An unserious, once-great nation burns while its overlords preen

And so the Most Equal Comrade weights in on Baltimore.

The gist of what he had to say when it came time for the obligatory addressing-of-social-ills portion of his remarks was the classic MEC combination of self-referential preening, partisan divisiveness, and pointy-headed bureaucratic remedies:

“There’s a bunch of my agenda that would make difference right now in that,” he said, calling for more funding for early education, criminal justice reform and job training.

Obama criticized members of Congress for blocking his agenda items, but encouraged Americans to do some “soul searching” during his joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this afternoon.

“I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” he said, adding that it was important to work to improve communities anyway.

He explained Americans should not “just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns,” but rather work together to tackle poverty around the nation.

“[W]hat I’ve tried to do is promote those ideas that would make a difference, but I think we all understand that politics is tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them as a law and order issue as opposed to a broader social issue,” he said.

That quintessential Freedom-Hater value - feeling good about your intentions regardless of the results of your policies - is on full display here.

Haven't we already made "massive investments in urban communities"?  Indeed we have.  And the results have been predictably underwhelming:

In 2009, Obama and the Democrats rammed the $840 billion federal stimulus package through Capitol Hill under the guise of immediate job creation and economic recovery. An estimated $64 billion went to public school districts; another nearly $50 billion went for other education spending. This included $13 billion for low-income public school kids; $4.1 billion for Head Start and childcare services; $650 million for educational technology; $200 million for working college students; and $70 million for homeless children.

How's that all working out? Last week, economists from the St. Louis Federal Reserve surveyed more than 6,700 education stimulus recipients and concluded that for every $1 million of stimulus grants to a district, a measly 1.5 jobs were created. "Moreover, all of this increase came in the form of nonteaching staff," the report found, and the "jobs effect was also not statistically different from zero." 

More than three-quarters of the jobs "created or saved" in the first year of the stimulus were government jobs, while roughly 1 million private sector jobs were forestalled or destroyed, according to Ohio State University. President Obama later admitted "there was no such thing" as "shovel-ready projects." But there were plenty of pork-ready recipients, from green energy billionaires to union bosses to Democratic campaign finance bundlers. About $230 billion in porkulus funds was set aside for infrastructure projects, yet less than a year later, Obama was back asking for another $50 billion to pour down the infrastructure black hole.

In 2010, President Obama signed the so-called Edujobs bill into law -- a $26 billion political wealth redistribution scheme paying back Big Labor for funding Democratic congressional campaigns. A year later, several were spending on the money to plug budget shortfalls instead of hiring teachers. Other recipients received billions despite having full educational payrolls and not knowing what to do with the big bucks. 

It goes on and on.  

In July 2014, with bipartisan support, Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to "help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy." (Never mind that a GAO review of the feds' existing 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies "generally found the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small, inconclusive or restricted to short-term impacts.")

In December 2014, the White House unveiled nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5."

That's all on top of the $6 billion government-funded national service and education initiative known as the SERVE America Act, which was enacted less than a month after the nearly $1 trillion stimulus with the help of a majority of Big Government Senate Republicans. The SERVE America Act included $1.1 billion to increase the investment in national service opportunities; $97 million for Learn and Serve America Youth Engagement Zones; and nearly $400 million for the Social Innovation Fund and Volunteer Generation Fund.

The "social innovation" slush fund was intended to "create new knowledge about how to solve social challenges in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development and school support, and healthy futures, and to improve our nation's problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities." The biggest beneficiaries? Obama's progressive cronies.

The basic social order in post-America breaks down, and all the overlords have to offer is redistribution to make it possible for a bunch of pointy-headed administrative-class nerds to sit in offices and give the appearance of productive activity. Said nerds then have a vested interest in keeping the gravy flowing. Occasionally they can be roused to put on a conference at which they give PowerPoint presentations that are rich stews of eye-glazing acronyms and flow charts and empty platitudes about bright tomorrows.

In the meantime, rival gangs form alliances to wage war on police, babies are mass produced by feral young men with no intention of raising them, and businesses quite correctly determine that the MEC's "urban communities" are no place to invest capital.

And the larger array of clear signs that night has fallen on post-America, from transgendered bathrooms to white-privilege conferences to fines for adhering to Christian doctrine to a foreign policy that takes a fiction such as "climate change" seriously while refusing to see immediate threats from actual enemies, looms as the context in which night falls on Baltimore.

How much longer do we have until the dystopian denouement?