Did any Leftist initiatives ever actually benefit the poor people, women, and minorities?

My son has a hard time waking up in the morning and, over the years, I’ve fallen into a bad habit: When he doesn’t emerge from his room, I head up the stairs to remind him to wake up. Last Friday, I got my exercise heading up those stairs five separate times. This morning, I thought to myself, “My God! I’m acting precisely like a Leftist, depriving my child of the opportunity to take responsibility for himself.”

When I woke my son up, I said “This is the last time I’m coming upstairs this morning. If you fall back asleep, I will not wake you up and, when you’re finally ready to head to school, you’ll walk there with a note from me to the office explaining that you overslept.”

“Really?” he asked incredulously.

“Really,” I answered.

My son came down to breakfast in record time.  It turned out that by allowing him to rely on me, I’d preventing him from being able to rely on himself.

Thinking about the inadvertent damage I was doing to my son with my well-meant efforts to get him off to school in time, I then started thinking about Leftists, who claim to act for and represent the other 99%: the poor, the people of varying colors and sexual indentities, women, etc. And what I asked myself was this: “Do any current Leftist initiatives actually benefit the people Leftists claim to serve?”

So far, my answer to that question is “no.” As of my writing this, I’ve come up with the following list of Leftist cause célèbres (which is not in any particular order), and the deleterious effects they have on the Left’s claimed constituency:

1. The anti-GMO movement

As the Left phrases it, they are saving the world from Frankengrains and other foods that will destroy the earth, all in the name of Monsanto’s enrichment. In fact, the historical ignorance behind the movement is staggering, since humans have been messing with animal and plant genetics since the beginning of human kind.

Every dog owner knows this — but for human interference, we wouldn’t have breeds ranging from Great Danes to Chihuahuas. As for foods . . . well, the health and variety available to us would have been pathetically small but for humans engaging in genetic manipulation:

The reality is that what’s happening now is what’s always happened, only with more targeted results. If the anti-GMO nuts would get off the case, golden rice could help alleviate childhood poverty around the world. In other words, the Lefties are campaigning vigorously against the health and well-being of poor people, children, and people of color around the globe.

Check out the third video down in this post for more information about the damage the anti-GMO activists are doing to their claimed constituencies.

2. The anti-fossil fuel movement

Is it possible to count the ways in which the anti-fossil fuel movement harms poor people at home and around the world? Off the top of my head:

• Policies aimed at driving up fuel prices to discourage driving harm poor people whose commutes take an increasingly large bite out of their limited income or who are unable to get to any jobs at all.
• The reliance on ethanol, aside from requiring for production amounts of fossil fuel in excess of the ethanol finally produced, has turned former food crops into cash crops, leading to hunger around the world and possibly having triggered the so-called Arab Spring which is, in reality, a jihadist nightmare.
• In the drive to get more electric cars on the road (cars that in many regions of the U.S. cause more, not less, pollution), federal and state governments are forcing low income tax payers to subsidize rich people who choose to buy those same electric cars.
• President Obama may keep the Oval Office at a comfortable 75, but those who don’t have taxpayers paying their energy bills are colder in the winter and hotter in the summer as they deal with the rising fuel costs Obama long desired and is finally making a reality with his recent EPA regulations. (But isn’t it nice that Obama’s effort to destroy an entire industry somehow managed to give his friend George Soros the chance to buy that industry at bargain basement prices, since he knows that, when Obama’s out of office, subsequent politicians will inevitably reverse these stultifying regulations.)
• Speaking of those EPA regulations, everything costs more when the government enacts policies that drive up fuel prices.  The rich people in Obama’s world can handle the marginal price difference of more expensive food (the production and distribution of which is heavily dependent on fossil fuel), but poor people can’t.  Obama’s policies are creating those “food deserts” he and his cadre so decry.

3. The pro-abortion movement

Unlimited abortion, say its proponents, is for women.  Accepting that statement at face value (solely for the purposes of this post), there’s one group of women it’s not good for — black women.  Actually, let me be more specific:  It’s not good for all those black women who were never born because they were aborted, just as it’s not good for all those black men who were never born because they were aborted.  The reality is that Margaret Sanger (who was not herself a big supporter of abortion) was a proud eugenicist who believed strongly that the black race needed to be bred out of existence.  Thanks to Planned Parenthood, Sanger’s dream is much closer to being a reality than it would have been otherwise:

On average, 1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the United States.

This incidence of abortion has resulted in a tremendous loss of life. It has been estimated that since 1973 Black women have had about 16 million abortions. Michael Novak had calculated “Since the number of current living Blacks (in the U.S.) is 36 million, the missing 16 million represents an enormous loss, for without abortion, America’s Black community would now number 52 million persons. It would be 36 percent larger than it is. Abortion has swept through the Black community like a scythe, cutting down every fourth member.”

Abortions also seem to put black women at greater risk of breast cancer:

A highly significant 1993 Howard University study showed that African American women over age 50 were 4.7 times more likely to get breast cancer if they had had any abortions compared to women who had not had any abortions.

Are Lefties doing blacks a favor by free their women from the slavery of childbirth and child-rearing (a “slavery” made worse by the fact that so many black women don’t have a husband to help them raise their children together) or are Lefties engaged in slow-motion black genocide?

4. The anti-gun movement

Remove inner city blacks from the equation and the reality about gun crime in America is that America’s gun crime rates are comparable to Europe’s — and that despite the fact that we have way more guns here.  And here’s the thing about those inner city blacks — they live in Democrat enclaves that have the strictest possible gun control.  Only when law-abiding black citizens in these ghettos are allowed guns to protect themselves does the black-on-black murder rate drop.

Conclusion:  Leftist gun control laws kill blacks which is of course the exact opposite of what Leftists purport to be doing for blacks.

5. The unlimited illegal immigration movement

• Unlimited illegal immigration brings in unnecessary competition for low wage jobs, hurting blacks, legal minorities, and other poor people;
• Unlimited illegal immigration places a strain on state and federal welfare systems, both financially and bureaucratically, so that the poor, including children and minorities, have to deal with more challenging bureaucracy and fight for the same resources;
• Unlimited illegal immigration increases rate of murder and other violent crimes, so that there are numerous crimes that would not have happened if our federal government enforced its laws, and these murders happen in the poor enclaves in which legal and illegal immigrants and other poor people live; and
• Unlimited illegal immigration brings in old-fashioned, dangerous infectious diseases that spread to the urban poor.

6. Modern feminism

I am an equity feminist:  I believe in equal pay for equal work, and equal access to jobs based upon the applicant’s ability to perform the reasonable and appropriate requirements for the job, regardless of sex.  And that’s pretty much it for my feminism.

Today’s feminists, however, are a hard-core of man-hating extremists who have convinced tragic generations of university women that men are evil predators and women their helpless victims.  There is no way to frame this development as being good for women.  True, they get a form of power, since they are able to bend university administrations to their demented will and destroy the lives of too many young men, but it’s pretty darn clear that this is a toxic power that poisons the young women who wield it.  They have turned themselves into paranoid hysterics incapable of extracting joy from the ordinary pleasures of life.  The power to destroy a 19-year-old boy’s life is actually a very poor payment for the complete destruction of your own life.

Please feel free to add to or challenge the list — although, as always, if you challenge it, please do so politely.