Mugabe-ize (vt): To turn any valuable piece of real estate, home or farm, into a trash dump.
You may not recall that Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, was once run by a small minority of white farmers, and had turned itself into the breadbasket of Africa under their minority apartheid rule. In 1980 Robert Mugabe, then considered an African nationalist, turned out the white government, and has remained in power ever since.
Mugabe expropriated the white farms, which provided grain for all of the country and much of southern Africa, and turned them over to cronies in his government and family. Within a few short years the entire nation was starving, the finest, most fertile farmland in Africa laid waste. It is still that way today.
Hence the term: Mugabe-ize.
Mugabe Acres
(Also from March, 2009)
There has always been a Mugabe-wing of the Democrat Party. In fact, we can lay the entire housing and mortgage crisis at their feet. What’s distressing, of course, is that the Mugabeites take a good deal of wind out of conspiracy theorists’ sails about the housing and banking meltdown having been intentional. For you see, Mugabe never got the outcome he intended to get. Zimbabwe wrote the book on “unintended consequences.”
This is not the case in Obama’s planned vision of relocating America.
Many believe that Obama does not have a policy to increase jobs. Others (Rush Limbaugh) say he cannot point to a single aspect of economic success in the past four years, however tepid and tiny, and tie it to any of his policies.
Indeed, he cannot, unless you point to the increase in government jobs. (Always look for the doublespeak of Democrat rhetoric.)
But he/they do have a policy, a very direct and beneficial policy, if you consider who it is he/they want to be benefited. And I don’t just mean employment in the public sector. The deconstruction of American society, the American dream, is a direct result of his actual policies already in place.
Now you may be wondering just what it means to be Mugabe-ized. Our predictions for American suburbs (below) should answer that. Again, from 2009:
You see, the Democrats have a big bill to pay to environmentalists whose various wings want “urban sprawl” not only to cease, but recede. They want to see those houses come down, the basements filled, the concrete crushed, and the ground returned to nature. Millions and millions of acres. And the mass transit wing and global warming, anti-automobile wing want to see newly created communities of high density, multi-family dwellings (having done so well with Cabrini Green you can see why they would cling to this ideal), that are more suitable to their themes of mass transit…and lowered expectations for the masses.
Stalin wanted his people clustered into cities because his design for the USSR was industrial; factories. But socialists of every stripe want the populations clustered for control. For Stalin that was merely a by-product, but for Obama, and his leftwing alliance, the end game.
Close your eyes and you can see how this will play out. Or, if you prefer, just get off the plane in Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Belgrade, Skopje, Warsaw, Moscow or any Russian city, even Prague and take a cab to the center of the city…where you will see hundreds upon hundreds of Cabrini-like complexes, in various states of external disrepair.
The American socialist theory is that Cabrini Green won’t be replicated under the new order because a higher class, er, a middle class citizenry, will be moving there, everyone having jobs to go to every day. These will not be housing for the poor.
The middle class will simply be defined and priced down.
Inside the buildings this may all be true, as citizens from the former Soviet empire lived immaculate lives indoors. My first image there, in 1991, was of a woman standing stalwart by the door, with a broom, daring a drop of dirt to sneak inside…her 1100 sq ft flat, a castle of two bedrooms the size of walk-in closets, sleeping four grown ups, a kitchen the size of a bathroom, a bathroom the size of a shower stall, only no shower, and a dining room table, where she entertained, also serving as the coffee table in the living room, where she served tea when guests came to call.
But the common areas, the stairwells, the elevators, the landings, and the outside walk-ups, are as filled with graffiti and the dank smell of urine, vomit and feces as any project you’ve ever visited on Chicago’s south side. The grass is uncut, weeds up to two feet, only, unlike the sparse days of communism, they are now filled with discarded products, paper wrappers, bottles and cans, the latter which gypsies will come and fetch once everyone is asleep. Under the imperial communists there was nothing to throw away because there was nothing that could be bought, but good times have engendered litter in the old Soviet world, a condition for which, in forty five years, they were never schooled to manage. (I once told a senior embassy official in Sofia that the best aid money we could give Bulgaria would be buckets and buckets of paint, and maybe hire three or four roaming teams of Mexicans with weed-whackers and lawn mowers to go to each of these “projects”. After a quick in and out, maybe the locals would catch on. He looked at me as if I had asked permission to kiss him.)
How Obama and his political allies see the new urbanization in America shaking out.
The first question is what to do with all the houses already sitting out there in suburbia? There are millions of them. And what to do with the people living in them? The idea of course, is to drive (er, invite) them out of those homes and invite them into these new concrete behemoths that some lucky companies, crony capitalists, will get to build.
After all, Obama’s people aren’t Stalinists. They can’t just go round ’em up with a bus and forcibly move them out. This is a kinder, gentler, and more subtle socialism, where instead they just destroy dreams, dig holes, then put barricades around every ladder out but one
How this works, and is working now:
Bob and Sally, have two kids, and both have jobs in the private sector, gross income about $85,000. (55K + 30K). Bob is an engineering draftsman and Sally works at a nearby branch bank. They have a modest $145K home in a middle class suburb outside of Omaha.
Step One (Year one): Bob loses his job, and takes the 99 weeks, knocking his pay down to $20K/yr while he looks for comparable work, which he never finds. Generally apolitical, he doesn’t know this is happening everywhere, that there are 20 qualified applicants for every new job opening. He won’t know for a few years that there was never intended to be a light at the end of the tunnel he finds himself in.
Step Two (Year One-Two): With $3000/month less coming in, the family correctly prioritizes what has to be saved most, beginning with holding onto the house. Cell phones (the kids are apoplectic) and nearly-new car with payments are early casualties. So is soccer. Credit rating is also an early casualty. (Point for Obama, as kids will blame either parents or the company that fired Dad, not him, and in 4-5 years, will be voting, in all likelihood, the straight Democrat ticket.)
Step Three (Year Two–Three) ; Unemployment runs out, Bob takes part-time job at Best Buy, working in warehouse, plus odd jobs. The bank is cutting back as well, so Sally is offered a position at a branch 30 miles away, on the other side of Omaha, and turns it down since gas is now $3.89 gallon, costing roughly $10/day-$250/month for the drive. Instead she is moved to temp status, cutting her pay to $18,500. House goes up on the market. With elderly parents, in the country, there is no where to move where even menial jobs are available.
Step Four (Year Five-Six); Unable to sell house, Bob and Sally default, and must choose between substandard rental in rough part of town with bad schools, or choose a new government high rise “for the new middle class.” Paid for by Obama’s infrastructure. 1200 sq feet of room and comfort. No smoking allowed. No pets either. A playground is behind Bldg C-13, where drugs are sold. Good thing Bob and Sally’s kids are almost grown.
Step Five (Year Eight): By the end of Obama’s second term, Bob is offered new job in solar energy company in what used to be a subdivision in northwest Omaha. Government got the land for a song. That and several other factories in the area are serviced by new electric street car line, easy back and forth. No car payment. No shopping at Walmart or Kroger’s either.
I could go on until the day Bob dies from a ruptured appendix. But you get the picture.
So imagine that $300,000 colonial in the cul de sac down the street, and imagine one day to wake up to see goats and chickens in the front yard. Then a smell. Then a very bad smell. Then suddenly, after maybe a year, the goats and chickens are gone, as by now so is all the grass, and so are most of your neighbors, glad to get half of what they paid for their house just to get out. So will you. Then one day they come in with bulldozers to take the condemned mansions down.
Obama will never be short of people willing to move into the suburbs and set loose the goats of war.
You’ve just been Mugabe-ized….and it is not unintentional.
Let the wrecking begin.
