that since McCain is no worse than your average democrat when it comes to his social beliefs, showing your dissatisfaction with him by helping a democrat win the WH and then get the blame for the damage the supposed socialist policies both they and McCain would enact will help the conservative cause. I think these people are crazy because they are hoping that a shift to the right in Congress would somehow check a donkey in the WH. i am not sure why they feel so assured Congress will go right in the next election. But that is an argument for a different time. What I am writing about is the presidential power to appoint judges to the SCOTUS. It is a given IMO that the next president will appoint at least 2 judges. All you need to do is read this article about the effects of the Medellin v. Texas SACOTUS decision and this other one about how that decision translates to the US ratifying the Kyoto protocol or some other such international treaty would have played out if the left had been the majority on the SCOTUS and abdicated our Constitutional rights to some international body like the ICJ. Read them both.

I call Bullshit!

OK, let me start off by saying that I am a hard core believer in the freedom of the market and that government has overburdened ours with costly and ridiculous regulations that do more harm than good, but when I read what the CEO of AT&T had to say about getting skilled workers, I just had to call bullshit. Walk through this exercise with me for a second, and you will see why.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

“We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs,” AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company’s headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

The jobs in question are customer service jobs. Basically the person that gets the job answers phone calls by customers with issues, complaints, or requests for new business. Now this guy wants us to believe that a job that ranked so low on priority that AT&T figured it could drastically cut the cost of these customer services by outsourcing it to people that didn’t even have English as their primary language suddenly has a problem being filled here in the US? Think about that. The reason these jobs went overseas was simply because AT&T figured that it was not a priority with them and that as long as they could get someone cheap, they where fulfilling their obligations to the customers.

Now I am not trying to cast aspersions on the people that got these jobs. They are often very capable and hard working people. The problem was that most Americans had trouble talking to someone that they had a hard time understanding and that got turned off from companies that implemented this practice. AT&T is bringing these jobs back, not because it feels it is a good financial choice, unless you look at the fact that it directly affects their bottom line when customers walk because of their outsourcing practices, or even because it thinks these workers have not done a good job - frankly I think, and I speak from my own personal experience in IT, that the higher ups making these decisions often do not care about this quality as long as they can finagle it to show that they cut costs - but because they are losing business. now stay with me.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent. “If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down,” he said. Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

I will be the first to admit that our high schools, especially in the urban communities which tend to be very liberal, in general have abysmal results, often because the people involved do not care about getting an education. Too many people have been told that there is nothing they can do to make the American dream happen for them because the system is rigged against them. The result is that most of them simply do not take advantage of the most important thing anyone hoping to get ahead in life needs: a good education. Couple that with schools that also do not care and peer pressure against those that do try to get an education, and you get the picture. No doubt about the fact that no company in the world other than the government or unionized teachers could get away with this kind of results. But even with that fact in mind, I can not help but call Bullshit! on this assessment. What kind of skills other than some basic reading, the ability to talk, and some good manners & people skills are necessary to do customer service? In fact the most important thing to do a customer service job is the ability to communicate with people effectively, and no school will teach you that in my opinion.

I am not sure he slipped up when he pointed out that no company had to hire locally anymore, but nobody should miss that. Our global world has made it possible for people in another company to do a job much cheaper than people here in the US. That is why these jobs went offshore. It was a conscious choice by AT&T driven not by their desire to provide better customer service, but by financials. This CEO is pissed because the people that pay for his product showed their displeasure at his company’s decision to use outsourcing to provide customer service used their ability to make a choice as well by taking their business somewhere else. Guess he doesn’t like others exercising their ability to choose either.

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T’s repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

Now, I am all for America’s businesses to start forcing the current educational system to change and produce more capable people. The education system could use a healthy dose of the real world. Co-opted by the left with an agenda to create better collectivist drones at the cost of a real education, our students remain woefully unprepared for the job market of today where high tech demands skills. But please do not try to bullshit us about that being the case for customer service jobs. How freaking hard is it to answer a phone or work a computer? Maybe the issue is that AT&T also outsourced their IT work and now the quality of that is so lacking that they need much more skilled people to do the job of dealing with the constant issues?

Nah, do not get fooled. Their decision to outsource was based on money only. They thought they where going to save a big amount of cash by paying Amit 20 cents an hour over paying Tom $8 or more dollars an hour. When the AT&T customers showed their displeasure in a way that hit their pocket books, they had to rethink this cost cutting effort. The only problem is that they do not like having to pay people here that much for that kind of low skilled job. And that is why they are having a hard time moving the jobs back here. Not because of lack of capable people. It is because of lack of capable people that will do the jobs for peanuts. This guy Stephenson is not really helping us address the issue of how our schools are failing us as a society by trying to bamboozle us into thinking customer service jobs are high skill. In fact he is outright hurting it by trying to hide the fact AT&T would prefer to keep these jobs where it is cheap for financial reasons but is forced to change that because their customers do not want it.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Want to see some serious bullshit?

As usual another leftist bunch of twits, this time at The Times, have conducted a serious evaluation of 235 nations of the world and ranked them, and concluded that the US sucks. Don’t despair however! See, there is a serious and obvious bias to all these rankings by these leftist organizations, too often done on purpose or because of their collectivist bias that you usually won’t get pointed out along with the results of the ranking system being used. Like with the questions asked with any survey done, the value of the rankings are only as significant as the criteria used to do the ranking. And you can spot the bias if you get good at reading between the lines. But let me give you a quick hint what to look for:

A one-year investigation and analysis of 235 countries and dependent territories has put the UK joint seventh in the premier league of nations. The top ten comprise also the Vatican, Sweden, Luxembourg, Monaco, Gibraltar, San Marino, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands and the Irish Republic.

The US lies 22nd and Switzerland, normally associated with wealth and untouchable stability, is rated 17th, losing points in the assessment of its social achievements.

Ah, of course! Social achievements! Well La-De-Dah! So a bunch of collectivists that skew the rankings by looking at how “progressive” a nation is, have somehow ranked the US, and many others without those high collectivist practices, low huh? Like similar healthcare ranking systems that constantly put the US lower than many of these countries we know have horrible government run healthcare systems because it does not have “free healthcare” - read government run healthcare for all but paid for only by the productive - the real importance of these rankings is to prop up collectivism. The fact is simply that despite the many and horrible problems with government run healthcare in countries like Britain and Canada what these ranking system really measure is not effectiveness or quality, but idiotic crap like “social justice” or “availability”. They are severely skewed in favor of systems where progressive collectivist practices are the norm. Simply put, the ranking system favors collectivism, and really of more importance the image of “social justice” introduced because of this collectivism, than the actual results produced by that collectivism, or lack there of. Strip this collectivist crap from these rankings and you can bet your ass the US ranks in the top 5, if not first.

So what you have here is nothing but a severely biased, and frankly meaningless ranking of nations, unless you are a socialist with an anti-US/anti-capitalist/anti-war agenda. Of course these days that seems to be the predominant line of action and thought around the world. We might have defeated the USSR, but the evils of collectivism seem to have spread further than ever in today’s world. While part of me often wishes these idiots could get a first hand taste of the world they would inherit without the US, I remain smart enough to know that I would prefer to never have to live through that hellish world.

Monday, March 24, 2008

More proof of why socialism sucks

Well, when I first heard about the effort to provide free wireless internet to everybody - read that to be people that can’t really pay for the service at the expense of those that work hard - I knew it would end up like this. Took government 3 years to get here, but then again, this socialist stuff never works as promised. Of course the usual class warfare gurus will point out that it was the greedy companies that pulled out of the deal once they realized how massive the losses they would be made to take, for the good of the people of course, that sunk the magic project. None of them ever points out that when the prohibitive losses sink these companies suffering the financial hit, the people that got the “free service”, those quote marks are the to point out there is no such thing a free lunch, are going to be left off far worse for having been given the taste and then having the plate yanked from under them. Not to mention that the company going under affects everyone else, including those that have paid out of their own pocket or have invested their money in the company for pensions, 401Ks, or some other savings, as well.

Look people. The lesson is simple. When government does it, if you are lucky it will only cost 2 or 3 times as much as if it was done by the private sector, and it is likely to be doomed from the start because these people to often live in La-La land. There are no “free” lunches either. It is a historical fact that nobody does anything if they can not become better off from that action. It’s human nature. Socialism sucks precisely because it demotivates and discourages anyone from doing anything more than the bare minimum to avoid getting in trouble. Need is a powerful motivator. When you need something it will make you get up and do something about it. How motivated do you think people would be to go work and get the money to pay for something if they can get it for free? Reality again sinks the pie-in-the-sky dreamer’s plan to hand out a free lunch for votes.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Good Riddance!

I can not help but say that I am elated at the news that CBS’s Jericho has been canceled. As one of the many that fought to bring the show back after its first cancelation this stance might baffle those that have not followed this season’s shows. But anyone that has attempted to watch the ridiculous anti-American, anti-conservative, and anti-capitalist drivel from Hollywood that passed for the new season of the show, would know that this cancellation is a blessing. I was ecstatic when the first episode of the new season came on. I could not wait to see the plot line worked out. Finally we had a show where nobody pussyfooted around the fact that there where evil people out there gunning to kill the US. Iran and North Korea, along with terrorists, both of the Jihadi kind and some of the domestic American variety with sympathy to the anti-American cause (read leftist anti-war idiots) of the Axis-of-Evil types, had been implicated in the attacks, and we had responded with harsh force to their evil. The potential for a show that would show how the American way would help a nation that was supposed to be crippled and destroyed bounce back from the brink of the abyss was there. And that was why Jericho seemed like such a great show that had to be allowed to play out.

Of course as soon as the second season started the anti-war drivel coming out of Hollywood was piled as high as it could get and any chance for a show that would show the greatness of America’s people and their spirit was washed away. In complete and total contradiction to all historical facts suddenly we find out that the culprits are a shadow conspiracy of neo-conservatives and a big corporation. It seems that these liberal idiots in Hollywood are incapable of understanding that any time such kinds of shenanigans have taken place that it was done by the so called “progressive” movement. It was FDR that locked up American citizens in camps. Kennedy & Johnson where the ones to fake the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify a war in Vietnam. Carter was the fool that almost helped the USSR win the Cold War. Bill Clinton was the SOB that started spying domestically on what the American people where doing and then lobbed missiles at other nations when he needed a diversion from his attempts to perjure and encourage perjury on his behalf. Not to mention that Bill Clinton was also the guy to hand out the largest amount of no-bid contracts to Halliburton, the evil company “Ravenwood” in Jericho was supposed to represent. And nobody gets more political contributions from people with nefarious reasons than the democrats. From the trial lawyers that want to destroy the constitution so they can make money to every business that knows that the only protection from the socialists democrats is to pay them the tribute they demand in campaign contributions to make sure they do not screw you over. But of course, Jericho had to have the leftists project their evil on conservatives. I do not remember any conservatives saying they had to destroy America to save it from the evils of the left. This kind of thinking is exclusive to the left. Sure these idiots might throw out McVeigh, but this guy was as conservative as I am into man love. Not a chance in hell. If anything McVeigh’s gripes are libertarian in nature because he wanted to strike at oppressive government after the whole Wacco fiasco. Hey wasn’t that another bunch of liberals dealing with people they didn’t like too?

Anyway, Jericho kept going downhill. We see the military suddenly accept and serve a shadow government that was not in the line of succession while completely ignoring their oath to the United States. Of course liberal idiots that only feel sympathy for military personnel that turn against their country, their fellow soldiers, or against an elected government they hate because it is not run the way they want it to be, would have no problem with having our military do these things. After all, these are the same idiots that have come up with the twisted logic where they want us to believe that they support the troops by undermining the sacrifices these troops are doing and handing them a sordid defeat. Personally I can do without the kind of support that feels like a gang rape in prison, but the left assures us they mean well and support the baby killing troops.

Not only does this military force have no problem serving the A.S., but they are suddenly very Nazi like in their behavior. They come in, restore order and services, clean house and get life back to normal, only to then turn the place into a concentration camp. In the mean time the government they serve is busy wiping all the people that disagree with them out with some shadow virus for which the vaccine is carefully regulated. Color me pink, but the only people that I have ever heard contemplating and actually arguing for something like this claiming that it would be a blessing to mankind, have been your prototypical leftist Gaia worshipping twits. Heck the way socialist government works is exactly like this. Do as we tell you or you will be eliminated. This is what life in the USSR, the Eastern Block nations, China, Cuba, and every other hell-hole where these progressive beliefs have been adopted was or continues to be like: serve the state or die. But of course the leftists in Hollywood projected that onto the right. And the list of idiotic stuff goes on.

In short, Jericho lost its appeal to everyone like me – and I guarantee you we where the ones in the majority that asked for it to come back for another season – and turned into a joke. No wonder it lost ratings. I only continued to watch the darn painful thing so I could put the occasional leftists conspiracy nut trying to use the show as proof that America now was a fascists state because they where not getting their way or in power back in his place as soon as they tried to make the idiotic analogies. It got old fast. Glad to see it gone for good. Maybe these twits in Hollywood should take a look at what made “24” so successful and do that for a change. This anti-American drivel might play well with the usual leftist meathead, but that type prefers to watch shows where the story line either tries to encourage men to have sex with each other, with minors, or with animals, or engage in rampant drug abuse. Of course always with a happy ending that could never be the case in the real world. I guess these idiots could not resist the urge to mess with people’s minds in an election year. I find great comfort that the American people are still too wise to fall for this communist anti-American and anti-capitalst propaganda and have let their remote contorlers do the talking. FU CBS!

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Elections & economics.

In these days leading to a national election with a decidedly biased MSM acting as a branch of the DNC, it is critical to understand the reality of our economic situation, especially since the usual class warfare leftists are lying about how bad things are, to be able to counter the bull. David Freddoso over at NRO has one heck of a good commentary piece dealing with this campaign of disinformation by the left which then links back to both an interesting discussion by one of my favorite economists Thomas Sowell as well as a Brad Schiller Wall Street Journal article destroying “ The Inequality Myth” thoroughly.

The main contention by the left is that the income share of the bottom 20 percent of households shrank from 4.1% in 1970 to 3.4% in 2006. But Freddoso points out that the 3.4 percent being bandied about applies to a pie three times as large as the pie of 1970. Adjust that for growth Freddoso points out that the average income of households in the bottom 20 percent has risen by 36% since 1970. Even a retard (most socialists tend to be a step lower that that however) can see that the poorest Americans are richer than they used to be, in addition to being among the richest poor people in the world. And there is another factor that is huge: the top 20 percent household bracket (64 million) contains nearly twice as many actual people as that bottom 20 percent bracket (39 million)! And keep in mind that today 27 percent of households are one-person households while in 1970 that number was just 17 percent. Does anyone want to contest the fact that one-person households are the most likely to be in the bottom quintile? What else? Freddoso points out that:

The bottom 20 percent includes millions of young people starting their first jobs, who will earn more as they grow older. It includes some retirees with assets but little income, and millions of new immigrants just stepping up to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. And yes, millions of chronically unemployed householders, too. But let’s take that bottom quintile for what it is and do a bit of amateur number crunching:

a)The 39 million people living in the bottom-earning household quintile (13 percent of Americans) made a total of $476 billion in 2006.

b) If they were their own nation — let’s call it Carteria (please, suspend your disbelief for a moment) — they would have had a per capita Gross National Income of $12,205 in 2006. (Their per capita GDP would be much higher, but also impossible to calculate with the numbers we’re given.)

c) According to my highly scientific survey of Wikipedia, that puts Carteria in a tie with Saudi Arabia for 41st place in per capita income. The average Carterian would be well ahead of the average Mexican and twice as well-off as the average Venezuelan or Russian.

That’s not great, but it’s not so bad considering that Carterians all come from the 23 million lowest-earning households in the United States.

Plain and simply put, the lowest 20%, is a bracket where a significant amount of the people really are not enduring much of any kind of hardship. But like with Healthcare where the number 43 million uninsured gets bandied about without ever pointing out what the breakdown of those 43 million is, this big number makes for better socialist propaganda. If however that 43 million is broken down thus making it obvious to the audience that the majority of people lumped in that group are there by choice - teenagers with parents that have insurance, young people that opt not to purchase insurance, and so on - or by shady accounting that includes illegal aliens (that vote for democrats) as uninsured people, then suddenly it loses its power. Just like that constant harping about the lowest 20% loses its power when you reveiw the above data. The fact is that democrats want to tax people into obedience and use government handouts to control society and perpetuate their power. They should not be allowed to lie about the economy to do so. The traditional MSM is not very likely to do the work and challenge their bull, so we need to do it ourselves. You can be certain that the economic improvements for anyone, and especially those in the bottom 20%, will never come from anything democrats do. Their MO usualy results in damaged economies and slowed or even worse false growth. Of course you would be damned to find anyone in the MSM that will not suddenly think the economy was just fine if the coccupant of the WH had a (D) next to his name like we had when Clinton was there.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Talk about exagerations…

Alarmists are at it again. What is the big problem this time?

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

Holy crap! This is some scary news. The consequences would be devastating on these poor people’s health and could have repercussions that would doom the same people for generations to come. Except…

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

At the risk of completely removing any seriousness from this argument - and that is exactly what should happen as this is plain and simple silly people hyping up a non-issue - let me point out that panicking about these below trace amount levels of contaminants is like panicking because you discover that there are minute traces of fart gas, at levels so small that you can’t even smell them, in the air we breath. Now, one could make the argument that farts are not toxic, but that’s a question of degrees. Farts are nothing but a nuisance precisely because the concentration of the chemicals is sow low that the worst it does when we get enough dosage is smell nasty and gross you out. But in a close room where the concentration gets increased the gas can become dangerous. The issue is that level of concentration needed to make it dangerous is enormous.

And that’s why this entire story is nothing but bull. Parts per billion or trillion? How many millions of gallons of this contaminated water would you have to chug in record time to even get enough of a level where these contaminants suddenly step up from “negligible” to “trace amounts”? I bet you will likely die from a water overdose - yes you can get too much H2O into your system and die from that - as your body chemistry goes bonkers dealing with the amount of water it needs to process as you try to drink enough water to make these contaminants an issue. Or even more obvious, you would drown long before you have ingested enough of these chemicals to make a difference. Coming back to the farts, I guarantee you that you would have a bigger & better chance of some adverse effect if you rode the elevator once with someone farting in it than if you drank a lifetime of this contaminated and supposedly dangerous water.

There is a real simple reason why nobody mentions what would be considered the minimum medical dose, or even what would be concidered the treshhold for a risky dosage. But I bet the people that led with this idiotic story will have everyone panicking over this crap and their names mentioned everywhere for their civic duty. Now that would not be too bad because stupid people deserve to be made fun of, but I am certain some politician will suddenly see a chance to score some cheap points, and we will all be made to pay with some legal idiocy that does absolutely nothing but cost the tax payer a fortune while expanding the death grip of big government. Talk about a bad smell…

Stupid idea!

Do you want to see a really dumb idea? Check out how the Intel guys think they will convince more people they are not the bad guys. Again with the “Hearts & Minds” thing? The problem with this approach is that the people that in general hold the opinion America is evil and its intelligence organizations are the spearhead responsible for that evil, are NOT going to change their opinions if they find out how the whole thing works. In fact, I guarantee that what will happen when they get the details will hurt our country more. These America haters will not suddenly soften their rabid hatred and opposition to anything pro-US once they realize how dangerous the world is and how idiotically PC the intelligence community has become. In fact, what they will do is sift over everything they get and only and specifically look for anything and everything they can use to do further damage to our ability to collect any kind of intelligence. Remember that we are talking about persuading the people that believe that the GWoT is a false and evil conspiracy to screw others and anything that helps America is a bad thing, that what the intelligence community does is good. That is the same as trying to convince the most radical PETA members that eating meat is OK. You can’t do that. And you can’t try to play nice with them because they will not.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Supporting the troops?

Looks like terrorists, or the usual terrorist supporting leftists that get angry when you point out they both lack patriotism and hate the very country that gives them the freedom to be idiots and are siding with the enemy have struck again. How are they going to spin this attack? We hate the war and support the troops by bombing recruiting stations? Could this be a ploy by the Berkeley city council to move focus from their fiasco with the Marines? Inquiring minds want to know!

Exposed crook is pissed

Is it any surprise that Chavez is calling the Columbian raid to kill a FARC commander a war crime? Remember that we are dealing here with a man that has made it his top priority of spreading the very misery he has inflicted on the Venezuelan people to his neighbors.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela and Ecuador warned that a regional diplomatic crisis wouldn’t cool down without clear international condemnation of Colombia’s government for a deadly cross-border strike leftist rebels hiding inside Ecuador. On Wednesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called the Colombian raid that killed two dozen rebels a “war crime.”

In a bid to defuse a dispute that has seen Venezuela and Ecuador move troops to their borders, the Organization of American States on Wednesday approved a watered-down resolution calling the raid on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia camp a violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty.

Sure there is an issue here with Columbian troops violating Equador’s soveighnity, but why would Venezuela care or act the way it is acting? Could it be that Venezuela has a legitimate beef here?

Chavez, a leftist ally of Ecuador’s president, called Saturday’s attack by Colombia’s U.S.-allied government a “war crime” and vowed to limit trade and investment with Colombia. “We demand condemnation of the Colombian government for this aberrant act,” Chavez said.

Well, no. The truth is far more sinister. You see, what has Chavez really pissed is the information that the Columbians found on a captured laptop. See Chavez has been sort of playing it up that he was trying to mediate the conflict between Columbia’s people and the communist terrorist/criminal organization FARC, but the truth is that the SOB has been in league with them for almost a decade and has actually been busy trying to undermine the elected Columbian government.

BOGOTA, Colombia — Files in a laptop computer seized from the wreckage of a Colombian rebel camp in Ecuador offer new insights into Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s desire to undermine Colombia’s U.S.-allied government. If authentic, the computer files suggest Chavez has been in league with the rebels for more than a decade. While Chavez is not one of the correspondents, his sentiments are conveyed in numerous messages exchanged by the rebels. Venezuela contends the texts are lies and fabrications. If so, they are expertly done.

...

They indicate that Chavez, seeking to raise the FARC’s stature and relieve it of its international pariah status, shares their goal of isolating and discrediting Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe. But do they prove that Venezuela was actually financing the FARC’s bid to overthrow a democratically elected government? That’s not clear. Naranjo alleges that the number “300,” also called the “dossier” in a Dec. 23 message signed by Marquez, refers to a $300 million gift from Chavez to the rebels.

And now we have the truth. Chavez’s anger is because the Columbians now seem to have proof he has been actively undermining their government, a tactic he has accused others of using against his own government without any proof, while pretending to have good intentions. Should anyone however be surprised that a Marxist resorts to subterfuge and vile practices while not only lying to the international community about what they are doing but accusing others of doing the same to them? Not really. This is SOP for these types of evil bastards. Of course, this will likely endear this crook even more with the usaal leftist twits and the terror masters like Chavez’s buddy Ah-Mad in Iran.

This might not play well for the democrats that have been actively undermining our relationship with Columbia, a staunch ally, and paying lip service to that moron Chavez. A real man of the people. Of course “The people” in this case are the socialist overlords that want to enslave humanity in that misery they pretend is social justice.

New Russia looks a lot like old USSR?